When a young model and novice actress (and future Elvis co-star) named Millie Perkins was cast in the lead role in 20th Century-Fox's 1959 production of "The Diary of Anne Frank," the heartbreaking journal that inspired the film was not a staple of high school reading lists, nor was it regarded as a key historical literary work of the 20th century.

Millie Perkins was cast in the lead role of 20th Century-Fox's 1959 production of "The Diary of Anne Frank."

Associated Press

"I got it right away. I knew how important it was," Millie Perkins, now 73, says of the movie.

STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

More Movie News

• Bill Plympton's career takes on animated life of its own
• Rain cancels Indie Memphis screenings at the Shell tonight
• Movie Capsules: Now showing

Share and Enjoy [?]

Anne herself -- the teenager whose diary was discovered in July 1945, almost a year after her arrest in an Amsterdam attic and some four months after her death in a Nazi concentration camp -- was at the beginning of her tragic, posthumous fame. She was not yet the universally recognized face of destroyed innocence, or a symbol of the estimated 6 million victims of anti-Semitic insanity and genocidal horror perpetrated by Hitler and his followers.

"I didn't know anything about Anne Frank," admits Perkins, 73, who was close to 20 when director George Stevens chose her for his film.

But when she first read an English translation of Anne Frank's diary after being scheduled to audition for Stevens, "it just immediately hit me in my heart," Perkins said, in a recent phone interview from her home in Los Angeles. "I got it right away. I knew how important it was."

The movie "The Diary of Anne Frank" is now available on DVD and Blu-ray in a "50th Anniversary Edition," which was released by Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment on June 16, four days after what would have been Anne Frank's 80th birthday.

The many bonus features include a commentary track with Perkins and producer George Stevens Jr., who worked on the movie with his father. The disc also includes snippets of footage shot by the elder Stevens when, as a filmmaker with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, he was among the first Americans to discover the horrors inside the Dachau concentration camp.

Such terrible events were relatively recent history when "The Diary of Anne Frank" was released to movie screens in 1959, seven years after the first American edition of the book and four years after a hit Broadway play based on the material.

The movie was touted as one of the year's prestige productions, and recognized with three Oscars (including one to Shelley Winters for Best Supporting Actress) and another five nominations (including Best Picture and Best Director). Yet the era of "Schindler's List" and the so-called "Holocaust movie" -- now a genre unto itself, with such titles as "The Reader," "The Pianist," "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" and "Life Is Beautiful" -- was a long way off.

Print advertisements for the film spotlighted the coming-of-age and teenage first-love aspects of Anne's story. One popular poster image emphasized the non-Jewish Perkins' resemblance to Audrey Hepburn by posing Anne in a beret, cuddling a kitten and cutely mugging.

The movie itself, however, is dark and often intentionally claustrophobic, despite the panoramic dimensions of its CinemaScope framing. The Oscar-winning black-and-white cinematography emphasizes the contrast between light and shadow, as if to remind us of the forces of good and evil at war in the world outside the attic that is a wartime hideout for the Anne Frank family and several neighbors.

A New Jersey native from a large family, Perkins was a pixieish model for Seventeen magazine and other clients when she won the "Anne Frank" role, beating out thousands of other contenders, according to Fox publicists.

Perkins said she wasn't intimidated by the part and, in fact, felt close to Anne.

"I realize now, as an actor, when you have the material, when you have a book you can read, or a biography of a character you're playing, it's always an asset," she said. "To have that book there and know how Anne felt and how she expressed herself -- she was a writer, she was wonderful. It didn't frighten me because it was all there in the pages for me."

She said she also wasn't intimidated by George Stevens, at that time considered one of Hollywood's most important directors, thanks to "Giant" and "A Place in the Sun."

"I was a lot like that Anne Frank character in those days. I was very feisty, and nobody could tell me what I could or couldn't do. ... I had a big mouth."

Perkins wasn't comfortable as a contract actress for Fox. Eschewing mainstream Hollywood, Perkins rejected studio offers and appeared in cult classics created by her "in crowd" friends, including "Wild in the Streets" (1968, written by her husband, Robert Thom), in which teenagers take over America, and director Monte Hellman's existential Westerns, "Ride in the Whirlwind" (1965), written by pal Jack Nicholson, and "The Shooting" (1967).

Her first feature after "Anne Frank" was the 1961 Elvis Presley vehicle, "Wild in the Country," in which she played Elvis' girlfriend. (Her rivals included Tuesday Weld and Hope Lange.) Some three decades later, she appeared as Elvis' mother, Gladys, in the short-lived 1990 ABC-TV series, "Elvis," shot in Memphis.

"Having just done 'The Diary of Anne Frank,' I thought, 'I didn't grow up to be in an Elvis movie,'" Perkins said of "Wild in the Country." But she learned, she said, that "Elvis was a person with taste, he wasn't just an icon. I liked Elvis a lot. His guys (Elvis' friends, the so-called 'Memphis Mafia') would come in, and they'd all start wrestling on the floor, and I used to think to myself, 'They're like puppy dogs.' "

For more about "Anne Frank," Perkins and her movies, see the full interview at TheBloodshotEye.com.