Celebrity Biographies
George Slüizer
George Sluizer broke into Hollywood in 1993 with “Kidnapped,” the English remake of his Dutch film “Disappeared.” The director passed away on September 20, 2014, at the age of 82, in Amsterdam. “He had been ill for a long time. He had suffered an aneurysm in 2007 and since then his condition was fragile,” a relative said.
George Sluizer was born on June 25, 1932 in Paris, into a family of Norwegian origin that would end up settling in the Netherlands. There he made his debut as a director with De Lage Landen , winner of the best short film at the 1961 Berlin Festival.
After a season as a documentary director for National Geographic, he jumped into feature films with titles like Twice a Woman , with Bibi Andersson and Anthony Perkins . His thriller From Him Missing caught the attention of Fox executives, who recruited him to shoot Kidnapped , the American version, where Kiefer Sutherland was looking for his girlfriend, kidnapped by Jeff Bridges ‘ character . The girl was played by a very young Sandra Bullock , who had only a few years into her career, and who has little presence in the film.
Although at that time Sluizer had a great future in Hollywood, bad luck came his way when River Phoenix died of an overdose while filming Dark Blood under his orders, leaving the film unfinished. In addition, the thriller The Hour of the Crime , where Stephen Baldwin played a young actor hired to play a real murderer on a television show, went unnoticed.
So George Sluizer returned to the old continent to take care of Utz , with Armin Mueller-Stahl as a porcelain-obsessed aristocrat. The veteran actor won the performance award in Berlin. During his last active years, he was closely linked to the Iberian Peninsula, after the Portuguese-Dutch co-production Mortinho por Chegar a Casa , he directed La balsa de piedra , an adaptation of the novel by the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner José Saramago , with Federico Luppi , Icíar Bollaín , Antonia San Juan and Gabino Diego , which was their last filming.
In 2010, he was accused of falsehood by Israel, after stating that he witnessed former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon murder two Palestinian children in a refugee camp in Beirut – where he was filming a documentary – in 1982. “I saw him shoot with his pistol against two children, as if he were hunting hares, at the entrance of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp”.
At the end of his life, George Sluizer insisted on rescuing Dark Blood from limbo , after taking over the rights and moving the footage to Switzerland. There he launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise the money needed to complete the unfinished 20 percent of the film. It managed to premiere in the framework of the Berlinale in 2013.