The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (382 page)

He worked hard throughout the 1960s in a variety of blockbusters: thus
The Fall of the Roman Empire
(64, Anthony Mann);
Behold a Pale Horse
(64, Fred Zinnemann);
The Fabulous Adventures of Marco Polo
(64, Christian-Jaque);
Genghis Khan
(65, Henry Levin); very subdued as
Dr. Zhivago
(65, Lean);
The Night of the Generals
(67, Anatole Litvak);
Cinderella Italian Style
(67, Francesco Rosi);
Funny Girl
(68, William Wyler);
Mayerling
(68, Terence Young);
MacKenna’s Gold
(69, J. Lee Thompson);
The Appointment
(69, Sidney Lumet);
Che!
(69, Richard Fleischer);
The Last Valley
(70, James Clavell);
The Horsemen
(71, John Frankenheimer);
Le Casse
(71, Henri Verneuil);
L’Isola Misteriosa e il Capitano Nemo
(73, Juan Antonio Bardem);
The Tamarind Seed
(74, Blake Edwards);
Juggernaut
(74, Richard Lester); and
Funny Lady
(75, Herbert Ross). Which is an awful lot of dull film, and much less interesting than the real picture of a cosmopolitan, bridge-playing Sharif, deprecating his own success and sophistication.

He was in
Crime and Passion
(76, Ivan Passer);
Ashanti
(79, Fleischer);
Bloodline
(79, Young);
Oh Heavenly Dog!
(80, Joe Camp);
Pleasure Palace
(80, Walter Grauman);
The Baltimore Bullet
(80, Robert Ellis Miller);
Green Ice
(81, Ernest Day);
Top Secret!
(84, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker);
Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna
(86, Marvin J. Chomsky);
Harem
(86, Billy Hale);
Peter the Great
(86, Chomsky and Lawrence Schiller);
The Possessed
(86, Andrzej Wajda);
Grand Larceny
(88, Jeannot Szwarc); and
Memories of Midnight
(91, Gary Nelson).

He is still a star in Egypt, a handsome figure at the tables, and likely to turn up anywhere as some kind of sheik:
Al-Aragoz
(91, Hany Lasheen); as an Armenian escaping Nazis in
Mayrig
(91, Verneuil),
588 Rue Paradis
(92, Verneuil);
Beyond Justice
(92, Duccio Tessari); a TV
Mayrig
(93, Verneuil);
Lie Down with Lions
(94, Jim Goddard);
Catherine the Great
(95, Chomsky and John Goldsmith); the sorcerer in
Gulliver’s Travels
(96, Charles Sturridge); Kahlil Gibran in
Heaven Before I Die
(97, Izadore K. Musallam);
The 13th Warrior
(99, John McTiernan);
The Parole Officer
(01, John Duigan);
Monsieur Ibrahim
(03, François Dupeyron);
Hidalgo
(04, Joe Johnston); the narrator on
10,000 B.C
. (08, Roland Emmerich).

Robert Shaw
(1927–78), b. West Houghton, England
Swashbuckling encounters with trash and meal-ticket movies do not dull the thought that Robert Shaw could have been one of the most frightening people in pictures. It would be easy to dismiss him as a hopeless ham, an actor drunk on power (and drink), and either laughable or disconcerting as a result of his reckless exaggeration. But he was a profound man, very talented, often troubled, and well aware of the compromises he was making. Movies sometimes seem too small for him—as they did for Charles Laughton. He heard strange voices and might do uncanny things if a project held his attention and stilled his arrogance. He put himself into his children (ten of them from three wives—one of whom was actress Mary Ure) and his novels. Perhaps he scorned movies. But he gave us moments of a child’s passion in a fierce man’s body, of gaiety suddenly consumed by a thundercloud.

His movie record is an odd one. For nearly twenty years he played supporting parts, seldom forgettable, but a flop whenever he starred. It was only in 1973, as a comic rogue, Doyle Lonnegan, exactly suited to the comic-strip adventure of
The Sting
(73, George Roy Hill), that he became an established star. He was nearly twenty years waiting for that:
The Dam Busters
(55, Michael Anderson);
Sea Fury
(58, Cy Endfield);
The Valiant
(62, Roy Baker);
Tomorrow at Ten
(62, Lance Comfort); a startling blond Russian in
From Russia with Love
(63, Terence Young);
The Caretaker
(63, Clive Donner);
The Luck of Ginger Coffey
(64, Irvin Kershner); shrill cheerfulness only signaling violent temper as Henry VIII in
A Man for All Seasons
(67, Fred Zinnemann); mangling an American accent in
Custer of the West
(67, Robert Siodmak);
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
(68, Irving Lerner);
The Battle of Britain
(69, Guy Hamilton);
Figures in a Landscape
(70, Joseph Losey);
A Reflection of Fear
(71, William Fraker); very good as Lord Randolph Churchill in
Young Winston
(72, Richard Attenborough);
The Hireling
(73, Alan Bridges);
The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3
(74, Joseph Sargent); as Quint in
Jaws
(75, Steven Spielberg); identical twins in
Diamonds
(75, Menahem Golan); the Sheriff of Nottingham in
Robin and Marian
(76, Richard Lester);
End of the Game
(76, Maximilian Schell);
Swashbuckler
(76, James Goldstone); the Israeli in
Black Sunday
(77, John Frankenheimer); another barnacle-encrusted sea-dog in
The Deep
(77, Peter Yates); and
Avalanche Express
(79, Mark Robson).

Norma Shearer
(Edith Norma Shearer) (1902–83), b. Montreal, Canada
It is only reasonable that the wife of an enigma should be difficult to account for. Undoubtedly, her highest fame owed itself to the determination of her husband, Irving Thalberg, that she should be “the first lady of Hollywood.” But it would be facile to allege simply that she happened to marry the right man. If not a star, she was at least a moderate success before the marriage, while it seems clear that she and Thalberg were deeply in love. Perhaps this was because they had so much in common. Like her husband, Norma Shearer was very hardworking, utterly practical, and seemingly fully conscious of the way packaging and publicity could enhance performance. Equally, Thalberg’s promotion of her bypassed the fact—evident to anyone who cares to look at her films—that she was fluttery, chilly, and more nearly vacant than any other goddess. Lillian Hellman talks of Shearer’s “face unclouded by thought.” (Even her fans have to decide whether or not she had a squint.) She was the daughter of the president of a construction company, and she studied at the Canadian Royal Academy of Music. After working briefly in a music store, she was taken to New York by an ambitious mother to be placed in movies. But she seldom got beyond extra and bit parts, reputedly in D. W. Griffith’s
Way Down East
(20) and
The Flapper
(20, Alan Crosland), at Trans-Atlantic and Biograph. She went back to Montreal and worked as a model (she was Miss Lotta Miles for tire ads) before renewing her attack through several small production companies:
The Bootleggers
(22, Roy Sheldon);
Channing of the Northwest
(22, Ralph Ince);
The Man Who Paid
(22, Oscar Apfel); and
A Clouded Name
(23, Austin O. Huhn).

She was then signed up by Louis B. Mayer, who tested her worth in John M. Stahl’s
The Wanters
(23), handled by First National, and loaned her to Fox for
The Wolf Man
(24, Edmund Mortimer) with John Gilbert and to Paramount for
Empty Hands
(24, Victor Fleming). MGM repossessed her with
Pleasure Mad
(23, Reginald Barker) and
Broken Barriers
(24, Barker), and she had a great success in a Lon Chaney film,
He Who Gets Slapped
(24, Victor Sjöström). By now, she was under Thalberg’s control and he cast her with John Gilbert in
The Snob
(24, Monta Bell), and built her up as a sophisticated woman in comedies and romances:
Lady of the Night
(25, Bell);
Excuse Me
(25, Alf Goulding);
His Secretary
(25, Hobart Henley);
Pretty Ladies
(25, Bell); with Chaney again in
The Tower of Lies
(25, Sjöström);
A Slave of Fashion
(25, Henley); Benjamin Christensen’s
The Devil’s Circus
(26); and
Upstage
(26, Bell).

Even so, her impact remained modest, and if Thalberg had not married her in 1927 it is possible that Mayer would have dropped her—though not her brother, Douglas, who led the studio’s sound department. Shearer was quickly elevated into one of MGM’s leading ladies in Lubitsch’s
The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg
(27);
The Demi-Bride
(27, Robert Z. Leonard);
The Latest from Paris
(28, Sam Wood);
The Actress
(28, Sidney Franklin);
A Lady of Chance
(29, Leonard);
The Trial of Mary Dugan
(29, Bayard Veiller)—hers and MGM’s first alltalking drama; Franklin’s
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney
(29);
Their Own Desire
(30, E. Mason Hopper);
Let Us Be Gay
(30, Leonard); and
The Divorcee
(30, Leonard), for which she won the best actress Oscar.

Having reached this peak, she was gradually withdrawn from circulation, first by having a child, then with Thalberg’s death, but throughout as an assertion of her special, rarefied quality. Would that the films supported this attitude:
Strangers May Kiss
(31, George Fitzmaurice); Clarence Brown’s
A Free Soul
(31); Franklin’s
Private Lives
(31); Leonard’s
Strange Interlude
(32), in which the gulf between her and the O’Neill material is comic; Franklin’s
Smilin’ Through
(32); Edmund Goulding’s
Riptide
(34); and, notoriously, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Franklin’s
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
(34). Then, despite a disastrous preliminary attempt in
The Hollywood Revue of 1929
, she persuaded Thalberg to mount
Romeo and Juliet
(36) for her, directed by George Cukor.

With Thalberg’s death, in 1936, Shearer was something of an embarrassment to MGM, chiefly because she was a large stockholder. In 1938, she played
Marie Antoinette
(W. S. Van Dyke) amid rumors that the studio wanted to be free of her. In fact, it is one of her better performances; much sillier was Clarence Brown’s
Idiot’s Delight
(39) in which she wore a blonde wig. In the same year, she was the central figure in Cukor’s
The Women
, the best film in which she appeared and arguably the only good one. She worked out her contract with Mervyn Le Roy’s
Escape
(40), a fanciful war story;
We Were Dancing
(42, Leonard); and, finally, Cukor’s
Her Cardboard Lover
(42). She then retired and refused several offers to return.

She married again, to Marti Arrougé, and then she went into a decline marked by loss of sight, failing memory, depression, and what she believed was a version of the mental illness that had beset her sister, Athole. Her looks had gone and she had long white hair. One of her last visitors was detained by Shearer’s unreachable anxiety. She held the man’s hand: “Are you Irving? Were we married?” she asked.

Ally
(Alexandra Elizabeth)
Sheedy
, b. New York, 1962
A lot of people were delighted to see the performance given by Ally Sheedy as the reclusive, neurotic photographer, Lucy Berliner, in
High Art
(98, Lisa Cholodenko). It wasn’t just the evidence of a real, mature actress that worked—somehow the actress and her director managed to convey the sense that Lucy was a genuine artist who had photographed the film. But that was already several years ago, and Sheedy (who has come back from drug problems, to say nothing of a very precocious youth) now faces the ordinary difficulties that confront forty-year-old actresses.

She is the daughter of an advertising executive and of the literary agent Charlotte Sheedy. As such, she had an excellent education and unusual opportunities. She attended the Bank Street School and was a child dancer with the American Ballet Theatre. Then she began writing: her children’s book,
She Was Nice to Mice
, was published in 1974, and she sometimes served as a teenage movie reviewer for the
Village Voice
. As an actress, she began in 1981 on TV in
I Think I’m Having a Baby
, and was soon a regular as a teenager in movies—often with Molly Ringwald (the Charlotte to Sheedy’s Emily Brontë?).

There has been a lot of TV, and probably too much of everything, but these are the highlights: her movie debut, as Sean Penn’s girlfriend in
Bad Boys
(83, Rick Rosenthal); with Matthew Broderick in
WarGames
(83, John Badham); with Rob Lowe in
Oxford Blues
(84, Robert Boris);
The Breakfast Club
(85, John Hughes);
St. Elmo’s Fire
(85, Joel Schumacher); as Gene Hackman’s daughter in
Twice in a Lifetime
(85, Bud Yorkin);
Blue City
(86, Michelle Manning);
Short Circuit
(86, Badham), with a robot;
Maid to Order
(87, Amy Jones);
She’s Having a Baby
(88, Hughes);
Heart of Dixie
(89, Martin Davidson);
Fear
(90, Rockne S. O’Bannon).

She was still second banana in
Betsy’s Wedding
(90, Alan Alda);
Only the Lonely
(91, Chris Columbus);
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
(92, Columbus); on TV in
Chantilly Lace
(93, Linda Yellen);
The Pickle
(93, Paul Mazursky); with a dog in
Man’s Best Friend
(93, John Lafia); and more and more dismal TV until
High Art
.