In Memoriam
7 Movies | December 27, 8 p.m.
The end of the year is a time for looking back, and TCM takes this opportunity to pay tribute to actors we have lost in 2021.
Jean-Paul Belmondo (1933-2021) made a handful of movies in the late 1950s, but when he starred in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), he became an international star and an instant icon of the French New Wave as a small-time criminal self-identified with Humphrey Bogart. Possessed of a craggy face that did nothing to blunt his palpable sex appeal, he went on to a long, acclaimed career in France and abroad, including a handful of English-language productions. He would be directed by Godard again in A Woman Is a Woman (1961) and Pierrot le Fou (1965), as well as an earlier short, Charlotte and Her Boyfriend (1958), and did outstanding work for Jean-Pierre Melville in Leon Morin, Priest (1961), Le Doulos (1962) and Magnet of Doom (1963).
Jane Withers (1926-2021) was that rare specimen – a child star who managed to enjoy a successful career on film and television for 70 years. Born in Atlanta, she was signed by Fox at six years old as a sort-of B movie version of their megastar Shirley Temple. In her first big role, Bright Eyes (1934), she plays a spoiled rich girl who makes life difficult for Temple as an orphan forced to live with the snobbish family who employed her late mother. Withers was one of dozens of kids who auditioned; she was cast when director David Butler heard her imitate a machine gun. Butler had to coerce Temple into slapping her in one scene, and when she finally did, both girls burst into tears. Withers had a memorable role later in life in the epic Giant (1956).
Cloris Leachman (1926-2021) made her feature debut in the noir thriller Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her dramatic performance in The Last Picture Show (1971), but she is probably best loved by audiences for her comedic roles. She was a multiple Emmy winner for her appearances on the sitcoms The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Malcolm in the Middle and a favorite of Mel Brooks, who cast her as Nurse Diesel in High Anxiety (1977) and Madame Defarge in History of the World, Part I (1981). In her first and arguably funniest film with Brooks, Young Frankenstein (1974), she plays Frau Blücher, a housekeeper whose very name inspires terror in horses.
Yaphet Kotto (1939-2021) brought his intense, imposing presence to a wide range of roles over the course of 50 years, including a thief (The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968), a Bond villain (Live and Let Die, 1973), Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (Raid on Entebbe, 1976), a spaceship crew member (Alien, 1979) and the title Shakespearian character in Othello (1980), a role he first played on stage when he was not yet 30. In the TCM offering for this special programming, Across 110th Street (1972), he is paired with Anthony Quinn as a New York cop investigating a Mafia-related murder.
Although Melvin Van Peebles (1932-2021) acted in dozens of movies and TV shows over the course of nearly 50 years, he’s the one person honored in this special program who is better known for his work behind the camera. He made his directing debut with the independent drama The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1967) but got his first studio-backed break with his next feature, Watermelon Man (1970). Van Peebles was ahead of his time as an African American director taking on serious racial themes, even humorously in this film about a bigoted white man who wakes up black and begins to discover the realities of a racist society. Comedian Godfrey Cambridge plays the lead in what was billed as “The Uppity Movie,” with Academy Award winner Estelle Parsons (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967) as his harried wife. Van Peebles also composed the score and played a small part in the film.
The Group (1966) features two actors who have died this year, Hal Holbrook (1925-2021) and Jessica Walter (1941-2021). The film, based on Mary McCarthy’s best seller about the lives of eight women from their college days through the 1930s, touched on controversial topics for its time, including abortion, contraception and mental illness, and featured a prominent lesbian character. The ensemble cast, under the direction of Sidney Lumet, showcases several women in their movie debuts: Candice Bergen, Joan Hackett, Joanna Pettet, Mary-Robin Redd and Kathleen Widdoes. It was also Holbrook’s big screen debut and only the second feature for Walter.
Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) was an international hit, a gloriously colorful experiment in which every word on screen was sung. For those only glancingly familiar with it, the film might seem to be a candy-coated piece of winsome romanticism, but as critic Roger Ebert pointed out, this story of star-crossed lovers “is unexpectedly sad and wise, a bittersweet reflection on the way true love sometimes does not…conquer all.” The lovers are played by a radiant Catherine Deneuve in one of her first starring roles and Italian actor Nino Castelnuovo (1936-2021). He had appeared in a number of smaller roles since the mid-1950s, including Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960), but Demy’s film was his big break. He worked primarily in Italy for most of his career, notably on television. His final English-language performance was in a small role in The English Patient (1996), and he retired from acting in 2016.
