The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (292 page)

But then you discover—very quickly—that there is another purpose, which is self-promotion. Could Moore turn into a real despot? I doubt it, for I think there is a fundament of good nature and respect for common sense. In which case, as things deteriorate, he may find himself in more and more danger. The bear is not a timid creature. Even if he’d rather stay home with his honey, he will fight when aroused. And Michael Moore has this signal virtue: he believes he’s been got at. He’s right, just as he’s justified in his cunning and in his certainty that playing fair is for people like Ken Burns.

Agnes Moorehead
(1906–74), b. Clinton, Massachusetts
What are the two most indelibly humane moments in the work of Orson Welles? There is a case for saying that Agnes Moorehead figures in both: in
Kane
, the scene with Kane’s mother opening the window to call in her son from the snow so that he may advance on his destiny; and in
Ambersons
, where Aunt Fanny watches Georgie devouring her strawberry shortcake, pleased to be useful, daunted by his appetite but knowing that he does not need her, deeply aware that her vibrant romantic hopes are growing shrill with neglect.

It is hardly coincidence that these are moments of loss and frustration that stay with us long afterwards, just as the last close-up of Kane’s mother, sinking down to the son’s face, is the way in which Kane has recalled her all his life—as stylized and emotional as the sort of operas in which he imprisons Susan Alexander. Sadly, they predicted the course of Agnes Moorehead’s career. She was one of several Mercury players brought to movies by Welles. Mrs. Danvers in
Rebecca
on radio showed her flair for melodrama and, in truth, she may have been best confined to brief passages where her intensity was limited. Her subsequent parade of shrews, rancorous mothers, bitches, and spinsters shows how quickly she overheated. But she was perfectly equipped for the controlled theatricality of Welles’s debut.

After those two first performances, what is worth remembering?
The Big Street
(42, Irving Reis);
Journey into Fear
(43, Norman Foster);
Jane Eyre
(44, Robert Stevenson);
Mrs. Parkington
(44, Tay Garnett);
Since You Went Away
(44, John Cromwell);
Dragon Seed
(44, Jack Conway and Harold Bucquet);
The Seventh Cross
(44, Fred Zinnemann);
Our Vines Have Tender Grapes
(45, Roy Rowland);
Dark Passage
(47, Delmer Daves);
Summer Holiday
(47, Rouben Mamoulian); as the 105-year-old woman in
The Lost Moment
(48, Martin Gabel);
Johnny Belinda
(48, Jean Negulesco);
The Great Sinner
(49, Robert Siodmak);
Caged
(50, Cromwell);
Fourteen Hours
(51, Henry Hathaway);
Show Boat
(51, George Sidney);
The Blue Veil
(51, Curtis Bernhardt);
The Blazing Forest
(52, Edward Ludwig);
Those Redheads from Seattle
(53, Lewis R. Foster);
Main Street to Broadway
(53, Garnett);
Scandal at Scourie
(53, Negulesco);
Magnificent Obsession
(54, Douglas Sirk);
All That Heaven Allows
(55, Sirk);
The Conqueror
(55, Dick Powell);
The Swan
(56, Charles Vidor);
The Revolt of Mamie Stover
(56, Raoul Walsh);
Jeanne Eagels
(57, Sidney);
The True Story of Jesse James
(57, Nicholas Ray);
Raintree County
(57, Edward Dmytryk);
Tempest
(57, Alberto Lattuada);
The Bat
(59, Crane Wilbur);
Pollyanna
(60, David Swift);
Twenty Plus Two
(61, Joseph Newman);
Who’s Minding the Store?
(63, Frank Tashlin); and
Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte
(64, Robert Aldrich). That stark face was latterly hidden behind false eyelashes as she played the mother in the TV series
Bewitched
, a part that relates to Aunt Fanny in the same grisly way as sherry commercials recall the great sad mouth of Charles Foster Kane.

Jeanne Moreau
, b. Paris, 1928

Moreau is one of the most challenging of screen actresses. Far from beautiful, she sometimes seems plain-faced, dumpy, and sullen. But when her personality is engaged, we have the feeling of an intelligent, intuitive woman wanting to commit herself to the inner rhythm of the movie. She flowers under sympathetic, intimate direction. At her best, she is riveting, capable of persuading us that she is beautiful, and able to vary her own appearance according to mood. Above all, and without any trace of rhetoric, she bares a vivid but vulnerable soul. Nothing expresses her so well as that instant in
Eve
(62, Joseph Losey) when she glares after the departing Stanley Baker and mutters “Bloody Welshman.” Those words embody not just the sensual dominance of the woman, but a residual sadness that so brutal a sexual conflict should exist.

Moreau’s eminence coincided with the cinema’s new interest in feminism. Her blend of intelligence and feelings is common to all great actresses, but it had seldom been based on less glamorous looks. Like the Catherine in
Jules and Jim
(61, François Truffaut), Moreau asserted herself so that stories took shape from a woman encouraged to experiment in front of the camera.
Eve
may be her most extreme role, but it involves the greatest risks and the most extraordinary triumph. Losey is not renowned for his handling of women, but
Eve
glories in Moreau’s emotional pragmatism and her instinctive, sour fun. That long sequence in which she takes over Baker’s bathroom, and the moment when she deludes him with a pathetic farrago about her own childhood, are perfect expressions of the cruelty and playfulness in Eve. Only Moreau could have made her so flouncingly sexy, so devouringly commercial, without losing sight of her loneliness or the moments in which she resembles a little girl.

The daughter of a chorus girl, Moreau was a leading actress at the Théâtre Nationale Populaire before she made her name in movies. She had acted regularly in movies since 1948, but she was thirty before the New Wave found a proper use for her, or saw that she was deeply attractive and animated. After
Touchez Pas au Grisbi
(54, Jacques Becker),
La Salaire du Péché
(56, Denys de la Patellière), and
Le Dos au Mur
(57, Edouard Molinaro), she made two films for Louis Malle:
Lift to the Scaffold
(57) and
Les Amants
(57). The first showed a new “modern” woman, while the second was a notorious advance into sexual frankness—a dishonest vein more in keeping with bourgeois French cinema, and not central to Moreau’s later work where she has usually suggested sexuality obliquely. In 1959, she went from
Le Dialogue des Carmélites
(Philippe Agostini) to Madame de Merteuil in Vadim’s updated
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
. That was a part worthy of her, but cheated by Vadim’s insistence on novelty at the expense of examination.

She was one of Martin Ritt’s
Five Branded Women
(60), and then began the run of outstanding parts:
Moderato Cantabile
(60, Peter Brook), an opaque study of a Marguerite Duras wife and mother on the point of breakdown, wonderfully inhabited by Moreau;
La Notte
(61, Michelangelo Antonioni), another portrait of alienation that Moreau steered carefully away from the self-pity growing in the director’s work—no one else could have sustained the long section in which she wanders through Milan, observing the harsh, uncoordinated fragments of life;
Jules and Jim
, a key character in Truffaut’s work, barely plausible on paper, but in Moreau’s image a moving, capricious self-destructive woman torn between being a happy and a sad fool; the nervy, blonde gambler in
La Baie des Anges
(62, Jacques Demy), harrowed by the dilatory wheel and blithely ridding herself of the winnings at the best hotel in town.

Those films made her one of the most desirable actresses in the world. In the event, she did not always choose parts well, but she was still more watchable in neutral than most others in top gear:
The Victors
(63, Carl Foreman);
Peau de Banane
(63, Marcel Ophuls); as Fraulein Becker in
The Trial
(63, Orson Welles), a brief flash of lewdness;
Will of the Wisp
(63, Malle); cool, matter-of-fact, and flexible in
Diary of a Chambermaid
(64, Buñuel).

Her insecurity was proved by her inability to dominate silly vehicles: thus
Mata-Hari, Agent H.21
(64, Jean-Louis Richard, who, briefly, had been her husband). She was dowdy in
The Train
(65, John Frankenheimer), a little strained with Bardot in
Viva Maria!
(65, Malle) and uncomfortable in
The Yellow Rolls-Royce
(64, Anthony Asquith). But she was a splendidly sordid Doll Tearsheet in
Chimes at Midnight
(66, Welles). Two Tony Richardson projects would have best been avoided, despite the nominal basis in Genet and Duras:
Mademoiselle
(66) and
The Sailor from Gibraltar
(67). The part of the avenging Julie Kohler in
The Bride Wore Black
(67, Truffaut) wavered in and out of life, but seemed as outside her ken as it was imposed on Truffaut by his admiration of Hitchcock.

In 1968, however, Welles cast her with characteristic tender mischief as the aging prostitute reclaimed by romance in the realization of Mr. Clay’s
Immortal Story
. The most poetic thing in that film is the way Moreau does seem to become younger from the moment she blows out the candles in the magical chamber appointed for the enactment of the story. It suggested that she might yet lead Welles into a film that dealt profoundly with women.

She looked her age and roamed the film world rather uncertainly:
Le Corps de Diane
(68, Richard);
Great Catherine
(68, Gordon Flemyng); to Hollywood for
Monte Walsh
(70, William Fraker) and
Alex in Wonderland
(71, Paul Mazursky);
Compte à Rebours
(70, Roger Pigaut);
Mille Baisers de Florence
(71, Guy Gilles); singing “Quand l’Amour se Meurt” in
Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir
(69); excelling once more for Marguerite Duras in
Nathalie Granger
(72); and
Chère Louise
(72, Philippe de Broca).

She yielded with ardent regret to middle age, married William Friedkin briefly, became a director herself—with
Lumière
(75)—and kept involved with enterprising pictures: to Brazil for
Joanna Francesca
(73, Carlo Diegues);
Souvenirs d’en France
(74, André Téchiné);
Making It
(74, Bertrand Blier);
Le Jardin Qui Bascule
(75, Guy Gilles);
Mr. Klein
(76, Losey); a temperamental actress in
The Last Tycoon
(76, Elia Kazan). In 1979, she directed her second film
L’Adolescente
.

She was in
Night Fires
(79, Mary Stephen);
Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid
(81, George Kaczender);
Plein Sud
(81, Luc Beraud);
Mille Milliards de Dollars
(81, Henri Verneuil); as an icon of foreboding in
Querelle
(82, Rainer Werner Fassbinder);
The Trout
(82, Losey);
L’Arbre
(84, Jacques Doillon);
Vicious Circle
(84, Kenneth Ives);
Le Paltoquet
(86, Michel Deville);
Sauve-Toi Lola
(86, Michel Drach);
La Miracule
(86, Jean-Pierre Mocky);
The Last Séance
(86, John Wyndham-Davies);
Hotel Terminus
(87, Marcel Ophuls);
La Nuit de l’Ocean
(88, Antoine Perset);
La Femme Nikita
(90, Luc Besson);
Alberto Express
(90, Arthur Joffé);
Until the End of Time
(91, Wim Wenders);
Map of the Human Heart
(93, Vincent Ward); and
The Summer House
(93, Warris Hussein).

Her voice spoke the words of Marguerite Duras looking back on the events of
The Lover
(92, Jean-Jacques Annaud)—as if too many Gauloises could have given Jane March a French accent. In addition, Moreau has contributed to documentaries on Fassbinder, Truffaut, Jean-Louis Barrault, and, not least, Lillian Gish—the latter of which she directed.

As she came to seventy, she was as commanding as ever:
L’Absence
(93, Peter Handke);
Je M’Appelle Victor
(93, Guy Jacques);
A Foreign Field
(93, Charles Sturridge);
Beyond the Clouds
(95, Wenders and Antonioni); narrating
Belle Epoque
(95, Gavin Millar);
Catherine the Great
(95, Marvin J. Chomsky and John Goldsmith);
I Love You, I Love You Not
(96, Billy Hopkins);
The Proprietor
(96, Ismail Merchant);
Amour et Confusions
(97, Patrick Braoudre);
Un Amour de Sorcière
(97, Rene Manzor);
Ever After
(98, Andy Tennant); ferocious as the mother in
Balzac
(99, Josee Dayan);
Il Manoscritto de Principe
(00, Roberto Ando);
Les Misérables
(00, Dayan);
Zaïde
(01, Dayan); as Marguerite Duras in
Cet Amour-Là
(01, Dayan);
The Will to Resist
(02, James Newton);
Les Parents Terribles
(03, Dayan); a cameo in
Love Actually
(03, Richard Curtis);
Time to Leave
(05, Francois Ozon);
Desengagement
(07, Amos Gitai).

Antonio Moreno
(1886–1967), b. Madrid, Spain
Not many careers begin at Biograph in 1912 (
Voice of the Million
) and end with John Ford’s 1956
The Searchers
. But it was during the in-between period—the silents of the twenties—that Antonio Moreno made his name (and his best films). He came to America from Spain young and tried the stage, his strikingly handsome looks helping him to supporting roles in vehicles for Maude Adams, Julia Marlowe, and Mrs. Lesley Carter, but it was the silents that provided sanctuary for good-looking Europeans with strong accents. He worked hard at Biograph, appearing in bit parts in
The Musketeers of Pig Alley
(1912) and
Judith of Bethulia
(1914), then drifted into serials, before signing with Paramount in 1923.