The French actor Jean Martin, who died on February 2 at the age of 86, had a distinguished career in the theater, where he appeared in the original productions of two of Samuel Beckett's plays, Waiting for Godot (as Lucky) and Endgame (as Clov). He also served with the French Resistance during World War II. In movies, though, he was one of those people who achieved immortality largely through his performance in a single role, that of Colonel Mathieu in Gillo Pontecorvo's great political film The Battle of Algiers (1966). Martin was the only professional actor in that movie's cast. Compared to the actors playing Algerian revolutionaries, his role was stylized and trickily conceived: he represented the face of the oppressive French colonial government, yet he was also the director's mouthpiece, explaining the film's view of guerrilla insurrection to the audience in speeches that made it clear that, however the action of the film migh turn out, he knew that he was playing a losing game. Eventually "the people" would emerge victorious; all he could do was postpone the inevitable. Martin delivered a remarkable performance, supplying a theatrical, instructional element to the movie without violating its documentary-style texture. (He might have been hired as much for his politics as for his talent; the actor was a commmitted leftist who, despite his heroic military background with the Resistance as an paratrooper in Indochina, was blackballed as punishment for having signed a petition protesting the French presence in Algeria.)

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Harold Pinter, who died at the age of 78 on Christmas Eve, was very likely the only writer ever to win the Nobel Prize, the French Légion d'honneur, and inspire an episode of Seinfeld. He was also a towering enough figure in modern theater to lend his name to a word: "Pinteresque." It was most commonly used in reference to the famous pauses written into his plays, and many a theater lover born during or after Pinter's first period of success knew long before discovering his plays that describing the sight of an actor daring the audience to wonder if he'd just forgotten his lines as Pinteresque was an easy way of seeming smart. More generally, and more and more as Pinter's career went on, it came to stand for the whole mysterious, threatening world he created on stage, a place where everyone seemed to be nursing a secret grudge and perpetually squaring off against and testing each other, and the balance of power kept shifting. Pinter, who attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1948, entered theater as an actor and spent twelve years struggling to get by as a member of various repertory companies; for about half that time, he performed under the name "David Baron." His time as a starving young actor in London overlapped with that of Michael Caine, and Caine has often enjoyed telling interviewers about the time good old "David" stormed out of the pub, saying that he was bloody sick to death of this bloody business and was going home to try to write something.

Speaking to The New York Times' Mel Gussow many years later, Pinter would recall that, as an actor, "My favourite roles were undoubtedly the sinister ones. They're something to get your teeth into." As an actor, he--like his American counterpart, Sam Shepard--brought to his writing an inside understanding of the charge that actors get out of the kind of menacing game-playing and shape-shifting that would go on in his plays, and how easily they can impart their excitement in those kinds of roles to the audience. He joined that kind of showmanship to a modernist sense that the hostility he put onstage might seem all the more haunting for seeming oblique in its motivating force, and to a poetic sense of spoken language that immediately joined him, in the minds of critics and the public, to his friend Samuel Beckett (who, as it happened, also died shortly before Christmas, nineteen years ago).

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The death of Anthony Minghella yesterday cut short the career of a gifted filmmaker who may have only begun to discover his own potential. Minghella's first movie, the 1991 Truly, Madly, Deeply, was small scale but struck deep in its emotional impact; a deserving cult hit, one could barely guess from its intimate charms that Minghella would, by the time of The English Patient, begin to demonstrate a rare contemporary mastery of epic filmmaking, bringing rich textures to the screen while skillfully deploying vast crews and across sprawling landscapes. One of Minghella's smallest and least-known projects is his two-aprt, fifteen-minute version of Samuel Beckett's Play (2000), Mighella's contribution to the multi-director, comprehensive "Beckett on Film": project. This bizarre, striking realization of the playwright's image-play about a man, his wife, and his mistress trapped together for eternity also serves as an intriguing footnote to the director's career for reuniting him with the stars of his first film, Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman, and the female lead of his biggest hit, Kristen-Scott Thomas.

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The Screengrab's Paul Clark is away from a workable computer, but asked me to post this tribute to Anthony Minghella:

MSN is reporting that Oscar-winning filmmaker Anthony Minghella passed away last night from a brain hemorrhage. Minghella, whose next film, the HBO/BBC production No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, is set to premiere next month in the UK, was fifty-four years old.

To many moviegoers, Minghella was best known as the director of prestige pictures such as The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Cold Mountain. In fact, so associated was he with high-toned adaptations that he recently appeared as the moderator of a literary program in last year's Atonement. But his best work was not so easily pigeonholed.

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