The Screengrab

If Gaby Wood's longish profile-interview with Chiwetel Ejiofor is any indication, the star of Redbelt and Talk to Me has got the equilibrium thing down pretty well. Ejiofor was in the New York area for his role in Philip Noyce's Salt, a thriller that also stars Liev Schreiber and Angelina Jolie, of whom he says, "She is very beautiful, but you know, you get used to it." Born in London in 1974 to Nigerian immigrants, Ejiofor's breakthrough movie role was in Stephen Frears's 2002 Dirty Pretty Things, in which he played a Nigerian immigrant--a former doctor--living under the radar in London. His other recent roles include that of Thabo Mbeki, who would go on to become president of South Africa, in Endgame, a TV drama about political negotitations during the dying days of apartheid. Wood writes that it "was the second time Ejiofor had been to South Africa. It took him a while to get over the first, a trip he made in 2004 to shoot the film version of Gillian Slovo's book Red Dust. In that, he played a torture victim, and was, as he now says, 'slightly traumatised'. He explains: 'I just wasn't expecting... I don't know, it was crazy not to have been expecting to come across a really complicated racial situation...There were people in our crew who had burned down villages in Zimbabwe, for example. You know, if you have a torture scene and somebody in the room says: "Yeah, that's exactly how you do it", it's a complicated set.'"

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The French actor Jean Martin, who died on February 2 at the age of 86, had a distinguished career in the theater, where he appeared in the original productions of two of Samuel Beckett's plays, Waiting for Godot (as Lucky) and Endgame (as Clov). He also served with the French Resistance during World War II. In movies, though, he was one of those people who achieved immortality largely through his performance in a single role, that of Colonel Mathieu in Gillo Pontecorvo's great political film The Battle of Algiers (1966). Martin was the only professional actor in that movie's cast. Compared to the actors playing Algerian revolutionaries, his role was stylized and trickily conceived: he represented the face of the oppressive French colonial government, yet he was also the director's mouthpiece, explaining the film's view of guerrilla insurrection to the audience in speeches that made it clear that, however the action of the film migh turn out, he knew that he was playing a losing game. Eventually "the people" would emerge victorious; all he could do was postpone the inevitable. Martin delivered a remarkable performance, supplying a theatrical, instructional element to the movie without violating its documentary-style texture. (He might have been hired as much for his politics as for his talent; the actor was a commmitted leftist who, despite his heroic military background with the Resistance as an paratrooper in Indochina, was blackballed as punishment for having signed a petition protesting the French presence in Algeria.)

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