David Hemmings Blow-Up (1966)
David Hemmings (1941–2003) plays Thomas, the photographer at the center of Blow-Up (1966). He was twenty-four when production began and almost completely unknown outside the British theatre and a handful of small films. The role made him an international star overnight and tied him for the rest of his career to Antonioni's image of swinging London.
A boy soprano before he was a star
Hemmings began as a boy soprano in Benjamin Britten's English Opera Group, originating the role of Miles in Britten's The Turn of the Screw in 1954 at age twelve. When his voice broke, he was reportedly devastated; the experience left him uneasy with his own face and voice, which served the Thomas performance — Hemmings as Thomas is at his most arresting when he is silent, watching, or pretending to listen.
How Antonioni found him
Antonioni had Terence Stamp under contract for the role and reportedly only switched to Hemmings shortly before shooting began. The director had been watching Hemmings in Dateline Diamonds (1965) and a stage production of Adventures in the Skin Trade. Stamp later wrote that the loss was crushing and shaped his decision to leave English film for several years.
"I had David's photograph on my desk. I knew it was him." — Michelangelo Antonioni, paraphrased in The Independent obituary (2003) (paraphrased)
The role was modeled, by Antonioni's own account, on an amalgam of London's leading fashion photographers — David Bailey, Terence Donovan, and Brian Duffy, the so-called "Black Trinity." Hemmings's Thomas borrows Bailey's Rolls and call sign culture, Donovan's east-end working-class swagger, and Duffy's irritability. (wikipedia)
What Hemmings actually does on camera
Thomas is on screen for almost every frame of the film. Hemmings's choices are small and load-bearing: the way he resets his demeanor when he climbs into the Rolls in the opening, the precise tone of "some people are bullfighters. Some people are politicians. I'm a photographer," the unsmiling absorption of the enlargement marathon, the slight jolt when Patricia says the print "looks like one of Bill's paintings." Antonioni's preferred technique was to give actors very little instruction; Hemmings later said he sometimes had to invent his own beats inside long, blocked sequences.
"Antonioni has the gift of knowing what he doesn't want, and waiting until you stop doing it." — David Hemmings, recounted in Senses of Cinema (2017)
After Blow-Up
Hemmings tried to capitalize on the role through the rest of the 1960s and never quite cleared escape velocity. He played the lieutenant in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) for Tony Richardson, the artist-detective in Dario Argento's Deep Red (Profondo Rosso) (1975) — a knowing nod to Blow-Up's photographic-evidence plot — and a string of smaller roles through the 1970s in films like The Love Machine and Voices.
Beginning in the late 1970s he reinvented himself as a television director. Through the 1980s he directed for Magnum, P.I., Airwolf, and Quantum Leap, working steadily without the public attention of his acting career.
In the 2000s he returned to acting with a startling third act: a heavy, leonine, white-haired character actor — Cassius in Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000), Tiberius in Olivier Marchal's films, Lloyd Beale in Last Orders (2001) — capped by a memorable turn in Mean Machine (2001) and Gangs of New York (2002). He died of a heart attack in December 2003 on a film set in Bucharest, age sixty-two.
What the role kept costing him
"I was Thomas. I am still Thomas. I will be Thomas in my obituary, which is fine, because Thomas was the best thing I ever did." — David Hemmings, The Guardian (2003)
The Guardian obituary noted that Hemmings made his peace with Blow-Up's gravity earlier than most actors associated with a single defining film.
"Hemmings's performance is the still center of the film. He is asked to be the camera's mirror — to be the audience's eyes inside the frame — and he gives Antonioni the precise quality of looking the film requires." — The Independent, obituary (2003)