![]() “We know what can happen when hatred goes unchecked,” Kean said. and around the world, “The Diary of Anne Frank” is more important than ever. With the rise of anti-Semitism and white nationalism in the U.S. “This was the first American-made Holocaust film.” “The Diary of Anne Frank” was historic, said Beth Kean, executive director of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. “That he loved me in the movie, saying he was so proud and so pleased with how we did the movie and my performance was what he wanted it to be and how he wanted to thank me for doing it.” “It was a letter telling me that he loved the movie,” said Perkins. But they sent us a copy of it because they have archives here with all these records.” “It went to California,” the woman told her. Perkins learned that he had sent her a letter after he saw the movie. “I always wondered.”īut when she was invited to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam for a special event recently, “one of the girls who works there came up to me and said, ‘Do you have a copy of the letter Mr. “I never really knew how he felt about the movie ever,” she said. She learned that he didn’t watch the movie until much later because it was too difficult for him in 1959. Then I looked up and he had tears in his eyes and he said - this moves me every time I say this - ‘Anne used to sit that way all the time.’” Frank is sitting there with his hands the same way. Perkins said she “was sitting there with both my thumbs closed that way. You know sometimes people when they’re a little nervous, they take their thumb and they have all their other fingers holding the thumb tight?” “I went in the room with him alone and we both sat there, very shy, both of us. Frank wanted to go into the library so you could talk to each other privately,” said Perkins, who was a successful model before she was cast as Anne. “I remember we just sat talking, sharing,” Baker said. Shortly thereafter, the two actresses were invited to have dinner with Frank at the home of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who had written the “Diary” play and screenplay. “He looked at me and there was sort of the beginning of tears and he said, ‘You remind me so much of my daughter.’ I had no words.” “He came up to me during the shooting,” she said. Baker remembers doing a screen test with Perkins the day Frank was visiting the set. It was just this tremendously emotional experience.”īaker and Perkins had a similar experience when they met Frank in Los Angeles. The father and son silently leafed through the pages, “and seeing the photographs of movie stars she’d pasted in and her handwriting. After a moment, he went over to the filing cabinet and brought something wrapped in cloth and put it on the desk and unfolded it in front of us. He was getting the first look at the man who was going to tell his daughter’s story. We went in and sat with him and his wife, whom he met in Auschwitz. ![]() “We went to this little office and this tall man opened the door,” he recalled. “Then we went to Munich and the next morning went to Dachau. “Dad was on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival,” George said. and Holocaust survivor Lya Frank.īefore Stevens began production on the film in 1958, he and his son, who was the associate producer, traveled to Europe. The screening, co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, will feature a discussion led by filmmaker Jon Kean with Perkins, Baker, George Stevens Jr. Rounding out the cast were Richard Beymer and an Oscar-nominated Ed Wynn. The film featured several actors from the original play, including Joseph Schildkraut as Otto Frank, Lou Jacobi and Gusti Huber, and marked the film debuts of Millie Perkins as Anne and Diane Baker as her older sister, Margot. Van Daan, the one attic resident Anne didn’t like. The 1959 film earned several Oscar nominations including best film and director and won three, including supporting actress for Shelley Winters as Mrs. “The Diary of a Young Girl” was translated into 67 languages and transformed into a Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning 1955 Broadway play. Her father, Otto Frank - the only one of his immediate family who survived the Holocaust - had her diary published in 1947. ![]()
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