Pamela Franklin was a very talented child actress who had a very successful transition to adult roles before retiring from the screen to raise her family. She was born to a British family in Japan in 1950.
iMDB entry:
She made her film debut in England in 1961 in Jack Clayton’s masterful “The Innocents” with Deborah Kerr. The following year she played the daughter of William Holden and Capucine in “The Lion”. In 1964 she went to Hollywood to make “A Tiger Walks” with Sabu for Walt Disney. She gave an insightful performance as Sandy in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” where she held her own acting opposite Maggie Smith at her best. In the early 1970’s she concentrated her career in Hollywood films and made her last (to date) television appearance in the series “Vegas” in 1981.
Lovely, petite, and beguiling brunette British actress Pamela Franklin was born in Yokohama, Japan. Because her father was an importer/exporter, Pamela grew up all over the world in such places as Hong Kong and Australia. Franklin studied dance at the Elmhurst School of Ballet in England and originally planned on becoming a dancer.
Franklin made her film debut at age 11 as “Flora” in the marvelously eerie The Innocents(1961). Pamela was quite appealing as “Tina” in The Lion (1962) and held her own alongside Bette Davis in the fine Hammer chiller The Nanny (1965). An adorable child, Pamela grew up to become a strikingly sensual and beautiful woman who was cast in more bold adult parts as she got older.
Pamela gave a terrific performance as the rebellious “Sandy” in the outstanding drama The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and was memorable as a hapless kidnap victim in The Night of the Following Day (1968). Franklin carved out a nice little niche as a personable and captivating scream queen in a handful of hugely enjoyable 70s horror features: the imperiled “Jane” in the harrowingAnd Soon the Darkness (1970), the equally endangered “Lori Brandon” in Necromancy(1972);
Frederick Treves was born in 1925 in Margate, Kent. He made his film debut in “Wheel of Fate” in 1953. Other movies included “The Elephant Man” in 1980. He died in 2012.
Gavin Gaughan’s “Guardian” obituary:
In an acting career that lasted for well over half a century, Frederick Treves, who has died aged 86, specialised in playing men in positions of authority – senior police officers, peers, admirals, colonels and scientists. He was a tall man with a heavily jowled, amiable face, a hawk-like profile and a patrician bearing. A regular National Theatre player, he supported many television dramas, including The Regiment (1973), a BBC series set in India; Destiny, David Edgar’s 1978 Play for Today; The Jewel in the Crown (1984); The Invisible Man (1984); Poirot (1991); Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (1997); and The Rector’s Wife (1994). In all of these disparate productions, he played a colonel.
Treves was the great-nephew of Sir Frederick Treves, the surgeon who rescued Joseph Merrick, the “Elephant Man” (he also had a role as an alderman in David Lynch’s 1980 film about the case). He was born in Margate, Kent, the son of a doctor, and saw second world war service in the royal and merchant navies. When his ship was sunk in a torpedo attack on its way to Malta, Treves rescued several comrades, and was awarded the British Empire Medal. He later wrote a play about the incident, Operation Pedestal (1974), broadcast on Radio 4.
In 1948 he joined Newquay repertory theatre in Cornwall, treading the boards with Kenneth Williams. He made his West End debut in Adventure Story, by Terence Rattigan, at the St James’s theatre in 1949. From 1956 until 1962, he was part of the Repertory Players, a “Sunday play-producing society” intended as a shop window for actors and playwrights that staged six new plays a year.
Treves’s director at Newquay had been Richard West, who gave him his first television part, in the early BBC soap The Grove Family, in 1956. He appeared in the TV series Maigret (1960) and in the stage play Maigret and the Lady (Strand theatre, 1965), both with Rupert Davies in the title role. He was Jenny Agutter’s imprisoned father in the BBC serial of The Railway Children (1968). One of Alun Owen’s last television plays, Lucky (1974), was set in a prison with Treves as the governor. Memorably, he was a plain-clothes inspector confronting Quentin Crisp (John Hurt) in The Naked Civil Servant (1975).
In 1979 he played Anthony Head, secretary of war, in Ian Curteis’s large-scale Suez 1956. Then he was Gayev, with Judi Dench as his sister, in The Cherry Orchard (1981), adapted by Trevor Griffiths and directed by Richard Eyre.
Treves worked on several occasions with John Thaw. After playing a villain in a helicopter in The Sweeney (1976), he was at his most august in the film spin-off Sweeney 2 (1978). In an early episode of Inspector Morse (1987), he was a dean to whom Morse discloses his suspicions. As Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, he differed on tactics with Thaw, in the title role, in Bomber Harris (1989). He was notable as a Polish doctor accused of having conducted experiments in Dachau, in Kavanagh QC (1997).
Private Dreams, Public Nightmares (1957), combining the voices of Treves and Andrew Sachs with electronic effects, was among the first productions of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. As a member of the BBC radio drama repertory company, Treves featured in several of the Paul Temple adventures. His long association with radio also extended into writing scripts. He wrote and co-starred with June Whitfield in My Favourite Broad (Radio 4, 1969), a light comedy about a botched honeymoon.
Highlights of his four National Theatre seasons included David Hare’s Plenty (1978) and Bill Bryden’s staging of The Passion in 1980. He was cast by Peter Hall as Menenius Agrippa to the Coriolanus of Ian McKellen in 1984. Despite injuring his back and having to be replaced by his understudy, he returned when the play was restaged in Athens in 1985.
One of Treves’s best roles was as the father of Sarah Layton (Geraldine James) in The Jewel in the Crown. Against type, he was a killer unmasked by Miss Marple in Sleeping Murder (1987). In Game, Set and Match (1988), adapted from Len Deighton’s spying trilogy and starring Ian Holm, he was the head of Berlin station. He seemed to be required casting in dramas depicting political chicanery such as For the Greater Good (1991); To Play the King (1993); and The Politician’s Wife (1995). He had a regular role in the period drama The Cazalets (2001).
Treves is survived by his wife, Jean, along with two sons, Simon (who followed him into acting) and Patrick; a daughter, Jeni; and 11 grandchildren.
• Frederick William Treves, actor and writer, born 29 March 1925; died 30 January 2012
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Patric Doonan was born in 1925. He was a popular actor in British films of the 1950’s. His films include “Highly Dangerous” with Margaret Lockwood in 1950, “The Blue Lamp” with Dirk Bogarde, “The Man in the White Suit” with Alec Guinness and “The Net” with Phyllis Calvert. He died in 1958.
Roger Rees, who has died aged 71 after suffering from cancer, was an outstanding associate of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who made his name in the title role of Nicholas Nickleby in 1980, winning an Olivier best actor award in London and a Tony best actor on Broadway before he moved to New York in the late 1980s, taking US citizenship in 1989, and becoming known to millions in two top television shows.
In Cheers, he was Kirstie Alley’s love interest, as the millionaire industrialist Robin Colcord; in The West Wing, he was the British ambassador to Washington Lord John Marbury. He became a go-to Brit on various US series, but returned briefly to Britain in 1988 to record the sitcom Singles, a sort of low-rent Cheers in a singles bar.
None of these roles exploited the vibrancy and emotional fizz Rees exhibited on stage, especially in a hot streak at the RSC which took him from one suicidal ditherer, Semyon, in the first UK production of Nikolai Erdman’s 1928 comic classic The Suicide in 1979, to a 1984 Hamlet in the same Stratford-upon-Avon season as Antony Sher’s Richard III and Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (Branagh was Laertes to his Hamlet). The electrifying Nicholas Nickleby came in between.
Like Ben Kingsley, he languished in small parts at the RSC when he first joined in 1967, but both he and Kingsley became stars, and associate artists, in the Trevor Nunn and Terry Hands era. There was always a febrile intensity about Rees, a quickness and charm that could move an audience to tears or laughter, often both, at the speed of light; he was a superb and touching Tuzenbach in Nunn’s brilliant 1978 production of Three Sisters, moustachioed and bespectacled, pleading with Emily Richard’s Irina to say something before he went off to be shot in the duel.
He returned to the London stage in 2010 as Vladimir in Sean Mathias’s revival of Waiting for Godot at the Haymarket; he took over the role, opposite Ian McKellen’s Estragon, from Patrick Stewart, and was spryer and infinitely more cheerful than Stewart, though more of a junior partner. He remained close friends with many old RSC colleagues; McKellen and Stewart, but also Judi Dench (he was Malcolm in the great 1976 Dench/McKellen Macbeth). With Dench, Rees sustained a comic ritual of exchanging sushi by special delivery at unexpected and inconvenient hours.
And then in 2012 he brought his solo show, What You Will, to the Apollo and seemed as puppyish and perennially youthful as ever as he mixed Shakespearean speeches with anecdotal gems (such as the story of Wilfrid Lawson, on a payday matinee, quelling a mutinous crowd as he lurched into the opening soliloquy of Richard III with: “If you think I’m pissed, wait till you see Buckingham … ”)
Rees was one of two sons of an Aberystwyth policeman, William Rees, and his wife Doris (nee Smith). The family moved to south London, where Roger attended Balham secondary modern school and the Camberwell School of Art; his drawing skills won him a place at the Slade. He had appeared only in Ralph Reader’s Gang Show at the Golders Green Hippodrome in 1963, and was painting scenery at the Wimbledon theatre in 1964 when a crisis of casting pitched him on to the stage as Alan Jeffcote, the juvenile lead in Stanley Houghton’s Hindle Wakes.
After a season at Pitlochry, he joined the RSC, gradually making his mark in the early 70s as Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing, Roderigo (the perfect comic gull: “I’ll go sell all my land”) in Othello, Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice and Posthumus in Cymbeline. He toured with the Cambridge Theatre Company as Fabian in Twelfth Night and Young Marlowe in She Stoops to Conquer before making a Broadway debut with the RSC as Charles Courtly in Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance in December 1974.
After Nickleby, Rees had another West End triumph as the pop fan playwright Henry in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing (1982), co-starring Felicity Kendal, at the Strand. Henry’s personal credo, delivered while wielding a cricket bat, of how ideas bounce more effectively from a hard, sprung surface, was a defining moment in the postwar theatre friction between politics and art, ideology and expression (“Screw the whale, save the gerund”) and all the better for shining in a play about love.
Rees’s transatlantic translation was also romantically motivated. He was in a relationship from 1982 onwards with the writer and producer Rick Elice (whom he married in 2011), and his Broadway and television work was increasingly shared with commitments as a director.
He won an off-Broadway Obie for his portrayal of a narcissistic doctor in John Robin Baitz’s The End of the Day (1992) and in 1995 he starred alongside Kathleen Turner, Eileen Atkins and Jude Law in Jean Cocteau’s Indiscretions (or Les Parents Terribles) on Broadway. He co-directed a Peter Pan prequel, Peter and the Starcatcher, written by Elice, in 2012 and scored, too, as the father in a 2013 revival of Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy.
He had been appointed artistic director of the Williamstown theatre festival in Massachusetts in 2004 (he resigned in 2007), where he workshopped John Kander and Fred Ebb’s last musical, The Visit, starring Chita Rivera. The show finally came to Broadway in spring 2015, and Rees played Anton Schell, the doomed ex-lover of Rivera’s extravagant millionairess, but illness forced him to leave the show in late May, shortly before it closed.
Rees made many films without ever matching the 1982 Channel 4 version of Nickleby, but he made an impression in Tony Tews’s God’s Outlaw (1986), as the impassioned Bible translator William Tyndale; in Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), as the ludicrous, not so dastardly Sheriff of Rottingham; in Julie Taymor’s Frida (2002), starring Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo and Alfred Molina as Diego Rivera; and in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006), starring Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale.
Rees is survived by Elice.
Michael Coveney
David Edgar writes: In 1976, I’d seen Roger Rees be unmatchably brilliant in the RSC’s musical Comedy of Errors. Three years on, I was asked to adapt Nicholas Nickleby, and he brought that genius to a part some thought less fruitful than the wonderful Dickensian grotesques which surrounded it.
The directors, John Caird and Trevor Nunn, had the idea that the actors would shift effortlessly from narrating the story to commenting on their character to playing it. The deftness with which Roger pulled off this post-Brechtian device was used to great comic effect (if he tried a line twice and it didn’t work, it was because it couldn’t), but also allowed him to chart the growth of an angry young man into a moral hero. He applied his unique talent for shaping a line both to a cod happy-ending Romeo and Juliet, and to the death of Smike, the orphan boy Nicholas has befriended. That moment proved the most heartbreaking any of us had ever seen.
When, after Nickleby’s transatlantic success, Roger moved to New York, he was rightly seen as a loss to the British but a gain for the American theatre. There were parts in later plays of mine I wish he could have played. But he played Nicholas Nickleby as well as it was possible for any actor to do.
• Roger Rees, actor, born 5 May 1944; died 10 July 2015
Nicholas Farrell was born in Essex in 1955. His film debut came with “Chariots of Fire” in 1981. In 1984, he was featured in “Greystroke” and “The Jewel in the Crown”. He has had an extensive career on television in such shows as “Foyle’s War” and “Casualty”. He is married to actress Stella Gonet.
Herbert Lom was born in 1917 in Prague. He came to Britain in 1939 and soon established himself as a popular young character actor often in villianous roles. His cinema debut was in “The Young Mr Pitt” in 1942. Among his film career highlights are “The Seventh Veil”, “Night and the City”, “Hell’s Drivers”, “North West Frontier” and “El Cid”. In 1954 he starred opposite Valerie Hobson in the London stage production of “The King and I”. His last credit to date is in “Murder at the Vicarage” which he made when he was 87 years of age. He died in 2012 at the age of 95.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
Herbert Lom, who has died aged 95, spent more than 50 years in dramatic roles, playing mostly smooth villains, but he was best known for his portrayal of Charles Dreyfus, the hysterically twitching boss of the bumbling Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) in the series of slapstick Pink Panther comedies. “Give me 10 men like Clouseau and I could destroy the world,” blurts out the bewildered Dreyfus in A Shot in the Dark (1964).
Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru was born into an impoverished aristocratic family in Prague. He studied philosophy at Prague University, where he organised student theatre. In 1939, on the eve of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, he arrived in Britain with his Jewish girlfriend, Didi, but she was sent back at Dover because she did not have the correct papers. Her subsequent death in a concentration camp haunted him all his life.
Because of his linguistic abilities, Lom worked for the BBC European Service during the second world war, while building an acting career in British films with his newly shortened name. He had already appeared in small parts in two Czech films. In his first British film, Carol Reed’s The Young Mr Pitt (1941), he played Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he resembled. It was the first of his three incarnations of, in Lom’s words, the “much-maligned gentleman”. The others were in War and Peace (1956) – while on location in Italy, hundreds of members of the Italian army, playing extras in the battle scenes, queued up to shake Lom’s hand – and in William Douglas-Home’s play Betzi, in a West End production in 1975.
With his penetrating brown eyes, saturnine looks and foreign accent, Lom was typecast as psychiatrists or sinister crooks. In The Seventh Veil (1945), he used his rich, deep voice to guide a concert pianist, Ann Todd, through her past with the aid of drugs and hypnosis. Almost two decades later, Lom had a similar role in the TV series The Human Jungle (1963-64) as a specialist in emotional distress who listens to his patients’ problems while being unable to cope with his teenage daughter. “A boring part,” Lom admitted. “All I had to do was sit behind a desk saying, ‘And vot happened next?’, and the terribly interesting patient got all the good bits.”
Lom was more active as a heavy, his lightly flavoured Czech accent serving for French, Spanish, Arab, Greek or Turk. In Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950), he played Kristo, a Greek racketeer who orders the murder of a petty crook, Richard Widmark. He was a devious pirate chieftain in Spartacus (1960) and Captain Nemo in Mysterious Island (1961), and took the title role in the Hammer production The Phantom of the Opera (1962). He stole the limelight in many a film from the nominal stars: playing a flamboyant Polish officer posing as a foreign agent in Rough Shoot (1953); a French count who steals the eponymous jewel in Star of India (1954), and Ahmad Shahbandar, the richest man in the world, in Gambit (1966). In these three films he ran rings around, respectively, Joel McCrea, Cornel Wilde and Michael Caine.
Lom failed to get satisfaction from such roles and never had the chance to realise his full potential on screen, but he nevertheless scowled effectively all the way to the bank. “When you are tempted to say no, they offer you so much money it would be irresponsible to one’s family, to one’s children, to refuse.” In 1948 he married Dina, with whom he had two sons. They lived in London, the Canary Islands and the French Riviera. The couple divorced in 1971. Lom subsequently married and divorced twice more and had a daughter with the potter Brigitte Appleby.
Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers (1955) was one of the few films that Lom looked upon with affection. As the most menacing of the gang trying to bump off an old lady, he ends up falling backwards off a railway bridge, landing in a passing goods wagon. The reason Lom wore a hat throughout the film was because his head had been shaved for his role in the musical The King and I at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Although not as singular a figure as Yul Brynner as the Siamese king, Lom proved to be just as imposing.
Lom, who worked with Sellers in The Ladykillers, was delighted to be cast as Clouseau’s superior in A Shot in the Dark, Blake Edwards’s follow-up to The Pink Panther. “I owe Blake the fact that I’ve been doing comedy,” Lom remarked. “When he called me for the first time, he said, ‘You’ve been the heavy so often, but I think you’re a funny man.'”
In The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), Lom ends up in a straitjacket, writing “Kill Clouseau” on the walls of his padded cell with his toes. In The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), he escapes from the asylum and becomes a master criminal. Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978) has him driven crazy again. Lom would twitch more frenetically as the films became progressively less funny.
It was then back to heavy duty as the devious Dr Hartz in the superfluous 1979 remake of The Lady Vanishes and he was Christopher Walken’s therapist in David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone (1983), trying to help his patient, who has come out of a coma, to cope with being able to see the future. Lom then played a corrupt South American dictator in Whoops Apocalypse (1988), and a Vatican mafioso in The Pope Must Die (1991). His last appearance was on television as a suspicious French professor in an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage (2004), with Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple.
Lom, a delightful raconteur, music lover and amateur painter, who had a fine collection of 20th-century masterpieces, also wrote two entertaining and scholarly books: Dr Guillotine (1993), a novel about the inventor of a “humane” form of execution, and Enter a Spy: The Double Life of Christopher Marlowe (1978). “When I’m writing, there’s nobody watching me,” he explained. “It’s a terrible thing to be watched, either by the audience or by the camera.” It was a curious admission from an actor seldom away from the screen.
He is survived by his children.
• Herbert Lom (Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru), actor, born 11 September 1917; died 27 September 2012
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Guy Pearce was born in 1967 in Cambridgeshire. When he was three years of age, his family moved to Geelong in Australia. In 1985 he was cast in the popular soap opera “Neighbours”. He was also featured in “Home and Away”. In 1994 he made international recognition with his role in the cult movie “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”. In the U.S. he has starred in such movies as “L.A. Confidential”, “Rules of Engagement” and “The Time Machine”. He recently won widespread critical acclaim for his role as Monty Beragon opposite Kate Winslet in the miniseries “Mildred Pierce”. He won an Emmy for his performance.
TCM Overview:
Having earned a considerable reputation in his native Australia through such primetime series as “Neighbours” (Network Ten, 1986- ) and “Home and Away” (Seven Network, 1988- ), actor Guy Pearce earned international attention as the bratty drag queen Adam/Felicia in “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” (1994). Catching the eye of director Curtis Hanson, Pearce went on to international stardom with his unforgettable portrayal of Lt. Edmund Exley in the critically acclaimed neo-noir, “L.A. Confidential” (1997). From there, he starred in both big and small features like “A Slipping Down Life” (1999) and “Rules of Engagement” (2000), before delivering one of his most memorable performances, playing an amnesiac trying to find his wife’s murderer in Christopher Nolan’s groundbreaking “Memento” (2001). Following underwhelming results with two high-profile projects, “The Count of Monte Cristo” (2002) and “The Time Machine” (2002), Pearce earned critical kudos in smaller fare like “The Proposition” (2006) and “Death Defying Acts” (2008), in which he portrayed famed escapologist Harry Houdini. He delivered a small, but notable turn in “The Hurt Locker” (2009) before portraying King Edward VIII in the Oscar-winning drama “The King’s Speech” (2010) and a playboy who seduces a mother and daughter in “Mildred Pierce” (HBO, 2011), which only added to the handsome actor’s exceptional versatility.
Born Oct. 5, 1967 in Ely, Cambridgeshire, England, Pearce and his family immigrated to Australia, setting up roots Geelong, when he was three years old. Five years later, his father, a New Zealand pilot, died tragically in a plane crash, leaving his English schoolteacher mother to care for him and his older sister Tracey. Even as a youngster, Pearce shunned subjects like math and science in favor of art and music. He joined local theatrical groups at the age of eleven, where he appeared in amateur theater productions of “The King and I,” “Alice in Wonderland,” and “The Wizard of Oz.” In a typical mix of Australian duality, at the same time he performed in stage musicals, the teenager also became involved in body building to pump up his naturally thin body. From ages 16 to 22, he competed in competitions, culminating in a “Mr. Junior Victoria” body building win. Lifting weights aside, Pearce knew his real calling was performing, be it on stage, telly or silver screen. Just two days after his final high school exam in 1985, Pearce won the role of hunky student-turned-teacher Mike Young on the popular Aussie soap “Neighbours” (1985), a four-year stint which helped turn him into a major teen idol. After his television successes in such other Australian programs as “Home and Away” (1988- ) and “Snowy River: The McGregor Saga” (1993-96), Pearce next conquered Australia’s big screen, landing parts in the contemporary rock drama, “Heaven Tonight (1990), the comical romantic fantasy, “Dating the Enemy” (1996) and portraying a young Errol Flynn in “Flynn” (1996).
Then he put on a dress, and the rest was history. In the international camp classic, “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” Pearce was the youngest of the three drag performers, a bundle of energy always pushing the envelope. Although “Priscilla” was his first big hit, it was his next film that catapulted him to levels only dreamed of. In 1997, director Curtis Hanson brought him to the States and, ironically, teamed him with fellow Aussie Russell Crowe as California policemen in the superb modern day noir “L.A. Confidential.” As the bespectacled Lt. Ed Exley, Pearce delivered a polished portrayal of a headstrong, politically astute cop who redeems himself in the end. Of the three leads (also including American actor Kevin Spacey), critics took notice of the two Australian unknowns, often mentioning Oscar nominations in the same breath. A far cry from the drag artiste of “Priscilla,” Exley demonstrated the actor’s range and versatility in adapting a flawless American accent.
Pearce further honed his talents as one of a group of soldiers pursued by a cannibal in the graphic thriller, “Ravenous” (1999). That same year, Pearce earned praise for his starring role opposite Lili Taylor, as a bearded brooding musician in “A Slipping Down Life.” Both films debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, but failed to capture much attention when theatrically released. He next costarred in the military courtroom drama, “Rules of Engagement” (2000), starring Samuel L. Jackson as a decorated officer on trial for a rescue mission gone bad and Tommy Lee Jones as his mediocre, but trusted lawyer. Though the two leads were trumpeted on the marquee, Pearce was cited by critics for his strong performance as a bulldog prosecuting attorney. In his most noteworthy performance since “L.A. Confidential,” Pearce landed the lead in Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough feature, “Memento” (2001). As Leonard, a former insurance claims adjuster who suffers from short-term memory loss after an attack in his home that also left his wife dead, he has only instamatic photographs, paper notes and tattoos to help him find his wife’s killer during the 15 minutes he is cognizant. Though Pearce was hailed by critics for his intricate performance, he was overshadowed by Nolan’s inventive backwards narrative and tense direction. Still, an international home run yet again.
On the heels of “Memento,” Pearce made the leap to big budget, special effects-laden Hollywood fare with a contemporary take on H.G. Wells’ classic sci-fi novel, “Time Machine” (2002). Playing a 19th century inventor determined to change the past by using a self-constructed time machine, he is instead hurtled 80,000 years into a post-apocalyptic future, where he discovers that mankind has been divided into hunters and the hunted. The film was not a hit with either critics or theatergoers, though Pearce received his usual acting accolades. He then costarred in “The Count of Monte Cristo” (2002), based on Alexandre Dumas’ epic novel, where he played the deceitful Fernand Mondego, who frames best friend Edmond Dantes (Jim Caviezel) for a crime he did not commit, in order to have his beautiful lover, Mercedes (Dagmara Dominczyk), to himself. After riding the Hollywood wave for several lucrative years, Pearce returned to his homeland to film “Till Human Voices Wake Us” (2003), a supernatural drama about a psychiatry instructor (Pearce) who develops a romance with a mysterious woman (Helena Bonham Carter) whom he rescues from drowning in a river. In “The Hard Word” (2003), Pearce displayed an engaging wit as the cool-headed brains of a trio of bank robbing brothers released from prison after an off-the-books deal is struck, only to discover that they must rob several banks for a pair of crooked cops and their shady lawyer.
In a change of pace, Pearce appeared in the family-friendly “Two Brothers” (2004), playing Aidan McRory, a big game hunter who kills a male tiger, forcing two orphaned cubs into captivity. After the cubs manage to escape, McRory must protect a nearby village from them, only to have a change of heart after seeing them in their natural habitat. Back again to Australia, Pearce filmed “The Proposition” (2006), a western set at the end of the nineteenth century about an Outback law enforcer who pits three notorious outlaw brothers against each other. Future roles for Pearce include famed escapologist Harry Houdini in “Death Defying Acts” and infamous 20th century artist and tabloid fixture, Andy Warhol in “Factory Girl” (2006) opposite Sienna Miller as his muse, Edie Sedgwick. Following a small, but memorable turn in “The Hurt Locker” (2009), Pearce portrayed Edward, the Prince of Wales, who becomes King Edward VIII only to abdicate the thrown and leave his stuttering brother (Colin Firth) to become King George VI in the Oscar-winning drama “The King’s Speech” (2010). In a rare television role, he essayed playboy Monty Beragon, who seduces a successful businesswoman (Kate Winslet) and her wayward daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) in the acclaimed miniseries remake of the Joan Crawford classic melodrama, “Mildred Pierce” (HBO, 2011). The role earned Pearce an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Movie.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
