Word: harrer
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...Additional photo credits -- Paulson: AP; AIG Ticker: Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg / Landov; Lehman: Getty; Federal Reserve Bank of New York: AP; Foreclosure: AP; AIP sign: Getty; Dow Jones...
DIED. HEINRICH HARRER, 93, Austrian adventurer and ex-Nazi whose 1953 memoir, Seven Years in Tibet, was the basis for the 1997 film, in which he was played by Brad Pitt; in Vienna. A onetime SS member who later renounced Nazism, Harrer was a skilled alpinist. In 1938 he took part in the first ascent of the Eiger north face in Switzerland. The next year, he embarked on a Himalayan expedition that led to his stay in Tibet, during which he became a teacher, adviser and friend to the Dalai Lama...
Annaud's version of the Harrer memoir, Seven Years in Tibet, is true to the compulsions and contradictions in each man. It has exciting, boy's-life-perils footage of men risking their necks (and breaking a leg) for the suicidal glory of getting to the top of something they can only come down from--the high before the depression. It documents the stubborn spirit of a fellow contemptuous of compromise, almost of humanity, and his rebirth in a land where each desolation dissolves in beatific smiles. It is about a solitary star, trussed in celebrity, who learns...
...country's predominant religion. He picked up a copy of Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, an introduction to the subject, but never cracked it, preferring in the end to enter the project as ignorant as was the character he plays, Austrian mountain climber Heinrich Harrer, when he stumbled across the Tibetan border in 1944. But on a movie set stocked with actual monks working as extras, the actor picked up a thing or two. "Their idea of a civilization that rejects violence on principle--I mean, what?" he ejaculates with Jackie Gleasonesque incredulity, feigning...
Pitt brushes off the controversy about Harrer's recently discovered SS past and the resulting news stories that suggested Pitt and director Jean-Jacques Annaud were making some kind of glam hero out of a Nazi scuzzbag. "That's a slant people took before they knew all the information," Pitt complains. "You shouldn't speak until you know what you're talking about. That's why I get uncomfortable with interviews. Reporters ask me what I feel China should do about Tibet. Who cares what I think China should do? I'm a f______ actor! They hand me a script...