Virile Brooklyn-born actor Harry Guardino, with dark, wavy hair and a perpetual worried look on his craggy-looking mug, started out in the acting school of hard knocks, slumming for nearly a decade in small, obscure ‘tough guy’ film parts in the early to mid 50s. A definite man’s man, he finally attracted some attention on the Broadway stage with “A Hatful of Rain” (1956) and was nominated for a Tony for “One More River” in 1960. By then, juicier film roles began to gravitate his way, stealing the thunder out from under Cary Grant and Sophia Loren as a comic handyman in Houseboat (1958). Harry went on to play other brash guys with and without a comic edge to them in both crime and war stories such as Pork Chop Hill (1959), 5 Branded Women (1960), Hell Is for Heroes (1962), Madigan (1968), Dirty Harry (1971) and The Enforcer (1976), the last two pairing up with Clint Eastwood. He even played “Barabbas” in the classic bible epic King of Kings (1961) for a change of pace and scenery. More and more, however, TV became Harry’s favorite medium. He portrayed district attorney “Hamilton Burger” in the 70s revival series of “Perry Mason” and co-starred in dozens of grim, rugged mini-movies often as a street-smart cop. Not so true to nature, he found an unlikely outlet in musical theatre in later years, going on to star in productions of “Woman of the Year” and “Chicago”. A solid, durable, all-round actor, he died of lung cancer in 1995 at age 69.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
“Independent” obituary by David Shipman:
Harry Guardino will be best remembered on this side of the Atlantic for his Lieutenant Bressler, the permanently perplexed superior officer of Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) in Dirty Harry (1971) and The Enforcer (1976), one of the several sequels. Given that Callahan’s methods of handling both crooks and his fellow officers was anything but orthodox, Bressler had every reason to be worried.
Guardino owed his role in the first of these to the director, Don Siegel, who had originally cast him Hell is for Heroes (1962), as the decent sergeant who gets killed (the film was set in France in 1944). Siegel used him again in Madigan (1968), as Rocky Bonaro, assistant to another eccentric police detective (Richard Widmark). Bonaro had found him easier to handle than Callahan – amused and tolerant and fiercely loyal, but inclined to be edgy when he’s reminded of his lesser status.
Guardino was an engaging actor, always convincing but typecast in movies and television: of the 50 or so roles he played in both media all but a dozen were top cops, men of integrity – so much so that it seems strange to come across him in another 1968 movie, The Hell with Heroes, in which he played a ruthless racketeer, or in Any Which Way You Can (1980), an Eastwood vehicle in which Guardino is a New York mobster.
He made his movie debut in Flesh and Fury (1952), in which Tony Curtis played a prizefighter, but was not really noticed till he was seen being understandably impressed by Sophie Loren’s physique in Houseboat (1958), directed by Melville Shavelson. As the boat’s Italian owner (and handyman) he stole every scene in which he appeared; Shavelson cast him as the band player who befriends Red Nichols (Danny Kaye) in The Five Pennies (1959), and in 1961 Guardino played Barabbas in King of Kings (1961).
Throughout this period he commuted between Hollywood and the television studios (such series as Dr Kildare, The Untouchables, The Dick Powell Show and a dozen television movies). He first appeared on Broadway in End as a Man (1953), followed a year later by A Hatful of Rain. With his movie successes under his belt he returned to star in the Stephen Sondheim / Arthur Laurents musical Anyone Can Whistle (1964), playing a visiting physician recruited by the mayoress, Angela Lansbury, to help her solve the town’s problems. Lee Remick was also in the cast, and it was the first musical for the three of them, if for only nine performances. The reviews indicated some self-indulgence, to which Sondheim later admitted, but because of the recording made the day after it closed it is probably the biggest “cult” item of all failed shows.
Guardino was to have better luck in his second musical, but in the meantime he was on Broadway in The Rose Tattoo (1966), in which Maureen Stapleton reprised the role she had first played in 1951. He was less happily employed in another Tennessee Williams play in 1968, The Seven Descents of Myrtle, as the dying Lot whose new wife, Estelle Parsons, dallies dangerously with his despised brother, Chicken, played by Brian Bedford – an odd concoction of bizarre obsessions and incestuous passions which moves dangerously close to self-parody.
In 1981 he was in a musical with Lauren Bacall, Woman of the Year, based on the Tracy-Hepburn movie of 1942, about two journalists of opposing tastes and views who embark on a stormy marriage. Once, when asked why the lady didn’t get top-billing, Tracy replied “This is a movie, not a lifeboat, dunderhead”; in this case Bacall was billed above the title and Guardino below: but as with their predecessors this was not a barrier to a close friendship during the Broadway run and the tour.
David Shipman
His “Independent” obituary can be accessed online here.
Tragic Heath Ledger was one of the best actors on film of his generation. He was born in 1979 in Perth, Western Australia. He began his career In 2000 he went to the U.S,. to play Billy Bob Thornton’s son in “Monster’s Ball”. “A Knight’s Tale” and “Ned Kelly” followed. He delivered a stunning performance in 2005 in “Brokeback Mountain”. He died suddenly in 2008 and was awarded a n Oscat for “The Dark Night” after his death.
TCM overview:
The handsome, curly-haired Australian Heath Ledger was introduced to American audiences as the young star of the Fox adventure series “Roar” (1997) and quickly rose through the ranks to become one of the busiest leading men of his generation, earning particular acclaim for his dramatic turn as a conflicted, closeted homosexual ranch hand in the bittersweet drama “Brokeback Mountain” (2005). Already a small screen veteran in his native land, the tall blond had been featured as the gay cyclist Snowy Bowles in the Australian TV drama “Sweat”, set at an elite training academy for young athletes. Ledger also did extensive guest work on Australian television, with appearances in the series “Ship to Shore”, “Bush Patrol” and “Corrigan”. Despite his status as an unknown in the USA, he was tapped to make his American television debut as the star of “Roar” (Fox, 1997), a medieval-set adventure in which he played Conor, a teenaged Celtic prince who becomes the leader of his people when the Romans murder his father and the rest of his family. With a job description that included bellowing a mighty roar before beating the baddies in addition to dealing with his inner turmoil, Ledger proved an impressive recruit, and was well loved by the series cult audience. Film appearances in the festival screened “Two Hands” (1998) and the teen comedy “10 Things I Hate About You” (1999) followed. The latter promised the rising player the opportunity for a great deal more exposure than a short-lived genre program could offer; he starred as Patrick Verona, a moody student with a reputed criminal past who is enlisted to woo Julia Stiles’ Kat in this modern retooling of “The Taming of the Shrew.” Ledger perhaps reached his widest audience to date, though, as Mel Gibson’s son in the much-heralded “The Patriot” (2000), a Revolutionary War saga about a pacifist (Gibson) forced to choose sides after his soldier son is captured by the enemy. Following the flurry of magazine covers and articles, the in-demand actor starred as medieval swashbuckler set to arena rock standards in “A Knight’s Tale” (2001), and he impressively held his own opposite Billy Bob Thorton as the anguished son of a cold-hearted prison guard in “Monster’s Ball” (2001). He signed on opposite Kate Hudson to headline yet another remake of “Four Feathers” (2002), directed by Shekhar Kapur, but the film made nary a ripple at the box office. Commencing a high-profile romance with slightly older actress Naomi Watts, Ledger quickly became a favorite subject of the paparazzi and entertainment media, and as his public profile rose he sought to shore up his professional reputation with his portrayal of renegade priest Father Alex Bernier who runs afoul of an ancient, secret and evil sect operating within the church in “The Order” (2003). In “Ned Kelly” (2004), Ledger played a good man driven to striking back at a corrupt British colonial system in 19th century Australia after serving a prison term on trumped-up charges for horse theft and the threat of more jail time for attempted murder. Reviews were mixed for the slow-moving western, and despite a cast that included Orlando Bloom, Geoffrey Rush and Naomi Watts, “Ned Kelly” was released by Universal into less than 20 theaters. His next appearance was in “Lords of Dogtown” (2005), the fictionalized rags-to-riches tale of board rats Jay Adams, Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta, Southern California riff-raff who revolutionized skateboarding and propelled themselves into wanton celebrity. Ledger was virtually unrecognizable as Skip Engblom, the stoner surfer-dude who owns a surf shop and forms the skaters into the celebrated Zephyr Skateboard Team. He then teamed with Matt Damon to play totally fictionalized versions of the famed Bavarian fairy tale spinners “The Brothers Grimm” (2005), reimagined by director Terry Gilliam as a pair of curse-removing con artists who are suddenly tasked with solving a genuine magical mystery that ultimately inspires many of their famous stories. Ledger showed some range as the sensitive, conflicted Jacob, but the story ultimately left him too little to do, and the film lacked some of the spark and imagination expected of a Gilliam project. His next project, that same year, more than made up for “Grimm’s” shortcomings: director Ang Lee’s sensitive film adaptation of E. Annie Proulx’s revered short story “Brokeback Mountain,” expanded by screenwriter Larry McMurtry, cast Ledger as Ennis Del Mar, a manly, rough-around-the-edges ranch hand who explores his homosexuality while on a 1960s sheep drive through a mountain range with a fellow cowboy (Jake Gyllenhaal), but continues to live a closeted life with a wife (Michelle Williams) and children even as he continues his on-off gay relationship over the ensuring decades. Ledger’s haunting, convincingly tortured performance was a revelation, his best work to date as he seemed to literally inhabit a character entirely different from his own on-screen image and sparked a wave of awards-season buzz. Ledger, who by the time of filming had also ended his high-profile relationship with Watts, became involved with his co-star Williams, and the two had a child together by the time of the film’s release. Meanwhile, Ledger was honored by a slew of award nominations, including the Oscar for Best Actor, but failed to win much of anything besides a New York Film Critics Circle award thanks to the juggernaut known as Philip Seymour Hoffman. Just weeks after his triumphant performance in “Brokeback Mountain” hit theaters, his final 2005 film debuted: “Casanova,” director Lasse Hallstrom’s fictionalized account of the legendary lothario falling in love, was easily one of the most ill-conceived and disappointing films of the year, despite lavish production values and game performances by Ledger and the rest of the all-star cast. Hot off of the phenomenal success of “Brokeback Mountain” it was announced that Ledger would appear as the legendary comic book villain The Joker opposite Christian Bale’s Batman in “The Dark Knight” (scheduled for release in 2008) in the second film in director Christopher Nolan’s popular revival of the Caped Crusader’s film franchise.
Sabu Dastagir (or Selar Shaik Sabu, depending on your resource) was born on January 27, 1924, in the little town of Mysore, India, which is nestled in the jungles of Karapur. The son of an elephant driver (mahout) in service for the Maharajah of his town, the young stable boy learned responsibility early in life when, at age 9, his father died and Sabu immediately became the ward of the royal elephant stables. As with many Hollywood success stories, good timing and dumb luck allowed the impoverished youth a chance for a better life. By sheer chance the timid 12-year-old orphan was discovered by a British location crew while searching for a youth to play the title role (an elephant driver!) in their upcoming feature Elephant Boy (1937). Quite taken aback by his earnest looks, engaging naturalness and adaptability to wild animals and their natural habitat, the studio handed the boy a film career on a sterling silver platter and was placed under exclusive contract by the mogul Alexander Korda himself.
Sabu and his older brother (as guardian) were whisked away to England to complete the picture and became subsequent wards of the British government. They were given excellent schooling in the process and Sabu quickly learned the English language in preparation for his upcoming films. Elephant Boy (1937) was an unqualified hit and the young actor was promptly placed front and center once again in the film Drums (1938) surrounded by an impressive British cast that included Raymond Massey and Valerie Hobson. With the parallel success of the Tarzan jungle movies in America, Hollywood starting taking a keen look at this refreshingly new boy talent when he first arrived in the U.S. for a publicity tour of the film. Again, his second film was given rave reviews, proving that Sabu would not be just a one-hit wonder.
His third film for Korda is considered one of the great true classics. In the Arabian fantasy-adventure The Thief of Bagdad (1940), Sabu plays Abu the Thief and is not only surrounded by superb actors — notably June Duprez, John Justin, Rex Ingram (as the genie) and Conrad Veidt (as the evil Grand Vizier) — but exceptional writing and incredible special effects. Sabu’s name began stirring international ears. His last pairing with Korda was the excellent adaptation of Rudyard Kipling‘s classic book Jungle Book(1942) playing Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves, who must adapt to the ways of mankind after being returned to his mother. The movie was directed by Alexander’s brother Zoltan Korda.
Following this triumph, Sabu officially became the exotic commodity of Universal Pictures and he settled in America. Although initially rewarding monetarily, it proved to be undoing. Unfortunately (and too often typical), a haphazard assembly-line of empty-minded features were developed that hardly compared to the quality pictures in England under Korda. Saddled alongside the unexceptional Maria Montez and Jon Hall, his vehicles Arabian Nights (1942), White Savage (1943) and Cobra Woman (1944) were, for the most part, drivel but certainly did fit the bill as colorful, mindless entertainment.
Almost 20 years old by the time he became a citizen of the U.S. in 1944, he enlisted in the Army Air Force and earned WWII distinction in combat missions (Distinguished Service Cross, Air Medal, among others) as a tail gunner. By the time Sabu returned to Universal and filming, the charm of his youth had worn off and the boyish stereotype impossible to escape.
Post-war audiences developed new tastes, but Sabu had not choice but to trudge on with retreads of his former glory. Films such as Tangier (1946) again opposite Ms. Montez,Man-Eater of Kumaon (1948) and Song of India (1949) opposite lovely princess Gail Russell did little to advance his career. While filming the last-mentioned movie, Sabu met and married actress Marilyn Cooper who temporarily filled in for an ailing Ms. Russell on the set. The couple went on to have two children.
Sabu actually fared better back in England during the late 40s, starring in the crime drama The End of the River (1947) and appearing fourth-billed as a native general in the exquisitely photographed Black Narcissus (1947). Daring in subject matter, the film hadDeborah Kerr heading up a group of Anglican nuns who battle crude traditions, unexpected passions and stark raving madness while setting up a Himalayan order. By the mid-50s Sabu’s career was rapidly approaching extinction, seeking work wherever he could find it – in low-budget Europe productions, public appearances, etc. An attempt to conjure up a TV series for himself failed. His life was further aggravated by unpleasant civil and paternity suits brought about against him. His last two pictures were supporting roles in Rampage (1963), which starred Robert Mitchum, and A Tiger Walks (1964), a thoroughly routine Disney picture which was released posthumously.
Sabu died unexpectedly at age 39 of a heart attack on December 2, 1963, at his home in Southern California and was buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in the Hollywood Hills. SonPaul Sabu developed into an accomplished songwriter and even formed a rock band called Sabu; daughter Jasmine Sabu, who died in 2001, was a noted horse trainer whose skill was utilized occasionally for films. Although he went the way of too many of our former stars, Sabu continues to enchant and excite newer generations with his unmatched athletic skills and magnetic charm in those early adventure fantasies of yesteryear.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
SabuThe Thief Of Bagdad, poster, US poster art, top from left: Sabu, John Justin, June Duprez, Rex Ingram, 1940. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
“In an interview once, Rex Harrison referred to Alan Jay Lerner, the writer of ‘My Fair Lady’:’ I owe that man such a great deal’. Few actors are so in debt. ‘My Fair Lady’ cam to him when he was past middle age and transformed him from leading man to super-star. He had even been a formidable light comedian but a fairish run of poor films had kept this Rolls Royce of actors going in only low gear. He is a player of strong personal style, presumably achieved by much work but looking deceptively easy., the aristocratic elegant Englishman, with ingratiating hints of well-being and devilry. He can play with real bite. Noel Coward’s famous crack is not quite fair:’ If next to me, you were not the finest light-comedian in the world, you’d be good for only one thing: selling cars in Great Portland Street’. It suggests that behind Harrison’s smooth surface bravado, there is not very much – which is intriguingly possible; ut it also suggests superb self-confidence and it was that deepened into arrogance, which made him such a marvellous Higgins. To the extent that ‘My Fair Lady’ put him right to the forefront of actors, with roles to match, we all owe Alan Jay Lerner a great deal”. – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years”. (1972).
TCM Overview:
Stagestruck from boyhood, suave British actor Rex Harrison joined the Liverpool Repertory Theatre at the age of 16, beginning a 66-year career that would culminate with his final performance on Broadway, May 11, 1990, three weeks prior to his death. Best known for his Tony- and Oscar-winning portrayal of Professor Henry Higgins in Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s “My Fair Lady”, he made his West End debut in “Getting George Married” (1930) and his Broadway debut in “Sweet Aloes” (1936), but it was a two year run on the London stage in Sir Terrence Rattigan’s “French Without Tears” that made him a star. Appearances in other sophisticated comedies, S N Behrman’s “No Time for Comedy” and Noel Coward’s “Design for Living” (both 1939), established him as what Coward himself called “the best light comedian in the world–after me.”
Harrison’s feature debut came in “The Great Game” (1930), and starring turns in movies like “Night Train to Munich”, (1940) “Major Barbara” (1941) and “Blithe Spirit” (1945) brought him to the attention of Hollywood, leading to a seven-year contract with 20th Century-Fox. He scored a major triumph as the King in “Anna and the King of Siam” (1946) and recorded another success with “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” (1947), but subsequent films performed poorly at the box office, although Preston Sturges’ “Unfaithfully Yours” (1948) later acquired a cult status. Actor and studio parted company by mutual agreement, and Harrison returned to Broadway, earning a Tony for his 1948 performance as King Henry VIII in Maxwell Anderson’s “Anne of the Thousand Days”. Continued acclaim followed for his work in T S Eliot’s “The Cocktail Party” and John van Druten’s “Bell, Book and Candle” (both 1950). He directed and starred in “The Love of Four Colonels” (1953) and a revival of “Bell, Book and Candle” (1954) and helmed “Nina” (1955), all for the London stage. He made his Broadway directing debut with “The Bright One” (1958).
Despite having, in his own words, a vocal range of “one-and-a-half notes”, Harrison talked his way through the numbers of Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady” (1956), directed for the stage by Moss Hart, and became the darling of the critics, playing the show for two years in New York and another in London. His waspish professor of phonetics was “crisp, lean, complacent and condescending until at last a real flare of human emotions burns the egotism away,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in THE NEW YORK TIMES, and the success of “My Fair Lady” once again brought Harrison important film offers. He earned his first Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Julius Caesar in “Cleopatra” (1963), stealing the picture from his more famous co-stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Reprising Higgins for the 1964 film version of “My Fair Lady” opposite Audrey Hepburn brought him a Best Actor Oscar and international fame, and “Dr. Dolittle” (1967) introduced him to a new generation of moviegoers as he shamelessly enjoyed himself playing the fanciful jungle gentleman who conversed with wildlife.
Harrison devoted most of his remaining years to his first love, the stage, taking parts in such diverse plays as Luigi Pirandello’s “Henry IV” and Rattigan’s “In Praise of Love” (both 1974). He co-starred with Claudette Colbert in a Broadway production of “The Kingfisher” (1978), and, after returning to Broadway in “My Fair Lady” (1981), garnered some of the best reviews of his career for a Broadway revival of “Heartbreak House” (1983), later captured for posterity in a 1985 Showtime cable special. Harrison portrayed Lord Grenham in London and Broadway productions of “Aren’t We All?” (1984-85) and Grand Duke Cyril Romanov in the NBC miniseries, “Anastasia: The Story of Anna” (1986). He last appeared on the London stage in “The Admirable Crichton” (1988) and bowed out in a Broadway revival of W Somerset Maugham’s “The Circle”, playing eight times a week just prior to his June 1990 death. The oft-married man dubbed ‘Sexy Rexy’ by Walter Winchell never wanted to be anything but an actor and never intended to retire. “He died with his boots on, no doubt about it,” said “The Circle” producer Elliot Martin.
The Foxes Of Harrow, poster, Rex Harrison, Maureen O’Hara, Vanessa Brown, 1947. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Rex Harrison
Article from 2009 in “The Guardian” by David Thomson:
James Mason had good friends, and sometimes that is the measure of a man, especially in the picture business, where it’s all too easy to lose contact as golden opportunities fade away. Consider his situation in the late 1940s. After giving his youth and his early beauty to British pictures and theatre, he decided to go to Hollywood. There must have been people who told him he was too patrician, too intelligent, as well as too old to break through in America. But he made wonderful contacts. There was a chance of doing the Svengali-Trilby story (with Jane Wyman), and Mason longed to have Jean Renoir as its director because he could see that the Frenchman loved actors. Alas, that project fell through, but then Renoir offered Mason the role of the wounded veteran in his Indian picture, The River. I can’t do it, sighed Mason; I’m set to play the male lead in La Duchesse de Langeais – which was to be the comeback picture for Greta Garbo.
Historians still argue as to why that picture collapsed. Advancing into his 40s, Mason had reason to think of bad luck as he played Erwin Rommel in a couple of movies, Rupert of Hentzau in a remake of The Prisoner of Zenda and “Hendrik van der Zee” in the dotty but deliriously beautiful romance, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. In Britain, there were already superior figures in acting who marvelled over what was happening to “poor Jimmy Mason”. But as we come to celebrate today what would have been his 100th birthday, there are those who only wish there was more of Pandora, more Rommel and an entire picture about Rupert of Hentzau, the only interesting person in that whole Zenda nonsense.
In every decade, from the 1930s to the 80s, James Mason did some poor work in disappointing pictures, just as he missed out on mouth-watering opportunities. So, yes, it’s lamentable that he was to have been Prospero for Michael Powell, only for that Tempest to blow out. But don’t forget that their long friendship did lead somewhere: to Australia, for the quirky but vivid Age of Consent, where Mason was the film’s co-producer and he and Powell managed to discover the 18-year-old Helen Mirren to be the muse for the beachcomber painter Mason plays.
Yes, I know you can see Mason in these parts, but it’s just as evident that you hear him and, before we go any further, it’s vital to consider the unique and languid but impassioned voice of this man. Is it enough to say that he was a lad born in Huddersfield (the son of a wool merchant) who was sent to Cambridge to speak properly? Should we consider also his years on the Dublin stage as a prelude to his tragic figure in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out – the film above all that promoted him from British pictures to a Hollywood player? Or is there not still something in Mason’s voice – aristocratic, but full of connoisseurship, too – that allowed the actor to become his true self just once, as the voice of Humbert Humbert in the film of Lolita? Humbert is not American. He is a scholar of comparative literature, as well as a judge of nymphets. He is a very bad man (if you like, or if you don’t like), but he may be the purest-spoken scoundrel in all the movies. For he has to deliver Nabokovian prose as if to say it was the most normal and sensible way of speaking the English language yet invented.
So Mason could be lord and nobleman, a very upper-class fellow – he did that from his Flaubert in the silly MGM production of Madame Bovary to Brutus in the same studio’s Julius Caesar, from Mr Jordan in Heaven Can Wait to the “prince of darkness” lawyer, Ed Concannon, in The Verdict. He could say something to another person so that one word seemed like a lash or a curare dart delivered in slow motion. This Mason was Mr Elocution, if you like, the personification of affectation and lingering insult or innuendo. But the same voice could burn with conviction – it does in Lolita, when he talks to his Lo, just as much as it did in A Star Is Born, with Judy Garland, in North By Northwest, with Eva Marie Saint, or in The Reckless Moment, with Joan Bennett, where he has the fine judgment to know that he is falling in love with the woman he is supposed to blackmail.
Pause over North By Northwest a moment. Why is it that, over the years, that crazed film calmly urges itself forward as maybe Hitch’s most entertaining picture? Well, of course, it’s the demented plot by Ernest Lehman, with the cornfields of Iowa leading to Mount Rushmore. And it’s also Cary Grant. But run the picture in your head a moment and isn’t it Mason’s voice you hear as Vandamm, the villain? Look at it again, if you doubt me – he’s the heart and head of the picture, and he is delighted to realise that North By Northwest is a frolic, a dance in mid-air, a fabulous absurdity. Of course, we love Grant and Saint and everyone else in it, but just look at Grant’s face and see the pleasure he feels at being placed beside so sublime a screen being as James Mason. (Time for a joke: in the year for which North By Northwest was eligible, 1959, Charlton Heston and Hugh Griffith won the acting Oscars for Ben-Hur.)
Mason never won an Oscar, though he was nominated three times – for A Star Is Born, The Verdict and Georgy Girl (the latter one of those pictures where he let his Yorkshire accent run riot and where, apparently, he took a deep shine to his co-star, Lynn Redgrave).
You might have thought that in a thousand words (so far), I’d have been able to mention all the worthwhile Mason films. But I haven’t even touched the Gainsborough period yet. In the war years (when Mason was a conscientious objector), he defined a new type in British pictures – the handsome, cruel mastermind who is irresistible to women. That is the Mason of The Man in Grey, a costume romance, where he dismantles Margaret Lockwood and Phyllis Calvert; The Wicked Lady, where he and Lockwood are highway robbers; and the cult classic, The Seventh Veil, where he is Ann Todd’s unkind guardian.
The same years include two other remarkable films: A Place of One’s Own, where he is the elderly husband, and The Upturned Glass – a film that Mason helped write – about a doctor fascinated with the psychology of murder. To say the least, that side of Mason – the mind that had ideas for films – was what made him most endearing to directors.
Once in America, he forged bonds with two of the least likely artists. First, he fell for Max Ophuls, effectively in exile, and did two films for him: Caught and The Reckless Moment. In the first, he is the doctor with a busy urban practice who takes in Barbara Bel Geddes as a secretary when she flees from her marriage to the tyrannical Robert Ryan. In The Reckless Moment, he plays a weak-willed villain, a man whose blackmail plans are thwarted by his own sentiments.
In both cases, Mason’s struggle to be decent and ordinary provides a foundation for the film. Equally, in every situation, Mason was the defender of Ophuls, a high-strung, stylistic perfectionist who was having a hard time in Hollywood.
A few years later, Mason became friends with another movie director, and an even more self-destructive man, Nicholas Ray. They wanted to do a story they had seen in the New Yorker about an idealistic teacher who is warped by his addiction to cortisone. The result, Bigger Than Life, is one of the great American films of the 50s, in which Ray’s dynamic use of colour and form is steadily attached to Mason’s tragic performance. In the slow reappraisal of American film by American critics, it’s worth saying that Caught, The Reckless Moment and Bigger Than Life (none of which was a hit) have now become standards by which other films are judged. In all these cases, the completion of the picture, as well as its initiation, owed a lot to the creative vision of an actor who was serving as an extra producer.
Is that all? By no means. To the end of his time (he died in 1984), Mason was doing intriguing small films such as Dr Fischer of Geneva and The Shooting Party. He was the star of works as different as The Deadly Affair, Mandingo, Cross of Iron and The Seagull (where he played Trigorin). He made Cry Terror! and The Decks Ran Red for that master of suspense, Andrew L Stone.
He was Sir Edward Carson to Peter Finch’s lead in The Trials of Oscar Wilde. He was toxic in The Pumpkin Eater and cool syrup in The Fall of the Roman Empire. He made every trashy costume seem as natural as a good suit and, for all his life, he seemed carried forward by the odd mixture of yearning and fatalism that prompted Humbert Humbert.
Graham Greene called it the marriage of sadness and pride. It is still there, to be treasured in something like 40 special films.
Odd Man Out (1947)
After making his name as the dashing, cruel-eyed star of wartime period costume pics, Mason did a 180-degree turn to play an made gunman staggering wounded through Belfast. Director Carol Reed assembles an arsenal of expressionist techniques to make this an early, and effective, British noir.
North By Northwest (1959)
Arguably Hitchcock’s finest, and maybe Mason’s, too – even though he didn’t have the lead role. Here he plays super-smooth microfilm smuggler Vandamm, egging on henchman Martin Landau to dispose of pesky Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint.
Lolita (1962)
Nabokov’s professorial paedophile terrified the life out of Hollywood’s star names, but Mason stepped up to play Humbert Humbert for Stanley Kubrick.(Both Laurence Olivier and David Niven turned it down.) Mason’s stuffed-shirt reticence, allied to his lasciviously clipped vowels, made him ideal for the role.
“The Times” obituary:
Mr James Mason, who died yesterday in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the age of 75, was a highly intelligent and creative cinema performer who appeared in more than 100 films. And though many of them were unworthy of his talent he could lift the poorest material just as he could enrich the best. He made a reputation in parts calling for moody and tyrannical introspection, notably as Ann Todd’s sadistic guardian in The Seventh Veil, before maturing into a versatile and dependable character player.
One of his best performances came under Sir Carol Reed’s direction in 1947, when he played a dying gunman on the run in Belfast in Odd Man Out. Soon afterwards, expressing his disenchantment with the British cinema, he left for Hollywood where, after a difficult start, he successfully built a new career.
James Mason was born in Huddersfield on May 15, 1909, the son of a textile merchant. He was educated at Marlborough and Peterhouse College, Cambridge where he took a first in architecture and got a taste for acting. His professional debut was at the Theatre Royal, Aldershot, in 1931 and two years later he made his first London appearance in Gallows Glorious at the Arts Theatre. He joined the Old Vic company and then the Gate Theatre in Dublin, where he played between 1934 and 1937.
He entered films in 1935, playing a reporter in Late Extra, but for several years most of his parts were in low budget “quota quickies”. In 1939, with two friends, Roy and Pamela Kelli-no, he set up his own film, I Met a Murderer, a crime story in which he was the killer of the title. He and Pamela Kellino were married two years later.
During the Second World War, he worked with ENSA and his film career finally took off through a series of costume melodramas which gave him the opportunity to create a memorable gallery of suave and vicious villains. The film that made him into a star was The Man in Grey, in which he took a whip to Margaret Lockwood; Fanny by Gaslight, They Were Sisters, and The Wicked Lady, also with Margaret Lockwood, followed in similar vein.
The Seventh Veil proved to be the most successful of all and from 1944 to 1947 Mason was voted Britain’s top box-office star. Among those who admired his performance in The Seventh Veil was the veteran American director, D W Griffith. But Mason had become increasingly unhappy with the films he was bing offered, and with what he saw as a monopolistic stranglehold on the industry by J Arthur Rank; and at the peak of his popularity he departed for Hollywood.
It was to be some time before the move paid off. Mason’s outspokenness did not endear him to Hollywood and his choice of parts was not always happy. He appeared in two films for the emigre director, Max Ophuls, Caught and The Reckless Moment, and made a splendid Rommel in The Desert Fox; while his Brutus in the 1953 production of Julius Caesar helped to make it one of the best screen versions of Shakespeare.
But it was not until 1954 when he played opposite Judy Garland in George Cukor’s remake of A Star is Born that he managed a major performance, a harrowing study of a man’s tragic decline, for which he gained an Oscar nomination. He brought the same nervous intensity to the part of a drug addict in Bigger Than Life (1956), a film which he also produced.
The best of his later roles was Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick’s film of the Nabokov novel, Lolita, which appeared in 1962. To his portrayal of a middle-aged man’s infatuation with a 12-year-old girl, Mason brought a degree of sympathy, combined with wry humour, that few other actors could have managed. With Odd Man Out, it ranks as his outstanding screen achievement.
Three years earlier he had been a memorable villain in Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest and had given an engagingly tongue in cheek performance in an adaptation of the Jules Verne story, Journey to the Centre of the Earth. He maintained a prolific output through the 1960s and 1970s, making two and three films a year, though many were routine assignments easily, and perhaps best, forgotten.
There was still, however, much to relish. His Timonides in The Fall of the Roman Empire was a bright spot in an otherwise dreary epic and he had good supporting parts in The Pumpkin Eater and as Gentleman Brown in Conrad’s Lord Jim. He added to his stock of German officers inThe Blue Max (1966) and in the same year he was in Georgy Girl, a story of the “swinging sixties”, and a John Le Carre thriller, The Deadly Affair.
In 1969 he turned producer again for Age of Consent, directed in Australia by Michael Powell; but a long-cherished Powell project, The Tempest, with Mason as Prospero, proved abortive. The martinet Yorkshire father in Spring and Port Wine was a tailor-made part, there were more Germans in Cross of Iron and The Boys From Brazil and a well judged Mr Jordan in the fantasy, Heaven Can Wait. He was superb as the old tutor recalling his days in India in James Ivory’s Autobiography of a Princess.
Once he became established in films, Mason returned only occasionally to the stage. He was in an unsuccessful Broadway play, Bathsheba, in 1947, and during the 1950s played Angelo in Measure for Measure and Oedipus in Oedipus Rex at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario.
Two of the greatest comic characters of popular American culture in the mid-20th century were Ed Norton and Felix Ungar, both involved in chalk-and-cheese relationships with other men, and both created by Art Carney, who has died aged 85.
Norton, the gentle, good-natured sewer worker or “underground sanitation expert”, was the long-suffering best friend of obstreperous bus driver Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) in the classic TV series The Honeymooners, which ran for 39 episodes from 1955 to 1956, and then, variously, on The Jackie Gleason Show until 1970. Carney, as slim as a rake, bounced off the corpulent Gleason in episode after episode of the blue-collar sitcom. Ungar was the chronic tidy-upper to sloppy bear Oscar Madison (Walter Matthau) in Neil Simon’s Broadway hit The Odd Couple (1965), about two divorced men trying to share an apartment.
Despite the fact that during the second world war he was hit by shrapnel at Normandy’s Omaha Beach which left him with a slight limp, Carney was a physical performer. Born in Mount Vernon, New York, he never had an acting lesson in his life. After appearing locally as an impressionist and tap dancer, Carney travelled for three years with Horace Heidt, who had a popular orchestra and quiz show. On radio in the 1940s, he displayed a remarkable range in daytime soaps and children’s shows, as well as impersonating the voices of prominent figures, among them Churchill and Roosevelt, in a political programme called Report To The Nation. In 1941, he landed a bit part as a radio announcer in Pot O’Gold, which featured the Heidt orchestra. He was not to make another film for 20 years.
After leaving The Honeymooners, for which he won several Emmys, Carney made his Broadway debut in The Rope Dancers (1957), a whimsical play by Morton Wishengrad, set in a turn-of-the-century Manhattan tenement. In it, Carney cre ated an impression as a feckless would-be writer. This was followed by Take Her She’s Mine (1961), a lightweight comedy by Henry and Phoebe Ephron, in which Carney was able to play exasperation, as only he could, as a father whose daughter is off to college.
His film debut proper was in The Yellow Rolls Royce (1964), in which he played Shirley MacLaine’s vulgar but soft-hearted chaperone in Italy while her gangster boyfriend (George C Scott) is away in Chicago. He then had the gem of a role in The Odd Couple, which began its long Broadway run in March 1965 although, by October, Carney, who was also an alcoholic, had to leave the show to enter a psychiatric hospital. His breakdown was due in part to the end of his 25-year marriage to Jean Myers.
But he was soon back on television as The Archer in the Batman television series, and on stage in Brian Friel’s Lovers (1968). Before his triumphant return to the big screen, he took over from Peter Falk in Neil Simon’s The Prisoner Of Second Avenue.
It was in a role originally meant for James Cagney that 55-year-old Carney played a 72-year-old widower in the film Harry And Tonto (1974), and won the Best Actor Oscar. Harry, evicted from his Manhattan apartment, sets off on an odyssey across the US to California with his marmalade cat, Tonto.
Paul Mazursky’s touching film provides – through Carney’s convincing central performance – a rare glimpse into the wisdom and pain of old age, and the transience of belonging. The character might have been a little too wise, tolerant and understanding, but Carney made it work by only just skirting sentimentality.
He was amusing as a hellfire religious lawman pursuing conman Burt Reynolds in WW And The Dixie Dance Kings (1975) and the muddle-headed surgeon at Walter Matthau’s hospital in House Calls (1978); straightfaced as a doctor in Stanley Donen’s pastiche Movie Movie (1978). In Robert Benton’s Chandleresque The Late Show (1977), a limping, grey-haired Carney excelled in playing, with laconic wit, an ageing detective.
After appearing in The Last Action Hero (1993), Carney retired. When his second marriage ended in divorce, he remarried his first wife, who survives him, as do their three children.
· Arthur (Art) William Matthew Carney, actor, born November 4 1918; died November 9 2003
1720342 Beau Brummel de CurtisBernhardt avec Stewart Granger et Elizabeth Taylor 1954; (add.info.: Beau Brummel de CurtisBernhardt avec Stewart Granger et Elizabeth Taylor 1954).Young Bess, poster, Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton, 1953. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
When Stewart Granger was the hottest male property around the British studios he was seldom taken seriously. He was just too good-looking, involved in too many junky films – and by his own admission – too arrogant. His relationship with the press was poor, so he was irritatingly labelled ‘glamour boy’. The name hardly stuck, but he never managed to get away from the dimpled teeth-flashing he-male roles he started with and only in glimpses has he been able to show that there is something more in him”. – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars- The International Years”. (1972)
Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary from 1993:
James Lablache Stewart (Stewart Granger), actor: born London 6 March 1913; married 1938 Elspeth March (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1948), 1950 Jean Simmons (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1960), 1964 Viviane Lecerf (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1969); died Santa Monica, California 16 August 1993.
TALL, DARK, debonair and rakishly handsome, Stewart Granger was one of the greatest British stars of the Forties, and went on to become one of the handful to achieve true international stardom in Hollywood. He was one of that quartet of stars – along with Margaret Lockwood, James Mason and Phyllis Calvert – who became associated with the enormous successes made by the Gainsborough Studios under the auspices of Maurice Ostrer, starting with The Man in Grey (1943), and including Fanny by Gaslight, Love Story, Madonna of the Seven Moons (all 1944), and Caravan (1946).
Granger’s dashing good looks, energy, humour and the arrogance that laced his romantic ardour made him the British cinema’s foremost sex symbol, with a huge teenage following, and in Hollywood he took his place among the greatest swashbucklers with at least one of his movies, Scaramouche (1952), a masterpiece comparable to the best of Errol Flynn. Though Mason was the finer actor, Granger achieved greater popularity in the Hollywood cinema, and it is ironic that Mason’s finest role there, as Norman Maine in A Star is Born (1954), went to him only after Granger turned it down. It is to be regretted that Granger’s enormous ego (to which he freely confessed) did not allow him to accept the role or the character roles later in his career that might have sustained and enhanced his reputation.
He was born James Stewart in London in 1913 and had planned to be a doctor. But he lacked the dedication (as he later admitted) to continue medical studies. A friend suggested that since he had a car and a good set of clothes he could find work as a film extra for a guinea a day. Work at the studios during 1933 – the Babe Daniels musical A Southern Mai, Allan Dwan’s I Spy, in which he acted as stand-in for Ben Lyon, and Give Her a Ring are his only known credits from this period – aroused an interest in acting and Granger won a scholarship to the Webber-Douglas School of Dramatic Art. He served a long apprenticeship in the theatre, working with the Hull and Birmingham repertory companies at the Malvern Festival (1936-37), where his performance as Magnus in The Apple Cart won the approval of its author, George Bernard Shaw, as well as that of the critics, and making his London debut at Drury Lane in 1938 in a short-lived musical version of Sanders of the River called The Sun Never Sets. He later talked warmly of these early years: ‘I learnt acting in the reps, where the audience teaches you – particularly timing.’
At Birmingham he had met the actress Elspeth March, and in 1938, while he was appearing at the Gate Theatre in Serena Blandish with Vivien Leigh, he and March were married. The same year he was given his first sizable screen role, as the romantic lead in So This Is London. His billing read Stewart Granger, the name he had taken to avoid confusion with the Hollywood actor, though throughout his life he would be known to his friends as ‘Jimmy’. In 1939 he and his wife starred in a season of plays in Aberdeen, including Hay Fever, Arms and the Man and On Approval – Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray were juveniles with the company.
After touring with the Old Vic as Dunois in St Joan, Granger was given a small role in Pen Tennyson’s admirably understated saga of the wartime navy Convoy (1940) before his acting career was interrupted by war service. He joined the Gordon Highlanders, then won a commission with the Black Watch but was invalided out with an ulcer. He resumed his career with two supporting film roles, in Secret Mission (1942) and Thursday’s Child (1943), before being asked to take over the role of Maxim DeWinter in a successful London stage production of Rebecca, and it was while appearing in this that he tested for The Man in Grey. This florid Regency melodrama was an unprecedented success, establishing a ‘house style’ that Gainsborough Pictures would market for several years to come and boosting the careers of all four stars. Granger, the least known, was an overnight sensation, causing the critic CA Lejeune to state in her review, ‘I don’t know of any British actor I would sooner sign as a prospect.’
Granger had indeed been signed to a contract. Before the release of The Man in Grey he had been assigned to The Lamp Still Burns, a restrained tribute to the nursing profession, then he was cast again with Calvert and Mason in Fanny by Gaslight, another great Gainsborough hit. Granger liked Mason, who shared his traits of independence and an outspoken disdain for the films they were making, but he envied Mason his villainous roles, maintaining they were more interesting than the heroic ones he was playing. He had particular disdain for his next two scripts.
Love Story starred Margaret Lockwood as a concert pianist with a fatal disease and Granger as the engineer she falls for – he does not know that she is dying, she does not know that he is going blind. With a background of pounding Cornish waves and a popular musical piece called ‘Cornish Rhapsody’, it was the sort of heady stuff to which audiences of the time flocked, and it was the perfect showcase for the mixture of bravado and vulnerability that was to make the best of Granger’s performances so appealing.
In Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944) Granger was a Romany gypsy who wooed a tempestuous hoyden (Calvert), in reality a society matron with a split personality. It was another gigantic success and the song a dubbed Granger sang, ‘Rosanna’, became a hit. Though Granger described these films as ‘terrible’ he also conceded that ‘they provided the escapism people needed’. (Whether regarded as camp, nostalgia or just plain fun, they are still giving pleasure 50 years on.)
Granger at last played a villain in his next film, Sidney Gilliatt’s Waterloo Road (1944), as a shady black marketeer who has dodged the draft and tries to steal the lonely wife (Joy Shelton) of a serviceman (John Mills). It was a splendidly gritty slice of wartime life and climaxed with a fist-fight between the two men which was uncompromisingly realistic for its day and achieved considerable notoriety. News of Granger’s fan following had by now spread to the United States, and when his next film, Gabriel Pascal’s financially disastrous Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), opened there, one critic described him as ‘the pet of the British bobby-soxers’.
Just before the war’s end, Granger did an Ensa tour through Europe performing Gaslight with Deborah Kerr, with whom he became romantically involved. (Granger later claimed in his autobiography that Kerr had initially seduced him in a London taxi, to which the actress’s response when queried on the story was, ‘What a gallant man he is]’) He then mistakenly turned down The Wicked Lady because the part of the highwayman was too small. James Mason took the role in Gainsborough’s most successful film. Instead, Granger did a sprawling but popular melodrama, Caravan (1946) and a highly fictionalised account of the life of Paganini, The Magic Bow (1946).
The actor’s arrogance and volatile temperament had not endeared him to some of his co-stars – during the filming of The Man in Grey his colleagues wrote a joint letter to his agent insisting that his strong language be curbed – and when Calvert was cast with him for the fourth time in The Magic Bow she rang him to ask if they should do it. He replied, ‘If you’re talking about our personal feelings, no. But if you’re talking about Our Public, yes.’ Yehudi Menuhin played the violin on the soundtrack, but the script was poor. Granger’s champion Lejeune gave it a one-word review (‘Fiddlesticks’) and even the public was disappointed.
Cinema was changing in the postwar atmosphere and though more realism was injected into Granger’s next few films, they failed to match his earlier successes at the box-office; Frank Launder’s Captain Boycott (1947), based on the true story of an Irish farmers’ revolt against unprincipled landlords, Marc Allegret’s Blanche Fury (1948), a tragic tale of treachery and murder, and Basil Deardon’s Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), the story of Sophie Dorothea’s doomed romance with Konigsmark, were all too grim for popular acceptance, though the last two had beautiful colour photography and splendid performances.
Granger had during this time been falling in love with the talented and beautiful actress Jean Simmons, though he confessed to some concern about their difference in age (she was 16 years younger). In 1949 he and March were divorced, and he conceived the idea for an updating of the Daddy Longlegs story as a vehicle for himself and Simmons. The result, Adam and Evelyne (1949), was a charming and popular romantic comedy, but the couple followed this with an ill-advised stage production of Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness. Granger later stated that he thought they would be applauded for choosing such a challenging project rather than a safe commercial venture, but the brooding, morbid piece (Simmons played a mentally retarded peasant) was disliked by audiences and regarded by critics as another example of Granger’s arrogance and pretensions.
Long aware that international stardom could only be achieved in Hollywood, Granger was delighted when MGM offered him the lead in King Solomon’s Mines (1950). Made partially in Africa, it was a creditable version of H. Rider Haggard’s adventure classic with Granger a dashingly heroic Allan Quatermain. It got his Hollywood career off to a rousing start, but his hesitancy to sign a long-term contract with the studio lost him the lead in Quo Vadis?, and when he finally committed himself he was rewarded with an uneasily comic version of Kipling’s Soldiers Three and a mild comedy- thriller, The Light Touch.
Next, though, came what is probably Granger’s finest film, George Sidney’s Scaramouche (1952), an exquisitely fashioned adaptation of the Rafael Sabatini classic with Granger as a roistering devil-may-care playboy-poet who, setting out to avenge his friend’s death by sword, becomes a fencing champion and joins a pantomime troupe to conceal his identity. Ardently wooing the demure Janet Leigh, exchanging verbal barbs with his waspish mistress Eleanor Parker, performing slapstick with the troupe or fencing as to the manner born, Granger is superb in a swashbuckling performance to rank with the best.
Sumptuously produced and directed with visual panache, the film builds excitingly to its memorable climax, a seven-minute swordfight in a theatre taking the protagonists over the boxes, through corridors, down the immense foyer staircase and finally on to the stage where props and curtains are slashed in this great action sequence. Scaramouche was a subject dear to Granger’s heart – he had read the book as a child and seen the 1923 silent version – and another classic of the past, The Prisoner of Zenda (1952), provided him with another fine heroic role. A scene-by- scene remake of the 1937 version (the film’s director, Richard Thorpe, had a Moviola on the set running the original), it tends to be underrated due to the classic quality of the earlier version, but Granger, Deborah Kerr and James Mason are excellent substitutes for the original cast and the final sabre duel is very exciting.
Granger and Simmons were married in 1950, and she joined him later in Hollywood when her remaining contract with Rank was bought by Howard Hughes. In 1953, while Granger was making Salome with Rita Hayworth, he and Simmons sued Hughes, who was claiming that he had the actress under personal contract for seven years. Much of Hollywood was sceptical at their taking on such a Goliath, but they won and Simmons was able to star at MGM in Young Bess (1953) with Granger, Charles Laughton and Deborah Kerr supporting the radiant star. Granger would later cite this as his best Hollywood film.
The couple owned a house overlooking the San Fernando Valley and regular visitors to their Sunday brunches included Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Wilding (who had been an extra with Granger), Richard and Sybil Burton, and Spencer Tracy, after whom they named their daughter. Granger had two children by his first marriage, Jamie and Lindsay, who lived with the couple in Hollywood for several years while growing up.
It was Tracy who suggested to the director George Cukor that Granger would be perfect as Norman Maine in A Star is Born after the first choice, Cary Grant, had turned it down. Granger auditioned with Judy Garland at Cukor’s home but the director’s insistence on advising on every vocal inflexion annoyed the actor and he walked out. He later expressed regret at turning down the role which proved the highlight of his old friend James Mason’s Hollywood career. It is highly probable that Granger would have been superb as the alcoholic former swashbuckler who sees his wife’s star rising as his fades, and it would doubtless have helped a career which was starting to fade.
Granger played the title-role in Beau Brummel (1954), which had only gorgeous decor to recommend it. The film caused a scandal in England when chosen for the Royal Film Performance since it shows the descent into madness of King George III. Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet (1955) was a disappointing smuggling adventure but Footsteps in the Fog (1955), made in England with Simmons, was an effective Victorian thriller. Granger finally worked with Cukor on Bhowani Junction (1956), an interesting attempt to film John Masters’s novel set against 1947 anti-imperialist India. Granger began a lifelong friendship with his co-star Ava Gardner, but Cukor was disparaging about him. ‘I wanted Trevor Howard; Granger was just a movie star.’
His contract coming to an end, he was given less important films by the studio, and he turned down the role of Messala in Ben Hur rather than be billed below Charlton Heston. Although 43 years old, he refused to see himself in character parts, while being disarmingly modest about his abilities: ‘I know I haven’t a nutshell of talent compared to my wife, Jean Simmons,’ he said in 1958. The couple had been very much in love, but the long separations involved in their careers eventually put a strain on the marriage and they were divorced in 1960, the year Granger made his last truly successful film as a star, Henry Hathaway’s rollicking comedy adventure North to Alaska, co-starring John Wayne.
Granger showed that he could still play a swashbuckling role with flair in Swordsman of Sienna (1961), but most of his films for the next decade were made on the Continent, including three as the German author Karl May’s western hero Old Surehand, and in the Seventies he become active in television movies. He played the villain in the 1978 adventure The Wild Geese, supporting his old friend Richard Burton, and in 1990 returned to the theatre, touring England and then making an acclaimed Broadway debut in Somerset Maugham’s The Circle with Rex Harrison and Glynis Johns
“It is easier for a man. For women to have a long career in films requires superhuman energy, guts and determination. The longest surviving ladies usually betray in their performances something of their off screen battles: impossible not to believe that Joan Crawford had not browbeaten producers the same way she harried her leading men. Susan Hayward was a small-scale Crawford. The final effect is less of domination than of pugnacity. Ability is not lacking, though it did not have the individuality of Bette Davis at her peak. Like Crawford, and to a lesser degree Barbara Stanwyck, Hayward was an entirely predictable actress. It was the aggressive, meaty roles of these actresses that she tried to inherit and in the 50’s she had the field to herself. She was lucky. Fans with a faiblesse for the grand manner liked her, but of she is at her peak in “I’ll Cry To-Morrow (she won an acting award at Cannes for it) she still is not good. Whenever she is on screen with Jo Van Fleet – playing her screen mother – you do not notice her. She is colourless in a plastic part, wrapped in cellophane. Whereas Van Fleet, if not exactly flesh and blood, at least does her job in an interesting way (for instance no reference is made to their being Jewish, but Van Fleet’s intonation and mannerisms suggest it). Later in the film, Hayward has to play an alcoholic – admittedly without help from either script or direction – and she just cannot supply what they lack. Davis, Stanwyck and even Crawford were given equally difficult tasks – their villainesses – but they could always suggest some motivation for their actions” – David Shipman – “The Great Movie Stars – The International Years” (1972).
TCM overview:
Pretty, exuberant leading lady who began her Hollywood career in 1937 as a bit player and was a star by the mid-1940s. Talented and tempestuous, with a penchant for playing ripe melodrama with all the stops out, Hayward reached her peak in the early 1950s in such enjoyably sudsy vehicles as “My Foolish Heart” (1950), “With a Song in My Heart” (1952) and “I’ll Cry Tomorrow” (1955). She was often cast as the brassy, defiant heroine, as in her Oscar-winning role “I Want to Live!” (1958), where she splendidly played the real-life Barbara Graham, a woman who was wrongly sentenced to death. Hayward’s stardom petered out by the mid-60s, but she continued playing occasional leads and character roles (including a part as a past-her-prime film star in the abysmal “Valley of the Dolls” 1969) on film and TV until shortly before her death of a brain tumor in 1975.
Richard DreyfussOne Sheet; Movie Poster; Film Poster; Cinema Poster;
The great Richard Dreyfuss is in Dublin soon to be honoured at the Jameson Film Festival. He was born in 1947 in Brooklyn, New York. He starred in some of THE major movies of the 1970’s including “American Graffiti”, “Jaws”, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, “The Goodbye Girl” for which he won an Oscar, and of course “Jaws”. More recent successes include “Mr Holland’s Opus”.
TCM overview:
At one time, the youngest actor ever to win the coveted Best Actor Oscar, Richard Dreyfuss – at age 29 – was propelled to stardom with his complex performance in “The Goodbye Girl” (1977). Thanks to his uncanny ability to make annoyingly vain, pompous, whiny or supercilious characters seem both heroic and likable, he rose to the top of the Hollywood heap with memorable turns in “American Graffiti” (1973), “Jaws” (1975) and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977). Though he was the epitome of cockiness on screen, there was always something reassuring about his presence, though he did gain the dubious off-screen reputation for being exceedingly arrogant. On top of the world at the end of the 1970s, Dreyfuss was poised to become one of the major superstars of the next decade. Instead, Dreyfuss blew his movie-star career sky-high through a cocktail of cocaine, booze and pills; yet another example of too much, too fast, too soon. After a period of recovery, Dreyfuss rebounded, both chastened and wiser with “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” (1986), “Stakeout” (1987) and “What About Bob?” (1991), reclaiming his mantle as one of Hollywood’s most gifted comedic and dramatic actors.
Born Oct. 29, 1947 in Brooklyn, NY, Dreyfuss was raised in Bayside, Queens by his father, Norman, an attorney who later became a restaurateur, and his mother, Gerry, a peace activist. When he was nine, the Dreyfuss family moved from the East Coast and settled in Los Angeles, where he began acting in plays at the Beverly Hills Jewish Center. He later attended Beverly Hills High School alongside the likes of Rob Reiner and Albert Brooks, and continued to pursue acting, particularly at the Gallery Theater in L.A. After graduating high school, Dreyfuss went to San Fernando Valley State College to continue his studies, but was kicked out for demanding a theater professor to apologize to the class for criticizing Marlon Brando’s performance as Marc Antony in a production of “Julius Caesar.” He spent the next two years working as a clerk in a Los Angeles hospital and managed to slip out of serving during the Vietnam War in 1967 by convincing the military that he was a conscientious objector. Soon after Dreyfuss landed an agent, he began appearing in episodes of “Gidget” (ABC, 1965-66) and “Bewitched” (ABC, 1964-1972) while performing both on and off-Broadway.
It was only a matter of time until Dreyfuss made his feature debut, which he did “in the last 40 seconds of the worst film ever made” – the campy show business melodrama, “Valley of the Dolls” (1967). Following a small, one-line role in “The Graduate” (1967), Dreyfuss attracted notice for playing a cocky, draft-dodging car thief in “The Young Runaways” (1968). After spending time in New York on Broadway in “But Seriously ” (1969) and off-Broadway as Stephen in Israel Horowitz’s “Line” (1971), Dreyfuss exploded onto the scene as Baby Face Nelson in John Milius’ “Dillinger” (1973), then had a career-marking turn in “American Graffiti” (1973), playing the ambivalent college-bound Curt Henderson, who spends the last night of summer with his friends trying to find a mysterious blonde (Suzanne Somers), which ultimately leads to the discovery of Wolfman Jack’s secret radio station. Dreyfuss put himself on the map for good with a star-making performance in “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” (1974), playing an ambitious kid from Montreal’s Jewish ghetto in the 1940s whose dreams of becoming successful eventually lead to drug smuggling, alienation and misery.
By the mid-1970s, Dreyfuss bypassed playing twentysomethings in favor of more adult roles. He further established himself in two of the decade’s top-grossing films – both directed by Steven Spielberg. His first collaboration with the director was on “Jaws” (1975), the first feature to break the $100 million mark at the box office and establish the concept of the summer blockbuster. Dreyfuss was memorable in a supporting role, playing an excitable ichthyologist whose warnings about a great white shark attacking vacationers at an Atlantic Ocean beach go unheeded by everyone except the town’s police chief (Roy Scheider). Dreyfuss followed with perhaps his two most important films, starting with his second effort with Spielberg, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977). In the director’s acclaimed epic sci-fi adventure, Dreyfuss played an Indiana power company technician bedeviled by an enigmatic obsession triggered from an encounter with aliens. His obsessive building of anything resembling what would be revealed later as Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower – specifically sculpting the tower with a plate of mashed potat s – amused audiences who connected with the everyman touched by something he could not understand and frustrated with a family who had no sympathy for his otherworldly predicament.
Confirmed now as a major talent, Dreyfuss went on to win an Academy Award for his first romantic role, playing an out-of-work actor who is forced to share an apartment with an ex-Broadway dancer (Marsha Mason) and her daughter (Quinn Cummings) in “The Goodbye Girl” (1977). Benefiting from arguably the best screenplay Neil Simon ever wrote, Dreyfuss ran the gamut in his performance, displaying both hilarious charm as an actor forced to play a flamboyant Richard III and poignant vulnerability as a – surprisingly – romantic lead. His hilarious staccato delivery of the line “and. I. don’t. like. the. panties. drying. on. the. rod” became a classic in the annals of famous movie lines. At age 29, Dreyfuss became the youngest performer to win an Oscar for Best Leading Actor. There was no denying that 1977 was, indeed, a good year for the quirky actor.
After his Oscar win, Dreyfuss was flying high over Hollywood – in more ways than one. By 1978, Dreyfuss had been fully indulging in cocaine, though his habit failed to affect his polished performances in “The Big Fix” (1978), a comedy thriller in which he played an aging 1960s radical-turned-private detective, and “The Competition” (1980), a romantic drama that saw him as a piano prodigy falling in love with his rival (Amy Irving). Both films, however, failed to perform at the box office unlike his last few mega-hits. He made several more inauspicious appearances, including in “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” (1981), a film that later caused him to remark, “Whatever it was that I accomplished in that film, I’m not very proud of myself. It’s really the only film that I’ve ever done that I feel uncomfortable taking credit for.” Then tragedy struck in 1982, when Dreyfuss crashed his Mercedes into a tree, leading to a trip to the hospital, and his arrest for possession of cocaine and prescription drugs. Ordered by the court to enter rehabilitation, Dreyfuss successfully completed the program and had both felony charges against him dropped. He then met his second wife, Jeramie, whom he married in March 1983.
Despite his personal recovery, Dreyfuss suddenly found his career in trouble. After all but vanishing from the screen for five years, he returned clean and sober to co-star in Paul Mazursky’s popular “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” (1986), playing a philandering businessman who saves a homeless man (Nick Nolte) from downing in his pool. He provided the opening and closing narration for the timeless Rob Reiner-helmed classic “Stand by Me” (1986), then played a struggling lawyer who tries to prove that a high-class call girl (Barbra Streisand) is fit to stand trial for murder in “Nuts” (1987). Dreyfuss was at his comedic best as a wisecracking Seattle detective tasked with his partner (Emilio Estevez) to keep watch on the girlfriend (Madeline Stowe) of an escaped thug (Aidan Quinn) in the surprise box office hit, “Stakeout” (1987). In Barry Levinson’s “Tin Men” (1987), later said to have been Dreyfuss’ personal favorite, the actor played a disgruntled aluminum siding salesman butting heads with a colleague (Danny DeVito) after getting involved in a traffic accident, leading to an all-out war of harassment against each other. Dreyfuss continued to work steadily, giving strong performances in “Moon Over Parador” (1988), “Always” (1989) and in his good friend and fellow drug addict Carrie Fisher’s autobiographical dramedy, “Postcards From the Edge” (1990).
Once the 1990s were ushered in, Dreyfuss was once again firing on all cylinders, but this time without the aid of cocaine. After playing the leader of a wandering actors troupe in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (1990), he was both charming and obnoxious as a big shot salesman who sweeps an aimless Boston woman (Holly Hunter) off her feet, only to run afoul with her family in the underappreciated romantic comedy, “Once Around” (1991). In “What About Bob?” (1991), Dreyfuss was in top form as an arrogant psychotherapist whose dismissive treatment of a highly neurotic, but ingratiating patient (Bill Murray) eventually drives him over the edge. Following an unnecessary and unwanted sequel, “Another Stakeout” (1993), Dreyfuss starred in the film version of Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers” (1993), then played a child psychologist brought out of retirement to coax an uncommunicative autistic child (Ben Faulkner) into revealing his parents’ murders in “Silent Fall” (1994). He gave another amazing performance in “Mr. Holland’s Opus” (1995), playing to perfection a musician who puts aside his own ambitions in order to dedicate his life to teaching music to high school students and try to connect to his deaf son. Such was his touching performance, Dreyfuss earned his second Academy Award nomination for Best Leading Actor.
Throughout his career, Dreyfuss was an outspoken advocate for media reform and freedom of speech, while actively speaking out against the erosion of individual rights. In an ironic turn, he convincingly played a cunning Republican senator who tries to smear an unabashedly liberal president (Michael Douglas) in “The American President” (1995). Meanwhile, throughout the majority of his career, Dreyfuss was a presence on the stage, performing in numerous plays over the years – most notably opposite Christine Lahti in Jon Robin Baitz’s “Three Hotels” (1995). After receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1996, he was cast by director Sydney Lumet in his moody courtroom drama, “Night Falls on Manhattan” (1997), playing a contentious lawyer who defends a drug dealer (Shiek Mahmud-Bey) after a shootout with the police leaves several officers dead. He next co-starred in a Disney production of “Oliver Twist” (ABC, 1997), then took a few steps back with the mind-numbingly dumb comedy “Krippendorf’s Tribe” (1998). Returning to the small screen, he gave a sterling performance in “Lansky” (HBO, 1999), playing the famed Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky, who rose from being a petty gambler to one of the most powerful mobsters in history. He then portrayed a mobster for laughs in “The Crew” (2000), playing one of four aging gangsters looking to save their retirement complex by pretending to take a job executing a Miami mob boss.
Without a substantial hit under his belt for several years, feature roles slowly became less available to Dreyfuss, making television a more viable outlet. He turned in a fine performance as the U.S. president in Stephen Frears live broadcast remake of the tense Cold War drama, “Failsafe” (CBS, 2000), then was convincing as former Secretary of State Alexander Haig in “The Day Reagan Was Shot” (Showtime, 2001). Meanwhile, he landed his first regular series role in the short-lived drama, “The Education of Max Bickford” (CBS, 2001-02), playing a troubled college history professor battling inter-office politics while dealing with an equally difficult family life. In “Coast to Coast” (Showtime, 2004), he played a husband trying to mend his marriage by taking a road trip with wife (Judy Davis), which he followed with a return to the big screen, appearing in “Silver City” (2004), John Sayles’ sharp satire about small town politics. In 2006, he joined the ensemble cast of “Poseidon,” a flawed remake of the 1972 original, in which he played a suicidal gay man who struggles to escape a capsized ocean liner with a ragtag group of passengers who must rely on and trust one another despite their differences. In a bit of inspired casting, director Oliver Stone tapped Dreyfuss and all his intensity to play Vice President Dick Cheney in “W” (2008), a look at the charmed life and troubled presidency of George W. Bush (Josh Brolin).
