John Shea (1982 Missing)
Excerpt from Rosetta Books 1982: John Shea | Missing | Pictures on Radiator Heaven
Missing: Disbelieving father seeks truth of son`s murder in Latin America
by Thomas Hauser
In adapting Thomas Hauser´s The Execution of Charles Horman to the screen, Costa-Gavras collaborated with writer Donald Stewart and assembled a powerful cast with Jack Lemmon as Ed Horman, the father of the missing journalist (played by John Shea), and Sissy Spacek as Charles Horman´s wife Beth.
© Rosetta Books
The Oscar Site 1982: John Shea
Missing US (1982): Drama/Thriller/Mystery
The key to its power onscreen stems from the decision not to center the action merely on the disappearance of Charles Horman (John Shea), but also on the search for him by his father Ed (Jack Lemmon) -- and on Ed's discovery of a son he never knew. The Oscar-winning script flows freely between that search and Charles's earlier experiences in the unnamed country (in the true account, Chile).
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· Writing (Best Screenplay based on material from another medium) 1982: Costa-Gavras, Donald Stewart
· Best Picture 1982: Edward Lewis & Mildred Lewis - Producers (Universal/Polygram, Universal)
· Actor 1982: Jack Lemmon
· Actress 1982: Sissy Spacek
4 nominations, 1 Award
The Oscar Site
Excerpt from New York Times 2/12/82: John Shea
'MISSING' BY COSTA-GAVRAS
By VINCENT CANBY Published: February 12, 1982
Now ''Missing,'' Mr. Costa-Gavras's latest film, which is about the 1973 kidnap and murder in Chile of Charles Horman, a young, Harvard-educated, counterculture journalist, is opening today at the Beekman Theater, two days after the release of a most unusual statement by the State Department.
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Charles, played with modest simplicity by John Shea, comes to life in the flashbacks. He's a dedicated, somewhat guilt-ridden heir to a privileged America, a young man who reads ''The Little Prince'' for literary inspiration and whose optimism is unshakable. If not deliberately naive, he's the kind of unsophisticated saint one always wants to believe in.
© New York Times
Excerpt from New York Times 2/12/82: John Shea
AT THE MOVIES; PARIS RECLUSE INSPIRES A FILM ON PREHISTORY.
By Chris Chase Published: February 12, 1982
Anyhow, New York is currently a John Shea festival. ''Missing,'' the Costa-Gavras movie in which he plays with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, is opening at the Beekman today and Sunday night ''The Dining Room,'' an ensemble theater piece in which Mr. Shea takes several parts, opens at Playwrights Horizons over on West 42d Street. Mr. Shea is 33, and a serious actor, which is why he's doing ''The Dining Room.'' ''I trained at Yale Drama School,'' he says, ''and I was taught that acting was interacting with other actors, not being the star of the play or the film. So I thought it would be healthy for me to go back to my roots just at the time that this film is coming out.''
Not that he didn't love working in the Costa-Gavras movie. He'd done one other film - ''Hussy'' - in London; it hasn't yet been released in the United States. And he'd also made -and been cut out of - ''It's My Turn,'' the Jill Clayburgh movie. ''What seemed tragic to me at the time - I had to phone my family and friends, it was embarrassing - now seems lucky. I'm really glad that fate saved me for 'Missing,' because, in the end, 'Missing' is a great picture, something I'm proud to be a part of. I've waited a long time for 'Missing.' ''
''Missing'' was shot in Mexico, but before filming started, Mr. Shea researched the life of the man he was playing, Charlie Horman, a young American who disappeared in Chile, after the overthrow of the Government of Salvador Allende Gossens. Mr. Shea studied books and newspaper files that told about the political atmosphere in Chile at the time, and he pored over Charlie Horman's diary. ''If they hadn't found that diary, they never would have been able to retrace his steps,'' he says.
Eventually, he met Charlie Horman's parents, and remembers that as ''an eerie experience - playing their lives, living their son.'' In his own life, Mr. Shea has been married to Miss Pettibone for 10 years and they could not ''be happier,'' he says. Because he'd envied Al Pacino and Robert De Niro the good luck of playing in ''The Godfather'' and getting to work with Marlon Brando, Mr. Shea sat down the other day and wrote Jack Lemmon a letter. ''I said, 'I feel equally lucky to have you as my screen dad.' I don't want to be corny, but I think of it as passing along a kind of tradition.''
© New York Times
Excerpt from New York Magazine 4/26/82: John Shea
John Shea: Acting For the Eighties
Anna Wontour
John Shea's desk is piled high with scripts. The offers started pouring in with the release of Missing, the film in which he portrays the young journalist Charles Horman and in which he projects an almost naive, quintessentially American earnestness. It could be that his arrival marks a new style of acting, an alternative to the inarticularte, streetwise, and self-involved performances of the seventies. "If you want to be thought of as a serious actor," says Shea, 33, "New York is the only place to be."
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Shea credits New York with helping him land the Missing role: The film's director, Costa-Gavras, was in town the day the newspapers reviewed a play he was in, saw his picture, asked to meet him and hired him without so much as an audition. And he credits that role -- working with Costa-Gavras, researching the life and death of Horman -- with increasing his political awareness.
© New York Magazine
Excerpt from People 5/24/82: John Shea
Missing's Heartthrob John Shea Is Present and Accounted for in An Off-Broadway Hit
By Lee Wohlfert-Wihlborg May 24, 1982 Vol. 17 No. 20
When last seen on the big screen in Constantin Costa-Gavras' political thriller Missing, John Shea had been kidnapped by right-wing junta forces in Latin America, leaving Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon to sleuth his whereabouts. But Manhattan theater audiences know just where to find him. Six days a week Shea is front and center at the Astor Place Theatre, appearing with a group of ensemble players in an off-Broadway hit called The Dining Room. "It was the craziest weekend of our lives," recalls Shea, 33, of the period last February when both Missing and The Dining Room opened back to back, each with favorable reviews. "When you keep a low profile for years," says the actor, who lives in a cluttered SoHo loft with his photographer wife, Laura Pettibone, "you're not used to the glare of celebrity."
Now that Missing has established him as one of Hollywood's hottest newcomers and The Dining Room's producers concede that his success has been a boon to the box office, Shea may have to get used to it. Says Missing co-star Sissy Spacek of Shea's potential: "I see him as a leading man wherever he wants to be-on stage or screen."
New Hampshire-born Shea admits a certain kinship to Charles Horman, the real-life Harvard-educated writer with leftist sympathies who moved to Chile with his wife, Joyce, in 1972 to witness the socialist regime of Salvador Allende and on whom the Missing role is based. Although never so politically involved as Horman, Shea spent three months researching Horman's life and the political climate in Chile when Horman vanished there during the coup that toppled Allende in 1973. Shea's "linchpin for the character" was not his grasp of Horman's political idealism. Instead, Shea focused on the personal motives that led Horman to return to Santiago despite authorities' warnings of danger. "I knew the gut reaction. I know what it's like to be in love, to be separated from your wife. I'd have had to get back and see if my wife was okay, too."
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After a part in Jill Clayburgh's It's My Turn that ended on the cutting room floor, Shea flew back to New York and opened in off-Broadway's American Days. His role as a Machiavellian showbiz exec who bullies a bunch of auditioning punk rockers brought him to the attention of Costa-Gavras. The director signed him for Missing without even seeing American Days. "We shook on it after a half-hour talk," says Shea. "But Costa caught the play that night, just to double-check."
Despite the success of Missing (which is favored to win the Cannes Film Festival Best Film award next week), Shea is reluctant to stray far from the New York stage for long. He will do a three-night engagement of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale at Carnegie Hall and perhaps summer stock with actress Sigourney (Eyewitness) Weaver, but he is picking and choosing film scripts carefully. One possibility is a Robert De Niro film. Also coming up: Hussy, a British movie he made pre-Missing that is scheduled for release in the U.S. this fall.
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How does Shea feel about being typed as Hollywood's newest up-and-coming sex symbol? "If it brings audiences in to see you," it's okay. But, Shea points out, "I'm in this for the long run. I hope when my 'heartthrob looks'-if that's what I've got-die away, the audiences will still come. I'll be here until I'm 60, and I want them to grow old with me."
© People
Excerpt from Christian Science Monitor 5/15/84: John Shea
Actor John Shea takes on another 'case' - as nuclear gumshoe
By Louise Sweeney / May 15, 1984
It was just another case for Shea, who played Charles Horman (the journalist-filmmaker in Costa-Gavras's film ''Missing'') and starred as Robert F. Kennedy in a British TV miniseries, ''Kennedy.''
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He never auditioned for the starring role in ''Missing'' either. The film's European director, Costa-Gavras, read three rave reviews in the New York dailies on his way in from the airport the morning after ''American Days'' opened with Shea starring as a British punk rocker. He drove from the airport to Universal Casting, asked for Shea, and signed him up for ''Missing'' after catching the play. ''It's like when the time is right, it just happens. Don't you feel that? Sometimes the best things in life happen most effortlessly. They're just BANG suddenly they're there,'' says Shea.
© Christian Science Monitor
Excerpt from New York Times 9/28/84: John Shea
AT THE MOVIES: Exploring the Differences Between Screen and Stage
By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER September 28, 1984
Like Mr. Fuller and Mr. O'Neal, John Shea had some things to say about the differences between screen and stage and about choosing roles. Mr. Shea waited for a year after ''Missing'' before choosing his next movie role - Danny Morgan, a struggling novelist in ''Windy City,'' Armyan Bernstein's story of friendship, playing at the Gemini. Between the two films, Mr. Shea occupied himself on stage, and he has clear ideas how the stage feeds his movie portrayals and vice versa. ''I would say that there is a kind of architecture of acting that you learn on the stage,'' Mr. Shea said, ''where you learn how to build a character from the beginning through the climax to the end. And learning how to do that for two or three hours on stage, where you are the emotional arc of the character, is something that serves you when you go to make movies. In the rehearsal of a film and the original conception of your role, as you read a script, you must build a similar emotional architecture. When you're shooting out of sequence, you know where you have to be at any given time emotionally, so when the editor puts it back together at the end, it will have an emotional integrity to it.''
As for the movies feeding theater, he said: ''The intimacy of the close- up lens demands continual thought and feeling from a character in the movies, and so a film actor is forced to create what we call an in-depth subtext - the thoughts and emotions beneath the text, so that when the camera is coming in close on you, it is simply reading the thoughts in your eyes. That attention to detail that film acting requires enriches stage work.''
© The New York Times
Excerpt from The Modesto Bee 3/5/89: John Shea & Lakeland Ledger
In Step with John Shea
John Shea played football with Bryant Gumbel at Bates College up in Maine. He attended Yale drama school with Sigourney Weaver. He recently made a movie with Sigourney Weaver. He recently made a movie with Kelly McGillis in Israel, where, he said, you'd see a young woman sunbathing on a blanket with her transistor radio and an Uzi submachine gun close at hand. And he co-starred with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek in a powerful movie called Missing.
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Shea won an Emmy Award last year for his role in the TV movie Baby M, but his career really got its big boost with Missing. That success was something of a mixed blessing. "It set such high standards that nothing after that was good enough," he told me. "I turned down some good things. Maybe I made mistakes."
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Brady's Bits
I know that after some movies are wrapped up, the actors shake hands and retreat into their own private worlds. I asked if Jack Lemmon was like that. "He never forgets you," John said. "Even though each of us played his role solo--I was the missing son, he was the searching father--Jack wanted to spend time with me, so he'd know the kind of young man he was looking for. He became my theatrical godfather. He has actors he worked with to dinner at his house. It's like an extended family. Jack loves poker, always with fresh cards and chips. He lays them down and says, 'Boys, let's play.' "
© The Modesto Bee
Excerpt from Eugene Register-Guard 12/31/90: John Shea
Actor puts reality into role of TV news director
By Seli Groves
Shea has a reputation for researching his roles as fully as possible before he begins working in the production.
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He studied the political situation in South America when he made his American film debut opposite Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek in "Missing." (He made his first movie in England opposite Helen Mirren in "Hussy.") A graduate of the Yale Drama School Master's program, he believes in meticulous and exhaustive preparation for every role he plays. "It's the best and only way I work," he says.
© Eugene Register-Guard
Excerpt from New Straits Times 9/29/92: John Shea
Shea Wins Fame for role as Baby M's Dad
A year later, Shea scored again in the Jack Lemmon film Missing. It brought overnight fame for him, partly because of the political furor centered on his role of real life "disappeared" person Charles Horman during the Chilean coup d'état.
© New Straits Times
Excerpt from Bates University 1993: John Shea
John Shea '70: Actor, Freelance
by Beck Shoenfeld: from Career Compass, Vol. 1, No. 17
Known for playing Bobby Kennedy in the Kennedy television mini-series, John Shea, '70 has gained much experience across the Broadway/Hollywood spectrum. Shea considers his performance in the motion picture Missing to be his best work and in fact, turned down many roles thereafter. "They [the roles] weren't worthy successors," he explained. "I existed that way for many years. Then I realized I may only get to make one great film in my life. It doesn't happen very often."
© Bates College
Excerpt from People 7/16/01: John Shea
Jack Be Nimble
By Samantha Miller July 16, 2001 Vol. 56 No. 3
Divine in Comedies, Searing in Dramas, Jack Lemmon Found His Most Memorable Role Offscreen as Hollywood's Mr. Nice Guy
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He also served as a mentor to younger costars. "Jack became a godfather to a whole generation of Hollywood actors," says Missing's John Shea. "He thought of us as part of his family."
© People
Excerpt from Bates Magazine Online 6/21/07: John Shea
Stages of Shea: Timing and talent have shaped the career of actor John Shea ’70
By Doug Hubley
His off-Broadway turn as a sleazy rock producer in American Days led film director Costa-Gavras to cast him alongside Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek in Missing. There, Shea’s portrayal of the doomed, idealistic Charlie Horman was pivotal for the 1982 film. His screen time is brief, and yet his character dominates the story “because of a certain innocent, ferocious charm that seems to be a natural part of his persona,” says Timothy Lea ’83, a screenwriter and TV producer whose credits include the popular series CSI: NY. The role was pivotal, too, for Shea. While Missing went on to win three Academy Awards, Shea went on to a career enviably balanced between aesthetic success and commercial reward, between pop culture sizzle and professional credibility. He’s credited with more than 60 film and TV roles, including his 2001-04 stint as Adam Kane on TV’s sci-fi drama Mutant X. He has done big Hollywood pictures, small art films, starred or had recurring roles in three TV series, and played characters ranging from romantic leads to psycho killers, from Bobby Kennedy to Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor.
© Bates Magazine Online
Excerpt from Go Erie.com's Showcase 10/24/08: John Shea
Powerful 'Missing' comes out on DVD
By BRUCE DANCIS Scripps Howard Published: October 24. 2008 12:01AM
Led by the compelling performances of Lemmon and Spacek as the father and wife of Charles Horman, the murdered American writer and filmmaker (played by John Shea), Costa-Gavras' film prodded the collective conscience of human rights supporters internationally and inspired new investigations into the Nixon Administration's covert support for the coup.
© Go Erie
Excerpt from Rope of Silicone 10/24/08: John Shea
Movie Review: Missing (1982) A political thriller that finds more success in family drama
By: Brad Brevet Friday, Oct 24, 2008 at 7:08 AM
John Shea also works extremely well in helping us get to know a man we meet in the opening moments and ultimately come to care for more and more as the story progresses.
© Rope of Silicone
Iona College Newsroom 3/1/10: John Shea
3/9/2010 - Film Screening and Q&A Lecture with Actor John Shea
Sponsored by the departments of Criminal Justice and Political Science, there will be a screening of the film "Missing" followed by a question and answer session with actor John Shea who plays Horman in the film and Joyce Horman, the widow of Charles Horman. This event will take place on Tuesday March 9 at 7:00 pm in the Chritopher J. Murphy Auditorium. Free admission and open to the Iona community.
© Iona
Excerpt from Horman Truth 3/9/10: John Shea
Speaking Engagements
Speaking Engagements for years 1998-2010
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March 9, 2010, IONA college. Screening of Missing for women's History Month for the Criminal Justice Department. Q&A following with John Shea.
© Horman Truth
Excerpt from Siasconset Union Chapel Spring 2011: John Shea
Siasconset Union Chapel: Wednesday Night Films
Spring 2011 Newsletter
How exciting it is that the summer of 2011 will be the 4th year that Movie Night has taken place. This community activity has been a tremendous success. Each Wednesday night, Bruce Rigdon or Ted Merriman has faithfully set up and run the projector to show a film. Classic old films will continue to be shown from late June until early September. From comedies and mysteries to tragedies and melodramas and silent films, there is bound to be something of interest for everyone. Do plan to attend these popular admission-free showings. Free-will offerings are, however, collected and the monies benefit Island causes. Last year John Shea, an actor who lives in ‘Sconset, gave an introduction to the film Missing, in which he acted. We hope that he is able to join us again.
© Siasconset Union Chapel