István Szabó Defends Past as Informant

The Guardian reports that Hungarian director István Szabó, 67, whose Mephisto won the 1981 best foreign-language film Academy Award, has been exposed "as a former informant for the communist authorities in 1950s Hungary. His activities coincided with the Soviet crackdown that followed the 1956 revolution and occurred when he was a student at the Budapest Academy of Film."
Szabó defended himself from the accusations, saying that "the state security job was the bravest and most daring endeavor of my life because we saved one of our classmates after the revolution of 1956 from exposure and certain hanging."
Besides Mephisto, which stars Klaus Maria Brandauer as an actor who sells out to the Nazis, Szabó’s films include Colonel Redl (1985), [...]

by Andre Soares | January 28, 2006   
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BEING JULIA – Annette Bening, Jeremy Irons

Being Julia (2004)
Direction: István Szabó
Screenplay: Ronald Harwood; from W. Somerset Maugham’s 1937 novel Theatre
Cast: Annette Bening, Jeremy Irons, Shaun Evans, Bruce Greenwood, Miriam Margolyes, Juliet Stevenson, Lucy Punch, Michael Gambon, Sheila McCarthy, Leigh Lawson, Rosemary Harris, Rita Tushingham
 

 

A LITTLE ABOUT AVICE
In Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1950 Oscar-winning classic All About Eve, Bette Davis plays Margo Channing, a major Broadway star who, despite her talent and wit, falls prey to the ambitious wannabe Eve Harrington: sweet, soft-spoken Anne Baxter on the outside, ruthless, poisonous gargoyle on the inside.
More than a decade earlier, in 1937 to be exact, W. Somerset Maugham had written Theatre, a novel about a West End star, the stage diva Julia Lambert (that four years later would [...]

by Andre Soares | December 26, 2004   
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