To me, John Malkovich, who will turn 72 a week from now, has long seemed like a fascinating, super-knowledgable, deep-drill fellow, and I’m sure he always will be. Nobody plays droll intelligent madmen better than he.
I was part of a small, very relaxed Malkovich press schmooze at the 2010 Marrakech Film Festival, and I remember gently asking him about cynical paycheck roles vs. the real stuff, and how he was simultaneously a wee bit taken aback and yet cool with the question after two or three seconds. Cool and settled.
Malkovich will always be mythic, but his peak era lasted 14 or 15 years — his Biff in the 1984 B’way stage production of Death of a Salesman (“a 31 year-old, totally-on-fire John Malkovich,” I wrote after seeing the play), Places in the Heart (’84), The Killing Fields (’85), Burn This on Broadway (’87), Dangerous Liaisons (Vicomte de Valmont) and his marriage-shattering affair with Michelle Pfeiffer, The Sheltering Sky (’90), In the Line of Fire (’93), Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom in Con Air (’87), and finally his multitudinous self in Being John Malkovich (’99).
And that, ladies and gems, was one hell of a 15-year peak.
Then Malkovich rebounded in Burn After Reading (’08) — I’ve long felt that his alcoholic, self-deluding, furiously frustrated Osborne Cox, a CIA guy, is not only his greatest-ever film performance, but one of the greatest film performances ever.