The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (366 page)

After the war, she embarked on heavy “acting” in two films for Dudley Nichols—
Sister Kenny
(46) and
Mourning Becomes Electra
(47)—and after
The Guilt of Janet Ames
(47, Henry Levin),
The Velvet Touch
(48, John Gage), and
Tell It to the Judge
(49, Norman Foster) she went back to the theatre and to a big success in
Wonderful Town
. After that, she concentrated on her unique form of overacting—shrill in the otherwise excellent
Picnic
(56, Joshua Logan); incredible in
Auntie Mame
(57, Morton da Costa), a role she had played on Broadway; terrible in Daniel Mann’s
Five Finger Exercise
(62); and well cast as Rose in Mervyn Le Roy’s film of
Gypsy
(62). It would barely have been accepted, as an invention, that her last work in movies included playing a Mother Superior to Hayley Mills, as directed by Ida Lupino, in
The Trouble with Angels
(66). The record books claim that there was even a sequel to this,
Where Angels Go … Trouble Follows
(67, James Neilson).

Theresa Russell
(Theresa Paup), b. San Diego, California, 1957
If ever a proper history is written of directors obsessed with, married to, or simply enslaved by actresses, then the case of Theresa Russell and her husband Nicolas Roeg will be especially important. It is not that Russell ever gave up working for other filmmakers, nor that she is less than a grave presence in her husband’s work, stunning in a Ingres-like way, yet stunned, too, like someone offering a first reading of a strange role. There has always been a sensual quality to Ms. Russell, a blunt staring in at the inquisitive, lewd process of film, as well as an untrained, even uncouth, unactorly air. She sometimes seems like a woman encountered at a Greyhound station and inveigled before the camera—unready, ungiving, suspicious, yet definitely there; more than an actress. She works in an uncommon terrain, between startling directness and our notion that perhaps she lacks a wealth of technique. Does Roeg love her for this charming flirtation with bad acting? Does he lead her down its path? Does he notice it?

She trained at the Lee Strasberg Institute and was well cast by Elia Kazan as Cecelia Brady in
The Last Tycoon
(76). But it was as Dustin Hoffman’s rather forlorn, even Faulknerian, girlfriend in
Straight Time
(78, Ulu Grosbard) that she really caught the eye. Indeed, this may be her most accomplished work yet, along with her exquisite, deadpan Mo Dean in TV’s
Blind Ambition
(79, George Schaefer).

Her first working encounter with Roeg was in his
Bad Timing
(80) where she was an authentic icon of passive sexuality, somewhere between Klimt and the drabbest porn parlor. Was she acting, or was she being observed? The question surely added to the discomfort of the film. Since then, for Roeg, she was the daughter in
Eureka
(82), Marilyn Monroe in
Insignificance
(85), out of her depth in
Track 29
(87), in
Aria
(87), and as the wife/lover in
Cold Heaven
(91).

She has also played, with Bill Murray, doing the Gene Tierney role in
The Razor’s Edge
(84, John Byrum); as the serial killer in
Black Widow
(87, Bob Rafelson)—one can’t help feeling that that awkward thriller would have had a better chance with the female roles reversed; as a lawyer in
Physical Evidence
(89, Michael Crichton); good as a narc under strain in
Impulse
(90, Sondra Locke); variably sensational and miscalculated, head on, in the title role of
Whore
(91, Ken Russell); as a victim in
Kafka
(92, Steven Soderbergh).

As the Roeg marriage ended, so Russell seems to have been busier: on TV in
A Woman’s Guide to Adultery
(93, David Hayman);
Thicker Than Water
(93, Marc Evans); the narrator in
Being Human
(93, Bill Forsyth);
The Flight of the Dove
(94, Steve Railsback);
The Grotesque
(95, John-Paul Davidson); as Morgan Le Fay in
A Young Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
(95, Ralph Thomas);
Trade Off
(95, Andrew Lane);
Hotel Paradise
(95, Roeg); as Ma Barker in
Public Enemies
(96, Mark Lester);
Once You Meet a Stranger
(96, Tommy Lee Wallace);
The Proposition
(97, Strathford Hamilton);
Wild Things
(98, John McNaughton);
Running Woman
(98, Rachel Samuels);
Luckytown Blues
(00, Paul Nicholas);
The Believer
(01, Henry Bean);
Earth vs. the Spider
(01, Scott Ziehl);
Now & Forever
(01, Bob Clark);
The House Next Door
(01, Joey Travolta);
Passionada
(02, Dan Ireland);
Destiny
(02, James Fargo);
Love Comes Softly
(03, Michael Landon Jr.);
Save It for Later
(03, Clark Brigham);
The Box
(03, Richard Pepin).

She was in the TV series
Empire Falls
(05, Fred Schepisi);
Blind Injustice
(05, Rex Piano);
Spider-Man 3
(07, Sam Raimi);
On the Doll
(08, Thomas Mignone);
Jolene
(08, Ireland);
16 to Life
(09, Becky Smith).

Walter Ruttmann
(1887–1941), b. Frankfurt, Germany All films documentaries, except those marked (s) and (f).
1921:
Opus I
(s);
Opus II
(s). 1923:
Der Seiger
(s);
Das Verlorene Paradies
(s);
Kantorowitz
(s);
Gesolei
(s). 1925:
Opus III
(s);
Opus IV
(s). 1927:
Berlin, Die Symphonie der Grosstadt/Berlin, Symphony of a City
. 1928:
Wochenende
(s);
Tonende Welle
(s);
Deutscher Rundfunk
. 1929:
Die Melodie der Welt
(s). 1931:
In der Nacht
(s);
Feind im Blut
(s). 1932:
Acciaio
(f). 1933:
Arbeit macht Glucklich
(f). 1934:
Altgermanische Bauernkultur; Metall des Himmels
. 1935:
Stadt der Verheissung; Cannstatter Volksfest; Stuttgart
. 1936:
Dusseldorf; Schiff in Not
. 1937:
Mannesmann
. 1938:
Henkel; Weltstrasse See; Im Dienste der Menschheit; Im Zeichen des Vertrauens
. 1939:
Hinter den Zahlen
. 1940:
Aberglaube; Deutsche Panzer; Volkskrankheit Krebs
.

Within twenty years, Ruttmann moved from being the proponent of absolute, abstract cinema to a leading propagandist, fatally wounded while planning another cinematic celebration of the German army. The “purity” of Ruttmann’s cinema was always sterile and formalistic, waiting to be exploited by a totalitarian message. It is hardly thorough to remember Leni Riefenstahl as an active Nazi, but still to associate Ruttmann with the experimental documentary of the 1920s. His method was always meretricious and dangerous, as John Grierson saw:

The symphonists have found a way of building such matters of common reality into very pleasant sequences. By uses of tempo and rhythm, and by the large-scale integration of single effects, they capture the eye and impress the mind in the sa me way as a tattoo or a military parade might do. But by their concentration on mass and movement … they tend to avoid the larger creative job. What more attractive (for a man of visual taste) than to swing wheels and pistons about in a ding-dong description of a machine, when he has little to say about the man who tends it, and still less to say about the tin-pan product it spills? And what more comfortable if, in one’s heart, there is avoidance of the issue of underpaid labour and meaningless production? For this reason I hold the symphony tradition of cinema for a danger and
Berlin
for the most dangerous of all film models to follow.

This is a sound objection, even if it is one that self-conscious British documentary did not always avoid.
Berlin
is artful decoration.
Metropolis
, by comparison, is obvious, but it loathes automation, foresees what it inflicts on people, and has a poetic and precise view of the way a city lends itself to intrigue and oppression. Ruttmann is an example of the beguiled cinema intellectual, so intent on cutting and composition that the artist vanished under artiness.

Originally a painter, he fought in the First World War and then devoted himself to abstract cinema. The Opus movies are archetypal experiments; even in the early 1920s Ruttmann foresaw the role of sound and tried to create a cinema in which the visuals were subordinate to the sound track. Such deliberate pioneering won him some fame: he “created” the “Falkentraum” sequence for
Siegfried
(24, Fritz Lang); he directed some special sequences for
Lebende Buddhas
(24, Paul Wegener); collaborated with Lotte Reiniger on
Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed
(26). His own major urban documentaries began in 1927 with
Berlin. Acciaio
was made in Italy from a Pirandello script. He assisted on the editing of
Olympiad
(36, Riefenstahl), the telling demonstration of the “ding-dong” applied, gloriously but fallaciously, to the human figure.

Meg Ryan
(Margaret Mary Emily Anne Hyra), b. Fairfield, Connecticut, 1961
Unerringly the girl next door—with resemblances to Doris Day and Goldie Hawn—Meg Ryan has been a steady, “cute” romantic lead for several years, best suited to playing rather conventional women who are tested by the circumstances of a love story. As such, she might easily have come and gone—and she has made her share of poor pictures, or ones in which she defers to the men. But she improves. She carried the flimsy
French Kiss
(95, Lawrence Kasdan), gave it charm and depth, outplayed the inventive Kevin Kline, and sometimes seemed as eager for more as an adventurous executive producer. It’s possible that she could be better still—even in the tradition of Jean Arthur and Stanwyck—given better material.

The daughter of a casting agent (her mother), she was Candice Bergen’s daughter in
Rich and Famous
(81, George Cukor). She had a small role in
Amityville 3-D
(83, Richard Fleischer), a couple of TV seasons on
As the World Turns
, and then an eye-catching turn in
Top Gun
(86, Tony Scott). She was in
Armed and Dangerous
(86, Mark L. Lester), and in
Innerspace
(87, Joe Dante), where she met her future husband, Dennis Quaid.

She was striking as a tough girl in
Promised
Land
(88, Michael Hoffman)—the feeling often lurks that she is both smarter and stronger than Hollywood wants her to be. But she was no more than a stooge to Quaid in
D.O.A
. (88, Rocky Norton and Annabel Jankel), and Sean Connery’s headstrong daughter in
The Presidio
(88, Peter Hyams).

Her breakthrough came in
When Harry Met Sally…
(89, Rob Reiner), not only for the celebrated fake orgasm in the delicatessen, but because the gimmick got at the real tension between primness and wildness in her character. She was the best thing—as three women—in
Joe Versus the Volcano
(90, John Patrick Shanley), but she could not help being a forlorn, teary onlooker in
The Doors
(91, Oliver Stone).

But then she found her level—as the confident lead in a series of romances and dramas: with Alec Baldwin in
Prelude to a Kiss
(92, Norman René); torn between two men—the real and the heard—in the cunning smash hit
Sleepless in Seattle
(93, Nora Ephron, who had written
When Harry Met Sally…);
with Quaid once more in
Flesh and Bone
(93, Steve Kloves); impressively and affectingly alcoholic in
When a Man Loves a Woman
(94, Luis Mandoki); as Einstein’s niece in
I.Q
. (94, Fred Schepisi). And then as the neurotic who blooms in France in
French Kiss
. It was harder to understand why she was in, or what she was doing in,
Restoration
(95, Hoffman). But her military officer in
Courage Under Fire
(96, Edward Zwick) was the most intriguing thing she had done.

Can she go further? Are there films in America with better parts? In recent years, she began to be the victim of a meek, repetitive system:
Addicted to Love
(97, Griffin Dunne); as the voice of
Anastasia
(97, Don Bluth); knocked about in
Hurlyburly
(98, Anthony Drazan);
City of Angels
(98, Brad Silberling);
You’ve Got Mail
(98, Ephron)—which seemed too calculating a reprise of her chemistry with Hanks;
Hanging Up
(00, Diane Keaton)—one of the girls again, yet nearly forty.

So she made
Proof of Life
(00, Taylor Hackford), an interesting, if rather old-fashioned, love story, and got so involved with costar Russell Crowe that her marriage to Quaid ended. Was the public really hurt? Or was it all a midlife crisis?
Kate & Leopold
(01, James Mangold) seemed more whimsy than an answer. She gave a superb, brave performance in
In the Cut
(03, Jane Campion) that was trashed by most critics. That was followed by
Against the Ropes
(04, Charles Dutton);
In the Land of Women
(07, Jonathan Kasdan);
The Deal
(08, Thomas Schachter);
The Women
(08, Diane English).

Robert Ryan
(1909–73), b. Chicago
Some while before his final struggle with cancer, Robert Ryan’s career seemed in retreat. He was going on sixty; he did not command starring roles; and he had never established much screen rapport in romance—put him with a woman and he was likely to become a threat. So it was sad sometimes to see him in passive, or even humiliated support—in
The Professionals
(66, Richard Brooks), say, or as the ridiculed officer in
The Dirty Dozen
(67, Robert Aldrich). He seemed old and weary, hanging on. Yet he had been one of the most particular and remarkable of American actors, a truly frightening man, not so much because of external menace but because of what he was thinking. If some people grind their teeth, Ryan was an eye-grinder.