Season 1 • Episode 4
LatestIn Venice Hemingway meets Adriana, who becomes the heroine of his next novel, "Across the River and into the Trees". He is greatly attracted to the young woman, but he feels that his time is over. In spite of the humiliation Mary suffers, she stays with him. His novel is torn apart by the critics. With "The Old Man and the Sea" Hemingway regains his self-confidence. Hemingway returns to Africa to reassume the self-imposed image of the Great White Hunter. During a photo-safari by plane he and Mary experience two consecutive plane crashes. Hemingway's health deteriorates due to severe brain damage. Hemingway becomes depressed; his memory no longer serves him. He can no longer write. Hemingway becomes suicidal. He goes into therapy at the Mayo Clinic but is released with doctor's instructions to abstain from all those things which had been essential to him.
Ernest Hemingway attained celebrity at the age of twenty-five. Some of his novels are among the greatest bestsellers of American literature. His life is a legend woven with countless passions, encounters and experiences. This colossus of a man was a novelist, journalist polemicist, playwright, hunter, fisherman, adventurer... A globetrotter with a hermit's soul, he went through three wars, had a life-long romance with danger, and made death his closest companion and his main source of inspiration. The son of a Puritan family, he was also a pleasure seeker. A self-confessed male chauvinist, he thought of Woman as a muse, a worshipper, a second mother. His four wives- Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh - represented both his mirror and his straight man, seeking to appease his torments and contradictions and to accompany him to the end of his dreams.
Acting
Stacy Keach devours scenery like Hemingway devoured everything else.
Production
Gloriously 80s vision of the 1920s-50s.
Costume
Safari chic and Parisian abandon, equally unhinged.
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Stacy Keach had already played Hemingway on stage and would voice him again decades later — dude had a whole second career as this man.
This miniseries arrived when 'male writer biopic' meant uncritical worship; modern viewers will find its lack of interrogation almost comical.
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