The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (226 page)

What is an actor? He is Gandhi, Meyer Lansky, Moses, a Sexy Beast, Sweeney Todd, and a Caterpillar.

Still, he gave one more great performance as Behrani in
House of Sand and Fog
(03, Vadim Perelman), and he soldiered on in
Suspect Zero
(04, E. Elias Merhige);
Thunderbirds
(04, Jonathan Frakes);
A Sound of Thunder
(04, Peter Hyams); and Dr. Herman Tarnower opposite Annette Bening in
Mrs. Harris
(05, Phyllis Nagy).

He had been knighted in 2001, and there was some humor expressed in whether or not he liked to be called “Sir Ben.” At any event, in one treasured episode of
The Sopranos
, he was called “Sir Kingsley” by the mafiosi who approached him with their script. He turned that one down, but not much else, and he proceeded to make himself a true polyglot actor, a questing spirit in whom nationalities and ethnicity melted together: Fagin in
Oliver Twist
(05, Polanski);
BloodRayne
(05, Uwe Böll);
Lucky Number Slevin
(06, Paul McGuigan);
You Kill Me
(07, John Dahl); a medieval sage in
The Last Legion
(07, Douglas Lefler); the narrator for
The Ten Commandments
(07, Bill Boyce and John Stronach); magnificent as a Roth-like figure in
Elegy
(08, Isabel Coixet);
War, Inc
. (08, Joshua Seftel);
The Love Guru
(08, Marco Schnabel);
The Wackness
(08, Jonathan Levine);
Transsiberian
(08, Brad Anderson);
Fifty Dead Men Walking
(08, Kari Skogland).

Keisuke Kinoshita
(1912–98), b. Hamamatsu, Japan
1943:
Hana Saku Minato/The Blossoming Port; Ikite Iru Magoroku/The Living Magoroku
. 1944:
Kanko no Machi/Jubilation Street; Rikugun/Army
. 1946:
Osone-ke no Asa/Morning for the Osone Family; Waga Koi Seshi Otome/The Girl I Loved
. 1947:
Kekkon/Marriage; Fushicho/Phoenix
. 1948:
Onna/Woman; Shozo/Portrait; Hakai/Apostasy
. 1949:
Ojosan Kampai/A Toast to the Young Miss; Yotsuya Kaidan/The Yotsuya Ghost Story; Yaburedaiko/Broken Drum
. 1950:
Konyaku Yubiwa/ Engagement Ring
. 1951:
Zemma/The Good Fairy; Karumen Kokyo ni Kaeru/Carmen Comes Home; Shonenki/A Record of Youth; Umi no Hanabi/Fireworks over the Sea
. 1952:
Karumen Junjosu/ Carmen’s Pure Love
. 1953:
Nihon no Higeki/A Japanese Tragedy
. 1954:
Onna no Sono/The Garden of Women; Nijushi no Hitomi/Twentyfour Eyes
. 1955:
Toi Kumo/Distant Clouds; Nogiku no Gotoki Kimi Nariki/You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum
. 1956:
Yuyake-gumo/Clouds at Twilight; Taiyo to Bara/The Rose on His Arm
. 1957:
Yorokobi mo Kanashimi mo Ikutoshitsuki/ The Lighthouse; Fuzen no Tomoshibi/A Candle in the Wind
. 1958:
Narayamabushi-ko/The Ballad of Narayama; Kono Ten no Niji/The Eternal Rainbow
. 1959:
Kazabana/Snow Flurry; Sekishuncho/The Bird of Springs Past; Kyo mo Mata Kakute Ari Nan/Thus Another Day
. 1960:
Haru no Yume/Spring Dreams; Fuefukigawa/The River Fuefuki
. 1961:
Ein no Hito/The Bitter Spirit
. 1962:
Kotoshi no Koi/This Year’s Love; Futari de Aruita Iku Shunju/The Seasons We Walked Together
. 1963:
Utae Wakodo-tachi/Sing, Young People!; Shito no Densetsu/Legend of a Duel to the Death
. 1964:
Koge/The Scent of Incense
. 1967:
Natsukashiki Fue ya Taiko/Lovely Flute and Drum
. 1976:
Sri Lanka no Ai to Wakare/Love and Separation in Sri Lanka
. 1984:
Kono Ko Wo Nokoshite
. 1986:
Shin Yorokobimo; Kanahimimo Ikutoshitsuki
.

Kinoshita—as far as I can trace—has never had a film open commercially in America or Britain. Thus, the opportunities to see his work are confined to festivals, museum screenings, and the invaluable presentations of the Japan Society. Whereas most readers of this book will “know” Kurosawa, and will likely have seen some of this films, Kinoshita will be a stranger. Yet again, we have been misled. Despite the flourish and fame of Kurosawa, the core of Japanese film is to be found in family stories, wistful romances, and in attention paid to women as much as to men. The great tradition in Japan is Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse (almost certainly), and Kinoshita.

He ran away from home as a teenager when his family resisted his desire to enter the movie industry. That led to formal training at the Oriental School of Photography and a first job at the Shochiku laboratories. By 1935, he was working as a camera assistant and he soon began to work for director Yasujiro Shimazu, for whom he wrote
Gonin no Kyodai
(39). For most of his career, Kinoshita has been his own screenwriter.

He worked in many different moods—the romantic, the satirically comic, and the sentimental—and, time and again, he made valiant, good-humored women his central characters. But
A Japanese Tragedy
uses the travails of a war widow to reflect upon modern Japanese history and rises to a level of unquestioned tragedy.

Elsewhere, Kinoshita won outstanding performances from Kinuyo Tanaka as the old woman in
The Ballad of Narayama
and the mother in
Army
. But probably his most original use of an actress—and Japan’s first film in color—was
Carmen Comes Home
, which found an unexpected comic presence in Hideko Takamine’s stripper. The same actress was as impressive, though far more conventional, as the teacher in
Twentyfour Eyes
.

Three of Kinoshita’s films—
Morning for the Osone Family; Twentyfour Eyes;
and
The Ballad of Narayama
—won the critics’ best picture award, but much of his work, however beautifully created, seems to Western eyes somewhat sentimental and politically naïve.

Klaus Kinski
(Nikolaus Gunther Nakszynski) (1926–91), b. Zoppot, Poland
Film Dope’s
entry on Kinski lists some 125 films, as well as another thirty or so that have appeared in some filmographies but that cannot be verified. These are films made all over the world, leaving no stone of cunning coproduction unturned. And in many of them, Kinski had small roles, single scenes, a few days of work in the headlong scramble of his life, which also included a good deal of theatre—often one-man shows, as if no one could work with him, or he refused to share. Kinski loved to play madmen on screen; they fulfilled a dream he had of himself. In person, he was unreliable about his own work—he did not remember accurately, he lied, or he did not care: he did not honor the clerical rules of filmography.

He sounds like a fictional being—a nomadic actor taken from Rimbaud and Céline, so driven that he gave up on such bourgeois concepts as destination or direction.
Film Dope
chuckled to itself about the contrary perceptions of Kinski: “Either he is among the cinema’s great tragic actors or among its great inadvertently comic ones.” It was clear they leaned toward the latter view, and they gently chided me for some rather breathless things I had said about Kinski. But I had met him a few times. I had spent hours only a few feet away from one of life’s more amazing faces. And
Film Dope
did not care to consider the possibility of something else I had written about Kinski: that he was both extremes at the same time—great actor
and
absurd figure. Yes, he could overact, just as he could be humorlessly intense in life. But neither fault was calculated, and Kinski was waiting for someone like Werner Herzog, a director whose taste was for faults in nature and monstrous paradoxes. Herzog found his own creative self in Kinski—and the actor found a frame that contained his unique frenzy.

One other thing: few actors trying to be great would deny their secret knowledge that the art, the profession, whatever, is demented and deranging. Kinski’s originality was in living that secret to the full. The list that follows is far from complete. It is still chaotic and lurid enough to help one appreciate the moments when Kinski was simply a face that had seen hell sharing the shock with us:
Morituri
(48, Eugen York);
Decision Before Dawn
(51, Anatole Litvak);
Ludwig II
(54, Helmut Kautner);
Kinder, Mutter und ein General
(54, Laslo Benedek);
Sarajevo
(55, Fritz Kortner);
Hanussen
(55, O. W. Fischer);
A Time to Love and a Time to Die
(57, Douglas Sirk);
Der Racher
(60, Karl Anton);
Die Toten Augen von London
(61, Alfred Vohrer);
Bankraub in der Rue Latour
(61, Curd Jürgens);
The Counterfeit Traitor
(61, George Seaton);
Kali-Yug, la Dea della Vendetta
(63, Mario Camerini);
Traitor’s Gate
(65, Freddie Francis);
The Pleasure Girls
(65, Gerry O’Hara);
The Dirty Game
(65, Terence Young);
Doctor Zhivago
(65, David Lean);
For a Few Dollars More
(65, Sergio Leone);
Quien Sabe?
(66, Damiano Damiani);
Circus of Fear
(66, John Moxey);
Carmen, Baby
(67, Radley Metzger);
Sumuru
(67, Lindsay Shonteff);
Coplan Sauve sa Peau
(67, Yves Boisset);
I Bastardi
(68, Duccio Tessari);
Il Grande Silenzia
(68, Sergio Corbucci);
Marquis de Sade: Justine
(68, Jess Franco);
La Peau de Torpedo
(69, Jean Delannoy);
E Dio Disse a Caino
(69, Anthony M. Dawson);
El Conde Dracula
(70, Franco);
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
(72, Herzog);
L’Important c’est d’Aimer
(74, Andrzej Zulawski);
Lifespan
(74, Alexander Whitelaw);
Jack the Ripper
(76, Franco);
Madame Claude
(76, Just Jaeckin);
Entebbe: Operation Thunderbolt
(77, Menahem Golan);
Mort d’un Pourri
(77, Georges Lautner);
Nosferatu
(78, Herzog);
Zoo Zero
(78, Alain Fleischer);
Woyzeck
(79, Herzog);
Love and Money
(80, James Toback);
Les Fruits de la Passion
(81, Shuji Terayama);
Buddy Buddy
(81, Billy Wilder);
Venom
(81, Piers Haggard);
Fitzcarraldo
(82, Herzog);
The Soldier
(82, James Glickenhaus);
Android
(83, Aaron Lipstadt);
The Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud
(84, Danford B. Greene);
Titan Find
(84, William Malone);
The Little Drummer Girl
(84, George Roy Hill);
Codename Wildgeese
(86, Dawson);
Crawlspace
(86, David Schmoeller);
Cobra Verde
(88, Herzog);
Nosferatu a Venezia
(88, Augusto Caminito); and
Paganini
(89), which he also directed, a labor of romantic devotion and close to unwatchable.

Nastassja Kinski
, b. Berlin, 1960
There was a moment, in the early eighties, when Kinski was the rage, a sensation … the most beautiful girl in the world. Her greatest interest may be in pioneering the new brevity of such rages.

In May 1982, she was on the cover of
Rolling Stone
, in one of several Avedon photographs that showed her naked and tousled in bed. John Simon’s text began: “I ask myself what makes Nastassia [remember that?] Kinski, at twenty-one, the biggest sex symbol of 1982, and perhaps of many years to come …” The piece went on—as if Simon had been in that bed with Kinski—“The breasts are perfect, though some might think them a bit small, pubescent; over the youthfully querying eyes, the brows are adult and ripely female. Or consider the voice: high and trilling one instant, then, suddenly, overcast, sensually clouded, as if a dark velvet hood descended protectively over some precious crystal object. The walk is emphatic: a very feminine presence approaching with masculine directness …”

But the rage wasn’t just John Simon and
Rolling Stone
. Avedon photographed Kinski with a python—the reptile and the lady in just their shining skins. Paul Schrader, in love with Kinski, said she was like the young Ingrid Bergman.
Time
put her on its cover: the profile writer, Richard Corliss, called her “Nasty.” Director James Toback told the press that Norman Mailer had told him she had a quality like Monroe’s.

I met Ms. Kinski, and she was lovely, uncertain, tricky, and helplessly seductive: it was evident that she looked to every new movie director as potential lover. Yet she was somehow frozen, too, as if waiting to be memorialized in still photographs, conscious of the huge effect she was having. She had vague plans for more training, for theatre, and for a career. But it seemed plain that she was the victim of the speed with which her life was moving, the eroticism of allowing oneself to be looked at, and the sheer perishability of such intensity.

What can one say after the sensation? That she was like thousands of other young women? That she had an extraordinarily alert, waiting gaze, enough to rivet other people and sway the camera?

She was also Klaus Kinski’s daughter. The family lived together for some eight years before divorce. What did that do to the child? There was a time when she did not speak to her father—yet talking to Klaus Kinski was never enough.

She was silent in
Wrong Movement
(75, Wim Wenders);
To the Devil—A Daughter
(76, Peter Sykes);
Reifenzeugnis
(76, Wolfgang Petersen);
Boarding School
(78, Andre Farwagi);
Stay As You Are
(78, Alberto Lattuada); very accomplished and touching as
Tess
(79, Roman Polanski); the circus girl in
One From the Heart
(82, Francis Ford Coppola); daringly sensual and often naked as the released sexual urge in
Cat People
(82, Schrader); as Clara Wieck in
Spring Symphony
(83, Peter Schamoni);
The Moon in the Gutter
(83, Jean-Jacques Beneix); her body played by violinist Rudolph Nureyev’s bow in
Exposed
(83, Toback); the old Linda Darnell role in
Unfaithfully Yours
(84, Howard Zieff), her childishness awoken by Dudley Moore; at her best in
Paris, Texas
(84, Wenders);
The Hotel New Hampshire
(84, Tony Richardson);
Maria’s Lovers
(84, Andrei Konchalovsky);
Revolution
(85, Hugh Hudson); and
Harem
(85, Arthur Joffe).