The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (306 page)

She stayed with Sennett two more years, but was anxious for a feature debut and got it, in 1918 at Paramount, in
Mickey
(Richard Jones). She then worked for Goldwyn for the next few years:
Sis Hopkins
(19, Clarence Badger);
The Pest
(19, Christy Cabanne);
When Doctors Disagree
(19, Victor Schertzinger);
Pinto
(19, Schertzinger);
Jinx
(19, Schertzinger);
The Slim Princess
(20, Schertzinger);
What Happened to Rosa?
(21, Schertzinger).

Disaster struck in 1922. Already on drugs, Mabel was implicated in the murder of director William Desmond Taylor and badly damaged by the scandal. Sennett took her back and tried to retrieve her fortunes with
Suzanna
(23, Jones) and
The Extra Girl
(23, Jones). But to no avail. Her last pictures were a few shorts for Hal Roach in 1926:
Raggedy Rose, One Hour Married
, and
The Nickel Hopper
.

Jeremy Northam
, b. Cambridge, England, 1961
The son of two university professors, Northam was himself educated at Bedford and London University before joining the Bristol Old Vic. In the late 1980s, he had a great stage success in
The Voysey Inheritance
and he played Stanhope in a TV revival of
Journey’s End
(88, Michael Simpson). He is tall, dark, and handsome in an old-fashioned way that has brought him a good many period roles. But he has a quietness and an ease that are not just unusual—they are intelligence itself. He is a star in waiting, increasingly versatile and inclined to take big gambles in his material. He runs the risk of making nearly everything seem easy, but proper recognition will come.

He was in the TV series
Wish Me Luck
(88–9), and then he played Hindley in
Wuthering Heights
(92, Peter Kosminsky); Beacus Penrose in
Carrington
(95, Christopher Hampton); went to America for
The Net
(95, Irwin Winkler), with Sandra Bullock;
Voices
(95, Malcolm Clarke); outstanding as Mr. Knightley in
Emma
(96, Douglas McGrath);
Mimic
(97, Guillermo Del Toro);
Amistad
(97, Steven Spielberg).

He was funny with Parker Posey in
The Misadventures of Margaret
(98, Brian Skeet) and with Steve Zahn in
Happy, Texas
(99, Mark Illsley), but no one has really explored that potential. So he did
Gloria
(99, Sidney Lumet); Chiltern in
An Ideal Husband
(99, Oliver Parker); the barrister in
The Winslow Boy
(99, David Mamet)—nearly comically cool; the Prince in
The Golden Bowl
(00, James Ivory)—icily hot. He did
Enigma
(01, Michael Apted); Ivor Novello—singing very well—in
Gosford Park
(01, Robert Altman);
Possession
(02, Neil La Bute);
Cypher
(02, Vincenzo Natali).

Then for TV, he did his best work—suave but shy, as Dean Martin in
Martin and Lewis
(02, John Gray). He was Mark Binney in the remake of
The Singing Detective
(03, Keith Gordon);
The Statement
(03, Norman Jewison); Walter Hagen in
Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius
(04, Rowdy Herrington);
Guy X
(05, Saul Metzstein); as the director in
A Cock and Bull Story
(05, Michael Winterbottom);
The Payback
(06, Olivier Bonas); wasted and supercilious in
The Invasion
(07, Oliver Hirschbiegel); Sir Thomas More in
The Tudors
(08);
Glorious 39
(09, Stephen Poliakoff).

Edward Norton
, b. Boston, Massachusetts, 1969
2000:
Keeping the Faith
The story goes that the people producing
Primal Fear
(96, Gregory Hoblit) had just about given up. Lots of young actors appreciated the split personality they were trying for—the stuttering, exploited wreck and the swaggering mastermind—but they simply couldn’t go from one to the other in the middle of a sentence. Then Edward Norton—from Yale and the theatre—came along and did it. He did it so that Frances McDormand blinked, Richard Gere giggled, and even the camera wanted to do a double-take. It was brilliant—but was it human? Was it life, or acting? By which I mean to say that since very few (if any) of us have actually encountered that kind of hard-edged schizoid, to see
Primal Fear
was to appreciate the acting above all. And so we will have to wait and see whether Edward Norton is just an uncanny actor or someone who might also move us.

His other work is all interesting, yet unresolved so far:
Everyone Says I Love You
(96, Woody Allen); the lawyer in
The People vs. Larry Flynt
(96, Milos Forman); an Oscar nomination for
American History X
(98, Tony Kaye);
Rounders
(98, John Dahl);
Fight Club
(99, David Fincher); his first dud performance, in
The Score
(01, Frank Oz);
Death to Smoochy
(02, Danny DeVito); as Nelson Rockefeller in
Frida
(02, Julie Taymor);
Red Dragon
(02, Brett Ratner); very good in
25th Hour
(02, Spike Lee); in another foolish caper film,
The Italian Job
(03, F. Gary Gray);
Down in the Valley
(05, David Jacobson);
Kingdom of Heaven
(05, Ridley Scott); as
The Illusionist
(06, Neil Burger);
The Painted Veil
(06, John Curran);
The Incredible Hulk
(08, Louis Leterrier), which he helped write;
Pride and Glory
(08, Gavin O’Connor);
The Invention of Lying
(09, Matthew Robinson and Ricky Gervais).

Kim Novak
(Marilyn Pauline Novak), b. Chicago, 1933
Novak was a big, shy blonde, diffident about her beautiful body and forever trying to speak up and project. Many critics saw this tense endeavor and concluded that she was not an actress. But film sometimes flinches at the expertise of actresses, and the sympathetic viewer may come to realize that there was a mute honesty in Novak: she did not conceal the fact that she had been drawn into a world capable of exploiting her. Filming seemed an ordeal for her; it was as if the camera hurt her. But while many hostile to the movies rose in defense of the devastation of Marilyn Monroe—whether or not she was a sentient victim—Novak was stoical, obdurate, or sullen. She allowed very few barriers between that raw self and the audience and now looks dignified, reflective, and responsive to feeling where Monroe appears haphazard and oblivious. Novak is the epitome of every smalltown waitress or beauty contest winner who thought of being in the movies. Despite a thorough attempt by Columbia to glamorize her, she never lost the desperate attentiveness of someone out of her depth but refusing to give in. Her performances improve with time so that ordinary films come to center on her; even
Vertigo
(58), Hitchcock’s masterpiece, owes some of its power to Novak’s harrowing suspension between tranquillity and anxiety.

She was Miss Deepfreeze—beauty queen of unthawed flesh—when Columbia recruited her. After a tiny part in
The French Line
(53, Lloyd Bacon), Harry Cohn “organized” her as Columbia’s backyard goddess. In a curious allusion to Hitchcock, she was the equivocal girl in
Pushover
(54, Richard Quine), and then in
Phffft!
(54, Mark Robson) and
Five Against the House
(55, Phil Karlson). The studio loaned her out for
The Man with the Golden Arm
(56, Otto Preminger), and she returned to Columbia for four films that slowly brought her into bloom. In
Picnic
(56, Joshua Logan), she was the insecure country belle; she was an agonized
Jeanne Eagels
(57, George Sidney) and a bashful chorine in
Pal Joey
(57, Sidney) making a marvelous, solemn lament out of “My Funny Valentine.” But it was
Bell, Book and Candle
(57, Quine) that first caught her special ambiguity: the witch yearning to be mortal; the beautiful woman who cries again and thereby abandons her magical powers. Quine was clearly in sympathy with her and Jame Wong Howe made her a beauty of the late 1950s. Hitchcock then drew her into
Vertigo
as a substitute for pregnant Vera Miles. Less a performance than a helpless confession of herself, Novak’s contribution to that film is one of the major female performances in the cinema. Among its many themes,
Vertigo
is about a rough young woman who gives a superb performance as a kind of Grace Kelly blind to being watched, and then finds herself trapped. The “Judy” in
Vertigo
loves Scotty, but it is her tragedy that she can only meet his desire for her by returning to the dream woman, “Madeleine.”
Vertigo
contains a very subtle analysis of the ordeal and the self-obliteration in acting, and it works all the better because Novak was so direct, unschooled, and slavelike. There are actresses whose intelligence always shows—like Katharine Hepburn, Louise Brooks in
Pandora’s Box
, or Dietrich in the Sternberg films. Then there are actresses who seem stripped of any chance of control. They are simply there, caught in the lights by the camera and the movie—like Brooks in
Pandora’s Box
, Karina in
Pierrot le Fou
, and Novak in
Vertigo
.

Novak was gloomily touching in
Middle of the Night
(59, Delbert Mann); so good in
Strangers When We Meet
(60, Quine) that a novelettish subject acquired the sadness of Ophuls. In the 1960s she declined: the system that created stars was fading, Novak was putting on weight and was the victim of an automobile accident.
The Notorious Landlady
(62, Quine) was a silly film;
Boys’ Night Out
(62, Michael Gordon) a stag comedy;
Of Human Bondage
(64, Ken Hughes and Henry Hathaway) beyond her histrionic capacity;
Kiss Me, Stupid
(64, Billy Wilder), her last classic part—Polly the Pistol, wistful for domesticity and forgetting the routine of seduction;
The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders
(65, Terence Young), a project that required a Cukor;
The Legend of Lylah Clare
(68, Robert Aldrich), in which she struggles to play a Dietrich-like actress;
The Great Bank Robbery
(69, Hy Averback);
The White Buffalo
(77, J. Lee Thompson), and
Just a Gigolo
(79, David Hemmings).

She appeared in
The Mirror Crack’d
(80, Guy Hamilton); on TV in
Malibu
(83, E. W. Swackhamer); in
The Children
(90, Tony Palmer); and still beautiful as a dying woman in
Liebestraum
(91, Mike Figgis).

Ramon Novarro
(Ramon Samaniegos) (1899–1968), b. Durango, Mexico
As a youth, Samaniegos and his family fled from revolution to Los Angeles. The young man had a variety of jobs before working as an extra in movies. His first real part was dancing in
A Small Town Idol
(21, Erle C. Kenton) and he had a supporting part in
Mr. Barnes of New York
(22, Victor Schertzinger). He was then signed up by Rex Ingram, who had already launched Valentino. Ingram persuaded the change of name and strenuously promoted Novarro as a Latin lover. After playing Rupert of Hentzau in Ingram’s
The Prisoner of Zenda
(22), Novarro was in Ingram’s next four movies:
Trifling Women
(22);
Scaramouche
(23);
Where the Pavement Ends
(23); and
The Arab
(24).

Novarro was by now a leading star with MGM and he made
Thy Name Is Woman
(24, Fred Niblo),
The Red Lily
(24, Niblo), and
The Midshipman
(25, Christy Cabanne). Then, after its initial disaster, Niblo and Novarro were chosen by the MGM hierarchy to replace Charles Brabin and George Walsh on
Ben-Hur
(27). Novarro was as successful as that film, but he lacked the special faunlike beauty of Valentino. His face tended to a rather flabby reproach, and he was clearly not as personally caught up in the idea of himself as romantic hero as was Valentino. He remained at MGM and was successful until the full arrival of sound:
Lovers?
(27, John M. Stahl);
The Road to Romance
(27, John S. Robertson);
The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg
(27, Ernst Lubitsch);
Across to Singapore
(28, William Nigh);
Forbidden Hours
(28, Harry Beaumont);
The Flying Fleet
(29, George Hill);
The Pagan
(29, W. S. Van Dyke), in which he sang “Pagan Love Song”; and
Devil-May-Care
(29, Sidney Franklin). Thereafter, his appeal declined and his acting seemed increasingly dull:
In Gay Madrid
(30, Robert Z. Leonard);
Call of the Flesh
(30, Brabin);
Son of India
(31, Jacques Feyder);
Daybreak
(31, Feyder); opposite Garbo in
Mata-Hari
(32, George Fitzmaurice).

His last years at MGM were a search for former glory:
The Son-Daughter
(32, Clarence Brown);
The Barbarian
(33, Sam Wood);
Laughing Boy
(34, Van Dyke); and
The Cat and the Fiddle
(34, William K. Howard), opposite Jeanette MacDonald. After
The Night Is Young
(35, Dudley Murphy), he left the studio, went to Spain and directed
Contra la Corriente
(36). He was back in Hollywood for
The Sheik Steps Out
(37, Irving Pichel) and
A Desperate Adventurer
(38, John Auer) and went to France to act in
La Comédie du Bonheur
(40, Marcel L’Herbier). During the war he lived in Mexico and afterwards he returned to Hollywood for only small parts:
We Were Strangers
(49, John Huston);
The Big Steal
(49, Don Siegel);
Crisis
(50, Richard Brooks); and
Heller in Pink Tights
(60, George Cukor). Novarro’s retirement was brutally ended in 1968 by a homosexual murder.