The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (213 page)

Johnson was a journalist and short-story writer who entered film as a writer in 1933, and became an associate producer two years later, usually for Fox:
Baby Face Harrington
(35, Raoul Walsh, w);
The Prisoner of Shark Island
(36, Ford w/as.p);
Slave Ship
(37, Tay Garnett, as.p);
Rose of Washington Square
(39, Gregory Ratoff, w/p);
Jesse James
(39, Henry King, w/as.p);
I Was an Adventuress
(40, Ratoff, as.p);
Tobacco Road
(41, Ford, w);
Roxie Hart
(42, William Wellman, w/p);
Holy Matrimony
(43, John M. Stahl, w/p);
The Pied Piper
(42, Irving Pichel, w/p);
Life Begins at Eight Thirty
(42, Pichel, w/p);
The Moon Is Down
(43, Pichel, w/p);
The Keys of the Kingdom
(44, Stahl, w);
Casanova Brown
(44, Sam Wood, w/p);
Along Came Jones
(45, Stuart Heisler, w);
The Dark Mirror
(46, Robert Siodmak, w/p);
The Senator Was Indiscreet
(48, George Kaufman, p);
Three Came Home
(50, Jean Negulesco, w/p);
The Gunfighter
(50, King, p);
The Mudlark
(50, Negulesco, w/p);
Rommel, Desert Fox
(51, Henry Hathaway, w/p); the “Ransom of Red Chief” episode from
O. Henry’s Full House
(52, Howard Hawks, w);
My Cousin Rachel
(52, Henry Koster, w/p);
Phone Call from a Stranger
(52, Negulesco, w/p);
We’re Not Married
(52, Edmund Goulding, w/p); and
How to Marry a Millionaire
(53, Negulesco, w/p). Johnson produced most and wrote all of his own films. But in the 1960s, he went back to writing alone:
Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation
(62, Koster);
The World of Henry Orient
(64, George Roy Hill); and
The Dirty Dozen
(67, Robert Aldrich), written with Lukas Heller.

Van
(Charles Van)
Johnson
(1916–2008), b. Newport, Rhode Island
MGM spotted Johnson in the chorus of
Pal Joey
on Broadway. He was one of Mr. Mayer’s projects—red-haired, freckled, naïve, and enthusiastic—a nice safe guy. So he joined the studio, and he had done a few small things
—Somewhere I’ll Find You
(42, Wesley Ruggles),
The War Against Mrs. Hadley
(42, Harold S. Bucquet)—when he was assigned to attend the premiere of
Keeper of the Flame
. But his car crashed, and Johnson had to have a small metal plate put in his head. He was 4-F for keeps, but ready, willing, and able. And so his career bloomed as so many possible rivals went off to war.

Whatever he owed to luck, the young public was crazy for Johnson, and his following showed in the work he got:
Madame Curie
(43, Mervyn LeRoy);
A Guy Named Joe
(43, Victor Fleming);
Pilot #5
(43, George Sidney);
The Human Comedy
(43, Clarence Brown);
The White Cliffs of Dover
(44, Brown); with June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven in
Two Girls and a Sailor
(44, Richard Thorpe);
Thirty Seconds over Tokyo
(44, LeRoy); with Esther Williams in
Thrill of a Romance
(45, Thorpe);
Weekend at the Waldorf
(45, Robert Z. Leonard);
Till the Clouds Roll By
(46, Richard Whorf).

After the war, the studio tried to build him up with more adult pictures:
State of the Union
(48, Frank Capra);
Command Decision
(48, Sam Wood); and
Battleground
(49, William Wellman), where he was fine as one of the soldiers. But he seemed more relaxed in lighter stuff:
The Romance of Rosy Ridge
(47, Roy Rowland), with Janet Leigh;
The Bride Goes Wild
(48, Norman Taurog), with Allyson;
Mother Is a Freshman
(49, Lloyd Bacon), with Loretta Young;
In the Good Old Summertime
(49, Leonard), with Judy Garland. He also did
The Big Hangover
(50, Norman Krasna), where he played a guy with a drinking problem.

Gradually he began to fade in the fifties, though not before opportunities in big dramatic roles:
Plymouth Adventure
(52, Brown); Lieutenant Maryk in
The Caine Mutiny
(54, Edward Dmytryk);
The Last Time I Saw Paris
(54, Richard Brooks), with Elizabeth Taylor; and even Bendrix in
The End of the Affair
(55, Dmytryk). His best work was as a drunk in
The Bottom of the Bottle
(56, Henry Hathaway), taken from a Simenon novel.

He was forty, and he looked it, despite the baby face. He also started working out of England more:
Miracle in the Rain
(56, Rudolph Maté), with Jane Wyman;
Action of the Tiger
(57, Terence Young), with Martine Carol;
Beyond This Place
(59, Jack Cardiff);
Subway in the Sky
(59, Muriel Box). Then there were fewer films:
Wives and Lovers
(63, John Rich);
Divorce American Style
(67, Bud Yorkin);
Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows
(68, James Neilson).

After that it was mostly TV or foreign productions, with the occasional gem like
The Purple Rose of Cairo
(85, Woody Allen), where his high-voiced charm still worked.

Angelina Jolie
(Voight), b. Los Angeles, 1975
No one writing about Angelina Jolie’s arrival on screen in the late 1990s was able to mask sheer wonder at the carnal embouchure that is her mouth. It is like a mouth made in braille on the flattest of screens, and it could blind anyone. She was the sexiest new thing, yet she was also a remarkable actress, full of daring (or its excess). There was a temptation (and it affected her films and her public posing) to play up the dangerous sensuality. Thus, she did her best work (and won an Oscar) as the lifer in
Girl, Interrupted
(99, James Mangold), whose friendship and instincts are the greatest threat to Winona Ryder’s survival. Jolie didn’t let that role turn into a she-devil, but it was a close call. Similarly, in the press she has not resisted the allure of behaving like an exotic tattoo on a private part of her husband, Billy Bob Thornton. But if they knit in the evenings, why not admit it?

She is also the daughter of Jon Voight and the actress Marcheline Bertrand, and thus the spectator to their divorce when she was still a child. For years, she was on poor terms with her father, but reportedly the rift has been mended. She studied with Lee Strasberg and made her actual debut, briefly, in
Lookin’ to Get Out
(82, Hal Ashby), on which Voight was star, cowriter, and coproducer.

Her career began properly with
Cyborg 2
(93, Michael Schroeder);
Hackers
(95, Iain Softley);
Without Evidence
(95, Gill Dennis);
Mojave Moon
(96, Kevin Dowling);
Foxfire
(96, Annette Haywood-Carter); an Emmy nomination for the second wife in
George Wallace
(97, John Frankenheimer);
Playing God
(97, Andy Wilson); and another Emmy nomination for
Gia
(98, Michael Cristofer).

She met Thornton while acting in
Pushing Tin
(97, Mike Newell);
Playing by Heart
(98, Willard Carroll);
Hell’s Kitchen
(98, Tony Cinciripini); making a big advance as the cop who acts for Denzel Washington in
The Bone Collector
(99, Phillip Noyce); just slutting around in
Gone in 60 Seconds
(00, Dominic Sena); a big hit for horny boys in
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
(01, Simon West); with Antonio Banderas in
Original Sin
(01, Cristofer), based on Cornell Woolrich;
Life or Something Like It
(02, Stephen Herek);
Beyond Borders
(03, Martin Campbell);
Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
(03, Jan de Bont);
Taking Lives
(04, D. J. Caruso);
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
(04, Kery Conran); as Olympias in
Alexander
(04, Oliver Stone).

It was on
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
(05, Doug Liman) that Angelina bumped into Brad Pitt. The film made a great deal of money, but far more in the way of public nonsense. Love descended on the couple to be followed by the label “Brangelina,” tattoos, adopted children, Pre-Raphaelite photo opportunities, and a renewed tabloid life that has not yet abated and that waits on something like Angelina going off with a voodoo tattoo artist, Tiger Woods, or Jennifer Aniston.

It seems humorless to recount her progress as an actress: she does pools of pained eyes in
The Good Shepherd
(06, Robert De Niro); she is earnest and valiant as Mariane Pearl in
A Mighty Heart
(07, Michael Winterbottom)—which Brad helped produce; she was Grendel’s mother in
Beowulf
(07, Zemeckis); a voice in
Kung Fu Panda
(08, John Stevenson and Mark Osborne);
Wanted
(08, Timur Bekmambetov); as bad as anyone has been in
Changeling
(08, Clint Eastwood) and in
Salt
(10, Phillip Noyce).

Al Jolson
(Asa Yoelson) (1886–1950), b. Srednik, Lithuania
It is as if printing had been invented to fill labels on ketchup bottles: that sound on film—the innovation that led to Fred Astaire’s heels on hard floors, to Bacall asking Bogart if he knew how to whistle, to Cherbourg being alive with song, to Tippi Hedren/Marnie saying, “There … there now” to the horse she had shot—should have been born on the lips of a Lithuanian Jew blackface minstrel encouraging his mother to love him.

The Jazz Singer
(Alan Crosland) opened in New York in October 1927, and it contained, as well as songs, these witless threats: “You ain’t heard nothing yet” and “Hey, Ma, listen to this!” The hero of
The Jazz Singer
is Jackie Rabinowitz, the son of a cantor, who opts for a career in vaudeville, changes his name to Jack Robin, and manages to be a Broadway star and to substitute for his ailing father at Yom Kippur. It seems implausible that the part would have been offered to anyone other than Jolson, but apparently both George Jessel and Eddie Cantor had turned it down.

As it happened, Jolson’s father was a cantor, too. But when the family brought the child Asa to America he soon yearned for the limelight. In the years before the First World War, Jolson put on blackface, and by the early 1920s he was a phenomenal star of vaudeville, musical comedy, and records, firing off such a barrage of sentimental songs of such banality that they could be explained away only by “personality.” There are people alive still who insist that Jolson was hugely compelling from the stage. So be it. But on film he seems like a caged beast, unaware how ably the medium conspires with the drama in songs. Jolson seems nineteenth century, while Judy Garland, say, is modern. But they had the same target—tearing your heart out.

Even before
The Jazz Singer
he had experimented with the movies. In 1923 he walked out on a D. W. Griffith project, and in 1926 he sang in a short film for Warners.
The Jazz Singer
increased Jolson’s status, even if it alarmed many people about the vulgarity sound films portended. Jolson made more pictures, but was in no sense a film actor. He was content to use movies as vehicles for his songs. In time, fashion changed and the industry opted instead for reticence:
The Singing Fool
(28, Lloyd Bacon);
Sonny Boy
(29, Archie Mayo);
Say It With Songs
(29, Bacon);
Mammy
(30, Michael Curtiz);
Big Boy
(30, Crosland);
Hallelujah, I’m a Bum
(33, Lewis Milestone);
Wonder Bar
(34, Bacon);
Go Into Your Dance
(35, Mayo), with his then wife, Ruby Keeler;
The Singing Kid
(36, William Keighley); and
Rose of Washington Square
(39, Gregory Ratoff). The last called on Jolson to sing all his great hits and is less spectacular than the collision of such hams as Jolson and Ratoff promises. In 1940, he played minstreller E. P. Christy in
Swanee River
(Sidney Lanfield); after which he appeared briefly as himself in the Gershwin biopic,
Rhapsody in Blue
(45, Irving Rapper).

During the war, he sang to the forces (who presumably fought all the harder at the thought of their mothers). In 1946, Columbia did a biopic of Jolson, in which Larry Parks mimed to the master’s voice:
The Jolson Story
(46, Alfred E. Green). It was a smash success and prompted a sequel in which Jolson congratulates Larry Parks:
Jolson Sings Again
(49, Henry Levin). He died after returning from a tour of Korea entertaining troops. Mothers everywhere remember him.

James Earl Jones
, b. Arkabutla, Mississippi, 1931
His is a voice that everyone recognizes, even if we cannot always name it. It is one of the great basses of our time, selling things on TV or emanating from behind the visor of Darth Vader in
Star Wars
(77, George Lucas),
The Empire Strikes Back
(80, Irvin Kershner), and
Return of the Jedi
(83, Richard Marquand).

He was educated at the University of Michigan, and from there he went on stage, coming to prominence as the Jack Johnson–like boxer in the play
The Great White Hope
in 1966. His movie career had begun in
Dr. Strangelove
(64, Stanley Kubrick), and he went on to do
The Comedians
(67, Peter Glenville);
The End of the Road
(70, Aram Avakian); the movie of
The Great White Hope
(70, Martin Ritt), for which he got a best actor Oscar nomination; as the president in
The Man
(72 Joseph Sargent);
Claudine
(74, John Berry);
The River Niger
(76, Krishna Shah);
The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings
(76, John Badham);
Deadly Hero
(76, Ivan Nagy);
Swashbuckler
(76, James Goldstone);
Exorcist II: The Heretic
(77, John Boorman); as Malcolm X in
The Greatest
(77, Tom Gries);
The Last Remake of Beau Geste
(77, Marty Feldman);
A Piece of the Action
(77, Sidney Poitier); as Alex Haley in
Roots: The Next Generation
(79) on TV;
The Bushido Blade
(79, Tom Kotani);
Conan the Barbarian
(82, John Milius);
City Limits
(85, Aaron Lipstadt);
My Little Girl
(86, Connie Kaiserman);
Soul Man
(86, Steven Miner);
Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold
(87, Gary Nelson);
Gardens of Stone
(87, Francis Ford Coppola);
Matewan
(87, John Sayles);
Coming to America
(88, John Landis);
Best of the Best
(89, Bob Radler);
Field of Dreams
(89, Phil Alden Robinson);
Three Fugitives
(89, Francis Veber);
The Hunt for Red October
(90, John McTiernan);
Scorchers
(91, David Beaird);
Patriot Games
(92, Phillip Noyce);
Sneakers
(92, Robinson);
Excessive Force
(93, Jon Hess);
The Sandlot
(93, David Mickey Evans); and
Meteorman
(93, Robert Townsend).