The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (195 page)

In several films over the years, Agnieszka Holland showed a remarkable talent for stories about displacement—the farmer who protects a Jewish woman during the war in
Angry Harvest;
the Jewish youth whose escape leads him into the German army in
Europa, Europa;
the fairy tale of
Olivier Olivier
, in which a lost child seems to return. These were pictures in which a tough, unsentimental structure and attitude were allied to a magical eye. It was all the more disappointing then that Holland’s
Secret Garden
felt staid and unadventurous, and much less than Fred Wilcox’s 1949 version, which has maybe the best ensemble of child actors ever seen. Holland’s version had many virtues, but it felt like a TV movie.

Holland was educated in Prague, studying with Milos Forman and Ivan Passer. In Poland, she encountered persecution such that eventually she moved to Paris. But her career began in Warsaw, and she was Andrzej Wajda’s screenwriter on several films:
Without Anesthesia
(78);
Danton
(82);
A Love in Germany
(83);
The Possessed
(87); and
Korczak
(90). She also wrote the screenplay for another fascinating study in displacement,
Anna
(87, Yurek Bogayevicz), and helped on the script for
Blue
(93, Krzysztof Kieslowski).

Holland continues to be inconsistent. Despite a script by Christopher Hampton and the presence of DiCaprio and David Thewlis (or was it because of those threatening assets?),
Total Eclipse
proved to be Rimbaud and Verlaine for strict beginners. Whereas,
Washington Square
was an admirable translation that used Albert Finney and Jennifer Jason Leigh very well.
The Third Miracle
was another dud. But
Shot in the Heart
, for HBO, was a superb telling of the problems of the Gilmore family (as in Gary Gilmore) with thrilling performances from Elias Koteas and Giovanni Ribisi. So it’s a very tricky career to read—an obviously talented, intelligent director, who seldom does what is exactly expected of her.

Judy Holliday
(Judith Tuvim) (1922–65), b. New York
The story goes that
Adam’s Rib
(49, George Cukor) was a conspiracy between Cukor, Katharine Hepburn, and Garson Kanin to convince Harry Cohn, the boss of Columbia, that Judy Holliday should play the dumb blonde in the film of
Born Yesterday
. It is a pleasant memoir from one of the most talented cliques within the movie world. And it is probably based on truth, even if we would be naïve to put much trust in benign conspiracies.

The film itself looks set up, especially in that early scene when attorney Hepburn interviews client Holliday. The scene is long, elaborately written, but filmed in one blatantly convenient setup—convenient, that is, for the virtuoso playing from Holliday. She does not simply steal the scene, but plays with it like a cat with a mouse. The effect is the more startling and contradictory in that such technical mastery is emanating from a character ostensibly stupid, impetuous, and imperceptive. Even granted Hepburn’s complicity, the upstaging is lurid. There are moments at which Hepburn seems to say to herself, “My, my, what a clever girl you are.” Holliday seldom looks at Hepburn. Like a child, she stares away into emptiness, the better to concentrate on herself. Yet, without looking, she dominates, so that Hepburn ends up as edgy and hesitant as the client should be.

Cohn saw the point—or so it is said. But Holliday was a strange actress, uneasily bending her own intelligence to the dumbest of New York blondes so that the performance in
Born Yesterday
often appears studied, cute, and condescending. It is a part of this curious meticulousness that she never seemed sexy on the screen. Never the “open, honest, bland, funny, sexy girl” that Kanin intended, but a neurotic barrage of timing, expression, and gestures. Still, her Billie Dawn won the Oscar, beating out Davis and Baxter in
All About Eve
and Swanson in
Sunset Boulevard
.

Holliday started in cabaret: she formed a group, the Revuers, with Betty Comden and Adolph Green. As such, she was a Greenwich Village star, and Nicholas Ray was one of her lovers. She had had three small film parts in 1944:
Greenwich Village
(Walter Lang);
Something for the Boys
(Lewis Seiler); and
Winged Victory
(George Cukor). But she then concentrated on the stage and played in Kanin’s
Born Yesterday
when Jean Arthur withdrew.
Adam’s Rib
secured her the film of
Born Yesterday
, where she won the best actress Oscar as reliably as she did every game of rummy. She had a chance to show a more rounded character in
The Marrying Kind
(52, Cukor), but her comic business obscured that potential. Thereafter she made
It Should Happen to You
(54, Cukor);
Phffft!
(54, Mark Robson);
The Solid Gold Cadillac
(56, Richard Quine);
Full of Life
(57, Quine); and, last—after playing the role on Broadway—as the telephonist, and much more pleasingly subdued, in
Bells Are Ringing
(60, Vincente Minnelli).

Sir Ian Holm
(Ian Holm Cuthbert), b. Goodmayes, England, 1931
Around the early sixties, on stage and TV, Holm seemed like a leading actor of great potential. He was dark, thoughtful, and intense, and his Richard III at the Royal Shakespeare Company can be compared with those of Olivier and Ian McKellen. But Holm had handicaps: he liked to work regularly; he was versatile; and he was not tall. Thus he became what is known as a supporting actor, a prodigious worker, a shy comic, and a mark of reliability. The list is more even than these:
The Bofors Gun
(68, Jack Gold);
The Fixer
(68, John Frankenheimer);
Oh! What a Lovely War
(69, Richard Attenborough); as the Al Bowlly enthusiast in Dennis Potter’s
Moonlight on the Highway
(69, James MacTaggart);
A Severed Head
(71, Dick Clement);
Nicholas and Alexandra
(71, Franklin Schaffner);
Mary, Queen of Scots
(71, Charles Jarrott);
Young Winston
(72, Attenborough);
The Homecoming
(73, Peter Hall);
Juggernaut
(74, Richard Lester); King John in
Robin and Marian
(76, Lester);
March or Die
(77, Dick Richards);
Alien
(79, Ridley Scott); the dour trainer in
Chariots of Fire
(81, Hugh Hudson);
The Return of the Soldier
(82, Alan Bridges); as F. R. Leavis in
The Last Romantics
(82, Jack Gold); as Napoleon in
Time Bandits
(81, Terry Gilliam); the Belgian explorer in
Greystoke
(84, Hudson); very touching as the cuckold in
Dance With a Stranger
(85, Mike Newell);
Wetherby
(85, David Hare); as Lewis Carroll in
Dreamchild
(85, Gavin Miller);
Brazil
(85, Gilliam);
Another Woman
(88, Woody Allen);
Henry V
(89, Kenneth Branagh);
Hamlet
(90, Franco Zeffirelli);
Kafka
(91, Steven Soderbergh);
Naked Lunch
(91, David Cronenberg); and
Blue Ice
(93, Russell Mulcahy).

Holm was well established: he won a supporting actor nomination for
Chariots of Fire
. Yet his growing range and volume was something to behold. Just consider the one year 1997, which offered Holm in five films—the adaptation of his National Theatre
King Lear
(Richard Eyre);
A Life Less Ordinary
(Danny Boyle);
The Fifth Element
(97, Luc Besson); and two phenomenal performances, as the insurance investigator in
The Sweet Hereafter
(97, Atom Egoyan), and as a New York cop who could have fooled Cagney in
Night Falls on Manhattan
(97, Sidney Lumet).

As well as all that, this great actor did
The Hour of the Pig
(93, Leslie Megahey); Pod in
The Borrowers
(93, John Henderson) and
The Return of the Borrowers
(93, Mary Norton);
Frankenstein
(94, Branagh);
The Madness of King George
(94, Nicholas Hytner); with his new wife, Penelope Wilton, on TV in
The Deep Blue Sea
(94);
Loch Ness
(95, Henderson);
Big Night
(96, Stanley Tucci);
eXistenZ
(99, Cronenberg);
Simon Magus
(99, Ben Hopkins);
The Match
(99, Mick Davis);
Shergar
(99, Dennis C. Lewiston);
Alice Through the Looking Glass
(99, Henderson); outstanding in
Joe Gould’s Secret
(00, Tucci); the voice of Pilate in
The Miracle Maker
(00, Derek W. Hayes and Stanislav Sokolov);
Esther Kahn
(00, Arnaud Desplechin);
Beautiful Joe
(00, Stephen Metcalfe);
Bless the Child
(00, Chuck Russell);
The Last of the Blonde Bombshells
(00, Gillies MacKinnon); Napoleon in
The Emperor’s New Clothes
(01, Alan Taylor); Gull in
From Hell
(01, Allen and Albert Hughes).

And then, Bilbo Baggins in
The Lord of the Rings
(01, Peter Jackson). In the first edition of this book, in 1975, I suggested—when it was too late already—what a Bilbo Cagney might have made. Now Holm has the part and it signifies the class he honors. He was back as Bilbo in
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
(03, Jackson);
The Day After Tomorrow
(04, Roland Emmerich);
The Aviator
(04, Martin Scorsese);
Strangers with Candy
(05, Paul Dinello);
Chromophobia
(05, Martha Fiennes);
Lord of War
(05, Andrew Niccol); a voice in
Renaissance
(06, Christian Volckman);
O Jerusalem
(06, Elie Chouraqui), as Skinner in
Ratatouille
(07, Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava).

Seth Holt
(James Holt) (1923–71), b. Palestine
1958:
Nowhere to Go
. 1961:
A Taste of Fear
. 1964:
Station Six Sahara
. 1965:
The Nanny
. 1967:
Danger Route
. 1971:
Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb
(finished by Michael Carreras when Holt died).

An intimate biography of Seth Holt would make a pretty picture of the razor lining to the film industry. When he died he was engaged on his least interesting film, a merciless potboiler. He was a man of fascinating, unfulfilled projects and of a casual talent that never swallowed a film whole. It speaks for his frustration that
If…
. (69) was his project originally, only passed on to Lindsay Anderson when Holt began to decline. His death—from heart disease and exhaustion—was little noticed by the press. Similarly, few people remarked on the death of Holt’s brother-in-law, Robert Hamer.

Despite the fact that Holt seemed unable to escape flawed, unfinished work, the creator of marvelous sequences within melodramas, he was the most gifted British director working in Britain.
Nowhere to Go
is an out-of-the-ordinary thriller (scripted by Holt and Kenneth Tynan);
A Taste of Fear
was genuinely frightening; and
Station Six Sahara
is a jittery account of sexual tension.
The Nanny
was subtle guignol and
Danger Route
an especially fragmented work. But even the cheapskate espionage of that film contains the enigmatic sequence in which Richard Johnson kills Carol Lynley.

The final disarray, complete with two abandoned films—
Diabolique
and
Monsieur LeCoq
—and a script about Bakunin (done with Al Alvarez), is the stranger because Holt served a dutiful apprenticeship. From acting, he joined Ealing in 1944 as an assistant editor. In that capacity he worked on
Return to the Vikings
(44, Charles Frend);
Champagne Charlie
(44, Alberto Cavalcanti);
Dead of Night
(45, Cavalcanti, et al.);
Hue and Cry
(46, Charles Crichton);
Scott of the Antarctic
(48, Frend);
Passport to Pimlico
(48, Henry Cornelius);
Kind Hearts and Coronets
(49, Robert Hamer);
The Lavender Hill Mob
(51, Crichton);
His Excellency
(51, Hamer);
Mandy
(52, Alexander Mackendrick);
The Titfield Thunderbolt
(52, Crichton); and
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(60, Karel Reisz). He was also an associate producer on Mackendrick’s
The Ladykillers
(55) and Crichton’s
The Man in the Sky
(56).

As a director he made many episodes for TV series and nurtured forlorn projects. His early career might have been textbook, but once he had made the grade he was antitraditional. His taste for visual excitement was more American than British, and not the least point in his favor was his skill at directing an oddly assorted range of actresses: Maggie Smith, Susan Strasberg, Carroll Baker, Bette Davis, and Carol Lynley.

Tom Hooper
, b. London, 1972
1992:
Painted Faces
(TV). 1997: four episodes of
Byker Grove
(TV). 1998: two episodes of
Cold Feet
(TV). 1999: two episodes of
East Enders
(TV). 2001:
Love in a Cold Climate
(TV). 2002:
Daniel Deronda
(TV). 2003:
Prime Suspect 6: The Last Witness
(TV). 2004:
Red Dust
(TV). 2005: episode of
Elizabeth I
(TV). 2006:
Longford
(TV). 2008: seven episodes of
John Adams
(TV). 2009:
The Damned United
. 2010:
The King’s Speech
(TV). 2011:
East of Eden
(TV).