RIP, Leon Vitali

[CalMeacham]

I see that he has just died. I knew him as Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon and the masked figure in Eyes Wide Shut, but I also remember him as Victor Frankenstein in Terror of Frankenstein, one of the few faithful adaptations of Mary Shelley’s novel (and made well before Coppola’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , not to mention more faithful to the novel), which was not a Kubrick film.

I had no idea that he had basically stopped beuing an actor and had become Kubrick’s aide.

Vitali was so fascinated by Kubrick and his processes that he made an unusual decision: He gave up on acting and devoted himself entirely to the famously demanding director for over two decades. His next Kubrick credit was as “personal assistant to the director” on “The Shining,” though that’s only part of the story — Vitali famously helped cast 4-year-old Danny Lloyd to play Danny Torrance and Louise and Lisa Burns as the creepy Grady twins (citing Diane Arbus as inspiration).

“I made one truly, truly radical change in my life and that was when I said, ‘I’m more interested in that’ than I was in the acting,” Vitali told the Associated Press in 2017. “That’s the biggest conscious decision I’ve ever made. There were some sacrifices, but there were gains too.”

After Kubrick’s death in 1999, Vitali oversaw restorations for many of Kubrick’s films.

Leon Vitali, Stanley Kubrick’s Right-Hand Man, Dies At 74