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Post by pacinoyes on Mar 30, 2020 9:56:16 GMT
Today's actor is one of the very best certainly on film and he won an Oscar and an Emmy but didn't pursue much theater - yet was involved in one of its greatest triumphs too - Paul Newman. 9 times Oscar nominated he's considered by more than a few our finest film actor in how he managed stardom and later dignified character work especially. I may hate the word "consistency" for actors but he was remarkably consistent and assured in his work. His Emmy turn (Empire Falls) for HBO is exactly the kind of "this could be a movie" work actors strive to find when they get older and on stage he was in the landmark original production (and film version) of Sweet Bird of Youth opposite the previously covered US GOAT contender Geraldine Page. His career - even with some minor shortcomings (not much daring in his many roles - he played what he knew he could play and didnt push himself that much) - still remains impeccably precise and specifically American too. He's on any list of major American actors. I wanted to go back and update this for Paul Newman who I short-changed a bit on stage - he didn't do theater much after he became a film star but he's in 3 genuine classic original productions in the 50s: Picnic, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Desperate Hours. Prior to watching The Desperate Hours I saw a brief segment on Newman in the play and how he lost out on the role he made famous to Bogart .......very interesting stuff and I was like - his theater chops are a lot more defined than I gave him credit for. Those 3 plays, plus the film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (which he "Bogarted" from Ben Gazzara - see how this works?) are a pretty stellar stage and stage/screen presence indeed. Newman in the original stage version of The Desperate Hours with Karl Malden:
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 7, 2020 11:30:44 GMT
Yesterday I posted Peter Mullan & Olivia Colman both exceptional in the "Tyrannosaur" in the "Last Great Performances" thread. These 2 have both been covered here in this thread and Colman is a possible future Triple Crown threat. It happens sometimes that you get big male and female co-stars and that got me thinking of Triple Crown matchups which are rare but do happen.........but the rarest of all is on to see it on stage since it's hard to get two draws to team up in a medium that pays the less money and is a bigger risk.......it does happen sometimes though and with that in mind Glenda Jackson & Christopher Plummer on stage together in Macbeth in the late 1980s - one of the rare dual Triple Crown theater matchups....... ever.
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 12, 2020 21:13:07 GMT
We talked in this thread about big actors doing TV in 2020......one of them I didn't know about is coming up. Nathan Lane AND Rory Kinnear in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels due end of month. Both actors have had some successes on TV but more episodic than a series and both were covered here earlier. Not sure how I missed this but that's 2 heavy hitters in one show - particularly guys with big-time stage success. Lane, Kinnear and Natalie Dormer from the upcoming Penny Dreadful: City of Angels
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 16, 2020 18:35:26 GMT
Judy.......The Father.......ElvisThose may contain Oscar winning performances of the next 3 years - and already won for Zellwegger in 2019 - and Rufus Sewell is in all of them. A guy with 0 Triple Crown wins but who works all 3 mediums big time, has a Tony and Emmy nod (and an Olivier win) - he is at that age where could start racking up awards early 50s and he's British, a lethal combination. His filmography is wildly diverse and a lot of people love him - though maybe not by name..........yet. A memorable villain in The Illusionist (2006):
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 24, 2020 13:49:32 GMT
One of the great theater performances - ever - #2 that I ever saw myself ......makes a return scheduled now for 2021......wonder if he's thinking about filming it, which I don't think would work..... but maybe it would and that would maybe translate as Oscar number 2. Though like I always say "Best Actor Tonys" do not win "Best Actor Oscars" nowadays - although Anthony Hopkins will challenge that theory this year (although Hopkins didn't do the play himself). A one day Triple Crown winner you would think unless something goes way wrong, who works all 3 mediums .........and one of the contenders for UK GOAT - certainly among current actors. This role is turning into his defining, enduring "played it forever" parts - it's like Pacino's American Buffalo or McKellen's King Lear. www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/apr/23/mark-rylance-to-return-as-rooster-byron-in-jerusalem-revivalRylance in Jerusalem:
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Post by stephen on Apr 24, 2020 13:56:44 GMT
One of the great theater performances - ever - #2 that I ever saw myself ......makes a return scheduled now for 2021......wonder if he's thinking about filming it, which I don't think would work..... but maybe it would and that would maybe translate as Oscar number 2. Though like I always say "Best Actor Tonys" do not win "Best Actor Oscars" nowadays - although Anthony Hopkins will challenge that theory this year (although Hopkins didn't do the play himself). A one day Triple Crown winner you would think unless something goes way wrong, who works all 3 mediums .........and one of the contenders for UK GOAT - certainly among current actors. This role is turning into his defining, enduring "played it forever" parts - it's like Pacino's American Buffalo or McKellen's King Lear. www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/apr/23/mark-rylance-to-return-as-rooster-byron-in-jerusalem-revivalRylance in Jerusalem:
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Post by Deleted on Apr 24, 2020 20:01:17 GMT
Have we mentioned Sir Tom Courtenay? One of the unfortunate few to be nominated for Emmy, Oscar, and Tony without receiving any wins...
Love him to pieces.
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 26, 2020 11:36:12 GMT
“I wanted to be Laurence Olivier.” That's right: Stacy Keach - I just got around to reading this great Variety profile (lotta high praise and quotes) from last week for his H'wood Walk of Fame star. And he hasn't been mentioned yet so here goes. Keach, a staunch theater actor whose work on stage spans over 50 years and counting. He's played Hamlet (twice), Lear, Richard III, Falstaff, Nixon, Buffalo Bill (1970, Tony nom, Drama Desk winner), and countless others, including a Hemingway one-man show two years ago where he had a mild heart attack on opening night (!) but worked himself into shape and tackled the production again the following year. As ol' Ernest said, "A man can be destroyed...but not defeated." Here is a full version of a benefit reading of King Lear streamed on April 23rd with Keach playing the monarch. Starts at 7:31: maybe kind of hard to watch a streaming staged reading but fun to watch in some key scenes at least.
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Post by Mattsby on May 3, 2020 1:05:56 GMT
Cloris Leachman Not yet mentioned! and turned 94 a few days ago. With almost 300 IMDb credits to her name - holy! She's a television force, and has some high movie peaks. Oscar winner for The Last Picture Show (her 9th movie) - and 8x Emmy winner, four of those btwn '73-'75. Some theater too - she did 10 Broadway plays thru the '50s- including As You Like It opposite Katherine Hepburn, and A Story for a Sunday Evening for which she won a Theater World award. The Last Picture Show - I know there are huge fans here, cough stephen - a crushing perf, how tangibly she suggests loneliness and repressed longing, right in the way she looks at Bottoms, the careful way she lifts her head. Deserved the Oscar. Somehow she did a ton of shows, 15 movies, and 22 TV Movies in the '70s (Dying Room Only, etc) - not to mention the Mel Brooks! A huge career, and still going.... Question for all: your fav perfs? She's wonderfully hilariously zippy in Crazy Mama (the Jonathan Demme)..... and there's a just okay Alfred Hitchcock Presents ep 'Where Beauty Lies' but she's terrific there, meek and wickedly calculating....
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Post by pacinoyes on May 3, 2020 1:28:48 GMT
Cloris Leachman Not yet mentioned! and turned 94 a few days ago. With almost 300 IMDb credits to her name - holy! She's a television force, and has some high movie peaks. Oscar winner for The Last Picture Show (her 9th movie) - and 8x Emmy winner, four of those btwn '73-'75. Some theater too - she did 10 Broadway plays thru the '50s- including As You Like It opposite Katherine Hepburn, and A Story for a Sunday Evening for which she won a Theater World award. The Last Picture Show - I know there are huge fans here, cough stephen - a crushing perf, how tangibly she suggests loneliness and repressed longing, right in the way she looks at Bottoms, the careful way she lifts her head. Deserved the Oscar. Somehow she did a ton of shows, 15 movies, and 22 TV Movies in the '70s (Dying Room Only, etc) - not to mention the Mel Brooks! A huge career, and still going.... Question for all: your fav perfs? She's wonderfully hilariously zippy in Crazy Mama (the Jonathan Demme)..... and there's a just okay Alfred Hitchcock Presents ep 'Where Beauty Lies' but she's terrific there, meek and wickedly calculating.... Johnny Staccato - ep 22 very memorable episode with Cassavetes and Elisha Cook Jr. on Youtube (all episodes are up!)
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Post by stephen on May 3, 2020 2:30:35 GMT
Cloris makes a very powerful case of being the greatest film/television actress ever when it comes to comedy, but her dramatic range (exhibited in her all-timer of a supporting performance in The Last Picture Show) is insane and very rarely tapped into. I still wish I could write a road trip movie with her and Eva Marie Saint as sisters who escape from an insane asylum for one last ride.
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Post by Mattsby on May 3, 2020 22:44:06 GMT
Johnny Staccato - ep 22 very memorable episode with Cassavetes and Elisha Cook Jr. on Youtube (all episodes are up!) Watched a few Staccatos last night - including this one, which is a top notch ep, you're right. Really tense/claustrophobic, and well-directed (by Cassavetes!) with great shot selection. Leachman is indeed terrific, alluringly confident and slightly demented. She gets a lot of close ups and does wonders with 'em. Fans must seek it out!
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Post by Mattsby on May 12, 2020 19:11:36 GMT
Stockard Channing - not talked about yet. At 76 her career seems to have slowed now but she's still working. I haven’t seen much but I do like her. In her debut The Fortune, a sporadically fun misfire, she more than holds her own against the worlds biggest leading stars Nicholson & Beatty. There’s her iconic film performance in Grease. She’s memorably sly in Smoke with an eye-patch, and wonderfully hilarious in Anything Else. I also just watched The Baby Dance which is a smart, deeply moving, layered perf. That’s about all I’ve seen but I didn’t realize just how acclaimed she was across TV/Stage…… 13x Emmy nominee (2x winner, both in ’02). 7x Tony nominee (across four decades, and won for Joe Egg in ’85). 1 Oscar nom for Six Degrees of Separation ’93, which I’ve never seen….. There are probably some other perfs worth seeing??
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Post by Mattsby on May 12, 2020 22:18:36 GMT
Happy 70th Bday to Gabriel Byrne - maybe a stretch to mention here? But I like him.... Especially a kinda mordant nonchalance or haunted laconic quality that I see in a lot of his perfs. He's a bit underrated. My fav perfs are - Defense of the Realm (that Kael enticingly called "an Orwellian coffee jag") where he plays a dogged journalist in over his head. Dark Obsession - one of his best - racked with envy and doubled-over guilt, with an upper class romantic doom it's almost like his own Phantom Thread. Miller's Crossing, The Usual Suspects.......... and he's the sharp stand-out of Man in the Iron Mask (and that's a cast that includes Irons, Depardieu, DiCaprio, Malkovich). Spider is another interesting, disturbed perf. He's better than Collette in Hereditary, underrated in Louder Than Bombs. As for TV - haven't seen anything but - 2x Emmy noms and 1 GG win for In Treatment (over 100 eps). Also earlier he pops up in some miniseries (Mussolini, Wagner, Columbus) rubbing shoulders with almost all of the worlds greatest actors. Stage - it's awesome that at age 50 he started taking on Broadway, got a Tony nom for his first in '00, and another Tony nom very recently for Long Day's Journey into Night opposite Jessica Lange. Wouldn't be surprised if we see more of him on stage...
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Post by pacinoyes on May 12, 2020 22:28:51 GMT
Happy 70th Bday to Gabriel Byrne - maybe a stretch to mention here? But I like him.... Especially a kinda mordant nonchalance or haunted laconic quality that I see in a lot of his perfs. He's a bit underrated. My fav perfs are - Defense of the Realm (that Kael enticingly called "an Orwellian coffee jag") where he plays a dogged journalist in over his head. Dark Obsession - one of his best - racked with envy and doubled-over guilt, with an upper class romantic doom it's almost like his own Phantom Thread. Miller's Crossing, The Usual Suspects.......... and he's the sharp stand-out of Man in the Iron Mask (and that's a cast that includes Irons, Depardieu, DiCaprio, Malkovich). Spider is another interesting, disturbed perf. He's better than Collette in Hereditary, underrated in Louder Than Bombs. As for TV - haven't seen anything but - 2x Emmy noms and 1 GG win for In Treatment (over 100 eps). Also earlier he pops up in some miniseries (Mussolini, Wagner, Columbus) rubbing shoulders with almost all of the worlds greatest actors. Stage - it's awesome that at age 50 he started taking on Broadway, got a Tony nom for his first in '00, and another Tony nom very recently for Long Day's Journey into Night opposite Jessica Lange. Wouldn't be surprised if we see more of him on stage... pacinoyes hot take: He's a better actor than his overrated Irish countryman Liam Neeson - yeah I said it ! - who is around his same age and shares a love of Eugene O'Neil with him too! Underrated Gabriel Byrne film : Jindabyne (based on a Raymond Carver story!) that takes 2 viewings to really wrap your head around - not "great" but ace acting opposite Laura Linney....
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Post by pacinoyes on May 18, 2020 13:42:35 GMT
We talk a lot about the Triple Crown club in this thread but a peripheral metric to track is Triple Crown nominations not just the wins. Often this stat: overall Oscar+Emmy+Tony nominations can give us a more complete idea of the depth of each generations actors and gives an equal weight to each medium - this is especially true of US actors: It's not exact of course but it is a good starting point. Now Meryl Streep (25 nominations) is not that far ahead of Glenn Close (22) even though she widely dominates in film nominations and Denzel Washington (10) is rivaled not merely by his main film competitor Tom Hanks (7) but Kevin Spacey (10) who is somewhat surprisingly tied for his generational top spot. Hanks, below in his Tony nominated role in Lucky Guy:
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Post by Deleted on May 18, 2020 14:13:05 GMT
pacinoyes - Had Glenn Close won in 2018, she would have had the most TC nominations of any TC-winning actor, ever, and would have tied Maggie Smith for the most TC wins (7).
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Post by pacinoyes on May 18, 2020 15:01:22 GMT
That's also a great stat - and of course her rival would be British! There are a lot of these kinds of metrics you can use to talk about actors especially generational US - people will see this stat with Adam Driver specifically soon - he is already at 6 (!) - that's a whole bunch - you can't blow it off that easy and we'll all notice it more over time.
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Post by Javi on May 18, 2020 15:51:35 GMT
I'd like to mention the Spanish devil Fernando Rey, a giant of Spanish film. I recently rewatched Tristana and his mix of picaresque, absurdity and tragedy is baffling--he's a tragic actor even as he makes you laugh. Famous for Viridiana, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Seven Beauties. Iconic in American movies as the undetectable evil in The French Connection. (Also that year he was in The Light at the Edge of the World with Kirk Douglas and in '76 in Voyage of the Damned). Won Best Actor in Cannes for Carlos Saura's Elisa, My Life. Kept winning awards throughout the 80s for stuff I sadly haven't seen. In the 90s he had huge success playing Don Quixote for TV (miniseries)--again winning a bunch of stuff for it, by then a living legend in Spain. Pictured in That Obscure Object of Desire, a miraculous perf in a beautiful, unexpected film (Buñuel called him his favorite actor)... Oscar nominated the movie for screenplay and foreign film but Rey should've gotten the Best Actor nod too.
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Post by pacinoyes on May 19, 2020 6:42:29 GMT
In 1989 Daniel Day Lewis famously.......quit theater.....forever........while onstage. Walking off stage in mid-performance of Hamlet after an apparent breakdown he was at an career/life low point. Cynics say the performance wasn't working and he merely "gave up". He was mocked, subjected to much ridicule and questions, deemed unprofessional at worst and temperamental at best. He then went on and won 3 Oscars ..... You can never tell when the tides will turn for or against an actor at a career low - in 1971 there was no way of knowing of a Brando comeback or for many years whether Glenda Jackson would ever act again, period. So for today keeping in mind that failure isn't only likely it's necessary......the topic is for every actor the show must go on and who knows what's around the corner Day-Lewis onstage in Hamlet (1989) opposite Judi Dench:
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Post by TerryMontana on May 19, 2020 14:28:07 GMT
In 1989 Daniel Day Lewis famously.......quit theater.....forever........while onstage. Walking off stage in mid-performance of Hamlet after an apparent breakdown he was at an career/life low point. Cynics say the performance wasn't working and he merely "gave up". He was mocked, subjected to much ridicule and questions, deemed unprofessional at worst and temperamental at best. He then went on and won 3 Oscars ..... You can never tell when the tides will turn for or against an actor at a career low - in 1971 there was no way of knowing of a Brando comeback or for many years whether Glenda Jackson would ever act again, period. So for today keeping in mind that failure isn't only likely it's necessary......the topic is for every actor the show must go on and who knows what's around the corner Day-Lewis onstage in Hamlet (1989) opposite Judi Dench:
How exactly did he quit stage? I don't know the story.
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Post by stephen on May 19, 2020 14:34:15 GMT
In 1989 Daniel Day Lewis famously.......quit theater.....forever........while onstage. Walking off stage in mid-performance of Hamlet after an apparent breakdown he was at an career/life low point. Cynics say the performance wasn't working and he merely "gave up". He was mocked, subjected to much ridicule and questions, deemed unprofessional at worst and temperamental at best. He then went on and won 3 Oscars ..... You can never tell when the tides will turn for or against an actor at a career low - in 1971 there was no way of knowing of a Brando comeback or for many years whether Glenda Jackson would ever act again, period. So for today keeping in mind that failure isn't only likely it's necessary......the topic is for every actor the show must go on and who knows what's around the corner Day-Lewis onstage in Hamlet (1989) opposite Judi Dench:
How exactly did he quit stage? I don't know the story. Day-Lewis famously was in the middle of performing Hamlet at the National Theatre when he suffered a nervous breakdown and walked off-stage. Anecdotally, it was due to the fact that while he was performing the famous ghost scene, where Hamlet converses with his dead father, Day-Lewis saw the specter of his own late father. Day-Lewis has since denied that he had seen Cecil's ghost, but that the pressures of his life and everything he had gone through at that time just hit him all at once (his father's death being one of them). In DDL's words, it was "a very vivid, almost hallunicatory moment in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father … but that wasn't the reason I had to leave the stage. I had to leave the stage because I was an empty vessel. I had nothing in me, nothing to say, nothing to give." When Day-Lewis walked offstage, his understudy (an unknown-at-the-time Jeremy Northam) stepped up. Northam has since enjoyed a healthy career of his own, and probably owes a fair amount of it to being an excellent in-fielder who stepped up to bat when the call came.
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Post by Deleted on May 19, 2020 14:49:23 GMT
I know that Day-Lewis has some peculiar proclivities as an actor, but I never would have imagined him to be so totally unprofessional... In the midst of his personal tragedy, he should have stepped away from the production before going on stage.
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Post by stephen on May 19, 2020 14:59:55 GMT
I know that Day-Lewis has some peculiar proclivities as an actor, but I never would have imagined him to be so totally unprofessional... In the midst of his personal tragedy, he should have stepped away from the production before going on stage. Cecil Day-Lewis died when his son was a teenager, so he wasn't really in the midst of a personal tragedy. I think it was more exhaustion than anything else, and when he went out on the boards that particular night, he found that he was spent and unable to carry on. Call it unprofessional if you'd like, but at least there are understudies for this sort of thing because it happens all the time in the theater world. Day-Lewis's story is just notorious because he never went back to the stage. Compare it against someone like Brando who shows up on the set of Apocalypse Now as a fat slob who doesn't even bother memorizing his lines or reading up on the source material despite it being requested by Coppola. There wasn't an understudy on hand for him.
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Post by Deleted on May 19, 2020 15:05:10 GMT
I know that Day-Lewis has some peculiar proclivities as an actor, but I never would have imagined him to be so totally unprofessional... In the midst of his personal tragedy, he should have stepped away from the production before going on stage. Cecil Day-Lewis died when his son was a teenager, so he wasn't really in the midst of a personal tragedy. I think it was more exhaustion than anything else, and when he went out on the boards that particular night, he found that he was spent and unable to carry on. Call it unprofessional if you'd like, but at least there are understudies for this sort of thing because it happens all the time in the theater world. Day-Lewis's story is just notorious because he never went back to the stage. Compare it against someone like Brando who shows up on the set of Apocalypse Now as a fat slob who doesn't even bother memorizing his lines or reading up on the source material despite it being requested by Coppola. There wasn't an understudy on hand for him. I do like. I can't imagine many of the actors already named in this thread ever walking away from the stage mid-performance.
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