“A unique twist,” Kearns tells the , “is that 20 years later, Brando had become something of a recluse, only taking occasional cameo roles, when he was convinced by director Andrew Bergman to ‘come back’ as a Mafia boss in The Freshman. Brando agreed, only if he could base the character on Don Corleone. So, in a parody of his landmark role in The Godfather, he was ‘discovered’ once again, surprising critics and audiences alike as a deft comic actor.”
A one-man career reviver
The patron saint of Hollywood comebacks is Quentin Tarantino. And the most significant miracle he ever worked was on John Travolta. By the end of the 1980s, the star of Grease and Saturday Night Fever was reduced to appearing in the Look Who’s Talking films, a series of family comedies in which the thoughts of babies and pets were voiced by actors. The third film in the series, Look Who’s Talking Now, was a box-office bomb in 1993. But less than a year later, Travolta was in cinemas as the black-suited Vincent Vega in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. An Oscar nomination followed, and he was the coolest man in Tinseltown again.
Not that Travolta was the only beneficiary of this casting: catching fallen stars has been good for Tarantino’s reputation, too. “When he fetches a forgotten or devalued actor from the attic – Travolta, Pam Grier, Robert Forster, Kurt Russell, Don Johnson – I often feel like I’m being somewhat one-upped, as if he were shaming me for not appreciating those folks’ careers and abilities,” says Shawn Levy, the author of biographies of Jerry Lewis, Robert De Niro and Paul Newman, among others. “I don’t think that being their rescuer, as it were, means as much to him as proving that he himself is a savant for loving their undervalued abilities or bodies of work. I picture him scanning his VHS collection and scouring some kind of not-dead-yet website to find performers he can flaunt in future projects.”
