Sixty years have passed since Burt Lancaster gave the performance that earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor. Directed by Richard Brooks, Elmer Gantry (1960) was typical of the kind of assignment that Lancaster chose to demonstrate that he was much more than a tough guy who could do his own stunts. In our latest Getting to Know profile, Cinema Paradiso celebrates a late bloomer who refused to play by Hollywood's rules.
'Bear with me,' Burt Lancaster once implored his fans, as he sought to stretch his limited talent in new directions that challenged them both. Few actors in screen history have done more with their resources and resolve than the onetime acrobat, who was 32 when he embarked upon a career that yielded 72 theatrical features and 13 small-screen credits. He was nominated for Best Actor on four occasions. But Lancaster never sought the approval of his peers. Instead, he spent his life striving to prove to himself that he had done the very best that he could do.
From the Mean Streets to the Great White Way
The fourth child of mailman James Lancaster and his wife, Elizabeth, Burton Stephen Lancaster was born on 2 November 1913 in the family home at 209 East 106th Street in the East Harlem district of New York. He was named after the doctor who had delivered him, Burton Thom, and grew up in a largely Italian neighbourhood, which he later claimed would have made him a better fit for Don Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) than the Oscar-winning Marlon Brando.
At the age of four, Burt made his stage debut as an angel in the Christmas pageant at the Church of the Son of Man. However, he spent much of the show trying to remove some gum from the sole of his shoe and he only returned to acting when he discovered that participating in plays could earn qualification points for a place at the Union Settlement House summer camp. It was here that the nine year-old Burt befriended Nick Cravat, who became a lifelong friend and shared the love of classical music and opera that had been instilled by his father. Indeed, Burt considered becoming a singer after joining the church choir, although he was also thrilled by the silent swashbuckling of Douglas Fairbanks and enjoyed the praise he received at the age of 11 for playing a dying man in a Union production of Booth Tarkington's Three Pills in a Bottle.
At the age of 15, Burt's voice broke and his puppy fat dropped off during a growth spurt that took him to well over six foot. While studying at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, he started to excel at sports, although he occasionally found himself embroiled in local gang feuds and was hospitalised after being wounded in the thigh during a fight. Around this time, he also lost his mother, from whom he had inherited his fierce temper. But Elizabeth also taught him honesty, loyalty and the need to treat everyone equally, qualities that would help shape Lancaster's destiny after he arrived in California.
In 1930, he enrolled at the University of New York on a sports scholarship. However, having been inspired by Australian acrobat Curley Brent, Lancaster dropped out and ran away to join the Kay Brothers Circus with Cravat. Billed as Lang and Cravat, the pair perfected an array of high-bar stunts before they formed The Three Toppers with Jack McCarthy in 1938. By this time, Lancaster had met, married and divorced fellow tumbler June Ernst. But his circus career came to an end in 1940 when doctors warned that they would have to amputate a badly infected finger unless he stopped performing.
In need of a job, Lancaster became a floorwalker and occasional lingerie salesman at the Marshall Field Department Store in Chicago. He was soon drafted, however, and worked as a singing waiter in New Jersey while awaiting deployment to the Special Forces unit of the Fifth Army Division, with whom he spent the next three years after being dispatched to North Africa as part of the Stars and Gripes revue.
While in Italy, he met USO entertainer Norma Anderson and was so besotted that, when he was furloughed Stateside, he tracked her down to the RCA Building in New York where she was working for radio producer Ray Knight. While riding in the lift, Lancaster was spotted by Jack Mahlor, who thought he would be perfect for the role of the tough sergeant in Irving Jacobs's upcoming production of A Sound of Hunting. Much to his surprise, Lancaster passed the audition and, although Harry Brown's three-act play only ran for 23 performances at the Lyceum on Broadway in the winter of 1945, it did enough to showcase his talent. Moreover, co-star Sam Levene introduced him to agent Harold Hecht and he promised the 32 year-old Lancaster that they would be making their own films within five years.
New Kid on the Block
In February 1946, Lancaster went to Hollywood to test for a role in Lewis Allen's Desert Fury. Producer Hal B. Wallis was so impressed that he offered him a non-exclusive eight-movie contract on a weekly salary of $1250. More importantly, Wallis agreed to let Lancaster make a film a year of his own choosing and, as Allen wasn't ready to start shooting, Hecht accepted an offer for Lancaster to play Ole 'Swede' Anderson in producer Mark Hellinger's noir, The Killers (1946). Adapted from a story by Ernest Hemingway and directed by Robert Siodmak, this brooding flashbacking saga cast Lancaster as a washed-up boxer who becomes a hitman and falls under the spell of femme fatale Ava Gardner.
Despite a certain first-timer stiffness in front of the camera, the picture made Lancaster an overnight star and he reinforced his status as Joe Collins in Jules Dassin's Brute Force (1947), a simmering prison exposé that featured a standout display of uniformed malevolence by Hume Cronyn as the sadistic security chief, Captain Munsey. Later the same year, Lancaster was on screen for a matter of seconds as himself in George Marshall's Variety Girl. But the fact that he was chosen to cameo in this showbiz comedy of errors alongside such Paramount titans as Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour, Gary Cooper, Alan Ladd, Barbara Stanwyck and Ray Milland proved that he had made it to the big time.
Frustratingly, only a couple of the features that Lancaster made over the next three years are currently available on disc, which is a shame, as he teamed with Kirk Douglas for the first time in Byron Haskin's I Walk Alone, played against type as Barbara Stanwyck's milquetoast husband in Anatole Litvak's Sorry, Wrong Number, and showed he could handle serious drama alongside Edward G. Robinson in Irving Reis's take on Arthur Miller's All My Sons (all 1948). Moreover, Hecht kept his promise about Lancaster producing his own films, as they launched Norma Productions with Norman Foster's noir, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, which teamed Lancaster with Joan Fontaine.
In 1951, Lancaster went West for the first time when MGM borrowed him for Richard Thorpe's Vengeance Valley , in which he played the decent Owen Daybright opposite Robert Walker's reckless stepbrother, Lee. Together with Jacques Tourneur's medieval romp, The Flame and the Arrow (1950), and Michael Curtiz's sporting biopic, Jim Thorpe: All American (1951), this ranch opera reminded the Paramount front office of Lancaster's physical attributes and he put his acrobatic skills to thrilling use as the earring-wearing Captain Vallo in Robert Siodmak's The Crimson Pirate (1952).
This rip-roaring tale of derring-do in the 18th-century Caribbean cast Nick Cravat as the spring-heeled Ojo. Yet, while Lancaster revelled in the opportunity to emulate his childhood hero, he saw himself as something more than the new Douglas Fairbanks. Indeed, he was already seeking projects that 'will help me as an actor against the time when I have to give up all this jumping around'.
Blazing a Trail
Although closer in style to Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum than Method men like Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, Lancaster quickly established himself as a distinctive presence. He was jokingly referred to as 'Mr Muscles and Teeth' by the press pack, but biographer Kate Buford hit the nail on the head when she claimed that Lancaster had 'glow-in-the-dark glamour'. In some of his early films, he burst out of the frame, as he learned how to rein in his natural exuberance. Occasionally, he also struggled to make emotional transitions during scenes. But the responsibility of having to carry as an actor the features he was producing for the newly named Hecht-Lancaster Productions focussed his mind.
In 1952, Lancaster revealed the more vulnerable side of his screen nature in playing recovering alcoholic Doc Delaney opposite the Oscar-winning Shirley Booth as Lola in Daniel Mann's Come Back, Little Sheba , an adaptation of a lauded William Inge play that sees a middle-aged couple battle to save their marriage after taking in lodger Marie Buckholder (Terry Moore). He was even more impressively fragile as First Sergeant Milton Warden in Fred Zinnemann's Best Picture-winning take on James Jones's bestseller, From Here to Eternity (1953) as he earned his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Unfortunately, he and co-star Montgomery Clift cancelled each other out and the award went to William Holden for his admirable, but unremarkable turn in Billy Wilder's POW dramedy, Stalag 17 . Deborah Kerr, who shared a famous clinch in the Hawaiian surf with Lancaster, also lost out to Audrey Hepburn for William Wyler's Roman Holiday .
Lancaster was not alone in signing up to commercial ventures in order to bankroll personal projects. But he gave Orson Welles an object lesson in how to shoot for the possible by following solid displays as the tribal warrior Massai and gunslinger Joe Erin in the Robert Aldrich duo of Apache and Vera Cruz (both 1954) by investing in Delbert Mann's big-screen version of Paddy Chayefsky's teleplay, Marty (1955). Starring Ernest Borgnine as an Italian American butcher in the Bronx, this poignant slice of social realism followed Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945) in winning both the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Picture. Moreover, it confirmed Hecht-Lancaster as a major player in a rapidly changing Hollywood, in which stars and their agents had started to call the tune.
Screenwriter James Hill joined the team in 1955, as Lancaster branched out in another new direction by making his directorial debut with The Kentuckian. He also headlined this adaptation of Felix Holt's The Gabriel Horn as Elias Wakefield, a frontiersman whose plan to start afresh in 1820s Texas is jeopardised the malicious Stan Bodine. The latter was played with whip-cracking relish by a debuting Walter Matthau. But, despite making the Golden Bear shortlist at the Berlin Film Festival, Lancaster didn't particularly enjoy calling the shots and two decades passed before he paired with Roland Kibbee for his only other credit behind the camera, on The Midnight Man (1974). This isn't currently available to rent and the same is true of Lancaster's fine performances opposite the Oscar-winning Anna Magnani and the nominated Katharine Hepburn in Daniel Mann's The Rose Tatto (1955) and Joseph Anthony's The Rainmaker (1956).
But it is possible to rent John Sturges's Gunfight At the OK Corral (1957), a masterly retelling of the events covered in equally iconic fashion by John Ford in My Darling Clementine (1946). Lancaster and Kirk Douglas respectively inherited the roles of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday that had been played by Henry Fonda and Victor Mature. But Lancaster was in a phase of his career when each picture presented a fresh challenge, as he sought to avoid stereotyping and hone his craft. Consequently, having won the Best Actor prize at Berlin for revisiting his past as aerialist Mike Ribble in Carol Reed's Trapeze (1956), Lancaster reunited with Tony Curtis to take on the markedly contrasting role of JJ Hunsecker, the Walter Winchell-like newspaper columnist in Alexander Mackendrick's scathing insight into the seedier side of show business, Sweet Smell of Success (1957).
Curtis was hugely impressed with his co-star, as he opined, 'Here's this great big aggressive guy that looks like a ding-dong athlete playing these big tough guys and he has the soul of - who were those first philosophers of equality - Socrates, Plato. He was a Greek philosopher with a sense that everybody was equal.' However, playwright Clifford Odets, who had endured a miserable shoot redrafting scenes in freezing billets on the streets of New York had jaundicedly concluded that there were seven Lancasters - 'Inscrutable Burt, Cocky Burt, Wild Man Burt, Big Daddy Burt, Monster Golem Burt, 'Marquis de Lancaster' Burt, and Hustler Burt' - and that each one was equally unappealing. He could certainly be a stern taskmaster and was renowned for his sharp tongue. But, in the main, the gossip columnists only had positive things to say about him, as Lancaster kept a firm grip on his private life and few knew that the father of five was a serial womaniser. Moreover, according to Buford, he was also bisexual and, at one point, was under surveillance by the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department and the Office of Naval Intelligence.
At the Peak of His Powers
As the 1950s progressed, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster began to command more respect. The King of Hollywood, Clark Gable, signed up for Robert Wise's submarine thriller, Run Silent, Run Deep , a Second World War variation on the Mutiny on the Bounty story that sees Lancaster's Lieutenant Commander Jim Bledsoe question the obsession of Captain Rich Richardson with pursuing the Japanese destroyer that had sunk his last ship. David Niven and Wendy Hiller scooped supporting Oscars for their work in Delbert Mann's adaptation of Terence Rattigan's play, Separate Tables (both 1958), which afforded Lancaster the opportunity to play John Malcolm, a man torn between Hiller's Bournemouth hotelier and glamorous guest, Rita Hayworth (who had just married James Hill). Moreover, Lancaster got to test his mettle against Kirk Douglas and Laurence Olivier as the Reverend Anthony Anderson in Guy Hamilton's interpretation of Geoge Bernard Shaw's The Devil's Disciple (1959).
The pioneering spirit also informed John Huston's psychological Western, The Unforgiven (1960), which teamed Lancaster with Audrey Hepburn in an early effort to expose the barbaric treatment of the First American tribes. However, this proved to be HHL's final outing, as Hill burnt his boats with his partners and was cast into the wilderness. Lancaster threw himself into playing the title role in Richard Brooks's adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry (1960) and was rewarded with the Academy Award for Best Actor for his larger-than-life performance as the opportunistic travelling salesman who finds fame and fortune as a fire and brimstone evangelical preacher in cahoots with Sister Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons). Shirley Jones also won an Oscar as Lulu Bains, the old flame who had turned to prostitution after Gantry had discarded her.
Emboldened by his success, Lancaster hired Edward Anhalt to turn Evan Hunter's novel, A Matter of Conviction, into John Frankenheimer's The Young Savages , which saw Lancaster return to Harlem to play Assistant District Attorney Hank Bell, who is seeking justice for a murdered Puerto Rican boy during a turf war between the Horsemen and the Thunderbirds. But he refused to rest on his laurels and sought the role of Dr Ernst Janning, a penitent German judge who pleads guilty to sending innocent people to their deaths in Stanley Kramer's powerful adaptation of Abby Mann's teleplay, Judgment At Nuremberg (both 1961), which received 11 Oscar nominations.
Lancaster found himself behind bars again in John Frankenheimer's Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), a largely fictionalised account of Robert Stroud's time in solitary confinement without hope of parole on The Rock, which saw the double murderer become an expert on both ornithology and the American penal system. In addition to Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, Lancaster also won a BAFTA and the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival for his intense performance. But it proved to be his final collaboration with Hecht, who went on to produce five more pictures.
Taking stock of his new situation, Lancaster cameoed as an animal rights activist in John Huston's all-star mystery, The List of Adrian Messenger. But he refused to court easy popularity and, as Dr Matthew Clark, he clashed with Jean Hansen (Judy Garland) after she joins the staff of the Crawthorne State Mental Hospital and questions his authoritarian methods in John Cassavetes's sobering drama, A Child Is Waiting (both 1963), which was produced by Stanley Kramer.
Lancaster's most audacious choice of the year, however, took him to Italy to play Prince Don Fabrizio Salinas in Luchino Visconti's The Leopard , a magnificent three-hour 70mm adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's landmark novel about the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies around the time of the 1860 insurgency led by Giuseppe Garibaldi and his Redshirts. Accepting a role spurned by Marlon Brando, Lancaster's dialogue was dubbed by Corrado Gaipa. But he demonstrated that he could hold his own in arthouse circles with the likes of Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale and Visconti was so impressed with 'the most perfectly mysterious man I ever met' that they joined forced again on Conversation Piece (1974), which earned Lancaster the David Di Donatello Award for Best Actor for his performance as The Professor, whose quiet existence in Rome is disrupted when he leases a room to the high-maintenance Marquise Bianca Brumonti (Silvana Mangano), who comes complete with an eccentric entourage.
A Difficult Decade
On his own in Hollywood for the first time, Lancaster became a jobbing actor. He came out with all guns blazing as the hawkish General James Mattoon Scott in John Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May (1964), a Cold War thriller that was written by Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame and set a decade into the future. Convinced that President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March) has shown weakness in signing a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, Moore plans to stage a coup. But Pentagon insider Colonel Jiggs Casey (Kirk Douglas) gets wind of the conspiracy. Lancaster was so impressed with Frankenheimer that he hired him after getting Arthur Penn fired a few days into shooting The Train (1964), a propulsive Second World War adventure that cast Lancaster as Paul Labiche, a member of the French Resistance intent on preventing art-loving Nazi, Colonel Von Waldheim (Paul Scofield), from stealing a trainload of treasures.
Roused by this fact-based thriller, Lancaster remained in action man mode for a pair of contrasting Westerns, John Sturges's The Hallelujah Trail (1965) and Richard Brooks's The Professionals (1966). The former was a comic odyssey set in 1860s Denver that saw Lancaster play cavalry colonel Thaddeus Gearhart, who is confronted by Temperence campaigner Cora Templeton Massingale (Lee Remick) when he has to escort a consignment of whiskey through treacherous territory. By contrast, the latter was a tough Hawksian study of men doing what they gotta do that was adapted from Frank O'Rourke's novel, A Mule For the Marquesa . Joining explosives expert Bill Dolworth in a bid to hunt down desperado Jesus Raza (Jack Palance) and rescue the kidnapped wife (Claudia Cardinale) of a Texan oil baron (Ralph Bellamy) are horse wrangler Hans Ehrengard (Robert Ryan), tracker Jake Sharp (Woody Strode) and marksman Rico Fardan (Lee Marvin).
Also in 1966, three-time Best Picture-winning producer Sam Spiegel persuaded Lancaster to overcome his fear of water by taking the title role in Frank Perry's adaptation of John Cheever's New Yorker story, The Swimmer. Set in rural Connecticut and showing how Ned Merrill gets home by swimming in the pools of his well-heeled suburban neighbours, this snapshot of a country divided over Civil Rights, the Permissive Society and the Vietnam War required the 52 year-old actor to spend almost the entire picture in nothing but a pair of swimming trunks. However, the shoot didn't go smoothly and Perry was fired after the first cut was considered an unholy mess. Sydney Pollack was called in to direct new linking sequences, but this challenging satire remained on the shelf for two years and Spiegel eventually removed his name from the credits. Half a century later, it's regarded as one of the key American films of the 1960s and Lancaster's display of tarnished machismo and curdled charisma retains its poignancy and power.
Stung by this unhappy experience. Lancaster took a year's sabbatical, during which he only narrated some long-forgotten documentaries. The most significant actuality he worked on was Sidney Lumet and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis (1970), which included footage of the August 1963 March on Washington that Lancaster had flown home from France to support. Having been an outspoken opponent of the witch-hunt into Communism in Hollywood in the 1940s, Lancaster proved just as verbal on the subject of Civil Rights and he made Sydney Pollack's The Scalphunters (1968) because it focused on the growing friendship between fur trapper Joe Bass and Joseph Lee (Ossie Davis), a cultivated house slave who had been traded in lieu of cash from some Kiowa Indians.
This adaptation of Ed Friend's novel was the first picture produced by Lancaster's new company, Norlan Productions, which he had formed with regular screenwriter Roland Kibbee. Another literary source inspired a reunion with Pollack on Castle Keep, a lively take on a William Eastlake story set after the Battle of the Bulge that centres on a ragtag US Army unit led by the eye-patched Major Abraham Falconer (Lancaster), which stumbles across the magnificent art-filled home of the Count of Maldoras (Jean-Pierre Aumont). However, a skydiving rendezvous with Deborah Kerr and director John Frankenheimer on The Gypsy Moths (both 1969) fell victim to internal wrangling at MGM and ended Lancaster's decade on a disappointing downswing.
But he bounced back by accepting the role of Mel Bakersfield, the manager of Lincoln International, in producer Ross Hunter's glossy, all-star adaptation of Arthur Hailey's bestseller, Airport (1970). This became Universal's biggest grossing film to date and, among its 10 Oscar nominations, it earned Helen Hayes the Best Supporting award for her performance as a stowaway upon the Boeing 707 whose plight provides Lancaster with a distraction from his romantic problems with wife Cindy (Diana Wynter) and mistress Tanya Livingston (Jean Seberg). Such was the film's success that it spawned several sequels. However, the fact that Lancaster dismissed the original as 'the biggest piece of junk ever made' left it open to parody in the form of Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker's Airplane! (1980).
Despite celebrating his silver jubilee as a star in 1971, Lancaster was no longer a Tinseltown power player. The ending of the Production Code in 1968 had given film-makers greater licence to express their opinions and, while Lancaster helped passionate views on a range of issues, he preferred them to run through his work as an undercurrent. Interestingly, he didn't collaborate with any of the 'easy riders and raging bulls' who came to dominate New Hollywood and, instead, sought out projects with old friends he could trust.
As if to symbolise his determination to stand against the tide, Lancaster began the new decade with a Western triptych comprising Michael Winner's Lawman , Edwin Sherin's Valdez Is Coming (both 1971) and Robert Aldrich's Ulzana's Raid (1972). The roles of marshals Jerred Maddox and Bob Valdez and US Cavalry Scout Marshall scarcely taxed him, but they belonged to a genre that had been spaghettified to the extent that audiences now preferred to see Clint Eastwood bestriding the frontier like a silent avenger than watch Lancaster test himself with another acting challenge. Despite his iron grip on the town of Bannock in Winner's uncompromising showdown, Lancaster betrays the hint of vulnerability that is also evident as he is tied to a heavy wooden cross and made to walk through the Mexican border desert in Sherwin's seething revenge saga. But it's a sense of conscience that sets Lancaster apart as he leads a party to capture a Chiricahua warrior in Aldrich's Vietnam allegory, which reunited the star with Harold Hecht, who served as an uncredited producer.
Lancaster would venture into frontier territory again, with a cameo as journalist Ned Buntline in Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1975). But he next plumped for a pair of contemporary conspiracy thrillers, which saw Lancaster's CIA assassin play a game of cat and mouse with protégé Alain Delon in Michael Winner's Scorpio and his black ops specialist plot with Robert Ryan to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in David Miller's Executive Action (both 1973). Another change of pace took him to biblical times to play the title role in Gianfranco Di Bosio's six-hour miniseries, Moses the Lawgiver (1974), which featured Lancaster's son, Bill, as the young Moses and boasted a score by the great Ennio Morricone.
Completing the Italian hat-trick with Visconti's Conversation Piece was Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 (1976), which was accompanied by another majestic Morricone score. Lancaster had to be content with a minor role as Alfredo Berlinghieri, the landowning grandfather who spoils grandson Alfredo, who was born on the day that opera composer Giuseppe Verdi died. Sharing the birthday of 27 January 1901 is estate foreman's son, Olmo Dalco and Bertolucci contrasts their fortunes as Alfredo (Robert De Niro) and Olmo (Gérard Depardieu) find themselves following diverging paths under the Fascist rule of Benito Mussolini.
The legacy of the war impinges upon the action in George P. Cosmatos's The Cassandra Crossing (1976), as a rickety bridge that has been out of commission since 1948 holds the key to the plan hatched by US military intelligence colonel Stephen McKenzie (Lancaster) to re-route a Geneva to Stockholm express carrying a thousand passengers and a plague-infected terrorist into a siding that had once served a Nazi concentration camp. Lancaster remained in uniform as General Lawrence Dell in Robert Aldrich's Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977). But, this time, he's the one posing the threat, as he has managed to get hold of a stockpile of nuclear missiles and threatens to detonate them unless President David Stevens (Charles Durning) tells the truth about Vietnam.
There's more menace behind the famous smile in Don Taylor's The Island of Dr Moreau (1977), as Andrew Braddock (Michael York) is washed up on the remote hideaway where a mad scientist has been conducting sinister experiments on the local wildlife. Adapted from a chilling tale by HG Wells, this version has many adherents because Lancaster more closely resembles the literary Moreau than other outings based on this literary source.
As he crept past pensionable age, Lancaster continued to defy both his advancing years and critical expectation by delivering performances of exceptional potency. None more so than as Major Asa Barker in Ted Post's Go Tell the Spartans (1978), an adaptation of former war correspondent Daniel Ford's 1967 novel, Incident At Muc Wa , which outlines how a veteran of two major wars realises that his superiors have delivered his unit into the hands of the Vietcong by sending them to guard a long-deserted French colonial outpost. The sins of the imperial era are also punished in Douglas Hickox's Zulu Dawn (1979), a prequel to Cy Endfield's Zulu (1964) that recounts the calamity at Isandlwana in Natal in 1879, as the British commander of the Cape Colony, Lord Chelmsford (Peter O'Toole), ignores the advice of allies and adjuncts alike and, with the support of Sir Henry Bartle Frere (Nigel Davenport), launches an attack on the Zulu Empire whose failure will ultimately be blamed on the one-armed Colonel Anthony Dumford (Lancaster), who is left to fight a rearguard while outnumbered by 16:1.
A Golden Twilight
In January 1980, Lancaster came close to death during an 11-hour gall bladder operation. Nine months later, like the star he was, he staged a triumphant comeback when he was universally feted for his work as small-time hood Lou Pascal in Louis Malle's Atlantic City (1980). Thrown together with aspiring blackjack dealer Sally Matthews (Susan Sarandon), Lou seizes upon a way to escape the crummy numbers game he's been running and make some serious money by selling the consignment of cocaine that was stolen by Sally's late husband. In addition to receiving a final Oscar nomination for Best Actor, Lancaster also won a BAFTA and a Donatello for a performance that is all the more remarkable for the state of his health at the time.
The old Lancaster twinkle was also present in Lamont Johnson's Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981), while Carl Reiner put clips from The Killers and I Walk Alone to hilarious use in the brilliantly edited hardboiled pastiche, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982). Trips to Italy followed for Lilliana Cavani's The Skin and for a cameo as Pope Gregory X in Giuliano Montaldo's seven-hour miniseries, Marco Polo (both 1982), which stars Ken Marshall as the 13th-century Venetian explorer who travelled to the court of Kublai Khan (Ying Ruocheng). But it was a brief sojourn on the Scottish coast that made a deeper impression, as oil tycoon Felix Happer is given a lesson in the bare necessities by beachcomber Ben Knox (Fulton McKay) when he comes to realise why the village of Ferness would not be the ideal site for a refinery in Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983).
Although much of the story centres on Happer's hapless emissary, Mac MacIntyre (Peter Riegert), it was Lancaster who stole the show and he received a Best Supporting BAFTA nomination for his efforts. He also set the plot in motion in Sam Peckinpah's twisting take on Robert Ludlum's bestseller, The Osterman Weekend (1983), as CIA director Maxwell Danforth, whose power-grabbing ambitions make journalist John Tanner (Rutger Hauer) come to doubt the word of his three best friends, TV producer Bernard Osterman (Craig T. Nelson), plastic surgeon Richard Tremayne (Dennis Hopper) and stock trader Joseph Cardone (Chris Sarandon).
In 1983, Lancaster underwent quadruple bypass surgery after suffering two minor heart attacks. Typically, however, he refused to quit. While he was having to make do with character roles in features, Lancaster was still taking leads in such small-screen fare as David Lowell Rich's Scandal Sheet (1985) and Lee Philips's Barnum (1986), which saw Lancaster relish the role of circus pioneer Phineas T. Barnum.
There was still one notable feature lead to come, however, as Lancaster followed playing stripper Margot Kidder's bank robber father in Alan Sharp's Little Treasure (1985) by reuniting for one last time with Kirk Douglas in Jeff Kanew's Tough Guys (1986). Released from prison after 30 years, Harry Doyle and Archie Long quickly discover that much has changed since 1956. But, despite being harassed by cop Deke Yablonski (Charles Durning) and pursued by short-sighted hitman Leon B. Little (Eli Wallach), the veterans agree that they have some unfinished business with a loot-laden Southern Pacific train nicknamed the Gold Coast Flyer.
Even a force of nature had to slow down eventually, however, Lancaster sandwiched Daniel Petrie's Rocket Gibraltar (1988) between his final trips to Italy to make Giuliano Montaldo's Control (1987) and Michael Anderson's The Jeweller's Shop (1988), which was adapted from a story by Karel Wojtyla, who had become Pope John Paul II a decade earlier. He would bow out with a courageously unsympathetic turn as 1950s lawyer John W. Davis arguing for the continued segregation of American schools against Thurgood Marshall (Sidney Poitier) in George Stevens, Jr's two-part teledrama, Separate But Equal (1991). But Lancaster would remind us one last time of the dignity and decency that underpinned everything he did as Archibald 'Moonlight' Graham, the 1920s baseball wannabe who became a doctor and helps Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) create his own baseball diamond in Phil Alden Robinson's Field of Dreams (1989), a heartwarming adaptation of WP Kinsella's magic realist novel, Shoeless Joe , which reflects on the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, which had rocked America when Burton Lancaster was a five year-old boy.
On 30 November 1990, Lancaster suffered a stroke that left him partially paralysed and unable to speak. The following autumn, he succumbed to a fatal heart attack on 20 October and insisted on being cremated without a funeral service. His ashes were scattered under a tree, leaving his films as his lasting legacy.
