The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (381 page)

By 1915, Keystone had become a part of Triangle: Sennett, Griffith, and Thomas Ince were the three great figures of that moment. When Triangle broke up, Sennett went back to his own unit, releasing through Paramount and then Pathé. Most of his pictures were one-or two-reelers, but over the years there were a few features:
Tille’s Punctured Romance
(15), which he directed himself, and
Mickey
(18, Richard Jones), a vehicle for Mabel Normand.

By the early twenties he was in decline, or passed by. As he admitted, he was not that receptive to story, character, or attitude. And his energy now looked raw and naïve. Of course, it was both, but looking back it is easier to see the dynamism of the age and its new technology. Keystone comedy has become a version of Dada where we see the specter of great terrors. The most alarming thing of all is that the pictures were played for laughter.

Andy Serkis
(Serkissian), b. London, 1964
Andy Serkis is in this book because his work as an actor merits it: his Ian Brady in
Longford
(06, Tom Hooper) is one of the more emphatically disturbing performances any of us can fear seeing. In addition, I found him fascinating and repellent as Rigaud in TV’s
Little Dorrit
(08) just as nearly ten years earlier he had been a startlingly small but still menacing Bill Sikes in
Oliver Twist
(99, Renny Rye). Still, he is of extra interest as perhaps the first actor to give his look and his voice, his moves and gestures, to the computer-generated creation of a fantasy character. He has done this twice, with great technical difficulty or labor, letting himself be photographed and then offered as a kind of ghost to the computer’s creation of an unreal character that is plainly of the Serkis family. He did this for Gollum in the three
Lord of the Rings
movies (01, 02, 03, Peter Jackson) and then for the role of Kong in Jackson’s
King Kong
(05). Of those two, Gollum is far the most effective and intriguing, though it’s evident that Serkis studied ape behavior at length before doing
Kong
. It’s hard to think that Serkis is anything other than a pioneer in a new kind of acting, performing (or genome-surgery). It’s not one I am entirely happy with, but that has nothing to do with the future of an implacable medium. And it is ridiculous to disown the rare genius in Andy Serkis.

He is of Armenian descent and he spent a great part of his childhood in Baghdad—so his culture was already mixed before he fell into the hands of machinery. He was trained as a painter and designer, and he still works in those forms—indeed, his recent decision to try film directing may mark a return to his graphic interests. But as a young man, designing for the stage carried him toward acting, and he soon won attention playing the Fool in a version of
King Lear
.

Serkis is a very hard worker, and through the 1990s especially he did a lot of British television:
Prince of Jutland
(94, Gabriel Axel);
Mojo
(97, Jez Butterworth), which he had started onstage;
Clueless
(98, Jonathan Karlsen);
Insomnia
(98, Andrew Gunn);
Among Giants
(98, Sam Miller);
Topsy-Turvy
(99, Mike Leigh);
Pandaemonium
(00, Julien Temple);
Shiner
(00, John Irvin);
The Escapist
(01, Gillies MacKinnon);
24 Hour Party People
(02, Michael Winterbottom);
Deathwatch
(02, Michael J. Bassett);
Standing Room Only
(04, Deborra Lee-Furness);
13 Going on 30
(04, Gary Winick);
Blessed
(04, Simon Fellows);
Stormbreaker
(06, Geoffrey Sax);
The Prestige
(06, Christopher Nolan); as Van Gogh in Simon Schama’s
Power of Art
(06); the interrogator in
Extraordinary Rendition
(07, Jim Threapleton);
Sugarhouse
(07, Gary Love); the voice of King Bohan in the video game
Heavenly Sword
(07); Einstein in
Einstein and Eddington
(08, Philip Martin);
Inkheart
(08, Iain Softley).

He played Ian Dury in (and coproduced)
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll
(10, Mat Whitecross) and he has many future projects, including directing, Captain Haddock in
The Adventures of Tintin
and the possibility of Gollum again for
The Hobbit
. So we shall be seeing him steadily—whether or not we recognize him.

Rod Serling
(1924–75), b. Syracuse, New York
He was a boxer, and a paratrooper in the Pacific in the last year of the war—wounded and decorated for valor. He was also one of the best short, dark, and handsome guys on television, and one of the first show hosts to imprint his personality on a series. He could be funny, he was not averse to being a little sinister, and he was very happy to leave a tingle on our spine. He never disguised his status as an entertainer (as opposed to a philosopher or astronomer), but he was smart, interested in ideas and startling reversals of accepted orders—like time, memory, life, and death and common sense. And so he took those things generally gathered under science fiction, the occult, or the supernatural, and he made them respectable on network television. He is nowhere near the genius of a Philip K. Dick, say, but Serling was a very important spokesman for a new area of mystery storytelling.

That was not where he seemed headed. After the war, he studied at Antioch College and then went into radio. It was from there that he won his first reputation as one of the exciting generation of television playwrights in the 1950s. Three times in a row he won Emmys, for
Patterns
(a groundbreaking study of life in business),
Requiem for a Heavyweight
(far more conventional as a study of a used-up fighter) and, best of all,
The Comedian
, a showbiz exposé of scorching force, lit up by a great performance from Mickey Rooney, as the beloved comic who is a bastard, and directed by John Frankenheimer.

These plays were realistic, rather old-fashioned, but full of the excitement of the 1950s—in fact, they stand up rather better than the ones Paddy Chayefsky was writing at the same time. That success encouraged Serling to mount what was called
The Twilight Zone
, a series that ran on CBS from 1959 to 1964, with Serling as the host, the writer of two-thirds of the 150-plus episodes, and plainly the show’s author. It was black-and-white, and just a thirty-minute slot at first, and it told tales with a twist and a sci-fi thrust. “There is a fifth dimension,” Serling warned, “beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call the Twilight Zone.”

The show was well-funded, tautly written (for plot rather than character), and it had veteran movie directors (Robert Florey and John Brahm) and some interesting name actors—Burgess Meredith, Roddy McDowall, Nehemiah Persoff, Rod Taylor. Twice in a row, in 1960 and 1961, Serling won writing Emmys for the show.
The Twilight Zone
never made it to the top twenty-five, probably because it was a bit too scary. But it had a loyal following and its influence on the medium can be felt in such shows as
The X-Files
and
Lost
.

Serling had a second show,
Night Gallery
, from 1970 to 1973, in which he was the host again, discovered at night in a rather spooky art gallery. It was not as successful, and Serling found his ideas being rejected by his own show. He had a bad heart and died after open-heart surgery. It’s hard to guess what he might have done, in part because he seemed content to be a writer and presenter and never felt drawn to directing.

The films from his work include
The Rack
(56, Arnold Laven);
Patterns
(56, Fielder Cook);
Saddle the Wind
(58, Robert Parrish);
Requiem for a Heavyweight
(62, Ralph Nelson) with Anthony Quinn as the boxer—it had been Jack Palance originally on TV;
The Yellow Canary
(63, Buzz Kulik);
Seven Days in May
(64, Frankenheimer);
Assault on a Queen
(66, Jack Donohue);
Planet of the Apes
(68, Franklin Schaffner), cowritten with Michael Wilson—just the kind of power upheaval Serling enjoyed; and
The Man
(72, Joseph Sargent), in which James Earl Jones plays the first black president.

Delphine Seyrig
(1932–90), b. Beirut, Lebanon
How beautiful was Delphine Seyrig? What did she look like? Was it she, unheard, seen at some distance, in 1967, in
Accident?
Why did so entrancing an actress so restrict her work in cinema? Because she knew memory thrived best on fragments?

Her diffident, disjointed career—cameos here, extraordinary, innovatory intensity there—is part of the abstracted calm that hung over her. She was able to invest small gestures with an enormous imaginary train. As she said herself:

I have to create an entire past history for her/me (a character). If one isn’t provided, I create it for myself. I invent it. I can’t work any other way. The act of moving, say, a cigarette lighter doesn’t interest me in itself; what interests me is how to move it as the character would. I think the real reason why one loves acting lies in this conception of the gesture bound by personality. I think that even actors who don’t admit it actually play much more than the text and the necessary movements. They act because they are inventing a character. And when one invents a character, one doesn’t invent her at thirty-five or seventy years old; one makes her arrive there. One creates a past for her.

While working in New York, she had appeared as Larry Rivers’s wife in
Pull My Daisy
(58, Robert Frank). But her first large part was as the woman in
Last Year at Marienbad
(61, Alain Resnais), the instrument of feeling through whom the idea of the past is brought to bear on the present. That deadly film is sustained by the grace of her movements and the emotional alertness of her expressions: a more hackneyed or less resourceful actress could never have carried the constant, but nonspecific attention.
Muriel
(63, Resnais) went beyond exercise and allowed Seyrig to create one of the most anguished and tender of screen women. As Jean Cayrol’s notes for the script make clear, the part of Hélène was an embodiment of past, present, and future, a crucible of experience. Seyrig astonishingly altered herself to fit these requirements:

Hélène’s figure is still young, but her face must be very mobile. In fact, she could pass for a slightly used 20-year-old or a 45-year-old on whom worry and fatigue have left their marks. She has kept her hair natural and untinted. And the wind can play in her hair continually, which will give it a life of its own, like the changes in her face.

Her expression is direct. It can be very fixed, as if she looked through the people in front of her at something else; but at the same time her gaze can be uneasy. One has the impression that her eyes become like those of someone who is mad.

Nothing she did after
Muriel
was as comprehensive, but much of the earlier creation has spread usefully into
La Musica
(66, Marguerite Duras and Paul Seban);
Accident
(67, Joseph Losey), where her brief liaison with Dirk Bogarde, without direct sound, is—contrary to Losey’s intention—more intriguing than anything else in the film;
Mr. Freedom
(68, William Klein);
Stolen Kisses
(68, François Truffaut), where her breathless playing of the seduction scene was aided by the practical measure of running up two flights of stairs immediately beforehand;
La Voie Lactée
(68, Luis Buñuel); a lady Dracula in
Daughters of Darkness
(70, Harry Kumel);
The Magic Donkey
(70, Jacques Demy), as a sophisticated fairy godmother; as the airy, felicitous, ultimately groomed lady at thwarted dinner parties in
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
(72, Buñuel), who restrains her lover’s advances because of “her scars”; as Kristine Linde in
A Doll’s House
(73, Losey);
The Day of the Jackal
(73, Fred Zinnemann); and
The Black Windmill
(74, Don Siegel).

Her sheer presence, at the same time declaratory and mysterious, and her rapport with Marguerite Duras, sustained the levels of
nouveau roman
and fashion show in
India Song
(75). But she was more real and resourceful in the very demanding
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce—1080 Bruxelles
(75, Chantal Akerman). Her range remained as extraordinary as it was because of an abiding reticence:
Aloise
(75, Liliane de Kermadec);
Le Jardin qui Bascule
(75, Guy Gilles).

She directed one film,
Sois Belle et Tais-Toi
(77), and she appeared in
Vera Baxter
(77, Duras);
Le Chemin Perdu
(80, Patricia Moraz);
Chere Inconnue
(80, Moshe Mizrahi);
Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevard Presse
(84, Ulrike Ottinger);
Golden Eighties
(86, Akerman);
Letters Home
(86, Akerman); and
Joan of Arc of Mongolia
(89, Ottinger).

Omar Sharif
(Michael Shalhoub), b. Alexandria, Egypt, 1932
Of Syrian-Lebanese descent, Sharif was given an essentially European education, as well as a solid grounding in American films. It was his ambition to be an international movie star, and he became the sex symbol of the Egyptian cinema toward that end. He attracted a certain amount of art-house attention in Jacques Baratier’s
Goha
(59), but his star rose when David Lean ventured eastwards and cast Sharif as the fierce, tribesman ally of
Lawrence of Arabia
(62). Such brigandlike handsomeness and the playful conjuring up of a latter-day Valentino left no doubt about Sharif’s international appeal.