Al Pacino Departs Stage Adaptation of HUNGER Due to Author's Nazi Support

Al Pacino has officially left the upcoming stage adaptation of Knut Hamsun's HUNGER.

The Academy Award-winner says he made the decision to drop the show produced by the Aveny-T theatre in Copenhagen, in which he was playing the narrator, because Hamsun was an avid Hitler and Nazi supporter.

"It is correct: he jumped at the last minute because he couldn't come to terms with Knut Hamsun's support for the German occupation and Nazism," said Jon Stephensen, Aveny-T manager. "We must respect that."

Al Pacino is an American actor and filmmaker. He is well known for playing mobsters, especially Michael Corleone in The Godfather films and Tony Montana in Scarface, and often appeared on the other side of the law-as a police officer, a detective and a lawyer.

Pacino won the Academy Award for Best Actor at the 65th Academy Awards for his performance as Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman. Prior to his win he had received seven Oscar nominations, including one other that same year.

He made his feature film debut in 1969 in the film Me, Natalie in a minor supporting role, before playing the lead role in the 1971 drama The Panic in Needle Park. Pacino's major breakthrough came in 1972 with the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. His other Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor were for Dick Tracy and Glengarry Glen Ross. Oscar nominations for Best Actor include The Godfather Part II, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and ...And Justice for All.

In addition to a career in film, he has enjoyed a successful career on stage, winning Tony Awards for Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? (1969) and The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1977). A longtime fan of Shakespeare, he made his directorial debut with Looking for Richard, a quasi-documentary on the play Richard III. Pacino has received numerous lifetime achievement awards, including one from the American Film Institute. He is a method actor, taught mainly by Lee Strasberg and Charlie Laughton at the Actors Studio in New York.

Knut Hamsun was a Norwegian author, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Hamsun's work spans more than 70 years and shows variation with regard to the subject, perspective and environment. He published more than 20 novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, and some essays.

The young Hamsun objected to realism and naturalism. He argued that the main object of modernist literature should be the intricacies of the human mind, that writers should describe the "whisper of blood, and the pleading of bone marrow". Hamsun is considered the "leader of the Neo-Romantic revolt at the turn of the [20th] century", with works such as Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892), Pan (1894), and Victoria (1898). His later works-in particular his "Nordland novels"-were influenced by the Norwegian new realism, portraying everyday life in rural Norway and often employing local dialect, irony, and humour.

Hamsun is considered to be "one of the most influential and innovative literary stylists of the past hundred years" (ca. 1890-1990). He pioneered psychological literature with techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue, and influenced authors such as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Maxim Gorky, Stefan Zweig, Henry Miller, Hermann Hesse, and Ernest Hemingway. Isaac Bashevis Singer called Hamsun "the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect-his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun".

On August 4, 2009, the Knut Hamsun Centre was opened in Hamarøy. Since 1916, several of Hamsun's works have been adapted into motion pictures.

Source: Telegraph