The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (313 page)

Becket
(64, Peter Glenville) was what passes for a film of ideas: but concentration on literary meaning only made O’Toole sound like the Player King.
Lord Jim
(65, Richard Brooks) was a boxoffice flop that might have ended his career, but he was given another chance: hysterical and implausible as the object of so much female interest in
What’s New, Pussycat?
(65, Clive Donner);
How to Steal a Million
(66, William Wyler);
The Bible
(66, John Huston);
The Night of the Generals
(67, Anatole Litvak);
The Lion in Winter
(68, Anthony Harvey);
Great Catherine
(68, Gordon Flemyng);
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
(69, Herbert Ross);
Murphy’s War
(71, Peter Yates);
Country Dance
(71, J. Lee Thompson);
Under Milk Wood
(72, Andrew Sinclair);
The Ruling Class
(72, Peter Medak);
Man of La Mancha
(72, Arthur Hiller);
Rosebud
(75, Otto Preminger);
Man Friday
(75, Jack Gold);
Coup d’Etat
(78, Martyn Burke);
The Stunt Man
(78, Richard Rush); and
Zulu Dawn
(79, Douglas Hickox).

He was nominated as best actor for
The Stunt Man
, a picture that drew upon O’Toole’s magnificent, if end-of-his-tether, charm. As he grew older, and battled alcoholism, he could look and behave like his own ghost. He could overact; he could be ridiculous. But he was never dull, and often riveting: as the Roman in
Masada
(80, Boris Sagal) on TV; in
Caligula
(80, Tinto Brass); nominated again for best actor and elegantly hilarious in
My Favorite Year
(82, Richard Benjamin); with Jodie Foster on TV as
Svengali
(83, Harvey). Also on British television, he played Sherlock Holmes a few times with perfect authority. He was in
Supergirl
(84, Jeannot Szwarc); as an Indian in
Kim
(84, John Davies);
Creator
(85, Ivan Passer);
Club Paradise
(86, Harold Ramis); magnificently starchy as the English tutor in
The Last Emperor
(87, Bernardo Bertolucci);
High Spirits
(88, Neil Jordan);
Crossing to Freedom
(90, Norman Stone);
Wings of Fame
(90, Otakar Votocek);
King Ralph
(91, David S. Ward);
Rebecca’s Daughters
(91, Karl Francis); and
The Seventh Coin
(92, Dror Soref).

His later years have been distinguished by his haunting gauntness, his record of seven unrewarded Oscar nominations, his autobiography—beginning with
Loitering with Intent
(1992)—his stage success in
Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell
, his ragbag of parts on television and his sheer survival:
Civvies
(92, Francis);
Heavy Weather
(95, Jack Gold), a TV series; the Emperor of Lilliput in
Gulliver’s Travels
(96, Charles Sturridge); as Conan Doyle in
FairyTale
(97, Sturridge);
Phantoms
(98, Joe Chappelle);
Coming Home
(98, Giles Foster);
The Manor
(99, Ken Berris);
Molokai: The Story of Father Damien
(99, Paul Cox); as Cauchon in
Joan of Arc
(99, Christian Duguay);
Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell
(99, Tom Kinniment and O’Toole);
The Final Curtain
(01, Patrick Harkins);
Rock My World
(01, Sidney J. Furie).

A tribute at Telluride in 2002 helped promote his honorary Oscar in 2003, and he kept acting: as Hindenburg in
Hitler: The Rise of Evil
(03, Duguay);
Bright Young Things
(03, Stephen Fry);
Imperium: Augustus
(04, Roger Young);
Troy
(04, Wolfgang Petersen).

In accepting his honorary Oscar, O’Toole made it clear that he would have preferred competition. And then—after
Lassie
(05, Charles Sturridge)—he found one of his most beguiling Oscar vehicles, as the dying actor in
Venus
(06, Roger Michell). So he lost again, even if he left a work of genius that was both tender and aloof. And what else should he do? Rest? So he has made
One Night with the King
(06, Michael O. Saybel); as the voice of Anton Ego in
Ratatouille
(07, Brad Bird);
Stardust
(07, Matthew Vaughn);
Dean Spanley
(08, Toa Fraser);
Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage
(08, Michael Campus); as the Pope in
The Tudors
(08); and as a character called Relic in the TV series
Iron Road
(08).

Maria Ouspenskaya
(1876–1949), b. Tula, Russia
If there had been no Maria Ouspenskaya, Hollywood would have had to invent one. For half a dozen years she was indispensable to any bigbudget movie that required a shriveled old lady with an autocratic air and a strong accent. To the industry she was the goods, given her background with Stanislavsky and her successes on Broadway after she turned up in America, in 1923, on a Moscow Art Theatre tour, and stayed. Her first Hollywood movie was Wyler’s wonderful
Dodsworth
(1936), in which she is an Austrian baroness, laying down the law to poor aging Ruth Chatterton. (It was a role she had done on stage.) As further proof of her nobility, she was a countess in the Garbo-Boyer
Conquest
(37, Clarence Brown) and a maharani in
The Rains Came
(39, Brown), even a queen (though only an Amazon queen) in
Tarzan and the Amazons
(45, Kurt Neumann). But mostly she was a madame: Madame Olga Kirowa (her best role, Vivien Leigh’s stern ballet mistress) in the 1940
Waterloo Bridge
(Mervyn LeRoy); Madame Lydia Basilova in
Dance, Girl, Dance
(40, Dorothy Arzner); Madame Tanya in
Beyond Tomorrow
(40, A. Edward Sutherland); Madame Cecile Roget in
The Mystery of Marie Roget
(42, Phil Rosen); Madame von Eln in
King’s Row
(42, Sam Wood); Madame Goronoff in
I’ve Always Loved You
(46, Frank Borzage); Madame Karina in her last film,
A Kiss in the Dark
(49, Delmer Daves).

To be fair, she had a democratic streak: she was Boyer’s non-noble French grandmother in McCarey’s
Love Affair
(39); an Austrian peasant—Jimmy Stewart’s mother!—in
The Mortal Storm
(40, Borzage); a grandmother here, a frau there, even an amah (in the 1941
Shanghai Gesture
, von Sternberg). But rank, nationality, costume, made no difference to her art: that inexorable Russian accent wiped out all distinctions. Nor did she vary her emotional pitch: “I luff you” has exactly the same weight and intonation as “I hate you.” And why not? Did Hollywood really know or care what a maharani or an amah (or an Austrian peasant) sounded like? Ouspenskaya had authority. Not even in what has turned out to be her most famous role—Maleva, the old Gypsy woman, in
The Wolf Man
(41, George Waggner) and
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
(43, Roy William Neill)—does she modify her performance by a whit. There are the famous trademarks—the immobile face; the completely flat, unnuanced intonation; the total lack of emotional register. No wonder everyone was terrified of her.

God knows what she taught generations of acting hopefuls in her highly respected and well-attended acting classes! (Lee Strasberg was one of her students.) In his biography of Alla Nazimova—a rival for many roles—Gavin Lambert tells us that Ouspenskaya “was a formidable presence who entered the classroom wearing a monocle and carrying a pitcher of what looked like water but was in fact gin. Her opening line to the class, delivered without a smile, became famous: ‘Make for me friendly atmosphere, please.’ One student reported that she would tell us to imagine we were blades of grass on the oceanbed. And everyone swayed.”

Michael Ovitz
, b. Encino, California, 1947
He was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, whence he attended high school and U.C.L.A. He married his college sweetheart in 1969. They lived in a decent house in Brentwood with two children. On graduating, he took a job with the William Morris Agency in Beverly Hills, and there learned the business—or more especially the art of packaging television—with special debt to the agent Howard West. He left Morris to go to law school, but that was never finished and he found himself back at the agency. He moved ahead very rapidly for simple reasons: he was smart, he worked all hours, he was determined. There isn’t really any more mystery to being a good agent. As for being a great agent, two things should be said: (1) a great agent may be a contradiction in terms, because (2) what does he really want? In other words, to be a terrific agent is to be self-effacing, even anonymous.

Michael Ovitz has the style of the first, but it has not led to obscurity. He was once the best-known person in the business, simply because most people in show business would have voted for him as the most powerful person around. He makes films? No, not really. There are some movies that are famous for his role as packager and kingmaker—for example,
Legal Eagles, Rain Man, Bugsy
, and
Ghostbusters
. But no one suggests he interfered with them, or proposed creative involvement. He made the deal: agents exist as 10 percent of the deal. And in an age of pay-or-play, it is not strictly necessary for the pictures to be made. Ovitz is a great deal-maker.

In 1975, he formed a dissident group within William Morris with Ron Meyer, William Haber, Michael Rosenfeld, and Rowland Perkins. They believed Morris was archaic, complacent, and too set at the top. Young lions could not get ahead. Ovitz and Meyer were fired, and they set up CAA on a very small budget. They undercut Morris on TV deals, and they found rapid success.

CAA had about one hundred agents, an annual gross of at least $100 million, a spiffy I. M. Pei–designed building at the junction of Wilshire and Santa Monica. And clients—for example, Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Magic Johnson, Kevin Costner, Dustin Hoffman, Sean Connery, Barry Levinson, Warren Beatty, Michael Douglas, Tom Cruise, and Robin Williams.

The agency had rivals: William Morris, still, and ICM. But CAA enjoyed several years of preeminence, reliant on revenue and talent, and on Ovitz’s superb insinuation of his mysterious self in the higher politics of show business. He was feared, envied, and disapproved of in some quarters. It is said that he had inflated the salaries of top talent; that he had reduced the studios to functionaries desperate to get enough big projects; that he saw the vital alliance of independent stars and the lawyerlike protection of their interests.

All of this is true, natural, and inevitable. Ovitz is only the man who crystallized the new state of power once the studio system collapsed. Every talent became his or her own studio. But talent is generally insecure, and Ovitz saw how far agencies could shelter, promote, and boost the stars. He did his job, and it was not really his job to worry about the movies except to the extent that they affect career prospects and bargaining positions.

There is more to Ovitz. He played very important but discreet roles in the deals whereby Matsushita purchased MCA (for $6.6 billion) and Sony purchased Columbia ($3.4 billion). He involved CAA in consulting deals with Coca-Cola and Credit Lyonnais (the effective owner of MGM). He made the strategy that took David Letterman to CBS. These developments seem natural in a young man who may be bored just putting movies together. In other words, the logic of Ovitz’s career must carry him higher, and the higher he goes the more dangerous life gets, because then he is doing so much more than make deals. He is involved in policy, dreams, and strategies—all of which know the way to hell.

That was 1994. A year later, of his own volition, but with the feeling that there is no stability, Ovitz left his own agency. He wanted the top job at Universal, but was disappointed—the first sign of enemies ready to see him humbled. Instead, Michael Eisner hired him as number two at Disney, an assignment that lasted a little over a year and ended in a severance deal of around $100 million. Thereafter, Ovitz was involved in several ventures—Livent, getting an NFL franchise to Los Angeles—without success. And so he went back to what he thought he had known, agenting, but with an industry arranged against him, and with the role of the agent more suspect. He formed a new company, Artists Television Group. However, by the summer of 2001, he was laying off many employees with rumors of losses in the region of $70 million. Mercy came in May 2002 as his company changed hands. At fifty-five, the Ovitz arc was complete. Or was it? Would he accept this story or not? Of course, his legacy is intact: he had presided over the most massive increase in prices there had ever been.

Clive Owen
, b. Coventry, England, 1964
I can still remember the shock of Clive Owen in
Croupier
(98, Mike Hodges). It wasn’t just the witty intricacy of that film, or even its sense of natural human deviousness. It was the shock—in an age of Jude Law and Tom Cruise—of seeing a lead actor who seemed grown up, so that his roughness or nastiness was not an adolescent assertion but the sort of bruised danger last seen in Britain in someone like Stanley Baker. Moreover, Owen’s access to mature, wounded emotions was what lifted
Closer
(04, Mike Nichols) out of the range of smart melodrama. There was never any doubt about his stardom (though
Croupier
was largely overlooked in Britain), and it’s still a mystery why he wasn’t drafted in as the next James Bond. Perhaps he had the sense to dodge the offers. Still, after the gravity that he insisted on with Julia Roberts in
Closer
, it was a tragedy to see them mixed up in the hollowness of
Duplicity
. What’s the point in having a Clive Owen around if there’s no one who knows how to write for the likes of Baker, McGoohan, the young Sean Connery, or even Sean Bean? As it is, Owen seems to have learned that his stardom exposes him to some very silly material—like
The International
(09, Tom Tykwer).