firefly, I didn't see the French version, but I knew that The Birdcage was based on Cage Aux folles. Liked Sister Sledge better than The Spice Girls, however. Robin Williams was in both it seems, and I saw a clip which was great.
Amazing. Pavarotti and Bon Jovi. Loved it, firefly. Let's replay this one for our fly of fire, folks.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born August 8, 1896
Washington, DC (USA)
Died December 14, 1953
St. Augustine, FL
(cerebral hemorrhage)
Occupation writer
Nationality American
Writing period 1928 - 1953
Genres fiction, Florida history
Notable work(s) The Yearling, 1939
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (August 8, 1896 - December 14, 1953)[1] was an American author who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels with rural themes and settings. Her best known work, The Yearling, about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was later made into a movie, also known as The Yearling. The book was written long before the concept of young-adult fiction, but is now commonly included in teen-reading lists.
Early life
Marjorie Kinnan was born in 1896 in Washington, DC, to Frank, an attorney for the US Patent Office, and Ida Kinnan.[1][2] She was interested in writing as early as age six, and submitted stories to the children's sections of newspapers until she was 16. At age 15, she entered a story titled "The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty," for which she won a prize.[3]
She attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she joined Kappa Alpha Theta[4] sorority and received a degree in English in 1918, and met Charles Rawlings while working for the school literary magazine. Kinnan briefly worked for the YWCA editorial board in New York, and married Charles in 1919.[1] The couple moved to Louisville, Kentucky writing for the Louisville Courier-Journal and then Rochester, New York both writing for the Rochester Journal,[5] and Marjorie writing a syndicated column called "Songs of the Housewife."[2]
In 1928, with a small inheritance from her mother, the Rawlingses purchased a 72 acre (290,000 m²) orange grove near Hawthorne, Florida, in a hamlet named Cross Creek for its location between Orange Lake and Lochloosa Lake. She brought the place to international fame through her writing. She was fascinated with the remote wilderness and the lives of Cross Creek residents, her Cracker neighbors, and felt a profound and transforming connection to the region and the land.[6][7] Wary at first, the local residents soon warmed to her and opened up their lives and experiences to her. Marjorie filled several notebooks with descriptions of the animals, plants, Southern dialect, and recipes and used these descriptions in her writings.[8]
Writing career
In 1926, Scribner's accepted two of her stories, "Cracker Chidlings" and "Jacob's Ladder," both about the poor, backcountry Florida residents who were quite similar to her neighbors at Cross Creek. Local reception to her stories was mixed between puzzlement of whom she was writing about and rage, as apparently one mother recognized her son as a subject in a story and threatened to whip Rawlings until she was dead.[9]
Her first novel, South Moon Under, was published in 1933. The book captured the richness of Cross Creek and its environs in telling the story of a young man, Lant, who must support himself and his mother by making and selling moonshine, and what he must do when a traitorous cousin threatens to turn him in. Moonshiners were the subject of several of her stories, and Rawlings lived with a moonshiner for several weeks near Ocala to prepare for writing the book. [7] "South Moon Under" was included in the Book-of-the-Month Club and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
That same year, she and her husband were divorced; living in rural Florida did not appeal to him.[2][7]
One of her least well received books, Golden Apples, came out in 1935. It tells the stories of several people who suffer from unrequited love from people unsuited for them. Rawlings herself was disappointed in it, and in a 1935 letter to her publisher Max Perkins, she called it "interesting trash instead of literature."[10]
But she found immense success in 1938 with The Yearling, a story about a Florida boy and his pet deer, which he is forced to shoot when the deer grows up and eats the family's crop, and the break he makes with his father as a result of it. It was also selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for 1939. MGM purchased the rights to the film version, which was released in 1946, and it made her very famous.
In 1942, Rawlings published Cross Creek, an autobiographical account of her relationships with her neighbors and her beloved Florida hammocks. Again it was chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and it was even released in a special armed forces edition, sent to servicemen during World War II.[11] She followed that with Cross Creek Cookery, a compilation of recipes that was evidence of her passion for cooking.
Rawlings' final novel, The Sojourner, published in 1953 and set in a northern setting, was about a boy who feels unwanted as his mother is distracted with missing his absent brother. In order to absorb the natural setting so vital to her writing, she bought an old farmhouse in Van Hornesville, New York and spent part of each year there until her death. Rawlings published 33 short stories from 1912 to 1949. Her editor was the legendary Maxwell Perkins of Scribner's. Over the years, she built friendships with fellow writers Ernest Hemingway whom she met in 1936 and traded praises with about their writing, Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald whom she also met in 1936 when Fitzgerald was recuperating in the mountains in North Carolina, Robert Frost, and Margaret Mitchell.
Because many of Rawling's works were centered in the North and Central Florida area, she was often considered a regional writer. Rawlings herself rejected this label saying, "I don't hold any brief for regionalism, and I don't hold with the regional novel as such don't make a novel about them unless they have a larger meaning than just quaintness."[12]
Libel case
In 1943, Rawlings faced a libel suit for her book Cross Creek by her very good friend Zelma Cason, whom Rawlings met the first day she moved to Florida. Cason, in fact, helped to smooth the angry mother made upset by her son's depiction in "Jacob's Ladder."[11]
Rawlings described Cason in this passage, yet never used her last name in the book:
"Zelma is an ageless spinster resembling an angry and efficient canary. She manages her orange grove and as much of the village a county as needs management or will submit to it. I cannot decide whether she should have been a man or a mother. She combines the more violent characteristics of both and those who ask for or accept her ministrations think nothing at being cursed loudly at the very instant of being tenderly fed, clothed, nursed, or guided through their troubles." [13]
Cason was outraged, and claimed Rawlings made her out to be a "hussy," although Rawlings spoke with her immediately and assumed their friendship was intact.[11] Cason, however, decided to sue Rawlings for $100,000 US for invasion of privacy �- a charge that had never been argued in a Florida court �- as the courts found libel too ambiguous[9]. Cason was represented by one of the first women lawyers in Florida, Kate Walton. Cason was reportedly profane indeed (one of her neighbors reported her swearing could be heard for a quarter of a mile), wore pants, had a fascination with guns, and was just as extraordinarily independent as Rawlings herself.[14] The toll the case took on Rawlings was great, in both time and emotion. Reportedly, Rawlings was shocked to learn of Cason's reaction to the book, and felt somewhat betrayed.[11] After the case was over, she moved away from Cross Creek and never wrote about it again, despite the fact that Cason and Rawlings eventually mended their friendship.[11]
Rawlings won the case and enjoyed a brief vindication, but the verdict was overturned in appellate court and Rawlings was ordered to pay damages in the amount of $1 US.[9]
Personal life
With money she made from The Yearling, Rawlings bought a beach cottage at Crescent Beach, ten miles south of St. Augustine.
In 1941 Rawlings married Ocala hotelier Norton Baskin, and he remodeled an old mansion into the Castle Warden Hotel in St. Augustine (currently the Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum). After World War II, he sold the hotel and managed the Dolphin Restaurant at Marineland, which was then Florida's number one tourist attraction. Rawlings and Baskin made their primary home at Crescent Beach, and Rawlings and Baskin both continued their respective occupations independently. When a visitor to the Castle Warden Hotel suggested she saw the influence of Rawlings in the decor, Baskin protested, saying, "You do not see Mrs. Rawlings' fine hand in this place. Nor will you see my big foot in her next book. That's our agreement. She writes. I run a hotel."[15] After purchasing her land in New York, Rawlings spent half the year there and half the year with Baskin in St. Augustine.
Her singular admitted vanity was cooking. She said, "I get as much satisfaction from preparing a perfect dinner for a few good friends as from turning out a perfect paragraph in my writing."[16]
Rawlings befriended and corresponded with Mary McLeod Bethune[17] and Zora Neale Hurston.[18] Her views on race relations were much different than her neighbors, castigating white Southerners for infantalizing African Americans and labeling their economic differences with whites "a scandal", but simultaneously considered whites superior.[13][7] She described her African-American employee Idella as "the perfect maid." Their relationship is described in the book Idella: Marjorie Rawlings' "Perfect Maid", by Idella Parker and Mary Keating.
Rawlings' home at Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park in Cross Creek, FloridaBiographers have noted her longing for a male child through her writings, as far back as her first story as a teenage girl in, "The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty," and repeated throughout several works, letters, and characters, most notably in The Yearling.[10][7] In fact, she stated that as a child she had a gift for telling stories, but that she demanded all her audiences be boys.[19]
Her hatred of cities was intense: she wrote a sonnet titled, "Having Left Cities Behind Me" published in Scribner's in 1938 to illustrate it (excerpt):
"Now, having left cities behind me, turned
Away forever from the strange, gregarious
Huddling of men by stones, I find those various
Great towns I knew fused into one, burned
Together in the fire of my despising..."
She was criticized throughout her career for being uneven with her talent in writing, something she recognized in herself, and that reflected periods of depression and artistic frustration. She has been described as having unique sensibilities; she wrote of feeling "vibrations" from the land, and often preferred long periods of solitude at Cross Creek. She was known for being remarkably strong-willed, but after her death, Norton Baskin wrote of her, "Marjorie was the shyest person I have ever known. This was always strange to me as she could stand up to anybody in any department of endeavor but time after time when she was asked to go some place or to do something she would accept -'if I would go with her.'"[7]
Rawlings died in 1953 in St. Augustine of a cerebral hemorrhage. She bequeathed most of her property to the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she taught creative writing in Anderson Hall. In return, her name was given to a new dormitory dedicated in 1958 as Rawlings Hall[20] which occupies prime real estate in the heart of the campus. Her land at Cross Creek is now the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park.
Norton Baskin survived her by 44 years, passing away in 1997. They are buried side-by-side at Antioch Cemetery near Island Grove, Florida. Rawlings' tombstone, with Baskin's inscription, reads "Through her writing she endeared herself to the people of the world." Rawlings' reputation has managed to outlive those of many of her contemporaries. A posthumously-published children's book, The Secret River, won a Newbery Honor in 1956, and movies were made, long after her death, of her story Gal Young 'Un, and her semi-fictionalized memoir Cross Creek (Norton Baskin, then in his eighties, made a cameo appearance in the latter movie).
In 2008, the United States Postal Service unveiled a stamp bearing Rawlings' image, in her honor.[21]
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Fri 8 Aug, 2008 07:29 am
Sylvia Sidney
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born Sophia Kosow
August 8, 1910(1910-08-08)
Bronx, New York
Died July 1, 1999 (aged 88)
New York, New York
Years active 1929-1998
Spouse(s) Bennett Cerf (1935-1936)
Luther Adler (1938-1946)
Carlton Alsop (1947-1951)
[show]Awards won
Golden Globe Awards
Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV
1986 An Early Frost
Other Awards
NBR Award for Best Supporting Actress
1973 Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams
Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress (film)
1988 Beetlejuice
Sylvia Sidney (August 8, 1910 - July 1, 1999) was an Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe Award-winning American actress.
Biography
Early life
Sidney, an only child, was born Sophia Kosow[1] in The Bronx, New York, the daughter of Rebecca (née Saperstein), a Romanian Jew, and Victor Kosow, a Russian Jewish immigrant who worked as a clothing salesman.[2][3] She was adopted by her step-father, Sigmund Sidney, a dentist.[4] Sidney became an actress at the age of fifteen as a way of overcoming shyness, using her stepfather's surname as her professional surname. As a student of the Theater Guild's School for Acting, Sidney appeared in several of their productions during the 1920s and earned praise from theater critics. In 1926, she was seen by a Hollywood talent scout and made her first film appearance later that year.
Career
During the Depression, Sidney appeared in a string of films, often playing the girlfriend or the sister of a gangster. She appeared opposite such heavyweight screen idols as Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda, Joel McCrea, Fredric March, George Raft (a frequent screen partner), and Cary Grant. Among her films from this period were: An American Tragedy, City Streets and Street Scene (all 1931), Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage and Fritz Lang's Fury (both 1936), You Only Live Once and Dead End (both 1937). Although Sidney had an arresting, slightly Eurasian face and a lovely figure, these assets were often obscured for the sake of the stark, gritty plots of her films.
Her career diminished somewhat during the 1940s. In 1952, she played the role of Fantine in Les Misérables, and her performance was widely praised and allowed her opportunities to develop as a character actress. She received an Academy Award nomination for her supporting role in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973), and was visibly furious at losing to the 10-year-old Tatum O'Neal. During the filming of Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams, costar Joanne Woodward remarked how she and her husband, Paul Newman, had a difficult time remembering their anniversary date. Later, Sidney surprised Woodward with a gift of a handmade pillow with the inscription "Paul and Joanne" and their anniversary date.
As an elderly woman Sidney continued to play supporting screen roles, and was identifiable by her husky voice, the result of a lifetime cigarette smoking habit. She was the formidable Miss Coral in the film version of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and later was cast as Aidan Quinn's grandmother in the television production of An Early Frost for which she won a Golden Globe Award. She played Aunt Marion in Damien: Omen II and had key roles in Beetlejuice (directed by longtime Sidney fan Tim Burton) and Used People (which co-starred Jessica Tandy, Marcello Mastroianni, Marcia Gay Harden, Kathy Bates and Shirley MacLaine). Her final role was in another film by Burton, Mars Attacks!, in which she played a senile grandmother whose beloved Slim Whitman records stop an alien invasion from Mars when played over a loudspeaker.
On TV, she appeared as the imperious mother of Gordon Jump on the pilot episode of WKRP in Cincinnati; as the troubled grandmother of Melanie Mayron in the comedy-drama Thirtysomething and, finally, as the crotchety travel clerk on the short-lived late-1990s revival of Fantasy Island with Malcolm McDowell, Fyvush Finkel and Mädchen Amick.
Sidney's Broadway theatre career spanned five decades, from her debut performance as a graduate of the Theatre Guild School in the June 1926 3-act fantasy Prunella[5] to the Tennessee Williams play Vieux Carré in 1977. Additional credits include The Fourposter, Enter Laughing, and Barefoot in the Park.
Personal life
Sidney was married three times, she married publisher Bennet Cerf on 1 October 1935, but the couple were divorced shortly after on April 9, 1936. She then was married to actor and acting teacher Luther Adler from 1938 until 1947, by whom she had a son, Jacob, who predeceased her, and a daughter, Jody, who was born on October 22, 1939. On March 5, 1947 she married radio producer and announcer Carlton Alsop. They were divorced on March 22, 1951. Sidney died from throat cancer in New York City at the age of 88, after a career spanning more than 70 years. She was cremated and her ashes were either given to a friend or family.
Sidney has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contribution to Motion Pictures at 6245 Hollywood Boulevard.
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Fri 8 Aug, 2008 07:33 am
Esther Williams
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born Esther Jane Williams
August 8, 1921 (1921-08-08) (age 87)
Inglewood, California, U.S.
Spouse(s) Leonard Kovner (1940-1944)
Ben Gage (1945-1959)
Fernando Lamas (1969-1982)
Edward Bell (1994-)
Esther Jane Williams (b. August 8, 1921[1][2] or 1922[3]) is a retired United States competitive swimmer and movie star, famous for her musical films that featured elaborate performances with swimming and diving.
Early years
Williams was born in Inglewood, California to Bula Myrtle Gilpin and Louis Stanton Williams. She was enthusiastic about swimming in her youth. She was National AAU champion in the 100 meter freestyle. Williams went to Hollywood, where she quickly became a popular star of the 1940s and 1950s. Her brother, Stanton Williams, also had a brief acting career during the 1920s before his untimely death while still a teenager.
She appeared with swimming star Johnny Weismuller in Billy Rose's "Aquacade" during the San Francisco World's Fair, 1939-41, where she first attracted attention from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer scouts, as she noted in her autobiography. She also had to fend off the amorous attentions of Weismuller, whom she said acted as if he were Tarzan on and off the screen.
Career
The scene most people associate Esther Williams with is the famous and often spoofed grand water ballet finale in Bathing Beauty (1944). Several moments, such as the swimmers who dive past one another in the pool, the moment where Williams is received as a queen, then dives and reappears above water, surrounded by several other swimmers who form a circle around her, became iconic. (See also Bathing Beauty)
Many of her MGM films, such as Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) and Jupiter's Darling (1955), contained elaborately staged synchronized swimming scenes, with considerable risk to Williams. She broke her neck filming a 115 ft dive off a tower during a climactic musical number for the film Million Dollar Mermaid which landed her in a body cast for seven months. She subsequently recovered, though she still suffers headaches as a result of the accident. Her many hours spent submerged in a studio tank resulted in her rupturing her eardrums numerous times. In her autobiography The Million Dollar Mermaid (1999), Williams detailed several other occasions in which she nearly drowned shooting her oxygen-defying stunts, since she rarely used a stunt double.
After years of appearing in musical comedies at MGM, she moved to Universal International in 1956 and appeared in a non-musical dramatic film, The Unguarded Moment. After that, her film career slowly wound down. She later admitted that husband Fernando Lamas preferred her not to continue in films.
Personal life
Her love life was a source of media interest. She has been married four times. She met her first husband Leonard Kovner while at Los Angeles City College. She later wrote in her autobiography The Million Dollar Mermaid that "he was smart, handsome, dependable...and dull. I respected his intelligence, and his dedication to a future career in medicine. He loved me, or so he said, and even asked me to marry him." They were married in the San Francisco suburb of Los Altos on June 27, 1940. On their split she said "I found, much to my relief, that all I needed for my emotional and personal security was my own resolve and determination. I didn't need a marriage and a ring. I had come to realize all too quickly that Leonard Kovner was not a man I could ever really love." They divorced in 1944.
She married singer/actor Ben Gage on November 25, 1945, with whom she had three children. In her autobiography, she portrays him as an alcoholic parasite who squandered her earnings. She also disclosed in her autobiography that she had a passionate affair with actor Victor Mature while they were working on the film Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), citing that at the time her marriage was in trouble and, feeling lonely, she turned to Mature for love and affection, and he gave her all she wanted. She was romantically linked with Jeff Chandler, but broke off the relationship when she discovered that Chandler was a cross-dresser, which she revealed for the first time in her autobiography. She and Gage divorced on 20 April 1959.
She then married former lover, Argentine actor/director, Fernando Lamas on December 31, 1969. They were married until his death from pancreatic cancer on October 8, 1982. She currently resides in Beverly Hills with actor-husband Edward Bell, whom she married on October 24, 1994.
Later life
Esther Williams retired from acting in the early 1960s and currently lends her name to a line of women's swimwear and to a company that manufactures swimming pools and swimming pool accessories. She co-wrote her autobiography The Million Dollar Mermaid (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999) with popular media critic and author Digby Diehl.[4]
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Fri 8 Aug, 2008 07:37 am
Rory Calhoun
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rory Calhoun
Born Francis Timothy McCown Durgin
August 8, 1922(1922-08-08)
Los Angeles, California
Died April 28, 1999 (aged 76)
Burbank, California
Other name(s) Smoke
Years active 1941-1993
Spouse(s) Lita Baron (1948-1970)
Sue Rhodes (1971-1999)
Rory Calhoun (August 8, 1922 - April 28, 1999) was an American television and film actor, screenwriter, and producer best known for his roles in Westerns.
Biography
Early life
Born Francis Timothy McCown in Los Angeles, California, Calhoun was raised in Santa Cruz, California. When he was nine months old, his father died. After his mother remarried, he occasionally used the last name of his stepfather, Durgin. At the age of thirteen, his theft of a revolver landed him in the California Youth Authority,Preston School of Industry reformatory at Ione, Ca. He escaped while in the adjustment center (jail within the jail) and never told how he managed it. After robbing several jewelry stores, he stole a car and drove it across state lines. This offense sent him to the federal penitentiary in Springfield, Missouri for three years. When he finished his sentence, he was incarcerated in San Quentin on other charges and remained there until he was paroled just before his twenty-first birthday.[1]
Career
After his release from San Quentin, Calhoun worked several odd jobs. In 1943, while horseback riding in the Hollywood Hills, he met actor Alan Ladd, whose wife was an agent. Sue Carol Ladd landed him a one-line role in the Laurel and Hardy comedy The Bullfighters under the name Frank McCown. Shortly after, the Ladds hosted a party to which Sue invited David O. Selznick employee Henry Willson, an agent known for his stable of young, attractive, marginally talented actors with unusual names. Willson signed him to a contract and initially christened him Troy Donahue, then changed his name to Rory Calhoun. As he did with all his protégés, Willson carefully groomed him and taught him basic social manners.[2]
Calhoun's first public appearance in the film capital was as Lana Turner's escort to the premiere of Spellbound. The glamorous blonde and her swarthy date drew the attention of the papparazzi, and photos of the couple appeared in several newspapers and fan magazines. Selznick loaned his now in-demand contract player to other studios, where Calhoun appeared in Adventure Island with Rhonda Fleming, The Red House with Edward G. Robinson, and That Hagen Girl with Shirley Temple.[3]
Calhoun's career gained momentum and he appeared in several westerns, musicals, and comedies including Way of a Gaucho with Gene Tierney, With a Song in My Heart with Susan Hayward, How to Marry a Millionaire, and River of No Return with Marilyn Monroe.
Willson maintained careful control over his rising star, arranging his social life and nixing his engagement to French actress Corinne Calvert.
In 1955, Willson disclosed information about Calhoun's years in prison to Confidential magazine in exchange for the tabloid not printing an exposé about the secret homosexual life of Rock Hudson, another Willson client. The disclosure had no negative effect on Calhoun's career and only served to solidify his bad boy image. Shortly after the story was published, Rachel and the Stranger was released and became a top box office attraction.[4]
In 1958, Calhoun starred in The Texan, a series that ran until 1960. While filming The Texan, Calhoun also began producing episodes and would continue to produce and write screenplays throughout his career. After the The Texan was canceled, he continued to appear in both television and film throughout the 1970s and 1980s including; Rawhide, Gilligan's Island,Hawaii Five-O, Alias Smith and Jones, Starsky and Hutch, and Motel Hell. In 1982, Calhoun had a regular role on the soap opera Capitol. He stayed with the series until 1987.[5]
His final role was that of grizzled family patriarch and rancher Ernest Tucker in the 1992 film Pure Country.
Personal life
Calhoun was married twice and had four daughters, three with Lita Baron, whom he divorced in 1970, and one with journalist Sue Rhodes (1971-1999).
Calhoun died in Burbank, California at the age of 76 from complications resulting from emphysema and diabetes.
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Calhoun has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7007 Hollywood Blvd. and a second star at 1750 Vine Street for his work in television.
Calhoun's second cousin is popular Canadian sports talk show host Bob McCown (host of Prime Time Sports on the Fan 590 Radio and nation wide on Rogers Sportsnet).
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Fri 8 Aug, 2008 07:43 am
Dustin Hoffman
from Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Dustin Lee Hoffman[1] (born August 8, 1937)[1] is a two-time Academy Award-, six-time Golden Globe-, three-time BAFTA- and Emmy Award-winning American actor.
Early life
Hoffman was born in Los Angeles, California,[1] the son of Lillian (née Gold), a jazz pianist, and Harry Hoffman, who worked as a prop supervisor/set decorator at Columbia Pictures before becoming a furniture salesman.[2][3] His brother, Ronald, is a lawyer and economist. Hoffman's family was Jewish, although he did not have a religious upbringing.[4][5]He graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1955.
Career
Early career
Hoffman began acting at the Pasadena Playhouse with fellow actor Gene Hackman. After two years at the playhouse, Hackman headed for New York City and Hoffman soon followed. He worked a series of odd jobs, including coat checking at restaurants, working in the typing department of the city Yellow Pages directory, and stringing Hawaiian leis, while getting the occasional bit television role. To support himself, he left acting briefly to teach. He worked as a professional fragrance tester for Maxwell House. He also did the occasional television commercial. An oft-replayed segment on programs that explore actors' early work is a clip showing Hoffman touting the Volkswagen Fastback.
In 1960, Hoffman landed a role in an off-Broadway production and followed with a walk-on role in a Broadway production in 1961. Hoffman then studied at the famed Actors Studio and became a dedicated method actor.
Through the early and mid-1960s, Hoffman made appearances in television shows and movies, including Naked City, The Defenders and Hallmark Hall of Fame. Hoffman made his theatrical film debut in The Tiger Makes Out in 1967, alongside Eli Wallach.
Between acting jobs, Hoffman also made ends meet by teaching acting at a community college night school, and by directing off-broadway and community theater productions. In 1967, immediately after wrapping up principal filming on The Tiger Makes Out, Hoffman flew from New York City to Fargo, North Dakota, where he directed a production of William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life for the Emma Herbst Community Theatre. The $1,000 he received for the eight-week contract was all he had to hold him over until the funds from the movie materialized.
Major Roles
In 1966, Mike Nichols began casting The Graduate. Negotiations with Warren Beatty and Robert Redford fell through, and Hoffman auditioned for the role. Before Hoffman, Charles Grodin had also been in consideration for the role but, according to one anecdote, refused to work for the amount offered. Hoffman had been set to play the role of Nazi playwright Franz Liebkind in Mel Brooks' 1968 movie The Producers, but dropped out when he landed the role of Benjamin Braddock, opposite Anne Bancroft. The film began production in March 1967. Hoffman received an Academy Award nomination for his performance. After the success of this film, another Hoffman film, Madigan's Millions, shot before The Graduate, was released on the tail of the actor's newfound success. It was considered a failure at the box office.
Hoffman's next role was Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy. Hoffman received his second Oscar nomination for Midnight Cowboy, while the film won the Best Picture honor. This was followed by his role in Little Big Man, where he played Jack Crabb, who ages from teenager to a 121-year-old man in the film. The film was widely praised by critics, but was overlooked for an award except for a supporting nomination for Chief Dan George.
Hoffman continued to appear in major films over the next few years. Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, Straw Dogs, and Papillon were followed by Lenny in 1974, for which Hoffman received third nomination for Best Actor in seven years.
Less than two years after the Watergate scandal, Hoffman and Robert Redford starred as Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, respectively, in All the President's Men. Hoffman next starred in Marathon Man, a film based on William Goldman's novel of the same name, opposite Laurence Olivier.
Hoffman's next roles were not as successful. He opted out of directing Straight Time but starred as a thief. His next film, Michael Apted's Agatha, was opposite Vanessa Redgrave starring as Agatha Christie.
Hoffman's next starred in Robert Benton's Kramer vs. Kramer as workaholic Ted Kramer whose wife unexpectedly leaves him and he must raise their son alone. Hoffman starred alongside Meryl Streep in the film, which earned Hoffman his first Academy Award. The film also received the Best Picture honor, as well as Supporting Actress (Streep) and Director.
In Tootsie, Hoffman portrays Michael Dorsey, a struggling actor who finds himself dressing up as a woman to land a role on a soap opera. His co-star was Jessica Lange. Tootsie earned ten Academy Award nominations, including Hoffman's fifth nomination.
Hoffman then turned to television in the role of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, for which he won the 1985 Emmy Award for Outstanding lead actor in a TV movie or miniseries. He would also go on to win a Golden Globe for the same performance.
Hoffman's largest film failure was Elaine May's Ishtar, with Warren Beatty. The film received almost completely negative reviews from critics and was nominated for three Razzie awards. James House, who later became a country music artist, served as Hoffman's vocal coach in the film.[6]
In director Barry Levinson's Rain Man, Hoffman starred an autistic savant, opposite Tom Cruise. Levinson, Hoffman and Cruise worked for two years on the film, His performance garnered Hoffman his second Academy Award. Upon accepting, Hoffman stated softly to his fellow nominees that it was okay if they didn't vote for him because "I didn't vote for you guys either."[citation needed]
After Rain Man, Hoffman appeared with Sean Connery and Matthew Broderick in Family Business. The film did relatively poorly with the critics and at the box office. In 1991, Hoffman voiced substitute teacher Mr. Bergstrom in the Simpsons episode "Lisa's Substitute", under the pseudonym Sam Etic.
Throughout the 1990s, Hoffman appeared in many large, studio films, such as Dick Tracy, Hero and the ill-fated Billy Bathgate. Hoffman also played the title role of Captain Hook in Steven Spielberg's Hook, earning a Golden Globe nomination. Hoffman played the lead role in Outbreak, alongside Rene Russo, Kevin Spacey, Morgan Freeman, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Donald Sutherland. Following that, he appeared in Sleepers with Brad Pitt and Jason Patric. He starred opposite John Travolta in the Costa Gavras vehicle Mad City.
It was in the mid-1990s that Hoffman starred in �- and was deeply involved in the production of �- David Mamet's American Buffalo, one of the very few "pure art projects" he is known for, and an early effort of film editor Kate Sanford.
Hoffman gained his seventh Academy Award nomination for his role in Wag The Dog. He next appeared in Barry Levinson's adaptation of Sphere, opposite Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson, Peter Coyote, Queen Latifah and Liev Schreiber.
Hoffman next appeared in Moonlight Mile, followed by Confidence opposite Edward Burns, Andy Garcia and Rachel Weisz. Hoffman would finally have a chance to work with Gene Hackman, in Gary Fleder's Runaway Jury, an adaptation of John Grisham's bestselling novel.
More recently, Hoffman played theater owner Charles Frohman in the J.M. Barrie biopic Finding Neverland, costarring Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet. In director David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabees, Hoffman appeared opposite Lily Tomlin as an existential detective team.
Hoffman co-starred with Barbra Streisand, Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller in 2004's Meet the Fockers, the sequel to Meet the Parents. Hoffman won the 2005 MTV Movie Award for Best Comedic Performance. Also, Hoffman recently was featured in cameo roles in Andy Garcia's The Lost City and on the final episode of HBO sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm's fifth season.
In 2006, Hoffman appeared in Stranger than Fiction, played the perfumer Giuseppe Baldini in Tom Tykwer's film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and had a small cameo in the 2006 film, The Holiday.
In 2007 he was featured in an advertising campaign for Australian telecommunications company Telstra's Next G network.[7], appeared in the 50 Cent video "Follow My Lead" as a psychiatrist, and played the title character in the family film Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium. In 2008, although he was reluctant to perform in an animated film, Hoffman had a prominent role in the acclaimed film, Kung Fu Panda which was praised in part for his comedic chemistry with Jack Black and his character's complex relationship with the story's villain.
Personal life
Hoffman married Anne Byrne in May 1969.[8] The couple had two children, Karina and Jenna. They divorced in 1980.[8] His second marriage to attorney Lisa Gottsegen in October 1980, produced four more children, Jacob, Maxwell, Rebecca and Alexandra. Hoffman also has two grandchildren. In an interview, he said that all of his children have had bar or bat mitzvahs and that he is a more observant Jew now than when he was younger, but also lamented that he is not fluent in Hebrew.
A political liberal, Hoffman has long supported the Democratic Party and Ralph Nader.[9]
Robert Duvall was a roommate of Hoffman's during their struggling actor years in New York City. Duvall and Hoffman tease each other on the matter of acting training, as Duvall was trained by Sanford Meisner whereas Hoffman was brought up on Lee Strasberg's method acting. Hoffman is good friends with actor Gene Hackman, who was also friends with Duvall during their years as starving actors.
In 1974, Hoffman on a talk show stated that the Oscars were "obscene, dirty and no better than a beauty contest." When presenting an award at that year's Oscar ceremonies, Frank Sinatra responded strongly: "And contrary to what Mr. Hoffman thinks, it is not an obscene evening. It is not garish and it is not embarrassing".[10]
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bobsmythhawk
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Fri 8 Aug, 2008 07:46 am
Connie Stevens
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Connie Stevens (born August 8, 1938) is an American actress and singer.
Biography
She was born Concetta Rosalie Anna Ingoglia in Brooklyn, New York, a daughter of Peter Ingoglia (known as musician Teddy Stevens) and singer Eleanor McGinley.
Connie adopted her father's stage name of Stevens as her own. Her parents were divorced and she lived with grandparents. At age eight, she started attending Catholic boarding schools. Actor John Megna is her half-brother.
Coming from a musical family, she formed a singing group called The Foremost, the other three vocalists went on to fame as The Lettermen. In 1953, Stevens moved to Los Angeles with her father. When she was sixteen, she replaced the alto in a singing group, The Three Debs. She enrolled at a professional school (Georgia Massey's School of Song and Dance in Leona Valley), sang professionally and appeared in local repertory theater. She was dismissed from The Three Debs for "unprofessional behavior" while on a job in Las Vegas. Ironically, she continued with a great professional career while the two original Debs dropped into obscurity.
Stevens then started working as a movie extra. After appearing in four B movies, Jerry Lewis saw her in Dragstrip Riot and cast her in Rock-A-Bye Baby. Soon after that, she signed a contract with Warner Brothers.
She played 'Cricket Blake' in the popular television detective series Hawaiian Eye from 1959 to 1962, a role that made her famous. Her principal costar was Robert Conrad. In a televised interview on August 26, 2003, on CNN's Larry King Live, Stevens recounted that while on the set of Hawaiian Eye she was told she had a telephone call from Elvis Presley. She didn't believe it, but in fact it was Elvis, who invited her to a party and said that he would come to her house and pick her up personally. They dated for a time and she says they remained lifelong friends.
Her first album was titled Concetta (1958). She had minor single hits with the standards "Blame It On My Youth" (music by Oscar Levant and lyrics by Edward Heyman), "Looking For A Boy" (music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin), and "Spring Is Here" (music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart). She appeared opposite James Garner in a comedy episode of the TV Western series Maverick entitled "Two Tickets to Ten Strike," and after making several appearances on the Warner Bros. hit TV series 77 Sunset Strip, she recorded the hit novelty song "Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb"(1959), a duet with one of the stars of the program, Edward Byrnes. She also had hit singles as a solo artist with "Sixteen Reasons" (1961) and "Too Young to Go Steady" (music by Jimmy McHugh and lyrics by Harold Adamson) (1960). Other single releases were "Why'd You Wanna Make Me Cry?", "Mr. Songwriter", and "Now That You've Gone".
Stevens felt she should be given a raise in 1962, and during the dispute with the studio she was placed on suspension. She was also angered over being denied a chance to audition for the lead in the upcoming Warner Bros. musical My Fair Lady. The differences between her and Warner Bros. were patched up long enough, however, for her to star as Wendy Conway in the television sitcom Wendy and Me (1964- 1965) with George Burns, who also produced the show and played an older man who watched Wendy's exploits upstairs on the TV in his apartment, periodically commenting to the viewers about what he saw. Her other Wendy and Me costars were Ron Harper, James Callahan, and character actor J. Pat O'Malley.
She also worked in summer stock, and she starred in the Broadway production of Neil Simon's Star Spangled Girl with Anthony Perkins.
Connie Stevens has had two husbands, actor James Stacy (married 1963-divorced 1967) and singer Eddie Fisher (married 1967-divorced 1969). She is the mother of actresses Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher.
In the 1970s, Stevens started singing the Ace Is The Place theme song on Ace Hardware TV commercials in Southern California and often was guest on the Dean Martin Celebrity Roast a few times. In the spring of 1977, she appeared in one of the two pilots for The Muppet Show, and in 1986, she had a regular role on the 1986 TV series Rowdies and appeared numerous times on the Bob Hope USO specials, including his Christmas Show from the Persian Gulf (1988).
During the early 1980s the actress received belated recognition as a sex symbol, mostly due to TV movies and appearances which highlighted her sex appeal. Surprisingly, her popularity in this regard was by teenage males who saw the naturally beautiful older woman as a refreshing change from the scrubbed, bland look of the era's more touted pinup girls. Her appearance as a sexy high school teacher in Grease 2 was a major contributing factor to her resurgence. But even more important was the 1981 TV-movie "Side Show" where Stevens had an onscreen seduction sequence with a teenager, a trailblazing scene which anticipated similar storylines of the 1980s. She appeared as herself in "Back to the Beach" in 1987. By the end of the decade Stevens had become a cult sex symbol.
Among her charitable works, she founded the Windfeather project to award scholarships to Native American Indians. In 1991, Stevens received the Lady of Humanities Award from Shriners Hospital and the Humanitarian of the Year Award by the Sons of Italy in Washington, DC.
Stevens developed her own cosmetic skin care product line, Forever Spring, and in the 1990s opened the Connie Stevens Garden Sanctuary Day Spa in Los Angeles. Her cosmetics empire has made Stevens one of the wealthiest women in Hollywood, quite the achievement for a woman who was on the verge of bankruptcy in the mid 1980s.
In 1994, she issued her first recording in several years, Tradition: A Family at Christmas, along with her two daughters.
In 1997, Stevens directed, wrote, and edited a documentary entitled A Healing, about Red Cross nurses who served during the Vietnam War. The following year it won the title of Best Film at the Santa Clarita International Film Festival.
She has also made nightclub appearances and headlined in major Las Vegas showrooms. She was an occasional guest panelist on Match Game.
Connie Stevens has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6249 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, and she has a star on the Star Walk in Palm Springs.
On September 23, 2005, Stevens was elected secretary-treasurer of the Screen Actors' Guild. This is the union's second-highest elected position. She succeeded James Cromwell, who did not seek re-election. Stevens will begin serving a two-year term on September 25. She received 68.2 percent of the union vote, having defeated Lee Garlington, who received 31.8 percent.
Stevens is a long-time supporter of U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona, a candidate once again for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.
Stevens maintains homes in Beverly Hills, Palm Springs, and New York City. She is currently making her feature-length directorial debut of a film she wrote called "Saving Grace" which is currently shooting in Boonville, Missouri.
The two Connies
She and singer Connie Francis are often mistaken for each other. Both are female Italian-American singers from the greater New York City area who anglicized their Italian birth name of "Concetta" into "Connie" and their last names into common English names. Both were born in 1938, and both enjoyed their success on the pop charts in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The Connie Stevens' song "Sixteen Reasons" is featured in the soundtrack of David Lynch's movie, Mulholland Drive but it is not on the film's commercially-available soundtrack CD.
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bobsmythhawk
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Fri 8 Aug, 2008 07:49 am
Keith Carradine
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born Keith Ian Carradine
August 8, 1949 (1949-08-08) (age 59)
San Mateo, California
Years active 1971 - present
Spouse(s) Hayley DuMond (18 November 2006 - present)
Sandra Will (6 February 1982 - ?) (divorced) 2 children
Awards won
Academy Awards
Best Music, Original Song
1976 Nashville
Keith Ian Carradine (born August 8, 1949) is an American Academy Award-winning actor and songwriter, born into a family of actors.
Biography
Early life
Carradine was born in San Mateo, California, the son of actress and artist Sonia Sorel (née Henius) and actor John Carradine.[1] His paternal half-brothers are David Carradine and Bruce Carradine, his maternal half-brother is Michael Bowen, and his full brothers are Christopher Carradine and Robert Carradine.
Career
David, Robert and Keith Carradine appeared together as the Younger brothers in Walter Hill's 1980 film "The Long Riders", with Keith playing Jim Younger. Carradine appeared again for Hill in 1981's Southern Comfort.
Carradine's first notable film appearance was in director Robert Altman's "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" in 1971. He also portrayed the character Kwai Chang Caine as a teenager in the 1972 television series "Kung Fu" (the adult Caine was portrayed by his half brother, David). He went on to play one of the principal characters, a callow, womanizing folk singer, in Altman's critically acclaimed 1975 movie "Nashville"' and his song from that movie, "I'm Easy", was a popular music hit in 1976. Carradine won an Oscar for Best Original Song for writing the tune.
In 1977 Carradine starred opposite Harvey Keitel in Ridley Scott's "The Duellists". He has worked several times in the offbeat films of Altman's protégé Alan Rudolph, playing a disarmingly candid madman in "Choose Me" (1984), an incompetent petty criminal in "Trouble in Mind" (1985) and an American artist in 1930s Paris in "The Moderns" (1988). He also had a cameo role as Will Rogers in Rudolph's 1994 film about Dorothy Parker, "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle". Carradine co-starred with Daryl Hannah as homicidal sociopath John Netherwood in the 1995 thriller "The Tie That Binds".
Other works include "Emperor of the North Pole" (1973), "Pretty Baby" (1978), "Chiefs", a television miniseries in 1983, and "My Father My Son", a television movie in 1988. In 1984 he appeared in the video for Madonna's single Material Girl. In the early 1990s he played the lead role in the Tony Award winning musical, the "Will Rogers Follies". He was nominated for Broadway's 1991 Tony Award as Best Actor (Musical) for this role.
More recently Carradine starred in the ABC sitcom "Complete Savages", and played Wild Bill Hickok in the HBO series "Deadwood". He has also appeared as a host of the factual "Wild West Tech" show on the History Channel.
In the 2005 miniseries "Into the West", produced by Steven Spielberg and Dreamworks, Carradine played Richard Henry Pratt. He guest starred on Dexter (TV series) as FBI Special Agent Frank Lundy during the 2007-2008 season.
Personal life
Carradine's daughter by actress Shelley Plimpton is Martha Plimpton, who was conceived when her parents appeared together in the Broadway musical "Hair".
He has two children by his ex-wife Sandra Will Carradine (married 6 February 1982, separated 1993): Cade Richmond Carradine, born on July 19, 1982, and Sorel Johannah Carradine, born on June 18, 1985. In 2006 Sandra Will Carradine was convicted on two counts of perjury for lying to a Grand Jury about her involvement in the Anthony Pellicano wire tap scandal. Sandra Will Carradine hired and then became romantically involved with Anthony Pellicano, after her divorce from Keith Carradine. According to reports, Anthony Pellicano tapped the phone of Keith Carradine and companion Hayley DuMond at the request of girlfriend Sandra Will Carradine, who is now facing ten years' prison.
On November 18 2006, in Torino, Italy, he married actress and long-time girlfriend Hayley DuMond. They met in 1997 when they co-starred in the Burt Reynolds film "The Hunter's Moon".
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bobsmythhawk
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Fri 8 Aug, 2008 07:52 am
Wish
A woman rubbed a bottle and out popped a genie.
The amazed woman asked if she got three wishes.
The genie said, "Nope, sorry, three-wish genies are a storybook myth. I'm a one-wish genie. So... what'll it be?"
The woman did not hesitate.
She said, "I want peace in the Middle East.
"See this map? I want these countries to stop fighting with each other and I want all the Arabs to love the Jews and Americans and vice-versa."
"It will bring about world peace and harmony."
The genie looked at the map and exclaimed, "Lady, be reasonable. These countries have been at war for thousands of years. I'm out of shape after being in a bottle for five hundred years.. I'm good but not THAT good! I don't think it can be done. Make another wish and please be reasonable."
The woman thought for a minute and said, "Well, I've never been able to find the right man. You know - one that's considerate and fun, romantic, likes to cook and help with the house cleaning, is good in bed, and gets along with my family, doesn't watch sports all the time, and is faithful. That is what I wish for...a good man."
The genie let out a sigh and said, "Let me see the map again."
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Raggedyaggie
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Fri 8 Aug, 2008 08:22 am
That's funny, Bob.
Today's picture gallery:
Have a great day.
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Letty
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Fri 8 Aug, 2008 08:53 am
Thanks, hawkman, for the enlightening background on the celebs. A puppy in a crystal ball can't do what a genie can't do. Good one, Bob. Thanks for what she can do, however, and that is a great montage.
Hmmm. Wonder if it's possible to teach a hawk to talk.
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firefly
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Fri 8 Aug, 2008 11:27 am
Thanks for playing more Pavarotti for me, Letty. It was fun hearing him with Meatloaf.
Since we seem to be into men in drag today, what with the Birdcage and all, and, since I loved the movie Tootsie, this one is for Dustin Hoffman on his birthday. He didn't make a bad-looking woman.
I sat here in my wee studio listening to Bill play and reading the last of M.D.'s treatise about his music. One outstanding observation, was that improvisation can often overshadow the melody. I also recall dj having said that the lyrics were very important, and I silently read the lyrics of the theme from Tootsie. They were beautiful. Yes, folks, lyric poetry was meant to be set to music.
Knowing the background on Bill Evans' life made me quite somber. Is that kind of creative genius a blessing or a curse?
How about some Mozart. He had the same problems that Bill had, in a way.
That's funny, Bob.
