Wallace Shawn Movies
The son of an editor for the New Yorker, the diminutive comedic actor Wallace Shawn speaks with a recognizable lisp that is appropriate for his frequent portrayals of little irate men. A graduate of both Harvard and Oxford University, he has taught several courses in English and struggled as a playwright in the early '70s; in 1977 he translated Machiavelli's The Mandrake. Shawn broke into films soon after, building a successful career as a supporting actor to help fund his playwriting. He debuted in two of the best films of 1979: Woody Allen's Manhattan and Bob Fosse's All That Jazz. In 1981, he co-wrote the semi-autobiographical My Dinner With André, a talky comedy starring himself and theater director André Gregory in a dinner conversation, directed by Louis Malle. The movie was acclaimed by critics, but many audiences grew tired during its two-hour running time. After this personal project, Shawn would build a career out of playing brief but surprisingly memorable roles in a long list of movies. One of his most warmly remembered appearances was in 1987 as Vizzini, the inept leader of a misfit criminal gang, in The Princess Bride. The same year, he supplied the heroic voice for the Masked Avenger in Woody Allen's Radio Days. Taking the next step to straight voice acting, he lent his distinctive speech to the animated features The Goofy Movie, All Dogs Go to Heaven, and both installments of Toy Story. He also continued to work with Woody Allen throughout the next decade in the films Shadows and Fog and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. Taking his quirky persona to the small screen, Shawn had several guest-star appearances on TV shows like Taxi, Murphy Brown, and The Cosby Show, but he didn't have his own reoccurring character until he reprised his feature-film role of Mr. Hall for the ABC sitcom version of Clueless. He quickly followed that with the role of Zek on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Throughout his acting career, Shawn has managed to continue writing successful plays, and eventually adapted one of them, The Designated Mourner, for a feature film in 1997. After a few brief appearances in some forgettable films in the late '90s, he gained some larger roles in TV movies and miniseries. In 2002, he played the publishing boss Mr. Gelb for the "Greta" story in Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity: Three Portraits. He then joined a large cast of other comedians for Danny DeVito's crime comedy Duplex in 2003. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide- 1979
Not to be confused with the 1986 TV miniseries of the same name, Strong Medicine is the bizarre tale of a bizarre young woman, played bizarrely by Kate Manheim. Shunted aside by society in general, she loses all touch with reality. It helps not at all that she comes in contact with several equally "lost" souls. For an avant-garde exercise, Strong Medicine has a remarkably high-profile cast; it also features Raul Julia and My Dinner With Andre's Wallace Shawn. Filmed in 1979, Strong Medicine lay on the shelf unreleased for nearly six years. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Kate Manheim
On the heels of Annie Hall, the Oscar-winning romantic comedy that rocketed Woody Allen to the front ranks of American filmmakers, Manhattan continued Allen's romantic obsessions in a slightly darker, more pessimistic vein. Allen stars as Isaac Davis, a TV comedy writer sick of the pap he is forced to churn out and harboring dreams of being the great American novelist. His love life is in barbed-wire territory: he is tormented by his second ex-wife Jill (Meryl Streep), a lesbian who has written a tell-all book about their marriage, and he is dating teenager Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), to whom he refuses to commit, and keeps hinting that a breakup may be imminent. Isaac's disillusioned (and married) best friend Yale (Michael Murphy) has begun an affair with the cerebral writer Mary Wilke (Diane Keaton). While Isaac makes a last minute, sink-or-swim decision to quit his job and devote all of his time to book writing, and neurotically moans about what the lack of a full time job will do to him ("My parents won't have as good of a seat in the synagogue," he moans. "They'll be far away from God... away from the action") Yale is crippled by his lack of resolve, as indicated by his inability to leave his wife Emily (Anne Byrne). Meanwhile, Isaac and {%Mary) begin to fall for one another. Tracy then tells Isaac the basic truth that none of his hung-up friends and past lovers fully realizes: "You have to have a little more faith in people." Manhattan is both a seriocomic dissection of perpetually dissatisfied New Yorkers and an ode to the city itself, filmed in glorious black-and-white by ace cinematographer Gordon Willis, and set to a score of rhapsodic George Gershwin music. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, (more)
