Peter O’Toole voted best actor for ‘The Stuntman’

Press, 29 August 1984, Page 14

Peter O’Toole voted best actor for ‘The Stuntman’

Peter O’Toole won the best actor award from the National Society of Film Critics and was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in “The Stuntman,” an unusual thriller screening on One at 8.30 tonight.

Richard Rush also received an Oscar nomination as best director for the film, which also stars Barbara Hershey and Steve Railsback.

Rush spent nearly a decade finding the money and developing the techniques required to turn Art Brodeur’s novel into a feature film.

After finally finishing "The Stuntman,” Rush had difficulty getting suitable distribution for the film in spite of a test engagement in Seattle where it did more business in its first week than any film except “The Empire Strikes Back.”

Finally, Twentieth Cen-tury-Fox picked up the film for national release and the Directors’ Guild of America nominated Rush for outstanding directorial achievement.

In the film, a fugitive from the law accidentally causes the death of a stunt man on location, and the director (Peter O’Toole) persuades the fugitive

to take the stuntman’s place. The world of movie-mak-ing is the perfect place for the young fugitive to hide until he begins to suspect

that the director would allow him to be killed if it would help his film. His attempts to escape soon become a matter of life and death. In Rolling Stone magazine, Michael Sragow described the film as “a bravura piece of moviemaking — a true popular work of modernist art. It makes the audience experience the uncertainty of the contemporary world in a visceral, often hilarious way.” Rush said in 1981 that the attraction of Brodeur’s book was the idea of the fugitive hiding his identity by posing as a stunt man on the film, and falling under the dominance of the director. “This seemed a marvellous coptext in which to examine the universal paranoia we have controlling our destinies and lives,” Rush said. “The story offered all'the spice for a giant action film, and so fulfilled a commitment to solid entertainment. It also became a marvellously tough clothes-line on which I could hang all that thematic laundry.”