- Born
- Died
- Birth nameMark Ernest Frechette
- Mark Frechette, a high school dropout of Quebecois ancestry from Fairfield, Connecticut, made his acting debut in Michelangelo Antonioni's controversial Zabriskie Point (1970). As Antonioni toured the U.S., experiencing cultural clash firsthand and shooting background footage, a talent scout saw Frechette, a carpenter, scream and throw a flowerpot at a woman on a Boston street. Antonioni immediately cast Frechette, a non-actor, in the movie's lead role: a college student, wrongfully hunted for the murder of a policeman during a campus uprising.
Throughout the filming, Frechette and the director disagreed bitterly about the script, while Frechette had an affair with co-star Daria Halprin. After the film, she joined Frechette in Mel Lyman's Boston commune, which supposedly had previously turned Frechette away, but accepted him after he was cast in Zabriskie Point (1970). He had been hospitalized twice for emotional problems, and several times arrested, prior to Zabriskie Point (1970). Lyman had been a member of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. Frechette donated $60,000 from films to the commune. Halprin soon left the Fort Hill commune.
Frechette quickly starred in two Italian movies, then was arrested for a 1973 bank robbery a few blocks from the commune, in which Christopher "Hercules" Thien, one of Frechette's two fellow cult member accomplices, was killed. Frechette's own gun had no bullets. After his arrest, he explained the bank robbery: "It would be like a direct attack on everything that is choking this country to death". In 1975, while serving a 6-15 year prison sentence, he died in an apparent weightlifting accident in the prison gym, when a 150-pound barbell fell on his neck, killing him.- IMDb Mini Biography By: David Stevens
- SpouseElizabeth G. Schmeling(1966 - September 27, 1975) (separated, 2 children)
- Died in the weight room at Massachusetts Correctional Institution when a 150-pound weight bar he was lifting fell on his throat, suffocating him. The death was ruled an accident.
- On Aug. 29, 1973, he and two accomplices attempted to rob a bank in Boston, MA. One of his accomplices was shot and killed by police and Frechette and the other man were arrested. Frechette was tried and sentenced to six to 15 years in prison.
- Donated his $60,000 earnings from Zabriskie Point (1970) to a commune.
- There was no way to stop what was going to happen. We just reached the point where all that the three of us really wanted to do was hold up a bank. And besides, standing there with a gun, cleaning out a teller's cage--that's about as fuckin' honest as you can get, man!
- I was desperate, working with a guy with his reputation and with what he knows about cinema, I wanted to learn something. But he wasn't teaching. So I got mad.
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