My friend Chris Conlon has written an eloquent tribute to the late Horton Foote on his blog, http://chrisconlon.livejournal.com. Foote had an enviable life and career, winning two Oscars and a Pulitzer Prize, and dying just short of his 93rd birthday on the eve of a premiere of a new play. Chris' tribute is superb, and there is nothing I can add to it, except to say that it is marvelous to consider the career of a playwright so concerned with making his characters real, and so naturally a gentleman, that he declined to put himself above them. Read Chris' essay, and you will understand exactly what I mean. (My only quibble with Chris' eulogy is, in discussing at length Foote's long association with Robert Duvall and correctly identifying "Tomorrow" and "Tender Mercies" as masterpieces, he did not even mention the name BOO RADLEY!)
Meanwhile, yesterday during a routine Internet search, I was saddened to hear of the death of someone whose life and career have been discussed previously on this blog. Kathleen Byron, the beautiful and idiosyncratic actress who was a key member of the Powell and Pressburger stock company in the 1940s, passed away in London in mid-January, a week after what was either her eighty-sixth birthday (according to the British Film Institute) or her eighty-eighth (according to the "Guardian" and "Independent"). Byron's death, to my knowledge, was not noted by newspapers in this country--and also, shamefully, not in this year's Oscar broadcast. Byron was not as lucky in her career as Foote was in his, and also not as lucky in her old age; in the early 2000s she was supposed to play Lauren Bacall's sister in Lars Von Trier's "Dogville"--what a glorious pair those two would have made!--but ill health forced her to drop out. Nevertheless, Byron will always have to her credit what is, for my money, one of the greatest performances ever recorded on film: the love-crazed Sister Ruth in "Black Narcissus." To see this film is to be under its spell forever, and Byron's performance is crucial to its impact.
The best way to memorialize great figures of the theater and cinema is to keep their work current in our memories. See "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Tender Mercies," "The Trip to Bountiful," and especially "Tomorrow"--a work of such exquisite purity that to see it is to have it burned in your memory forever--and you will see at work the embodiment of the gentleman artist, a phrase considered an oxymoron in our day. Then see "Black Narcissus," a masterpiece of an altogether different sort, and get blown away by the power of one woman's performance.