The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (42 page)

But then, in his early twenties, he shifted his name to “Robert” and gradually forged an adult career that climaxed in the TV series
Baretta
(75–78), for which he won an Emmy:
Rumble on the Docks
(56, Fred F. Sears);
The Tijuana Story
(57, Leslie Kardos);
The Beast of Budapest
(58, Harmon Jones);
Revolt in the Big House
(58, R. G. Springsteen);
Battle Flame
(59, Springsteen);
The Purple Gang
(60, Frank McDonald);
Town Without Pity
(61, Gottfried Reinhardt);
The Connection
(61, Shirley Clarke);
PT 109
(63, Leslie Martinson);
The Greatest Story Ever Told
(65, George Stevens);
This Property Is Condemned
(66, Sydney Pollack); outstanding, with Scott Wilson, in
In Cold Blood
(67, Richard Brooks);
Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here
(69, Abraham Polonsky); a boxer in
Ripped Off
(71, Franco Prosperi); a stock-car racer in
Cooky
(72, Leonard Horn); the smart cop in
Electra Glide in Blue
(73, James William Guercio);
Busting
(74, Peter Hyams); a trucker who takes on Dyan Cannon in
Coast to Coast
(80, Joseph Sargent);
SecondHand Hearts
(81, Hal Ashby); acting in and producing a TV version of
Of Mice and Men
(81, Reza Badiyi); as Jimmy Hoffa on TV in
Blood Feud
(83, Mike Newell);
Money Train
(95, Joseph Ruben).

And then, in 2001, bizarre melodrama: a wife—yet hardly a wife?—a restaurant, a car, shots in the night. And they say that David Lynch is fanciful. In 2005, Blake was acquitted in a trial for the murder of his companion, Bonnie Lee Bakley. But later that year, her children won a civil suit against Blake with damages of $30 million. That was cut by half on appeal, but the actor was bankrupt.

Cate
(Catherine Elise)
Blanchett
, b. Melbourne, Australia, 1969
Whether or not director Anthony Minghella will be proved right—that Cate Blanchett can do “anything”—remains to be seen. But it will be fun finding out, I think, just because of what Minghella discovered with her in
The Talented Mr. Ripley
(99): that she has a comic imp inside that can make a character out of something very slight. Her Meredith Logue is enlarged from the Highsmith novel for plot purposes, but Blanchett found the special restlessness of a woman not quite beautiful or rich enough, yet ill at ease if she isn’t dealing with people who do have money.

A student at Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art, Blanchett has done Miranda, Ophelia, and
The Seagull
’s Nina in Australia, as well as David Hare’s
Plenty
in London. Her screen debut was in
Police Rescue
(94, Michael Carson);
Parklands
(96, Kathryn Millard);
Paradise Road
(97, Bruce Beresford);
Thank God He Met Lizzie
(97, Cherie Nowlan);
Oscar and Lucinda
(97, Gillian Armstrong);
Elizabeth
(98, Shekhar Kapur), a big, fine performance, Oscar-nominated, yet a little monotonous; the best thing in
Pushing Tin
(99, Mike Newell);
An Ideal Husband
(99, Oliver Parker).

Yes, she had looked and felt like the Tudor Elizabeth, but she’d also been so sly, horny, and sad as Connie Falzone in
Pushing Tin
, when she was surrounded with vaunted young Americans projecting “attitude.” The world caught on, so that no one has been busier in the last few years:
The Man Who Cried
(00, Sally Potter); a psychic in
The Gift
(00, Sam Raimi); showing up the posturing of Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis in
Bandits
(01, Barry Levinson); and then, all in one December, luminous as Galadriel in
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
(01, Peter Jackson); slutty in
The Shipping News
(01, Lasse Hallström); and let down by just about everything in
Charlotte Gray
(01, Armstrong).

She was in
Heaven
(02, Tom Tykwer):
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
(02, Jackson); Irish in
Veronica Guerin
(03, Joel Schumacher);
Coffee and Cigarettes
(03, Jim Jarmusch); tough and brave in
The Missing
(03, Ron Howard);
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
(03, Jackson); Katharine Hepburn in
The Aviator
(04, Martin Scorsese) for which she won the supporting actress Oscar.

So by now she was top of the line, and taking over from Nicole Kidman as the most in-demand actress around. In which case, something is not quite clicking. Could it be that she does not care whether she moves up or not?
Little Fish
(05, Rowan Woods); prone and unconscious for most of
Babel
(06, Alejandro González Iñárritu);
The Good German
(06, Steven Soderburgh); implausible in
Notes on a Scandal
(06, Richard Eyre); again in
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
(06, Kapur); flashy as Dylan in
I’m Not There
(07, Todd Haynes);
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
(08, Steven Spielberg); unbelievable and undesirable in
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
(08, David Fincher); a voice in
Ponyo
(09, Hayao Miyazaki);
Robin Hood
(10, Ridley Scott).

Enough?

Brenda Blethyn
(Bottle), b. Ramsgate, England, 1946
These days, Brenda Blethyn is thought of in the picture business as a mother, if not a matron (though she’s not to be confused with Brenda Fricker, the mother in
My Left Foot
). So it’s appealing to recall that in the early 1980s, when the BBC was working its way through all of Shakespeare, she was Cordelia in
King Lear
and Joan in
Henry VI, Part One
. In those days, she was at the National Theatre. There was a good deal more TV throughout the eighties, before her movie debut in
The Witches
(90, Nicolas Roeg) and then
A River Runs Through It
(92, Robert Redford). But her real breakthrough was as the mother who meets her long-lost daughter in
Secrets and Lies
(96, Mike Leigh), for which she got an Oscar nomination. You can think of it as a raw slice of life or an overjuiced piece of shtick—it all depends on your response to Leigh.

Since then, she has been in
Remember Me?
(97, Nick Hurran);
Girls’ Night
(97, Hurran);
Night Train
(98, John Lynch); to Australia for
In the Winter Dark
(98, James Bogle);
Little Voice
(98, Mark Herman); as Louella Parsons in
RKO 281
(99, Benjamin Ross);
Saving Grace
(00, Nigel Cole); on TV in
Anne Frank
(01, Robert Dornhelm);
Daddy and Them
(01, Billy Bob Thornton);
Lovely and Amazing
(01, Nicole Holofcener);
On the Nose
(01, David Caffrey);
The Sleeping Dictionary
(01, Guy Jenkin);
Pumpkin
(02, Adam Larson Broder and Tony Abrams);
Sonny
(02, Nicolas Cage); a voice on
The Wild Thornberrys Movie
(02, Cathy Malkasian and Jeff McGrath);
Blizzard
(02, LeVar Burton); the mother in
Beyond the Sea
(04, Kevin Spacey);
A Way of Life
(04, Amman Asante);
On a Clear Day
(05, Gaby Dellal);
Pride & Prejudice
(05, Joe Wright);
Clubland
(07, Cherie Nowlan);
London River
(09, Rachid Bouchareb).

Bertrand Blier
, b. Paris, 1939
1962:
Hitler? … Connais Pas!
(d). 1967:
Si J’Etais un Espion
. 1974:
Les Valseuses/Going Places
. 1975:
Calmos/Femmes Fatales
. 1977:
Preparez Vos Mouchoirs/Get Out Your Handkerchiefs
. 1979:
Buffet Froid
. 1981:
Beau-Père
. 1983:
La Femme de Mon Pote/My Best Friend’s Girl
. 1984:
Nôtre Histoire
. 1986:
Tenue de Soirée/Ménage
. 1989:
Trop Belle pour Toi/Too Beautiful for You
. 1991:
Merci la Vie
. 1993:
Un, Deux, Trois, Soleil
. 1996:
Mon Homme
. 2000:
Les Acteurs
. 2003:
Les Côtelettes
. 2005:
Combien Tu M’Aimes?

When Bertrand Blier was born, his father, the actor Bernard Blier (1916–89), was making
Le Jour se Lève
for Carné and Prevert. This may help to explain why Bertrand Blier, who came of age as the films of the New Wave were spilling on the shore, remains attached to prior tradition. Blier the son is a provocateur. His dialogue is not as good as Prevert’s, but his ideas are lovely, cute reversals of order that tickle the bourgeois fancy. His commercial appeal rests in his exactly judged subversiveness, his titillating danger, and his use of successful actors in wellmade scenarios. And we should note that Blier came into his own at the French box office just as the generation of the New Wave began to seem tired. It is not too great a stretch to see that Blier can be reckoned alongside not just Carné, but Lubitsch and Wilder. There is much to be said for movies that get under the skin, the nerves, and the safe thinking of the middle class. There are even moments when the cunning, opportunistic Blier seems a comrade to Buñuel.

He worked as an assistant to several directors notably not affiliated with the New Wave (including Christian-Jaque and Jean Delannoy). He made documentaries and wrote novels before the breakthrough of
Les Valseuses
—which came from one of his own books. That was a movie that encouraged, or permitted, audiences to be thrilled by the very forces of outrage that most alarmed them. Gérard Depardieu’s fame rose with the film’s success, for Depardieu was exactly the Caliban Blier needed to bring into the salon.

Calmos
was a sardonic attack on feminism—and even on women, for Blier has several strains of the classic reactionary in him.
Get Out Your Handkerchiefs
was an ostensible shocker—it involved sexual swapping and Carole Laure giving herself to a teenage boy—yet it won the Oscar for best foreign film.
Buffet Froid
was a satirical thriller, with Depardieu as a dumb innocent caught up in a murder story.
Beau-Père
was a version of
Lolita. My Best Friend’s Girl
was another story about sexual restlessness.
Nôtre Histoire
was an odd mixture of Buñuel and Harold Pinter’s
The Lover. Ménage
took the old pattern of sexual exchange into gay relationships, and
Too Beautiful for You
is a mockery of the whole notion of loveliness.

The piquant attitude in so many Blier films is invariably colored with cynicism. He is tender, but the air of the films is helpless, wry, or bemused. With just a touch of wonder, the films would be immeasurably better. But Blier is too aware of pulling off a cruel practical joke.

Joan Blondell
(1909–79), b. New York
Having been called West by Warners along with James Cagney in 1930—they were young successes in the same Broadway play—Joan Blondell may have been struck by the way Cagney prospered while she stayed a supporting actress. In fact, she was a mainstay at that studio for men, able to sing and dance as well as swop sour dialogue with gangsters, cops, or hustling stage managers. A pretty girl, she was given a cutting edge by so much dull work. When, at last, she broke away from Warners—some ten years later—it was to discover that her talent was already out of date. From 1930–39, she made fifty-three movies, mostly at Warners; but in the next ten years she made only thirteen. Hardly any of her pictures were big or important for their time, but look back over the Warners product and see how her slightly blowsy blonde, as round and shiny as cultured pearls, has lasted. Time and again she brings life, fun, and worldliness to her scenes:
Sinner’s Holiday
(30, John Adolfi), the screen version of the play she and Cagney had starred in;
Office Wife
(30, Lloyd Bacon);
Other Men’s Women
(30, William Wellman);
Illicit
(31, Archie Mayo);
My Past
(31, Roy del Ruth);
Night Nurse
(31, Wellman);
Public Enemy
(31, Wellman);
Blonde Crazy
(31, del Ruth);
The Crowd Roars
(32, Howard Hawks);
Famous Ferguson Case
(32, Bacon);
Miss Pinkerton
(32, Bacon);
Big City Blues
(32, Mervyn Le Roy);
The Greeks Had a Word for Them
(32, Lowell Sherman);
Three on a Match
(32, Le Roy);
Lawyer Man
(33, William Dieterle);
Blondie Johnson
(33, Ray Enright);
Gold Diggers of 1933
(33, Le Roy);
Goodbye Again
(33, Michael Curtiz);
Footlight Parade
(33, Bacon);
Havana Widows
(33, Enright);
Convention City
(33, Mayo);
The Kansas City Princess
(34, William Keighley);
Smarty
(34, Robert Florey);
I’ve Got Your Number
(34, Enright);
He Was Her Man
(34, Bacon);
Dames
(34, Enright);
The Traveling Saleslady
(35, Enright);
Broadway Gondolier
(35, Bacon);
We’re in the Money
(35, Enright);
Miss Pacific Fleet
(35, Enright);
Colleen
(36, Alfred E. Green);
Bullets or Ballots
(36, Keighley);
Stage Struck
(36, Busby Berkeley);
Three Men on a Horse
(36, Le Roy and Mayo);
Gold Diggers of 1937
(36, Bacon);
The King and the Chorus Girl
(37, Le Roy);
The Perfect Specimen
(37, Curtiz);
Back in Circulation
(37, Enright);
Stand In
(37, Tay Garnett);
There’s Always a Woman
(38, Alexander Hall); and
East Side of Heaven
(39, David Butler). After that, she went back to the theatre and married her third husband, Mike Todd; the first two had been cinematographer George Barnes and actor Dick Powell. She worked a lot on TV as well as on the stage, and managed to tickle our sense of nostalgia in a number of character parts:
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
(45, Elia Kazan);
Adventure
(46, Victor Fleming);
Nightmare Alley
(47, Edmund Goulding);
For Heaven’s Sake
(50, George Seaton);
The Blue Veil
(51, Curtis Bernhardt);
The Opposite Sex
(56, David Miller);
This Could Be the Night
(57, Robert Wise);
The Desk Set
(58, Walter Lang);
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
(58, Frank Tashlin);
Angel Baby
(61, Paul Wendkos);
The Cincinnati Kid
(65, Norman Jewison);
Waterhole 3
(67, William Graham); and
Support Your Local Gunfighter
(71, Burt Kennedy).