Word: oscarization
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...spain's greatest cinematic talents, screenwriter Rafael Azcona penned nearly 100 scripts over his prolific career, including several enduring works that examined his homeland's troubled past. Among the many tales he spun out of the jarring legacy of the Spanish Civil War, Belle Epoque earned him an Oscar for Best Screenplay in 1992. The film, which marked the first major leading role of fellow Spaniard Penélope Cruz, harked back to a less complicated time, on the eve of dictator Francisco Franco's rise. With a deft ability to move between drama and levity, innocence and anguish...
...Cannes Film Festival, where he met his future wife, the actress Melina Mercouri. They made nine films together, including his biggest success, Never on Sunday. That romantic comedy, with the director playing a naive American grecophile and Mercouri as the Athens whore who liberates him, landed Dassin two Oscar nominations, for director and screenplay. In 1964, Topkapi also proved quite popular. But that was his last hit, 44 years...
...gang comprises not the standard tough guys but con artistes on a lark, to steal a jewel-encrusted scimitar from a hall in the Topkapi museum. Maximilian Schell leads a troupe of some of the major muggers of international cinema: Mercouri, Akim Tamiroff, Peter Ustinov (who won an Oscar), Titos Vandis and Robert Morley. But the more valuable member is the muscular Gilles Segal, as the acrobat whose job is to be lowered by rope into the hall from a high window, then remove the case, nick the scimitar and replace the case, all without touching the electronically sensitive floor...
...when a guy like Heston - and, really, there was no guy like Heston - walks onto a set, people line up to put him in majestic roles. Cecil B. De Mille saw his appeal immediately, casting him as the circus owner in the Oscar-winning The Greatest Show on Earth, then giving him the 31-year-old the role of Moses, where Heston, with an old man's beard and a young athlete's energy, holds his staff above his head, parts the waters of the Red Sea and beckons the Israelites to walk on through. That last...
...stubbornness, but that was only because screenwriter Abby Mann believed it was his duty to contribute to the betterment of mankind. His works tackled complex social issues: the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the challenges faced by mentally disabled children and, in his best-known screenplay, 1961's Oscar-winning Judgment at Nuremberg, the accountability of those who worked with the Nazis. He was known to recall his works if he didn't like the way they had been adapted, often out of concern that they would lose their social relevance. "A great screenwriter should be given the same...