LOS ANGELES — Before there was Rodgers and Hammerstein, there was Rodgers and Hart. Ethan Hawke is one of the Oscar nominees this year for Best Actor for playing lyricist Lorenz Hart in the Richard Linklater film, “Blue Moon.”
After a quarter century, Hart’s alcoholism and erratic behavior caused a split with his musical partner, Richard Rodgers, who would go on to famously and successfully to work with Oscar Hammerstein, first with the Broadway smash, “Oklahoma!”
“This is a story of a man’s death. A guy who basically died of heartbreak at an opening night party,” Hawke said.
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“As soon as Linklater shared the script with me, I thought, A: it was one of the most blisteringly beautiful screenplays I’d ever read. And, B: I just loved this guy. I wanted to play him so badly. A lot of the men who were my mentors when I was coming up in the theater reminded me of Lorenz Hart,” Hawke said.
“They don’t treat the arts as a job,” said Hawke. “They treat it as a spiritual calling and it’s life and death, every rhyme is life and death and, you know, I just loved him so I was grateful for the chance.”
Hawke went on to say, “The film assumes an intelligence on the part of the audience that is, I find, rare. Richard assumes that you care about human nuance, that you care about heartbreak and that you care about love.”
Hawke’s nomination for “Blue Moon” is now one of many over the past two dozen years. At 55-years-old, this is his fifth nomination.
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