Vilmos Zsigmond: He was known as a champion of natural light in filmmaking, a major contribution that he and fellow Hungarian László Kovács brought to Hollywood in the late 1960s. Zsigmond shot The Deer Hunter, Deliverance and Close Encounters of the Third Kind,and was nominated for four Oscars, winning for Close Encounters. Read my Vilmos Zsigmond remembrance for recommendations on one of his overlooked masterpieces and a film ABOUT his art, along with several of his striking film images and a link to an excellent essay by Sheila O’Malley.
George Kennedy: Won his Oscar for Cool Hand Luke (remember the bet on eating boiled eggs?). Kennedy’s performances were essential elements of The Dirty Dozen, The Eiger Sanction and one of my guilty pleasures, Bandolero! He labored in episodic TV for years until the mid 1960s when he triumphed in those singular supporting roles in war movies, cop movies and Westerns. His career peaked throughout the mid 1970s, when he was cast in all of the big disaster movies.
Alan Rickman, the reliable British actor most well-known for playing Snape in the Harry Pottter movies, left us a supremely textured performance in this year’s Eye in the Sky, layered with the character’s wry humor, contained frustration and quiet determination.
Gene Wilder: Star of perhaps the funniest movie of all-time, The Producers. And star and CO-WRITER of another comedy classic, Young Frankenstein.
Frank Finlay: The British character actor had 137 screen credits, but was talented enough to earn an Oscar nod for playing Iago to Laurence Olivier’s Othello. As recently as 2002, he played the father in The Pianist. But I am a huge fan of Richard Lester’s immensely entertaining The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974), and Finlay’s Porthos was a major ingredient in the fun.
Abe Vigoda: We remember him for one of The Godfather’s most unforgettable lines, “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes”.
Jacques Rivette: The prolific French director with one great masterpiece, La Belle Noiseuse (1991); that movie is almost four hours long, yet transfixing.
Robert Vaughn: The icy actor left a body of work with 226 screen credits, mostly on television. He was nominated for a Supporting Actor Oscar for The Young Philadelphians, but I think his most enduring feature film role was as one of The Magnificent Seven. Of course, for us Baby Boomers, Vaughn will always be remembered as Napoleon Solo in the Bond spy spoof The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which absolutely dominated television briefly in the mid-1960s.
Leon Russell: The band leader in the groundbreaking concert movies Mad Dogs and Englishmen and The Concert for Bangladesh. (The Concert for Bangladesh, organized by George Harrison, was the first big benefit concert with a collection of mega-stars.) You can enjoy lots of unfiltered 1972-74 Leon, both on- and off-stage in the documentary A Poem is a Naked Person.
