The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (8 page)

In the 1950s, Ameche did a good deal of television, with just a few movie roles after 1960:
A Fever in the Blood
(61, Vincent Sherman);
Picture Mommy Dead
(66, Bert I. Gordon);
Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came?
(70, Hy Averback);
Ginger Gets Married
(72, E. W. Swackhamer); and
Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood
(76, Michael Winner).

But the real comeback waited for the eighties:
Trading Places
(83, John Landis); winning his Oscar in
Cocoon
(85, Ron Howard);
A Masterpiece of Murder
(86, Charles S. Dubin) and
Pals
(87, Lou Antonio), both for TV;
Harry and the Hendersons
(87, William Dear);
Cocoon: The Return
(88, Daniel Petrie);
Things Change
(88, David Mamet);
Oscar
(91, Landis); and
Folks!
(92, Ted Kotcheff).

Alejandro Amenábar
, b. Santiago de Chile, Chile, 1972
1992:
Himenóptero
. 1995:
Luna
. 1996:
Tesis
. 1997:
Abre los Ojos/Open Your Eyes
. 2001:
The Others
. 2004:
Mar Adentro/The Sea Inside
. 2009:
Ágora
.

Amenábar was born in Chile just as Pinochet came to power. So his mother, a radical veteran of the Spanish Civil War, took him to Spain for his education. He studied at Madrid University, but dropped out. By then he was a brilliant student, and he has had a career as a composer in film as well as a writer/director. He came to attention with
Open Your Eyes
(which starred the young Penélope Cruz) and was derived in part from
Vertigo
—it was a love story in which the present was remodeled on the past. The thriller element was so lit up by psychological dream power that Tom Cruise was excited enough to remake the film as
Vanilla Sky
(with himself, Cruz, and Cameron Diaz). And as another part of this exchange, Amenábar directed Nicole Kidman in an Irish-like ghost story,
The Others
. This was one of the films that lifted Kidman to the status of real actress as opposed to Mrs. Tom. It is not a perfect film—the story might have been more enclosing—but it showed that Amenábar was a magical realist with a melancholy cast of mind.

In that light,
The Sea Inside
was a tremendous advance: the story of a quadriplegic who ends his own life after a prolonged battle for the right to kill himself. It featured an amazing performance from Javier Bardem as the man and it won the Oscar for best foreign film.

So it’s not quite clear why such a gap followed in Amenábar’s output. But
Ágora
is a classical story in which a noblewoman (Rachel Weisz) falls in love with her own slave (Max Minghella). It remains to be seen how successful this will be, just as Amenábar seems poised over the decision of what kind of a director he will be.

Jon Amiel
, b. London, 1948
1986:
The Singing Detective
(TV). 1989:
Queen of Hearts
. 1990:
Tune in Tomorrow.…
1993:
Sommersby
. 1995:
Copycat
. 1997:
The Man Who Knew Too Little
. 1999:
Entrapment
. 2002:
The Core
. 2009:
Creation
.

Jon Amiel has gone from studying the wrecked skin of “Philip Marlowe” to ogling the up-thrust haunches of Catherine Zeta-Jones. Well, yes, there’s room for both in this book, but here is a warning case about the risks in going to Hollywood. A seasoned television director in London, Amiel got his great chance with Dennis Potter’s six-part serial. He may have complained at low budgets and tight schedules; still, there is nothing like material, and Ron Bass (the screenwriter on
Entrapment
) has a smoothness of personality that keeps him years away from understanding such characters as Potter’s Marlowe.

The transition is sadder still when one recalls that
Queen of Hearts
—about Italians running a café in England—was full of charm, vitality and originality.
Tune in Tomorrow …
, from the Vargas Llosa novel
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
, was offbeat. But
Sommersby
is a numb remake of
The Return of Martin Guerre; Copycat
was contrived and nasty; and
Entrapment
is all concept and no material, and enough to strand its two likable star personalities.

Gillian Anderson
, b. Chicago, 1968
Having given one of the best performances of its year, as Lily Bart in
The House of Mirth
(00, Terence Davies), and seeing it largely ignored, what is Gillian Anderson to think? That her Dana Scully on TV’s
The X-Files
passes as real drama or more serious work? In fact, of course, all Lily Bart did was persuade the discerning that those hints of uncommon character and intelligence as Scully were not accidental. (In that strange series, many minimal things can seem larger than is really the case—let no one be fooled, high-class tosh has frequently wasted two of the smartest actors on any screen.) As a child, Anderson was taken to live in London for over ten years. But she finished her school at the Goodman Theatre School in Chicago. After a small role in
The Turning
(92, L.A. Puopolo), she went into
The X-Files
in 1993. Her ventures beyond that hit show were odd to say the least: she narrated a documentary,
Why Planes Go Down
(97), presumably because Scully’s deadpan encouraged the thought of unnatural reasons. She was “Southside Girl” in
Chicago Cab
(98, Mary Cybulski and John Tintori);
The Mighty
(98, Peter Chelsom); in the movie of
The X-Files
(98, Rob Bowman);
Playing by Heart
(98, Willard Carroll). And then Lily Bart, with an exceptional command of class, passion, bad luck, and despair. In fact, the reception given
The House of Mirth
seemed to prove one principle behind
The X Files
—there are a lot of dead heads out there.

She is based in Britain now, and cares for three children. As to work, nearly everything she does is out of the ordinary: to Ireland for
The Mighty Celt
(05, Pearse Elliott); both herself and the Widow Wadman in
A Cock and Bull Story
(05, Michael Winterbottom); as Lady Dedlock on TV in
Bleak House
(05, Justin Chadwick and Susanna White);
The Last King of Scotland
(06, Kevin Macdonald);
Straightheads
(07, Dan Reed);
The X-Files: I Want to Believe
(08, Chris Carter);
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
(08, Robert B. Weide);
Boogie Woogie
(09, Duncan Ward).

Dame Judith
(Frances Margaret)
Anderson
(1897–1992), b. Adelaide, Australia.
Mrs. Danvers is made of certainty. That is her prison, and what makes her so much stronger than the two leading figures in
Rebecca
(40, Alfred Hitchcock). But she is not free. She has a terrible job—the housekeeper—and she exercises it in the shape of a staircase and in the folded suggestiveness of her mistress’s underwear in a drawer. It is because she is the housekeeper that she has to die with the house. And so she carries herself like an immense tragic actress, and it is her humiliation in
Rebecca
that her house and authority have been intruded on by two feeble people. She was nominated for the supporting part (Jane Darwell won in
The Grapes of Wrath!
), yet she shouldn’t have won—because she knows hers is the leading part.

She went to America in the 1930s and commanded several classic roles on Broadway—Gertrude to Gielgud’s Hamlet, Medea, Lady Macbeth, and
Mourning Becomes Electra
. But she was never a female attraction, and over the years that surely limited her work and may have bred a certain lack of humor. It was the brilliant Kay Brown who proposed Anderson for Mrs. Danvers—but it was the actress who insisted on $1,000 a week and all expenses paid. The authority shows—but it kept Anderson from so many other parts.

In fact, she had made one film before—
Blood Money
(33, Rowland Brown). But then nothing until Manderley. After that she worked steadily in Hollywood for ten years, often in the most unexpected projects: with Eddie Cantor in
40 Little Mothers
(40, Busby Berkeley);
Free and Easy
(41, George Sidney); in a B-picture crime movie,
Lady Scarface
(41, Frank Woodruff);
All Through the Night
(42, Vincent Sherman);
King’s Row
(42, Sam Wood);
Edge of Darkness
(43, Lewis Milestone);
Laura
(44, Otto Preminger);
And Then There Were None
(45, René Clair);
The Diary of a Chambermaid
(46, Jean Renoir).

She was in
Specter of the Rose
(46, Ben Hecht);
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
(46, Milestone);
Pursued
(47, Raoul Walsh);
The Red House
(47, Delmer Daves);
Tycoon
(47, Richard Wallace);
The Furies
(50, Anthony Mann).

After that, she worked a lot on TV and she did
The Silver Cord
(51, Lawrence Carra) for the small screen. In addition, she was Herodias in
Salome
(53, William Dieterle);
The Ten Commandments
(56, Cecil B. DeMille); Big Momma in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(58, Richard Brooks); on TV again for
Medea
(59, Wes Kenney);
The Moon and Sixpence
(59, Robert Mulligan);
Cinderfella
(60, Frank Tashlin), with Jerry Lewis;
Don’t Bother to Knock
(61, Cyril Frankel).

She lived a long time, and in old age she made
A Man Called Horse
(70, Elliot Silverstein);
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
(89, Leonard Nimoy); and several years on the daytime TV show
Santa Barbara
.

Lindsay Anderson
, (1923–94), b. Bangalore, India
1948:
Meet the Pioneers
(d). 1949:
Idlers That Work
(d). 1951:
Three Installations
(d). 1952:
Wakefield Express
(d). 1953:
Thursday’s Child
(codirected with Guy Brenton) (d);
O Dreamland
(d). 1954:
Trunk Conveyor
(d). 1955:
Foot and Mouth
(d);
A Hundred Thousand Children
(d);
The Children Upstairs
(d);
Green and Pleasant Land
(d);
Henry
(d);
£20 a Ton
(d);
Energy First
(d). 1957:
Every Day Except Christmas
(d). 1959:
March to Aldermaston
(codirected) (d). 1962:
This Sporting Life
. 1966:
The White Bus
(s). 1967:
Raz, Dwa, Trzy/The Singing Lesson
. 1968:
If.…
1972:
O Lucky Man!
. 1974:
In Celebration
. 1979:
The Old Crowd
(TV);
Red White and Zero
. 1982:
Britannia Hospital
. 1987:
The Whales of August
. 1989:
Glory! Glory!
(TV).

The contradictoriness in Anderson’s personality was vigorous enough to prevent him from a filmmaking career that had any continuity. And yet since the war he had been one of the more active and idiosyncratic figures in the British arts. Anderson had been so fiercely engaged with the problem of why it is so difficult to make good films in England, but his energies were unresolved and his rather prickly talent had never been fully expressed. England’s fault or Anderson’s? The question is crucial because Anderson was involved in some of the most thorough scrutiny of the British cinema. And just as there was never much doubt that he was more talented than his contemporaries—Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz—so he never allowed his solution to the questions to become tied to any noncinematic dogma. Briefly, in the mid-1950s, his sense of commitment fastened on that left-wing emotion that marched to Aldermaston. But Anderson was too good an artist to swallow politics whole. His need to be committed was itself the chief impulse of his career, and the catalogue of his causes is, by implication, the story of dissipation. His productions of David Storey’s stage plays have an earnestness and need for significance that might alarm an author and certainly expose the texts. In retrospect, he seems a lesser figure than, say, Robert Hamer or Seth Holt—if only because he made so few features.

Anderson was the son of an officer in the Indian army. He came back to England to go to Cheltenham and Oxford: which underlines the biographical elements of Kipling and public school in
If.…
His period at university was interrupted by war service. But, still at Oxford, in 1947, he was one of the founders of the magazine
Sequence
(Karel Reisz was the other). He edited it for five years, by which time he was involved in documentary filmmaking. The simultaneous criticism and creativity was vital to
Sequence
but sadly peripheral to filmmaking and appreciation in Britain. Anderson’s documentaries are no advance on the films of the 1930s and 1940s, while
Sequence
is an uneasy and inconsistent proponent of a director’s cinema. Anderson’s own taste was for what he called “poetic” cinema; but that led him to liking John Ford as much as Vigo. The beginnings of a proper appreciation of American cinema in
Sequence
were always evaded, perhaps through ultimate critical shortcomings, perhaps through distaste for America. In any event, Anderson missed the chance that
Cahiers du Cinéma
gobbled up, of a new movie aesthetic that took American sound films as its models.