The deaths were announced last week of two fine actors. Cinema Paradiso remembers Julian Sands and Frederic Forrest.
Where would cinema be without character actors? They might not get the headlines, but it's the ensemble players populating screen story worlds who enable the leads to exude their particular brand of star quality. Julian Sands and Frederic Forrest were much more than jobbing actors. Each had his moment in the spotlight. However, they took roles for the creative challenges they posed rather than merely for the kudos or the pay cheque they offered. Some of their choices could seem quixotic. But, during the course of their long and varied careers, Sands and Forrest delivered some truly memorable performances.
Julian Sands (1958-2023)
Julian Richard Morley Sands was born in Otley, Yorkshire on 4 January 1958. Father William was a soil analyst, while mother Brenda was a Tory councillor. When the couple divorced in the early 1960s, their five sons were divided between them, with the youngest three accompanying Brenda to Gargrave in the Dales.
Sands's love of the outdoors came from a childhood he compared to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons. The former was filmed by Peter H. Hunt as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1985), while Claude Whatham's 1974 adaptation of the latter was followed by Philippa Lowthorpe's remake in 2016. All three are available to rent on high-quality disc from Cinema Paradiso.
As Brenda was a member of the local amateur dramatic society, Sands began appearing in plays and pantomimes at the age of eight. At 13, he left for a boarding school in Hampshire after winning a scholarship to Lord Wandsworth College. Here, he participated in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and decided to apply for the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
While studying, Sands was befriended by director Derek Jarman, who coaxed him into being a last-minute replacement for David Bowie as the Devil in the last of three videos commissioned to promote Marianne Faithfull's 1979 album, Broken English. He's not on screen long, but the gig gave Sands his first taste of filming. However, he would have to endure a stint as a department store Santa Claus before he formed a theatre group that toured schools and youth clubs to give kids a chance to act in short films.
His sole line in his feature debut, Michael Blakemore's Privates on Parade (1983), was cut and Sands's hopes of playing Tarzan were dashed when funding fell through for what would eventually become Hugh Hudson's Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984). Christopher Lambert landed the lead, but Sands got to team with Anthony Hopkins in the Channel Four mini-series, A Married Man (1983), and cropped up as a Greek soldier in Penny Rye's tele-take on John Masefield's The Box of Delights. He did his own rowing in riling Rob Lowe's cocky American as snooty student Colin Gilchrist Fisher in Robert Boris's Oxford Blues and made a lifelong friend in John Malkovich during a five-month shoot in Thailand while playing hot-headed photojournalist Jon Swain in Roland Joffé's Oscar-winning account of the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, The Killing Fields (all 1984).
Following a roll in the hay with Twiggy ('which took about 15 takes') in Freddie Francis's body-snatching chiller, The Doctor and the Devils, Sands remained in the horror genre to play schizophrenic Laurence Hunningford in Sergio Guerraz and Dominique Othenin-Girard's After Darkness (both 1985), in which John Hurt was cast as his teacher brother. However, the same year saw Sands became a heart-throb after kissing Helena Bonham-Carter's Lucy Honeychurch in a Florentine field as George Emerson in James Ivory's heritage classic, A Room With a View.
Ismail Merchant's producing partner was unconvinced by the floppy-haired newcomer, however, and threatened to cancel the shoot unless John Travolta was hired in his stead. But Sands brought some relatable awkwardness to the role of the aesthete with a zest for life, who went skinny-dipping and fell out of an olive tree while rejoicing in love and beauty. 'I wanted him to be real, not a two-dimensional minor screen god,' he revealed later. 'I liked him in his lighter, sexier moments, less so when he was brooding.'
Shedding his clothes once more, Sands added a sinister touch to the dandyish élan as poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in Ken Russell's Gothic, which recalled the creation of Mary Shelley's much-filmed 1818 novel, Frankenstein. He also held his own alongside stars of the magnitude of Omar Sharif and Ava Gardner, as the man searching for the abducted Nancy Travis in William Hale's teleplay, Harem: The Loss of Innocence (both 1986).
But Sands was concerned about being typecast and dropped out of Merchant-Ivory's second E.M. Forster adaptation, Maurice, and decamped to Hollywood to co-star with Ellen Barkin in Mary Lambert's Siesta (both 1987) and with Cyndi Lauper in Ken Kwapis's Vibes (1988). Indeed, he left journalist wife Sarah Sands in the UK in order to pursue his ambitions. But, rather than seeking high-profile blockbusters, Sands was prepared to sign up for quirky independent projects that tested him as an actor. 'I didn't want to become a Hollywood actor,' he explained in one interview. As a result, he looked for 'things that took me out of myself...I think I found myself a little boring.'
That said, he agreed to take the title role in Steve Miner's Warlock (1989) because he thought that Sean Connery was going to play the witch-hunter. In the event, Richard E. Grant took the part and jousted to darkly comic effect with the pony-tailed ghoul intent on summoning Satan to modern-day Los Angeles. In addition to receiving a Best Actor nomination at the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards, Sands also earned the chance to reprise the role in Anthony Hickox's Warlock: The Armageddon (1993).
He was not averse to the mainstream, as he demonstrated as entomologist Dr James Atherton in Frank Marshall's creature feature, Arachnophobia (1990), which required Sands to have his face covered in spiders. He was in equally squirm-inducing territory as shape-shifting Swiss centipede, Yves Cloquet, in David Cronenberg's body horror interpretation of William S. Burrough's Naked Lunch (1991). Yet, Sands also showed to advantage as Sergio Giuramondo in Night Sun (1990), Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's Father Sergius, and as Franz Liszt in James Lapine's Impromptu (1991), which co-starred Hugh Grant as Frédéric Chopin and Judy Davis as George Sand.
Aware of the film's camper aspects, Sands dubbed it, 'Carry On Composer', and this subversive wit informed the unconventional line readings that were to become the trademark of his unchained acting style. He exuded melancholy as a lovesick predator in Shimako Sato's Tale of a Vampire (1992) and even managed to seem regretful as the sadistic surgeon who kidnaps Sherilyn Fenn and removes her limbs to prevent her from escaping in Jennifer Lynch's controversial Boxing Helena (1993). This is one of several Sands films currently unavailable on disc, which is a shame, as gives some of his most interesting performances in his lesser vaunted outings.
It's surprising to find Mike Figgis's The Browning Version (1994) out of reach, although Anthony Asquith's 1951 version of Terence Rattigan's play can be rented from Cinema Paradiso. This public school saga was the first of eight features that Sands and Figgis made together, although it would have been nine if Sean Bean hadn't pipped him to Stormy Monday (1988). Happy to take cameos as well as character parts, Sands rubbed shoulders with the Oscar-winning Nicolas Cage as vicious Latvian pimp Yuri Butso menacing Elisabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas (1995). He also played the AIDS-afflicted Robert Downey, Jr.'s nurse in One Night Stand (1997), film director Nic (with Jonathan Rhys Meyers playing his teenage self) in The Loss of Sexual Innocence (1999), Quentin the New Age masseur in Timecode (2000), the tour guide in Hotel (2001), and DCI Hackett in Suspension of Disbelief (2012). Sands also travelled to Hong Kong during the Covid pandemic to appear in Figgis's Mother Tongue, which is currently in post-production.
Figgis commended the fearlessness of his friend's acting and this is why directors of the calibre of Gianni Amelio and Wim Wenders requested him for Lamerica (1994) and The Million Dollar Hotel (2000). Dario Argento saw him as Erik, the curiously unblemished sewer-dwelling misanthrope in his re-imagining of Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera (1998), which co-starred Asia Argento as Christine. Yet, Sands was lucky to have been alive to take the role, as he had been stranded by a storm in the Andes during a hiking expedition that had claimed several members of another party.
While Cinema Paradiso can bring you Sands's slots in Chicago Hope (1994-2000), Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (1999-), Law and Order: Criminal Intent (2001-11), and The L Word (2004-09), we can't offer his display of aloof regality as Louis XIV in Roland Joffé's Vatel or his reunion with Ellen Barkin in Damian Harris's Mercy (both 2000). Indeed, Sands was beginning to spend more time on the small screen, seeking to clip the wings of Christian Clavier's emperor as Prince Klemens von Metternich in Yves Simoneau's lavish mini-series, Napoléon (2002) or give Keifer Sutherland's Jack Bauer trouble as Russian mobster Vladimir Bierko in Season Five of 24 (2006). He also excelled as Laurence Olivier in Chris Durlacher's Kenneth Tynan: In Praise of Hardcore (2005), which should be as available to rent as Sands's turn as John Le Mesurier in another BBC docudrama, Steve Bendelack's We're Doomed! The Dad's Army Story (2015).
Also rentable via a click are Sands's guest slots in Rose Red (2001), Stargate SG-1 (2005), Ghost Whisperer, Blood Ties, Agatha Christie's Marple: Towards Zero (all 2007), Lipstick Jungle (2008), Castle (2010), Above Suspicion (2011), Person of Interest (2012), Dexter (2013), Banshee, Crossbones, The Village (all 2014), Gotham (2015), Medici: Masters of Florence (2016), Man in an Orange Suit (2017), and Elementary (2018). Unfortunately, a menacing display in 'A Nasty Piece of Work' in Jason Blum's series, Into the Dark (2018), is out of reach, but don't miss the chance to see Sands step into Marlon Brando's shoes by becoming only the second actor to play Jor-El in two episodes of Smallville (2009-10).
Back on the big screen, Sands gave Jackie Chan a run for his money as crimelord Snakekead Staul in Gordon Chan's English-language debut, The Medallion (2003), before essaying Spain's first documented serial killer, Manuel Blanco Romasanta, in Paco Plaza's Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt (2004). Travelling to Germany, he played Hagen in Uli Edel's Sword of Xanten (aka Curse of the Ring, 2004), a TV version of the Norse myths that had inspired Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen duo of Siegfried and Kriemhold's Revenge (both 1924).
Back in Blighty, he played unorthodox doctor Hal Burns treating traumatised Second World War pilot Toby Jugg (Robert Pattinson) in Chris Durlacher's The Haunted Airman (2006), which was inspired by a psychological thriller by Dennis Wheatley. But, while four of his more recent films had scarcely been seen, Sands reached one of his biggest audiences as computer whizz Greco Montgomery in Ocean's Thirteen (2007), the concluding part of the heist trilogy that Steven Soderbergh has started with Ocean's Eleven (2001) and Ocean's Twelve (2004). On radio, he amused as Q opposite Toby Stephens in 10 BBC dramatisations of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels.
Sands remained in the mainstream as an Ori named Doci in Robert C. Cooper's Stargate: The Ark of Truth (2008), although this sequel drew a limited audience, as did Peter DeLuise's Robin Hood: Beyond Sherwood Forest (2009), in which Malcolm (Sands) attempts to lure Robin (Robin Dunne) into a trap using a girl who can change into a dragon. Perhaps this might make a left-field double bill with David Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), which cast Sands as the younger incarnation of Henrik Vanger, the wealthy businessman seeking his lost niece who was played by Christopher Plummer.
In between times, Sands proved suitably hissable as black market arms dealer and fight promoter Franklin McVeigh opposite Michael Jai White in Ben Ramsey's martial arts actioner, Blood and Bone (2009). He also showed his ruthless side as gang goon George Cutter in George Isaac's Brit Crime drama, The Deadly Game (aka All Things to All Men, 2013). Having popped up among the interviewees in The Last Impresario (2010), Gracie Otto's profile of British theatre entrepreneur, Michael White, Sands joined John Malkovich in a bit part in Diego Luna's farming biopic, Cesar Chavez (2014).
The rare lead of Richard Mellor came in Giles Foster's tele-adaptation of Rosamund Pilcher's Unknown Heart (2014). But Sands was back in the ranks as resentful son and murder suspect Philip Leonides in Gilles Pacquet-Brenner's take on Agatha Christie's Crooked House (2017).
If only Dan Cadan's wrestling romp, Walk Like a Panther was available on disc, as it would make for a splendid northern sporting duo with Marcus H. Rosenmüller's The Keeper (both 2018), the Bert Trautmann biopic in which Sands plays the president of Manchester City. The following year, he revisited his own past when he voiced George Emerson's father in an audio edition of A Room With a View. But the tone couldn't have been more contrastingly grave in Václav Marhoul's adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird (2019), in which Sands is despicably chilling as Garbos, the pitiless paedophile who offers a home to Joska (Petr Kotlár) after the Jewish orphan is entrusted to the local priest (Harvey Keitel) at the height of the Second World War.
The terrors of conflict were also apparent in Terence Davies's Benediction, which cast Sands in the minor role of the chief medical officer treating Great War poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden). A reunion with John Malkovich and Jonathan Rhys Meyers followed in Jon Keeyes's The Survivalist, a Covid thriller in which Sands plays Meyers's murdered father. He would enjoy a final outing with Malkovich in Robert Schwenke's Seneca: On the Creation of Earthquakes (2023). But his last appearance on the Cinema Paradiso roster (for now at any rate) came as
Lionel Foyster, the 1930s clergyman who is forced to call in a paranormal investigator in Steven M. Smith's The Ghosts of Borley Rectory (2021). As is often the case, Sands's performance will catch you off guard. No wonder he once remarked, 'As an actor, people quite often do ask you, "What do you want to play?" But I really have no idea. I respond to other people's ideas about who I should play.'
Frederic Forrest (1936-2023)
Frederic Fenimore Forrest, Jr. was born on 23 December 1936. Mother Virginia became a teacher, while father Frederic ran a greenhouse business. After one successful year, Forrest and younger sister Ginger were given Shetland ponies for Christmas. Spending his boyhood summers picking cotton and baling hay, Forrest attended Waxahachie High School, where he played four sports.
'All we had was the picture show,' he recalled in an interview. 'There was no television, so we'd go see all the movies.' His heroes were Method rebels like Marlon Brando and James Dean. But he didn't think about acting himself, despite being voted the handsomest boy in class. 'I fell into movies,' he confessed. 'I never thought about it. I didn't think I was good at anything. I didn't feel like I had a "so-called" talent. I wasn't good at anything people considered important. I really didn't know what I was going to do.'
Inspired by Dean's performances in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause, Elia Kazan's East of Eden (both 1955), and George Stevens's Giant (1956), Forrest travelled to New York to join the Actors Studio. However, he was so awestruck by the sight of Marlon Brando leaving the building that he signed up to the US Army while he weighed up his options. On being demobbed, Forrest studied radio, television, and theatre at Texas Christian University. Graduating in 1960, he married campus sweetheart Nancy Ann Whittaker and headed back to the Big Apple to train under acting gurus Sanford Meisner and Lee Strasberg.
In 1966, Forrest made his stage debut in the off-Broadway anti-war musical, Viet Rock, which influenced the epochal show Hair, which was filmed by Miloš Forman in 1979. As a member of the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, he also appeared in Futz!, a 1967 play about a farmer who falls for his pig that afforded Forrest his second screen credit when the show was recorded by Tom O'Horgan in 1969. His debut had come under the pseudonym Matt Garth, as a boxer torn between two women in Andy Milligan's sexploitation romp, The Filthy Five (1968).
When the off-Broadway production, Silhouettes, transferred to Los Angeles, Forrest decided to take his chance and seek film and television work. However, the show flopped and he found himself baking pizzas and driving a brewery truck. Determined to hone his craft, Forrest attended classes at Actors Studio West, where he was spotted by director Stuart Millar, who cast him alongside Richard Widmark in When the Legends Die (1972). Despite being 35 at the time, Forrest played 18 year-old Native American rodeo rider Tom Black Bull and received a Best Newcomer nomination at the Golden Globes for his efforts.
The role of Tony Fargo followed in Richard Fleischer's crime drama, The Don Is Dead (1973), in which Anthony Quinn and Robert Forster fight a turf war. But, despite acclaim for his performance as a man wrongly confined in a psychiatric institution for 26 years in William A. Graham's teleplay, Larry (1974), Forrest struggled for work.
'Hollywood never knew how to peg me,' he later complained. 'This one big writer said, "What kind of actor are you?" I said, "Strawberry."' Eventually, he realised 'I had to learn to lie and ask them, "How old do I look?" They'd tell me I looked 24 so I'd say "No, I'm 25" and they'd go, "I thought so." If I had been honest and said I was 35, they would have told me I was too old.' Frustrated, Forrest lowered his expectations. 'This is a fickle town, no rhyme or reason to it,' he said. 'By the time you go down the driveway to pick up your mail, you're forgotten. I waited a year after Larry to try to do something good, but no scripts came.'
In fact, Forrest had already landed one of the most significant roles of his career. He's not on screen for long, as Mark, the bespectacled man talking to Ann (Cindy Williams) on San Francisco's Union Square. But the words 'He'd kill us if he got the chance' are heard repeatedly, as surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) tries to assess their meaning in Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974). In many ways an audio variation on Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) - as, indeed, was Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981) - this tense Watergate era treatise on paranoia became an American classic and put Forrest on Coppola's radar.
First, however, he had to pay his dues in overlooked items like The Gravy Train (1974) and Permission to Kill (1975), which perhaps should be on disc, as the first was co-written by Terrence Malick and the second teamed Dirk Bogarde and Ava Gardner. Forrest's turn as Lee Harvey Oswald in Mel Stuart's TV-movie, Ruby and Oswald (1978), is also worth seeing. However, Cinema Paradiso users can catch Forrest fulfilling an ambition as Cary in Arthur Penn's rustling Western, The Missouri Breaks (1976), which starred Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. Also available to rent is It's Alive 2: It Lives Again (1978), Larry Cohen's sequel to It's Alive (1974), in which Forrest and Kathleen Lloyd's mutant infant is targeted by government forces.
In between these assignments, Forrest spent a year in the Philippines as part of the ensemble shooting Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). He excelled as Jay 'Chef' Hicks, who is part of the expedition into Cambodia led by Major Willard (Martin Sheen) to track down the rebellious Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). The sequence in which Chef freaks out after coming across a tiger while scavenging for mangoes sums up the attitude of many conscripts towards the war in South-East Asia
However, as is revealed in the documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991), the shoot took its toll on all concerned. As Forrest would recall, 'Because we were creating a surreal, dreamlike war, nightmare personal things began happening. Sometimes we would think we were losing our minds. I became almost catatonic in the Philippines. I could think of no reason to do anything.' On returning to the States, he claimed to have 'drunk enough to last me a lifetime' and even played Marc Antony in a Los Angeles theatre production of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar for free in order to clear his mind.
For all his problems, Forrest was on a roll and he drew more excellent notices as Huston Dyer, the deserter sergeant-turned chauffer who tries to keep self-destructive rock diva Mary Rose Foster (Bette Midler) on the straight and narrow in Mark Rydell's The Rose (1979). Forrest would land Best Supporting Actor nominations at both the Golden Globes and the Oscars. But, while he lost out to Melvyn Douglas in Hal Ashby's Being There, his cumulative efforts in 1979 brought him recognition from the National Society of Film Critics.
As bad luck would have it, Forrest would be out of action for the next three years working on two ill-starred projects that dragged his reputation down with them. Filmed at his new Zoetrope facility, Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart sought to pay homage to the musicals of Hollywood's heyday. However, delays over the lavish Las Vegas sets meant the critics were ready to pounce on the story of Reality Wrecking Company mechanic Forrest and Teri Garr's troubled marriage. Also made under the Coppola umbrella, Wim Wenders's Hammett (both 1982), was similarly beset by problems in imagining how crime writer Dashiell Hammett (Forrest) came to pen the hard-boiled classic, The Maltese Falcon, which John Huston would adapt with Humphrey Bogart as shamus Sam Spade in 1941.
As a result of reshoots, Forrest met second wife, Marilu Henner, when they were asked to kiss as part of a screen test. 'Someone almost had to throw cold water on us,' Henner later remembered. 'The tape is pretty wild.' Unfortunately, the marriage only lasted three years, while Forrest's union with British model Nina Dean proved even shorter lived, as she started struggling with schizophrenia.
Curiously, Forrest would play Hammett again, opposite James Woods's Roy Cohn, in Citizen Cohn (1992), Frank Pierson's account of the HUAC Communist witch-hunt in postwar Hollywood. By this time, however, Forrest's hopes of stardom had faded and he settled into character roles. During a busy 1983, for example, he charmed as health food restaurateur Steve Richman in Martha Coolidge's teen romcom, Valley Girl, before displaying flawed vulnerability as Ivan Fray, the husband of dying 1950s mother of 10, Lucille Fray (Ann-Margret) in John Erman's teleplay, Who Will Look After My Children?
He completed the year as Bob Chesneau, the CIA agent having an affair with British bank manager Barbara Dean (Judi Dench) in Stephen Frears's take on David Hare's British TV-movie, Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983). Staying on the small screen, Forrest essayed Wild Bill Hickok alongside Janes Alexander in James Goldstone's Calamity Jane (1985), lasted the first five episodes of 21 Jump Street (1987-91) as Captain Richard Jenkins, and guested as the outlaw Blue Duck in Larry McMurtrey's much-garlanded Western mini-series, Lonesome Dove (1989).
Several performances from this period have slipped through the home entertainment cracks. However, Cinema Paradiso can offer such Forrest outings as Sharron Miller's Little Girl Lost, in which he and Tess Harper play grieving foster parents; Francis Ford Coppola's Tucker: The Man and His Dream (both 1988), in which he forms part of Jeff Bridges's team of mechanics; Abel Ferrara's take on Elmore Leonard's Cat Chaser, in which his army veteran plans a scam with former NYPD officer, Charles Durning; and Costa-Gavras's Music Box (both 1989), in which Forrest impresses as Jack Burke, the attorney prosecuting Mike Laszlo (Armin Mueller-Stahl) for war crimes.
Forrest's lack of luck with prestige projects bit again, as he played Chuck Newty in Jack Nicholson's The Two Jakes (1990), a log-delayed Robert Towne-scripted sequel to Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974). Following a TV spot in The Young Riders (1989-92), Forrest found himself playing an obsessive psychologist named Judd in giallo maestro Dario Argento's first American picture, Trauma (1993). The same year, he revelled in the role of Nick, the white supremacist owner of a Los Angeles Nazi surplus store who catches William 'D-Fens' Foster (Michael Douglas) on the wrong day in Joel Schumacher's brutal satire, Falling Down.
Having hooked up with fellow Apocalyse Now survivor Dennis Hopper on Chasers, Forrest turned baddy as avaricious sheep farmer Sam Garland in Donald Petrie's Lassie. He also showed a no-nonsense side as prison officer Weisbad in John Frankenheimer's Against the Wall (both 1994), a fictionalised version of the 1971 Attica prison riot that co-starred Kyle MacLachlan and Samuel L. Jackson. And he remained in uniform as Admiral Pendleton in Andrew Stevens's Crash Dive (1996), in which the nuclear submarine USS Ulysses is hijacked by Yugoslavian terrorists.
In 1997, Forrest reunited with Marlon Brando, who plays a snuff movie director who strikes a deal with Johnny Depp's impoverished Native American in The Brave, which remains Depp's sole directorial outing. Later in the year, Wim Wenders came calling again and Forrest appeared as Ranger McDermott in The End of Violence, which centres on another film-maker, this time played by Bill Pullman. However, he dropped down the cast list as Edsel Dundee in Craig Hamman's abrasive diatribe on honour among thieves, Boogie Boy (1998).
A similar tone was adopted by Isaac H. Eaton's Shadow Hours and Jim Wynorski's Militia (both 2000). However, Forrest was given a more substantial chance to show what he could still do, as General Earle Wheeler persuading President Lyndon B. Johnson (Michael Gambon) to increase US involvement in Vietnam in John Frankenheimer's Path to War (2002). He also bonded well with Blythe Danner as a pair of reunited lovers in Keith Gaby's The Quality of Light (2003). But Forrest only made one more film, playing Sean Penn's father in All the King's Men (2006), Steven Zaillian's remake of Robert Rossen's 1949 Best Picture-winning adaptation of the Robert Penn Warren political classic that had earned Broderick Crawford the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as crooked operator, Willie Stark.
