The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (414 page)

On the credit side, Thalberg persisted with Stroheim on
The Merry Widow;
helped his friend King Vidor to make, among others,
The Big Parade
and
The Crowd;
led MGM into sound with
The Broadway Melody
(although he did not immediately see its importance); carefully promoted Garbo’s American career; insisted that MGM make
Freaks
(32, Tod Browning); and helped win Oscars for Norma Shearer in
The Divorcee
(30, Robert Z. Leonard), Lionel Barrymore in
A Free Soul
(31, Clarence Brown), Marie Dressler in
Min and Bill
(30, George Hill), and Helen Hayes in
The Sin of Madelon Claudet
(31, Edward Selwyn).

By late 1932 Thalberg’s relations with MGM had deteriorated. He had largely lost the support of Mayer through a series of claims for larger salary and a greater share of the profits. He was also shocked by the suicide of Paul Bern (friend and producer) and distressed by the decline in production standards during the Depression. He asked to be freed for a year so that he could travel. Nick Schenk and Mayer tried to dissuade him, but also hired David Selznick as a possible replacement. Thalberg left for Europe and while still away, in 1933, was relieved of his duties in charge of production.

On his return, he was given an autonomous unit. Never again as powerful, Thalberg nevertheless spent his last three years producing entertainment films of glossy smartness, if little real sparkle:
Riptide
(34, Edmund Goulding);
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
(34, Sidney Franklin);
The Merry Widow
(34, Ernst Lubitsch); the robust
China Seas
(35, Tay Garnett);
Mutiny on the Bounty
(35, Frank Lloyd);
Romeo and Juliet
(36, George Cukor);
The Good Earth
(37, Franklin, et al.), and
Camille
(36, Cukor), one of Garbo’s finest pictures.

He died in 1936, from pneumonia, to immense obituary tributes, a dedication on
The Good Earth
, and the foundation of the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for high production achievement. It is the final irony in this mysterious career that he should be remembered largely through the disputed portrait in
The Last Tycoon
. It is hard now to credit the idea of a great producer. Easier to see how he graciously guided every department at MGM toward smoothness. But most plausible of all to see him as the untypical figure idealized by the inhabitants of a dream world craving dignity and seriousness. Thus, the strange adulation of this fictional portrait from Fitzgerald, a writer never happy at MGM: “He had flown up very high to see, on strong wings, when he was young. And while he was up there he had looked on all the kingdoms, with the kind of eyes that can stare straight at the sun. Beating his wings tenaciously—finally frantically—and keeping on beating them, he had stayed up there longer than most of us, and then, remembering all he had seen from his great height of how things were, he settled gradually to earth.”

That Fitzgerald could write with such romantic grandiloquence speaks not only of Thalberg’s personal impact but of the self-induced thralldom in which he could be King Arthur. A contrary view comes from Lillian Hellman, who thought that Fitzgerald had “got sticky moon-candy about a man who was only a bright young movie producer.”

Charlize Theron
, b. Benoni, South Africa, 1975
It’s no surprise to learn that a Hollywood agent saw Ms. Theron in a line and immediately gave her his card. Many men might go further for this tall blonde who moves with predatory grace. Her early impact was personified in the way, as the unnamed supermodel in Woody Allen’s
Celebrity
(98) she swept up every man in sight. But there’s much more than greets the eye—including strength of character and an un-American serenity.

She was a farmer’s daughter in South Africa, and the survivor of great trouble: her mother shot and killed her father in self-defense, and was acquitted for it. That doesn’t guarantee acting, but it’s a rather more challenging life than most American beauties face. In even a nasty piece of manipulative suspense, like
Trapped
(02, Luis Mandoki), you can see Theron’s decency and fighting spirit.

Trained as a dancer, she was briefly with the Joffrey Ballet before trying L.A. She is uncredited in
Children of the Corn III
(95, James Hickox);
2 Days in the Valley
(96, John Herzfeld);
That Thing You Do!
(96, Tom Hanks); on TV in
Hollywood Confidential
(97, Reynaldo Villalobos), then
Trial and Error
(97, Jonathan Lynn) caught the eye and made for promotion: Southern and very lush in
The Devil’s Advocate
(97, Taylor Hackford);
Mighty Joe Young
(98, Ron Underwood);
The Astronaut’s Wife
(99, Rand Ravich); and
The Cider House Rules
(99, Lasse Hallström).

She marked time for a few pictures then—
Reindeer Games
(00, John Frankenheimer);
The Yards
(00, James Gray);
Men of Honor
(00, George Tillman Jr.); as Adele Invergordon in
The Legend of Bagger Vance
(00, Robert Redford);
Sweet November
(01, Pat O’Connor);
15 Minutes
(01, Herzfeld);
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
(01, Allen)—as Laura Kensington (she has acquired some classy names).

Trapped
was trash, but she came out of it well, and then did
Waking Up in Reno
(02, Jordan Brady); very feisty in
The Italian Job
(03, F. Gary Gray); and startlingly good as Aileen Wuornos in
Monster
(03, Patty Jenkins), which she helped produce. I don’t think anyone would have recognized her in that film without credits. In itself, that is not acting, but Theron moved and thought in ways she had never touched on before. It was a great performance. Three minutes after it began you knew she had the Oscar. That was followed by
Head in the Clouds
(04, John Duigan), and Britt Ekland in
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers
(04, Stephen Hopkins).

As with many Oscar winners, her work has not flowered: nominated again with no chance of winning in
North Country
(05, Niki Caro); trying sci-fi action in
Aeon Flux
(05, Karyn Kusama);
In the Valley of Elah
(07, Paul Haggis), seemingly resolved to subdue her own looks; as producer too in
Sleepwalking
(08, William Maher); with Will Smith in
Hancock
(08, Peter Berg); producer again in
The Burning Plain
(09, Guillermo Arriaga);
The Road
(09, John Millcoat); and narrating
Astro Boy
(09, David Bowers).

David Thewlis
, b. Blackpool, England, 1963
Trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, David Thewlis was both a rock guitarist and an actor at first. He won attention as a villain in
Prime Suspect 3
(93, David Drury). He had joined Mike Leigh’s unofficial company and showed his great sense of humor, in shorts and full-length works. Since then, Thewlis’s rare dedication has turned him into an international figure and one of the more esteemed actors in film. But his status is still uncertain—much of his work unworthy:
Little Dorrit
(88, Christine Edzard);
Life Is Sweet
(91, Leigh);
Afraid of the Dark
(91, Mark Peploe); alarmingly good as the spellbinding drifter in
Naked
(93, Leigh);
The Trial
(93, David Hugh Jones);
Black Beauty
(94, Caroline Thompson);
Restoration
(95, Michael Hoffman); as Verlaine in
Total Eclipse
(95, Agnieszka Holland);
Dragonheart
(96, Rob Cohen); a voice in
James and the Giant Peach
(96, Henry Selick);
The Island of Dr. Moreau
(96, John Frankenheimer);
Seven Years in Tibet
(97, Jean-Jacques Annaud);
The Big Lebowski
(98, Joel Coen); excellent again in
Besieged
(99, Bernardo Bertolucci);
Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?
(99, Peter Hewitt); the voice of Judas in the TV
The Miracle Maker
(00, Derek W. Hayes and Stanislav Sokolev);
Gangster No. 1
(00, Paul McGuigan);
Endgame
(00, Conor McPherson) for TV;
Goodbye Charlie Bright
(01, Nick Love). He acted in, wrote, and directed
Cheeky
(03).

One is tempted to say that Thewlis (like others) has relied on Harry Potter: he has been Remus Lupin in three films—directed by Alfonso Cuarón and David Yates. In other respects, he has often slipped away from lead roles or films worthy of him:
Timeline
(03, Richard Donner);
Kingdom of Heaven
(05, Ridley Scott);
The New World
(05, Terrence Malick);
Basic Instinct 2
(06, Michael Caton-Jones);
The Omen
(06, John Moore);
The Inner Life of Martin Frost
(07, Paul Austen);
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
(08, Mark Herman);
Veronika Decides to Die
(09, Emily Young);
Mr. Nice
(10, Bernard Rose).

Emma Thompson
, b. London, 1959
By the spring of 1993, Emma Thompson seemed like a guaranteed summer. She had her Oscar, playing Margaret Schlegel in
Howards End
(92, James Ivory); she was about to open as Beatrice in the Tuscan sunniness of her husband Kenneth Branagh’s
Much Ado About Nothing
(93). Ahead lay the promise of the movie of
Remains of the Day
(93, Ivory), in which she was cast once more with Anthony Hopkins. She was on magazine covers everywhere, yet she remained modest, funny, ironic, a protestant in the High Church of Celebrity. One remembered her shamelessly camp performance of surprise—and the garish frock—when she heard that she had won the Oscar. It was the response not just of a natural, but of a chronic, subversive comedienne. Let us hope she finds the chance to stay that unruly.

She is the daughter of actors—of Phyllida Law and Eric Thompson, who also created a lovely BBC television show for young children,
The Magic Roundabout
. She was well educated at Camden School for Girls and Newnham College, Cambridge. From Footlights shows at Cambridge she took to the stage, to television, and eventually to film. Her role in Kenneth Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company led to their marriage in 1989. She did some song-and-dance on the London stage in
Me and My Girl;
she did a lot of writing for her TV comedy series,
Thompson
(88); she played the Fool to Branagh’s
Lear
on stage, and Alison to his Jimmy Porter in
Look Back in Anger
. Moreover, by now, she and Branagh can hardly breathe in Britain without being told how much they resemble that fabled, “golden” couple—Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Let us hope that today’s goldens have a proper sense of the awkwardness of that first partnership. Vivien Leigh was a helpless rival to Olivier, and a well-cast victim for his jealousy and cunning. Emma Thompson may yet discover the need to look after herself.

To these eyes, she has never been as good as she was in the TV adaptation of Olivia Manning’s Balkan novels:
Fortunes of War
(87, James Cellan Jones). In addition, she was very funny in two minor films—
The Tall Guy
(89, Mel Smith) and
Impromptu
(91, James Lapine). Then she was the dutiful female presence, variously stranded or neglected, in several of Branagh’s projects: the films of
Look Back in Anger
(89, David Jones and Judi Dench), where she looks merely wan and weary; as the French princess in
Henry V
(89, Branagh); and in the dire and fatuous
Dead Again
(91, Branagh) and
Peter’s Friends
(93, Branagh)—ventures that might yet arouse something more than loyalty in a wife. Summers in Britain can turn into horrid disappointments.

Her housekeeper in
Remains of the Day
was faultless, yet not very interesting: the woman in question is so fixed in her own place, and so much the innocent bow to Hopkins’s stealthy fiddle. She needed more Mrs. Danvers—but then she wouldn’t have been hired, in that home, or in that film.

She was very good as the lawyer in
In the Name of the Father
(93, Jim Sheridan), even if the role was unduly fabricated.

Her marriage to Branagh concluded, but that may have been a release. Her recent work has been very mixed—often trying comedy—yet also seizing on drama such as only Meryl Streep could handle: with Schwarzenegger in
Junior
(94, Ivan Reitman); uncredited in
My Father the Hero
(94, Steve Miner);
The Blue Boy
(94, Paul Murton); brilliant and tragic as
Carrington
(95, Christopher Hampton), a badly neglected film; doing the script and pulling
Sense and Sensibility
(95, Ang Lee) together;
Hospital!
(97, John Henderson); with her mother in
The Winter Guest
(97, Alan Rickman); very funny as the president’s wife in
Primary Colors
(98, Mike Nichols);
Judas Kiss
(98, Sebastian Gutiérrez);
Maybe Baby
(00, Ben Elton); and magnificent as the dying woman in
Wit
(01, Nichols).

There was a pause, for regathering, before
Imagining Argentina
(03, Hampton); a dazzling array of cameos in
Angels in America
(03, Nichols); and
Love Actually
(03, Richard Curtis);
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
(04, Alfonso Cuarón); as the screenwriter on
Nanny McPhee
(05, Kirk Jones);
Stranger Than Fiction
(06, Marc Forster);
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
(07, David Yates); a cameo in
I Am Legend
(07, Francis Lawrence); Lady Marchmain in
Brideshead Revisited
(08, Julian Jarrold); overindulging Dustin Hoffman in
Last Chance Harvey
(08, Joel Hopkins); the headmistress in
An Education
(09, Lone Scherfig);
Pirate Radio
(09, Curtis).