Showing posts with label Actors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Actors. Show all posts

Monday, August 5, 2024

Quote of the Day (Richard Burton, on Seeing Elizabeth Taylor for the First Time)

“There were quite a lot of people in and around the pool, all suntanned and all drinking the Sunday morning liveners – Bloody Marys, boilermakers, highballs, iced beer….I was enjoying this small social triumph, but then a girl sitting on the other side of the pool lowered her book, took off her sunglasses and looked at me. She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud…. She was unquestionably gorgeous. I can think of no other word to describe a combination of plentitude, frugality, abundance, tightness. She was lavish. She was a dark unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much, and not only that, she was totally ignoring me.”—Actor Richard Burton (1925-1984), in a diary entry recalling his first sight, at a 1952 California party, of future wife Elizabeth Taylor, quoted by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, “A Love Too Big To Last,” Vanity Fair, June 2010

Richard Burton—who died 40 years ago today at his home in Geneva, Switzerland—fascinates me as much as any actor. He was a hell-raiser, to be sure—and, in coupling with the object of desire mentioned in the above paragraph a decade later, in Cleopatra, a cyclone of scandal.

Since his death at age 58, many have wondered how much more he might have accomplished had he not become addicted to both fame and alcohol. He himself thought he had squandered his talent on work that was essentially inconsequential: “All my life I think I have been secretly ashamed of being an actor and the older I get the more ashamed I get.”

I think of Burton as suffering from Mickey Mantle Disease, named after another prodigiously talented celebrity who overcame the humblest of origins—but still rued that he never became more.

But think of it this way in both cases: How many other gifted people have yielded to their demons without accomplishing anything at all?

Oscar nominated seven times (though he never won), Burton, for all his difficulties in staying sober, still showed at the end of his life that he could be superb in a supporting role, as in his unsettling appearance as the mysterious, cruel Party leader “O’Brien” in his last film, 1984.

At his best, in earlier films like Look Back in Anger, Becket, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Equus—not to mention stage work such as his legendary 1964 Broadway appearance in Hamlet— few could match his erudition, intensity, or magnificent baritone voice.

Burton showed talent in another capacity besides acting. (Surprisingly, it wasn’t in directing—his single foray behind the camera, a 1967 adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, was critically panned.)

No, his talent turned out to be writing. It didn’t involve screenplays, as so many other actors have turned their hands to, nor film analysis (Louise Brooks), novels (Dirk Bogarde), or memoirs (too many to list here), but diaries, 400,000 words scrawled in pocketbooks, desk diaries and loose paper.

Burton’s observational powers were acute, as was his sense of the rhythm of words. Thinking to himself, he could summon passion for material he admired such as Shakespeare’s plays:

“Last night I was lying on the bed doing a double crostic and looked up a quotation in the paperbacked Quotation Dictionary that I carry around with me specifically for that purpose. I immediately became lost in the book and read all the Shakespeare ones right through very slowly. There was hardly a line there that I didn't immediately know but seeing the miraculous words in print again doomed me to a long trance of nostalgia, a stupor of melancholy, like listening to really massive music, music that moans and thunders and plumbs fathomless depths.”

Unfortunately, just as often he expressed anger and disenchantment that all his attempts at self-medication could do nothing to assuage:

“I loathe, loathe, loathe acting. in studios. In England. I shudder at the thought of going to work with the same horror as a bank clerk must loathe that stinking tube journey every morning and the rush hour madness at night.”

In Elizabeth Taylor, he found his muse (they would star in 11 films together) and his downfall, as surely as Zelda Fitzgerald served the same functions for her novelist husband Scott. And, like the Jazz Age duo, their marriage was as much train wreck as love story, with the volatility and drinking of each only worsening the same instincts in the other.

Tuesday, March 14, 2023

Quote of the Day (‘Grumplestiltskin’ Grant, Showing His Surly Side to Ashley Graham and a Worldwide Audience)

Ashley Graham: “What’s your favorite thing about coming to the Oscars?”

Hugh Grant: “Well, um, it’s fascinating. The whole of humanity is here. It’s vanity fair.”

Graham: “Oh, it’s all about Vanity Fair. It’s let loose and have a little fun. What are you most excited to see tonight?”

Grant: “To see?”

Graham: “Yeah. I know that you watch a few of the movies. Are you exited to see anyone win? Do you have your hopes up for anyone?”

Grant: “No one in particular.”

Graham: “Okay. What are you wearing tonight, then?”

Grant: “Just my suit.”

Graham: “Your suit? You didn’t make your suit! Who designed it?”

Grant: “I can’t remember…My tailor.”

Graham: “That’s okay. Shout-out to your tailor! So tell me, what does it feel like to be in Glass Onion? It was such an amazing film, I really loved it. I love a thriller! How fun is it to shoot something like that?”

Grant: “Well, I’m barely in it. I’m in for about three seconds.”

Graham: “But still, you showed up and you had fun, right?”

Grant: “Uh, almost.”—Hugh Grant and Ashley Graham quoted by Michael Ausiello, “Oscars: Hugh Grant Shuts Down Ashley Graham in Mesmerizingly Awkward Red Carpet Interview,” www.tvline.com, Mar. 12 2023

Movie fans who only know Hugh Grant as the bumbling but winning lead in rom-coms like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love, Actually had a chance to see him without a script at the Oscars on Sunday night. This recent spectacle will not exactly burnish his reputation as a charmer.

Former flame Elizabeth Hurley, who still remains on good terms with the English actor, revealed to talk-show host Andy Cohen eight years ago that Grant’s peevishness had earned him the nickname "Grumplestiltskin" among her friends. His dialogue above with supermodel Ashley Graham should tip you off how he acquired that surly sobriquet.

You will get no argument from me about the general inanity of the so-called "red carpet" (or, this year, "champagne-colored carpet") chatter before the industry’s main event of the year. Nor will you hear me disagree that what transpired between Grant and Graham was still better than Will Smith’s slap of Chris Rock in last year’s controversial telecast.

But, from the moment that Ms. Graham mistook Grant’s reference to William Makepeace Thackeray’s Victorian satire of human vainglory for an allusion to the glitzy magazine famous for its Oscar parties, it was all downhill. The actor’s lifted eyebrows at the end of their exchange said far more than his clipped answers about his contempt for the whole circus.

Reaction to this tense interview on social media was swift, and mostly against Grant.

Much the same division of sentiment followed after he acted as presenter with Four Weddings and a Funeral co-star Andie McDowell. Some called his description of how he looked without moisturizer funny; others thought it tasteless.

I voted for “tasteless.” In fact, when I first heard Grant’s description of his face, I thought I must have been mistaken, that he was resorting to the stuttery style of speaking that had endeared him to so many.

Clearly, he had ad-libbed while on stage, as you might have guessed from Andie McDowell’s surprised reaction to what was meant to be a compliment to her appearance.

Richard Gere was banned as a presenter for 20 years after ad-libbing at the 1993 ceremony, but at least he did it for a good cause: a protest against the Chinese government for its mistreatment of Tibet. What should the Academy do about Grant’s tacky, raunchy joke?

“The only thing an actor owes his public is not to bore them,” Humphrey Bogart reportedly said. Maybe.

But entertainers owe each other what all human beings owe the rest of humanity: courtesy. That attitude exudes grace and is more essential to what we call “class” than something ephemeral and maybe ill-gotten like money.

Over the weekend, it was missing from Grant’s repertoire. I guess we will find out soon, once he’s had some time to consider what he did and to craft an apology, if it was ever really part of his carefully crafted persona.

(The image accompanying this post, of Hugh Grant at a charity fundraiser held in South Bank, London, was taken Mar.15, 2011, by Julien Rath.)

Friday, December 30, 2022

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Producers,’ on Actors)

Leo Bloom [played by Gene Wilder]: “Actors are not animals! They're human beings!”

Max Bialystock [played by Gene Wilder]: “They are? Have you ever eaten with one?”— The Producers (1967), written and directed by Mel Brooks

Monday, December 26, 2022

Quote of the Day (Noel Coward, on an Easy Casting Decision for One of His Shows)

“The girl who plays Nancy is quite remarkable. She can neither sing, dance nor act, has a lisp and no top to her head! I left terse orders for her to be replaced.”—English playwright, singer-songwriter, and director Noel Coward (1899-1973), on an inadequate cast member in an Australian production of his musical Sail Away, June 6, 1963 letter to private secretary Lorn Loraine, in The Letters of Noel Coward, edited by Barry Day (2007)

Friday, August 5, 2022

Quote of the Day (David Warner, on Not Being Choosy About His Roles)

“I said to him [actor Ian Holm], ‘What are you doing next?’ And Ian, who was always in the best way choosy, said he was doing the Kafka film with Jeremy Irons. Then he said, ‘So what are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m doing a thing called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze.’”—English actor David Warner (1941-2022), quoted in Neil Genzlinger, “David Warner, Actor Who Played Villains and More, Dies at 80,” The New York Times, July 25, 2022

The year he won the first of his two Best Supporting Actor Oscars, Michael Caine was unable to pick up his statuette for his Hannah and Her Sisters because he was on location for another, rather more forgettable, film: Jaws, The Revenge.

Caine, with more than 175 film credits (and counting) on his resume, might be in the best position to understand the attitude towards work and roles exemplified by the late David Warner.

Why are such actors so prolific, so accepting of whatever jobs they are offered? Do they like the chance to work with a certain director or co-star? Is the money irresistible? Is the job a nice change of pace from what they usually do? Do they just figure the hell with it—who knows how, when all is said and done, after the director and studio wrestle over the footage, the picture will turn out, anyhow? Or are they just fearful of never working again, and figure they’ll take what they can get?

With Warner, there might be another factor involved in all those movies: his relative lack of stage credits. After a sterling beginning in the Sixties, Warner came down with such a terrible case of stage fright that he did not appear in a theatrical role until he played munitions titan Andrew Undershaft in of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara.

I saw him in that Roundabout Theatre show back in 2001, but was so annoyed at the normally estimable Cherry Jones’ in the title role that I didn’t appreciate how lucky I was to catch Warner in such a rare appearance.

Whatever the reason or reasons involved, Warner certainly made his share of movies—about 225, or more than even Caine has appeared in so far. You might not recall his name, but there’s a good chance you’ve seen one of his films—or will soon.

In fact, the weekend following his death, I caught one of his appearances from quite a while ago: one of those Perry Mason made-for-TV movies that Raymond Burr made two decades after his long-running hourly series went off the air, now showing up again on MeTV.

In this case, Warner made a fast but memorable appearance as a not-very-likable murder victim in The Case of the Poisoned Pen. (Evidently, the experience was agreeable enough for both parties that he came back for another one of those Mason TV movies three years later.)

But the movies that cropped up repeatedly in his obituaries were The Omen (source of the still accompanying this post), Titanic, Tron, and various films in the Star Trek franchise. With that long, lean face, he was fated for character actor rather than leading man roles. It might not have made him the most prominent actor in Hollywood, but it did make him among those you’d see the most.

And sometimes, you didn’t even have to see him. His voice made him a natural not just for sci-fi and thrillers, but also voice-over work in animated movies and games, as discussed in this piece by Riordan Zentler of the Spokane Spokesman-Review.

I’m sorry that Warner is gone now, besides the fact that one hates to see the end of a performer of such versatility. Remarkably for his profession—and especially for one admired so much by his peers—he seems to have had a refreshing lack of ego.

After all, he may have played countless villains, but anyone who can joke about being in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze can’t be that bad a guy.

Tuesday, March 8, 2022

Quote of the Day (John Lithgow, on His Disastrous 'Batman' Audition)

“My worst audition was for [director] Tim Burton for Batman. I have never told anyone this story, but I tried to persuade him I was not right for the part [The Joker], and I succeeded. I didn’t realize it was such a big deal. About a week later I heard they were going after Robin Williams and Jack Nicholson…. How about that for stupid? Actors are not necessarily smart people.”—Tony-winning actor John Lithgow, quoted in Katie Van Syckle, “John Lithgow Still Regrets Passing on Playing the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman,” New York Magazine, June 13, 2017

In the new blockbuster version of the adventures of the Caped Crusader/Dark Knight, Barry Keoghan plays the vexing villain, The Joker. It would have been fascinating 33 years ago, though, to see how Lithgow would have put his stamp on a role that, in addition to Keoghan and Nicholson, has also been played by Cesar Romero, Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix.

(The accompanying image of John Lithgow was taken by David Shankbone on March 27, 2007.)

Monday, September 27, 2021

Quote of the Day (Christine Baranski, on Her Frustrating Early Auditions)

“After I graduated [from Juilliard], I found myself rather like, ‘Why am I going up for these skinny, gangly, awkward funny girls?’ And then I’m like, ‘Well, it’s because you’re kind of a skinny, funny girl.’ ”—Tony- and Emmy-winning actress Christine Baranski on her early auditions, quoted in Rebecca Milzoff, “The New Adventures of Christine Baranski,” New York Magazine, Sept. 17, 2012

(The image accompanying this post is a cropped photo of Ms. Baranski, at a 2010 Metropolitan Opera performance of Das Rheingold, by David Shankbone.)

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Quote of the Day (Mary-Louise Parker, on the Chance to ‘Go Deeper’ in Theater)

“There is relief in the fact that on my worst day backstage in a theater, I at least know where I am. I hear ‘places, please’ and know how to get there, which is somewhere. Theater is this amazing metaphor: You get another chance to un-know stuff and go deeper. When you hit on something true and leave yourself behind, it is freeing in a way that renders you weightless. That feels worthy traversing any steep ladder within yourself, until you say your humble prayers to whomever and then dive.”— American film, TV, and theater actress Mary-Louise Parker, “The Very First Time…I Had Actual Egg on My Face,” The New York Times, Nov. 6, 2016

(Photo of Mary-Louise Parker at the 2010 Comic-Con in San Diego by Rick Marshall)

Thursday, February 11, 2021

Quote of the Day (Catherine Deneuve, on the ‘Charming’ Burt Reynolds)

“He was a charming man. He had a great sense of humour. I remember going to his trailer and everything was monogrammed. He said: 'If I could have, I would have put it on my toilet paper.'”—French actress Catherine Deneuve, on working with Burt Reynolds on Hustle, quoted in Nick Foulkes, “I Was a Symbol, I Suppose,” The Financial Times, Jan. 12-13, 2019

Burt Reynolds—born on this day 85 years ago in Lansing, Mich.—occupies a niche in film somewhere between Steve McQueen and George Clooney, two other actors who made the transition from TV regular to big-screen star. Reynolds possessed considerably more skill and self-mocking humor than McQueen, but did not display often enough Clooney’s ambition and daring. At its best, his career amply reflected his laid-back charm, but at the time of his death in 2018, I was dismayed that it could have been so much more.

The dominant theme of Reynolds’ career was a refusal to take the game seriously, starting with his appearance in Cosmopolitan Magazine, where he wore a grin and little else. It was burnished by approximately 60 Tonight Show appearances in which he might say or do anything—shaving half his moustache, spraying whip cream down Johnny Carson’s pants, even joking about how bad some of his films were.

He certainly appeared in movies that any actor would have been proud to have made—notably Deliverance (the one that put him on the map), Starting Over (my favorite of his, when he was inexplicably deprived of an Oscar nomination), and Boogie Nights (which did get him a nomination, along with a short-lived second comeback). But out of 63 films—and given the power he enjoyed at his career height—that list seems paltry.

Every actor in the business long enough will have stinkers in his resume, so Reynolds can’t be faulted for that. An entertainer also makes the most of his assets, and Reynolds maximized his good looks and that ever-present twinkle in his eyes, to such an extent that he ranked only behind Robert Redford as the top male box-office star of the 1970s, according to the Web site Ultimate Movie Rankings.

So, why did his star sink in the Eighties? Several factors account for it, I think:

*Taking the easy paycheck and easy way out. In one sense, Reynolds only mirrored what Hollywood as a whole has done, increasingly so in recent years: go for the seemingly easy score, especially through sequels. Make Smokey and the Bandit? Fine. But by the time he got to Smokey and the Bandit Part 3, the well had surely run dry. The same thing happened with Cannonball Run II. It didn’t help that his screen persona carried over insistently, with little variation, to yet other films.

*Poor career choices. Reynolds admitted he made a big mistake in turning down the chance to appear as James Bond, but his errors didn’t end there. A 2018 article in Variety catalogued roles that others rode to career triumphs, including Harrison Ford (Star Wars), Richard Gere (Pretty Woman), Bruce Willis (Die Hard), and Jack Nicholson (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest AND Terms of Endearment—both of which won the actor the Oscar that forever eluded Reynolds).

*Bad health. While filming City Heat with old buddy Clint Eastwood, Reynolds suffered a broken jaw when he was hit in the face with a metal chair. Instead of going to the hospital, he took painkillers. Before he received a diagnosis of temporomandibular disorder and was treated appropriately, he lost considerable weight, leading to rumors that he had AIDS. That put an additional chill on his career prospects for two crucial years in the mid-1980s.

*Sexism. The Cosmopolitan photo session that made Reynolds notorious—and, he suggested with some justification later, kept him from being taken more seriously—may have been sparked when the magazine’s editor, Helen Gurley Brown, taunted him by asking him before a Tonight Show audience if he was sexist. (Later, off camera, she made the offer of the session, according to Brooke Hauser’s 2016 biography of Brown, Enter Helen.) Moreover, as I discussed in this prior post on the making of the disastrous Switching Channels, Reynolds exacerbated what already promised to be a complicated production by telling co-star Kathleen Turner “something about not taking second place to a woman,” as she recalled. With her star then in the ascendant and his close to nadir, it was a foolish thing to say and irredeemably disrupted their chemistry on the film.

Maybe the best concise description of Reynolds, with all his virtues and faults as an actor, came in this statement, released after his death, from TV showrunners Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who created their early ‘90s comedy Evening Shade for him: “Burt won the Emmy for best actor during our first season. He was sweet, brash, exasperating, hot-tempered, generous and wickedly talented. To be sure, it was a wild ride. R.I.P. Burt. May your star never go out."

I’m afraid it has already dimmed, though, and it may continue to do so.

Tuesday, February 9, 2021

Appreciations: Christopher Plummer, Prince of Players

“No matter what I do between, the stage always beckons and gets me every time. I suppose it's because there are no tedious retakes, no endless waiting, no cutting-room floor upon which I can end up. Once on the stage, we are thrown to the lions, no barrier comes down between us and the mob; everything is exposed, dangerous and now."—Canadian Tony- and Oscar-winning actor Christopher Plummer (1929-2021), In Spite of Myself: A Memoir (2008)

The death this past weekend of Christopher Plummer at age 91 concluded a career lengthy and storied enough to land his passing on the front page of The New York Times.

Like Falstaff (the one role he scoffed at playing in his last years because it required a fat suit), Plummer had many a time “heard the chimes at midnight.” Indeed, it was nothing short of miraculous that he survived into his nineties.

Reading In Spite of Myself is likely to induce in a reader the worst case of drunkenness by osmosis since Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Plummer was such a champion hell-raiser that around 20 years ago, when I visited the place that thrust him into the spotlight in the 1950s, the Stratford Festival, one aficionado of the longtime Canadian theater institution was still shaking his head over a drinking binge by the actor from years before.

With his keen intelligence, matinee-idol looks, vigorous libido, and epic thirst, Plummer could have easily sunk into sodden self-parody as John Barrymore had. But he credited his third and last wife, Elaine, with curbing his wild ways, and he proceeded to do much of his best work well into old age.

Unlike, say, Nathan Lane, whom I blogged about last week, Plummer had a significant film career. Early on, he appeared in the most high-profile vehicle imaginable, the blockbuster musical The Sound of Music (which he insisted afterward on terming The Sound of Mucus).

Although he felt his role as Captain Von Trapp to be woefully wooden and thin, he found later parts far more suited to his talents, including in John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King; a personal favorite of mine, the Sherlock Holmes thriller Murder by Decree; and three films that netted Oscar nominations, The Last Station, All the Money in the World, and Beginners (the last of which earned him the coveted trophy, at age 82, making him the oldest actor ever to win the Academy Award for supporting actor).

But it was the stage, with its audiences reacting, its rich classic texts by Shakespeare, Sophocles, Rostand and Shaw, and its never-to-be repeated moments, that clearly catalyzed Plummer. His transatlantic theater appearances were sensations.

Much to my regret, I missed Plummer on the three different times I visited Stratford in the 1990s and 2000s. But I caught him on Broadway in the winter of 1982, and it wasn’t just any play. It was Othello, a production of fire (James Earl Jones, as the Moor of Venice) and ice (Plummer, in perhaps the greatest of all villain roles, Iago).

New York Times critic Walter Kerr called Plummer’s Iago “quite possibly the best single Shakespearean performance to have originated on this continent in our time.” I was hardly prepared to argue that point. I barely noticed then an up-and-coming young actor named Kelsey Grammar as the easily gulled Cassio, and, despite the admiration of Jones and Plummer, had little use for Diane Wiest as Desdemona. Instead, I was intent on how Plummer’s Iago devised his intricate spider’s web to ensnare Jones’ Othello.

That February night, as Plummer let his resonant voice drop as Iago vowed to turn Desdemona’s “virtue into pitch,” the atmosphere in the Winter Garden Theatre turned darker and chillier than what awaited us on the street.

That production, which began at Connecticut’s American Shakespeare Theatre, was booked for a limited Broadway run but was so popular had to be extended twice. Nevertheless, all was not well backstage.

The problems began in initial rehearsals, according to Michael Riedel’s Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway, when the original director, Peter Coe, was sacked, after his impolite suggestion to Jones that “Mr. Plummer is mopping the floor with you.” A new director, Zoe Caldwell, on good terms with both leads, dissipated much of the animosity, but the issue Coe identified remained: Plummer was, astonishingly enough, “mopping the floor” with Jones.

During the play's run, I heard scuttlebutt that Jones was annoyed by Plummer. In his memoir, Plummer, while praising his co-star’s “great authority” in the role, thought he had decided to “restrain and underplay the great moments of surging poetry.” Nor did it help that Jones objected to the unexpected laughs that Plummer elicited.

How much did this barely suppressed bristling reflect honest differences in interpreting the play? How much derived from the leads’ egos? In the end, it didn’t matter. Those like myself fortunate enough to witness one of those shows will remember how an old play took on new life amid this clash of theatrical titans.

Jones shouldn’t have felt badly about coming off second best to Plummer. Over 60 years in the theater, the Canadian channeled his flamboyance and astuteness into a well-earned reputation as an international prince of players. He brought to his craft an abiding love, realizing that acting had:

“…taught me music, poetry, painting and dance; it has introduced me to the big bad world outside; it has made me face rejection; it has taught me humour in its blackest and gentlest forms; it has made me think; it has even taught me about love. It has shown me the majesty of language, the written word in all its glory, and it has taught me above all that there is no such thing as perfection -- that in the arts, there are no rules, no restrictions, no limits -- only infinity."

(The photo accompanying this post shows Christopher Plummer at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, September 2007. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gdcgraphics/1752518829/in/set-72157602744288487/ ; author: gdcgraphics at https://www.flickr.com/photos/gdcgraphics/ )

Saturday, October 17, 2020

Quote of the Day (Peter Bogdanovich, on the Magnetism of Montgomery Clift)

“[Montgomery] Clift had been a kind of unacknowledged leader. His performances in [Howard] Hawks’ Red River (his first movie, though [Fred] Zinnemann’s The Search was released earlier), in [William] Wyler’s The Heiress, in [George] Stevens’ A Place in the Sun, heralded a new acting style. It came to be known, inaccurately, as the Method. After Clift came Brando, and after Brando, James Dean. Clift was the purest, the least mannered of these actors, perhaps the most sensitive, certainly the most poetic. He was also remarkably beautiful. Over eight years he acted in eight films, became a teenage heartthrob as well as a popular star with older audiences. He was nominated for Best Actor Oscars three times in six years and should have won each time. He gave at least four performances – in Red River, in A Place in the Sun, in I Confess and in Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity – that remain among the finest anyone has given in the movies.”— Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Hell’s in It: Portraits and Conversations (2004)

Montgomery Clift was born 100 years ago today in Omaha, Neb. Bogdanovich describes meeting this “most romantic and touching actor of his generation” at a 1961 showing of I Confess at a New York revival house.

As a result of a horrifying car accident three years before that wrecked his looks, Clift was on the downside of his career and five years away from his death at age 46. (I discussed that career- and life-changing incident in this post from 11 years ago.)

Bogdanovich’s narration of this encounter is profoundly poignant and moving. But to get beyond the tragic facts of his life to why we continue to value Clift’s work—the sheer labor, intensity and sensitivity he brought to each role—I recommend this post from the blog “And So It Begins” by director Alex Withrow.

Tuesday, August 11, 2020

Quote of the Day (Actress Emily Watson, on Nixing ‘Big Stupid Movies for Big Stupid Money’)


“I was offered big stupid movies for big stupid money and said no because mostly I thought: I will come a cropper. I had a strong sense of what my currency was going to be, which was: interesting, intelligent, character-driven. I also had an instinct that it was a place for swimming with the sharks, which we now know it was.”—British actress Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves, Gosford Park), quoted in Horatia Harrod, “Breaking the Mould,” Financial Times, Apr. 13-14, 2019

(Photo of Emily Watson was taken at the San Sebastian Festival 2016, and posted Apr. 20, 2017, by Bruno Chatelin.)

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Quote of the Day (Nicole Kidman, on the Importance of Showing Up for Others)


“I had no idea, when things have gone down, the people who have shown up for me. And you are down on your knees, you are like, 'I'm so vulnerable and so lost right now, and I'm unbelievably grateful for what you have done; you have no idea what you have just done. And by gosh, I’m going to do that—if it’s not for you, it’s for somebody else. Because I know what it means.”—Oscar-winning actress-producer Nicole Kidman, quoted in Elisa Lipsky-Karasz, “The Sorcoress,” WSJ. Magazine, May 2020

(Photo of Nicole Kidman was taken at the Cannes Film Festival, May 22, 2017, by Georges Biard.)



Friday, November 9, 2018

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Tootsie,’ With an Agent Astonished by His Client’s Transformation)


 “Oh, God! I begged you to get therapy.”— Agent George Fields [played by Sydney Pollack], upon discovering that actor-client Michael Dorsey [played by Dustin Hoffman], has gone in drag to get a woman’s part, in Tootsie (1982), screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal, based on a story by Don McGuire, with uncredited contributions by Barry Levinson, Robert Garland and Elaine May, directed by Sydney Pollack