Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born 6 August 1809(1809-08-06)
Somersby, Lincolnshire, England
Died 6 October 1892 (aged 83)
London, England
Occupation Poet laureate
Influences
William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (6 August 1809 - 6 October 1892) was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom and remains one of the most popular English poets.
Much of his verse was based on classical mythological themes, although In Memoriam was written to commemorate his best friend Arthur Hallam, a fellow poet and classmate at Trinity College, Cambridge, who was engaged to Tennyson's sister, but died from a cerebral hemorrhage before they were married. One of Tennyson's most famous works is Idylls of the King (1885), a series of narrative poems based on King Arthur and the Arthurian tales, as thematically suggested by Sir Thomas Malory's earlier tales on the legendary king. The work was dedicated to Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria. During his career, Lord Tennyson attempted drama, but his plays enjoyed little success in his lifetime.
Tennyson wrote a number of phrases that have become commonplaces of the English language, including: "nature, red in tooth and claw", "better to have loved and lost", "Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die", and "My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure". He is the second most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare.[1]
Early life
Alfred Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, a rector's son and fourth of 12 children. He was one of the descendants of King Edward III of England.[2] Reportedly, "the pedigree of his grandfather, George Tennyson, is traced back to the middle-class line of the Tennysons, and through Elizabeth Clayton ten generations back to Edmund, Duke of Somerset, and farther back to Edward III."[3]
His father, George Clayton Tennyson (1778-1831), was a rector for Somersby (1807-1831), also rector of Benniworth and Bag Enderby, and vicar of Grimsby (1815). The reverend was the elder of two sons, but was disinherited at an early age by his own father, the landowner George Tennyson (1750-1835) (who belonged to the Lincolnshire gentry as the owner of Bayons Manor and Usselby Hall),[3] in favour of his younger brother Charles, who later took the name Charles Tennyson d'Eyncourt. Rev. George Clayton Tennyson raised a large family and "was a man of superior abilities and varied attainments, who tried his hand with fair success in architecture, painting, music, and poetry."[3] Rev. Tennyson was "comfortably well off for a country clergyman and his shrewd money management enabled the family to spend summers at Mablethorpe and Skegness, on the eastern coast of England."[3] His mother, Elizabeth Fytche (1781-1865) was the daughter of Stephen Fytche (1734-1799), vicar of Louth (1764) and rector of Withcall (1780), a small village between Horncastle and Louth.[3] Tennyson's father "carefully attended to the education and training of his children."[3]
Tennyson and two of his elder brothers were writing poetry in their teens, and a collection of poems by all three was published locally when Alfred was only 17. One of those brothers, Charles Tennyson Turner later married Louisa Sellwood, the younger sister of Alfred's future wife; the other poet brother was Frederick Tennyson.
Education and first publication
Tennyson was first a student of Louth Grammar School for four years (1816-1820)[3] and then attended Scaitcliffe School, Englefield Green and King Edward VI Grammar School, Louth. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1828, where he joined the secret society called the Cambridge Apostles. At Cambridge Tennyson met Arthur Henry Hallam, who became his best friend. His first publication was a collection of "his boyish rhymes and those of his elder brother Charles" entitled Poems by Two Brothers published in 1827.[3]
In 1829 he was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, on "Timbuctoo".[4][5] Reportedly, "it was thought to be no slight honor for a young man of twenty to win the chancellor's gold medal."[3] He published his first solo collection of poems, Poems Chiefly Lyrical in 1830. "Claribel" and "Mariana", which later took their place among Tennyson's most celebrated poems, were included in this volume. Although decried by some critics as over sentimental, his verse soon proved popular and brought Tennyson to the attention of well-known writers of the day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Return to Lincolnshire and second publication
In the spring of 1831, Tennyson's father died, requiring him to leave Cambridge before taking his degree. He returned to the rectory, where he was permitted to live for another six years, and shared responsibility for his widowed mother and her large brood. His friend Arthur Hallam came to stay with him during the summer and became engaged to Tennyson's sister, Emilia Tennyson.
In 1833, Tennyson published his second book of poetry, which included his well-known poem, The Lady of Shalott. The volume met heavy criticism, which so discouraged Tennyson that he did not publish again for 10 more years, although he continued to write. That same year, Hallam suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while on vacation in Vienna and died. It devastated Alfred, but inspired him to produce a body of poetry that has come to be seen as among the world's finest and best poems. However, roughly a decade of poetic silence followed Hallam's death.
Tennyson and his family were allowed to stay in the rectory for some time, but later moved to Essex. An unwise investment in an ecclesiastical wood-carving enterprise soon led to the loss of much of the family fortune.
Third publication and recognition
In 1842, while living modestly in London, Tennyson published two volumes of Poems, the first of which included works already published and the second of which was made up almost entirely of new poems. They met with immediate success. Poems from this collection, such as Locksley Hall, "Tithonus", and "Ulysses" have met enduring fame. The Princess: A Medley, a satire of women's education, which came out in 1847, was also popular. W. S. Gilbert later adapted and parodied the piece twice: in The Princess (1870) and in Princess Ida (1884).
It was in 1850 that Tennyson reached the pinnacle of his career, finally publishing his masterpiece, In Memoriam A.H.H., dedicated to Hallam. Later the same year he was appointed Poet Laureate in succession to William Wordsworth. In the same year (June 13), Tennyson married Emily Sellwood, whom he had known since childhood, in the village of Shiplake. They had two sons, Hallam (b. Aug. 11, 1852) ?- named after his friend ?- and Lionel (b. March 16, 1854).
The Poet Laureate
After William Wordsworth's death in 1850, Tennyson succeeded to the position of Poet Laureate, which he held until his own death in 1892. He fulfilled the requirements of this position by turning out appropriate but often uninspired verse, such as a poem of greeting to Alexandra of Denmark when she arrived in Britain to marry the future King Edward VII. In 1855, Tennyson produced one of his best known works, "The Charge of the Light Brigade," a dramatic tribute to the British cavalrymen involved in an ill-advised charge on 25 October 1854, during the Crimean War. Other esteemed works written in the post of Poet Laureate include Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington and Ode Sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition.
Queen Victoria was an ardent admirer of Tennyson's work, and in 1884 created him Baron Tennyson, of Aldworth in the County of Sussex and of Freshwater in the Isle of Wight. Tennyson initially declined a baronetcy in 1865 and 1868 (when tendered by Disraeli), finally accepting a peerage in 1883 at Gladstone's earnest solicitation. He took his seat in the House of Lords on 11 March 1884.[3]
Tennyson's life at Freshwater features in Virginia Woolf's play of the same name, in which Tennyson mingles with his friend Julia Margaret Cameron and G.F.Watts. He was the first English writer raised to the Peerage. A passionate man with some peculiarities of nature, he was never particularly comfortable as a peer, and it is widely held that he took the peerage in order to secure a future for his son Hallam. Recordings exist of Lord Tennyson declaiming his own poetry, which were made by Thomas Edison, but they are of relatively poor quality.
Towards the end of his life Tennyson revealed that his "religious beliefs also defied convention, leaning towards agnosticism and pandeism":[6] Famously, he wrote in In Memoriam: "There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds." In Maud, 1855, he wrote: "The churches have killed their Christ." In "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," Tennyson wrote: "Christian love among the churches look'd the twin of heathen hate." In his play, Becket, he wrote: "We are self-uncertain creatures, and we may, Yea, even when we know not, mix our spites and private hates with our defence of Heaven." Tennyson recorded in his Diary (p. 127): "I believe in Pantheism of a sort." His son's biography confirms that Tennyson was not Christian, noting that Tennyson praised Giordano Bruno and Spinoza on his deathbed, saying of Bruno: "His view of God is in some ways mine." D. 1892.[7]
Tennyson continued writing into his eighties, and died on 6 October 1892, aged 83. He was buried at Westminster Abbey. He was succeeded as 2nd Baron Tennyson by his son, Hallam, who produced an authorised biography of his father in 1897, and was later the second Governor-General of Australia.
Throughout his career some anthologists have noted subtle anti-American undertones in his work. Tennyson never denied the underlying themes when questioned about them.[citation needed]
Relationship with Arthur Hallam
Tennyson's poetry describing his tormented soul established him as the greatest poet of his day. The focus of his suffering was the grief he could not assuage over the death of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam, whom he met while an undergraduate. The men formed a relationship of such intensity that the word 'love' is barely adequate to describe it. When Hallam died suddenly in 1833, Tennyson was more than bereft; he entered a state of mourning and melancholia which was to last for 20 years, resolved finally by the completion of his masterpiece In Memoriam A.H.H., a long poem detailing the 'voyage of his soul', as the poet himself described it, from despair to resignation and acceptance.[8]
Tennyson's love for Hallam has remained until recent decades critically sacrosanct, the ideal friendship, a relationship of platonic perfection. This was partly the result of the prudery of academic scholars, but also because all the letters between Hallam and Tennyson were burned by Hallam's father immediately after his son's death and because Tennyson's eldest son, his literary executor and first biographer, Hallam Tennyson, destroyed many more letters after his father's death. In Memoriam was viewed as a metaphysical poem laden with symbolic and allegorical meaning. Only since the reprinting of his early poems, have critics begun to re-examine the nature of Tennyson's love for Hallam. Now it seems clear that their relationship was both passionate and romantic, though it is doubtful that it was ever consummated.[9]
Tennyson's love for Hallam was likely to have been homosexual but did not seem to occasion any sense of remorse or guilt, or a sense of the illicit. The idea of homosexuality denoting a psychological identity did not yet exist, and since the men were most likely chaste,[9] they had nothing to reproach themselves for, regarding the sin of sodomy. To the end of his days, and literally on his deathbed, Tennyson would proclaim that the greatest love of his life, the love that 'surpassed the love of women', was Hallam.[10]
The art of Tennyson's poetry
Tennyson used a wide range of subject matter, ranging from medieval legends to classical myths and from domestic situations to observations of nature, as source material for his poetry. The influence of John Keats and other Romantic poets published before and during his childhood is evident from the richness of his imagery and descriptive writing. He also handled rhythm masterfully. The insistent beat of Break, Break, Break emphasizes the sadness and relentlessness of the subject matter. Tennyson's use of the musical qualities of words to emphasize his rhythms and meanings is sensitive. The language of "I come from haunts of coot and hern" lilts and ripples like the brook in the poem and the last two lines of "Come down O maid from yonder mountain height" illustrate his telling combination of onomatopoeia, alliteration and assonance:
The moan of doves in immemorial elms
And murmuring of innumerable bees.
Tennyson was a craftsman who polished and revised his manuscripts extensively. Few poets have used such a variety of styles with such an exact understanding of metre. He reflects the Victorian period of his maturity in his feeling for order and his tendency towards moralizing and self-indulgent melancholy. He also reflects a concern common among Victorian writers in being troubled by the apparent conflict between religious faith and scientific progress. Like many writers who write a great deal over a long time, he can be pompous or banal, and his personality rings throughout all his works?-work that reflects a grand and special variability in its quality. Tennyson possessed the strongest poetic power; he put great length into many works, most famous of which are Maud and Idylls of the King, the latter one of literature's greatest treatments of the legend of King Arthur and The Knights of the Round Table.
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Wed 6 Aug, 2008 07:06 am
Leo Carrillo
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born Leopoldo Antonio Carrillo
August 6, 1880(1880-08-06)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Died September 10, 1961 (aged 81) (age 81)
Santa Monica, California, United States
Years active 1915-1957
Spouse(s) Edith Haeselbarth (1940-1953)
Leopoldo Antonio Carrillo (August 6, 1880 - September 10, 1961), was an actor, vaudevillian, political cartoonist, and conservationist.
Biography
Family roots
Although he played stereotypical Latinos, Leo Carrillo was part of an old and respected Californio family who could trace their roots back to the conquistadores. His great-great grandfather, José Raimundo Carrillo (1749-1809) was an early Spanish settler of San Diego, California. His great-grandfather Carlos Antonio Carrillo (1783-1852) was Governor of Alta California from 1837 to 1838, his great-uncle, José Antonio Carrillo, was a Californio defender and three-time mayor of Los Angeles, and his grandfather Pedro Carrillo, educated in Boston, was a writer.
Early history
The family moved from San Diego to Los Angeles then to Santa Monica, where Carrillo's father Juan José Carrillo (1842-1916), served as the city's police chief and later the first mayor. His cousin was Broadway star William Gaxton (real name Arturo Antonio Gaxiola). Proud of his heritage, Leo Carrillo wrote a book, The California I Love, published shortly before his death in 1961.
Career
A university graduate, Leo Carrillo worked as a newspaper cartoonist for the San Francisco Examiner before turning to acting on Broadway . In Hollywood, he appeared in more than 90 films, in which he played supporting or character roles. However, he is best remembered from the television show The Cisco Kid, on which he portrayed Pancho, a role he had previously played in several films. Duncan Renaldo starred as the Cisco Kid. The popular TV series ran from 1950 until 1956.
Civic contributions
A preservationist and conservationist, Carrillo served on the California Beach and Parks commission for eighteen years, and played a key role in the state's acquisition of Hearst Castle at San Simeon, the Los Angeles Arboretum, and the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. He was eventually made a goodwill ambassador by the State Governor.
As a result of his service to the State, the Leo Carrillo State Park, west of Malibu on the Pacific Coast Highway, was named in his honor, and the city of Westminster, California named an elementary school for him. The Leo Carrillo Ranch Historic Park originally Rancho de los Qiotes, in Carlsbad, California is a registered California Historical Site.
Death
Leo Carrillo died of cancer in 1961 and was interred in the Woodlawn Memorial Cemetery in Santa Monica.
Legacy
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Leo Carrillo has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1635 Vine Street.
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bobsmythhawk
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Wed 6 Aug, 2008 07:09 am
Hoot Gibson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born Edmund Richard Gibson
August 6, 1892
Tekamah, Nebraska USA
Died August 23, 1962
Los Angeles, California USA
Occupation Actor
Years active 1910 - 1960
Hoot Gibson (August 6, 1892 - August 23, 1962) was a rodeo champion and a pioneer cowboy film actor, film director and producer.
Early life and career rise
Born Edmund Richard Gibson in Tekamah, Nebraska, he learned to ride a horse while still a very young boy. His family moved to California when he was seven years old. As a teenager he worked with horses on a ranch, which led to competition on bucking broncos at area rodeos. Given the nickname "Hoot Owl" by co-workers, the name evolved to just "Hoot".
In 1910, film director Francis Boggs was looking for experienced cowboys to appear in his silent film short, Pride of the Range. Gibson and another future star of Western films, Tom Mix, were hired. Gibson made a second film for Boggs in 1911. After the director was killed by a deranged employee, Gibson was hired by director Jack Conway to appear in his 1912 Western, His Only Son.
Acting for Gibson was then a minor sideline and he continued competing in rodeos to make a living. In 1912 he won the all-around championship at the famous Pendleton Round-Up in Pendleton, Oregon and the steer roping World Championship at the Calgary Stampede.
World War I and increased interest in 'Cowboy Films'
Gibson's career was temporarily interrupted with service in the United States Army during World War I. When the war ended, he returned to the rodeo business and became good friends with Art Acord, a fellow cowboy and movie actor. The two participated in summer rodeo then went back to Hollywood for the winter to do stunt work. For several years, Gibson had secondary film roles (primarily in Westerns) with stars such as Harry Carey. By 1921 the demand for cowboy pictures was so great that Gibson began receiving offers for leading roles. Some of these offers came from up-and-coming film director John Ford, with whom Gibson developed a lasting friendship and working relationship.
Marriage, divorce, financial difficulties and later life
Hoot Gibson apparently (but unconfirmedly) married Rose August Wenger, a rodeo performer he had met at the Pendleton Round-Up in Oregon sometime between 1911 and 1913. Under the name Helen Gibson, she would become a major film star in her own right for a time, notably in the lead role of The Hazards of Helen adventure film serial. Census records for 1920 indicate that they were living separately, Hoot Gibson listing himself as married, Helen listing herself as widowed.[1]
Following their separation/divorce, Hoot met a young woman named Helen Johnson, whom he did marry in either 1920 or 1922 and with whom he had one child, Lois Charlotte Gibson. They divorced in 1930. The fact that Hoot Gibson was married to two consecutive women who used the name Helen Gibson in some fashion has led to a good deal of confusion.
From the 1920s through the 1940s, Hoot Gibson was a major film attraction, ranking second only to Tom Mix as a western film box office draw. He successfully made the transition to talkies and as a result became a highly paid performer. He appeared in his own comic books and was wildly popular until singing cowboys such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers displaced him.
In 1933, Hoot injured himself when he crashed his plane while racing cowboy star Ken Maynard in the National Air Races. Later, the two friends teamed up to make a series of low budget movies in the twilight of their careers. After his divorce from Helen Johnson Gibson, Hoot had a brief marriage to film actress Sally Eilers. That marriage ended in 1933.
Hoot married a final time, to Dorothy Dunstan, on July 3, 1942. His wife would survive him.
Gibson's years of substantial earnings did not see him through his retirement. He had squandered much of his income on high living and poor investments.
By the 1950s, Gibson faced financial ruin, aided in part by costly medical bills from serious health problems. To get by and pay his bills, he earned money as a greeter at a Las Vegas casino. For a time, he worked in a carnival and took virtually any job his dwindling name value could obtain.
Hoot Gibson died of cancer in 1962 in Woodland Hills, California and was interred in the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California.
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Hoot Gibson has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1765 Vine Street. In 1979, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
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Wed 6 Aug, 2008 07:19 am
Lucille Ball
from Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lucille Ball (August 6, 1911 - April 26, 1989) was an iconic American comedienne, film, television, stage and radio actress, glamour girl, film executive, and star of the landmark sitcoms I Love Lucy, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy. Lucille Ball was one of the most popular stars in America during her lifetime and had one of Hollywood's longest careers.[1] She was a movie star from the 1930s to the 1970s, and appeared on television for more than thirty years.
Ball received thirteen Emmy Award nominations and four wins.[2] She was the recipient of the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1979, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kennedy Center Honors in 1986 and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Governors Award in 1989.[3]
In 1929, Ball landed work as a model and later began her performing career on Broadway using the stage name "Diane Belmont". She appeared in many small movie roles in the 1930s as a contract player for RKO Radio Pictures. Ball was labeled as the "Queen of the B's" (referring to her many roles in B-films). In 1951, Ball was pivotal in the creation of the television series I Love Lucy. The show co-starred her then husband, Desi Arnaz as Ricky Ricardo and Vivian Vance and William Frawley as Ethel and Fred Mertz, the Ricardos' lovable landlords. After the show ended in 1960, Ball went on to star in two more successful television series: The Lucy Show, which ran on CBS from 1962 to 1968, and Here's Lucy from 1968 to 1974. Her last attempt at a television series was a 1986 show called Life With Lucy. The show proved to be a critical and commercial flop which was canceled less than two months into its run by ABC.[4]
Ball met and eloped with Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz in 1940. On July 17, 1951, Ball gave birth to their first child, Lucie Desiree Arnaz.[5] A year and a half later, Ball gave birth to their second child, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV, known as Desi Arnaz, Jr.[6] Ball and Arnaz divorced on May 4, 1960. On April 26, 1989, Ball died of a Heart Attack at age 77.[7] At the time of her death, she had been married to her second husband, standup comedian and business partner Gary Morton, for twenty-eight years.[8]
Biography
Early life and career
Lucille Désirée Ball was born to Henry Durrell Ball (September 16, 1886 - February 28, 1915) and Desiree "DeDe" Evelyn Hunt (September 21, 1892 -July 20, 1977) in Jamestown, New York, and grew up in the adjacent small town of Celoron. Although Lucy was born in Jamestown, she told many people that she was born in Butte, Montana.[9] Her family was Baptist; her father was of Scottish descent, whose mother was Mary Ball.[10] Her mother was of French, Irish and English descent.[11] Her genealogy can be traced back to the earliest settlers in the colonies.[12]
Her father, a telephone lineman for Anaconda Copper, was frequently transferred because of his occupation, and within three years of her birth, Lucille had moved many times, from Jamestown to Anaconda, Montana, and then to Wyandotte, Michigan.[13] While DeDe Ball was pregnant with her second child, Frederick, Henry Ball contracted typhoid fever and died in February 1915.[14] After her father died, Ball and her brother Fred were raised by her mother and grandparents.[15] Her grandfather, Fred C. Hunt, was an eccentric socialist who also enjoyed the theater. He frequently took the family to vaudeville shows and encouraged young Lucy to take part in both her own and school plays.[16]
In 1927, Ball dated a gangster's son by the name of Johnny DeVita. Because of this relationship, her mother decided to ship Ball off to the John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts in New York City.[17] There, Ball attended with fellow actress, Bette Davis. Ball went home a few weeks later when drama coaches told her that she "had no future at all as a performer".[18]
Ball was determined to prove her teachers wrong and returned to New York City in 1929. She landed work as a fashion model. Her career was thriving, when she became ill with rheumatoid arthritis and could not work for two years.[19] She moved back to New York City in 1932 to become an actress and had some success as a fashion model for designer Hattie Carnegie and as the Chesterfield girl. She began her performing career on Broadway using the stage name "Diane Belmont" and was hired?-but then quickly fired?-by theatre impresario Earl Carroll from his Vanities and by Florenz Ziegfeld from a touring company of Rio Rita.[20]
She was let go again from the Shubert brothers production of Stepping Stones.[16] After an uncredited stint as one of the Goldwyn Girls in Roman Scandals (1933) she permanently moved to Hollywood to appear in films. She appeared in many small movie roles in the 1930s as a contract player for RKO Radio Pictures, including movies with the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges. She can also be seen as one of the featured models in the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film Roberta (1935), where she met her lifelong friend, Ginger Rogers.[21] She and Rogers played aspiring actresses in the hit film Stage Door (1937) co-starring Katharine Hepburn. Ball was signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the 1940s, but she never achieved major stardom from her appearance in those films.[22]
She was known in many Hollywood circles as "Queen of the B's"?-a title previously held by Fay Wray?-starring in a number of B-movies, such as 1939's Five Came Back.[23] Like many budding starlets Ball picked up radio work to earn side income as well as gain exposure. In 1937 she appeared as a regular on the Phil Baker show. When that completed its run in 1938, Ball joined the cast of the Wonder Show staring future Wizard of Oz tin man Jack Haley.[24] It was on this show that she began her fifty year professional relationship with Gale Gordon who served as the show's announcer. The Wonder show only lasted one season with the final episode airing in April 7, 1939.[25]
In 1940, Ball met Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz while filming the film version of the Rodgers and Hart stage hit Too Many Girls. Ball and Arnaz connected immediately and eloped the same year, garnering much press attention. Arnaz and Ball frequently argued, especially over his indiscretions with other women, but they always made up in the end.[citation needed] Arnaz was drafted to the United States Army in 1942. He ended up being classified for limited service due to a knee injury.[citation needed] As a result, Arnaz stayed in Los Angeles, organizing and performing USO shows for wounded GIs being brought back from the Pacific. Ball filed for a divorce in 1944. Shortly after Ball obtained an interlocutory decree, however, she reconciled with Arnaz again.[26] Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were only six years apart in age but apparently believed that it was less socially acceptable for an older woman to marry a younger man, and hence split the difference in their ages, both claiming a 1914 birth date.[27]
I Love Lucy and Desilu
In 1948, Ball was cast as Liz Cugat (later "Cooper"), a wacky wife, in My Favorite Husband, a radio program for CBS Radio. The program was successful, and CBS asked her to develop it for television. She agreed, but insisted on working with Arnaz. CBS executives were reluctant, thinking the public would not accept an All-American redhead and a Cuban as a couple. CBS was initially not impressed with the pilot episode produced by the couple's Desilu Productions company, so the couple toured the road in a vaudeville act with Lucy as the zany housewife wanting to get in Arnaz's show. The tour was a smash, and CBS put I Love Lucy on their lineup.[28] The I Love Lucy show was not only a star vehicle for Lucille Ball, but a way for her to try to salvage her marriage to Desi Arnaz, which had become badly strained, in part by the fact that each had a hectic performing schedule which often kept them apart.[29]
Along the way, she created a television dynasty and reached several "firsts". Ball was the first woman in television to be head of a production company: Desilu, the company that she and Arnaz formed. After buying out her by-then ex-husband's share of the studio, Ball functioned as a very active studio head.[30] Desilu and I Love Lucy pioneered a number of methods still in use in television production today.[31] During this time Ball taught a thirty-two week comedy workshop at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute. Ball is quoted as saying, "You cannot teach someone comedy, either they have it or they don't."[32]
When the show premiered, most shows were aired live from New York City studios to Eastern and Central Time Zone audiences, and captured by kinescope for broadcast later to the West Coast. The kinescope picture was inferior to film, and as a result the West Coast broadcasts were inferior to those seen elsewhere in the country. Ball and Arnaz wanted to remain in their Los Angeles home, but the time zone logistics made that broadcast norm impossible. Prime time in L.A. was too late at night on the East Coast to air a major network series, meaning the majority of the TV audience would be seeing not only the inferior picture of kinescopes but seeing them at least a day later.[33]
Sponsor Philip Morris did not want to show day-old kinescopes to the major markets on the East Coast, yet neither did they want to pay for the extra cost filming, processing and editing would require, pressuring Ball and Arnaz to relocate to New York City. Ball and Arnaz offered to take a pay cut to finance filming, on the condition that their company, Desilu, would retain the rights to that film once it was aired. CBS relinquished the show rights back to Desilu after initial broadcast, not realizing they were giving away a valuable and durable asset. Desilu made many millions of dollars on I Love Lucy rebroadcasts through syndication and became a textbook example of how a show can be profitable in second-run syndication. In television's infancy, the concept of the rerun hadn't yet formed, and many in the industry wondered who would want to see a program a second time.[34] In fact, while other celebrated shows of the period exist only in incomplete sets of kinescopes too degraded to show to subsequent generations of television viewers, I Love Lucy has virtually never gone out of syndication since it began, seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world over the past half century. The success of Ball and Arnaz's gamble was instrumental in drawing television production from New York to Hollywood for the next several decades.[35]
Desilu also hired legendary German cameraman Karl Freund as their director of photography. Freund had worked for F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, shot part of Metropolis (1927) and had directed a number of Hollywood films himself. Freund used a three-camera setup, which became the standard way of filming situation comedies.[36]Shooting long shots, medium shots, and close-ups on a comedy in front of a live audience demanded discipline, technique, and close choreography. Among other non-standard techniques used in filming the show, cans of paint (in shades ranging from white to medium gray) were kept on set to "paint out" inappropriate shadows and disguise lighting flaws.[37][38]
I Love Lucy dominated the weekly TV ratings in the United States for most of its run. In the scene where Lucy and Ricky are practicing the tango in the episode, "Lucy Does The Tango," the longest recorded studio audience laugh in the history of the show was produced. It was so long, in fact, that the sound editor had to cut that particular part of the soundtrack in half[39] The strenuous rehearsals and demands of Desilu studio kept the Arnazes too busy to comprehend the show's success. During the show's hiatus, they starred together in feature films: Vincente Minnelli's The Long, Long Trailer (1954) and Alexander Hall's Forever, Darling (1956).
Desilu produced several other popular shows, most notably Our Miss Brooks (starring Ball's 1937 Stage Door co-star Eve Arden), The Untouchables, Star Trek, and Mission: Impossible. Many other shows, particularly Sheldon Leonard-produced series like Make Room for Daddy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, and I Spy, were filmed at Desilu Studios and bear its logo.
Testimony Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities
In 1953, Ball was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities because she had registered to vote in the Communist party primary election in 1936 at her socialist grandfather's insistence (per FBI FOIA-released documents in a declassified FBI file).[40] Immediately before the filming of episode 68 ("The Girls Go Into Business") of I Love Lucy, Desi Arnaz, instead of his usual audience warm-up, told the audience about Lucy and her grandfather. Arnaz quipped: "The only thing red about Lucy is her hair, and even that's not legitimate." Then, he presented his wife and she received a standing ovation from the audience [16]
Children and divorce
On July 17, 1951, just one month before her fortieth birthday and after several miscarriages, Ball gave birth to her first child, Lucie Desiree Arnaz.[5] A year and a half later, Ball gave birth to her second child, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV, known as Desi Arnaz, Jr.[6] When he was born, I Love Lucy was a solid ratings hit, and Ball and Arnaz wrote the pregnancy into the show (indeed, Ball gave birth in real life on the same day that her Lucy Ricardo character gave birth).[6] There were several challenges from CBS, insisting that a pregnant woman could not be shown on television, nor could the word "pregnant" be spoken on-air. After approval from several religious figures the network allowed the pregnancy storyline, but insisted that the word "expecting" be used instead of "pregnant". (Arnaz garnered laughs when he deliberately mispronounced it as "'spectin'").[41] The episode's official title was "Lucy Is Enceinte," borrowing the French word for pregnant.[13] The birth made the first cover of TV Guide in January 1953.[42] Ball's instincts with business were often astonishingly sharp, and her love for Arnaz was passionate, but her relationships with her children were sometimes strained. Lucie Arnaz, her daughter, spoke of her mother's "controlling" nature.[43] Ball was very outspoken against the relationship that Desi Jr. had with Liza Minnelli. She was quoted as saying, "I miss Liza, but you cannot domesticate Liza."[44] She had a few very good friends in the business: Ginger Rogers, Mary Wickes and Vivian Vance. All were childless; Wickes never married.
In October 1956, Ball, Vivian Vance, Desi Arnaz, and William Frawley all appeared on a Bob Hope special on NBC, including a spoof of I Love of Lucy, the only time all four stars were together on a color telecast. Fortunately, at least part of the program has been preserved in a rare color kinescope.
By the end of the 1950s, Desilu had become a large company, causing a good deal of stress for both Ball and Arnaz; his increased drinking further compounded matters.[45] On May 4, 1960, just two months after filming the final episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, the couple divorced. Until his death in 1986, however, Arnaz and Ball remained friends and often spoke very fondly of each other.[46] Indeed, both Arnaz and Ball spoke lovingly of each other after the breakup. Her real-life divorce indirectly found its way into her later television series, as she was always cast as a single woman.[47][48]
The following year, Ball did a musical on Broadway, Wildcat, co-starring Paula Stewart.[49] It was Stewart who introduced her to her next husband Gary Morton, a Borscht Belt stand-up comic who was thirteen years her junior.[8] Morton claimed he had never seen an episode of "I Love Lucy" due to his hectic work schedule.[44]That marked the beginning of a thirty-year friendship between Lucy and Paula. Ball immediately installed Morton in her production company, teaching him the television business and eventually promoting him to producer. Morton also played occasional bit parts on Ball's various series.[44]
Later career
The 1960 Broadway musical Wildcat was a successful sell-out that ended its run early when Ball became too ill to continue in the show.[44] The show was the source of the song she made famous, "Hey, Look Me Over", which she performed with Paula Stewart on The Ed Sullivan Show. She made a few more movies including Yours, Mine, and Ours (1968), and the musical Mame (1974), and two more successful long-running sitcoms for CBS: The Lucy Show (1962-68), which costarred Vance and Gale Gordon, and Here's Lucy (1968-74), which also featured Gordon, as well Lucy's real life children, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz, Jr. Ball appeared on the Dick Cavett show and spoke of her history and life with Arnaz. She insisted that Mame was by far one of her most favorite "family" movies she had ever done. During that interview, Ball revealed how she felt about other actors and actresses as well as her love for Arnaz. She continued by telling Dick that the success to her life was, getting rid of what was wrong and replacing it with what is right. (Talking about her divorce from Arnaz and marriage to Morton) Lucy also reveals in this interview that the strangest thing to ever happen to her was after she had some dental work completed and after placing lead fillings in her teeth, she started hearing radio stations in her head. She explained coming home one night from the studio and as she passed one area, she heard what she thought was morse code or a "tapping." She stated that "As I backed up it got stronger. The next morning, I reported it to the authorities and upon investigation, they found a Japanese radio transmitter that had been buried and was activeley transmitting codes back to the Japanese." [32]
Ball was originally considered by Frank Sinatra for the role of Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate. Director/producer John Frankenheimer, however, had worked with Angela Lansbury in a mother role in another film and insisted on having her for the part.[50]
During the mid-1980s, she attempted to resurrect her television career. In 1982, Ball hosted a two-part Three's Company retrospective, showing clips from the show's first five seasons, summarizing memorable plotlines, and commenting on her love of the show.[51] A 1985 dramatic made-for-TV film about an elderly homeless woman, Stone Pillow, was well received. Her 1986 sitcom comeback Life With Lucy, costarring her longtime foil Gale Gordon and co-produced by Ball, Gary Morton, and former actor Aaron Spelling, was a critical and commercial flop which was canceled less than two months into its run by ABC.[4] The failure of this series was said to have sent Ball into a serious depression, and other than a few miscellaneous awards show appearances, she was absent from the public eye for the last several years of her life. Her last public appearance, just one month before her death, was at the 1989 Academy Awards telecast in which she and fellow presenter, Bob Hope, were given a standing ovation.
Death
On April 18, 1989, Ball complained of chest pains and was rushed to the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She was diagnosed as having a dissecting aortic aneurysm and underwent heart surgery for nearly eight hours. The surgery was successful, and Ball was recovering; she was walking around her room with little assistance.[7] On April 26, shortly after dawn, Ball awoke with severe back pains. Her aorta had ruptured in a second location and Ball quickly lost consciousness. All attempts to revive her proved unsuccessful and at approximately 05:47 PST, Lucille Ball died at the age of seventy-seven.[7] She was initially interred in Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, but in 2002 her children moved her ashes to the family plot at Lake View Cemetery in Jamestown, New York, where Ball's mother, father, brother, and grandparents are buried.[43]
Legacy and posthumous recognition
Ball has received many prestigious awards throughout her career including some that she received posthumously such as the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George H. W. Bush on July 6, 1989.[52] The Women's International Center's Living Legacy Award.[53] There is a Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center museum in Jamestown, NY. The Little Theatre in Jamestown, New York, was renamed the Lucille Ball Little Theatre in her honor.[54] Ball was among Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the Century.[55]
On August 6, 2001, on what would have been her ninetieth birthday, the United States Postal Service honored her with a commemorative postage stamp as part of its Legends of Hollywood series.[56] Ball appeared on the cover of TV Guide more than any other person; she appeared on thirty-nine covers, including the very first cover in 1953, with her baby son Desi Arnaz, Jr.[57] TV Guide voted Lucille Ball as the Greatest TV Star of All Time and later it commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of I Love Lucy with eight collector covers celebrating memorable scenes from the show and in another instance they named I Love Lucy the second most influential television program in American history.[58] Because of her liberated mindset and approval of the women's movement, Ball was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.[59]
Finally, she was awarded the Legacy of Laughter award at the fifth Annual TV Land Awards in 2007.[60] and I Love Lucy was named the Greatest TV Series by Hall of Fame Magazine.[19] In November of that year, Lucille Ball was chosen as the second out of the 50 Greatest TV Icons, after Johnny Carson. In a poll done by the public, however, they chose her as the greatest icon.[61]
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Wed 6 Aug, 2008 07:23 am
Robert Mitchum
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born Robert Charles Durman Mitchum
August 6, 1917(1917-08-06)
Bridgeport, Connecticut
Died July 1, 1997 (aged 79)
Santa Barbara, California
Spouse(s) Dorothy Spence (1940-1997)
Awards won
Golden Globe Awards
Cecil B. DeMille Award
1992 Lifetime Achievement
Other Awards
NBR Award for Best Actor
1960 Home from the Hill ; The Sundowners
Robert Charles Durman Mitchum (August 6, 1917 - July 1, 1997) was an Academy Award nominated American film actor and singer. Mitchum is largely remembered for his starring roles in several major works of the film noir style, and is considered a forerunner of the anti-heroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and 1960s.
Life and career
Early life and career
Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to shipyard and railroad worker James Thomas Mitchum and Ann Harriet Gunderson. James Mitchum was crushed to death in a railyard accident when Mitchum was eighteen months old, leaving Ann to find work as a linotype operator at a newspaper.
Throughout Mitchum's childhood, he was known as a prankster, often involved in fistfights and mischief. When he was 12, Ann sent Robert to live with his grandparents in Felton, Delaware, where he was promptly expelled from his middle school for scuffling with a principal. A year later, in 1930, he moved in with his older sister, waitress and stage actress Julie Mitchum, in New York's Hell's Kitchen. After being expelled from Haaran High School, he left his sister and traveled throughout the country on railroad cars, taking a number of jobs including as a ditch-digger for the Civilian Conservation Corps and as a professional boxer. He experienced numerous adventures during his years as one of the Depression era's "wild boys of the road." In Savannah, Georgia, he was arrested for vagrancy and put on a local chain gang. By Mitchum's own account, he escaped and returned to his family in Delaware. It was during this time, while recovering from injuries that nearly lost him a leg, that he met the woman he would marry, a teenaged Dorothy Spence. He soon went back on the road, eventually riding the rails to California.
Mitchum arrived in Long Beach, California, in 1936, staying again with his sister Julie. Soon the rest of the Mitchum family joined them in Long Beach. It was sister Julie who convinced Robert to join the local theater guild with her. In his years with the Players Guild of Long Beach, he made a living as a stagehand and occasional bit player in plays. He also wrote several short pieces which were performed by the guild. According to Lee Server's biography (Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care), Mitchum put a talent for poetry to work writing song lyrics and monologues for his sister Julie's nightclub performances. In 1940 he returned East to marry Dorothy, taking her back to California. He remained a footloose character until the birth of their first child, Jim, nicknamed Josh (two more children would follow, Christopher and Petrine). Robert then got a steady job as a machine operator with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation.
An apparent nervous breakdown from this encounter with conformity led Mitchum to look for work as an actor or extra in movies. An agent he had met got him an interview with the producer of the Hopalong Cassidy series of B-westerns; he was hired to play the villain in several films in the series between 1942 and 1943. He continued to find further work as an extra and supporting actor in numerous productions for various studios. After impressing director Mervyn LeRoy during the making of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Mitchum signed a seven-year contract with RKO Radio Pictures. He found himself groomed for B Western stardom in a series of Zane Grey adaptations.
Following the moderately successful western Nevada, Mitchum was lent from RKO to United Artists for the William Wellman-helmed The Story of G.I. Joe. In the film, he portrayed war-weary officer Bill Walker, who remains resolute despite the troubles he faces. The film, which followed the life of an ordinary soldier through the eyes of journalist Ernie Pyle (played by Burgess Meredith), became an instant critical and commercial success. Shortly after making the film, Mitchum himself was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving at Fort MacArthur, California. At the 1946 Academy Awards, the film was nominated for four Oscars, including Mitchum's only nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He finished the year off with a western (West of the Pecos) and a story of returning Marine veterans (Till the End of Time), before transitioning into a genre that came to define both Mitchum's career and screen persona: film noir.
Work in film noir
Mitchum would become a signature actor in the style of film known as film noir (a style used in many genres but most commonly in gangster and crime movies). His first entry into this world of dark crime stories was the well-regarded B-movie, When Strangers Marry, about a psychotic serial killer. One of Mitchum's early film noir outings, Undercurrent, featured him playing against type as a troubled, sensitive man entangled in the affairs of his brother (Robert Taylor) and his brother's suspicious wife (Katharine Hepburn). The ill-received film was Vincente Minnelli's first and last film noir as a director.
John Brahm's The Locket (1946) featured Mitchum as a bitter ex-husband to Laraine Day's femme fatale, while the Raoul Walsh-helmed Pursued (1947) combined the western and film noir genres, with Mitchum's character trying to remember his past and find those responsible for killing his family. Crossfire, also released in 1947 featured Mitchum as a member of a group of soldiers, one of whom killed a Jew. It featured themes of anti-Semitism and the failings of military training. The film, directed by Edward Dmytryk, was one of the most critically acclaimed of the year, garnering five Academy Award nominations.
Following Crossfire, Mitchum starred in what was arguably the definitive film of his career, Out of the Past (aka Build My Gallows High), directed by Jacques Tourneur and benefiting from the cinematography of Nicholas Musuraca. Mitchum played Jeff Markham, a small-town gas station owner whose unfinished business with gambler Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) and one of the most memorable of all femmes fatales, Kathie Moffett (Jane Greer), comes back to haunt him. Though the film was ignored by most critics upon its release, the film was a modest box office hit and has steadily gained the highest critical praise from both film journalists and filmmakers since its release. Mitchum was photographed again by Musuraca in the Robert Wise "psychological western" Blood on the Moon the following year.
Mitchum's cynical, mischievous attitude continued through adulthood and led him to shrug off fame as a fluke. On the set, he often played pranks on fellow actors and crew. His expulsion from 1955's Blood Alley is frequently attributed to his pranks, especially one in which he reportedly threw the film's transportation manager into San Francisco Bay. On September 1, 1948, after a string of successful films for RKO, he and actress Lila Leeds were arrested for possession of marijuana. The arrest was the result of a sting operation designed to capture other Hollywood partiers as well, but Mitchum and Leeds did not receive the tip-off. After serving a week at the county jail, Mitchum spent 43 days (February 16 to March 30) at a Castaic, California, prison farm, with Life right there snapping photos of him mopping up in his prison uniform.[1] The arrest became the inspiration for the exploitation film She Shoulda Said No! (1949), which starred Leeds. The arrest did little to affect Mitchum's career in the long term, but was seen as an embarrassment by his studio, who ordered Mitchum to clean up his act. The conviction was later overturned by the Los Angeles court and District Attorney's office on January 31, 1951, with the following statement, after it was exposed as a set-up.
"After an exhaustive investigation of the evidence and testimony presented at the trial, the court orders that the verdict of guilty be set aside and that a plea of not guilty be entered and that the information or complaint be dismissed."
Despite troubles with the law and his studio, the films released immediately after his arrest were box-office hits. Rachel and the Stranger (1948) featured Mitchum in a supporting role as a mountain man interested in gaining the hand of Loretta Young, the indentured servant and wife of William Holden, while the John Steinbeck adaptation The Red Pony as a trusted cowhand to a ranching family.
Mitchum returned to true film noir in 1949's The Big Steal, pairing Mitchum and Jane Greer once again in an early Don Siegel film. In Where Danger Lives (1950) he played a doctor who comes between a mentally unbalanced Faith Domergue and cuckolded Claude Rains. The Racket was a noir remake of the early crime drama The Racket and featured Mitchum as a police captain fighting corruption in his precinct. The Josef von Sternberg film Macao (1952) saw Mitchum a victim of mistaken identity at an exotic resort casino, playing opposite Jane Russell. Otto Preminger's Angel Face saw the first of three collaborations between Mitchum and British stage actress Jean Simmons. In the film, Simmons plays an insane heiress who plans to use young ambulance driver Mitchum to kill for her.
Career in the 1950s and 1960s
Though Mitchum continued to star in a number of crime dramas, some classified within the film noir genre, 1955 marked his last true noir outing and his first film as a freelance actor, the Charles Laughton helmed The Night of the Hunter. Many considered this to be Mitchum's best performance. Following a series of conventional westerns and films noir, including the Marilyn Monroe vehicle River of No Return (1954), The Night of the Hunter would become one of the landmark films of the decade. Based on a novel by Davis Grubb, the film noir thriller starred Mitchum as a psychotic criminal posing as a preacher to find money hidden by his cellmate in the cellmate's home. The film remains one of the most chilling and suspenseful thrillers of the decade, though it was a critical and commercial failure upon its first release. While The Night of the Hunter was a box office flop which went on to become critically acclaimed decades afterward, Stanley Kramer's melodrama Not as a Stranger, also released in 1955, was a box office hit for Mitchum, which has been largely forgotten today. The film starred Mitchum against type, as an idealistic young doctor, who marries an older nurse (Olivia de Havilland), only to question his morality many years later. However, the film was not critically acclaimed, especially since Mitchum, Frank Sinatra and Lee Marvin were all too old for their characters.
Following a succession of average westerns and the poorly received Foreign Intrigue (1956), Mitchum starred in the first of three screen collaborations with British actress Deborah Kerr. The intriguing John Huston war drama Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison starred Mitchum as a marine corporal shipwrecked on a Pacific Island only to discover his sole companion is a nun, Sister Angela (Deborah Kerr). The character study centers on the relationship between the two as they fight for survival from the elements and the invading Japanese army. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, including Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay. For his role, Mitchum was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actor. Mitchum and Kerr were paired again in 1960, first for the critically acclaimed Fred Zinnemann film, The Sundowners, where they played husband and wife struggling in Depression-era Australia. Opposite Mitchum, Kerr was nominated for yet another Academy Award for Best Actress, while the film was nominated for a total of five Oscars. Robert Mitchum was awarded that year's National Board of Review award for Best Actor for his performance. The award also recognized his superior performance in the Vincente Minnelli western drama Home from the Hill. He was teamed with both Kerr and previous leading lady Jean Simmons as well as Cary Grant for the extremely offbeat Stanley Donen ensemble comedy The Grass Is Greener the same year.
Mitchum's performance as the menacing southern rapist Max Cady in 1962's Cape Fear brought him even more attention and furthered his renown as playing cool, predatory characters. The 1960s were marked by a number of lesser films and missed opportunities. Among the films Mitchum passed on during the decade was John Huston's The Misfits, the last film of its stars Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, the Academy Award-winning Patton, and Clint Eastwood's breakthrough film Dirty Harry. The most notable of his films later in the decade included the war epics The Longest Day (1962) and Anzio (film) (1968), the Shirley MacLaine comedy-musical What a Way to Go! (1964), and the Howard Hawks western El Dorado (1966), a remake of Rio Bravo (1959), in which Mitchum took over Dean Martin's role of the drunk who comes to the aid of John Wayne.
Music career
One of the lesser known aspects of Mitchum's career was his forays into music. His voice had long been used instead of the professional singers when characters portrayed by Mitchum sang in his films. Notable productions featuring Mitchum's own singing voice included Rachel and the Stranger (1948), River of No Return (1954) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). After hearing traditional calypso music and meeting artists such as Mighty Sparrow and Lord Invader while filming Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison in the Caribbean island of Tobago, he recorded Calypso ?- Is Like So... in March of 1957. On the album, released through Capitol Records, he emulated the calypso sound and style, even adopting the style's unique pronunciations and slang. A year later he recorded a song he had written for the film Thunder Road, titled "The Ballad of Thunder Road." The country-styled song became a modest hit for Mitchum, reaching #69 on the Billboard Pop Singles Chart. The song was included as a bonus track on a successful reissue of Calypso... and helped market the film to a wider audience.
Though Mitchum continued to use his singing voice in his film work, he waited until 1967 to record his follow-up record, That Man, Robert Mitchum, Sings. The album, released by Nashville-based Monument Records, took him further into country music, and featured songs similar to The Ballad of Thunder Road. "Little Old Wine Drinker Me," the first single, was a top ten hit at country radio, reaching #9 there, and crossed over onto mainstream radio, where it peaked at #96. Its follow-up, "You Deserve Each Other," also charted on the Billboard Country Singles Chart.
Later career and death
Mitchum made a departure from his typical screen persona with the David Lean classic Ryan's Daughter in 1970. In the critically acclaimed film, he starred as Charles Shaughnessy, a mild-mannered schoolmaster in World War I era Ireland. Though the film was nominated for four Academy Awards (winning two) and Mitchum was much publicized as a contender for a Best Actor nomination, he was not nominated. George C. Scott won the award for his performance in Patton, a project which Mitchum had rejected for Ryan's Daughter.
The 1970s, however, saw Mitchum in a number of well-received crime dramas. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) saw the actor playing an aging Boston hoodlum caught between the Feds and his criminal friends. Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza (1975) transplanted the typical film noir story arc to the Japanese underworld. Mitchum's stint as an aging Philip Marlowe in the Raymond Chandler adaptation, Farewell, My Lovely (1975), was well-received by audiences and critics. He also appeared in 1976's Midway, about the World War II battle of the same name. Reprising the Marlowe role in 1978's The Big Sleep proved a mistake, however, as Michael Winner took the film at once closer to the source material and farther away from its spirit and context, setting the film in modern day London.
1982 saw Mitchum on-location in Scranton, Pennsylvania, playing Coach Delaney in the film adaptation of playwright/actor Jason Miller's 1973 Pulitzer Prize winning play That Championship Season.
Mitchum expanded into the medium of television with the 1983 miniseries The Winds of War. The big-budget Herman Wouk adaptation aired on ABC and starred Mitchum as "Pug" Henry, a naval officer and examined the events leading up to America's involvement in World War II. He followed it in 1988 with War and Remembrance, which followed America through the war, and returned to the big screen for a memorable supporting role in Bill Murray's Scrooged.
Though Mitchum continued to appear in films throughout the 1990s, such as Tombstone and Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, the actor gradually slowed his workrate. His last film appearance was in the television biopic, James Dean: Race with Destiny. His last starring role had been in the 1995 Norwegian movie Pakten, a final nod to his Norwegian ancestry. He died on July 1, 1997,at the age of 79, in Santa Barbara, California, due to complications of lung cancer and emphysema. He was survived by his wife, Dorothy Mitchum, and actor sons, James Mitchum, Christopher Mitchum, and daughter Petrina (Trina) Mitchum. His grandchildren, Bentley Mitchum and Carrie Mitchum, are also actors, as was his younger brother John Mitchum,who died in 2001. In 1991, he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures and the Cecil B. DeMille Award from the Golden Globe Awards in 1992. It had been widely predicted for at least a decade that his eventual death would spark a huge fascination with his film canon, but James Stewart died the very next day, immediately eclipsing Mitchum's death in the mainstream media.
Mitchum is regarded by critics as one of the finest actors of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Roger Ebert called him 'the soul of film noir'. Mitchum himself, however, was self-effacing; in an interview with Barry Norman for the BBC about his contribution to cinema, Mitchum stopped Norman in mid flow and in his typical phlegmatic style said
" Look! I have two kinds of acting. One on a horse and one off a horse. That's it.
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Wed 6 Aug, 2008 07:27 am
Barbara Bates
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born August 6, 1925
Denver, Colorado, USA
Died March 18, 1969 (aged 43)
Denver, Colorado, USA
Occupation Film, television actress
Barbara Bates (August 6, 1925 - March 18, 1969) was an American actress best known for her role as Phoebe in the 1950 drama, All About Eve.
Early life
The eldest of three daughters, Bates was born in Denver, Colorado. While growing up in Denver, she studied ballet and worked as a teen fashion model. The shy teen was persuaded to enter a local beauty contest and won, receiving two round-trip train tickets to Hollywood, California. Two days before returning to Denver, Bates met Cecil Coan, a United Artists publicist, who would ultimately change the course of her life.[1]
Career
In September 1944, Bates signed a contract with Universal Pictures after Cecil Coan introduced her to producer Walter Wanger. Soon after, she was cast as one of the "Seven Salome Girls" in the 1945 drama, Salome Where She Danced starring Yvonne De Carlo. Around this time, she fell in love with Coan, who was married with three sons. In March 1945, Coan divorced his wife and secretly married Bates days later. Bates spent the next few years as a stock actress, landing bit parts in movies and doing cheesecake layouts for magazines like Yank, the Army Weekly and Life. It was one of those photo sessions that caught the eye of executives at Warner Bros. who signed her in 1947. Warner Bros. highlighted her "girl-next-door" image and her acting career took off. She appeared with some of the biggest stars of the day including Bette Davis in June Bride and Danny Kaye in The Inspector General.[1]
After her appearance in All About Eve, Bates co-starred in Cheaper by the Dozen, and its sequel Belles on Their Toes, with Jeanne Crain and Myrna Loy.[2] In 1951, she landed a role opposite MacDonald Carey and Claudette Colbert in the comedy, Let's Make It Legal.
Decline
Despite a seemingly successful career, Bates' life, both on and off screen, started unraveling. She became a victim of extreme mood swings, insecurity, ill health, and chronic depression. In 1954, she landed the role of Cathy on the NBC sitcom, It's a Great Life. After only 7 episodes, she was written out of the show due to her erratic behavior and depression. Bates tried to salvage her career and traveled to England to find work. She was signed on as a contract player with the Rank Organisation, only to drop out of two leading roles in one month. Bates continued to be too emotionally unstable to work and in 1957, her contract with the Rank Organisation was canceled.[1] Her last onscreen appearance would come in an episode of The Saint that aired in November 1962.[3]
In 1960, Bates and her husband moved back to the United States and got an apartment in Beverly Hills. Later that year, Coan was diagnosed with cancer. Bates remained devoted to her husband and rarely left his bedside, but the strain was too much for her. She attempted suicide by slashing her wrists and was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Hospital where she soon recovered.[1]
Death
In January 1967, Bates' husband, Cecil Coan, died of cancer. She was devastated by his death and fell apart. Her depression worsened and she again became suicidal. Later that year, she retreated back to Denver and fell out of public view. For a time, Bates worked as a secretary, a dental assistant, and as a hospital aide. In December 1968, she married for the second time to a childhood friend, sportscaster William Reed.[1] Despite her new marriage and location, she remained increasingly despondent and depressed.
On March 18, 1969, just months after her marriage to Reed, Barbara Bates committed suicide in her mother's garage by carbon monoxide poisoning. She was 43 years old.[1]
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Wed 6 Aug, 2008 07:32 am
Frank Finlay
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born Francis Finlay
6 August 1926 (1926-08-06) (age 82)
Farnworth, Greater Manchester, England
Occupation actor
Spouse(s) Doreen Shepherd
Francis "Frank" Finlay, CBE (born 6 August 1926) is a British stage, film and television actor.
Biography
Personal life
Finlay was born in Farnworth, England, the son of Margaret and Josiah Finlay[1], a butcher. A devout Catholic,[citation needed] he belongs to the British Catholic Stage Guild. He was educated at St. Gregory the Great School and then trained as a butcher himself, gaining a City and Guilds Diploma in the trade. He met his future wife, Doreen Shepherd, when they were both members of the Farnworth Little Theatre. They lived in Weybridge, Surrey and were married until her death in 2005.[2]
Stage career
Finlay began his stage career in rep before graduating from RADA. There followed several appearances at the Royal Court Theatre, notably in the Arnold Wesker trilogy. He is particularly associated with the National Theatre, especially during the Olivier years and its predecessor, the Chichester Festival Theatre, where he played a wide variety of roles ranging from the First Gravedigger in Hamlet to Saint Joan, Hobson's Choice, Much Ado About Nothing, The Dutch Courtesan, The Crucible, Mother Courage, Juno and the Paycock and culminating in his controversial Iago to Laurence Olivier's title character in the 1965 film adaptation of Othello.
Finlay's original stage performance of Iago as an NCO left critics unmoved, but later received high praise when the play was filmed and earned him an Academy Award nomination. He was also seen on Broadway in Epitaph for George Dillon (1958-59), and, also, in the National Theatre and Broadway productions of Filumena (opposite Olivier's wife, Joan Plowright) in 1980.
Television and film
His first major success on television was in the title role of Casanova in Dennis Potter's BBC2 series of the same name. Following which in 1972, he won perhaps the greatest praise of his career for his portrayal of Adolf Hitler in The Death Of Adolf Hitler.
He portrayed Richard Roundtree's nemesis Amafi in the third Shaft film Shaft in Africa (1973) before playing Porthos for director Richard Lester in The Three Musketeers (1973), The Four Musketeers (1975) and The Return of the Musketeers (1989). He has also appeared several other films, including The Wild Geese (1978).
He went on to star as the father in the controversial Bouquet of Barbed Wire and he was reunited with his Bouquet of Barbed Wire co-star, Susan Penhaligon, when he played Van Helsing in the BBC Count Dracula with Louis Jourdan (1977).
He appeared in two Sherlock Holmes films as Inspector Lestrade, solving the Jack the Ripper murders (A Study in Terror and Murder by Decree). In 1984, Finlay appeared on American television in A Christmas Carol. He played Marley's Ghost opposite George C. Scott's Ebenezer Scrooge.
Finlay also played a rather slim Sancho Panza, opposite Rex Harrison's Don Quixote, in the 1973 British made-for-television film The Adventures of Don Quixote, for which he won a BAFTA award. He won another BAFTA award that year for his performance as Voltaire in a non-musical BBC TV production of Candide.
He also guest-starred as "The Witchsmeller Pursuivant" in an episode of the popular 1983 British sitcom Blackadder.
In 1988 Finlay played the role of Justice Peter Mahon in the award-winning New Zealand television miniseries Erebus: The Aftermath.
In 2002 Finlay portrayed Adrien Brody's character's father in the Roman Polanski film The Pianist (2002). His most recent appearances have been in the TV series Life Begins and as Jane Tennison's father in the last two stories of Prime Suspect (2006 and 2007). In 2007 he guest-starred in the Doctor Who audio adventure 100.
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Wed 6 Aug, 2008 07:36 am
Abbey Lincoln
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Background information
Birth name Anna Marie Wooldridge
Born August 6, 1930 (1930-08-06) (age 78)
Origin Chicago, Illinois
Genre(s) Jazz
Occupation(s) Singer
Instrument(s) Vocals
Label(s) Riverside, Verve
Associated acts Max Roach
Abbey Lincoln (born Anna Marie Wooldridge on August 6, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois) is a jazz vocalist, songwriter, and actress, who is widely respected for her writing skills. She is one of many singers influenced by Billie Holiday. She has had a very long and productive career. She continues to perform and can often be found at the Blue Note in New York City. [1]
With Ivan Dixon, she co-starred in Nothing But a Man (1964), an independent film written and directed by Michael Roemer. She also co-starred with Sidney Poitier and Beau Bridges in 1968's For Love of Ivy.[2] She was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for For the Love of Ivy in 1969.
She sang on the famous We Insist! - Freedom Now Suite (1960) by jazz musician Max Roach and was married to him from 1962 to 1970. [3]
Abbey Lincoln also appears in the 1956 film The Girl Can't Help It. [2]
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bobsmythhawk
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Wed 6 Aug, 2008 07:38 am
Energizer Bunny arrested; charged with battery.
A man's home is his castle, in a manor of speaking.
A pessimist's blood type is always b-negative.
My wife really likes to make pottery, but to me it's just kiln time.
Dijon vu: the same mustard as before.
Practice safe eating: always use condiments.
I fired my masseuse today. She just rubbed me the wrong way.
A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.
Shotgun wedding: A case of wife or death.
I used to work in a blanket factory, but it folded.
I used to be a lumberjack, but I just couldn't hack it, so they gave me the ax.
If electricity comes from electrons, does that mean that morality comes from morons?
A man needs a mistress just to break the monogamy.
Marriage is the mourning after the knot before.
A hangover is the wrath of grapes.
Corduroy pillows are making headlines.
Is a book on voyeurism a peeping tome.
Dancing cheek-to-cheek is really a form of floor play.
Banning the bra was a big flop.
Sea captains don't like crew cuts.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
A successful diet is the triumph of mind over platter.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
A gossip is someone with a great sense of rumor.
Without geometry, life is pointless.
When you dream in color, it's a pigment of your imagination.
Condoms should be used on every conceivable occasion.
Reading whilst sunbathing makes you well-red.
When two egotists meet, it's an I for an I.
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Letty
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Wed 6 Aug, 2008 08:19 am
Welcome back, hawkman. Thanks for the info on the celeb's. We always learn something valuable from them. Loved the play on words, especially the reminder that "kiln" has a silent "n".
Fabulous, firefly, and welcome back. I know that my godson would rehash every episode of I Love Lucy to me should I happen to drop by his house at the proper time. Thanks, gal. Lucy was quite an entertainer.
I think Desi did this one, but I couldn't find it by him so we shall have to settle for Jim Carey. This is funny, however.
Today's BD photo gallery:
