The Reincarnation of Michael Sarrazin

Here’s a forgotten star closer to our own time. When I was a kid in the ’70s Michael Sarazin (1940-2011) was everywhere, in all kinds of major screen projects with top actors, and for all the world seemed like a top tier Hollywood star himself, after the pretty-boy pattern of Robert Redford and Steve McQueen. He combined the long-haired, somewhat vacant appeal of Peter Fonda, the downright feminine beauty of Michael Blodget, and the exotic Quebecois identity of Genieve Bujold. His main squeeze was Jacqueline Bisset! But by the ’80s, though he was still acting, he seemed to fade into the woodwork, at least on the American landscape. Not sure why this occurred. It may due to the fact that most of his vehicles haven’t really endured. But I certainly know them well enough! So I thought I would remind some that he existed, and inform those who never knew he did.

I especially associate him with horror films that frightened me in my youth. He was in Eye of the Cat (1969), Frankenstein: The True Story (1973) and The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975). He appeared with Paul Newman in Sometimes a Great Notion (1971) and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972). He co-starred with Jane Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) and with Barbra Streisand in For Pete’s Sake (1974). He was in The Flim-Flam Man (1967) George C. Scott; with Scott’s wife Trish Van Devere, he starred in Harry in Your Pocket (1973). he’s met Bisset while starring in the biker film The Sweet Ride (1968), which also features Bob Denver as comic relief in one of his first post-Gilligan roles. With the low-brow car race comedy The Gumball Rally (1976), he seemed to close out his period of American stardom.

In the early ’80s he starred in things like the TV mini-series Beulah Land (1980) and the thriller The Seduction (1982) with Morgan Fairchild, but his status had slipped for some reason. He continued to turn up on things like Murder She Wrote and Deep Space Nice, but by then his looks had evaporated, or turned more rugged at any race. The more mature Sarrazin’s face was kind of like that of Patrick McGoohan, and from same angles, even Pat Hingle. I’m not sure he had the acting chops to transcend the absence of his prettiness. His last project was a Hallmark film called TheChristmas Choir (2008). Cancer killed him at the age of 70 in his native Montreal.