Alfred Hitchcock
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Birth name Alfred Joseph Hitchcock
Born August 13, 1899(1899-08-13)
Leytonstone, London, England
Died April 29, 1980 (aged 80)
Bel Air, Los Angeles, USA
Spouse(s) Alma Reville (1926-1980)
[show]Awards
Academy Awards
Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award
1968 Lifetime Achievement
Golden Globe Awards
Best TV Show
1958 Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Cecil B. DeMille Award
1972 Lifetime Achievement
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE (August 13, 1899 - April 29, 1980) was an iconic and highly influential British-born film director and producer who pioneered many techniques in the suspense and thriller genres. He directed more than fifty feature films in a career spanning six decades, from the silent film era, through the invention of talkies, to the colour era. Hitchcock was among the most consistently successful and publicly recognizable world directors during his lifetime, and remains one of the best known and most popular of all time.
Famous for his expert and largely unrivalled control of pace and suspense, Hitchcock's films draw heavily on both fear and fantasy, and are known for their droll humour and witticisms. They often portray innocent people caught up in circumstances beyond their control or understanding.
Hitchcock was born and raised in Leytonstone, London, England. He began his directing career in the United Kingdom in 1922, but from 1939 he worked primarily in the United States and applied for U.S. citizenship in 1956. Hitchcock and his family lived in a mountaintop estate high above Scotts Valley, California, from 1940 to 1972. He died of renal failure in 1980.
Rebecca was the only one of his films to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, although four others were nominated. However, Hitchcock never won an Academy Award for Best Director. He was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in 1967, but never personally received an Academy Award of Merit.
Life
Childhood and youth
Alfred Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899, in Leytonstone, Essex (now London), the second son and youngest of three children of William Hitchcock (1862-1914), a greengrocer and poulterer, and his wife, Emma Jane Hitchcock (née Whelan; 1863-1942). His family was mostly Roman Catholic. Hitchcock was sent to the Jesuit Catholic school St. Ignatius College in Enfield, London. He often described his childhood as being very lonely and sheltered, which was undoubtedly compounded by his weight issues.
It is widely known that as a child, Hitchcock's father once sent him to their local police station with a note asking the officer to lock him away for ten minutes as punishment for behaving badly. This idea of being harshly treated or wrongfully accused is more than commonly reflected in Hitchcock's films.
His mother would often make him address her while standing at the foot of her bed, especially if he behaved badly, forcing him to stand there for hours. This would be recalled by the character Norman Bates in Psycho.
When Hitchcock was 14, his father died; the same year, he left the Jesuit-run St Ignatius' College in Stamford Hill, his school at the time, to study at the School for Engineering and Navigation. After graduating, he became a draftsman and advertising designer with a cable company.
About that time, Hitchcock became intrigued by photography and started working in film in London. In 1920, he got a full-time job at Islington Studios with its American owner, Famous Players-Lasky and their British successor, Gainsborough Pictures, designing the titles for silent movies.
Pre-war British career
In 1925, Michael Balcon of Gainsborough Pictures gave him a chance to direct his first film, The Pleasure Garden made at Ufa studios in Germany. The commercial failure of this film threatened to derail his promising career. In 1926, however, Hitchcock made his debut in the thriller genre. The resulting film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog was a major commercial and critical success. Like many of his earlier works, it was influenced by Expressionist techniques he had witnessed firsthand in Germany. This is the first truly "Hitchcockian" film, incorporating such themes as the "wrong man".
Following the success of The Lodger, Hitchcock began his first efforts to promote himself in the media, and hired a publicist to cement his growing reputation as one of the British film industry's rising stars. On December 2, 1926, he married his assistant director Alma Reville at Brompton Oratory. Their daughter Patricia was born in 1928. Alma was Hitchcock's closest collaborator. She wrote some of his screenplays and (though often uncredited) worked with him on every one of his films.
In 1929, he began work on his tenth film Blackmail. While the film was in production, the studio decided to make it one of Britain's first sound pictures. With the climax of the film taking place on the dome of the British Museum, Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences.
In 1933, Hitchcock was once again working for Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British Picture Corporation. His first film for the company, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), was a success and his second, The 39 Steps (1935), is often considered one of the best films from his early period. It was also one of the first to introduce the concept of the "MacGuffin", a plot device around which a whole story would revolve. In The 39 Steps, the MacGuffin is a stolen set of blueprints.
His next major success was in 1938, The Lady Vanishes, a clever and fast-paced film about the search for a kindly old Englishwoman (Dame May Whitty), who disappears while on board a train in the fictional country of Vandrika (a thinly-veiled version of Nazi Germany).
By the end of the 1930s, Hitchcock was at the top of his game artistically, and in a position to name his own terms when David O. Selznick managed to entice the Hitchcocks to Hollywood.
Hollywood
Hitchcock's gallows humour and the suspense that became his trademark continued in his American work. However, working arrangements with his new producer were less than optimal. Selznick suffered from perennial money problems and Hitchcock was often unhappy with the amount of creative control demanded by Selznick over his films. Consequently, Selznick ended up "loaning" Hitchcock to the larger studios more often than producing Hitchcock's films himself.
With the prestigious Selznick picture Rebecca in 1940, Hitchcock made his first American movie, although it was set in England and based on a novel by English author Daphne du Maurier and starred Sir Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. This Gothic melodrama explores the fears of a naïve young bride who enters a great English country home and must grapple with the problems of a distant husband, a predatory housekeeper, and the legacy of her husband's late wife, the beautiful, mysterious Rebecca. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940. However, the statuette went to Selznick as the film's producer, and the film did not win the Best Director award. There were additional problems between Selznick and Hitchcock; Selznick, as he usually did, imposed very restrictive rules upon Hitchcock, hindering his creative control. Hitchcock was forced to shoot the film as Selznick wanted, immediately creating friction within their relationship. At the same time, Selznick complained about Hitchcock's "goddam jigsaw cutting," which meant that the producer did not have nearly the leeway to create his own film as he liked, but had to follow Hitchcock's vision of the finished product.
Hitchcock's second American film, the European-set thriller Foreign Correspondent, was also nominated for Best Picture that year. It was filmed in the first year of World War II and inspired by the rapidly-changing events in Europe, as covered by an American newspaper reporter portrayed by a wise-cracking Joel McCrea. The film cleverly used actual footage of European scenes and scenes filmed on a Hollywood backlot.
Hitchcock's work during the 1940s was diverse, ranging from the romantic comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) and the courtroom drama The Paradine Case (1947) to the dark and disturbing Shadow of a Doubt (1943).
Suspicion (1941) marked Hitchcock's first film as a producer as well as director. This was Cary Grant's first film with Hitchcock. Joan Fontaine won Best Actress Oscar and New York Film Critics Circle Award for her outstanding performance in Suspicion.
Saboteur (1942) was the first of two films that Hitchcock made for Universal, a studio where he would work in his later years. Hitchcock was forced to utilize Universal contract players Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane, both known for their work in comedies and light dramas; Hitchcock made the most of the situation and got remarkably good performances from the two lead actors. Breaking with Hollywood conventions of the time, Hitchcock did extensive location filming, especially in New York City, and memorably depicted a confrontation between a suspected saboteur (Cummings) and a real saboteur (Norman Lloyd) atop the Statue of Liberty.
Shadow of a Doubt, his personal favourite of all his films and the second of the early Universal films, was about young Charlotte "Charlie" Newton (Teresa Wright), who suspects her beloved uncle Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten) of being a serial murderer. In its use of overlapping characters, dialogue, and closeups it has provided a generation of film theorists with psychoanalytic potential, including Jacques Lacan and Slavoj iek. The film also harkens back to one of Cotten's best known films, Citizen Kane. Hitchcock again filmed extensively on location, this time in the Northern California city of Santa Rosa.
In 1945 Hitchcock served as "treatment advisor" (in effect, editor) for a Holocaust documentary produced by the British Army. The film, which recorded the liberation of Concentration Camps, remained unreleased until 1985, when it was completed by PBS Frontline and distributed under the title Memory of the Camps.
Spellbound explored the then-fashionable subject of psychoanalysis and featured a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí. The dream sequence as it actually appears in the film is considerably shorter than was originally envisioned, which was to be several minutes long, because it proved to be too disturbing for the audience.
Notorious (1946) followed Spellbound. As Selznick failed to see its potential, he allowed Hitchcock to make the film for RKO. From this point onwards, Hitchcock would produce his own films, giving him a far greater degree of freedom to pursue the projects that interested him. Notorious starred Hitchcock regulars Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant and features a plot about Nazis, uranium, and South America. It was a huge box office success and has remained one of Hitchcock's most acclaimed films. His use of uranium as a plot device briefly led to Hitchcock's being under surveillance by the FBI.
After completing his final film for Selznick, The Paradine Case, Hitchcock filmed his first colour film, Rope, which appeared in 1948. Here Hitchcock experimented with marshalling suspense in a confined environment, as he had done earlier with Lifeboat (1943). He also experimented with exceptionally long takes ?- up to ten minutes long (see Themes and devices). Featuring James Stewart in the leading role, Rope was the first of four films Stewart would make for Hitchcock. It was based on the Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s.
Under Capricorn (1949), set in nineteenth-century Australia, also used the short-lived technique of long takes, but to a more limited extent. He again used Technicolor in this production, then returned to black and white films for several years. For these two films Hitchcock formed a production company with Sidney Bernstein, called Transatlantic Pictures, which folded after these two unsuccessful pictures.
Peak years and Knighthood
With Strangers on a Train (1951), based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, Hitchcock combined many of the best elements from his preceding British and American films. Two men casually meet and speculate on removing people who are causing them difficulty. One of the men, though, takes this banter entirely seriously. With Farley Granger reprising some elements of his role from Rope, Strangers continued the director's interest in the narrative possibilities of blackmail and murder. This was Hitchcock's first production for Warner Brothers, which had distributed Rope and Under Capricorn.
MCA head Lew Wasserman, whose client list included James Stewart, Janet Leigh, and other actors who would appear in Hitchcock's films, had a significant impact in packaging and marketing Hitchcock's films beginning in the 1950s. With Wasserman's help, Hitchcock received tremendous creative freedom from the studios, as well as substantive financial rewards as a result of Paramount's profit-sharing contract.
Three very popular films starring Grace Kelly followed. Dial M for Murder (1954) was adapted from the popular stage play by Frederick Knott. This was originally another experimental film, with Hitchcock using the technique of 3D cinematography, although the film was not released in this format at first; it did receive screenings in the early 1980s in 3D form. The film also marked a return to Technicolor productions for Hitchcock. Rear Window starred James Stewart again, as well as Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr. Here, the wheelchair-bound Stewart observes the movements of his neighbours across the courtyard and becomes convinced one of them has murdered his wife. Like Lifeboat and Rope, the movie was photographed almost entirely within the confines of a small space: Stewart's tiny studio apartment overlooking the massive courtyard set. To Catch a Thief, set in the French Riviera, starred Kelly and Cary Grant.
A remake of his own 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much followed, this time with James Stewart and Doris Day, who sang the theme song, "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)" (which became a big hit for Day). The Wrong Man (1957), based on a real-life case of mistaken identity, was the only film of Hitchcock's to star Henry Fonda.
Vertigo (1958) again starred Stewart, this time with Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes. The film was a commercial failure, but has come to be viewed by many as one of Hitchcock's masterpieces; it is now placed highly in the Sight & Sound decade polls. It was premiered in the San Sebastian International Film Festival, where Hitchcock won a Silver Seashell.
Hitchcock followed Vertigo with three more successful pictures. All are also recognised as among his very best films: North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963). The latter two were particularly notable for their unconventional soundtracks, both by Bernard Herrmann: the screeching strings in the murder scene in Psycho pushed the limits of the time, and The Birds dispensed completely with conventional instruments, using an electronically produced soundtrack. These were his last great films, after which his career slowly wound down (although some critics such as Robin Wood and Donald Spoto contend that Marnie, from 1964, is first-class Hitchcock). Failing health also reduced his output over the last two decades of his life. In 1972, Hitchcock returned to London to film Frenzy, his last major success. For the first time, Hitchcock allowed nudity and profane language, which had before been taboo, in one of his films.
Family Plot (1976) was his last film. It related the escapades of "Madam" Blanche Tyler played by Barbara Harris, a fraudulent spiritualist, and her taxi driver lover Bruce Dern making a living from her phony powers. William Devane, Karen Black and Cathleen Nesbitt co-starred.
Near the end of his life, Hitchcock worked on the script for a project spy thriller, The Short Night, which was never filmed. The script was published in book form after Hitchcock's death.
Hitchcock was created a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in the 1980 New Year's Honours. He died just four months later, on April 29, before he had the opportunity to be formally invested by the Queen. Despite the brief period between his knighthood and death, he was nevertheless entitled to be known as Sir Alfred Hitchcock and to use the postnominal letters "KBE", because he remained a British subject when he adopted American citizenship in 1956.
Alfred Hitchcock died from renal failure in his Bel-Air, Los Angeles home, aged 80, and was survived by his wife Alma Reville, and their daughter, Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell. A funeral service was held at Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the Pacific.
Themes and devices
Suspense
Hitchcock preferred the use of suspense over surprise in his films. In surprise, the director assaults the viewer with frightening things. In suspense, the director tells or shows things to the audience which the characters in the film do not know, and then artfully builds tension around what will happen when the characters finally learn the truth.
Audience as voyeur
Further blurring the moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty, occasionally making this indictment inescapably clear to viewers one and all, Hitchcock also makes voyeurs of his "respectable" audience. In Rear Window (1954), after L. B. Jeffries (played by James Stewart) has been staring across the courtyard at him for most of the film, Lars Thorwald (played by Raymond Burr) confronts Jeffries by saying, "What do you want of me?" Burr might as well have been addressing the audience. In fact, shortly before asking this, Thorwald turns to face the camera directly for the first time ?- at this point, audiences often gasp.
Similarly, Psycho begins with the camera moving toward a hotel-room window, through which the audience is introduced to Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and her divorced boyfriend Sam Loomis (John Gavin). They are partially undressed, having apparently had sex though they are not married and Marion is on her lunch "hour." Later, along with Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), we watch Marion undress through a peephole.
MacGuffin
One of Hitchcock's favourite devices for driving the plots of his stories and creating suspense was what he called the "MacGuffin." The Oxford English Dictionary, however, credits Hitchcock's friend, the Scottish screenwriter Angus MacPhail, as being the true inventor of the term. Hitchcock defined this term in a 1964 interview conducted by François Truffaut, published as Hitchcock/Truffaut (Simon and Schuster, 1967). Hitchcock would use this plot device extensively. Many of his suspense films revolve around this device: a detail which, by inciting curiosity and desire, drives the plot and motivates the actions of characters within the story, but whose specific identity and nature is unimportant to the spectator of the film. In Vertigo, for instance, "Carlotta Valdes" is a MacGuffin; she never appears and the details of her death are unimportant to the viewer, but the story about her ghost's haunting of Madeleine Elster is the spur for Scottie's investigation of her, and hence the film's entire plot. In Notorious the uranium that the main characters must recover before it reaches Nazi hands serves as a similarly arbitrary motivation: any dangerous object would suffice. And state secrets of various kinds serve as MacGuffins in several of the spy films, especially his earlier British films The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and The Lady Vanishes. In Psycho, what might be mistaken for a MacGuffin at the beginning of the film (a package containing $40,000 in stolen money) is actually a red herring.
Signature appearances in his films
Many of Hitchcock's films contain cameo appearances by Hitchcock himself: the director would be seen for a brief moment boarding a bus, crossing in front of a building, standing in an apartment across the courtyard, or appearing in a photograph. This playful gesture became one of Hitchcock's signatures. As a recurring theme he would carry a musical instrument ?- especially memorable was the large double bass case that he wrestles onto the train at the beginning of Strangers on a Train.
In his earliest appearances he would fill in as an obscure extra, standing in a crowd or walking through a scene in a long camera shot. But he became more prominent in his later appearances, as when he turns to see Jane Wyman's disguise when she passes him on the street in Stage Fright, and in stark silhouette in his final film Family Plot. (See a list of Hitchcock cameo appearances)
Motifs
Numerous motifs (recurring objects or stylistic choices) can be found throughout Hitchcock's work.
Ordinary Person - Placing an ordinary person into extraordinary circumstances is a common element of Hitchcock's films. In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), James Stewart plays an ordinary man from Indianapolis vacationing in Morocco when his son is kidnapped. In The Wrong Man, Henry Fonda is arrested for a crime he didn't commit. In Psycho, Janet Leigh is an unremarkable secretary whose personal story is violently interrupted by a furious schizophrenic. Other clear examples are Strangers on a Train, I Confess, Vertigo, and North By Northwest.
Wrong Man - Mistaken identity is a common plot device in his films. In North By Northwest, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken for George Kaplan, a non-existent CIA agent. In The Wrong Man, Henry Fonda is mistaken for a criminal. The plot of Vertigo revolves around James Stewart's investigation of Kim Novak's actual identity. In both versions of Man Who Knew Too Much the lead character is mistaken for a spy.
Likeable Criminal - The "villain" in many of Hitchcock's films is charming and refined rather than grotesque and vulgar. Especially clear examples of this tendency are Claude Rains in Notorious, Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt, and James Mason in North by Northwest.
Stairways - Images of stairs often play a central role in Hitchcock's films. Hitchcock's first movie, The Lodger, tracks a suspected serial killer's movement on a staircase. Years later, a similar shot appears in the final sequence of Notorious. In Psycho, several staircases are featured prominently: as part of the path up to the Bates mansion, as the entrance to the fruit cellar, and as the site of Martin Balsam's murder. In Rear Window, an entirely nonfunctional staircase adorns James Stewart's apartment, in addition to the numerous fire escape staircases seen each time we follow Stewart's gaze out of his window. In Shadow of a Doubt, Joseph Cotten attempts to murder his niece by rigging a staircase to collapse. This is attributed to the influence of German Expressionism, which often featured heavily stylized and menacing staircases (cf. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). In fact, early director Leopold Jessner is often credited with creating the first dramatic, cinematic staircases in his 1921 film Hintertreppe. Frenzy features an unusal shot which tracks the killer and his victim first up the stairs, then retreats backwards down the stairs alone while the audience is left to imagine the killing which is taking place.
Mothers - Mothers are frequently depicted as intrusive and domineering, as seen in Rope, Notorious, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds.
Brandy - Hitchcock includes the consumption of brandy in nearly every film. "I'll get you some brandy. Drink this down. Just like medicine ..." says James Stewart to Kim Novak in Vertigo. In a real-life incident, Hitchcock dared Montgomery Clift at a dinner party around the filming of I Confess (1953) to swallow a carafe of brandy, which caused the actor to pass out almost immediately. This fixation upon brandy remains unexplained. In Torn Curtain and Topaz, brandy is defined more closely as cognac.
Sexuality - For their time, Hitchcock's films were regarded as rather sexualized, often dealing with perverse and taboo behaviors. Sometimes, the prudish conventions of his era caused him to convey sexuality in an emblematic fashion, such as in North by Northwest, when the film cuts abruptly from two aroused but visually chaste lovers to a train entering a tunnel. Hitchcock found a number of ways to convey sexuality without depicting graphic behaviors, such as the substitution of explicit sexual passion with the passionate consumption of food. In a particularly amusing scene in Psycho, Anthony Perkins is carrying on a conversation with Janet Leigh while one of his hands strokes a dead animal and the other hand lingers in his crotch. Sexual feelings are often strongly associated with violent behavior. In The Lodger and Psycho, this association is the whole basis of the film. In other films, such as Vertigo, the intertwining of sex and violence is more complex, though undeniably present.
Voyeurism - Another aspect of Hitchcock's enthusiasm for perversion is the prominence of voyeurism in many films, including Vertigo, Rear Window, and Psycho. Many critics have suggested that voyeurism may be a useful metaphor with which to explain Hitchcock's approach to film narrative. (see above section)
Crime - With only a few exceptions, crime is the foundation for all Hitchcock stories. Occasionally, we encounter a crimeless film, such as The Birds, but Hitchcock should be classified as a storyteller who primarily told stories about crime and criminals. Hitchcock's signature manipulation of the crime genre is his relentless emphasis on the ordinary people whose lives cross paths with criminals. Hitchcock isn't so much interested in criminals, or the psychology or motivation of criminals, as he is on the dramatic intersection of criminals and normal people.
Blonde Women - Hitchcock had a dramatic preference for blonde women, stating that the audience would be more suspicious of a brunette. Many of these blondes were of the Kim Novak/Grace Kelly variety: perfect and aloof. In Vertigo James Stewart forces a woman to dye her hair blonde. The Lodger, one of Hitchcock's earliest films, features a serial killer who stalks blonde women.
Silent Scenes - As a former silent film director, Hitchcock strongly preferred to convey narrative with images rather than dialogue. Hitchcock viewed film as a primarily visual medium in which the director's assemblage of images must convey the narrative. Examples of imagery over dialogue are in the lengthy sequence in Vertigo in which Jimmy Stewart is silently following Kim Novak, the Albert Hall sequence in the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, or the extended sequence in Psycho in which Janet Leigh is frantically, wordlessly fleeing Phoenix.
Numbers - Hitchcock often placed numbers that add up to 7 in his movies.
Cinematic experimentation
Hitchcock seemed to delight in the technical challenges of filmmaking. In Lifeboat, Hitchcock sets the entire action of the movie in a small boat, yet manages to keep the cinematography from monotonous repetition. His trademark cameo appearance was a dilemma, given the limitations of the setting; so Hitchcock appeared on camera in a fictitious newspaper ad for a weight loss product.
In Spellbound two unprecedented point-of-view shots were achieved by constructing a large wooden hand (which would appear to belong to the character whose point of view the camera took) and outsized props for it to hold: a bucket-sized glass of milk and a large wooden gun. For added novelty and impact, the climactic gunshot was hand-coloured red on some copies of the black-and-white print of the film.
Rope (1948) was another technical challenge: a film that appears to have been shot entirely in a single take. The film was actually shot in eight takes of approximately 10 minutes each, which was the amount of film that would fit in a single camera reel; the transitions between reels were hidden by having a dark object fill the entire screen for a moment. Hitchcock used those points to hide the cut, and began the next take with the camera in the same place.
His 1958 film Vertigo contains a camera trick that has been imitated and re-used so many times by filmmakers, it has become known as the Hitchcock zoom.
Although famous for inventive camera angles, Hitchcock generally avoided points of view that were physically impossible from a human perspective. For example, he would never place the camera looking out from inside a refrigerator. This helps to draw audience members into the film's action. (A notable exception is the pacing of the mysterious lodger being viewed through the floor from beneath in The Lodger (1927), giving the audience a visual to what the family is imagining in response to the sound of footsteps - which otherwise wouldn't come across as strongly in a silent film.)
Character and its effects on his films
Hitchcock's films sometimes feature characters struggling in their relationships with their mothers. In North by Northwest (1959), Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant's character) is an innocent man ridiculed by his mother for insisting that shadowy, murderous men are after him (in this case, they are). In The Birds (1963), the Rod Taylor character, an innocent man, finds his world under attack by vicious birds, and struggles to free himself of a clinging mother (Jessica Tandy). The killer in Frenzy (1972) has a loathing of women but idolizes his mother. The villain Bruno in Strangers on a Train hates his father, but has an incredibly close relationship with his mother (played by Marion Lorne). Sebastian (Claude Rains) in Notorious has a clearly conflictual relationship with his mother, who is (correctly) suspicious of his new bride Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman). And, of course, Norman Bates' troubles with his mother in Psycho are infamous.
Hitchcock heroines tend to be lovely, cool blondes who seem proper at first but, when aroused by passion or danger, respond in a more sensual, animal, or even criminal way. As noted, the famous victims in The Lodger are all blondes. In The 39 Steps, Hitchcock's glamorous blonde star, Madeleine Carroll, is put in handcuffs. In Marnie (1964), the title character (played by Tippi Hedren) is a kleptomaniac. In To Catch a Thief (1955), Francie (Grace Kelly) offers to help a man she believes is a cat burglar. In Rear Window, Lisa (Grace Kelly again) risks her life by breaking into Lars Thorwald's apartment. And, most notoriously, in Psycho, Janet Leigh's unfortunate character steals $40,000 and is murdered by a reclusive lunatic. Hitchcock's last blonde heroine was - years after Dany Robin and her "daughter" Claude Jade in Topaz - Barbara Harris as a phony psychic turned amateur sleuth in his final film, 1976's Family Plot. In the same film, the diamond smuggler played by Karen Black could also fit that role, as she wears a long blonde wig in various scenes and becomes increasingly uncomfortable about her line of work.
Hitchcock saw that reliance on actors and actresses was a holdover from the theater tradition. He was a pioneer in using camera movement, camera set ups and montage to explore the outer reaches of cinematic art.
Most critics and Hitchcock scholars, including Donald Spoto and Roger Ebert, agree that Vertigo represents the director's most personal and revealing film, dealing with the obsessions of a man who crafts a woman into the woman he desires. Vertigo explores more frankly and at greater length his interest in the relation between sex and death than any other film in his filmography.
Hitchcock often said that his personal favourite was Shadow of a Doubt.
Style of working
Hitchcock once commented, "The writer and I plan out the entire script down to the smallest detail, and when we're finished all that's left to do is to shoot the film. Actually, it's only when one enters the studio that one enters the area of compromise. Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn't have to cope with the actors and all the rest."
Hitchcock would storyboard each movie down to the finest detail. He was reported to have never even bothered looking through the viewfinder, since he didn't need to do so, though in publicity photos he was shown doing so. He also used this as an excuse to never have to change his films from his initial vision. If a studio asked him to change a film, he would claim that it was already shot in a single way, and that there were no alternate takes to consider. However, respected film critic Bill Krohn in his book Hitchcock At Work has questioned the popular notion of Hitchcock's reliance on storyboards. In his book, Krohn after researching script revisions of Hitchcock's most popular works, concludes that Hitchcock's reliance on storyboards has been exaggerated and argues that Hitchcock only storyboarded a few sequences and not each and every scene as most think. He also notes that this myth was largely perpetuated by Hitchcock himself.
Similarly much of Hitchcock's hatred of actors has been exaggerated. Hitchcock simply did not tolerate the method approach as he believed that actors should only concentrate on their performances and leave work on script and character to the directors and screenwriters. In a Sight and Sound interview, he stated that, ' the method actor is OK in the theatre because he has a free space to move about. But when it comes to cutting the face and what he sees and so forth, there must be some discipline' (see [1]). During the making of Lifeboat, Walter Slezak, who played the German character, stated that Hitchcock knew the mechanics of acting better than anyone he knew. Several critics have observed that despite his reputation as a man who disliked actors, several actors who worked with him gave fine, often brilliant performances and these performances contribute to the film's success.
Regarding Hitchcock's sometimes less than pleasant relationship with actors, there was a persistent rumor that he had said that actors were cattle. Hitchcock later denied this, typically tongue-in-cheek, clarifying that he had only said that actors should be treated like cattle. Carole Lombard, tweaking Hitchcock and drumming up a little publicity, brought some cows along with her when she reported to the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. For Hitchcock, the actors, like the props, were part of the film's setting.
The first book devoted to the director is simply named Hitchcock. It is a document of a one-week interview by François Truffaut in 1967. (ISBN 0-671-60429-5)
Until the later part of his career, Hitchcock was far more popular with film audiences than with film critics, especially the elite British and American critics.[citation needed] In the late 1950s the French New Wave critics, especially Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut, were among the first to see and promote his films as artistic works. Hitchcock was one of the first directors to whom they applied their auteur theory, which stresses the artistic authority of the director in the film-making process.
Influence
Hitchcock's innovations and vision have influenced a great number of filmmakers, producers, and actors. His influence helped start a trend for film directors to control artistic aspects of their movies without answering to the movie's producer.
Awards
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Hitchcock the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, in 1967. However, despite six earlier nominations, he never won an Oscar in a contested category. His Oscar nominations were:
for Best Director: Rebecca (1940), Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945), Rear Window (1954), and Psycho (1960);
as producer, for Best Picture: Suspicion (1941).
Rebecca, which Hitchcock directed, won the 1940 Best Picture Oscar for its producer David O. Selznick. In addition to Rebecca and Suspicion, two other films Hitchcock directed, Foreign Correspondent and Spellbound, were nominated for Best Picture.
Hitchcock is considered the Best Film Director of all time by The Screen Directory. [2] Hitchcock was knighted in 1980.
Sixteen films directed by Hitchcock earned Oscar nominations, though only six of those films earned Hitchcock himself a nomination. The total number of Oscar nominations (including winners) earned by films he directed is fifty. Four of those films earned Best Picture nominations.
Television and books
Along with Walt Disney, Hitchcock was one of the first prominent motion picture producers to fully envision just how popular the medium of television would become. From 1955 to 1965, Hitchcock was the host and producer of a long-running television series entitled Alfred Hitchcock Presents. While his films had made Hitchcock's name strongly associated with suspense, the TV series made Hitchcock a celebrity himself. His irony-tinged voice, image, and mannerisms became instantly recognizable and were often the subject of parody. The title theme of the show pictured a minimalist caricature of his profile (he drew it himself, it is comprised of only around seven lines) which his real silhouette then filled. His introductions before the stories in his program always included some sort of wry humor, such as the description of a recent multi-person execution hampered by having only one electric chair, while two are now shown with a sign "Two chairs--no waiting!" He directed a few episodes of the TV series himself, and he upset a number of movie production companies when he insisted on using his TV production crew to produce his motion picture Psycho. In the late 1980s, a new version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents was produced for television, making use of Hitchcock's original introductions in a colorised form.
Alfred Hitchcock appears as a character in the popular juvenile detective series, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators. The long-running detective series was created by Robert Arthur, who wrote the first several books, although other authors took over after he left the series. The Three Investigators -- Jupiter Jones, Bob Andrews and Peter Crenshaw -- were amateur detectives, slightly younger than the Hardy Boys. In the introduction to each book, "Alfred Hitchcock" introduces the mystery, and he sometimes refers a case to the boys to solve. At the end of each book, the boys report to Hitchcock, and sometimes give him a memento of their case.
When the real Alfred Hitchcock died, the fictional Hitchcock in the Three Investigators books was replaced by a retired detective named Hector Sebastian. At this time, the series title was changed from Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators to The Three Investigators.
At the height of Hitchcock's success, he was also asked to introduce a set of books with his name attached. The series was a collection of short stories by popular short story writers, primarily focused on suspense and thrillers. These titles included Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum, Alfred Hitchcock's Supernatural Tales of Terror and Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbinders in Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock's Witch's Brew, Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery, Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories to be Read with the Door Locked, Alfred Hitchcock's A Hangman's Dozen and Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful. Hitchcock himself was not actually involved in the reading, reviewing, editing or selection of the short stories; in fact, even his introductions were ghost-written. The entire extent of his involvement with the project was to lend his name and collect a check.
Some notable writers whose works were used in the collection include Shirley Jackson (Strangers in Town, The Lottery), T.H. White (The Once and Future King), Robert Bloch, H. G. Wells (The War of the Worlds), Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain and the creator of The Three Investigators, Robert Arthur.
Hitchcock also wrote a mystery story for Look magazine in 1943, "The Murder of Monty Woolley." This was a sequence of captioned photographs inviting the reader to inspect the pictures for clues to the murderer's identity; Hitchcock cast the performers as themselves: Woolley, Doris Merrick, and make-up man Guy Pearce, whom Hitchcock identified, in the last photo, as the murderer. The article was reprinted in Games Magazine in November/December 1980.
Phobias
Alfred Hitchcock had an extreme fear of eggs (also known as ovophobia). He once said:
"I'm frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes
have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I've never tasted it."[3]
Hitchcock also had a serious fear of the police, which reportedly was the reason he never learned to drive. His reasoning was that if one never drove, then one would never have an opportunity to be pulled over by the police and issued a ticket. This fear can be attributed to a circumstance encountered by Hitchcock in his youth. In an attempt to punish Hitchcock for an instance of misbehavior, Alfred's father detailed in writing that the young Hitchcock had engaged in some form of childish mischief. Hitchcock's father then handed the description to Alfred, sending him to the local police station to demonstrate his wrongdoing. In response to the written notice, the on-duty police officer immediately brought Hitchcock to an empty cell and locked him there for a full 5 minutes, citing the justification for this action as a means to reprimand the young boy. Undoubtedly, history has recorded this incident as scarring. This perhaps influenced his signature theme in his movies where an innocent person would become entangled in the web of another guilty person's behaviour. This can be noted in many of his films, and a possible reason would be due to his hatred for authority, and his siding with the innocent. He also manages to convey this message to his audience in order to allow them to take his (the innocent) side. [4]
Gene Raymond
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gene Raymond (August 13, 1908 - May 2, 1998) was a popular film actor of the 1930s and 1940s.
Gene Raymond was an actor of stage, film, and TV, singer, composer, writer, director, producer, decorated military pilot, and for 28 years the husband of movie star Jeanette MacDonald.
Stage and movie career
Gene Raymond was born Raymond Guion on August 13, 1908 in New York City. He attended the Professional Children's School while appearing in productions like "Rip Van Winkle" and "Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch". His Broadway debut, at age 17, was in "The Cradle Snatchers" which ran two years. (The cast included Mary Boland, Edna May Oliver, and a young Humphrey Bogart.)
His important films, mostly as a second lead actor, include Red Dust (1932) with Jean Harlow, Zoo in Budapest (1932) with Loretta Young, Flying Down to Rio (1933) with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, I Am Suzanne (1934) with Lilian Harvey, Sadie McKee (1934) with Joan Crawford, Alfred Hitchcock's Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) with Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery, and The Locket (1946) with Laraine Day, Brian Aherne, and Robert Mitchum. He costarred with his wife in just one film, Smilin' Through in 1941.
Raymond was also a composer, and some of his songs were used in the series of light-hearted RKO musicals he made with Ann Sothern, or sung by his wife in concert.
His screen debut was in Personal Maid (1931). With his blond good looks, classic profile, and youthful exuberance ?- plus a name change to the more pronounceable "Gene Raymond" ?- he scored in films like the classic Zoo In Budapest and a series of light RKO musicals, mostly with Ann Sothern. He wrote a number of songs, including the popular "Will You?" which he sang to Ann Sothern in Smartest Girl In Town (1936). His wife sang several of his more classical pieces in her concerts and recorded one entitled "Let Me Always Sing".
MacDonald and Raymond made one film together, Smilin' Through, which came out as the U.S. was on the verge of entering the World War II.
Controversy
A 2001 biography of Nelson Eddy and MacDonald, Sweethearts by Sharon Rich, claims that Raymond had affairs with men during his marriage to MacDonald. The book includes documentation of Raymond being arrested on three occasions for sex with other men: a photo of Raymond's January 1938 arrest and booking number (page 498 of the 2001 edition); a U.S. Army nurse is named and quoted concerning the second arrest; and retired Scotland Yard detective Joe Sampson confirms the third arrest, which occurred in England during World War II.
The book also claims that Louis B. Mayer engineered the marriage of MacDonald to Raymond -- even though Mayer knew Raymond was bisexual -- to prevent MacDonald from marrying Nelson Eddy. Mayer was concerned that a MacDonald-Eddy marriage would end in divorce, due to their temperaments, then he would lose his lucrative box office team. Also, Eddy wanted children and preferred MacDonald to at least semi-retire, which didn't please the studio mogul. While Mayer blessed the MacDonald-Raymond union, he had Raymond blacklisted following his 1938 arrest. After Stolen Heaven (Paramount, 1938), Raymond made no films until Cross-Country Romance (RKO, 1940) and Hitchcock's Mr. and Mrs. Smith (RKO, 1941) -- previously he averaged 4 movies a year.
Neville Brand
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born August 13, 1920(1920-08-13)
Template:FlagiconIowa Griswold, Iowa, United States
Died April 16, 1992 (aged 71)
Sacramento, California, United States
Spouse(s) Jean Brand
Neville Brand (August 13, 1920 - April 16, 1992), was an American television and movie actor.
Gravel-voiced Neville Brand was born in Griswold, Iowa. He started his big screen career in D.O.A. (1950) as a henchman named Chester. He became well known as a villain when he killed the character played by Elvis Presley in Love Me Tender. He played the villain in so many movies, his self-image became affected, culminating in a television interview on Entertainment Tonight with the actor moving about in agitation repeating, "I'm a loser. I'm a loser."
However, he played a very romantic lead in the movie Return From the Sea with Jan Sterling and a heartwarming character who was brain damaged and misunderstood in an episode of the TV show Daniel Boone. He played Hoss Cartwright's (Dan Blocker) Uncle Guntur on Bonanza.
Of the hundreds of roles he has played, he is probably most well known as Al Capone in the TV show The Untouchables. The characterization caused an outcry from the Italian American community over stereotypes.
Many will remember him as Bull Ransom, the prison guard of Birdman of Alcatraz, and as the antagonistic and untrusting, yet dedicated POW, "Duke", in Stalag 17.
Known also for his cowboy roles, he starred in his own TV series, Laredo, with William Smith, Peter Brown, and Philip Carey.
One of the most heart-rending scenes on TV showed Brand's character, Reese Bennet, waiting in torment when he realizes he has been stood up by the love of his life.
In one episode, the gruff and dusty Reese has an immaculate and proper lookalike that confounds the other Texas Rangers.
Brand was a real life hero. He served in the US Army during World War II. It should be pointed out that, according to the IMDb, the claim that he was the fourth most decorated soldier (Actor Audie Murphy being the first) is often repeated but is incorrect, though that same article does list a lot of decorations that he did receive.
In a November 1979 interview with author William R. Horner for his book "Bad at the Bijou", Brand related that he was a highly decorated soldier in WWII , winning a Silver Star, but that he wasn't the fourth most decorated. He attributed it to someone in Hollywood, and said that when he would deny it people thought he was just being modest. Brand was also an insatiable reader, who amassed a collection of 30,000 books over the years, many of which were destroyed in a 1978 fire at his Malibu home.
Brand co-starred with George Takei in "Encounter", an episode of the original Twilight Zone series. Ironically, Brand (a genuine war hero in real life) portrays a phony war hero: a coward whose prize trophy (a Japanese soldier's sword) was obtained through theft. After its initial airing, "Encounter" triggered complaints from Japanese-Americans due to the backstory of the character played by Takei: he portrays a Nisei (the U.S.-born son of Japanese immigrants) whose father spied for the Japanese navy during the Pearl Harbor attack. There is no evidence of any Japanese-American disloyalty to the U.S.A. during that war. Although "Encounter" is a taut drama with excellent performances by Brand and Takei, this historical inaccuracy (and the complaints it engendered) has caused this episode to be omitted from syndicated broadcasts of The Twilight Zone.
Neville Brand died from emphysema in 1992.
Don Ho
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Background information
Birth name Donald Tai Loy Ho
Also known as Don Ho
Born August 13, 1930
Origin Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
Died April 14, 2007 (aged 76)
Genre(s) Hawaiian
Pop Music
Easy Listening
Occupation(s) Musician
Instrument(s) Vocals
Years active 1959 - 2007
Label(s) Reprise Records
Associated
acts The Ali?'is
Website
www.donho.com
Don Ho, born Donald Tai Loy Ho (in Chinese characters, 何大來, Hé Dàlái), (August 13, 1930 - April 14, 2007) was a Hawaiian musician and entertainer.
Life and career
Ho, of mixed Chinese, Hawaiian, Portuguese, Dutch, and German descent, was born in the small Honolulu neighborhood of Kakaʻako, but he grew up in Kāneʻohe on the windward side of the island of Oʻahu. He was a graduate of the Kamehameha Schools in 1949 and he attended Springfield College in 1950, but returned home to earn a bachelor's degree in sociology at University of Hawai'i in 1953. In 1954 Ho entered the United States Air Force and spent time flying fighter jets in both Texas and Hawaii.
Ho left the United States Air Force in 1959 due to his mother's illness and began singing at his mother's club, Honey's. In 1963, he moved from Kāneʻohe to Waikīkī in Honolulu and played at a night club called Duke's owned by Duke Kahanamoku, where he caught the attention of record company officials.
Ho was originally signed to Reprise Records.[1] Ho released his debut album, Don Ho Show, in 1965 and began to play high profile locations in Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, and New York City. In 1966 he released his second album, a live compilation called Don Ho ?- Again!, which charted in the early part of that year. In the fall of 1966, Ho released his most famous song, Tiny Bubbles, which charted on both the pop (#8 Billboard) and easy listening charts and caused the subsequent Tiny Bubbles LP to remain in the album Top 20 for almost a year.[2] Another song that was familiar with Don was the song "Pearly Shells". Guest appearances on television shows such as I Dream of Jeannie, The Brady Bunch, Sanford and Son, Charlie's Angels, and Fantasy Island soon followed. Although his album sales peaked in the late 1960s, he was able to land a television spot on ABC from October 1976 to March 1977 with the Don Ho Show variety program which aired on weekday mornings.[3][4]
Later life
Ho had ten children.[5] His daughter, Hōkū, performed with her father in his Waikīkī show and in 2000 went on to become a nationally known recording artist in her own right.
Ho was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy in 2005 and had a pacemaker installed.[6] He contacted Theravitae, a biotechnology company specializing in treating heart conditions with adult stem cells working in conjunction with Dr. Amit Patel, a cardiac surgeon and pioneer of the use of adult stem cells for heart disease. On December 6, 2005, Ho had his own blood-derived stem cells injected into his heart by Patel with his surgeons in Thailand. The treatment went without incident. Later in the month, Ho said, "I'm feeling much better and I'm so happy I came up here to do it."[7]
In September 2006, Ho married Haumea Hebenstreit, who produced his show at the Waikīkī Beachcomber.[8] Although he had a new pacemaker installed on September 16, 2006,[9] Ho died in Waikīkī from heart failure on April 14, 2007. On May 11, 2007 Ho's 51 year old daughter Dayna died in a friend's home in Waialua on the North Shore of O'ahu. The Honolulu medical examiner's office determined that the cause of death was an accidental methamphetamine overdose.[10]
Legacy
A cover version of "Tiny Bubbles" became the signature tune of the Scottish soft country and western singer Sydney Devine.
California punk rock band NOFX released a 12" single entitled "HOFX". The cover had a picture of the band with Don Ho in Hawaii.
Dan Fogelberg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Background information
Birth name Daniel Grayling Fogelberg
Born August 13, 1951 (1951-08-13) (age 56)
Peoria, Illinois, USA
Genre(s) Rock
Folk Rock
Occupation(s) Singer-songwriter
Musician
Instrument(s) Voice
Guitar
Piano
Years active 1971-present
Label(s) Columbia Records, Epic Records, Giant Records, Mailboat Records
Associated
acts Fools Gold, Tim Weisberg
Website
http://www.danfogelberg.com/
Daniel Grayling "Dan" Fogelberg (born August 13, 1951) is an American singer songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, whose music has been inspired by sources as diverse as folk, pop, classical, jazz, and bluegrass music.
Early Life and Family
Fogelberg, the youngest of Lawrence and Margaret (Young) Fogelberg's three sons, was born in Peoria, Illinois. His father was a high school band director who spent most of his career at Peoria Woodruff High School and Pekin High School, and his mother was a pianist. His father would later be the inspiration for the song "Leader of the Band". Using a Mel Bay course book, he taught himself to play a Hawaiian slide guitar his grandfather gave to him; he also learned to play the piano. He started his music career at age 14 when he joined his first band, The Clan, which paid homage to The Beatles. His second band was another cover combo, The Coachmen, which, in 1967, released two singles on Ledger Records: "Maybe Time Will Let Me Forget" and "Don't Want To Lose Her."
Early Musical Career
After graduating from Woodruff High School in 1969, he studied theater arts and painting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and began performing as a solo acoustic player in area coffeehouses. There, he was discovered in 1971 by Irving Azoff. Fogelberg and Azoff, who started his music-management career promoting another Illinois act, REO Speedwagon, moved to California to seek their fortunes. Fogelberg became a session musician who played with pop-folk artists like Van Morrison. In 1972, he released his debut album Home Free to lukewarm response. His second effort was much more successful: the 1974 Joe Walsh-produced album Souvenirs and its hit song "Part of the Plan" made him a major star.
Musical Career
Following Souvenirs, Fogelberg released a string of gold and platinum albums and found commercial success with songs like "The Power of Gold," "The Language of Love," "Lonely in Love," and "Longer," which became a wedding standard. His 1978 Twin Sons of Different Mothers was the first of two collaborations with jazz flutist Tim Weisberg. The Innocent Age, released in October 1981, reached the peak of critical and popular acclaim. The double album "song cycle" included four of his biggest hits: "Leader of the Band," "Run for the Roses," which aired during the 1980 Kentucky Derby, "Hard To Say," and "Same Old Lang Syne," based on a real-life accidental meeting with a former girlfriend.
In 1985, Fogelberg released High Country Snows. Recorded in Nashville, it showcased his (and some of the industry's best) talent in the bluegrass genre. Vince Gill, Jerry Douglas, David Grisman, Chris Hillman and Herb Pedersen were among those who contributed to the record.
River of Souls, released in 1993, was Fogelberg's last studio album for Sony Records. In 1997, Portrait encompassed his career with four discs, each highlighting a different facet of his music: "Ballads", "Rock and Roll", "Tales and Travels" (which displayed his talents as a narrative songwriter) and "Hits". In 1999, he fulfilled a career-long dream of creating a Christmas album called "First Christmas Morning" and, in 2003, Full Circle showcased a return to the folk-influenced, 1970s soft rock-style of music for which he and other singer-songwriters from his era had gained popular recognition.
A very personal songwriter, Fogelberg has also used his music to address social issues, among them peace and Native American concerns. He has been particularly outspoken about his commitment to the environment and to finding alternatives to nuclear power. To that end, Fogelberg performed at a number of the Musicians United for Safe Energy "No Nukes" concerts in 1979 and 1980.
His live concerts won acclaim across the nation over the years. Fogelberg has said that one of his proudest moments came in 1979 when he played at New York's Carnegie Hall for an audience that included his mother and father. Most summers, Fogelberg would perform with a full band or in a solo acoustic setting; the differing formats allowed the artist to show the breadth and depth of his talent as a singer, guitarist, pianist and bandleader. In 2002, fans showed their appreciation by choosing Fogelberg to be one of the first 10 inductees into the Performers Hall of Fame at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Denver, Colorado.
Cancer
In May 2004, Dan Fogelberg was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. He underwent hormonal therapy and as a result achieved a partial remission, The cancer was not eliminated, but was reduced to a very small size and is no longer spreading. August 13, 2005, his 54th birthday, Fogelberg confirmed on his web site that through his first year of treatments they had succeeded in slowing the progression of his prostate cancer. In that same announcement, he thanked his many fans for their support, and noted that he had no immediate plans to return to making music, but was keeping his options open, and was enjoying spending time with his wife, musician Jean Fogelberg.
In June 2005, it was reported that Fogelberg, who, since 1982, lived on Mountain Bird Ranch, 610 acres near Pagosa Springs, Colorado, has put the lavishly appointed property up for sale at an asking price of US$17.5 million.
Popular culture
On the September 25, 2006, episode of the NBC show Late Night with Conan O'Brien, O'Brien concluded his discussion of the controversy over Pope Benedict's public use of a statement by a 14th century Byzantine emperor, and singer Cat Stevens' reaction to the remarks, with the punchline: "So far, no word yet from Dan Fogelberg. [light laughter, then a pause] He was a singer back in the 70s."[1]
In the Trey Parker/Matt Stone movie BASEketball, Fogelberg's name is mentioned in reference to popular youth culture by Ernest Borgnine, along with such outdated things as Zima and Pac-man video games.
Two of his songs have been used in feature films: "There's a Place in the World for a Gambler" (originally on Souvenirs) can be heard in the 1978 movie FM; and "Times Like These" was used in the 1980 movie Urban Cowboy, a year before it appeared on The Innocent Age.
In No Cure For Cancer, Denis Leary, in reference to heavy metal bands being sued over teenage suicides, asks "Does that mean I can sue Dan Fogelberg for making me into a pussy in the mid-'70s? Is that possible, huh? Huh?!"
Well, folks, I have spent quite a bit of time searching for the movie based on the Loeb and Leopold case. The Rope by Hitchcock was not the one I saw. I read Compulsion some time ago, and it has always stuck with me, so while we are on the macabre here is some breaking news.
By Mark Potter
Correspondent
NBC News
Updated: 8:58 p.m. ET Aug 12, 2007
FT MYERS, FLORIDA - On the morning of March 23rd, around 10 o'clock, Detective Sgt. Jennifer Soto received a phone call that would lead her and other officers into a dark forest, and involve them in an unsettling mystery.
The caller said a human skull had just been found in a thick stand of melaleuca trees off Arcadia Road. At first, Soto and her partner were skeptical, because the area had long been used as a dumping ground by hunters disposing of hog and alligator remains.
Walking through the thick brush, however, it didn't take long for them to confirm the report was true. In fact, there was much more than just one human skull, there were eight. Talk about a cold case file.
The rest of the story here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20236967/
So, a song from Stevie Wonder would seem appropriate.
"Skeletons"
Skeletons in your closet
Itchin' to come outside
Messin' with your conscience
In a way your face can't hide
Oh things are gettin' real funky
Down at the old corral
And it's not the skunks that are stinkin'
It's the stinkin' lies you tell
[Bridge]
What did your mama tell you about lies
She said it wasn't polite to tell a white one
What did your daddy tell you about lies
He said one white lie turns into a black one
So, it's gettin' ready to blow
It's gettin' ready to show
Somebody shot off at the mouth and
We're getting ready to know
It's gettin' ready to drop
It's gettin' ready to shock
Somebody done turned up the heater
An' a it's gettin' ready to pop
Crevices in your pantry
Now what do we have in here
Havin' a day time nightmare
Has always been your biggest fear
Oh things are gettin' real crucial
Up the old wazoo
Yet you cry, why am I the victim?
When the culprit's y-o-u
[Bridge]
What did your mama tell you about lies
She said it wasn't polite to tell a white one
What did your daddy tell you about lies
He said one white lie turns into a black one
So, it's gettin' ready to blow
It's gettin' ready to show
Somebody shot off at the mouth and
We're gettin' ready to know
It's gettin' ready to drop
It's gettin' ready to shock
Somebody done turning the heater
An' a it's gettin' ready to pop
It's gettin' ready to seep
You're gettin' ready to freak
Somebody done picked up the talk box
And gettin' ready to speak
It's gettin' ready to jive
It's gettin' ready to gel
Somebody done gone let the lid off
And it's gettin' ready to smell
They're gettin' ready to deal
You're gettin' ready to ill
Somebody done just dropped the big dime
And they're gettin' ready to squeal
It's gettin' ready to turn
We're gettin' ready to learn
Somebody done fired up the brimstone
And you're gettin' ready to burn
It's gettin' ready to shake
You're gettin' ready to ache
Somebody done snitched to the news crew
And it's gettin' ready to break
You're gettin' ready to lie
They're gettin' ready to spy
Somebody' s been put on the hot seat
And you're gettin' ready to fry
Good morning, WA2K folks.
Hey, edgar and M.D., What's with all this Shirley Temple tribute songs?
Here's how Dali saw her.
Well, there is some question about Bill Robinson being Mr. Bojangles, but let's listen to Bob Dylan do the song anyway.
Mr. Bojangles Lyrics (Bob Dylan)
Bob Dylan - Mr. Bojangles Lyrics
I knew a man Bojangles and he'd dance for you in worn out shoes
Silver hair, ragged shirt and baggy pants, that old soft shoe
He'd jump so high, he'd jump so high, will he likely touch down ?
Mr. Bojangles, Mr. Bojangles, dance.
I met him in a cell in New Orleans, I was down and out
He looked to me to be the eye of age as he spoke right out
He talked of life, he talked of life, laughing slapped his leg stale
Mr. Bojangles, Mr. Bojangles, dance.
He said the name Bojangles and he danced a lick all across the cell
He grabbed his pants for a better stance, oh he jumped so high and he clicked
up his heels
He let go laugh, he let go laugh, shook back his clothes all around
Mr. Bojangles, Mr. Bojangles, dance, yeah, dance.
He danced for those at minstrel shows and county fairs throughtout the south
He spoke with tears of 15 years of how his dog and him but just travelled all about
Hid dog up and died, he up and died, and after 20 years he still grieves
Mr. Bojangles, Mr. Bojangles, dance.
He said I dance now at every chance at honky-tonks for drinks and tips
But most of the time I spend behind these county bars,Ocause I drink so bitO
He shook his head, yes he shook his head, I heard someone ask him, OpleaseO,
Mr. Bojangles, Mr. Bojangles, dance, dance, Mr Bojangles, dance.
Well, edgar, don't much like Dali either. There are two or three atypical pieces that speak to me, but that one of Shirley ain't one of the three.
Thanks for the leadbelly song, Texas. Wonder what the Red Cross Store was like in his day?
Well, well, folks. There's the dys back singing the mule skinner blues. Like that version, cowboy. Sooooo, it seems to be folk ballad day.
How about this one, then.
Down In The Valley
(original jail version)
Traditional American
G D7
Down in the valley, valley so low.
D7 G
Hang your head over, hear the wind blow.
G D7
Hear the wind blow, dear, hear the wind blow.
D7 G
Hang your head over, hear the wind blow.
Give my heart ease, love, give my heart ease.
Think of me, darling, give my heart ease.
Write me a letter, send it by mail.
Send it in care of the Birmingham Jail.
Writing me a letter, containing three lines,
Answer my question, "Will you be mine?"
"Will you be mine, dear, will you be mine?"
Answer my question, "Will you be mine?"
Roses love sunshine, violets love dew.
Angels in Heaven know I love you.
Know I love you, dear, know I love you.
Angels in Heaven, know I love you.
This gloomy prison is far from you, dear.
But not forever, only a year.
I make this promise: to go straight and true.
I'll spend my lifetime just loving you.
If you don't love me, love whom you please
Throw your arms round me, give my heart ease
Give my heart ease, dear, give my heart ease
Throw your arms round me, give my heart ease
Throw your arms round me, before it's too late
Throw your arms round me, feel my heart break
Feel my heart break, dear, feel my heart break
Throw your arms round me, feel my heart break
Down in the valley, valley so low.
Hang your head over, hear the wind blow.
Steve Martin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Birth name Stephen Glenn Martin
Born August 14, 1945 (1945-08-14) (age 62)
Waco, Texas, USA
Spouse(s) Victoria Tennant (1986-1994)
Anne Stringfield (2007-Present)
Influences British television
Official site
www.stevemartin.com/
[show]Awards
Emmy Awards
Outstanding Writing Achievement in Comedy, Variety or Music
1969 The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
Grammy Awards
Best Comedy Album
1978 Let's Get Small
1979 A Wild and Crazy Guy
Other Awards
NYFCC Award for Best Actor
1984 All of Me
Stephen Glenn Martin (born August 14, 1945) is an American comedian, writer, producer, actor, magician, musician and composer.
Biography
Early years
Steve Martin was born in Waco, Texas to Glenn Vernon Martin, a real estate salesman and aspiring actor and Mary Lee Stewart, a housewife. Martin was raised in Garden Grove, California and is of English, Scottish and Irish descent.[1] As a teenager, Martin started out working at the Magic Shop at Disneyland, where he developed his talents for magic, juggling, playing the banjo and creating balloon animals. He teamed up with friend and Garden Grove High School classmate Kathy Westmoreland to do a musical comedy routine, performing at local coffee houses and at the Bird Cage Theater in Knott's Berry Farm.
Martin majored in philosophy at California State University at Long Beach, and for a while, considered becoming a philosophy professor instead of an actor-comedian. In 1967, he transferred to UCLA and switched his major to theater. Martin soon began working local clubs at night, to mixed notices. At the age of twenty-one, he dropped out of college for good.[2] Martin periodically spoofed his philosophy studies in his 1970s stand-up act, comparing philosophy with studying geology. "If you're studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life."[3]
While attending college, he appeared in an episode of The Dating Game. His time there changed his life: "It changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy. Something about non sequiturs appealed to me. In philosophy, I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, 'Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!' Then it gets real easy to write this stuff, because all you have to do is twist everything hard?-you twist the punch line, you twist the non sequitur so hard away from the things that set it up, that it's easy... and it's thrilling."[4] Martin's girlfriend in 1967 was a dancer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. She helped Martin land a writing job with the show by submitting his work to head writer Mason Williams. Williams initially paid Martin out of his own pocket. Along with the other writers for the show, Martin won an Emmy Award in 1969. Martin also wrote for John Denver (a neighbor of his in Aspen, Colorado at one point), The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, and The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. He also appeared on these shows and several others, in various comedy skits.
Martin also performed his own material, sometimes as an opening act for groups such as The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and The Carpenters. He appeared at San Francisco's The Boarding House, among other venues. He continued to write, earning an Emmy nomination for his work on Van Dyke and Company in 1976. In the early seventies, Martin embarked on an ill advised comedy tour where he was often booked into seedy venues in the Midwest as either a solo act or an opener for down and out musical groups. His father compiled an account of these awful bookings and frequently alluded to his son's difficulties in his monthly letter to his real estate clients. Occasionally Steve would be booked with other comedians, most of them very bad with ineffectual gimmicks such as ventriloquism dummies, balloons, chaotic animal acts, and musical instruments. Martin borrowed heavily from these unpleasant experiences in many of his future routines.
But he states that his biggest influence has been British Television, its mostly the comedies that have inspired him, but he was also inspired by its science fiction and its dramas.
Fame
In the mid-1970s, Martin made frequent appearances as a stand-up comedian on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. That exposure, together with appearances on HBO's On Location and NBC's Saturday Night Live (SNL) (on which, despite a common misconception, he was never a cast member) led to his first of three comedy albums, Let's Get Small. The album was a huge success; one of its tracks, Excuse Me, helped establish a national catch phrase. His next album, A Wild and Crazy Guy, was an even bigger success, reaching the #2 spot on the sales chart in the U.S. and featured another catch phrase (the album's title), this time based on a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Martin and Dan Aykroyd played a couple of bumbling Czechoslovakian would-be playboys, the Festrunk Brothers. The album ended with a song "King Tut", sung and written by Martin and released as a 45 RPM single during the King Tut craze that accompanied the extremely popular travelling exhibit of the Egyptian king's tomb artifacts; the single reached the top 20 (# 17) in 1978. The song was backed by the "Toot Uncommons" (they were actually members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band). The album was a million seller. Both albums won Grammys for Best Comedy Recording in 1977 and 1978, respectively. In his comedy albums, Martin's stand-up comedy was clearly self-referential and sometimes self-mocking. It mixes philosophical riffs with sudden spurts of "happy feet", banjo playing with balloon depictions of concepts like venereal disease. His style is off-kilter and ironic, and sometimes pokes fun at stand-up comedy traditions. A typical gag might be interrupted for a sip from a glass of water and just as he was about to speak again, he forcefully spits the water onto the floor.
Movie career
By the end of the 1970s, Martin had acquired the kind of following normally reserved for rock stars, with his tour appearances typically occurring at sold-out arenas filled with tens of thousands of screaming fans. But unknown to his audience, stand-up comedy was "just an accident" for him. His real goal was to get into film.[4] Martin's first film was a short, The Absent-Minded Waiter (1977). The seven-minute long film, also featuring Buck Henry and Teri Garr, was written by and starred Martin. The film was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Short Film, Live Action. His first feature film appearance was in the musical Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, where he sang The Beatles' "Maxwell's Silver Hammer". In 1979, Martin wrote and starred in his first full-length movie, The Jerk, directed by Carl Reiner. The movie was a huge success, grossing over $73 million on a budget of far less than that amount.[5]
The success of The Jerk opened more doors for Martin. Stanley Kubrick met with him to discuss the possibility of Martin starring in a screwball comedy version of Traumnovelle (Kubrick later changed his approach to the material, the result of which was 1999's Eyes Wide Shut). Martin was executive producer for Domestic Life, a prime-time television series starring Martin Mull, and a late-night series called Twilight Theater. It emboldened Martin to try his hand at his first serious film, Pennies From Heaven, a movie he was anxious to do because of the desire to avoid being typecast. To prepare for that film, Martin took acting lessons from director Herbert Ross, and spent months learning how to tap dance. The film was a financial failure; Martin's comment at the time was "I don't know what to blame, other than it's me and not a comedy."
Martin was in three more Reiner-directed comedies after The Jerk: Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid in 1982, The Man with Two Brains in 1983 and All of Me in 1984. In 1986, Martin joined fellow Saturday Night Live veterans Martin Short and Chevy Chase in ¡Three Amigos!, directed by John Landis, and written by Martin, Lorne Michaels, and Randy Newman. It was originally entitled The Three Caballeros and Martin was to be teamed with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. In 1986, Martin was in the musical film version of the hit off-Broadway play Little Shop of Horrors (based on a famous B-movie), as a sadistic dentist, Orin Scrivello. The film also marked the first of three films teaming Martin with actor Rick Moranis. In 1987, Martin joined comedian John Candy in the John Hughes movie Planes, Trains & Automobiles. That same year, the Cyrano de Bergerac adaptation Roxanne, a film Martin co-wrote, won him a Writers Guild of America award and more importantly, the recognition from Hollywood and the public that he was more than a comedian. In 1988, he performed in the Frank Oz comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels alongside Michael Caine.
Martin starred in the Ron Howard film Parenthood, with Moranis in 1989. He later met with Moranis to make the Mafia comedy My Blue Heaven in 1990. In 1991, Martin starred in and wrote L.A. Story and was a member of the ensemble existentialist tragedy Grand Canyon that were both about life in Los Angeles. In a serious role, Martin played a tightly wound Hollywood film producer trying to recover from a traumatic robbery that left him injured. In contrast to the serious tone of Grand Canyon, Martin also appeared in a remake of the comedy Father of the Bride in 1991 (followed by a sequel in 1995).
In David Mamet's 1997 thriller, The Spanish Prisoner, Martin played a darker role as a wealthy stranger who takes a suspicious interest in the work of a young businessman (Campbell Scott). In 1999, Martin and Goldie Hawn starred in a remake of the 1970 Neil Simon comedy, The Out-of-Towners. By 2003, Martin ranked 4th on the box office stars list, after co-starring in Bringing Down The House and starring in Cheaper By The Dozen, each of which earned over $130 million at U.S. theaters. Both were family comedies.
In 2005, Martin wrote and starred in Shopgirl, based on his own novella. Martin played a wealthy businessman who strikes up a romance with a Saks 5th Avenue counter girl (Claire Danes). He also starred in Cheaper by the Dozen 2 that year. Martin's last work to date was the 2006 installment of The Pink Panther, standing in Peter Sellers shoes as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau. In 2007, he announced on his website that he would likely be starting work on the sequel later in the year.
Other work
Throughout the 1990s, after Tina Brown took over The New Yorker, Martin wrote various pieces for the magazine. They later appeared in the collection Pure Drivel. He appeared in a version of Waiting for Godot as Vladimir (with Robin Williams as Estragon). In 1993, Martin wrote the play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which had a successful run in several American cities. In 1998, Martin guest starred with U2 in the 200th episode of The Simpsons titled Trash of the Titans. Martin provided the voice for sanitation commissioner Ray Patterson. In 2001, Martin hosted the 73rd Annual Academy Awards. Also in 2001, he played banjo on Earl Scruggs' remake of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown". Martin called fellow comedian and banjo player Billy Connolly to tell him, prompting the cry of "you lucky bugger!!" Connolly's wife thought he was referring to Martin being chosen as the Oscar's host. The recording was the winner of the Best Country Instrumental Performance category at the following year's Grammys. In 2002, Martin adapted the Carl Sternheim play The Underpants, which ran Off-Broadway at Classic Stage Company. In 2003, Martin hosted the Academy Awards for the second time.
In 2005, Martin hosted a film along with Donald Duck, Disneyland: The First 50 Magical Years, which was intended to show at Disneyland until the end of Disneyland's 50th anniversary celebration in September 2006, but it is continuing to run indefinitely. Martin was also honoured in 2005 with a Disney Legend award, acknowledging Martin's early career at Disneyland and connections with The Walt Disney Company throughout his career. Martin has guest-hosted Saturday Night Live 14 times, as of his February 2006 hosting (musical guest: Prince featuring Tamar), breaking his previous record of 13 (now held by fellow frequent host Alec Baldwin) and retaining his title as SNL's most frequent host. Coincidentally, Steve Martin was supposed to host with Prince as the musical guest on the first episode of SNL's 30th season, but both he and Prince backed out at the last minute and were replaced by Ben Affleck and Nelly.
Martin has also written two novellas, Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company. Shopgirl was later turned into a film (see above).
In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, Martin was voted one of the top 15 greatest comedy acts ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders. On October 23, 2005, Martin was presented with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Early in Martin's career he developed a character entitled "The Great Flydini". This magician would produce eggs and light candles from his open zipper found on his dress slacks. Even an opera singing hand puppet would make an appearance. Much of Steve Martin's comedy styling would be influenced by the actor, comedian, magician Carl Ballantine. Carl performed at the opening of Disneyland and young Steve Martin would watch his performances closely.
Art collection
Martin is an avid art collector, particularly modern American art, and a trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Martin's personal collection has at one time included the art of Georgia O'Keeffe, John Henry Twachtman, Richard Diebenkorn, Po Shun Leong, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Cy Twombly, Helen Frankenthaler, Edward Hopper, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein and Pablo Picasso. In 2005, The Huntington Library in San Marino, California announced that Martin had pledged US$1 million over five years for the museum's American art collection.[6] Three-quarters of the gift will be used for exhibitions, with the remainder being used for acquisitions. Before he made his pledge, Martin loaned paintings to the museum, helped it acquire a sculpture by John Gregory, and sponsored an exhibition of "sugar paintings" by 19th century American artist Eastman Johnson. Jessica Todd Smith, the museum's American art curator, said Martin became an "enthusiastic" supporter of The Huntington after he visited the museum in 2002 while filming a movie nearby.
Marriages
On July 28, 2007, Steve married his girlfriend, Anne Stringfield, 34, at his Los Angeles home. Former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey presided over the ceremony. Lorne Michaels, creator of Saturday Night Live, was his best man. Several of the guests, including close friends Tom Hanks, Eugene Levy, comedian Carl Reiner, and magician/actor Ricky Jay were not informed that a wedding ceremony would take place. Instead, they were told they were invited to a party.[7] Steve was previously married to actress Victoria Tennant for eight years until 1994. Before that, he was involved with singer/actress Bernadette Peters and actress Anne Heche.
Sarah Brightman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Background information
Born August 14, 1960 (1960-08-14) (age 47)
Origin Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England
Genre(s) Classical crossover, operatic pop
Occupation(s) Singer, actress
Years active 1976-present
Label(s) A&M Records (1993)
East West Records (1995-1997)
Angel Records/EMI (1998-present)
Website
http://www.sarah-brightman.com
Sarah Brightman (born August 14, 1960) is an English classical crossover soprano, actress and dancer.
Brightman debuted as a dancer in troupes such as Hot Gossip and later released a string of disco singles. She achieved greater fame as a musical theatre performer and partner of theatre composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, originating several roles, including Christine Daaé in The Phantom of the Opera. Her 1984 marriage to Lloyd Webber attracted active tabloid coverage. The couple divorced in 1990, effectively ending her musical theatre career.
After her divorce, Brightman established a position as a crossover artist with former Enigma producer Frank Peterson. Her style, a blend of classical vocals and pop-inspired instrumentation and arrangement, earned her further success. To date, Brightman has received over 150 Gold and Platinum awards in 34 countries[1] and is the only artist to hold #1 spots on the Billboard Classical and Dance charts simultaneously.
Biography
Sarah Brightman was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England to Paula and Grenville Brightman. She was the eldest of six children. Her ambition to be an artist was apparent from an early age; she took ballet lessons starting from age three. At age eleven she attended a boarding school for theatre, where she remained despite her displeasure with the institution. Brightman auditioned for London's Royal Ballet some time later, but was rejected.[2]
At age sixteen, in 1976, Brightman joined the dance group Pan's People. After some time, she moved on and led Hot Gossip, a mixed dance act who appeared regularly on The Kenny Everett Video Show. The group, which was noticeably more provocative than Pan's People, had a chart-topping disco hit in 1978 with "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper", a space-themed track which sold half a million copies and reached number six on the UK charts. The group released a follow-up single, "Adventures of the Love Crusader", six months later, but it was less successful, failing to chart on the UK's top 50.[3] Brightman, now solo, released several more disco singles in subsequent years under Whisper Records; these included "Not Having That" and a cover of the song "My Boyfriend's Back".[4] However, none of these became as prominent as "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper".
[edit] 1981-1989: Stage career
In 1981, Brightman auditioned for a role in the new musical Cats and received the role of Jemima. It was there that she met her future husband, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber; the two married in 1984. Brightman starred in several of his musicals, including Song and Dance and the mass Requiem, the latter expressly written for her voice. With Requiem she earned her first Grammy nomination.[1]
Brightman achieved greater success with her starring role as Christine Daaé in Lloyd Webber's adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera. The role of Christine, like Requiem before it, was specifically written for her.[1] Lloyd Webber refused to open The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway unless Brightman originated the role of Christine. Initially, the American Actors' Equity Association balked, due to their policy of hiring only Americans. Lloyd Webber had to agree to cast an American in a leading role in his next West End musical before the Equity would allow Brightman to appear (a promise he kept later in the casting for Aspects of Love).[5]
After leaving Phantom, Brightman pursued several projects. Immediately after her departure, she performed in a tour of Lloyd Webber's music throughout England, Canada, and the United States, and performed Requiem in the Soviet Union. She also released some studio recordings. These releases included the single "Anything But Lonely" from Aspects of Love and two solo albums: the 1988 album The Trees They Grow So High, a compilation of traditional folk songs accompanied by piano, and the 1989 album The Songs That Got Away, a musical theatre compilation of songs which were cut from shows by composers such as Irving Berlin and Stephen Sondheim. By 1990, Brightman and Lloyd Webber separated. After the official divorce, Brightman was given a lead role in Lloyd Webber's Aspects in London opposite Michael Praed, before transferring to Broadway. It would be her last theatre role.[4]
1990's: Solo career
Her stage career curtailed, Brightman pursued solo recording in Los Angeles. She was inspired by the German band Enigma and requested to work with one of its members. Her request was answered and in 1991 she traveled to Germany to meet her future producer, Frank Peterson. Their first collaboration on a major label release (with A&M Records) was Dive (1993), a loosely water-themed pop album that featured the hit "Captain Nemo" (a cover of a song by the Swedish electronica band Dive).[6]
Fly (1995), a pop/rock album and her second collaboration with Peterson, propelled Sarah Brightman to fame in Europe with the hit "A Question of Honour". The song, introduced at the World Boxing Championship match between Germany's Henry Maske and Graciano Rocchigiani, featured a mix of electronic dance music, rock elements, classical strings, and excerpts from the aria "Ebben? ... Ne andrò lontana" from Alfredo Catalani's opera La Wally.[7]
"Time to Say Goodbye" ("Con te partirò") was the second Brightman song debuted for Maske, this time at his retirement match. This duet with tenor Andrea Bocelli sold more than 3 million copies in Germany alone,[1] became Germany's highest-selling single, and was a bestseller in numerous other countries. The album eventually sold over 5 million copies worldwide. Due to the song's success, a 1996 re-issue of Fly featured "Time to Say Goodbye" as the first track.
Timeless (released in 1997, with the title Time to Say Goodbye in the United States) contained "Time to Say Goodbye" and other classical-inspired tracks such as "Just Show Me How to Love You", a duet with José Cura (originally sung by Dario Baldambembo with the title "Tu Cosa Fai Stasera?"), a cover of the Queen hit "Who Wants to Live Forever", and "Tu Quieres Volver", (originally recorded by the Gipsy Kings).
The album was a smash-hit worldwide and is possibly Brightman's most successful solo release. Her mainstream exposure in the United States also began around this time, starting with an appearance on Bocelli's December 1997 PBS television special, duetting "Time to Say Goodbye"; later, in March 1998, her own PBS special, Sarah Brightman in Concert at the Royal Albert Hall, marked the key point when she crossed from Billboard's Top Heatseekers chart to the Billboard 200 chart, with Time to Say Goodbye.[8] Despite this, however, attempts to market songs from the album to U.S. Top 40 and heritage radio formats were mostly unsuccessful. [8]
2000 to present
Subsequent albums included Eden (1998) (the title track of which was a cover of a song by Belgian band Hooverphonic), and La Luna (2000). Both of these albums took the crossover beginnings she had originally introduced on Time to Say Goodbye and made them her own. Reviews, however, were mixed - LAUNCHcast deemed Eden "deliriously sappy",[9] while All Music Guide called Eden "a winning combination"[10] and La Luna "a solid, stirring collection".[11]
Chart performance for both albums was more uniformly positive. Eden reached #65 on the Billboard 200 charts (certified Gold for selling over 500,000 copies), and La Luna peaked at #17. In addition, both albums reached #1 on Billboard's Classical Crossover charts. At the end of 2001, Billboard magazine noted Brightman as one of four classical crossover artists from the UK (the others being Charlotte Church, Russell Watson, and bond) with albums on both the Classical Crossover and Billboard 200 charts, a phenomenon which, it said, contributed to a resurgence of UK music in the U.S. after "a historic low" in 1999.[12]
In 2001, Brightman released Classics, an album comprised of operatic arias and other classical pieces, including a solo version of "Time to Say Goodbye". Many of the songs on this album originally appeared on her previous albums. Reviews were somewhat better: Entertainment Weekly, although calling Brightman a "stronger song stylist than a singer", gave the album a grade of B-.[13]
Her 2003 album Harem represented another departure: a Middle Eastern-themed album influenced by dance music. On Harem, Brightman collaborated with artists such as Ofra Haza and Iraqi singer Kazem al-Saher. Nigel Kennedy contributed violin tracks to the songs "Free" and "The War Is Over", and Jaz Coleman contributed arrangements.[1]
The album peaked at #29 on the Billboard 200 charts (with sales tracked by Nielsen SoundScan figuring at approximately 333,000, or about one-third the total sales of La Luna),[14] #1 on the Billboard Classical Crossover chart, and yielded a #1 dance/club single with the remix of the title track. Some time later, another single from the album (the ballad "Free", cowritten with Sophie B. Hawkins) became a second Top-10 hit on this chart. Nevertheless, radio airplay for the album's singles, at least in the U.S., was almost nonexistent.[14]
The albums Eden, La Luna, and Harem were accompanied by live tours which incorporated the theatricality of her stage origins. Brightman acknowledged this in an interview, saying, "They're incredibly complicated...[but also] natural. I know what works, what doesn't work, all the old tricks."[15] In both 2000 and 2001, Brightman was among the top 10 most popular British performers in the U.S., with concert sales grossing $7.2 million from 34 shows in 2000 and over $5 million from 21 shows in 2001.[12]
Most recently, the Harem tour grossed over $60 million and sold over 700,000 tickets,[1] $15 million and 225,000 sales of which came from the North American leg; though with ticket prices raised 30% from previous tours, average sales per venue were up 65%.[14] In North America, Harem tour promoters Clear Channel Entertainment (now Live Nation) took the unusual step of advertising to theatre subscribers, in an effort to reach fans of Brightman's Broadway performances, and also sold VIP tickets (at $750 each) that included on-stage seating during the concert and a backstage pass.[14]
Tour reviews have been mixed: one critic from the New York Times called the La Luna tour "not so much divine but post-human" and "unintentionally disturbing: a beautiful argument of emptiness."[16] In contrast, a reviewer from the Boston Globe deemed the Harem tour "unique, compelling" and "charmingly effective."[17]
Television specials on PBS were produced for every Brightman album in the U.S.; a director of marketing has credited these as her number-one source of exposure in the country.[12]
Brightman released a DVD collection of her music videos on October 3, 2006 under the title of Diva: The Video Collection. Diva: The Singles Collection is the accompanying CD, released on the same date. The album marked the first time Brightman has released a greatest hits album in the United States; it reached #1 on the Billboard Classical Crossover chart. (Classics, from 2001, featured seven new recordings in addition to the previously-released material, and her other reflective offering, The Best of 1990-2000, was a European-only release.)
Brightman was one of the artists featured on the January 2007 series of the prime time BBC One Show Just the Two of Us, partnered with English cricketer Mark Butcher.[18] The pair finished the competition in third place.
Brightman performed at the Concert For Diana in July 2007, singing "All I Ask Of You" from Phantom of the Opera in a duet with Josh Groban.
She is currently working on a new album, working title "Symphony", that she describes as having a gothic metal feel to it.[19] The current release date is set at January 29th, 2008 but is still subject to change.[20] In 2007, Brightman was announced as singing the theme song to the 10th Pokémon motion picture, Dialga VS Palkia VS Darkrai. A preview of the film and the song, Be With You: Itsumo Soba ni (Always by Your Side), can be found on her page on the Toshiba EMI website.[21]
On 7 July 2007 she performed "Time to say Goodbye" and "Nessun Dorma" at the Chinese leg of Live Earth in Shanghai to standing ovations in the pouring rain.[22]
Music and voice
Brightman has undergone vocal training first with Elizabeth Hawes, head of the Trinity Music College in London, and later with Ellen Faul of Juilliard. She has a three-octave vocal range[23] that extends to an E above Soprano C.[4]
David Caddick, a conductor of Phantom, has stated:
"What is amazing about Sarah is that she has two voices, really. She can produce a pop, contemporary sound, but she can also blossom out into a light soprano. The soprano part of her voice can go up to an E natural above high C. She doesn't sing it full out, but it is there. Of course, she has to dance while she is singing some of the time, so it's all the more extraordinary."[4]
She sometimes deploys both her pop and classical voices in the same song. "Anytime, Anywhere" from Eden is among one of the songs, which is based on Tomaso Albinoni's Adagio in G minor. In that song, she starts out in classical voice, switches to pop voice temporarily, and finishes with her classical voice.[24]
Brightman's music is generally classified as classical crossover. Brightman, in a 2000 interview with People, dismissed the label as "horrible" but stated she understood the need for categorization.[25] Her music influences include 60s and 70s musicians and artists such as David Bowie and Pink Floyd.[1] Her music alternates in style from pop/rock to classical and contemporary. The material on her albums ranges from versions of opera arias from composers such as Puccini (on Harem, Eden, and Timeless), to pop songs by artists such as Kansas ("Dust in the Wind" on Eden), Dido ("Here with Me" on La Luna), and Procol Harum ("A Whiter Shade of Pale" on La Luna).
Personal life
At age 18, Brightman married Andrew Graham Stewart, a music manager. This marriage ended in divorce. She met Lloyd Webber while performing in Cats. Lloyd Webber divorced his first wife, Sarah Hugill, to marry Brightman in 1984. During their partnership, the couple faced intense media and tabloid scrutiny. The marriage lasted until 1990, when they divorced. Brightman acknowledged the marriage in a 1999 interview as a "difficult time" but also one of much creative output.[26] Currently they are on friendly terms; at the 20th London anniversary of The Phantom of the Opera, Lloyd Webber publicly pronounced Brightman a "wonderful woman" and "absolutely beloved mentor". In 1990, Brightman became involved with Peterson; this relationship lasted for eleven years.
Brightman has suffered several personal crises, including the suicide of her father in 1992, and two miscarriages. In an interview with the British magazine Hello!, she stated that motherhood would have been "lovely", but she accepted her destiny peaceably.[27
Halle Berry
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Birth name Halle Maria Berry
Born August 14, 1966 (1966-08-14) (age 41)
Bedford, Ohio, U.S.
Spouse(s) David Justice (1992-1996)
Eric Benét (2001-2005)
Official site
www.hallewood.com
[show]Awards
Academy Awards
Best Actress
2001 Monster's Ball
Emmy Awards
Outstanding Lead Actress - Miniseries/Movie
2000 Introducing Dorothy Dandridge
Golden Globe Awards
Best Actress - Mini-series
2000 Introducing Dorothy Dandridge
Golden Raspberry Awards
Worst Actress
2004 Catwoman
Halle Maria Berry (IPA: [ˈhæliː ˈbeɹiː]) (born August 14, 1966[1]) is an Academy Award-winning American actress. Berry has received Emmy and Golden Globe awards, and received an Academy Award for Best Actress in 2002 for her performance in Monster's Ball. She is the only woman of African American descent to have won the award for Best Actress.
Biography
Early life and career
Berry's parents selected her first name from Halle's Department Store, which was then a local landmark in her birthplace of Cleveland, Ohio. She is the daughter of Englishwoman Judith Ann Hawkins, a Liverpudlian,[2] and Jerome Jesse Berry, who was African American. Berry's maternal grandmother, Nellie Dicken, was born in Sawley, Derbyshire, England, while her maternal grandfather, Earl Ellsworth Hawkins (an American), was born in Ohio.[3] Berry's parents divorced when she was 4 years old and she was subsequently raised by her mother, a psychiatric nurse. Her father was an orderly in the same psychiatric ward where her mother worked and later worked as a bus driver.[4] Berry has two older sisters, Heidi, who was born two years before her, and Renee (from a different mother).
Berry was a popular student at Bedford High School and was a cheerleader, honor society member, editor of the school newspaper, class president and prom queen. She worked in the children's department at Higbee's Department store. She subsequently attended Cuyahoga Community College.
Before becoming an actress, she entered several beauty contests, winning Miss Ohio USA and Miss Teen All-American. Other entries include Miss USA (first runner-up in 1986 to Christy Fichtner of Texas, the second of the Texas Aces), and sixth place in Miss World 1986 (the winner being Trinidad and Tobago's Giselle Laronde). In the Miss USA 1986 pageant interview competition, she said she hoped to become an entertainer, or to have something to do with the media or newspaper. Her interview was awarded the highest score by the judges.[5]
In 1989, during the taping of the short-lived television series Living Dolls, Berry lapsed into a coma and was diagnosed with diabetes mellitus type 1.[6]
Hollywood career
In the late 1980s, she went to Chicago to pursue a modeling career as well as acting. One of her first acting projects was a television series for local cable by Gordon Lake Productions called Chicago Force. In 1992, Berry was cast as the love interest in the video for R. Kelly's seminal hit, "Honey Love". Berry auditioned for a role in an updated Charlie's Angels television series by producer Aaron Spelling. She impressed Spelling and he encouraged her to continue acting.
In 1989, Berry landed the role of Emily Franklin in the short-lived ABC television series Living Dolls (a spin-off of Who's the Boss?). Her breakthrough feature film role was in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever in which she played a drug addict named Vivian. Her first co-starring role was in the 1991 film Strictly Business. In 1992, Berry portrayed a career woman who falls for Eddie Murphy in the romantic comedy Boomerang. That same year, she caught the public's attention as a headstrong biracial slave in the TV adaption of Queen: The Story of an American Family, based on the book by Alex Haley. Berry also played the sultry secretary in the live action Flintstones movie as "Sharon Stone".[7]
Playing a former drug addict struggling to regain custody of her son in Losing Isaiah (1995), Berry showed she could tackle more serious roles, holding her own opposite co-star Jessica Lange. She portrayed Sandra Beecher in Race the Sun (1996), which was based on a true story, and co-starred along side Kurt Russell in Executive Decision. In Bulworth, Berry received praise for her role as an intelligent woman raised by activists who gives politician Warren Beatty a new lease on life, and as the singer Zola Taylor, one of the three wives of pop singer Frankie Lymon, in the biopic Why Do Fools Fall in Love both in 1998.
In the 1999 film Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, Berry portrayed the first black woman to be nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award. In this HBO biopic, Berry's performance was recognized with several awards including an Emmy and a Golden Globe. (She was also one of the producers of the project.)
Berry portrayed the mutant Storm in the movie adaptation of the popular comic book series X-Men (2000) and its successful sequels X2: X-Men United (2003) and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). In late 2001, Berry appeared as Leticia Musgrove, the wife of an executed murderer, in the film Monster's Ball. Her performance was awarded the National Board of Review and the Screen Actors Guild prizes. The role earned her an Academy Award for Best Actress: she made history by becoming the first African American woman to earn a Best Actress Academy Award.
As Bond Girl Jinx in the (2002) blockbuster Die Another Day she famously re-created the scene from Dr. No, bursting from the surf to be greeted by James Bond, as Ursula Andress had 40 years earlier. In late 2003, Berry starred in the psychological thriller Gothika opposite Robert Downey Jr. Her next lead role was in the film Catwoman, for which she was awarded a "worst actress" Razzie award in 2005, which she accepted in person with a sense of humor and recognition that "to be at the top, you must experience the rock bottom".
Berry next appeared in the Oprah Winfrey-produced ABC telepic Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005), an adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's novel, in which Berry portrayed Janie Crawford, an iconoclastic, free-spirited woman whose unconventional mores regarding relationships upset her 1920s contemporaries in her small community. Meanwhile, she voiced the character of Cappy, one of the many mechanical beings in the animated feature, Robots (2005). She has filmed the thriller Perfect Stranger with Bruce Willis and wrapped shooting Things We Lost in the Fire with Benicio Del Toro. She is set to star in Class Act, based on the real life story of a teacher whose students helped her run for political office and "Tulia", which will reunite her with Monster's Ball costar Billy Bob Thornton.
Berry is making the transition to working on the production side of film and television. She is working with author Angela Nissel to executive produce a comedy series based on Nissel's two memoirs, The Broke Diaries and Mixed: My Life in Black and White.[8] Berry has served many years as the face of Revlon cosmetics, and was recently named the face of Versace. She is featured in Maxim magazine's Girls of Maxim gallery.[9]
Berry is one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood, commanding $14 million each for Gothika and Catwoman. In July 2007 she topped In Touch magazine's list of the world's most fabulous 40-something celebrities. [10]
Personal life
Berry has been married twice. Her first marriage in 1992 to pro baseball player David Justice ended in divorce in 1996. Justice played with the Atlanta Braves and experienced a measure of fame as the team rose to prominence in the early 1990s. The couple found it difficult to maintain their relationship while he was playing baseball and she was filming elsewhere. Berry has stated publicly that she was so despondent after her breakup with Justice that she considered taking her own life.[11]
Her second marriage in 2001 to musician Eric Benét resulted in a 2004 separation and 2005 divorce. In 2004, after the separation, Berry stated "I want love, and I will find it, hopefully".[12] While married to Benét, Berry made plans to adopt Eric's daughter, India. However, the process was never finalized.
As of November 2005, she was dating French-Canadian supermodel Gabriel Aubry, who is nine years her junior. The couple met at a Versace photoshoot. After six months with Aubry, she stated in an interview "I'm really happy in my personal life, which is a novelty to me. You know I'm not the girl that has the best relationships".[13]
Berry revealed on Extra that she plans to adopt children. "I will adopt if it doesn't happen for me naturally", she said. "I will definitely adopt. And I probably will adopt even if it does happen naturally". (Aubry, who lived in five foster families between the ages of 3 and 18, is presumably open to being an adoptive parent as well.)[12] Later, she stated "I never want to be married again. I guess you could say I have bad taste in men. But I no longer feel the need to be someone's wife. I don't feel like I need to be validated by being in a marriage".[14]
Racial self-identification
Berry has stated that the manner in which people have reacted to her is often the result of ignorance. Her own self-identification has been influenced by her mother. She is quoted as saying her mother taught her not to discriminate because we're all part of the same race; the human race.[15]
Controversy
In February 2000, Berry was involved in a car accident in which she struck a vehicle after running a red light, and left the scene before the police arrived. Berry, who had sustained a head injury, stated she had no recollection of the accident and pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge. She paid a fine, made restitution to the other driver, performed community service, and was placed on three years' supervised probation by the Los Angeles County Adult Probation Office.[16]
