The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (379 page)

For the rest there was a lot of television, with the most prestigious thing being a 1961
Jane Eyre
where he was Rochester and Sally Anne Howes was Jane.

George Seaton
(1911–79), b. South Bend, Indiana
1945:
Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe; Junior Miss
. 1946:
The Shocking Miss Pilgrim
. 1947:
Miracle on 34th Street
. 1948:
Apartment for Peggy
. 1949:
Chicken Every Sunday
. 1950:
The Big Lift; For Heaven’s Sake
. 1952:
Anything Can Happen
. 1953:
Little Boy Lost
. 1954:
The Country Girl
. 1956:
The Proud and the Profane
. 1958:
Teacher’s Pet
. 1961:
The Pleasure of His Company; The Counterfeit Traitor
. 1962:
The Hook
. 1964:
36 Hours
. 1968:
What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?
1970:
Airport
. 1972:
Showdown
.

Once a radio and stage actor, Seaton entered movies as a writer and worked in that capacity for some twelve years:
A Day at the Races
(37, Sam Wood);
Coney Island
(43, Walter Lang);
The Song of Bernadette
(43, Henry King); and
The Eve of St. Mark
(44, John M. Stahl).
Coney Island
and
Bernadette
were both produced by William Perlberg, with whom Seaton formed a partnership in 1952. They functioned together until
36 Hours
and also produced
The Bridges at Toko-Ri
(55, Mark Robson);
The Tin Star
(57, Anthony Mann); and
The Rat Race
(60, Robert Mulligan). The latter two are a good deal more serious than any of Seaton’s own films. He is a run-of-the-mill artisan sentimentalist, who discerned talent in the very young Natalie Wood and marshaled the tears well enough in
The Country Girl
to win Oscars for Grace Kelly and for his own screenplay. Essentially predictable in his writing and direction, Seaton was not up to the promising situation of
36 Hours
—a subject that Hitchcock or Lang might have reveled in—of a Nazi attempt to set up a fake Allied hospital so that James Garner, coming out of a coma, may spill the beans. But he had big hits with
Teacher’s Pet
and
Airport
.

Jean Seberg
(1938–79), b. Marshalltown, Iowa
There was an endearing smalltown common sense about Jean Seberg that stood up to the powerful attentions of several discoverers and that, on occasion, brought a deliberate naturalism to good films. Although at the time she was treated contemptuously by the critics, her
Saint Joan
(57, Otto Preminger) is a shrewd and touching fusion of provincial America, rural France, and Shaw’s notion of a fustian saint picking logic with kings and bishops. She was chosen for that film, by Preminger, after an exhaustive search; even cropped and in armor she looked pretty and robust, and managed through her very disavowal of spirituality to bring odd conviction to the claims that she had heard voices.

Preminger persisted, despite critics, and won a marvelous performance from her as the spoilt adolescent in
Bonjour Tristesse
(58). It was apparent by now that unlike most discoveries who had previously only done local stock, she was self-possessed and mature. Beauty, the conventional asset of the newcomer, had been restricted by the hairstyles of her first two films. Perhaps it was in reaction against the bad reviews, and as an emotional gesture toward American cinema, that—after
The
Mouse That Roared
(59, Jack Arnold) and
Let No Man Write My Epitaph
(59, Philip Leacock)—Jean-Luc Godard got her to play Patricia, the American girl in Paris in
Breathless
(59).

At first, she rather rebelled against his conception of a treacherous escapee from some film noir, but in the end was credibly
degeulgasse
, the more so for not knowing what the word meant. She then became the first notable American actress to work in France. Learning the language quickly, she was given a wig for
Infidelity
(61, Philippe de Broca) and matched Micheline Presle for sexiness. Here again, the Iowa girl proved surprisingly worldly. She married Frenchman François Moreuil and he directed her rather limply in
Playtime
(62). She divorced him and married novelist Romain Gary, and then played in
In the French Style
(63, Robert Parrish) and the “Grand Escroc” episode from
Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du Monde
(63, Godard), a Patricia Leacock blithely subjecting all around her to cinema verité.

In 1963, despite the fact that Yvette Mimieux had recommended
Lilith
to him, Robert Rossen chose Seberg for that part. As with Joan, she brought an earthiness to a mythological character. The film is ambitious beyond its director’s talent, but her playing throughout has a proper rapture and it is Seberg’s most evident proof of poetic imagination.

After that she worked in France and America, but never in really testing parts:
Un Milliard dans un Billiard
(65, Nicholas Gessner);
Moment to Moment
(65, Mervyn Le Roy);
A Fine Madness
(66, Irvin Kershner);
La Ligne de Démarcation
(66, Claude Chabrol);
Estouffade à la Caraibe
(66, Jacques Besnard);
Les Oiseaux Vont Mourir au Pérou
(68, Gary)—wildly pretentious and arty;
Pendulum
(68, George Schaefer);
Paint Your Wagon
(69, Joshua Logan);
Airport
(70, George Seaton);
Macho Callahan
(70, Bernard Kowalski);
Kill
(71, Gary);
L’Attentat
(72, Yves Boisset);
La Corrupcion de Chris Miller
(72, Juan Antonio Bardem); and
Cat and Mouse
(74, Daniel Petrie).

She married Dennis Berry, son of John Berry, and appeared in his
Le Grand Délire
(75). She directed a short film,
Ballad of the Kid
(74), and acted in
Die Wildente
(76, Hans Geissendorfer).

On September 8, 1979, two policemen looked into a white Renault that had been parked ten days on a quiet street in Paris. They found the decomposing body of Jean Seberg, with a bottle of barbiturates. She had been involved with black activists. The FBI had hounded and harassed her. A child of hers had died. The hideous story is well told in David Richards’s
Played Out
, but Seberg’s tragedy has been attempted on stage, and it lingers.

Peter Sellers
(1925–80), b. Southsea, England
When commercial cinema was breaking down in the late fifties, it adopted many novelties in a frenzied search for security. One of them was Peter Sellers. He was, beyond argument, a brilliant radio comedian, capable of inventing vivid fantasy characters with his great flair as a mimic. But cinema flinches from mimicry and peels away bogusness. Moreover, as Sellers became world famous, so strains of vanity and neurosis arose, so close to madness that his real heart disease seemed incidental.

He became an international figure without ever apparently considering the nature of acting. Darting in and out of comic personae could seem slippery or chronic on screen. He was often funny—though on film he was broader than he had been on radio—but he was too evidently a virtuoso, and little else. His comedy never helped him find a character—as happened with Fields, Groucho, and so many others. There was no attitude there in Sellers: his deftness was ghostly; yet he could be very dull when some serious fancy took him. His health was poor, but his ego was very strong. He was not easy to work with, and he was very self-indulgent as Inspector Clouseau.

After many years on radio in
Ray’s a Laugh
and
The Goon Show
(which revolved around him), he played supporting parts in British films:
The Ladykillers
(55, Alexander Mackendrick);
The Smallest Show on Earth
(57, Basil Dearden); and
The Naked Truth
(57, Mario Zampi). He rose to leading parts, but seldom appeared without some disguise:
Carlton-Browne of the F.O
. (59, Roy Boulting);
The Mouse That Roared
(59, Jack Arnold);
I’m All Right, Jack
(59, R. Boulting);
Battle of the Sexes
(59, Charles Crichton);
Two-Way Stretch
(60, Robert Day); as a gangster in
Never Let Go
(60, John Guillermin); as his caricature Indian in
The Millionairess
(60, Anthony Asquith); in his one direction of himself,
Mr. Topaze
(61); and
Only Two Can Play
(61, Sidney Gilliat).

His elevation to major stardom began with the part of Quilty in
Lolita
(62, Stanley Kubrick) and
Waltz of the Toreadors
(62, Guillermin). Then came the three parts—British flier, U.S. president, and evil genius—in
Dr. Strangelove
(63, Kubrick), in which his own pretensions vied with those of the director.

The “international comedian” label was now pinned on him: as Inspector Clouseau in
The Pink Panther
(64, Blake Edwards) and
A Shot in the Dark
(64, Edwards); and
The World of Henry Orient
(64, George Roy Hill). He had a heart attack before
Kiss Me, Stupid
could get under way, and soulfully declared his regeneration. But there was no firmer grip on a character for himself, and the films got worse:
What’s New, Pussycat?
(65, Clive Donner);
The Wrong Box
(66, Bryan Forbes);
After the Fox
(66, Vittorio de Sica);
The Bobo
(67, Robert Parrish);
Woman Times Seven
(67, de Sica);
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas
(68, Hy Averback);
The Party
(68, Edwards);
The Magic Christian
(69, Joseph McGrath);
Hoffman
(69, Alvin Rakoff);
There’s a Girl in My Soup
(70, R. Boulting);
Soft Beds, Hard Battles
(73, R. Boulting);
The Optimists of Nine Elms
(73, Anthony Simmons); as Queen Victoria in
The Great McGonagall
(74, McGrath). He stayed loyal to Clouseau, but came close to being surpassed by Herbert Lom’s Dreyfuss in
The Return of the Pink Panther
(74),
The Pink Panther Strikes Again
(76), and
The Revenge of the Pink Panther
(78)—all by Blake Edwards. He was another comic policeman in
Murder by Death
(76, Robert Moore), and the traditional double-act in
The Prisoner of Zenda
(79, Richard Quine).

He was wonderfully well used as the empty vessel who rises to command in
Being There
(80, Hal Ashby)—it’s hard to think of another actor who could have played the vital yet elusive role so well, and perhaps he was all the better in it because illness kept him quiet, still, and impassive. His last film was
The Fiendish Plot of Fu-Manchu
(80, Piers Haggard), but
Trail of the Pink Panther
(82, Edwards) used old footage from Clouseaus of the past.

David O. Selznick
(1902–65), b. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The
O
was added later in his youth by Selznick himself for euphony and to keep up with other moguls. Having elected
O
, he called himself Oliver.

He was the son of Lewis J. Selznick. Educated briefly at Columbia University, he began working in his teens for his father’s film company. He edited the company magazine and was in charge of newsreels and short subjects. After his father’s bankruptcy in 1923, David embarked on independent newsreels—on the boxer Luis Firpo and a beauty contest judged by Rudolph Valentino. In 1924, he produced his first feature,
Roulette
(S. E. V. Taylor), and in 1926 he left New York for Hollywood. His name barred him from good jobs and he worked for MGM as assistant story editor. He reformed the writers’ department and became chief assistant to Harry Rapf on cheap quickies. While there, with W. S. Van Dyke directing, he made two Tim McCoy vehicles simultaneously at great savings, fought with Louis B. Mayer, and was fired after an argument with Hunt Stromberg.

He joined Paramount and there produced or supervised
Forgotten Faces
(28, Victor Schertzinger);
Chinatown Nights
(29, William Wellman);
The Dance of Life
(29, John Cromwell and Edward Sutherland);
The Four Feathers
(29, Merian Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack, and Lothar Mendes);
The Man I Love
(29, Wellman);
Street of Chance
(30, Cromwell);
Sarah and Son
(30, Dorothy Arzner);
Honey
(30, Wesley Ruggles);
The Texan
(30, Cromwell);
For the Defense
(30, Cromwell); and
Manslaughter
(30, George Abbott).

In 1930, he married Irene Mayer, the daughter of Louis B. He resigned from Paramount in 1931 and was hired as studio boss of the new RKO. It was there that he first showed his special talent by hiring George Cukor, Merian Cooper, and Katharine Hepburn. His productions at RKO included
Symphony of Six Million
(32, Gregory La Cava);
What Price Hollywood?
(32, Cukor);
A Bill of Divorcement
(32, Cukor);
Bird of Paradise
(32, King Vidor);
The Age of Consent
(32, La Cava);
Topaze
(33, Harry d’Arrast);
Little Women
(33, Cukor);
Our Betters
(33, Cukor); and
King Kong
(33, Schoedsack and Cooper).

In 1933 he returned to MGM with his own production unit and made
Dinner at Eight
(33, Cukor);
Night Flight
(33, Clarence Brown);
Dancing Lady
(33, Robert Z. Leonard), and Astaire’s first film;
Viva Villa!
(34, Jack Conway and Howard Hawks);
Manhattan Melodrama
(34, W. S. Van Dyke);
David Copperfield
(34, Cukor);
Reckless
(35, Victor Fleming);
Anna Karenina
(35, Brown); and
A Tale of Two Cities
(35, Conway).