home/movie/2014/magician the astonishing life and work of orson welles
Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
Not Rated
Documentary
6.7/10(34 ratings)
The extraordinary life of Orson Welles (1915-85), an enigma of Hollywood, an irreducible independent creator: a musical prodigy, an excellent painter, a master of theater and radio, a modern Shakespeare, a magician who was always searching for a new trick to surprise his audience, a romantic and legendary figure who lived only for cinema.
12-12-2014
1h 32m
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Main Cast
Movie Details
Production Info
Director:
Chuck Workman
Writer:
Chuck Workman
Production:
Cohen Welles Project
Budget:
$813,505
Key Crew
Producer:
Charles S. Cohen
Editor:
Chuck Workman
Locations and Languages
Country:
US
Filming:
US
Languages:
en
Main Cast
Simon Callow
Simon Phillip Hugh Callow CBE (born 15 June 1949) is an English actor, writer, theatre and opera director.
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Norman Nathan Lloyd (né Perlmutter; November 8, 1914 – May 11, 2021) was an American actor, producer and director with a career in entertainment spanning nearly a century. He worked in every major facet of the industry including theatre, radio, television, and film, with a career that started in 1923. Lloyd's final film, Trainwreck, was released in 2015, after he had attained 100 years of age.
Julie Taymor (born December 15, 1952) is an American director of theater, opera and film. Taymor's work has received many accolades from critics, and she has earned two Tony Awards out of four nominations, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Costume Design, an Emmy Award, and an Academy Award nomination for Original Song. She is widely known for directing the stage musical, The Lion King, for which she became the first woman to win the Tony Award for directing a musical, in addition to a Tony Award for Original Costume Design. She had been the director of the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark before leaving in March 2011, after four months of previews (the longest preview period for any show in Broadway history), following artistic differences with the producers.
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Peter Bogdanovich ComSE (July 30, 1939 – January 6, 2022) was an American director, writer, actor, producer, critic, and film historian. He started his career as a film critic for Film Culture and Esquire before becoming a prominent filmmaker as part of the New Hollywood movement. He received accolades including a BAFTA Award and Grammy Award, as well as nominations for two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.
Bogdanovich worked as a film journalist until he was hired to work on Roger Corman's The Wild Angels (1966). His credited feature film debut came with Targets (1968), before his career breakthrough with the drama The Last Picture Show (1971) which earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, and the acclaimed films What's Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973). Other films include Saint Jack (1979), They All Laughed (1981), Mask (1985), Noises Off (1992), The Cat's Meow (2001), and She's Funny That Way (2014).
As an actor, he was known for his roles in HBO series The Sopranos and Orson Welles's last film The Other Side of the Wind (2018), which he also helped finish. He received a Grammy Award for Best Music Film for directing the Tom Petty documentary Runnin' Down a Dream (2007).
Bogdanovich directed documentaries such as Directed by John Ford (1971) and The Great Buster: A Celebration (2018). He also published numerous books, some of which include in-depth interviews with friends Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles. Bogdanovich's works have been cited as important influences by many major filmmakers.
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Henry Jaglom is a London-born American film director and playwright.
Jaglom was born to a Jewish family in London, England, the son of Marie (née Stadthagen) and Simon M. Jaglom, who worked in the import-export business. His father was from a wealthy family from Russia and his mother was from Germany. They left for England because of the Nazi regime. Through his mother, he is a descendant of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.
Jaglom trained with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York, where he acted, wrote and directed off-Broadway theater and cabaret before settling in Hollywood in the late 1960s. Under contract to Columbia Pictures, Jaglom featured in such TV series as Gidget and The Flying Nun and acted in a number of films which included Boris Sagal's The Thousand Plane Raid (1969), Jack Nicholson's Drive, He Said (1971), Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie (1971), Orson Welles' never-completed The Other Side of the Wind and more.
Jaglom's transition from acting in films to creating them was largely influenced by his experience watching the Italian film 8½ (1963). “The film changed my identity. I realized that what I wanted to do was make films. Not only that, but I realized what I wanted to make films about: my own life, to some extent.”
Jaglom began his filmmaking career working with Nicholson on the editing of Hopper's Easy Rider (1969), and made his writing/directing debut with A Safe Place (1971), starring Tuesday Weld, Nicholson and Welles. His next film, Tracks (1976), starred Hopper and was one of the earliest movies to explore the psychological cost on America of the Vietnam War. His third film, the first to be a commercial success, was Sitting Ducks (1980), a comic romp.
Jaglom co-starred in four of his most personal films—Always, But Not Forever (1985), Someone to Love (1987) starring Orson Welles in his farewell film performance, New Year's Day (1989), which introduced David Duchovny, and Venice/Venice (1992) opposite French star Nelly Alard.
In 1983, Jaglom taped lunch conversations with Orson Welles at Los Angeles's Ma Maison. Edited transcripts of these sessions appear in Peter Biskind's book My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles (2013).
As a playwright, has written four plays that have been successfully performed on Los Angeles stages: The Waiting Room (1974), A Safe Place (2003), Always—But Not Forever (2007) and Just 45 Minutes from Broadway (2009/2010). Jaglom is the subject of the Henry Alex Rubin's and Jeremy Workman's documentary Who Is Henry Jaglom? (1997).
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Peter Stephen Paul Brook CH CBE (March 21, 1925 – July 2, 2022) was an English theatre and film director. He worked first in England, from 1945 at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, from 1947 at the Royal Opera House, and from 1962 for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). With them, he directed the first English-language production in 1964 of Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss, which was transferred to Broadway in 1965 and won the Tony Award for Best Play, and Brook was named Best Director. He also directed films such as an iconic version of Lord of the Flies in 1963.
He was based in France from the early 1970s, where he founded an international theatre company, playing in developing countries, in an approach of great simplicity. He was often referred to as "our greatest living theatre director". He won multiple Emmy Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, the Japanese Praemium Imperiale, the Prix Italia and the Europe Theatre Prize. In 2021, he was awarded India's Padma Shri.
Walter Scott Murch (born July 12, 1943) is an American film editor, director, writer and sound designer. With a career stretching back to 1969, including work on THX 1138, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, and The English Patient, with three Academy Award wins (from nine nominations: six for picture editing and three for sound mixing), he has been referred to by Roger Ebert as "the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema."
Konstantinos Gavras (born 12 February 1933), known professionally as Costa-Gavras, is a Greek filmmaker, who lives and works in France. He is best known for directing films with overt political themes, most famously the fast-paced thriller “Z” (1969). Most of his movies were made in French, though starting with “Missing” (1982), several were made in English.
Oja Kodar (/ˈɔɪ.ə ˈkoʊdɑːr/ OY-ə KOH-dar; born Olga Palinkaš; 1941) is a Croatian actress, screenwriter and director known as Orson Welles's partner during the later years of his life.
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Buck Henry (born Henry Zuckerman; December 9, 1930 – January 8, 2020) was an American actor, screenwriter, and director. Henry's contributions to film included, his work as a co-director on Heaven Can Wait (1978) alongside Warren Beatty, and his work as a co-writer for Mike Nichols's The Graduate (1967) and Peter Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc? (1972). His long career began on television with work on shows with Steve Allen in The New Steve Allen Show (1961). He went on to co-create Get Smart (1965-1970) with Mel Brooks, and hosted Saturday Night Live 10 times from 1976 to 1980. He later guest starred in such popular shows as Murphy Brown, Hot in Cleveland, Will & Grace, and 30 Rock.
He was twice nominated for an Academy Award, for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Graduate (1967) and for Best Director for Heaven Can Wait (1978) alongside Warren Beatty.
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Richard Benjamin (born May 22, 1938) is an American actor and film director. He has starred in a number of productions, including Goodbye, Columbus (1969), based on the novella (1959) by Philip Roth, and Westworld (1973).
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Wolfgang Johannes Puck is an Austrian-American chef, restaurateur, and actor. Born in Austria, Puck moved to the United States at the age of 24. In 1973, Puck moved to Los Angeles, opening his first restaurant, Spago, in 1982.
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Irwin Lawrence "Paul" Mazursky (April 25, 1930 – June 30, 2014) was an American film director, screenwriter, and actor. Known for his dramatic comedies that often dealt with modern social issues, he was nominated for five Academy Awards for Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), An Unmarried Woman (1978), Harry and Tonto (1974), and Enemies, A Love Story (1989). He is also known for directing such films as Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976), Moscow on the Hudson (1984), Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), Moon over Parador (1988), and Scenes from a Mall (1991).
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Frank Wilton Marshall (born September 13, 1946) is an American film producer and director, often working in collaboration with his wife, Kathleen Kennedy. With Kennedy and Steven Spielberg, he was one of the founders of Amblin Entertainment. He is a partner with Kennedy in The Kennedy/Marshall Company, a film production company formed in 1991, which signed a new contract with Columbia Pictures effective April 1, 2009 and in force through to October 31, 2011.
George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985), best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio. Noted for his innovative dramatic productions as well as his distinctive voice and personality, Welles is widely acknowledged as one of the most accomplished dramatic artists of the twentieth century, especially for his significant and influential early work—despite his notoriously contentious relationship with Hollywood. His distinctive directorial style featured layered, nonlinear narrative forms, innovative uses of lighting such as chiaroscuro, unique camera angles, sound techniques borrowed from radio, deep focus shots, and long takes. Welles's long career in film is noted for his struggle for artistic control in the face of pressure from studios. Many of his films were heavily edited and others left unreleased. He has been praised as a major creative force and as "the ultimate auteur."
After directing a number of high-profile theatrical productions in his early twenties, including an innovative adaptation of Macbeth and The Cradle Will Rock, Welles found national and international fame as the director and narrator of a 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds performed for the radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was reported to have caused widespread panic when listeners thought that an invasion by extraterrestrial beings was occurring. Although these reports of panic were mostly false and overstated, they rocketed Welles to instant notoriety.
Citizen Kane (1941), his first film with RKO, in which he starred in the role of Charles Foster Kane, is often considered the greatest film ever made. Several of his other films, including The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Touch of Evil (1958), Chimes at Midnight (1965), and F for Fake (1974), are also widely considered to be masterpieces.
In 2002, he was voted the greatest film director of all time in two separate British Film Institute polls among directors and critics, and a wide survey of critical consensus, best-of lists, and historical retrospectives calls him the most acclaimed director of all time. Andrew Sarris in his influential book of film criticism The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 included him in the "pantheon" of the 14 greatest film directors who had worked in the United States. Well known for his baritone voice, Welles was also an extremely well regarded actor and was voted number 16 in AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars list of the greatest American film actors of all time. He was also a celebrated Shakespearean stage actor and an accomplished magician, starring in troop variety shows in the war years.
William Alland was an American actor, film producer and writer, mainly of Western and science-fiction/monster films, including This Island Earth, It Came From Outer Space, Tarantula!, The Deadly Mantis, The Mole People, The Colossus of New York, The Space Children, and the three Creature from the Black Lagoon films.
Steven Allan Spielberg (born December 18, 1946) is an American film director, writer and producer. A major figure of the New Hollywood era and pioneer of the modern blockbuster, he is the most commercially successful director of all time. Spielberg is the recipient of various accolades, including three Academy Awards, a Kennedy Center honor, four Directors Guild of America Awards, two BAFTA Awards, a Cecil B. DeMille Award and an AFI Life Achievement Award. Seven of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. He moved to California and studied film in college. After directing several episodes for television including Night Gallery and Columbo, he directed the television film Duel (1971) which gained acclaim from critics and audiences. He made his directorial film debut with The Sugarland Express (1974), and became a household name with the 1975 summer blockbuster Jaws. He then directed huge box office successes Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and the Indiana Jones original trilogy (1981-89). Spielberg subsequently explored drama in the acclaimed The Color Purple (1985) and Empire of the Sun (1987).
After a brief hiatus, Spielberg directed the science fiction thriller Jurassic Park (1993), the highest-grossing film ever at the time, and the Holocaust drama Schindler's List (1993), which has often been listed as one of the greatest films ever made. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for the latter and for the 1998 World War II epic Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg continued in the 2000s with science fiction films A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2002) and War of the Worlds (2005). He also directed the adventure films The Adventures of Tintin (2011) and Ready Player One (2018); the historical dramas Amistad (1997), Munich (2005), War Horse (2011), Lincoln (2012), Bridge of Spies (2015) and The Post (2017); the musical West Side Story (2021); and the semi-autobiographical drama The Fabelmans (2022). He has been a producer on several successful films, including Poltergeist (1982), Gremlins (1984), Back to the Future (1985) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) as well as the miniseries Band of Brothers (2001).
Spielberg co-founded Amblin Entertainment and DreamWorks, and has served as a producer for many successful films and television series. He is also known for his long collaboration with the composer John Williams, with whom he has worked for all but five of his feature films. Several of Spielberg's works are among the highest-grossing and greatest films all time. Premiere ranked him first place in the list of 100 Most Powerful People in Movies in 2003. In 2013, Time listed him as one of the 100 most influential people.
John Houseman (September 22, 1902 – October 31, 1988) was a Romanian-born British-American actor and film producer who became known for his highly publicized collaboration with director Orson Welles from their days in the Federal Theatre Project through to the production of Citizen Kane. He is perhaps best known for his role as Professor Charles Kingsfield in the 1973 film The Paper Chase for which he won a best supporting actor Oscar. He reprised his role as Kingsfield in the subsequent TV series adaptation of The Paper Chase. Houseman was also known for his commercials for the brokerage firm Smith Barney. He had a distinctive Mid-Atlantic English accent, in common with many actors of his generation.
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William David Friedkin (August 29, 1935 – August 7, 2023) was an American film, television and opera director, producer, and screenwriter who was closely identified with the "New Hollywood" movement of the 1970s. Beginning his career in documentaries in the early 1960s, he is best known for his crime thriller film The French Connection (1971), which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and the horror film The Exorcist (1973), which earned him another Academy Award nomination for Best Director.
Friedkin's other films in the 1970s and 1980s include the drama The Boys in the Band (1970), considered a milestone of queer cinema; the originally deprecated, now lauded thriller Sorcerer (1977); the crime comedy drama The Brink's Job (1978); the controversial thriller Cruising (1980); and the neo-noir thriller To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). Although Friedkin's works suffered an overall commercial and critical decline in the late 1980s, his last three feature films, all based on plays, were positively received by critics: the psychological horror film Bug (2006), the crime film Killer Joe (2011), and the legal drama film The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023), released two months after his death. He also worked extensively as an opera director from 1998 until his death, and directed various television films and series episodes for television.
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Robert Earl Wise (September 10, 1914 – September 14, 2005) was an American sound effects editor, film editor, film producer and director. He won Academy Awards as Best Director for The Sound of Music (1965) and West Side Story (1961) as well as nominations as Best Film Editing for Citizen Kane (1941) and Best Picture for The Sand Pebbles (1966).
Among his other films are Born to Kill; Destination Gobi; The Hindenburg; Star Trek: The Motion Picture; The Day the Earth Stood Still; Run Silent, Run Deep; The Andromeda Strain; The Set-Up; The Haunting; and The Body Snatcher. Wise's working period spanned the 1930s to the 1990s.
Often contrasted with contemporary "auteur" directors such as Stanley Kubrick who tended to bring a distinctive directorial "look" to a particular genre, Wise is famously viewed to have allowed his (sometimes studio assigned) story to dictate style. Later critics such as Martin Scorsese would go on to expand that characterization, insisting that despite Wise's notorious workaday concentration on stylistic perfection within the confines of genre and budget, his choice of subject matter and approach still functioned to identify Wise as an artist and not merely an artisan. Through whatever means, Wise's approach would bring him critical success as a director in many different traditional film genres: from horror to noir to Western to war films to science fiction, to musical and drama, with many repeat hits within each genre. Wise's tendency towards professionalism led to a degree of preparedness which, though nominally motivated by studio budget constraints, nevertheless advanced the moviemaking art, with many Academy Award-winning films the result. Robert Wise received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1998.
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Pandro Samuel Berman (March 28, 1905 – July 13, 1996), also known as Pan Berman, was an American film producer.
Berman was an assistant director during the 1920s under Mal St. Clair and Ralph Ince. In 1930, Berman was hired as a film editor at RKO Radio Pictures, then became an assistant producer. When RKO supervising producer William LeBaron walked out during production of the ill-fated The Gay Diplomat (1931), Berman took over LeBaron's responsibilities, remaining in the post until 1939.
After David O. Selznick became chief of production at RKO in October 1931, Berman managed to survive Selznick's general firing of most of the staff. Selznick named Berman producer for the adaptation of Fannie Hurst's short story Night Bell, a tale of a Jewish doctor's rise out of the Lower East Side ghetto to the height of becoming a Park Avenue physician, which Selznick personally retitled Symphony of Six Million. He ordered Berman to have references to ethnic life in the Jewish ghetto restored. The movie was a box-office and critical success. Both Selznick and Berman were proud of the picture, with Berman later saying it was the "first good movie" he had produced.
The Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals were in production during the Berman regime, Katharine Hepburn rose to prominence, and such RKO classics as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Gunga Din (both 1939) were completed.
Upset when an RKO power play diminished his authority, Berman left for MGM in 1940, where he oversaw such productions as Ziegfeld Girl (1941), National Velvet (1944), The Bribe (1949), Father of the Bride (1950), Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Butterfield 8 (1960).
He survived several executive shake-ups at MGM and remained there until 1963, then went into independent production, closing out his career with the unsuccessful Move (1970).
Berman was the winner of the 1976 Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. Six of his films were nominated for Academy Award for Best Picture: The Gay Divorcee (1934), Alice Adams and Top Hat (both 1935), Stage Door (1937), Father of the Bride (1950), and Ivanhoe (1952).
Berman died of congestive heart failure on July 13, 1996 in his Beverly Hills home, aged 91. He was buried at the Hillside Memorial Park, Culver City, California.
Martin Charles Scorsese (born November 17, 1942) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. One of the major figures of the New Hollywood era, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential directors in film history. Scorsese's body of work explores themes such as Italian-American identity, Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption, faith, machismo, nihilism, crime and sectarianism. Many of his films are known for their depiction of violence and the liberal use of profanity. Scorsese has also dedicated his life to film preservation and film restoration by founding the nonprofit organization The Film Foundation in 1990, as well as the World Cinema Foundation in 2007 and the African Film Heritage Project in 2017.
Scorsese studied at New York University (NYU), where he received a bachelor's degree in English literature in 1964, and received a master's degree in fine arts in film from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 1968. In 1967 Scorsese's first feature film Who's That Knocking at My Door was released and was accepted into the Chicago Film Festival, where critic Roger Ebert saw it and called it "a marvelous evocation of American city life, announcing the arrival of an important new director".
He has established a filmmaking history involving repeat collaborations with actors and film technicians, including nine films made with Robert De Niro. His films with De Niro are the psychological thriller Taxi Driver (1976), the biographical sports drama Raging Bull (1980), the satirical black comedy The King of Comedy (1982), the musical drama New York, New York (1977), the psychological thriller Cape Fear (1991), and the crime films Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995) and The Irishman (2019). Scorsese has also been noted for his collaborations with actor Leonardo DiCaprio, having directed him in five films: the historical epic Gangs of New York (2002), the Howard Hughes biography The Aviator (2004), the crime thriller The Departed (2006), the psychological thriller Shutter Island (2010), and the Wall Street black comedy The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). The Departed won Scorsese an Academy Award for Best Director, and for Best Picture. Scorsese is also known for his long-time collaboration with film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited every Scorsese film beginning with Raging Bull. Scorsese's other film work includes the black comedy After Hours (1985), the romantic drama The Age of Innocence (1993), the children's adventure drama Hugo (2011), and the religious epics The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Kundun (1997) and Silence (2016).
Beatrice Giuditta Welles (also known as Beatrice Mori di Gerfalco Welles; born November 13, 1955) is an American former child actress, known for her roles in the film Chimes at Midnight (1966) and the documentary travelogue In the Land of Don Quixote (1964). The daughter of American filmmaker Orson Welles and Italian countess Paola Mori, she is a former model, radio and TV personality, founder of a cosmetics line and designer of handbags and jewelry.
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Charlton Heston was an American actor of film, theatre and television. Heston is known for heroic roles in films such as The Ten Commandments, Planet of the Apes and Ben-Hur, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Heston was also known for his political activism. In the 1950s and 1960s he was one of a handful of Hollywood actors to speak openly against racism and was an active supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. Initially a moderate Democrat, he later supported conservative Republican policies and was president of the National Rifle Association from 1998 to 2003.
George Walton Lucas Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an American filmmaker and entrepreneur. Lucas is known for creating the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises and founding Lucasfilm, LucasArts and Industrial Light & Magic. He served as chairman of Lucasfilm before selling it to The Walt Disney Company in 2012.
After graduating from the University of Southern California in 1967, Lucas co-founded American Zoetrope with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas wrote and directed THX 1138 (1971), based on his earlier student short Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which was a critical success but a financial failure. His next work as a writer-director was the film American Graffiti (1973), inspired by his youth in early 1960s Modesto, California, and produced through the newly founded Lucasfilm. The film was critically and commercially successful, and received five Academy Award nominations including Best Picture.
Lucas's next film, the epic space opera Star Wars (1977), had a troubled production but was a surprise hit, becoming the highest-grossing film at the time, winning six Academy Awards and sparking a cultural phenomenon. Lucas produced and co-wrote the sequels The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). With director Steven Spielberg, he created, produced and co-wrote the Indiana Jones films Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Temple of Doom (1984), The Last Crusade (1989) and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). He also produced and wrote a variety of films and television series through Lucasfilm between the 1970s and the 2010s.
In 1997, Lucas rereleased the Star Wars trilogy as part of a special edition featuring several alterations; home media versions with further changes were released in 2004 and 2011. He returned to directing with a Star Wars prequel trilogy comprising The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2002), and Revenge of the Sith (2005). He last collaborated on the CGI-animated television series Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008–2014, 2020), the war film Red Tails (2012), and the CGI film Strange Magic (2015).
Lucas is one of history's most financially successful filmmakers and has been nominated for four Academy Awards. His films are among the 100 highest-grossing movies at the North American box office, adjusted for ticket-price inflation. Lucas is considered a significant figure of the 20th-century New Hollywood movement.
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Anthony Perkins (April 4, 1932 – September 12, 1992) was an American actor and singer. He is best known for his role as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and his Oscar-nominated role in Friendly Persuasion (1956). He made his film debut in The Actress (1953) directed by George Cukor before experiencing success on Broadway with Elia Kazan’s production of Tea and Sympathy (1955).
He quickly became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, working alongside actors such as Henry Fonda (The Tin Star), Sophia Loren (Desire Under the Elms), Shirley MacLaine (The Matchmaker), Audrey Hepburn (Green Mansions), and Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, and Ava Gardner (On the Beach).
He left Hollywood in 1960 and had a successful career in Europe, where he co-starred with Ingrid Bergman (Aimez-vous Brahms?), Melina Mercouri (Phaedra), Brigitte Bardot (Une ravissante idiote), and Romy Schneider, Jeanne Moreau, Elsa Martinelli, and Orson Welles (Le procès). He returned to Hollywood in 1968 with Pretty Poison, which became a cult classic.
In the decades that followed, his career continued to flourish alongside personalities like Diana Ross (Mahogany), Jeff Goldblum (Remember My Name), Elizabeth Taylor (Winter Kills), John Candy (Double Negative), and Lauren Bacall (Murder on the Orient Express). In 1973, he co-wrote The Last of Sheila with Stephen Sondheim.
During his career, he won a Golden Globe, a Cannes Award, and a David di Donatello Award, and was nominated for two Tony Awards and one Academy Award. Perkins died on September 12, 1992, of AIDS complications.
Richard Linklater (born July 30, 1960) is an American self-taught film director, producer and screenwriter. Linklater was among the first and most successful talents to emerge during the American independent film renaissance of the 1990s. Typically setting each of his movies during one 24-hour period, Linklater's work explored what he dubbed "the youth rebellion continuum," focusing in fine detail on generational rites and mores with rare compassion and understanding while definitively capturing the 20-something culture of his era through a series of nuanced, illuminating ensemble pieces which introduced any number of talented young actors into the Hollywood firmament.
Jeanne Moreau (23 January 1928 – 31 July 2017) was a French actress, singer, screenwriter, and director.
She made her theatrical debut in 1947, and established herself as one of the leading actresses of the Comédie-Française. She began playing small roles in films in 1949 and eventually achieved prominence as the star of Lift to the Scaffold (UK)/Elevator to the Gallows (USA) (1958), directed by Louis Malle, and Jules et Jim (1962), directed by François Truffaut. Most prolific during the 1960s, Moreau continued to appear in films until her death in 2017, at the age of 89.
Moreau was the recipient of a César Award for Best Actress, a BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress and a Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Award for individual performances, and several lifetime awards.
Sydney Irwin Pollack (July 1, 1934 – May 26, 2008) was an American film director, producer and actor. For his film Out of Africa (1985), Pollack won the Academy Award for Best Director and Best Picture. He was also nominated for Best Director Oscars for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) and Tootsie (1982).
Some of his other best-known works include Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Way We Were (1973), Three Days of the Condor (1975) and Absence of Malice (1981). His subsequent films included Havana (1990), The Firm (1993), The Interpreter (2005), and he produced and acted in Michael Clayton (2007). Pollack also made appearances in Robert Altman's Hollywood mystery The Player (1992), Woody Allen's relationship drama Husbands and Wives (1993), and Stanley Kubrick's erotic psychological drama Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
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John Marcellus Huston (August 5, 1906 – August 28, 1987) was an American film director, screenwriter, actor, and visual artist. He wrote the screenplays for most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics: The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The African Queen (1951), The Misfits (1961), Fat City (1972), The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Prizzi's Honor (1985).
In his early years, Huston studied and worked as a fine art painter in Paris. He explored the visual aspects of his films throughout his career, sketching each scene on paper beforehand, then carefully framing his characters during the shooting. While most directors rely on post-production editing to shape their final work, Huston instead created his films while they were being shot, with little editing needed. Some of Huston's films were adaptations of important novels, often depicting an "heroic quest," as in Moby Dick, or The Red Badge of Courage. In many films, different groups of people, while struggling toward a common goal, would become doomed, forming "destructive alliances," giving the films a dramatic and visual tension. Many of his films involved themes such as religion, meaning, truth, freedom, psychology, colonialism, and war.
Huston has been referred to as "a titan", "a rebel", and a "renaissance man" in the Hollywood film industry. Author Ian Freer describes him as "cinema's Ernest Hemingway"—a filmmaker who was "never afraid to tackle tough issues head on." During his 46-year career, Huston received 15 Oscar nominations, winning twice. He directed both his father, Walter Huston, and daughter, Anjelica Huston, to Oscar wins.
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Dennis Lee Hopper (May 17, 1936 – May 29, 2010) was an American actor, filmmaker and artist. As a young man, Hopper became interested in acting and eventually became a student of the Actors' Studio. He made his first television appearance in 1954, and appeared in two films featuring James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956). During the next 10 years, Hopper appeared frequently on television in guest roles, and by the end of the 1960s had played supporting roles in several films. He directed and starred in Easy Rider (1969), winning an award at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay as co-writer. "With its portrait of counterculture heroes raising their middle fingers to the uptight middle-class hypocrisies, Easy Rider became the cinematic symbol of the 1960s, a celluloid anthem to freedom, macho bravado and anti-establishment rebellion." Film critic Matthew Hays notes that "no other persona better signifies the lost idealism of the 1960s than that of Dennis Hopper." He was unable to build on his success for several years, until a featured role in Apocalypse Now (1979) brought him attention. He subsequently appeared in Rumble Fish (1983) and The Osterman Weekend (1983), and received critical recognition for his work in Blue Velvet and Hoosiers, with the latter film garnering him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He directed Colors (1988) and played the villain in Speed (1994). Hopper's later work included a leading role in the television series Crash. Hopper's last performance was filmed just before his death: The Last Film Festival, slated for a 2011 release. Hopper was also a prolific and acclaimed photographer, a profession he began in the 1960s.
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François Marie Adrien Maurice Mitterrand (26 October 1916 – 8 January 1996) was President of France, serving under that position from 1981 to 1995, the longest time in office in the history of France. As First Secretary of the Socialist Party, he was the first left-wing politician to assume the presidency under the Fifth Republic.
Reflecting family influences, François Mitterrand started political life on the Catholic nationalist right. He served under the Vichy Regime during its earlier years. Subsequently he joined the Resistance, moved to the left, and held ministerial office several times under the Fourth Republic. Mitterand opposed Charles de Gaulle's establishment of the Fifth Republic. Although at times a politically isolated figure, he outmanoeuvered rivals to become the left's standard bearer in the 1965 and 1974 presidential elections, before being elected president in the 1981 presidential election. He was re-elected in 1988 and remained in office until 1995.
François Mitterrand invited the Communist Party into his first government, which was a controversial decision at the time. In the event, the Communists were boxed in as junior partners and, rather than taking advantage, saw their support erode. They left the cabinet in 1984. Early in his first term, he followed a radical left-wing economic agenda, including nationalisation of key firms, but after two years, with the economy in crisis, he reversed course. He pushed a socially liberal agenda with reforms such as the abolition of the death penalty, the 39-hour work week, and the end of a government monopoly in radio and television broadcasting. His foreign and defense policies built on those of his Gaullist predecessors, except as regards their reluctance to support European integration, which he reversed. His partnership with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl advanced European integration via the Maastricht Treaty, and he reluctantly accepted German reunification. During his time in office, he was a strong promoter of culture and implemented a range of costly "Grands Projets". He was the first French President to appoint a female Prime Minister, Édith Cresson, in 1991. François Mitterrand was twice forced by the loss of a parliamentary majority into "cohabitation governments" with conservative cabinets led, respectively, by Jacques Chirac (1986–1988), and Édouard Balladur (1993–1995). Less than eight months after leaving office, he died from the prostate cancer he had successfully concealed for most of his presidency.
Beyond making the French Left electable, François Mitterrand presided over the rise of the Socialist Party to dominance of the left, and the decline of the once-mighty Communist Party (As a share of the popular vote in the first presidential round, the Communists shrank from a peak of 21.27% in 1969 to 8.66% in 1995, at the end of François Mitterrand's second term.) ...
Source: Article "François Mitterrand" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
