Description

David recalls: We all remember his great love scene with Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity. Thirty years later I wanted a picture with Burt Lancaster on the beach. Aware that he insisted on being addressed as Mr Lancaster (at all times by everyone on the set of Local Hero including director Bill Forsyth), I approached with due deference, ‘Mr Lancaster, is it possible to photograph you on the beach, down by the sea?’ He looked me in the eye, silent for a few seconds and then, holding out his hand, palm facing me with fingers spread, he said: ‘I’ll give you five,’ – meaning five minutes. I hurriedly got him down to the beach and erected the chair close to the incoming tide. He sat down leisurely, looked at me and said, ‘You’ve got three.’ That’s what you call a man of few words.
Location: Scotland
Year: 1982
Biography: American screen icon, Lancaster’s performance in The Killers (1946) prompted a lifetime of films spanning several genres and four decades. He constantly defied being typecast, his powerful on-screen presence carrying him through romantic and gangster films, Westerns, historical and political dramas, and many more. Perhaps his most famous role was in From Here to Eternity (1953), for which he won one of many Oscar nominations, but it was the film Elmer Gantry (1960), where he played a fraudulent fire-and-brimstone evangelist, that proved most successful critically – he won a Best Actor Oscar, a Golden Globe and the New York Film Critics award. He set up his own production company in the mid-Fifties as an active antithesis to the studio system in Hollywood. He continued to work until he suffered a massive stroke in 1990 and died four years later.
Print Type: Digital C-Type
Printed by: Metro Imaging, London
Limited Editions: All prints are limited editions, no further prints are produced once sold
Bespoke: All prints are bespoke and printed to order, stamped and numbered
Presentation: Prints are supplied to clients flat in an acid-free box or rolled in a tube
Watermark: Watermarks will not be present on an original print
Tags: burt lancaster, american actor, film, movies, hollywood, star, elmer gantry, the birdman of alcatraz, atlantic city, trapeze, sweet smell of success, separate tables, from here to eternity, the leopard, judgement at nuremberg, mr muscles and teeth
Copyright: © David Steen / The David Steen Archive