Leslie Halliwell; Authored ‘Film Guide,’ ‘Companion’

Leslie Halliwell, whose anthologies “The Filmgoer’s Companion” and “Film Guide” have become as necessary as popcorn to motion picture aficionados, is dead of abdominal cancer at 59.

Daily Variety, the entertainment trade publication, reported this week that he died Jan. 21 in the English town of Esher near London.

Unlike most reference works, both Halliwell’s “Companion,” with thousands of entries about actors, writers, producers, directors and musicians, and his “Film Guide,” with a list of 14,000 of the approximately 30,000 English-language titles produced over the decades, are sprinkled with writings as heated as those of a Revolutionary War pamphleteer.

Words such as “frothy,” “completely unsatisfactory” and “wasted performances,” vie with “splendid” and “spectacular” in both volumes.

Newer actors compete with the legends for space. Keith Carradine merits nine lines. His late father, John, a half page.

And there are the famous Halliwell quizzes--Who was the Ringo Kid in “Stagecoach?” (John Wayne); to whom was Carole Lombard married when she died? (Clark Gable).

Over the years the Halliwell who started his first edition of the “Companion” in 1965 grew less tolerant of his preferred medium than the Halliwell who published his eighth edition in 1984.

“I am still slightly too young to be a fuddy-duddy,” he said a dozen years ago in an interview with The Times. “But I find few films of the ‘70s to my taste, their explicitness being no substitute for the imagination and skill which were poured into the studio products of Hollywood’s golden age.”

Halliwell was a film reviewer and buyer of pictures for British television who was standing idly at a London cocktail party in 1964 when a fellow guest asked him what a one-volume film encyclopedia should contain.

By the time Halliwell finished elaborating, the guest (who was a book publisher) encouraged him to publish it.

“In my innocence,” he said in 1980, “I was thinking of 10 or 12 paid volunteers to help me, but it turned out to be impossible to corral them.”

He began the work himself, pecking away at the entries in his spare time. In the introduction to the first edition, which had a foreword by Alfred Hitchcock, Halliwell said simply, “This book is for people who like movies.”

Compared to later editions (a ninth will be published in March) the original was skimpy. But each revision expanded by 20% on what had become two of the most popular books on films ever published (150,000 copies to date). The eighth edition contains 7,000 new or revised entries spread over 1,150 pages (in paperback).

And how did he keep up with the credits, the deaths, the retirements, the new films?

Copious notes, of course, he said when on a visit to Los Angeles in 1980. And “lots of correspondence.”

“Douglas Fairbanks Jr. wrote to argue about something I’d written about his father, and Joan Crawford blistered me for having her age wrong, or so she said.”

Not all were celebrities. Fans, scholars and the idly curious filled his mailbox daily.

He catalogued everything in his study and put it all on casters. “File cabinets, chair, typewriter stand. When I need something I can wheel over to it without having to stand up.

“(I) spend my weekends propelling myself around the study furiously, like Monty Woolley in ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner.’ ”

He is survived by a wife and son.