Alec’s first feature film was Forever, Lulu (1987), which,
except for the presence of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, was an
entirely forgettable film. He appeared in his first popular
film, Working Girl, in 1988, a year in which he appeared in
good roles in several other films, including Married to the
Mob, She’s Having a Baby, and Beetlejuice. The following year,
he had another strong role in a popular film, The Hunt for Red
October, but his next few films were unremarkable. He did star
in The Marrying Man (1991) with Kim Basinger, whom he
married, and with whom he appeared in The Getaway (1993).
His best role in 1992 was in Glengarry Glen Ross, in which he
played a smooth (and he always seems smooth) but ruthless
“motivator” of sales personnel. In 1994 he played Lamont
Cranston in the film adaptation of The Shadow, and in 1995
he and Jessica Lange reprised their Broadway roles in a
remake of A Streetcar Named Desire.
With these films, he moved from being a significant sec-
ondary character to a leading character. In Heaven’s Prisoner
(1995), he played a flawed hero, an ex-homicide detective and
recovering alcoholic, and in 1996 he played opposite Demi
Moore in The Juror and portrayed the assistant district attor-
ney in Ghosts of Mississippi. One of his best roles was in The
Edge, an action film in which he and Anthony Hopkins square
off against each other and against a very bad bear. In Mercury
Rising (1998), he played one of his meanest roles, a govern-
ment official ready to sacrifice a boy’s life for national secu-
rity. In 2001 Alec Baldwin played aviation pioneer Jimmie
Doolittle in Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor. More important,
perhaps, was Alec’s role as the brainless hunk actor Bob
Berrenger in David Mamet’s State and Main (2000), which he
followed with voiceover roles in Cats and Dogs (2001) and
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001).
Daniel Baldwin (1960– ) attended Ball State University
for a year and then worked as a stand-up comic before he got
his start as detective Beau Felton on the NBC television
series Homicide and made his film debut appearing with
brother William in Born on the Fourth of July (1989). He has
had small roles in good films such as Mulholland Falls (1995)
and big roles in less successful films such as The Attack of the
50-Foot Woman (1993) and Harley Davidson and the Marlboro
Man (1991). His career seemed to be on the rise, but he spent
most of the 1990s appearing in television roles and forget-
table, low-profile movies. Among the few of note were Car
54, Where Are You? (1994), John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998),
and King of Ants (2003).
William Baldwin (1963– ) attended SUNY Binghamton
and worked as a model before making his television debut
with the film The Preppy Murder (1989). After roles in several
films, most notably Backdraft (1991), Sliver (1993), and Bul-
worth (1998), he emerged as a lead in Virus and Shattered
Image (both 1998). William continued working in movies
with
Primary Suspect (2000), One-Eyed King (2001), and the
German film Y
ou Stupid Man (2002).
Stephen Baldwin (1965–
) was a budding opera singer in
high school and attended the American Academy of Dra-
matic Arts. He appeared in the Off-Broadway show Out in
America and had roles in some television series, including
China Beach, Kate and Allie, and Family Ties. Most of his roles
have been in independent films, but he was also cast in The
Usual Suspects (1995), a critical and popular hit, and Last Exit
to Brooklyn (1990), another critically acclaimed film. Stephen
then settled into a steady routine of roles in low-profile and
made-for-television movies and played Barney Rubble in The
Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (2000).
Because Joseph Baldwin (1970– ) has appeared on a tel-
evision science-fiction series, Code Name: Eternity, it seems
safe to assume that the Baldwins will continue to surface on
film screens for years to come.
Ballard, Lucien (1908–1988) A cinematographer,
Ballard was recognized for his excellence rather late in his
career.
JOSEF VON STERNBERG
had been his mentor in the
early 1930s, and Ballard learned a great deal from him, but he
rarely worked on an “
A
”
MOVIE
during the 1930s and 1940s,
and his expertise with black-and-white photography didn’t
receive much notice. Finally, working as a freelance cine-
matographer during the 1950s and 1960s, Ballard became
fully appreciated both for his excellent black-and-white pho-
tography and his abilities in lighting and shooting outdoor
action films.
Ballard began working in Hollywood as a roustabout,
doing physical labor on a
CLARA BOW
film called Dangerous
Curves (1929). When shooting was finished, Bow invited him
and the rest of the cast to her home for a party. As related in
Leonard Maltin’s excellent book, Behind the Camera, Ballard
recalled, “I came home three days later, and I said, ‘Boy, this
is the business for me!’”
He worked his way up during the next five years to assis-
tant cameraman and finally cameraman (a position we now
refer to as cinematographer or director of photography). He
shared the cameraman credit on his first job as a cinematog-
rapher for Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman (1935).
He had the job to himself on von Sternberg’s version of
Crime and Punishment (1935). Unfortunately, most of his
films during the rest of the 1930s and 1940s are relatively
unknown, but Ballard’s stark black-and-white photography
can be seen to fine effect in films such as Craig’s Wife (1936),
The Lodger (1944)—which starred his soon-to-be wife, Merle
Oberon (a marriage that lasted from 1945 to 1949)—Laura
(1944), which he co-photographed, and Berlin Express (1948).
It wasn’t until Ballard began to work on the films of
HENRY HATHAWAY
,
BUDD BOETTICHER
,
STANLEY KUBRICK
,
SAM PECKINPAH
, and others that his reputation finally began
to soar. He displayed his virtuosity in black and white in films
such as Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) and Boetticher’s The Rise
and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960). When he finally began to
work in color, lighting and shooting outdoor action films, his
work was all the more rich and evocative, most notably in
Boetticher’s Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Sam Peckinpah’s
Ride the High Country (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), and The
Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), and Henry Hathaway’s The Sons
of Katie Elder (1965) and True Grit (1969).
In all, Ballard was the cinematographer of more than 100
feature films, as well as director of photography for television
work and comedy shorts (including uncredited work for the
BALLARD, LUCIEN
28