Ronald Bergan obituary
The film scholar Ronald Bergan, who has died aged 82 after suffering from urosepsis, wrote a number of biographies that revealed a considerable understanding of the cinema both in front of and behind the camera. Key to their success was the passion they conveyed and a prose style that kept the reader simultaneously entertained and informed. He was also a university lecturer and a prolific journalist, notably with obituaries for this newspaper from Jim Backus, the voice of Mr Magoo in 1989, onwards.
He addressed big themes: in his book The Coen Brothers (2000) he took the view that even if Ethan Coen saw a style as just an agglomeration of decisions made along the way, a film such as the brothers’ first, Blood Simple (1984), is postmodernist in the way that it “alludes to 1940s film noir through a number of inverted commas. The film noir was a product of the psychology of postwar America which expressed the nihilism and depression brought about by the second world war and intensified by the cold war, resulting in a distrust of human nature and institutions.”
In Dustin Hoffman (1991), there is a chapter on the film Tootsie (1982), which he puns as “Hoffman/Hoffwoman”. The actor’s portrayal of the central character, Dorothy, was based on Hoffman’s mother, who died a year before the movie was completed.
“Dustin threw himself more than ever into the part which, as his brother Ronald suggested, was a way of keeping his mother alive by playing her. Freud got in before Dustin’s brother,” Bergan observes, “by claiming that transvestism was a way men had of reclaiming the lost feminine part of themselves.” Though we cannot know the effect that wearing dresses had on the actor, “he certainly admitted that the character of Dorothy had affected him emotionally the way no other character ever had before”.
In 1993 he was a consultant for a pair of TV movies about the director Jean Renoir, which were followed by his book Jean Renoir: Projections of Paradise (1995). Other biographical subjects included Anthony Perkins (1996), Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict (1997) and Katharine Hepburn: An Independent Woman (2013).
Bergan was an astute critic as well. In his studio history The United Artists Story (1986) he noted that Tony Curtis as the cringing, loathsome press agent Sidney Falco in Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957) “gave a compelling performance proving he wasn’t just a pretty face with a pretty awful accent”; Dirk Bogarde in Judy Garland’s last film, I Could Go on Singing (1963, directed by Ronald Neame) “offered a range of two expressions, approving and disapproving”; and he captured the very essence of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) “with its meticulously structured plot and dialogue, a perfect blend of sweet and sour, tender and heartless and masterful comic timing”.
His other books included The AZ of Movie Directors (1982), Film Isms – Understanding Cinema (2011), Glamorous
Musicals (1984) and Beyond the Fringe ... And Beyond, a critical study of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller (1989).
He was born Ronald Ginsberg in Johannesburg, South Africa, to Leslie Ginsberg, a stockbroker who died when Ronald was 14, and his wife, Hannah (nee Fay). He was educated at King Edward VII in Johannesburg and liked to recall that he and the golfer Gary Player were students together.
I was at King Edward VII as well, and got to know Ronald after he matriculated in 1954. We became lifelong friends sharing a passion for cinema, theatre and classical music.
He was also seduced by the glamour of show business and decided he would like to try his hand at acting. In 1956 he joined a local drama academy, whose founder, Ruth Oppenheim, despite the fact that he was rather lanky and slightly built, decided to cast him as the sheriff in her forthcoming production of Eugene O’Neill’s play Desire Under at the Elms Library theatre,in Johannesburg.
The role comprised just one line: “Open in the name of the law!” The incongruity in build between Bergan’s scrawny appearance and the well-built man he had came to arrest struck the first-nighters as hilarious and the entire audience burst into spontaneous laughter. The following morning the critic of the Rand Daily Mail headed his review The Climax That Failed and a deeply humiliated Bergan vowed he would never tread the boards again.
After spending two years working for African Films in Johannesburg, Bergan, who was fiercely critical of South Africa’s apartheid policies, decided to try his luck in London, arriving in 1958 with very little funds and no job prospects. He checked into the Overseas Visitors Club in Earl’s Court, a home from home for itinerant South Africans. It was there that he met his future wife, Maureen Myersohn.
They married in 1960 and blew what little money they had on a trip to the US, after which Maureen gave birth to a son, Leslie. However, their dire financial situation made it impossible to keep the baby, and Maureen’s
mother, Florence, who lived in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), suggested adopting the infant and bringing it up as her own.
They would not see their son again until 2002, at which time Leslie, who was living in the US and was in London on business, met them for tea at the Savoy hotel. He now lives in Canada.
In the late 60s Bergan accepted a teaching job at the Sorbonne in Paris, a city he claimed to love even more than London. It was at this point that he changed his name from Ginsberg to Bergan. Maureen also changed her name – to Catriona.
After several years in France, in 1980 the couple returned to London, where they decided to separate. Four years later they reconciled. Bergan was now in the midst of juggling two careers – lecturing as well as writing. He quickly followed The A-Z of Movie Directors with Sports in the Movies (1982).
From 2001 he was a professor of film history and theory at Florida International University, Miami, and three years later he and Catriona returned to France, settling in Biarritz. He served as a vice-president of Fipresci, the international federation of film critics, sitting on the juries of some of Europe’s most prestigious film festivals. On behalf of Fipresci, his fellow critic Derek Malcolm wrote of Bergan’s phenomenal knowledge of cinema and deep appreciation of all that is best in it.
Bergan’s last position, which he held for six years from September 2014, was at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where he lectured on film studies, mostly to American students.
Following his retirement, Bergan and his wife left Prague in March this year, aiming to make Scotland their new home.
He is survived by Catriona, Leslie and his siblings, Stephen and Pam.
• Ronald Bergan (Ginsberg), film studies scholar and writer, born 20 November 1937; died 23 July 2020