The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (454 page)

Strangely, he has had his best opportunities on television: winning Emmys as James Garner’s schizophrenic brother in
Promise
(86, Glenn Jordan) and as the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous in
My Name is Bill W
. (89, Daniel Petrie); in a Hemingway short story, “Hills Like White Elephants” in
Women and Men: Stories of Seduction
(90, Tony Richardson); in the part from heaven, Roy C. in
Citizen Cohn
(92, Frank Pierson). For movies, he was the villain in
The Getaway
(94, Roger Donaldson).

Time and again in the dreary nineties, Woods’s exuberance lit up the screen and established him as a founder member of that select club for nasties we love to hate (Christopher Walken and Steve Buscemi are other stalwarts): goosing Stallone in
The Specialist
(94, Luis Llosa);
Curse of the Starving Class
(95, J. Michael McClary); very good as the tireless defense lawyer in
Indictment: The McMartin Trial
(95, Mick Jackson); the perfect scumbag, Lester Diamond, in
Casino
(95, Martin Scorsese); so good as Haldeman in
Nixon
(96, Stone) that you could see a better film with Haldeman as the central figure;
The Summer of Ben Tyler
(96, Arthur Allan Seidelman); glittery and odious as Byron De La Beckwith in
Ghosts of Mississippi
(96, Rob Reiner);
Killer: A Journal of Murder
(96, Tim Metcalfe);
Kicked in the Head
(97, Matthew Harrison);
Contact
(97, Robert Zemeckis);
Vampires
(98, John Carpenter);
Another Day in Paradise
(98, Larry Clark); the editor in
True Crime
(99, Clint Eastwood);
The Virgin Suicides
(99, Sofia Coppola);
The General’s Daughter
(99, Simon West);
Any Given Sunday
(99, Stone); the museum director defending Mapplethorpe in
Dirty Pictures
(00, Pierson);
Riding in Cars with Boys
(01, Penny Marshall).

He never stops:
Race to Space
(01, Sean McNamara);
Jon Q
(02, Nick Cassavetes);
Northfork
(03, Michael Polish); and one more in his gallery of real-life charismatics,
Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story
(03, Robert Dornhelm). With Roy Cohn, Haldeman, and Giuliani already notched up, a nightmare looms in which James Woods is every demon in American history. He then did
Pretty Persuasion
(04, Marcos Siega) and then seemed to lose interest. He has done voice jobs and been on TV, but it’s as if he’s given up on the steady stream of uneasy gain he perfected. Our loss.

Joanne Woodward
, b. Thomasville, Georgia, 1930
Educated at Louisiana State University, she studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse Dramatic School and appeared on Broadway in
Picnic
. Hers is a career full of contradictions: one of Hollywood’s most respected actresses, few films have actually explained her reputation. Known as a wife and mother and as an articulate participant in radical, third-party politics, she is most striking on the screen in slatternly roles that encourage her to exaggerate her Southern accent. Her marriage to Paul Newman has too often involved her in poor films:
The Long Hot Summer
(58, Martin Ritt);
From the Terrace
(59, Mark Robson);
Paris Blues
(61, Ritt);
A New Kind of Love
(64, Melville Shavelson);
Winning
(69, James Goldstone);
WUSA
(70, Stuart Rosenberg), in which she is like a dutiful wife who goes along on the husband’s fishing trips. His direction of her in the decent and touching
Rachel, Rachel
(68) and
The Effect of
Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
(72) went only some way to canceling this debt. Even in her best film with her husband,
Rally Round the Flag, Boys!
(58, Leo McCarey), her sense of humor is neglected.

On the credit side there is
Count Three and Pray
(55, George Sherman); the Oscar-rewarded tour de force in
The Three Faces of Eve
(57, Nunnally Johnson); an original and touching victim in Gerd Oswald’s
A Kiss Before Dying
(56); a radiant, outcast heroine, opposite Brando, in Lumet’s
The Fugitive Kind
(59); in Schaffner’s
The Stripper
(62); a good comic performance in
A Fine Madness
(66, Irvin Kershner). But she is dreadfully suited to the worthy smothering of hysteria in
Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams
(73, Gilbert Cates). Sadly, she is more attractive and interesting in interviews than in films. And even her portraits of Southern helplessness seem sedate when put beside Barbara Loden’s
Wanda
. She was a good Dr. Watson in
They Might Be Giants
(71, Anthony Harvey) and the ex-wife in
The End
(78, Burt Reynolds).

She was in
Streets of L.A
. (79, Jerrold Freedman);
Crisis at Central High
(80, Lamont Johnson);
The Shadow Box
(80, Newman)—all for TV. She was in
Harry & Son
(84, Newman) in theatres, but then returned to TV for
Passions
(84, Sandor Stern) and
Do You Remember Love?
(85, Jeff Bleckner), for which she won an Emmy. She played Amanda in
The Glass Menagerie
(87, Newman) and then costarred with her husband in
Mr. and Mrs. Bridge
(90, James Ivory).

She was the narrative voice for
The Age of Innocence
(93, Martin Scorsese), allegedly spreading style and wit over the glossy imagery, but actually sounding like the resort of a director unsure whether his story was working. She also played the mother in
Philadelphia
(93, Jonathan Demme). For TV, she was in
Foreign Affair
(93, Jim O’Brien) and
Breathing Lessons
(94, John Erman).

Cornell Woolrich
(1903–68), b. New York City
Cornell Woolrich found the world a hard place, so he counted on dying. And while he waited, he tried to fend off his worst imaginings by writing books and stories that exist between noir and pulp. In that field he is one of the handful of writers who anticipated and enlarged both the dream and the dread in movies.

He was not a tough guy, not hardboiled; he was sickly, timid, and fearful, the sort of man who looked out of his window, saw something odd, and wondered if it was the start of a murder. That’s the set-up in one of his great stories—“It Had to Be Murder”—which became
Rear Window
(54, Alfred Hitchcock). But in the movie, the guy is Jimmy Stewart and he has a girl, Grace Kelly. We know they’re going to be all right, because they are so beautiful. But in the story, the watcher is alone and not strong, and so when the killer turns his eyes on the voyeur, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We have to sit and wait and worry. It’s part of Woolrich’s genius that killers and their storytellers have an affinity. They need each other.

There may be a corpse in the gutter at the end of the unlit street, with the killer lurking in a doorway. You can go down that street if you wish, summoning up all your courage. You may find the crucial clues. But if you are too nervous to go out, you may sit at home in your bleak room, imagining the corpse and the shadows. The writer may wonder whether the killer won’t come back up the street, listening for the giveaway tapping on a typewriter. After all, the writer seems to know how the killer thinks, and so the murderer comes back to his author, to destroy his witness.

Woolrich was unhappy in every aspect of his life—he had a bad marriage; he was fearful of coming out of the closet; he lived most of his adult life in a hotel in New York with his mother. He walked the streets anonymously, inhaling the acrid air and the threat of violence. Then he went back to the hotel and tapped it all onto onionskin paper. He was a nervous wreck, a man who died from his own physical self-neglect.

And yet he lives on, a ghost walking beside us. One novel,
Waltz into Darkness
(under the name William Irish—he hid a lot), was turned into the fatal romance,
Mississippi Mermaid
(69, François Truffaut). He wrote the material that became such films as
The Bride Wore Black
(68, Truffaut);
The Window
(49, Ted Tetzlaff);
Street of Chance
(42, Jack Hiveley);
The Leopard Man
(43, Mark Robson);
Phantom Lady
(44, Robert Siodmak);
The Chase
(46, Arthur Ripley);
No Man of Her Own
(50, Mitchell Leisen);
Deadline at Dawn
(46, Harold Clurman);
I Married a Dead Man
(82, Robin Davis); and
Night Has a Thousand Eyes
(48, John Farrow). There are others, from America and from abroad, and the Irish influence of Woolrich has often been lifted or borrowed without acknowledgement.

He is the essential noir author, to be pursued in secondhand bookstores, old libraries, and the collections of connoisseurs who live alone and fear a knock at the door from someone prepared to kill for a book. He is the great poet of the shy recluse, pale from living in the dark, who cherishes the idea of murder.

Fay Wray
(1907–2004), b. Mountain View, Canada
It is 1933, and movies know enough about us and themselves to goose us. But is it Merian Cooper, David Selznick, or just Robert Armstrong’s magnificent Carl Denham (so much more monstrous than Kong) who says, “This is how the dame will look and see and scream—and this is how we’ll show it”? The dame is Fay Wray, on deck, in satiny décolletage, getting ready to open up a lovely mouth and
scream
. This is one of the great moments of screen irony, just as
King Kong
(33, Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack) is an untouchable, the epitome of cute sensation that makes great movies. Fay Wray is forever the wisp of near-naked woman in the beast’s paw. Seventy years later the image is as stirring and as surreal as ever.

In truth, Fay Wray made a lot of minor films, especially after about 1935. But everyone has always loved her for
Kong
, and for her exceptional good nature. She was a social figure in Hollywood, too, in part because of marriages to two screenwriters—John Monk Saunders (from 1927–40) and Robert Riskin (1942–55)—and her long romance with Clifford Odets.

She came to Los Angeles in 1920 and within a few years was working, rising to a position of near stardom at Paramount:
The Coast Patrol
(25, Bud Barsky);
Lazy Lightning
(26, William Wyler);
A One Man Game
(27, Ernest Laemmle);
The First Kiss
(28, Rowland V. Lee);
Legion of the Condemned
(28, William Wellman);
The Street of Sin
(28, Mauritz Stiller);
The Wedding March
(28, Erich von Stroheim);
The Four Feathers
(29, Schoedsack and Cooper);
Thunderbolt
(29, Josef von Sternberg);
The Texan
(30, John Cromwell);
Dirigible
(31, Frank Capra);
The Unholy Garden
(31, George Fitzmaurice);
Doctor X
(32, Michael Curtiz);
The Most Dangerous Game
(32, Schoedsack and Irving Pichel);
The Bowery
(33, Raoul Walsh);
Mystery of the Wax Museum
(33, Curtiz);
One Sunday Afternoon
(33, Stephen Roberts); and
The Affairs of Cellini
(34, Gregory La Cava).

Decline followed, with several films made in Britain:
The Countess of Monte Cristo
(34, Karl Freund);
Madame Spy
(34, Freund);
The Richest Girl in the World
(34, William A. Seiter);
Viva Villa!
(34, Jack Conway);
White Lies
(34, Leo Bulgakov);
Bulldog Jack
(35, Walter Forde);
The Clairvoyant
(35, Maurice Elvey);
They Met in a Taxi
(36, Alfred E. Green);
When Knights Were Bold
(36, Jack Raymond);
Smashing the Spy Ring
(39, Christy Cabanne);
Adam Had Four Sons
(41, Gregory Ratoff);
Not a Ladies Man
(42, Lew Landers);
Small Town Girl
(53, Leslie Kardos);
Treasure of the Golden Condor
(53, Delmer Daves);
The Cobweb
(55, Vincente Minnelli);
Queen Bee
(55, Ranald MacDougall);
Hell on Frisco Bay
(56, Frank Tuttle);
Crime of Passion
(57, Gerd Oswald);
Rock, Pretty Baby
(57, Richard Bartlett);
Tammy and the Bachelor
(57, Joseph Pevney);
Dragstrip Riot
(58, Basil Bradbury); and
Summer Love
(58, Charles Haas).

Teresa Wright
(1918–2005), b. New York
For fifteen years, Teresa Wright was one of the more perceptive actresses in films, not glamorous enough to be a star, but too quickly pushed into motherly or plain roles. She had been on the stage for only a few years when Lillian Hellman recommended her for a movie debut in
The Little Foxes
(41, William Wyler). Next year, for Wyler again, she won the supporting actress Oscar in
Mrs. Miniver
and played opposite Gary Cooper in
The Pride of the Yankees
(Sam Wood). Hitchcock then borrowed her from Goldwyn to play the niece, Charlie, in
Shadow of a Doubt
(43). The screenplay for that film was by Thornton Wilder, in whose
Our Town
Wright had played on tour. In
Shadow of a Doubt
, she beautifully caught the smalltown adolescent unable to comprehend the complicity she feels for her murdering uncle. It showed just how subtly Hitchcock could work up anguish in a relatively plain-faced actress.

She then played in
Casanova Brown
(44, Sam Wood);
The Best Years of Our Lives
(46, Wyler);
Imperfect Lady
(47, Lewis Allen);
Pursued
(47, Raoul Walsh), written by her then-husband, Niven Busch;
Enchantment
(48, Irving Reis);
The Capture
(50, John Sturges);
The Men
(50, Fred Zinnemann);
Something to Live For
(52, George Stevens);
The Steel Trap
(52, Andrew L. Stone); as the mother (although only thirty-four years old, when her “daughter,” Jean Simmons, was twenty-four years old) in
The Actress
(53, George Cukor);
Count the Hours
(53, Don Siegel);
Track of the Cat
(54, William Wellman);
The Search for Bridie Murphy
(56, Noel Langley); and
The Wonderful Years
(58, Helmut Kautner). She went back to the stage and returned to films only for
Hail, Hero!
(69, David Miller); as Jean Simmons’s mother again in
The Happy Ending
(69, Richard Brooks);
Flood
(76, Earl Bellamy); as a dancer with memories in
Roseland
(77, James Ivory);
Somewhere in the Night
(80, Jeannot Szwarc);
Bill—On His Own
(83, Anthony Page);
The Good Mother
(88, Leonard Nimoy); and
Perry Mason: The Case of the Desperate Deception
(90, Christian Nyby II).