The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (240 page)

Ms. Jacobs was screen-tested while still at school, and with her new name she became a Universal kid in
Louisa
(50, Alexander Hall). Thereafter, she was with Donald O’Connor in
The Milkman
(50, Charles T. Barton); with Tony Curtis in
The Prince Who Was a Thief
(51, Rudolph Maté);
Francis Goes to the Races
(51, Arthur Lubin); with Curtis in
No Room for the Groom
(52, Douglas Sirk); with Rock Hudson in
Has Anybody Seen My Gal?
(52, Sirk); with Curtis again in the classic
Son of Ali Baba
(52, Kurt Neumann); with Tyrone Power in
Mississippi Gambler
(53, Maté);
The Golden Blade
(53, Nathan Juran);
Dangerous Mission
(54, Louis King);
Johnny Dark
(54, George Sherman);
Dawn at Socorro
(54, Sherman);
Smoke Signal
(55, Jerry Hopper);
Ain’t Misbehavin’
(55, Edward Buzzell);
Kelly and Me
(57, Robert Z. Leonard).

Until They Sail
(57, Robert Wise), with Paul Newman, was actually her first grownup film. But then she retired for four years before
The Hustler
came along. It should have brought her so many better offers, but in the event she married the critic Joseph Morgenstern and then retired seriously for fifteen years.

Her comeback was as the mother in
Carrie
(76, Brian De Palma), an overwrought performance that won a supporting nomination—she lost to Beatrice Straight in
Network
. Since that, Laurie has worked fairly steadily, often for television:
Ruby
(77, Curtis Harrington);
The Boss’s Son
(78, Bobby Roth); in love with Mel Gibson in
Tim
(79, Michael Pate);
Skag
(80, Frank Perry); as Magda Goebbels, nominated for an Emmy in
The Bunker
(81, George Schaefer);
The Thorn Birds
(82, Daryl Duke); as Aunt Em in
Return to Oz
(85, Walter Murch); another Oscar nomination in
Children of a Lesser God
(86, Randa Haines)—she lost to Dianne Wiest in
Hannah and Her Sisters; Appointment with Death
(88, Michael Winner);
Tiger Warsaw
(88, Amin Q. Chaudhri);
Dream a Little Dream
(89, Marc Rocco); spectacular on TV in David Lynch’s
Twin Peaks
(90);
Other People’s Money
(91, Norman Jewison);
Storyville
(92, Mark Frost);
Trauma
(93, Dario Argento);
Wrestling Ernest Hemingway
(93, Haines);
The Crossing Guard
(95, Sean Penn);
The Grass Harp
(96, Charles Matthau);
The Faculty
(98, Robert Rodriguez); on TV in
Inherit the Wind
(99, Daniel Petrie);
The Mao Game
(99, Joshua John Miller);
Possessed
(00, Steven E. de Souza);
Midwives
(01, Glenn Jordan);
The Last Brickmaker in America
(01, Gregg Champion);
Eulogy
(03, Michael Clancy);
The Dead Girl
(06, Karen Moncrieff);
Hounddog
(07, Deborah Kampmeier);
Saving Grace B. Jones
(09, Connie Stevens).

(David)
Jude Law
, b. London, 1972
No, not Jude the Obscure, Hardy’s melancholy hero, but “Hey, Jude,” the Beatles’ song from 1968. But how could anyone expect obscurity from this intensely on-fire actor? In just a few years, the southeast Londoner has proved himself one of the few modern actors with a confident grasp of old-fashioned charisma. He has a way of seizing films that reminds one of Blackbeard with treasure. There is a zeal for attention in his eyes reminiscent of Tyrone Power, yet Law is so much more up-to-date in his attitudes and prickly smarts. There has as yet been no one film that opts for his power, nerve, and witty stare. But they will come. Meanwhile, he has the slightly awkward ability to unbalance movies that try to keep him on a leash.

The child of teachers, he entered the National Youth Music Theatre in London, and in 1990 he got a role in the British TV soap
Families
. He went on stage and did
Indiscretions
in London and New York. His movie career began with
Shopping
(94, Paul Anderson III);
I Love You, I Love You Not
(96, Billy Hopkins), where he played opposite Claire Danes; outstanding, lovely, and dangerous, as Lord Alfred Douglas in
Wilde
(97, Brian Gilbert);
Gattaca
(97, Andrew Niccol), the first film in which his steel gaze was used as something more than human; a smaller role in
Bent
(97, Sean Mathias); the best thing in
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
(97, Clint Eastwood);
Music from Another Room
(98, Charlie Peters); a vampire in
The Wisdom of Crocodiles
(98, Po-Chih Leong);
eXistenZ
(99, David Cronenberg), with another venture beyond ordinary limits.

His breakthrough came as Dickie Greenleaf in
The Talented Mr. Ripley
(99, Anthony Minghella). Much as I admire that film (and Matt Damon in it), it’s hard to escape the feeling that the picture loses some drive and fascination when Dickie dies. It’s a measure of how seldom we see raw human vitality on screen these days. He then did
Love, Honor and Obey
(99, Dominic Anciano and Ray Burdis); the marksman in
Enemy at the Gates
(01, Jean-Jacques Annaud); a dazzling Gigolo Joe in
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
(01, Steven Spielberg), where his role is unnecessary to the plot but vital to any hope of pleasure.

He was nearly exotic as Weegee crossed with Widmark in
Road to Perdition
(02, Sam Mendes), and did his best to carry off the lead role in
Cold Mountain
(03, Minghella). Whereupon his star season was clear:
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
(04, Kerry Conran); redoing Michael Caine in
Alfie
(04, Charles Shyer); as Errol Flynn in
The Aviator
(04, Martin Scorsese);
I Heart Huckabee’s
(04, David O. Russell);
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
(04, Brad Silberling).

He was a star, with a messy private life as proof, but all of a sudden you could feel the public deciding that they’d had a bit too much of Jude. He was helpless in
All the King’s Men
(06, Steven Zaillian); not very convincing in
Breaking and Entering
(06, Minghella);
The Holiday
(06, Nancy Meyers);
My Blueberry Nights
(07, Wong Kar Wai); with Michael Caine and dreadful in
Sleuth
(07, Kenneth Branagh), which his production company led to the scaffold;
Rage
(09, Sally Potter);
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
(09, Terry Gilliam); as Watson in
Sherlock Holmes
(09, Guy Ritchie);
Repo Men
(10, Miguel Sapochnik). At the same time, in London and New York, he offered a Hamlet, painfully earnest and comically half-baked.

Richard Leacock
, b. London, 1921
Richard is the younger brother of Philip Leacock, a director of humdrum feature movies that have seldom exceeded the limits of entertainment cinema. Nothing in his own work reveals Richard as a more distinct or talented director. And yet he is vastly more important. Indeed, in the long-term survey of man’s use of film, it may be that Leacock’s part in the cinema verité movement will be seen as highly influential. If only because he is marginally the senior, and because the approach of cinema verité amounts to a blurring of the talents or personalities of the filmmakers, it is legitimate to include within an entry on Leacock his chief collaborators in the fusion of cinema and journalism: Robert Drew, Greg Shuker, the Maysles brothers, and D. A. Pennebaker. (In addition, as head of film at M.I.T., he produced far too many young men and women who carried a camera in nearly every life situation.) Richard is first and foremost a cinematographer of documentary projects. Having come to America in his teens, he became photographer to Willard Van Dyke, for several wartime films made by the army, and in 1948, on Robert Flaherty’s
Louisiana Story
, the last gesture of pioneering documentary, intent on going to the corners of the earth to bring back pictorial celebrations of the simple life that existed there. Leacock was capable of the beauty of the swamp scenery and the “symphonic” treatment of the oil rig. But Flaherty was enchanted by the idea of the noble savage so that his films are curiously out of touch with political and economic realities.
Louisiana Story
is nominally about oil drilling, but it has little sense of time and place, let alone political direction or human involvement. Even so, it was set up on much the same basis as the classic 1930s films by Pare Lorentz—
The River
and
The Plow That Broke the Plains
. In other words, it was made on institutional or corporation money, to propound some notion about how the world ought to be run, or rerun.

Documentaries of that sort may still be made:
Nuit et Brouillard
, for instance, was filmed by Alain Resnais for the Museum of the Second World War. But since 1948 a new, journalistic appetite for documentary or reportage had come into being: TV.
Louisiana Story
, and films like it, might have taken six to nine months to make, being composed with care and artistry before being released to rather select audiences, numbered in the thousands. But TV is geared quite differently. In any one evening it is likely to show seventy-seven minutes (the length of
Louisiana Story
) of newsreel or documentary footage—shot and processed with the emphasis on speed—to an audience measured in the millions. And the next night, and the next … Most of such footage comes to us because a cameraman was sent in time to … Vietnam, the Middle East, or wherever. We hardly know who “directed” or “was responsible for” the miles of film from Vietnam, but nevertheless we were moved to tears, anger, and dismay by it. Someone pressed the button, and we did the rest. It may be odious to “compose” a close-up of a child whose face has been stripped by napalm.

Cinema verité is based on the thought that film ought, as swiftly and directly as possible, to connect that child with our sensibilities. It is able to rest its case on the objectivity of its method and on the usefulness of filming important people at close quarters, without unsettling them, and then conveying those images to audiences. Leacock and Robert Drew began by making films for
Time-Life
, for TV showing, with novel cameras and tape recorders that allowed two men, as unobtrusively as possible, to cover such newsworthy events as the 1960 primary in Wisconsin between senators Kennedy and Humphrey (
Primary);
a motor race (
Eddie Sachs at Indianapolis);
the ordeal of a man sentenced to death (
The Chair);
and the rehearsal of a play and the effects on its actress (
Jane
). Drew and Leacock experimented with the famous and the unknown. But they found the recurring need for a subject that had wide appeal and where there was an extra dramatic interest in seeming to catch people under stress reacting spontaneously. Cinema verité has tended to founder on the everyday and mundane. Secretly, it has the journalist’s uneasy lust for disaster or breakdown, for the moment when the subject “cracks.”

Leacock and his colleagues argued that they did not believe that their remorseless coverage disturbed the people they were filming. Reasonably, they argued that a senator working for his life soon forgot one discreet camera that was always in his presence—after all, men forget their wives in that way. It might be different with a showoff like Joseph Levine (
Showman
), and there were arguments that Jane Fonda’s creative energy could have been sapped by the cameras that filmed her rehearsals. In part, that is journalism demanding the right to be everywhere and then being amazed by charges of intrusiveness. In fact, politicians hire TV coaches and makeup artists, and know as much as Dietrich about how they photograph best. Later cinema verité films have been more concerned about what effect filming has on reality. Godard asked runic questions and made films about the helpless answers to them.
Gimme Shelter
, made by the Maysles brothers in 1971, on the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, edged up to the dilemma of how far the cameraman might have a duty to intervene. On the “American Family” series, made for TV, there came a moment when an affair between the unhappy wife and the sympathetic director seemed imminent.

The “artistic” importance of cinema verité is that it has asked these questions. We now look at real events as if they were also performances. The “American Family” situation only reproduced a common bond in fiction film production. That is no disgrace. For who believes that people have not always performed or played themselves, that they have not always had to present themselves in everyday life? Cinema verité has made us reappraise sincerity and see the qualities shared by fiction and documentary. When Sam Ervin at Watergate reacted to criticism by conceding that he was only a country lawyer, he was James Stewart in
Anatomy of a Murder
blunting the sharpness of George C. Scott. And when Orson Welles lumbered on set to be interviewed by Dick Cavett, he was only one more surrogate Kane ready to say, “They asked the questions quicker in my day.”

Sir David Lean
(1908–91), b. Croydon, England
1942:
In Which We Serve
(codirected with Noel Coward). 1944:
This Happy Breed
. 1945:
Blithe Spirit; Brief Encounter
. 1946:
Great Expectations
. 1948:
Oliver Twist
. 1949:
The Passionate Friends; Madeleine
. 1952:
The Sound Barrier
. 1954:
Hobson’s Choice
. 1955:
Summer Madness
. 1957:
The
Bridge on the River Kwai
. 1962:
Lawrence of Arabia
. 1965:
Dr. Zhivago
. 1970:
Ryan’s Daughter
. 1984:
A Passage to India
.