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
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).
Ann Rutherford is forever remembered for two roles,’Careen’ in “Gone With The Wind” in 1939 and as ‘Polly Benedict’ girlfriendof Mickey Rooney in the ‘Andy Hardy’ series made by MGM in the 1940;s. She was born in 1917 in Vancouver, Canada and her family moved to San Francisco while she was a baby. She also played Suzanne Pleshette’s mother in TV’s “The Bob Newhart Show”. She died at the age of 95 in 2012.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
Ann Rutherford, who has died aged 94, was adept at portraying pluck and persistence. As Polly Benedict, Andy Hardy’s ever-faithful girlfriend, in 13 of the 15 Hardy family film series made between 1937 and 1946, she had to wait around for Mickey Rooney’s accident-prone adolescent to return to her after some dalliance with another girl. Andy would seek advice on romance from his stern but wise and fair father, Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone). “Dad, can I talk to you man to man? Can a guy be in love with two girls at once?” Inevitably, Andy would realise, with hints from his dad, that Polly was his own true love.
The Hardy series, one of the most popular in screen history, was the archetypal idealisation of small-town America and apple-pie family values, with dark-haired Rutherford as the quintessential girl next door. She had to compete with a number of starlets that MGM was trying out in the series, including Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Esther Williams and Donna Reed. But Rutherford, a contract player, got plenty of work as Polly and tons of fan mail.
Born in Vancouver, she was the daughter of former Metropolitan Opera tenor John Rutherford and Lucille Mansfield, a silent-screen actor. She was brought up in California, where she made her theatre debut at the age of six, in a production of Raggedy Ann, and started to appear in films from the age of 16.
In fact, she got used to the waiting game in the several B-westerns she made before MGM snapped her up in 1937. Warbling cowboy Gene Autry, in four of the genre, seemed more interested in his horse Champion and his comic sidekick Smiley Burnette than Rutherford. Even when she’s kidnapped by baddies in The Singing Vagabond (1935), he has time for a ballad or two. Up-and-coming John Wayne paid her a little more attention in The Oregon Trail, The Lawless Nineties and The Lonely Trail (all 1936), though there was hardly time for romance during the 70 minutes or so of action.
At MGM, Rutherford immediately took on the role of Polly Benedict in the second of the Hardy series entitled You’re Only Young Once (1938). In between her on-and-off relationship with bouncy Rooney, Rutherford appeared as an ingenue in Dramatic School and Of Human Hearts, and as the spirit of Christmas past in A Christmas Carol (all in 1938).
In 1939, she was cast as Carreen, Scarlett O’Hara’s weak-willed younger sister in David O Selznick’s Gone With the Wind, a role Selznick previously envisioned for Garland. This “nothing part”, as Louis B Mayer dubbed it, initially as a reason for not loaning Rutherford out to Selznick’s company, eventually made her proud. In recent years, as one of the few surviving cast members of Gone With the Wind, she was a stalwart attendee at anniversary showings, where she was always besieged by autograph hunters.
Another younger-sister role was that of Lydia Bennet in the handsomely mounted Pride and Prejudice (1940), a film which was first publicised as: “Five charming sisters (age 16-24) on the gayest, merriest manhunt that ever snared a bewildered bachelor. Girls, take a lesson from these husband-hunters.”
While Jane Austen spun in her grave, Rutherford appeared as the winsome wife of comedian Red Skelton as radio sleuth “the Fox” in Whistling in the Dark (1941), Whistling in Dixie (1942) and Whistling in Brooklyn (1943), and was Robert Stack’s sweetheart in the western Badlands of Dakota (1941). The following year she was lent out to 20th Century Fox for Orchestra Wives, playing the new spouse of an instrumentalist in the “Gene Morrison band” – as the Glenn Miller band were called in the film. In 1942, Rutherford completed her duties towards Rooney in Andy Hardy’s Double Life (1942), leaving MGM to freelance soon afterwards.
After a number of shoestring movies, there came Sam Goldwyn’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), in which she was Danny Kaye’s grasping fiancée Gertrude Griswold, whom he understandably leaves at the altar for Virginia Mayo. Her last substantial role before retiring in 1950 was as Dona Elena in Adventures of Don Juan (1948), submitting to the seduction of an ageing Errol Flynn.
In 1953, Rutherford married her second husband, the producer William Dozier (who was formerly married to Joan Fontaine). In the 70s, she made a brief comeback in two canine films, They Only Kill Their Masters (1972) and Won Ton Ton: the Dog Who Saved Hollywood (1976). She is survived by her daughter, Gloria.
• Mary Cecilia Ramone Theresa Ann Rutherford, actor, born 2 November 1917; died 11 June 2012
Anne Archer was born in Los Angeles in 1947. She is the daughtor of actors Marjorie Lord and John Archer. She made her film debut in 1972 in “The Honkers”. In 1976 she garnered positive reviews for her performance opposite Sam Elliott in “Lifeguard”. She was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in “Fatal Attraction|” with Glenn Close and Michael Douglas in 1987. Other films include “Raise the Titanic” and “The Narrow Margin” opposite Gene Hackman
TCM overview:
While Anne Archer earned an Academy Award nomination for her supporting performance in the popular 1987 thriller “Fatal Attraction,” it was the actress’ television career that provided the most long-term visibility. She earned her reputation as a loyal wife in big budget movies “Patriot Games” (1992) and “Clear and Present Danger” (1994) opposite Harrison Ford, and on the small screen she starred in countless movies-of-the-week as women coping with the aftermath of divorce, death, remarriage and infidelity. Archer also starred in a number of family-related television series, playing high-powered executive matriarchs on the glamorous dramas “Falcon Crest” (CBS, 1981-1990), and “Privileged” (The CW, 2008-09), proving her versatility as both a vulnerable every-woman and a saucy force to be reckoned with.
Archer was born on Aug. 24, 1947 in Los Angeles to actor parents John Archer – who appeared in the film classics “White Heat” (1947) and “Rock Around the Clock” (1956) – and Marjorie Lord, who starred as Danny Thomas’ TV wife Kathy “Clancy” Williams on the classic sitcom, “Make Room for Daddy” (ABC, 1953-57; CBS 1957-1964). Young Anne was determined to continue in the family business, and earned a degree in Theater Arts from nearby Claremont Men’s College (now known as Claremont McKenna College). Archer’s professional acting career began with a number of guest television appearances before she was cast as one of the title foursome on the short-lived sitcom version of Paul Mazursky’s feature “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” (ABC, 1973). She had a number of supporting film roles in the early 1970s and landed her first screen lead in “Lifeguard” (1976), playing opposite Sam Elliott as a former sweetheart who reconnects at a high school reunion and encourages Elliot’s lifeguard to reexamine his life. Archer studied with Scientologist drama coach Milton Katselas at the Beverly Hills Playhouse in the late 1970s and appeared in a string of movies like Sylvester Stallone’s “Paradise Alley” (1978) and the famous adventure flop “Raise the Titanic!” (1980).
While continuing to average a movie a year, Archer worked steadily in television on the blended family drama “The Family Tree” (NBC, 1982-83) and “Falcon Crest” (CBS, 1981-90), where she made her mark as a duplicitous advertising exec. Archer’s status rocketed from “working actress” to “noted actress” in 1987 with her role as the beautiful, wronged wife of Michael Douglas in Adrian Lyne’s thriller “Fatal Attraction” (1987), who ends up taking out her onscreen nemesis, Glenn Close, with a famous gunshot to the heart. For her work in the seminal 1980s film, Archer was recognized with Best Supporting Actress nominations from the Academy and Golden Globe Awards. Suddenly in demand, she began to field offers for big budget Hollywood features like “Patriot Games” (1992), where she played the beleaguered wife of CIA agent Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford). She followed up with supporting role in the critically lambasted Madonna vehicle “Body of Evidence” (1993), but made a better showing with her role as a children’s party clown at a moral crossroads with her husband (Fred Ward) in Robert Altman’s brilliant ensemble “Short Cuts” (1993), which earned a Best Ensemble Cast award at the Golden Globe Awards.
Archer reprised her role as Harrison Ford’s supportive wife in “Clear and Present Danger” (1994), but the actress spent the majority of the decade playing wives in peril in movies-of-the-week, starring as a recent divorcee in “Because Mommy Works” (NBC, 1994), the new wife of a widower (James Woods) in “Jane’s House” (CBS, 1994), and a woman whose marriage to a writer (Alan Alda) is threatened by his imaginary love life in “Jake’s Women” (CBS, 1996). In a change of pace, the actress played Angelina Jolie’s alluring mother in the independent feature “Mojave Moon” (1996) before resuming her telepic run with “Indiscretion of an American Wife” (Lifetime, 1998) and “My Husband’s Secret Life” (USA, 1998). A pair of thankless roles in the military legal drama “Rules of Engagement” (2000) opposite Tommy Lee Jones, and the action thriller “The Art of War” (2000) opposite Wesley Snipes followed. Archer hit the London stage to essay the sultry Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate,” and following guest stints on “The L Word” (Showtime, 2004-09) and “Boston Public” (Fox, 2000-04), resurfaced on movie screens as Tommy Lee Jones’ college professor love interest in the comedy “Man of the House” (2005).
After Archer’s portrayal of first lady to president Jack Scalia in the political thriller “End Game” (2006) went straight-to-DVD, the actress returned to television with recurring roles as the socialite mom of Dee and Dennis on the sitcom “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” (FX, 2005- ) and as the mother of a psychically gifted woman (Jennifer Love Hewitt) on the supernatural drama “Ghost Whisperer” (CBS, 2005-09). In 2006, Archer founded the non-profit organization Artists for Human Rights. She resurfaced on movies screens as the sultry cougar who catches the eye of an irrepressible bachelor (Matthew McConaughey) in “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” (2009) while at the same time appearing weekly as a jet-setting cosmetics entrepreneur on the glitzy drama “Privileged” (The CW, 2008-09).
The great character E.G. Marshall was born in 1914 in Minnesota. A great character actor, he was terrific in “Twelve Angry Men” in 1957, “Interiors” and “Absolute Power” with Clint Eastwood in 1997. He died in 1998.
Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:
ONE OF America’s finest character actors, E. G. Marshall will be remembered by television viewers of the Sixties for his Emmy Award- winning role as half of a father-son team of lawyers in the superior crime series The Defenders.
The often bespectacled actor frequently found himself in legal roles – among his most notable were those of a juror in Twelve Angry Men and the patiently determined prosecuting attorney in Compulsion. On stage, he was in the first Broadway productions of The Iceman Cometh, The Crucible and Waiting for Godot, while both on radio and television his authoritative voice brought him prolific work as a narrator and in commercials. He modestly called himself a “utility actor who fits in easily” but his work was far more distinguished than that self-assessment would suggest.
The son of Norwegians, Marshall was born in Owatonna, Minnesota, in 1910. He was secretive about the middle G. of his name and suggested at different times that his initials might stand for “Edda Gunnar” or “Enigma Gregarious”, although the truth of the matter may now never be known (his nickname, however, was “Eej”). He was educated at Carlton College and the University of Minnesota, and his first ambition was to enter the Episcopalian ministry but he abandoned this when he realised that he was agnostic.
In 1932 he made his radio debut in St Paul and then worked in Theatre Guild on the Air in Chicago. Now set on an acting career, he joined the Oxford Players, a touring Shakespearean repertory company, in 1933. He made his Broadway debut in 1938 with a Federal Theatre Project production, Prologue to Glory. He took over the role of Mr Fitzpatrick in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), played the Brigadier in Jacobowsky and the Colonel (1944) and Willie Oban in The Iceman Cometh (1946).
Always keen to improve his craft, he became part of the Actors Studio when it was formed by Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis in 1947. He created the role of the Rev John Hale in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) and later took over the leading role of John Proctor. He won great acclaim when he played the derelict philosopher Vladimir in the Broadway premiere of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1956), and vehemently defended the play as a positive, life-affirming work. “Godot is a real theatre piece,” he said. “The theatre today is too flaccid, too passive, too dull. It is good to have it stirred up by a piece like this.”
He made his film debut (billed as Everett Marshall) as a morgue attendant in Henry Hathaway’s landmark thriller The House on 92nd Street (1945). Based on the true story of Nazi agents seeking the formula for the atom bomb, its documentary-style approach started a new genre, and Marshall was in two more Hathaway films shot in similar style – 13 Rue Madeleine (1946) and Call Northside 777 (1948).
By the time he returned to films in 1954 after concentrating on theatre and television, he was being billed as E. G. Marshall and had established a reputation for excelling in figures of authority and integrity, and played such roles in The Caine Mutiny (1954) and Pushover (1954).
In Sidney Lumet’s fine version of Reginald Rose’s play Twelve Angry Men (1957), Marshall was the implacable Juror Four who, along with 10 of the other jurors, wants to pass a verdict of guilty but is eventually persuaded by the dogged Juror Eight (Henry Fonda) to change his opinion. In Compulsion (1959), based on the notorious Leopold-Loeb murder case, Marshall was at his finest as the diligent prosecuting attorney, holding his own against a scene-stealing performance by Orson Welles as the defence lawyer.
It was as a lawyer, the father and senior partner in the firm Preston and Preston in the television series The Defenders (1961) that Marshall found greatest fame. “I’d been on television for years, in over 400 roles,” he said in 1962, “but nobody seemed to recognise me on the streets or in restaurants. Now people are likely to turn around and look at me.” The show, with Robert Reed playing Marshall’s son, ran for five years, and won Marshall two Emmys. A staunch liberal Democrat, he was delighted that the show earned a reputation for dealing with controversial subjects – in one 1962 episode his character defended an abortionist, and the network, CBS, ran the show despite protests by viewers and cancelled advertising.
Marshall credited the show with deepening his concern about constitutional liberties and leading him to take a course in jurisprudence. He was instrumental in getting a black judge added to the series, aided documentaries on deprived groups in society and volunteered to help legal rights groups.
He starred in another hit television series, The New Doctors, from 1969 to 1973, again playing a role of integrity as the head of a combination hospital and research centre dedicated to finding new medical techniques. Marshall’s later film roles included military officials in Is Paris Burning? (1965), The Bridge at Remagen (1968) and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), and the US President in Superman II (1980).
Last year he was seen in the important role of an ageing tycoon whose wife is murdered by Gene Hackman (whom he ultimately kills) in Clint Eastwood’s Absolute Power. He recently completed two television movies based on The Defenders, with his son now played by Beau Bridges.
Everett G. Marshall, actor: born Owatonna, Minnesota 18 June 1910; married 1931 Helen Wolf (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1953), second Judith Coy (two sons, one daughter); died Mount Kisco, New York 24 August 1998.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
The archetypal Hollywood movie star of the postwar era, Kirk Douglas built a career with he-man roles as soldiers, cowboys and assorted tough guys in over 80 films. His restless, raging creations earned him three Academy Award nominations for Best Actor and one Golden Globe win for his portrayal of Vincent van Gogh in “Lust for Life” (1956). But besides his lasting mark as a seething strong man with a superhero-like head of hair and the most famous dimpled chin this side of Shirley Temple, Douglas was a Tinseltown innovator and rebel. As one of the first A-listers to wrest further control of their career by founding an independent production company, Douglas also effectively ended the 1950s practice of blacklisting Hollywood talent suspected of communist ties when he insisted on crediting famed screenwriter Dalton Trumbo for his script adaptation of “Spartacus” (1960). Douglas maintained his position as a perennial favorite – often opposite fellow tough guy Burt Lancaster – in Westerns and World War II films until the early 1970s, when changing tastes edged the timeworn genres into the wings. He began a second career as a writer and focused on the philanthropic efforts of The Douglas Foundation, occasionally surfacing throughout the 1980s and 1990s to portray irrepressible old firecrackers in made-for-TV movies and the occasional feature. Kirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch on Dec. 9, 1916. He was the only boy of seven kids born to Russian Jewish immigrants, Herschel and Bryna. His parents were junk dealers in Amsterdam, NY and Douglas’ memoir characterized his early years as plagued with poverty and anti-Semitic backlash from local kids. The determined teenager landed a wrestling scholarship to St. Lawrence University, where he was a star on the wrestling team and began to dabble in the drama department. He was a natural, charismatic talent and went on to land another scholarship to the acclaimed American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, where his classmates included a 16-year-old Lauren Bacall and future wife, Diana Dill. Douglas was poised to break into Broadway (and adopted the stage name Kirk Douglas) when U.S. involvement in World War II prompted him to join the U.S. Navy, where he served as a communications officer. Douglas returned to New York and promptly married his Academy schoolmate Diana Dill, herself a rising young starlet. Douglas resumed his budding career, working hard to break into radio dramas and commercials before landing on the Great White Way in productions including “Alice in Arms” and “The Wind is Ninety” (1945). Douglas and Dill had a son, Michael in 1944. Hollywood ingénue now a star overnight, thanks to Bogie and “To Have and Have Not” (1944), Lauren Bacall recommended her former classmate to director Hal Wallis, which led to Douglas’ feature film debut opposite Barbara Stanwyck in “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” (1946). In 1947, Douglas became a father again with the birth of son, J l, and his career ramped up with features “Mourning Becomes Electra” (1947) and “Out of the Past” (1947). He enjoyed the first of seven roles opposite Burt Lancaster in “I Walk Alone” (1948) before truly achieving stardom as the unscrupulous boxer punching his way to the top in Stanley Kramer’s “Champion” (1949). Douglas’ Oscar-nominated performance established his forceful and intense screen persona, setting the tone for many more strong performances as selfish, cocky and egocentric characters. Douglas was bumped up to an average of three films a year and began working with the top directors of the day in Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole” (1951), William Wyler’s “Detective Story” (1951) and Howard Hawks’ “Big Sky” (1952), all of which showcased the actor’s coiled intensity and commanding movie star presence. Offscreen, his marriage to Dill ended and the actress moved back to New York to raise the couple’s young sons. Focusing on his work, Douglas kicked off a four-film collaboration with director Vincente Minnelli, beginning with the riveting melodrama “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952), in which he played a ruthless movie mogul clawing his way to the top and leaving a trail of deception and betrayal in his wake. His violent, over-the-top scenes with an equally overly dramatic Lana Turner were borderline camp, but engrossing nonetheless, making the film a huge hit with audiences. Douglas earned a second Oscar nomination for the performance and went on to appear in Minnelli’s romance “The Story of Three Loves” (1953) the following year. While filming “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” (1954), well-known ladykiller Douglas swept his French publicity agent, Anne Buydens, off her feet and married her in a quick Las Vegas ceremony. The pair had son, Peter, in 1955 and the same year, hatched one of Hollywood’s first independent production companies, named Bryna in honor of Douglas’ mother. He also established The Douglas Foundation, a civic-minded charity involved in health and community programs. Bryna’s first production, the Western “The Indian Fighter” (1955), was released later that year. He received far more attention – including a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination – for his portrayal of Vincent van Gogh in Minnelli’s biopic “Lust for Life” (1956) – one of Hollywood’s most rhapsodic takes on the obsessive, self-tortured artist. Under the Bryna banner, Douglas brought Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” (1957) to theaters. It was a disappointment in its initial release, but grew in stature to the front rank of anti-war films. Douglas played a French Army officer (and attorney) who defends three soldiers unjustly accused of cowardice in the trenches during World War I, but the real star was Kubrick, whose camera moved inexorably through the carnage of battle, capturing a brutal authenticity. That same year, the Douglas-Lancaster electricity brightened famously in “Gunfight at the OK Corral” (1957), creating a humorous public rivalry after starring roles as Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. In the producer’s chair, Douglas starred in the underappreciated Western “Last Train from Gun Hill” (1959) before he, Lancaster and Laurence Olivier delivered standout performances in the sparkling film adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s “The Devil’s Disciple” (1959), Shaw’s take on how the bumbling British lost their American colonies. In 1960, Douglas and Bryna productions made history when, in the middle of anti-communist witch hunts that blacklisted Hollywood talent suspected of being communist sympathizers, Douglas insisted on crediting blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo for his screen adaptation of Howard Fast’s novel Spartacus. This courageous action – perhaps Douglas’ overriding offscreen legacy – essentially ended the blacklist, allowing banned filmmakers to openly return to the industry. “Spartacus” (1960) itself also became an instant classic of the ancient “sand & sandles” epic genre. He again collaborated with Trumbo on the Western “Lonely Are the Brave” (1962), where Douglas essayed a fugitive steeped in the values of the old West who escapes into the Rocky Mountains on horseback in this melancholy and powerful film that eventually attained cult status and earned the star a BAFTA nomination. Douglas bought the rights to Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and adapted it for Broadway, where he appeared in 1963 in the role of Randel P. McMurphy. Lancaster and Douglas showed up heavily disguised in character roles for John Huston’s engaging murder mystery “The List of Adrian Messenger” (1963) and returned to leading roles in John Frankenheimer’s absorbing political thriller, “Seven Days in May” (1964). After releasing a solid run of Westerns and World War II films like “Her s of Telemark” (1965), “Is Paris Burning?” (1966) and “The Way West” (1967), shifting tides in American cinema began to render postwar her s like Douglas a thing of the past. So instead, he sought new opportunities, keeping close to his son-of-a-bitch persona in Martin Ritt’s mafia drama “The Brotherhood” (1968) and in Elia Kazan’s study of the modern man “The Arrangement” (1969), but that role was originally intended for very different actor, Marlon Brando, and it fit Douglas as poorly as Brando’s own clothes might have. Even as Douglas-type Westerns were evolving into a different entity, he soldiered on in the comedic “There Was a Crooked Man” (1970) and the dark, psychedelic “The Gunfight” (1971) opposite Johnny Cash. His directing debut “Scalawag” (1973) was an unsuccessful mash-up of musical, Western and pirate films, and highlighted that the sturdy leading man was having difficulty transitioning into a new era of filmmaking and public taste.
In 1975, Douglas sat by frustrated when, after having tried unsuccessfully to bring “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to the big screen for a decade, son Michael finally produced the film and the studio cast Jack Nicholson in his former stage role. Nicholson went on to win Best Actor and the film Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Douglas released his sophomore directing effort that year, faring better with the Western “Posse” (1975), in which he returned to tried and true territory and as a haughty, self-obsessed sheriff. He teamed with fellow aging star Burt Lancaster in the TV movie “Victory at Entebbe,” (ABC, 1976) and appeared in the spooky thriller “The Fury” (1978) before taking the stage in a tour de force performance as grown up Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer in Bernard Sabath’s “The Boys in Autumn” (1981). Douglas took on another dual role in the Australian Western “The Man from Snowy River” (1983), a family video favorite for its eye-filling scenery and incredible action sequences with wild horses. He earned an Emmy nomination in the title role of the CBS movie “Amos” (1985), which led Douglas to become active in the cause of elderly abuse, for which he even testified before the Congressional Select Sub-Committee on Aging. In 1986, Lancaster and Douglas brought the curtain down on their collaboration with the good-natured parody and aptly titled feature, “Tough Guys” (1986). Douglas published the memoir The Ragman’s Son in 1988, and the bestseller sparked a new writing career. His first novel Dance with the Devil was released in 1990, a year before he made headlines for surviving a Los Angeles helicopter crash that killed two fellow passengers. The Douglas Foundation opened the doors of the Anne Douglas Center for Women, a homeless shelter in downtown Los Angeles, and Douglas returned to bookstores with well-received titles The Secret in 1992 and Last Tango in Brooklyn in 1994. He starred opposite Craig T. Nelson in the father-son reconciliation TV film “Take Me Home Again” (NBC, 1994) and made a rare comedy appearance as a crotchety family elder in the feature “Greedy” (1994), which fell short of expectations but not because of Douglas, whose love of life clearly came through in a dynamic performance. In 1996, a debilitating stroke permanently impaired his speech but Douglas made an emotional public comeback to accept a lifetime achievement Oscar at the 1996 Academy Awards, despite his impaired speech. In 1997, Douglas released a second autobiographical work, Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning and the Douglas Foundation funded a citywide program to fix up more than 400 children’s playgrounds in Los Angeles. The same year, he reunited with longtime friend Lauren Bacall in the light comedy “Diamonds” (1997) co-starring Dan Aykroyd. Douglas was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hollywood Film Festival in 1997 and another from the Screen Actor’s Guild in 1999. In 2002, he released a third autobiography, My Stroke of Luck. The following year he and son Michael – known to have had a tumultuous relationship (made perhaps worse through career jealousies once Michael’s star eclipsed his father’s) – made a long overdue screen pairing (along with Michael’s son Cameron and Douglas’ ex-wife, Diandra) in the comedy “It Runs In the Family” (2003), the story of a dysfunctional New York family and their attempts to reconcile. Unfortunate for any parent, Douglas lost his youngest son Eric, an aspiring actor and comedian, to a drug overdose the same year he and wife Anne Buydens celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with a renewal of their vows. Already getting on in years and dealing with his stroke on a daily basis, Douglas took the loss of his youngest extremely hard, having watched Eric struggle with substance abuse over the years. In 2005, Douglas allowed longtime friend, actress-director Lee Grant, to explore the storied careers and relationship of Douglas and his equally famous son Michael in the HBO documentary “A Father…A Son…Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (2005).
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
“When Julie Andres cam along there was only a handful of female stars with any appeal at all. Most of the others were the same tired hopefuls, manufactured if not by the studios, by their own PR firms. With Julie, the genuine thing was back and everyone knew it. She embodied some of the best qualities of the great stars of the 30s, on the surface the same common sense, underneath the hint of other things – the gaiety of Irene Dunne, the independence of Hepburn, the irreverence of Carole Lombard, the vulnerability of Margaret Sullavan. And what they had and she has is style and discipline. She knows instinctively what to do, what she can do. She is what she seems to be” by David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars- The International Years. (1972)
TCM overview:
Singer-actress Julie Andrews came from humble beginnings on the English vaudeville circuit before going on to become one of the showbiz’s brightest talents, and ultimately, one of entertainment’s greatest living treasures. After a string of hit productions on Broadway – and being denied the opportunity to reprise her roles on film – Hollywood at last opened its doors to Andrews when she landed the lead in Walt Disney’s “Mary Poppins” (1964). Her enchanting performance, combined with a stunning four-octave vocal range, won her an Oscar. Andrews followed with her career-making turn as the embodiment of kindness and sincerity, Maria Von Trapp, in “The Sound of Music” (1965). The record breaking film would remain one of the most successful and beloved movies of all time, gaining legions of fans for generations to come. As the Sixties came to a close, Andrews’ professional output waned, although her personal life flourished with a marriage to director Blake Edwards. Andrews went on to score more cinematic hits with her director husband including “10” (1979) and “Victor/Victoria” (1982), as well as enjoy a respectable career as a children’s book author. In a tragic bit of irony, the angelic-voiced actress would lose her instrument after a botched throat operation in 1998. However, this did not prevent Andrews from winning over new audiences with turns in projects like “The Princess Diaries” (2001), or lending her still regal voice to the animated fairy tale romp, “Shrek 2” (2004). Through the years, Andrews came to epitomize the concepts of dignity, grace and rare talent – traits that endeared her to fans the world over for nearly 50 years.
Born on Oct. 1, 1935 in Walton-on-Thames, England, Andrews joined her mother Barbara and stepfather Ted Andrews’ touring vaudeville act at the age of 12. In her first major appearance – in “Starlight Waltz” (1947) – Andrews brought the house down at the Hippodrome with her amazing vocal prowess. She quickly graduated to top billing, becoming the family’s primary breadwinner on the strength of her several octave-range soprano and continued to tour once her parents retired, traveling with a tutor until she was 15. Title roles in pantomime productions of “Humpty Dumpty” (1948), “Red Riding Hood” (1950) and “Cinderella” (1953) preceded her Broadway debut as Polly in Sandy Wilson’s 1920s pastiche, “The Boyfriend” (1954). Two years later, she was starring on the Great White Way as Eliza Doolittle in a production of “Pygmalion,” and in Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady,” which earned her a Tony nomination. After a four-year run, Andrews landed another plum role, playing Guinevere to Richard Burton’s King Arthur in Lerner and Loewe’s “Camelot.” A second Tony nomination soon followed.
Though her lilting, sweet soprano and prim British charm had earned her kudos as a Broadway musical star, Andrews was slow to win Hollywood over and would lose all three roles she had created on Broadway to non-singers in their film incarnations. She did impress Walt Disney enough, however, to be offered the title role of “Mary Poppins” (1964), although she kept him waiting until it was definite that Eliza Doolittle would be played by Audrey Hepburn. A truly wonderful amalgam of live-action, animation and Oscar-winning music, “Mary Poppins” earned her an Academy Award for Best Actress. That same year, she displayed her non-musical abilities opposite James Garner in “The Americanization of Emily” before reaching greater heights as Maria in the blockbuster film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music” (1965), which became the highest-grossing movie of all time until “Jaws” knocked it from its perch a decade later. The incredible success of that film chiseled her wholesomeness in granite, while the musical “Thoroughly Modern Millie” (1967) reinforced her as a sweet thing with terminal cuteness. Hoping to repeat the success of their initial teaming on “The Sound of Music,” director Robert Wise cast Andrews as stage legend Gertrude Lawrence in “Star!” (1968), but the actress failed to come across in that razzle-dazzle biopic-cum-musical. Nevertheless, Andrews acquitted herself in the production numbers, but was hampered by the script’s take on Lawrence.
Attempts to break away from her goody-two-shoes stereotyping by appearing in less wholesome, non-musical fare – e.g., Hitchcock’s “Torn Curtain” (1966) – were ineffectual, and it would take frequent collaborations with second husband Blake Edwards – including roles in “The Tamarind Seed” (1974), “10” (1979) and “That’s Life” (1986) – for her to finally prove herself a deft comedienne and a warm dramatic actress. In his glib Movieland satire “S.O.B” (1981), Andrews played an actress baring her breasts for financial reasons, and since she was still trying to shed her virginal image at the time, her going buff made the film a parody of itself. One of her most significant big screen successes was Edwards’ gender-bending, often hilarious “Victor/Victoria” (1982), which earned her a third Best Actress Oscar nomination. Over a decade later, she reprised its woman playing a man playing a woman for the Broadway version. Andrews created a flap when she declined her Tony nomination in protest because no one else associated with the production received a nod. A televised version of the 1995 production was aired as part of the Bravo cable series “Broadway on Bravo.”
In 1998, Andrews underwent throat surgery that went horribly awry and subsequently robbed her of her crystalline, perfectly pitched singing voice. In 2000, her malpractice suit against the doctors who allegedly botched her surgery was settled for an undisclosed sum, estimated at $30 million. After some counseling to help her deal with the trauma of the loss of her most treasured asset, Andrews also engaged in therapy that helped her regain some of her vocal range. In the meantime, she stayed busy as an actress, appearing as the awkward fledgling royal Anne Hathaway’s oh-so-regal grandmother in Garry Marshall’s surprise hit film, “The Princess Diaries” (2001), a role she reprised for the sequel “The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement” (2004). She also provided the voice of Queen Lillian, mother of Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) in the animated sequels, “Shrek 2” (2004) and “Shrek the Third” (2007). That same year, Andrews provided narration for Disney’s spot-on self-parody of the fairy tale genre it helped create with “Enchanted” (2007), one the studio’s most successful live action features in years. Less worthy of the famous Andrews charm was the Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson vehicle “Tooth Fairy” (2010), in which she played the head tooth fairy, Lily. She again voiced the Queen in “Shrek Forever After” (2010), in addition to voicing the mother of super villain extraordinaire, Gru, in Dreamworks’ animated feature, “Despicable Me” (2010).
As if the multi-faceted entertainer did not have enough feathers in her cap, Andrews authored several children’s books – something she had actually been doing for years – including The Very Fairy Princess written with her daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton. The mother-daughter team collaborated once again on a personally-selected anthology, Julie Andrews’ Collection of Poems, Songs, and Lullabies. The illustrated book was accompanied by four CDs featuring Andrews introducing the selections, and giving dramatic readings of the material along with Hamilton. In November 2010, Andrews’ most revered film made headlines once more, when its core cast reunited for the 45th anniversary of “The Sound of Music” on the “Oprah Winfrey Show.” The studio audience was ecstatic, as cast members like Christopher Plummer regaled them with anecdotes from the production. Sadly, the year would end on a supremely tragic note, when on December 15, Andrews’ husband, collaborator and friend, Blake Edwards, died of complications due to pneumonia. The actress and their five children were at Edwards’ hospital bedside when he passed.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Dustin Hoffman emerged as a key figure in the Hollywood Renaissance period of the 1960s and 1970s, personifying identifiable misfits and antiheroes in films embraced by a new breed of filmgoer. After struggling on and off Broadway, the Strasberg-trained actor rocketed to fame as the star of director Mike Nichols’ seminal “The Graduate” (1967). Chameleon-like characters in such diverse efforts as “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), “Little Big Man” (1970), “Straw Dogs” (1971) and “Papillon” (1973) solidified his growing reputation. The one-two punch of the hits “All the President’s Men” (1976) and “Marathon Man” (1976) proved Hoffman could deliver at the box office as well. More so than any other actor of the period, he pleased critics and fans alike with his performances in “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979), “Tootsie” (1982) and “Rain Man” (1988), winning Best Actor Oscars for two of these three nominated performances. Over the decades that followed, Hoffman divided his energies between strong supporting work in projects like “Sleepers” (1996) and sharing top-billing with fellow heavy weights like Robert De Niro in such films as “Wag the Dog” (1997). In the new millennium, he enjoyed a creative and commercial resurgence with a run of playful comic performances in “I [Heart] Huckabees” (2004), “Meet the Fockers” (2004), and the hit animated feature “Kung Fu Panda” (2008). Hoffman boasted a film career that spanned more than four decades and consistently delved into new creative territory, validating his status as one of the most gifted actors of his generation or any other.
Dustin Lee Hoffman was born on Aug. 8, 1937, in Los Angeles. His father worked at Columbia Studios in props and set dressing before shifting to furniture design, launching his own short-lived store, Harry Hoffman Furniture Company. His mother was a former jazz pianist and set Hoffman up with a piano and a teacher from the age of five. He was a restless student who frustrated parents and teachers with his poor grades and was first kicked out of school in the third grade. He harbored dreams of becoming a jazz musician, studying piano at with the L.A. Conservatory of Music, but he eventually became frustrated with what he felt was his limited talent, giving up music in his late teens to try his hand at something else. When he graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1955, Hoffman enrolled at Santa Monica City College, and within a year, was in danger of flunking out. He was desperately looking for a way to boost his grades when a friend suggested an acting course, which would be an easy three credits and a guaranteed no-fail. Hoffman found much more than just an easy-A class – he found his true passion. He was not the greatest actor initially, but for the first time in his life, he found himself focusing for hours on end on something.
After barely making it through a year at Santa Monica College, Hoffman convinced his parents to fund his new found passion with tuition to the Pasadena Playhouse, where he became fast friends with fellow student Gene Hackman. At the time, the Playhouse was populated with square-jawed matinee types hoping to become the next Rock Hudson, while Hoffman and Hackman stood apart with their anti-establishment reverence for Beat poetry and Method acting. Factor in their average looks and Hoffman’s 5’5″ height, and they seemed destined for character actor status. They shared the stage in a number of productions over the next two years, including “Of Mice and Men” and “The Taming of the Shrew,” before Hackman headed to Manhattan. Hoffman soon followed his friend, arriving in New York City in 1958 and spending his first few weeks too scared to leave Hackman and his wife’s postage stamp-sized apartment, where he spent nights nestled between the refrigerator and the bathtub. Eventually the newlyweds wanted their kitchen back and Hackman sent Hoffman to live with his friend Robert Duvall. The three remained close during the ensuing decade of off-off-Broadway productions, workshop training and odd jobs. They shared a dedication to their art, playing bongos on rooftops in homage to their hero Marlon Brando, and resigning themselves to a broke, bohemian existence rich with meaning. Becoming movie stars was never even a goal for the budding thespians, who would have been happy scraping by far from the Great White Way.
It would be several years before Hoffman would grace even the smallest stages; instead starting his New York career working in a mental institution and typing phone books while auditioning for roles for which he was consistently rejected. By 1960, he was ready to give up acting altogether, when he finally landed onstage in one of Gertrude Stein’s final plays, “Yes is for a Very Young Man.” The following year, he had a small part on Broadway and his first walk-on television role. Just as he was beginning to build some momentum, however, an accident left Hoffman hospitalized with burns so severe that he was not expected to live. Following extensive surgery, he was able to make a full recovery, but his brush with death made him more determined than ever to pursue his passion. When he was able to resume a normal life, Hoffman began training with Method acting legend Lee Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio. It was there, that he refined his technique and began to hone the dramatic approach that would become his trademark. He spent a year onstage with the Theater Company of Boston before returning to the New York stage in 1965’s “Harry, Noon and Night.” He gained further theatrical experience as an assistant director on “A View From the Bridge” and as manager on the Broadway play “The Subject Was Roses.” All the while, the starving actor was hawking toys at Macy’s and waiting tables. In 1966, Hoffman began to receive critical recognition for his work, earning Drama Desk and Theater World Awards for the farce “Eh?” and an Obie for the war drama “Journey of the Fifth Horse,” which was recorded and shown on public television the same year.
Little did Hoffman know that his years of Method training and his non-traditional looks would be tailor-made for the filmmaking renaissance that exploded in the late 1960s with character-based dramas that boldly explored the darker side of the American dream. Hoffman was among the establishing figures in “New Hollywood” when director Mike Nichols improbably cast the unknown in “The Graduate” (1967). Despite playing a protagonist that the novel characterized as a tall, blonde, athletic New England blueblood, Hoffman happened to possess the perfect blend of awkwardness, goofiness and disaffected melancholy in his portrayal of Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate reluctant to sign up for the empty, post-Atomic lifestyle of his cocktail-chugging parents. Benjamin’s complicated relationship with the older generation, further complicated by an affair with family friend Mrs. Robinson, resonated strongly with young audiences battling with their own value systems. Due to his career-making performance in his first of many hit films, Hoffman became a symbol of that generation, despite being 30 years old when the film was released.
For skillfully navigating the treacherous strait between satiric caricature and Method drama, Hoffman received an Academy Award nomination for his subtly hilarious yet profoundly moving performance. Hoffman’s payday for the landmark film was paltry – a concession he had made in order to avoid signing a multi-picture deal that would put him at the mercy of the studio. His career breakthrough was followed by a trip back to the unemployment line – where aLife magazine photographer happened to capture the unglamorous moment – before Hoffman returned to Broadway in Murray Shisgal’s “Jimmy Shine.” The film offers poured in, but most were pale “Graduate” variations and none captured Hoffman’s interest until John Schlesinger approached him for a very different role. Advisors told Hoffman he was nuts for following up an Oscar-nominated starring role with a supporting one opposite some unknown named Jon Voight, but his instincts were spot on when it came time to choose his next project, “Midnight Cowboy” (1969). The absorbing film adaptation of Leo Herlihy’s novel about a pair of desperate outsiders barely surviving New York’s sordid underbelly became a landmark of American cinema. Hoffman was again nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo, a limping, tubercular nickel-and-dime conman who forms an unlikely support system with a Texas hustler (Voight). Upon Hoffman’s second nomination, a Life magazine cover featured a sketch of Hoffman and fellow nominee John Wayne, with the headline “A Choice of Heroes.” The Academy was apparently not ready to embrace the new face of Hollywood, instead awarding the statue to Wayne.
On a definite roll moving into the 1970s, Hoffman starred in a new take on Wayne’s Western genre with the satirical “Little Big Man” (1970), earning a BAFTA nomination for the subtle anti-war protestation. He joined director Sam Peckinpah for “Straw Dogs” (1971), playing an expatriate mathematician caught up in escalating violence with local English toughs before a gritty turn opposite Steve McQueen in the prison escape drama “Papillon” (1973). Hoffman was again recruited by John Schlesinger for the thriller “Marathon Man” (1976), now portraying a troubled college student caught up in a conspiracy plot with former Nazi Laurence Olivier. In 1974’s “Lenny” (1974), Hoffman was nominated for an Academy Award for his complex, multi-dimensional portrait of hard-driving social comedian Lenny Bruce. The same year, he made his directorial debut on Broadway with Murray Schisgal’s “All Over Town.” Hoffman tackled the portrayal of another real-life figure in the gripping Watergate docudrama, “All the President’s Men” (1976), playing aggressive, young Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein who, along with Bob Woodward (Robert Redford), tirelessly unraveled the crimes of the Nixon administration. “Straight Time” (1978) failed to attract popular attention, but Hoffman’s acclaimed performance as a hard-core criminal stood as a hallmark of his approach to performance – one which eschewed easy sentiment in favor of three-dimensional grit.
Hoffman scored both a critical and popular success in 1979 with “Kramer vs. Kramer.” In the film, his role as a father left to forge a relationship with his young son after his wife leaves them, hit close to home for the actor who was simultaneously struggling with the end of his own marriage. Finally, after turning in over a decade of incredible performances, he received his first Best Actor Oscar for his painfully honest portrait. His next outing, “Tootsie” (1982), was considerably more lighthearted but also explored the evolving role of gender in society. The story, developed by Hoffman and Shisgal with an uncredited Elaine May, revolved around a desperate unemployed actor who masquerades as a woman in order to land a part on a soap opera, and unwittingly becomes a role model of the liberated, modern woman. Hoffman’s ability to move between genders believably and hilariously made his portrayal of Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels perhaps his most beloved performance, but the shoot was not without its troubles, with the notoriously difficult Hoffman clashing often with director and co-star Sydney Pollack. Hoffman’s well-informed performance as a struggling New York actor may have induced nostalgia, for he next returned to Broadway for a revival of “Death of a Salesman,” winning a Drama Desk Award, but curiously overlooked by the Tony committee for his run as Willy Loman in the Arthur Miller classic. Competing with the ghost of Lee J. Cobb’s original stage performance, some found Hoffman too slight and too young, ignoring the fact that he was almost a decade older than Cobb when he played the role on Broadway. However, a taped version of the play aired on CBS in 1985 and Hoffman was recognized with Emmy and Golden Globe awards.
Sadly, a charming Elaine May script called “Ishtar” (1987) suffered from highly-publicized budgetary failures, forever tarnishing the enjoyable Dustin Hoffman/Warren Beatty comedy about a pair of cut-rate lounge singers. Hoffman rebounded from this embarrassment with a second Academy Award for his riveting portrayal of an autistic savant in “Rain Man” (1988), hailed by some as one of the most objective, unsentimental portraits of a handicapped person in the American cinema. Hoffman and co-star Tom Cruise spent months in preparation for their roles, befriending real-life counterparts to the film’s brothers to bring as much realism as possible to Hoffman’s behavior and the pair’s strained relationship. Returning to the beloved immediacy of the stage, Hoffman next enjoyed a long run on London’s West End as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice.” In 1990, he reprised the role on Broadway, receiving a Tony nomination. There was no question that Hoffman had a solid reputation as one of America’s greatest actors, but even his high performance standards were not enough to boost a string of failures like “Family Business” (1989) “Dick Tracy” (1990) and “Hero” (1992). In Steven Spielberg’s lavish but uneven update of the Peter Pan “Hook” (1991), Hoffman’s villain was more comical than menacing and though curiously successful overseas, “Hook” was seen as a flop at home. Hoffman bounced back in a surprisingly traditional heroic role in the hit thriller “Outbreak” (1995). As a military specialist in epidemiology, Hoffman’s serious and dedicated Colonel Sam Daniels was a thorn in the side of Army brass but the best man for the job when an unknown virus in the African rain forest spreads to the United States.
Hoffman reunited with director Barry Levinson for a three-picture run, beginning with “Sleepers” (1996), in which the actor offered a scene-stealing turn as a pony-tailed defense lawyer with substance abuse problems. “Wag the Dog” (1997) cast him as a slick Hollywood producer called upon to create a fake war to divert the country’s attention away from a presidential sex scandal. The actor’s droll turn – reputedly inspired by legendary producer Robert Evans – was the highlight of the film. “Sphere” (1998) teamed Hoffman with Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson and Peter Coyote as scientists on an underwater mission investigating the crash of a possible alien spacecraft. In 1999, Hoffman produced his first feature, the Vietnam-era family portrait “A Walk on the Moon” (1999), and was honored by the American Film Institute in “A Tribute to Dustin Hoffman,” a televised ceremony during which he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
What should have been a career highlight was followed by several years of doubt and anxiety over his work. Having temporarily lost his spark, Hoffman reevaluated his career as an actor in his mid-fifties and toyed with ideas of writing and directing. Ultimately, he decided to cast aside many of his self-imposed limitations and approach offers with a new openness and renewed zeal for his art. He returned with a run of wonderful, mature dramas beginning with “Moonlight Mile,” where he played half of a married couple (opposite Susan Sarandon) grieving over the death of their daughter with the aid of her fiancé, Jake Gyllenhaal. He was surprisingly intimidating as a nightclub owner and crime boss in the neo-noir caper “Confidence” (2003) before starring for the first time opposite longtime friend Gene Hackman in “Runaway Jury” (2003). In the adaptation of the John Grisham bestseller, Hoffman played a courtly Southern attorney drawn into a deadly confrontation over the attempts of a ruthless jury manipulator (Hackman) to influence the verdict of a case.
Hoffman joined the cast of writer-director David O. Russell’s eccentric “I [Heart] Huckabees” (2004), playing opposite Lily Tomlin as a husband-and-wife team of “existential detectives” and continued his career upswing with a supporting turn in “Finding Neverland” (2004) as the nervous but charming financier of “Peter Pan” creator J.M. Barrie (Johnny Depp). He teamed with Barbra Streisand to play Ben Stiller’s eccentric parents in “Meet the Fockers” (2004), with Hoffman nearly stealing the entire film with his genial, ever-smiling characterization of proud papa Bernie Focker. Hoffman earned equal comedic accolades for his more understated performance as a literary expert enlisted to help protagonist (Will Ferrell) identify the author he hears narrating his own life in his head in “Stranger Than Fiction” (2006). The pair’s rapid-fire exchanges were among the film’s comedic highlights.
Hoffman’s role as a French perfume maker in the stylish period thriller “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” (2006) was well-reviewed though little-seen in the United States; however it was a box office hit internationally. He returned to mainstream cinema in the cartoonish title role of “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” (2007), a film about an enchanted toy store and its 243-year-old proprietor. Unfortunately, the suspiciously “Willy Wonka”-like tale failed to inspire critics, though its whimsical promise lured a fair amount of families to the multiplex. After voicing martial arts master, Shifu, in the hugely successful “Kung Fu Panda” (2008), Hoffman delivered a comically touching performance in “Last Chance Harvey” (2008), playing a down-and-out jingle writer and spurned father who finds his life and romantic passions renewed when he meets an intelligent and compassionate woman (Emma Thompson) at the airport. Hoffman made a long-awaited return to award contention when he received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical.
Hoffman followed soon after with a scene-stealing performance as the father of Paul Giamatti’s curmudgeonly title character in the dark comedy “Barney’s Version” (2010). Arguably less daring on an artistic level, although certainly more lucrative were his contributions to the inevitable sequels “Little Fockers” (2010) and “Kung Fu Panda 2” (2011). Far more intriguing was Hoffman’s first venture as the star of the ensemble television drama “Luck” (HBO, 2011-12). An insider’s look at the lives of various denizens in and around a Los Angeles area racetrack, “Luck” centered around the story of Chester “Ace” Bernstein (Hoffman), an ex-con with mob connections looking to get back in the game, take over the racetrack, and exact a bit of revenge on the people responsible for landing him in prison. Created by David Milch and co-produced by Michael Mann (who directed the pilot episode), “Luck” met with exceptional reviews and strong ratings, ensuring it a second season. Amidst the accolades, however, concerns over the deaths of two horses during production threatened to change the fortunes of the show for the worse. When a third thoroughbred died in March 2012, HBO – under siege from outraged animal activism groups – scrapped the planned second season and cancelled the show altogether in a move that shocked the industry.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
