Kazantzakis

The filmmaker, who had been raised in a strict Catholic household in New York’s Little Italy and had in his prior films grappled with ideas of belief in a violent world, was obsessed with adapting Nikos Kazantzakis’ 1955 novel “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

Dafoe embraced the role of a most human Jesus in Scorsese’s controversial adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel.

He quotes Christ and Kazantzakis, pals around with kindred villains, regularly has sex with balloon-breasted ladies but also spends a lot of time alone, which means the comic panels overflow with his loathing and insipid thoughts.

“Widely known for rendering ‘Gone with the Wind’ into Vietnamese, Duong Tuong translated a huge range of world literature, from Roald Dahl’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ to Stefan Zweig’s ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman,’ to Alex Haley’s ‘Roots,’ to Nikos Kazantzakis’s ‘Zorba the Greek,’ ” Cam Nguyen, a lecturer at the department of South and Southeast Asian studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an email.

‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ Willem Dafoe portrays the man from Galilee in director Martin Scorsese’s controversial 1988 adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ controversial 1955 novel.