Michael Caine

TCM overview:

Prolific British film actor Michael Caine rose to fame as an icon of London’s ‘swinging ’60s,’ but four decades later, having contributed to some of cinematic history’s highest and lowest moments, he was recognized as an international film legend. Caine initially seemed an unlikely movie star, with his glasses and working class cockney accent, but with films like “The Ipcress File” (1965) and “Alfie” (1966), he came to personify the cultural upheaval of 1960s Britain, when the smashing of class barriers finally meant that regular blokes had a shot at the spotlight. With his foundation in repertory theater, Caine had already played hundreds of characters by the time he hit it big, and that background made him one of the most versatile leading actors on film. He deftly transitioned from gritty mobster (“Get Carter”), to scheming soldier (“The Man Who Would Be King”), warm-hearted doctor (“The Cider House Rules”), charming con man (“Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”), erudite professor (“Educating Rita”) to transvestite psychologist murderer (“Dressed to Kill”). Caine convincingly inhabited some of the best-known characters in literature and world history – not through self-analysis and method acting, but by holding up a mirror to the audience, presenting them with truths about themselves. His realistic acting style and ability to connect with an audience earned the actor a reputation for being approachable and down-to-earth, despite his ultra-luxury lifestyle and bona fide star status. For Caine, this was no act, as he had risen from the poorest of the poor with all odds seemingly stacked against him.

Michael Caine was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite Jr. in the charity wing of St. Olaves hospital in the Rotherhithe area of South London on March 14, 1933. The child of a fish market worker (with an unlucky gambling habit) and a cleaning woman, Caine was born with rickets from prenatal malnutrition and wore leg braces as a child. He was also diagnosed with blepharitis – an inflammation of the eyelids responsible for his heavy-lidded look, and a mild facial tic that was then known as St. Vitus dance. Caine’s younger brother Stanley was born two years later, and the family lived in a two-room flat with no electricity or running water. Generations of earlier Micklewhites may have been satisfied working at the fish market, but Caine – a voracious reader and avid moviegoer – knew that there was a better life out there and he was going to live it. However, there was little encouragement or opportunity for young working class toughs like Caine to explore drama. West End theaters were out of reach, drama lessons were unheard of, and the family did not have a TV, so for Caine, the movie theater became his second home. He idolized Humphrey Bogart, as much for the powerful onscreen characters he created as for the luxurious movie star lifestyle he lived, but Caine had no idea how one even began the journey from his South London flat to a Hollywood mansion. And the code of his class dictated that he was born a cockney and that was all he would ever be. But Caine’s intelligence and interest in the arts did make him different from the street gangs who did not quite accept him. He was finally given the chance to explore his interests at the age of 14, when he joined a local youth program designed to keep kids off the street. Their drama department gave Caine his first exposure to the stage, and he appeared in all their stage productions, as well as found a mentor in a film history teacher and short filmmaker who worked with the group, giving Caine an early education in filmmaking.

Caine left school at 16 and landed an entry-level production job at an industrial film company. At 18, he was called upon to do military service, and for the next two years, served overseas and even saw frontline combat in Korea. He made his glorious re-entry into civilian life working at a butter factory before landing a job as an assistant stage manager and eventually an actor at a repertory theater in West Sussex. However, a bout of post-war malaria forced him offstage for a time. After his recovery, he joined another repertory theater in the seaside town of Lowestoft. As with his earlier position, Caine barely made enough money to cover his living expenses, but the experience proved to be invaluable, with the actor often having to learn a new role every week.

While in Lowestoft, Caine met and fell in love with fellow troupe member Patricia Haines. The couple married and moved to London to try their acting luck, but Haines fared better. With his roles few and far between, Caine was forced to work as a plumber’s assistant and a baker. The financial pressure proved to be too much for the young couple, especially after the birth of their daughter, leaving both to eventually move back home with their parents and to divorce. Caine’s father died shortly thereafter and with the walls closing in on him, he escaped to Paris for a month, wandering the streets and sleeping in subway stations and brothels. He eventually dragged himself home to find a telegram from his agent, offering him a bit part in the military drama “Hell in Korea” (1956). This led to small, mostly uncredited appearances in more films and TV, alternating with civilian jobs and frequent moving from one cheap roommate situation to another. His misery had plenty of company, as he had made scores of friends who were struggling artists and actors, all hoping against hope that they would someday be household names – Harold Pinter, Terence Stamp, David Hockey, even his barber, Vidal Sassoon.

Caine, who had by now officially changed his stage name to Caine in order to appear in an actor’s equity production, carried on with play after play, eventually making it to the London’s famed West End in 1963. He understood that stage was his training ground, but Caine’s sights were still firmly set on becoming a film actor of the most glamorous sort. Not long afterwards, he went on an audition for a role as a cockney soldier in a war film, only to have the American director take one look at his lean frame and long blond locks and instead cast him in a leading role as an upper crust army officer. “Zulu” (1964) was truly Caine’s breakthrough, earning him more money than he had ever seen, as well as an offer to star in the espionage thriller “The Ipcress File” (1965) and a seven-year film contract. In “The Ipcress File,” Caine played working-class spy Harry Palmer – the antithesis of James Bond’s ridiculous glamour – who drank pints of beer rather than shaken martinis, and whose mode of transport was a public bus, not a snappy sports car. Caine gave an exceptional performance; his matter-of-fact delivery perfectly suited for the part. With his salary of 10,000 pounds a week, he moved his mother to a nicer flat, got himself a new place, and outfitted it with the best of everything.

“Ipcress” won Caine sizable fame, but “Alfie” (1966) succeeded in making the long-struggling, 33-year-old actor a household name. A swinging cockney cad with a great tailor and insatiable appetite for the ladies, Caine’s Alfie – along with the success of the Beatles – signaled a major shift in the British cultural voice away from the elite aristocracy and towards anyone who wanted to join the youth-driven party. Caine earned an Oscar-nomination for “Alfie” and made his U.S. debut later that year opposite Shirley MacLaine, who invited him to appear in the enjoyable comic caper “Gambit.” The full-time movie star reprised Harry Palmer with “Funeral in Berlin” (1966) and “Billion Dollar Brain” (1967), before churning out two American films for 20th Century Fox – “Deadfall” (1968) and “The Magus” (1968) – and starring in one of the most memorable films of his career, the action comedy classic, “The Italian Job” (1969).

Caine had established himself with wry, street smart characters who were ultimately likeable even when they were up to no good, but there was nothing he could not or would not tackle. Evolving with the climate of the times, Caine reflected the grittier, more violent atmosphere of the city streets with 1971’s landmark action film “Get Carter,” playing a hit man searching for the man who killed his own brother. In 1972, he held his own opposite acting giant Laurence Olivier in the psychological tete a tete, “Sleuth,” earning his second Best Actor Oscar nomination. In 1975, Caine was thrilled to receive an offer from director John Huston to take the leading role initially intended for his hero Humphrey Bogart in the epic adventure “The Man Who Would Be King.” He next revisited his flair for comedy in the classic Neil Simon ensemble romp “California Suite” (1978), playing a British tourist in Beverly Hills. Forever worried that his fortune might dry up and his fame disappear, Caine tried to stay as busy as possible, which explained why he finished out the decade with horrific missteps, “The Swarm” (1978) and “Beyond the Poseidon Adventure” (1979).

Caine had spent considerable time stateside during his career. With penal taxes threatening to bankrupt him, he and his second wife Shakira (also an actress and co-star of “The Man who Would Be King”) and their daughter moved to the famed Hollywood Hills, with Caine officially realizing his childhood dreams of the movie star life. He was welcomed to America with an offer from controversial director Brian DePalma to play a transvestite psychiatrist in his stylized thriller “Dressed To Kill” (1980) and one from Sidney Lumet to play opposite Christopher Reeve in the thriller “Deathtrap” (1982), which generated controversy for an onscreen kiss between the co-stars. With Caine’s next film, “Educating Rita” (1983), any recent trespasses were soon forgotten. Caine took home Golden Globe and BAFTA awards as well as another Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Dr. Frank Bryant, a college professor and failed poet whose alcoholic self-loathing turns a corner when he begins tutoring a hairdresser (Julie Walters) looking to improve her lot in life. Caine played the complexities of Bryant’s despairing soul with a stirring subtlety that reminded audiences why he had been a leading man for 20 years.

Caine finally picked up an Oscar in the Best Supporting Actor category for “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986). In what was arguably Woody Allen’s best ensemble piece, Caine was tenderly sympathetic as a cultured accountant who becomes lovestruck by his wife’s sister (Barbara Hershey), who is herself trapped in a suffocating relationship. Back in London, Caine gave a mesmerizing performance as a contemptible mob boss in Neil Jordan’s “Mona Lisa” (1986). Any discussion of Caine’s work during the 1980s should mention the actor’s theory that for every five films, you need one standout picture in order to survive. He knew from experience, having dodged the bullet several times. 1987’s “Jaws: The Revenge” and ’88’s “Bullseye” definitely fell into the clunker category, but Caine bounced back quickly with a Golden Globe-winning performance in the miniseries “Jack the Ripper” (CBS, 1988). Ever a delight when he returned to comedy, Caine’s sophistication paired nicely with the broad antics of Steve Martin in 1988’s classic con men comedy, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” (1988).

By the 1990s, Michael Caine was again living in London and enjoying his status as an elder statesman of the cinema. For the first time since prior to becoming a film star, he appeared in a number of television projects, starring in 1990’s “Jekyll & Hyde” (ABC) and producing and starring in HBO’s spy drama “Blue Ice” (1993). He made a rare family film appearance as Scrooge in “A Muppet Christmas Carol”(1992), before reprising an aging Harry Palmer in Showtime’s original “Bullet to Beijing” (1995). If one mercifully overlooked the lackluster Steven Seagal vehicle “On Deadly Ground” (1994), Caine could be said to have made a most auspicious return to the big screen in his excellent but little seen performance as a ruthless safe cracker in “Blood & Wine” (1996). Instead, the film adaptation of the West End hit “Little Voice” (1998) proved to be Caine’s so-called comeback. As Ray Say, a Northern seaside town-dwelling talent scout whose London accent divulges his washed up status, the actor gave a stand-out performance in a film brimming with exceptional acting. Always keeping Ray Say’s pathetic desperation just below the surface until the end, Caine reached new heights in an already remarkable career. His show-stopping performance of “It’s Over” was nothing short of breathtaking, so it was not surprising that the legendary actor should win that year’s Golden Globe.

Caine’s big screen renaissance also included a fifth Oscar nomination and second win for Best Supporting Actor in Lasse Hallstrom’s “The Cider House Rules” (1999). Caine was back at the top of his game as a New England orphanage-running abortionist, and it was the actor’s keen subtlety that saved what might have been a treacly sentimental parable into something of moving relevance. The 66-year-old actor celebrated his latest landmark by taking a year off for the first time in his life since he began working at age 16. He wrote and released the entertaining autobiography What’s It All About? and decided to retire. For Caine, retirement meant taking small supporting roles as they interested him, but passing on leads that would take months to shoot and involve rigorous promotional tours. Still, to Caine, essentially retirement still meant appearing in two or three movies a year. He took a small role in the pointless Stallone-helmed remake of his early hit “Get Carter” (2000), and likewise paid homage to the cheeky spy dramas he helped popularize in “Austin Powers in Goldmember” (2002), playing the equally randy father of Mike Myer’s “shagadellic” secret agent.

Caine “came out of retirement” in 2002 and earned some of the best acting notices of his career for playing a British journalist covering the early days of Vietnam’s revolt against the French government in Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American.” He earned another Best Actor Academy Award nomination and went back to smaller roles with “Batman Begins” (2006), the stylish period thriller “The Prestige” (2006), and Alfonso Cuarón’s apocalyptic “Children of Men” (2006).

In 2007, Caine again revisited an earlier triumph with an updated version of 1972’s “Sleuth,” playing the aging writer role that had been Laurence Olivier’s and Jude Law in Caine’s original role as the young upstart vying for the writer’s wife. Despite the screenplay by Caine’s old friend Harold Pinter and direction by Kenneth Branagh, the overwrought film lacked the allure of the original. Law had previously starred in a 2004 remake of “Alfie,” but like most remakes of Caine’s prime work, it paled in comparison.

All actors had their side investments and pet projects, and for Michael Caine it was being a restaurateur. Caine, at one time, had partnerships in five restaurants, including his first venture, Langan’s Brasserie in London and the English-style grille Shepherd’s. The actor took an active role in running the businesses and could frequently be seen dining under his own awnings. He eventually sold all of his restaurant interests, but added another title to his long resume in the summer of 2007 when he released the CD Cained, a collection of chill-out tracks. Though he was admittedly far north of the electronica music’s demographic, Caine was a big fan of chill-out music and after years of making compilations for friends, he was encouraged by his friend Elton John to release his own collection of favorites.

Caine’s body of work was recognized in 1999 with an Evening Standard British Film Awards Lifetime Achievement Award. The following year, he was knighted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the UK Empire Awards. The National Board of Review honored Caine with a Career Achievement Award and the San Sebastian Film Festival recognized the actor with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. The Film Society of Lincoln Center honored Caine with a star-studded Gala Tribute in 2004. Caine accepted his honor with the expected witty charm: ”I’ve been practicing humility all day. It’s very difficult for someone who’s been an actor for 40 years.”

Wikipedia entry:

Jonathan Newth (born 6 March 1939 in Devon) is a British actor, best known for his performances in television.

Credits include: Emergency Ward 10, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Ace of Wands, The Troubleshooters, Z-Cars, Callan, Van der Valk, The Brothers, Softly, Softly, Poldark, Doctor Who, Notorious Woman, Secret Army (Barsacq), The Professionals, The Nightmare Man, The Day of the Triffids, Tenko (Colonel Clifford Jefferson), Triangle, Angels, Juliet Bravo, After Henry, Boon, Bugs,The Bill, Agatha Christie’s Poirot (Dumb Witness), Peak Practice, Heartbeat and The Spire (Play at Sailsbury Cathedral).

Roy Marsden

Roy MarsdenWorking full time in the theatre. Roy has chosen to devote his full attention to acting and directing on stage. His latest effort was his own production of “A Christmas Carol” that he not only directed but also played Scrooge. His days as Commander Adam Dalgliesh are surely over as the new BBC production of PD James’ latest book “Death in Holy Orders” will star Martin Shaw as Dalgliesh. [March 2003]

On his television series “Airline”: It was one of the most enjoyable programmes I ever made. Learning to fly those old DC-3s was terrific. And I enjoyed playing Ruskin enormously because he had hope. Of course, he was a pain up the tushie most of the time, but then you’d see that youthful desire to actually get out and triumph against enormous odds. I identified with that character the most.

Lee Evans was born on February 25, 1964 in Avonmouth, Bristol, England. He is an actor and writer, known for There’s Something About Mary (1998), The Fifth Element (1997) andMousehunt (1997). He has been married to Heather Nudds since September 22, 1984. They have one child.

TCM overview:

Dustin Hoffman emerged as a key figure in the Hollywood Renaissance period of the 1960s and 1970s, personifying identifiable misfits and antiheroes in films embraced by a new breed of filmgoer. After struggling on and off Broadway, the Strasberg-trained actor rocketed to fame as the star of director Mike Nichols’ seminal “The Graduate” (1967). Chameleon-like characters in such diverse efforts as “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), “Little Big Man” (1970), “Straw Dogs” (1971) and “Papillon” (1973) solidified his growing reputation. The one-two punch of the hits “All the President’s Men” (1976) and “Marathon Man” (1976) proved Hoffman could deliver at the box office as well. More so than any other actor of the period, he pleased critics and fans alike with his performances in “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979), “Tootsie” (1982) and “Rain Man” (1988), winning Best Actor Oscars for two of these three nominated performances. Over the decades that followed, Hoffman divided his energies between strong supporting work in projects like “Sleepers” (1996) and sharing top-billing with fellow heavy weights like Robert De Niro in such films as “Wag the Dog” (1997). In the new millennium, he enjoyed a creative and commercial resurgence with a run of playful comic performances in “I [Heart] Huckabees” (2004), “Meet the Fockers” (2004), and the hit animated feature “Kung Fu Panda” (2008). Hoffman boasted a film career that spanned more than four decades and consistently delved into new creative territory, validating his status as one of the most gifted actors of his generation or any other.

Dustin Lee Hoffman was born on Aug. 8, 1937, in Los Angeles. His father worked at Columbia Studios in props and set dressing before shifting to furniture design, launching his own short-lived store, Harry Hoffman Furniture Company. His mother was a former jazz pianist and set Hoffman up with a piano and a teacher from the age of five. He was a restless student who frustrated parents and teachers with his poor grades and was first kicked out of school in the third grade. He harbored dreams of becoming a jazz musician, studying piano at with the L.A. Conservatory of Music, but he eventually became frustrated with what he felt was his limited talent, giving up music in his late teens to try his hand at something else. When he graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1955, Hoffman enrolled at Santa Monica City College, and within a year, was in danger of flunking out. He was desperately looking for a way to boost his grades when a friend suggested an acting course, which would be an easy three credits and a guaranteed no-fail. Hoffman found much more than just an easy-A class – he found his true passion. He was not the greatest actor initially, but for the first time in his life, he found himself focusing for hours on end on something.

After barely making it through a year at Santa Monica College, Hoffman convinced his parents to fund his new found passion with tuition to the Pasadena Playhouse, where he became fast friends with fellow student Gene Hackman. At the time, the Playhouse was populated with square-jawed matinee types hoping to become the next Rock Hudson, while Hoffman and Hackman stood apart with their anti-establishment reverence for Beat poetry and Method acting. Factor in their average looks and Hoffman’s 5’5″ height, and they seemed destined for character actor status. They shared the stage in a number of productions over the next two years, including “Of Mice and Men” and “The Taming of the Shrew,” before Hackman headed to Manhattan. Hoffman soon followed his friend, arriving in New York City in 1958 and spending his first few weeks too scared to leave Hackman and his wife’s postage stamp-sized apartment, where he spent nights nestled between the refrigerator and the bathtub. Eventually the newlyweds wanted their kitchen back and Hackman sent Hoffman to live with his friend Robert Duvall. The three remained close during the ensuing decade of off-off-Broadway productions, workshop training and odd jobs. They shared a dedication to their art, playing bongos on rooftops in homage to their hero Marlon Brando, and resigning themselves to a broke, bohemian existence rich with meaning. Becoming movie stars was never even a goal for the budding thespians, who would have been happy scraping by far from the Great White Way.

It would be several years before Hoffman would grace even the smallest stages; instead starting his New York career working in a mental institution and typing phone books while auditioning for roles for which he was consistently rejected. By 1960, he was ready to give up acting altogether, when he finally landed onstage in one of Gertrude Stein’s final plays, “Yes is for a Very Young Man.” The following year, he had a small part on Broadway and his first walk-on television role. Just as he was beginning to build some momentum, however, an accident left Hoffman hospitalized with burns so severe that he was not expected to live. Following extensive surgery, he was able to make a full recovery, but his brush with death made him more determined than ever to pursue his passion. When he was able to resume a normal life, Hoffman began training with Method acting legend Lee Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio. It was there, that he refined his technique and began to hone the dramatic approach that would become his trademark. He spent a year onstage with the Theater Company of Boston before returning to the New York stage in 1965’s “Harry, Noon and Night.” He gained further theatrical experience as an assistant director on “A View From the Bridge” and as manager on the Broadway play “The Subject Was Roses.” All the while, the starving actor was hawking toys at Macy’s and waiting tables. In 1966, Hoffman began to receive critical recognition for his work, earning Drama Desk and Theater World Awards for the farce “Eh?” and an Obie for the war drama “Journey of the Fifth Horse,” which was recorded and shown on public television the same year.

Little did Hoffman know that his years of Method training and his non-traditional looks would be tailor-made for the filmmaking renaissance that exploded in the late 1960s with character-based dramas that boldly explored the darker side of the American dream. Hoffman was among the establishing figures in “New Hollywood” when director Mike Nichols improbably cast the unknown in “The Graduate” (1967). Despite playing a protagonist that the novel characterized as a tall, blonde, athletic New England blueblood, Hoffman happened to possess the perfect blend of awkwardness, goofiness and disaffected melancholy in his portrayal of Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate reluctant to sign up for the empty, post-Atomic lifestyle of his cocktail-chugging parents. Benjamin’s complicated relationship with the older generation, further complicated by an affair with family friend Mrs. Robinson, resonated strongly with young audiences battling with their own value systems. Due to his career-making performance in his first of many hit films, Hoffman became a symbol of that generation, despite being 30 years old when the film was released.

For skillfully navigating the treacherous strait between satiric caricature and Method drama, Hoffman received an Academy Award nomination for his subtly hilarious yet profoundly moving performance. Hoffman’s payday for the landmark film was paltry – a concession he had made in order to avoid signing a multi-picture deal that would put him at the mercy of the studio. His career breakthrough was followed by a trip back to the unemployment line – where aLife magazine photographer happened to capture the unglamorous moment – before Hoffman returned to Broadway in Murray Shisgal’s “Jimmy Shine.” The film offers poured in, but most were pale “Graduate” variations and none captured Hoffman’s interest until John Schlesinger approached him for a very different role. Advisors told Hoffman he was nuts for following up an Oscar-nominated starring role with a supporting one opposite some unknown named Jon Voight, but his instincts were spot on when it came time to choose his next project, “Midnight Cowboy” (1969). The absorbing film adaptation of Leo Herlihy’s novel about a pair of desperate outsiders barely surviving New York’s sordid underbelly became a landmark of American cinema. Hoffman was again nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo, a limping, tubercular nickel-and-dime conman who forms an unlikely support system with a Texas hustler (Voight). Upon Hoffman’s second nomination, a Life magazine cover featured a sketch of Hoffman and fellow nominee John Wayne, with the headline “A Choice of Heroes.” The Academy was apparently not ready to embrace the new face of Hollywood, instead awarding the statue to Wayne.

On a definite roll moving into the 1970s, Hoffman starred in a new take on Wayne’s Western genre with the satirical “Little Big Man” (1970), earning a BAFTA nomination for the subtle anti-war protestation. He joined director Sam Peckinpah for “Straw Dogs” (1971), playing an expatriate mathematician caught up in escalating violence with local English toughs before a gritty turn opposite Steve McQueen in the prison escape drama “Papillon” (1973). Hoffman was again recruited by John Schlesinger for the thriller “Marathon Man” (1976), now portraying a troubled college student caught up in a conspiracy plot with former Nazi Laurence Olivier. In 1974’s “Lenny” (1974), Hoffman was nominated for an Academy Award for his complex, multi-dimensional portrait of hard-driving social comedian Lenny Bruce. The same year, he made his directorial debut on Broadway with Murray Schisgal’s “All Over Town.” Hoffman tackled the portrayal of another real-life figure in the gripping Watergate docudrama, “All the President’s Men” (1976), playing aggressive, young Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein who, along with Bob Woodward (Robert Redford), tirelessly unraveled the crimes of the Nixon administration. “Straight Time” (1978) failed to attract popular attention, but Hoffman’s acclaimed performance as a hard-core criminal stood as a hallmark of his approach to performance – one which eschewed easy sentiment in favor of three-dimensional grit.

Hoffman scored both a critical and popular success in 1979 with “Kramer vs. Kramer.” In the film, his role as a father left to forge a relationship with his young son after his wife leaves them, hit close to home for the actor who was simultaneously struggling with the end of his own marriage. Finally, after turning in over a decade of incredible performances, he received his first Best Actor Oscar for his painfully honest portrait. His next outing, “Tootsie” (1982), was considerably more lighthearted but also explored the evolving role of gender in society. The story, developed by Hoffman and Shisgal with an uncredited Elaine May, revolved around a desperate unemployed actor who masquerades as a woman in order to land a part on a soap opera, and unwittingly becomes a role model of the liberated, modern woman. Hoffman’s ability to move between genders believably and hilariously made his portrayal of Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels perhaps his most beloved performance, but the shoot was not without its troubles, with the notoriously difficult Hoffman clashing often with director and co-star Sydney Pollack. Hoffman’s well-informed performance as a struggling New York actor may have induced nostalgia, for he next returned to Broadway for a revival of “Death of a Salesman,” winning a Drama Desk Award, but curiously overlooked by the Tony committee for his run as Willy Loman in the Arthur Miller classic. Competing with the ghost of Lee J. Cobb’s original stage performance, some found Hoffman too slight and too young, ignoring the fact that he was almost a decade older than Cobb when he played the role on Broadway. However, a taped version of the play aired on CBS in 1985 and Hoffman was recognized with Emmy and Golden Globe awards.

Sadly, a charming Elaine May script called “Ishtar” (1987) suffered from highly-publicized budgetary failures, forever tarnishing the enjoyable Dustin Hoffman/Warren Beatty comedy about a pair of cut-rate lounge singers. Hoffman rebounded from this embarrassment with a second Academy Award for his riveting portrayal of an autistic savant in “Rain Man” (1988), hailed by some as one of the most objective, unsentimental portraits of a handicapped person in the American cinema. Hoffman and co-star Tom Cruise spent months in preparation for their roles, befriending real-life counterparts to the film’s brothers to bring as much realism as possible to Hoffman’s behavior and the pair’s strained relationship. Returning to the beloved immediacy of the stage, Hoffman next enjoyed a long run on London’s West End as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice.” In 1990, he reprised the role on Broadway, receiving a Tony nomination. There was no question that Hoffman had a solid reputation as one of America’s greatest actors, but even his high performance standards were not enough to boost a string of failures like “Family Business” (1989) “Dick Tracy” (1990) and “Hero” (1992). In Steven Spielberg’s lavish but uneven update of the Peter Pan “Hook” (1991), Hoffman’s villain was more comical than menacing and though curiously successful overseas, “Hook” was seen as a flop at home. Hoffman bounced back in a surprisingly traditional heroic role in the hit thriller “Outbreak” (1995). As a military specialist in epidemiology, Hoffman’s serious and dedicated Colonel Sam Daniels was a thorn in the side of Army brass but the best man for the job when an unknown virus in the African rain forest spreads to the United States.

Hoffman reunited with director Barry Levinson for a three-picture run, beginning with “Sleepers” (1996), in which the actor offered a scene-stealing turn as a pony-tailed defense lawyer with substance abuse problems. “Wag the Dog” (1997) cast him as a slick Hollywood producer called upon to create a fake war to divert the country’s attention away from a presidential sex scandal. The actor’s droll turn – reputedly inspired by legendary producer Robert Evans – was the highlight of the film. “Sphere” (1998) teamed Hoffman with Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson and Peter Coyote as scientists on an underwater mission investigating the crash of a possible alien spacecraft. In 1999, Hoffman produced his first feature, the Vietnam-era family portrait “A Walk on the Moon” (1999), and was honored by the American Film Institute in “A Tribute to Dustin Hoffman,” a televised ceremony during which he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

What should have been a career highlight was followed by several years of doubt and anxiety over his work. Having temporarily lost his spark, Hoffman reevaluated his career as an actor in his mid-fifties and toyed with ideas of writing and directing. Ultimately, he decided to cast aside many of his self-imposed limitations and approach offers with a new openness and renewed zeal for his art. He returned with a run of wonderful, mature dramas beginning with “Moonlight Mile,” where he played half of a married couple (opposite Susan Sarandon) grieving over the death of their daughter with the aid of her fiancé, Jake Gyllenhaal. He was surprisingly intimidating as a nightclub owner and crime boss in the neo-noir caper “Confidence” (2003) before starring for the first time opposite longtime friend Gene Hackman in “Runaway Jury” (2003). In the adaptation of the John Grisham bestseller, Hoffman played a courtly Southern attorney drawn into a deadly confrontation over the attempts of a ruthless jury manipulator (Hackman) to influence the verdict of a case.

Hoffman joined the cast of writer-director David O. Russell’s eccentric “I [Heart] Huckabees” (2004), playing opposite Lily Tomlin as a husband-and-wife team of “existential detectives” and continued his career upswing with a supporting turn in “Finding Neverland” (2004) as the nervous but charming financier of “Peter Pan” creator J.M. Barrie (Johnny Depp). He teamed with Barbra Streisand to play Ben Stiller’s eccentric parents in “Meet the Fockers” (2004), with Hoffman nearly stealing the entire film with his genial, ever-smiling characterization of proud papa Bernie Focker. Hoffman earned equal comedic accolades for his more understated performance as a literary expert enlisted to help protagonist (Will Ferrell) identify the author he hears narrating his own life in his head in “Stranger Than Fiction” (2006). The pair’s rapid-fire exchanges were among the film’s comedic highlights.

Hoffman’s role as a French perfume maker in the stylish period thriller “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” (2006) was well-reviewed though little-seen in the United States; however it was a box office hit internationally. He returned to mainstream cinema in the cartoonish title role of “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” (2007), a film about an enchanted toy store and its 243-year-old proprietor. Unfortunately, the suspiciously “Willy Wonka”-like tale failed to inspire critics, though its whimsical promise lured a fair amount of families to the multiplex. After voicing martial arts master, Shifu, in the hugely successful “Kung Fu Panda” (2008), Hoffman delivered a comically touching performance in “Last Chance Harvey” (2008), playing a down-and-out jingle writer and spurned father who finds his life and romantic passions renewed when he meets an intelligent and compassionate woman (Emma Thompson) at the airport. Hoffman made a long-awaited return to award contention when he received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical.

Hoffman followed soon after with a scene-stealing performance as the father of Paul Giamatti’s curmudgeonly title character in the dark comedy “Barney’s Version” (2010). Arguably less daring on an artistic level, although certainly more lucrative were his contributions to the inevitable sequels “Little Fockers” (2010) and “Kung Fu Panda 2” (2011). Far more intriguing was Hoffman’s first venture as the star of the ensemble television drama “Luck” (HBO, 2011-12). An insider’s look at the lives of various denizens in and around a Los Angeles area racetrack, “Luck” centered around the story of Chester “Ace” Bernstein (Hoffman), an ex-con with mob connections looking to get back in the game, take over the racetrack, and exact a bit of revenge on the people responsible for landing him in prison. Created by David Milch and co-produced by Michael Mann (who directed the pilot episode), “Luck” met with exceptional reviews and strong ratings, ensuring it a second season. Amidst the accolades, however, concerns over the deaths of two horses during production threatened to change the fortunes of the show for the worse. When a third thoroughbred died in March 2012, HBO – under siege from outraged animal activism groups – scrapped the planned second season and cancelled the show altogether in a move that shocked the industry.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Obituary: Sam Shepard

Playwright, actor, writer, drummer and haunter of Dublin late at night

FUSING BECKETT: Playwright Sam Shepard — a restless, roaming man of talents

Barbara McCarthy

2017.

I was very flattered when Sam Shepard asked a friend could he be introduced to me on Wexford Street one night some years back.

He was tall, handsome, taciturn, cowboy-esque and he was impressed by my sartorial choices and wanted to know where I was from. It was 2am, and I just finished hosting my karaoke night in the Village – a long-running event which attracted stragglers on rollovers, musicians, artists and some mad punters around town.

Patrick Bergin, The Darkness, Kiefer Sutherland, Ryan Tubridy, GreenDay and Daft Punk frequented it over the years. I insisted he come the following week and he did.

You wouldn’t think a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Oscar-nominated actor, author, and self-styled “rock ‘n’roll Jesus with the cowboy mouth” described as a “poet laureate of America’s emotional badlands,” who died peacefully in his home in Kentucky from complications related to Lou Gehrig’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, would be into karaoke, but he visited a few times during that period in early 2007 when he directed his play, Kicking a Dead Horse, with Stephen Rea in the Abbey.

It was an amazing time in Dublin -the Tiger was yet to eat itself, people were spilling onto the street each night talking loudly and he was immersed in it. He asked me to come to his play. I never did. What an idiot.

One night I brought him to a party after my gig. There were musicians sitting in a badly lit dive above a shop playing bluegrass at 3am – that was when musicians could still afford to live in town. I left after a while. He stayed behind. Sitting silently, without pretension, happy in the dinge and fag smoke, absorbed in the music.

When I read Shepard’s ‘Buddy’ Patti Smith’s beautifully articulated tribute to her friend and collaborator in The New Yorker after he died, last Saturday, aged 73, I reminisced about that night. She described, how, during a trip to Dublin in 2012 to receive an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Trinity College, the pair joined musicians in his favourite local pub, the Cobblestone. “As we playfully staggered across the bridge, he recited reams of Beckett off the top of his head,” she recalled.

It encapsulated everything beautiful and poetic about a disappearing Ireland that a middle-American man, who transversed the bridge between the prairies and the big city, and who had Beckett’s original writings hanging on his kitchen walls, would hold in his heart.

Jimmy Fay, who directed Shepard’s plays True West twice (once for the Lyric in Belfast, and once for the Abbey), Ages of the Moon and Curse of the Starving Class, also in the Abbey in 2011, described him as “generous, razor sharp, experimental, strange, iconic, Elvis-like”, while also being “utterly engaging, interested in people, an outdoors man, a great poet who always had to write”.

He could fuse Samuel Beckett and Little Richard. He could combine pop rock with existentialist angst. He was able to make really odd, strange, beautiful plays. He gave a voice to the drama of the heartland. He was a horseman, who raised thoroughbreds, and loved jazz and read Proust. He was gloriously paradoxical.

“He was an extraordinary artist with a brain bigger than anyone else around him,” Fay said. “And I was in awe of him.”

Born Samuel Shepard Rogers VII in Fort Sheridan, Illinois on November 5, 1943, the eldest of three children, his early years were nomadic. His father was a bomber pilot in World War II, so the family moved from one military base to another, taking in South Dakota, Guam and Florida before settling in an avocado ranch in Duarte, California.

His father’s experiences of war deeply affected him and he became an alcoholic, which later inspired Shepard’s finest semi-autobiographical plays featuring dysfunctionality and darkness.

After abandoning an agricultural degree, he arrived in New York in 1963, a counter-cultural cauldron with “a cowboy mouth with matinee-idol looks”, a mid-western drawl and vague aspirations to act, make music and write. After securing a job as a busboy at the Village Gate nightclub, he became part of the underground avant-garde movement.

His first Gestalt pieces, Cowboy and The Rock Garden, caused confusion and some uproar when they were first shown Off Off Broadway. New York, it seemed, wasn’t ready for such a raw injection of profane language and psychodrama.

He won OBIEs (Off-Broadway Theater Awards) for Chicago, Icarus Mother and Red Cross. In 1967, he wrote his first full length play, La Turista, an allegory on the Vietnam war about an American couple in Mexico and won his fourth OBIE. He won 13 in total.

His early science-fiction play, The Unseen Hand (1969), influenced Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show, while Operation Sidewinder featured a computerised snake, hopi Indians, black panthers, and his rock group, the Holy Modal Rounders, for which he played drums.

John Lahr, a former theatre critic at The Nation and the Village Voice, described it in The New Yorker. “He didn’t conform to the manners of the day; he’d lived a life outside the classroom and conventional book-learning. He was rogue energy with rock riffs. In his coded stories of family abuse and addiction, he brought to the stage a different idiom and a druggy, surreal lens,” Lahr wrote.

In 1979 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his play Buried Child, which was part of a quintet of family tragedies including Curse of the Starving Glass, (1977), and True West (1980), which depicted the rivalry between two estranged brothers, later to be played by actors including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Gary Sinese and John Malkovich. Fool For Love (1983) and A Lie of the Mind, (1985) established him as one of the visionaries of US theatre. By the age of 40, he had become the second most widely performed US playwright after Tennessee Williams.

When Curse of the Starving Class was performed in The Abbey theatre, in 2011, Shepard became the Abbey’s most frequently staged playwright. Joe Hanley, who played the role of the explosive alcoholic father Weston in the semi-autobiographical play, said of Shepard: “He was the last of the great American writers. A theatrical and gifted man without ego.”

At the time his playwriting was beginning to peak, with predictable oddity he became a romantic movie lead in movies such as Baby Boom. “The shift was so unexpected that many of his fans in the theatre thought it had to be somebody else when his name appeared with Richard Gere and Brooke Adams in Days of Heaven, but his on-screen magnetism was powerful enough to match, if not overpower Gere’s own,” film critic Gene Seymour said.

In 1983, Shepard was nominated for an academy award for Best Supporting Actor as his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. He also starred in Steel Magnolias, Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Frances with his partner-to-be Jessica Lange, The Notebook, Black Hawk Down, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and The Pelican Brief, with Julia Roberts amongst others. Recently, he starred as in Bloodline on Netflix.

Despite his many acting credentials, Shepard humbly insisted that his performances were ‘hit and miss’.

In February of this year, his book, The One Inside – a collection of short stories – was hailed by actor Ed Harris. “The most intimate thing he wrote. Read that and it’s like you’re holding the essence of Sam in your hands,” he said in an obituary in the Guardian. “Exploring his characters is like a bottomless pit. We just did 125 performances of Buried Child in London and we’re still discovering things about these people at the end of the run.”

Shepard was constantly working on something. Once one thing finished, he would move onto the next, be it a poem or a screenplay, but he also had a great impulse to hit the open road, as his ex-lover Patti Smith wrote in her evocative piece: “Sam liked being on the move. He’d throw a fishing rod or an old acoustic guitar in the back seat of his truck, maybe take a dog, but for sure a notebook, and a pen, and a pile of books.”

Unlike modern stars, who court attention, Shepard was very private. He didn’t like flying or the internet, used a typewriter and liked to roam the streets freely.

He married actress O-Lan Jones with whom he had a son, Jesse Mojo Shepard, in 1969. He met Jessica Lange while making the movie Frances in 1982. They were together for almost 30 years until 2009. They had two children, Hannah Jane and Samuel Walker. All three of his children were with him when he passed away.

He was cowboy, a badass and an enigma, who, according to Lange, wasn’t easy going. “But no man I’ve ever met compares to Sam in terms of maleness,” she said. She was probably wrong though.

She probably meant to say that no one ever compares to Sam

IMDB entry:

As the eldest son of a US Army officer (and WWII bomber pilot), Sam Shepard spent his early childhood moving from base to base around the US until finally settling in Duarte, California. While at high school he began acting and writing and worked as a ranch hand in Chino. He graduated high school in 1961 and then spent a year studying agriculture at Mount San Antonio Junior College, intending to become a vet.

In 1962, though, a touring theater company, the Bishop’s Company Repertory Players, visited the town and he joined up and left home to tour with them. He spent nearly two years with the company and eventually settled in New York where he began writing plays, first performing with an obscure off-off-Broadway group but eventually gaining recognition for his writing and winning prestigious OBIE awards (Off-Broadway ) three years running.

He flirted with the world of rock, playing drums for the Holy Modal Rounders, then moved to London in 1971 where he continued writing.

Back in the US by 1974, he became playwright in residence at San Francisco’s Magic Theater and continued to work as an increasingly well respected playwright throughout the 1970s and into the ’80s.

Throughout this time he had been dabbling with Hollywood having, most notably in the early days, worked as one of the writers on _”Zabriski Point” (1970)_, but it was his role as Chuck Yeager in 1983’s The Right Stuff (1983) that brought him fully to the attention of the wider, non-theater audience.

Since then he has continued to write, act and direct, both on screen and in the theater.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous

Kecin Spacey

TCM overview:

A chameleonic actor equally at home on stage or in film either as a hero or a villain, Kevin Spacey first gained notice with several strong stage performances both on and off-Broadway. Performing in stage productions of “Ghosts,” “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and “Hurlyburly” helped pave the way for a feature film career atop the A-list, though his real on-camera start came with his deliciously eccentric performance as a heroin-addicted millionaire on the cult television series, “Wiseguy” (CBS, 1987-1990). After making the segue into features, Spacey bounced around in supporting roles until he gained widespread recognition for “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992), in which he managed to keep up with heavyweights Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin and his personal idol, Jack Lemmon. But it was his Academy Award-winning performance as the mysterious Verbal Kint in “The Usual Suspects” (1995) that propelled Spacey into the limelight. He made equally impressionable appearances in “L.A. Confidential” (1997) and “Se7en” (1997), cementing his status as a hypnotic performer willing to challenge himself by playing unique characters. Though he slipped a bit with “Pay It Forward” (2000) and “K-PAX” (2001), Spacey remained a vital force in films like “Superman Returns” (2006), while also assuming the role of artistic director of the Old Vic theatre in London in 2003. With award-worthy performances in the made-for-HBO movie “Recount” (2008) and the feature “Casino Jack” (2010), Spacey only enhanced his stature as one of Hollywood’s most diverse and accomplished performers.

Born July 26, 1959 in South Orange, NJ, Spacey was raised from an early age in and around Los Angeles by his father, Thomas, an oft-unemployed technical writer, and his mother, Kathleen, a secretary. Though his parents were strict, Spacey was rebellious; even destructive – he burned down his sister’s tree house in the backyard of his family’s Malibu home and was later expelled from the Northridge Military Academy for hitting a fellow student with a tire. He moved on to Chatsworth High School, where he discovered theater and acted alongside fellow classmate and future actors, Val Kilmer and Mare Winningham. After graduating, he tried his hand at stand-up comedy, even trying out for “The Gong Show” (1975-1980), but failed to make the cut. He then followed Kilmer to the dramatic program at the Julliard School in Manhattan, where he managed to stick around for only two of the required four years. Spacey occasionally landed small roles on small stages, while working as a shoe salesman and a building superintendent to pay the bills. At the beginning Spacey’s career was decidedly hard-fought.

Spacey was doing office work at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival when the festival director saw him in an off-off-Broadway play and told him he should be acting, not pushing pencils. He soon landed the role of a soldier in the company’s production of “Henry VI, Part I” (1981). Other roles soon followed and Papp one day “fired” the office worker so he would be free to find employment as an actor. It was not long until Spacey made his Broadway debut opposite Liv Ullman in “Ghosts” (1982), effectively launching his stage career. After appearing in regional theater, Spacey auditioned for the national touring company of “The Real Thing,” but director Mike Nichols instead suggested he try for a role in another one of his productions, “Hurlyburly.” After serving as the understudy for the role of Mickey – which was played by Harvey Keitel – Spacey was the standby for two of the other male roles in the same play. Nichols later gave the actor his first onscreen break as a subway rider who mugs Meryl Streep’s Rachel in “Heartburn” (1986), then later cast him as a Wall Street broker in “Working Girl” (1989).

In between his two parts, Spacey earned plaudits – though he was the only cast member passed over for a Tony Award nomination – playing Jamie Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1986), a part he landed thanks to stealing a cocktail party invitation from an old woman falling asleep next to him at a lecture given by the play’s director, Jonathan Miller. Spacey sauntered into the party, sat next to Miller and described his months of difficulty getting an audition. Two days later, Spacey scored an audition and eventually landed the part. After calling upon his background as a stand-up comic for “Rocket Gibralter” (1988), Spacey was cast as the lecherous, heroin-addicted multi-millionaire villain Mel Profitt in the cult favorite drama, “Wiseguy.” Spacey continued the television trend, appearing in the miniseries “The Murder of Mary Phagan” (NBC, 1988), which he followed with a return to features with the maudlin “Dad” (1988). As the 1990s dawned, he delivered a dazzling starring turn as disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker in “Fall From Grace” (NBC, 1990), then performed admirably as renowned attorney Clarence Darrow in “Darrow” (PBS, 1991). Both roles preceded his Tony-winning featured performance as a gangster wannabe in Neil Simon’s nostalgic play “Lost in Yonkers” (1991), which cemented his status as an exceptional stage performer capable of making the transition to the big screen.

Despite wide exposure from his television and film work, it was his stage performances that helped propel him down a path of critically acclaimed films that eventually vaulted him atop the Hollywood A-list. Al Pacino had been an audience member at “Lost in Yonkers” and came away duly impressed with Spacey’s performance, lobbying for Spacey to be cast to as Mr. Williamson, the put-upon manager of an office full of deadbeat salesmen in David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992). So electric were the scenes between Spacey and the other actors – including Pacino, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin and mentor Jack Lemmon – that Spacey felt beaten down from all the yelling and cursing hurled his way. Later that same year, he visited a suburbia riddled with dark secrets for the first time in Alan Pakula’s not entirely successful tale of wife swapping and murder, “Consenting Adults” (1992). Spacey starred in the underrated black comedy “The Ref” (1994) which paired him with the equally formidable Judy Davis as battling spouses whose home is burglarized by a gunman (Denis Leary) who holds them hostage and forces them to reconcile their differences for the sake of his diminishing sanity.

Spacey continued tackling character-centered roles in small films that he helped amplify with his strong, intense performances. In “Swimming With Sharks” (1994) – on which he also served as a co-producer – Spacey let it fly as an abusive Hollywood studio executive who is taken hostage by his lowly assistant (Frank Whaley) after he steals the recent film grad’s script idea. Hitting his stride as a variety of villainous characters, Spacey offered a chilling – and unbilled – turn in David Fincher’s atmospheric “Seven” (1995), playing serial killer John Doe, who commits a series of bizarre and grisly murders based on the seven deadly sins. As the man who delivered Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box to her unsuspecting onscreen husband Brad Pitt, Spacey proved no one could do creepy as well as he could. On an unbelievable roll, he stole the show as the seemingly crippled con man, “Verbal” Kint, in “The Usual Suspects” (1995), one of the most talked about films of the 1990s, thanks to one simple question: Who is Keyser Söze? Despite stellar performances from Chazz Paleminteri, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio Del Toro and Gabriel Byrne, Spacey was again singled out by most critics for his intricate portrayal of the pathetic Kint, who narrates to a customs agent the story of a heist gone bad without giving away his ulterior motives. Spacey earned several award nominations and for his work as Kint, won the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.

With his sudden rise to the top of his profession, Spacey began fielding offers for roles in more mainstream Hollywood fare. After playing a researcher at the Center for Disease Control in the unfortunate “Outbreak” (1995), Spacey essayed the role of a smugly crusading prosecutor in “A Time to Kill” (1996). Like many successful performers, Spacey had an itch to direct. So he stepped behind the cameras for “Albino Alligator” (1997), a character-driven thriller about three petty crooks mistaken for big-time bank robbers. While Spacey had much to learn about camera placement and movement, he clearly knew how to deal with actors, eliciting fine work from Gary Sinise, Matt Dillon and Viggo Mortensen. Returning to his stock in trade, Spacey delivered one of his finest screen performances as the smarmy celebrity cop Jack Vincennes in “L.A. Confidential” (1997), Curtis Hanson’s brilliant adaptation of James Ellroy’s serpentine novel about crime and corruption on both sides of the law in 1950s Los Angeles. In fact, critics considered his death scene a marvel for the way he literally did not move a muscle once shot dead, holding the shot for well over 15 seconds, eyes wide open. Similarly his portrayal of Jim Williams, the homosexual Savannah resident accused of murder in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (1997), allowed the actor to plumb the depths of an upstanding public citizen who succumbs to his darker impulses.

His successful turn as Jim Williams merely fueled speculation about his private life, which peaked with an October 1997Esquire cover story by Tom Junod that intimated that the actor was, in fact, gay. The matter proved a double-edged sword for Spacey. He earned sympathy from those who felt the journalist and the magazine had crossed a line, but scorn from those who felt he should offer comments on his private life, and if indeed gay, “come out” already. Spacey later addressed the concerns in a 1999 Playboy interview, effectively denying the rumors. The profile, however, had zero effect on his career – Spacey took on a rare heroic role to play a cop who excels at excising hostages from their kidnappers in “The Negotiator” (1998). Paired with Samuel L. Jackson – who portrayed a good cop suspected of wrongdoings – Spacey proved a mesmerizing presence and matched Jackson’s intensity. The pair meshed well and elevated a somewhat pedestrian mystery into an enjoyable film. After a turn voicing the evil Hopper in the animated “A Bug’s Life” (1998), Spacey reprised his stage role as the amoral and cynically sarcastic casting agent, Mickey, for the filmed version of “Hurlyburly” (1998).

Unlike many stage-trained actors who achieved Hollywood success, Spacey returned to the theater with a great deal of fanfare. He undertook the difficult role of Theodore “Hickey” Hickman in Eugene O’Neill’s mammoth “The Iceman Cometh,” originally staged at London’s Almeida Theatre in the spring of 1998. By taking on a role that had become associated with Jason Robards, Spacey managed to successfully make it his own, offering a unique perspective on the hardware salesman. Spacey earned himself a Tony Award nomination, but lost to Brian Dennehy, who ironically starred in a Chicago production of “Iceman Cometh.” Spacey returned to the big screen as Lester Burnham in “American Beauty” (1999), a character who ranked among his best and most fully realized screen creations. In delineating the mid-life crisis of a man who moves from a henpecked husband, ignored father and impotent employee to an empowered, take-charge guy, Spacey undertook a risky role that firmly vaulted him from esteemed character actor to full-fledged leading man. Spacey earned critical kudos for “Beauty” across the board – as well as his second Academy Award; this time, for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

Returning to his more conventional slickster persona, he joined Danny DeVito to star as a smooth-talking salesman in “The Big Kahuna” (2000) – a dazzling performance in an otherwise little-seen film – before starring in “Ordinary Decent Criminal” (2000), a fictionalized biography of Irish master thief Martin Cahill. Playing juicy roles in small films had no effect on Spacey’s reputation as being one of the premiere actors working in Hollywood, but the actor seemed to have lost some steam when he starred in the mawkish “Pay It Forward” (2000), playing a scarred schoolteacher who opens himself up to love when his young student (Haley Joel Osment) devises a system of paying good deeds forward to three people. Spacey’s affected manner and overdone makeup did little to aid this already over-sentimentalized tale. Spacey received mixed reviews when he teamed with Jeff Bridges in “K-PAX” (2001), playing a man who claims to be an alien from outer space. Later that year, he was cast – and many argued, miscast – as the milquetoast hero of the screen adaptation of the Pulitzer-winning “The Shipping News” (2001), which also suffered from tepid reviews and indifferent audience response. Meanwhile, Spacey made the requisite appearance on “Inside the Actors Studio” (Bravo, 1995- ), where he impressed host James Lipton and the audience with dead-on impressions of Jimmy Stewart, Johnny Carson, Christopher Walken, Marlon Brando and even Katherine Hepburn.

In between projects, Spacey distinguished himself as a champion of his craft, becoming involved with the Screen Actors Guild and launching Triggerstreet.com as a means for aspiring creative people to form an online community. In 2003, he was named artistic director of London’s historic Old Vic Theater, a stage where he appeared in his triumphant production of “The Ice Man Cometh.” Despite being a celebrity – guaranteeing not giving him the anonymity enjoyed past artistic directors – Spacey’s tenure at the Old Vic was a rocky one. He was heavily criticized for not putting on enough classics, though his “Richard II,” in which he starred as the immature and detached king, was critically acclaimed. While the press had a field day lambasting his choices, Spacey cited his success in bringing the theater back into public prominence. Several productions – notably “National Anthems” (2005) and “Philadelphia Story” (2005) – filled seats, but reviews were savage. Then Spacey hit a bona fide disaster with Arthur Miller’s “Resurrection Blues,” which suffered from poor performances and attendance that failed to reach even half-capacity. Spacey remained unapologetic, however, claiming that the press was out to get him because of his celebrity.

The actor was next seen as an academic with strong views on capital punishment who finds himself accused of murder in director Alan Parker’s film “The Life of David Gale” (2003). Again slipping into a now-familiar martyr role, Spacey found his performance praised despite the movie’s many flaws, which included an overwrought and unconvincing story, and an overindulgent anti-death penalty message. Changing gears, Spacey returned beyond the camera to helm – as well as co-write and star in – “Beyond the Sea” (2004), a pet project about the popular 1950s and 1960s singer Bobby Darin, who the actor had idolized and imitated since he was a child. Ironically, the singer had died an early death and by the time Spacey got the project into production, he was nearly too old to play Darin. Fortunately, a clever script device had Darin looking back at his life and plugging his later-years self into his memories, allowing audiences to easily forget Spacey’s age. The actor provided a tour de force performance and provided all of the Darin-like vocals himself. As a director, he excelled at visually interpreting the film’s lavish and energetic musical sequences, though some of the performances were a tough sell. Nonetheless, Spacey delivered an engaging film and one of his finest performances.

Spacey made headlines when he agreed to reunite with Bryan Singer for the first time since “The Usual Suspects,” starring in the director’s controversial revival of the original comic book film franchise, playing the Man of Steel’s brilliant nemesis Lex Luthor in “Superman Returns” (2006). With a shaven head and flashy suits, Spacey exuded a much more subdued evil than did predecessor Gene Hackman’s campy take in the 1978 version. Nonetheless, Luthor’s plot this time around was no less dastardly – he plans to use Superman’s own technology from Krypton to create a new land mass in the Atlantic Ocean so he can destroy the United States, sending Superman (Brandon Routh) on an epic journey through the depths of the ocean and into the reaches of outer space. After playing an efficiency expert hell-bent on ridding the world of Christmas in the terribly unfunny “Fred Claus” (2007), Spacey was an unorthodox math professor and genius statistician who leads a group of likewise brilliant MIT students to Las Vegas to crack the gambling code in “21” (2008), a slick and sexy thriller based on the best seller, Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions.

Before he was inked to revive Lex Luthor for Bryan Singer’s second go-round with “Superman: Man of Steel” (2011), Spacey generated considerable critical acclaim playing Democratic insider Ron Klain in the made-for-television movie, “Recount” (HBO, 2008), a behind the scenes look at the voting scandal that erupted in Florida in 2000 during the election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. For his work, he was nominated in late 2008 for a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television. After voicing the robot Gerty in the acclaimed “Moon” (2009), Spacey co-starred opposite George Clooney in the moderately panned military satire, “The Men Who Stare at Goats” (2009). Returning to the political arena, Spacey was the perfect choice to play Jack Abramoff in the satirical comedy “Casino Jack” (2010), which chronicled the rise and fall of Washington’s most notorious and disgraced lobbyist. Directed by George Hickenlooper, who died just weeks after the release of the film, “Casino Jack” gave Spacey the right platform to once again put his formidable talents on display, resulting in a Golden Globe nod for Best Performance by an Actor in a Comedy or Musical.

After playing Jason Bateman’s manipulative boss in the hit R-rated comedy “Horrible Bosses” (2011), Spacey was a Wall Street executive whose decisions during the first days of the 2008 financial crisis are called into question in the indie financial thriller “Margin Call” (2011). Surrounded by a strong cast that included Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, Demi Moore, Zachary Quinto and Simon Baker, Spacey stood out as a man worn down by the machinations of the cutthroat financial world. In 2011, he returned to the stage to star in a production of “Richard III” directed by Sam Mendes, which premiered at the Old Vic, and later commenced on a worldwide tour that ended in early 2012. From there, Spacey took a rare turn into television with “House of Cards” (Netflix, 2013- ), a remake of a British miniseries of the same name that aired on the BBC in 1990. Set in the world of Washington politics, “House of Cards” starred Spacey as Frank Underwood, the Democratic House Majority Whip who hides behind his genial Southern charm while plotting Machiavellian-like vengeance for being passed over as Defense Secretary. Co-starring Robin Wright as his Lady Macbeth, Kate Mara as an ambitious young reporter and Cory Stoll as a drug-addled congressman under Underwood’s thumb, “House of Cards” made waves for being streamed exclusively on Netflix, where all 13 episodes were available for viewing at once. Both the series and Spacey’s performance were widely hailed by critics.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Kathleen McNenny, Keith Carradine, Lee Godart, Ken Russell (Director) Theatre Marquee attending the Opening Night Performance Celebration of MINDGAME at the SoHo Playhouse in New York City. November 9, 2008 © Walter McBride / Retna Ltd. (Photo by Walter McBride/Corbis via Getty Images)

Keith Carradine

TCM overview:

Like his brothers David, Robert and Bruce and half-brother Michael Bowen, Keith Carradine followed in the footsteps of his father, John Carradine, and became an actor in the early 1970s. He enjoyed considerable success in that decade thanks to performances in independent-minded films like “Nashville” (1975), “Welcome to L.A.” (1976) and “Pretty Baby” (1978). Carradine branched into Hollywood features in the 1980s, but found more success on Broadway in the following decade, most notably with his Tony-nominated turn as American humorist Will Rogers in “The Will Rogers Follies” (1991). Carradine later divided his time between features and television, often in Western roles which benefited from his laconic presence, particularly as Wild Bill Hickok on David Milch’s brilliant revisionist series, “Deadwood” (HBO, 2004-07). By the time he played a formidable FBI agent hunting down the titular serial killer in “Dexter” (Showtime, 2006- ), Carradine had proven himself to be a highly-sought and versatile actor comfortable in both leading and supporting roles.

Born on Aug. 8, 1949 in San Mateo, CA, Carradine was raised in a show business home headed by his actor father, John, and his actress mother, Sonia Sorel. Carradine’s father had made a name for himself in Hollywood for his performances in films by John Ford and Cecil B. DeMille, among many others. After Sorel gave birth to his brothers Robert and Christopher, Carradine’s parents split when he was 6; she later married artist Michael Bowen and gave birth to Carradine’s half-brother Michael Bowen Jr. A protracted custody battled followed, but his father eventually claimed custody of his three sons, who joined their half-brothers, David and Bruce, in the sprawling clan. Meanwhile, Carradine began acting in high school and later attended Colorado State University as a theater major. But he found collegiate life stifling and dropped out after three months to pursue acting fulltime. After returning to Los Angeles in 1968, Carradine joined the Broadway production of “Hair” the following year; ironically, it was David who auditioned for the role and brought Carradine along to accompany him on piano. The producers preferred Carradine over David and cast him in the role of “tribal leader” Claude. During his tenure with the show, he and co-star Shelley Plimpton had a daughter, Martha, who later became an acclaimed stage and film actress of her own.

A 1970 stage production of “Tobacco Road” with his father preceded his first onscreen appearance in the downbeat Western “A Gunfight” (1971) with Kirk Douglas and Johnny Cash. Director Robert Altman liked his performance and cast Carradine as a cowpoke in his revisionist Western, “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (1971), a film that marked the first of several acclaimed collaborations between the actor and director over the next half-decade. He bolstered his resume with several television appearances, including a guest shot on David’s hit series “Kung Fu” (ABC, 1972-75), in which he played the teenage version of Caine in flashbacks. Carradine began delivering impressive dramatic performances in a series of independent features, as well as the occasional Hollywood title. He was best used in mildly sensuous roles, like the Depression Era bank robber who complicates the life of a small town girl (Shelley Duvall) by falling in love with her in Altman’s “Thieves Like Us” (1974), or the folk singer who carries on multiple affairs with fellow musicians in “Nashville.” Carradine’s composition for the film, “I’m Easy,” earned him a 1976 Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Original Composition, and even ushered in a brief spell as a pop star when the song reached #17 on the Billboardcharts.

Carradine’s offbeat romantic qualities were also put to excellent use in “Welcome To L.A.” (1976), an early effort by Robert Altman’s protégé Alan Rudolph, and in Joan Tewkesbury’s “Old Boyfriends” (1979). The terminal point for these types of roles came in Louis Malle’s controversial “Pretty Baby,” which cast him as a dissolute 19th century photographer who falls in love with a 12-year-old New Orleans prostitute (Brooke Shields). Carradine also scored as a French officer entangled in a bitter struggle over respect in Ridley Scott’s “The Duellists” (1976) and Walter Hill’s Western “The Long Riders” (1980), which found him co-starring with brothers David and Robert as notorious outlaws the Younger brothers.

Eventually, Carradine’s involvement in arthouse-minded efforts began to yield fewer positive returns – features like Rudolph’s “Choose Me” (1984) and Andrei Konchalovsky’s “Maria’s Lovers” (1984) received critical praise, but were seen by relatively few moviegoers. Around this time, he began to shift his interests to television, where he found rewarding work in television movies and miniseries like “A Rumor of War” (CBS, 1980), “Chiefs” (CBS, 1983), which earned him an Emmy nomination for playing a Southern serial killer, and “A Winner Never Quits” (1986), in which he played one-armed baseball pitcher Pete Gray. His most widely seen television appearance of the decade, however, was undoubtedly Madonna’s music video for “Material Girl” (1984), which cast him as a Golden Age Hollywood director who is smitten by the singer after seeing her in a production number inspired by “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953).

Carradine made a return to Broadway opposite the legendary Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in “Foxfire” (1982), which brought him an Outer Critics Circle Award. He reprised the role in Los Angeles in 1985 while racking up praise for his turns in “Another Part of the Forest” (1983) and “Detective Story” (1984). His greatest stage success, however, came with “The Will Rogers Follies” (1991), which required him to not only sing and dance, but show off some impressive rope tricks and deliver quips on the day’s headlines at each show. For his ingratiating turn as the American humorist, Carradine earned a Tony Award nomination and a Drama Desk Award that same year.

Carradine’s film career continued to blaze an independent path during the late 1980s and early 1990s. He remained faithful to director Alan Rudolph, enjoying a richly florid role as a wildly coiffured killer in “Choose Me” (1986), before he tackled playing an American ex-patriate painter in “The Moderns” (1988) and reprising Will Rogers for a cameo in “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle” (1994). Carradine also displayed a talent for art by creating the painting that served as the one-sheet for “The Moderns.” Most of his big-screen efforts, however, were viewed by limited audiences, though not for lack of quality. He was Vanessa Redgrave’s ex-husband in Simon Callow’s fine film version of “The Ballad of the Sad Café” (1991) for producers Merchant Ivory, but few saw managed to see it, as was the case for “CrissCross” (1992) and the dark Southern comedy “Daddy’s Dyin’, Who’s Got the Will?” (1990). Carradine had his biggest hit in theaters during the 1990s with “Andre” (1994), a genial true story about a Maine family who nurses a baby seal back to health and later adopts the animal when it returns to their home after trying to set him free. Carradine also marked the decade by claiming his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1993.

Carradine kept busy throughout the late 1990s and into the new millennium in numerous features and television projects, as well as occasional turns to the stage. Among the better received stage efforts was a fine take on George W. Bush in a 2005 production of David Hare’s “Stuff Happens,” which concerned the political thinking behind the invasion of Iraq. He also made his debut as a series regular for the Showtime series “Fast Track” (1997), a short-lived drama from Larry Gelbart about the world of professional stock car racing. Meanwhile, “Complete Savages” (ABC, 2004-05), Carradine’s foray into family comedy, met a similar fate. But he received outstanding notices as Wild Bill Hickok in the first season of “Deadwood” (HBO, 2004-06), despite only surviving the series for its initial four episodes. In playing the weary gunslinger, Carradine imbued the often misunderstood figure with depth and nuance, turning a typically caricatured persona into a highly complex human being. His identification with the Old West later brought him to the hosting duties for the History Channel technology series “Wild West Tech” (2003-05) and the Stephen Spielberg-produced miniseries “Into the West” (TNT, 2005), where he played misguided Native American policymaker and educator Richard Henry Pratt.

In 2006, Carradine returned to Broadway in the sparkling comedy “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” The production preceded his joining the cast of Showtime’s darkly comic thriller, “Dexter” (2006- ); Carradine played Special Agent Lundy, who is tasked by the FBI to track down the Bay Harbor Butcher, also known as the series’ titular serial killer (Michael C. Hall). Off-screen, however, he was associated with a real-life criminal case when his first wife, Sandra Will Carradine, was convicted on two counts of perjury for her false testimony in the wiretapping trial of celebrity detective Anthony Pellicano. After divorcing Carradine in 1993, she hired Pellicano to place wire taps on her ex-husband’s phone, as well as that of his girlfriend and eventual second wife, Haley DuMond. Carradine’s ex-wife later complicated her involvement by becoming romantically involved with Pellicano. Meanwhile, Carradine appeared in an episode of “Criminal Minds” (CBS, 2005- ), which he followed by voicing a character in the Grapes of Wrath segment of “Novel Reflections on the American Dream” (PBS, PBS, 2007), a documentary look at how novelists have portrayed the idea of the American Dream.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Powers Boothe

TCM overview:

A dependable character actor for over three decades, Emmy winner Powers Boothe lent grit to powerful men on both sides of the moral fence in a variety of diverse projects like “Red Dawn” (1984), “Nixon” (1995), “Deadwood” (HBO, 2004-06), “24” (Fox, 2001-2010) and “The Avengers” (2012). Boothe made an indelible impression on audiences with his first major screen role as the deranged Reverend Jim Jones in “Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones” (CBS, 1980) before making the leap to features with Walter Hill’s “Southern Comfort” (1981). He soon became a favorite for directors like Hill and Oliver Stone, who cast Boothe as flinty bad guys in “Extreme Prejudice” (1987), “U Turn” (1990) and “Nixon” (1995). “Deadwood” brought him back to prominence with his complex turn as a brutal but emotionally wounded brothel owner, which in turn led to high-profile parts on “24” and significant smaller roles in “Sin City” (2005) and “The Avengers” (2012). Boothe’s tough exterior and talent for intimate drama made him one of the most in-demand character actors in Hollywood.

Born June 1, 1948 on a farm in Snyder, TX, Powers Allen Boothe was the youngest of three sons by Merrill Vestal Boothe and his wife, Emily Reeves. He attended Texas State University, where he earned a degree in theater. Unsure if he could make a living as an actor, Boothe considered teaching before being encouraged by fellow members in a summer stock troupe to audition for the graduate program at Southern Methodist University. After receiving his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1972, Boothe was a member of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, then made his stage debut in New York in a 1974 production of “Richard III” at Lincoln Center. He would return to the play for his screen debut in 1977’s “The Goodbye Girl,” which featured him as a cast member in a doomed, off-off-Broadway production which depicted Richard – as portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss’ character Elliot Garfield – as a camp homosexual.

Boothe made his Broadway debut in 1980 with the comic one-act “Lone Star,” but his stage work was completely overshadowed by his terrifying performance as the Reverend Jim Jones, the fanatical leader of the People’s Temple who led his followers to commit mass suicide, in “Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones” (CBS, 1980). For his formidable turn as the messianic madman, Boothe received not only critical praise but also the Emmy for Best Actor in 1980. He was the only actor in any category to attend the ceremony that year, which was under boycott by the Screen Actors Guild due to a strike. In his acceptance speech, Boothe admitted that his appearance at the ceremony was either the bravest moment of his career or the most foolish.

Boothe’s fears proved unwarranted, as the acclaim for “Guyana Tragedy” led to a string of lead and supporting roles in features. Blessed with considerable height (6’5″) and a strong jaw, he was a natural to play men of action, as he did for Walter Hill in “Southern Comfort” (1981) and John Milius in the cult favorite “Red Dawn” (1984). But Boothe brought more than brawn to his tough guy roles; there was also an all-too-evident humanity that made him both vulnerable and appealing to audiences. These traits were put to excellent use in John Boorman’s “The Emerald Forest” (1985), with Boothe as an engineer in Brazil whose son (the director’s son, Charley Boorman), was abducted by and inducted into a primitive tribe. Boothe also possessed the right mix of brass and world-weariness to play Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s iconic detective, in the cable series “Philip Marlowe, Private Eye” (ITV/HBO, 1983-86).

By the end of the 1980s, Boothe’s movie career seemed stuck in conventional action roles, playing heavies or cops in Hill’s ultra-violent “Extreme Prejudice” (1987) and Brandon Lee’s sidekick in “Sudden Death” (1990). He found more substantive work on the small screen, where he essayed Navy officer and convicted spy John A. Walker, Jr. in “Family of Spies” (CBS, 1990), and “By Dawn’s Early Light” (HBO, 1990), as a B-52 bomber pilot who refused to honor orders to drop nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union. In 1993, he played real-life outlaw “Curly Bill” Brocious in the all-star “Tombstone” (1993), about the events leading up to and after the famed gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

In the mid-1990s, Boothe settled into character roles, often as imposing authority figures, ruthless villains or some combination of both attributes. He faced off against Jean-Claude Van Damme as a terrorist holding the vice president hostage at a hockey game in Peter Hyams’ “Sudden Death” (1995), then shifted gears to play the hawkish Alexander Haig, White House chief of staff in Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” (1995). Boothe reunited with Stone in 1997 to play a corrupt Southwestern sheriff in the neo-noir “U Turn.” His gravely voice also found frequent employment on animated series like “Justice League” (Cartoon Network, 2001-04) and full-length animated features like “Superman: Brainiac Attacks” (2006), for which he voiced the DC Comics supervillains Gorilla Grodd and Lex Luthor, respectively.

In 2004, he enjoyed something of a revival with a recurring role on “Deadwood” as Cy Tolliver, a polished brothel owner whose dandified veneer hid both an iron hand in business dealings, as well as a damaged heart over Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens), a former prostitute made madam under Tolliver’s aegis. The exposure afforded by the critically acclaimed but short-lived “Deadwood” led to small parts in major features like “Sin City” (2005) and steady work on television, most notably as the duplicitous Vice President Noah Daniels on “24” (Fox, 2001-2010).

In 2008, Boothe’s steely, conservative screen persona made him the ideal choice to narrate a television campaign for Senator John McCain’s bid for the Presidency. He worked steadily over the next few years in projects ranging from the wildly popular animated series “Ben 10: Alien Force” (Cartoon Network, 2008-2010) to the dismal failed comedy “MacGruber” (2010). However, 2012 proved to be a banner year for Boothe, with a bit role as the World Security Council Leader in the box office blockbuster “The Avengers” (2012) landing shortly before his appearance as judge Valentine “Wall” Hatfield, whose decision in a case involving stolen livestock leads to a bloody feud in “Hatfields & McCoys” (A&E, 2012), one of the highest-rated made-for-cable miniseries in history. He died in 2017.

By Paul Gaita

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Collection of Contemporary Actors

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Playwright, actor, writer, drummer and haunter of Dublin late at night

Kevin Spacey

Keith Carradine

Powers Boothe

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