Swedish actor best known for the 1966 film Hunger
Per Oscarsson, who has died aged 83, was perhaps the only leading Swedish actor who never worked with Ingmar Bergman. This might have been by accident rather than design, although Oscarsson was known for his manic performances, whereas Bergman's men were usually placid. In other words, Oscarsson was more Klaus Kinski than Max Von Sydow.
Oscarsson's most memorable role was in Sult (Hunger, 1966) as Pontus, a bespectacled, penniless and starving young writer in Norway at the end of the 19th century. His complex, agonisingly convincing portrait of a man, ravaged by hunger, whose mind is on the verge of disintegration, split between moments of lucidity and despair, won Oscarsson the best actor award at Cannes and worldwide acclaim.
Hunger was the first all-Scandinavian co-production. Shot in Oslo, it was based on the famous psychological novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun, with a...
Per Oscarsson, who has died aged 83, was perhaps the only leading Swedish actor who never worked with Ingmar Bergman. This might have been by accident rather than design, although Oscarsson was known for his manic performances, whereas Bergman's men were usually placid. In other words, Oscarsson was more Klaus Kinski than Max Von Sydow.
Oscarsson's most memorable role was in Sult (Hunger, 1966) as Pontus, a bespectacled, penniless and starving young writer in Norway at the end of the 19th century. His complex, agonisingly convincing portrait of a man, ravaged by hunger, whose mind is on the verge of disintegration, split between moments of lucidity and despair, won Oscarsson the best actor award at Cannes and worldwide acclaim.
Hunger was the first all-Scandinavian co-production. Shot in Oslo, it was based on the famous psychological novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun, with a...
- 2/9/2011
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
Sam Peckinpah, 1969
Director Sam Peckinpah was considered a spendthrift, a loose cannon, and a failure by the time he shot The Wild Bunch in 1968. His last feature, Major Dundee, had been an acrimonious experience. It had been released in a brutally truncated and mutilated form to middling reviews. In the interim Peckinpah had regained a measure of respect for his beautiful TV adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter's 1937 novel Noon Wine. It is the least seen of his great works, and demonstrated, at the time, that he was not the madman of recent legend (not that there wasn't plenty of legendary madness to come).
Offered the screenplay for The Wild Bunch, he tore it apart with a vengeance, retrofitting it to accommodate his own key concerns and themes: men out of time facing obsolescence and death (it could easily be called No Country for Old Men); violence as a ballet...
Director Sam Peckinpah was considered a spendthrift, a loose cannon, and a failure by the time he shot The Wild Bunch in 1968. His last feature, Major Dundee, had been an acrimonious experience. It had been released in a brutally truncated and mutilated form to middling reviews. In the interim Peckinpah had regained a measure of respect for his beautiful TV adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter's 1937 novel Noon Wine. It is the least seen of his great works, and demonstrated, at the time, that he was not the madman of recent legend (not that there wasn't plenty of legendary madness to come).
Offered the screenplay for The Wild Bunch, he tore it apart with a vengeance, retrofitting it to accommodate his own key concerns and themes: men out of time facing obsolescence and death (it could easily be called No Country for Old Men); violence as a ballet...
- 10/19/2010
- by John Patterson
- The Guardian - Film News
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