WALKING down the Croisette during the week I spotted the distinctive features of the bald, bespectacled American actor, Daniel Benzali. Dressed in black, he was in Cannes to represent the turgid and pretentious competition entry, The End of Violence, the Wim Wenders movie dubbed "The End of Patience" by some critics here.
Admirers of the television series Murder One will have fond memories of Benzali, who oozed gravitas as attorney Ted Hoffman in the first series, but was less than satisfactorily replaced for the second season by Anthony La Paglia.
I couldn't resist passing on my regrets to, the great Benzali, so I stopped him on the street. It was a shame they dropped you from the second series " I commiserated with him. "I wasn't dropped,", he replied politely. "I left. I'm making movies now. But thank you anyway.
. BUSY actor Richard Harris is planning to direct a movie in Ireland later this year, it was announced in Cannes. Harris will also star in the film, an English-language remake of the Icelandic movie Children Of Nature, which received an Oscar nomination in 1992. He is in Prague at present, starring in Nikita Mikhalkov's The Barber Of Serbia.
It was also announced that his actor son, Jared Harris, who played the eponymous painter in I Shot Andy Warhol is to star in the Irish thriller, Johnny Jump Up, which will be shot in, the autumn. It will be directed by Kieron J. Walsh and produced bye Tim Palmer and Alan Maloney of the Dublin-based company, Parallel, with Harvey Keitel's company,
Goatsinger, as co-producer. Could that mean Keitel himself might be crossing the Atlantic to take at least a cameo in the movie?