The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (309 page)

Some of those plays worked very well—and would do so on screen—but they became increasingly melodramatic. Meanwhile, as part of his Hollywood dues, Odets wrote a screenplay for
The General Died at Dawn
(36, Lewis Milestone). Out of his friendship with Cary Grant, he wrote and directed
None but the Lonely Heart
, a seriously underrated picture. And he built up an 800-page screenplay on the life of George Gershwin as the first step in the process that led to
Rhapsody in Blue
(45, Irving Rapper). Oscar Levant read that script and reckoned that Odets had told his own story—with songs. That script was dumped, but a few years later Odets resurrected some of it for
Humoresque
(46, Jean Negulesco), in which the ethos of
Golden Boy
, John Garfield (and Oscar Levant) meets the world and romance of Joan Crawford.

For other credits, Odets did
Deadline at Dawn
(46, Harold Clurman—an old colleague from the Group Theatre). He also had a hand in
Sweet Smell of Success
(57, Alexander Mackendrick), working on the streets at night from Ernest Lehman’s original script. He directed
The Story on Page One
(59), and he wrote the Elvis Presley film
Wild in the Country
(61).

More than that, “stranded” in Hollywood, Odets became one of the first script doctors (an attached name so big it has to be hush-hush) and the entertaining model of self-betrayal. Again, Kazan saw how it worked:

Cliff spent the last dozen years of his life writing films to pay bills that were too large for a man who hoped to continue working in the theatre. He made his home in a Beverly Hills “Spanish mansion.” He drove a Lincoln Continental and had what he claimed to be the outstanding collection of Paul Klees in the country. He worked frequently and was well paid by New York theatre standards. But he was always broke or near it.…

His rewriting jobs were the trail of his friendships—and he was close to Nicholas Ray, so that he advised on
Rebel Without a Cause
and actually took to the typewriter on
Bigger Than Life …
until the James Mason character reminded some people of Clifford Odets.

Maureen O’Hara
(Maureen Fitzsimmons), b. Dublin, Ireland, 1920
A gorgeous red-haired, green-eyed heroine, the perfect test material for color processes, but short of inner significance. She was a woman in a man’s world, inclined to thrust her hands on her hips, speak her mind, and be told, “You’re pretty when you’re angry.” She is remembered now, with affection, as a very ardent, true (and rather limited) woman in several Ford pictures.

From the theatre, she went into British films:
My Irish Molly
(38, Alex Bryce);
Kicking the Moon Around
(38, Walter Forde); and
Jamaica Inn
(39, Alfred Hitchcock). She moved to Hollywood and was quickly employed to adorn color spectaculars, and to inhabit John Ford’s curious, reinvented Ireland:
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(39, William Dieterle);
A Bill of Divorcement
(40, John Farrow);
Dance, Girl, Dance
(40, Dorothy Arzner); “Ireland” in Wales in
How Green Was My Valley
(41, Ford);
The Black Swan
(42, Henry King);
The Immortal Sergeant
(42, John M. Stahl);
The Fallen Sparrow
(43, Richard Wallace);
This Land Is Mine
(43, Jean Renoir);
Buffalo Bill
(44, William Wellman);
The Spanish Main
(45, Frank Borzage);
Sentimental Journey
(46, Walter Lang);
The Foxes of Harrow
(47, Stahl);
Miracle on 34th Street
(47, George Seaton);
Sitting Pretty
(48, Lang);
Britannia Mews
(49, Jean Negulesco);
A Woman’s Secret
(49, Nicholas Ray); “Ireland” in Texas in
Rio Grande
(50, Ford); “Ireland” actually in Ireland in
The Quiet Man
(52, Ford);
Against All Flags
(52, George Sherman);
Kangaroo
(52, Lewis Milestone);
Flame of Araby
(52, Charles Lamont);
The Redhead from Wyoming
(53, Lee Sholem);
Malaga
(54, Richard Sale); “Ireland” at West Point in
The Long Gray Line
(55, Ford); letting down her glorious hair for
Lady Godiva
(56, Arthur Lubin);
The Magnificent Matador
(55, Budd Boetticher);
Lisbon
(56, Ray Milland);
The Wings of Eagles
(57, Ford), in which Wayne calls her “my Teetian-haired darling”;
Our Man in Havana
(60, Carol Reed);
The Deadly Companions
(61, Sam Peckinpah);
The Parent Trap
(61, David Swift);
Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation
(62, Henry Koster);
Spencer’s Mountain
(63, Delmer Daves); still making a tempestuous romantic partnership with John Wayne in
McClintock!
(63, Andrew V. McLaglen);
The Battle of the Villa Fiorita
(65, Daves);
The Rare Breed
(66, McLaglen);
How Do I Love Thee?
(70, Michael Gordon);
Big Jake
(71, George Sherman); and
The Red Pony
(73, L. Robert Totten).

She made a lovely comeback in
Only the Lonely
(91, Chris Columbus), playing John Candy’s mother. Since then she has done
The Christmas Box
(95, Marcus Cole);
Cab to Canada
(98, Christopher Leitch);
The Last Dance
(00, Kevin Dowling)—all for TV.

Dan O’Herlihy
(1919–2005), b. Wexford, Ireland
He had studied architecture in Dublin and done a little work in stage design, in the course of which he wandered onstage. He was seen by Carol Reed who cast him as one of the gang in
Odd Man Out
(47). He followed this with
Hungry Hill
(47, Brian Desmond Hurst), and he was a handsome fellow with a rich, commanding voice. He went to Hollywood quickly and got the parts of Alan Breck in
Kidnapped
(48, William Beaudine) and Macduff in
Macbeth
(48, Orson Welles). He seemed to be on the rise, but in a strange way he never went higher. It’s a mystery that he wasn’t better employed over the years, especially since he never seems to have given up on acting.

He was in
The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel
(51, Henry Hathaway);
The Blue Veil
(51, Curtis Bernhardt);
The Highwayman
(51, Lesley Selander);
Actors and Sin
(52, Ben Hecht and Lee Garmes). It was at that point that he went to Mexico to make
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
(52, Luis Buñuel). It is a fine performance, with an Oscar nomination—yet in its way it’s just part of the oddity of O’Herlihy’s progress and it seemed to have no real impact on his career.

He came back to Hollywood for modest parts:
Bengal Brigade
(54, Laslo Benedek);
The Black Shield of Falworth
(54, Rudolph Maté);
The Purple Mask
(55, H. Bruce Humberstone); Lord Derry in
The Virgin Queen
(55, Henry Koster); to England for
That Woman Opposite
(57, Compton Bennett);
Home Before Dark
(58, Mervyn LeRoy);
Imitation of Life
(59, Douglas Sirk). And then he was Caligari in
The Cabinet of Caligari
(62, Roger Kay)—which must have seemed more promising in outline than it turned out.

And then the list of credits turns really strange:
Fail Safe
(64, Sidney Lumet);
100 Rifles
(69, Tom Gries); as Marshal Ney in
Waterloo
(69, Sergei Bondarchuk);
The Carey Treatment
(72, Blake Edwards);
The Tamarind Seed
(74, Edwards); as FDR in
MacArthur
(77, Joseph Sargent);
Halloween III
(82, Tommy Lee Wallace);
The Last Starfighter
(84, Nick Castle)—in lizard makeup;
The Whoopee Boys
(86, John Byrum);
The Dead
(87, John Huston);
RoboCop
(87, Paul Verhoeven)—suddenly in a lead part;
RoboCop 2
(90, Irvin Kershner). As late as 1998, he was in a TV movie,
The Rat Pack
(Rob Cohen), playing Joseph Kennedy.

Gary Oldman
, b. New Cross, London, 1958
After a dozen or so films, did the public have a better idea of Gary Oldman’s own personality than before he began? That is not ingratitude, merely a way of observing that Oldman seems like a blank, anonymous passerby (like someone in Dallas on November 22, 1963, running interference for a real Lee Harvey Oswald), who waits to be occupied by demons. He is a suit hanging in a closet, waiting to be possessed, which means that he brings an uncommon, self-effacing service to his roles. Part of that attitude is his complete and easy readiness not to be liked. So he is both vacant and uningratiating: it will be intriguing to see how long such a career can last.

He had done a good deal of theatre in England, and a few modest movies
—Remembrance
(82, Colin Gregg),
Meantime
(83, Mike Leigh), and
Honest, Decent and True
(85, Les Blair)—before he turned in a performance of unnerving, aggressive immersion as Sid Vicious in
Sid and Nancy
(85, Alex Cox). The switch to Joe Orton in
Prick Up Your Ears
(87, Stephen Frears) was dazzling proof of a genius for impersonation.

Since then, Oldman has had to put up with a lot of poor roles and bad films. Yet his reticence, mixed with his great facility, makes it unlikely that he will ever be more than the victim of whimsical, or desperate, casting calls:
Track 29
(88, Nicolas Roeg);
We Think the World of You
(88, Gregg);
Criminal Law
(89, Martin Campbell); brilliant on TV in
The Firm
(89, Alan Clarke);
Chattahoochee
(89, Mick Jackson);
State of Grace
(90, Phil Joanou); with Tim Roth in
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
(90, Tom Stoppard); on British TV in
Heading Home
(90, David Hare); as Lee Harvey Oswald in
JFK
(91, Oliver Stone).

Then, for Francis Ford Coppola, he played the archetypically pale, enervated prowler after other lives, in
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(92). He had many looks in that film, but none meant more than the self-intoxicated spectacle of the direction. He was a drug dealer, theatrically black, in
True Romance
(93, Tony Scott); and a crooked cop in
Romeo Is Bleeding
(94, Peter Medak).

Oldman has become an international actor, I suppose, but time and again his talent goes to waste. He has directed one film—the remarkable, abrasive
Nil by Mouth
(97), a fair measure of his very tough London. But what is that man doing as Beethoven in the fatuous
Immortal Beloved
(94, Bernard Rose)—and when does a modern actor realize that you don’t play Christ, Beethoven, or Francis of Assisi? This is a record of skills perverted and of Oldman’s blankness turning increasingly toxic—his own loathing of where he is rises off his movies like mustard gas:
Léon
(94, Luc Besson);
Murder in the First
(95, Marc Rocco); Dimmesdale in the pathetic
Scarlet Letter
(95, Roland Joffe);
Basquiat
(96, Julian Schnabel);
The Fifth Element
(97, Besson); the hijacker in
Air Force One
(97, Wolfgang Petersen);
Lost in Space
(98, Stephen Hopkins); a voice in
Quest for Camelot
(98, Frederik DuChau); Pilate in
Jesus
(99, Roger Young);
The Contender
(00, Rod Lurie); Mason Verger in
Hannibal
(01, Ridley Scott);
Nobody’s Baby
(01, David Seltzer);
Interstate 60
(02, Bob Gale); as Satan, with James Brown, in
The Hire: Beat the Devil
(02, Tony Scott);
Tiptoes
(03, Matthew Bright);
Sin
(03, Michael Stevens);
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
(04, Alfonso Cuarón);
Dead Fish
(04, Charley Stadler).

In recent years, Oldman has married for a fourth time. He has had treatment for alcoholism. And he has given his name and voice to several video games. His work is mainstream, and
Nil by Mouth
seems far away:
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
(05, Mike Newell);
Batman Begins
(05, Christopher Nolan);
The Backwoods
(06, Koldo Serra);
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
(07, David Yates);
The Dark Knight
(08, Nolan);
The Unborn
(09, David S. Goya); Cratchit in
A Christmas Carol
(09, Robert Zemeckis);
Rain Fall
(09, Max Mannix);
The Book of Eli
(10, The Hughes Brothers).

Lena Olin
, b. Stockholm, Sweden, 1956
She is the daughter of the Swedish actor Stig Olin, who was in several Ingmar Bergman films—
Crisis
(45);
To Joy
(49);
This Can’t Happen Here
(50)—and directed a few of his own. It was Bergman who promoted the young Lena at the Stockholm Royal Dramatic Theatre and then cast her in his own work: she has a small role as a saleswoman in
Face to Face
(75); she is a nursemaid in
Fanny and Alexander
(82); and she is the young actress (pregnant—as in life) in
After the Rehearsal
(84).

Granted those credentials, and her own beauty and ability, it would seem natural for Olin to become a star in English-language pictures. And she has worked in America for over a decade, often with great impact, without establishing herself: astounding as the sophisticate in
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(88, Philip Kaufman); nominated as supporting actress for
Enemies: A Love Story
(89, Paul Mazursky); she was the (Ingrid) Bergmanesque lead in
Havana
(90, Sydney Pollack), and that film’s failure seems to have affected her prospects badly;
Mr. Jones
(93, Mike Figgis);
Romeo Is Bleeding
(93, Peter Medak);
Night Falls on Manhattan
(97, Sidney Lumet);
Polish Wedding
(98, Theresa Connelly);
Hamilton
(98, Harald Zwart);
Mystery Men
(99, Kinka Usher);
The Ninth Gate
(99, Roman Polanski);
Chocolat
(00, Lasse Hallström—her husband);
Ignition
(01, Yves Simoneau);
Darkness
(01, Jaume Balagueró);
Queen of the Damned
(02, Michael Rymer); in
Alias
on TV;
The United States of Leland
(03, Matthew Ryan Hoge);
Hollywood Homicide
(03, Ron Shelton). She was in
Casanova
(05, Hallstrom);
Bang Bang Orangutang
(05, Simon Staho);
Awake
(07, Joby Harold); and exceptional in
The Reader
(08, Stephen Daldry).