[Inaugurating a new series about movies that are not currently available on home video, and why this sucks.]

Patty Hearst wasn't Natasha Richardson's first movie, but it did mark the first time that the then-twenty-five-year-old actress had the lead role in a feature film. It also marked the first time that she was asked to pass for American, an ability that can make or break an English performer who hopes to make it in the international marketplace. In fact, she was asked to pass for an actual American, in a film based on Hearst's own account of her 1974 abduction by the crackpot "revolutionary" group the SLA and that event's aftermath--a film that Hearst herself, who posed for publicity photos with her movie doppelganger, had some input on. But no pressure! The director Paul Schrader made the movie on a tight budget at a time when he was coming off some expensive failures; much of the first half is set in the house where Hearst was kept prisoner. In fact, because of Schrader's decision to tell the story from Hearst's point of view, a fair amount of it is set in the dark closet where she was locked until she began parroting the SLA members' slogans and convinced them that she was ready to switch sides and become a guerrilla soldier. The strategy means that Richardson has to not just carry the picture but to supply its heart and soul, while remaining essentially mysterious to the audience: as Patty goes from being helpless, whimpering victim to fugitive from justice, you stare at her, trying to figure out where her head is at. It isn't until the end, when she's behind bars and plotting out how best to spin her story, that it's fully clear that, up to that point, she hasn't really known herself.

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Natasha Richardson, who has died, at 45, after a well-reported accident on a Canadian ski resort, was born into it. Natasha, like her sister Joely, was the daughter of the director Tony Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave (who in turn was the sister of Lynn Redgrave and the daughter of Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson). Natasha made her movie debut at four in her father's 1968 The Charge of the Light Brigade, in which her mother played the female lead. After studying at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, Richardson began her career in earnest at the Old Vic, where she played such roles as Ophelia and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1986, she appeared with her mother in a production of Chekhov's The Seagull. Although a famous name can help someone get a foot in the door in the entertainment business, it is not automatically a guarantee of a successful career, something that could be attested to by any number of people who probably owe me a dinner for not mentioning their names. But by the time Richardson made her mature movie debut, playing Mary Shelley in Ken Russell's 1986 Gothic, it was clear that she had the talent to back it up. Her first real chance to show what she could do on-screen came in 1988, when Paul Schrader cast her in the difficult title role of Patty Hearst. In her review in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote that Richardson had "been handed a big unwritten role" and added, "She feels her way into it, and she fills it" and "always has something in reserve--you keep waiting for what she may show you next."

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OK, so it was an accident. In a revealing new interview with New York magazine, the 61-year-old director of Pink Flamingos and Hairspray makes it clear he’s not ready for a life of early bird specials and Matlock reruns. He’s ready to start shooting his 17th film Fruitcake, and Cry-Baby is about to follow Hairspray to the Broadway stage. He’s working on a book called Role Models, “a self-portrait where I write profiles of other people and how much I love them and how much they changed my life and influenced me—famous people, criminals, people you’ve never heard of.” But as Ariel Levy writes, “his interests have remained intact: art, sex, drugs, class, and transgression.”

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That Guy!'s salute to Black History Month continues with a look at one of our favorite contemporary African-American character actors, Ving Rhames. A powerfully built six-footer with an intimidating mein and a penchant for playing bruisers and bad-asses, Rhames is in fact one of Hollywood's most notorious nice guys, a deeply spiritual and profoundly humanitarian person with a reputation in America's most backstabbing town for always being the touch for someone in need. Born with the substantially less intimidating Christian name of "Irving" in 1959, Rhames picked up his stage name not from the mean streets of his native Harlem, but from the decidedly non-superfly Stanley Tucci, a classmate of his at SUNY-Purchase. After formative experiences at the High School of Performing Arts and on Broadway, he launched a successful film career in the mid-1990s and has gone on to become something of a go-to guy for casting directors looking for a deft blend of intimidation and intelligence. (Which is not to say that his film career is nothing but bluster: he not only played a drag queen in a TV movie entitled Holiday Heart, but recently appeared in the excrable I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry, singing "I'm Every Woman" while naked in a locker room full of men.)

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