portraits

Pencils on paper 33×24 cm

Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó (20 October 1882 – 16 August 1956), better known as Bela Lugosi, was a Hungarian-American actor, famous for portraying Count Dracula in the original 1931 film and for his roles in various other horror films. He had been playing small parts on the stage in his native Hungary before making his first film in 1917, but had to leave the country after the failed Hungarian Revolution. He had roles in several films in Weimar Germany before arriving in America as a seaman on a merchant ship. In 1927, he appeared as Count Dracula in a Broadway adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, where he was talent-spotted as a character actor for the new Hollywood talkies. He would appear in the classic 1931 Dracula by Universal Pictures. Through the 1930s, he occupied an important niche in popular horror films, with their East European setting, but his Hungarian accent limited his repertoire, and he tried unsuccessfully to avoid typecasting. Meanwhile, he was often paired with Boris Karloff, who was able to demand top billing. To his frustration, Lugosi was increasingly restricted to minor parts, kept employed by the studio principally for the sake of his name on the posters. By this time, Lugosi had been receiving regular medication for sciatic neuritis, and he became addicted to morphine and methadone. This drug dependence was noted by producers, and the offers eventually dwindled down to a few parts in Ed Wood’s low-budget movies. Lugosi died of a heart attack on August 16, 1956, while lying on a couch in his Los Angeles home. Lugosi was buried wearing one of the Dracula Cape costumes, per the request of his son and fifth wife, in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. His gestures and his hypnotic look  made him famous all over the world.

Pencils on paper 33×24 cm

Rosario Dawson (born May 9, 1979) is an American actress, singer, and writer. Dawson was born in New York City, New York. Her mother, Isabel Celeste, is a writer and singer who is of Puerto Rican and Afro-Cuban descent.  As a child, Dawson made a brief appearance on Sesame Street. At the age of 15, she was subsequently discovered on her front porch step by photographer Larry Clark and Harmony Korine, where Korine lauded her as being perfect for a part he had written in his screenplay that would become the controversial 1995 film Kids. She went on to star in varied roles, ranging from independent films to big budget blockbusters including Rent, He Got Game, and Men in Black II. She starred as Becky in 2006’s Clerks II, and mentioned in Back to the Well, the making-of documentary, that the donkey show sequence was what made her decide to take the role. She also appeared in the adaptation of the graphic novel Sin City, co-directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, portraying Gail, a prostitute-dominatrix. Also in that year, she appeared in a graphically violent scene in the Rob Zombie film The Devil’s Rejects. Though the scene was cut from the final film, it is available in the deleted scenes on the DVD release. In my personal opinion, the role of the prostitute Gail in the movie Sin City is memorable: “Shoot me now or get the hell out of my way.”

Pencils on paper 33×24 cm

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock,  (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English film director and producer. Often nicknamed “The Master of Suspense”, he pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, renowned as England’s best director, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood in 1939 and became a US citizen in 1955. Over a career spanning more than half a century, Hitchcock fashioned for himself a distinctive and recognisable directorial style. He pioneered the use of a camera made to move in a way that mimics a person’s gaze, forcing viewers to engage in a form of voyeurism. Hitchcock directed more than fifty feature films in a career spanning six decades. Psycho is almost certainly Hitchcock’s best-known film.Produced on a constrained budget of $800,000, it was shot in black-and-white on a spare set using crew members from his television show “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”. The unprecedented violence of the shower scene, the early death of the heroine, the innocent lives extinguished by a disturbed murderer became the defining hallmarks of a new horror movie genre and have been copied by many authors of subsequent films. Hitchcock died at age 80 in his Bel Air home of renal failure.

Pencils on paper 33×24 cm

Rutger Oelsen Hauer born 23 January 1944) is a Dutch actor and writer. His career began in 1969 with the title role in the popular Dutch television series Floris. Hauer was born in Breukelen in the Netherlands, the son of drama teachers Arend and Teunke. Hauer grew up in Amsterdam. Since his parents were very occupied with their careers, he and his three sisters (one older, two younger) were brought up mostly by nannies. At the age of 15, Hauer ran off to sea and spent a year scrubbing decks aboard a freighter. Returning home, he worked as an electrician and a joiner for three years while attending acting classes at night school. Hauer joined an experimental troupe, with which he remained for five years before Paul Verhoeven cast him in the lead role of the successful 1969 television series Floris, a Dutch medieval action drama. The role made him famous in his native country, and Hauer reprised his role for the 1975 German remake Floris von Rosemund. Hauer made his American debut in the Sylvester Stallone film Nighthawks (1981) as a psychopathic and cold blooded terrorist named Wulfgar. The following year, he appeared in arguably his most famous and acclaimed role as the eccentric and violent but sympathetic anti-hero Roy Batty in Ridley Scott’s 1982 science fiction thriller Blade Runner, in which role he improvised the famous tears in rain soliloquy. His monologue at the end of the film is entered in the history of cinema. “I’ve seen things you people would not believe, attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion,  i watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gates. All Those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain . Time to Die. “

Pencils on paper 33×24 cm

Salma Hayek Jiménez (born September 2, 1966) is a Mexican and American film actress, director and producer. She began her career in Mexico and at the age of 23, Hayek landed the title role in Teresa (1989), a successful Mexican telenovela that made her a star in Mexico. Hayek moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1991 to study acting under Stella Adler. Due to dyslexia, she had limited fluency in English. Robert Rodriguez, and his producer and then-wife, Elizabeth Avellan, soon gave Hayek a starring role opposite Antonio Banderas in 1995’s Desperado. In 2003, she reprised her role from Desperado by appearing in Once Upon a Time in Mexico, the final film of the Mariachi Trilogy. She followed her role in Desperado with a brief role as a vampire queen in From Dusk Till Dawn, in which she performed a table-top snake dance. The dance with the snake is  anthology.