March 9: Happy Birthday Raúl Juliá

[TMC]

https://lebeauleblog.com/2018/03/09/...nd-raul-julia/

Raúl Juliá (1940-1994) became well known to film audiences in his last dozen years or so of life as a talented and versatile character actor and occasional leading man. He received the first of three Golden Globe nominations for his film work for Paul Mazursky’s Tempest, a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He was also nominated for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Moon Over Parador. He had prominent roles in films like One From the Heart, The Morning After, Tequila Sunrise, and Romero, and of course many viewers will remember him playing Gomez Addams in the two early-1990s Addams Family features. He won posthumous Emmy and Golden Globe honors for the TV movie The Burning Season.

What many of his film fans may not have been aware of was that Juliá was also a distinguished stage actor. He had begun his theatrical career as a young man in his native Puerto Rico, and in the mid-sixties moved to New York; he soon began a lengthy association with Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival. He made his Broadway debut in 1968, and in 1972 received the first of four Tony nominations, for a musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Two Gentleman of Verona. His Shakespeare roles included the title roles of Othello and Macbeth, Prospero in The Tempest, and Pertruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. One of his most famous musical theater roles, which brought him another Tony nomination, was as Macheath in The Threepenny Opera. A 1989 New Zealand film of the musical, titled Mack the Knife, preserves Juliá’s performance.