Word: langella
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British Playwright Nichols' twist is that almost before the affair begins, the triangle becomes a pentangle. James and Eleanor have alter egos, played by Frank Langella and E. Katherine Kerr. These are id-like private selves who ironically, amusingly and sometimes heartrendingly blurt out and unmask the hypocrisies, fears, desires and fantasies the public selves are hiding. This is a device very much like the one Eugene O'Neill used in Strange Interlude. It can be a potent mode of psychological revelation, al though on occasion it can be, and is, slightly confusing...
...Star Andy Gibb, for instance, was eventually fired from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat after missing twelve performances in little more than a month; George C. Scott failed to appear twelve times last year during the six-month run of Noel Coward's Present Laughter; and Frank Langella missed 28 performances during his half year in Amadeus. On any given night, several of the felines in Cats may be substitutes. By contrast, the indestructible Marian Seldes was never out once during 1,793 performances of Deathtrap, and except for vacations, those three iron ladies, Lauren Bacall, Raquel Welch...
...made a mistake in not having a woman review the movie Dracula [July 23]. Mr. Schickel either did not grasp or simply ignored the film's best asset, Frank Langella's sex appeal. Any woman who sees the film will go "batty" over its leading...
Which is odd, since Langella looks as if he's been preening before one for the last 20 years. For Langella, Dracula is a haunted lover, a slave to his lust. He brings off the concept, while Richter and Badham whip up blood squalls around him. But the performance is a fraction of what it could have been. Maybe Langella is too good an actor to be frittered away on the screen. I don't mean that as an insult to films, but where else can an actor with no technical resources--a Jack Nicholson (good...
...Christopher Lee, who played Dracula in seven Hammer films and one independent production. Lee is not a very good actor--he's usually much too stiff and rather boring--but something in Dracula tapped the best of him. True, it was an impersonal vampire, a far cry from Langella's more complex lover. But Bram Stoker's Dracula is not much of human being, either. Lee was such a commanding Dracula, statuesque and solemn but with tremendous reserves of strength, capable of exploding at any given instant into blazing, hellish fury. Yet he was also capable of displaying a kind...