The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (453 page)

Natalie Wood
(Natasha Gurdin) (1938–81), b. San Francisco
She was the youngest veteran in movies, with quite distinct periods to her career: divine child; edgy kid; beautiful young woman; slow sad fade. The daughter of a set decorator and a ballet dancer, she made her debut, at age five, in Irving Pichel’s
Happy Land
(43). Unlike most child stars, she had no real break in her film work:
Tomorrow Is Forever
(45, Pichel);
The Bride Wore Boots
(46, Pichel);
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
(47, Joseph L. Mankiewicz);
Miracle on 34th Street
(47, George Seaton);
Driftwood
(47, Allan Dwan);
Chicken Every Sunday
(49, Seaton);
No Sad Songs for Me
(50, Rudolph Maté);
The Jackpot
(50, Walter Lang);
Never a Dull Moment
(50, George Marshall);
The Blue Veil
(51, Curtis Bernhardt); Bing Crosby’s daughter in
Just for You
(52, Elliott Nugent).

She then graduated to teenage parts: Stuart Heisler’s
The Star
(53) and Nicholas Ray’s
Rebel Without a Cause
(55), a masterpiece on unhappy youth that promoted her from child to adult. Although her work with Ray and Dean was outstanding, she was still too young for many good parts and, apart from the girl who has lived with the Indians in Ford’s
The Searchers
(56), for a few years she marked time as an adolescent:
The Burning Hills
(56, Heisler);
The Girl He Left Behind
(56, David Butler);
Cry in the Night
(56, Frank Tuttle); Gordon Douglas’s
No Sleep Till Dawn
(57); the syrupy
Marjorie Morningstar
(58, Irving Rapper); Daves’s
Kings Go Forth
(58); Pevney’s
Cash McCall
(60).

She was fully matured, however, in Kazan’s
Splendor in the Grass
(61), which has a controlled use of sexual hysteria. In 1961, she was a star as Maria in
West Side Story
(Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins), and in 1962 she played an all-too-discreet stripper in Le Roy’s
Gypsy
. She was harassed in Mulligan’s
Love With the Proper Stranger
(63), and was at her best in his
Inside Daisy Clover
(66), but was generally happier with humor: from the pastiche of Blake Edwards’s
The Great Race
(65) to the comedy of manners in Paul Mazursky’s
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
(69). In that, she looked like a ripe plum, ready to be persuaded to try
Gypsy
again. But sadly, she came to seem a little weary of filming:
The Affair
(73, Gilbert Cates);
Peeper
(75, Peter Hyams); and
Meteor
(79, Ronald Neame).

She was married to Robert Wagner from 1957 to 1963, then to producer Richard Gregson, and then to Wagner again from 1972 onward. In 1976, they had played together as Maggie and Brick (with Olivier as Big Daddy) in a British television production of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(Robert Moore). She played Karen Holmes (the Deborah Kerr role) in the TV miniseries
From Here to Eternity
(79);
The Cracker Factory
(79, Burt Brinckerhoff), about an alcoholic who goes to a mental hospital;
The Last Married Couple in America
(79, Cates);
The Memory of Eva Ryker
(80, Walter Grauman); and
Brainstorm
(83, Douglas Trumbull). It was during the shooting of this last film that she drowned off Catalina Island.

Sam Wood
(1883–1949), b. Philadelphia
1919:
Double Speed
. 1920:
Excuse My Dust; The Dancin’ Fool; What’s Your Hurry?; Sick Abed
. 1921:
Don’t Tell Everything; The Great Moment; Peck’s Bad Boy; The Snob; Under the Lash
. 1922:
Beyond the Rocks; Her Gilded Cage; Her Husband’s Trademark; The Impossible Mrs. Bellew; My American Wife
. 1923:
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife; His Children’s Children; Prodigal Daughters
. 1924:
Bluff; The Female; The Mine with the Iron Door; The Next Corner
. 1925:
The Recreation of Brian Kent
. 1926:
Fascinating Youth; One Minute to Play
. 1927:
The Fair Co-ed; A Racing Romeo; Rookies
. 1928:
The Latest from Paris; Telling the World
. 1929:
It’s a Great Life; So This Is College
. 1930:
Paid; They Learned About Women
(codirected with Jack Conway);
Sins of the Children; The Girl Said No; Way for a Sailor
. 1931:
New Adventures of Get Rich Quick Wallingford; A Tailor Made Man; Man in Possession
. 1932:
Huddle; Prosperity
. 1933:
Hold Your Man; The Barbarian; The Late Christopher Bean
. 1934:
Stamboul Quest
. 1935:
A Night at the Opera; Whipsaw; Let ’em Have It
. 1936:
The
Unguarded Hour
. 1937:
A Day at the Races; Navy Blue and Gold; Madame X
. 1938:
Lord Jeff; Stablemates
. 1939:
Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Gone With the Wind
(Wood directed some sequences when Victor Fleming was ill). 1940:
Rangers of Fortune; Raffles; Our Town; Kitty Foyle
. 1941:
The Devil and Miss Jones
. 1942:
King’s Row; The Pride of the Yankees
. 1943:
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. 1944:
Casanova Brown
. 1945:
Guest Wife
. 1946:
Saratoga Trunk; Heartbeat
. 1947:
Ivy
. 1949:
The Stratton Story; Command Decision; Ambush
.

Perhaps the most staid director ever to be entrusted to the Marx Brothers, Wood interfered with their riot no more or less than other MGM directors. Even so,
The Groucho Letters
contains a new use of “knock on Wood” to commemorate the director’s obstructiveness. He had begun as an assistant to De Mille, and thus he worked for Paramount before serving through the 1930s as an assignments man at MGM. His work there was without distinction, despite his guiding of Robert Donat to an Oscar in
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
. In the 1940s, as a freelancer, he was involved in rather more prestigious movies—another Oscar, for Ginger Rogers as
Kitty Foyle;
the entertaining
Devil and Miss Jones;
the supposedly classy
King’s Row;
and a quartet of Gary Cooper pictures that were among his last portraits of the hero unhindered by doubts
—Pride of the Yankees
, a baseball biopic;
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, a studio-bound and mock Spanish rendering of Hemingway;
Casanova Brown;
and
Saratoga Trunk
, the latter an interminable, fussy movie, the ending of which has twice been denied to me by sleep. After the war, only the genteel frenzy of Joan Fontaine in
Ivy
is memorable.

Alfre Woodard
, b. Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1953
For over twenty years now, in movies and on TV, Alfre Woodard has been about as reliable as an actress can be. She can be very funny, deadpan, tragic, brave, tough, wise, street smart, or stupid. Yet she has never been trusted to carry a big picture, which is a way of complaining that such trust is often misplaced. At the age of fifty, Alfre Woodard has shown more, more often, with more controlled craft than—let us say—Debra Winger or Anjelica Huston, actresses of about her age.

She attracted a lot of attention as the hotel manager in
H.E.A.L.T.H
. (79, Robert Altman) and as the supermarket checkout girl in
Remember My Name
(78, Alan Rudolph). She had as good a watchful look—wary and sexy—as anyone in pictures. She was in
The Ambush Murders
(82, Steven Hilliard Stern) on TV; and she did a season in the series,
Tucker’s Witch
(82–83).

It was in 1983 that she really had a breakthrough: she got a supporting actress nomination in
Cross Creek
(Martin Ritt), but won a far larger audience in three episodes of
Hill Street Blues
, one of which—“Dani in Wonderland”—won her an Emmy. Also on TV, she began a two-year run (opposite Denzel Washington) as Dr. Roxanne Turner in
St. Elsewhere
. In 1986, she won a second Emmy for the pilot of
L.A. Law
(Gregory Hoblit).

There had been movies, too:
Go Tell It on the Mountain
(84, Stan Latham);
Extremities
(86, Robert M. Young); and then back to TV for
Unnatural Causes
(86, Lamont Johnson), written by John Sayles;
Mandela
(87, Philip Saville), as Winnie; and
The Child Saver
(88, Latham).

Since then, she has been in
Scrooged
(88, Richard Donner);
Miss Firecracker
(89, Thomas Schlamme); as basketball player Isiah Thomas’s mother in
A Mother’s Courage
(89, John Patterson);
Grand Canyon
, opposite Danny Glover (91, Lawrence Kasdan); as the nurse in
Passion Fish
(92, Sayles);
The Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag
(92, Allan Moyle);
Rich in Love
(93, Bruce Beresford);
Bopha!
(93, Morgan Freeman);
Blue Chips
(94, William Friedkin); and
Crooklyn
(94, Spike Lee).

Sadly, very few things in recent years have really challenged Ms. Woodard, or approached her abilities. The obstacle remains in America in 2001 that some people are reckoned actresses, and others black actresses; thus, some films only fire white bullets—their explosive force (their budget) demands it. So a lot of Alfre Woodard is to be found on television or in small parts. It’s still worth the search:
The Piano Lesson
(95, Lloyd Richards);
How to Make an American Quilt
(95, Jocelyn Moorhouse); the Queen of Brobdingnag in
Gulliver’s Travels
(96, Charles Sturridge); the judge in
Primal Fear
(96, Gregory Hoblit);
A Step Toward Tomorrow
(96, Deborah Reinisch);
Star Trek: First Contact
(96, Jonathan Frakes); the lead in
Miss Evers’ Boys
(97, Joseph Sargent);
Follow Me Home
(97, Peter Bratt);
Secrets
(97, Sheryl Lee Ralph).

She was superb, with Anna Paquin, in a TV version of
The Member of the Wedding
(97, Fielder Cook);
Down in the Delta
(98, Maya Angelou);
Brown Sugar
(98, John Eyres);
Funny Valentines
(99, Julie Dash);
Mumford
(99, Kasdan);
The Wishing Tree
(99, Ivan Passer);
What’s Cooking?
(00, Gurinder Chadha);
Love & Basketball
(00, Gina Prince);
Holiday Heart
(00, Robert Townsend);
K-PAX
(01, Iain Softley);
Baby of the Family
(01, Jonee Ansa);
The Singing Detective
(03, Keith Gordon);
The Core
(03, Jon Amiel);
Radio
(03, Michael Tollin);
The Forgotten
(04, Joseph Ruben);
Beauty Shop
(05, Bille Woodruff);
Something New
(06, Sanaa Hamri);
Take the Lead
(06, Liz Friedlander);
Pictures of Hollis Woods
(07, Tony Bill);
American Violet
(08, Tim Disney);
The Family That Preys
(08, Tyler Perry); in the TV series
My Own Worst Enemy
(08, David Semel).

James Woods
, b. Vernal, Utah, 1947
We all know—don’t we?—that appearance is a matter of chance? We’ve all had
Beauty and the Beast
read to us so often we can recite the principle that sometimes great ugliness masks a rich and generous heart. We have learned that the best-looking people sometimes behave the worst. But the movies remain loyal to the code that good-looking equals good. It follows that the guys with faces as narrow as James Woods, with eyes so close together, play finks, villains, snakes, liars, hoods, cheats, and rats, and even Roy Cohn. We may gather or deduce that Mr. Woods likes himself, but how can a movie act upon the same faith?

He studied political science at M.I.T., and has been known to expound on his own great intelligence (is this rat behavior or what?). He made his debut in
The Visitors
(72, Elia Kazan) and soon found himself as an available nasty:
Hickey and Boggs
(72, Robert Culp);
The Way We Were
(73, Sydney Pollack)—as a radical;
The Gambler
(74, Karel Reisz);
Distance
(75, Anthony Lover); as the stuntman in
Night Moves
(75, Arthur Penn);
The Disappearance of Aimee
(76, Anthony Harvey);
Alex & the Gypsy
(76, John Korty);
The Choirboys
(77, Robert Aldrich);
Holocaust
(78, Marvin J. Chomsky);
The Black Marble
(79, Harold Becker); and
And Your Name Is Jonah
(79, Richard Michaels).

He was memorably loathsome in his breakthrough film,
The Onion Field
(79, Becker), and followed it with
Eyewitness
(81, Peter Yates);
Fast-Walking
(82, James B. Harris);
Split Image
(82, Ted Kotcheff); in the Kirk Douglas role in
Against All Odds
(83, Taylor Hackford);
Videodrome
(83, David Cronenberg); oddly subdued as the traitor in
Once Upon a Time in America
(84, Sergio Leone);
Joshua Then and Now
(85, Kotcheff); very good in
Salvador
(86, Oliver Stone) as journalist Richard Boyle (and nominated for best actor);
Best Seller
(87, John Flynn);
The Boost
(88, Becker);
Cop
(88, Harris);
Immediate Family
(89, Jonathan Kaplan)—trying to adopt a child!;
True Believer
(89, Joseph Ruben);
The Hard Way
(91, John Badham);
Diggstown
(92, Michael Ritchie);
Straight Talk
(92, Barnett Kellman); and a wicked lawyer in
Chaplin
(92, Richard Attenborough).