Kurtz (Heart of Darkness) circumstances and remote settings to assert power over others. It is widely believed that Conrad drew influence from these characters, as well as Stevenson's plot lines, when writing "Heart of Darkness". In the 1958 loose adaptation for the CBS television anthology series "Playhouse 90" Kurtz was played by Boris Karloff. This version uses the encounter between Marlow and Kurtz as its final act, and adds a backstory in which Marlow had been Kurtz's adopted son. Francis Ford Coppola's acclaimed Vietnam War film "Apocalypse Now" (1979) centers on the protagonist's mission to find and kill the renegade Colonel Kurtz (played by
Joseph Conrad on the Congo River, an episode that would inspire his novella, "Heart of Darkness". During this period, in 1890 in the Congo, Conrad encountered and befriended the Irish Republican and advocate for human rights, Sir Roger Casement. When Conrad left London on 25 October 1892 aboard the clipper ship "Torrens", one of the passengers was William Henry Jacques, a consumptive Cambridge graduate who died less than a year later (19 September 1893) and was, according to Conrad's "A Personal Record", the first reader of the still-unfinished manuscript of his "Almayer's Folly". Jacques encouraged Conrad to continue writing the novel. Conrad