![]() ![]() Piaf was devastated.The huge weight gain De Niro underwent to play Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull is regularly and rightly cited as indicative of his intense commitment to the craft, but De Niro’s fearless, if in this case, perhaps slightly misguided, pursuit of excellence is equally evident in Bernardo Bertolucci’s five-and-a-half-hour epic 1900. The plane crashed in the Azores, killing him and everyone else onboard. Four months later, after agreeing to a rematch with LaMotta, Cerdan took a flight from France to New York to visit his girlfriend, the singer Edith Piaf. The film focuses on that rather than following Cerdan's story, which quickly turned to tragedy. ![]() "I felt like, you know, God had given me the world," LaMotta said of his win it was "absolutely the happiest moment of my life". In June 1949, LaMotta fights world middleweight champion Marcel Cerdan. ![]() For the sake of streamlining the film, the characters of Pete and Joey were merged. In real life, the victim was his friend and the co-author of his autobiography, Pete Savage. The scene in which he beats his brother Joey (Joe Pesci) up for the vaguest suspicion that he might have slept with Vikki is not quite accurate. ![]() "I was able to talk Vickie into not leaving me, but maybe she was right about me being a maniac," Jake wrote. Both Jake and Vikki LaMotta's books tell harrowing stories of their life together, marred by his paranoid jealousy and violence. The depiction of their relationship onscreen is fair, going by Vikki's own autobiography, published after her death in 2005. LaMotta meets his second wife, Vikki (Cathy Moriarty), at a swimming pool in the Bronx. For De Niro's own sake, though, it's probably a good thing no one has asked him to play William Pitt the Younger ( for which he would have to drink three bottles of port a day), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (for which he would have to be paralysed from the waist down) or Admiral Nelson (for which he would have to be shot in the arm and have it amputated on board ship during a battle, and later also get shot in the head). It's a magnificent effort towards historical accuracy, and makes for a remarkable performance. Then, for the part of the film that follows LaMotta's retirement, he went on an eating tour of France and Italy to gain a reported 60lbs of genuine washed-up boxer flab. Famously, De Niro spent almost a year training with LaMotta to learn his distinctive style and develop a similar physique. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |