Harvey Keitel Life magazine March/April 2024
Harvey Keitel’s face is lined and craggy, as befits a Hollywood grandee of 84. But when Keitel — renowned for his roles as a villain or a thug in iconic films such as Mean Streets, Reservoir Dogs, Taxi Driver or Pulp Fiction — smiles, the years fall away as his enthusiasm escalates.
Since his 1967 film debut in Who’s That Knocking At My Door, director Martin Scorsese’s first feature film, Keitel has racked up 28 wins and 24 nominations for his acting roles. He’s been directed by Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, has often appeared with fellow actor/villain Robert de Niro and was Oscar-nominated for his part in Bugsy; and he’s even become familiar to UK TV viewers for parlaying his Pulp Fiction character, the wisecracking Winston Wolf, who was on hand to solve Direct Line’s customer problems between 2014 and 2020.
He also, quite literally, bared body and soul in the 1993 critical and commercial success, The Piano, a maverick smash hit from New Zealand.
But today, Keitel is talking about his latest role, the elderly Lali Sokolov, in the forthcoming TV adaptation of Heather Morris’s best-selling book, The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
New Zealand-born Morris met Lali in Melbourne, where she was a social worker. She had heard from his son, Gary, that he was looking for someone to tell his father’s story. From 2003 to his death in 2006, aged 90, she sat with Lali Sokolov and heard his experiences of the death camp. It was while he was deployed by the Nazis as one of the camp’s tattooists that he met Gita Furman — and told Morris that the two had begun their love affair in Auschwitz.
The couple survived the camp and found each other after the war in Bratislava, eventually moving to Australia. Lali’s story ultimately became Morris’s debut novel, a fictionalised version of life in Auschwitz — but the book received harsh criticism for inaccuracies from Holocaust historians.
Bizarrely, one of the criticisms was that Morris erred in recording the tattooed number which Lali supposedly etched on Gita Furman’s arm. Furman herself gave testimony in the 1990s and gave a completely different number — but she had the entire tattoo removed in Australia when she was in her 60s.
Nevertheless, mistakes or no mistakes,The Tattooist of Auschwitz became a worldwide phenomenon and it seems as though Harvey Keitel could have been born to play Lali Sokolov.
He hadn’t read the book until he was approached for the role, he says. But then something odd happened; he says: “As strange as it might sound, I felt it was in the wind that Heather Morris’s book and I were meant to come together. My initial reaction was to bear witness. It’s our duty to condemn the barbarism and inhumanity inflicted on Jews, Roma and Sinti, political dissidents and any of the communities that were persecuted by the Nazis during the Holocaust”.
Throughout his long and storied career, Keitel — a Method actor who was trained by the legendary Lee Strasberg — has dipped in and out of his Jewish background to bring an authentic note to his roles. He has, of course, played many tough guys, but he’s also played Jews — sometimes tough, too — and even, once, a Nazi officer.
Keitel was born in New York on May 13 1939, the youngest child of Miriam Klein, from Romania, and Harry Keitel, from Poland. His parents owned a fast-food cafe (his father also worked as a hat-maker), and Keitel, who often worked there before and after school, has spoken nostalgically of typical Brooklyn delights such as egg creams and the perfect milkshake.
He dropped out of high school in Brooklyn when he was 16 and, untypical for a Jewish teen of the time, joined the Marines. He spent three years in service and was deployed to Lebanon — he’s said that the experience taught him to look after himself both physically and mentally.
And after the Marines, Keitel did something else unexpected — he became a court reporter. He did this for 12 years, enjoying the silence and anonymity of observing. At the same time he began acting classes and fell in love with the possibility of becoming other people.
One of his Jewish roles — though the film itself was not critically acclaimed — was as the mobster Meyer Lansky, who fled to Israel when sought by the US government but was ultimately extradited back to America. Playing Lansky was a breeze for Keitel, he’s said. Lansky immigrated to America in the early 1900s from Belarus. Keitel said: “I come from a family of immigrants. My mother and father immigrated. I’m a first-generation American, so I had that to work from. My parents didn’t have an education, and they had to make a living the best they could. And they did. They did a lot of things to make a living.”
The actor has many ties with Israel — he married his wife, Canadian actress Daphna Kastner, in Jerusalem in 2001, and the couple’s son was barmitzvah at the Kotel.
In 2001 Keitel was not just in Israel to get married — he was also the guest of honour at the Haifa Film Festival, which was showing his film, The Grey Zone, in which he played a Nazi officer in charge of a Sonderkommando unit in a World War II concentration camp.
And he combined his son’s barmitzvah trip with the (so far) only film he has made in Israel, Esau, where he played the patriarch of a family of bakers. During the shooting of that film he told Haaretz: “I’m working on a project I really love, working with a director I love. The people of Israel, I’ve worked with before, but never in this country itself. The vibe of the people here is something very…” He searches for the right word, before opting for ‘other’.”
He added: “To stand by the Kotel was an experience that I haven’t got the words to describe. The history of it, the image of it. The wonderful religious men I met there gave me a deeper knowledge than I possessed about the meaning of Israel. And I am very grateful to them for that.”
The rabbis, he says, referred to Israel “as a house of study. What a wonderful way to think of your country.”
Returning to The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Keitel says he read widely, and watched videos, particularly testimony by former prisoners of the camp. He said: “I read texts by Eli Wiesel, Viktor Frankl. There are so many important and valuable books.
“There are some video interviews of Lali online… I watched everything I could get my hands on. I met a wonderfully spirited woman — not unlike Lali and Gita — named Celine Karp Biniaz, a ‘Schindler’s List’ survivor, who was at a friend’s gathering to share her experiences with younger generations. There is also a beautiful short documentary by Alan Resnais called Night and Fog, which is a must-see”.
Playing Lali, the survivor, Keitel said, was not a challenge but an honour. “The hope was to bring to light, through our dramatisation of Lali’s story, the horror of the Holocaust and keep this history relevant as there are fewer Holocaust survivors alive to tell their own stories. The truth is in one’s research of a story like this, it’s overwhelming and it doesn’t let go of you”.
He added: “Lali and Gita’s love for each other, miraculously led to their survival. Yes, they were lucky, but they had to sacrifice things too. They had to live with those demons they encountered on their way to their survival for the rest of their lives. In that respect, no one survived Auschwitz”.
The executive producer of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Claire Mundell, said: “To have Harvey [Keitel] join us was a dream come true. The commitment and authenticity with which he approached the portrayal of Lali was breathtaking to watch. It was important that both young and old Lali were played authentically by Jewish actors, who were able to deliver the part with nuance, empathy, compassion, and the complexity that we need from that character.”
As for Keitel himself, he says he’s not letting age dictate his future career choices. He has “many more projects in the works”, and jokes: “I’ll let the Divine decide when I retire.”
But he adds: “The human race can be ridiculous about religion. That idea that my religion has the connection to God, and your religion does not seems absurd. I remember feeling that way growing up, that my religion was special and every other religion was not. Having grown up, I know what I know and I pursue a path of wanting to be aware, wanting to know what I don’t know, but sense is there. I can say that there is only one Divine and that is the Divine. I grew up Jewish. Now, my religion is to do what is right”.
Harvey Keitel stars as the elder Lali Sokolov, Jonah Hauer-King as the Holocaust-era Lali, in The Tattooist of Auschwitz, directed by Israeli Tali Shalom-Ezer. The series begins on Sky TV on May 2.