40 Years an Actor; Six a Movie Star

Sir Nigel Hawthorn, 1929-2001

IN 1990, I SAT IN BROADWAY'S Brooks Atkinson Theatre and watched a 61-year-old British actor whom I had never before seen perform the hell out of the lead role of C.S. Lewis (author of the Narnia books) in William Nicholson's Shadowlands. A confirmed British bachelor, Lewis finally found true love with a younger American divorcee, only to have her die before her time. Toward the end, Hawthorne had a monologue that transformed seamlessly into a pained declaration of raw grief. It was a masterful display of profound sadness and controlled rage. Later, the openly-but-quietly gay Hawthorne shared that it had been fueled by his own prolonged nightly vigil at the deathbed of a dear friend dying from AIDS.

Despite a Tony Award for the role, Richard Attenborough cast the more bankable Anthony Hopkins in his 1993 film version. Though I kept waiting to compare the two men in the climactic speech, it never came. A casualty of the screen trans­lation. All the better for now it belongs to Hawthorne and to those who were lucky enough to bear witness.

Nigel Hawthorne was a steadily working actor for 40 years' before Shadowlands. He had a significant British stage resume and achieved popular success starring in the hit British comedy series, Yes, Minister, and its follow-up, Yes, Prime Minister, both of which played to PBS audiences in the States. But it wasn't until Alan Bennett insisted that Hawthorne recreate his stage triumph in the title role of the 1995 film adaptation of his play, The Madness of King George that Hawthorne truly became known on the interna­tional scene. In the U.S., his royally insane portrayal brought him a Best Actor Oscar nomination, the first for an openly gay actor.

For the next four years, he worked as a character actor in American and British films, appearing in David Mamet's The Winslow Boy and Steven Spielberg's Amistad, but never came by a lead role as perfectly suited to his gifts as that of the Mad King. One of his most substantial turns is one of his least seen, that of the reclusive gay advisor/mentor to William Hurt's Senator in The Big Brass Ring, which was produced independently and premiered on Showtime. Written by Orson Welles (and heavily re-written by F.X. Feeney and director George Hickenlooper), Welles had planned to direct and play Hawthorne's role. There's an overt coldness to the film and a remoteness in Hurt that makes the film oddly uninvolving-yet Hawthorne captivates.

He was knighted in 1999 and returned to the London stage that same year in what seems to be every older stage actor's dream of ulti­mate conquest: the title role in King Lear. Sadly, it was not well received.

This seemed to fit the strange pattern. He would triumph on the stage in Shadowlands, but not in the film; he could conquer King George, but not Shakespeare's Lear; he would work in modest Anglo-centered success for 40 years but become an inter­national movie star for only the final six. By all reports, the bemused Sir Nigel, who lived the country life and never sought stardom, took it in stride with a reserved smile and that enig­matic glimmer in his eyes of something untold.

Julia Philips (1994-2002) was a Hollywood Produced from a Different Era

Tenacious and hard-noses, she knew that writers and directors were what mattered

AS A PRODUCER, JULIA PHILLIPS COULD only have existed in the Hollywood of the early 1970s. Foul­mouthed, with close-cropped hair and a penchant for jeans and T-shirts, she was far removed from the power-suited Sherry Lansings of the late '80s. She operated in an era when a producer didn't talk much about opening weekend box office, but might tell a studio boss she'd miscarry right in his office if he didn't greenlight her picture (which Phillips was purported to have done while fighting for Taxi Driver). These 1970s producers-Phillips and her husband Michael, Bert Schneider, Bob Evans, Ed Pressman-knew that directors and writers were what mattered. They defended their artists and did a minimum of studio ass-kissing. As she would later tell an interviewer: "One of the reasons that it felt okay to leave Hollywood was that the new guys didn't care about how great the movie was, they cared about their Range Rover, their Mercedes and their Lexuses, or Lexi.”

However, along with many of her 70s cohorts, creative explo­ration and suit rejection ran hand in hand with embracing the perceived creative liberation provided by excessive drug and alcohol use. All night and all morning parties at her Malibu beach house were the norm. They were attended by hungry, penniless nobodies named Scorsese, De Palma and Schrader, and a frail dweeb named Spielberg. The late, great screenwriter Waldo (Midnight Cowboy) Salt said of her, "Julia had a real eye for spotting talent, and she would throw herself bodily upon it." These relationships led to her being a truly creative producer on Steelyard Blues and The Sting (both 1973), the latter of which brought her the first Oscar ever won by a woman for producing. As she would later say, she survived Oscar night with the aid of "a diet pill, a small amount of coke, two joints, three Valium and a glass-and-a-half of wine."

The snazzy Redford/Newman audience-friendly period comedy was followed up by the ferocious and unrelentingly contemporary Taxi Driver (1976), which she and Michael had optioned from Paul Schrader years earlier for $1,000. Although Scorsese had always begged to direct it, she was resistant based on his first feature, Boxcar Bertha (1972). But after screening Mean Streets (1973), Scorsese was in... as long as he delivered newcomer Robert De Niro in the title role instead of Scorsese's first choice, Harvey Keitel. As the director later said, "There was something about Julia that was tenacious. I knew she was gonna fight like I was gonna fight." And fight she did.

Her disparate trilogy of Great American Films of the '70s concluded with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). By most reports, her drug and alcohol excesses, hot temper and unpre­dictable behavior were already beginning to distance many. Phillips countered that the male-dominated town couldn't handle her success, her strong will and her refusal to appear "grateful" to the men around her. And she was probably right. But the drugs and booze didn't help. Neither did her 1991 tell-all You'll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again, which helped temporarily ease her ailing finances, but effectively dynamited any smoldering bridges that might have still been standing. Phillips died of cancer on New Year's Day, 2002-a day when most people eat a late breakfast and dinner, skipping lunch completely.

The Death of Homer

Harold Russell 1914-2002

TWO SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN THE dominant number in Harold Russell's life. He volunteered to serve his country in World War II, lost two hands, gained two hooks, won two Oscars for The Best Years of Our Lives, wrote two autobiographies, had two wives, two kids and died in 2002. So what does it all mean? Who knows?

We try to find some succinct meaning when someone passes-some theme to his or her life. But as a faceless reporter learned about a certain guy named Charlie Kane, no one word or idea can really encapsulate a life. In Harold Russell's case, perhaps instead it was a defining day. For, truth be told, had that horrible 6th day of June, 1944 not transpired, I would not have known he existed, let alone be asked to pay him tribute.

While demonstrating how to assemble explosives in Camp Mackall, North Carolina, a defective fuse detonated a charge of TNT. Both hands belonging to 30-year old Harold Russell had to be amputated and replaced by hooks. Within a year, he appeared in an Army training film called Diary of a Sergeant; which director William Wyler saw and decided Russell was a more palatable example of the scars of war than what had been presented in the script for The Best Years of Our Lives. The Russell character-Homer Parrish-was originally written as a vet who suffered nerve damage resulting in spastic paralysis. The studio thought this might be too disturbing and found a compromise in Harold Russell in casting double amputee Russell. He did not disappoint.

Watching Russell elevates the now occasionally maudlin melodrama. It certainly lends a blunt gravity to his scenes and brings out that something extra from costars Fredric March, Dana Andrews and debuting Cathy O'Donnell, who so touchingly plays the gal to whom Homer is returning. Although 32 when the film was made, Russell's baby face, juxtaposed against hard steel hooks and raw, authentic emotions, leaves a permanent impact, especially within the clarity of Gregg Toland's black and white cinematography. Once experienced, Homer Parrish is hard to forget.

Now about those two Oscars. As Russell and much of Hollywood surmised, the Academy was safeguarding against the likelihood that he would certainly not win his Best Supporting Actor nomination. Not with heavyweights Claude Rains and Clifton Webb as his competition. So they created a Special Oscar, handed to him by Shirley Temple, that reflected "the hope and courage he brought to his fellow veterans." "Then when they announced my name as best supporting actor, no one was more surprised than me," Russell later said.

He only appeared in two more films in the next 53 years, for his real focus was on helping the disabled. He chaired and consulted on many federal and private organizations but gained more notoriety in 1992 when finances forced him to auction off one of his Oscars-the Supporting Actor nod, not the Special Award, of which he was infinitely more proud. His motto; "It's not what you have lost, but what you have left that counts." After the loss of his hands, Harold Russell not only had something special left, he left behind something extraordinary-a unique life that positively impacted millions. MM