The "Hot" List
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Since starring in his first film, Splendor in the Grass (1961), Warren Beatty has been said to have demonstrated a greater longevity in movies than any actor of his generation. Few people have taken so many responsibilities for all phases of the production of films as producer, director, writer, and actor, and few have evidenced so high a level of integrity in a body of work.
In Rules Don't Apply (2016), he writes, produces, directs and stars in. Only Beatty and Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) have been nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as an actor, a director, a writer, and a producer for the same film. Beatty is the only person ever to have done it twice, for Heaven Can Wait (1978) and again for Reds (1981). Beatty has been nominated 15 times by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and 8 films he has produced have earned 53 Academy nominations. In 1982 he won the Academy Award for Directing and in 2000 was given the Academy's highest honor, the Irving G. Thalberg Award.
He was awarded Best Director from the Directors Guild of America and Best Writer three times from the Writers Guild of America. He has received the Milestone Award from the Producers Guild, the Board of Governors Award from the American Society of Cinematographers, the Directors Award from the Costume Designers Guild, the Life Achievement Award from the Publicists Guild, and the Outstanding Contribution to Cinematic Imagery Award from the Art Directors Guild. The National Association of Theater Owners has honored him as Director of the Year, as Producer of the Year and as Actor of the Year.
He has won 16 awards from the New York and Los Angeles Film Critics, the National Board of Review, and the Golden Globes. In 1992, he was made a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France; in Italy he received the David di Donatello award in 1968 and again in 1981 and its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998; in 2001, he received the Donostia Lifetime Achievement Award from the San Sebastian International Film Festival; in 2002, he received the British Academy Fellowship from BAFTA; and in 2011, he was awarded the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellence in Film.
In December 2004, Beatty received The Kennedy Center Honor in Washington, D.C. In addition, he is the recipient of the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, the HFPA Cecile B. DeMille Award and many others. Politically active since the 1960's, Beatty campaigned with Robert F. Kennedy in his 1968 presidential campaign. That same year he traveled throughout the United States speaking in favor of gun control and against the war in Vietnam. In 1972 he took a year off from motion pictures to campaign with George McGovern.
In 1981, Beatty was a founding board member of the Center for National Policy. He is a founding member of The Progressive Majority, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has participated in the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland.
Beatty serves on the Board of Directors of the Motion Picture and Television Fund Foundation. He previously served on the Board of Trustees of The Scripps Research Institute for several years. He has received the Eleanor Roosevelt Award from the Americans for Democratic Action, the Brennan Legacy Award from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, and the Philip Burton Public Service Award from The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights.
In multiple forums he has addressed campaign finance reform, the increasing disparity of wealth, universal health care and the need for the Democratic Party to return to its roots.
In March of 2013, he was inducted into the California Hall of Fame.
Beatty was born in Richmond, Virginia. He and his wife, Annette Bening, live in Los Angeles and have four children.
His mother, Kathlyn Corinne (MacLean), was a drama teacher from Nova Scotia, Canada, and his father, Ira Owens Beaty, a professor of psychology and real estate agent, was from Virginia. His sister is actress Shirley MacLaine (born Shirley MacLean Beaty). His ancestry is mostly English and Scottish.- Actress
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From the age of five, Linda Blair had to get used to the spotlight, first as a child model and then as an actress, when out of 600 applicants she was picked for the role of Regan, the possessed child, in The Exorcist (1973). Linda quickly rose to international fame, won the Golden Globe, and seemed to be set to take the Academy Award for that role, but when it leaked how some parts of the role were not performed by her (the demonic voice was dubbed by Mercedes McCambridge, and eight seconds of a stunt dummy were used) that dream broke, and with that disappointment probably came the first blow to what looked like the beginning of an A-list career.
Over the next few years she had no trouble securing lead roles in a number of pictures, including the highly successful television films Born Innocent (1974) (the #1 TV movie of that year) and Sarah T. - Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (1975), as well as the Exorcist sequel Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). However, when she was peer pressured into buying cocaine at the age of 18, it led to an arrest and subsequent sentencing to three years probation. The much-publicized drug bust caused Linda to be blacklisted in Hollywood, and her career was soon reduced to B-movies and occasional TV guest appearances only.
Although her career never returned to its former glory, Linda proved to be a good sport about embracing the change, and out of the '80s emerged lead roles in two cult classics: the women-in-prison film Chained Heat (1983) and the femme fatale vigilante action film Savage Streets (1984). She continued acting in numerous films throughout the '80s and '90s, including the Exorcist spoof Repossessed (1990). In 1997, she also took to the Broadway stage and starred as "Rizzo" in the revival of "Grease." She received widespread mainstream attention again in the 2000's with the theatrical re-release of the Exorcist, followed by a hosting job on the hit Fox Family TV series Scariest Places on Earth (2000), which ran for six years and followed Linda as she visited notorious "haunted" locations around the world.
Linda was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to Elinore, a real estate agent, and James, an executive headhunter. She has a brother, Jimmy, and a sister, Debbie. Linda has been a Hollywood icon for over 40 years, but it is her first love of animals that has ultimately taken center stage in her life. She now runs the Linda Blair WorldHeart Foundation, a non-profit 501C3 tax deductible organization dedicated to rescuing and rehabilitating abused, neglected, and abandoned animals from the harsh streets of the Los Angeles area, as well as from the overcrowded and overwhelmed city and county animal shelters. She works and lives on the 2-acre rescue sanctuary full-time in California, which was featured on The Today Show in a segment titled "From Devil to Angel." Of course, she also makes frequent appearances at horror fan conventions to celebrate the legacy of The Exorcist (1973) .- Actor
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A Martinez was born in Glendale, California, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for Longmire (2012), Dark Winds (2022) and Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024). He has been married to Leslie Bryans since 17 July 1982. They have three children. He was previously married to Mare Winningham.- Actress
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Clara Gordon Bow, destined to become "The It Girl", was born on July 29, 1905 in Brooklyn, New York, and was raised in poverty and violence. Her often absentee and brutish father could not or did not provide and her schizophrenic mother tried to slit Clara's throat when the girl spoke of becoming an actress. Bow, nonetheless, won a photo beauty contest which launched her movie career that would eventually number 58 films, from 1922 to 1933.
The movie It (1927) defined her career. The film starred Clara as a shopgirl who was asked out by the store's owner. As you watch the silent film you can see the excitement as she prepared for her date with the boss, her friend trying hard to assist her. She used a pair of scissors to modify her dress to try to look "sexier." The movie did much to change society's mores as there were only a few years between World War I and Clara Bow, but this movie went a long way in how society looked at itself. Clara was flaming youth in rebellion. In the film she presented a worldly wisdom that somehow sex meant having a good time. But the movie shouldn't mislead the viewer, because when her boss tries to kiss her goodnight, she slaps him. At the height of her popularity she received over 45,000 fan letters a month. Also, she was probably the most overworked and underpaid star in the industry. With the coming of sound, her popularity waned. Clara was also involved in several court battles ranging from unpaid taxes to being in divorce court for "stealing" women's husbands. After the court trials, she made a couple of attempts to get back in the public eye. One was Call Her Savage (1932) in 1932. It was somewhat of a failure at the box office and her last was in 1933 in a film called Hoopla (1933).
She then married cowboy star Rex Bell at 26 and retired from the film world at 28. She doted on her two sons and did everything to please them. Haunted by a weight problem and a mental imbalance, she never re-entered show business. She was confined to sanitariums from time to time and prohibited access to her beloved sons. She died of a heart attack in West Los Angeles, on September 26, 1965 at age 60. Today she is finding a renaissance among movie buffs, who are recently discovering the virtues of silent film. The actress who wanted so much to be like the wonderful young lady in It (1927) has the legacy of her films to confirm that she was a wonderful lady and America's first sex symbol.- Actor
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Aaron Edward Eckhart is an American actor. Born in Cupertino, California, Eckhart moved to the United Kingdom at an early age, when his father relocated the family. Several years later, he began his acting career by performing in school plays, before moving to Australia for his high school senior year. He left high school without graduating, but earned a diploma through a professional education course, and graduated from Brigham Young University (BYU) in 1994 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree in film. For much of the mid-1990s, he lived in New York City as a struggling, unemployed actor.- Actress
- Producer
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Alfre Woodard was born on November 8, 1952 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the youngest of three children of Constance, a homemaker, and Marion H. Woodard, an interior designer. She was named by her godmother, who claimed she saw a vision of Alfre's name written out in gold letters. A former high school cheerleader and track star, she got the acting bug after being persuaded to audition for a school play by a nun at her school. She went on to study acting at Boston University and enjoyed a brief stint on Broadway before moving to Los Angeles, California. She got her first break in Remember My Name (1978) which also starred Jeff Goldblum. She lives in Santa Monica, California with her husband, writer Roderick M. Spencer, and their two adopted children: Mavis and Duncan. She was named one of the Most Beautiful People in America by People Magazine.- Actor
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The award-worthy actor, now enjoying an over five decade career, has a resume that includes everything from Shakespeare to Seinfeld -- from the villainous Senator on Ozark to the wise judge on Lincoln Lawyer.
Born on June 28, 1946, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Clair, an architect and musician, and Marian (Holman) Davison, a secretary, Bruce's parents divorced when he was just three. He developed a burgeoning interest in acting while majoring in art at Penn State and after accompanying a friend to a college theater audition. Making his professional stage debut in 1966 as Jonathan in "Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Bad" at the Pennsylvania Festival Theatre, he made it to Broadway within just a couple of years (1968) with the role of Troilus in "Tiger at the Gates" at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre. The year after that he was seen off-Broadway in "A Home Away from Home" and appeared at the Lincoln Center in the cast of "King Lear."
Success in the movies came immediately for the perennially youthful-looking actor after he and a trio of up-and-coming talents (Barbara Hershey [then known as Barbara Seagull], Richard Thomas and Catherine Burns) starred together in the poignant but disturbing coming-of-age film Last Summer (1969). From this he was awarded a starring role opposite Kim Darby in The Strawberry Statement (1970), an offbeat social commentary about 60s college radicalism, and in the cult horror flick Willard (1971) in which he bonded notoriously with a herd of rats.
Moving further into the 70s decade, his film load did not increase significantly as expected and the ones he did appear in were no great shakes. With the exception of his co-starring role alongside Burt Lancaster in the well-made cavalry item Ulzana's Raid (1972) and the powerful low-budget Short Eyes (1977) in which he played a child molester, Bruce's film roles were underwhelming, such as his elder Patrick Dennis in the Lucille Ball musical film version of Mame (1974), as well as The Jerusalem File (1972), Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976), Grand Jury (1976) and Brass Target (1978).
As such, Bruce wisely looked elsewhere for rewarding work and found it on the stage and on the smaller screen. Earning strong theatrical roles in "The Skin of Our Teeth," "The Little Foxes" and "A Life in the Theatre," he won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award for his work in "Streamers" in 1977. On TV, he scored in mini-movie productions of Mourning Becomes Electra (1978), Deadman's Curve (1978) (portraying Dean Torrence of the surf-era pop duo Jan and Dean) and, most of all, Summer of My German Soldier (1978) co-starring Kristy McNichol as a German prisoner of war in the American South who falls for a lonely Jewish-American girl. In 1972 Bruce married actress Jess Walton who appeared briefly as a college student in The Strawberry Statement (1970) and later became a daytime soap opera fixture. The marriage was quickly annulled the following year.
The 1980s was also dominated by strong theater performances. Bruce took over the role of the severely deformed John Merrick as "The Elephant Man" on Broadway; portrayed Clarence in "Richard III" at the New York Shakespeare Festival; was directed by Henry Fonda in "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial"; played a moving Tom Wingfield opposite Jessica Tandy's Amanda in "The Glass Menagerie"; received a second Los Angeles Drama Critics Award for his work in the AIDS play "The Normal Heart"; and finished off the decade gathering up fine reviews in the amusing A.R. Gurney period piece "The Cocktail Hour". While hardly lacking for work on film (Kiss My Grits (1982), Crimes of Passion (1984), Spies Like Us (1985), and The Ladies Club (1985)), few of them made use of his talents and range.
It was not until he was cast in the ground-breaking gay drama Longtime Companion (1989) that his film career revitalized. Giving a quiet, finely nuanced, painfully tender performance as the middle-aged lover and caretaker of a life partner ravaged by AIDS, Bruce managed to stand out amid the strong ensemble cast and earn himself an Oscar nomination for "Best Supporting Actor". Although he lost out to the flashier antics of Joe Pesci in the mob drama Goodfellas (1990) that year, Bruce was not overlooked -- copping Golden Globe, Independent Spirit, New York Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics awards. Other gay-themed films also welcomed his presence, including The Cure (1995) and It's My Party (1996). The actor eventually served as a spokesperson for a host of AIDS-related organizations, including Hollywood Supports, and has been active with foundations that assist abused children.
Bruce has been all over the screen since his success in Longtime Companion (1989). Predominantly seen as mature, morally responsible dads and politicians, his genial good looks and likability have on occasion belied a weak or corrupt heart. Bruce married actress Lisa Pelikan in 1986 and they have one son, Ethan, born in 1996. (Color of Justice (1997)). Popular films have included Six Degrees of Separation (1993) starring Will Smith, the family adventure film Far from Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog (1995) and the box-office hit X-Men (2000) and its sequel in the role of Senator Kelly. More controversial art-house showcases include Dahmer (2002), as serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer's father, and Hate Crime (2005), as a bigoted, murderous pastor.
Into the millennium, Bruce has played mature gents and several high-level officials in such films as The Dead Girl (2006), Christmas Angel (2009), Camp Hell (2010), Black Beauty (2015), Displacement (2016), 9/11 (2017), Along Came the Devil (2018), Itsy Bitsy (2019)
Divorced from second wife Lisa Pelikan, Bruce is happily married to Michele Correy and has a daughter with her, Sophia Lucy, born in 2006. They live in the Los Angeles area.- Actress
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Phoebe Belle Cates was born on July 16, 1963 in New York City, New York, and raised there. She is the daughter of Lily and Joseph Cates, who was a Broadway producer and television pioneer. Her uncle was director/producer Gilbert Cates. Phoebe is of Russian Jewish, and one quarter Chinese, descent. She studied at Miss Hewitt's school and at the Professional Children's School in New York City. She took classes at Juilliard when she was ten-years-old for three and a half years until a knee injury forced her to stop. Phoebe had been a busy New York model starting at the age of fourteen. She's since been featured on the covers of four Seventeens, two Elle covers, a British Vogue, and Andy Warhol's Interview, as well as in numerous layouts in other magazines. She actively pursued her modeling career, until she met her film agent at a party at New York's Studio 54. She trains with Robert Ravan, founder of The Actors' Circle in New York. Previously she studied with Alice Spivack of the H.B. Studios. Cates made her motion picture debut as Sarah in Paradise (1982) in the same year she starred as Jennifer Jason Leigh's "experienced" confidante in Amy Heckerling's acclaimed Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). Cates then landed the role of "Christine Ramsey" in Private School (1983), then co-starred in the innovative Gremlins (1984) for Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, directed by Joe Dante. Cates has remained active in theatre, as well. After making her New York debut in Joseph Papp's Off-Broadway production of "The Nest of the Wood Grouse" in 1984, she followed with David Henry Hwang's "Rich Relations" at The Second Stage and a one-act festival at the Manhattan Punchline. On the West Coast, Cates played "Nina" in the La Jolla Playhouse production of Anton Chekhov's "The Sea Gull" and has since appeared in "Much Ado About Nothing" at New York's Public Theatre, and as "Juliet" in Chicago's Goodman Theatre production of "Romeo and Juliet".
Since 1989, Cates has been married to actor Kevin Kline, with whom she has two children.- Actor
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Aidan Gillen is an Irish actor. He is best known for portraying Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish in the HBO series Game of Thrones (2011), CIA operative Bill Wilson in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Stuart Alan Jones in the Channel 4 series Queer as Folk (1999), John Boy in the RTÉ Television series Love/Hate (2010), and Tommy Carcetti in the HBO series The Wire (2002).
In 2011, Gillen began playing Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish on the HBO series Game of Thrones (2011), for which he received his second Irish Film & Television Award nomination.
In 2015 he starred in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015) the second film in the Maze Runner trilogy.
He also appeared in the fourth season of Peaky Blinders as Aberama Gold,and reprises his role in the fifth season too.- Actress
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Amanda Blake was born in Buffalo, NY, of English and Scottish descent. She and her parents moved to Claremont, California, while Amanda was still in high school, and she graduated from Claremont High. She enrolled at Pomona College but, due to her avid participation in community and theater productions, she was devoting much more time to acting than her schoolwork. Amanda started on a full acting schedule, doing summer stock in New England. She followed that up with theater and radio acting in Buffalo and then movies in Hollywood. While acting in small theater and stock companies she also painted backdrops and scenery. She was still in her teens when she debuted in MGM"s Stars in My Crown (1950), and her first television role was in Double Exposure (1952). Her most famous role, however, came in 1955, when she starred in the classic western series Gunsmoke (1955) as "Miss Kitty" Russell, the feisty madame and proprietor of Dodge City's Long Branch Saloon opposite James Arness' Marshal Matt Dillon.- Actress
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One of the brightest film stars to grace the screen was born Emilie Claudette Chauchoin on September 13, 1903, in Saint Mandé, France where her father owned a bakery at 57, rue de la République (now Avenue Général de Gaulle). The family moved to the United States when she was three. As Claudette grew up, she wanted nothing more than to play to Broadway audiences (in those days, any actress or actor worth their salt went for Broadway, not Hollywood). After her formal education ended, she enrolled in the Art Students League, where she paid for her dramatic training by working in a dress shop. She made her Broadway debut in 1923 in the stage production of "The Wild Wescotts". It was during this event that she adopted the name Claudette Colbert.
When the Great Depression shut down most of the theaters, Claudette decided to make a go of it in films. Her first film was called For the Love of Mike (1927). Unfortunately, it was a box-office disaster. She wasn't real keen on the film industry, but with an extreme scarcity in theatrical roles, she had no choice but to remain. In 1929 she starred as Joyce Roamer in The Lady Lies (1929). The film was a success and later that year she had another hit entitled The Hole in the Wall (1929). In 1930 she starred opposite Fredric March in Manslaughter (1930), which was a remake of the silent version of eight years earlier. A year after that Claudette was again paired in a film with March, Honor Among Lovers (1931). It fared well at the box-office, probably only because it was the kind of film that catered to women who enjoyed magazine fiction romantic stories. In 1932 Claudette played the evil Poppeia in Cecil B. DeMille's last great work, The Sign of the Cross (1932), and once again was cast with March. Later the same year she was paired with Jimmy Durante in The Phantom President (1932). By now Claudette's name symbolized good movies and she, along with March, pulled crowds into the theaters with the acclaimed Tonight Is Ours (1933).
The next year started a little on the slow side with the release of Four Frightened People (1934), where Claudette and her co-stars were at odds with the dreaded bubonic plague on board a ship. However, the next two films were real gems for this young actress. First up, Claudette was charming and radiant in Cecil B. DeMille's spectacular Cleopatra (1934). It wasn't one of DeMille's finest by any means, but it was a financial success and showcased Claudette as never before. However, it was as Ellie Andrews, in the now famous It Happened One Night (1934), that ensured she would be forever immortalized. Paired with Clark Gable, the madcap comedy was a mega-hit all across the country. It also resulted in Claudette being nominated for and winning the Oscar that year for Best Actress. IN 1935 she was nominated again for Private Worlds (1935), where she played Dr. Jane Everest, on the staff at a mental institution. The performance was exquisite. Films such as The Gilded Lily (1935), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and No Time for Love (1943) kept fans coming to the theaters and the movie moguls happy. Claudette was a sure drawing card for virtually any film she was in. In 1944 she starred as Anne Hilton in Since You Went Away (1944). Again, although she didn't win, Claudette picked up her third nomination for Best Actress.
By the late 1940s and early 1950s she was not only seen on the screen but the infant medium of television, where she appeared in a number of programs. However, her drawing power was fading somewhat as new stars replaced the older ones. In 1955 she filmed the western Texas Lady (1955) and wasn't seen on the screen again until Parrish (1961). It was her final silver screen performance. Her final appearance before the cameras was in a TV movie, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (1987). She did, however, remain on the stage where she had returned in 1956, her first love. After a series of strokes, Claudette divided her time between New York and Barbados. On July 30, 1996, Claudette died in Speightstown, Barbados. She was 92.- Actor
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Aidan Quinn was born on 8 March 1959 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He is an actor and producer, known for Benny & Joon (1993), Practical Magic (1998) and Flipped (2010). He has been married to Elizabeth Bracco since 1 September 1987. They have two children.- Actress
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Statuesque 5'7" blonde beauty Sybil Danning reigns supreme as one of the sexiest, most dynamic, and commanding actresses to achieve cult B-movie queen status. Born in Austria as daughter of US Army major and Austrian mother she grew up on army bases in New Jersey, Maryland and Sacramento, CA.. Sybil started as a model then film debut as the beautiful tragic Lorelei, German legend who threw herself into the Rhine River in despair over a faithless lover then transformed into a siren who lured fishermen to destruction. As Nibelungen princess Kriemhild, she turns she-devil revenges death of her love Siegfried by her brutal Burgundian King brothers. Sybil studied 3 years with noted German drama coach Anne-Marie Hanschke, multiple mainstream European and American movies followed. When offered lead in prestigious Francis Durbridge play for Germany, Switzerland, and Austria; she chose Hollywood instead. Sybil's (Raid on Entebbe) Oscar nominated Best Foreign Film OPERATION THUNDER BOLT, aka MIVTSA JONATAN with Klaus kinski was her calling card. It was her impressive performance as vivacious Valkyrie warrior "St Exmin" for which she won multiple awards, science-fiction cult movie BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS that introduced Sybil to young and old worldwide. A studio contracted Sybil to produce an action figure based on St Exmin with street date April 2021. Male & female fans love her rare beauty, sexiness, & toughness as tough prison inmate, formidable swanky swordfighter, wicked werewolf queen, cunning femme fatale English professor, Queen of the Moon, wicked warden, alien queen, loyal LAPD officer, brave bounty hunter, etc. Sybil has 2 comics, RUGER(TM) currently in discussion for an action TV series. Away for a while due to personal reasons, Tarantino and Rob Zombie brought her back in GRINDHOUSE as Nazi Villain and HALLOWEEN as nasty nurse! Sybil's back in action!- Actor
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Alfredo James "Al" 'Pacino established himself as a film actor during one of cinema's most vibrant decades, the 1970s, and has become an enduring and iconic figure in the world of American movies.
He was born April 25, 1940 in Manhattan, New York City, to Italian-American parents, Rose (nee Gerardi) and Sal Pacino. They divorced when he was young. His mother moved them into his grandparents' home in the South Bronx. Pacino found himself often repeating the plots and voices of characters he had seen in the movies. Bored and unmotivated in school, he found a haven in school plays, and his interest soon blossomed into a full-time career. Starting onstage, he went through a period of depression and poverty, sometimes having to borrow bus fare to succeed to auditions. He made it into the prestigious Actors Studio in 1966, studying under Lee Strasberg, creator of the Method Approach that would become the trademark of many 1970s-era actors.
After appearing in a string of plays in supporting roles, Pacino finally attained success off-Broadway with Israel Horovitz's "The Indian Wants the Bronx", winning an Obie Award for the 1966-67 season. That was followed by a Tony Award for "Does the Tiger Wear a Necktie?" His first feature films made little departure from the gritty realistic stage performances that earned him respect: he played a drug addict in The Panic in Needle Park (1971) after his film debut in Me, Natalie (1969). The role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972) was one of the most sought-after of the time: Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Ryan O'Neal, Robert De Niro and a host of other actors either wanted it or were mentioned, but director Francis Ford Coppola wanted Pacino for the role.
Coppola was successful but Pacino was reportedly in constant fear of being fired during the very difficult shoot. The film was a monster hit that earned Pacino his first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. However, instead of taking on easier projects for the big money he could now command, Pacino threw his support behind what he considered tough but important films, such as the true-life crime drama Serpico (1973) and the tragic real-life bank robbery film Dog Day Afternoon (1975). He was nominated three consecutive years for the "Best Actor" Academy Award. He faltered slightly with Bobby Deerfield (1977), but regained his stride with And Justice for All (1979), for which he received another Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Unfortunately, this would signal the beginning of a decline in his career, which produced flops like Cruising (1980) and Author! Author! (1982).
Pacino took on another vicious gangster role and cemented his legendary status in the ultra-violent cult film Scarface (1983), but a monumental mistake was about to follow. Revolution (1985) endured an endless and seemingly cursed shoot in which equipment was destroyed, weather was terrible, and Pacino fell ill with pneumonia. Constant changes in the script further derailed the project. The Revolutionary War-themed film, considered among the worst films ever made, resulted in awful reviews and kept him off the screen for the next four years. Returning to the stage, Pacino did much to give back and contribute to the theatre, which he considers his first love. He directed a film, The Local Stigmatic (1990), but it remains unreleased. He lifted his self-imposed exile with the striking Sea of Love (1989) as a hard-drinking policeman. This marked the second phase of Pacino's career, being the first to feature his now famous dark, owl eyes and hoarse, gravelly voice.
Returning to the Corleones, Pacino made The Godfather Part III (1990) and earned raves for his first comedic role in the colorful adaptation Dick Tracy (1990). This earned him another Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and two years later he was nominated for Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). He went into romantic mode for Frankie and Johnny (1991). In 1992, he finally won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his amazing performance in Scent of a Woman (1992). A mixture of technical perfection (he plays a blind man) and charisma, the role was tailor-made for him, and remains a classic.
The next few years would see Pacino becoming more comfortable with acting and movies as a business, turning out great roles in great films with more frequency and less of the demanding personal involvement of his wilder days. Carlito's Way (1993) proved another gangster classic, as did the epic crime drama Heat (1995) directed by Michael Mann and co-starring Robert De Niro. He directed the film adaptation of Shakespeare's Looking for Richard (1996). During this period, City Hall (1996), Donnie Brasco (1997) and The Devil's Advocate (1997) all came out. Reteaming with Mann and then Oliver Stone, he gave commanding performances in The Insider (1999) and Any Given Sunday (1999).
In the 2000s, Pacino starred in a number of theatrical blockbusters, including Ocean's Thirteen (2007), but his choice in television roles (the vicious, closeted Roy Cohn in the HBO miniseries Angels in America (2003) and his sensitive portrayal of Jack Kevorkian, in the television movie You Don't Know Jack (2010)) are reminiscent of the bolder choices of his early career. Each television project garnered him an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie.
Never wed, Pacino has a daughter, Julie Marie, with acting teacher Jan Tarrant, and a set of twins with former longtime girlfriend Beverly D'Angelo. His romantic history includes Jill Clayburgh, Veruschka von Lehndorff, Carole Mallory, Debra Winger, Tuesday Weld, Marthe Keller, Carmen Cervera, Kathleen Quinlan, Lyndall Hobbs, Penelope Ann Miller, and a two-decade intermittent relationship with "Godfather" co-star Diane Keaton. He currently lives with Argentinian actress Lucila Solá, who is 36 years his junior.
As of 2022, Pacino is 82-years-old. He has never retired from acting, and continues to appear regularly in film.- Actress
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Angie Dickinson was born in Kulm, North Dakota, in 1931, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. L. H. Brown. Mr. Brown was the publisher of The Kulm Messenger. The family left North Dakota in 1942 when Angie was 11 years old, moving to Burbank, California. In December of 1946, when she was a senior at Bellamarine Jefferson High School in Burbank, she won the Sixth Annual Bill of Rights Contest. Two years later her sister Janet, did likewise. Being the daughter of a printer, Angie at first had visions of becoming a writer, but gave this up after winning her first beauty contest. After finishing college she worked as a secretary in a Burbank airplane parts factory for 3-1/2 years. In 1953 she entered the local Miss America contest one day before the deadline and took second place. In August of the same year she was one of five winners in a beauty contest sponsored by NBC and appeared in several TV variety shows. She got her first bit part in a Warner Brothers movie in 1954 and gained television fame in the TV series The Millionaire (1955) and got her first good film role opposite John Wayne and Dean Martin in Rio Bravo (1959). Her success then climbed until she became one of the nation's top movie stars.- Actress
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Actress, writer, and producer on both the big and small screen, Abigail Spencer is quickly making a name for herself in Hollywood.
Spencer was seen in Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), a prequel take on The Wizard of Oz (1939), alongside James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, and Michelle Williams.
She has starred in the Sundance Channel's first scripted series, Rectify (2013). The series follows "Daniel Holden" (played by Aden Young), who must put his life back together, after serving 19 years on Georgia's Death Row before DNA evidence calls his conviction into question.
Spencer also was on the indie, Kilimanjaro (2013), opposite Brian Geraghty, and reprising her role of "Annie" for the online series, "Burning Love" on YouTube, which got picked up for a second and third season. The series, produced by Red Hour, is a funny parody of a "Bachelor"-esque show. She also reprised her role on the USA hit show, Suits (2011), and was seen in the season of Childrens Hospital (2008) for Adult Swim.
Abigail was the lead in Daniela Amavia's cinematic piece A Beautiful Now (2015), produced by Keith Kjarval/Unified Pictures.
As a screenwriter and producer, Spencer is in development on Wrong Number, with James Franco producing through his "Rabbit Bandini Productions" banner. Spencer will also star in the indie romantic comedy directed by AnnaRose King. Spencer also co-wrote, with Lauren McBrayer Miller, the television series "Teach", which was purchased by ABC Family and deals with the lives of high-school teachers.
Spencer starred, alongside Gerard Butler in Curtis Hanson's, Chasing Mavericks (2012). The film follows surfer "Jay Moriarity", who sets out to ride the Northern California break, known as "Mavericks". She was also seen opposite Jon Hamm on AMC's award-winning and critically-acclaimed original series Mad Men (2007), in the series' third season, as Don Draper's latest love interest, who also happens to be his daughter's school teacher. Other film credits include McG's This Means War (2012) and Jon Favreau's Cowboys & Aliens (2011).- Actress
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Pam Grier was born in Winston-Salem, NC, one of four children of Gwendolyn Sylvia (Samuels), a nurse, and Clarence Ransom Grier Jr., an Air Force mechanic. Pam has been a major African-American star from the early 1970s. Her career started in 1971, when Roger Corman of New World Pictures launched her with The Big Doll House (1971), about a women's penitentiary, and The Big Bird Cage (1972). Her strong role put her into a five-year contract with Samuel Z. Arkoff of American-International Pictures, and she became a leading lady in action films such as Jack Hill's Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974), the comic strip character Friday Foster (1975) and William Girdler's 'Sheba, Baby' (1975). She continued working with American-International, where she portrayed William Marshall's vampire victim in the Blacula (1972) sequel, Scream Blacula Scream (1973).
During the 1980s she became a regular on Miami Vice (1984) and played a supporting role as an evil witch in Ray Bradbury's and Walt Disney Pictures' Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), then returned to action as Steven Seagal's partner in Above the Law (1988). Her most famous role of the 1990s was probably Jackie Brown (1997), directed by Quentin Tarantino, which was an homage to her earlier 1970s action roles, She occasionally did supporting roles, as in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! (1996), In Too Deep (1999) and a funny performance in Jawbreaker (1999). She also appeared in John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001) and co-starred with Snoop Dogg in Bones (2001). Her entire career of over 30 years has brought only success for this beautiful and talented actress.
A sister of Grier's died from cancer in 1990 and the son of that sister committed suicide because of his mother's illness. Pam herself was diagnosed with cancer in 1988 and given 18 months to live, which has had an effect on how she has chosen to live. She has never been wed, although she has been romantically linked to Richard Pryor and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the past.- Actor
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Aaron was born one minute before his twin, Shawn Ashmore, in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada. He is the son of homemaker Linda and manufacturing engineer Rick. When they were 10, their mother was a part of a club called the "Multiple Births Association," or as Aaron likes to call it, "The Multiple Rugrats." The support group, located in Alberta, Canada was where the twins were discovered by a talent agent. It didn't take long for the problem of rejection to arise. The twins started out in commercials, sometimes by themselves and sometimes together. When they were 12, Aaron got an offer to be in a commercial, but he fell ill on that day, and Shawn went in his brother's place. Ever since then, Shawn's career has always been 1 step in front of his brother's. Since high school, when they were routinely mixed up with one another, their talents have become a lot less identical. They have been offered different roles to play, and they are looking a lot less identical, now that they are growing older. Aaron is now more sturdily built, with a broader face and broad shoulders. He stands 6'0", which is an inch taller than Shawn, who is 5'11". To that, Shawn says, "It's shoes and hair". Aaron lives in Toronto, where he shares an apartment with Shawn.- Actress
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Angela Michelle Harmon is an American actress and model from Dallas, Texas. She is known for her work on Agent Cody Banks, Baywatch Nights, Law & Order, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, Women's Murder Club, Seraphim Falls and Rizzoli & Isles. She was married to Jason Sehorn and has three children.- Actor
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Aaron is the comic that simply has to close out shows. When you see him, you'll know why. He is undeniably hilarious and packs more laughs per minute than any other comedian working today. No two sets are ever the same. Aaron was just cast in Uwe Boll's new feature film The First Shift, which bolsters his acting resume to well over 50 projects including cult classic feature films like The Boondock Saints 2, Detroit Rock City, The Kitchen opposite Melissa McCarthy and Saturday Night Live's The Ladies Man. He played the role of "Cork" opposite Joseph Gordon Levitt, Jeff Daniels and Isla Fisher in the Independent Spirit award winning film The Lookout. He was also a lead in the dark comedy series 24 Hour Rental now airing on Amazon.
Aaron's world record breaking documentary about stand up comedy in NYC "25 Sets" is now available on Amazon. Aaron's Comedy Central debut on THIS IS NOT HAPPENING has 2 million views and he has made two appearances on AXS TV's LIVE AT GOTHAM as well as appearances on GOTHAM VR, BIG JAY OAKERSON'S "WYFD?!?" and Comedy Central's Roast Battle Season 2 and DC comics' feature film THE KITCHEN.
Aarons podcast Street Famous NYC is available on YouTube and Patreon where the numbers build daily and the clips are routinely viral. He is also an author and has two books out currently. Mr Manners and American Etiquette. His 6 stand up albums are available on iTunes and Amazon "Aaron Berg Stands Down", "COMEDY COLTRANE", "Mr. Manners: Live From Long Island City", "UNSCRIPTED", American Etiquette live from the New York Comedy Festival and 180 which was just released.
Aaron can be seen doing stand up every night in NYC.- Actor
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Roberts is an Academy Award nominee for his role in Runaway Train, and a three-time Golden Globe nominee for Runaway Train, Star 80, and King of the Gypsies.
In addition, Roberts received acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival for his role in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints and It's My Party. He also starred in La Cucaracha, which won Best Film at the Austin Film Festival, and for which Roberts won Best Actor at the New York Independent Film Festival that same year. Other notable performances include his roles in The Dark Knight, Final Analysis, and Paul Thoman Anderson's Inherent Vice for Warner Bros., Millennium Films' Lovelace and The Expendables for Lionsgate.
On television, Roberts' memorable recurring roles include USA's Suits, CSI and Code Black for CBS, NBC's Heroes, and Crash for Starz. He has appeared in guest star roles on ABC's Greys Anatomy, NBC's Will & Grace, Fox's Brooklyn Nine-Nine, CBS' Hawaii Five-O, HBO's Entourage, and so much more.
Upcoming, Roberts plays Matt Dillon's doctor in Head Full of Honey, a Warner Bros. Germany production that is directed by Til Schweiger. Emily Mortimer and Nick Nolte also star. He also has a supporting role in the independent Hard Luck Love Song directed by Justin Corsbie. Roberts will play "Skip," a grizzled doorman whom offers advice to characters played by Michael Dorman and Sophia Bush. The film also stars Dermott Mulroney, and American rapper, RZA. Finally, Roberts is set to recur as DEA boss "Erick Sheldon" in La Reina del Sur for Telemundo Global Studio and Netflix.
Roberts was born in Biloxi, Mississippi, and grew up in and around the Atlanta area. He began his career in theatre in New York City where he won the Theatre World Award for his role on Broadway in Burn This.
He resides in Los Angeles with his wife of 26 years and brood of felines.
Roberts is represented by Sovereign Talent Group, Cultivate Entertainment, and Miles Anthony Associates in the UK.- Actress
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Born in Portland, Oregon, she grew up in on a farm in Ketchum, Idaho. But dad was Jack Hemingway, son of the Nobel prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway and, with that heritage, fame was almost foreordained. By the time she was 21, after the lead in the rape melodrama Lipstick (1976), she had a budding movie career, a $1 million promotional contract with Faberge perfume, and her face on magazine covers around the world. But, within the decade, it was all lost. Her sister Mariel Hemingway, whose role in Lipstick (1976) had been suggested by Margaux, was a much greater success. Margaux had started drinking heavily; two marriages had failed. In 1988, she checked herself into the Betty Ford Center for rehabilitation. Attempts to parley her recovery from alcohol into a revived career failed and, by the time she was 41, almost nothing was left. She lived alone in a studio apartment, no children, no lover, few friends. Neighbors informed police that she had not been seen for days and, on July 1, they entered through a 2nd-floor window. Dental records had to be used to confirm her identity.- Actor
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Aaron Kwok Fu-shing (born 26 October 1965) is a Hong Kong singer, dancer, and actor. He has been active since the 1980s and to the present. He is considered one of the "Four Heavenly Kings" of Hong Kong. Kwok's onstage dancing and displays is influenced by Michael Jackson. While most of his songs are in the dance-pop genre, he has experimented numerous times with rock and roll, ballad, rock, R&B, soul, electronica and traditional Chinese music.- Actress
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Mariel Hemingway was born on 22 November 1961 in Mill Valley, California, USA. She is an actress and producer, known for Manhattan (1979), Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) and The Sex Monster (1999). She was previously married to Stephen Crisman.- Actor
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Alan Rickman was born on a council estate in Acton, West London, to Margaret Doreen Rose (Bartlett), of English and Welsh descent, and Bernard Rickman, of Irish descent, who worked at a factory. Alan Rickman had an older brother (David), a younger brother (Michael), and a younger sister (Sheila). When Alan was 8 years old, his father died. He attended Latymer Upper School on a scholarship. He studied Graphic Design at Chelsea College of Art and Design, where he met Rima Horton, who would later become his longtime partner.
After three years at Chelsea College, Rickman did graduate studies at the Royal College of Art. He opened a successful graphic design business, Graphiti, with friends and managed it for several years before his love of theatre led him to seek an audition with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). At the relatively late age of 26, Rickman received a scholarship to RADA, which started a professional acting career that has lasted nearly 40 years, a career which has spanned stage, screen and television, and overlapped into directing, as well. In 1987, he first came to the attention of American audiences as the Vicomte de Valmont in "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" on Broadway (he was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in the role). Denied the role in the film version of the show, Rickman instead made his first film appearance opposite Bruce Willis in Die Hard (1988) as the villainous Hans Gruber. His take on the urbane villain set the standard for screen villains for decades to come.
Although often cited as being a master of playing villains, Rickman actually played a wide variety of characters, such as the romantic cello-playing ghost Jamie in Anthony Minghella's Truly Madly Deeply (1990) and the noble Colonel Brandon of Sense and Sensibility (1995). He treated audiences to his comedic abilities in such films as Dogma (1999), Galaxy Quest (1999) and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), and roles like Dr. Alfred Blalock in Something the Lord Made (2004), and as Alex Hughes in Snow Cake (2006), showcased his ability to play ordinary men in extraordinary situations. Rickman even conquered the daunting task of singing a role in a Stephen Sondheim musical as he took on the role of Judge Turpin in the movie adaptation of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007). In 2001, Rickman introduced himself to a whole new, younger generation of fans by taking on the role of Severus Snape in the film versions of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001). He continued to play the role through the eighth and last movie Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011).
Alan Rickman died of pancreatic cancer on 14 January 2016. He was 69 years old.- Actress
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Actress and singer Ann-Margret is one of the most famous sex symbols and actresses of the 1960s and beyond. She continued her career through the following decades and into the 21st century.
Ann-Margret was born Ann-Margret Olsson in Valsjöbyn, Jämtland County, Sweden, to Anna Regina (Aronsson) and Carl Gustav Olsson, who worked for an electrical company. She came to America at age 6. She studied at Northwestern University and left for Las Vegas to pursue a career as a singer. Ann-Margret was discovered by George Burns and soon afterward got both a record deal at RCA and a film contract at 20th Century Fox. In 1961, her single "I Just Don't Understand" charted in the Top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 Charts. Her acting debut followed the same year as Bette Davis' daughter in Frank Capra's Pocketful of Miracles (1961). She appeared in the musical State Fair (1962) a year later before her breakthrough in 1963. With Bye Bye Birdie (1963) and Viva Las Vegas (1964) opposite Elvis Presley, she became a Top 10 Box Office star, teen idol and even Golden Globe nominated actress. She was marketed as Hollywood's hottest young star and in the years to come got awarded the infamous nickname "sex kitten." Her following pictures were sometimes ripped apart by critics (Bus Riley's Back in Town (1965) and The Swinger (1966)), sometimes praised (The Cincinnati Kid (1965)). She couldn't escape being typecast because of her great looks. By the late 1960s, her career stalled, and she turned to Italy for new projects. She returned and, by 1970, she was back in the public image with Hollywood films (R.P.M. (1970) opposite Anthony Quinn), Las Vegas sing-and-dance shows and her own television specials. She finally overcame her image with her Oscar-nominated turn in Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge (1971) and succeeded in changing her image from sex kitten to respected actress. A near-fatal accident at a Lake Tahoe show in 1972 only momentarily stopped her career. She was again Oscar-nominated in 1975 for Tommy (1975), the rock opera film of the British rock band The Who. Her career continued with successful films throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s. She starred next to Anthony Hopkins in Magic (1978) and appeared in pictures co-starring Walter Matthau, Gene Hackman, Glenda Jackson and Roy Scheider. She even appeared in a television remake of Tennessee Williams's masterpiece play "A Streetcar Named Desire" in 1983. Another late career highlight for her was Grumpy Old Men (1993) as the object of desire for Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. She continues to act in movies today.- Actress
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Adrianne Leon was born on 15 March 1987 in San Diego, California, USA. She is an actress, known for General Hospital (1963), The Young and the Restless (1973) and Hot Properties (2005).- Actor
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Marlon Brando is widely considered the greatest movie actor of all time, rivaled only by the more theatrically oriented Laurence Olivier in terms of esteem. Unlike Olivier, who preferred the stage to the screen, Brando concentrated his talents on movies after bidding the Broadway stage adieu in 1949, a decision for which he was severely criticized when his star began to dim in the 1960s and he was excoriated for squandering his talents. No actor ever exerted such a profound influence on succeeding generations of actors as did Brando. More than 50 years after he first scorched the screen as Stanley Kowalski in the movie version of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and a quarter-century after his last great performance as Col. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), all American actors are still being measured by the yardstick that was Brando. It was if the shadow of John Barrymore, the great American actor closest to Brando in terms of talent and stardom, dominated the acting field up until the 1970s. He did not, nor did any other actor so dominate the public's consciousness of what WAS an actor before or since Brando's 1951 on-screen portrayal of Stanley made him a cultural icon. Brando eclipsed the reputation of other great actors circa 1950, such as Paul Muni and Fredric March. Only the luster of Spencer Tracy's reputation hasn't dimmed when seen in the starlight thrown off by Brando. However, neither Tracy nor Olivier created an entire school of acting just by the force of his personality. Brando did.
Marlon Brando, Jr. was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Marlon Brando, Sr., a calcium carbonate salesman, and his artistically inclined wife, the former Dorothy Julia Pennebaker. "Bud" Brando was one of three children. His ancestry included English, Irish, German, Dutch, French Huguenot, Welsh, and Scottish; his surname originated with a distant German immigrant ancestor named "Brandau." His oldest sister Jocelyn Brando was also an actress, taking after their mother, who engaged in amateur theatricals and mentored a then-unknown Henry Fonda, another Nebraska native, in her role as director of the Omaha Community Playhouse. Frannie, Brando's other sibling, was a visual artist. Both Brando sisters contrived to leave the Midwest for New York City, Jocelyn to study acting and Frannie to study art. Marlon managed to escape the vocational doldrums forecast for him by his cold, distant father and his disapproving schoolteachers by striking out for The Big Apple in 1943, following Jocelyn into the acting profession. Acting was the only thing he was good at, for which he received praise, so he was determined to make it his career - a high-school dropout, he had nothing else to fall back on, having been rejected by the military due to a knee injury he incurred playing football at Shattuck Military Academy, Brando Sr.'s alma mater. The school booted Marlon out as incorrigible before graduation.
Acting was a skill he honed as a child, the lonely son of alcoholic parents. With his father away on the road, and his mother frequently intoxicated to the point of stupefaction, the young Bud would play-act for her to draw her out of her stupor and to attract her attention and love. His mother was exceedingly neglectful, but he loved her, particularly for instilling in him a love of nature, a feeling which informed his character Paul in Last Tango in Paris (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris") when he is recalling his childhood for his young lover Jeanne. "I don't have many good memories," Paul confesses, and neither did Brando of his childhood. Sometimes he had to go down to the town jail to pick up his mother after she had spent the night in the drunk tank and bring her home, events that traumatized the young boy but may have been the grain that irritated the oyster of his talent, producing the pearls of his performances. Anthony Quinn, his Oscar-winning co-star in Viva Zapata! (1952) told Brando's first wife Anna Kashfi, "I admire Marlon's talent, but I don't envy the pain that created it."
Brando enrolled in Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at New York's New School, and was mentored by Stella Adler, a member of a famous Yiddish Theatre acting family. Adler helped introduce to the New York stage the "emotional memory" technique of Russian theatrical actor, director and impresario Konstantin Stanislavski, whose motto was "Think of your own experiences and use them truthfully." The results of this meeting between an actor and the teacher preparing him for a life in the theater would mark a watershed in American acting and culture.
Brando made his debut on the boards of Broadway on October 19, 1944, in "I Remember Mama," a great success. As a young Broadway actor, Brando was invited by talent scouts from several different studios to screen-test for them, but he turned them down because he would not let himself be bound by the then-standard seven-year contract. Brando would make his film debut quite some time later in Fred Zinnemann's The Men (1950) for producer Stanley Kramer. Playing a paraplegic soldier, Brando brought new levels of realism to the screen, expanding on the verisimilitude brought to movies by Group Theatre alumni John Garfield, the predecessor closest to him in the raw power he projected on-screen. Ironically, it was Garfield whom producer Irene Mayer Selznick had chosen to play the lead in a new Tennessee Williams play she was about to produce, but negotiations broke down when Garfield demanded an ownership stake in "A Streetcar Named Desire." Burt Lancaster was next approached, but couldn't get out of a prior film commitment. Then director Elia Kazan suggested Brando, whom he had directed to great effect in Maxwell Anderson's play "Truckline Café," in which Brando co-starred with Karl Malden, who was to remain a close friend for the next 60 years.
During the production of "Truckline Café," Kazan had found that Brando's presence was so magnetic, he had to re-block the play to keep Marlon near other major characters' stage business, as the audience could not take its eyes off of him. For the scene where Brando's character re-enters the stage after killing his wife, Kazan placed him upstage-center, partially obscured by scenery, but where the audience could still see him as Karl Malden and others played out their scene within the café set. When he eventually entered the scene, crying, the effect was electric. A young Pauline Kael, arriving late to the play, had to avert her eyes when Brando made this entrance as she believed the young actor on stage was having a real-life conniption. She did not look back until her escort commented that the young man was a great actor.
The problem with casting Brando as Stanley was that he was much younger than the character as written by Williams. However, after a meeting between Brando and Williams, the playwright eagerly agreed that Brando would make an ideal Stanley. Williams believed that by casting a younger actor, the Neanderthalish Kowalski would evolve from being a vicious older man to someone whose unintentional cruelty can be attributed to his youthful ignorance. Brando ultimately was dissatisfied with his performance, though, saying he never was able to bring out the humor of the character, which was ironic as his characterization often drew laughs from the audience at the expense of Jessica Tandy's Blanche Dubois. During the out-of-town tryouts, Kazan realized that Brando's magnetism was attracting attention and audience sympathy away from Blanche to Stanley, which was not what the playwright intended. The audience's sympathy should be solely with Blanche, but many spectators were identifying with Stanley. Kazan queried Williams on the matter, broaching the idea of a slight rewrite to tip the scales back to more of a balance between Stanley and Blanche, but Williams demurred, smitten as he was by Brando, just like the preview audiences.
For his part, Brando believed that the audience sided with his Stanley because Jessica Tandy was too shrill. He thought Vivien Leigh, who played the part in the movie, was ideal, as she was not only a great beauty but she WAS Blanche Dubois, troubled as she was in her real life by mental illness and nymphomania. Brando's appearance as Stanley on stage and on screen revolutionized American acting by introducing "The Method" into American consciousness and culture. Method acting, rooted in Adler's study at the Moscow Art Theatre of Stanislavsky's theories that she subsequently introduced to the Group Theatre, was a more naturalistic style of performing, as it engendered a close identification of the actor with the character's emotions. Adler took first place among Brando's acting teachers, and socially she helped turn him from an unsophisticated Midwestern farm boy into a knowledgeable and cosmopolitan artist who one day would socialize with presidents.
Brando didn't like the term "The Method," which quickly became the prominent paradigm taught by such acting gurus as Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Brando denounced Strasberg in his autobiography "Songs My Mother Taught Me" (1994), saying that he was a talentless exploiter who claimed he had been Brando's mentor. The Actors Studio had been founded by Strasberg along with Kazan and Stella Adler's husband, Harold Clurman, all Group Theatre alumni, all political progressives deeply committed to the didactic function of the stage. Brando credits his knowledge of the craft to Adler and Kazan, while Kazan in his autobiography "A Life" claimed that Brando's genius thrived due to the thorough training Adler had given him. Adler's method emphasized that authenticity in acting is achieved by drawing on inner reality to expose deep emotional experience
Interestingly, Elia Kazan believed that Brando had ruined two generations of actors, his contemporaries and those who came after him, all wanting to emulate the great Brando by employing The Method. Kazan felt that Brando was never a Method actor, that he had been highly trained by Adler and did not rely on gut instincts for his performances, as was commonly believed. Many a young actor, mistaken about the true roots of Brando's genius, thought that all it took was to find a character's motivation, empathize with the character through sense and memory association, and regurgitate it all on stage to become the character. That's not how the superbly trained Brando did it; he could, for example, play accents, whereas your average American Method actor could not. There was a method to Brando's art, Kazan felt, but it was not The Method.
After A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which he received the first of his eight Academy Award nominations, Brando appeared in a string of Academy Award-nominated performances - in Viva Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953) and the summit of his early career, Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). For his "Waterfront" portrayal of meat-headed longshoreman Terry Malloy, the washed-up pug who "coulda been a contender," Brando won his first Oscar. Along with his iconic performance as the rebel-without-a-cause Johnny in The Wild One (1953) ("What are you rebelling against?" Johnny is asked. "What have ya got?" is his reply), the first wave of his career was, according to Jon Voight, unprecedented in its audacious presentation of such a wide range of great acting. Director John Huston said his performance of Marc Antony was like seeing the door of a furnace opened in a dark room, and co-star John Gielgud, the premier Shakespearean actor of the 20th century, invited Brando to join his repertory company.
It was this period of 1951-54 that revolutionized American acting, spawning such imitators as James Dean - who modeled his acting and even his lifestyle on his hero Brando - the young Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. After Brando, every up-and-coming star with true acting talent and a brooding, alienated quality would be hailed as the "New Brando," such as Warren Beatty in Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961). "We are all Brando's children," Jack Nicholson pointed out in 1972. "He gave us our freedom." He was truly "The Godfather" of American acting - and he was just 30 years old. Though he had a couple of failures, like Désirée (1954) and The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), he was clearly miscast in them and hadn't sought out the parts so largely escaped blame.
In the second period of his career, 1955-62, Brando managed to uniquely establish himself as a great actor who also was a Top 10 movie star, although that star began to dim after the box-office high point of his early career, Sayonara (1957) (for which he received his fifth Best Actor Oscar nomination). Brando tried his hand at directing a film, the well-reviewed One-Eyed Jacks (1961) that he made for his own production company, Pennebaker Productions (after his mother's maiden name). Stanley Kubrick had been hired to direct the film, but after months of script rewrites in which Brando participated, Kubrick and Brando had a falling out and Kubrick was sacked. According to his widow Christiane Kubrick, Stanley believed that Brando had wanted to direct the film himself all along.
Tales proliferated about the profligacy of Brando the director, burning up a million and a half feet of expensive VistaVision film at 50 cents a foot, fully ten times the normal amount of raw stock expended during production of an equivalent motion picture. Brando took so long editing the film that he was never able to present the studio with a cut. Paramount took it away from him and tacked on a re-shot ending that Brando was dissatisfied with, as it made the Oedipal figure of Dad Longworth into a villain. In any normal film Dad would have been the heavy, but Brando believed that no one was innately evil, that it was a matter of an individual responding to, and being molded by, one's environment. It was not a black-and-white world, Brando felt, but a gray world in which once-decent people could do horrible things. This attitude explains his sympathetic portrayal of Nazi officer Christian Diestl in the film he made before shooting One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Edward Dmytryk's filming of Irwin Shaw's novel The Young Lions (1958). Shaw denounced Brando's performance, but audiences obviously disagreed, as the film was a major hit. It would be the last hit movie Brando would have for more than a decade.
One-Eyed Jacks (1961) generated respectable numbers at the box office, but the production costs were exorbitant - a then-staggering $6 million - which made it run a deficit. A film essentially is "made" in the editing room, and Brando found cutting to be a terribly boring process, which was why the studio eventually took the film away from him. Despite his proved talent in handling actors and a large production, Brando never again directed another film, though he would claim that all actors essentially direct themselves during the shooting of a picture.
Between the production and release of One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Brando appeared in Sidney Lumet's film version of Tennessee Williams' play "Orpheus Descending," The Fugitive Kind (1960) which teamed him with fellow Oscar winners Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward. Following in Elizabeth Taylor's trailblazing footsteps, Brando became the second performer to receive a $1-million salary for a motion picture, so high were the expectations for this re-teaming of Kowalski and his creator (in 1961 critic Hollis Alpert had published a book "Brando and the Shadow of Stanley Kowalski"). Critics and audiences waiting for another incendiary display from Brando in a Williams work were disappointed when the renamed The Fugitive Kind (1960) finally released. Though Tennessee was hot, with movie versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) burning up the box office and receiving kudos from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, The Fugitive Kind (1960) was a failure. This was followed by the so-so box-office reception of One-Eyed Jacks (1961) in 1961 and then by a failure of a more monumental kind: Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), a remake of the famed 1935 film.
Brando signed on to Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) after turning down the lead in the David Lean classic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) because he didn't want to spend a year in the desert riding around on a camel. He received another $1-million salary, plus $200,000 in overages as the shoot went overtime and over budget. During principal photography, highly respected director Carol Reed (an eventual Academy Award winner) was fired, and his replacement, two-time Oscar winner Lewis Milestone, was shunted aside by Brando as Marlon basically took over the direction of the film himself. The long shoot became so notorious that President John F. Kennedy asked director Billy Wilder at a cocktail party not "when" but "if" the "Bounty" shoot would ever be over. The MGM remake of one of its classic Golden Age films garnered a Best Picture Oscar nomination and was one of the top grossing films of 1962, yet failed to go into the black due to its Brobdingnagian budget estimated at $20 million, which is equivalent to $120 million when adjusted for inflation.
Brando and Taylor, whose Cleopatra (1963) nearly bankrupted 20th Century-Fox due to its huge cost overruns (its final budget was more than twice that of Brando's Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)), were pilloried by the show business press for being the epitome of the pampered, self-indulgent stars who were ruining the industry. Seeking scapegoats, the Hollywood press conveniently ignored the financial pressures on the studios. The studios had been hurt by television and by the antitrust-mandated divestiture of their movie theater chains, causing a large outflow of production to Italy and other countries in the 1950s and 1960s in order to lower costs. The studio bosses, seeking to replicate such blockbuster hits as the remakes of The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959), were the real culprits behind the losses generated by large-budgeted films that found it impossible to recoup their costs despite long lines at the box office.
While Elizabeth Taylor, receiving the unwanted gift of reams of publicity from her adulterous romance with Cleopatra (1963) co-star Richard Burton, remained hot until the tanking of her own Tennessee Williams-renamed debacle Boom! (1968), Brando from 1963 until the end of the decade appeared in one box-office failure after another as he worked out a contract he had signed with Universal Pictures. The industry had grown tired of Brando and his idiosyncrasies, though he continued to be offered prestige projects up through 1968.
Some of the films Brando made in the 1960s were noble failures, such as The Ugly American (1963), The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). For every "Reflections," though, there seemed to be two or three outright debacles, such as Bedtime Story (1964), Morituri (1965), The Chase (1966), A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), Candy (1968), The Night of the Following Day (1969). By the time Brando began making the anti-colonialist picture Burn! (1969) in Colombia with Gillo Pontecorvo in the director's chair, he was box-office poison, despite having worked in the previous five years with such top directors as Arthur Penn, John Huston and the legendary Charles Chaplin, and with such top-drawer co-stars as David Niven, Yul Brynner, Sophia Loren and Taylor.
The rap on Brando in the 1960s was that a great talent had ruined his potential to be America's answer to Laurence Olivier, as his friend William Redfield limned the dilemma in his book "Letters from an Actor" (1967), a memoir about Redfield's appearance in Burton's 1964 theatrical production of "Hamlet." By failing to go back on stage and recharge his artistic batteries, something British actors such as Burton were not afraid to do, Brando had stifled his great talent, by refusing to tackle the classical repertoire and contemporary drama. Actors and critics had yearned for an American response to the high-acting style of the Brits, and while Method actors such as Rod Steiger tried to create an American style, they were hampered in their quest, as their king was lost in a wasteland of Hollywood movies that were beneath his talent. Many of his early supporters now turned on him, claiming he was a crass sellout.
Despite evidence in such films as The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) that Brando was in fact doing some of the best acting of his life, critics, perhaps with an eye on the box office, slammed him for failing to live up to, and nurture, his great gift. Brando's political activism, starting in the early 1960s with his championing of Native Americans' rights, followed by his participation in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's March on Washington in 1963, and followed by his appearance at a Black Panther rally in 1968, did not win him many admirers in the establishment. In fact, there was a de facto embargo on Brando films in the recently segregated (officially, at least) southeastern US in the 1960s. Southern exhibitors simply would not book his films, and producers took notice. After 1968, Brando would not work for three years.
Pauline Kael wrote of Brando that he was Fortune's fool. She drew a parallel with the latter career of John Barrymore, a similarly gifted thespian with talents as prodigious, who seemingly threw them away. Brando, like the late-career Barrymore, had become a great ham, evidenced by his turn as the faux Indian guru in the egregious Candy (1968), seemingly because the material was so beneath his talent. Most observers of Brando in the 1960s believed that he needed to be reunited with his old mentor Elia Kazan, a relationship that had soured due to Kazan's friendly testimony naming names before the notorious House un-American Activities Committee. Perhaps Brando believed this, too, as he originally accepted an offer to appear as the star of Kazan's film adaptation of his own novel, The Arrangement (1969). However, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Brando backed out of the film, telling Kazan that he could not appear in a Hollywood film after this tragedy. Also reportedly turning down a role opposite box-office king Paul Newman in a surefire script, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Brando decided to make Burn! (1969) with Pontecorvo. The film, a searing indictment of racism and colonialism, flopped at the box office but won the esteem of progressive critics and cultural arbiters such as Howard Zinn. He subsequently appeared in the British film The Nightcomers (1971), a prequel to "Turn of the Screw" and another critical and box office failure.
Kazan, after a life in film and the theater, said that, aside from Orson Welles, whose greatness lay in film making, he only met one actor who was a genius: Brando. Richard Burton, an intellectual with a keen eye for observation if not for his own film projects, said that he found Brando to be very bright, unlike the public perception of him as a Terry Malloy-type character that he himself inadvertently promoted through his boorish behavior. Brando's problem, Burton felt, was that he was unique, and that he had gotten too much fame too soon at too early an age. Cut off from being nurtured by normal contact with society, fame had distorted Brando's personality and his ability to cope with the world, as he had not had time to grow up outside the limelight.
Truman Capote, who eviscerated Brando in print in the mid-'50s and had as much to do with the public perception of the dyslexic Brando as a dumbbell, always said that the best actors were ignorant, and that an intelligent person could not be a good actor. However, Brando was highly intelligent, and possessed of a rare genius in a then-deprecated art, acting. The problem that an intelligent performer has in movies is that it is the director, and not the actor, who has the power in his chosen field. Greatness in the other arts is defined by how much control the artist is able to exert over his chosen medium, but in movie acting, the medium is controlled by a person outside the individual artist. It is an axiom of the cinema that a performance, as is a film, is "created" in the cutting room, thus further removing the actor from control over his art. Brando had tried his hand at directing, in controlling the whole artistic enterprise, but he could not abide the cutting room, where a film and the film's performances are made. This lack of control over his art was the root of Brando's discontent with acting, with movies, and, eventually, with the whole wide world that invested so much cachet in movie actors, as long as "they" were at the top of the box-office charts. Hollywood was a matter of "they" and not the work, and Brando became disgusted.
Charlton Heston, who participated in Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington with Brando, believes that Marlon was the great actor of his generation. However, noting a story that Brando had once refused a role in the early 1960s with the excuse "How can I act when people are starving in India?," Heston believes that it was this attitude, the inability to separate one's idealism from one's work, that prevented Brando from reaching his potential. As Rod Steiger once said, Brando had it all, great stardom and a great talent. He could have taken his audience on a trip to the stars, but he simply would not. Steiger, one of Brando's children even though a contemporary, could not understand it. When James Mason' was asked in 1971 who was the best American actor, he had replied that since Brando had let his career go belly-up, it had to be George C. Scott, by default.
Paramount thought that only Laurence Olivier would suffice, but Lord Olivier was ill. The young director believed there was only one actor who could play godfather to the group of Young Turk actors he had assembled for his film, The Godfather of method acting himself - Marlon Brando. Francis Ford Coppola won the fight for Brando, Brando won - and refused - his second Oscar, and Paramount won a pot of gold by producing the then top-grossing film of all-time, The Godfather (1972), a gangster movie most critics now judge one of the greatest American films of all time. Brando followed his iconic portrayal of Don Corleone with his Oscar-nominated turn in the high-grossing and highly scandalous Last Tango in Paris (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris"), the first film dealing explicitly with sexuality in which an actor of Brando's stature had participated. He was now again a top ten box office star and once again heralded as the greatest actor of his generation, an unprecedented comeback that put him on the cover of "Time" magazine and would make him the highest-paid actor in the history of motion pictures by the end of the decade. Little did the world know that Brando, who had struggled through many projects in good faith during the 1960s, delivering some of his best acting, only to be excoriated and ignored as the films did not do well at the box office, essentially was through with the movies.
After reaching the summit of his career, a rarefied atmosphere never reached before or since by any actor, Brando essentially walked away. He would give no more of himself after giving everything as he had done in Last Tango in Paris (1972)," a performance that embarrassed him, according to his autobiography. Brando had come as close to any actor to being the "auteur," or author, of a film, as the English-language scenes of "Tango" were created by encouraging Brando to improvise. The improvisations were written down and turned into a shooting script, and the scripted improvisations were shot the next day. Pauline Kael, the Brando of movie critics in that she was the most influential arbiter of cinematic quality of her generation and spawned a whole legion of Kael wannabes, said Brando's performance in Last Tango in Paris (1972) had revolutionized the art of film. Brando, who had to act to gain his mother's attention; Brando, who believed acting at best was nothing special as everyone in the world engaged in it every day of their lives to get what they wanted from other people; Brando, who believed acting at its worst was a childish charade and that movie stardom was a whorish fraud, would have agreed with Sam Peckinpah's summation of Pauline Kael: "Pauline's a brilliant critic but sometimes she's just cracking walnuts with her ass." He probably would have done so in a simulacrum of those words, too.
After another three-year hiatus, Brando took on just one more major role for the next 20 years, as the bounty hunter after Jack Nicholson in Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks (1976), a western that succeeded neither with the critics or at the box office. Following The Godfather and Tango, Brando's performance was disappointing for some reviewers, who accused him of giving an erratic and inconsistent performance. In 1977, Brando made a rare appearance on television in the miniseries Roots: The Next Generations (1979), portraying George Lincoln Rockwell; he won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for his performance. In 1978, he narrated the English version of Raoni (1978), a French-Belgian documentary film directed by Jean-Pierre Dutilleux and Luiz Carlos Saldanha that focused on the life of Raoni Metuktire and issues surrounding the survival of the indigenous Indian tribes of north central Brazil.
Later in his career, Brando concentrated on extracting the maximum amount of capital for the least amount of work from producers, as when he got the Salkind brothers to pony up a then-record $3.7 million against 10% of the gross for 13 days work on Superman (1978). Factoring in inflation, the straight salary for "Superman" equals or exceeds the new record of $1 million a day Harrison Ford set with K-19: The Widowmaker (2002). He agreed to the role only on assurance that he would be paid a large sum for what amounted to a small part, that he would not have to read the script beforehand, and his lines would be displayed somewhere off-camera. Brando also filmed scenes for the movie's sequel, Superman II, but after producers refused to pay him the same percentage he received for the first movie, he denied them permission to use the footage.
Before cashing his first paycheck for Superman (1978), Brando had picked up $2 million for his extended cameo in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) in a role, that of Col. Kurtz, that he authored on-camera through improvisation while Coppola shot take after take. It was Brando's last bravura star performance. He co-starred with George C. Scott and John Gielgud in The Formula (1980), but the film was another critical and financial failure. Years later though, he did receive an eighth and final Oscar nomination for his supporting role in A Dry White Season (1989) after coming out of a near-decade-long retirement. Contrary to those who claimed he now only was in it for the money, Brando donated his entire seven-figure salary to an anti-apartheid charity. He then did an amusing performance in the comedy The Freshman (1990), winning rave reviews. He portrayed Tomas de Torquemada in the historical drama 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), but his performance was denounced and the film was another box office failure. He made another comeback in the Johnny Depp romantic drama Don Juan DeMarco (1994), which co-starred Faye Dunaway as his wife. He then appeared in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), co-starring Val Kilmer, who he didn't get along with. The filming was an unpleasant experience for Brando, as well as another critical and box office failure.
Brando had first attracted media attention at the age of 24, when "Life" magazine ran a photo of himself and his sister Jocelyn, who were both then appearing on Broadway. The curiosity continued, and snowballed. Playing the paraplegic soldier of The Men (1950), Brando had gone to live at a Veterans Administration hospital with actual disabled veterans, and confined himself to a wheelchair for weeks. It was an acting method, research, that no one in Hollywood had ever heard of before, and that willingness to experience life.- Actress
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Hedy Lamarr, the woman many critics and fans alike regard as the most beautiful ever to appear in films, was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria. She was the daughter of Gertrud (Lichtwitz), from Budapest, and Emil Kiesler, a banker from Lemberg (now known as Lviv). Her parents were both from Jewish families. Hedwig had a calm childhood, but it was cinema that fascinated her. By the time she was a teenager, she decided to drop out of school and seek fame as an actress, and was a student of theater director Max Reinhardt in Berlin. Her first role was a bit part in the German film Geld auf der Straße (1930) (aka "Money on the Street") in 1930. She was attractive and talented enough to be in three more German productions in 1931, but it would be her fifth film that catapulted her to worldwide fame. In 1932 she appeared in a Czech film called Ekstase (US title: "Ecstasy") and had made the gutsy move to appear nude. It's the story of a young girl who is married to a gentleman much older than she, but she winds up falling in love with a young soldier. The film's nude scenes created a sensation all over the world. The scenes, very tame by today's standards, caused the film to be banned by the U.S. government at the time.
Hedy soon married Fritz Mandl, a munitions manufacturer and a prominent Austrofascist. He attempted to buy up all the prints of "Ecstasy" he could lay his hands on (Italy's dictator, Benito Mussolini, had a copy but refused to sell it to Mandl), but to no avail (there are prints floating around the world today). The notoriety of the film brought Hollywood to her door. She was brought to the attention of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, who signed her to a contract (a notorious prude when it came to his studio's films, Mayer signed her against his better judgment, but the money he knew her notoriety would bring in to the studio overrode any moral concerns he may have had). However, he insisted she change her name and make good, wholesome films.
Hedy starred in a series of exotic adventure epics. She made her American film debut as Gaby in Algiers (1938). This was followed a year later by Lady of the Tropics (1939). In 1942, she played the plum role of Tondelayo in the classic White Cargo (1942). After World War II, her career began to decline, and MGM decided it would be in the interest of all concerned if her contract were not renewed. Unfortunately for Hedy, she turned down the leads in both Gaslight (1940) and Casablanca (1942), both of which would have cemented her standing in the minds of the American public. In 1949, she starred as Delilah opposite Victor Mature's Samson in Cecil B. DeMille's epic Samson and Delilah (1949). This proved to be Paramount Pictures' then most profitable movie to date, bringing in $12 million in rental from theaters. The film's success led to more parts, but it was not enough to ease her financial crunch. She made only six more films between 1949 and 1957, the last being The Female Animal (1958).
Hedy retired to Florida. She died there, in the city of Casselberry, on January 19, 2000.- Actor
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Alec Baldwin is the oldest, and best-known, of the four Baldwin brothers in the acting business (the others are Stephen Baldwin, William Baldwin and Daniel Baldwin). Alexander Rae Baldwin III was born on April 3, 1958 in Massapequa, New York, the son of Carol Newcomb (Martineau) and Alexander Rae Baldwin Jr., a high school teacher and football coach at Massapequa High School. He is of Irish, as well as English, French, Scottish, and German, descent.
Alec Baldwin burst onto the TV scene in the early 1980s with appearances on several series, including The Doctors (1963) and Knots Landing (1979), before scoring feature film roles in Forever, Lulu (1986), Beetlejuice (1988), Working Girl (1988), Married to the Mob (1988) and Talk Radio (1988). In 1990, Baldwin appeared in the first on-screen adaptation of the "Jack Ryan" character created by mega-selling espionage author, Tom Clancy. The film, The Hunt for Red October (1990), was a box office and critical success, with Baldwin appearing alongside icy Sean Connery. Unfortunately, Baldwin fell out with Paramount Studios over future scripts for "Jack Ryan", and subsequent Ryan roles went to Harrison Ford.
Baldwin instead went to Broadway to perform "A Streetcar Named Desire", garnering a Tony nomination for his portrayal of "Stanley Kowalski" (he would reprise the role in a 1995 TV adaptation). Baldwin won over critics as a lowlife thief pursued by dogged cop Fred Ward in Miami Blues (1990), met his future wife Kim Basinger while filming the Neil Simon comedy, The Marrying Man (1991), starred in the film adaptation of the play, Prelude to a Kiss (1992) (in which he starred off-Broadway), and made an indelible ten-minute cameo as a hard-nosed real estate executive laying down the law in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). He also made a similar tour-de-force monologue in the thriller, Malice (1993), as a doctor defending his practices, in which he stated, "Let me tell you something: I am God".
Demand for Baldwin's talents in the 1990s saw more scripts swiftly come his way, and he starred alongside his then-wife, Kim Basinger, in a remake of the Steve McQueen action flick, The Getaway (1994), brought to life the famous comic strip character, The Shadow (1994), and starred as an assistant district attorney in the civil rights drama, Ghosts of Mississippi (1996). Baldwin's distinctive vocal talents then saw him voice US-aired episodes of the highly popular UK children's show, Thomas & Friends (1984), plus later voice-only contributions to other animated/children's shows, including Clerks (2000), Cats & Dogs (2001), Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) and The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004).
In the early 2000s, Baldwin and Basinger endured an acrimonious break-up that quickly became tabloid fodder but, while his divorce was high-profile, Baldwin excelled in a number of lower-profile supporting roles in a variety of films, including State and Main (2000), Pearl Harbor (2001), The Cooler (2003) (for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor), The Aviator (2004), Along Came Polly (2004) and The Departed (2006). As he was excelling as a consummate character actor, Baldwin found a second career in television comedy. Already known for his comedic turns hosting Saturday Night Live (1975), he essayed an extended guest role on Will & Grace (1998) in 2005 before taking on what would arguably become his most famous role, that of network executive "Jack Donaghy", opposite Tina Fey in the highly-acclaimed sitcom, 30 Rock (2006). The role brought Baldwin two Emmy Awards, three Golden Globes, and an unprecedented six Screen Actors Guild Awards (not including cast wins).
Continuing to appear in films as 30 Rock (2006) wrapped up its final season, Baldwin was engaged in 2012 to wed Hilaria Baldwin (aka Hilaria Lynn Thomas); the couple married on June 30, 2012.- Actress
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Annie Potts is an American film, television, and stage actress. She is known for her roles in popular 1980s films such as Ghostbusters (1984) and Pretty in Pink (1986). She made her debut on the big screen in 1978 in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer comedy film Corvette Summer (1978), with Mark Hamill, for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe. In 2017 she was cast to portray Meemaw in Young Sheldon (2017), a spin-off of the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory (2007). Potts also voiced voiced Bo Peep in the animated films Toy Story (1995), Toy Story 2 (1999) and Toy Story 4 (2019).
Interested in stage and film at an early age, Annie Potts attended Stephens College in Missouri, enrolling in the theater studies course, followed by graduate work in California. At the age of 20, she married her college sweetheart, Steven Hartley. Only a short time later, she and her husband were in serious automobile accident in Sumner, Washington -- their Volkswagen bus was demolished by two drivers who were drag racing. Steve lost a leg, and Annie had multiple fractures (resulting in a traumatic arthritis that still persists). Early roles were primarily in television, such as Black Market Baby (1977), but her presence moved up with an appearance in the mega-hit Ghostbusters (1984), and then she hit the big time with a seven-year stint as one of the stars of Designing Women (1986). A brief period in Love & War (1992) ended with the cancellation of the show, about which she remains resentful.- Aaron McCusker was born in 1978 in Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, UK. He is an actor, known for Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), Shameless (2004) and Dexter (2006).
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Adrienne Eliza Bailon was born on October 24, 1983 in New York City, New York to Nilda Felix & Freddy Bailon. She was raised by her parents & her stepfather Joe Felix. She has a sister named Claudette, who's 3 years older. When they were younger, they would sing for family & friends at home. They knew that singing was what they wanted to do when they grew up. Her major breakthrough occurred 1 fateful day in 1999. She was singing w/ her church at Madison Square Garden when Ricky Martin walked through the doors. He asked that the 4 best singers from her choir be chosen to sing backup for him at his concert that night. She was 1 of those singers. Although this was exciting, her real breakthrough came when she was asked to join the R&B group 3 Little Women along w/ Naturi Naughton & Kiely Williams. Its self-titled debut"3LW was released in 2000 & went double platinum. A week before the release of its 2nd album A Girl Can Mack, Naturi Naughton left the group. The members of now include Adrienne, Kiely Williams & Jessica Benson.- Actress
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One of the leading sex symbols of the 1950s and 1960s, film actress Jayne Mansfield was born Vera Jayne Palmer on April 19, 1933 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the only child of Vera J. (nee Palmer; later Peers) and Herbert W. Palmer. Her parents were well-to-do, with her father a successful attorney in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, where she spent a portion of her childhood. Her parents were both born with the same surname, and her ancestry was seven eighths English and Cornish and one eighth German. She was reportedly a talented pianist and played the violin when she was young.
Tragedy struck when Jayne was three, when her father suddenly died of a heart attack. Three years later, her mother remarried and she and her mother moved to Dallas, Texas, buying a small home where she had violin concerts in the driveway of their home. Her IQ was reportedly 163, and she attended the University of Dallas and participated in little-theater productions. In 1949, at the age of 16, she married a man five years her senior named Paul Mansfield. In November 1950, when Jayne was seventeen, their daughter, Jayne Marie Mansfield was born. The union ended in divorce but she kept the surname Mansfield as a good surname for an actress.
After some productions there and elsewhere, Jayne decided to go to Hollywood. Her first film was a bit role as a cigarette girl in Pete Kelly's Blues (1955). Although the roles in the beginning were not much, she was successful in gaining those roles because of her ample physical attributes which placed her in two other films that year, Hell on Frisco Bay (1955) and Illegal (1955). Her breakout role came the next year with a featured part in The Burglar (1957). By the time she portrayed Rita Marlowe in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) and Playgirl After Dark (1960), Jayne was now known as the poor man's Marilyn Monroe. She did not get the plum roles that Marilyn got in her productions. Instead, her films were more of a showcase for her body more than anything else. She did have a real talent for acting, but the movie executives insisted she stay in her dumb blonde stereotype roles. By the 1960s, her career had options that grew lower. She made somewhat embarrassing guest appearances like on the popular game show What's My Line? (1950), she appeared on the show four times in 1956, 1957, 1964, and 1966 and many other 1950s and 1960s game shows. By 1962, she was dropped from 20th Century Fox and the rest of her career had smaller options like being in B movies and low budget movies or performing at food stores or small nightclubs.
While traveling from a nightclub in Biloxi, Mississippi and 30 miles from New Orleans to where she was to be on television the following day, she was killed instantly on Highway 90 in Slidell, Louisiana in a car crash in the early hours of June 29, 1967, when the car in which she was riding slammed into the back of a semi-tractor trailer truck that had stopped due to a truck in front of the tractor trailer that was spraying for bugs. Her car went under the truck at nearly 80 miles per hour. Her boyfriend Samuel Brody and their driver Ronnie Harrison, were also killed. The damage to the car was so bad that the engine was twisted sideways. She was not, however, decapitated, as had long been misreported. She was 34 years old.
Mansfield's funeral was on July 3, 1967 and hundreds of people lined the main street of Pen Argyl for Mansfield's funeral, a small private ceremony at Fairview Cemetery in Plainfield (outside Pen Argyl), Pennsylvania (where her father was also buried), attended by her family. The only ex-husband to attend was Mickey Hargitay. Her final film, Single Room Furnished (1966), was released the following year. In 2000, Mansfield's 97 year old mother, Mrs. Vera Peers, was interred alongside Mansfield.
After Mansfield's death, Mansfield's mother, as well as her ex-husband Mickey Hargitay, William Pigue (legal guardian for her daughter, Jayne Marie), Charles Goldring (Mansfield's business manager), and Bernard B. Cohen and Jerome Webber (both administrators of the estate) all filed unsuccessful suits to gain control of her estate, which was initially estimated at $600,000 ($3,712,000 in 2018 dollars), including the Pink Palace (estimated at $100,000 ($619,000 in 2018 dollars)), a sports car sold for $7,000 ($43,000 in 2018 dollars), her jewelry, and Sam Brody's $185,000 estate left to her in his last will ($1,145,000 in 2018 dollars).
In 1971, Beverly Brody sued the Mansfield estate for $325,000 ($2,011,000 in 2018 dollars) worth of presents and jewelry given to Mansfield by Sam Brody; the suit was settled out of court.
In 1977, Mansfield's four eldest children (Jayne Marie, Mickey, Zoltan, and Mariska) went to court to discover that some $500,000 in debt which Mansfield had incurred ($3,093,000 in 2018 dollars) and litigation had left the estate insolvent.- Writer
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Andrew Stevens, President/CEO of Andrew Stevens Entertainment and Stevens Entertainment Group, has produced and/or financed one hundred and eighty films through his various production and distribution companies. Unique in the motion picture industry, Stevens has functioned in almost every capacity in the entertainment business, from creative development of motion picture stories and screenplays, to foreign sales, distribution, post-production, deliveries and collections. He is an accomplished screenwriter, director, as well as prolific producer, academic author of several academic books, an educator and public speaker and was a successful actor for more than 20 years. Outside of the entertainment business, Stevens has been successful in both commercial and residential real estate development, song-writing for film, with 9 credited songs in film and 6 in TV to date, community service working with elderly patients with dementia, and E-Sports.
Active since January 2003, his company has developed, produced and/or arranged the financing for more than thirty motion pictures, including the newly completed Send It!, which he also directed, All good Things, 47 Hours the Lifetime movie, The Wrong Affair, Half Past Dead 2, Walking: Tall Lone Justice, Walking: the Payback, the SyFy Channel films, Fire From Below, Mongolian Death Worm and Mandrake, 7 Seconds and The Marksman, both starring Wesley Snipes, Black Dawn starring Steven Seagal, Pursued starring Christian Slater, Blessed starring Heather Graham, Method, starring Elizabeth Hurley, to name a few. including 7 Seconds (2005) and The Marksman (2005), both starring Wesley Snipes, Black Dawn (2005) starring Steven Seagal, Pursued (2004) starring Christian Slater, Blessed (2004) starring Heather Graham, Method (2004), starring Elizabeth Hurley, and Silent Partner (2005), starring Tara Reid.
From 1997 through 2002, Stevens co-founded, and served as President and Chief Operating Officer of Franchise Pictures, an independent film production and distribution company with a domestic theatrical output deal with Warner Bros. During his five-and-a-half tenure at Franchise, Stevens produced or executive produced and provided the finance or co-finance for more than 60 feature films including the enormously successful The Whole Nine Yards (2000), and its sequel The Whole Ten Yards (2004), both starring Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry, The In-Laws (2003), starring Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks, Angel Eyes (2001) starring Jennifer Lopez and Jim Caviezel, City by the Sea (2002) starring Robert De Niro, The Pledge (2001) starring Jack Nicholson, 3000 Miles to Graceland (2001), starring Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell, Half Past Dead (2002) starring Steven Seagal. Stevens was also responsible for creating Franchise Classics, a division which produced and distributed many films which appeared in such major film festivals as Cannes, Sundance Film Festival and Toronto Film Festival including The Big Kahuna (1999), starring Kevin Spacey, Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (2000), starring Cameron Diaz and Glenn Close, Green Dragon (2001), starring Forest Whitaker and Patrick Swayze, and The Caveman's Valentine (2001), starring Samuel L. Jackson. Concurrent with the formation of Franchise, Stevens co-founded and served as president of a sister company, Phoenician Entertainment which produced such films as The Third Miracle (1999), starring Ed Harris and Anne Heche, Entropy (1999), starring Stephen Dorff and U2, Woman Wanted (1999), starring Kiefer Sutherland and Holly Hunter, and many genre action/adventure films. Prior to Franchise and Phoenician, Stevens was an owner and president of Royal Oaks Entertainment, which produced and/or distributed seventy pictures over a three-year period including many HBO, Showtime and Sci-Fi Channel world premieres. Prior to Royal Oaks, Stevens' initial venturing into foreign sales and production company ownership was with Sunset Films International, which amassed a library of nineteen titles, (including seven in-house productions) during his first year as president of the company. Stevens serves on the board of directors of the International Film and Television Alliance, (the former American Film Marketing Association) and until recently served as Chairman of the Independent Producers Association (IPA), which is, among other things, active in collective bargaining for independent producers and film companies. Stevens has been involved in many guild negotiations with both the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Directors Guild of America (DGA) on behalf of the constituency of independent producers and was a key architect of the current DGA/IPA multi-tiered low-budget agreement.
Stevens was a award-winning actor, including a Golden Globe nomination and the Star of Tomorrow award from the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) starring in over 80 feature films and/or television series. Stevens authored a fully accredited Associate of Applied Arts college degree program in Motion Picture Production, which he later distilled into an online certificate program, (2015) DVD and Vimeo series. "Foolproof Film School. Dallas: Stevens Entertainment Group. ISBN 978-0-6924374-9-0, which teaches Stevens' unique practical perspective of the business side of making movies, based on his academic texts, (2014) Book: "Foolproof Filmmaking". Westport: Prospecta Press. ISBN 978-1-935212-27-0; (2016) Book: "Producing for Profit". New York and London" Focal Press/Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group. ISBN 978-1-138-12104-1; and (2017) Book "Screenwriting for Profit". New York and London" Focal Press/Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group. ISBN 978-1-138-95060-3- Actress
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Zooey Deschanel's quirky charm, striking blue eyes, and distinctively offbeat humor have made her one of the most beloved indie darlings of recent decades. Hailing from a renowned entertainment family, she began her career in the late 1990s. Deschanel's talent shines through her diverse roles, encompassing both comedic and dramatic territory, as well as her musical abilities.
After a brief guest appearance on the sitcom 'Veronica's Closet,' Deschanel made her feature film debut in Lawrence Kasdan's 'Mumford' (1999). Her breakout role came courtesy of Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical 'Almost Famous' (2000), where she portrayed the enigmatic Anita Miller, the older sister of the film's protagonist. Deschanel effortlessly embodies the rebellious and free-spirited youth of the 1970s rock scene. Her nuanced performance in 'Almost Famous' solidified her status as a rising star.
Deschanel's reputation is built on her ability to portray endearingly awkward and unconventional female characters. Her portrayal of the heartbroken yet resilient Summer Finn in '(500) Days of Summer' (2009) became an iconic portrayal of unconventional romance in the 21st-century. Her deadpan delivery and self-aware humor found perfect expression in her most well-known role, Jessica Day, in the hit sitcom 'New Girl' (2011 - 2018). As the bubbly and optimistic school teacher who moves in with three male roommates, she quickly became a beloved television icon, earning numerous award nominations for her performance.
While widely recognized for her comedic roles, Deschanel has also proven her dramatic chops in independent films such as 'All the Real Girls' (2003). This critically-acclaimed film earned her recognition for authentically portraying a young woman navigating a complex relationship. She further demonstrated her versatility with the role of Trillian in the science-fiction comedy 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'(2005), demonstrating her ability to adapt to fantastical and quirky settings.
Deschanel's off-screen talents extend to her musical abilities. She often showcases her singing in films and television, notably in 'Elf' (2003) where her rendition of 'Baby, It's Cold Outside' with Will Ferrell is a holiday classic. She also starred in the television adaptation of 'Once Upon a Mattress' (2005). Deschanel formed the musical duo 'She & Him' in 2006 with singer-songwriter M. Zooey Claire Deschanel, is an American actress and musician.
Ward, where her retro-inspired vocals and songwriting talents have produced multiple successful albums.
Beyond acting and music, Deschanel has become a multi-faceted figure in popular culture. Her co-founding of the women-focused digital media company HelloGiggles in 2011 demonstrated her entrepreneurial spirit and desire to empower women. Her carefully curated personal style, often featuring vintage-inspired pieces, has also earned her recognition as a fashion icon.
Deschanel's career has continued to thrive in recent years. She lent her voice to the animated film 'Trolls' (2016) and its sequel 'Trolls World Tour' (2020), playing the cheerful and optimistic Princess Bridget. She also took on supporting roles in films like 'Rock the Kasbah' (2015) and 'The Driftless Area' (2015). Alongside her continued musical endeavors, Deschanel remains an active figure on television, hosting 'The Celebrity Dating Game' (2021).
Looking ahead, Deschanel has several projects in development. She's attached to star in 'Dreamin' Wild', a biopic where she will portray legendary singer-songwriter Cass Elliot of The Mamas & the Papas. Deschanel is also slated to make a return to dramatic territory with the film 'Harold and the Purple Crayon,' a live-action adaptation of the beloved children's book. Her continued willingness to experiment across genres solidifies her place as a dynamic and enduring talent in the entertainment world.
With her endearing personality, comedic timing, and the ability to imbue both quirky and serious characters with depth and heart, Zooey Deschanel has built a captivating and enduring career. Her contributions to film, television, and music have earned her a devoted following and a position as a beloved figure in popular culture. As she ventures into new projects, Deschanel continues to captivate audiences with her unique blend of charm, talent, and undeniable individuality.- Actress
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Adrienne Jo Barbeau is an American actress and author best known for her roles on the sitcom Maude (1972) and in horror films, especially those directed by John Carpenter, with whom she was once married. She was born on June 11, 1945 in Sacramento, California, the daughter of an executive for Mobil Oil Company. Early on in her career, she starred in Someone's Watching Me! (1978), The Fog (1980) and Escape from New York (1981), all John Carpenter-related projects. She has collaborated with George A. Romero on occasion, such as Stephen King's anthology Creepshow (1982) and Two Evil Eyes (1990). Her work with other horror directors includes Wes Craven's superhero monster movie Swamp Thing (1982). During the 1990s, she became best known for providing the voice of Catwoman on Batman: The Animated Series (1992). She was the original tough-girl Betty Rizzo in the first Broadway production of "Grease". She is the author of the memoir "There Are Worse Things I Can Do" (2006), and the comedy romance vampire novels "Vampyres of Hollywood" (2008), "Love Bites" (2010) and "Make Me Dead" (2015).- Actor
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Darby Hinton was born in Santa Monica California August 19th, 1957 to actor Ed Hinton, from Wilmington NC, and his school teacher wife, Marilynn Hinton from Chicago. The Hinton name goes back through early American history even crossing through Daniel Boone's family tree, while Marilynn's parents both immigrated from Germany in their youth.
Darby started his long acting career at the tender age of 6 months old and he hasn't stopped since. His first appearance was on 'Play House 90' followed by commercials and many of the classic TV shows back then. Like, 'Mr. Ed,' 'Wagon Train,' 'Route 66' & The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
Darby's film career didn't start until he was 4 years old when he was featured in a film called 'Hero's Island'. Working with the likes of Harry Dean Stanton, Rip Torn, Neville Brand. and James Mason. Followed by Disneys 'Son of Flubber.' Just before turning 6, Darby landed the plumb role of playing Fess Parker's son 'Israel Boone' on the hugely popular 'The Daniel Boone Show' which ran for 6 seasons and had a Thursday night viewing audience of 30 million by it's 4th season. The show still has millions of loyal fans and lives on in reruns attracting even more fans today.
After 'Boone' ended, Darby tried to shake the all American image by playing a drug user on, 'The Bold Ones: The New Doctors,' a troubled youth on 'Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law' even a drug dealer on Jack Lord's, 'Hawaii Five-0.' But everybody still loved and knew him as 'Israel'. Darby then decided to take time off and focus on education, since most of his had been on set with a studio teacher. He left Hollywood and graduated High School from, The American School in Switzerland. He then started his College experience completing 3 around the world voyages aboard the SS Universe while attending World Campus Afloat. Where he was able to study theatre, and actors, around the word. From Indonesian Shadow Dance, Noh & Kabuki Theatre, to the classic Greek & Roman Tragedies, all in their place of origin. When his academic voyages ended he went right back to work, with featured roles on, 'Magnum, P.I.,' 'The Fall Guy,' 'Hunter' and 'Mike Hammer' to name a few.
Darby took great pleasure in honing his craft over the years with great acting coaches like, Milton Katsales, Howard Fine, Larry Moss, Corey Allen, and the wonderful Joan Darling, even studying and performing with, 'The Groundlings'
Darby continued his film work as well, from martial arts films in the Philippines to a detective in Malibu that couldn't shoot straight in the cult classic, 'Malibu Express.' He did a number of other features as well, at home and abroad. They took him to places like Russia, Romania, Bulgaria. When he started his family however, he decided to look for more steady work closer to home. He became the Probation Officer on 'Days Of Our Lives,' and eventually became 'The Salem Rapist' during some of the shows highest ratings. With more kids, came more responsibilities, and not having a real father growing up, (His father was killed in a plane crash when he was 14 months old), Darby wanted to be there for his kids, to help them and watch them grow. But... he still loved acting. So, he started just pursuing commercials and theatre close to home. That lead him to a role based on Charles Doheny for Theatre 40's, 'The Manor.' A play he has stared in for the last 16 years, performing to sold out audiences in the real 1920s Doheny estate, 'Greystone,' in Beverly Hills.
Having spent a life time studying, characters, people, and human nature, to be able to portray the vastly different characters he has over the decades, Darby felt it also important, and fascinating, to study with some of the master teachers in the world of spirituality and human nature. Teachers like Wayne Dyer, Julia Cameron, Jim Rohn, Brian Tracy, Jack Canfield to name a few and even ended up traveling around as a 'Master Trainer' with Tony Robbins, helping Tony get thousands to walk across hot burning coals.
As soon as the youngest of his 5 children left home to be a ski instructor in New Zealand, Darby started focusing on his acting career again and has since got to portray some memorable historical characters; Like David Burnet, 1st president of Texas in, 'Texas Rising.' George Donner in, 'The Donner Party - Dead of Winter,' and his most recent role, Cole Younger in, 'Bill Tilghman and The Outlaws.' due out in late 2018.
Along with these and other acting roles Darby is also proud to be an advocate for child performers everywhere, having been on the 'SAG-AFTRA Young Performer's Committee,' a long time member of, 'A Minor Consideration'. and since it's very conception in 2003, being on the advisory committee for 'Looking Ahead'. A non profit that helps young performers and their families thrive and avoid pitfalls due to the unique challenges of working in the entertainment industry, with the motto: Grow, Give Back, and Have Fun!!
As much as he loves acting, Darby feels his work with these organizations might be some of his most important work, having lost so many fellow young performers and friends to some of those pitfalls along the way.
Darby has also now written a successful book documenting, with over 500 pictures, his early years in the Business, his love of acting, and mostly what it was like: 'Growing Up Israel.' For more information you can visit his website.- Jaime Lyn Bauer was born on 9 March 1949 in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. She is an actress, known for The Centerfold Girls (1974), Days of Our Lives (1965) and Young Doctors in Love (1982). She has been married to Jeremy Swan since 15 April 1980. They have three children. She was previously married to Dr. Richard Sayre Goldstein.
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Brenda Dickson originated the role of Jill Foster Abbott on The Young and the Restless (1973) where she worked for almost 12 years. Ms. Dickson has studied with Lee Strasberg, and then she studied with Milton Katselas. Ms. Dickson has worked with Bob Hope, singing and dancing in his 1971 Christmas Show. She traveled with Johnny Grant to entertain the troops and did radio shows that were broadcast in Vietnam. She received a Senate resolution for her work in finding jobs for permanently injured vets working with Nancy Reagan. She was in Director, Jimmy Burrows, hit play "Mr. Roberts" with Gordon Jump and James Drury of "The Virginian." She also performed in a hit play with Francis Fisher and Bob Crane called "Send Me No Flowers." She worked in a Tennessee Williams's production of his hit play, "Vieux Carre." opposite Mike Nader and Ray Stricklyn. She played the part of Jane Sparks, Mike Nader, her lover, and Ray Stricklyn, as Tennessee Williams. She did a film with Robert Quarry called Deathmaster (1972), a cult favorite. She starred in an "FBI" episode with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. She did Love, American Style (1969), "Falcon Crest", "Here We Go Again", and she starred opposite William Shatner, Jan-Michael Vincent and Robert Foxworth in "Men at Law." After her illegal firing and blacklisting she never worked in Hollywood, she is now back in Hollywood and intends to pursue a film career. She created a hit, runaway internet film she wrote, produced and directed called, "Welcome to My Home" that was put on by a fan. The film quickly garnered 3 million viewers. Dickson produced the film into a DVD. Dickson brought people into her home to spend the day with her. She showed her cat and dog and did a fashion show of over the top couture gowns from the 80s. The industry took note of this film and suddenly a reality show was born. The Kardashians brought you into their home. Other shows did the same. High fashion became a Red Carpet must, and all of the industry was changed. Blue jeans and tee shirts were suddenly replaced by top designers.
In Brenda Dickson's book, "My True Hidden Hollywood Story", released on e-books in mid March 2013 and hard copy to be released in late March or early April 2013.- Actor
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David Hasselhoff has become one of the most recognizable faces on television and throughout the world. Aside from starring in Knight Rider (1982) and Baywatch (1989), he is also an accomplished singer and popular recording artist.
David Michael Hasselhoff was born on July 17, 1952 in Baltimore, Maryland, to Dolores Therese (Mullinex) and Joe Hasselhoff (Joseph Vincent Hasselhoff), a business executive. He is of German (from his paternal grandfather), English, and Irish descent. The acting bug first hit when David was seven and so he took acting, singing and dancing lessons. He was very shy off stage in front of girls because he was tall and thin, but when he was on stage he was in his element. Due to his father's work, his family (he has four sisters) moved around frequently. He initially thought his career was going to go in the direction of musicals and Broadway.
American audiences first came to know Hasselhoff when he portrayed the popular "Dr. Snapper Foster" for six seasons on CBS's soap opera, The Young and the Restless (1973). Lured by NBC's Brandon Tartikoff to move from daytime to prime time, Hasselhoff went on to star as "Michael Knight" in NBC's hit series Knight Rider (1982). The role garnered him a "People's Choice Award" for most popular actor and the show became a huge success overseas. The success of Knight Rider (1982) resulted in Hasselhoff's first major international following. When the show ended, Hasselhoff launched a successful recording career in Europe. In 1989, "Looking for Freedom" remained in the number one spot on the German charts for eight consecutive weeks. He has continued to perform regularly in concert and has released nine albums to date.
Hasselhoff returned to episodic television as Mitch Buchannon on Baywatch (1989) when the show debuted on NBC in 1989. Though it enjoyed good ratings, the network canceled the series after only one season. Undeterred, Hasselhoff and his partners acquired the rights to the show and, based on Hasselhoff's popularity overseas, they were able to secure financing and revive "Baywatch" in 1991. Now a piece of American pop culture and an international television phenomenon, Baywatch (1989) was at its peak seen in 140 countries by over one billion viewers each week. During his lengthy career, Hasselhoff has flexed his acting muscles in numerous other projects. He starred in the epic miniseries Shaka Zulu (1986), shot on-location in Morocco.
Hasselhoff is an outdoor sports enthusiast whose interests include scuba diving, hiking, white water rafting, tennis, and jogging. In addition, he has parachuted with the US Army Parachute Demonstration Team, The Golden Knights, and flown with the US Navy's Blue Angels. He is an avid sports fan, and has attended the World Cup Soccer Finals, the NBA Finals, the Olympics, the Indy 500, and the Kentucky Derby. Hasselhoff has traveled throughout Australia, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean. He spends many hours visiting children's hospitals throughout the world. His charity, "Race For Life", works with the terminally ill and handicapped children in America.
He was married to the beautiful actress Pamela Bach-Hasselhoff, with whom he has two daughters, Taylor-Ann and Hayley Amber.- Actress
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Eclectic is the qualificative that best defines the career of Yvonne Furneaux. Born in Roubaix (a big industrial town in the North of France) in 1926, the little girl was immediately placed under the sign of bilingualism, her father being English and her mother French. As a result, once this alluring brunette had become an actress, she could as easily play in an English or a French film, which did not prevent her from being a regular in Italy and in West Germany, with a foray into Spain. Likewise, she could appear in any film genre, from psychological dramas (Affair in Monte Carlo (1952), her film debut) to adventure yarns (The Master of Ballantrae (1953)), from war films (Il carro armato dell'8 settembre (1960)) to films noirs (Enough Rope (1963), The Champagne Murders (1967)), from sword & sandal movies (Slave Queen of Babylon (1963), The Lion of Thebes (1964)) to horror movies (The Mummy (1959)), from comedies (Versuchung im Sommerwind (1972) to chillers (Repulsion (1965)). The same is true for the quality of her films, ranging from bombs (Frankenstein's Great Aunt Tillie (1984), mediocre run-of-the mill products (The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse (1964)), average works (Slave Queen of Babylon (1963)), quite good (Lisbon (1956)), good (The Beggar's Opera (1953)), very good (In the Name of the Italian People (1971)), excellent (Polanski's Repulsion (1965), as demented Catherine Deneuve's normal sister), to an unclassifiable masterpiece (Fellini's immortal La Dolce Vita (1960), in which she is Mastroianni ex-wife). Such heterogeneity more or less put Yvonne Furneaux at a disadvantage, despite an undeniable acting talent and her having been chosen by great directors (Peter Brook, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Claude Autant-Lara, Roman Polanski, Claude Chabrol and Dino Risi. Another reason why she is not remembered as she should be, is the fact she gave up appearing on the screens little time after marrying cinematographer Jacques Natteau in the late sixties. One should not however dismiss or forget what I would call her cold beauty, which particularly worked wonders when she played haughty women of power such as Princess Ananka (in the classic of the genre,Terence Fisher's The Mummy (1959)), Semiramide or Cleopatra. Without a doubt, Yvonne Furneaux needs better than oblivion.- Zona Jones, born in Corpus Christi, Texas, and raised in Valentine, Texas, is an American country music singer and attorney. Growing up, several influences guided Zona. Living on a working cattle ranch, his grandmother's love of music, and his parents' value of education. The combination of these led Zona to the place that sparked his musical career. Zona received his undergraduate degree from Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He went on to earn a law degree which, in turn, landed him a job at a prestigious firm in Beaumont, Texas. It was where Zona found a booming musical community.
He signed to D/Quarterback Records in 2004. While touring and growing his regional popularity, Zona recorded the album, Harley's & Horses. Released in Feb 2004, the CD spawned three top-five singles on the Texas Music Chart along with the album's most popular single and radio hit, "Two Hearts" - which hit No. 47 on the country charts. This was Zona's first real national exposure. Along with radio success, "Two Hearts" garnered Zona a unique performance opportunity as he made a guest appearance, and performed the hit single on an episode of "The Simple Life 2 - Interns" with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.
In 2008, he signed to Rocky Comfort Records, a label owned by Tracy Lawrence, to release his next album, 2009's Prove Me Right.