The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (298 page)

Mikio Naruse
(1905–69), b. Tokyo, Japan
Naruse sounds wonderful. He is a favorite director of this book’s editor—Bob Gottlieb—who has steadily urged the films on me. “If you love Ozu,” he says, “you’ll love Naruse.” It is something I look forward to. Indeed, I anticipate at some stage in the future a Naruse season—it is said he made nearly ninety films—in fine 35mm prints, on a large screen. I will see them one day. But like all lifelong filmgoers, I know the allure of films unseen. Going to the movies has always been a matter of immediate expectation, which—on seeing the trailers—makes me suddenly wish it could be next week now. I may never maintain the highest love of Naruse without refusing to see the films. No, not refusing—declining, postponing, putting off, keeping that bounty for a rainy day.

But, really, I’m persuaded already that Naruse was a master, a teller of domestic dramas, small and sweeping, built around indomitable women. I have heard how impressive Hideko Takamine is in his films, not to mention Machiko Kyo and Masayuki Mori. And if there is only a time for a few films—and, as far as I know, no Naruse film ever had commercial release in the United States or Great Britain—then I have to see
Wife, Be Like a Rose!
(35),
Repast
(51),
Mother
(52),
Older Brother, Younger Sister
(53),
Sound of the Mountain
(54),
Floating Clouds
(55),
Flowing
(56),
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
(60), and
Yearning
(64).

There is nothing like knowing that one has still to see a body of great work. And no gamble as interesting as pushing the desire to its limit.

Very well: the above was a ruse—I have seen Naruse films, and they are … ineffable. But I hold to the official stance of vital anticipation. Thus, so far, I have seen nothing made by Nicholas Thomson (but he is only fifteen).

Alla Nazimova
(1879–1945), b. Yalta, Russia
Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams had one experience in common—they had been transfixed by seeing Nazimova play Ibsen, so much so that they reckoned they had never quite confronted the
reality
of theatre before. So many critics and observers reported that Nazimova, on stage, brought a startling immediacy to every scene, so that people believed they were beholding real life. And so the legends of acting went—before movies lasted long enough to show that nearly every style of acting dates. Nazimova was a great figure of the early movies: her
War Brides
(16, Herbert Brenon) was a huge hit. But no copy survives, and so we can only heed the word of O’Neill and Williams and try to measure the melodramatic stills of
War Brides
against movies from her last years.

Of course, Nazimova is more than just that enigma. She is a link between cultures and ages. She had studied with Stanislavsky and known Chekhov. In America, she would earn $13,000 a week—this in 1915. She was a bisexual society hostess in Hollywood at her house, the Garden of Allah. She was a force behind the flimsy being of Valentino. She was aunt to Val Lewton. All of this, and much more, can be explored in Gavin Lambert’s finely researched biography, published in 1997.

She left Russia for America in 1905, and for ten years she played Ibsen—
Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, A Doll’s House
, and Regina in
Ghosts
(later, she would move on to Mrs. Alving). She worked and lived with the actor/director Charles Bryant (though there was a husband alive still back in Russia) and she entered movies. She made
War Brides
for the Lewis Selznick Company and went on to Metro with
Revelation
(18, George D. Baker), in which she plays a prostitute who poses for a painter (Bryant) and who when asked to pose as the Madonna, becomes her! So much miracle—yet no film surviving: it’s the pattern of Nazimova’s early movies.

She played mother and daughter in
Toys of Fate
(18, Baker) and Hassouna, an Arab girl, in
Eye for Eye
(18, Albert Capellani). She played two women (one European, one Eurasian) in love with one man in
The Red Lantern
(19, Capellani) and a slum girl in
The Brat
(Herbert Blaché). I should add that for most of these lost films Lambert reckons that Nazimova was the actual director.

She did an Indian temple dance in
Stronger Than Death
(20, Blaché). In
Heart of a Child
(20, Ray C. Smallwood), she was a Cockney girl who marries a lord. She was a Russian princess in
Billions
, another mother and daughter in
Madame Peacock
. It was in her
Camille
(21, Smallwood) that Valentino played Armand. There was a movie of
A Doll’s House
(22, Bryant)—yet another lost film. And then she played the teenaged
Salome
in her forties—“a Pantomime after the play by Oscar Wilde,” she called it, with costumes by Natacha Rambova. After that came
Madonna of the Streets
(24, Edwin Carewe);
The Redeeming Sin
(25, J. Stuart Blackton); and
My Son
(25, Carewe)—in which Constance Bennett plays her romantic rival.

She retired from movies and did more theatre, everything from
Ghosts
again to
The Cherry Orchard
(she was Ranevskaya and Eva Le Gallienne was Varya) to
Mourning Becomes Electra
and O-Lan in
The Good Earth
(with Claude Rains). David Selznick offered her the role of Madame Defarge in
A Tale of Two Cities
, and she seems to have tested for Mrs. Danvers in
Rebecca
. She also yearned to play Pilar in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. In fact, her final credits are less striking:
Escape
(40, Mervyn LeRoy); Tyrone Power’s mother in
Blood and Sand
(41, Rouben Mamoulian); Paul Henreid’s mother in
In Our Time
(44, Vincent Sherman); the Marquesa in
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(44, Rowland V. Lee); and as the Eastern European immigrant in Selznick’s
Since You Went Away
(44, John Cromwell).

Dame Anna Neagle
(Marjorie Robertson) (1904–86), b. London
I have a friend who was once struggling to use a London telephone box when out of the thresh of crossed wires a sweet voice boomed at him: “This is Anna Neagle speaking.” He hurried away, head down against the crowd, unnerved by such melody emitting from the technological maelstrom. All this at a time when Miss Neagle was tripping her way through
Charlie Girl
on the London stage in order to pay off some of her husband’s debts. It shows serene pluck that she was still prepared to pick up her own phone and announce herself with the cheerfulness of London calling the world at war.

I can recall being taken as a child to see
The Courtneys of Curzon Street
(47, Herbert Wilcox),
Spring in Park Lane
(48, Wilcox), and
Maytime in Mayfair
(49, Wilcox), enchanted by such tales of Samarkand on the other side of the river and thinking how long-suffering it was of my mother to go on living in south London. The Anna Neagle of those days brought out the urchin chimney sweep in me; perhaps we could never have lived so long with ration books and whale meat but for her innocuous impersonation of a lady nourished by romance.

She was a dancer originally and then one of Charles Cochran’s young ladies. After small parts in
Should a Doctor Tell?
(30, H. Manning Haynes) and
The Chinese Bungalow
(31, J. B. Williams), Herbert Wilcox costarred her with Jack Buchanan in his film of
Goodnight Vienna
(32). He did not marry her until 1943, but he was in doting charge of her career thereafter and directed nearly all her films:
The Flag Lieutenant
(33, Harry Edwards);
The Little Damozel
(33);
Bitter Sweet
(33);
The Queen’s Affair
(34); a great success as a very girlish
Nell Gwynn
(34); followed by
Peg of Old Drury
(35). It comes as something of a shock years later to realize that Miss Neagle is probably essaying Restoration and Hogarthian sex in those films, and that the other characters, chiefly Cedric Hardwicke, respond as if she was succeeding. Her next films were musicals:
Limelight
(36),
The
Three Maxims
(36), and
London Melody
(37). At this point, Wilcox took advantage of the new freedom to present Queen Victoria and delivered a decorous one-two to the soft British belly of sentimental patriotism:
Victoria the Great
(37) and
Sixty Glorious Years
(38). (If Hitler saw those films it might explain his eager hustling toward the brink of war. Though in her next film,
Nurse Edith Cavell
[39], Miss Neagle gave warning of the severity of welfare services.) Miss Neagle and Wilcox did go to Hollywood during the darkest days:
Irene
(40);
No, No Nanette
(40), with Victor Mature;
Sunny
(41); and an episode from
Forever and a Day
(43). She returned to London to play Amy Johnson in
They Flew Alone
(42) and
The Yellow Canary
(43). After the war she began to map out the arbors of chivalry that might exist in a blitzed, black market London:
I Live in Grosvenor Square
(45),
Piccadilly Incident
(46), and so on, by way of Curzon Street, Park Lane, and Mayfair—a purple patch in the Monopoly of love and idleness, with Michael Wilding as the male object. But after
Elizabeth of Ladymead
(49), she took on sterner things in the rather grisly
Odette
(50). Her healing vocation was recalled as Florence Nightingale in
The Lady with the Lamp
(51).

Her time was nearly up, but she carried on blithely in
Derby Day
(52);
Lilacs in the Spring
(54);
King’s Rhapsody
(55)—the latter two in the unsuitable company of a declining Errol Flynn—
My Teenage Daughter
(56);
No Time for Tears
(57);
The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk
(58); and
The Lady Is a Square
(59). That was her last film, and for it she “discovered” Frankie Vaughan, a cruel test of the affection of her admirers but one that she apparently weathered.
Charlie Girl
played to full houses for some five years, with Dame Anna’s admirers being bused in from the Midlands by charabanc.

Patricia Neal
, b. Packard, Kentucky, 1926
Educated at Northwestern University, she was a model before working in summer stock and making her Broadway debut in 1946 in
The Voice of the Turtle
. Her film debut was in
John Loves Mary
(49, David Butler) and she was outstanding in King Vidor’s
The Fountainhead
(49), entering without hesitation into that unique film’s study of elemental creative power and being effectively wooed by Gary Cooper and a pneumatic drill. She was a blonde, yet she had a dark look. Her voice was grownup, drawling, but a little harsh—all beyond her years. She had something new, and Gary Cooper was shaken by it. He and Neal had an intense affair that nearly unhinged his marriage.

But in the next few years she failed to establish herself as a major screen actress, perhaps by choice:
The Hasty Heart
(49, Vincent Sherman);
Bright Leaf
(50, Michael Curtiz);
Three Secrets
(50, Robert Wise);
The Breaking Point
(50, Curtiz);
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(51, Wise);
Weekend with Father
(51, Douglas Sirk);
Operation Pacific
(51, George Waggner);
Canyon Pass
(51, Edwin L. Marin);
Washington Story
(52, Robert Pirosh);
Diplomatic Courier
(52, Henry Hathaway);
Something for the Birds
(52, Wise);
Immediate Disaster
(54, Burt Balaban), a 16mm production; and
Stranger from Venus
(54, Balaban).

Having married the writer Roald Dahl, she made only a few, carefully selected films: Kazan’s
A Face in the Crowd
(57); Blake Edwards’s
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
(61); as the long-suffering housekeeper in Martin Ritt’s
Hud
(63), for which she won the best actress Oscar. But after Alexander Singer’s
Psyche 59
(64) and Preminger’s
In Harm’s Way
(65), she suffered a debilitating stroke. Her recovery from paralysis has been extraordinary and she has since made
The Subject Was Roses
(68, Ulu Grosbard);
Baxter!
(72, Lionel Jeffries);
Happy Mother’s Day … Love George
(73, Darren McGavin);
B. Must Die
(73, Jose Luis Borau);
The Passage
(78, J. Lee Thompson);
All Quiet on the Western Front
(79, Delbert Mann); and
Ghost Story
(81, John Irvin).

In 1981, her recovery from the stroke was filmed as
The Patricia Neal Story
(Anthony Harvey and Anthony Page)—with Glenda Jackson playing her and Dirk Bogarde as Dahl. Since then, she has acted in
Shattered Vows
(84, Jack Bender);
Love Leads the Way
(84, Mann);
Caroline?
(90, Joseph Sargent); as Shelley Winters’s sister in
An Unremarkable Life
(89, Amin Q. Chaudhri);
A Mother’s Right: The Elizabeth Morgan Story
(92, Linda Otto);
Heidi
(93, Michael Ray Rhodes);
Cookie’s Fortune
(99, Robert Altman);
For the Love of May
(00, Mary McDonough and Mary Beth McDonough).

Ronald Neame
(1911–2010), b. London
1947:
Take My Life
. 1950:
The Golden Salamander
. 1952:
The Card
. 1953:
The Million Pound Note
. 1956:
The Man Who Never Was
. 1957:
The Seventh Sin
(partly directed by Vincente Minnelli). 1958:
Windom’s Way
. 1959:
The Horse’s Mouth
. 1960:
Tunes of Glory
. 1961:
Escape from Zahrain
. 1962:
I Could Go On Singing
. 1963:
The Chalk Garden
. 1964:
Mister Moses
. 1966:
A Man Could Get Killed
(codirected with Cliff Owen);
Gambit
. 1968:
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
. 1970:
Scrooge
. 1972:
The Poseidon Adventure
. 1974:
The Odessa File
. 1979:
Meteor
. 1980:
Hopscotch
. 1981:
First Monday in October
. 1987:
Foreign Body
. 1990:
The Magic Balloon
.