Word: actor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...last 20 years. For Langella, Dracula is a haunted lover, a slave to his lust. He brings off the concept, while Richter and Badham whip up blood squalls around him. But the performance is a fraction of what it could have been. Maybe Langella is too good an actor to be frittered away on the screen. I don't mean that as an insult to films, but where else can an actor with no technical resources--a Jack Nicholson (good as he is), a Clint Eastwood, a Burt Reynolds--come off so well? Langella has broad features that express grand...
...vote goes to Christopher Lee, who played Dracula in seven Hammer films and one independent production. Lee is not a very good actor--he's usually much too stiff and rather boring--but something in Dracula tapped the best of him. True, it was an impersonal vampire, a far cry from Langella's more complex lover. But Bram Stoker's Dracula is not much of human being, either. Lee was such a commanding Dracula, statuesque and solemn but with tremendous reserves of strength, capable of exploding at any given instant into blazing, hellish fury. Yet he was also capable...
DIED. Michael Wilding, 66, dapper English actor and second husband of Elizabeth Taylor; after a fall in his home; in Chichester, England. His success during the 1940s and '50s in light comedies (Spring in Park Lane) brought him to Hollywood, where he married Taylor, 19, and, he said, "watched my career turn to ashes." Divorced after five years and two children, Wilding returned briefly to the London stage before becoming a talent agent...
DIED. Cornelia Otis Skinner, 78, gifted monologist, actress and humorist; of a stroke; in New York City. Cornelia was weaned on her actor father's renditions of Shakespeare, and made her Broadway debut with him in 1921. Too tall and gawky to play ingenues, she built her stage career slowly, tirelessly touring the U.S. heartlands and Britain in monodramas she wrote and staged herself. Her self-deprecating humor and satirical wit found an outlet in light verse and anecdotal magazine pieces, plays and books, the best known of which was her 1942 travelogue, Our Hearts Were Young...
Freedman has given fresh significance to Pindarus--whom Cassius captured, forced into servitude, and finally frees-by assigning the role to a black actor (a forceful Joe Morton). Ray Dooley is sufficiently young-looking for the 21-year-old Octavius, and nicely captures the chill efficiency of this whiz kid with a fourragere on his uniform...