The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (401 page)

Madeleine Stowe
, b. Eagle Rock, California, 1959
I was going to begin by saying: Of course, all the young actresses are beautiful. Though not even that is true anymore. There are new actresses who seem inclined toward some abrasive or sluttish oddity—as if no one could endure the cult of flawless looks any longer. In that sense, Ms. Stowe is a throwback: one reason for her impact in
The Last of the Mohicans
(92, Michael Mann)—the first time she was properly
noticed
—was the way Mann’s inarticulate but very sensual attention to presence helped us recognize a silent screen rapture in period costume. Maybe the movie helped the actress gain confidence, for she has seemed stronger in the years since and now seems capable of real stardom—if the right parts come her way; or if she determines that they are hers.

Her mother is Costa Rican and her father from Oregon. She was a student at USC, and she went on to do a little theatre and TV. But she made her debut as the likely victim in
Stakeout
(87, John Badham).
Tropical Snow
(86, Ciro Duran)—in which she played a Colombian—had been filmed earlier, but it was not released until much later, on video. She was not much more than romantic spectacle in
Worth Winning
(89, Will Mackenzie) and
Revenge
(90, Tony Scott), where she had to suffer a great deal. But she had a comic seduction scene with Nicholson in
The Two Jakes
(90, Jack Nicholson); and there was ample show of enterprise in
Closet Land
(91, Radha Bharadwaj).

In
Mohicans
, she was genuinely brave, and persuasively moved by her Hawkeye. Mann’s camera homed in on her bold, frontal stare, her nostrils twitching like a fine mare’s.
Unlawful Entry
(92, Jonathan Kaplan) was more conventional, but she was one of many admirable women in
Short Cuts
(93, Robert Altman)—tough, wry, shrewd, and credibly trapped in a tricky life. In
Blink
(94, Michael Apted), she was a rugged Irish violinplayer who was blind; in truth, she was more interesting that way than with her sight restored. But she made a slight premise intriguing. She has also done
China Moon
(94, John Bailey); and
Bad Girls
(94, Kaplan).

She has tended to be a hanger-on in her more recent pictures:
Twelve Monkeys
(95, Terry Gilliam);
The Proposition
(98, Lesli Linka Glatter);
Playing by Heart
(98, Willard Carroll);
The General’s Daughter
(99, Simon West);
Impostor
(02, Gary Fleder);
Avenging Angelo
(02, Martyn Burke); as Isabelle in the TV
The Magnificent Ambersons
(02, Alfonso Arau);
We Were Soldiers
(02, Randall Wallace);
Avenging Angelo
(02, Martyn Burke);
Octane
(03, Marcus Adams). Since then, she has done just a little television.

Lee Strasberg
(Israel Strasberg) (1901–82), b. Budzanow, Austria
Was there ever a more adroit or enchanting casting coup than to have Lee Strasberg play Hyman Roth in
The Godfather Part II
(74, Francis Ford Coppola)? Roth is in poor health from the moment we see him. He plays so many of his scenes sitting, or on his back. He rests in the shade in a small Miami home, with lunch on his lap, and football on television. He sighs, he defers, he does not reckon to have long to go. Yet in Strasberg’s being, Roth is a monster of soft-voiced control, a serene monotone dictator. We know that Roth has never contemplated a way of life in which he does not have his own way.

Strasberg’s Roth flattered the real-life model, Meyer Lansky (movies usually flatter such brutal heroes of our time). But Coppola’s Roth surely caught Strasberg, the teacher of actors who failed to find much success himself as an actor, or director, but who quietly appropriated the Method and led the Actors Studio in its most influential years. Strasberg’s colleague, Elia Kazan, was so much more successful, dynamic, and charismatic. But Strasberg persisted with the Studio until it became his family and he became its godfather. He exerted a steely authority such that many of his best students slipped into a state of dependence. If you doubt the thoroughness with which this personal history assisted Roth in
The Godfather Part II
(and Al Pacino was Strasberg’s star pupil), then you are missing some of the subtlest intricacies of casting.

Lee Strasberg came to America when he was nine. He trained at the American Laboratory Theater, under Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya. He was a cofounder of the Group Theater, artistic director of the Actors Studio from 1948 onward, and, after 1969, head of the Lee Strasberg Institute of the Theater. His influence on movie acting was enormous, and it surely fostered the sense of malady and victimization in people. We should not lose sight of how far Strasberg’s teaching made for a depressive yet sentimentalized monster like Michael Corleone.

After his nomination for Hyman Roth, Strasberg acted a good deal in his last years and gradually revealed a fussy ham:
The Cassandra Crossing
(77, George Pan Cosmatos); on TV in
The Last Tenant
(78, Jud Taylor);
Boardwalk
(79, Stephen Verona); with Pacino again in
… And Justice for All
(79, Norman Jewison); as one of a trio of old men in
Going in Style
(79, Martin Brest); on TV again in
Skokie
(81, Herbert Wise).

A word should be added for the women in his life: Paula, his first wife, a feared figure on many sets; Susan, his daughter, who had great moments as an actress; Marilyn Monroe, his disciple; and the many actresses he inspired, intimidated, and quietly lusted after.

David Strathairn
, b. San Francisco, 1949
By now, no one can have any prospect of David Strathairn ever giving a poor performance. Maybe the only question that remains is whether the actor is capable of taking on a large part, and carrying a picture—in the way that Kevin Spacey, say, carried the stage revival of
The Iceman Cometh
. As it is, Strathairn has earned a reputation for reliability, care, self-effacement, and detail in a world that seems decreasingly impressed by those things.

He was a student at Williams College and the Ringling Brothers School for Clowns—there could be a richer comic side than we have ever seen. One of his contemporaries at Williams was John Sayles, and so Strathairn made his debut in
Return of the Secaucus Seven
(79) and became a part of the Sayles group:
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
(83, Mirra Bank and Ellen Hovde);
Lovesick
(83, Marshall Brickman);
Silkwood
(83, Mike Nichols);
The Brother from Another Planet
(84, Sayles);
Iceman
(84, Fred Schepisi);
At Close Range
(86, James Foley);
Matewan
(87, Sayles);
Call Me
(88, Sollace Mitchell);
Dominick and Eugene
(88, Robert M. Young);
Eight Men Out
(88, Sayles);
Stars and Bars
(88, Pat O’Connor);
The Feud
(89, Bill D’Elia);
Memphis Belle
(90, Michael Caton-Jones);
City of Hope
(91, Sayles);
Big Girls Don’t Cry … They Get Even
(92, Joan Micklin Silver);
Bob Roberts
(92, Tim Robbins); blind in
Sneakers
(92, Phil Alden Robinson);
Passion Fish
(92, Sayles);
Shadows and Fog
(92, Woody Allen);
A League of Their Own
(92, Penny Marshall);
Lost in Yonkers
(93, Martha Coolidge);
The Firm
(93, Sydney Pollack);
A Dangerous Woman
(93, Stephen Gyllenhaal); plainly second billing as husband to Meryl Streep in
The River Wild
(94, Curtis Hanson); nasty in
Dolores Claiborne
(95, Taylor Hackford); equally subordinate to Jessica Lange in
Losing Isaiah
(95, Gyllenhaal);
Mother Night
(96, Keith Gordon);
L.A. Confidential
(97, Hanson);
Limbo
(99, Sayles);
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(99, Michael Hoffman); excellent in
A Map of the World
(99, Scott Elliott);
Freedom Song
(00, Phil Alden Robinson) for TV;
Harrison’s Flowers
(00, Elie Chouraqui); the father in
The Miracle Worker
(00, Nadia Tass) on TV;
The Victim
(02, Doug Magee);
Blue Car
(02, Karen Moncrieff);
Lathe of Heaven
(02, Philip Haas);
Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story
(02, Lawrence Schiller);
Speakeasy
(02, Brendan Murphy);
Twisted
(04, Philip Kaufman).

He played Estes Kefauver in
The Notorious Bettie Page
(05, Mary Harron);
Missing in America
(05, Gabrielle Savage Dockterman). Then came the breakthrough: an Oscar nomination as Edward R. Murrow in
Good Night, and Good Luck
(05, George Clooney).

Yet it had no impact:
Heavens Fall
(06, Terry Green);
We Are Marshall
(06, McG);
The Sensation of Sight
(07, Aaron Wiederspahn), which he produced;
Steel Toes
(07, Mark Adams and David Glow);
Fracture
(07, Gregory Hoblit);
The Bourne Ultimatum
(07, Paul Greengrass);
My Blueberry Nights
(07, Wong Kar Wai);
Matters of Life and Death
(07, Joseph Mazzello);
The Spiderwick Chronicles
(08, Mark Waters);
The Un invited
(09, the Guard brothers);
Cold Souls
(09, Sophie Barthes);
Temple Grandin
(10, Mick Jackson).

Jean-Marie Straub
, b. Metz, France, 1933
1963:
Machorka-Muff
(s). 1965:
Nicht Versohnt/Unreconciled
(s). 1967:
Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach
. 1968:
Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter/The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp
(s). 1970:
Les Yeux ne Veulent pas en Tout Temps se Fermer/Peut-être qu’un jour Rome se permettra de choisir a son tour/Othon
. 1972:
Leçons d’Histoire
. 1975:
Moses and Aaron
. 1976:
Fortini/Cani
. 1979:
Della Nube alla Resistenza/From the Cloud to the Resistance
. 1982:
Trop Tot Trop Tard
(d). 1983:
En Rachachant
(d). 1984:
Klassenverhaltnisse/Class Relations
. 1986:
Tod des Empedokles/The Death of Empedokles; Schwarze Sunde
. 1989:
Cézanne
. 1992:
Antigone
. 1994:
Lothringen!
(s). 1997:
Von Heute auf Morgen
. 1999:
Sicilia!
2001:
Operai, Contadini
. 2003:
Le Retour du Fils Prodigue—Humiliés
. 2004:
Une Visite au Louvre
. 2006:
Quei Loro Incontri
.

Straub is an extreme, austere exponent of minimalist cinema. His work is an attempt to clarify the nature of his medium, and no task is as likely to unsettle or offend people who consider themselves familiar with the medium. Cinema has always adhered to its own reputation as a form of popular narrative entertainment for general audiences. But within that approach there have often been apparent inconsistencies: for instance, audiences actually respond as much to particular, recurring photographs of, say, Garbo, Gable, darkness, and skin, as to the stories in which they figured. What we think of as the story is invariably the effect of a chosen way of filming. The medium is intensely decision based, and thus there has always been an abiding formal element to it.

In that light, film is a succession of still images that seem to move, and it is more appropriate to call a film sequential than narrative. Every frame has its own shapes and forms. Those forms may alter during the sequence of frames in a shot. There is a further, inevitable kind of order in the sequence of shots within a film. And although Straub’s work has alarmed audiences and been enjoyed by relatively few, it is built upon the assertion that in cinema we respond to those sequences; that composition, light, movement, and sound play upon our thoughts and feelings.

What emerges in Straub’s hands are films that are composed out of bare necessity, with an eye-level, unprejudiced camera looking diagonally at unarranged events and stripped-down settings, with people who are not actorly or charming, nonprofessionals who speak their lines without intonation or personality. He reasserts reality and hopes only to record it. Thus his insistence on actual sound and unassisted appearance.

There is a paradox in Straub’s work in that, from a political point of view, he is humorlessly intent on making films for a total audience in order radically to improve their attitudes to their own lives. Yet, the formal care—which is stringent, demanding, and admirable—has undoubtedly carried his films toward that very select band supporting modern music, painting, and literature. The stirring potential of cinema, as I see it, is the size of an audience, the way that it illuminates without solving the confusion of reality and fantasy, and the way it may contribute toward a society of observant, critical spectators. While admiring Straub, I cannot convince myself that his uncompromising pursuit of independence is not self-indulgent. Nevertheless, he is an intense purist and a stark eminence.

He studied literature at Strasbourg and Nancy and ran a film society at Metz, where he made the crucial discovery of the abstraction of Bresson’s
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
. Already marked by French and German influences, he went to Paris in the mid-1950s and worked as an assistant on
La Tour de Nesle
(54, Abel Gance);
French Can Can
(55, Jean Renoir);
Eléna et les Hommes
(56, Renoir);
Le Coup de Berger
(56, Jacques Rivette);
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Echappé
(56, Bresson); and
Une Vie
(58, Alexandre Astruc). He married Danièle Huillet, his subsequent collaborator, and left France to avoid military service in Algeria.