Word: melvyn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...work was superb. There was none of the outrageous improvisation that marks Sellers' acting when he feels a project is going badly. "I was amazed at the discretion with which he handled the part," says Co-Star Melvyn Douglas. "Never was there a suggestion of having overblown any sense of it." Adds Richard Dysart, who played a doctor: "The texture of that man's work! He gave Hal Ashby two or three different characters?not that varied, but different. I began to see that there was a through line for each, that they were consistent." Ashby thus had not just...
...reflect back at everyone he meets whatever qualities they have projected on him. The woman (Shirley MacLaine) who takes him in after he has been injured in an encounter with her limousine sees him as a highly charged sexual being, although he is in fact a virgin. Her husband (Melvyn Douglas), a mighty captain of industry, believes him to be a Baruch-like financial wizard, since his few childlike responses to questions on these matters can be interpreted as metaphorical profundities. The President (Jack Warden) is similarly buffaloed by Chance's vague imagery, all of it drawn from the only...
...gardener who does nothing but watch TV, tend to his plants, eat and sleep. His screenplay for Being There could hardly be more faithful to the novel. According to Kosinski's metaphorical fable, the TV-idiot, Chauncey Gardiner (Sellers), bumps his way to the mansion of influential, dying financier, Melvyn Douglas and his younger, sex-starved wife Shirley MacLaine. So limited is Gardiner's intelligence that his communication consists only of child-like imitations of people he has seen on TV or references to his beloved garden. The hilarity--and the irony--begins when Douglas, MacLaine, Douglas' friend the President...