Word: brandos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...grew larger and crazier, as Alexis purred and Krystle pouted, as Blake surged from kidnapping to murder rap, Forsythe kept his hold on the viewers' belief and rooting interest. He knew that his job was to make the impossible sound plausible, and that not every actor has to be Brando. The craft can be sedative as well as stimulant. There's a place for the traditional performer - the audience's ordinary extraordinary surrogate, the one who explains to them the awful thing that just happened...
...devoted to the theory of drama. "It even tells you where in the audience a critic should sit," Khan says. "But you cannot learn acting from that." So he immersed himself in the films of Scorsese, Costa-Gavras and Bergman, and watched Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Marlon Brando over and over, trying to work out for himself how they do what they do. (See best movies, TV, books and theater of the decade...
...Broadway acclaim; in The Young Bess Simmons was a budding Queen of England, co-starring with her first husband, Stewart Granger. She ornamented De Mille-style antique epics like The Robe and The Egyptian, which required only that she look good and speak well. And she went up against Brando first in the 1954 Desirée, where she's a French maid with a crush on Napoleon, then a year later in Guys and Dolls, an undervalued movie much more crucial to Simmons's screen persona...
...princess in Roman Holiday because Howard Hughes, the owner of Simmons' contract at the time, refused to loan her out for the role. She determined never to be indentured to a studio again, and as a freelancer forged a strong résumé that cast her opposite Marlon Brando, Laurence Olivier, Robert Mitchum (twice with each star), Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Richard Burton and other dominant movie males. She earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, in the 1969 The Happy Ending, to go with the Supporting Actress Oscar nomination she had received...
...Salvation Army lass liberated from propriety by demon rum and the attentions of a sharp gambler. As Sergeant Sarah Brown, Simmons begins with a virginal haughtiness, compromised only slightly by her nervous habit of unbuttoning the middle button on her army jacket. Then, on a night in Havana with Brando's Sky Masterson (he's made a $1,000 bet he can take her there), she's the innocent blossoming into sexual joy. That emotional unbuttoning is something the actress had rarely been allowed to portray in her early roles, except for The Blue Lagoon. As Estella, for example...