Tim asked:
Born in what was then the Irish quarter of East Harlem, Lancaster showed an early aptitude for sport and athletics. He enrolled at New York University, but dropped out to form an acrobatic duo with boyhood friend, Nick Cravat, billed as ‘Lang and Cravat’. They played several circus troupes before injury forced Lancaster to quit. During the war he served in the army entertainments section, and on his discharge decided to take up acting. His first role, as a juvenile lead in a Broadway play, brought him numerous Hollywood offers (he signed with Hal Walis) and a partnership with agent Harold Hecht.
Lancaster’s inexperience and the narrowness of his range, evident in such early roles as the fall-guy in Siodmaks’s The Killers (1946) and the victimized con in Dassin’s taut prison drama Brute Force (1947), were more than offset by the intensity of his screen presence – a brooding, feral power than even in supposedly weak characters, such as Stanwyck’s scheming husband in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), conveyed a sense of barely suppressed violence. It was a quality new in Hollywood leading men, as Lancaster himself acknowledged: ‘I was part of a new kind of furniture – tougher, less polished, grainier.’
This dangerous edge fitted him perfectly for the noir movies of the period. Its upside, played with an infectious air of self-mockery, was a swashbuckling zest that made him one of the most exhilarating of action heroes. In the movies Flame and the arrow (1950) and The Crimson Pirate (1952) Lancaster, reteamed with his old partner Nick Cravat, swung, soared and tumbled with ballet grace and evident delight in the sheer physicality of his performance. By comparison, even Flynn and Fairbanks seem earthbound.
Some critics, seeing no further than the superb physique and the toothy grin, derided him as beefcake, missing the fierce intelligence he brought to every role. Lancaster, well aware of his own limitations, was constantly pushing to extend his range and reveal the vulnerability beneath the brawn – as with his weary, ex-alcoholic doctor in the movie Come Back, Little Sheba, cannily underplaying to Shirley Booth’s tour de force as his wife.
Lancaster was too shrewd to self himself into the contractual slavery that had trapped most pre-war stars. His box-office appeal, allied to Hecht’s financial acumen, created the first of the actors-agent partnerships that would break the power of Hollywood studios. Later joined by script-writer James Hill, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster became the most powerful independent production company of the 1950s, always willing to take on risky projects. Some of them paid off – such as the movie Apache (1954), a pro-Indian Western that appealed to Lancaster’s staunchly liberal politics. But Mackendrick’s late-noir masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success (1957) failed at the box-office, despite one of Lancaster’s most chilling performances on screen as the monstrous showbiz columnist, king of a predatory night-world.
Westerns suited his rangy physique and relaxed athleticism. He turned the grin to fine villainous account opposite Gary Cooper’s principled loner in the movie Vera Cruz (1954), then swapped roles to play a staid, controlled Wyatt Earp to Kirk Douglas’s maverick Doc Holliday in Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957). And few actors were better equipped to play con-men, cold-eyed and ruthless beneath purring charm: he was good in movies such as The Rainmaker (1956) but overwhelmed as Elmer Gantry (1960), drunk on the floor of his own swaggering oratory.
Hecht-Hill-Lancaster broke up around 1960, and Lancaster turned to quieter, more reflective roles, though never losing the sense of contained menace: in Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) his condemned killer handles tiny fragile creatures with infinite gentleness, and his megalomaniac general of Seven Days in May (1964) is all the scarier for an air of glassy-eyed calm. But his portrayal of the Sicilian prince in the movie Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963) came as a revelation. Few people – including initially Visconti himself – had thought him capable of such poised aristocratic melancholy. The movie revealed unexpected depths in him; Visconti called him ‘the most perfectly mysterious man I have ever met’. This mysterious quality was exploited again by Visconti in Conversations Piece (1974), where Lancaster plays the lonely professor enticed out of his isolation by the decadent ‘family’ which moves in next to his book-strewn apartment.
Lancaster’s later movies were variable, but they include some of his finest roles as age relaxed and mellowed him. In Ulzana’s Raid (1972) he exuded innate authority as the grizzled, fatalistic scout, dying stoically for the stupidity of others. He good-humouredly guyed his own dynamic image for Bill Forsyth’s quirky comedy Local Hero (1983), and contributed a touchingly wistful cameo in Field of Dreams (1989). But he was at his best, blending pathos with bravado, in Malle’s Atlantic City USA (1980) as the ageing two-bit gangster granted the chance to live out his own absurd fantasies. ‘I think I may have a respectful following, but not a affectionate one ‘, Lancaster once observed, but time has proven him wrong. Not only did his range broaden and deepen with age; he also – against all expectations – became lovable as well.
1913 – 1994
Tramadol
Born in what was then the Irish quarter of East Harlem, Lancaster showed an early aptitude for sport and athletics. He enrolled at New York University, but dropped out to form an acrobatic duo with boyhood friend, Nick Cravat, billed as ‘Lang and Cravat’. They played several circus troupes before injury forced Lancaster to quit. During the war he served in the army entertainments section, and on his discharge decided to take up acting. His first role, as a juvenile lead in a Broadway play, brought him numerous Hollywood offers (he signed with Hal Walis) and a partnership with agent Harold Hecht.
Lancaster’s inexperience and the narrowness of his range, evident in such early roles as the fall-guy in Siodmaks’s The Killers (1946) and the victimized con in Dassin’s taut prison drama Brute Force (1947), were more than offset by the intensity of his screen presence – a brooding, feral power than even in supposedly weak characters, such as Stanwyck’s scheming husband in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), conveyed a sense of barely suppressed violence. It was a quality new in Hollywood leading men, as Lancaster himself acknowledged: ‘I was part of a new kind of furniture – tougher, less polished, grainier.’
This dangerous edge fitted him perfectly for the noir movies of the period. Its upside, played with an infectious air of self-mockery, was a swashbuckling zest that made him one of the most exhilarating of action heroes. In the movies Flame and the arrow (1950) and The Crimson Pirate (1952) Lancaster, reteamed with his old partner Nick Cravat, swung, soared and tumbled with ballet grace and evident delight in the sheer physicality of his performance. By comparison, even Flynn and Fairbanks seem earthbound.
Some critics, seeing no further than the superb physique and the toothy grin, derided him as beefcake, missing the fierce intelligence he brought to every role. Lancaster, well aware of his own limitations, was constantly pushing to extend his range and reveal the vulnerability beneath the brawn – as with his weary, ex-alcoholic doctor in the movie Come Back, Little Sheba, cannily underplaying to Shirley Booth’s tour de force as his wife.
Lancaster was too shrewd to self himself into the contractual slavery that had trapped most pre-war stars. His box-office appeal, allied to Hecht’s financial acumen, created the first of the actors-agent partnerships that would break the power of Hollywood studios. Later joined by script-writer James Hill, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster became the most powerful independent production company of the 1950s, always willing to take on risky projects. Some of them paid off – such as the movie Apache (1954), a pro-Indian Western that appealed to Lancaster’s staunchly liberal politics. But Mackendrick’s late-noir masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success (1957) failed at the box-office, despite one of Lancaster’s most chilling performances on screen as the monstrous showbiz columnist, king of a predatory night-world.
Westerns suited his rangy physique and relaxed athleticism. He turned the grin to fine villainous account opposite Gary Cooper’s principled loner in the movie Vera Cruz (1954), then swapped roles to play a staid, controlled Wyatt Earp to Kirk Douglas’s maverick Doc Holliday in Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957). And few actors were better equipped to play con-men, cold-eyed and ruthless beneath purring charm: he was good in movies such as The Rainmaker (1956) but overwhelmed as Elmer Gantry (1960), drunk on the floor of his own swaggering oratory.
Hecht-Hill-Lancaster broke up around 1960, and Lancaster turned to quieter, more reflective roles, though never losing the sense of contained menace: in Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) his condemned killer handles tiny fragile creatures with infinite gentleness, and his megalomaniac general of Seven Days in May (1964) is all the scarier for an air of glassy-eyed calm. But his portrayal of the Sicilian prince in the movie Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963) came as a revelation. Few people – including initially Visconti himself – had thought him capable of such poised aristocratic melancholy. The movie revealed unexpected depths in him; Visconti called him ‘the most perfectly mysterious man I have ever met’. This mysterious quality was exploited again by Visconti in Conversations Piece (1974), where Lancaster plays the lonely professor enticed out of his isolation by the decadent ‘family’ which moves in next to his book-strewn apartment.
Lancaster’s later movies were variable, but they include some of his finest roles as age relaxed and mellowed him. In Ulzana’s Raid (1972) he exuded innate authority as the grizzled, fatalistic scout, dying stoically for the stupidity of others. He good-humouredly guyed his own dynamic image for Bill Forsyth’s quirky comedy Local Hero (1983), and contributed a touchingly wistful cameo in Field of Dreams (1989). But he was at his best, blending pathos with bravado, in Malle’s Atlantic City USA (1980) as the ageing two-bit gangster granted the chance to live out his own absurd fantasies. ‘I think I may have a respectful following, but not a affectionate one ‘, Lancaster once observed, but time has proven him wrong. Not only did his range broaden and deepen with age; he also – against all expectations – became lovable as well.
1913 – 1994
Tramadol
