ALREADY A SUPER-STAR IN HOLLAND, DEREK DE LINT IS HOT TO TROT ON NEW TURF

 

 

 

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Derek de Lint's flight bonus plan is looking real hefty these days. With all teh commuting he's doing between L.A. and Amsterdam, he literally is a flying Dutchman. He's also a happy Dutchman: After 14 years of acting-- theater as well as in 15 films--he's coming into his own internationally. His name doesn't make L.A. producers jump for joy, yet, or hearts throb on this side of teh Atlantic, yet, but his clean-cut good looks, his strong stage and film presence, his green-into-brown eyes, and his irresistibly charming smile make a face that's not easily forgotten. And by year's end, American audiences will have seen him in at least three movies: Last spring The Assault, a Dutch film in which he starred, captured the Oscar and Golden Globe awards for best foreign film. In June is first feature film, Soldier of Orange, was aired on prime-time TV, and this Novemnber, the much-talked-about Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff director) film, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, will open with de Lint in the lead. And his recelty completed film with Charlotte Rampling, Mascara, and another film, Diary of a Mad Old Man, will be released here. Not bad for a fella who just decided a year ago that it was time to make a name for himself in American films.
        de Lint is part of a growing number of young, bona-fide European stars who, tempted by l'Amerique, dare to leave the comforts of stardom at home in order to capture the elusive golden apple in Hollywood. Gerard Depardieu, Christopher Lambert, Rutger Hauer, and Klaus-Marie Brandauer represent an Eighties version of the handsome, debonair foreigner of the David Niven or Marcello Mastroianni sort who was able to penetrate the closed American audience which, in general, has had a history of rejecting anything "foreign" in movies. This new crop is older than our own Eighties brat pack--Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, and Matt Dillon--and just different enough from our older stars--Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, and Robert Redford--to fascinate and intrigue. de Lint, who was 37 last July, is confident enough in his talent to risk starting all over in the U.S.

FLYING
DUTCHMAN
                        BY RUTH GARDNER
flash presentation
 

Starting over hardly means the bottom for him, not when you consider his experience and the leading ladies he's been competing for. Sigourney Weaver, for instance. he lost the role opposite her in the film about ethnologist Dianne Fossey, but he was smiling when he talked about it: "I could have spent three months in the jungles with Sigourney," he muses, "but it probably happened for a good reason, I'm sure I would have gotten bitten by a mosquito and caught malaria." Under the circumstances, that's a positive attitude, and that's teh one de Lint intends to keep while he works his way into the big time, American style.

Derek de Lint's resume looks like a computer went haywire, merging his file with a few others. Let's start with his languages, all five of them--Yugoslav, German, French, English, and of cource, Dutch. With a laugh he explains,"in a country the size of Holland (about half the size of Maine), you have to learn a lot of languages because it you go 15 miles east, you have to speak German, if you 70 miles south, you have to speak French, and if you go 10 miles west, you have to swim, if you go 100 miles north, you have to speak Danish. I wish I were fluent in more languages so that I could work in more countries."

   He dabbled in the few areas "before deciding what I wanted to be when I grew up." On his way to stardom, he's been a farmer, a stand-up comic, a painter, a play produder, raised peacocks, and still in an ardent amateru photographer.