Top left: OW, circa 1980. Top right: Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts in a scene from CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR (2007), Bottom left: Charles Fernley Fawcett, actor and activist, in a scene from one of his movies. Bottom right: Osama Bin Laden with Afghan freedom fighters.
Charles Fernley Fawcett:
http://www.varianfry.org/fawcett_en.htm
Charles Fernley Fawcett—rescuer, freedom fighter, actor, musician—died Sunday, Feb. 3, 2008, in London, at the age of 92.
Fawcett, an American expatriate and moral adventurer most of his life, became best known in recent years for his rescue work alongside Varian Fry in Marseille in 1940, after France fell to the Nazis.
After the war, he drifted into acting, a profession he thoroughly enjoyed: “For a short while you could be what you wanted to be.” A handsome man with a booming voice, Fawcett performed in over one hundred films, sometimes as the villain, working with stars such as Errol Flynn, Alan Ladd, and Robert Taylor. Living in Rome in the 1950s, the man-about town developed a local reputation in the press as the "Mayor of Via Veneto," escorting such beautiful stars as girlfriend Hedy Lamarr.
Always vulnerable to a good cause and the battle for human rights, a swashbuckling figure off-screen as well as on, Fawcett helped Hungarians escape their country after the Soviet invasion in 1956. Especially close to his heart was the Afghan cause after the Soviet Union invaded the country in 1979.
In the recent motion picture Charlie Wilson's War, Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) is invited by Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) to a party to see a documentary about the Afghanistan resistance made by a friend of her's. The unnamed friend is Fawcett, and the documentary was Courage Is Their Weapon, narrated by his friend Orson Welles. Since Fawcett was known to old friends as Charlie, this war was also Charlie Fawcett’s War.
Welles knew Fawcett from the Via Vaneto, the famous street in Rome, which was the setting of Fellini's Le Dolce Vita.
http://washingtonlife.com/2008/02/01/tr ... charlie/2/
Fawcett guided Joanne and her barrel into the war zone, where he was training the mujahideen freedom fighters – shoeless boys and weaponless men defending their villages against air strikes. Joanne interviewed them for Courage is Our Weapon, the documentary they filmed; he got pal Orson Welles, to narrate, and they set off to tell the world.
Congressman Charlie Wilson, (played by Tom Hanks, in the film) was a slim, handsome Texan, seven feet tall in his cowboy boots, widely known around Washington as a “hard-drinking, skirt-chaser,” which flamboyant Charlie never denied. He barely knew Joanne then, though she was later his fiancée.
A longtime anti-communist, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan made her an activist. Seeking Washington support, she urged Wilson to come to Houston, see their film and meet the legendary Fawcett, who has been the subject of 18 books. Stirred by Fawcett’s account, Wilson pledged his Congressional committee clout to quietly find anti-aircraft weapons for the Afghans. The most surreal covert operation in US history was launched.
"These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world... and then we fucked up the end game." - Charlie Wilson