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The cast, folks:

September 22, 1957 - July 8, 1962
ABC Western - 124 Episodes

Cast:
Bret Maverick: James Garner
Bart Maverick: Jack Kelly
Beau Maverick: Roger Moore
Samantha Crawford: Diane Brewster
Dandy Jim Buckley: Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.
Gentleman Jack Darby: Richard Long
Brent Maverick: Robert Colbert
Big Mike McComb: Leo Gordon
Doc Holliday: Peter Breck
Announcer: Edwin Reimers

The exploits of Bret and Bart Maverick, brothers, self-
centered, unconventional, and untrustworthy gentlemen
gamblers. Seeking rich prey.

Roger Moore?

Letty, a quick anecdote about Belize for now...no time at present to do a full treatment. Our last night there we spent in a small fishing village in the north--we were there checking out a real estate development. In the morning we asked some old Belize hands from Kansas City who were staying at the same inn about a place to do lunch on the way to the airport in Belize City. So 1 1/2 hours later, we had a nice meal at Lee's (chinese) Restaurant in Orange Walk, along with 8 or 9 Mennonites. (if i ever saw a Mennonite before Belize, i had no inkling i had seen one.) Then we made it to the airport car rental about 5 minutes before it was due to be returned. I told the agent, a black Belizean, about our lunch,and he told me that when he's in Orange Walk, he eats at the same restaurant.

We didn't really visit either Belize City, where a quarter of Belizeans live, or San Pedro in Ambergris Caye, the primary destination for tourists, so our impressions may be atypical but Belize seems mainly composed of small towns where everyone knows everyone. It's also paradise for nature lovers, and bird watchers in particular.

I remember the Chan conversation. I don't remember the movie.

Roger Moore : As regular - Cousin Beauregard Maverick (1960-61; 13 episodes of season 4)

and a guest appearance as :
. The Rivals (Leslie H. Martinson) 25/01/1959

Episode 45: Lydia Linley is a young heiress who yearns for a man like Sydney Carton of A Tale of Two Cities - "a man of warmth, imagination, courage, and a sense of adventure." Jack Vandergelt III (Roger Moore) is in love with Lydia but knows she will have nothing to do with him because he is rich. Vandergelt hires Bret Maverick to switch identities with him in hopes that Lydia will love and accept him for who he is before she realizes he is a Vandergelt. The plan goes smoothly until Jack Vandergelt's father unexpectedly arrives in town.

William Wordsworth
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William Wordsworth, English poet
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William Wordsworth, English poet

William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 - April 23, 1850) was a major English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's masterpiece is generally considered to be The Prelude, an autobiographical poem of his early years that was revised and expanded a number of times. It was never published during his lifetime, and was only given the title after his death (up until this time it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge"). Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.
Contents
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* 1 Early Life and Education
* 2 France
* 3 First Publication and Lyrical Ballads
* 4 Germany
* 5 Marriage
* 6 Autobiographical Work and Poems in Two Volumes
* 7 The Prospectus
* 8 The Poet Laureate
* 9 Death of Wordsworth
* 10 External links

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Early Life and Education

The second of five children, Wordsworth was born in Cumberland?-part of the scenic region in northwest England called the Lake District. With the death of his mother in 1778, his father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar School. In 1783 his father, who was a lawyer and the solicitor for the Earl of Lonsdale (a man much despised in the area), died. The estate consisted of around £5000, most of it in claims upon the Earl, who thwarted these claims until his death in 1802. The Earl's successor, however, settled the claims with interest. After their father's death, the Wordsworth children were left under the guardianship of their uncles. Although many aspects of his boyhood were positive, he recalled bouts of loneliness and anxiety. It took him many years, and much writing, to recover from the death of his parents and his separation from his siblings.

Wordsworth began attending St John's College, Cambridge in 1787. In 1790, he visited Revolutionary France and supported the Republican movement. The following year, he graduated from Cambridge without distinction.
[edit]

France

In November,1791, Wordsworth returned to France and took a walking tour of Europe that included the Alps and Italy. He fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, who in 1792 gave birth to their child, Caroline. Because of lack of money and Britain's tensions with France, he returned alone to England that year, but he supported Vallon and his daughter as best he could in later life. The Reign of Terror estranged him from the Republican movement, and war between France and Britain prevented him from seeing Annette and Caroline again for several years. There are also strong suggestions that Wordsworth may have been depressed and emotionally unsettled in the mid 1790s.
[edit]

First Publication and Lyrical Ballads

1793 saw Wordsworth's first published poetry with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. He received a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert in 1795 so that he could pursue writing poetry. That year, he also met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, moved to Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey. Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English Romantic movement. The volume had neither the name of Wordsworth or Coleridge as author. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey", was published in the work, along with Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The second edition, published in 1800, had only Wordsworth listed as author. A third edition of "Lyrical Ballads," published in 1802, contained more poems by Wordsworth, including a preface to the poems. This Preface to "Lyrical Ballads" is considered a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and which avoids the poetic diction of much eighteenth-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth also gives his famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility."
[edit]

Germany

Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Coleridge then travelled to Germany. During the harsh winter of 1798-1799, Wordsworth lived with Dorothy in Goslar, and despite extreme stress and loneliness, he began work on an autobiographical piece later titled The Prelude. He also wrote a number of famous poems, including "the Lucy poems." He and his sister moved back to England, now to Grasmere in the Lake District, and this time with fellow poet Robert Southey nearby. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey came to be known as the "Lake Poets". Through this period, many of his poems revolve around themes of death, endurance, separation, and grief.
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Marriage

In 1802, he and Dorothy travelled to France to visit Annette and Caroline. Later that year, he married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy did not appreciate the marriage at first, but lived with the couple and later grew close to Mary. The following year, Mary gave birth to the first of five children, John.
William Wordsworth, reproduced from Margaret Gillies' 1839 original
Enlarge
William Wordsworth, reproduced from Margaret Gillies' 1839 original
Portrait, 1842, by Benjamin Haydon.
Enlarge
Portrait, 1842, by Benjamin Haydon.

Both Coleridge's health and his relationship to Wordsworth began showing signs of decay in 1804. That year Wordsworth befriended Robert Southey. With Napoleon's rise as emperor of France, Wordsworth's last wisp of liberalism fell, and from then on he identified himself as a conservative.
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Autobiographical Work and Poems in Two Volumes

Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long philosophical poem in three parts, which he intended to call The Recluse. He had in 1798-99 started an autobiographical poem, which he never named but called the "poem to Coleridge", which would serve as an appendix to The Recluse. In 1804 he began expanding this autobiographical work, having decided to make it a prologue rather than an appendix to the larger work he planned. By 1805, he had completed it, but refused to publish so personal a work until he should have completed the whole of The Recluse. The death of his brother, John, in 1805 affected him strongly.

In 1807, his Poems in Two Volumes were published, including "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". Up to this point Wordsworth was known publicly only for Lyrical Ballads, and he hoped this collection would cement his reputation. Its reception was only lukewarm, however. For a time, Wordsworth and Coleridge were estranged over the latter's opium addiction.

Two of his children, Thomas and Catherine, died in 1812. The following year, he moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside where he spent the rest of his life.
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The Prospectus

In 1814 he published The Excursion as the second part of the three-part The Recluse. He had not completed the first and third parts, and never would complete them. However, he did write a poetic Prospectus to "The Recluse" in which he lays out the structure and intent of the poem. The Prospectus contains some of Wordworth's most famous lines on the relation between the human mind and nature:

my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too,
Theme this but little heard of among Men,
The external World is fitted to the Mind . . .

Some modern critics recognise a decline in his works beginning around the mid-1810s. But this decline was perhaps more a change in his lifestyle and beliefs, since most of the issues that characterise his early poetry (loss, death, endurance, separation, abandonment) were resolved in his writings. But, by 1820 he enjoyed the success accompanying a reversal in the contemporary critical opinion of his earlier works.

Dorothy suffered from a severe illness in 1829 that rendered her an invalid for the remainder of her life. In 1835, Wordsworth gave Annette and Caroline the money they needed for support. The government awarded him a civil list pension amounting to £300 a year in 1842.
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The Poet Laureate

With the death in 1843 of Robert Southey, Wordsworth became the Poet Laureate. When his daughter, Dora, died in 1847, his production of poetry came to a standstill.
[edit]

Death of Wordsworth

William Wordsworth died in Rydal Mount in 1850 and was buried at St Oswald's Church in Grasmere.

His widow Mary published his lengthy autobiographical "poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude several months after his death. Though this failed to arouse great interest in 1850; it has since come to be recognised as his masterpiece.

The lives of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in particular their collaboration on the "Lyrical Ballads," are discussed in the 2000 film Pandaemonium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink ;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The very deep did rot : O Christ !
That ever this should be !
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night ;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.

Walter Winchell
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Walter Winchell (April 7, 1897 - February 20, 1972), an American newspaper and radio commentator, invented the gossip column at the New York Evening Graphic. He broke the journalistic taboo against exposing the private lives of public figures, permanently altering the shape of journalism and celebrity.

Professional career

Born Walter Winchel (with only one l) in New York City, where he spent his formative years, Winchell started performing in vaudeville troupes while still in his teens. His career as a journalist began when he started posting gossipy notes about his acting troup on backstage bulletin boards. He became a professional journalist in the 1920s.

Winchell was extremely popular and influential in shaping public opinion, notoriously aiding and ruining the careers of many entertainers. Although he concentrated on gossiping about entertainment figures, Winchell frequently expressed opinions about public affairs, too. He was one of the first public commentators in America to attack Adolf Hitler and American pro-fascist and pro-Nazi organizations such as the German-American Bund. He generally had a left-of-center political view through the 1930s and World War II, when he was stridently pro-Roosevelt, pro-labor, and pro-Democratic Party. Following the war, he perceived Communism as the main threat facing America and in a few short years he became allied with the right-wing of American politics. He frequently attacked politicians he didn't like by implying in his commentaries that they were Communist sympathizers.

In the 1950s he supported Senator Joseph McCarthy, and as McCarthy's "Red Scare" tactics became more extreme and unbelievable, Winchell lost credibility along with McCarthy. His readership gradually dropped, and when his home paper, the New York Daily Mirror, for which he worked for 34 years, closed in the 1960s, he faded from the public eye. He did, however, receive $25,000 an episode to narrate The Untouchables on the ABC television network for five seasons beginning in 1959. Winchell's highly recognizable voice lent credibility to the series, and his work as narrator is often better remembered today than his long-out-of-print newspaper columns.


Personal life

Winchell married Rita Greene, one of his onstage partners, on August 11, 1919. They separated a few years later and he moved in with June Magee, who had already given birth to their first child, daughter Walda, by the time he actually divorced Greene in 1928. He and Magee had been pretending to be married for some years by then. They never did marry because he was always afraid that the marriage license would be discovered and reveal to the world that Walda was illegitimate.

Winchell and Magee successfully kept the secret of their non-marriage their whole lives, but were struck by tragedy with all three of their children. Their adopted daughter Gloria died of pneumonia at age nine and Walda spent time in mental institutions. However, Walter, Jr.'s story was perhaps the most tragic. The only son of the journalist committed suicide in his family's garage on Christmas night, 1968. Having spent the previous two years on welfare, Winchell, Jr. had last been employed as a dishwasher in Santa Ana, CA, but listed himself as a freelance writer.

Winchell announced his retirement on February 5, 1969, citing the tragedy as a major reason, while also noting the delicate health of his wife. Exactly one year later, she died at a Phoenix hospital while undergoing treatment for a heart condition.

Winchell's final two years were spent as a recluse at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles before dying of prostate cancer at the age of 74. Although his obituary appeared on the front page of The New York Times, his prominence had long since faded.


Legacy

It would be difficult to overestimate the effects Walter Winchell continues to have on American politics and popular culture. It has become a commonplace to say that America has a "culture of celebrity." Anyone contemplating a career in either entertainment or politics must assume that their every secret will be revealed and will likely be portrayed in the worst possible light. They can also count on being the subject of false gossip from time to time.


Persons targeted by Winchell

Tokyo Rose, James Forrestal, Martin Dies, Theodore Bilbo, William Dudley Pelley, Henry Ford


Portrayals in the media

Not surprisingly, given his importance to the era, shows set in the American entertainment world of the 30s, 40s, or 50s often feature Walter Winchell. He has been played by Joseph Bologna in Citizen Cohn (1992) (TV), by Joey Forman in The Scarlett O'Hara War (1980) (TV), by Craig T. Nelson in The Josephine Baker Story (1991) (TV), by Michael Townsend Wright in The Rat Pack (1998) (TV) and by Mark Zimmerman in Dash and Lilly (1999) (TV). Although the lead characters of Okay, America and Sweet Smell of Success are not named "Walter Winchell" they are clearly based on him. Indeed, Winchell was originally scheduled to play the lead in Okay, America.

Stanley Tucci briefly brought Winchell back into the public consciousness in 1998, playing the titular role in the made-for-cable biopic Winchell on HBO.

A fictionalized "Walter Winchell" is also an important character in the bestselling novel The Plot Against America by Philip Roth.

Author Michael Herr wrote "Walter Winchell - A Novel" in 1990.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Winchell

Hey, Mr. Turtle. Thanks for the travelogue, buddy. Yes, it was succinct and informative, but that's the way we like it.

My word, Raggedy. You have such power of recall, gal. Thanks, PA.

Well, bio Bob is here, listeners, so we will return after he finishes.

Percy Faith
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Percy Faith (April 7, 1908 - February 9, 1976) was a band-leader, orchestrator and composer, known for his arrangements of standard tunes with lush string sections and female chorus vocal and wordless. The female chorus became a Percy Faith signature with his mid to late 60's "Young Lovers" projects, and was used in his final Holiday album "Christmas Is" released in 1967.

He was born in Toronto, Ontario. His live orchestra was a staple of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's live-music broadcasting from 1938 to 1940, when he resettled in Chicago. In 1945, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He made many recordings for Voice of America. After working briefly for Decca Records, he worked for Mitch Miller at Columbia Records, where he turned out dozens of albums and provided arrangements for many of the pop singers of the 1950s.

His most famous and remembered recordings are 'Delicado' (1952), 'Moulin Rouge' (1953) and 'Theme from A Summer Place' (1960). He died in Encino, California.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Faith

Theme from "A Summer Place"

* Performed by: Percy Faith
* Words by Mack Discant, music by Max Steiner
* From the 1959 film, A Summer Place, starring Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue
* #1 hit instrumental for Percy Faith in 1960
* Lyrics as recorded by The Lettermen in 1965 (#6)

There's a summer place
Where it may rain or storm
Yet I'm safe and warm
For within that summer place
Your arms reach out to me
And my heart is free from all care

For it knows
There are no gloomy skies
When seen through the eyes
Of those who are blessed with love

And the sweet secret of
A summer place
Is that it's anywhere
Where two people share
All their hopes
All their dreams
All their love

There's a summer place
Where it may rain or storm
Yet I'm safe and warm
In your arms, in your arms
In your arms, in your arms
In your arms, in your arms

Billie Holiday
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Billie Holiday (April 7, 1915 - July 17, 1959), also called Lady Day, was an American singer, generally considered one of the greatest jazz voices of all time, alongside Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald.


Early life

Born Eleanora Fagan but also known as 'Lady Day', she had a difficult childhood which affected her life and career. Much of Holiday's childhood is clouded by conjecture and legend, some of it propagated by herself in her autobiography published in 1956. She was born in Philadelphia but grew up in the Fells Point section of Baltimore, Maryland. According to her autobiography, her house was the first on their street to have electricity. Her mother, Sadie Fagan, was allegedly only thirteen at the time of her birth; her father Clarence Holiday, a jazz guitarist who would play for Fletcher Henderson, was fifteen. According to Billie Holiday's autobiography, her parents married when she was three, but they soon divorced, leaving her to be raised largely by her mother and other relatives. A hardened and angry child, she dropped out of school at an early age and began working as a prostitute with her mother. This preceded her move to New York with her mother sometime in the early 1930s.

There is controversy regarding Holiday's paternity. This stems from a copy of her birth certificate in Baltimore archives that lists the father as a "Frank DeViese." Some historians consider this an anomaly, probably inserted by a hospital or government worker (See Donald Clarke, Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon, ISBN 0306811367). Clarence Holiday accepted paternity, but was hardly a responsible father. In the rare times she did see him, she would shake him down for money by threatening to tell his then-girlfriend that he had a daughter.

Early career successes

Settling in Harlem, Holiday began singing informally in numerous clubs. Around 1932 she was "discovered" by record producer John Hammond at a club called Monette's (there is still some dispute among historians about who was the first to hear and publicise her, although it is generally agreed that Hammond was the first.) Hammond arranged several sessions for her with Benny Goodman; her first-ever recording was "My Mother's Son-In-Law" (1933).

It was around this time that Holiday had her first successes as a live dancer. On November 23, 1934, she performed at the Apollo Theater to glowing reviews. The performance, with pianist (and then-lover) Bobby Henderson, did much to solidify her standing as a jazz and blues singer. Shortly thereafter, Holiday began performing regularly at numerous clubs on 52nd Street in Manhattan.

Compared to other jazz singers, Holiday had a rather limited range of just over an octave. She more than compensated for this shortcoming, however, with impecable timing, nuanced phrasing, and emotional immediacy.

She later worked with such legends as Lester Young, Count Basie, and Artie Shaw, breaking the color barrier along the way by becoming one of the black jazz singers of that era to perform with white musicians. Nevertheless, she was still forced to use the back entrance and forced to wait in a dark room away from the audience before appearing on stage. Once before an audience, she was transformed into Lady Day with the white gardenia in her hair. She explained the sense of overpowering drama that featured in her songs, saying "I've lived songs like that." and she had.

Later life and death

Holiday was a dabbler in recreational drug use for most of her life, smoking marijuana, by some accounts, as early as twelve or thirteen years of age. However, it was heroin that would be her undoing. It is unclear who first introduced Holiday to the drug, but there is consensus from historians and contemporaneous sources that she began intravenous use sometime around 1940.

Holiday's success was marred by this growing dependence on drugs, alcohol, and abusive relationships. This affected her voice as well, and in her later recordings her youthful spirit was replaced by overtones of regret. Her impact on other artists was undeniable, however; even after her death she influenced such singers as Janis Joplin and Nina Simone. In 1972, Diana Ross played her in a movie version of Holiday's autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. To everyone's surprise, the film was a commercial smash and earned a Best Actress nomination for Ross. In 1987 U2 released "Angel of Harlem", a tribute to her.

Her personal life was as turbulent as the songs she sang. She married trombonist Jimmy Monroe on August 25, 1941. While still married to Monroe, she took up with trumpeter Joe Guy as his common law wife. She finally divorced Monroe in 1947 as she split with Guy. On March 28, 1952, Billie married Louis McKay, a Mafia "enforcer." McKay, like most of the men in her life, was abusive, but did try to get her off drugs. They were separated at the time of her death. Holiday was also rather openly bisexual and was rumored to have had an affair with notable stage and film actress Tallulah Bankhead. However, Bankhead dismissed the rumors.

Her late recordings on Verve are as well remembered as her Commodore and Decca recordings of 20 years before. Several of her songs, including her signature song "God Bless the Child", George Gershwin's "I Love You Porgy" (covered exactly by Simone), and the rueful blues "Fine and Mellow" are jazz classics. Her performance of "Fine and Mellow" on CBS's The Sound of Jazz program is memorable for her interplay with her long-time friend Lester Young; both were less than two years from death.

Her performance of Abel Meeropol's anti-lynching song on Commodore, "Strange Fruit," with the lyric "Southern trees bear a strange fruit" gave her a place, not just in musical history, but in American history as well. [1]

She was arrested for heroin possession in May 1947 and served eight months of a year-and-a-day sentence at the Alderson Federal Correctional Institution for Women in West Virginia. Her New York City Cabaret Card was subsequently revoked, which kept her from working in clubs there for the remaining 12 years of her life.

Following a highly successful European tour in 1954, Holiday toured the continent again from late 1958 to early 1959. While in London in February 1959, Holiday made a memorable televised appearance on the BBC's Chelsea at Nine, singing, among other songs, "Strange Fruit." Holiday made her final studio recordings (with Ray Ellis and his Orchestra, who had also recorded her Lady in Satin album the previous year ?- see below) for the MGM label in March 1959 (included in her complete Verve recordings collection.) These final studio recordings were released posthumously on a self-titled album, later re-titled and re-released as Last Recordings. She made her final public appearance at a benefit concert at the Phoenix Theater in Greenwich Village, New York City on May 25, 1959. According to the masters of ceremony at that performance, Leonard Feather (a renowned jazz critic) and Steve Allen, she was only able to make it through two songs, one of which was "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do."

On May 31, 1959, she was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York, suffering from liver and heart problems. On July 12, she was placed under house arrest at the hospital for possession, despite evidence suggesting the drugs may have been planted on her. Holiday remained under police guard at the hospital until she died from cirrhosis of the liver on July 17, 1959 at the age of 44. In the final years of her life, she had been progressively swindled out of her earnings, and she died with only $0.70 in the bank and $750 on her person.

Billie Holiday is interred in Saint Raymond's Cemetery, Bronx, New York.

Voice

While instantly recognizable, Holiday's voice changed over time. Her first recordings in the mid-1930s featured a bouncy, girlish voice. By the early 1940s her singing became informed by her acting skill. It was during this time when she recorded her signature songs "Strange Fruit" and "I Cover The Waterfront." Many called her voice lovingly sweet, weathered and experienced, sad and sophisticated. As she aged, the effects of her drug abuse continued to ravage her range and her voice changed considerably, becoming somewhat rougher. Her last major recording, Lady in Satin, was released in 1958 and reveals a woman with an extremely limited range, but wonderful phrasing and emotion. The recording featured a backing from a 40-piece orchestra conducted and arranged by Ray Ellis, who said of the album in 1997:


I would say that the most emotional moment was her listening to the playback of "I'm a Fool to Want You." There were tears in her eyes...After we finished the album I went into the control room and listened to all the takes. I must admit I was unhappy with her performance, but I was just listening musically instead of emotionally. It wasn't until I heard the final mix a few weeks later that I realized how great her performance really was.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_Holiday

James Garner
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born: April 7, 1928
Norman, Oklahoma

James Garner (born April 7, 1928) is an American film and television actor of partially Cherokee Indian descent. He starred in several television series that spanned a career of five decades, including his roles as Bret Maverick in the popular western-comedy series, Maverick (1957-1960), Jim Rockford in the popular crime drama, The Rockford Files (1974-1980), and Jim Egan in the popular but short-lived comedy, 8 Simple Rules (2003-2005), and made dozens of movies, including the classics The Great Escape (1963) and Paddy Chayefsky's The Americanization of Emily (1964).


An Okie in Korea

Garner was born James Scott Baumgarner in Norman, Oklahoma to Weldon Warren Baumgarner and Mildred Meek. After an endless number of early bad jobs, he joined the Merchant Marine at 16. He was later in the National Guard before being drafted into the Korean War, where he received a Purple Heart.

After modeling Jantzen bathing suits in print ads, in 1954 Garner had a non-speaking role in the Broadway production of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, where he watched Henry Fonda at close quarters night after night. He subsequently moved on to television commercials and eventually to television roles. His first movie appearances were in The Girl He Left Behind and Toward the Unknown in 1956.

Maverick

After four supporting feature film roles, including the smash-hit Sayonara with Marlon Brando, he got his big break when he starred in a stunningly popular comedy-Western series, Maverick, playing the role of professional gambler Bret Maverick from 1957 to 1960. No one but Garner and series creator Roy Huggins thought the series could compete with The Ed Sullivan Show and The Steve Allen Show, but Maverick quickly became a national sensation, making Garner a household name almost immediately at the age of 29. With the arguable exception of the movie The Great Escape, Garner was never again involved with a project that generated as much public and media obsession.

Various actors had recurring roles as Maverick foils, including Efrem Zimbalist, Jr as "Dandy Jim Buckley" and Richard Long as "Gentleman Jack Darby," and the series veered effortlessly from comedy to adventure and back again. The relationship with Huggins, the creator and original producer of Maverick, would later pay dividends for Garner.

Garner was originally sole star of Maverick (for the first seven episodes) but production demands forced the studio, Warner Brothers, to create a second Maverick brother, Bart, played by Jack Kelly. This move allowed two production units to film episodes simultaneously (the series also featured extremely popular cross-over episodes with both Maverick brothers). Critics marvelled at Garner and Kelly's extraordinary chemistry in their episodes together, but Garner quit the series in the third season in a dispute with Warner Brothers.

The studio attempted to replace Garner with a Maverick cousin who had lived in Britain long enough to pick up an English accent, played by an eventual movie James Bond, Roger Moore, but Moore quit the series due to a decline in script quality after only 15 episodes, insisting that if he'd gotten stories like Garner's earlier ones, he would have stayed. Warner Brothers also dressed Robert Colbert, a Garner look-alike, in Bret Maverick's outfit and called the character Brent, but Brent Maverick did not catch on with viewers and Colbert made only two episodes toward the end of the season, leaving the rest of the series' run to Kelly (alternating with reruns of episodes with Garner).

In 2004, Garner became one of the first three honorees in the World Poker Tour Walk of Fame for his portrayal of Maverick.

Major 1960s movie career

In the 1960s he starred in such films as The Thrill of It All and Move Over, Darling, both with Doris Day, Boys' Night Out with Kim Novak and Tony Randall, The Great Escape, The Americanization of Emily with Julie Andrews and James Coburn, The Art of Love with Dick Van Dyke, and Support Your Local Sheriff! with Walter Brennan.

The hugely lavish flop Grand Prix (film) gave him a fascination with car racing, while permanently damaging his movie career. Unlike Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, he never did well in major sports car racing events.

The Americanization of Emily, an extremely literate anti-war D-Day comedy, featured an exquisitely written script by Paddy Chayefsky and always remained Garner's favorite of all his own work. The Great Escape was a towering cultural milestone, but Garner only played second lead, supporting fellow ex-TV series cowboy Steve McQueen.

In 1969 Garner joined a long line of actors to play Raymond Chandler's creation, Phillip Marlowe, in Marlowe. Chandler had always written the character while visualizing Cary Grant in the role (not an unusual occurrence for a writer), but Grant never accepted the part. Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and even Elliot Gould each took a turn at it, but only Garner's version features Bruce Lee dropping by his office to smash everything into pieces with karate chops.


Nichols

In 1971, Garner returned to television in an extremely offbeat western called Nichols. The character proved so unorthodox that the network had him killed, with Garner showing up as the character's more normal twin brother at the end of the season, but then the series was cancelled. It was Garner's favorite TV series outing, but was almost as unpopular as Maverick had been sensationally successful. In the last episode Garner had Nichols killed so that a sequel could not be filmed.

The Rockford Files

In the 1970s Roy Huggins had an idea to redo Maverick, but this time in the form of a modern-day private detective. Huggins teamed with co-creator and eventual TV icon Stephen J. Cannell, and the pair tapped Garner to attempt to re-kindle the phenomenal success of Maverick, actually recycling many of the plots from the original series. Starting with the 1974 television season, Garner was back on television as private investigator Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files. For six seasons, the inspired and iconoclastic scripts stood Garner in good stead and many consider Rockford his best role. He received an Emmy Award for Best Actor in 1977.

Bearish actor Noah Beery, Jr., nephew of screen legend Wallace Beery, played Rockford's father, and there was a surprising physical resemblance between Garner and Beery, while Gretchen Corbett played Rockford's lawyer and sometime lover until she left the series over a salary dispute with the studio. Critics delighted in pointing out that The Rockford Files took iconoclasm to new heights, with almost everyone in authority being mean-spirited, wrong-headed, and just plain stupid, out to make Rockford's life as unremittingly miserable as they possibly could. The witty dialogue crackled with intense humor; The Rockford Files was at least as much comedy as drama.

Garner pulled the plug on the show, despite consistent ratings, because it was taking too much of a physical toll on his body. Appearing in practically every frame of film, doing many of his own stunts ?- including one that injured his back ?- was wearing him out. A knee injury that he had received in the National Guard was worsening in the wake of the continuous jumping and rolling. He was also hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer in 1979, some years before the cure for ulcers was discovered. Between his knee, back, and ulcer, he was done: Garner looked frighteningly unhealthy in the superb last episode of the series, "Deadlock in Parma," with the look on his face of a dying man.

Critics agreed that The Rockford Files had featured some of the very best writing ever presented on television.

Bret Maverick At 53

After a rest, Garner returned to his most popular TV role in 1981 with the television revival series Bret Maverick, but NBC unexpectedly cancelled the show after only one season despite reasonably good ratings. Critics noted that most of the scripts didn't begin to measure up to the first series, although Garner's performance as a 53-year-old Bret Maverick was almost universally applauded. Jack Kelly (Bart Maverick) was going to become a series regular had the series been picked up for another season, and appeared in the last scene of the final episode as a surprise.

Garner had also played Bret Maverick in the TV-movie The New Maverick in 1978 and for one scene at the beginning of the short-lived series Young Maverick the following year.

Top-quality TV-movies

During the 1980s, he played mainly dramatic roles, starring in a number of TV movies, from Heartsounds (with Mary Tyler Moore) to Promise (also starring Piper Laurie) and My Name is Bill W.. Garner was nominated for his 1st Oscar award, for Best Actor in a Leading Role in the movie Murphy's Romance, opposite Sally Field. Field had to fight the studio to get Garner cast since he was regarded as a TV name by that point. In 1988 Garner underwent heart surgery due to his excessive smoking. Though he rapidly recovered, the doctors insisted that he stop smoking. In 1993, he played the lead in another well-received TV-movie, Barbarians at the Gate, and went on to reprise his role as Jim Rockford in eight The Rockford Files made-for-TV movies, beginning the following year. The frenetic opening theme song from the original series was rerecorded and slowed to a funereal pace, and practically everyone in the original cast of recurring characters returned for the new outings (except Beery, who had died in the interim and appeared only in the two-dimensional form of a photograph on Rockford's desk).

Wyatt Earp

Garner played Wyatt Earp, whom he physically resembled to judge from Earp's photographs, in two very different movies shot 21 years apart, Hour of the Gun in 1967 and Sunset(movie) in 1988. The first film was a realistic depiction of the OK Corral shootout and its aftermath, while the second was a fictionalization of Earp's much later relationship with silent movie cowboy star Tom Mix, featuring Bruce Willis as Mix in his second movie role. Although Willis was billed over Garner, the film actually gave more screen time and the most emphasis to Earp rather than Mix. Malcolm McDowell played a villainous silent comedian.

In 1994 Garner played an Earp-like role as "Marshal Zane Cooper" in a movie version of Maverick, with Mel Gibson as Bret Maverick and Jodie Foster as a gambling lass with a fake southern accent based on a character played in the TV series by Diane Brewster.

In 1995 Garner played lead character Woodrow Call, an ex-lawman, in the TV miseries sequel to Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo, based on Larry McMurtry's book. Garner had been offered Robert Duvall's role in the original miniseries but had to turn it down for health reasons, and eventually wound up playing the part first portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones instead.

Later work in TV and movies

In 1996 Garner and Jack Lemmon, critically regarded as the two best American light comedians of their generation, finally teamed up in My Fellow Americans, playing two former presidents on the run together.

In addition to a major recurring role during the last part of the run of TV series Chicago Hope, he also starred in a couple of short-lived series, the animated God, the Devil and Bob and First Monday, in which he played a Supreme Court justice.

In 2000 Garner appeared with Clint Eastwood (who'd played a villain in the original Maverick series) in the movie Space Cowboys, also featuring Tommy Lee Jones. During a mass appearance by the cast on television's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Leno ran a brief clip from Garner and Eastwood's lengthy saloon fistfight during Eastwood's Maverick appearance over forty years earlier.

Upon the death of John Ritter in 2003, Garner joined the cast of 8 Simple Rules as Grandpa Egan (Cate's father). Originally intended to be a one-shot guest role, he stayed with the series until its end.

In 2004 Garner starred in the movie version of Nicholas Spark's The Notebook alongside Gena Rowlands as his wife (played in flashbacks by Rachel McAdams), directed by Nick Cassavetes, Rowlands' son.

The Tall Dark Stranger

For his contribution to the film and television industry, Garner received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (6927 Hollywood Blvd). In 1990, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. On 9 February 2005 he received the Screen Actor's Guild Lifetime Achievement Award; when Morgan Freeman won an acting award that Garner was also up for that night, he affectionately led the delighted audience in a lively sing-along of the original Maverick theme song, written by David Buttolph and Paul Francis Webster:

Who is the tall dark stranger there?
Maverick is his name.
Riding the trail to who-knows-where
Luck is his companion
Gamblin' is his game.

Smooth as the handle on a gun.
Maverick is his name.
Wild as the wind in Oregon
Blowin' up a canyon/ Easier to tame.

Riverboat ring your bell.
Fare-thee-well Annabelle.
Luck is the lady that he loves the best.
Natchez to New Orleans.
Livin' on jacks and queens.
Maverick is the legend of the west.

Quote from James Garner: "Marriage is like the Army; everyone complains, but you'd be surprised at the large number of people who re-enlist." [Garner himself never had to re-enlist, however, since he stayed with his first wife.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Garner

Francis Ford Coppola
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Francis Ford Coppola (born April 7, 1939) is an American film director, screenwriter, vintner, magazine publisher, and hotelier, most renowned for directing the highly regarded Godfather trilogy and the Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now.


Life and career (1960 to 1978)

Coppola was born into a creative and supportive Italian American family in Detroit, Michigan, but he grew up in a New York suburb. His father Carmine Coppola, was a composer and musician. His mother is alleged to have been an actress, but in fact this is not true.[citation needed] He studied theatre at Hofstra University prior to studying film at UCLA and while there, he made numerous short films, including some soft-core porn films. In the early 1960s, he started his professional career making low-budget films with Roger Corman and writing screenplays. His first notable motion picture was made for Corman, the low-budget Dementia 13 (which is available on video).


After graduating to mainstream motion pictures with You're a Big Boy Now, Coppola was offered the reins of the movie version of the Broadway musical Finian's Rainbow, starring Petula Clark, in her first American film, and veteran Fred Astaire. Producer Jack Warner was nonplussed by Coppola's shaggy-haired, bearded, "hippie" appearance and generally left him to his own devices. He took his cast to the Napa Valley for much of the outdoor shooting, but these scenes were in sharp contrast to those obviously filmed on a Hollywood soundstage, resulting in a disjointed look to the film. Dealing with outdated material at a time when the popularity of film musicals was already on the downslide, Coppola's end result was only semi-successful, but his work with Clark no doubt contributed to her Golden Globe Best Actress nomination.

In 1971, Coppola won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Patton. However, his name as a filmmaker was made as the co-writer and director of The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), which both won the Academy Award for Best Picture ?- the latter being the first sequel to do so.

In between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Coppola directed The Conversation, a story of a paranoid wiretapping and surveillance expert (played by Gene Hackman) who finds himself caught up in a possible murder plot. The Conversation was released to theaters in 1974 and was also nominated for Best Picture, resulting in Coppola being the first filmmaker to have directed two films competing for the same Best Picture Oscar since the annual number of nominees was cut down to five in 1945. (This had previously been accomplished seven times, by six different directors, between 1937 and 1943, when the Academy announced ten nominees yearly. Coppola's feat would later be matched by Herbert Ross in 1978, with The Goodbye Girl and The Turning Point, and Steven Soderbergh in 2001, with Erin Brockovich and Traffic.) While The Godfather Part II won the Oscar, The Conversation won the 1974 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

During this period he also wrote the screenplay for the critically and commercially unsuccessful 1974 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby (starring Mia Farrow and Robert Redford) and produced George Lucas's breakthrough film, American Graffiti.


Career: 1979 to present

Following the success of The Godfather and its sequel, Coppola set about filming Apocalypse Now, an ambitious version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with the setting changed from colonial Africa to the Vietnam War. Before setting off to make the film, Coppola went to his mentor Roger Corman for advice about shooting in the Philippines, since Corman himself was familiar with shooting a film in that area. It was said that all Corman advised Coppola was "Don't go". The creation of the film was a disaster from the start, being beset by numerous problems, including typhoons, nervous breakdowns, Martin Sheen's heart attack, and an unprepared Marlon Brando with a bloated appearance (which Coppola attempted to hide by shooting him in the shadows). It was delayed so often it was nicknamed Apocalypse Whenever. The film was equally lauded and hated by critics when it finally appeared in 1979, and the cost nearly bankrupted Coppola's nascent studio American Zoetrope. However, like Citizen Kane, reputation has grown in time and Apocalypse Now is regarded by many as a masterpiece of the New Hollywood era. Roger Ebert considers it to be the finest film on the Vietnam war and included it on his list for the 2002 Sight and Sound poll for the greatest movie of all time.

However, to many, Apocalypse Now represents Coppola's highpoint, a feat he has been unable to equal or exceed ever since. The 1991 documentary film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, directed by Eleanor Coppola (Francis's wife), Fax Bahr, and George Hickenlooper, chronicles the difficulties the crew went through making Apocalypse Now, and features behind the scenes footage filmed by Eleanor.


Despite the setbacks and ill health Coppola suffered during the making of Apocalypse Now, he kept up with film projects, presenting in 1981 a restoration of the 1927 film Napoléon that was edited and released in the United States by American Zoetrope. However it wasn't until the experimental musical One from the Heart (1982) that he returned to directing. Unfortunately, the film was a huge failure, although it developed a cult following in later years.

In 1986 Coppola, with George Lucas, directed the Michael Jackson film for Disney theme parks, Captain Eo, which at the time was the most expensive film per minute ever made.

In 1990 he completed the Godfather series with The Godfather Part III which, while not as critically acclaimed as the first two movies, was still a box office success. Some reviewers criticized the casting of Coppola's daughter Sofia, who stepped into a role abandoned by Winona Ryder just as filming began. Sofia Coppola had previously appeared in her father's films, including a memorable performance as the younger sister in Peggy Sue Got Married, but her performance in The Godfather Part III was subjected to critical ridicule, much of it mean-spirited. Sofia Coppola has since gone on to become a well-respected director in her own right.

Son Roman Coppola is also a filmmaker, directing his first feature film, CQ.

Coppola's father Carmine was a renowned composer and musician, and wrote the scores of many of his son's films; his nephew Nicolas Cage is an acclaimed actor.

In recent years, Coppola with his family has extended his talents to winemaking in California's Napa Valley at the Niebaum-Coppola Winery, producing a line of specialty pastas and pasta sauces, and opening resorts in Guatemala and Belize, inspired by his accommodation in the Philippines during the making of Apocalypse Now, with decor supervised by Eleanor Coppola.

In 1997, Coppola founded Zoetrope All-Story, a flashy literary magazine that publishes short stories. The magazine has published fiction by T.C. Boyle and Amy Bloom and essays by David Mamet, Steven Spielberg, and Salman Rushdie. Since its founding, the magazine has grown in reputation to become one of the premier American journals of literary fiction. Coppola serves as founding editor and publisher of All-Story.

The director is based in the San Francisco Bay Area where he co-owns the Rubicon restaurant alongside fellow San Franciscan Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. In addition to his restaurant, Coppola serves as the Honorary Ambassador of the Central American nation of Belize in San Francisco, California. On their official roster of worldwide honorary consulates found on their official website, he is referred to as "His Excellency Ambassador Francis Ford Coppola," although he is not a Belizean citizen.

Recently, during November 2005, Coppola took part as a special guest in the 46th Thessaloniki Film Festival, in northern Greece.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Ford_Coppola

Jackie Chan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Jackie Chan (born April 7, 1954 in Hong Kong) is a Chinese martial artist, actor, director, stuntman and singer.

Jackie Chan is one of the most recognised names in Kung Fu and action movies worldwide, known for his acrobatic fighting style, comic timing and use of improvised weapons and other items. Jackie has starred in over a hundred movies, and is one of the most recognisable Chinese and Asian movie stars in the world. He sings many of his films theme songs and also has a pop music singing career which began in the 1980s. He is one of the Seven Little Fortunes.


Biography

Jackie Chan is the son of Lee-Lee and Charles Chan who migrated to Canberra, Australia in 1960 as a refugee from the Chinese civil war and who had previously worked as a maid and butler for the French ambassador to Hong Kong. His Chinese name at birth was Chan Kong-sang (meaning "Born in Hong Kong").

Before he adopted the Westernised name, "Jackie", he was known by a variety of other nicknames. As he was a heavy baby, (12lb at birth, having apparently spent 12 months in the womb), his mother nicknamed him "Pao Pao" (meaning "Cannonball"). Later, while studying at the Peking Opera school (alongside Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao) he was known as Yuen Lo, as a mark of respect to his master, Yu Jim-Yuen.

In his early stuntman and acting career (prior to New Fist of Fury in 1976) he was known as Chen Yueng Lung (or Chen Yuen Lung). He was thereafter known as "Jackie", named by his Australian co-workers when living in Australia in 1976-19771. On the building site he worked on, he worked with Jack - due to the language barrier, he was known as little Jack (later shortened to Jackie). Because his father's family name was originally Fong and was changed only when arriving in Hong Kong, Jackie Chan's Chinese name was changed in family records years later to "Fong Si Lung2". He has also been listed as "Sing Lung" (meaning "Already a Dragon" or "Becoming a Dragon"), particularly in relation to his music and it may be no coincidence that his character in the film Fearless Hyena was called "Shing Lung".

Jackie got his first international success with the film Drunken Master. The movie showed Wong Fei Hung, played by Jackie, as a young and mischievous rascal instead of the venerable, confucious, master of kung fu that he normally was. This approach made the movie pretty radical. Another special thing about the movie was the silly antics and charm of Jackie and Yuen Siu Tien, AKA Simon Yuen, father of Yuen Woo-ping. The film was a big success and led the way for other international hits such as Rumble in the Bronx

Jackie married Taiwanese actress Lin Feng-Jiao (林鳳娇) in 1983 according to his autobiography, but many Asian sources state he was married on December 1, 1982. His official website states that he was married in 1982. Jackie and Lin Feng-Jiao had a son, Jaycee Chan (aka Jo-Ming), who was born on December 3, 1982, although Jackie's autobiography lists his son's birth year as 1984. Jackie also has a daughter, Etta Ng Chok Lam (b. November 19, 1999) with Elaine Ng Yi-Lei out of wedlock.

He was educated at Nan Hua Elementary Academy, but his parents felt he didn't fit in at school so they sent him to the Chinese Opera Research Institute (1961-1971) and Peking Opera School. Jackie was in the Seven Little Fortunes Chinese opera troupe as a youth, along with Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao and Corey Kwai.

Jackie is often labelled as doing all his own stunts. While this claim does not hold up to close scrutiny, he does insist on doing the majority of them, including stunts for other characters if they are not showing their faces, and has racked up an impressive list of injuries to prove it. (The closing credits of his movies usually show bloopers and at least one serious injury.) This is why he is unable to get insurance anywhere in the world. He came closest to death while filming Armour of God (1985), when he fell from a tree in a relatively routine stunt and fractured his skull.

Around the time of Project A in 1983, Jackie officially formed the Jackie Chan Stunt Team, allowing him to train and work with a group of trusted martial artists and stuntmen for each of his ensuing movies. Jackie says that this means it is easier to choreograph fight scenes as he already has trust in them.

In his autobiography, Jackie says he originally created his screen persona as a reaction to that of Bruce Lee, and the numerous imitators who appeared before and after Lee's death (see "Bruceploitation"). Where Lee's characters were typically stern, morally upright heroes, Jackie plays well-meaning, slightly foolish regular guys, often at the mercy of friends, girlfriends or families. However, his characters always triumph in the end.

Jackie repeatedly attempted to break into the American movie industry, appearing in movies like Battle Creek Brawl, Cannonball Run, Cannonball Run II and The Protector in the early 1980s. His friend, Sylvester Stallone, offered Jackie the role of the criminal, Simon Phoenix, in the futuristic film Demolition Man but he declined as he did not want to play a villain for fear of being typecast for any future Hollywood roles. The role was instead taken by Wesley Snipes.

While he did attain cult popularity in the US, his break into the mainstream was Rumble in the Bronx in 1995. He has attained the box-office guarantee that has so far eluded other Hong Kong movie stars like Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh in Hollywood. He also made a successful animated series called Jackie Chan Adventures.

In 1994, MTV honoured Jackie with a lifetime achievement award for his action-oriented movies, and a year later, he made his "official" debut in North America with a worldwide release of Rumble in the Bronx.


Jackie has a star on the Avenue of Stars in Hong Kong as well as the Walk of Fame. Jackie is also known as a major pop star in Asia, and he released over 100 song titles in 20 albums since 1984. He sings in many different languages including English, Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese.

As well as many on-going projects, Jackie is a keen philanthropist and has worked tirelessly to champion many charity works and causes. As a well-respected figure of the Hong Kong entertainment industry, he is often one of the leaders in such works, speaking up for conservation, against animal abuse as well as promoting disaster relief efforts such as the recent mainland China relief flood programmes and the 2004 Tsunami donations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Chan

Russell Crowe
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Russell Ira Crowe (born April 7, 1964) is an Oscar-winning New Zealand-Australian film actor.


Early life and career

Crowe was born in Wellington, New Zealand, of Welsh, Scottish, Norwegian and Māori descent. When he was four years old, his family moved to Australia, where his parents pursued a career in filmset catering. His maternal grandfather, Stan Wemyss, was a cinematographer whom Crowe says [1] produced the first film by New Zealander Geoff Murphy. The producer of the Australian TV series Spyforce was his mother's godfather, and Crowe at age five or six was hired for a line of dialogue in one episode, opposite series star Jack Thompson, whom years later played Crowe's father in The Sum of Us.

Crowe attended Sydney Boys High School. When he was 14, his family moved back to New Zealand, where he attended the Auckland Grammar School. He did not complete secondary school, leaving early to help his family financially. Crowe returned to Australia at age 21, intending to apply to the National Institute of Dramatic Art. "I was working in a theater show, and talked to a guy who was then the head of technical support at NIDA," Crowe recalled. "I asked him what he thought about me spending three years at NIDA. He told me it'd be a waste of time. He said, 'You already do the things you go there to learn, and you've been doing it for most of your life, so there's nothing to teach you but bad habits.'"[2].

After appearing in the TV series Neighbours and Living with the Law, Crowe was cast in his first film, The Crossing (1990), a small-town love triangle directed by George Ogilvie. Before production started, a film-student protege of Ogilvie's, Steve Wallace, hired Crowe for the film "Blood Oath," a.k.a. "Prisoners of the Sun" (1990), which was released a month earlier, although actually filmed later.


Hollywood

After initial success in Australia, Crowe began acting in American films. He went on to become a three-time Oscar nominee, winning the Academy Award as Best Actor in 2001 for Gladiator. Crowe wore his grandfather Stan Wemyss's Member of the Order of the British Empire medal to the ceremony.

Crowe received three consecutive best actor Oscar nominations for The Insider, Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind. All three films were also nominated for best picture. Within the six year stretch from 1997-2003, he also starred in two other best picture nominees, LA Confidential and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, though he was nominated for neither.

On March 9, 2005, Crowe revealed to GQ magazine that Federal Bureau of Investigation agents had approached him prior to the 73rd Academy Awards on March 25, 2001 and told him that the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda wanted to kidnap him. Crowe told the magazine that it was the first time he had ever heard of al-Qaeda (the September 11 attacks took place later that year) and was quoted as saying:

"You get this late-night call from the FBI when you arrive in Los Angeles, and they're, like, absolutely full-on. 'We've got to talk to you now before you do anything. We have to have a discussion with you, Mr. Crowe.'" Crowe recalled that "it was something to do with some recording picked up by a French policewoman, I think, in either Libya or Algiers...it was about taking iconographic Americans out of the picture as a sort of cultural-destabilization plan."

Crowe was guarded by Secret Service agents for the next few months, both while shooting films and at award ceremonies (Scotland Yard also guarded Crowe while he was promoting Proof of Life in London in February 2001). Crowe said that he "never fully understood what the **** was going on." The FBI confirmed Crowe's statement (which is uncharacteristic of the agency in that it usually does not comment to the media).

Temperament

Crowe has been involved in a number of altercations in recent years which have given him a reputation of having a bad temper. He won the Best Actor in the 2002 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards for his portrayal of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. During the presentation for his award, he planned to read a piece of poetry called Sanctity by Patrick Kavanagh but was cut short to fit in the BBC's tape-delayed broadcast. At the awards after party, he accosted producer Malcolm Gerrie. [3] Crowe later apologised for his actions, but many believe this incident was responsible for depriving Crowe of the Oscar for Best Actor that year. A Beautiful Mind won four of the eight awards for which it was nominated, with the most conspicuous exception being Crowe's nomination for Best Actor. During the filming of A Beautiful Mind on the campus of Princeton University, he made an obscene gesture to a Princeton student whom he spotted photographing him, which raised a media stir. [4]

In the early hours of November 18, 1999, Crowe was involved in a scuffle at the Saloon Bar in Coffs Harbour, Australia. The altercation was caught by a security video, which three men unsuccessfully used to attempt to extort money from him.

In the early morning of June 6, 2005, Crowe was arrested and charged with second degree assault by New York Police, in connection with an incident at the Mercer Hotel, SoHo, New York, in which Crowe threw a broken telephone at a hotel employee. He was further charged with fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon (the telephone).

Crowe released a statement saying he was jet-lagged, missing his family in Australia and became frustrated after having repeated difficulties making a phone call to his wife in Australia. He was sentenced to conditional release on the basis that he not be arrested in the United States for a year and pay US$160 in court costs. He also paid about US$100,000 to settle the civil lawsuit to the concierge, Nestor "Josh" Estrada, who was treated for a facial laceration on his upper right cheek.

Crowe's temperament was parodied in an episode of the cartoon South Park titled The New Terrance and Phillip Movie Trailer. In this episode, Crowe is the star of his own, fictional TV series "Russell Crowe - Fightin' 'Round the World" in which he travels the world in his tug boat "Tugger" to fight people of different nationalities. The show is somewhat made up like a nature documentary.

Family and general interests

On April 7, 2003, his 39th birthday, Crowe married the Australian singer and actress Danielle Spencer. Their son, Charles Spencer Crowe, was born on December 21 of that year. Crowe met Spencer while filming "The Crossing" (1990). In January 2006, Crowe annouced they were expecting their second child in July. In March, Crowe announced on the Tonight Show that the baby would be a boy. Crowe previously dated the American filmstar Meg Ryan, after they met while filming Proof of Life (2000).

Two of Russell Crowe's cousins, Martin and Jeff Crowe are former New Zealand cricket captains.

Crowe currently resides in Australia at both his Sydney home (in Woolloomooloo, New South Wales) and his rural property near Coffs Harbour, New South Wales.

South Sydney Rabbitohs

On 19 March 2006, the voting members of the South Sydney Rabbitohs voted (in a 75.8% majority) to allow Crowe and businessman Peter Holmes a Court to purchase 75% of the club, leaving 25% ownership with the members. It will cost them (AUD) $3 million, and they will receive four of eight seats on the board of directors.

Crowe has been a major supporter of the Rabbitohs rugby league team for many years, appearing at many home games, and supporting the club during its time when they were forced from the National Rugby League competition for two years, once paying $40,000 during an auction for a brass bell used to open the first Rugby League competition match in Australia in 1908, which he then returned to the club. In 2005, he made them the first club team in Australia to be sponsored by a film, when he negotiated a deal to advertise his movie Cinderella Man across the front of their jerseys throughout the latter half of the season.

He is friends with many current and former players of the club, and currently employs former South Sydney forward Mark Caroll as a bodyguard and personal trainer. He has been noted on several occasions to have tried to sway co-stars or friends in supporting the club. Some who have supported the club or have been seen at the clubs games along with Crowe are Tom Cruise and Burt Reynolds.

Prominent business and television identity Eddie McGuire has been offered a seat on the Rabbitohs board.

Music career


Crowe is also a singer and composer. He was the lead singer and guitarist of an Australian pub rock band, 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts, which formed in 1992. The band had found neither critical nor popular success but had several releases including 1998's Gaslight, 2001's Bastard Life or Clarity and 2003's Other Ways of Speaking, plus various CD releases now out of print. His early stage name was "Rus Le Roq" and he was billed as such while performing with the New Zealand production of Rocky Horror.

According to a message from Crowe on his band's web site, the group has "dissolved/evolved" and his music would take a new direction. He continued with a collabortion with Alan Doyle of the Canadian band, Great Big Sea, in early 2005. A new single, Raewyn, was released on April 19, 2005. Former members of his previous band have taken part in the new project. An album entitled My Hand, My Heart has been released for download on iTunes and includes a tribute song to the late actor, Richard Harris, who became a close friend when the two were making Gladiator.

According to Russell, there is no 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts without his longtime musical partner, Dean Cochran, who was absent for the recording of My Hand, My Heart. Though Dean was present for a mid-2000s show in Le Thor, France. and took part in the filming of a music video for the song Weight of a Man, the band was billed as Russell Crowe and Friends. Crowe has also been behind the camera: in 2002, he directed the music video clip (which starred former child actor Duy Nguyen) for his wife Danielle Spencer's single 'Tickle Me' from her 'White Monkey' album.

On March 10, 2006 Crowe performed with his new band The Ordinary Fear of God on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Crowe

An English major was being released from prison. The nice-looking
female clerk was about to give him the $100.00 they give to all
released prisoners.

Since the inmate had not had female attention for a long time, he
suggested that she could keep the money if she would come home
with him. He was immediately re-arrested and thrown back into jail.
EVERYBODY knows you should never end a sentence with a proposition!

Oh, my Gawd, Hawkman. That is one big groaner, right folks? "Never end a sentence with a proposition."

Back later, to review B.B.'s thorough background info.

Artist: The Beatles
Song: Give Peace A Chance Lyrics


Two, one, two, three, four
Ev'rybody's talking about
Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism,
Ragism, Tagism
This-ism, That-ism, is-m, is-m, is-m
All we are saying is give piece a chance,
All we are saying is give piece a chance
C'mon
Ev'rybody's talking about ministers,
Sinister, Banisters
And canisters, Bishops, Fishops,
Rabbis, and Pop eyes, Bye, bye, bye byes
All we are saying is give peace a chance,
All we are saying is give peace a chance
Let me tell you now
Revoluton, evolution, masturbation,
Flagellation, regulation, integrations,
Meditations, United Nations,
Congratulations
Ev'rybody's talking about
John and Yoko, Timmy Leary, Rosemary,
Tommy Smothers, Bobby Dylan,
Tommy Copper,
Derek Taylor, Norman Mailer,
Allen Ginsberg, Hare Krishna,
Hare
Krishna

(I don't think so somehow)

Bob, that revelation about Wordsworth and Coleridge was mind boggling. I vaguely recall Robert Southey. Need to check him out, folks.

Hey, Try. Well, we let you pass us by one more time, buddy. The Beatles had some things right, right? Thanks for the protest reminder. I am trying to remember who said, Man handles war well; it's peace that is the problem. That definitely a paraphrase, listeners.

Researched Robert Southey and found this:

Ariste


Let ancient stories round the painter's art,
Who stole from many a maid his Venus' charms,
Till warm devotion fired each gazer's heart
And every bosom bounded with alarms.
He culled the beauties of his native isle,
From some the blush of beauty's vermeil dyes,
From some the lovely look, the winning smile,
From some the languid lustre of the eyes.

Low to the finished form the nations round
In adoration bent the pious knee;
With myrtle wreaths the artist's brow they crowned,
Whose skill, Ariste, only imaged thee.
Ill-fated artist, doomed so wide to seek
The charms that blossom on Ariste's cheek!

I can remember everthing about Coleridge and Wordsworth, but little of Robert except for his having been kicked out of Westminster because he opposed flogging. Go, Robert! <smile>

International news:


Mirror that reflects your future self
19:00 02 February 2005
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition
Will Knight





In Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, the eponymous subject keeps his youthful looks while the vagaries of age are visited upon his portrait in the attic. Now a digital version of Wilde's idea is being developed to show you what you will look like in five years' time if you take no exercise, eat too much junk food and drink too much alcohol.

At Accenture Technology's lab in Sophia Antipolis, near Nice in France, a flat-screen LCD TV linked to a set of cameras and a powerful image-processing computer replaces the portrait described in Wilde's novel.

Initially the system acts just like a sophisticated "mirror" in which an image captured by a wireless camera is displayed in front of you. But that is just the start. Its main purpose is to conjure up a computer-modified image of the effects of overindulgence at the press of a button, says Accenture lab director Martin Illsey.

To do this the computer builds up a profile of your lifestyle, using a network of high-resolution cameras dotted around the house. These webcams will feed images of your everyday activities to a computer running software that is able to recognise different patterns of behaviour.

UhOh!

I would like to dedicate this song to Calamity Jane and Walter, because their places always inspire me to remember.

Upon looking at the Walking Man statue in Munich



James Taylor

Moving in silent desperation
Keeping an eye on the Holy Land
A hypothetical destination
Say, who is this walking man?

Well, the leaves have come to turning
And the goose has gone to fly
And bridges are for burning
So don't you let that yearning
Pass you by
Walking man, walking man walks
Well, any other man stops and talks
But the walking man walks

Well the frost is on the pumpkin
And the hay is in the barn
An Pappy's come to rambling on
Stumbling around drunk
Down on the farm

And the walking man walks
Doesn't know nothing at all
Any other man stops and talks
But the walking man walks on by
Walk on by

Most everybody's got seed to sow
It ain't always easy for a weed to grow, oh no
So he don't hoe the row for no one
Oh for sure he's always missing
And something is never quite right
Ah, but who would want to listen to you
Kissing his existence good night

Walking man walk on by my door
Well, any other man stops and talks
But not the walking man
He's the walking man
Born to walk
Walk on walking man
Well now, would he have wings to fly
Would he be free
Golden wings against the sky
Walking man, walk on by
So long, walking man, so long

Thanks, C.J. and Walt. Hugs to you both

I thank you Miss Letty - that's a song I don't know of
James Taylor who is a true favorite of mine.