Ah, edgar, that showcases his voice, and you are right. He sounds great, Texas. Perhaps it is the song that one chooses that gives the right slant on appreciation. Thanks, buddy.
Here is a group that I really love, and although I know his name isn't pronounced this way, an electrical surge made me think of him and Brazil 66.
Pyrrhic victory
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Pyrrhic victory (IPA: /ˈpɪrɪk/) is a victory with devastating cost to the victor. The phrase is an allusion to King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army suffered irreplaceable casualties in defeating the Romans at Heraclea in 280 BC and Asculum in 279 BC during the Pyrrhic War. After the latter battle, Plutarch relates in a report by Dionysius:
The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.[1]
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Fri 18 Jul, 2008 07:48 am
William Makepeace Thackeray
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born July 18, 1811(1811-07-18)
Calcutta, India
Died December 24, 1863 (aged 52)
London, England
Occupation Novelist
William Makepeace Thackeray (IPA: /ˈθækərɪ/; July 18, 1811 - December 24, 1863) was an English novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of English society.
Biography
Thackeray, an only child, was born in Calcutta, India, where his father, Richmond Thackeray (1 September 1781 - 13 September 1815), held the high rank of secretary to the board of revenue in the British East India Company. Richmond Thackeray, born at South Mimms, went to India at the age of sixteen to assume his duties as writer. By 1804 he had fathered a daughter by a native mistress, the mother and daughter being named in his will. Such liaisons being common among gentlemen of the East India Company, it formed no bar to his courting and marrying Anne Becher. Anne Becher (1792-1864) was the second daughter of Harriet and John Harman Becher, also a writer for the East India Company. They sent Anne abroad in 1809, telling her that the man she loved, Henry Carmichael-Smyth, had died. This was not true, but her family wanted a better marriage for her than with Carmichael-Smyth, a military man. She married Richmond Thackeray on 13 October 1810. The truth was unexpectedly revealed in 1812, when Richmond Thackeray unwittingly invited to dinner the supposedly dead Carmichael-Smyth. After Richmond's death, Henry Carmichael-Smyth married Anne in 1818 and they returned to England the next year.
William had been sent to England earlier, at the age of five, with a short stopover at St. Helena where the imprisoned Napoleon was pointed out to him. He was educated at schools in Southampton and Chiswick and then at Charterhouse School, where he was a close friend of John Leech. He disliked Charterhouse, parodying it in his later fiction as "Slaughterhouse." Illness in his last year there (during which he reportedly grew to his full height of 6'3") postponed his matriculation at Trinity College, Cambridge, until February 1829. Never too keen on academic studies, he left the University in 1830.
He traveled for some time on the continent, visiting Paris and Weimar, where he met Goethe. He returned to England and began to study law at the Middle Temple, but soon gave that up. On reaching the age of 21 he came into his inheritance but he squandered much of it on gambling and by funding two unsuccessful newspapers, The National Standard and The Constitutional for which he had hoped to write. He also lost a good part of his fortune in the collapse of two Indian banks. Forced to consider a profession to support himself, he turned first to art, which he studied in Paris, but did not pursue it except in later years as the illustrator of some of his own novels and other writings.
Thackeray's years of semi-idleness ended after he met and, on 20 August 1836, married Isabella Gethin Shawe (1816-1893), second daughter of Matthew Shawe, a colonel, who had died after extraordinary service, primarily in India, and his wife, Isabella Creagh. The marriage appears to have been a very happy one though beset by problems (an overbearing mother-in-law and sickness). Their three daughters were Anne Isabella (1837-1919), Jane (1837; died at 8 months) and Harriet Marian (1840-1875). He now began "writing for his life," as he put it, turning to journalism in an effort to support his young family.
He primarily worked for Fraser's Magazine, a sharp-witted and sharp-tongued conservative publication, for which he produced art criticism, short fictional sketches, and two longer fictional works, Catherine and The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Later, through his connection to the illustrator John Leech, he began writing for the newly created Punch magazine, where he published The Snob Papers, later collected as The Book of Snobs. This work popularized the modern meaning of the word "snob".
Tragedy struck in his personal life as his wife succumbed to depression after the birth of their third child in 1840. Finding he could get no work done at home, he spent more and more time away, until September of that year, when he noticed how grave her condition was. Struck by guilt, he took his ailing wife to Ireland. During the crossing she threw herself from a water-closet into the sea, from which she was rescued. They fled back home after a four-week domestic battle with her mother. From November 1840 to February 1842 she was in and out of professional care, her condition waxing and waning.
In the long run, she deteriorated into a permanent state of detachment from reality, unaware of the world around her. Thackeray desperately sought cures for her, but nothing worked, and she ended up confined in a home near Paris. She remained there until 1893, outliving her husband by thirty years. After his wife's illness, Thackeray became a de facto widower, never establishing another permanent relationship. He did pursue other women, in particular Mrs. Jane Brookfield and Sally Baxter. In 1851 Mr. Brookfield barred Thackeray from further visits to or correspondence with Jane. Baxter, an American twenty years his junior whom he met during a lecture tour in New York City in 1852, married another man in 1855.
In the early 1840s, Thackeray had some success with two travel books, The Paris Sketch Book and The Irish Sketch Book. Later in the decade, he achieved some notoriety with his Snob Papers, but the work that really established his fame was the novel Vanity Fair, which first appeared in serialized installments beginning in January 1847. Even before Vanity Fair completed its serial run, Thackeray had become a celebrity, sought after by the very lords and ladies he satirized; they hailed him as the equal of Dickens.
He remained "at the top of the tree", as he put it, for the remaining decade and a half of his life, producing several large novels, notably Pendennis, The Newcomes, and The History of Henry Esmond, despite various illnesses, including a near fatal one that struck him in 1849 in the middle of writing Pendennis. He twice visited the United States on lecture tours during this period.
Thackeray also gave lectures in London on the English humourists of the eighteenth century, and on the first four Hanoverian monarchs. The latter series was published in book form as The Four Georges. In Oxford, he stood unsuccessfully as an independent for Parliament. He was narrowly beaten by Cardwell (1070 votes, against 1005 for Thackeray).
In 1860, Thackeray became editor of the newly established Cornhill Magazine, but was never comfortable as an editor, preferring to contribute to the magazine as a columnist, producing his Roundabout Papers for it.
His health worsened during the 1850s and he was plagued by the recurring stricture of the urethra that laid him up for days at a time. He also felt he had lost much of his creative impetus. He worsened matters by over-eating and drinking and avoiding exercise, though he enjoyed horseback riding and kept a horse. He could not break his addiction to spicy peppers, further ruining his digestion. On 23 December 1863, after returning from dining out and before dressing for bed, Thackeray suffered a stroke and was found dead on his bed in the morning. His death at the age of fifty-three was entirely unexpected, and shocked his family, friends, and reading public. An estimated 7000 people attended his funeral at Kensington Gardens. He was buried on 29 December at Kensal Green Cemetery, and a memorial bust sculpted by Marochetti can be found in Westminster Abbey.
Works
Thackeray began as a satirist and parodist, with a sneaking fondness for roguish upstarts like Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, Barry Lyndon in The Luck of Barry Lyndon and Catherine in Catherine. In his earliest works, writing under such pseudonyms as Charles James Yellowplush, Michael Angelo Titmarsh and George Savage Fitz-Boodle, he tended towards the savage in his attacks on high society, military prowess, the institution of marriage and hypocrisy.
One of his very earliest works, "The Snob" (1829), contained his burlesque upon the subject set for the Cambridge Chancellor's medal for English verse, Timbuctoo (the contest was won by Tennyson with "Timbuctoo"). His writing career really began with a series of satirical sketches now usually known as The Yellowplush Papers, which appeared in Fraser's Magazine beginning in 1837.
Between May 1839 and February 1840, Fraser's published the work sometimes considered Thackeray's first novel, Catherine, originally intended as a satire of the Newgate school of crime fiction but ending up more as a rollicking picaresque tale in its own right.
In The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a novel serialized in Fraser's in 1844, Thackeray explored the situation of an outsider trying to achieve status in high society, a theme he developed much more successfully in Vanity Fair with the character of Becky Sharp, the artist's daughter who rises nearly to the heights by manipulating the other characters.
He is best known now for Vanity Fair, with its deft skewerings of human foibles and its roguishly attractive heroine. His large novels from the period after this, once described unflatteringly by Henry James as examples of "loose baggy monsters", have faded from view, perhaps because they reflect a mellowing in the author, who became so successful with his satires on society that he seemed to lose his zest for attacking it.
The later works include Pendennis, a sort of bildungsroman depicting the coming of age of Arthur Pendennis, a kind of alter ego of Thackeray's who also features as the narrator of two later novels: The Newcomes and The Adventures of Philip. The Newcomes is noteworthy for its critical portrayal of the "marriage market", while Philip is noteworthy for its semi-autobiographical look back at Thackeray's early life, in which the author partially regains some of his early satirical zest.
Also notable among the later novels is The History of Henry Esmond, in which Thackeray tried to write a novel in the style of the eighteenth century. In fact, the eighteenth century held a great appeal for Thackeray. Not only Esmond but also Barry Lyndon and Catherine are set then, as is the sequel to Esmond, The Virginians, which takes place in America and includes George Washington as a character who nearly kills one of the protagonists in a duel.
Reputation
Thackeray is most often compared to one other great novelist of Victorian literature, Charles Dickens. During the Victorian era, he was ranked second only to Dickens, but he is now much less read and is known almost exclusively for Vanity Fair. In that novel he was able to satirize whole swaths of humanity while retaining a light touch. It also features his most memorable character, the engagingly roguish Becky Sharp. As a result, unlike Thackeray's other novels, it remains popular with the general reading public; it is a standard fixture in university courses and has been repeatedly adapted for movies and television.
In Thackeray's own day, some commentators, such as Anthony Trollope, ranked his History of Henry Esmond as his greatest work, perhaps because it expressed Victorian values of duty and earnestness, as did some of his other later novels. It is perhaps for this reason that they have not survived as well as Vanity Fair, which satirizes those values.
Thackeray saw himself as writing in the realistic tradition and distinguished himself from the exaggerations and sentimentality of Dickens. Some later commentators have accepted this self-evaluation and seen him as a realist, but others note his inclination to use eighteenth-century narrative techniques, such as digressions and talking to the reader, and argue that through them he frequently disrupts the illusion of reality. The school of Henry James, with its emphasis on maintaining that illusion, marked a break with Thackeray's techniques.
Trivia
Thackeray wrote such a positive review of Jane Eyre that Charlotte Brontë dedicated the second edition to him. This caused her some great embarrassment when she found out about the parallels between the book's plot and Thackeray's domestic situation.[citation needed]
The quote (often wrongly attributed to O'Barr), "Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children," from Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair,[1] was used in James O'Barr's graphic novel The Crow, as well as in the subsequent film, although the line was slightly altered from the original ("... of all children").[citation needed]
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Fri 18 Jul, 2008 07:51 am
Chill Wills
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born July 18, 1903(1903-07-18)
Seagoville, Dallas County, USA
Died December 15, 1978 (aged 75)
Encino, California, U.S.
Chill Theodore Wills (July 18, 1903 - December 15, 1978) was an American film actor and singer in the Avalon Boys Quartet.
Biography
Wills was born in Seagoville in Dallas County, Texas. He was a performer from early childhood, forming and leading the Avalon Boys singing group in the 1930s. After appearing with them in a few westerns, he disbanded the group in 1938 and struck out on a solo acting career.
One of his more memorable roles was that of the distinctive voice of Francis the Mule in a series of popular films. Wills' deep, rough voice and Western twang were perfectly matched to the personality of the cynical, sardonic mule. As was customary at the time, Wills was given no billing for his vocal work, though he was featured prominently on-screen as blustery General Ben Kaye in the fourth entry, Francis Joins the WACS.
Wills also appeared in numerous serious roles, including that of Uncle Bawley in Giant, a 1956 film starring Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean.[1] Wills was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in 1960 for his role as the beekeeper in the film The Alamo. However, his aggressive campaign for the award was considered tasteless by many, including the film's producer, John Wayne, who publicly apologized for Wills. Wills' publicity agent, W.S. "Bow-Wow" Wojciechowicz, accepted blame for the ill-advised effort, claiming that his employer had known nothing about it. Wills was defeated for the Oscar by Peter Ustinov, who won for his role in Spartacus.[2]
Wills served as master of ceremonies for George Wallace for the California campaign stops in Wallace's 1968 Presidential campaign.[1]He and Walter Brennan were among the few Hollywood celebrities to endorse Wallace's campaign against Hubert H. Humphrey and Richard M. Nixon.
Wills' last role was in 1978 as a janitor in Stubby Pringle's Christmas.
On his death in Encino, California, Chill Wills was interred in the Grand View Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale.
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Fri 18 Jul, 2008 07:55 am
Lupe Vélez
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez
July 18, 1908
San Luis Potosí, San Luis Potosí, Mexico
Died December 13, 1944 (aged 36)
Years active 1927-1944
Lupe Vélez (July 18, 1908 - December 13, 1944) was a Mexican American actress.
Early life
Vélez was born María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez in the city of San Luis Potosí, the daughter of an army officer and his wife, an opera singer. Her father refused to let her use his last name in theater, so she used her mother's maiden name. Lupe was educated at a convent school in Texas before finding work as a sales assistant. She took dancing lessons and in 1924, made her performing debut at the Teatro Principal. She moved to California that year and was first cast in movies by Hal Roach.
Film career
Vélez's first feature-length film was Douglas Fairbanks's The Gaucho (1927); the next year, she was named one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars, the young starlets deemed to be most promising for movie stardom. Most of her early films cast her in exotic or ethnic roles (Hispanic, Native American, French, Russian, even Asian).
Within a few years Vélez found her niche in comedies, playing beautiful but volatile foils to comedy stars. Her slapstick battle with Laurel and Hardy in Hollywood Party and her dynamic presence opposite Jimmy Durante in Palooka (both 1934) are typically enthusiastic Vélez performances. She was featured in the final Wheeler & Woolsey comedy, High Flyers (1937), doing impersonations of Simone Simon, Dolores del Rio, and Shirley Temple.
Vélez was now nearing 30 and hadn't yet become a major star. Disappointed, she left Hollywood for Broadway. In New York, she landed a role in You Never Know, a short-lived Cole Porter musical. After the run of You Never Know, Vélez looked for film work in other countries. Returning to Hollywood in 1939, she snared the lead in a B comedy for RKO Radio Pictures, The Girl from Mexico. She established such a rapport with co-star Leon Errol that RKO made a quick sequel, Mexican Spitfire, which became a very popular series. Vélez perfected her comic character, indulging in broken-English malaprops, troublemaking ideas, and sudden fits of temper bursting into torrents of Spanish invective. She occasionally sang in these films, and often displayed a talent for hectic, visual comedy. Vélez enjoyed making these films and can be seen openly breaking up at Leon Errol's comic ad libs.
The Spitfire films rejuvenated Lupe Vélez's career, and for the next few years she starred in musical and comedy features for RKO, Universal Pictures, and Columbia Pictures in addition to the Spitfire films. In one of her last films, Columbia's Redhead from Manhattan, she played a dual role: one in her exaggerated comic dialect, and the other in her actual speaking voice, which was surprisingly fluid and had only traces of an accent.
Lupe Vélez was very popular with Spanish-speaking audiences, and lent her services toward improving the film industry in Mexico.
Romances
Emotionally generous, passionate, and high-spirited, Vélez had a number of highly publicized affairs, including a particularly emotionally draining one with Gary Cooper, before marrying Olympic athlete Johnny Weissmuller (of 'Tarzan' fame) in 1933. The fraught marriage lasted five years; they repeatedly split and finally divorced in 1938. In 1943, she returned to Mexico and starred in an adaptation of Emile Zola's Nana (1944), which was well received. Subsequently, she returned to Hollywood.
Death
In the mid-1940s, she had a relationship with the young actor Harald Maresch, and became pregnant with his child. Vélez, following her Catholic upbringing, refused to have an abortion. Unable to face the shame of giving birth to an illegitimate child, she decided to take her own life. Her suicide note read, "To Harald, may God forgive you and forgive me too but I prefer to take my life away and our baby's before I bring him with shame or killing him, Lupe."
She retired to bed after taking an overdose of sleeping pills. According to newspaper accounts, her body was found by her secretary and companion for ten years, Beulah Kinder.
A well-known urban myth tells that Vélez was ultimately found in the morning with her head in the toilet. Variations on this story include versions in which she had either drowned in the toilet or that she had tripped and was found in the toilet with a broken neck. Kenneth Anger's 1959 Hollywood Babylon tale of her death, though unsubstantiated, was the basis for the 1965 Andy Warhol film Lupe starring Edie Sedgwick. It has continued to filter through popular culture, in the pilot episode of the television series Frasier and again in The Simpsons episode "Homer's Phobia".
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Fri 18 Jul, 2008 07:56 am
Harriet Nelson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born July 19, 1909(1909-07-19)
Des Moines, Iowa, U.S.
Died October 2, 1994 (aged 85)
Laguna Beach, California, U.S.
Harriet Nelson (also known as Harriet Hilliard) (July 18, 1909 - October 2, 1994) was an American singer and actress.
She was born Peggy Lou Snyder in Des Moines, Iowa, to Roy Hilliard Snyder and Hazel Dell McNutt. By 1932, she was performing in vaudeville when she met the saxophone-playing bandleader Ozzie Nelson. Nelson hired her to sing with the band, under the name Harriet Hilliard. They married three years later. (Hilliard had a pleasant singing voice and in retrospect, she was one of the brightest female band vocalists of the era.)
Harriet Hilliard had a respectable film career as a solo performer, apart from the band. RKO Radio Pictures signed her to a one-year contract in 1936, and she appeared in three feature films, the most famous being the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Follow the Fleet. She was very much in demand during the World War II years for leading roles in escapist musicals, comedies, and mysteries.
In Ozzie's book, he wrote that Harriet was quite popular during the short time at RKO and they wanted her to continue her solo film career, but decided that it was more important for her to continue with the band and subsequent radio show.
Although Ozzie and Harriet occasionally appeared together in movies, either as a duo (in Honeymoon Lodge) or as separate characters (in Hi, Good Lookin'), they are best known for their broadcasting efforts. In 1944 the Nelsons began a domestic-comedy series for radio, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. It was highly popular and made a successful transition to television. It was one of the stalwarts of the ABC-TV schedule through 1966. The Nelsons' two sons, Ricky Nelson and David Nelson, were featured continuously on the show.
Ozzie and Harriet also appeared in the syndicated 1973 sitcom, Ozzie's Girls.
In the 1980s Harriet Nelson lived in Laguna Beach, California. She died of congestive heart failure on October 2, 1994, at the age of 85.
She is interred with her husband and younger son Ricky (who died in a plane crash) in the Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
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Fri 18 Jul, 2008 07:59 am
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Fri 18 Jul, 2008 08:04 am
Red Skelton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born Richard Bernard Skelton
July 18, 1913(1913-07-18)
Vincennes, Indiana, USA
Died September 17, 1997 (aged 84)
Palm Springs, California, USA
Years active 1937-1981
Awards won
Emmy Awards
Writing in a Comedy Series
1961 The Red Skelton Show
Other Awards
Hollywood Walk of Fame
Hollywood Boulevard
Richard Bernard "Red" Skelton (July 18, 1913 - September 17, 1997) was an American comedian who was best known as a top radio and television star from 1937 to 1971. Skelton's show business career began in his teens as a circus clown and went on to vaudeville, Broadway, films, radio, TV, clubs and casinos, while pursuing another career as a painter.
Born in Vincennes, Indiana, Skelton was the son of a Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus clown named Joe who died in 1913 shortly before the birth of his son. Skelton himself got one of his earliest tastes of show business with the same circus as a teenager. Before that, however, he had been given the show business bug at age ten by entertainer Ed Wynn, who spotted him selling newspapers in front of the Pantheon Theatre in Vincennes, trying to help his family. After buying every newspaper in Skelton's stock, Wynn took the boy backstage and introduced him to every member of the show with which he was traveling. By age 15, Skelton had hit the road full-time as an entertainer, working everywhere from medicine shows and vaudeville to burlesque, showboats, minstrel shows and circuses. While performing in Kansas City in 1930, Skelton met and married his first wife, Edna Stillwell. The couple divorced 13 years later, but Stillwell remained one of his chief writers.
Career
Film
Skelton caught his big break in two media at once: radio and film. In 1938 he made his film debut for RKO Radio Pictures, in the supporting role of a camp counselor in Having Wonderful Time, Two short subjects followed for Vitaphone in 1939: Seeing Red and The Bashful Buckaroo. Skelton was hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to lend comic relief to its Dr. Kildare medical dramas, but soon he was starring in comedy features (as inept radio detective "The Fox") and in Technicolor musicals. When Skelton signed his long-term contract with MGM in 1940, he insisted on a clause that permitted him to star in not only radio (which he had already done) but on television, which was still in its early years; studio chief Louis Mayer agreed to the terms, only to regret it years later when television became a serious threat to the motion picture industry.[1] Many of Skelton's films, especially the Technicolor musicals, were issued on home video.
In 1945, he married Georgia Davis. The couple had two children, Richard and Valentina; Richard's childhood death of leukemia devastated the household. Red and Georgia divorced in 1971, and he remarried. In 1976, Georgia committed suicide by gunshot. Deeply affected by the loss of his ex-wife, Red would abstain from performing for the next decade and a half, finding solace only in painting clowns.
Radio
After 1937 appearances on The Rudy Vallee Show, Skelton became a regular in 1939 on NBC's Avalon Time, sponsored by Avalon Cigarettes. On October 7, 1941, Skelton premiered his own radio show, The Raleigh Cigarette Program, developing routines involving a number of recurring characters, including punch-drunk boxer Cauliflower McPugg, inebriated Willy Lump-Lump and "mean widdle kid" Junior, whose favorite phrase ("I dood it!") became part of the American lexicon. That, along with "He bwoke my widdle arm!" or other body part, and "He don't know me vewy well, do he?" all found their way into various Warner Bros. cartoons. Skelton himself was referenced in a Popeye cartoon in which the title character enters a haunted house and encounters a "red skeleton". There were also con man San Fernando Red with his pair of cross-eyed seagulls, Gertrude and Heathcliffe, and singing cabdriver Clem Kadiddlehopper, a country bumpkin with a big heart and a slow wit. Clem had an unintentional knack for upstaging high society slickers, even if he couldn't manipulate his cynical father: "When the stork brought you, Clem, I shoulda shot him on sight!" Skelton would later consider court action against the apparent usurption of this character by Bill Scott, for the voice of Bullwinkle.
Skelton also helped sell World War II war bonds on the top-rated show, which featured Ozzie and Harriet Nelson in the supporting cast, plus the Ozzie Nelson Orchestra and announcer Truman Bradley. Harriet Nelson was the show's vocalist.
It was during this period that Red divorced his first wife Edna and married his second wife Georgia. Red and Georgia's only son, Richard, was born in 1945. Georgia continued in her role as Red's manager until the 1960s.
Skelton was drafted in March 1944, and the popular series was discontinued on June 6, 1944. Shipped overseas to serve with an Army entertainment unit as a private, Skelton led an exceptionally hectic military life; in addition to his own duties and responsibilities, he was always being summoned to entertain officers late at night. The perpetual motion and lack of rest resulted in a nervous breakdown in Italy. He spent three months in a hospital and was discharged in September 1945. He once joked about his military career, "I was the only celebrity who went in and came out a private."
On December 4, 1945, The Raleigh Cigarette Program resumed where it left off with Skelton introducing some new characters, including Bolivar Shagnasty and J. Newton Numbskull. Lurene Tuttle and Verna Felton appeared as Junior's mother and grandmother. David Forrester and David Rose led the orchestra, featuring vocalist Anita Ellis. The announcers were Pat McGeehan and Rod O'Connor. The series ended May 20, 1949, and that fall, he moved to CBS. Ironically, given that his peak of popularity came with his television show, in recent years, recordings of the Red Skelton radio show have become much easier to come by than the TV show.
Television
In 1951, NBC beckoned Skelton to bring his radio show to television. His characters worked even better on screen than on radio; television also provoked him to create his second best-remembered character, Freddie the Freeloader, a traditional tramp whose appearance suggested the elder brother of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus clown Emmett Kelly. Announcer/voice actor Art Gilmore, who voiced numerous movie trailers in Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s, became the announcer on the show with David Rose and his orchestra providing the music. A hit instrumental for Rose, called "Holiday for Strings", was used as Skelton's TV theme song. During the 1951-52 season, Skelton broadcast live from a converted NBC radio studio.[2] When he complained about the pressures of doing a live show, NBC agreed to film his shows in the 1952-53 season at Eagle Lion Studios, next to the Sam Goldwyn Studio, on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood.[3] Then, the show was moved to the new NBC television studios in Burbank. Declining ratings prompted NBC to cancel his show in the spring of 1953. Beginning with the 1953-54 season, Skelton began doing his shows for CBS, where he remained until 1970.[4] Biographer Arthur Marx documented Skelton's personal problems, including heavy drinking, as well as disappointing ratings. An appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show apparently was the beginning of a turnaround for Skelton's television career; he curtailed his drinking and recognized that he did have loyal fans. His ratings at CBS began to improve.
Many of Skelton's television shows have survived due to kinescopes, films and videotapes and have been featured in recent years on PBS television stations. In addition, a number of excerpts from Skelton's television shows have been released on home video in both VHS and DVD formats.
Besides Freddie the Freeloader, Skelton's other television characters included Cauliflower McPugg, Clem Kaddiddlehopper, the Mean Widdle Boy, Sheriff Deadye, George Appleby, and San Fernando Red. Sometimes, during the sketches, Skelton would break up or cause his guest stars to laugh, not only on the live telecasts but the taped programs as well. Skelton's weekly signoff -- "Good night and may God bless" -- became as familiar to television viewers as Edward R. Murrow's "Good night and good luck" or Walter Cronkite's "And that's the way it is".
Skelton was the first CBS television host to begin taping his weekly programs in color, in the early 1960s, after he bought an old movie studio on La Brea Avenue (once owned by Charlie Chaplin) and converted it for television productions. He tried to encourage CBS to tape other shows in color at the facility, although most shows were taped in black and white at Television City near the Farmers Market in Los Angeles. However, CBS boss William S. Paley had generally given up on color television after the network's unsuccessful efforts to receive FCC approval for their "color wheel" system (developed by inventor Peter Goldmark) in the early 1950s. Although CBS occasionally would use NBC facilities or its own small color studio for specials, the network avoided color programming --except for telecasts of The Wizard of Oz and Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella -- until the fall of 1965, when both NBC and ABC began televising most of their programs in RCA's compatible color process. By that time, Skelton had abandoned his own studio and moved to Television City, where he resumed programs until he left the network. In 1962, CBS expanded his programs to a full hour.[5]
At the height of Skelton's popularity, his son was diagnosed with leukemia. In 1957 this was a virtual death sentence for any child. The illness and subsequent death of Richard Skelton at age 13 left Skelton unable to perform for much of the 1957-1958 television season. The show continued with guest hosts that included a very young Johnny Carson. CBS management was exceptionally understanding of Red's situation, and no talk of cancellation was ever entertained by CBS president Paley. Skelton would seemingly turn on CBS and Paley after his show was cancelled by the network in 1970.
Skelton was inducted into the International Clown Hall of Fame in 1989, but as Kadiddlehopper showed, he was more than an interpretive clown. One of his best-known routines was "The Pledge of Allegiance," in which he explained the pledge word by word. Another Skelton staple, a pantomime of the crowd at a small town parade as the American flag passes by, reflected Skelton's essentially conservative, rural, Americana tastes.
Skelton frequently used the art of pantomime for his characters, using few props. He had a hat that he would use for his various bits, a floppy fedora that he would quickly mold into whatever shape was needed for the moment.
In his autobiography Groucho And Me, Groucho Marx, in asserting that comic acting is much more difficult than straight acting, rated Red Skelton's acting ability highly and considered him a worthy successor to Charles Chaplin. One of the last known on-camera interviews with Skelton was conducted by Steven F. Zambo. A small portion of this interview can be seen in the 2005 PBS special The Pioneers of Primetime.
Off the air
Skelton kept his high television ratings into 1970, but he ran into two problems with CBS: demographics showed he no longer appealed to younger viewers, and his contracted annual salary raises grew disproportionately thanks to inflation. Since CBS had earlier decided to keep another longtime favorite, Gunsmoke, whose appeal was strictly to older audiences, it's possible that without Skelton's inflationary contract raises he might have been kept on the air a few more years. However, between 1970 and 1971, CBS moved away from its traditional weekly variety shows hosted by veterans Skelton, Jackie Gleason, Ed Sullivan, and others whom network programmers thought were alienating younger audiences and resulting in lower ratings (see rural purge for more information on this topic). Remarkably, CBS continued with Carol Burnett's highly popular show until 1978, and aired variety programs hosted by younger entertainers such as Sonny and Cher. Years later, Burnett told reporters that network variety shows had become too expensive to bring back today.
He moved to NBC in 1971 for one season in a half-hour Monday night version of his show, then ended his long television career after being canceled by that network.
Skelton was said to be bitter about CBS's cancellation for many years to follow. Ignoring the demographics and salary issues, he bitterly accused CBS of caving in to the anti-establishment, anti-war faction at the height of the Vietnam War, saying his conservative politics and traditional values caused CBS to turn against him. Skelton invited prominent Republicans, including Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen, to appear on his program.
As if the loss of his show was not enough, his wife Georgia committed suicide in 1976, five years after their divorce, and on the anniversary of their son's death years before. This was her second attempt at suicide but this time she made sure with a self-inflicted gun shot wound to the head.
When he was presented with the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences' Governor's Award in 1986, he received a standing ovation. "I want to thank you for sitting down," Skelton said when the ovation subsided. "I thought you were pulling a CBS and walking out on me."
Clown and circus art
Skelton returned to live performance after his television days ended, in nightclubs and casinos and resorts, as well as performing such venues as Carnegie Hall. Many of those shows yielded segments that were edited into part of the Funny Faces video series on HBO's Standing Room Only. He also spent more time on his lifetime love of painting, usually of clown images, and his works began to attract prices over US$80,000.
Red married for a third and last time in 1983 to the much younger Lothian Toland. She continues to maintain a website and business selling Skelton memorabilia and art prints.
In Death Valley Junction, California, Skelton found a kindred spirit when he saw the artwork and pantomime performances of Marta Becket. Today, circus performers painted by Marta Becket decorate the Red Skelton Room in the 23-room Amargosa Hotel, where Skelton stayed four times in Room 22. The room is dedicated to Skelton, as explained by John Mulvihill in his essay "Lost Highway Hotel":
Marta Becket is the magic behind the Amargosa Hotel. For the past 32 years it has provided both a home and a venue for her lifetime ambition: to perform her dance and pantomime works to paying audiences. Since 1968 she's been doing just that, twice a week, audiences or no. The hotel guest's first encounter with Marta is through her paintings in the lobby and dining area. Once she and her husband had upgraded the structure of the hotel and theatre, she make them unique by painting their walls with shimmering frescoes (not real frescoes but the effect is the same) in a style uniquely hers. Some of the paintings are deceptively three-dimensional, like the guitar leaning against a wall that you don't realize is a painting until you reach to pick it up. Some are evocative of carnival art from the early part of this century. All are vibrant, whimsical. If you're lucky, your room will be graced with similar wall paintings. Room 22 is where Red Skelton used to stay. He visited once to catch Marta's show, and like so many others, fell victim to the Amargosa's enchantment and returned again and again. He asked Marta to illustrate his room with circus performers and though he died shortly thereafter, she did so anyway. Staying in this room, with acrobats scaling the walls and trapeze artists flying form the ceiling, is a singularly evocative experience, one I wouldn't trade for a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria.[6][7]
Writing and music
Near the end of his life, Skelton said his daily routine included writing a short story a day. He collected the best stories in self-published chapbooks. He also composed music which he sold to background music services such as Muzak. Among his more notable compositions was his patriotic "Red's White and Blue March."
Red Skelton died in a hospital in Palm Springs, California of pneumonia on September 17, 1997. He was 84 years old. At the time of his death, he lived in Anza, California. He is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
In 2002 during the controversy over the phrase "under God," which had been added to U.S. Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, a recording of a monologue Skelton performed on his 1969 television show resurfaced. In the speech, he commented on the meaning of each phrase of the Pledge. At the end, he added: "Wouldn't it be a pity if someone said that is a prayer and that would be eliminated from schools too?" Given that advocates were arguing that the inclusion of "under God" in a pledge recited daily in U.S. public schools violated the First Amendment separation of church and state, Skelton suddenly regained popularity among religious conservatives who wanted the phrase to remain.
Fraternity
Red Skelton was a Freemason; a member of Vincennes Lodge No. 1 in Indiana. He also was a member of both the Scottish and York Rite. He was the recipient of the General Grand Chapter's Gold Medal for Distinguished Service in the Arts and Sciences.
On September 24, 1969, he was coroneted an Inspector General Honorary 33° Scottish Rite Mason. He was also a member of the Shriners in Los Angeles, California.
Legacy
The Red Skelton Bridge spans the Wabash River and provides the highway link between Illinois and Indiana on U.S. Route 50, near his hometown of Vincennes, Indiana.
At a cost of $16.8 million, Red Skelton Performing Arts Center was built on the Vincennes University campus. It was officially dedicated on Friday, February 24, 2006. The building includes an 850-seat theater, classrooms, rehearsal rooms and dressing rooms. The grand foyer is a gallery for Red Skelton paintings, statues and film posters. In addition to Vincennes University theatrical and musical productions, the theater hosts special events, convocations and conventions. Work is underway on the Red Skelton Gallery and Education Center to house the $3 million collection of Skelton memorabilia donated by Lothian Skelton. [8][9]
The Red Skelton Festival, June 14, 2008 in Vincennes, featured the "Parade of a Thousand Clowns," an Evening of Music with Crystal Gayle and clown seminars.[9] In 2007, restoration was planned for the historic Vincennes Pantheon Theater where Skelton performed during his youth.
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bobsmythhawk
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Fri 18 Jul, 2008 08:10 am
James Brolin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born Craig Kenneth Bruderlin
July 18, 1940 (1940-07-18) (age 68)
Los Angeles, California, USA
Spouse(s) Barbra Streisand (1998-present)
Jan Smithers (1986-1995)
Jane Cameron Agee (1966-1984)
Official website
Awards won
Emmy Awards
Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama
1970 Marcus Welby, M.D.
Golden Globe Awards
Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
1971 Marcus Welby, M.D.
1973 Marcus Welby, M.D.
James Brolin (born July 18, 1940) is a two-time Golden Globe Award-winning and Emmy Award-winning American television, film, character actor, producer, and director, best known for his roles in soap operas, movies, sitcoms, and television.
Biography
Early life
Brolin was born Craig Kenneth Bruderlin in Los Angeles, California, United States, North America. The eldest of two brothers and two sisters, he was the son of Helen Sue (née Mansur), a homemaker, and Henry Bruderlin, a building contractor.[1][2] The family settled in Westwood after his birth. As a young child, he was apparently more interested in animals and airplanes than in acting. When young Bruderlin was 10 in 1950, he began building model airplanes and was taught to fly them. As a teenaged moviegoer in the mid-1950s he was particularly fascinated with actor James Dean. When his parents invited a director over to his family's house for dinner before auditioning, he met another fellow actor and classmate, Ryan O'Neal, who was about a year younger than Brolin, and the two clicked, while the two enrolled in Los Angeles's renowned University High School. However, Bruderlin's own acting exposed his stifling shyness. His assurance grew when O'Neal invited him to a casting agency. Brolin graduated from University in 1958, and his family was already encouraging him to become an actor like O'Neal.
Early career
Prior to taking acting classes in school, Brolin started out as a character actor on an episode of Bus Stop in 1961. The part led to parts in other television productions such as Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Margie, Love, American Style, Twelve O'Clock High and The Long, Hot Summer. He made 3 guest appearances on the popular 1960s series Batman, alongside Adam West and Burt Ward, as well as roles in The Virginian, and Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law alongside Arthur Hill and Lee Majors. He also had a recurring role on the short-lived television series The Monroes.
At the age of 20 he changed his last name from "Bruderlin" to "Brolin" to become James Brolin. He accepted a contract with 20th Century Fox. While in school struggling to make it big, he met future young actor Clint Eastwood. Brolin also had small roles in several movies including Take Her, She's Mine (1963), Dear Brigitte (1965), Fantastic Voyage (1966). The following year, his first big role was in The Cape Town Affair (1967), but it did not receive any success at the box office. Brolin was ultimately fired by 20th Century Fox.
Film work
During the 1970s, the 6 ft 4 inch Brolin began appearing in leading roles in films, including Skyjacked (1972), and Westworld (1973). By the mid-1970s, he was a regular leading man in films, starring in Gable and Lombard (1976), The Car (1977), Capricorn One (1978), The Amityville Horror (1979) and High Risk (1981). When Roger Moore expressed his desire to leave the role of James Bond, Brolin screen tested for the role in the next film Octopussy (1983). Ultimately, however, Moore decided to continue in the series.
In 1985, Brolin parodied his near-hiring as James Bond in the film Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. In a film within the film, he merged the characters of Bond and Pee-Wee Herman, the "real" version of whom was played by Paul Reubens. He is referred to as "PW" and the role of Pee-Wee Herman's girlfriend "Dottie" is played by Morgan Fairchild.
Television roles
Brolin has starred in three television series in a career which has spanned four decades. He became widely-known for his roles as Robert Young's, youthful skilled and professional physician, Dr. Steven Kiley on Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969-1976), Peter McDermott on Hotel (1983-1988), and Lt. Col. Bill "Raven" Kelly on Pensacola: Wings of Gold (1997-2000). He also had a recurring role as Governor and presidential candidate Robert Ritchie in The West Wing.
In 1968, Brolin transferred to Universal Studios, where he auditioned for a co-starring role opposite longtime actor Robert Young in the popular medical drama Marcus Welby, M.D.. The series was one of the top-rated television shows of the day. Brolin won the role of Dr. Steven Kiley, a young doctor working with another more experienced doctor, and the chemistry between Young & Brolin clicked, and even came to attractive young women on medical terms, throughout the show's run. In its first season in 1970, Brolin won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role, and was subsequently nominated three more times. He was also nominated for Golden Globes three times for Best Supporting Actor, and won twice between 1971 and 1973.
In 1983, Brolin returned to television to star in another popular series. He teamed up with producer Aaron Spelling for the pilot episode of a prime-time soap opera, Hotel, for ABC. On this show, he played Peter MacDermott, a hotel manager who tried to help everybody solve their own problems and to let love in his own life at the same time. Co-starring on the show was an unfamiliar actress, Shari Belafonte as Peter's receptionist, Julie Gillette, familiar actress, Connie Sellecca, as Brolin's promotions manager and later girlfriend, Christine Francis, and the late Nathan Cook as Billy Griffin, an ex-con who later became Peter's best friend. Together, they each had a wonderful chemistry with Brolin, on the set. As with Marcus Welby, this show was a ratings winner. In his first year, Brolin was nominated twice for Golden Globes between 1983 and 1984 for Best Performance By an Actor in a TV Series, but didn't win. He would also serve as a director on the show, giving him more input into the direction of the series. On one episode of Hotel, he even invited his future wife Jan Smithers to guest-star on the show as the writers suggested that they developed a storyline for them, as Brolin was going through a difficult divorce. By 1988, after 5 seasons, Hotel was about to close its doors for good and the show was cancelled. That same year, his co-star, Cook had died of an allergic reaction to penicillin, and Brolin among the rest of his cast attended his funeral.
Sellecca said of Brolin's on-screen chemistry with him on Hotel, "I remember instantly feeling comfortable with Jim, and that's the thing that Jim has is to women, most women, they need to feel safe, and Jim gets that." She also said, "To have him in a different role and have that confidence, it was a wonderful experience." The 1995 death of Brolin's first wife, Jane, had drawn the relationship closer between the actor himself & Sellecca, as Connie was one of the people to find out about this.
As the new decade approached, Brolin starred in both Angel Falls for CBS and Extreme for ABC, although neither matched the popularity of his earlier series.
In 1997, Brolin's luck changed with the syndicated television series Pensacola: Wings of Gold. He played the role of Lt. Col. Bill "Raven" Kelly, whose job was to teach young marines in a special unit, before being promoted to work with a group of talented Marine fighter pilots. Brolin served as an executive producer and director on the series. In 2000, however, the show was cancelled after 66 episodes due to low ratings.
Recent work
In late 2003, he was supposed to play Ronald Reagan in the TV movie The Reagans. After creative differences, bad scripts, and high rising costs, CBS decided to scrap The Reagans, but then chose to move it to cable channel Showtime, also owned by Viacom. Brolin was nominated for another Emmy Award, making it his fifth Emmy nomination and a Golden Globe making it also his fifth, although he didn't win. He co-starred with Jason Lee and Selma Blair in the comedy movie A Guy Thing (2003), and made two films in 2005, The Alibi and The American Standards.
In 2002, Brolin played Governor Robert Ritchie of Florida, the Republican opponent of President Jed Bartlet on the TV series The West Wing. In Bartlet's words, he had "turned being unengaged into a Zen-like thing" and seemed to enjoy it. The character seemed to be a parody of real-life President George W. Bush, whose brother, John Ellis "Jeb" Bush, was the Governor of Florida at the time.
In 2006, Brolin played the Governor of Maine, who in order to get re-elected, opposes the legalization of gay marriage, in the A&E Network movie Wedding Wars.
Hobbies
James has 12 hobbies: watching movies, riding horses, sailing, fishing, farming, playing guitar, photography, auto racing, petting animals, spending time with his family, and riding motorcycles.[citation needed] According to an A&E Biography, it was mentioned that Brolin also did a lot of flying in real-life, and on Pensacola: Wings of Gold.
Quotes
James on winning his first Emmy Award in 1970 for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series: "Well, you start these shows out with a bang, don't you? Well, I ... I had no speech. I ... started to write one and my wife came in and asked me, what I was doing. I said I was writing a speech. And she said, 'What for? You haven't got a chance in hell!' But here I am. Geez!" (Source: A&EBiography.com)
James: "I think you can have a whole terrific, smart career as a second and third banana and work more and have much less risk than the lead guy. But I like being the lead guy." (Source: A&EBiography.com)
James as a director: "One of the things I love about directing is I love actors, because no matter how complex they are, once you get down to working and talking to them and the toughest guy will want you to open them up and he wants to show you stuff he was afraid to show anybody before." (Source: A&EBiography.com)
Josh on his father's hellish 1st marriage: "My father is so passive and my mother was so aggressive that it became a joke. He'd be watering the plants kind of glassy-eyed; my mother would be screaming some obscenity about something to someone. It became like a Norman Rockwell gone wrong." (Source: A&EBiography.com)
James on his wife's car crash: "I think it was she was avoiding a deer. I was surprised, and oh, I was affected. Yeah, I was really ripped up." (Source: A&EBiography.com)
James, when asked if he'd be interested in dating Barbra Streisand: "I said, 'Ah, I don't need .... I don't need another involvement, you know? But OK, yeah, ah, she's real interesting. I'm going, 'How do I get out of this?' And it was ... I think it's just fear and not knowing whether you want to get involved with anybody or ... and she did exactly the same thing." (Source: A&EBiography.com)
James: "I spent most of the money I made on phone calls." (Source: A&E Biography.com)
James Brolin was on the Chaz & AJ Show to promote his new movie "The Hunting Party". When the radio hosts mentioned it was the sixth anniversary of 9/11, Brolin responded: "Right! Oh yeah. Oh Happy 9/11!" Brolin was later criticised for his tactless comments on national news and by the radio hosts.
Personal life
Brolin resides in Malibu, California with his wife, Barbara Streisand. He has been married three times.
In 1966, Brolin married Jane Cameron Agee, an aspiring actress at Twentieth Century Fox. The couple had 2 children, Josh (1968), and Jesse (1972). They were divorced in 1984, after 18 years of marriage. Jane died in a car accident on February 13, 1995, one day after son Josh's 27th birthday.
In 1985, Brolin met Jan Smithers, an actress, on the set of Hotel, and they married in 1986. The couple had a daughter, Molly Elizabeth (1987). Jan Smithers filed for divorce from Brolin in 1995, a few weeks after the death of his first wife, Jane.
In 1996, Brolin met the singer and actress Barbra Streisand through a friend, and the two were married on July 1, 1998.
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bobsmythhawk
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Fri 18 Jul, 2008 08:12 am
Ricky Skaggs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Background information
Birth name Ricky Lee Skaggs
Born July 18, 1954 (1954-07-18) (age 54)
Lawrence County, Kentucky, United States
Genre(s) Country, bluegrass
Occupation(s) Singer-songwriter, session musician, bandleader, producer, arranger
Instrument(s) singer, mandolin, guitar, banjo, fiddle
Years active 1960s-present
Label(s) Sugar Hill, Epic, Rounder, DCC, Atlantic, Camden, Rebel, Hollywood, Legacy, Skaggs Family
Associated acts Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys, J. D. Crowe and New South, Emmylou Harris and the Hot Band, The Whites, Kentucky Thunder, Bruce Hornsby
Website http://www.skaggsfamilyrecords.com/
Richard Lee Skaggs (born July 18, 1954, in Lawrence County, Kentucky) is a Grammy-winning country and bluegrass singer, musician, producer, and composer. He plays fiddle, guitar, banjo, and, primarily, mandolin.
Biography
Early career
Ricky Skaggs started playing music after he was given a mandolin by his father. At age 6, he played mandolin on stage with Bill Monroe. At age 7, he appeared on television's Martha White country music variety show, playing with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. He also wanted to audition for the Grand Ole Opry at that time, but was told he was too young.
In his mid-teens, Skaggs met a fellow teen prodigy, fiddler Keith Whitley, and the two started playing together with Whitley's banjoist brother Dwight on radio shows. By 1970, they had earned a spot opening for Ralph Stanley and Skaggs and Keith Whitley were thereafter invited to join Stanley's band, the Clinch Mountain Boys
Skaggs later joined J. D. Crowe's New South. For a few years, Skaggs was a member of Emmylou Harris's Hot Band. He wrote the arrangements for Harris's 1980 bluegrass-roots album, Roses in the Snow. In addition to arranging for Harris, Skaggs sang harmony and played mandolin and fiddle.
Move to Nashville
Skaggs moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1980 and was signed to Epic Records, where he produced his debut album, Waitin' For The Sun to Shine. The album produced four successful singles, including two number one hits with "Cryin' My Heart Out Over You" and "I Don't Care" in 1982, songs that sparked the birth of the neotraditional country movement.
Skaggs' lifelong dream of joining the Grand Ole Opry finally became reality in 1982. He racked up 12 number one hits and six top 10 singles during the 1980s. Skaggs picked up dozens of industry awards in the ensuing years, including four Grammy Awards and eight awards from the Country Music Association including Entertainer of the Year in 1985.
He married Sharon White of the family group The Whites in 1982. Together they have two children, a daughter Molly Kate and a son Lucas. Ricky also has a son, Andrew, and a daughter, Mandy, from his first marriage.
Neotraditionalism and experimentation
Into the 1990s and 2000s, Skaggs has embraced his bluegrass roots, as well as experimenting with new sounds. With his band, Kentucky Thunder, he is a perennial winner of Grammy Awards and International Bluegrass Music Association for best bluegrass album.
"I always want to try to promote the old music, as well as trying to grow, and be a pioneer too," Skaggs once said.[citation needed]
In 2000, he shared the stage with the now defunct jam band, Phish.[citation needed] On March 20, 2007, Skaggs released an album with rock musician Bruce Hornsby.
In 2007, Skaggs is slated to release an album he recorded with The Whites on his Skaggs Family Records label.
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bobsmythhawk
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Fri 18 Jul, 2008 08:16 am
Elizabeth McGovern
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born July 18, 1961 (1961-07-18) (age 47)
Evanston, Illinois, United States
Spouse(s) Simon Curtis (1992-present)
Awards won
Academy Awards
Best Supporting Actress (Nominated)
1981 Ragtime
Golden Globe Awards
New Star of the Year in a Motion Picture (Nominated)
1981 Ragtime
Elizabeth McGovern (born July 18, 1961) is an Academy Award-nominated American film and theater actress, who later became a singer songwriter. In 1992, she married English producer and director Simon Curtis, with whom she lives in Chiswick, London, together with their two daughters.
McGovern was born in Evanston, Illinois, the daughter of Katharine Woolcot (née Watts), a high school teacher, and William Montgomery McGovern, a university professor.[1] Her family moved to Los Angeles, where her father accepted a position with UCLA. Elizabeth McGovern is the older sister of novelist and writer, Cammie McGovern.
McGovern started acting in plays in high school. Agent Joan Scott saw her performance in The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder, was impressed by her talent, and recommended that she take acting lessons. McGovern followed her advice and studied, first at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, and then at The Juilliard School in New York City.
Career
While studying at Juilliard, she was offered in 1980 a part in her first movie, Ordinary People, in which she played the girlfriend of troubled teenager Timothy Hutton. It was also Robert Redford's first film as director. The movie won four Oscars. The next year she earned an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of the early 20th century actress Evelyn Nesbit in the movie Ragtime.
The following year she completed her education as an actress at the American Conservatory Theatre and at The Juilliard School, and began to act in theater plays, first off-Broadway and later in famous theaters.
Since then she has continued performing on stage between film assignments rather than concentrating on becoming a film star. As a movie actress, big-eyed and slightly baby-faced, McGovern gave preference to eccentric roles over those parts typically tailored for actresses of her age. In 1989 she played Mickey Rourke's sweet girlfriend in Johnny Handsome, directed by Walter Hill, and the same year she appeared as a rebellious lesbian in Volker Schlöndorff's thriller The Handmaid's Tale.
Summing up her screen career in 1991, film critic David Quinlan wrote: "After a striking debut at 19, she has proved not quite forceful enough to become a big star. On the tall side, she has been described by one of her directors as 'talented, intelligent. committed and complex', atrributes that should keep her busy even if she's not set to become a box office power."[2]
Television
Besides cinema and theater, she has also played in several television films, the most recent, a Law & Order segment, Harm, in which she played a psychiatrist, Dr. Sutton.
She has listed her television work as including Broken Glass (Arthur Miller, 1996); Tales from the Crypt; The Changeling; Tales from Hollywood; HBO Men and Women series; The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt; Faerie Tale Theatre - Snow White; and If Not For You (CBS 1995, own series).
In May 2007, McGovern played Ellen Doubleday, Daphne du Maurier's lesbian lover, in Daphne, a BBC2 television drama by Amy Jenkins, based on Margaret Forster's biography of the author.[3]
In the same year she appeared in a three-part BBC comedy series, the metrocentric Freezing, written by James Wood and directed and co-produced by her husband Simon Curtis. First broadcast on BBC Four, it received a further three consecutive evening transmissions on BBC2 in February 2008. In it she played an American expat actress Elizabeth, living in Chiswick with her publisher husband, played by Hugh Bonneville and co-starring Tom Hollander as her theatrical agent.
Music
Music has now taken over as McGovern's ruling passion.[4] In 2008 she became a singer songwriter, fronting the band Sadie and the Hotheads at The Castle pub venue in Balham. They also released an album of a selection of songs she has developed with The Nelson Brothers, musicians and producers, who are now part of the band; plus Ron Knights on bass and Rowan Oliver, borrowed from Goldfrapp, as drummer for the recording sessions.
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bobsmythhawk
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Fri 18 Jul, 2008 08:17 am
Things Children Have Learned
No matter how hard you try, you can't baptize cats.
When your Mom is mad at your dad, don't let her brush your hair.
If your sister hits you, don't hit her back. They always catch the second
person.
Never ask your 3-year old brother to hold a tomato.
You can't trust dogs to watch your food.
Reading what people write on desks can teach you a lot.
Don't sneeze when someone is cutting your hair.
Puppies still have bad breath even after eating a tic-tac.
Never hold a dust buster and a cat at the same time.
School lunches stick to the wall.
You can't hide a piece of broccoli in a glass of milk.
Don't wear polka-dot underwear under white shorts.
The best place to be when you are sad is in Grandma's lap.
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firefly
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Fri 18 Jul, 2008 08:19 am
Similar to edgar's experience with Jerry Butler and Moon River (which was great BTW), my first hearing of this song wasn't the Righteous Brothers, it was this version, which was the original. He had a great voice.
Dutchy, loved that dance and that music. WOW! Thanks eagle man.
firefly, I always recognize Ertha by that vibrato, and that was a great song. I love the way she pantomimes evil with her gesticulations.
Strange, however, I didn't know that The Righteous Brothers did that one, dear. Love to learn here.
Bob, Thanks for the definition and etymology of pyrrhic victory. I kinda knew that. Your observations about what children learn early in life is soooo right. Once again we are in debt to you for the great bio's.
Here is a wonderful tribute to Red who was so great, but who had such a tragic life.
