Mark Frechette

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Mark Ernest Frechette (born December 4, 1947 in Boston , † September 27, 1975 in Norfolk , Massachusetts ) was an American actor .

Life

Frechette, of French Canadian descent, grew up in Fairfield , Connecticut and dropped out of high school . After a stay in New York , he moved in 1966 with his wife and the common child to Boston , where he earned his living by occasional begging and carpentry in the ghetto of Roxbury denied. In the late 1960s, Frechette became aware of Mel Lyman through the underground newspaper Avatar . Lyman, a former musician and self-proclaimed guru who among other Jonas Mekas , Andy Warhol or Bruce Conner was one of his friends, had settled in the poor neighborhood of Fort Hill and a 100-strong, religious and political Hippie - community around gathered. Frechette's attempts to get in touch with Lyman and his supporters, the so-called Lyman Family , were initially unsuccessful.

In 1968, after a fit of anger on the street in Boston, Frechette was discovered by a talent scout for Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni . The amateur actor then got the lead role in Antonioni's first American feature film production, Zabriskie Point (1970). Through the part of the Mark he became known to a wide audience and thus found access to the inner circle of the Lyman Family . He supported the community with his film fee of 60,000 US dollars. With his film partner Daria Halprin , who was meanwhile also his partner, Frechette moved to Lyman's commune. This was followed by two other leading roles in the Italian films Battalion of the Lost (1970) as Lieutenant Sassu and in La Grande Scrofa Nera (1971).

In 1973 he was arrested for an attempted bank robbery and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Through the death of a friend who was involved in the robbery, Frechette suffered from severe depression, which manifested itself in an eating disorder, whereupon he lost a lot of weight. On September 27, 1975, Frechette was found dead in the detention center's exercise room. On his neck was a weighted barbell of 75 kg, which had caused death by suffocation. Naughty death was rated as a training accident. His grave is in Mount Feake Cemetery in Waltham .

Filmography

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b cf. O'Brian, Dave: The Sorry Life & Death of Mark Frechette . In: Rolling Stone , November 6, 1975, p. 32
  2. ^ Mark E. Frechette , Find a Grave.
personal data
SURNAME Cheeky, Mark
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Frechette, Mark Ernest (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION US-American actor
DATE OF BIRTH 4th December 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston
DATE OF DEATH September 27, 1975
Place of death Norfolk , Massachusetts