Michael Sarrazin

Michael Sarrazin, who died on April 17 aged 70, enjoyed a spasm of fame as Jane Fonda’s co-star in Sydney Pollack’s 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? 

Michael Sarrazin Photo: Alamy

 

Nominated for nine Academy Awards, the film is a grim parable of American life set during the Depression. Jane Fonda — already an international star thanks to her performances in Cat Ballou (1965) and Barbarella (1968) — plays the ageing, cynical, damaged Gloria, who makes her way to Hollywood to try to make it as an actress; there she meets Robert Syverton (Sarrazin), whose fantasy has always been to be a successful director. They enter a gruelling dance marathon on Santa Monica Pier, with tragic consequences.

In an interview with the Toronto Star in 1994 Sarrazin recalled of the days on set: “We stayed up around the clock for three or four days .... We stayed in character. Pollack said we should work until signs of exhaustion. Fights would break out among the men; women started crying.”

Jacques Michel André Sarrazin was born on May 22 1940 in Quebec City and grew up in Montreal, first treading the boards at Loyola High School. According to his brother, Pierre, who later became a film producer: “He wasn’t a particularly good student, but he was a great actor, and the Jesuits and fellow students loved him. His first high school role was in The Bishop’s Candlestick, and he was very upset when he came offstage and everyone in the crowd was laughing. He thought they were laughing at him. They were laughing with him.”

Among the last actors to come up through the old studio system, Sarrazin was offered a contract by Universal in the mid-1960s after studying at the Actors’ Studio in New York. “None of us was surprised when Hollywood called for Michael because he was such a star in our family,” his brother said. “People from the next block were coming over saying 'I hear there’s a very funny guy, funny kid on the street’.”

After securing a role in the television series The Virginian, in 1967 Sarrazin appeared in Gunfight in Abilene, alongside the singer Bobby Darin, and in The Flim-Flam Man, starring George C Scott. In the following year he played a Confederate soldier in Journey to Shiloh (in the company of another aspiring actor, Harrison Ford) and was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance as a surfer in The Sweet Ride opposite Jacqueline Bisset — she and Sarrazin began a relationship that was to last for 14 years.

Those who thought that Sarrazin’s role in They Shoot Horses presaged a career as one of Hollywood’s major stars were to be disappointed. He was perhaps unlucky in failing to secure the role of Joe Buck in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) — the part went to Jon Voight after the film’s producers failed to come to an agreement with Universal for Sarrazin’s services.
But his subsequent work was steady rather than spectacular, with parts in Sometimes a Great Notion (1970), based on Ken Kesey’s novel; The Pursuit of Happiness (1971); The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972); Harry in Your Pocket (1973); For Pete’s Sake (1974); The Gumball Rally (1976); Joshua Then and Now (1985); and Bullet to Beijing (1995).
There were many solid television roles, in series such as Street Legal, Murder, She Wrote and Alfred Hitchcock Presents; and he won particular praise for his performance in the made-for-TV film Frankenstein: The True Story (1973). His last appearance on television was in 2008, in the film The Christmas Choir.
In recent years Michael Sarrazin had returned to Montreal to be near his two daughters, both of whom survive him.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8467353/Michael-Sarrazin.html