The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (196 page)

At the age of thirty-seven, and having done only one thing for the cinema, Tom Hooper is surely one of the most effective movie directors working anywhere. But “effective” is a mealymouthed piece of praise, one that takes for granted the industrial base of television whether we mean the BBC or HBO. Also, let’s stress that
Longford
is one of the best films of the new century, an astonishing pursuit of guilt and innocence, exploitation and generosity, all in one narrative span, with outstanding performances from Jim Broadbent, Samantha Morton, Andy Serkis, and Lindsay Duncan. But then one has to admit that
John Adams
is not just a chronicle or an epic but a profound recreation of period in which interiors and ideas are equally carefully composed.

I think it’s fair to say that Tom Hooper has not established a personal cinematic style. But he is working at a level where that would be an intrusion. What is established is his interest in people and their interactions—in short, his sense of visual storytelling. It will be fascinating to see whether his own emerging tastes in subject matter can be pursued as TV—or will he need the vanity space of theatrical movies?

The other thing to stress is that, short of forty, Hooper has done (in addition to his series work) a George Eliot novel, a
Prime Suspect, Longford, Red Dust
and its opening up of South African issues, the world of
John Adams
and the paranoia of Brian Clough. Which director of that age has had to face as much of life? Needless to say, if Hooper ever gets to do an
East of Eden
, it will be the whole book as Steinbeck wrote it, and not just the rump steak that Elia Kazan carved out for himself.

Bob Hope
(Leslie Townes Hope) (1903–2003), b. Eltham, England
In 1970, Bob Hope was in London to rattle off jokes while the ladies changed costume in the Miss World competition. He was heckled by women’s rights demonstrators and a bag of flour burst beside him on the stage. He looked old and anxious, both understandable. But it was a surprise that his act seized up, and the nice guy who for years had made comedy out of cowardice was transformed into a nervy reactionary shooting off inappropriate and sententious sneers at those trying to disrupt his act. “Brave men run in my family”—Painless Potter’s admission in
The Paleface
—suddenly seemed relevant.

That awkward little performance confirmed Hope’s shortcomings as a film comedian: the habitual reliance on prepared verbal gags; the monotony of the boaster who turns coward with the wind; and his inability to organize his films or his screen character into anything more profound than a mouthpiece for jokes written by an army of scriptwriters. Of course, at that purely mechanical level—of calculated asides, smart answers, and double takes—he can be very funny. But there is never the sense—as there is with Groucho, Fields, or even Jerry Lewis—that he sees comedy as a way of expressing or relieving anxieties, and that good lines are of secondary importance. There are no great comedians who do not occasionally admit to us what a sad business it is making people laugh.

Hope came to America at the age of four and moved from vaudeville to Broadway and, in 1934, to radio. He was such a hugely popular figure there that he was cast by Paramount in
The Big Broadcast of 1938
(38, Mitchell Leisen), singing “Thanks for the Memory” with Shirley Ross. That song became a film, directed by George Archainbaud, and after a few Martha Raye musicals
—College Swing
(38, Raoul Walsh);
Give Me a Sailor
(38, Elliott Nugent); and
Never Say Die
(39, Nugent)—he was put in
The Cat and the Canary
(39, Nugent), the first demonstration of his comedy of alarm; and
Caught in the Draft
(41, David Butler).

But it was the market for uncomplicated, companionable humor brought about by the war that really established Hope. The “Road” films are inventive without being imaginative, amusing but not penetrating, and Hope fitted perfectly with Crosby and Lamour in a bland trio:
Road to Singapore
(40, Victor Schertzinger);
Road to Zanzibar
(41, Schertzinger);
Road to Morocco
(42, Butler);
Road to Utopia
(45, Hal Walker);
Road to Rio
(47, Norman Z. McLeod); and
Road to Bali
(52, Walker).

Apart from that series, Hope’s career has been a largely fruitless search for material that would suit him:
Louisiana Purchase
(41, Irving Cummings);
My Favorite Blonde
(42, Sidney Lanfield);
The Princess and the Pirate
(44, Butler);
Monsieur Beaucaire
(46, George Marshall); the excellent
The Paleface
(48, McLeod), unexpectedly well matched by Jane Russell;
The Great Lover
(49, Alexander Hall);
Fancy Pants
(50, Marshall);
The Lemon Drop Kid
(51, Lanfield);
My Favorite Spy
(51, McLeod);
Son of Paleface
(52, Frank Tashlin); as Eddie Foy in
The Seven Little Foys
(55, Melville Shavelson); bemused by Katharine Hepburn in
The Iron Petticoat
(56, Ralph Thomas) and by Fernandel in
Paris Holiday
(58, Gerd Oswald); as Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York in
Beau James
(57, Shavelson); and in Paleface country again in
Alias Jesse James
(59, McLeod).

His last good partner was Lucille Ball in
The Facts of Life
(60, Melvin Frank) and
Critic’s Choice
(63, Don Weis). After the ill-advised
The Road to Hong Kong
(62, Norman Panama), his films became an annual ordeal:
Call Me Bwana
(63, Gordon Douglas);
A Global Affair
(64, Jack Arnold);
I’ll Take Sweden
(65, Frederick de Cordova);
Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!
(66, Marshall);
Eight on the Lam
(67, Marshall);
How to Commit Marriage
(69, Norman Panama); and
Cancel My Reservation
(72, Paul Bogart).

As a senior citizen, he had been devoted to golf, USO specials (still going overseas to entertain troops), and to the occasional TV special. He did cameos in
The Muppet Movie
(79, James Frawley) and
Spies Like Us
(85, John Landis), and he teamed up with Don Ameche in
A Masterpiece of Murder
(86, Charles S. Dublin), his first TV movie.

In May 2003, Hope passed his 100th birthday—the tributes were genuine and they showed what an amazing live act he had always been, live and wired. Then quick as a double take he was gone.

Sir Anthony Hopkins
, b. Port Talbot, Wales, 1937
Though he grew up very consciously as a neighbor and disciple to Richard Burton, Hopkins has a range that reaches from Charles Laughton to Laurence Olivier. Belatedly, but with a sense of the obvious being made manifest at last, Hannibal Lecter in
The Silence of the Lambs
(91, Jonathan Demme) allowed the public, and the business, to see that Hopkins was that age’s brilliant British actor. And, like Olivier, Hopkins’s versatility, his sheer love of danger, amounts to a boxoffice charm never quite achieved by lovable personality. He is a loner, someone who prefers America, who works relentlessly, even if on poor projects sometimes.

He has been a momentous stage actor in England, often with the National Theatre (he auditioned before Olivier and did a scene from
Othello):
as Coriolanus and King Lear; in
M. Butterfly
and
Antony and Cleopatra;
and as Lambert Le Roux, the press tycoon, in David Hare’s
Pravda
.

His movie debut was in
The Lion in Winter
(68, Anthony Harvey); he was Claudius to Nicol Williamson in
Hamlet
(69, Tony Richardson);
The Looking Glass War
(70, Frank R. Pierson);
When Eight Bells Toll
(71, Etienne Perier); Lloyd George in
Young Winston
(72, Richard Attenborough); Torvald to Claire Bloom in
A Doll’s House
(73, Patrick Garland);
The Girl from Petrovka
(74, Robert Ellis Miller);
Juggernaut
(74, Richard Lester);
Audrey Rose
(77, Robert Wise);
A Bridge Too Far
(77, Attenborough);
International Velvet
(78, Bryan Forbes); and
Magic
(78, Attenborough).

He was like a boozer game for any drink, the classics or nonsense, to all of which he brought the same steadfast earnestness. In truth, when he was good it was largely because of technique and natural authority. He didn’t want to be seen trying—another affinity with Olivier. But
Magic
was a real part, and a more disturbing psychopath than even Hannibal Lecter would prove. The film was a failure but the evidence showed that Hopkins had something like genius.

For a time, he lived in America, his life barely under control. As ever, his parts were unaccountable:
A Change of Seasons
(80, Richard Lang); the doctor in
The Elephant Man
(80, David Lynch); Bligh in
The Bounty
(84, Roger Donaldson); creepily pathetic in
The Good Father
(87, Mike Newell);
84 Charing Cross Road
(87, David Jones);
The Tenth Man
(88, Jack Gold); in the Alan Ayckbourn adaptation
A Chorus of Disapproval
(88, Michael Winner); and
Desperate Hours
(90, Michael Cimino).

Hopkins has admitted that Hannibal Lecter was not difficult to do, once he had found a look and a voice. Brian Cox’s Lecter in
Manhunter
(86, Michael Mann) is arguably more intriguing and more frightening. Hopkins is playing to the camera, to the faint hints of a love story, to humor, and to Demme’s indulgent last scene. There is something Wellesian in the ham. Still, it is as riveting and probably as influential as Anthony Perkins in
Psycho
. Hopkins took his best actor Oscar in gracious humor, knowing that when a plum falls nothing can stop it. He went on to a fine Wilcox in
Howards End
(91, James Ivory); the inane
Free-jack
(91, Geoff Murphy); a cheery Van Elsing amid the
son et lumière
chaos of
Dracula
(92, Francis Coppola); and the butler in
Remains of the Day
(93, Ivory). The latter was fiendishly clever, emotional, and intricate, and it was only later that one remembered he was supposed to be playing a man who was limited, cold, and unable to express any feelings!

But this is not all. Hopkins has been a steady actor on TV, on both sides of the Atlantic, capable of winning a string of fascinating roles and acting with hushed bravura: as Pierre in the BBC
War and Peace
(72, John Davies); as the doctor in
Dark Victory
, with Elizabeth Montgomery as Bette Davis (76, Robert Butler); as Yitzhak Rabin in
Victory at Entebbe
(76, Marvin J. Chomsky); as Bruno Hauptmann in
The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case
(76, Buzz Kulik); as the great actor
Kean
(78, James Cellan Jones); as
Othello
(81, Jonathan Miller); as Hitler in
The Bunker
(81, George Schaefer); as St. Paul in
Peter and Paul
(81, Robert Day); as Quasimodo in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(82, Michael Tuchman); as Count Ciano in
Mussolini: The Decline and Fall of Il Duce
(85, Alberto Negrin); in
Hollywood Wives
(85, Day);
Guilty Conscience
(85, David Greene); redoing Boyer in
Arch of Triumph
(85, Waris Hussein); a superb Guy Burgess in
Blunt
(86, John Glenister); and as a persecuted Paraguayan in
One Man’s War
(91, Sergio Toledo).

The Queen knighted him on January 1, 1993, while she still had the chance, before he played Queen Victoria—or, one guesses, before she’d seen the dire
Chaplin
(92, Attenborough) in which Hopkins plays the publisher with a few small narrative problems to sort out with the great man.

At the end of 1993, he did an artful job playing C. S. Lewis in
Shadowlands
(Attenborough)—though this was close to the butler from
Remains of the Day
promoted to a don. Hopkins must be wary of playing this character too often.

Indeed, his brilliance and ease may be his greatest threats, for he can be cast as nearly anything—especially if one is to feel far mountains and close-up sighs and tics in the character’s mental landscape. There’s not another actor around better equipped to take on large, eccentric characters, or with so little fuss. So it’s important to stress his failures, as well as the projects hardly worth the trouble. In other words, Hopkins will be big in a picture, whatever you give him. Answer: make sure the part and the challenge are big.

He is whimsical, happy to move from small ventures, like playing writer Gwyn Thomas in
Selected Exits
(93, Tristram Powell) on BBC TV to the patriarch in
Legends of the Fall
(94, Edward Zwick), a movie that lacked the O’Neill-like horizons the actor saw. The same slippage hurt
The Road to Wellville
(94, Alan Parker), and then, more fatally,
Nixon
(96, Oliver Stone), where his inordinate resources could not dispel our collective history with that man. His Nixon is fiendishly clever—yet never as brilliantly self-deceiving as Nixon managed. He directed and acted in
August
(96), which was a cosy Welsh version of
Uncle Vanya;
the awful
Surviving Picasso
(96, Ivory); the amusing
The Edge
(97, Lee Tamahori); a meticulous John Quincy Adams in
Amistad
(97, Steven Spielberg); lazy and lovely in
The Mask of Zorro
(98, Mark Campbell);
Meet Joe Black
(98, Martin Brest);
Instinct
(99, Jon Turteltaub); very good in
Titus
(99, Julie Taymor); uncredited in
Mission: Impossible II
(00, John Woo).