Word: langella
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...Best Actor and Best Actress. It's practically a toss-up between the top two in each category. For Best Actor, Mickey Rourke is the favorite at 6 to 5, while Sean Penn is the second choice at 7 to 5. The other three: Frank Langella at 6 to 1, Brad Pitt at 15 to 1, and Richard Jenkins at 40 to 1. For Best Actress, Kate Winslet is the favorite at 8 to 5, while I've got Meryl Streep at 9 to 5. The other three in that category are Anne Hathaway at 6 to 1, Angelina Jolie...
...events and adapted for the screen by Peter Morgan from his Tony Award-winning stage play, is encapsulated within its title. “Frost/Nixon” tells the story of David Frost (Michael Sheen), a British comedian, who sets out to interview disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon (Langella). What begins for Frost as a publicity stunt quickly grows into something more—a mission to extract from Nixon the confession he never gave to the American people. “Tricky Dick,” on the other hand, hopes to use this appearance on national television?...
...Frank Langella would be proud of such a performance. But this display of mood-altering confession and self-justification was the real Nixon, in his TV marathon with Frost in 1977, three years after he left the White House in disgrace. That four-part joust, still the highest-rated interview show in U.S. history, was the inspiration for Peter Morgan's London and Broadway play starring Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost. Langella and Sheen (and Morgan) repeat their roles in the Ron Howard movie version opening today. Both the movie and the interviews (now available...
...strong, insisting an interview be stopped at the first sign of Nixon's vulnerability. All these plot elements have some basis in fact. Morgan's one fanciful addition is a phone call Nixon makes to Frost, spilling out his guts, fears and resentments. In this scene above all others, Langella leeches into the president's anxieties, and summons much of the angry power of the private man - or at least our image of the private man. But this is an impressive performance throughout. Langella is not a natural Nixon; he has a voluptuary's face and a self-assurance...
...customers know what they're hearing is just a pitch. On TV, his stabs at an intimate geniality showed the effort more than the effect, as if invisible wires were pulling his mouth into a smile. This was the Nixon so easily caricatured by political cartoonists and comedy impressionists; Langella gets all these elements but adds a certain poignant grandeur...