Word: actorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Eighty years later, Chaplin is still here. In a 1995 worldwide survey of film critics, Chaplin was voted the greatest actor in movie history. He was the first, and to date the last, person to control every aspect of the filmmaking process--founding his own studio, United Artists, with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith, and producing, casting, directing, writing, scoring and editing the movies he starred in. In the first decades of the 20th century, when weekly moviegoing was a national habit, Chaplin more or less invented global recognizability and helped turn an industry into...
...actor, not the camera, did the acting in his films. Never a formal innovator, Chaplin found his persona and plot early and never totally abandoned them. For 13 years, he resisted talking pictures, launched with The Jazz Singer in 1927. Even then, the talkies he made, among them the masterpieces The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952), were daringly far-flung variations on his greatest silent films, The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928) and City Lights...
...SEND IT SOLID. FROM THE GREASY POLACK YOU WILL SOMEDAY ARRIVE AT THE GLOOMY DANE. Tennessee Williams' heartfelt (if politically incorrect) telegram to Marlon Brando, on the opening night of A Streetcar Named Desire 51 years ago, got it right and got it wrong. The young actor, in his first starring role, sent it solid all right--sent it immortally. His performance as Stanley Kowalski, later repeated on film, provided one of our age's emblematic images, the defining portrait of mass man--shrewd, vulgar, ignorant, a rapacious threat to all that is gentle and civilized in our culture...
Worse, his own admirers kept piling pressures on him. An actor and friend named William Redfield spoke for them all when he said, "We...believed in him not just as an actor, but as an artistic, spiritual and specifically American leader." But this was not a role that suited him, for there was nothing in his nature that he could draw on to fill it out. The son of alcoholics--a stern taciturn father; a sweet, culturally aspiring mom--he had drifted to New York City and into acting when he was expelled from the military school that was supposed...
...there was the 80th-birthday hoopla of 2 1/2 years ago, followed by the flock of recently published books circling, vulture-like, in clear anticipation of his passing. At this point any recounting of his accomplishments--his unassailable greatness as a singer, his somewhat more assailable greatness as an actor, his impeccable taste as a curator of the great American songbook, his ancillary talents as both philanthropist and thug, his status as a totem of midcentury masculinity--inevitably takes on a dutiful, ritualistic air. So what better way to breathe a little life into the process than with an insult...