Word: existentialist
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...that there has been only one Marcello to play. In his first eminence, as the cynical journalist in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita and the indecisive director in Fellini's 8 1/2, Mastroianni might have been typed as an existentialist heartthrob, a Valentino for the atomic age. But by the early '60s he was also playing a comic-pathetic roue in Divorce, Italian Style; a quiet-spoken syndicalist in The Organizer; a trio of Italian males in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. From these disparate parts emerged the full image of Mastroianni: a sensual, reasonable man, agreeably passive, remarkably resilient...
...life drew near its sordid end, Liu Yong, 22, took to wearing nothing but black. In perhaps a more telling symptom of his decadence, the engineering student and former Communist Youth League officer read the existentialist works of Sartre and Nietzsche, wrote solipsistic essays and handed out calling cards identifying himself as the Count of Monte Cristo. Failing all his courses, he boasted that he would someday be famous. Last March, he knifed a young woman to death and then electrocuted himself...
...What noted existentialist and television celebrity, when asked in supermarket parking lots whether she is the legendary Erma Bombeck, blushes prettily, lowers her gaze and says, "No, I'm Ann-Margret, but thank you anyway...
...glorious eccentricity). The old man's death, when he attempts to break free of lordly constraint to celebrate his grandson's return, and the death of Tarzan's ape "father," at the hands of a panicky civilization, turn the noble savage into a premature existentialist permanent outsider, last seen heading back to the bush, where he will have to invent a life in the borderlands between two communities he can never fully join. Jane (Andie MacDowell) watches him go, awaiting reunion in a sequel one suspects will never...
Only now and then does one catch a handsome exit line today. Gary Gilmore, the murderer executed in Utah in 1977, managed a moment of brisk existentialist machismo when he told the warden, "Let's do it." There was a charm, a mist of the fey overlaying the terror, in the official last words that William Saroyan telephoned to the Associated Press before he died in 1981: "Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?" Last fall the British Actor John Le Mesurier dictated to his wife...