The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (139 page)

These days, a lot of her work is for TV:
A Woman of Independent Means
(95, Robert Greenwald);
Eye for an Eye
(96, John Schlesinger); as George’s mother and the narrator in
Merry Christmas, George Bailey
(97, Matthew Diamond and Rae Kraus); as codirector and Trudy Cooper in
From the Earth to the Moon
(98, David Carson);
A Cooler Climate
(99, Susan Seidelman);
Where the Heart Is
(00, Matt Williams); as Betsey Trotwood in
David Copperfield
(00, Peter Medak)—did Edna Mae Oliver growl in her grave?;
Time of Our Lives
(00, Mary Agnes Donoghue);
Say It Isn’t So
(01, James B. Rogers). Plus her schizy mother on
ER
and a Supreme Court justice on
The Court
. She was in
Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
(03, Charles Herman-Wurmfeld);
Two Weeks
(06, Steve Stockman).

W. C. Fields
(William Claude Dukinfield) (1879–1946), b. Philadelphia

My Dear Wilkie,

Fields died yesterday. Poor Bill Fields, you will say, until it strikes you that the scoundrel contrived to juggle his passing on to Christmas Day, that day he despised above all and which, he believed, needed some small alternative to the celebrations that have been attached to its other anniversary. It occurs to me that we might work up a bright little piece on misanthropes all over the world, roused from the Christmas stupor of dandling children on their knees and having to share hard drink with nephews by word that Fields had put a permanent stain on the day. No man who has ever passed Christmas Day on his own trying to avoid the sounds of others’ happiness could resist a nod to old Bill. Of course, he was wrecked by the end and thus, as ever, unwarmed by his own joke.

As you know, I had been acquainted fleetingly with Fields for many years, and I am by no means within the filmmaking fraternity—though I might have written a great deal more but for the distractions of their offerings. Nevertheless, I always found it remarkable that so many shrewd, not to say incredulous, men took Fields for a comedian. As though our laughing at a creature made him a clown! I have hardly comprehended the fearful wretchedness of his life, but the mottling of his sad face, and the horrid knowledge that those plum blotches were blood ready to force a way through papery skin, were enough to shame anyone who has sat in the lamplight and tried to invent a plausible illness for some literary character. Nor could even your own ingenuity for narrative, my dear Collins—and you know what honest admiration I have for it—begin to trace the anxiety with which Fields hid away his money in some several hundred separate bank accounts; nor invent the strange names in which those accounts were lodged. There was no reasoning with him in this, and no kind comfort that convinced him of any other fate than a brutal alcoholic death.

There was nothing amusing in the complete absence of pathos in his view of himself. Have you not noticed among the Hollywood folk that faces attempt constantly to make themselves more attractive? Not Fields. He had the expression of a man sunk in despair and yet untouched by self-pity. The world is very bad, Fields’ face seemed to say, which is exactly what anyone would expect. When his Micawber assured us that he was for ever expecting something to turn up, who was left in any doubt but that he foresaw some fresh disaster, as prickly and unpredictable as those strange names he invented for himself: Mahatma Kane Jeeves, Egbert Souse, Cuthbert J. Twillie? Although their characters were opposite, I was always reminded of Sterne’s Toby, a figure all the more tragically comic for his ignorance of the humour that floats off him. Fields became funnier, the more desperately he resorted to that baleful view of treacherous, cowardly and disgusting humankind. He made it clear that any man who does not do away with himself once he is old enough to measure the poison is a public laughing stock.

“Mr. Dickens,” he once said to me, “what oversight permitted you to omit from the good Micawber’s ploys to captivate Father Time some elementary juggling? Were there no carving knives idle?” It was that drawling politeness that drew me to him, with its suggestion that Fields was either a fraudulent manservant or a drunk uncertain of his articulation. You will remember how the earnest Selznick would have no juggling: take care to remember that that exclusion was not of my doing. As it was, Fields made me breathless and I could not escape the thought of my own irresponsibility in concocting Micawber when such broken men trudged on. I could not advise him; I would have trusted him with every invention. As long as he was not encouraged to be amusing he was particularly comic. If he realised he was in motley, it made him vague and fussy. It was his mode to stand amid chaos, bereft of any comfort save sourness. No comedian, no actor, but an ordinary failure who would not be coaxed into the last face-saving.

Only to think of him is to splutter with laughter and tears. I have appended a few facts so that you may print a proper notice in
Household Words
—not that it can convey the man.

Yours ever,
Charles Dickens

A leading vaudeville performer by 1900, Fields became a star of the Ziegfeld Follies:
Pool Shark
(15) is a short film of his stage act. But his films show a great extension of his character in that he does not have to act, but reacts to the world. After a small part in
Janice Meredith
(24, E. Mason Hopper), a stage success,
Poppy
, was filmed by Paramount as
Sally of the Sawdust
(25, D. W. Griffith). There followed
That Royale Girl
(26, Griffith);
It’s the Old Army Game
(26, Edward Sutherland);
So’s Your Old Man
(26, Gregory La Cava);
The Potters
(27, Fred Newmeyer);
Running Wild
(27, La Cava);
Two Flaming Youths
(27, John Waters);
Tillie’s Punctured Romance
(28, Sutherland);
Fools for Luck
(29, Charles Reisner);
The Golf Specialist
(30, Monte Brice);
Her Majesty Love
(31, William Dieterle);
The Dentist
(32, Leslie Pierce); an episode from
If I Had a Million
(32, Edward Cline);
Million Dollar Legs
(32, Cline);
International House
(33, Sutherland);
The Barber Shop
(33, Arthur Ripley);
The Fatal Glass of Beer
(33, Ripley);
The Pharmacist
(33, Ripley); Humpty Dumpty in
Alice in Wonderland
(33, Norman Z. McLeod);
Tillie and Gus
(33, Francis Martin);
Six of a Kind
(34, Leo McCarey);
You’re Telling Me
(34, Erle Kenton);
Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch
(34, Norman Taurog);
It’s a Gift
(34, Taurog);
The Old-Fashioned Way
(34, William Beaudine);
The Man on the Flying Trapeze
(34, Clyde Bruckman);
David Copperfield
(34, George Cukor);
Mississippi
(35, Sutherland);
Poppy
(36, Sutherland);
The Big Broadcast of 1938
(38, Mitchell Leisen);
You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man
(39, George Marshall);
The Bank Dick
(40, Cline);
My Little Chickadee
(40, Cline);
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break
(41, Cline); in an episode cut from
Tales of Manhattan
(42, Julien Duvivier);
Follow the Boys
(44, Sutherland), reprising his poolroom act; a cameo in
Song of the Open Road
(44, S. Sylvan Simon); and
Sensations of 1945
(45, Andrew L. Stone).

Ralph
(Nathaniel)
Fiennes
, b. Suffolk, England, 1962
With RADA and many leading stage roles behind him, Ralph Fiennes looms as the latest in the line of Great English Actors. There are those who find him beautiful, inherently imbued with class, and with forces of intellect burning deep. Some see all three. Others remark on the extraordinary opportunities he has had, coupled with the strange reticence—call it a lack of stamina, a kind of metaphysical disinterest, or a reluctance to expose himself. (I mean his spirit—he takes his clothes off regularly.) He sometimes acts as if he would rather be offscreen. The large public surely feels this, and has learned a similar detachment or distance. For some people, his mere presence is a warning of a kind of self-lacerating intelligence or hidden malice. It all suggests how well cast he was in
Schindler’s List
(93, Steven Spielberg), still his best film work by far.

He was Heathcliff opposite Juliette Binoche in a TV version of
Wuthering Heights
(92, Peter Kosminsky);
The Baby of Macon
(93, Peter Greenaway); adroit and subtle, and very evasive, in
Quiz Show
(94, Robert Redford); horribly miscast in
Strange Days
(95, Kathryn Bigelow); suitably remote in
The English Patient
(96, Anthony Minghella); with Cate Blanchett in
Oscar and Lucinda
(97, Gillian Armstrong); the voice of Rameses in
The Prince of Egypt
(98, Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, and Simon Wells);
One-gin
(99, Martha Fiennes, his sister); anemic and unlikable in
The End of the Affair
(99, Neil Jordan);
Sunshine
(00, István Szabó); for British TV as Proust in
How Proust Can Change Your Life
(00, Peter Bevan); the voice of Jesus in the animated
The Miracle Maker
(00, Derek W. Hayes and Stanislav Sokolov).

He was villainous in
Red Dragon
(02, Brett Ratner); desperately schizophrenic in
Spider
(02, David Cronenberg); a very unlikely mate for J.Lo in
Maid in Manhattan
(02, Wayne Wang);
The White Countess
(04, James Ivory) and quite spooky as Voldemort in
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
(05, Mike Newell).

Did magic alter or relax him? He has been so much better since:
Land of the Blind
(06, Robert Edwards);
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
(07, David Yates); charming and sly in
Bernard and Doris
(07, Bob Balaban); funny but nasty
In Bruges
(08, Martin McDonagh);
The Duchess
(08, Saul Dibb); at his best again in
The Reader
(08, Stephen Daldry);
The Hurt Locker
(09, Bigelow).

Mike Figgis
, b. Carlisle, England, 1949
1988:
Stormy Monday
. 1990:
Internal Affairs
. 1991:
Liebestraum
. 1993:
Mr. Jones
. 1994:
The Browning Version
. 1995:
Leaving Las Vegas
. 1997:
One Night Stand
. 1998:
The End of Sexual Innocence
. 1999:
Miss Julie
. 2000:
Timecode
. 2001:
Hotel
. 2001:
The Battle of Orgreave
(d). 2002: “About Time 2,” episode from
Ten Minutes Older: The Cello
. 2003: “Red, White and Blues,” for
The Blues
(TV);
Cold Creek Manor
. 2004: “Cold Cuts,” an episode from
The Sopranos;
2008:
Love Live Long
.

Though Mike Figgis had never made a dull or worthless film before
Leaving Las Vegas
, still nothing prepared us for the intensity of that work. Did it prosper because a low budget and a short schedule allowed Figgis to work undisturbed? Because John O’Brien’s autobiographical (and suicidal) novel released a kind of emotional directness hitherto veiled? Or was it because two players—Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue—seized on the opportunity of profound roles securely set in a tragic love story? Let’s assume that all those things played their part. Does that mean Figgis can manage to reproduce such favorable circumstances? Can he build on the most revolutionary (and classical) American film of the nineties? It is a revolution now to make a film so simple, so naked, so modest in means and yet so large in impact.

As a boy, Figgis was raised in colonial Kenya. On returning to England, and the Newcastle area, he gravitated towards jazz and a theatre group called the People Show. It was with them that he developed as writer, director, actor, musician, and sound engineer—and note that Figgis is one of those people who like to serve a lot of roles in a close-knit group. He was rejected by the National Film School and so found himself as a self-avowed maverick. This has had the valuable result of making him unusually open to non-British material.

Stormy Monday
was a self-consciously noir and bluesy view of Newcastle, with a lot of jazz and a distinct assurance at handling genre violence. But the human story never sought depth.
Internal Affairs
, on the other hand, was an L.A. police story that included brilliant character studies—Richard Gere and Andy Garcia have never been better—and the handling of Gere showed a rare talent in Figgis for seeing hitherto untried resources. It also felt as if Figgis was excited by L.A., by the place and its unstable society.

After that,
Liebestraum
seemed unduly cultish and confused, a failure despite the welcome (if gloomy) resurrection of Kim Novak.
Mr. Jones
had major studio battles and enforced changes, all of which left the central subject, that of a schizophrenic, intriguing, novel, and maybe a bit beyond Richard Gere. A remake of
The Browning Version
was the first sign that Figgis might face difficulties just staying in work.