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He is approaching 75, but Howard Hawks still fits the old Ben Hecht description of him as ‘a drawling fashion plate, apurr with melodrama.’
On the stage of the Carnegie Theater for the Chicago Film Festival last November, a month before the premiere of his Rio Lobo, he was the image of the consummate professional. He was wearing rimless dark glasses, and kept them on even when the audience, through an electrician’s error, was left in darkness. As he sat there in the spotlight, asking for light, it seemed oddly appropriate – recalling Robin Wood’s words about ‘the eternal darkness… against which the Hawksian stoicism shines.’
Norman Lloyd was not too impressed with director Peter Weir when Weir asked him to audition for the role of the headmaster in Dead Poets Society in 1988. After all, he had been working in showbusiness for around 65 years by then and was one of the stars of hit series St Elsewhere.
But Weir was Australian and had never seen the US hospital drama. Lloyd, who was in his seventies, did audition and he got the part of the stern principal at the stuffy private school, alongside Robin Williams’s liberal English teacher, but only after Lloyd had made sure that the try-out was not going to clash with his twice-daily tennis schedule.
Lake Forest Obituary: Joseph Patrick Howard, 90 patch.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from patch.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.