Holland Taylor and Amy Irving both knew as children they would act for a living. Udo Kier stumbled into his 50 years-plus career-with-no-sign-of-stopping as a magnetically attractive young man who was cast just for his looks. Here, from recent BOSTON HERALD interviews, this trio recounts that distant, life-changing time.
AMY IRVING: Born not exactly in a trunk but into a distinguished theatrical family, her father Jules Irving would be a director of Lincoln Center Theater, her mother Priscilla Pointer, a revered stage and TV actress. Irving had no doubt she would follow in the family business.
I pretty much knew when I was two-and-a-half. I remember telling my mom, I’m not gonna go to normal college. I went to drama school and I always imagined that being in theater wasn’t about fame and fortune. It was about acting. And being in the theater I grew up in the most incredible magical way, in a theater company. My brother and sister and I were thrown on the stage when we were very young. My mother was the lead actress in the company. My dad, who started the company, was the lead director. And I just loved the world, a world I want to be a part of. I’ve got to say when I’m in the dressing room in the theater getting ready, I feel more at ‘home’ in that room more often than I do in my own. It’s an environment that I feel very comfortable in. When I was in drama school in London [London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art] for three years, my dad moved from Lincoln Center to directing ‘Rich Man, Poor Man’ in LA and my mom was on ‘Dallas.’ Suddenly going ‘home’ was not going to New York, it was going home to LA. When I got there my mother’s agent Nicole David signed me and I started out there doing ‘Romeo and Juliet’ at the Free Shakespeare Theatre. I was doing that by night, and ‘Happy Days’ during the day. Crazy. ‘Carrie’ [the 1976 Brian DePalma horror classic] was my first film. The first year I was there I got that film and things kind of happened when I didn’t really mean to be in the movies. That’s what they were doing so I started doing it. I was having fun and after about five years, five movies, actually, after ‘The Competition’ I auditioned heavily for ‘Amadeus’ and did nine months on Broadway. I thought I was back home, This is what I want to be doing! I’m never going to go back to film again. This makes me happy! And then Barbra Streisand came with ‘Yentl.’ I actually turned it down. My friend, who was a stage manager, said, ‘Are you kidding!’ So I met with her and we ended up doing that. [Irving was Oscar-nominated as Best Supporting Actress for ‘Yentl.’]
HOLLAND TAYLOR came to New York immediately after graduating from Bennington College. Her truly fabulous career began in ’64-65, propelled because she always knew her passion: Acting.
It really is a wonderful thing to know so early. When I meet people who are 30 who say, ‘I don’t really know what to do with my life,’ I think it’s tragic. Really tragic. I can’t imagine how difficult that must be to experience because I knew in my early teens. I mean, I knew at 12 or 13. By the time I was 14 or 15 I was working in a summer stock theater in the summers. I was performing. There was just simply no question in my mind about it. I think both of my parents thought I should learn to type. It wasn’t until I wrote a play [‘Ann,’ her acclaimed stage play about the late Texas governor Ann Richards. Taylor was Tony-nominated as Best Actress for it] that I actually went back and tried to learn to type again so I would be able to do that better. But I don’t think I ever doubted it, I just didn’t really question it. I wasn’t the wisest actress — and I didn’t have an overview. I have a very narrow view of what I wanted to do. And I had unbelievable good luck. I mean, door after door opened! I didn’t have some stellar — I wasn’t some big deal. I didn’t have early stardom. I never thought I had stardom, so I just simply worked a lot. When I first started in New York the theater was very active and I got work right away. There was just something there very, very lucky. Then when I was about 35 or so, 36, 37 — somewhere in there — the theater, they wanted more and more people who were nationally famous. Who were very well known. You couldn’t just be a ‘New York actor’ in the theater, you had to have more currency than that. And actually who told me that was a very old woman, Stella Adler [ a legend who tutored Brando among many], the great acting teacher who said, ‘You’ve got to go out to Hollywood.’ I’d been offered a part — that’s why I was discussing it with her. I’ve been offered this advice to do ‘Bosom Buddies’ with Tom Hanks. Should I do that? She said, ‘You absolutely should do that, you’re exactly at the moment where you have to get known nationally. Then you can have the freedom to do the theater.’ The problem is, if you come to LA and you build a life here, you have [another] life 3,500 miles away. It’s very challenging to go back and forth. Not if you’re a big star with homes up the Coast, then you go back and forth effortlessly. But as a young journeyman actor, trying to go back and forth was quite a challenge. I was lucky.
UDO KIER: My first film was 1968 in London. I grew up – it sounds so strange sitting in an expensive hotel saying, ‘I grew up poor’ — but I was born at the end of the war, 14th of October 1944 [he’s 76] . There was really nothing to eat. I lived with my mother alone and when I was 18 I was allowed to go to London to learn English, I wanted to speak English. I went to London and I got discovered in ‘68 for a movie. I said, ‘I don’t know how to do it’ and they said leave it up to us. The camera was always far away from me — I didn’t know there was a long lens. Then when the film came out I was in CinemaScope. Onscreen. My face. William Morris [a powerful, legendary Hollywood talent and booking agency] got me under contract. The newspaper wrote, ‘The most beautiful man is the New Face of cinema. [The magazine] Films & Filming put me on the cover. So I liked the attention: I became an actor. I was a lucky man all my life.
So I got in a big film, in the second main part ,with Herbert Lom called ‘The Mark of the Devil.’ People are still renting it. That’s how it all started. I was sitting in an airplane with a man next to me. We talked — and American people always ask, ‘What do you do?’ — so he said, ‘What are you doing for your life?’ and I said, ‘I’m an actor’ and I showed him — because it was the beginning of my career — I showed him right away a picture of myself. He said, ‘Interesting. Give me your number.’ And then he wrote my number. A couple of weeks later I got a call, ‘Hey, it’s Paul [Morrissey] from New York. You remember, the guy from the plane.’ He told me that he was the director for Andy Warhol and ‘I’m doing a film “Frankenstein” in 3-D in Rome for the husband of Sophia Loren, Carlo Ponti. And I have a role for you.’ And I said, ‘That’s great. What do I play?’ He said Frankenstein. So that’s how a lucky man started. [He jumps to years later] I sit in Berlin, I meet a man who tells me, ‘My name is Gus van Sant, and I do my next film with Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix, “My Own Private Idaho” and I have a role for you.’ I said okay. That was my first American film made in America, ‘My Own Private Idaho.’ I came back for the premiere, I liked it. And I’ve stayed.
NEW DVDs:
EXECUTION Disturbing and intentionally so, the 1972 aptly titled ‘The French Conspiracy’ (aka ‘L’attentat,’ ‘The Plot’ and ‘The Assassination’) (Blu-ray, Code Red, Not Rated) details a notorious 1965 case when Moroccan leftist political leader Mehdi Ben Barka arrived in Paris, only to ‘disappear’ on Oct. 19. It took until 2018 that an Israeli journalist detailed that Israeli intelligence operatives coordinated the planning of the kidnapping, then French police and Moroccan agents for King Hassan II murdered Barka and disposed of his body in, take your pick according to rival theories, a vat of acid in Morocco or a cement burial outside Paris with his head subsequently transported to Morocco and buried there. Yves Boisset’s all-star film version enticed Jean-Louis Trintignant, then France’s top box-office star, to play a variation of his role in the now-classic Bernardo Bertolucci drama ‘The Conformist’: The man of conscience who nevertheless conspires to kill a good man. Jean Seberg is his troubled partner, Michel Piccoli a particularly nasty French agent and Gian Maria Volonte front and center as the Moroccan leader who must be wooed from his safe berth in Geneva to Paris. One surprise is the presence of a French-speaking Hollywood star Roy Scheider (‘All That Jazz,’ ‘Jaws’) as a freelance American journalist in Paris who may or may not be an undercover CIA agent. Bonus: In this 4K restoration from the original camera negative, there is also the English dubbed version which is shorter than the 123-minute original. In French with subtitles.
LOW-KEY CRYSTAL Billy Crystal co-wrote, directs, produces and stars opposite Tiffany Haddish in an inside-showbiz drama ‘Here Today’ (DVD, Stage6 Films, PG-13). Crystal’s Charlie is a veteran comedy writer being forced to recognize his encroaching dementia. When he meets a New York singer, Emma Payge (Haddish!), they eventually bond and become friends. She in turn becomes a constant intermediary between Charlie, his estranged children, even with his work. Adapted by Crystal and Alan Sweibel from his short story ‘The Prize,’ there’s an audio commentary w Crystal, Zweibel and Haddish. Plus interviews with the filmmakers and cast.
BE KIND TO SHARKS? With an ecological catastrophe looming via the threat of extinction to sharks, ‘Great White’ (Blu-ray, RLJE Films, Not Rated) qualifies as a politically incorrect throwback thriller. Like ‘Jaws,’ 2 Great White sharks in the water in ‘Great White’ pose life and death danger to the 5 passengers of a downed seaplane. They are mighty vulnerable in an inflatable life raft as they try to navigate to land. The international cast is led by Katrina Bowden (‘Piranha 3DD,’ ‘Scary Movie 5’), with Aaron Jakubenko, Tim Kano, Te Kohe Tuhaka and Kimie Tsukakosh. Special Features: Making of and behind-the-scenes photo gallery.
ACUPUNCTURE KICKS Bruce Lee died in 1973 but within months his legend was already being burnished. Robert Clouse who had directed Lee in his final film ‘Enter the Dragon’ (and also had helmed the Tarantino favorite ‘Darker Than Amber’) and martial arts master Jim Kelly who had co-starred in ‘Dragon,’ reunited for the 1974 Asia-set ‘Golden Needles’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, PG). In this brand new 2K Master we follow 7 seekers of a golden statue which reputedly has 7 youth-restoring acupuncture needles. They include burly Joe Don Baker (the 007 ‘GoldenEye,’ ‘Congo,’ the Tim Burton classic ‘Mars Attacks!’), Elizabeth Ashley (‘Ship of Fools’), Hollywood legend Ann Sothern (‘Undercover Maisie,’ ‘A Letter to Three Wives’) and Rocky Balboa’s coach Burgess Meredith. Special Features: Audio commentary and newly commissioned art as well as an Image Gallery.
BEAU BELMONDO! Looking at Jean-Paul Belmondo in the 1976 ‘The Hunter Will Get You’ (‘L’alpagueur’) (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated) where he plays a tough mercenary known as ‘The Hunter’ you might squint and imagine him as Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry – if Harry was a nice guy. Belmondo exudes charm and a sense of playfulness as he takes jobs for hire where he does what the cops can’t. Everything changes when he is asked to capture a sadistic sociopath (are there any other kind?) played by Bruno Cremer who is known as ‘The Hawk.’ A favorite Cremer tactic is to take a vulnerable teenage boy who thinks he’s a tough customer, give him money to join a heist – and then kill them so the Hawk can’t be identified. This Hawk needs to become the prey! There is an audio commentary and, 25 years after its release, an interview in 2000 with co-writer/director Philippe Labro who had earlier made Belmondo’s big, big hit ‘The Inheritor.’ Labro justly spotlights 2 mightiest of the mighty Belmondo sequences. The first is when he must race after a truck that’s nabbed his young accomplice. It’s Belmondo racing like an Olympian up and down hilly, uneven terrain until he gets to the truck — then jumps up and climbs the attached rear ladder. A reminder that Belmondo, long before Jackie Chan or Tom Cruise, did his own stunts. Labro reveals the star did this sequence without complaint only learning much later Belmondo was being beset by sciatica. The other sequence Labro dubs an homage to Peckinpah and features a fantastic showdown – everyone’s toting sawed off shotguns and the bodies pile up – in a 2-level house.
1960 was definitely Belmondo’s breakthrough year – he had no less than 7 feature films released and 2 of them were major international hits: ‘Breathless’ opposite Jean Seberg propelled not only Belmondo to stardom, it also launched the New Wave, while ‘Two Women’ made history when Italy’s Sophia Loren was the first non-English-speaking star to win the Best Actress Oscar. The first of his ’60 films, ‘Seven Days… Seven Nights’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated) is a self-conscious arthouse entry from 2 literary lions: author Marguerite Duras and lionized theater director Peter Brook. Belmondo meets a psychologically disturbed Jeanne Moreau in a café where she witnessed a murder. Now she is convinced Belmondo is trying to kill her. Moreau, a New Wave icon (Truffaut’s ‘Jules and Jim’) won the Cannes Best Actress prize for this. Bonus: Historian Daniel Kremer’s audio commentary.
EVE! EVE! EVE! Eve Myles made quite the splash when ‘Keeping Faith’ debuted. After all, the BBC decided to broadcast the Welsh-set series in Welsh, followed weeks later in an English language version. So Myles had to learn a new language and play every scene at least twice. No wonder Myles won a Welsh BAFTA. ‘Keeping Faith: Series 3’ (Blu-ray, 6 episodes, 2 discs, AcornTV, Not Rated) continues and concludes the highly melodramatic ups, downs and turnarounds of Myles’ often troubled lawyer and mother of 3, Faith Howells. Now divorced but fighting against custody to her deceitful husband Evan (Bradley Freegard, married to Myles in real life – she learned Welsh from him. With their 2 daughters they all converse in Welsh at home). Standouts here include versatile Celia Imrie as Faith’s estranged mother. Bonus: a hour-long Behind the Scenes and 2-minute primer on Welsh words & phrases.
POWER PLAYS Rachel Griffiths, an award-winning Aussie actress (‘Muriel’s Wedding,’ ‘Six Feet Under’), created, stars and executive produced ‘Total Control: Season 1’ (Blu-ray, 6 episodes, 2 discs, Sundance Now, Not Rated), an Australian political thriller. Griffiths is the Aussie Prime Minister (there actually was one, back in 2010) who seizes an indigenous woman’s domestic abuse case as a political weapon and backs her for the Senate. But things don’t go as planned and the woman, Alex (top-billed Deborah Mailman), seeks revenge.
TURN OF CENTURY TORONTO Yannick Bisson continues to be the glue that has guided ‘Murdoch Mysteries: Season 14’ (Blu-ray, 11 episodes, 3 discs, AcornTV, Not Rated) for over a decade as dapper, optimistic Detective William Murdoch. As the series has continually done, real-world celebrities make appearances, like local actress Mary Pickford who would become a Queen of Hollywood and a founder of United Artists. Here, it’s the great Charlie Chaplin who is invoked as a performer at a vaudeville carnival where an entertainer is murdered. There are also the complications of the series’ regulars – the coroner Violet Hart (Shanice Banton), Dr. Julia Ogden (Helene Joy), Murdoch’s wife, Detective Watts (Daniel Maslany). Constable George Crabtree (Jonny Harris) and troubled Inspector Brackenreid (Thomas Craig).
EARLY REYNOLDS In 1970 Burt Reynolds’ star was still ascendant. He would soon become for 5 consecutive years The Rock of his day, Hollywood’s No. 1 Box-office star. This New Guinea-set missing link adventure film speculates that a tribe, the Tropis, is discovered. When one is killed, a trial ensues with the question being: Are the Tropis’ ancestors of early Man? Or are they animals which voids a murder charge? ‘Skullduggery’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, PG) in a brand-new 2K Master co-stars Susan Clark (‘Coogan’s Bluff’), William Marshall (‘Blacula’) and ‘Flower Drum Song’ stage star Pat Suzuki. Film historians Howard S. Berger and C. Courtney Joyner contribute an audio commentary.
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Stephen Schaefer’s Hollywood & Mine - Boston Herald
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