Zeta-Jones portrays a made-up character called Mary McGarvie, who ekes out a living in music halls by posing as a psychic with her partner in crime, her 12-year-old daughter, Benji. You may not be surprised to learn that the script does quite a bit of tinkering with the facts of Houdini's life. Pearce's Houdini has Catherine Zeta-Jones. In his unbound moments, Curtis's Houdini had Janet Leigh to flirt with. I don't think Houdini was endowed with the Pearce cheekbones, which seem to grow a little sharper every year, but the hairstyle, which ripples across his scalp in intricate corrugations, looks about right and he certainly projects the intensity needed by anyone who makes a living out of being chained up and hurled into deep water. In those days, Curtis rarely appeared in anything else.Īs far as I'm concerned, Guy Pearce, who stars as Houdini in Gillian Armstrong's Death Defying Acts, has a hard act to follow - although it has to be said he looks the part rather more than Curtis did. For me, Harry Houdini is forever Tony Curtis, who played the great escape artist in a bio-pic I saw as a child.
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