The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (199 page)

Houseman was the son of an English mother and a father from Alsace. After he went to school at Clifton, he traveled to Argentina before moving into the American theatre. His notable work as a stage producer led, in 1937, to his founding of the Mercury Theater with Welles. Houseman admired Welles’s talent deeply and took to mollifying the tender ego of his young compatriot. Their years together were hectically rich and, even if they parted angrily,
Kane
seems to have implanted an interest in movies in Houseman.

In 1941, he became a vice-president to David Selznick and did packaging work on
Saboteur
(42, Alfred Hitchcock) and
Jane Eyre
(44, Robert Stevenson) before he moved on to
Voice of America
. After the war, however, he shared his time between the theatre, the cinema, and, latterly, TV. He was an independent producer with attachments to Paramount, RKO, and MGM:
The Unseen
(45, Lewis Allen);
Miss Susie Slagle’s
(46, John Berry);
The Blue Dahlia
(46, George Marshall);
They Live By Night
(48, Nicholas Ray);
Letter From an Unknown Woman
(48, Max Ophuls);
The Company She Keeps
(50, John Cromwell);
On Dangerous Ground
(51, Ray);
The Bad and the Beautiful
(52, Vincente Minnelli);
Julius Caesar
(53, Joseph L. Mankiewicz);
Executive Suite
(54, Robert Wise);
Her Twelve Men
(54, Robert Z. Leonard);
Moonfleet
(55, Fritz Lang);
The Cobweb
(55, Minnelli);
Lust for Life
(56, Minnelli);
All Fall Down
(62, John Frankenheimer);
Two Weeks in Another Town
(62, Minnelli); and
In the Cool of the Day
(63, Robert Stevens).

Four of Minnelli’s best, Nicholas Ray’s debut, and Ophuls’ finest American picture make a tremendous record. Yet another career opened up when Houseman played a Harvard Law School professor in
The Paper Chase
(73, James Bridges)—and won the supporting actor Oscar. This encouraged him to act again, in
Rollerball
(75, Norman Jewison);
Three Days of the Condor
(75, Sydney Pollack); and
St. Ives
(76, J. Lee Thompson). He had great success in the TV series of
Paper Chase
and then appeared in
The Cheap Detective
(78, Robert Moore) and
Old Boyfriends
(79, Joan Tewkesbury).

The TV series promoted Houseman to prominent TV commercials (notably for Smith, Barney: “They make money the old-fashioned way—they earn it.”). Thus in his last decade, Houseman became a recognized figure, and a much-trusted man. He appeared in
A Christmas Without Snow
(80, John Korty);
Wholly Moses!
(80, Gary Weis);
My Bodyguard
(80, Tony Bill);
Murder by ’Phone
(80, Michael Anderson);
The Fog
(80, John Carpenter); he produced and acted in
Gideon’s Trumpet
(80, Robert Collins);
Ghost Story
(81, John Irvin);
Scrooged
(88, Richard Donner); and
Another Woman
(89, Woody Allen).

Leslie Howard
(Leslie Howard Stainer) (1893–1943), b. London
He was the son of Hungarian immigrants. The great reputation that Howard enjoyed seems remote to a generation that knows him only through revivals of
Gone With the Wind
. His Ashley Wilkes in that film is such a nonentity, and the comparison with Gable so diminishing, that one wonders not only what people saw in Howard, but how Selznick’s epic ever survived. No matter that central Europe haunted his features, Hollywood adopted him as its shyest English gentleman and as the epitome of class. Britain fell for this image a little later but devoured it wholesale after his patriotic wartime movies and his death, shot down in a plane from Lisbon to London. There has always been the scent of mystery about that death. Had Howard been used as a decoy—he was on a government mission—to divert attention from Churchill who was also flying that day? It is the sort of heroic sacrifice that a whey-faced exile from land-locked Hungary might have dreamed of.

Howard was educated at Dulwich College, and after working in a bank and suffering shell shock in the First World War he recalled that that school had been founded by an actor. He soon established himself as a leading player in London and New York, playing
Her Cardboard Lover
opposite Tallulah Bankhead and producing a play of his own,
Tell Me The Truth
. One of his stage successes had been in
Outward Bound
, a strange postwar blues production about a liner full of dead souls. Warners elected to film it in 1930 and invited Howard to take the lead, directed by Robert Milton. After that, MGM acquired him for
Never the Twain Shall Meet
(31, W. S. Van Dyke),
Five and Ten
(31, Robert Z. Leonard), and
A Free Soul
(31, Clarence Brown). For a few years he shifted between England
—Service for Ladies
(32, Alexander Korda) and
The Lady Is Willing
(34, Gilbert Miller)—and America—
Devotion
(31, Robert Milton);
Smilin’ Through
(32, Sidney Franklin);
The Animal Kingdom
(32, Edward H. Griffith);
Secrets
(33, Frank Borzage);
Captured!
(33, Roy del Ruth); and
Berkeley Square
(33, Frank Lloyd).

In 1934, he signed for Warners and made
British Agent
(Michael Curtiz) before being loaned to RKO for
Of Human Bondage
(34, John Cromwell, with Bette Davis), and to Korda for Sir Percy Blakeney in
The Scarlet Pimpernel
(34, Harold Young)—a costume romance in keeping with Howard’s fragility. He was well cast as the half-baked writer in
The Petrified Forest
(36, Archie Mayo), and partly responsible for Bogart’s being in that film; but horribly exposed in MGM’s
Romeo and Juliet
(36, George Cukor), a film that, remarkably, did not harm his reputation. Warners limited him to modern-day dress comedy:
It’s Love I’m After
(37, Tay Garnett) and, in 1938, Howard returned to Britain to act in and codirect (with Anthony Asquith)
Pygmalion
. His Higgins is cold, like so many of Shaw’s intellectuals, but he carried the film’s wit with great ease.

His last films in Hollywood were both for Selznick:
Gone With the Wind
(39, Victor Fleming) and
Intermezzo
opposite Ingrid Bergman (39, which he coproduced with Gregory Ratoff)—the latter as generous to Howard as the former was unflattering. At this point he returned to an England at war and became not only one of the most active of producer-directors, but something of an emotional figurehead:
Pimpernel Smith
(39, actor and director);
49th Parallel
(41, Michael Powell) in which he is a humanist in a wigwam, reading Thomas Mann and gloating over a Picasso;
The Lamp Still Burns
(41, producer);
The First of the Few
(42, director and actor—as R. J. Mitchell, the inventor of the Spitfire); and
The Gentle Sex
(43, codirector, with Maurice Elvey).

Ron Howard
, b. Duncan, Oklahoma, 1954
1977:
Grand Theft Auto
. 1982:
Night Shift
. 1984:
Splash
. 1985:
Cocoon
. 1986:
Gung Ho
. 1988:
Willow
. 1989:
Parenthood
. 1991:
Backdraft
. 1992:
Far and Away
. 1994:
The Paper
. 1995:
Apollo 13
. 1996:
Ransom
. 1999:
Ed TV
. 2000:
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
. 2001:
A Beautiful Mind
. 2003:
The Missing
. 2005:
Cinderella Man
. 2006:
The Da Vinci Code
. 2008:
Frost/Nixon
. 2009:
Angels & Demons
.

Ron Howard is the exemplary child given over to the Society of Jesus called Hollywood. The son of actors, he was a regular in a hit TV series,
The Andy Griffith Show
, from the ages of six to fourteen. He played the ideal, freckled American boy—Tom Sawyer without the wit—safe, satisfying, and sedulous about every item of American faith that was being dismantled in the 1960s.

Then he was the central youth, already equipped with a girlfriend for life, in
American Graffiti
(73, George Lucas), the movie that inaugurated a culture, of which
Happy Days
is a key part. On TV, that show lasted a decade, from Nixon to Reagan, yet oblivious of all but the securely small and local concerns that advertisers would wish upon the young man growing up.

In the process, by the age of thirty, Ron Howard was folkloric. He had more hours of moving-image time to his name than anyone of his age. He was hugely popular in the business—and he seems flawlessly likeable and unthreatening. Why should anyone be threatening, you ask, or adventurous, or difficult? There’s no good reason at all—unless such wayward thoughts take you.

He was a good child actor, and tolerable as a teenager; and he is a proficient director of mild entertainments that make people feel good about their fellows. It’s just that I could scream.

As a movie actor, he was in
The Journey
(59, Anatole Litvak);
The Music Man
(62, Morton Da Costa); very good in
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
(63, Vincente Minnelli);
Village of the
Giants
(65, Bert I. Gordon);
The Wild Country
(71, Robert Totten);
Happy Mother’s Day, Love George
(73, Darren McGavin);
The Spikes Gang
(74, Richard Fleischer);
The First Nudie Musical
(76, Mark Haggard);
Eat My Dust
(76, Charles Griffith);
The Shootist
(76, Don Siegel); and
More American Graffiti
(79, B. W. L. Norton).

As a director, there is fun and novelty in his early work: Daryl Hannah could not ask for better than
Splash; Cocoon
did raise the dread topic of old age; and no one has looked at flame with the awe of
Backdraft
. But such virtues pale in the larger blandness of the works. His record shows the market there is for what Howard does, but I can hardly watch such profit with pleasure.

It must be said that, through his company, Imagine, Howard has begun to lend his reputation as a producer or executive producer to far less viable projects:
No Man’s Land
(87, Peter Werner);
Clean and Sober
(88, Glenn Gordon Caron);
The Burbs
(89, Joe Dante); and
Closet Land
(91, Radha Bharadway).

He directs big films now, even if most of them seem derived from prior works or topical situations. But
The Grinch
was very unusual, and a huge success, and
A Beautiful Mind
was an unusual exploration of inner worlds, even if it settled for a false kindliness. Just as it won best picture, so Howard is a Thalberg Award winner one day—and a deserved one: he makes Hollywood feel better about itself. And these days that is a tough trick. Of course, it might be better for the artist in Howard if he felt less settled or secure about things—about everything.

Cinderella Man
is sincere and plodding—it’s close to the rhythms of the real Jim Braddock. The two Dan Brown pictures seem to me disastrous and pointless—did the man who made
Apollo 13
really feel excited by them? That said,
Frost/Nixon
is a very accomplished psychological thriller and a movie that led Howard to a new subject—grownups.

Trevor Howard
(1913–87), b. Cliftonville, England
Educated at Clifton and RADA. He worked on the stage from 1934–40, when he joined the army. In 1943, having been wounded, he returned to the theatre and to his film debut in Carol Reed’s
The Way Ahead
(44). When one considers Howard the actor—a candid, scathing personality—it is remarkable to discover how very few good films he made. In part, this was the dilemma of an English actor reluctant to commit himself to Hollywood, but it must also owe something to persistently bad selection by Howard himself.

He is another rarity in that his first English films are better than anything he did later: Asquith’s
The Way to the Stars
(45), David Lean’s
Brief Encounter
(45), in which he and Celia Johnson stood for the love lives of the unglamorous, and Carol Reed’s
The Third Man
(49), three quite distinct and interesting Howards; and he seems to have had a strong personal commitment to Reed’s
Outcast of the Islands
(51), and especially to George More O’Ferrall’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s
The Heart of the Matter
(53). In these years, he also made
I See a Dark Stranger
(46, Frank Launder);
Green for Danger
(46, Sidney Gilliat);
So Well Remembered
(47, Edward Dmytryk);
They Made Me a Fugitive
(47, Alberto Cavalcanti);
The Passionate Friends
(49, Lean);
Odette
(50, Herbert Wilcox);
The Golden Salamander
(50, Ronald Neame); and
The Clouded Yellow
(50, Ralph Thomas).

His choice of larger parts, however, sometimes seemed willfully inconsequential and the films were invariably blighted: José Ferrer’s
Cockleshell Heroes
(56); Reed’s
The Key
(58); Huston’s
The Roots of Heaven
(58); as Bligh in Milestone’s
Mutiny on the Bounty
(62). He was good in Guy Hamilton’s
Manuela
(57) and as the father in Jack Cardiff’s
Sons and Lovers
(60), but gradually he slipped into supporting or cameo parts, often playing morose, recalcitrant men:
The Lion
(62, Cardiff); Ralph Nelson’s
Father Goose
(64); Mark Robson’s
Von Ryan’s Express
(65); Bernhard Wicki’s
Morituri
(65); Ken Annakin’s
The Long Duel
(66); Hamilton’s
The Battle of Britain
(69); the dreadful
Twinky
(69, Richard Donner); and
The Night Visitor
(71, Laslo Benedek). Only three performances stand out in this waste: a willful and randy eccentric in
The Charge of the Light Brigade
(68, Tony Richardson); as the priest in David Lean’s
Ryan’s Daughter
(69); as Dr. Rank to Jane Fonda in
A Doll’s House
(73, Joseph Losey). Otherwise, there was
The Count of Monte-Cristo
(74, David Greene);
Hennessy
(75, Don Sharp); Squire Western in
The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones
(75, Cliff Owen);
Death in the Sun
(75, Jurgen Goslar);
Conduct Unbecoming
(75, Michael Anderson);
Aces High
(76, Jack Gold);
The Last Remake of Beau Geste
(77, Marty Feldman);
Slavers
(77, Goslar);
Stevie
(78, Robert Enders);
Superman
(78, Richard Donner); and
Hurricane
(79, Jan Troell).