The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (328 page)

Zasu Pitts
(1898–1963), b. Parsons, Kansas
One day in 1919, King Vidor was riding on a Hollywood trolley car: “A strange angular young girl sat opposite me watching anxiously for her destination. Each time she turned she managed by weird gesticulation to strike the passenger on either side of her. When the conductor announced that hers was the next stop, she showed her delight and appreciation with a good backhand slap on his stomach.… I just couldn’t sit there and let this interesting creature go out of my life for ever. I bounded out of the car and caught up with her as she reached the corner of Hollywood and Gower.

“ ‘What is your name, please?’

“ ‘Zasu. Last of Eliza, first of Susie.’ ”

It might be a scene from a von Stroheim film, with the wide-eyed, eccentric ingenue engaged in “weird gesticulation.” Vidor snapped her up and wrote a script for her in which she played “Nancy Scroogs,” a girl in a boarding school who pretends to receive love letters from a famous baseball player. That film,
Better Times
(19), caught the forlorn romantic hopes of a girl who foresees spinsterhood.

Her pale face was nearly ghoulish with large, staring eyes—no wonder she transfixed a trolley car. By popular standards she was not pretty, and in her later films she was a comic little old lady. But Stroheim’s poetic melodrama recognized her passionate daydream of married bliss in the ordinary girl and cast her as Trina in
Greed
(25). She shows how Stroheim’s “realism” is a mixture of full-blooded melodrama and psychological insight. She made over 120 films, many of poor quality, but in
Greed
she gives one of the most compelling performances in silent cinema, with the bursting frenzy of a trapped bird.

Vidor claimed to have discovered Pitts, but she had already been in films for two years before
Better Times
. His instinct about her proved correct, except that this “strange angular” girl usually played cameos and supporting parts:
The Little Princess
(17, Marshall Neilan);
How Could You, Jean?
(18, William Desmond Taylor);
The Other Half
(19, Vidor);
Poor Relations
(19, Vidor);
Patsy
(21, John McDermott);
A Daughter of Luxury
(22, Paul Powell);
Is Matrimony a Failure?
(22, James Cruze);
Youth to Youth
(22, Emile Chautard);
Poor Men’s Wives
(23, Louis J. Gasnier);
Tea With a Kick
(23, Erle C. Kenton);
Three Wise Fools
(23, Vidor);
Daughters of Today
(24, Rollin Sturgeon);
The Fast Set
(24, William De Mille);
The Goldfish
(24, Jerome Storm);
Triumph
(24, Cecil B. De Mille);
The Great Divide
(25, Reginald Barker);
The Great Love
(25, Neilan);
Lazybones
(25, Frank Borzage);
Pretty Ladies
(25, Monta Bell);
The Recreation of Brian Kent
(25, Sam Wood);
Thunder Mountain
(25, Victor Schertzinger);
Wages for Wives
(25, Borzage);
Early to Wed
(26, Borzage);
Mannequin
(26, Cruze);
Monte Carlo
(26, Christy Cabanne);
Sunny Side Up
(26, Donald Crisp);
Casey at the Bat
(27, Monte Brice);
Sins of the Fathers
(28, Ludwig Berger);
The Wedding March
(28, von Stroheim);
Her Private Life
(29, Alexander Korda);
The Locked Door
(29, George Fitzmaurice);
Oh Yeah!
(29, Garnett);
Paris
(29, Clarence Badger);
The Squall
(29, Korda);
This Thing Called Love
(29, Paul L. Stein);
Twin Beds
(29, Alfred Santell); she played the mother in
All Quiet on the Western Front
(30, Lewis Milestone), but her scenes were refilmed for sound with Beryl Mercer in the part;
The Devil’s Holiday
(30, Edmund Goulding);
Honey
(30, Wesley Ruggles);
The Lottery Bride
(30, Stein);
No, No, Nanette
(30, Badger);
Monte Carlo
(30, Ernst Lubitsch);
River’s End
(30, Michael Curtiz);
Seed
(31, John M. Stahl);
Finn and Hattie
(31, Norman Taurog);
The Guardsman
(31, Sidney Franklin);
The Big Gamble
(31, Fred Niblo);
Blondie of the Follies
(32, Goulding);
Back Street
(32, Stahl);
The Roar of the Dragon
(32, Ruggles);
The Man I Killed
(32, Lubitsch); also in 1932, she was cast—as a girl called Zasu, half in love with death—in Stroheim’s
Walking Down Broadway
. But that film foundered on production quarrels, was largely reshot and released as
Hello Sister
(33).

At about this time, she combined with Thelma Todd in a series of comedy shorts and went in for more character parts:
Mr. Skitch
(33, Cruze);
Her First Mate
(33, William Wyler);
Aggie Appleby, Maker of Men
(33, Mark Sandrich);
The Gay Bride
(34, Jack Conway);
Their Big Moment
(34, Cruze);
Dames
(34, Ray Enright);
Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch
(34, Taurog);
Ruggles of Red Gap
(35, Leo McCarey);
Going Highbrow
(35, Robert Florey);
Sing Me a Love Song
(36, Enright);
Mad Holiday
(36, George Seitz);
Naughty But Nice
(39, Enright);
Nurse Edith Cavell
(39, Herbert Wilcox);
Eternally Yours
(39, Garnett);
No, No, Nanette
(40, Wilcox);
Broadway Limited
(41, Gordon Douglas);
Weekend for Three
(41, Irving Reis);
The Bashful Bachelor
(41, Malcolm St. Clair);
Let’s Face It
(43, Sidney Lanfield);
Life With Father
(47, Curtiz);
Francis
(50, Arthur Lubin);
Denver & Rio Grande
(52, Byron Haskin);
This Could Be the Night
(57, Robert Wise);
The Gazebo
(59, George Marshall);
The Thrill of It All
(63, Norman Jewison); and
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
(63, Stanley Kramer).

Christopher Plummer
, b. Toronto, Canada, 1927
One of the first men who noticed Christopher Plummer’s promise was David O. Selznick, who nearly cast the Canadian actor as Dick Diver in the 1962 film of
Tender Is the Night
. So it’s nice to be able to say that Plummer did the narration for TNT’s documentary
The Making of a Legend: Gone With the Wind
(89, David Hinton). Along the way, Plummer has been, variously, a star in big pictures, a fine supporting actor, and—quite simply, as Mike Wallace in
The Insider
(99, Michael Mann)—a great movie actor. Of course, he has always stayed loyal to the stage as well—in recent years he has done a John Barrymore one-man show and
Lear
. He has one other contribution to the film arts (not his least) in that he is father (as Tammy Grimes was mother) to the remarkable Amanda Plummer.

He was the young playwright in
Stage Struck
(58, Sidney Lumet); the Audubon man in
Wind Across the Everglades
(58, Nicholas Ray); a fine, chilling Commodus in
The Fall of the Roman Empire
(63, Anthony Mann); seeming very uncomfortable or unmelted as Baron von Trapp in
The Sound of Music
(65, Robert Wise);
Inside Daisy Clover
(66, Robert Mulligan); safecrackerspy in
Triple Cross
(66, Terence Young); Rommel in
Night of the Generals
(67, Anatole Litvak);
Oedipus the King
(68, Philip Saville);
The High Commissioner
(68, Ralph Thomas); Atahualpa in
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
(69, Irving Lerner);
Battle of Britain
(69, Guy Hamilton);
Lock Up Your Daughters
(69, Peter Coe); as Wellington in
Waterloo
(71, Sergei Bondarchuk);
The Pyx
(73, Harvey Hart);
The Return of the Pink Panther
(75, Blake Edwards);
Conduct Unbecoming
(75, Michael Anderson); excellent as Kipling in
The Man Who Would Be King
(75, John Huston);
Aces High
(76, Jack Gold); the Archduke Ferdinand in
The Day That Shook the World
(77, Veljko Bulajic);
The Assignment
(77, Mats Aréhn);
The Disappearance
(77, Stuart Cooper); as Sherlock Holmes in
Murder by Decree
(79, Bob Clark); very good in
The Silent Partner
(79, Daryl Duke);
Hanover Street
(79, Peter Hyams);
Somewhere in Time
(80, Jeannot Szwarc);
Eyewitness
(81, Peter Yates);
Dreamscape
(84, Joseph Ruben); with Maggie Smith in
Lily in Love
(85, Károly Makk);
Ordeal by Innocence
(85, Desmond Davis);
The Boss’ Wife
(86, Ziggy Steinberg);
Dragnet
(87, Tom Mankiewicz);
Mindfield
(90, Jean-Claude Lord);
Where the Heart Is
(90, John Boorman);
Wolf
(94, Mike Nichols);
12 Monkeys
(95, Terry Gilliam);
Dolores Claiborne
(95, Taylor Hackford);
Skeletons
(96, David DeCoteau);
Hidden Agenda
(98, Iain Patterson);
The Clown at Midnight
(98, Jean Pellerin);
Blackheart
(98, Dominic Shiach); Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe in the TV
Nuremberg
(00, Yves Simoneau); F. Lee Bailey in
American Tragedy
(00, Lawrence Schiller); Van Helsing in
Dracula 2000
(00, Patrick Lussier); the old Henry Fonda part in
On Golden Pond
(01, Ernest Thompson) for TV; a doctor in
A Beautiful Mind
(01, Ron Howard).

He was in
Full Disclosure
(01, John Bradshaw);
Night Flight
(02, Nicholas Renton);
Ararat
(02, Atom Egoyan);
Agent of Influence
(02, Michel Poulette); as Ralph in
Nicholas Nickleby
(02, Douglas McGrath);
Blizzard
(02, LeVar Burton);
Cold Creek Manor
(03, Mike Figgis);
National Treasure
(04, Jon Turteltaub).

In the first decade of the new century, it seemed to dawn on everyone that Plummer was the natural casting left open by the loss of Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson, Fonda, Peck, and Holden. And Plummer was up to it. So his parts improved, and he got more attention—all of which seemed to help his honest ego: as Aristotle in
Alexander
(04, Oliver Stone); Cardinal Bernard Law in
Our Fathers
(05, Dan Curtis);
Must Love Dogs
(05, Gary David Goldberg);
Syriana
(05, Stephen Gaghan);
The New World
(05, Terrence Malick);
Inside Man
(06, Spike Lee);
The Lake House
(06, Alejandro Agresti); as an oldtime moviemaker in
Man in the Chair
(07, Michael Schroeder);
Closing the Ring
(07, Richard Attenborough);
Emotional Arithmetic
(07, Paolo Barzman);
Already Dead
(07, Charlie Huston).

Then in 2008 he published an autobiography,
In Spite of Myself
—old-fashioned, casual, careless but full of charm—and it did well. He was Caesar (with Nikki Michelle James) in
Caesar and Cleopatra
(09, Des McAnuff); a voice in
Up
(09, Pete Docter and Bob Peterson);
My Dog Tulip
(09, Paul Fierlinger);
9
(09, Shane Acker);
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
(09, Terry Gilliam); and Leo Tolstoy in
The Last Station
(09, Michael Hoffman).

Sidney Poitier
, b. Miami, Florida, 1924
1971:
Buck and the Preacher
. 1972:
A Warm December
. 1974:
Uptown Saturday Night
. 1975:
Let’s Do It Again
. 1977:
A Piece of the Action
. 1980:
Stir Crazy
. 1982:
Hanky Panky
. 1985:
Fast Forward
. 1990:
Ghost Dad
.

It’s not easy in the age of Spike Lee, Michael Jordan, and Eddie Murphy to realize how important Sidney Poitier was in the late fifties and early sixties. He played lead roles in self-consciously liberal films, and he was liked and accepted by large parts of the American population. When Poitier was nominated for the best actor Oscar for
The Defiant Ones
(Tony Curtis was nominated, too—they stayed chained together), no black actor had ever been nominated before. For black actors were more threatening than black actresses.

Was Poitier a threat? Seen again, pictures like
The Defiant Ones
seem polite and careful, and Poitier is so decent, so well spoken, so handsome, so reasonable, that he looks rather like a white black. (It’s relevant to note that he was raised in the Bahamas, where his family came from. He did not share totally in the black American experience. He had a confidence and a smile not often found in American blacks.) At any event, when Poitier received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 1992, Morgan Freeman noted how vital a lead Poitier had given succeeding generations.

He made his debut in Joseph Mankiewicz’s
No Way Out
(50) and was in
Cry the Beloved Country
(52, Zoltan Korda),
Red Ball Express
(52, Budd Boetticher), and
Go Man, Go
(53, James Wong Howe), before two excellent performances: in Richard Brooks’s
Blackboard Jungle
(55) and Martin Ritt’s
Edge of the City
(57). Thereafter, however, his films became more directly conscious of race—in tune with American public feeling:
Something of Value
(57, Brooks) and Stanley Kramer’s ponderous
The Defiant Ones
(58) are the first of the self-conscious films in which Poitier carried the wearying banner of racial harmony: Daniel Petrie’s
A Raisin in the Sun
(60); Ralph Nelson’s
Lilies of the Field
(63), an unctuous study of Poitier and a band of German nuns charming each other to pieces, leading to a best actor Oscar for Poitier; Guy Green’s
A Patch of Blue
(66); James Clavell’s
To Sir With Love
(67); Kramer’s
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
(67);
The Lost Man
(69, Robert Alan Aurthur)—a black reworking of
Odd Man Out; Brother John
(70, James Goldstone); a woeful attempt to be a South African freedom fighter in
The Wilby Conspiracy
(74, Nelson).