The door creaks open and a VERY tall disturbing looking butler answers the door with an impossibly low voice: “You rang?”
I always enjoyed ‘Lurch” from the Addams Family series. He was meant to be a sort of Frankenstein monster that acted as the butler of the family. He looked a bit scary, but was actually a softy. This Lurch was played by actor Ted Cassidy, who was 6’9”.
In the later film (1991) Lurch was played by a Dutch actor, Carel Struycken. He owed much of his succes in acting to his height. He was 2 meters 13 cm tall (in Dutch we would say he was that ‘long’). This equates to 7 feet tall. He was diagnosed with acromegaly when he was 20. This was about 10 years before he was discovered in Hollywood.
He was born in 1948 in The Hague and moved to Curaçao with his family when he was 4. He returned to the Netherlands at 16 and started into film, taking him to California. It was here in 1978 that a woman leaped out of her car and chased him down to tell him that he was needed for a film. This film ended up being Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
In the Netherlands it is not at all unusual to feel like a pygmy in the land of giants while standing in the checkout line at the grocery store. Dutch men and women are among the tallest in the world. Carel Struycken is clearly just that little bit taller and was able to use that to step into people’s lives through film.
No comments:
Post a Comment