At 100, Marsha Hunt Still Has Plenty of Surprises Up Her Impeccably Stylish Sleeve

At the TCM Classic Film Festival, actress and activist Marsha Hunt gave us the scoop of the century, a secret that’s waited since 1944 to come to light.

Nowadays we’re inundated with breaking news, exhausted by ubiquitous celebrities, and desensitized by the barrage of alerts that light up our phones.

But how about romantic Hollywood gossip that surfaces after more than 70 years?

There’s something almost enchanted about a revelation like that, paradoxically old and new, something that gains power through years of secrecy. Particularly when the news comes straight from the person who lived it.

In conversation with the Czar of Noir Eddie Muller, Hunt recalled the making of None Shall Escape, an ambitious B film that anticipated the post-war trials of Nazi war criminals. Towards the end of the interview, Muller asked about the film’s colorful, underrated director André De Toth. And, boy, did he get more than he bargained for.

“Bundy—as we called him, that was the nickname he chose—Bundy De Toth was irresistible… I tried and I couldn’t.” She finished the thought with a smile verging on naughtiness.

The crowd, as they say, went wild. You could feel it crackle through the air, that buzz of hundreds of people thinking, “Did she just say what I think she said?”

Even Eddie Muller, who has stared down the barrel of Ann Savage’s gun and dodged a punch or two from Lawrence Tierney, was left temporarily speechless. 100 years on planet earth have only intensified Hunt’s flair for a well-timed coup-de-théâtre.

Praising De Toth as “a damn good director,” she elaborated on his charms: “He was also more personable, more entrancing, more irresistible than almost anybody I had met up to that point.”

With the audience in the palm of her hand, Hunt wryly left the rest to our imaginations, “You take it from there…” Make no mistake: this wasn’t a slip of the tongue or an unguarded moment. Hunt clearly enjoyed tantalizing her adoring crowd with this deliberate news drop.

Indeed, Hunt is exquisitely in control, shining with the poise and wisdom she’s earned over the course of a long, well-spent life. She tends to speak about the past carefully, deliberately, as though weighing each reminiscence against an iron-clad personal standard of truth.

For example, Muller asked about Columbia’s notoriously vulgar mogul Harry Cohn, who greenlit None Shall Escape. Rather than yield to hearsay, Hunt gave a clear-eyed appraisal of the studio head’s vision: “I never met him. So far as I know, he was gentleness itself. Because I never saw him or heard to the contrary. Harry Cohn, whatever his social manners might have been, knew good films and he had a lot of courage, I think, about the films he chose to make, for which he deserves great credit. A Harry Cohn film, very often as not, stood for something, and not just a film. So here’s to Harry Cohn.”

Hunt is proud of her involvement in such a prophetic and historically significant film as None Shall Escape. “It was a great privilege that I felt so lucky to be given,” she says.

She remembers the surreal experience of making a movie about wartorn Poland… on studio sets out in Burbank: “It was on the way to the airport, and the cars whizzed by. And we were creating another day, another atmosphere, another continent, another everything. It was fascinating be in such a contrast all at once.”

Hunt spoke fondly of co-star Alexander Knox, who garnered an Oscar nomination for Wilson the same year he chillingly portrayed a Nazi officer in None Shall Escape. ”How’s that for broad talent? He was a lovely man. We became lifetime friends. When my husband and I went to England they took beautiful care of us, and we had a lovely reunion over there.”

After its world premiere restoration at TCMFF, hopefully None Shall Escape will find a larger audience. Its astute psychological inquiry into the origins of evil remains frighteningly, enduringly relevant. As Muller pointed out, “It was very common for American movies during the war to make jingoistic propaganda pictures to boost our morale and convince us we were going to win. This movie does something very different. It looks at this from the enemy’s side and it talks about… how you make a fascist. Here’s how you create a Nazi.” Hunt added, “Think how important those formulae are. How to make a villain… We need to pay very great attention to those how-tos.”

Hunt’s first-hand experience opposing fascism—the home-grown, all-American kind—got her blacklisted during the McCarthyite frenzy. As HUAC threatened Hollywood in 1947, Hunt and a group of other prominent industry figures, the Committee for the First Amendment, traveled to Washington D.C. to protest. Unfortunately, their brave efforts failed to stop the momentum of rabid red-baiters in Congress.

The Committee for the First Amendment in Washington. Marsha Hunt is on the left edge of the frame wearing that super-cool double-breasted ensemble.

In a longer conversation at the Larry Edmunds Bookshop during the TCMFF weekend, Hunt candidly spoke about the Red Scare in Hollywood. “It was a very ugly, ugly time,” she said, shaking her head at the damage done to so many lives, including her close friend Adrian Scott.

“I didn’t know or understand communism or care anything about it, except that I gathered that a lot of people who had joined that party were idealists, and that couldn’t be so bad,” Hunt explained. “So I didn’t make any so-called communists my enemies. And that probably won me some enemies.”

Marsha doing her part for WWII morale, just a few years before she’d be blacklisted for leftist connections.

During the 1940s, Hunt’s home was a gathering place for the likes of Leonard Bernstein and other renowned artists of the day. Even in that haven of creatives, political tensions bubbled up to the surface. Hunt recalled how some guests would storm out of the house rather than share the room with somebody on the opposite side of the political spectrum.

This behavior puzzles Hunt, who believes in frank exchanges of ideas. “I think it’s rather lovely for people who disagree to have some chats and conversations,” she says. “Once we’ve taken our own side and are pretty sure of it, then go with it and enjoy the journey.”

An independent thinker, Hunt fiercely objected to the idea that someone could be persecuted on the basis of their politics. “I was lumped with the far left because I spoke freely about whatever I cared about. And those were dangerous days.”

Refusing to name names or disavow her beliefs, Hunt was blacklisted at the peak of her career. The integrity that made her a target then makes her a hero today.

In style as well as politics, Hunt has a boldly independent streak. According to Eddie Muller, right before their TCMFF interview, “The make-up woman went to do her lipstick, and Marsha just took it from her and did it herself.”

As Hunt casually explains, “I haven’t been made up within memory. I’ve always done my own make-up.”

Hunt earned her expertise in cosmetics during the rigorous apprenticeship that she set out for herself in hopes of a film career. When Hunt was growing up in the 1920s and early 1930s, “There was no training for movies. You learned how to make movies then by making movies, but you could train for the theaters.”

“I always, my whole life, meant to be an actress. Oddly enough I was never stagestruck. It had to be movies. And I knew that was going to take some managing. But, in the meantime, I thought, ‘Well, what can I do to help prepare for that? Let’s see… I ought to learn to dress, and make up, and be groomed.’ All of the visuals.”

After graduating high school, Hunt attended dramatic school and found work with the elite Powers Modeling Agency. “I’m long waisted, and it’s a small waist, and I guess that qualifies me as a model.”

That preparation enabled Hunt to take an active role in shaping what she wore on and off the screen. “I loved to design,” she told us. When asked to talk about style, however, Hunt peered into the audience of TCMFF-ers, many decked to the nines in vintage glad rags, and modestly exclaimed, “They can tell me!”

Though schooled in glamour, Hunt knew that she craved something more from film acting. She sought out challenging character parts and often played women considerably older than she was, as in None Shall Escape.

“I wanted to be a different kind of actress,” Hunt recalls. “I wanted to play people who had nothing to do me, with my look, with my age—particularly age—or type, or any of that. I wanted a total disguise in every role. There are actresses and actors who love to play themselves. Well, God bless them! I thought it was fun to pretend. So that’s what I went after.”

Unbroken by one of the darkest chapters in 20th century American history, Hunt is a courageous and compassionate survivor.

Despite the stolen years of the blacklist, her body of work on film is a gallery of diverse, memorable, utterly credible characterizations. She has created an equally impressive legacy of humanitarianism, using her fame, financial resources, and industry connections to advocate for refugees, establish homeless shelters, and fight world hunger.

So… what is her secret? How did she forge such a meaningful century from adversity?

Hunt mainly credits her parents and upbringing. She believes that her sunny outlook also has something to do with it: “I’m a born optimist. I guess the bright side always appealed to me to look at rather than the dark. I’ve been blessed. I never figured out why. But I sure have and I want the fates to know, I’m grateful!”

You can see that “bright side” in her impish sense of humor. As Eddie Muller and Alan Rode passed a microphone back and forth, she quipped, “Who’s on first?” And, when Muller proudly mentioned that he directed Hunt’s last film, The Grand Inquisitor (2008), she joked, “And she never worked again!” After the crew at Larry Edmunds sang “Happy Birthday” (an honorary birthday, since every day over 100 deserves celebration), she cooed, “I could marry all of you!”

I had the honor of briefly meeting Marsha, and it will rank among the great thrills of my life. You feel infinitely humbled to be in the presence of someone who has done so much good for so long. As I stammeringly told her that I admired her performances in 2 movies I love, Kid Glove Killer and Raw Deal, she smiled and thanked me.

I also asked her about one of my favorite behind-the-scenes photos. Was she really a knitter? Or was it staged? (Look, it might seem like a silly question, but you have to admit it was original.)

Hunt looked at the picture and, with that sharp, deliberate memory of hers, she confirmed that she was indeed an on-the-set knitter. “It helped me keep busy during the long camera set-ups.” And, what’s more, she remembers that she knit argyle socks! Imagine keeping track of those patterns amidst all the distractions of a movie set.

As a knitter myself, I choose to believe that needlework is the secret ingredient to Marsha’s longevity. Because it’s far easier to practice than optimism (though she has inspired me to work harder at that).

Eddie Muller describes Hunt as “the most exemplary human being I have ever met in my life.” After spending just a short amount of time basking in her radiant cheer and kindness, I’m inclined to agree. Long may she grace this world with her presence.

Glamour and Grit: Gina Lollobrigida Reflects on Fame, Art, and Hard Work at TCMFF

Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Turner.

Gina Lollobrigida is serious about being taken seriously. She refuses to downplay her accomplishments as an actress (in 3 languages), a photojournalist, and a sculptor.

In a world that continues to underrate and undervalue the creativity of women, a world that respects a woman’s competence more if she renounces her femininity, Lollobrigida’s unapologetic self-worth shines.

On the red carpet at the TCM Classic Film Festival, I got to ask many special guests about their most moving experiences in the industry. I heard stories about tearjerking melodramas, poignant comedies, and controversial dramas.

But Lollobrigida gave me the most inspiring reply of the evening.

Resplendent in a gold-trimmed hot pink gown, she leaned in to share an emotional memory—not a sad story, but a personal triumph. Cast in the fin-de-siècle farce Hotel Paradiso (1966), Lollobrigida worried about measuring up to her prestigious costar.

“I was afraid, because Alec Guinness was a great actor,” she recalled. “So I was very much prepared—and when we had a reading just before the shooting, everybody had a script. I knew it by heart! Alec Guinness and the director couldn’t believe it.”

She grinned, glowing with the pride of a true pro. “I impressed them!”

I’ve been turning that story over and over again in my mind. Terrified of being underestimated, Lollobrigida outpaced her colleagues. It’s a story of insecurity used as rocket fuel, a story of exceeded expectations. A story that I think most women on Planet Earth can relate to.

Classical cinema invites us to contemplate (and consume) movie stars, especially actresses, as fully-formed demigods, removed from the tribulations of mere mortals. Even “candid” shots churned out by the studio publicity departments reinforce impossible ideals of natural elegance, poise, and domesticity. Hollywood’s magic largely depended on the erasure of real blood, sweat, and tears. You have to train yourself to appreciate the ambition and craft that stars brought to their careers and performances, the effort required to appear effortless.

The TCM Classic Film Festival gives living legends a chance to take their bows as resilient human beings who sustained all those glorious illusions. Lollobrigida, more than any other old Hollywood icon I’ve seen in person, made me aware of the sheer hard work involved in movie acting and star maintenance. At 87, she is both a survivor and a siren. She deserves recognition not only for her glamour, but also for her grit.

Photo by Mike Windle/Getty Images for Turner.

At Club TCM, Lollobrigida sat down for an hour-long conversation with Leonard Maltin and expressed some gutsy feminist beliefs. La Lollo explained that a woman must work doubly hard to earn respect and make progress: “You know, the steps for a woman to go ahead, it’s so difficult. As if a man has two brains and us one brain. I mean, it’s ridiculous. We are equal!”

She had to fight the idea that beauty and talent are somehow mutually exclusive. “I started as a beautiful woman and then suddenly I was a photographer. It was so difficult [for others in the industry] to say, ‘She’s not bad, you know?’ The third time, the third success, sculpture, that was too much.”

From childhood Lollobrigida showed artistic promise. And that’s why she didn’t consider a career in movies until much later. When approached to be an extra in a film, she initially rejected the offer: “I thought that cinema was not art at all, so I said, ‘I’m not interested.’” However, when she learned that the job paid 1,000 lire a day, she couldn’t refuse the chance to support her family in post-WWII Italy.

On the set, Lollobrigida attracted attention—too much, in fact. “When I started as an extra, it was not easy because then I made a double for the star,” she said, “but under the lights I looked even better than the star. So she fired me!”

A kind makeup man gave her the chance to work as an assistant to the studio hairdresser. After taking third place in the 1947 Miss Italy pageant, Lollobrigida won leading roles. And in 1950 Hollywood came knocking, in the form of Howard Hughes.

His designs on her quickly became clear. “He made me come to Los Angeles. First there were two tickets—for me, for my husband—then one ticket. He changed his mind,” Lollobrigida wryly notes. “But my husband said to me, ‘Don’t worry, I trust you. Go ahead, because I don’t want you to be telling me tomorrow that I’ve forbidden you from being a star in the movies.’”

Photo by Mike Windle/Getty Images for Turner.

Lollobrigida recalled Hughes’s famous eccentricity. He wore mostly crude work clothes despite his fabulous wealth. His language wasn’t exactly refined either. “My English was not so good, so he helped me, especially with the bad words,” Lollobrigida said.

“I had to prepare myself to make an acting test, but I never did it because he wanted me… anyhow.” She stayed in Hollywood for 2 months before deciding to leave Hughes and return to Italy. What happened exactly? For now, Lollobrigida prefers to keep that a mystery. “He had a good time with me. The rest I will tell you later… in my bio,” she confided. (And, in the unlikely event that you’re reading this, Gina, please do write your memoirs!)

Back in Europe, Lollobrigida scored her first success in a French film, the comic swashbuckler Fan-Fan la Tulipe (1952). Although she always expected that she’d have to adopt a screen name, Fan-Fan made Lollobrigida famous under her birth name.

“When we were doing it, I didn’t have a name as an actress, and Gina Lollobrigida, my God, it’s very complicated,” she laughed. “So I said, ‘Put anything you want.’ But then it was too late, they’d already made the titles with Gina Lollobrigida.”

A catchy nickname cut out a few syllables for actress’s colleagues (and the press): “They called me, to make it quicker, Lollo. So even now when I answer on the phone, instead of saying, ‘Gina’ or ‘Gina Lollobrigida,’ I say ‘Lollo.’”

Her big break in English came in 1953 with the caper parody Beat the Devil, directed by John Huston and written by Truman Capote. But producer David O. Selznick had reservations about Lollobrigida at the last minute.

As she tells it, “I was very excited. The first day he was in Italy the producer called me and said, ‘Oh, Miss Lollobrigida, we don’t really need you. You can have all the money and not do the movie.’ I said, ‘I don’t care, Mr. Selznick. I will do the movie because I have a contract.’ So I stayed.”

Why did Selznick attempt to cut out a rising star? “He was afraid that I was too beautiful near Jennifer Jones.”

Lollobrigida studied for months to act in her third language. “I called the University of London and said I’d like a teacher for my English, especially the accent, so I had more than I needed answer, they wanted to all come to my home and have a good time,” she chuckled. “So I chose a young girl, and she stayed with me for almost a year. When she went away, she could speak Italian perfectly.”

Though Lollobrigida didn’t feel entirely comfortable with her English dialogue, her sultry, exotic delivery set just the right note for her character—and prompted some sage advice from her costar. “Bogart said to me, ‘Don’t study English any more. If you lose this beautiful accent, it would be a pity.’”

Lollobrigida fondly remembered Bogart and their humorous onset rapport. “He was very friendly, but sometimes he was talking to me like that [loudly, moving her arms], and I thought he was angry. I didn’t understand that it was a joke. So, finally when I understood that it was a joke, I did the same joke to him in Italian.”

(And here the Club TCM audience burst into raucous laughter imagining Lollobrigida scaring the bejeezus out of Bogie with torrents of aggressive Italian.)

The Bogie that Lollobrigida knew, a man very much in love and accompanied by Lauren Bacall, contrasted with his brooding onscreen persona. “He was completely different from the character that you see in the movies. In all of the films he was very serious, very tough. But you could see him in the morning coming down the steps singing happily.”

The young actress relished John Huston’s laid-back direction. “He respected the actors and he had a system to leave the actors to do and say even something that wasn’t in the script. He wanted the actors to feel free.”

She also sparked a friendship with Truman Capote which would last until his death. “We were very close. When he came to Italy, I thought that he looked like a young boy. And when I saw him just before he died he looked like an old man.”

In the mid-1950s, Lollobrigida proved her fearlessness as a performer in two surprising ways: by singing opera and flying on a trapeze!

Starring in Beautiful But Dangerous (1955), a biopic of opera star Lina Cavalieri, Lollobrigida panicked when the producer suggested that she sing in the film.

Though she had a trained voice, the actress didn’t know if she could do justice to Cavalieri’s legend. The producer encouraged Lollobrigida to try… and assembled a 50-piece orchestra for the occasion. Trembling, she sang “Vissi d’arte” from Tosca, accompanied by the skeptical group of musicians. “I did the first take and was very good. The orchestra started to applaud. So it was a miracle.”

To Lollobrigida’s dismay, American reviewers assumed that she’d been dubbed. “The film came to New York. Bosley Crowther said, ‘What a beautiful voice. It’s a pity it’s not her.’ That was my voice!” She exclaimed. Even those close to La Lollo could hardly believe it. “My friend Maria Callas said, ‘It’s you?’”

So, let’s set the record straight, once and for all. Lollo does her own signing. Watch and be wowed.

Hollywood beckoned, but the ghost of mansplainers past rose to sabotage Lollobrigida. “I couldn’t come because, with that contract with Howard Hughes, he was making war against me. He was saying to all of the studios that they couldn’t use me, because I was property of him, like an object.” The subtle bitterness of her words betrayed how frustrating it must have been for Lollobrigida. That memory, the indignity of being Hughes’s virtual possession, still stings, 60 years later.

Undaunted, La Lollo bided her time and gained momentum on the Continent, in spite of Hughes. “He was not strong in Europe as he was in the United States.”

Lollobrigida signed up for Trapeze (1956) because, “they offered me so much money I had to say yes!” She would more than earn her keep over weeks of extensive training and a challenging shoot.

“They sent to me a trapeze, to my villa in Rome, and for 6 months I rehearsed. I realized that, my God, if you try to fly, you must have muscles! I mean, it’s dangerous even to fall on the net,” she recalled with a shudder. “If you fall straight, you can break your ankle.”

The actress jumped into the daredevil demands of her role from her first day on the set. “They were trying the triple summersault, so the trapeze wasn’t at the same level as everyday, but higher! So they said, “Come up!” I went up. The professional people, they go up 15 days before they fly…. But the second day, I lost my voice. I couldn’t talk anymore. But I did it!”

Lollobrigida gladly took risks over the course of the production: “I wanted to do everything!” But sometimes it wasn’t a matter of choice. “I had two doubles, but the one that looked like me broke her nose. So I had to be the double for the double of me! And I was glad.”

She praised Trapeze’s director Carol Reed, particularly his flair for widescreen composition. “The Cinemascope was new at the time, to have the screen very, very long. He was telling one story on one side and another story on the other side.”

Burt Lancaster, the film’s major star, was also the producer, which led to some behind-the-scenes tensions. “He started to direct the actors. I was nervous because I respected Carol Reed as a director. It was not fair to replace Carol Reed. So I was waiting my turn for him to direct me, but I stopped him. I said, ‘Mr. Lancaster, I came here to be directed by Carol Reed.’ He was embarrassed, but then he realized that he was wrong. And so we became friends again.”

The actress’s feistiness and her lack of tolerance for other stars’ entitlement flared up again when she worked with Sinatra on Never So Few (1959). From the first, his stipulations slowed down the shooting schedule.

“He wanted to be free in the evening, probably to have a good time. And he wanted to start at twelve o’clock. I said, ‘I can start at nine o’clock so we can save some money.’ And they said, ‘No. Miss Lollobrigida, you are already a star and you will be treated like a star.’”

She grudgingly accepted the star treatment à la Sinatra. “But one time he was one or two hours late. So I made a joke to him, but he didn’t understand. I said, ‘Next time that you want to come late, call me at six o’clock in the morning, so I can go to sleep again.’” The crack hit home a little too hard for Sinatra, who acted wounded for days.

In the late 1950s, Lollobrigida had to cope with more emotionally-draining experiences than the occasional sulky costar, however. When Leonard Maltin asked about Solomon and Sheba (1959), Lollobrigida recounted the ordeal of shooting the ill-starred Biblical epic.

She enjoyed a close friendship with Tyrone Power, who may have sensed the end was near for him. “I remember one night, it was two o’clock, he called me, and I said, ‘My God, what’s happening?’ He said, ‘I can’t sleep. I must tell you what a pleasure it is to work with you.’”

On the fatal day, Power had some philosophical words for her. “He had to do a duel with George Sanders. He probably had a heart attack, and he stopped.” The actor came and sat in the trailer with Lollobrigida who was nervously studying her lines. “I was afraid that something would go wrong. And he said, ‘Don’t worry. Life goes on anyhow.’ Then he said, ‘I don’t feel really very well.’”

After almost an hour of boisterous storytelling, Lollobrigida’s voice grew quiet as she relived that horrible day on location.

“I did not know what to do, so I gave him my shawl, so he would be warm. And the car was not there. So I said, ‘Take my car. Go to the hospital.’ And they take him to the car, and he died there.

“The poor makeup man had to take his paint off, and he was young. He died and suddenly he looked much younger.”

Shocked by Power’s death and exhausted by months of filming on location, Vidor had to reshoot most of the film, his last feature. According to Lollobrigida, Vidor was a shadow of his former self. “At any age you can be old. He was, my God, a fantastic director. But by that movie he was dead already.”

So the leading actors stepped in to finish the big-budget movie: “We directed the film. Me if I was alone, me and Yul Brynner if we were together. I mean, these are things that you don’t say, but that’s what happened.”

Perhaps you’re noticing a pattern here? No trapeze is too high, no male ego too big, no obstacle too great, no tragedy too heartbreaking to stop Gina Lollobrigida.

Though the censors tried.

The moralizing blue-pencil brigade of Production Code-era Hollywood took issue with La Lollo’s curvaceous figure. Looking back, the actress can hardly believe the tame material that censors scissored. “The films that I made were very noble,” she insists. “You could see them in church! But the censor was ridiculous.”

Lollobrigida’s décolletage raised such objections that her family tried to intervene. “Even my mother said, ‘Gina, please, be careful! Not so low.’ Now they’re naked on the street!”

Censor meddling clearly made Lollobrigida’s blood boil, no doubt because she took great pains to preserve the integrity of her performances. Lollobrigida did all her own foreign-language dubbing, a fairly rare accomplishment at the time. “If I was doing it in Italian, I dubbed it in French and English. If I was doing it in English, I dubbed in French and Italian,” she says. “I wanted to protect what I did.”

She applied herself to foreign-language dialogue until it became second nature. As she explained, “you have to know the words like, ‘Ave Maria, piena di grazia…’” In other words, like a prayer.

Lollobrigida acknowledged the screenwriters who gave her a hand in shaping her characters’ dialogue. “They tried to use my suggestions even if I had to change something for the character. I didn’t want more words or less words. I wanted the character to be right. Because instead of acting, I was being as close as possible to the character I was playing. That’s why I was lucky to have all important women characters—all different.”

Indeed, from the doomed queen of an ancient empire to a canny single mother and entrepreneur, Lollobrigida’s roles run the gamut from grim to hilarious. “It’s easier to do drama than comedy,” she confessed. Which makes her breezy comedic timing in films like Hotel Paradiso and Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell all the more impressive.

By the late 1960s, Lollobrigida decided to move on to the next phase of her career: photography. “When there was not so many scripts as good as before, I thought, ‘It’s better that I do photography or sculpture,’ which was my real love. And I thought that by going away and doing something different I wouldn’t be in the eyes of the public any more, but I was surprised, because anytime I was in public, the actress was in front all of the time.”

Lollobrigida wished that she had taken up professional photography sooner and captured portraits of her contemporaries, especially Marilyn Monroe. “We were very friendly when I was living in Los Angeles…. She deserved the success she had. It’s a pity that she became so famous after.”

After touring her beloved home country in disguise, Lollobrigida released her first book of images, Italia Mia, and won the Nadar International Prize. Traveling to Cuba, Lollobrigida secured an exclusive interview with Fidel Castro. In India, she forged a friendship with Indira Gandhi and photographed her. She shot portraits of Salvador Dali, Paul Newman, and Audrey Hepburn, among others. “I really grew up with photography,” she remembers, “going all over the world with my camera.”

She also proudly pointed out that she had anticipated Photoshop and digital image enhancement by manually adding color to her photographs.

Nevertheless, Lollobrigida admits that she doesn’t care much for modern art or movies.

“In the cinema technically, it’s unbelievable the progress that they’ve made. But I prefer that the story is the important thing,” she explains. “I want to be moved. If there is no emotion, it’s not art for me.”

Once the thunderous applause from the Club TCM audience settled down, Leonard Maltin cheerfully told the star that she was preaching to a choir of diehard classics fans.

She smiled. “So I didn’t say something new, but I have the guts to say it.”

But does the multitalented Lollobrigida regret all her hard work in the realm of cinema—something that she didn’t even consider a proper art form back in 1946? It would seem not.

“I gave the best years of my life to the movies,” she remarked, unprompted, in the middle of the interview, “and I met incredible, talented people, so I’m glad.”

On the Edge of the Volcano: Isabella Rossellini on Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, and Stromboli (1950)

It all started with a letter. In 1948, Ingrid Bergman (at the height of her Hollywood career) wrote to Roberto Rossellini (triumphant director of Rome, Open City and Paisà) to express her admiration for his films. She hoped to act for him in the future.

Her letter not only set into motion one of the most notorious celebrity scandals of the 20th century, but also sparked one of the most fruitful director-muse collaborations in cinema history.

At the Cinémathèque Française this summer, Isabella Rossellini, one of Bergman and Rossellini’s three children, shared memories of her parents and reflected on their legacy. Her interview in French* with Serge Toubiana, following a screening of Stromboli, was the highlight of the Cinémathèque’s retrospective to celebrate the centenary of Ingrid Bergman’s birth.

Isabella Rossellini in conversation with Serge Toubiana on the stage of the Cinémathèque Française’s Salle Henri Langlois (my photo).

Rossellini explained that her mother’s letter was by no means an unusual gesture for her. “Mama wrote many letters to directors whose films she liked. Sometimes she’d say, ‘If you have a character that you think would be right for me, I’d really like to work with you.’”

Unwilling to let studios dictate role after role for her, Bergman actively sought out cinema’s innovators. In her daughter’s words, “She wasn’t vain at all, not the way people think beautiful actors are. She was a great actress and a great artist who had an enormous curiosity about working with many directors with different styles.”

In this case, however, the proposed partnership seemed an unlikely one. What could a neorealist director, who favored working with non-actors, do with a talented top movie star who, by her own confession, could say only “ti amo” in Italian?

Rossellini found his inspiration one day while driving past a refugee camp, where women from northern European countries lined up along a barbed wire fence. The director stopped to observe and the guard motioned him away—but not before a Latvian woman, with a look of “mute intense despair” seized his arm. When Rossellini returned to the camp with a pass, he discovered that the mysterious woman had married a soldier and left to live in the Lipari islands.

As he replied in a letter to Bergman, “I tried to imagine the life of the Latvian girl, so tall, so fair, in this island of fire and ashes, amidst the fishermen, small and swarthy, amongst the women with the glowing eyes.” His vision for Stromboli, the first of 5 films he’d make with Bergman, was born out of this chance encounter.

Shortly after Bergman travelled to Italy, Rossellini and his then-married star became lovers. Bergman’s resulting divorce from Petter Lindström and her pregnancy outside of marriage ignited gossip columns and outraged the American public.

The affair destroyed Bergman’s image of ethereal, on-a-pedestal purity and stirred up prejudices still rankling from WWII. As Isabella Rossellini noted, “The idea that she fell in love with an Italian, from a country that 5 years before had been America’s enemy, that shocked people.”

Bergman’s Swedish nationality made her an easy target, according to her daughter: “She was already a foreigner and Americans tend to distrust foreigners…. The Senate took a position against my mother, saying that foreigners who came to live and work in America, since Hollywood could have such a phenomenal effect on someone’s success, needed to be under moral control.”

While the American press gloated over the fall of an angelic icon, Bergman had more pressing challenges. Like the character she plays in Stromboli—Karen, an urbane Lithuanian bound to a primitive culture by a marriage of desperation—Bergman was ill-prepared for tribulations of life on a rugged Mediterranean island.

Bergman “was used to sets with very specialized crews, hundreds of people, but they made Stromboli with about 15 people who all carried the equipment,” Rossellini says.

Fascinating behind-the-scenes footage of the arduous production exists, thanks to one of Bergman’s hobbies: “She made little home movies for herself, and we see that everyone carried these heavy burdens, for example, to the top of the volcano.” (You can watch snippets shot by Bergman’s camera on YouTube courtesy of the Criterion Collection.)

The actress also had to adapt her technique to a cinematic style—and cast—very different to what she was accustomed to. As her daughter said, “Mama found herself without Cary Grant, without Spencer Tracy, with a fisherman that Papa picked!”

“If Papa needed a fisherman, he got a fisherman,” Rossellini explained. “A real fisherman will have the gestures, the sunburned face, the authenticity you’d never get with an actor.”

In the starkly sensual Stromboli, Bergman’s conflicted, expertly communicated emotions set her apart from the borderline awkward naturalism of the other cast members. This contrast, far from a drawback, contributes beautifully to the film, since Karen rebels against, and is largely rejected by, the island’s benighted world.

To achieve the improvisational feel he sought, Rossellini had to work around his non-actors’ unease. As his daughter told her audience at the Cinémathèque, “Italian films are often dubbed, so you don’t have to know your lines. My father would direct by saying, ‘There’s a scene where you come in for lunch and people are sitting down, so act like you would in real life. Say “Hello, goodbye, how are you, and so on.”’

“That was difficult for an actor [Bergman] who was used to learning a text, to having everything written beforehand…. A bigger challenge was that the non-actors were extremely intimidated by the camera and wouldn’t speak. Instead of saying, ‘Hello. How are you? Have a seat,” they’d stand there frozen with terror.

“So, Papa would say, ‘Listen, it doesn’t matter what you say, because I’m going to dub it afterwards.’ So, Mama would come in and say, ‘Hello, how are you?’ and the non-actor would go ‘One-two-three-four-five-six.’”

Describing such odd “dialogue,” Isabella Rossellini laughed, “Rossellini’s realism was just on the screen, because if you visited the set, it was surrealism!” (To be fair, though, I think most of us would freeze up in the radiant presence of Ingrid Bergman.)

Though lauded as a epiphanic neorealist masterwork today, Stromboli flopped at the box office in 1950—despite all of the inflammatory free publicity. However, “the French recognized that a film that didn’t work at the box office, that didn’t sell a lot of tickets, could be an important film.”

Cinémathèque founder Henri Langlois in particular saw the genius in Rossellini’s work and was a good friend of the director’s family. Isabella shared an amusing personal reminiscence of Henri Langlois and his wife as somewhat, ahem, fragrant and unwashed bohemians: “My mother and father would say, ‘Isabella, you mustn’t say that they smell bad. Shush!’”

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the cinephiles bred by the Cinémathèque would latch onto Stromboli and the other Bergman-Rossellini collaborations as examples of the kind of personal, documentary-style cinema they respected. “My father was more of a director who’d influenced other directors than a box office success,” Rossellini recalled. “It was Cahiers du Cinéma that rediscovered my parents’ movies.”

Roberto Rossellini returned the favor by becoming a mentor to the future Nouvelle Vague directors: “When I saw Godard three or four years ago, he told me, ‘Your father was kind of a like an uncle to me. He said, “Why be a critic? Why not make your own movies?”’ So my father also encouraged Truffaut and Godard—when they were movie critics—to make films.”

When her father passed away in 1977, Rossellini’s family received a touching tribute from Godard: “the most moving telegram I’ve ever gotten. He wrote, ‘We are alone in the woods.’ Because my father was such a patriarch. He was my dad, but he was also the Taviani brothers’ and Godard’s father in a way.”

The Taviani brothers paid tribute to Roberto Rossellini somewhat differently: by offering Isabella her first significant film role, in Il Prato (1979). Remembering Rossellini’s objections to movie careers for his children, “I thought, ‘Dad’s going to turn over in his grave. He would be furious. He gave the Tavianis a prize and now they want me to act for them.’”

But Ingrid Bergman urged her daughter to accept the offer. “My mom came in and said, ‘No, you have to take advantage of this. It’s an adventure. You can’t turn up this chance to try to be an actress. And, in any case, they work in your father’s style, with non-actors, so you’re not going to be an actress…. You’ll have an experience with great artists.’”

The diverging opinions on Isabella’s acting career were typical of Bergman and Rossellini, a striking case of “opposites attract.” She was introverted and methodical. He was outgoing and unpredictable.

“My father was infinitely disorganized,” Rossellini said. “He was Italian, so we don’t have very many of his things left. My mother was Swedish—and infinitely organized. She saved every letter, every photo, every film poster.”

At one of the most poignant moments of her interview, Isabella Rossellini revealed the insight that motivated her mother’s methodical collecting. “I remember when my mother was sick, she had cancer, there was a big room where she was storing all these things. Mama was very humble, very simple, and extremely shy. I said, ‘Why did you keep all this? You were born in Sweden, you went to America, then you went to Italy, then you went to live in France… why did you drag all of these photos, all of these letters, all of these newspaper clippings with you?’

“She gave me a response that totally shocked me. She said, ‘Because I’ve always known that my life as an artist was very important.’

“I was scandalized by this pretension! But she said, “You know, I think that we’re part of the most influential art of the last century. When we were young, we all watched movies as much as we read the great classics. We read the classics in school because we have to, we go to museums from time to time, but everyone goes to the movies and loves the cinema.’”

It’s reassuring to know that Ingrid Bergman recognized her place and significance in cinema history—from Intermezzo to Autumn Sonata, from Casablanca to Stromboli, from Gaslight to Elena and Her Men.

100 years after her birth, Bergman’s versatility, her spontaneity, and her fearless defiance of convention remain as modern as ever. Will we ever quite catch up to this goddess of incandescent contradictions? I doubt it.

*Please note that all quotations of Isabella Rossellini in this article are my translations.

From Naples to Hollywood (and Back): At TCMFF, Sophia Loren Reflects on Her Vibrant Career

It’s hard to imagine a time when Sophia Loren wouldn’t have been considered a dazzling beauty. However, at the Montalban Theater in Hollywood for TCM Classic Film Festival, Loren harkened back to her early days as an actress—and her disastrous first screentest.

In an extended interview with her son, director Edoardo Ponti, Loren recalled, “They put a cigarette in my mouth, so I started to cough like hell.”

Looking at the test footage, the cameraman gave a grim appraisal of Loren’s future in films: “She has a long nose. She has a big mouth. And she doesn’t know how to act.”

Loren was ready to give up and go home, but her mentor and future husband, producer Carlo Ponti, convinced her to keep trying, for which we can all be grateful.

More than 20 years the starlet’s senior, Ponti brought hope and stability into her life after a bleak childhood. “He was a very sensitive person,” Loren said. “I think he had a nice smile. I found great comfort in him.” Even today, Loren feels that he remains with her in spirit. “Sometimes I don’t know what to do, sometimes I have problems. I think of him and I don’t feel alone.”

Contrary to popular belief, though, Ponti did not rechristen Sophia Scicolone as Sophia Loren. She set the record straight; it was another producer, Goffredo Lombardo, who came up with her screen name. “He was doing a picture, Africa Under the Sea, and he said, ‘Look, Sophia Cicolone I don’t like. We have to change the name, because I like you, you look good in a bathing suit…’”

Greeted by a chorus of laughter from the audience at the Montalban, Loren paused, shrugged, and acknowledged her deservedly lauded figure: “It helps.”

Photo credit: Edward M. Pio Roda

Flipping through a dictionary, Lombardo searched for words with a similar sound to the name of an actress he liked. Coren… Soren… Loren!

Her big break came with Aïda (1953), a lavish film adaptation of Verdi’s opera. The movie placed unusual demands on Loren, who more or less fell into the role to replace an American actress. Painted from head-to-toe to play an African princess, Loren acted in tune with a pre-recorded score—and had to put in extra practice to learn every beat of the music, including several famous arias.

She recalled, “For at least 2 months I was in a little room trying to sing the lipsynch of [the celebrated soprano] Renata Tebaldi, every day, all day, and then I did it.” Because the soundstages were cold in winter, crew members had to use hairdryers to eliminate the visible breath emanating from the star’s open mouth!

How did Loren feel about the results? “It’s great. It looks like I am singing!” At the Montalban, when Edoardo asked his mother, “Were you singing a little bit?” he got an incredulous response: “Ma tu sei pazzo?” Are you crazy?

“Ma tu sei pazzo?” Sophia Loren and son Edoardo Ponti at the Montalban Theater. Photo credit: Edward M. Pio Roda

The following year, in 1954, Loren began her collaboration with Vittorio De Sica, the director who would shape her greatest screen performances. She remembered her makeup man introducing her to De Sica at Cinecittà, warning, “She’s a wonderful girl. She’s very young, Vittorio. She’s very, very young.”

Thus reminded to remain a gentleman, De Sica suggested that Loren do a screentest for his next production, an episodic film set in Naples. Remembering her earlier experience, she baulked. “I started to take away the possibility of doing L’oro di Napoli, because I didn’t want to do a test,” Loren said.

Undeterred, De Sica invited Loren to visit his studio, where he discussed the role with her and decided to cast her without a test. “You leave tomorrow for Naples,” he told her.

A great actor as well as director, De Sica performed for his cast even when working behind the camera. Loren recalled, “Every director has a way of showing [what he wants] to an actor, with words sometimes, with gestures sometimes. For him, it was acting, from A to Z, little actors, big actors, a man, a woman… He would act the scene for everybody.”

Photo credit: Edward M. Pio Roda

Some actors would no doubt bristle at a director showing them how to play their part, but Loren appreciated seeing how De Sica would act out her character: “That’s the way he felt that he could give some truth to the scene. So I learned from him. I was always in a lesson with him.”

Loren found plenty in De Sica’s directorial acting to emulate and ultimately make her own. She confided, “I like to steal—Naples, you know—I like to steal good things, the kind of things that make you grow.”

When asked what she “stole” from De Sica, she replied with one word: “naturalezza” or naturalness.

Like many screen legends, Loren honed her craft as an actress as she climbed the ladder of stardom—without studying acting in a traditional sense. Edoardo wondered whether the lack of formal training ever undermined her confidence. “Well, I felt insecure because I didn’t go to the actors’ studio, but I see so many people that did go to the actors’ studio who are more insecure than I am! Now I don’t feel insecure, because I learned from life… I learned to read the minds of people, to read the mind of the character I am playing.”

In the mid-1950s, she found herself increasingly in demand. When Loren met Suso Checchi D’Amato, then working on a script called Too Bad She’s Bad, on a train, the screenwriter mentioned a perfect part for her: an alluring thief who falls in love with the taxi driver she cons.

Although the 19-year-old Loren had fun “playing the star” and telling D’Amato to see if Ponti could “fit your project into my schedule,” the movie turned out to be a personal and professional milestone. “It was really my first film where I had to open up and really show to people the little things I was learning.”

Too Bad She’s Bad (1954) also paired Loren with Marcello Mastroianni for the first time. From the moment she met Mastroianni on the set they were immediately simpatico. “Since I saw him, it was like he was my old friend. He was a gentle person.”

Their friendship was based on two things, according to Loren: “sense of humor and food.” The latter sounds like Mastroianni’s favorite subject. “When he came on the set in the morning the first thing he said wasn’t, ‘Come stai, Sophia?’ No. ‘Cosa mangerai stasera?’ What are you going to eat tonight?”

At the TCL Chinese Theater, when Ben Mankiewicz asked Loren if she and Mastroianni worked on their onscreen chemistry, she replied, “I don’t think you can work on chemistry. There is or there isn’t. So, as soon as I saw Marcello, there is.”

Audiences felt the rapport, too, and a new screen team was formed. “When the film came out it was so successful that other writers started writing other things for us both, always for comedies, though, in the beginning.”

After Loren’s string of Italian hits in the 1950s, Hollywood beckoned, and Ponti offered her the opportunity to break the language barrier and prepare to enchant new audiences. She shared an anecdote that revealed the producer’s determination. Loren received a telegram stating, “‘Tomorrow you start learning English.’” As she was mulling the idea over, she reported, “The door rang—that was my teacher!”

Loren’s first English-language film, The Pride and the Passion (1957), entailed a 6-month shoot in Spain and sparked the actress’s legendary romance with Cary Grant. However, they didn’t exactly start off on the right foot.

“Cary Grant was being very funny, because he mixed my name up with Gina Lollobrigida. So, I went to him and I said, ‘If you keep on doing that, I’m leaving.” While making his apology, “He looked into my eyes and he was stuck. That’s all.”

Listening to stories about his mother and Grant, Eduardo Ponti got one of the biggest laughs of the day: “I have a bittersweet feeling about Cary Grant: sweet, because he’s somebody who meant a lot to you, bitter because my birth was threatened.” You know, I can’t really blame him.

Photo credit: Edward M. Pio Roda

Who could turn down Cary Grant? Well, Loren explained that it wasn’t Grant so much as a break with her life in Italy that she was resisting: “I think that with Carlo [Ponti] I had found a kind of calm, a kind of tranquility. He came from Italy… I was afraid to change so quickly in my life and go to America.”

Knowing that her future as an artist, not merely a star, resided in her native country, Loren went home. Although she didn’t seem to find her English-language films particularly fulfilling, she confessed her fondness for a few: “I’ve done things that sometimes I thought were okay, like the picture I did with Cary, Houseboat, and then also a film I did, The Key with Carol Reed.”

In 1960, Loren gave her most acclaimed performance in Two Women, as a mother struggling to help her daughter survive in wartorn Italy, again directed by De Sica. Initially slated to play the daughter, Loren ended up in the role of the mother after Anna Magnani turned it down—but suggested rewriting the script to feature Sophia as the older lead.

The artistic triumph emerged from a grueling production, leading up to the horrifying church rape scene. “I spent nights and nights and nights without sleep,” Loren said. “When the day came, we did a rehearsal and then we started shooting.

“On the first [take], De Sica said, “Print!” I said, ‘Don’t we do another one?’ He said, ‘No, we won’t do another one.’ All the scenes from that moment on until the end De Sica never did it twice.”

The one-take method made Loren nervous, “I was so preoccupied and I said, ‘My god, it will be terrible and and I will have to do the same thing [again]… he said, ‘No, you could never do it better. Shut up.’”

De Sica was right, as Loren learned on Oscar night when she became the first actor ever to win an Academy Award for a foreign-language performance.

Ben Mankiewicz looks adorably starstruck in the presence of Sophia Loren before their interview at the TCL Chinese Theater. Photo credit: Edward M. Pio Roda

At the TCL Chinese Theater, the day after her interview at the Montalban, Loren recounted how she received the word of her victory. Seized by the jitters, Loren had decided not to attend the ceremony, thinking, “I will stay in Rome, because if I win, I’m going to faint. If I faint in my own house, then it’s fine. Nobody sees me. If I faint on the stage, it’s going to be a disaster.”

Instead, Loren and Ponti enjoyed a quiet night at home. The clock ticked by, past the time when the winner was supposed to have been announced. Assuming that no news was bad news, the couple headed up to bed.

“At that moment,” Loren told the packed crowd at the Chinese Theater, “the telephone rang. I said, ‘Hello? Pronto? Chi è?”

What she heard at the other end is probably the best thing anyone has ever heard in the history of phones: “It’s Cary Grant. You won!”

Marriage Italian Style (1964) reunited Loren with De Sica and her frequent co-star Marcello Mastroianni. One of Loren’s favorites in her filmography, the bawdy, beloved dramedy allowed the actress to prove her talent to a surprising critic: her mother.

“Even though after a while I started to be in movies and they were giving me already good roles, one time we were looking at the television and there was a lady called Regina Bianchi, ah, mi ricordo… and she was doing Marriage Italian Style. My mother, because she was very natural, sometimes she could say things that could hurt you a lot.

“So, I said, ‘Maybe Carlo would like to do Marriage Italian Style.’ And she looked at the television and she said, ‘But you could never do it.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ ‘Because she’s so good.’”

Perhaps Bianchi was good, but Loren is “a cinematic event” in Marriage Italian Style, to borrow Ben Mankiewicz’s description. Amazed by Loren’s walk in a certain iconic scene, Mankiewicz began, “When you walk, just walk in a movie—”

“I dance,” Loren aptly finished the sentence. “I walked like that because there was music underneath, so I had to do a double step, and I enjoyed it very much.”

Loren cherished the part of Filumena, a prostitute who longs for a loving marriage with her keeper of 20 years, for its range of emotion. “It’s a beautiful role for a woman. You can cry, you can laugh, but the tragedy of the woman at that time is always there.”

Marriage Italian Style also captures the beauty and vitality of Loren’s heritage in Naples. “I think I owe everything to [being] Neapolitan,” She reflected. “Every kind of picture that I’ve done with De Sica, the source was always Naples in a way.”

What else is there to say? Grazie, Naples. E grazie, Sophia.

Art Imitates Life: Shirley MacLaine Revisits The Apartment (1960) at TCMFF

“We didn’t know where it was going,” Shirley MacLaine recalled.

That “it” happened to be the plot of The Apartment, which remained up in the air as shooting for the film began. “Jack [Lemmon] and I both, we talked about it, we were given 29 pages of script.”

The actors just had to wait and see how it would crumble, cookie-wise.

At the TCM Classic Film Festival, MacLaine, exuberant as ever at age 80, regaled a packed audience in the TCL Chinese Theater with stories about the making of Billy Wilder’s enduringly powerful dramedy. 

I consider myself very fortunate to have been in that audience. After seeing MacLaine 4 times over the course of the festival, believe me, I could have listened to this fascinating and endlessly sassy woman for hours more!

In conversation with Leonard Maltin, MacLaine revealed how behind-the-scenes spontaneity helped to shape the masterpiece. Asked about the onscreen sparks between herself and Jack Lemmon, with whom she’d never worked before, she explained, “I think chemistry is good when you find yourself on a discovery mission.”

MacLaine and Maltin at Club TCM. Photo credit: Tyler Golden.

In keeping with this atmosphere of “discovery,” writer-director Wilder and his co-writer I.A.L. Diamond largely eschewed any preconceived story or characterizations. Instead, they tailored their script to fit the two leading actors’ growing friendship—with remarkable results.

According to MacLaine, Diamond and Wilder “watched the developing working relationship. They were so on cue, on key about every little movement, every little sigh and disappointment and joy and happiness, and they made little notes about what they saw. So, the love affair between Fran and [Baxter] became basically what they observed.” 

Wilder and Diamond also mined MacLaine’s personal life for screenwriting material, finding inspiration for what would become a major motif in The Apartment: “I was hanging out with the Rat Pack a lot and a couple of gangsters were teaching me how to play gin rummy, teaching me how to cheat,” she remembered.

“When he would ask on the Monday mornings, ‘Well, what was it like for the weekend?’ I would tell Billy what I’d learned, and that’s why he put the gin game in the movie, because he was fascinated by who my compatriots were over the weekend.” 

MacLaine also unwittingly supplied one of the film’s most memorable lines while having lunch with Wilder: “I was having a love affair that wasn’t working. I said, ‘Why do people have to be in love with people anyway? Why can’t we be in love with giraffes?’ or something like that. And he said, ‘That’s it, that’s it!’”

Knowing a good thing when he heard it, Wilder launched into action. “He ordered us to retake the whole scene, because that made sense to him and to Izzy Diamond,” MacLaine said. “See, that’s unusual, because it took a lot of expense, time, and so forth, but when he saw something that seemed, in his opinion, to make his stuff better, he went for it.” 

Fans of the film will know that Fran Kubelik does closely echo MacLaine’s words. Sitting up in bed after her failed suicide attempt, she half-ignores Baxter’s sweetly clumsy attempt to distract her from her sorrows with a game of cards and asks, “Why do people have to love people anyway?” 

In contrast to Wilder’s human-centered approach to the script, he proved a steely, almost clinical taskmaster when it came to coaching performances. 

Wilder was “the most scientific of directors,” as MacLaine described him. “He would say to us, ‘Do the scene again and take out 12-and-a-half seconds.’ I don’t really know how that worked, but we did it.” 

On the whole, with 55 years of perspective on The Apartment, MacLaine spoke of Wilder in fond and admiring terms: “As a person, I liked him a lot. He was very funny and very sensitive when it came to what he thought would be best for the screen.”

Day to day, however, Wilder often used his caustic wit to keep the actress in line and it hurt. “At times he was very brittle with women,” she observed, “but in the end you were better for it.”

The next day at Club TCM, again in interview with Leonard Maltin, MacLaine elaborated on the pressures of being directed by Wilder. “He was very sarcastic. I see why Marilyn [Monroe] was afraid to come to work,” she said. “He scared the hell out of me. But he taught me how to be self-reliant and how to take criticism.” 

Fortunately for MacLaine, years as a dancer had taught her to deal with tough overseers. “Choreographers are made to make you miserable, so I was used to that… When this incredible Austrian [Wilder] came at me, I thought, ‘Okay, well, just show me the step.’” 

And what a dance it turned out to be!

 As for her co-star Jack Lemmon, MacLaine had nothing but positive memories: “He was such a sweetheart. What a wonderful man.” On the set, she would watch Lemmon perform whenever possible: “He really could do anything. He was good, very, very, very good, until the sixth or seventh take. I mean, absolutely sterling.”

With his “scientific” approach to comedy, Wilder gave MacLaine plenty of opportunity to watch, as he put Lemmon through long series of takes, seemingly for the sake of experiment. “I think Billy wanted to see what the contrived actor in all of us could do if he asked him to do take 16,” she said. “He was seeing how far probably the best actor of drama and comedy… could go and still be honest to it.”

MacLaine also mentioned an encouraging foible of Lemmon’s: “He would say, ‘Magic time!’ every time the camera rolled. And then we knew we’d better make some magic.”

Fred MacMurray didn’t get off so easily in MacLaine’s no-punches-pulled appraisal. “Fred never picked up the check at lunch,” she wryly commented, prompting gales of laughter at the Chinese Theater. The next day at Club TCM, the spirited actress couldn’t resist another jab at MacMurray’s parsimony: “His money blinked when he took it out of his pocket. It had never seen the sun.”

While discussing the collaborative effort of making The Apartment, MacLaine emphasized a contributor who rarely gets the credit he deserves: Doane Harris. “He was Billy’s secret,” MacLaine insisted. This veteran editor worked on most of Wilder’s greatest films, including Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and Ace in the Hole, and received credit as an associate producer on The Apartment.

After looking over the rushes in the cutting room, Harris would make his diagnosis to Wilder. As MacLaine recounted, “He would say, and I heard this because Billy didn’t mind if I heard… ‘Billy, you gotta shoot that whole day over. You did not break my heart today.’ And they would re-do it.”

“See, that’s where trust comes in,” she explained. “Billy didn’t even ask why. To save time, he just did it.” 

On the subject of retakes, MacLaine told us about a scene where the dialogue posed a frustrating challenge for her: when Fran and Sheldrake meet in the Chinese restaurant after 6 weeks spend apart and rekindle their affair.

“My line was, ‘So you sit there and you make yourself a cup of instant coffee while he rushes out to catch the train.’ I, being half-Canadian, would say ‘oat’ [instead of ‘out’] all my life, and I was self-conscious about that.” 

Trying to work around the offending “out,” MacLaine substituted “off” into the line and hoped that no one would notice her minor change. But there was no fooling Wilder, who insisted that she speak the dialogue exactly as written.

Whenever the director heard “off” where an “out” should be, “He would send the script girl down to basically beat the shit out of us.”

After a few takes, MacLaine’s nervousness about the line interfered with her ability to project Fran’s multitude of emotions in that scene, as she opens up about the shame of being the mistress of a married man.

The young actress felt overwhelmed. “At the same time as Billy insisted on the intricacies of every word, in that particular scene I had to well up,” she recalled. “I couldn’t do it. It was hard.” 

Wilder expected better—and expressed his disappointment in MacLaine’s performance during the scene in no uncertain terms: “We went to the dailies the next day. And Billy stood up in front of everybody in the room and said, ‘Well, I tried.’”

(Ouch. Yeah, I can see why Marilyn was scared of Wilder, too.)

Whereas other actresses might have buckled under the humiliation of being called out in front of her colleagues, MacLaine had a different reaction. 

“Now, let me tell you, this was wonderful for me,” she said, like a true pro. “When you hear someone be that sarcastic and that talented, you learn to take criticism, because his criticism was right.” 

The time came to reshoot the scene, but Wilder hadn’t suppressed his frustration yet. “We went back. Fred and I sat in the chairs. Billy said, ‘Action.’ And he left! He walked outside.”

Without the director, MacLaine mustered her courage and gave the scene her all. She overcame her pesky linguistic hang-up and delivered as heartbreaking a line read as I’ve ever heard, the kind that gives you chills just thinking about it. 

And that’s the take they used… shot while Wilder presumably fulminated elsewhere.

“That’s the scene in the movie!” MacLaine proudly informed the audience. “And I’m here to tell you, that’s because I was brave.”

I’m darned grateful that she was, because the scene plays beautifully. It stands as a lesson to all of us. There’s a lot to be said for “Shut up and deal.”

“it will always be modern”: Emmanuelle Riva Revisits Hiroshima Mon Amour

“Happy” isn’t a word that comes to mind when we ponder Alain Resnais’s harrowing, innovative Hiroshima Mon Amour. However, according to Emmanuelle Riva, it was a joy to make.

At the Reflet Medicis movie theater in Paris, the stage and screen veteran shared mostly glowing memories of the intense production in Japan and France. “I can still feel the happiness of those days, it hasn’t left me,” She told a rapt audience. “It was so extraordinary to live that adventure.”

Elegant and lively at age 87, Riva introduced a screening of the New Wave masterpiece under the auspices of the Paris Cinéma Festival, which launched a series showcasing 50 of the greatest female roles. More than deserving of its place in the program, Hiroshima Mon Amour presented Riva with a unique challenge in film history. And, in only her second movie appearance, she rose to it.

Her character in the movie, a French actress, embarks on a torrid affair with a Japanese architect in Hiroshima, thus reawakening trauma from a doomed liaison with a German soldier during WWII. Within the context of a nonlinear movie, Riva movingly conveyed one woman’s passions and sorrows while still grappling with the film’s abstract themes of memory, loss, and identity.

“I was very pleased with the role because it will always be modern,” Riva said of the complex, liberated woman she played. “Her freedom exists naturally within her.”

Riva with Noël Corbin, Paris Director of Cultural Affairs, and Aude Hesberg, Director of the Paris Cinéma Festival

Penned by Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour also used Riva’s crystalline voice to hypnotic effect through extended voice-over monologues. “Marguerite has her own rhythm,” Riva noted. “There’s a precise, childlike quality in her writing that you can’t ignore. You can’t escape it, but it’s actually a pleasure.”

Still, Riva wanted to set the record straight about those famous voice-overs. “Not long ago,” she recounted, “I was listening to some old interviews and I heard Alain Robbe-Grillet talking about Hiroshima… He said that Marguerite Duras had sent out cassettes of the text. I must have listened to them—and there was nothing left for me to do but mimic her. And he laughed and laughed.”

“Well, I never heard these cassettes,” She attested. “It’s totally untrue. And I’m very glad to have the chance to tell you this!”

With a subtle glimmer of accomplishment in her eyes, she explained, “I didn’t have to imitate. That doesn’t interest me at all. I like to create.”

Over the course of a month of filming in Japan and two weeks in France, Riva found plenty of opportunity to create, both onscreen and off: “I took pictures while Sylvette Baudrot [the script girl] and Alain Resnais figured out how the film would be shot. I had about 4 or 5 days and I walked around the entire city that was still largely in rubble. I photographed everything I saw… I ended up putting together a series of very precious photos, because soon afterwards the city was totally reconstructed.”

Her stunning street photography has since formed the basis for an exhibition and a book. Riva’s own interest in documenting the changing face of Hiroshima no doubt informed her contributions to a movie preoccupied with history as both a collective narrative and an individual experience.

As for the production itself, Riva fondly recalled the atmosphere of “sympathy” that reigned among the cast and crew. Resnais directed his actors with sensitivity: “[He] would come up close, talk with each of us intimately, and quietly tell us what he hoped to achieve in the scene.” The actress also praised her co-star, Eiji Okada: “He learned all his lines phonetically… His work was just amazing and he has a magnificent presence in the film.”

Riva shared only one negative recollection of the production, but a painful one at that. During the drawn-out tearoom scene, interspersed with numerous flashbacks, Riva’s character breaks down as she tells the story of her tragic first romance. Reacting to a moment of borderline hysteria, her lover slaps her with such force that the entire restaurant turns to gape. “This was very difficult, because the camera was on a crane that would drop on a certain syllable of a word—it had to be that precise,” She explained. “So, I received quite a few slaps. And I got very angry, because I’d had enough of being slapped.”

A key part of Riva’s most difficult work didn’t take place on the set, however, but during a week in the recording studio: “The film was entirely dubbed, since we had a camera that squeaked.” As for re-recording dialogue after the fact, “I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do it. It’s very tough, working from recording with lots of background noise.” The conviction and unsettling honesty of the dialogue scenes in Hiroshima Mon Amour stand out as even more impressive, considering that the emotions had to be recaptured.

In the 55 years since the movie’s acclaimed release, nearly all those involved in the production have passed away. Riva noted, “I’m the last one left from Hiroshima Mon Amour,” apart from her friend Sylvette Baudrot, the film’s script girl. The actress lamented the recent death of Alain Resnais this past March, “I was really stunned. I’d grown to believe that he would live forever.”

These days, when Riva is called upon to watch Hiroshima Mon Amour, as when Argos Films invited her to present a new restoration at Cannes, she never does so willingly: “It’s as though I were watching somebody else.” Just as the film reveals the surreal distances injected into our experiences by the passage of time, Riva observed, “We each have many lives. And Hiroshima is in another life for me.”

Nevertheless, the actress—who estimated that she’s on her seventh life—expressed her pleasure at seeing so many young viewers in the audience. (This is the point where she smiled at me in the front row and I nearly passed out.) Asking how many first-time viewers were present, she exclaimed, “Wonderful!” at the significant show of hands.

As the actress cheerfully shared clear, detailed memories of a production long ago, her deep love for her craft, at its best and its worst, seemed to illuminate her from within. Grounded and sincere, she’s the very epitome of humility, yet her every measured movement and syllable seems to announce, “This, kids, is a pro.”

Only unimportant people try to seem important. Great artists don’t have to. So, it’s fitting that, when her interviewers thanked her for coming, Emmanuelle Riva smiled and simply replied, “I live quite close.”

Please note that all quotations from Riva in this article are my own translation of her words. For an article about the screening in the original French, I recommend this one on Paris Cinéma’s own site. You should also watch this interview (with subtitles) that Riva gave at Cannes in 1959. It’s great. 

You can also  learn more about the 50 Grands Rôles de Femmes series at the Reflet Medicis, which will be continuing until December 2014.

Thank you to Paris Cinéma for allowing me to include their photos of the event, taken by Clara Baillot and Camille Griner, on this blog.

Journey’s End: Remembering Colin Clive on His Birthday

“I’m no Clark Gable in the matter of looks; I require a good dramatic play before my fatal charm is discernible.” —Colin Clive

Fatal, indeed.

On this date in 1900, Clive Clive came into the world. In 1937, he died alone and unhappy in an oxygen tent, succumbing to alcohol-exacerbated tuberculosis. He didn’t stay here for long, but in some ways he never left.

He lives in a thousand imitations of his broken-reed voice, in horror movies that he hated making, in the dormant celluloid of films not available for distribution, and in my cinephiliac obsession. He always seemed to be a bundle of nerves—even beyond the diegetic gallery of tightly-wrapped characters he played, from the alcoholic Captain Stanhope to the blasphemous Dr. Frankenstein to the traumatized Stephen Orlac.

The twitchy, overblown energy of Clive’s performances, his harnessed panic, makes you somehow more aware of what the film critic Laura Mulvey has called death at 24 frames per second, the poignant passage of time as captured by the camera.

There are many things that I would like to say to Clive, but someone else pretty much wrote it all down and actually sent it to him when he was still around to read it:

“I want to thank you for the little bit of rare beauty you have given me, a real spark of something which does not exist in the world today. I am not speaking of your great acting nor the great part you brought to life so expertly. Others have done great acting before, and there have been many great parts written. I am speaking of something which, probably, was very far from the mind of the author when he wrote Journey’s End, and from your own when you acted it. Perhaps that which I saw in you exists only in my own mind and no one else would see it, or care to see. I am speaking of your achievement in bringing to life a completely heroic human being.”

This is an excerpt from a beautifully written fan letter by no less than Ayn Rand (!) who saw Clive perform in a stage revival of Journey’s End in 1934. She was herself a successful playwright at the time. Clive replied that her praise meant a lot to him. I hope that he internalized some of it. Whatever anyone may think or feel about Ayn Rand, I must admit that she seized on a key aspect of Colin Clive.

It’s ironic that Rand, who championed iron wills and inner strength, should have so admired a man whose weaknesses and insecurities destroyed him. And yet, Clive was not just a downward spiral, but an aspiration towards something higher.

All of his performances have a grace and beauty to them, as if even the most loathsome characters could have been better people—should have been, but were cut off by some cruel twist of fate.

When Clive’s Dr. Frankenstein delivers his speech about clouds and stars and eternity, he becomes my personal definition of the heroic in mankind. In this case, I know exactly what Rand was on about.

Some actors have fans, and that’s just fine. Colin Clive has a cult. I wonder what he would have thought of us, the endless Googlers of his image, holding vigil over his memory. I’m not entirely sure that he would have been pleased. He may well have been a trifle freaked out.

But I would like to remember him on his 113^th birthday with a few words about his first film, in which he recreated his signature stage role: Captain Stanhope, a part he seemed born to play.

The cast of Journey’s End and James Whale listen to the radio on the set.

Directed by James Whale, Journey’s End reminds me a lot of Das Boot: quite long, claustrophobic, and character-driven. After two hours, confined almost entirely to the trench set, we feel as though we’re really in there with these damned, laughing fellows. We come recognize and cherish their foibles and mannerisms through the intimacy of the camera.

I must confess, though, the first time I saw this, I found myself disappointed by how terribly uncinematic it seems. Then again, overwhelmingly stationary shots are par for the course in an early talkie.

Whale matter-of-factly plunks us down in the trench and lets most of the action unfold in medium long shots, with the occasional significant close-up—a yucky blancmange, a box of candles, hands opening a letter. Apart from the striking chiaroscuros of a few bombardment scenes and some muddy tracking shots, we get little sense of the innovating flair James Whale clearly had for making horror jump off the screen.

However, trench warfare isn’t cinematic, is it? It’s not a sweeping crane shot. It’s not lyrical in the least. It’s creaky, stale, and soggy. Journey’s End manages to convey these qualities aptly, while still mobilizing the force of our bond with the characters to hold our attention. By about ten minutes in, we like these unfortunate chaps. We wonder which ones of them are going to die. We hope that the causalities will be minimal.

The cast works remarkably well together. David Manners, in particular, will surprise you if you’ve only seen him play juvenile romantic leads. As Raleigh, he transforms from the fresh-cheeked schoolboy soldier into a mortified, disillusioned young man. Returning from a raid in which most of the men died, Raleigh collapses onto a bed; Whale gives us a close-up of Manners who really did pull out all the stops. He looks shattered, hollow-eyed, sweaty, and broken—a far cry from his wooden pretty boy reputation.

Whale does occasionally oblige us with moments of conspicuous filmic brilliance. For instance, at the very end, when the cowardly Hibbert hesitates to join the front line, we get a shot of the doorway to the top of the trench, where a body is being carried past on a stretcher in silhouette. It borders on allegory: the doorway to death. The image shifts towards abstraction, like the famous reaper shots in Dreyer’s Vampyr. A WWI veteran himself, Whale knew how to reduce trench warfare to a bare, razor-sharp grisaille. This touch foreshadows the morbid, metaphysical resonance of Frankenstein.

Just as Frankenstein begins before it starts with the sounds of weeping that precede the opening images of the funeral, the deep, booming bass of exploding shells begins over the credits of Journey’s End—and keeps banging away through the film until the audience’s nerves have gone to pieces, too. Pretty astute use of sound for 1930.

Returning to our leading man, Clive became Stanhope. Or perhaps Stanhope became Clive. One can understand why Whale insisted that Clive be imported from England immediately, as no other actor would do.

This was rather unusual, that a stage actor unseasoned by cinema experience be brought thousands of miles for a single part only. Well, from the moment Clive enters the dugout set—his face half-hidden from the camera by his metal helmet, brushing briskly by, trying to drop his knapsack on his bunk, then pulling the strap off where he caught it on his shoulder with a weary tug—his every movement rings utterly true. We never feel that he’s playing for the camera, which I consider a small miracle, since he had never acted for one before.

Drunk parts are notoriously hard and perhaps Clive wasn’t faking drunk. Whatever Clive’s consumption of whisky was during production, though, Stanhope’s state of inebriation varies through so many shadings of prickly, dreamy, and cheerily garrulous that we’re watching a person shot through a prism—all the emotions that usually coexist in diluted form come through in vivid contrast. He portrays a man fractured and fragmented into pieces, pieces that some central, guiding insight is trying like mad to hold together.

The thing that nurtures Stanhope, his perspicacity, his ability to understand the point of staying strong in the midst of pointlessness, is also the thing that makes him need to numb himself out with alcohol. Like a plant which, when its growth upwards is blocked off, twists around but keeps on growing, Stanhope’s passion for life has been stunted by war into the desire to die like a man—the only option left. Part child and part old soul, Clive’s Stanhope shines with the feverish glow of the actor’s own incandescent torment.

I consider Stanhope the flip side of Clive’s Frankenstein. Both are individuals attuned to some higher significance. Stanhope delivers a marvelous speech about giddy stars and mortality that almost certainly inspired the famous monologue from Frankenstein (which was not in the shooting script, incidentally). We recognize in Stanhope, as in Frankenstein, a brutal hubris that holds everyone to a high standard—but himself to an almost impossible standard.

Perhaps most importantly, Whale shows both men (Stanhope and Frankenstein) to be rather childlike. Remember how Frankenstein, seeing Elizabeth, takes a few steps and collapses in his laboratory when his father comes for him? That moment echoes a scene in Journey’s End when, consumed by worries and heavily inebriated, Stanhope falls into his bunk and partially out of frame. His head and shoulders are off-screen as the fatherly Sergeant Osborne puts a blanket on him. It’s as if he disappeared for a moment, regressed into a place where he’s no longer trapped in the trenches, but he then calls pathetically, “Tuck me up!” In both films, Whale and Clive deliver moving depictions of men returning to helpless boyhood on the brink of exhaustion.

In one of the most moving scenes of the film, Osborne reads a letter from Raleigh, who happens to be the brother of Stanhope’s fiancée. Stanhope fears that Raleigh will unmask him as a drunkard and ruin his reputation with the girl he loves, but instead, as Osborne reads the letter, Stanhope hears nothing but kind words for his spirit and leadership. The play of emotions on Clive’s face is, as usual, extraordinary. We spot relief, yes, but also anguish, sadness, an attempt to gather his courage, as though he were facing down German machine guns. I have to commend Clive on this unique interpretation, but a very genuine one, as I believe that praise is the most humbling thing in this world. Praise frightens Stanhope more than criticism, because being a fine fellow is an ideal he has to live up to. Heroism is his curse.

Clive exuded a borderline ludicrous modesty in his interviews, claiming that anyone could have done his parts well, that it was the writing or the directing that did most of the work. This quote, from a 1932 issue of Picture Show magazine, characterizes his attitude towards fame and his obvious talent:

“It took me ten years to learn my job on the provincial stage—of course, I’m still learning now; but I’m afraid it will take me a lot longer to learn anything really worthwhile about films. The technical side is so interesting, and if ever I do master this part of making pictures I would like to produce pictures and give up acting altogether. 

“You see, I’m little more than a puppet really as far as film work is concerned. The director does all the brain work. He is the man who makes the picture.”  

I think that praise frightened this self-deprecating man as much as it scared Stanhope. Well, that’s too bad. I want to praise how he ruffles a dying friend’s hair, while looking away from the body in horror. I want to praise how disobligingly nasty and snappish he acts at times in the film, yet still makes us care for him. I want to praise him for “the little bit of beauty” he bequeathed to us with his performance.

Watch Journey’s End and I think you will too.

(Note: I refuse to post screenshots of this film because the print on YouTube, as well as the one on my DVD, look like they’ve been dropped in the mud at the Battle of Ypres. You can watch the full movie by clicking here, although it’s a crime against humanity that someone has not restored this magnificent film about the tragedy of war. Since no one has, I’ve decided to include a lot of publicity stills and materials in this post which I gleaned from the fantastic Tumblrs of missanthropicprinciple, sullivanstrvls, and, of course, colincliveforever. Do give them a look. They post terrific movie-related images and reflections and they have my gratitude.)