Heart of Darkness Karloff) as its final act, and adds a backstory in which Marlow had been Kurtz's adopted son. The cast includes Inga Swenson and Eartha Kitt. The most famous adaptation is Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 motion picture "Apocalypse Now" based on the screenplay by John Milius, which moves the story from the Congo to Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam War. In "Apocalypse Now", Martin Sheen plays Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a US Army Captain assigned to "terminate the command" of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz. Marlon Brando played Kurtz, in one of his most famous roles. A production documentary of the
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