The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (134 page)

Basic Instinct
is a dreadful film, but Stone is triumphant in it. She runs through the gamut of fantasy role-playing, as if she were doing a series of ads. She dominates the film and the several men (Verhoeven, Joe Eszterhas, and Michael Douglas) who were paid so much more than she could get. And she is so funny, so smart, and so quick that one laments the lack of Howard Hawks today. I suspect that Sharon Stone could have been a comedienne in the class of Carole Lombard, as well as a romantic, a sexpot, and a destroyer of feeble men.

She cashed in, and she knew she had only a few years. She is obliged to stay camp and ruthless, so she has to chuckle that the fruits of glory come as stupid as
Sliver
(93, Phillip Noyce) or as plain as
Intersection
(94, Mark Rydell). No one as smart as Sharon Stone could survey her own and Frances Farmer’s career and do anything other than marry well and form a business. Which only helps reveal some likelihood that Sharon Stone is crazy, too.

Stone did marry—Phil Bronstein, a leading San Francisco newspaper executive. And she has turned herself into a business, reckoning to realize her accumulated value swiftly, before it ran out:
The Quick and the Dead
(95, Sam Raimi); her finest work, as Ginger in
Casino
(95, Martin Scorsese), for which she received an Oscar nomination;
Diabolique
(96, Jeremiah S. Chechik);
Last Dance
(96, Bruce Beresford);
Sphere
(98, Barry Levinson);
The Mighty
(98, Peter Chelsom): the voice of Princess Bala in
Antz
(98, Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson);
Gloria
(99, Sidney Lumet);
The Muse
(99, Albert Brooks);
Simpatico
(99, Matthew Warchus);
If These Walls Could Talk 2
(00, Anne Heche);
Picking Up the Pieces
(00, Alfonso Arau);
Beautiful Joe
(00, Stephen Metcalfe);
Cold Creek Manor
(03, Mike Figgis). She and Phil Bronstein sought divorce. But she was Mrs. Kim Philby in
A Different Loyalty
(04, Marek Kanievska);
Catwoman
(04, Pitof).

She won an Emmy as a featured actor in a season of
The Practice
(04);
Broken Flowers
(05, Jim Jarmusch);
Alpha Dog
(06, Nick Cassavetes); unable to resist in
Basic Instinct 2
(06, Michael Caton-Jones); very touching in
Bobby
(06, Emilio Estevez);
If I Had Known I Was a Genius
(07, Dominique Wirtschafter);
When a Man Falls in the Forest
(07, Ryan Eslinger).

Richard Farnsworth
(1920–2000), b. Los Angeles
One saw Richard Farnsworth at the Academy Awards in March 2000. He wore an old-fashioned white scarf, like a cowboy come to town from Lincoln, New Mexico, and he grinned sourly when Kevin Spacey won the Oscar for
American Beauty
. It was an obvious reward for a film that had been a hit, whereas no one knew how to see
The Straight Story
(99, David Lynch) without seeming sentimental. Hollywood has so little experience with seventy-nine-year-olds.

I had talked to Farnsworth a few weeks earlier, on the phone, and he was sweetly polite about having a chance at Oscar, and he said, oh yes, he would surely be in Los Angeles for the night. Which meant a two-day drive, because he was spooked by flying. He might have ridden, but he wasn’t riding anymore—not until he got a new hip.

But it turned out that he had cancer, too, had had it a couple of years. The pain was so bad he talked about it to his young fiancée, Jewel—they were on his ranch, ninety acres, outside Lincoln, on Bonita Creek. In October he shot himself. I’d say maybe it could have been an accident, but Farnsworth was no more of a fool with guns than he was with horses.

The Straight Story
was so simple and clear, about an old man in Iowa who fears he could die anytime, so maybe he ought to visit his brother in Wisconsin. But Alvin Straight (a real person) had no horse—just a John Deere tractor. So he makes his journey that way, a few hundred miles by back roads, and it’s the story of people he meets, plus Alvin and his daughter, who is a little simple (Sissy Spacek), and the brother, who turns out to be Harry Dean Stanton.

Once upon a time, the Academy would have given the Oscar to Richard Farnsworth out of respect for kindness, and feeling a whole life spread out like a picnic on the grass. He was born in Los Angeles, but his father died when he was young, and Richard got a job at a local polo stable. It was a place where stars kept their horses. He cleaned out and groomed the animals, so that’s where he learned to ride. Within a few years he was offered stunt roles in pictures. He was never credited, but he’d ride in galloping chases, where actors might fall off and get hurt. From that he got promoted to standin work and stunting for fights.

He was a soldier in
Gone With the Wind
(39, Victor Fleming); he was in
Gunga Din
(39, George Stevens) and
Fort Apache
(48, John Ford). But the best time he ever had was on
Red River
(48, Howard Hawks), when Hawks cast Montgomery Clift as the young cowboy. Well, Clift was a hell of an actor, but he didn’t know the West from Central Park West. When they told him to put on a pair of six-guns, Clift sagged and could hardly cross the street. Put him on a horse and he was a very insecure young actor.

So Hawks asked Farnsworth to hang out with Clift. Help him pick out a hat, teach him to walk, make sure he could stay on a horse and read lines, and roll a cigarette for himself. It worked; Farnsworth liked Clift and had no envy of him. At ten dollars a day, Farnsworth was getting more than he could from anything else, and the anything else would have been work.

There was a community of stunt riders, rodeo people, and wranglers from movies, and Farnsworth was one of them. He kept his own horses and hired them out to the movies, too. It was fun for a while, until the world lost the habit for Westerns. So he ranched a little. But then in 1968, on a picture called
The Stalking Moon
(Robert Mulligan), they decided they needed an extra to read a line or two. The producer, Alan J. Pakula, asked him, and Farnsworth did it for him. Then a whole ten years later, on
Comes a Horseman
, with Pakula directing, there was this real part—the oldtimer who helps Jane Fonda work her ranch. They had no one for it, and Pakula saw Richard, and remembered him, and said, “Maybe you’d like to do that?” The cowboy asked his wife, and she promised she’d help him.

He got a best supporting actor nomination for that—lost to Christopher Walken in
The Deer Hunter
. No complaining about that. Then, for a decade or so, Farnsworth really acted. He had one lead role, as Bill Miner, the gentleman train robber, in a Canadian picture called
The Grey Fox
(82, Phillip Borsos). It’s the best thing he ever did. See what a soft-spoken, tender, wry man he could be, and ask yourself whether it was acting or whether he just had a way about him that the camera liked.

He’s in a number of other pictures—like
The Natural
(84, Barry Levinson),
The Two Jakes
(90, Jack Nicholson),
Misery
(90, Rob Reiner), and the remake of
The Getaway
(94, Roger Donaldson)—where he does fine work. Probably everyone on those pictures knew the story of how he’d been a rodeo man and a stunt rider and just been noticed. And it charmed them. But what happened in New Mexico tells you how strong he was. He’d been classified 4-F at the time of World War II—he had spots on his lung—but I don’t think he’d been in a hospital a night in his life, and he didn’t plan on it. So, long before he became an embarrassment, or less than a hard rider, he took the decision his way.

John Farrow
(1904–63), b. Sydney, Australia
1937:
Men in Exile; West of Shanghai; War Lord
. 1938:
The Invisible Menace; She Loved a Fireman; Little Miss Thoroughbred; My Bill; Broadway Musketeers
. 1939:
The Saint Strikes Back; Women in the Wind; Sorority House; Five Came Back; Reno; Full Confession
. 1940:
Married and in Love; A Bill of Divorcement
. 1942:
Wake Island; Commandos Strike at Dawn
. 1943:
China
. 1944:
The Hitler Gang
. 1945:
You Came Along
. 1946:
Two Years Before the Mast
. 1947:
California; Easy Come, Easy Go; Blaze of Noon; Calcutta
. 1948:
The Big Clock; Beyond Glory; The Night Has a Thousand Eyes
. 1949:
Alias Nick Beal; Red Hot and Blue
. 1950:
Where Danger Lives; Copper Canyon
. 1951:
His Kind of Woman; Submarine Command
. 1953:
Ride, Vaquero!; Plunder in the Sun; Hondo; Botany Bay
. 1954:
A Bullet Is Waiting
. 1955:
The Sea Chase
. 1956:
Back from Eternity
. 1957:
The Unholy Wife
. 1959:
John Paul Jones
.

Farrow was educated in Australia and at Winchester. He was originally a writer: of stage plays and, from 1927, of movie scripts, including
Ladies of the Mob
(28, William Wellman);
Wolf Song
(29, Victor Fleming);
A Dangerous Woman
(29, Rowland V. Lee);
Seven Days’ Leave
(30, Richard Wallace);
Woman of Experience
(31, Harry Joe Brown); and, years later, with S. J. Perelman and James Poe, for
Around the World in 80 Days
(56, Michael Anderson).

In addition, Farrow was a Roman Catholic convert who wrote books about Thomas More and the papacy as well as some novels. Indeed, his daughter Mia Farrow (by his marriage to actress Maureen O’Sullivan) has said that “He was very friendly with the Jesuits, and the house was always filled with priests; to some extent he looked down on Hollywood.”

Such condescension hardly shows in Farrow’s movies, and whatever the indignity of writing
Tarzan Escapes
(36, Richard Thorpe), it was then that Farrow met his wife, Johnny Weissmuller’s Jane. Indeed, he seems one of the more engaging, enterprising, and critically neglected of entertainment directors. (There are enough tales of famous temper and eccentricity to help one understand later Farrows.) It may have been the writer in him, or the Australian Wykhamist, but his films invariably pick on novel settings or plots, managing to lift routine products through ingenuity and freshness. The lack of authenticity or thrill in
Botany Bay
ill befits an Australian. But
Two Years Before Mast, Blaze of Noon, The Big Clock, Alias Nick Beal, Where Danger Lives, His Kind of Woman, Ride, Vaquero!, Hondo
, and
Back from Eternity
are films that do not fit readily into any genre, and that are worth staying up late for. Farrow never scorned adventure movies, or missed a chance to add an extra imaginative character to them.
The Big Clock
and
Alias Nick Beal
are thrillers with a serious interest in evil.
Hondo
is a Western with rare emphasis on psychology and atmosphere. While
His Kind of Woman
is a comedy thriller that admirably exploits Mitchum, Jane Russell, Vincent Price, and Raymond Burr.

Farrow generally showed special interest in his players and in turn won better-than-usual performances. In his early days he used Boris Karloff well in
West of Shanghai
and
Invisible Menace
, and Ann Sheridan in
She Loved a Fireman
and
Broadway Musketeers
. As well as directing Veronica Lake in her debut (
Sorority House
), he worked often with Alan Ladd and Ray Milland—the latter in
California, The Big Clock, Alias Nick Beal
, and
Copper Canyon
. Above all, he tickled Charles Laughton’s wandering fancy for
The Big Clock
, and subjugated John Wayne in
Hondo
.

Mia Farrow
(Maria de Lourdes Villiers Farrow), b. Los Angeles, 1945
It’s tempting to regard Mia Farrow as the waif overshadowed by the potent men in her life: she was married briefly and uneasily to Frank Sinatra (66–68), more fruitfully to André Previn (70–79), and then there was Woody Allen. But their prolonged battle in court revealed a Farrow who fought like a lioness, and who leads her own life. The thought remains that her father—John Farrow, director, Catholic, and something of a wild man—may still be the dominant male influence in her life. He or her children, for Ms. Farrow takes on cubs, by birth or adoption, out of some primitive need.

She is the daughter of Farrow and actress Maureen O’Sullivan, and she was raised at Catholic schools, but in the Hollywood community. As a child she had polio, and that surely added to her vulnerability as a young woman—an effect deepened by her cropped hair and pale face.

When she was very young, she had a small role in her father’s
John Paul Jones
(59), and she played onstage in
The Importance of Being Earnest
. At nineteen, she began two seasons as Allison Mackenzie in the TV
Peyton Place
(64–66), and she made her real movie debut in
Guns at Batasi
(64, John Guillermin).

She became a phenomenon when cast as the young mother-to-be in
Rosemary’s Baby
(68, Roman Polanski). That very visceral, erotic, and frightening film owes so much to her: not just because of her gauntness and the sense of her life being sucked away from her as it grows inside her, but in her exceptional interest in what it is like to be pregnant. She was good again in
Secret Ceremony
(68, Joseph Losey), but she quickly became conventional in
A Dandy in Aspic
(68, Anthony Mann) and the forgettable
John and Mary
(69, Peter Yates).

It was as if she needed Polanski’s black magic. She was no more than competent in
Blind Terror
(71, Richard Fleischer) and
Follow Me!
(71, Carol Reed), and she made
Docteur Popaul
(72) for Claude Chabrol. Then she was cast as Daisy in
The Great Gatsby
(73, Jack Clayton), probably because Robert Evans had lost Ali McGraw. She was eerily close to the vapid, hard nonentities Fitzgerald was so good at describing, but she brought no pathos or irony to the shimmering soft focus. And she was not sexy or alluring—why was Gatsby crazy about her?