Free Broken Heart by Tim Weaver

to give Hosterlitz a very small budget to make My Evil Heart . Against all odds, it was a critical and commercial smash and, off the back of it, Hosterlitz – just twenty-four at the time – signed a four-film deal with American Kingdom Inc. There, he made Connor O’Hare and Only When You’re Dead , gaining two Oscar nominations, and then The Eyes of the Night. That was the game-changer. And not just for Hosterlitz either. His leading man in that movie, Glen Cramer, who’d already won an Oscar for his portrayal of the title character in Hosterlitz’s Connor O’Hare , also went on to win his second Oscar for The Eyes of the Night .
In an interview with the LA Times in 1989, during the press for Half-Light , for which he won his fourth and final acting Oscar, Glen Cramer was quick to give Hosterlitz his dues: ‘If it hadn’t been for Bobby, I’d be serving hamburgers in McDonald’s. I’ll never forget, before he cast me in Connor , he came to see this show I was doing in New York. He waited outside the stage door, and I thought he wanted an autograph. I said to him, “This is the first autograph I’ve ever signed,” and he said, “Well, it won’t be the last.” I’ll never forget that. When he died last year, he left such a hole to fill. That HUAC bullshit back in the fifties has a lot to answer for. It was an absolute scandal.’
    Accused of being a communist by the House of Un-American Activities, Hosterlitz fled LA for London, but he was soon in an irreversible slide. His career failed to ignite in Britain, he made three films in Germany, and then – eight years after he left, and no longer of interest to the HUAC – he returned to the US when his mother became ill. He got some TV work, directing episodes of Bonanza and Petticoat Junction , and then seemed to have manoeuvred himself back into the big time when he signed with Paramount to direct a western he’d also written the script for called The Ghost of the Plains . It was destroyed by The Good, the Bad and the Ugly at the box office. Hosterlitz’s career was finished.
‘He fell into more TV work to pay the bills,’ Korin says, ‘but then his mom died in 1969, and everything disintegrated. He got depression. He got addicted to painkillers, sleeping pills, speed … call girls.’ Korin pauses at those last two words, then shrugs. ‘He was lonely and grieving. He said the drugs made him paranoid, and he lost a lot of friends.’ Disgruntled, unloved and alone, Hosterlitz moved back to the UK, where Hammer rival, Amicus, offered him the haunted house film House of Darkness (1971).
The production turned out to be a disaster.
‘He was strung out on drugs most of the time,’ remembers the producer Gordon Lem, ‘and – even when he wasn’t – everyone thought he was weird, all the way down to the woman who made the tea. To be honest, I felt sorry for him by the end. He was like the walking dead: gone behind the eyes.’
Three years later, Hosterlitz suffered a stroke. After a long recovery, and unable to get any work anywhere in either the UK or the US, Robert – now penniless – moved to Spain to direct the first Ursula film.
The grindhouse producer Isaac L. Murray offered to double his money if he directed back-to-back sequels to Ursula , so Hosterlitz made Ursula: Queen Kommandant (1978) and Ursula: Butcher of El Grande (1978), which switched the action to a South American prison. By that time, he and Korin were married. ‘Those films were bad,’ she says. ‘If I tried to convince you otherwise, you’d laugh me out of the room. I mean, I spent most of the time in the buff. But if I hadn’t done them, I never would have met Robert.’
    It was at this point that Collinsky began to talk about Korin’s own career, in particular the years after she married Hosterlitz. She seemed open and honest in her responses, always giving a straight answer to a straight question – but then Collinsky asked her about what had attracted her to