It is unfortunate, if inevitable, that the subsequent storms in their relationship and her life have so often been read back into the tormented portraits of these years.
We then went to Boston College's McMullen Museum of Art, which had assembled a rare collection of etchings, lithographs and paintings by Edvard Munch, beginning with tormented self-portraits and ending with pastoral landscapes.
Earlier in his career, when he was under the spell of language and logos, he recreated himself more subtly and disembodied in the confrontational piece Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles) composed entirely of logos that have a personal meaning, as politics, daily life, obsession and distraction.
In this tormented expressionist self-portrait the British painter Leon Kossoff looks like Frankenstein's monster as played by Boris Karloff.
And from the show's opening moments, when Ms. Shaw's Andersen struggles with autistic exertion to complete the phrase "once upon a time," it is clear that this resourceful performer will be making an original and incisive contribution to the overcrowded gallery of portraits of tormented artists.
But while the suspense is minimal in this first-person account of an underachieving small-town lawyer who fears for the sanity of his gifted but unstable sister, the narrative is sustained by its thematic richness and the subtlety of its psychological portraits of tormented characters.
Drawing on previously untranslated letters and diaries, published reminiscences, and passages from Sōseki's fiction, Nathan renders intimate scenes of the writer's life and distills a portrait of a tormented yet unflaggingly original author.
Some of the highest praise for the film has deservedly gone to its portrait of the tormented black moderate embodied by Forest Whitaker in the title role.
Mr. van Dantzig shot to international fame with his 1965 ballet "Monument for a Dead Boy," a portrait of a tormented adolescent discovering his homosexuality in an intolerant milieu.
