Alan Hale, Sr.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alan Hale, Sr. (born Rufus Edward Mackahan, February 10, 1892 - January 22, 1950) was an American movie actor and director, best known for his many supporting character roles, in particular as frequent sidekick of Errol Flynn. He was the father of lookalike actor Alan Hale, Jr., best known as "the Skipper" on television's Gilligan's Island.
He was born in Washington, D.C.. His first film role was in the 1911 silent movie The Cowboy and the Lady. He played "Little John" in the 1922 film Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks and Wallace Beery, reprised the role sixteen years later in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) with Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone, then played Little John again in Rogues of Sherwood Forest in 1950 with Bo Derek's future husband John Derek as Robin Hood, 28 years after his initial performance in the original Fairbanks classic (this might be the longest period for any actor to appear in the same role in movie history). His other films include Fog Over Frisco, The Little Minister, and It Happened One Night with Clark Gable, all released in 1934; the 1937 remake of Stella Dallas (1937); High, Wide, and Handsome (1937); The Fighting 69th (1940) with James Cagney; They Drive By Night (1940) with George Raft, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino, and Humphrey Bogart; Manpower (1941) with Edward G. Robinson, Marlene Dietrich, and George Raft; and as the cantankerous Sgt. McGee in the 1943 movie This Is the Army with George Murphy and Ronald Reagan. Hale directed eight movies during the 1920s and 1930s and acted in 235 theatrical films (according to the Internet Movie Database).
Hale's son Alan Hale, Jr. played the Skipper in Gilligan's Island on television, and the two blond and heavy-set actors closely resembled each other. Both men had very long and extremely successful movie/television careers.
Alan Hale, Sr. died in Hollywood, California on January 22, 1950 following a liver ailment and viral infection. He is interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
Hale's son (who died 40 years later, almost to the day), often regretted that his father had died before the major success of Gilligan's Island.
Leontyne Price
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mary Violet Leontyne Price (born February 10, 1927) is an American opera singer (soprano). She was best known for her Verdi roles, above all the title role of Aida. An African American born in the segregated South, she rose to international fame in the 1950s and 60s, and became the first black "superstar" at the once-segregated Metropolitan Opera. For almost 40 years, she was one of America's most beloved and widely recorded sopranos.
Price was a leading interpreter of the lirico spinto (Italian for "pushed lyric", or middleweight) roles of Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini, as well as of roles in several operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Her voice ranged from A flat below Middle C to the E above High C. (She said she sang high Fs "in the shower.") The voice is noted for its brilliant upper register, the smoky huskiness in the middle and lower registers, its smooth "legato" phrasing, and wide dynamic range. She herself called her singing "soul in opera."
She is a quotable woman whose many bon mots have entered opera lore. Once, when discussing whether she would sing in Atlanta as Minnie, the cowgirl lead in Puccini's La Fanciulla del West, the Met's general manager Rudolf Bing warned her she wouldn't be able to stay in the same segregated hotel with the company. She looked at him and said, "Don't worry, Mr. Bing, I'm sure you can find a place for me and the horse."
After her retirement from the opera stage in 1985, she gave recitals for another dozen years. Among her many honors are the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1965), the Kennedy Center Honors (1980), the National Medal of Arts (1985), numerous honorary degrees, and nineteen Grammy Awards, including a special Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, more than any other classical singer. In 2005, American talk show host Oprah Winfrey honored Price and 24 other influential African-American women at a Legends Ball.
Life and career
Leontyne Price was born in a black neighborhood of Laurel, Mississippi. Her father worked in a lumber mill and her mother was a midwife with a rich singing voice. They had waited 13 years for a child, and Leontyne became the focus of intense pride and love. Her parents gave her a toy piano at age 3 and she began piano lessons right away with a local teacher. When she was in kindergarten, her parents traded in the family phonograph as the down payment on an upright piano. At 10, she was taken on a school trip to hear Marian Anderson sing in Jackson, and she remembered the experience as inspirational. In her teen years, Leontyne accompanied the "second choir" at St. Paul's Methodist Church while singing and playing for the chorus at the black high school. Meanwhile, she often visited the home of Alexander and Elizabeth Chisholm, an affluent white family for whom Leontyne's aunt worked as a maid. Mrs. Chisholm encouraged the girl's early piano playing, and later noticed her extraordinary singing voice.
Aiming for a teaching career, Price enrolled in the music education program at the all-black Wilberforce College (later Central State University) in Wilberforce, Ohio. Her success in the glee club led to solo assignments, and she completed her studies in voice. With the help of the Chisholms and the famous bass Paul Robeson, she enrolled as a scholarship student at the Juilliard School in New York City, where she studied with Florence Page Kimball.
Her first important stage performances were as Mistress Ford in a 1952 student production in Verdi's Falstaff. Shortly thereafter, Virgil Thomson hired her for the revival of his all-black opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. After a two-week Broadway run, Saints went to Paris. Meanwhile, she had been cast as Bess in the Blevins Davis/Robert Breen revival of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, and returned for the opening of the national tour at the Dallas State Fair, on June 9, 1952. The tour visited Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C, and then went on a tour of Europe, sponsored by the U.S. State Department. After stops in Vienna, Berlin, London, and Paris, the company returned to New York when Broadway's Ziegfield Theater became available for a "surprise" run.
Meanwhile, on the eve of the European tour, Price had married the man who had sung Porgy, the noted bass-baritone William Warfield, at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, with many in the cast in attendance. In his memoir, My Music and My Life, Warfield describes how their careers forced them apart. They were legally separated in 1967, and divorced in 1973. They had no children.
At first, Price had aimed for a recital career, in the footsteps of contralto Marian Anderson, tenor Roland Hayes, Warfield, and other great black singers to whom American opera houses were closed. Granted leaves from "Porgy" to sing concerts, she championed new works by American composers, including Lou Harrison, John La Montaine, and Samuel Barber.
Opera proved a stronger calling. She had been drawn to opera since hearing Ljuba Welitsch sing Salome at the Met while she was at Juilliard, and as Bess she had proved she had the instincts and the voice for the big stage. The Met itself acknowledged this when it invited her to sing "Summertime" at a "Met Jamboree" fund-raiser on April 6, 1953 at the Ritz Theater on Broadway. Thus Price was the first African American to sing with the Met and for the Met, if not at the Met. That distinction went to Marian Anderson, who, on January 7, 1955 sang Ulrica in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. The occasion was important, but the role was small, racially typecast (Ulrica is specified in the libretto as a Negress), and came late in Anderson's career. The question was, when would a young black soprano make a career in leading roles?
Emergence
In November 1955, Price made a recital debut at New York's Town Hall with a program that featured the New York premiere of Samuel Barber's "Hermit Songs," with the composer at the piano. (She had sung the world premiere the previous fall at the Library of Congress, and she remained a frequent promoter of new works by American composers.) In February, she sang the title role of Puccini's "Tosca" for NBC-TV Opera, under music director Peter Herman Adler, becoming the first black to appear in televised opera. Offended by the idea of a black in a romantic role, four Southern NBC affiliates canceled the broadcast. A videotape at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City shows an attractive young soprano with a natural acting style, immaculate English enunciation, and easy, shining top notes.
Later that year, she auditioned for the Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, in New York on his first tour with the Berlin Philharmonic. Declaring her "an artist of the future," he invited her to sing Salome at La Scala. (On advice, she wisely declined.) In 1956 and 1957, Price made recital tours across the country, and traveled abroad to India and Australia, sponsored by the U. S. State Department.
Her opera house debut was in San Francisco on September 20, 1957, as Madame Lidoine in the U.S. premiere of Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites. A few weeks later, when the Italian soprano Antonietta Stella fell ill with appendicitis, she stepped in and sang her first staged Aida. Meanwhile, von Karajan, who had become intendant of the Vienna Staatsoper, invited her to make her European debut with him as Aida on May 24, 1958. The next year, she returned to Vienna as Aida and Pamina in Die Zauberflöte.
Over the next decade, Karajan led Price in some of her greatest performances, in the opera house (in Mozart's Don Giovanni, Verdi's Il Trovatore and Puccini's Tosca), in the concert hall (Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Bruckner's Te Deum, and the Verdi Requiem [1]), and in the recording studio, where they produced complete recordings of Tosca and Carmen, and a bestselling holiday music album A Christmas Offering. All are available on CD.
In the late 1950s, Price continued a string of European debuts, appearing as Aida at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the Arena di Verona, both in 1958. On May 21, 1960, she sang at La Scala, again as Aida. (Mattiwilda Dobbs had been the first African American to sing there, in 1953, as Elvira in Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri.)
Arrival
On January 27, 1961, Price arrived at the Met, in a co-debut with the Italian tenor Franco Corelli that ended in a 42-minute ovation, most of which was for Price. (Her third Act aria, "D'amor sul'ali roseee," won 15 minutes of applause.) The next day, New York Times critic Harold Schonberg wrote that Price's "voice, warm and luscious, has enough volume to fill the house with ease, and she has a good technique to back up the voice itself. She even took the trills as written, and nothing in the part as Verdi wrote it gave her the least bit of trouble. She moves well and is a competent actress. But no soprano makes a career of acting. Voice is what counts, and voice is what Miss Price has." He had less to say about Corelli, who, disappointed by his reception, said afterwards he would never sing with Price again. (He did.)
She was not the first African American to sing leading roles at the Met. Since Marian Anderson's debut in 1955, four other black singers had preceded her: Robert McFerrin, a baritone and father of popular singer Bobby McFerrin, sang Amonasro in Aida in 1955 and Rigoletto the next season; the soprano Mattiwilda Dobbs sang Gilda (with Leonard Warren) in 1956; that year, the dancer Geoffrey Holder performed in the Aida ballet sequence; in 1958, soprano Gloria Davy sang Aida, Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, and, the next year, Nedda in Pagliacci; also in 1959, the soprano Martina Arroyo sang the offstage Celestial Voice in Don Carlo.
Nevertheless, Price was the first African American to sing multiple leading roles to acclaim in the leading opera houses, at home and abroad. She was also the first to earn the Met's top fee. A 1964 memo revealed that she was paid $2,750 per performance, on a par with Joan Sutherland, Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi. Birgit Nilsson, who had Wagner roles more or less to herself, earned a little more, $3,000. And in October 1961, she became the first African American to open a Met season, a sign of having arrived as a prima donna with peers but no superiors.
Price's arrival had been carefully timed. The Met's general manager Rudolf Bing had invited her to sing Aida after her Covent Garden success in 1958, but she had turned him down, according to Warfield, on the advice of Peter Herman Adler, director of NBC Opera. According to Warfield, Adler said, "Leontyne is to be a great artist. When she makes her debut at the Met, she must do it as a lady, not a slave." As a result, when Price arrived at the Met three years later, she had several roles securely under her belt, a strong European reputation, and several recordings out on RCA Victor. She was featured on the cover of Time magazine and named "Musician of the Year" by Musical America. In subsequent years, many other African-American singers went on to make world careers, including Martina Arroyo, Shirley Verrett, Grace Bumbry, Jessye Norman, and Kathleen Battle.
Met career
Over the next 24 years, Price sang in 201 Met performances, in 16 different roles, at the house and on tour, including galas. (She was absent for three seasons, 1970-71, 1977-78, 1980-81, and sang only in galas in three others: 1972-73, 1979-80, and 1982-83.) In her ambitious first season, she sang five roles: the Trovatore Leonora, Aida, Liù in Turandot, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, and Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly. The next season, she added Minnie in La Fanciulla del West and Tosca. When a musicians' strike threatened to delay the 1961-2 season, and her historic opening night, Price appealed to President Kennedy, asking him to send Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to mediate. The strike was settled, and the Met opened on time with Fanciulla.
Midway in the second performance, however, she had another crisis: She gradually lost her singing voice and shouted her lines through to the end of the Act, while tenor Richard Tucker tried to comfort her. Soprano Dorothy Kirsten stepped in to sing the third Act. The cause of the lapse seems to have been a virus--and overwork during a high-pressure year. Others said that Minnie's music was too heavy for Price's essentially lyric voice.
From 1962-67, Price added seven more roles at the Met (in order): Elvira in Verdi's Ernani, Pamina in Mozart's Zauberflöte, Fiordiligi in Mozart's Così fan tutte, Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Cleopatra in Barber's Antony and Cleopatra Amelia in Un Ballo in Maschera and Leonora in La Forza del Destino. She proved herself best suited to "middle period" Verdi roles, with their high, legato lines and postures of noble grief and prayerful supplication. They (and the Requiem) became her core repertoire.
Antony and Cleopatra
Another career milestone came on September 16, 1966, when Price sang Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra by American composer Samuel Barber, commissioned to open the Met's new house at Lincoln Center. Since the success of "Hermit Songs" in 1954, Price and Barber had remained friends and frequent collaborators. In his new opera, Barber tailored Cleopatra's music to Price's voice, and often carried pages of fresh music to her home for them to work on.
It was not a success. Many felt that director Franco Zeffirelli buried the music under a multitude of extras and animals, floating steel clouds, and a rotating Sphinx. Others blamed the technical challenges of moving into a new high-tech house. At the dress rehearsal, the expensive new turntable broke down, and on opening night Price was briefly trapped inside a pyramid. Others felt that Barber's score was weak, lacking dramatic focus and satisfying set pieces, other than Cleopatra's powerful death scene, "Give me my crown." The opera ran for eight performances, and was never revived at the Met. Barber reworked it for successful productions at Juilliard and the Spoleto festival (Charleston, S.C.), and Price often sang a concert suite of Cleopatra's arias, prepared for her by the composer.
Late opera career
In the 1970s, Price cut back her appearances in opera in favor of recitals and concerts. She hinted at frustration with the number (and quality) of new productions at the Met. She also talked about needing to avoid overexposure, and may have felt a need to adjust to natural changes in her aging vocal instrument. In late 1969, after a new "Aida" was postponed, she told Bing she would take the next season off and limited her Met appearances to a handful each season after that.
After 1970, she added three roles to her repertoire, all of them with limited success: Giorgetta in Puccini's Il Tabarro (in San Francisco), Puccini's Manon Lescaut, and Ariadne in Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos (in San Francisco and New York). In January 1973 she sang Onward, Christian Soldiers at the state funeral of President Lyndon Johnson. In October, she sang Butterfly, for the first time in a decade, and earned a half-hour ovation at the Met, and returned that spring as Donna Anna. In 1976, she sang Aida, in a new production, with Marilyn Horne as Amneris, (directed by John Dexter). The next year, she renewed her partnership with von Karajan, singing the Brahms Requiem with the Berlin Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall, and then Il Trovatore in Salzburg and Vienna.
In 1977, Price sang Strauss' Ariadne--her last new role--in San Francisco, to enthusiastic reviews. When she sang the role at the Met in 1979, she had a virus infection. She canceled the first and last of three scheduled performances, and the Times reviewer didn't have much good to say about the second.
She had a late triumph in 1981 in San Francisco, when she stepped in at the last minute for an ailing Margaret Price) to sing Aida, a role she had not performed since 1976 and considered packed-up. Pavarotti was the Radames. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herbert Caen reported that she had insisted on being paid $1 more than the tenor, which would have made her, for the moment, the highest paid opera singer in the world. The opera house denied this.
After revisiting several roles in San Francisco (Forza, Carmélites, Il Trovatore, and more Aidas), and the Met ("Forza" and "Il Trovatore"), Price gave her last operatic performance on January 3, 1985, in a broadcast Aida from the Met (her 41st there). After taking "an act or two to warm up," wrote the "Times" chief critic Donal Henahan, she produced "pearls beyond price," notably the Act III aria, "O patria mia," which received a three-minute ovation. (In 2007, PBS viewers voted this performance of the aria the No. 1 "Great Moment" in 30 years of Met telecasts. Excerpts have been visible on YouTube.com.)
Another Times critic, John Rockwell, had written harshly of the first performance in the run on Dec. 20: "The 'O patria mia' in the third act and the final duet had many of the opulent vocal characteristics that distinguished Miss Price in her prime. Unfortunately, they also had many of the self-indulgent vocal mannerisms, the stolid acting and the hoarse lower register with its rough linkage to the top that also marked her operatic prime."
Post-Operatic Career
For the next dozen years, she concentrated on concerts and recitals. Her recital programs, chosen with her longtime accompanist David Garvey, combined French mélodies, German Lieder, Spirituals, an aria or two, and a group of American art songs, many of them written for her, by composers including Barber, Ned Rorem and Lee Hoiby. In addition to giving concerts and recitals in the major American cities and universities, Price gave recitals in Hamburg, Vienna, Paris, Lucerne, and, regularly, at the Salzburg Festival (1975, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1981, and 1984).
In her later years, Price's voice became darker and heavier, but the upper register held up remarkably well, and the conviction and joy in her singing spilled over the footlights to sold-out houses. On November 19, 1997, when she was a few months shy of 71, she gave a recital in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that turned out to be her last.
Price avoided the term African American, preferring to call herself an American, even a "chauvinistic American." She once summed up her philosophy thus: "If you are going to think black, think positive about it. Don't think down on it, or think it is something in your way. And this way, when you really do want to stretch out, and express how beautiful black is, everybody will hear you."
Price continued to teach master classes at Juilliard and other schools. In 1997, she wrote a children's book version of Aida, which became the basis for a hit Broadway musical by Elton John and Tim Rice in 2000. She lives in Greenwich Village in New York City.
In October 2001, at age 74, Price was asked out of retirement to sing in a memorial concert in Carnegie Hall for victims of the September 11 attacks. With James Levine at the piano, she sang a favorite spiritual, "This Little Light of Mine," followed by an unaccompanied "God Bless America," capping it with a bright, well placed high B-flat.
Recordings
Leontyne Price's commercial recordings include three complete sets of Il Trovatore, two of Forza, two of Aïda, two of Verdi's Requiem, two of Tosca, and an Ernani, Ballo, Carmen, Madama Butterfly, Cosí Fan Tutte, Don Giovanni (as Donna Elvira), Il Tabarro and (her final complete opera recording) Ariadne auf Naxos. She recorded highlights from "Porgy and Bess" (including music for the other female leads Clara and Serena) with Warfield, under Skitch Henderson. She also recorded five "Prima Donna" albums of selected arias that she never performed in staged productions, two collections of Strauss arias, recitals of French and German art songs, two albums of Spirituals, and a single crossover disc, Right as the Rain, with Andre Previn. Her Barber recordings, including the "Hermit Songs," scenes from Antony and Cleopatra, and "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," appeared on CD under "Leontyne Price Sings Barber." Perhaps her best operatic collection was her first, titled simply "Leontyne Price," and often referred to as the "blue album." It has been re-released often on CD.
In 1996, to honor her 70th birthday, RCA-BMG brought out a deluxe 11-CD box of selections from her recordings, with an accompanying book, titled "The Essential Leontyne Price." Copies are hard to find; one was recently sold on EBay for $650. Historical recordings have also appeared. In 2002, RCA found a tape of her 1965 Carnegie Hall recital debut and released it in its "Rediscovered" series. In 2005, Bridge Records released her 1954 Library of Congress recital, including the "Hermit Songs," and Henri Sauguet's song-cycle "La Voyante," and songs by Poulenc.
Reputation
In "The Grand Tradition," a 1974 history of operatic recording, the British critic J.B. Steane writes of Leontyne Price that "one might conclude from recordings that she is the best interpreter of Verdi of the century." For the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, a Price performance of Tosca at the Vienna State Opera "left me with the strongest impression I have ever gotten from opera." In his 1983 autobiography, Plácido Domingo writes, "The power and sensuousness of Leontyne's voice were phenomenal--the most beautiful Verdi soprano I have ever heard."
Miles Davis, in his self-titled autobiography, writes of Price, "I have always been one of her fans because in my opinion she is the greatest female singer ever, the greatest opera singer ever. She could hit anything with her voice. Leontyne's so good it's scary. Plus, she can play piano and sing and speak in all those languages... I love the way she sings Tosca. I wore out her recording of that, wore out two sets... I used to wonder how she would have sounded if she had sung jazz. She should be an inspiration for every musician, black or white. I know she is to me."
She has also had her critics. Peter G. Davis writes in his book, "The American Opera Singer," that Price had "a fabulous vocal gift that went largely unfulfilled," noting her reluctance to try new roles, criticizing her Tosca for its lack of a "working chest register," and her late Aidas for a "swooping" vocal line. Others have criticized her stiff technique in florid music, and her occasional mannerisms. In mid-career, her voice became darker and her vocal style stiffer, disrupted by occasional outbreaks of self-indulgent emphasis, including scooping or swooping up to high notes. Von Karajan took her to task for these in rehearsals in 1977 for "Il Trovatore," as Price herself related in an interview in Diva, by Helena Matheopoulos. As later recordings and appearances show, she took his advice to heart and sang with a cleaner line.
Her acting, too, varied over a long career. Her Bess was praised for its fire and sensuality and her early NBC productions show her moving naturally on camera. Later, she became a stiff, at times even an awkward, singer-actress. She herself once said, "I don't expect to win any Academy Awards." In a 1982 "Live from the Met" TV broadcast of "Forza," available on DVD--the only available film of Price in a complete opera --she carries herself with compelling dignity.
In March 2007, BBC Music magazine published a list of the "20 All-time Best Sopranos" based on a poll of 21 British music critics and BBC presenters. Leontyne Price placed fourth, after, in order, Maria Callas, Joan Sutherland, and Victoria de los Angeles.[citation needed]
Robert Wagner
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Birth name Robert John Wagner
Born February 10, 1930 (1930-02-10) (age 78)
Detroit, Michigan, U.S.
Spouse(s) Natalie Wood (1957-1962, 1972-1981)
Marion Marshall (1963-1970)
Jill St. John (1990-)
Robert John Wagner (born February 10, 1930) is an American film and television actor in movies, soap operas and television. In his early days in Hollywood in the 1950s, he was mentored by the movie actor Spencer Tracy.
He also starred in three popular American television series that spanned three decades: as playboy-thief-turned-secret-agent, Alexander Mundy, in It Takes a Thief (1968-1970), as Eddie Albert's ex-con man turned crime-fighting partner, Det. Pete T. Ryan, in the con-artist-oriented drama Switch (1975-1978), and as Stefanie Powers's super-rich husband and private-eye partner, Jonathan Hart, in the lighthearted crime drama Hart to Hart (1979-1984). He also starred as Number Two in the Austin Powers films of the late 1990s and early 2000s. He is currently starring as Teddy on the TV sitcom "Two and a Half Men".
Biography
Early career
Born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of a steel executive,[1] Wagner moved with his family to Los Angeles, California, when he was seven. Wagner became an aspiring actor and was successfully employed in a variety of jobs, most prominently as a caddy for actor Clark Gable. However, it wasn't until he was dining with his family at a Beverly Hills restaurant that he was "discovered" by a talent scout. Making his debut in The Happy Years (1950), he would play minor characters in several military themed films until his performance in With a Song in My Heart (1952) starring Susan Hayward, which would lead to a contract with 20th Century Fox.
His signing on with Fox would lead to a series of films in starring roles including Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953) and Prince Valiant (1954) as well as smaller, although impressive performances, in A Kiss Before Dying (1956) and Between Heaven and Hell (1956).
It was during his early career that he became the protégé of veteran actor Clifton Webb, appearing with him in Stars and Stripes Forever (1952). His performance earned him a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer in motion pictures. According to Robert Hofler in The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson, his biography of Hollywood talent agent Henry Willson, Wagner was the most prominent client to break with Willson after the homosexuality of Willson and his top client, Rock Hudson, became a topic of Hollywood gossip.
Personal life
On his way to becoming one of Fox's visible younger stars, Wagner began appearing in public with several young actresses including Joan Collins and Debbie Reynolds, eventually becoming lifelong friends with both. In 1956, Wagner became involved with 18-year-old actress Natalie Wood, and was married in Scottsdale, Arizona on December 28, 1957. The marriage was celebrated in Hollywood as the most "glittering union of the 20th century". Living in a Beverly Hills home worth $150,000, the couple soon became involved in financial troubles. At Fox, Wagner's career was slowly being overtaken by newer actors such as Marlon Brando and Paul Newman while Natalie Wood's also ran into trouble as her contract with Warner Bros. was suspended for 14 months after her refusal to appear in a movie filming in England. The two would eventually file for divorce on April 27, 1962, with Natalie entering a relationship with actor Warren Beatty, who had recently broken off an engagement with Wagner and Wood's friend Joan Collins, soon afterwards.
Wagner, reportedly distraught over the divorce, traveled to Europe and was working on The Longest Day (1962) when he met an old friend, actress Marion Marshall. After a brief courtship, Wagner married Marshall on July 22, 1963 and the following year had a daughter, Katie Wagner. The two divorced in 1970.
Television
In 1968, Wagner made his television debut starring in his first series, It Takes a Thief and, after a successful two and a half seasons, his career began to rise. In this series most notably he acted with Fred Astaire, who played his father. Astaire was a lifelong friend of Wagner's, and he had gone to school with Astaire's eldest son, Peter. In 1972 he was cast opposite Bette Davis in the television movie Madame Sin, which was released in foreign markets as a feature film.
By the mid-1970s, Wagner's television career was at its peak with the popular television series Switch, opposite longtime idol Eddie Albert, where he spent a lot of time working with the veteran Academy Award-winner, on and off the set, after having been a lifelong fan of his. His third successful series was, Hart to Hart, which co-starred his longtime friend Stefanie Powers, also created a loving bond. Before those roles, Wagner also made guest appearances in the pilot episode of The Streets of San Francisco and as a regular in the UK World War II drama, Colditz. He would later be nominated for an Emmy Award for Best TV Actor for his performance in It Takes a Thief and for four Golden Globe awards for his role as Jonathan Hart in Hart to Hart.
Wagner is currently pitching reverse mortgage company the Senior Lending Network.
Remarriage to Natalie Wood
Despite his divorce, Wagner continued to keep in contact with Natalie Wood and, in 1971, at a chance meeting with Wood in a restaurant, the two began to resume their relationship (despite her marriage to British producer Richard Gregson). Wood eventually divorced Gregson, and gaining custody of her daughter Natasha, they remarried on June 16, 1972 in a ceremony on their yacht Splendour. Two years later, along with Katie Wagner and Natasha Gregson Wagner, the couple had a daughter Courtney Brooke.
The two would later appear together in the television movies The Affair, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (as part of the UK television series Laurence Olivier Presents) and Wagner's own television series Hart to Hart. In 1973, with his wife Natalie Wood, Wagner arranged a deal with Aaron Spelling to submit ideas for pilots to ABC, one of which resulted in the TV series Charlie's Angels in which Wagner and Wood shared the profits with Spelling equally.
On November 29, 1981, Natalie Wood drowned after falling off their yacht Splendour while sailing near Catalina Island with Wagner and Christopher Walken. Wagner, reportedly distraught over Natalie's death, would remain unmarried for almost ten years while continuing to raise their three daughters.
After sister-in-law Lana Wood published her 1984 autobiography Natalie: A Memoir, Wagner broke off contact with his late wife's family. She would go on to produce the television movie The Mystery of Natalie Wood (2004), starring Justine Waddell and Michael Weatherly as Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner.
In 1991, he married actress Jill St. John. In the spring of 2000, St. John herself would become involved in an altercation with Lana Wood during a cover shoot for Vanity Fair featuring the actresses of the long running James Bond series. St. John and Lana co-starred in the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds are Forever.
On September 21, 2006, he became a first time grandfather when his daughter, Katie, gave birth to a son, Riley Wagner-Lewis.
Return to film and TV
Wagner's film career received a revival after his role in the popular Mike Myers's Austin Powers, as Dr. Evil's henchman Number 2, as well as becoming the host of Fox Movie Channel's Hour of Stars, featuring original television episodes of The 20th Century-Fox Hour (1955), a series which Wagner had appeared on in his early days with the studio.
In 2007, Wagner had a role in the [BBC/AMC] series Hustle fourth season premiere, where he plays a crooked Texan being taken for half a million dollars. As Wagner is considered "a suave icon of American caper television, including It Takes a Thief and Hart to Hart,[2] Robert Glenister (Hustle's fixer, Ash Morgan) commented that "to have one of the icons of that period involved is a great bonus for all of us".[3]
Recently, Wagner played the pivotal role of President James Garfield in the comedy/horror film Netherbeast Incorporated (2007). The role was written with Wagner in mind.
Aaron Spelling lawsuit
In June 2000, Wagner sued Aaron Spelling Productions for $20 million for breach of contract and fraud, claiming he had been cheated out of profits from the Fox television series Beverly Hills, 90210 regarding an agreement between the show's creator and producer Aaron Spelling and the Fox Network in conflict with his own business relationship with Spelling since the early 1970s.
In 1988, Wagner agreed to become involved in Spelling's television series Angels 88, then in development, in which Spelling had agreed Wagner would receive a 7.5% gross profit for his participation, regardless of services rendered. However, when the series was initially picked up by Fox and then later dropped in favor of Beverly Hills, 90210, Wagner claimed he was entitled to the rights previously agreed upon their 1988 agreement.
Friendship with Eddie Albert
Wagner was a loyal friend to Eddie Albert for over 40 years and said Albert was a true blessing to him. Wagner was only 8 when he first watched his future mentor in the 1938 movie, Brother Rat, and was impressed. He first worked with the seasoned actor in the 1962 movie, The Longest Day. Shortly afterwards, they co-starred together in both Switch, and The Concorde: Airport '79. Wagner was grief stricken when in 1985, he has heard about the loss of his mentor's wife, Margo. Margo's death had strengthened the friendship between Albert & Wagner, as the two kept in touch for the next two decades, until Albert's own death in 2005, where Wagner gave one of the eulogies.
Friendship with Stefanie Powers
Long before Wagner shared top billing with Stefanie Powers in Hart to Hart, his friendship with the legendary actress began in the late 1950s, when Powers was in her teens. They became close friends at that time, and have coped with the highs and the lows of each other's lives since then. Their first meeting was on the set of the movie West Side Story when Powers was a dancer/member of the ensemble cast, but was 'fired' before filming began due to the restrictions of employing a minor (she was under 18 at the time). Powers and Wagner met when he visited the set with his wife, Natalie Wood (who was the film's leading lady). Nine years later, Powers guest-starred alongside Wagner on his own show, It Takes a Thief. In 1981, Wagner and Powers lost their partners. This shared berevement cemented their already strong bond. Six years after Hart to Hart ended, they started touring with the play Love Letters, taking it across the US and into Europe. Wagner and Powers remain good friends to this day.
Roberta Flack
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Background information
Born February 10, 1937 (1937-02-10) (age 71)
Origin Asheville, North Carolina, United States
Genre(s) Jazz, soul, folk
Website
www.robertaflack.com
Roberta Flack (born February 10, 1937 in Asheville, North Carolina) is an American singer, notable in the areas of jazz, soul, and folk. Flack is best known for singles such as "Killing Me Softly with His Song," "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," "Where Is the Love?" (one of her many duets with Donny Hathaway), and "Feel Like Making Love". "Killing Me Softly with His Song" won the 1974 Grammy for Record of the Year.
Biography
Flack was raised in Arlington, Virginia. She first discovered the work of African American musical artists when she heard Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke sing in a predominantly black Baptist church.
In her early teens, Flack so excelled at classical piano that Howard University awarded her a full music scholarship. She matriculated at Howard University at the age of 15, making her one of the youngest students ever to enroll there. She eventually changed her major from piano to voice, and became an assistant conductor of the university choir. Her direction of a production of Aida received a standing ovation from the Howard University faculty.
Flack became the first black student teacher at an all-white school near Chevy Chase, Maryland. She graduated from Howard University at 19 and began graduate studies in music, but the sudden death of her father forced her to take a job teaching music and English for $2800 a year in Farmville, North Carolina.
Flack then taught school for some years in Montgomery County, Maryland. During this period, her music career began to take shape on evenings and weekends in Washington, D.C. area night spots. At the Tivoli Club, she accompanied opera singers at the piano. During intermissions, she would sing blues, folk, and pop standards in a back room, accompanying herself on the piano. Later, she performed several nights a week at the 1520 Club, again providing her own piano accompaniment. Around this time, her voice teacher told her that he saw a brighter future for her in pop music than in the classics. She modified her repertoire accordingly and her reputation spread.
Subsequently, a Capitol Hill night club called Mr. Henry's built a performance area especially for her.[citation needed]
In 1999, a star with Flack's name was placed on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. That same year, she gave a concert tour in South Africa, whose final concert was attended by President Nelson Mandela.
Flack is a member of the Artist Empowerment Coalition, which advocates the right of artists to control their creative properties.
Recording and performing
When Flack did a benefit concert for the Inner City Ghetto Children's Library Fund, Les McCann happened to be in the audience. He later said on the liner notes of what would be her first album "First Take" noted below, "Her voice touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked every emotion I've ever known. I laughed, cried, and screamed for more...she alone had the voice." Very quickly, he arranged an audition for her with Atlantic Records, during which she played 42 songs in 3 hours for producer Joel Dorn. In November of 1968, she recorded 39 song demos in less than 10 hours. Three months later, Atlantic recorded her debut album, "First Take," in a mere 10 hours.[citation needed] Flack later spoke of those studio sessions as a "very naive and beautiful approach...I was comfortable with the music because I had worked on all these songs for all the years I had worked at Mr. Henry's."[citation needed]
Flack's Atlantic recordings did not sell particularly well, until Clint Eastwood chose a song from First Take, "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face", for the sound track of his directorial debut Play Misty for Me; it became a #1 hit in 1972. Eastwood has remained an admirer and friend of Flack's ever since. In 1983, she recorded the end music to the Dirty Harry film Sudden Impact.[citation needed]
Flack soon began recording regularly with Donny Hathaway, scoring hits such as "Where is the Love" (1971) and "The Closer I Get to You" (1978). On her own, Flack scored her second #1 hit, "Killing Me Softly with His Song" (1973; see 1973 in music). Flack and Hathaway recorded several duets together, including two LPs, until Hathaway's 1979 suicide. She began working with Peabo Bryson with more limited success, charting as high as #5 on the Black Singles charts (plus #16 Pop and #4 Adult Contemporary) with "Tonight I Celebrate My Love" in 1983. Her next two singles with Bryson, "You're Looking Like Love To Me" and "I Just Came Here To Dance," fared better on adult contemporary (AC) radio than on pop or R&B radio.
After 1988's Oasis failed to make an impact with Pop audiences (the title track did reach #1 on the R&B chart), Flack found herself in the US Top 10 with the hit song "Set the Night to Music", a 1991 duet with Jamaican vocalist Maxi Priest, peaked at #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts and #2 AC. Flack's smooth R&B sound lent itself easily to Easy Listening airplay during the 1970s, and she has had four #1 AC hits.
Trivia
When Flack played the gold record she won for "Killing Me Softly With His Song" on a turntable, what she heard was "Come Softly to Me" by The Fleetwoods.[citation needed]
The song "What You Know" by T.I. utilizes a sample of Roberta Flack's version of The Impressions's "Gone Away"
In 1986, Flack sang the theme song entitled "Together Through the Years" for the NBC television series, "The Hogan Family." The song was used for all of the show's six seasons.[citation needed]
In 1996, The Fugees famously covered "Killing Me Softly with His Song", renaming it simply "Killing Me Softly".
Flack is the aunt of the professional ice skater Rory Flack Burghardt.
Flack resides at the famous "Dakota" apartment house (73rd Street and Central Park West) in New York City, which was also the residence of John Lennon and Yoko Ono at the time of the legendary ex-Beatle's death.[citation needed]
Flack is a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
Flack is mentioned by name in the Red Hot Chili Pepper's song "My Lovely Man."
"Killing Me Softly with His Song" is said to have been written about Don McLean after Lori Lieberman, also a singer/song writer saw him singing Don's composition "Empty Chairs" in concert. Afterwards , Lori wrote a poem titled "Killing me softly with his blue", and inspired by this poem, Norman Gimbel/Charles Fox wrote this song and the rest is history.
Rap artist Project Pat, of the Memphis-based group Three 6 Mafia, sampled the tune from Flack's song "The Closer I Get to You," in his Layin' da Smack Down track "Take da Charge".
Roberta was mentioned in an episode of the The Bernie Mac Show as being "Alicia Keys with an afro".
Laura Dern
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Birth name Laura Elizabeth Dern
Born February 10, 1967 (1967-02-10) (age 41)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Spouse(s) Ben Harper (2005-)
[show]Awards
Academy Awards
Rambling Rose (Nomination)
Laura Elizabeth Dern (born February 10, 1967) is an Academy Award nominated American actress. Dern is best recalled for her roles in Blue Velvet (1986) and Jurassic Park (1993). She also received critical acclaim for her performance in the 1991 film Rambling Rose, for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role.
Biography
Early life and career
Dern was born Laura Elizabeth Dern in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of actors Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd and the great-granddaughter of former Utah governor George H. Dern. Laura Dern's film debut was in fact a cameo in her mother's film White Lightning; also making a brief appearance in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, one of Ladd's signature roles. Her mother objected to the 13-year-old Dern's presence on the set of Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, but a defiant Dern sued for emancipation.
In the mid-1980s she gained critical acclaim for roles in films by Peter Bogdanovich (Mask) and David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart). Dern's starring role in Blue Velvet appeared to be a breakthrough but her next notable film took almost four years to be released, Wild at Heart, also directed by Lynch. Dern's affiliation with Lynch has continued throughout her career, with her most recent role in INLAND EMPIRE. In 1992, Dern and her mother became the first and only mother and daughter ever to be nominated for an Academy Award for acting in the same film in Rambling Rose. They, however, did not play a mother and daughter in the film.
In 1993 Dern played Dr. Ellie Sattler in Steven Spielberg's blockbuster hit, Jurassic Park. The same year Clint Eastwood enlisted Dern for his film A Perfect World. Dern also starred as Ruth in the 1996 satire Citizen Ruth, the directorial debut of Alexander Payne. In a reversal of roles, Dern's mother makes a cameo appearance, with Dern's character screaming a torrent of abuse at her. The film became an indie sensation with Dern's hilarious portrayal of drug addict Ruth Stoops receiving praise. In 1997, Dern was featured in Widespread Panic's music video for their song, "Aunt Avis", which was directed by Dern's then boyfriend and at one time fiancé, Billy Bob Thornton. In 1998 Dern, and Stockard Channing co-starred in the moving Showtime film The Baby Dance. The touching film, produced by Jodie Foster, followed two couples from different backgrounds through a difficult adoption. Dern was moving as a poor woman from Louisiana giving her child up.
In 1999, Dern was dating Billy Bob Thornton and he selected her as his love interest in his film Daddy and Them. The film is about a dysfunctional Arkansas family which includes (again) Diane Ladd, Andy Griffith and Jim Varney in his final film performance. Dern also appeared in Joe Johnston's film October Sky opposite Jake Gyllenhaal and Chris Cooper. Robert Altman called upon Dern's talents to play a champagne loving Aunt in his Texas based comedy Dr. T & the Women in 2000. The film also starred Richard Gere, Helen Hunt and Kate Hudson.
2001 was a busy year for Dern as she took on five films. The first was a TV movie with Ellen Burstyn called Within These Walls. Dern played a nun who taught female inmates to train dogs for special needs people. The film was based on a true story. Dern also co-starred with William H. Macy in Focus based on Arthur Miller's novel. Next Dern starred with Steve Martin in Helena Bonham Carter in the dark comedy Novocaine. She also had a minor role in Jurassic Park III. The film I Am Sam with Sean Penn and Michelle Pfeiffer also featured Dern in a supporting role.
The 2002 Showtime film Damaged Care starred Dern as real life woman Linda Peeno who was famous for testifying before the United States Congress against health maintenance organizations after working for them in the 1980s. An interesting side-note is that the real Linda Peeno made an appearance in Michael Moore's documentay SiCKO. The 2004 film We Don't Live Here Anymore gave Dern some of the best reviews of her career, as she portrayed a woman in a troubled marriage opposite Mark Ruffalo.
Dern was part of the ensemble drama/comedy Happy Endings in 2005. The film directed by Don Roos follows a loosely connected group of L.A. residents through their life trials. The film also starred Lisa Kudrow, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Steve Coogan. That year Dern also appeared in the film The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio with Julianne Moore and Woody Harrelson. When David Lynch and Dern reunited in 2006 for INLAND EMPIRE the critical praise for Dern's lead role was overwhelming. Many journalists even believed that she deserved the best actress award for that film. Also in 2006, Dern had a supporting role in the film Lonely Hearts. The film was about the famed Lonely Hearts Killers and starred Salma Hayek, John Travolta and Jared Leto.
Mike White, known for writing such films as School of Rock and The Good Girl, hired Dern for his directorial debut. The film, released in 2007, was a comedy titled Year of the Dog starring Molly Shannon, John C. Reilly and Peter Sarsgaard. Later this year Dern will star opposite Russell Crowe in the independent drama Tenderness.
Dern has stated that she would reprise her role as Ellie Sattler in Jurassic Park IV.
Dern has also done much work on television, most notably Afterburn, for which she received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Mini-Series or Movie. She has also guest-starred on The West Wing, as a voice on King of the Hill, and as a lesbian who coaxes Ellen DeGeneres out of the closet in the famous "Puppy Episode" of the television series Ellen. On the 24 April 2007 airing of DeGeneres' talk show Dern revealed she did not work for more than a year following her appearance in that episode because of resulting backlash but nevertheless called her work an 'extraordinary experience and opportunity'.
Politics and personal life
Dern is known as an outspoken activist and supporter of many charitable causes, such as The Children's Health Environmental Coalition, which aims to raise awareness about toxic substances that can affect a child's health. She has been acknowledged with several awards from the independent film industry including the Sundance Institute and was the subject of an aggressive media campaign by David Lynch to win her an Academy Award nomination for her work in Inland Empire.
Dern had high-profile romances with Kyle MacLachlan, Nicolas Cage, Renny Harlin, Jeff Goldblum and Billy Bob Thornton, who ended their relationship abruptly by marrying Angelina Jolie. She married musician Ben Harper on December 23, 2005, after dating him for five years.
