Artists take key role in Oscars
By David Germain
AP Movie Writer
LOS ANGELES — Tormented artists will be well represented at this year's Academy Awards, and we're not talking about the nominees who'll go home empty-handed that night.
The four acting categories are stacked with performers playing real-life creative types whose lives had more than a fair share of mental and emotional turmoil.
Three are in the best-actor category.
There's Ed Harris as the boozing, manic-depressive painter Jackson Pollock in "Pollock.'' Javier Bardem plays Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, repressed because of his homosexuality and "counterrevolutionary'' writings, who wasted away from AIDS after fleeing his homeland. And Geoffrey Rush, who already has an Oscar for his take on the very real, very troubled pianist David Helfgott in "Shine,'' is nominated again for "Quills, a disturbing portrait of the Marquis de Sade, confined to an asylum and battling artistic tyranny because of his "deviant'' writing.
Marcia Gay Harden has a supporting-actress nomination as fellow painter Lee Krasner in "Pollock,'' who suffered through a love-hate marriage to the abstract artist.
Then there's Willem Dafoe, a supporting-actor nominee for "Shadow of the Vampire.'' His role is a strange hybrid: Dafoe technically is playing Max Schreck, the obscure actor who starred in the silent-film classic "Nosferatu.'' But the darkly whimsical film has fictionalized Schreck as that most tortured of souls, a real vampire hired to lend authenticity to the horror flick.
Different Oscar themes crop up from year to year. Two years ago, the best-picture field had three World War II dramas and two Elizabethan period pieces. In 1982, it was performers in cross-dressing or transsexual roles, with acting nominees including Dustin Hoffman for "Tootsie,'' Julie Andrews for "Victor/Victoria'' and John Lithgow for "The World According to Garp.''
This year, tragic artists are in vogue, purely by coincidence, nominees say.
"No one held a meeting and said, 'I think tortured artists are going to be big this year,''' Rush said.
Actors often are drawn toward extreme figures distressed by inner demons, people on the edge such as despondent writers or painters.
"For me, it was much more about his attempt than about him being a self-destructive person,'' Harris said of Pollock, who died in a drunken driving accident in 1956. "This guy tried hard for 42 years. He was really a lost soul and didn't know what to do with himself. He was pretty much up for grabs, trying to find something that gave his life meaning. And he found art.''
Harris grew fascinated with Pollock after reading biographies on the painter in the mid-1980s and spent years trying to get the movie made. He wound up directing the film himself, capturing Pollock and Krasner's volcanic relationship with brutal frankness.
"Whether they're real-life people or not, it is the struggle that's interesting, like the road less traveled,'' Harden said. "For Ed, he had been with this project so long, and he fell in love with this guy Jackson Pollock and was drawn to his torment and struggle.''
Krasner was not the artistic genius her husband was, but she shared many of the gloomy traits that often trouble creative minds, Harden said.
"She was disputatious,'' Harden said. "She was somewhat arrogant. I don't think she was ever a warm and fuzzy person. She seemed to look for relationships that had ample amounts of rejection. She might have been a bit lighter on her heels had she been with someone more romantic.''
In "Shadow of the Vampire,'' Dafoe's bloodsucker winds up becoming the ultimate of petulant actors, threatening the director, promising to "eat the script girl'' and preying on dispensable members of the cast and crew.
The vampire also spends his down time on the set lamenting the pitfalls of immortality, remembering his glory days and moping about being centuries past his prime.
That's something Schreck himself might have related to. "Nosferatu'' was the high point of his movie career. After that, he did theater in Germany and landed bit film roles, dying in relative obscurity in 1936. It was well after Schreck's death that "Nosferatu'' came to be considered a horror masterpiece.
"Someone once said about him that he was an actor of no great distinction. It always sends a chill down my spine,'' Dafoe said. "There's a brotherhood of actors, and somehow, I feel sorry for the guy.''
De Sade actually wanted to fall into such anonymity, asking that his writings be destroyed after his death. "Quills'' depicts the man whose name became the root for the word "sadism'' as a writer so compelled to tell his subversive stories that he uses his own body fluids and waste as ink when denied his quill pens.
"I sometimes wonder, am I just playing loopy guys? But they do have heightened dramatic possibilities,'' Rush said. "Shakespeare knew madness was a great metaphor to push characters to extremes to see when they'll crack.
"We are interested in the artistic side of humanity, and it tends to be those figures engaged with struggles with themselves and the world around them, like the Marquis. Maybe there's a desperate need to get in touch with those dimensions in life, and these characters tend to be good embodiments.''
For example, people in Australia, where Rush lives, have become intrigued with the "life of this gay, Cuban poet'' because of "Before Night Falls,'' he said.
Bardem plays Arenas with a stalwart sense of humor that helps him endure persecution and imprisonment in the harshest of conditions under Fidel Castro's regime.
"In order to really survive all that, a lot of people insist Reinaldo was a person who was laughing about all of this at the same time he was suffering,'' Bardem said.
"Yes, of course he was a tortured man. He was not a happy soul at all, I think. What he said was, 'I am three things they don't allow in Cuba. I'm a writer, I'm a homosexual and I'm a counterrevolutionary.' He suffered for all three things. But instead of surrender, he fought, and he won at the end.''
