The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (299 page)

The son of photographer Elwin Neame and actress Ivy Close, Neame entered British films as a camera assistant and went on to photograph
Drake of England
(35, Arthur Woods);
The Ware Case
(38, Robert Stevenson);
Pygmalion
(38, Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard);
Come on, George
(39, Anthony Kimmins);
Major Barbara
(41, Gabriel Pascal);
In Which We Serve
(42, Noel Coward and David Lean); and
Blithe Spirit
(45, David Lean). His association with Lean expanded when Neame became producer of
Brief Encounter
(45),
Great Expectations
(46),
Oliver Twist
(48), and
The Passionate Friends
(49). He also produced the Festival of Britain film,
The Magic Box
(51, John Boulting).

Neame’s work has fluctuated, but it remains above the dismal average of British cinema.
The Seventh Sin
is an intriguing guessing game, but Neame deserves some credit for its picture of feminine hysteria, if only because two other films show a special taste for romantic feverishness:
I Could Go On Singing
and
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The Seventh Sin
looks a good deal better than the two later films, but Neame did manage to draw on the same sort of nervous animation in Eleanor Parker, Judy Garland, and Maggie Smith. Something of that bursting shrillness could be seen in John Mills’s performance in
Tunes of Glory
and in
The Chalk Garden
’s assembly of tremulous women. In addition,
The Horse’s Mouth
is a worthy attempt at Joyce Cary’s novel, with Alec Guinness exhilarating as the luminous scoundrel painter, Gulley Jimson. At the very least, Neame has a filmmaker’s eye and the ability to produce attractive entertainments. Too often, however, he has been caught up in tame adventure films.
Scrooge
is an ugly and turgid picture, while
Mister Moses, Escape from Zahrain
, and
The Poseidon Adventure
are far beyond his proper territory.

Hopscotch
was an effective comedy pairing of Glenda Jackson and Walter Matthau—but in
First Monday in October
Matthau seemed tied down by judicial robes. Neame was also the executive producer on the engaging
Bellman and True
(87, Richard Loncraine).

Liam Neeson
, b. Ballymena, Northern Ireland, 1952
There’s something not quite “right” about Liam Neeson—and it’s his most intriguing quality. He is an authentically big man—over six feet three—and we can credit that he was once a bit of a boxer and a brewery worker. Yet, at the same time, he has a soft look and a softer voice. When he was chosen to narrate the TNT tribute to Clark Gable,
Tall, Dark and Handsome
(96), it was so evident that Neeson was taller by far, yet problematic and mysterious. Of course that indecision is at the heart of his performance in
Schindler’s List
(93, Steven Spielberg), so uncanny a mining of large unsoundness, of producer’s flair and actor’s unease, that one wonders sometimes how fully Neeson grasped his own work. But who else could have done Schindler so well? Or left intact the question whether Schindler was a saint or an opportunist?

He was doing theatre in Belfast when John Boorman discovered him for the role of Gawain in
Excalibur
(81). He has worked steadily ever since, and he has become an American actor, even if he seldom dominates a picture:
Krull
(83, Peter Yates);
The Bounty
(84, Roger Donaldson); in the Irish film
Lamb
(85, Colin Gregg);
The Innocent
(85, John Mackenzie);
Arthur the King
(85, Clive Donner), for TV;
Duet for One
(86, Andrei Konchalovsky); as the mute accused in
Suspect
(87, Yates);
A Prayer for the Dying
(87, Mike Hodges);
Satisfaction
(88, Joan Freeman);
The Dead Pool
(88, Buddy Van Horn); with Diane Keaton in
The Good Mother
(88, Leonard Nimoy);
High Spirits
(88, Neil Jordan);
Next of Kin
(89, John Irvin); as the vengeful, disfigured scientist in
Darkman
(90, Sam Raimi);
Crossing the Line
(91, David Leland);
Shining Through
(91, David Seltzer);
Under Suspicion
(92, Simon Moore).

He was in
Husbands and Wives
(92, Woody Allen);
Leap of Faith
(92, Richard Pearce);
Deception
(93, Graeme Clifford); and
Ethan Frome
(93, John Madden). He played on Broadway in
Anna Christie
with Natasha Richardson and married her (he had romanced several actresses in the past). They played together without much spark in
Nell
(94, Jodie Foster), and he was then an odd sort of Ballymena Highland hero in
Rob Roy
(95, Michael Caton-Jones). He was the father in
Before and After
(96, Barbet Schroeder).

It is an unresolved career, and one that may lead to serious casting difficulties. Misfits as rich as Oskar Schindler are not common Hollywood material. He did his best as
Michael Collins
(96, Neil Jordan) and as Valjean in yet another
Les Misérables
(98, Bille August), but by 1999 he was plainly bored out of his mind in the empty
Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace
(99, George Lucas) and unable to prevent the inanity of
The Haunting
(99, Jan de Bont).

He has narrated a number of documentaries—notably
The Endurance
(00, George Butler); and he acted in
Gun Shy
(00, Eric Blakeney);
K-19: The Widowmaker
(02, Kathryn Bigelow);
Gangs of New York
(02, Martin Scorsese);
Love Actually
(03, Richard Curtis); the lead in
Kinsey
(04, Bill Condon).

He did the voice of Aslan for several Narnia films;
Kingdom of Heaven
(04, Ridley Scott);
Batman Begins
(05, Christopher Nolan);
Breakfast on Pluto
(05, Jordan);
Seraphim Falls
(07, David Von Ancken); very strong again as a father searching for a daughter in
Taken
(08, Pierre Morel);
Five Minutes of Heaven
(08, Oliver Hirschbiegel);
After Life
(08, Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo). And in 2009 he lost his wife in a bizarre accident on the ski slopes.

Pola Negri
(Barbara Appolonia Chalupiec) (1894–1987), b. Janowa, Poland
Negri was the first European actress to be wooed by Hollywood: in response, she scorned the shoddiness of American, as compared with German, films, gradually lost the popularity earned by American versions of those films, was the gloomy heavy in a stoked-up rivalry at Paramount with Gloria Swanson, and, cruellest twist of all, was offered to Mauritz Stiller as compensation for the Garbo he had brought to America but whom MGM preferred to keep to themselves.

The dark, soulful concentration of Negri, as well as her deliberate cultivation of an aura of mystery, now make her seem a very dated figure. Rodney Ackland’s verdict places her as the archetypal “great actress”: “She had a blind and uncritical admiration of her own genius in the blaze of which her sense of humor evaporated like a dew-drop on a million-watt arc lamp.” Most memorably, she is the star described in Dos Passos’s portrait of Valentino, swooning at the actor’s funeral “after she had shown the reporters a message allegedly written by one of the doctors alleging that Rudolph Valentino had spoken of her at the end as his bride to be.” The press mocked her for that, just as many people in movies laughed at her extravagant immersion in her own emotions. The irony was that she launched the career of Ernst Lubitsch, but was sadly untouched by his restraint.

She had trained as a dancer in St. Petersburg and, during the First World War, she made a number of films in Poland with Aleksander Hertz. But in 1917, Max Reinhardt brought her to Berlin to play in the stage version of
Sumurun
. She quickly became a star in the German cinema and, after several pictures for Curt Matull, she asked for the young Lubitsch to direct her in
Die Augen der Mumie Ma
(18). She worked for other directors—Georg Jacoby, Paul Ludwig Stein, and Dmitri Buchowetzki (
Sappho
, 20)—but she was outstanding in Lubitsch’s costume films to which she brought not only beauty and expressiveness, but unusual depth of character, so that, as Lotte Eisner wrote, she showed up stage actors for their artifice:
Carmen
(18);
Madame Dubarry
(19);
Medea
(20);
Sumurun
(20);
Die Bergkatze
(21); and
Die Flamme
(22).

Madame Dubarry
, retitled
Passion
, had been shown with enormous success in America, and in 1922 Paramount invited her to America. Her first films there were far short of her German work:
Bella Donna
(23, George Fitzmaurice);
The Cheat
(23, Fitzmaurice);
The Spanish Dancer
(23, Herbert Brenon); and
Shadows of Paris
(24, Brenon). In an effort to revivify her, she was paired with one of her directors in Germany, Buchowetzki, for
Men
(24) and
Lily of the Dust
(24). But it was only with Lubitsch, in
Forbidden Paradise
(24), that she matched her former glory.

She worked in Hollywood for another four years until sound and her accent forced her to abandon America:
East of Suez
(25, Raoul Walsh);
The Charmer
(25, Sidney Olcott);
Flower of Night
(25, Paul Bern);
A Woman of the World
(25, Malcolm St. Clair);
The Crown of Lies
(26, Buchowetzki);
Good and Naughty
(26, St. Clair);
Hotel Imperial
(26, Stiller);
Barbed Wire
(27, Rowland V. Lee);
The Woman on Trial
(27, Lee);
Three Sinners
(28, Lee);
The Secret House
(28, Lee); as Rachel in
Loves of an Actress
(28, Lee); and
The Woman from Moscow
(28, Ludwig Berger). She went to England to make
The Woman He Scorned
(29, Paul Czinner) and after one more film in America,
A Woman Commands
(32, Paul L. Stein), and
Fanatisme
(34, Gaston Ravel), in France, she returned to Germany.

She had a great popular success in
Mazurka
(35, Willi Forst) and played in
Moskau-Shanghai
(36, Paul Wegener); as
Madame Bovary
(37, Gerhard Lamprecht);
Tango Notturno
(37, Fritz Kirchhoff);
Die Fromme Luge
(38, Nunzio Malasomma); and
Die Nacht der Entscheidung
(38, Malasomma). In the first years of the war she was in France, but in 1943 she went to America and made
Hi, Diddle Diddle
(43, Andrew L. Stone). She retired and reappeared in only one cameo in
The Moonspinners
(64, James Neilson).

Jean Negulesco
(1903–93), b. Craiova, Rumania
1941:
Singapore Woman
. 1944:
The Mask of Dimitrios; The Conspirators
. 1946:
Nobody Lives Forever; Three Strangers
. 1947:
Humoresque; Deep Valley
. 1948:
Johnny Belinda; Road House
. 1949:
Britannia Mews/The Forbidden Street
. 1950:
The Mudlark; Under My Skin; Three Came Home
. 1951:
Take Care of My Little Girl
. 1952:
Phone Call From a Stranger; Lydia Bailey; Lure of the Wilderness;
“The Last Leaf,” episode from
O. Henry’s Full House
. 1953:
Scandal at Scourie; Titanic; How to Marry a Millionaire
. 1954:
Three Coins in the Fountain; Woman’s World
. 1955:
Daddy Long Legs; The Rains of Ranchipur
. 1957:
Boy on a Dolphin
. 1958:
The Gift of Love; A Certain Smile
. 1959:
Count Your Blessings; The Best of Everything
. 1962:
Jessica
. 1965:
The Pleasure Seekers
. 1969:
The Heroes
. 1970:
Hello-Goodbye; The Invincible Six
.

Anyone coming upon Negulesco in the early 1950s could be forgiven for associating him with trashy, sentimental novelettes. By the end of that decade, even the titles of his movies screeched out a warning of bogus romantic comfort foisted on enervated melodramatic plots:
The Gift of Love, A Certain Smile, Count Your Blessings, The Best of Everything
. That era represents the worst of cinema, when production schedules had not shrunk to the new, smaller audience or begun to aspire to its higher standards. For a few years, major studios still churned out a pale version of their blithe past. Nowhere was the pallor more gruesome than at Twentieth Century—Fox.

Andrew Sarris has argued that the watershed in Negulesco’s career was CinemaScope, Fox’s ploy to defeat TV. Certainly those late women’s pics are the less intimate for being stretched out over a wider frame. But the real turning point for Negulesco seems to me a matter of where he was employed. For in 1948, he moved from Warners to Fox, and thus lost the chance to continue the romantic treatment of “hard” people, and gave himself up to the sentimental view of coziness. Different studios perpetrated different attitudes to the world. Warners learned from the success of
Casablanca
, in 1943, which emphasizes narrative pace and density—an old hallmark of the gangster pictures—low-key black-and-white photography, and the glamour of cynical, worldly people exchanging offhand, knowing dialogue—Bogart hunched up in the dark, urging Sam to play it again. Negulesco bloomed in that Indian summer:
The Mask of Dimitrios
, from the Eric Ambler thriller, is Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre;
The Conspirators
is Hedy Lamarr, Paul Henreid, and Greenstreet;
Nobody Lives Forever
is John Garfield;
Three Strangers
is Lorre, Greenstreet, and Geraldine Fitzgerald;
Humoresque
is a fine Jerry Wald women’s picture, with Joan Crawford and Garfield;
Deep Valley
is Ida Lupino. In most of them, there is an entrancing, velvety quality of dream world brought to life. The timing, mood, and nuance are as precise as in
Casablanca
, and Negulesco seems as assured a director as Michael Curtiz.