TOP 100 ACTOR SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America by Peter Biskind | Book review Euan Ferguson admires an impeccable life of the Hollywood man-god who wanted total controlHeadlines over the past few days have focused, predictably, on the fact that Warren Beatty has, according to this long-awaited semi-authorised biography, bedded almost 13,000 women in his life. This temporary outbreak of prurience might, at least, bring the one-time superstar to the attention of young things who've hardly heard of the man whose hits are long behind him. Dick Tracy (1990) made $100m, but there are cogent arguments that he hasn't had a truly popular hit since Heaven Can Wait in 1978. However, the focus on Beatty's sexual exploits do a reductive disservice to the book as a whole.Peter Biskind, a former executive editor of Premiere magazine and the highly regarded author of 1998's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, one of the best books on Hollywood of the past quarter-century, never quite got official access to Beatty, but never quite didn't. As he explains near the start of this equally stunning piece of truth-telling, every page full of nuggets without descending to salaciousness, the pair were always near-friends, and Beatty was always going to almost allow him to write the book officially. Yet he shillied and stalled and changed his mind so often that Biskind remained unsure even as publication approached whether he'd actually got the go-ahead.The tale that emerges, through the thicket of quotes from Hollywood's biggest players of the past 50 years (and how the mild-mannered Biskind got them to talk to him again, after the revelations in Easy Riders, is a mystery), is that of a man-god gone sadly wrong. Warren Beatty could have been almost anything. He had charm, a vaulting intellect, beautiful looks and physique, unstoppable ambition and all the necessary connections. And he didn't do badly out of it. He got to make at least one wonderful hit, Bonnie and Clyde, and at least two passionate films reflecting his left-leaning politics (Reds and Bulworth). He got to march tall and revered in the fairyland of Hollywood for decades: you suddenly remember, reading this, that he belonged too to the world of of Lillian Hellman and Vivien Leigh.And then there are his estimated 12,775 sexual conquests – which is quite some going, given that he has been apparently faithfully married to Annette Bening since 1992 (it makes Tiger Woods look like an impoverished eunuch). The tally includes Isabelle Adjani, Diane Keaton, Madonna, Jane Fonda, Joan Collins, just as tasters. Charm he certainly had, and many who shared his bed stress this to Biskind. But there was also a driving need for complete control, which may have got them weak-kneed in the first place but ultimately revealed a man afraid ever to relinquish the tiller, and so secretive that Bob Dylan thought he was a freemason. As Leslie Caron, who was a married mother when they embarked on their two-year affair (Biskind notes that husbands were "never much of an impediment to Beatty"), remembers: "Seduction was his greatest asset. Once he was interested in a woman, he would never let go. He enveloped her with his every thought. He wanted total control of her; her hair, her make up, her work. He took notice of everything."As with his women, so with his films. Before long, in a fast-changing Hollywood, word got out that he was impossible to work with. He couldn't act without directing, and he couldn't direct without directing life itself: with charm, certainly, but also with his unremitting control freakery and often volcanic temper. Part of the problem with the deservedly forgotten Town & Country (2001), for instance, was that according to one of Biskind's sources Beatty "worried every speech to death", re-analysing and re-editing every breath, pause, verb and comma to the point that no sense lingered.By then, although he was a happily settled father, the films had been going wrong for a while. As one colleague, the Oscar-winning production designer Dick Sylbert, said as long ago as 1995: "Warren… no longer counts in this town. His fangs have been pulled. In fact, he pulled his own fangs, which is more than interesting."The full package – charm, brillance, brains, ego, narcissism – both took Beatty to the top and prevented him, crucially, from noticing when the slide began. Rather than settling (like Clint Eastwood, for instance) with splendid directing, he ached to be the overarching superstar of every film; felt he deserved not only to live forever, but to live at the top forever.The ever closed Beatty may hate this book, but it is both impeccable and rolicking, and a not disloyal tribute to a man who had it all and yet, but for himself, could have had so much more.BiographyWarren BeattyEuan Fergusonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Meryl Streep is back - but where is the trademark funny accent? Surely Streep can be persuaded to uncork another big accent. It's just a matter of castingRight now, Meryl Streep fans are glowing. After a long stretch in the wilder-ness, their heroine has come roaring back. Her performance as an emotional restaurateur has helped turn the romcom It's Complicated into January's word-of-mouth success story. This follows the box-office smash Mamma Mia: the Movie, which had her crooning Abba hits while throwing back her head in joyous laughter and wearing denim dungarees. And let's not forget her scary magazine boss, Miranda Priestly, in The Devil Wears Prada.But each time . . . her voice. Well, it's a bit normal, isn't it? Where are the accents? These days, going to see a Meryl Streep film is like going to buy Ben & Jerry's and finding only vanilla on offer. We are all pining for the exotic accents from Streep's golden age, from when she hedd a fahhhh-m in Effrika and when, oh my Gord, the deeengo tuk her bay-bee.Could it be that Streep has moved into a "post- accent" career phase? Has she stopped twanging and torturing her epiglottis? If so, it's a bit like Prospero breaking his staff. Streep's range of accents was a thing of wonder. Her mittel- europäisch accent in Sophie's Choice was a thick, tragic vocal borscht and her English accent in The French Lieutenant's Woman decanted like a fine ruby port.Is the big award-friendly thesp accent considered a bit dated nowadays? Or is it that her "normal" accents are as controlled and worked on as everything else – Streep has no real voice, and off-camera she just bleeps and beeps like R2D2?Surely she can be persuaded to uncork another big accent. After all, her rasping New York Irish voice in Proof and her plummy impression of TV chef Julia Child (Julia & Julia) showed she can still do it. It's just a question of casting. I suggest she plays Princess Margaret, then follows it up with a biopic of German chancellor Angela Merkel. And then an intimate emotional portrait of Susan Boyle, with Jeremy Irons as Simon Cowell. The SuBo factor will place a gold statuette back in her hand.Meryl StreepPeter Bradshawguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Golden Globes Dimmed by Stars' Haiti Earthquake Concern The rain wasn't the only dampening force on the normally raucous Golden Globes Awards on Sunday night in Los Angeles. The specter of Haiti hung over the glitzy event like a rare and dark Southern California cloud feedproxy.google.com |
Jean Simmons: an unforgettable English rose Philip French pays tribute to the Rank Organisation starlet who went on to become one of Hollywood's most luminous actressesJean Simmons, who has died at the age of 80 of lung cancer in Santa Monica, California, was among the finest, most beautiful British movie actresses of the postwar years. She was one of only two from that great 1940s flourishing of our native industry under J Arthur Rank to become a major star in Hollywood; the other was Deborah Kerr, with whom she twice appeared.Born in 1929, the daughter of a gym teacher who had represented Britain in the 1912 Olympics, she grew up in CrickleÂwood, north London, of which she once disloyally remarked: "No Cricklewood girl would ever admit to being from there." She got a deal of work as a child actress, without becoming a child star (her most memorable early appearance is singing at a forces concert in the morale-building wartime favourite The Way to the Stars), then found fame as a teenager.She is often spoken of as a demure English rose, and indeed a 2004 American TV documentary was called Jean Simmons: Rose of England, and she crossed the Atlantic at a time when British actresses were not required to adopt American accents. But the early roles that established her reputation were dangerously troubled figures in postwar British classics: Estella, the wilful agent of the destructive Miss Haversham in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946); the eastern temptress in the Himalayan convent in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947); and Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948).In his review of Hamlet, America's greatest film critic of the time, James Agee, said she was "the only person in the picture who gives every one of her lines the bloom of poetry and the immediacy of ordinary life". She received the first of her Oscar nominations for the part, though she had never read or seen a Shakespeare play before, and Olivier's suggestion that she go to drama school was vetoed by the Rank Organisation. Rank then sold her contract to Howard Hughes, and she went to Hollywood in 1950 with her husband, Stewart Granger, then a major star and 16 years her senior, whom she had worked with on the romantic comedy Adam and Evelyne (1949).The capricious Hughes ill-used her talent. She flourished, however, as soon as she broke free of him, becoming for more than a decade one of the dominant performers in an industry where the studio system was in decline. The first great part was playing the Roman patrician converted to Christianity in the widescreen epic The Robe (1953), the first feature made in CinemaScope. In it she acted opposite Richard Burton, and at different times she co-starred with Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy (she called her first child Tracy Granger), Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster and Cary Grant, and was directed by Otto Preminger, George Cukor, Joseph L Mankiewicz, William Wyler, Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Donen and her second husband, Richard Brooks (with whom she had a daughter named Kate after Katharine Hepburn).Simmons was impressive in her first Hollywood role as a homicidal psychopath in the noir thriller Angel (made under Hughes's auspices) and in 1958 gave one of her greatest performances as an overbearing academic's wife experiencing a breakdown in Home Before Dark.Her characteristic roles at this time were strong but never sanctimonious super ego figures, people of moral stature, as varied as the Salvation Army officer Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls (which allowed her to sing and show her delightful sense of comedy), the schoolmarm acting as a restraining influence during a Texas range war in The Big Country, the slave Verina courted by Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, and the dedicated evangelist in Elmer Gantry. There are unforgettable scenes in all these pictures.From the mid-70s onwards, her work was mainly for television in such mini-series as The Thorn Birds and North and South, and her career came full circle when she played Miss Haversham in a television version of Great Expectations. She made a notable return to London and the stage in 1975 as Desirée Armfeldt in a West End production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, a role created on Broadway by Glynis Johns, another British expatriate and Simmons's closest friend. She was excellent, and infinitely superior to Elizabeth Taylor in the film version.Most recently she came out of retirement to appear in a final movie in Britain, David RockÂsavage's Shadows in the Sun, playing a frail, terminally ill poet determined to hang on to her family house in East Anglia, who dies shortly after watching an alfresco production of that wise play about departure and death, The Tempest. It opened last June, the same day that Spartacus was reissued, and it was a deeply moving experience to see the two performances, separated by nearly half a century, on the same day.Philip Frenchguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Sutherland roped into alleged cattle scam Actor Kiefer Sutherland was among cattle customers roped into an alleged scam that netted more than $1m (€700,000), it emerged today. breakingnews.ie |