Willy Holt Movies, TV Shows, and Filmography
Willy Holt
Art
Biography
Willy Holt (30 November 1921 – 22 June 2007) was an American production designer, art director and actor who lived in France for many years. He was nominated for an Academy Award in the category Best Art Direction for the film Is Paris Burning?, and won a César Award for Best Production Design for Au revoir, les enfants. Willy Holt was born in Quincy, Florida, in 1921, the son of an American military photographer and his French wife. After his parents divorced his mother returned with him to her home country, where he was naturalised as a French citizen in 1923. He graduated with a baccalauréat from the Lycée Fermat in Toulouse during the early years of the Occupation. Holt was married for four years to the actress Micheline Bourday, subsequently marrying the actress Martine Pascal in 1958. He and Pascal had two children. Holt was a member of the French Resistance and was arrested at Grenoble railway station in December 1943 while transferring money on behalf of anti-Nazi Resistance fighters. He was interned at Auschwitz, via the Drancy internment camp. He survived the death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, where he was one of those liberated on 13 April 1945. Holt wrote about his wartime experiences in his 1995 book Femmes en deuil sur camion. After briefly working as a fashion designer, Holt was hired to work in television in 1946. His set designs for several television shows led to further work in cinema, initially as an art director. As befitted his Franco-American origins, Holt worked on several productions in both countries, collaborating with a number of internationally renowned film directors such as John Frankenheimer, Stanley Donen, Otto Preminger, Robert Parrish, Fred Zinnemann, Bertrand Blier, Woody Allen, Michael Ritchie, Louis Malle and Roman Polanski. Source: Article "Willy Holt" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Filmography Movies
Acting
The Ninth Gate
A rare book dealer finds himself at the heart of a string of paranormal events when he is hired to find the last two copies of a text, The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, capable of summoning the Devil.
A Shadowed Gaze
For fifty years, Willy Holt was silent. He wanted to live, to have a family : he needed to forget. In 1995, however, this famous art director decided to pass on his memory through the story of his deportation.
Zelig
Fictional documentary about the life of human chameleon Leonard Zelig, a man who becomes a celebrity in the 1920s due to his ability to look and act like whoever is around him. Clever editing places Zelig in real newsreel footage of Woodrow Wilson, Babe Ruth, and others.
For a Cop's Hide
Victim of manipulation, Cop Choucas is wanted for two murders and searched for by every cop in town.
Production
Au Revoir les Enfants
Au revoir les enfants tells a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss concerning two boys living in Nazi-occupied France. At a provincial Catholic boarding school, the precocious youths enjoy true camaraderie—until a secret is revealed. Based on events from writer-director Malle’s own childhood, the film is a subtle, precisely observed tale of courage, cowardice, and tragic awakening.
May Fools
During the events of May 1968 in France, different worldviews of conflicting relatives collide in their family estate.
Staircase
An aging gay couple owns a barber shop in the East End of London. One of them is a part-time actor about to go on trial for propositioning a police officer. The action takes place over the course of one night as they discuss their loving but often volatile past together and possible future without each other.
The Down-in-the-Hole Gang
Here we find a group of misfits who've given up on humanity and have decided to dwell below the pavement. The group has its own hierarchy, of course, and soon the conditions that drove them underground begin to manifest themselves without the influences of the Outside World.
The Train
As the Allied forces approach Paris in August 1944, German Colonel Von Waldheim is desperate to take all of France's greatest paintings to Germany. He manages to secure a train to transport the valuable art works even as the chaos of retreat descends upon them. The French resistance however wants to stop them from stealing their national treasures but have received orders from London that they are not to be destroyed. The station master, Labiche, is tasked with scheduling the train and making it all happen smoothly but he is also part of a dwindling group of resistance fighters tasked with preventing the theft. He and others stage an elaborate ruse to keep the train from ever leaving French territory.
The Ruffian
The adventures of a group of friends who plan to recover crates full of gold from a fall in Canada.
The Other One's Mug
Martial Perrin is the president of a right-wing political party which is gearing itself up for a forthcoming election. When he learns that a notorious criminal named Kraus has escaped from prison, Perrin panics and goes into hiding. His deputy, Constant, hires Perrin’s cousin, Gilbert, an actor who is a perfect double of Perrin, to replace him. What Gilbert does no know is that the killer Kraus is bumping off the people who were implicated in the affair for which he was arrested, and that Perrin is next on his list.
The Sergeant
Master Sgt. Albert Callan is a war hero and a no-nonsense leader who reforms his previously mismanaged military base. Although Callan seems collected, he struggles as a closeted homosexual. When the sergeant becomes obsessed with his handsome clerk, Tom Swanson, he even disrupts the young man's relationship with his French girlfriend, Solange. Since Swanson isn't receptive to Callan's advances, it creates major tension between the two men.
Les enragés
Marc and Laurent, two worrying misfits, break into a large isolated property in the middle of the countryside. Marc discovers with amazement that the place belongs to his idol, the movie star Jessica Melrose, of whom he is crazy. After a strange night, in the morning, Jessica meets the two "explorers" who will make her live a day of waking nightmare .
Love and Death
In czarist Russia, a neurotic soldier and his distant cousin formulate a plot to assassinate Napoleon.
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