Edward Herrmann had collapsed at the studio in New York, and no one knew why.
The actor had arrived to record his narrator part for Ken Burns’ latest documentary epic for PBS, “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies.” The three-part, six-hour film, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, traces the story of the disease from its earliest accounts in ancient Egypt to the latest scientific breakthroughs and their impact on real-life patients.
Herrmann, a favorite collaborator of Burns’, was helped up by colleagues after he had crumpled to the floor and was soon back at the microphone. “But during the break, he came back into the booth and explained that he not only had cancer, he had terminal cancer, brain cancer,” the film’s director, Barak Goodman, said. “He was confident he could finish this. … He felt it was appropriate that this be his final project.”
Herrmann — who died last December at 71 — did finish his work on “Cancer,” which premieres on PBS stations Monday. But that cancer cells were ravaging his body as he narrated the story of humanity’s battle against the disease offered a haunting symbolism. This is an illness so frightening that people sometimes find it hard even to utter its name, resorting to such euphemisms as the “C-word.”
Despite decades of increasingly sophisticated medical research, cancer remains relentless. And ubiquitous. Burns, the director behind “The Civil War” (PBS’ No. 1 series of all time), “Jazz” and many other documentaries, lost his own mother to breast cancer when he was 11.
Cancer is perhaps the most-feared of all diseases — which is exactly why Burns sees it as a vital topic, if never a welcome one.
“The essence of drama is conflict, and the essence of conflict is live or die,” the filmmaker, 61, said in a joint interview with Goodman and Mukherjee. “Those are the stakes here. … One out of three women and half of all men will get cancer” at some point in their lives.
“There are sad moments and there are exultant moments” in the film, he added. But “if you’re curious about who you are and what your fate is, you’ve got to know about this.”
Burns insists the topic is not as depressing as it might first sound. The work on “Cancer” has convinced him that a cure might not be as far off as it sometimes seems. “Just as progress has often led to intolerable failure,” he said, “failure has been the sponsor of so much extraordinary progress.”
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