Hemmings, David Leslie Edward

▪ 2004

      British actor, director, and producer (b. Nov. 18, 1941, Guildford, Surrey, Eng.—d. Dec. 3, 2003, Bucharest, Rom.), played the lead, a mod fashion photographer, in Michelangelo Antonioni's classic “swinging '60s” film Blowup (1966; U.S. title, Blow-Up). For many people both the actor and his character epitomized the era, and Hemmings's boyish good looks and charisma quickly made his freewheeling lifestyle a subject for the tabloids. As a child he sang many boy soprano roles written by composer Benjamin Britten, notably that of Miles in The Turn of the Screw. Thereafter he attended art school and tried to make a living as a nightclub singer. He acted onstage and in several minor films before Blowup, which he followed with successful roles in such films as Camelot (1967), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), and Barbarella (1968). Beginning in the 1970s he directed for the cinema—notably The 14 (1973), which won a Silver Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival, and Just a Gigolo (1979)—and for television. By the end of the 1990s, Hemmings had grown portly, with fiendishly wild eyebrows, and he began a second career as a character actor, notably in Gladiator (2000), Last Orders (2001), Gangs of New York (2002), and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003).

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