ASH in 1970 was his breakthrough, and since then perhaps no other director has made more titles of the first rank, including McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Player, Nashville, and Short Cuts.The obituaries for Robert Altman, who died November 20, 2006, all made it a point that he was “preparing a film.” Well, of course he was. Preparing a film and making it and releasing it were the conditions of his life.
I remember a day in January 2002 when we visited the set of his Gosford Park, shooting outside London. It was a mild and pleasant day, and he was surrounded, as he liked to be, by cast and crew, friends and family. And he confided a personal truth.
“We were out driving one day, looking for a location, and it was time to go and have lunch. We went into a shopping center, and I suddenly realized there wasn’t one single person there who would know who I was. We had stepped over into real life. We had gotten lost. There was no assistant director around to do what I wanted him to do.
“Then I realized that if I stopped making movies, I would die, because my entire existence presupposed a movie in production. I don’t remember the years when things happened, but I remember the movie I was directing when they happened. The movies are the eras of my life. In fact, the movies are life.”
This is literally true. In the thirty-eight years since he stopped working for television, and his career as a movie director started, in 1968, he made thirty-seven movies. He also directed operas for the stage and TV miniseries (Tanner).
Altman was in his forties when this act in his life started; before that, he did episode TV, low-budget quickie features, and even industrial films.
MASH in 1970 was his breakthrough, and since then perhaps no other director has made more titles of the first rank, including McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Player, Nashville, and Short Cuts.
He liked big casts, overlapping dialogue, a sense of reality as if things are happening spontaneously. He was criticized because Shelley Duvall’s skirt kept getting caught in the car door in Three Women. The first time, it was an accident. He liked it and kept it in—every time she got in the car.
Altman’s range was so wide that sometimes he seemed to be deliberately avoiding patterns and styles. I don’t think so—I think he was a youthful adventurer at heart, ready for whatever was next.
I saw him last before the 2006 Academy Awards. He was in a private room with family, friends, colleagues such as Lily Tomlin. Before that I watched him for a day directing A Wedding for Chicago’s Lyric Opera. In neither case did he seek to be the center of attention. “The actors do it,” he said at the Lyric. “My job is to appreciate them.”
Yet I saw him subtly adjusting, altering, changing their words, almost without them realizing it. He had a quality of sympathy and empathy that made actors feel free to improvise and experiment.
His last completed film was A Prairie Home Companion—ostensibly about the last radio show Garrison Keillor was to record, but more truly (I thought at the time) the last film Altman was to direct. He was not well. He had cancer. He had a transplanted heart.
And yet Keillor’s character, in a sense playing Altman, had no regrets. “It is nothing less than an elegy,” I wrote in my review, “a memorial to memories of times gone by, to dreams that died but left the dreamers dreaming, to appreciating what you’ve had instead of insisting on more.”
Robert Altman had that quality. I remember when, unable to get a film financed, he filmed his current stage play, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, on the same set he used for the stage. And had as much fun as he did using his first camera.
Unlike with most directors, you do not look at Altman films one by one. You consider the whole body of work—the mood, the tone, the spirit. There is no director I loved more. When he died, it was at Thanksgiving, surrounded by friends and family, including his devoted wife, Kathryn. I hope he fully realized how much he had given to the world.
A Prairie Home Companion includes “Red River Valley,” which for some reason strikes me as the saddest song ever written.
Bob: From this valley they say you are going. We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile.
Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian director who perfected a style of languid, weary alienation in a series of influential films mostly made between 1960 and 1970, is dead at ninety-four. He died on Monday, July 30, 2007, the same day as Ingmar Bergman; with Federico Fellini, the three were sometimes thought of as the ruling triumvirate of European art cinema.
Although film lovers endlessly debated his best films, he had only one major international hit, Blow-Up (1966). Filmed in London, it starred David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave in the story of a photographer who takes a picture of her in a park with a man, and then later, painstakingly enlarging his work, thinks he may have photographed a murder.
The film was popular because of the mystery of the murder, because of its portrait of “swinging London” in a moment of time, and because viewers thought they could see a flash of pubic hair. Those motives were unworthy of a film whose greatness depended much more on an overall tone of uncertainty and dread.
Antonioni’s international breakthrough came in 1960, when his film L’Avventura was booed at Cannes but inspired a joint statement by critics defending it. For audiences seeking the conventional, it was an affront: Rich people disembark from a yacht on an island, one of them disappears—and never turns up again, the mystery of the vanishing still unsolved at film’s end.
Antonioni loved to thwart expectations, showing his often decadent characters afloat in a world without resolution. L’Avventura was championed by the young critic Pauline Kael, but with his next film, La Notte (1961), she lost patience. In a famous essay titled “The Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties,” she wrote that she had tried to goad people into seeing L’Avventura, only to find herself detesting Antonioni’s next film:
“La Notte is supposed to be a study in the failure of communication, but what new perceptions of this problem do we get by watching people on the screen who can’t communicate if we are never given any insight into what they could have to say if they could talk to each other?”
In 1964, Antonioni made his first color film, elegantly controlling his palette in The Red Desert, and when Blow-Up came two years later, he became notorious for color perfectionism in deciding the grass wasn’t green enough; he had it painted, and also a road and a building. “Antonioni paints the grass!” he told me in a 1969 interview. “To some degree, all directors paint and arrange or change things on a location, and it amused me that so much was made of it in my case.”
Kael observed: “He doesn’t tell conventional stories. He uses a seemingly random, peripheral course of development, apparently merely following the characters through inconsistencies and inadvertencies.”
She didn’t make that as a criticism, and when we spoke in 1969, Antonioni essentially agreed with it: “Until the film is edited, I have no idea myself what it will be about. And perhaps not even then. Perhaps the film will only be a mood, or a statement about a style of life. Perhaps it has no plot at all, in the way you use the word. I depart from the script constantly. I may film scenes I had no intention of filming; things suggest themselves on location, and we improvise. I try not to think about it too much. Then, in the cutting room, I take the film and start to put it together, and only then do I begin to get an idea of what it is about.”
I got an insight into how that process worked when in 1999 I received a letter from an actor named Ronan O’Casey, who said he played the “body” in Blow-Up and revealed that his character originally had a name, dialogue, and a role in the plot. By reducing him to an indistinct long shot, Antonioni redefined the film and essentially shaped it into a masterpiece.
In 1970, he filmed Zabriskie Point in the lowest place in Death Valley, telling the story of two young American hippies disillusioned by the Vietnam era. And in 1975, he made the masterpiece The Passenger, with Jack Nicholson as a man who takes a dead man’s identity, tries to hide from the world, inherits the man’s problems, and finds that only a young hitchhiker (Marla Schneider) cares much about him.
Born in Ferrara in 1912, he worked sometimes as a film critic before attending film school in Rome and later writing for such directors as Visconti. He made seventeen films in Italy, mostly well-received, before L’Avventura began his period of fame. Antonioni continued to work with varying success until 2004, although a stroke in the mid-1990s made it necessary to work with collaborators such as Wim Wenders. In 1995, he won an Oscar for lifetime achievement.
He was married twice, most recently in 1986 to Enrica Fico Antonioni, an actress and composer, who survives. He lived for years with the actress Monica Vitti, who starred in many of his films. He had no children.
Speculating on an afterlife, he contrasted himself with Bergman. The London Telegraph quoted him that “the Swede was solely concerned with the question of God,” while he was just the opposite.
The solitary, poetic, fearful, creative, brave, and philosophical mind of Ingmar Bergman has been stilled, and the director is dead at eighty-nine. Death was an event on which he long meditated; it was the subject of many of his greatest films, and provided his most famous single image, a knight playing chess with Death in The Seventh Seal.
The end came Monday, July 30, 2007, on the remote island of Faro, off the Swedish coast, where he made his home and workshop for many years. During a long and productive career, he made more than fifty films, some of them in longer versions for television, and directed more than two hundred plays and operas.
Woody Allen, who made some films in deliberate imitation of Bergman, said he was “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.”
And David Mamet has just written me: “When I was young the World Theatre, in Chicago, staged an all-day Ingmar Bergman Festival. I went at 10 o’clock in the morning and stayed all day. When I left the theater it was still light, but my soul was dark, and I did not sleep for years afterward.”
Provided with a secure home for decades within the Swedish film industry, working at Stockholm’s Film House, which his films essentially built, Bergman had unparalleled freedom to make exactly the films he desired. Occasionally they were comedies, and he made a sunny version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, but more often they were meditations on life and death, on the difficulties of people trying to connect, and on what he considered the silence of God. In a film like Wild Strawberries (1957), however, he imagined an old man terrified by death, revisiting his memories and finally finding reconciliation.
The son of a strict Lutheran minister, Bergman remembered such punishments as being locked in a cabinet and told mice would nibble at his toes. He resented his father for years, returning to that childhood again near the end of his career in Fanny and Alexander (1982), one of his greatest films.
What he saw as God’s refusal to intervene in the suffering on Earth was the subject of his 1961-63 Silence of God Trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light (a pitiless film in which a clergyman torments himself about the possibility of nuclear annihilation), and The Silence. In his masterpiece, Persona (1967), an actress (Liv Ullmann) sees a television image of a monk burning himself in Vietnam, and she stops speaking. Sent to a country retreat with a nurse (Bibi Andersson), she works a speechless alchemy on her, leading to a striking image when their two faces seem to blend.
So great was the tension in that film that Bergman made it appear to catch in the projector and burn. Then, from a black screen, the film slowly rebuilt itself, beginning with crude images from the first days of the cinema. These images were suggested by a child’s cinematograph, which his brother received as a present; so envious was Ingmar that he traded his brother for it, giving up his precious horde of one hundred tin soldiers.
In the fullness of his career, the director settled into a rhythm. “We’ve already discussed the new film the year before,” Sven Nykvist, his longtime cinematographer, told me in 1975. “Then Ingmar goes to his island and writes the screenplay. The next year, we shoot—usually about the 15th of April. Usually we are the same eighteen people working with him, year after year, one film a year.”
Of the eighteen, one was the “hostess,” hired to serve coffee and pastries and make the set seem domestic. “How large a crew do you use?” David Lean asked him one year at Cannes. “I always work with eighteen friends,” Bergman said. “That’s funny,” said Lean. “I work with a hundred and fifty enemies.”
In 1975 I visited the Bergman set for Face to Face. He took a break and invited me to his “cell” in Film House: a small, narrow room filled with an army cot, a desk, two chairs, and on the desk an apple and a bar of chocolate. He said he’d been watching an interview with Antonioni the night before: “I hardly heard what he said. I could not take my attention away from his face. For me, the human face is the most important subject of the cinema.”
Nykvist was his collaborator in filming those faces, and in The Passion of Anna (1969) did something unprecedented: filmed a conversation by the light of a single candle. “He said it could be done, and he was right,” Bergman said.
Bergman was married five times and had eight children, including Liv Ullmann’s daughter, the novelist Linn. He was not proud of how he behaved in some of those relationships, and in an extraordinary late film, Faithless (2000), written by Bergman and directed by Ullmann, he imagines a director (Erland Josephson) hiring an actress (Lena Endre) to help him “think through” an unhappy affair. It becomes clear that the actress is imaginary, that the affair has some connection with Ullmann and other women, and that the film is a confession. It is all shot on Faro, in Bergman’s house.
Other filmmakers spoke in awe of Bergman’s methods, which had the luxury of time and complete independence. Haskell Wexler, the great cinematographer, has just written me: “I was good friends with Sven Nykvist, who told me stories about Bergman. They sat in a big old church from very early in the morning until as black as the night gets. They noted where the light moved through the stained glass windows. Bergman planned where he would stage the scenes for a picture they were about to do. This had the practical advantage of minimizing light and generator costs.
“Sven said sitting alone with Ingmar in the church had a profound effect on him. I asked him if it made him more religious. He said he didn’t think so, but it did give him some kind of spiritual connection to Ingmar, which helped him deal with the times Bergman became very mean.”
There are so many memories crowding in now from the richness of Bergman’s work that I know not what to choose. A turning point in his despair occurred, perhaps, in Cries and Whispers, a chamber drama in an isolated Swedish estate where Harriet Andersson is a woman dying painfully of cancer and her sisters have come to be with her. After she dies, they find a journal in which she recalls a perfect day in the autumn, when the pain was not so bad, and the women took up their parasols and walked in the garden. “This is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better,” she writes. “I feel profoundly grateful to my life, which gives me so much.”
When Faithless played at Cannes in 2001, Liv Ullmann told me this story:
“When he was sixty years old, he celebrated his birthday on his island, on that beach. And my daughter was there; she was five years old. And he said to her, ‘When you are sixty, what will you do then?’ She said, ‘I’ll have a big party, and my mother will be there. She’ll be really old and stupid and gawky, but it’s gonna be great.’ And he looked at her and said, ‘And what about me? Will I not be there?’ And the five-year-old looked up at him and she said, ‘Well, you know, I’ll leave the party and I’ll walk down to the beach and there on the waves you will come dancing toward me.’”
Nobody ever seemed to know what Dusty Cohl did for a living. He was a lawyer, and it was said he was “in real estate,” but in over thirty years I never heard him say one word about business. His full-time occupation was being a friend, and he was one of the best I’ve ever made.
Yes, he was “cofounder of the Toronto Film Festival.” That’s how he was always identified in the Toronto newspapers. And he founded and ran the Floating Film Festival, one of the great boondoggles, on which Dusty and 250 friends cruised for ten days while premiering films and paying tributes to actors and directors. There was no reason for the floater except that if you were Dusty’s friend, you floated.
But beyond those titles, from which he made not a dollar, he was, simply, a phenomenon of friendship. He didn’t want anything from you. He lived to be a friend, and he wanted his friends to know one another, and he liked to put people together so good things would happen. He considered himself at one degree of separation.
“When he was young, he was a social director at a resort in the Canadian Catskills,” his wife, Joan, told me once. “I don’t think he ever really left the job.”
Dusty died about 3 p.m. Friday, January 11, 2008, at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, a victim of liver cancer. He was surrounded at the end by family and friends. He left Joan, his wife of fifty-six years; his children, Karen, Steve, and Robert; five grandchildren; and uncounted happy memories. In 2003, he was given the Order of Canada, the highest civilian honor.
But who was he, and how did I meet him? One day in 1977, when I was a stranger at the Cannes Film Festival, I was crossing the famous terrace of the Carlton Hotel and was summoned by name to the table of a man with a black beard, wearing blue jeans, a Dudley Do-Right T-shirt, and a black cowboy hat studded with stars and pins. How did he know who I was? He knew who everybody was.
Dusty was the nucleus of a group of Canadian and American film people, heavily weighted toward film critics. In those days, his circle included Chuck Champlin of the Los Angeles Times, Kathleen Carroll and Rex Reed of the New York Daily News, Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice, Richard Corliss of Time, and his longtime buddy, George Anthony of the Toronto Sun. There was a method to his madness. He wanted us involved with the film festival.
A few years earlier, Dusty and Joan had been on holiday on the French Riviera and found a parking space smack dab in front of the Carlton during the Cannes festival. Sitting on the terrace, surrounded by festivalgoers, Dusty asked, “Why doesn’t Toronto have a film festival?” Joan replied, “You’ll probably start one, Dust.” And he did.
In the early years, Toronto was far from its present eminence. We headquartered in a hotel where Dusty and the other organizers held a morning press conference to not announce so much as predict, with fingers crossed, what would happen that day. He almost forced the festival into being, by calling in favors from friends, including the leading Canadian directors Ted Kotcheff and Norman Jewison, young director Atom Egoyan, and actors like Helen Shaver and Donald Sutherland. He raised money from cronies at the morning coffee hour where he presided. He twisted arms to bring in film critics, because he knew press coverage was the key to putting the festival on the map. In the earliest years, the festival was covered more in Los Angeles or New York than it was in Toronto, with the exception of George Anthony’s lonely voice at the Toronto Sun.
At first the big competition in the autumn was from Montreal and New York. But New York had limited seating, Montreal had political problems, and year by year Toronto grew, until in the 1990s it became the venue of choice for the premieres of the big, new autumn pictures. When Dusty stepped upstairs to his newly created post of “chief accomplice,” it was on its way to becoming the most important festival in North America and one of the top five in the world. He was far from retired; one of his bright ideas was for Gene Siskel and me to host annual tributes, which we did for Martin Scorsese, Robert Duvall, and Warren Beatty.
Dusty was not finished with festivals. In the 1990s he created the Floating Film Festival aboard a cruise ship on which everyone had two things in common: They liked movies, and they liked Dusty Cohl. He also kept fingers in other pies. His cousin Michael Cohl owned the company that ran the road tours of the Rolling Stones and other supergroups, and Dusty was often backstage, his cowboy hat serving as his pass. He and Michael were involved in the farewell appearance of the Weavers at Toronto a few years ago. During the week, his “office” was a chair in the office of Eddie Greenspan, the most famous trial attorney in Canada, whose client recently was disgraced press baron Conrad Black. His job? “I gossip with Eddie, and we smoke his cigars.”
That left time for other assignments. When I founded my own Overlooked Film Festival at the University of Illinois eleven years ago, it went without question that Dusty and Joan would be in attendance from Year One, bearing the titles “co-accomplices in chief.” Most of the festival guests stayed in rooms at the student union, and Dusty posted himself in the coffee atrium to greet them, and, of course, introduce them to one another. He became close friends with such as Werner Herzog, Paul Cox, Scott and Heavenly Wilson, Bertrand Tavernier, Errol Morris, Mario Van Peebles and his father, Melvin, Sturla Gunnarsson, David Bordwell, Lisa Nesselson, and David Poland. That started at 8 a.m. After midnight, he could be found advising on menu choices at the Steak ’n Shake, the official festival restaurant. He and Joan took off one night to attend a Champaign High School production of Guys and Dolls, and the next night the cast, now all friends of theirs, turned up at the Steak ’n Shake to serenade the visiting filmmakers.
One way you knew you were a friend was when Dusty honored you with a Dusty Pin, a silver hat with a star on it. Rule was: Wear it at film festivals. At Cannes and Sundance, even on years Dusty wasn’t there, I spotted them on studio heads Michael Barker and Harvey Weinstein and half the members of the North American press corps.
Dusty Cohl made an enormous difference in my life, saving a first-time visitor to Cannes from bewilderment, introducing me to everybody, and then plopping me down in the middle of the excitement of creating the Toronto festival. When I got married, he stood up with me, and became Chaz’s confidant as well, giving her love, advice, and support during my health crisis. We saw the Cohls three, four, five times a year, and talked on the phone as often as daily. He was devoted to full-time friendship, and he wanted his friends to be friends of one another. So there are hundreds, thousands, of us now.
Just today, I was able to see an advance screening of a film because Dusty pulled some strings from his sickbed in the last few weeks. Chaz and I flew down to Florida to see him over Thanksgiving, where he was weaker but still high-spirited and involved in everything. And we were able to fly to Toronto last Tuesday to say good-bye. When he took a year off from Cannes, the Carlton Hotel took a full-page ad in a festival daily showing only a cowboy hat and a cigar, with the caption, “We miss you.” Yes, we all do.
Recently we lost two American actors who embodied widely different styles, and their passing is a reminder that the very presence of an actor can suggest everything about a film.
Charlton Heston was tall, outward, masculine, exuding bravado, often cast in larger-than-life roles. Richard Widmark was lithe, inward, sardonic. Heston’s characters stood on mountaintops and divided the Red Sea. Widmark’s often lived in the shadows. Heston played some smaller roles, but there was always the danger he would be too big for them. Widmark often played mainstream roles but was always more interesting when he was an outsider on the run.
Heston made at least three movies that almost everybody eventually sees: Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, and Planet of the Apes. Widmark occupied smaller, darker pieces and embodied film noir. Many filmgoers may not have seen Night and the City or Panic in the Streets (both 1950) or Pickup on South Street (1953), but if they have, they remember him. All the TV obituaries used that same clip of him pushing an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs in Kiss of Death (1947), his first film, but there was so much more than that.
Heston, raised on Chicago’s North Shore, wanted to be an actor almost from the get-go and made a 16 mm version of Julius Caesar in college. “We used all actual locations,” he told me in a 1968 interview. “The steps of the Art Institute, the Elk’s Temple, the Field Museum, the beaches of Lake Michigan. You would have sworn it was the real thing, except for the acting.”
He was “tabbed for stardom,” as they used to say, by Cecil B. DeMille, who cast him as the ringmaster in The Greatest Show on Earth, which many argue is the worst movie to ever win the Best Picture Oscar, and in 1956 established himself forever in DeMille’s Ten Commandments. From then on he was often in epics of the sort called “towering,” and began to be the victim of self-parody, even though he was always on pitch and had the heft to carry roles others would have disappeared in. His firm authority makes Planet of the Apes (1968) a better film than many, including me, thought at the time.
Widmark’s roles were in the middle, not the epic, range. He played cops, robbers, wise guys, military men, horror characters, and cowboys, figuring importantly in some of John Ford’s elegiac last films. His characters never saved the world, but they usually saved their own skin, and that was the point. He kept a low public profile, made few statements, endorsed few causes, retired so successfully some people were surprised, at the time of his death, that he was still alive. Why did the Academy never honor his lifetime achievement?
Heston was very public, very political (first liberal, then conservative), a willing spokesman for what he believed. In early days he led the charge against racist Hollywood hiring policies. In later years he was the voice of the National Rifle Association. It is always tragic when someone suffers from Alzheimer’s, but his bravery and grace in publicly acknowledging his illness was dignified and touching.
What intrigues me about Heston is what he might have done had he never met the bombastic DeMille. Seek out a little film named Will Penny (1968), which he told me was his personal favorite, to see an entirely different side of his abilities. Or see him in Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 Hamlet, where he embodies the Player King with astonishing invention, transforming conventional ideas about the role.
Probably, DeMille or not, Heston would have found himself in roles of heroic stature; in an industry that focuses on appearances, he looked like the hero, not the best buddy. It took another larger-than-life figure, Orson Welles, to find a channel for that presence, in his Touch of Evil (1958).
Widmark stayed within a narrower, more realistic range. He told me in 1968 he treasured his work with the great John Ford in Cheyenne Autumn (1964) and Two Rode Together (1961). “I’m glad I got him as a director at all,” he said almost wistfully. We were speaking at the time of the ascendancy of James Bond, and he defended his own pure, straight-ahead film noir: “I have this kind of nostalgia for crime films,” he said. “I think we’ve about exhausted the fancy angles and trick cigarette lighters. Hollywood developed the crime film almost into an art over the years, and it hurt me to see all that work thrown away on spoofs and put-ons.”
If Widmark was guarded and private, Heston was outgoing, good company. I remember drinking with him one night at O’Rourke’s, the legendary Chicago newspaperman’s saloon. He was introduced to Mike McGuire, the military editor of the Chicago Tribune. “Ah, yes,” he said. “You supported my policies in the Ben-Hur campaign.”
Speaking of Will Penny, he said: “It’s one of my favorite roles because it is real, you see, and not all faked up to make it nice. It even has an unhappy ending.” Left unsaid was how many of his films such qualities did not apply to. “I always get the superhero parts,” he said. “That’s one nice thing about Will Penny. I’m just an ordinary cowboy, not Ben-Hur in the saddle.”
Compared to today’s superstars, who are so cosseted and idolized, actors like Heston and Widmark went at their craft full bore, as solid professionals. They expected to be surrounded by supporting actors, did not monopolize a film, were not marketed as the whole product.
Listen to the gassy profundity of so many of today’s stars, analyzing their techniques, and then listen to Widmark describing why John Ford liked making Westerns: “He enjoys working in the fresh air.” Or listen to Heston, describing how he mastered the art of Ben-Hur’s chariot driving: “Actually, I played it by ear.”
She shared a passionate kiss with Burt Lancaster as the surf rolled over them in From Here to Eternity She was I in The King and I. She crawled through the mud with a marine played by Robert Mitchum in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. She was a sheep drover’s wife in The Sundowners, a headmaster’s wife in Tea and Sympathy, and the wife of Brutus in Julius Caesar. She missed an appointment with Cary Grant atop the Empire State Building in An Affair to Remember. In three different roles, she represented the colonel’s lifelong romantic obsession in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. And simply by standing up in Black Narcissus, she started the young Martin Scorsese thinking about movies in a new way.
Deborah Kerr, the flame-tressed beauty who was one of the most luminous stars of her time, is dead at eighty-six. A victim of Parkinson’s disease, she died Tuesday, October 16, 2007, in Suffolk, England, where she had moved from her longtime home in Switzerland to be near her daughters and grandchildren.
Kerr held the record for the most Best Actress Oscar nominations without a win, after getting Academy nods for Edward, My Son (1949), From Here to Eternity (1953), The King And I (1956), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Separate Tables (1958), and The Sundowners (1960). She won an honorary Oscar in 1994, telling the audience, “I’ve never been so frightened in my life, but it’s better now, because I know I am among friends.”
Originally trained as a dancer with the Sadler’s Wells company, she began appearing in British films in 1940 and caught the eye of Michael Powell, the leading British director of the time, who said in his autobiography that he was always in love with her. In his great film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), she appears three times in three different characters in the life of the colonel, who ages from a hero into a figure of fun for younger officers.
Four years later, in Powell’s Black Narcissus, she did something that young Martin Scorsese couldn’t figure out. “There was something called the ‘Million Dollar Movie’ on TV when I was a kid,” he told me, “and they played the same movie every day for a week. I watched that one five times. She plays a nun in a convent in the Himalayas, who is told by a British officer that he believes she has sexual feelings. There is a cut to a close-up of her. But not just any close-up. There was a quality of shock and surprise in her face, and another quality I couldn’t pin down. What did she do, and how did she do it? I began to look at movies with a more analytical eye.”
Years later, Scorsese hired Powell, whose films he hugely admired, as a consultant, and he asked Powell about that shot. “I didn’t simply cut to a close-up,” Powell said. “I had her stand up in shock, from below frame, and then I edited the shot to begin the moment she arrived in frame. So you sensed that alarmed movement.”
Kerr was married twice, first in 1945 to Anthony Bartley, a war hero. They had two daughters, Melanie and Francesca. After they divorced in 1959, Kerr wed the writer Peter Viertel, whose mother was Greta Garbo’s best friend, and who was said to be the original for the Robert Redford character in The Way We Were. Her husband, daughters, and three grandchildren survive.
Kerr was born in Helensburgh, Scotland, on September 30, 1921. Despite her many down-to-earth roles, she was long seen as a proper English beauty but, the New York Times reported, “instructed friends to tell anyone who asked that she preferred cold roast beef sandwiches and beer to champagne and caviar, any day.”
Sydney Pollack, who directed some of the best mainstream films of the last forty years and acted in some of the others, is dead at seventy-three. He died Monday, May 26, 2008, of cancer at home, in Pacific Palisades, California, according to a friend.
Born in 1934 in Lafayette, Indiana, the son of Russian immigrants, Pollack was encouraged to try acting by his high school drama teacher in South Bend. “From almost the first time I stepped on a stage,” he told me, “I knew that was what I wanted to do.”
He went to New York to study acting under the famed teacher Sandy Meisner, taught acting at Meisner’s Neighborhood Playhouse, moved into television, and stepped behind the camera. Although his main occupation from the 1960s on would be directing, he never lost his love for acting, and had more credits (thirty) as an actor than as a director (twenty-one). He had top billing in Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives and most recently was seen as the powerful, authoritative head of the law firm in Michael Clayton; in Made of Honor he played Patrick Dempsey’s multi-divorced wealthy magnate of a father.
A tall, handsome, immediately charismatic man, he was a director most actors loved to work with because when he talked to them about acting he knew what he was talking about. He and Robert Redford were each other’s favorite director and actor, working together seven times. Indeed, in This Property Is Condemned (1966), he was instrumental in establishing Redford as a star.
“I am not a visual innovator,” Pollack told me shortly before the release of his Out of Africa (1985), which won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and was nominated for four more. “I haven’t broken any new ground in the form of a film. My strength is with actors. I think I’m good at working with them to get the best performances, at seeing what it is that they have and that the story needs.”
To mention the titles of some of his films is to stir smiles, affection, nostalgia, respect: the Depression-era drama They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), the epic Western Jeremiah Johnson (1972), the Redford-Streisand love story The Way We Were (1973), the CIA thriller Three Days of the Condor (1975), Robert Mitchum against Japanese mobsters in The Yakuza (1975), Redford and Jane Fonda in The Electric Horseman (1979), Paul Newman as the maligned son of a gangster in Absence of Malice (1981), hungry actor Dustin Hoffman in drag in Tootsie (1982), Redford with Meryl Streep in Out of Africa (1985), Tom Cruise as a lawyer in The Firm (1993).
When I invited the great cinematographer Owen Roizman to join me in analyzing a film using the shot-by-shot approach at the Hawaii Film Festival, he choose Pollack’s Havana, pointing out the director’s instinct for compositions that helped underline the point of a scene. Instead of discussing the film’s visuals as representing what he himself did, Roizman often said things like, “Look how Sydney handles this.”
Although he got on well with most actors, he had well-publicized differences with Dustin Hoffman during Tootsie, for which they both got Oscar nominations. They actually acted together in the movie, with Pollack playing his dubious agent, and Hoffman a desperate actor who says he can play tall, he can play short, and “nobody does vegetables like me. I did an evening of vegetables off-Broadway. I did the best tomato, the best cucumber—I did an endive salad that knocked the critics on their ass.”
Hoffman persuaded Pollack that he should cast himself in the role, and they worked on the scene together. “I think it benefited from the experiences both of us have had in that situation,” Pollack said, smiling.
He is survived by his wife since 1958, Claire, and two of their three children, Rachel and Rebecca. A son, Steven, died in an airplane crash in 1993.