GLBTQ Women and Men in Entertainment
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- Actress
- Soundtrack
Cherry Jones was born on 21 November 1956 in Paris, Tennessee, USA. She is an actress, known for The Village (2004), Signs (2002) and The Perfect Storm (2000). She has been married to Sophie Huber since 2015.- Actress
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Jane Marie Lynch is an American actress, comedian and author. She is known for starring as Sue Sylvester in the musical comedy series Glee (2009-2015), which earned her a Primetime Emmy Award. Lynch also gained recognition for her roles in Christopher Guest's mockumentary films, such as Best in Show (2000), A Mighty Wind (2003) and For Your Consideration (2006).- Actress
- Producer
- Director
Jodie Foster started her career at the age of two. For four years she made commercials and finally gave her debut as an actress in the TV series Mayberry R.F.D. (1968). In 1975 Jodie was offered the role of prostitute Iris Steensma in the movie Taxi Driver (1976). This role, for which she received an Academy Award nomination in the "Best Supporting Actress" category, marked a breakthrough in her career. In 1980 she graduated as the best of her class from the College Lycée Français and began to study English Literature at Yale University, from where she graduated magna cum laude in 1985. One tragic moment in her life was March 30th, 1981 when John Warnock Hinkley Jr. attempted to assassinate the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan. Hinkley was obsessed with Jodie and the movie Taxi Driver (1976), in which Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, tried to shoot presidential candidate Palantine. Despite the fact that Jodie never took acting lessons, she received two Oscars before she was thirty years of age. She received her first award for her part as Sarah Tobias in The Accused (1988) and the second one for her performance as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).- Actress
- Writer
- Producer
Joan Crawford was born Lucille Fay LeSueur on March 23, 1906, in San Antonio, Texas, to Anna Belle (Johnson) and Thomas E. LeSueur, a laundry laborer. By the time she was born, her parents had separated, and by the time she was a teenager, she'd had three stepfathers. It wasn't an easy life; Crawford worked a variety of menial jobs. She was a good dancer, though, and -- perhaps seeing dance as her ticket to a career in show business -- she entered several contests, one of which landed her a spot in a chorus line. Before long, she was dancing in big Midwestern and East Coast cities. After almost two years, she packed her bags and moved to Hollywood. Crawford was determined to succeed, and shortly after arriving she got her first bit part, as a showgirl in Pretty Ladies (1925).
Three films quickly followed; although the roles weren't much to speak of, she continued toiling. Throughout 1927 and early 1928, she was cast in small parts, but that ended with the role of Diana Medford in Our Dancing Daughters (1928), which elevated her to star status. Crawford had cleared the first big hurdle; now came the second, in the form of talkies. Many stars of the silents saw their careers evaporate, either because their voices weren't particularly pleasant or because their voices, pleasing enough, didn't match the public's expectations (for example, some fans felt that John Gilbert's tenor didn't quite match his very masculine persona). But Crawford wasn't felled by sound. Her first talkie, Untamed (1929), was a success. As the 1930s progressed, Crawford became one of the biggest stars at MGM. She was in top form in films such as Grand Hotel (1932), Sadie McKee (1934), No More Ladies (1935), and Love on the Run (1936); movie patrons were enthralled, and studio executives were satisfied.
By the early 1940s, MGM was no longer giving her plum roles; newcomers had arrived in Hollywood, and the public wanted to see them. Crawford left MGM for rival Warner Bros., and in 1945 she landed the role of a lifetime. Mildred Pierce (1945) gave her an opportunity to show her range as an actress, and her performance as a woman driven to give her daughter everything garnered Crawford her first, and only, Oscar for Best Actress. The following year she appeared with John Garfield in the well-received Humoresque (1946). In 1947, she appeared as Louise Graham in Possessed (1947); again she was nominated for a Best Actress from the Academy, but she lost to Loretta Young in The Farmer's Daughter (1947). Crawford continued to choose her roles carefully, and in 1952 she was nominated for a third time, for her depiction of Myra Hudson in Sudden Fear (1952). This time the coveted Oscar went to Shirley Booth, for Come Back, Little Sheba (1952). Crawford's career slowed after that; she appeared in minor roles until 1962, when she and Bette Davis co-starred in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Their longstanding rivalry may have helped fuel their phenomenally vitriolic and well-received performances. (Earlier in their careers, Davis said of Crawford, "She's slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie", and Crawford said of Davis, "I don't hate [her] even though the press wants me to. I resent her. I don't see how she built a career out of a set of mannerisms instead of real acting ability. Take away the pop eyes, the cigarette, and those funny clipped words, and what have you got? She's phony, but I guess the public really likes that.")
Crawford's final appearance on the silver screen was in the flop Trog (1970). Turning to vodka more and more, she was hardly seen afterward. On May 10, 1977, Joan died of a heart attack in New York City. She was 71 years old. She had disinherited her adopted daughter Christina and son Christopher; the former wrote a tell-all book called "Mommie Dearest", The Sixth Sense published in 1978. The book cast Crawford in a negative light and was cause for much debate, particularly among her friends and acquaintances, including Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Crawford's first husband. (In 1981, Faye Dunaway starred in Mommie Dearest (1981) which did well at the box office.) Crawford is interred in the same mausoleum as fellow MGM star Judy Garland, in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.- Music Department
- Composer
- Writer
Cole Porter was born June 9, 1891, at Peru, Indiana, the son of pharmacist Samuel Fenwick Porter and Kate Cole. Cole was raised on a 750-acre fruit ranch. Kate Cole married Samuel Porter in 1884 and had two children, Louis and Rachel, who both died in infancy. Porter's grandfather, J.G. Cole, was a multi-millionaire who made his fortune in the coal and western timber business. His mother introduced him to the violin and the piano. Cole started riding horses at age six and began to studying piano at eight at Indiana's Marion Conservatory. By age ten, he had begun to compose songs, and his first song was entitled "Song of the Birds".
He attended Worcester Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1905, an elite private school from which he graduated in 1909 as class valedictorian. That summer he toured Europe as a graduation present from his grandfather. That fall, he entered Yale University and lived in a single room at Garland's Lodging House at 242 York Street in New Haven, CT, and became a member of the Freshman Glee Club. In 1910, he published his first song, "Bridget McGuire". While at Yale, he wrote football fight songs including the "Yale Bulldog Song" and "Bingo Eli Yale," which was introduced at a Yale dining hall dinner concert. Classmates include poet Archibald Macleish, Bill Crocker of San Francisco banking family and actor Monty Woolley. Dean Acheson, later to be U.S. Secretary of State, lived in the same dorm with Porter and was a good friend of Porter. In his senior year he was president of the University Glee club and a football cheerleader.
Porter graduated from Yale in 1913 with a BA degree. He attended Harvard Law school from 1913 to 1914 and the Harvard School of Music from 1915 to 1916. In 1917 he went to France and distributed foodstuffs to war-ravaged villages. In April 1918 he joined the 32nd Field Artillery Regiment and worked with the Bureau of the Military Attache of the US. During this time he met the woman who would become his wife, Linda Lee Thomas, a wealthy Kentucky divorcée, at a breakfast reception at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. He did not, as is often rumored, join the French Foreign Legion at this time, nor receive a commission in the French army and see combat as an officer.
In 1919 he rented an apartment in Paris, enrolled in a school specializing in music composition and studied with Vincent D'indy. On December 18, 1919, married Linda Lee Thomas, honeymooning in the south of France. This was a "professional" marriage, as Cole was, in fact, gay. Linda had been previously married to a newspaper publisher and was described as a beautiful woman who was one of the most celebrated hostesses in Europe. The Porters made their home on the Rue Monsieur in Paris, where their parties were renowned as long and brilliant. They hired the Monte Carlo Ballet for one of their affairs; once, on a whim, they transported all of their guests to the French Riviera.
In 1923 they moved to Venice, Italy, where they lived in the Rezzonico Palace, the former home of poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. They built an extravagant floating night club that would accommodate up to 100 guests. They conducted elaborate games including treasure hunts through the canals and arranged spectacular balls.
Porter's first play on Broadway featured a former ballet dancer, actor Clifton Webb. He collaborated with E. Ray Goetz, the brother-in-law of Irving Berlin, on several Broadway plays, as Goetz was an established producer and lyricist.
His ballad "Love For Sale" was introduced on December 8, 1930, in a revue that starred Jimmy Durante and was introduced by Kathryn Crawford. Walter Winchell, the newspaper columnist and radio personality, promoted the song, which was later banned by many radio stations because of its content. In 1934, his hit "Anything Goes" appeared on Broadway. During the show's hectic rehearsal Porter once asked the stage doorman what he thought the show should be called. The doorman responded that nothing seemed to go right, with so many things being taken out and then put back in, that "Anything Goes" might be a good title. Porter liked it, and kept it. In 1936, while preparing for "Red, Hot and Blue" with Bob Hope and Jimmy Durante, Ethel Merman was hired to do stenographic work to help Porter in rewriting scripts of the show. He later said she was the best stenographers he ever had.
Porter wrote such classic songs as "Let's Do It" in 1928, "You Do Something To Me" in 1929, "Love For Sale" in 1930, "What Is This Thing Called Love?" in 1929, "Night and Day" in 1932, "I Get A Kick Out Of You" in 1934, "Begin the Beguine" in 1935, "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" in 1938, "Don't Fence Me In" in 1944, "I Love Paris" in 1953, "I've Got You Under My Skin", In the Still of The Night", "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To", "True Love", "Just One Of Those Things", "Anything Goes", "From This Moment On", "You're The Top", "Easy to Love" and many, many more.
On October 24, 1937, taking a break from a re-write of what would be his weakest musical, "You Never Know", visiting as a guest at a countess' home, Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, New York, he was badly injured in a fall while horseback-riding. Both of his legs were smashed and he suffered a nerve injury. He was hospitalized for two years, confined to a wheelchair for five years and endured over 30 operations to save his legs over the next 20 years. During his recuperation he wrote a number of Broadway musicals.
On August 3, 1952, his beloved mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage. His wife, Linda, died of cancer on May 20, 1954. On April 3, 1958, he sustained his 33rd operation, and still suffering from chronic pain, his right leg was amputated. He refused to wear an artificial limb and lived as a virtual recluse in his apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. He sought refuge in alcohol, sleep, self-pity and sank into despair. He even refused to attend a "Salute to Cole Porter" at the Metropolitan Opera on May 15, 1960, and the commencement exercises at Yale University in June of 1960 when he was conferred with an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, or his 70th birthday party arranged by his friends at the Orpheum Theater in New York City in June 1962.
After what appeared to be a successful kidney stone operation at St. John's hospital in Santa Monica, California, he died very unexpectedly on October 15, 1964. His funeral instructions were that he have no funeral or memorial service and he was buried adjacent to his mother and wife in Peru, Indiana.- Director
- Additional Crew
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
George Cukor was an American film director of Hungarian-Jewish descent, better known for directing comedies and literary adaptations. He once won the Academy Award for Best Director, and was nominated other four times for the same Award.
In 1899, George Dewey Cukor was born on the Lower East Side of New York City. His parents were assistant district attorney Viktor Cukor and Helén Ilona Gross. His middle name "Dewey" honored Admiral George Dewey who was considered a war hero for his victory in the Battle of Manila Bay, in 1898.
As a child, Cukor received dancing lessons, and soon fell in love with the theater, appearing in several amateur plays. In 1906, he performed in a recital with David O. Selznick (1902-1965), who would later become a close friend.
As a teenager, Cukor often visited the New York Hippodrome, a well-known Manhattan theater. He often cut classes while attending high school, in order to attend afternoon matinees. He later took a job as a supernumerary with the Metropolitan Opera, and at times performed there in black-face.
Cukor graduated from the DeWitt Clinton High School in 1917. His father wanted him to follow a legal career, and had his son enrolled City College of New York. Cukor lost interest in his studies and dropped out of college in 1918. He then took a job as an assistant stage manager and bit player for a touring production of the British musical "The Better 'Ole". The musical was an adaptation of the then-popular British comic strip "Old Bill" by Bruce Bairnsfather (1887-1959).
In 1920, Cukor became the stage manager of the Knickerbocker Players, a theatrical troupe. In 1921, Cukor became the general manager of the Lyceum Players, a summer stock company. In 1925, Cukor was one of the co-founders the C.F. and Z. Production Company. With this theatrical company, Cukor started working as a theatrical director. He made his Broadway debut as a director with the play "Antonia" by Melchior Lengyel (1880-1974).
The C.F. and Z. Production Company was eventually renamed the Cukor-Kondolf Stock Company, and started recruiting up-and-coming theatrical talents. Cukor's theatrical troupe included at various times Louis Calhern, Ilka Chase, Bette Davis, Douglass Montgomery, Frank Morgan, Reginald Owen, Elizabeth Patterson, and Phyllis Povah.
Cukor attained great critical acclaim in 1926 for directing "The Great Gatsby", an adaptation of a then-popular novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940). He directed six more Broadway productions until 1929. At the time, Hollywood film studios were recruiting New York theater talent for sound films, and Cukor was hired by Paramount Pictures. He started as an apprentice director before the studio lent him to Universal Pictures. His first notable film work was serving as a dialogue director for "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1930).
After returning to Paramount Pictures, he worked as aco-director. His first solo directorial effort was "Tarnished Lady" (1931), and at that time he earned a weekly salary of $1500. Cukor co-directed the film "One Hour with You" (1932) with Ernst Lubitsch, but Lubitsch demanded sole directorial credit. Cukor filed a legal suit but eventually had to settle for a credit as the film's assistant director. He left Paramount in protest, and took a new job with RKO Studios.
During the 1930s, Cukor was entrusted with directing films for RKO's leading actresses. He worked often with Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003), although not always with box-office success. He did direct such box office hits as "Little Women" (1933) and "Holiday" (1938), but also notable flops such as "Sylvia Scarlett" (1935).
In 1936, Cukor was assigned to work on the film adaptation of the blockbuster novel "Gone with the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell. He spent the next two years preoccupied with the film's pre-production, and with supervising screen tests for actresses seeking to play leading character Scarlett O'Hara. Cukor reportedly favored casting either Katharine Hepburn or Paulette Goddard for the role. Producer David O. Selznick refused to cast either one, since Hepburn was coming off a string of flops and was viewed as "box office poison," while Goddard was rumored to have had a scandalous affair with Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) and her reputation suffered for it.
Cukor did not get to direct "Gone with the Wind", as Selznick decided to assign the directing duties to Victor Fleming (1889-1949). Cukor's involvement with the film was limited to coaching actresses Vivien Leigh (1913-1967) and Olivia de Havilland (1916-). Similarly, the very same year, Cukor also failed to receive a directing credit for "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), though he was responsible for several casting and costuming decisions for this iconic classic.
In this same period, Cukor did direct an all-female cast in "The Women" (1939), as well as Greta Garbo's final motion picture performance in "Two-Faced Woman" (1941). Then his film career was interrupted by World War II, as he joined the Signal Corps in 1942. Given his experience as a film director, Cukor was soon assigned to producing training and instructional films for army personnel. He wanted to gain an officer's commission, but was denied promotion above the rank of private. Cukor suspected that rumors of his homosexuality were the reason he never received the promotion.
During the 1940s, Cukor had a number of box-office hits, such "A Woman's Face" (1941) and "Gaslight" (1944). He forged a working alliance with screenwriters Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, and the trio collaborated on seven films between 1947-1954.
Until the early 1950s, most of his Cukor's films were in black-and-white, and his first film in Technicolor was "A Star Is Born" (1954), with Judy Garland as the leading actress. Casting the male lead for the film proved difficult, as several major stars were either not interested in the role or were considered unsuitable by the studio. Cukor had to settle for James Mason as the male lead, but the film was highly successful and received 6 Academy Award nominations. But Cukor was not nominated for directing.
He had a handful of critical successes over the following years, such as Les Girls (1957) and "Wild Is the Wind" (1957), and also helmed the unfinished "Something's Got to Give" (1962), which had a troubled production and went at least $2 million over budget before it was terminated.
Cukor had a comeback with the critically and commercially successful "My Fair Lady," one of the highlights of his career., for which he won both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Director, along with the Directors Guild of America Award. However, his career very quickly slowed down, and the aging Cukor was infrequently involved with new projects.
Cukor's most notable film in the 1970s was the fantasy The Blue Bird (1976) , which was the first joint Soviet-American production. It was a box-office flop, though it received a nomination for the Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film and was groundbreaking for its time. Cukor's swan song was "Rich and Famous" (1981), depicting the relationship of two women over a period of several decades., played by co-stars Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen, Cukor's final pair of leading ladies.
He retired as a director at the age of 82, and died a year later of a heart attack in 1983. At the time of his death, his net worth was estimated to be $2,377,720. He was buried at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, CA. Cukor was buried next to his long-time platonic friend Frances Howard (1903-1976), the wife of legendary studio mogul Samuel Goldwyn.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Linda Hunt is a veteran character actress who had only just begun acting in motion pictures when director Peter Weir required her peculiarities to animate one of cinema's most esoteric characters, Billy Kwan, the intellectual and virtuous Chinese-Australian dwarf and photographer, in the Australian romantic drama, The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). Hunt's work in the film earned an Oscar, among many critic awards, all for Best Supporting Actress.- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Harvey Fierstein is an American actor, screenwriter and playwright who has been in several stage productions, films, shows and games. He voiced Yao in Mulan and Huaca in Kingdom of the Sun (prototype for The Emperor's New Groove). He also acted in Hairspray, Independence Day, Mrs. Doubtfire, Bros, Big Mouth, Death to Smoochy and Bullets Over Broadway,- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Nathan Lane is an American actor and singer from New Jersey who is known for playing Timon from The Lion King, Spot Helperman/Scott Leadready II from Teacher's Pet, Max Bialystock from The Producers, Snowball from Stuart Little, Hamegg from Astro Boy and Ernie Smuntz from Mouse Hunt. He is married to his husband Devlin Elliott since 2015.- Actress
- Producer
- Director
Heather Matarazzo was born November 10, 1982, in Oyster Bay, New York. She was adopted by Camille and Ray Matarazzo, an Italian-American couple although she is of Irish descent biologically. Heather attended both Oyster Bay High School and Long Island High School for the Arts. In 1997, she made her film debut in Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), she played the lead role of Dawn Wiener a shy, unattractive, unpopular 7th grader who falls for a charismatic and handsome aspiring rock musician, and decides to pursue him romantically. She won an Independent Spirit Award for her performance in the film.- Actress
- Writer
- Music Department
Performer, actress, singer and author Sandra Bernhard appeared as a series regular in season three of the immensely popular FX Television/Ryan Murphy show "POSE" reprising her role as brassy but caring Nurse Judy Kubrack, who works with H.I.V. / AIDS patients, following a memorable season one guest appearance and hugely successful second season. Bernhard has also done a special guest appearance on Ryan Murphy's "American Horror Story: Apocalypse", highlighting a successful, decades long television career.
She is also currently in her fifth year hosting her weekly radio show Sandyland on Sirius XM's Radio Andy channel 102, for which she won a broadcasting Gracie Award.
A pioneer of the one-woman show, Bernhard brings a completely unique and raucous mix of cabaret, stand-up, rock-n-roll, and social commentary to her live stage performances. Just last year she celebrated the 10 year anniversary of her iconic annual holiday shows at Joe's Pub in New York City, while she also continues to tour throughout the country and overseas.
Extremely notable past live stage shows, which she has performed both on and off-Broadway, include Without You I'm Nothing, I'm Still Here, Dammit, Everything Bad and Beautiful, and #blessed.
Bernhard's film credits include The King of Comedy, for which she was awarded Best Supporting Actress by the National Society of Film Critics, Track 29, Hudson Hawk, Dinner Rush, and the live performance film Without You I'm Nothing. Past television credits include Two Broke Girls, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Broad City, Difficult People, You're the Worst, The New Adventures of Old Christine, Will &Grace, The Sopranos, The Larry Sanders Show and Roseanne. Music albums include I'm Your Woman (Polygram, 1986), Excuses for Bad Behavior (Epic, 1994) and the world music album Whatever It Takes (Mi5, 2009). She has written three books: May I Kiss You on the Lips, Miss Sandra?, Confessions of a Pretty Lady, Love, Love and Love.- Actress
- Producer
- Writer
The grand, highly flamboyant Russian star Alla Nazimova of Hollywood silent films lived an equally grand, flamboyant life off-camera, though her legendary status has not held up as firmly as that of a Rudolph Valentino today.
Alla Nazimova was born Miriam Edez Adelaida Leventon in 1879, in Yalta, Crimea, in the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents, Sonya Horowitz and Yakov Leventon. She was the third child in an abusive, contentious household. Most of her sad childhood was spent in foster homes or in the care of other relatives and she showed a strong penchant for outrageous behavior to cope. Nazimova also showed a great aptitude for music at a young age and began violin lessons at age seven. She changed her name to Alla Nazimova when she began appearing on stage--her father insisted on it, as "performing" was not considered respectable at the time.
She began acting lessons at age 17 and joined Konstantin Stanislavski's company of actors as a pupil of his "method style" at the Moscow Art Theatre. During that time she supported herself by being kept by rich, older men. A failed love affair led to her only marriage, to an acting student named Sergei Golovin, but they separated quickly. She grew discontented with Stanislavsky and later performed in repertory. She met the legendary Pavel Orlenev, a close friend of Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky, and entered into both a personal and professional relationship with him. They toured internationally throughout Europe with great success and came to New York in 1905, where Nazimova was saluted on Broadway for her definitive interpretations of Henrik Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" and "A Doll's House." Orlenev returned to Russia but Nazimova stayed.
She made her screen debut with War Brides (1916), which was initially a 35-minute play. By 1918 she was a box-office star for Metro Pictures and completed 11 films for the studio over a three-year period. A torrid, stylish and rather outré tragedienne who played exotic, liberal women confronted by great personal anguish, she earned personal successes as a reformed prostitute in Revelation (1918), a suicide in Toys of Fate (1918) and dual roles as half-sisters during the Boxer Rebellion in The Red Lantern (1919), not to mention the title role of Camille (1921) with Rudolph Valentino. At the same time she maintained a strong Broadway theatrical career.
In accordance with her rise in the film industry, she began producing her own efforts, which were bold and experimental--and monumental failures, although they are hailed as great artistic efforts today. Her Salomé (1922) was quite scandalous and deemed a failure at the time. The monetary losses she suffered as producer were astronomical. The Hays Code, which led to severe censorship in pictures, also led to her downfall, as did her outmoded acting style. She was forced to abandon films for the theater, scoring exceptionally well in Anton Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard." She did return to films briefly in the 1940s in a variety of supporting roles, but she made these solely for the money.
Nazimova's private life has long been the subject of industry gossip. As a Hollywood cover to her well-known bisexual lifestyle, she coexisted in a "marriage" with gay actor Charles Bryant for well over a decade. Her "Garden of Allah" home was the centerpiece for many glamorous private parties. She died in 1945.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Today Barbara Stanwyck is remembered primarily as the matriarch of the family known as the Barkleys on the TV western The Big Valley (1965), wherein she played Victoria, and from the hit drama The Colbys (1985). But she was known to millions of other fans for her movie career, which spanned the period from 1927 until 1964, after which she appeared on television until 1986. It was a career that lasted for 59 years.
Barbara Stanwyck was born Ruby Catherine Stevens on July 16, 1907, in Brooklyn, New York, to working class parents Catherine Ann (McPhee) and Byron E. Stevens. Her father, from Massachusetts, had English ancestry, and her Canadian mother, from Nova Scotia, was of Scottish and Irish descent. Stanwyck went to work at the local telephone company for fourteen dollars a week, but she had the urge (a dream--that was all it was) somehow to enter show business. When not working, she pounded the pavement in search of dancing jobs. The persistence paid off. Barbara was hired as a chorus girl for the princely sum of $40 a week, much better than the wages she was getting from the phone company. She was seventeen, and was going to make the most of the opportunity that had been given her.
In 1928 Barbara moved to Hollywood, where she was to start one of the most lucrative careers filmdom had ever seen. She was an extremely versatile actress who could adapt to any role. Barbara was equally at home in all genres, from melodramas, such as Forbidden (1932) and Stella Dallas (1937), to thrillers, such as Double Indemnity (1944), one of her best films, also starring Fred MacMurray (as you have never seen him before). She also excelled in comedies such as Remember the Night (1939) and The Lady Eve (1941). Another genre she excelled in was westerns, Union Pacific (1939) being one of her first and TV's The Big Valley (1965) (her most memorable role) being her last. In 1983, she played in the ABC hit mini-series The Thorn Birds (1983), which did much to keep her in the eye of the public. She turned in an outstanding performance as Mary Carson.
Barbara was considered a gem to work with for her serious but easygoing attitude on the set. She worked hard at being an actress, and she never allowed her star quality to go to her head. She was nominated for four Academy Awards, though she never won. She turned in magnificent performances for all the roles she was nominated for, but the "powers that be" always awarded the Oscar to someone else. However, in 1982 she was awarded an honorary Academy Award for "superlative creativity and unique contribution to the art of screen acting." Sadly, Barbara died on January 20, 1990, leaving 93 movies and a host of TV appearances as her legacy to us.- It would not be easy for anyone to out-do one of American theater's finest thespians, but somehow actress Sandy Dennis managed to even out-quirk the legendary Geraldine Page when it came to affecting nervous tics and offbeat mannerisms on stage and in film. She and Page had few peers when it came to the neurotic-dispensing department. The two Actor's Studio disciples developed fascinating characterizations that seemed to manifest themselves outwardly to such physical extremes and, like a bad car accident, their overt styling was capable of both drawing in, and repelling audiences. There was no gray area. Either way, both had a searing emotional range and were undeniably transfixing figures who held up Oscar trophies to prove there was a "Method" to their respective madness. Sandy's signature quirks--her stuttering, fluttering, throat gulps, eye twitches, nervous giggles, hysterical flailing--are all a part of what made her so distinctive and unforgettable. Her untimely death of cancer at age 54 robbed the entertainment industry of a remarkable talent.
The Nebraska-born-and-bred actress was born Sandra Dale Dennis in Hastings, on April 27, 1937, the daughter of postal clerk Jack Dennis and his secretary wife Yvonne (née Hudson), who divorced in 1966 after a 38-year marriage. Living in both Kenesaw (1942) and Lincoln (1946) while growing up, she and brother Frank went to Lincoln High School with TV host Dick Cavett. Her passion for acting grew and grew while still at home. A college student at both Nebraska Wesleyan University and the University of Nebraska, she eventually found her career direction after appearing with the Lincoln Community Theater Group.
The toothy actress left Nebraska and towards the Big Apple at age 19 just to try her luck. An intense student of acting guru Uta Hagen, Sandy made her New York stage debut in a Tempo Theatre production of "The Lady from the Sea" in 1956 and that same year won her first TV role as that of Alice Holden in the daytime series Guiding Light (1952). A year later she made it to Broadway as an understudy (and eventual replacement) for the roles of Flirt and Reenie in the William Inge drama "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs," directed by Elia Kazan at the Music Box Theatre. She toured with that production and also found regional work in the plays "Bus Stop" and "Motel" while continuing to shine as a budding New York fixture in "Burning Bright," "Face of a Hero" and "Port Royal".
Along with fellow newcomers Gary Lockwood and Phyllis Diller, Sandy made her movie debut in playwright Inge's Splendor in the Grass (1961), a movie quite welcoming of Sandy's neurotic tendencies. In the minor but instrumental role of Kay, she is an unwitting instigator of friend Deanie's (played by an ambitiously unbalanced Natalie Wood) mental collapse. Despite this worthy little turn, Sandy would not make another film for five years.
Instead, the actress set her sights strongly on the stage and for this she was handsomely rewarded, most notably in comedy. After appearing in a two-month run of the Graham Greene drama "The Complaisant Lover" at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1961, stardom would be hers the very next year with her outstanding social worker role in the lighter-weight "A Thousand Clowns". Winning the Theatre World as well as the coveted Tony Award for her performance, she continue her run of prizes with a second consecutive Tony for her sexy turn in the comedy "Any Wednesday" (1964). Having made only one picture at this juncture, Sandy was not in a good position to transfer her award-winning characters to film and when they did, they went to Barbara Harris and Jane Fonda, respectively.
TV was also a viable medium for Sandy and she appeared sporadically on such programs as The Fugitive (1963), Naked City (1958) and Arrest and Trial (1963). In 1965, she appeared in London as Irina in a heralded Actor's Studio production of Chekhov's "The Three Sisters" with fellow devotees Geraldine Page, Kim Stanley, Shelley Winters, Luther Adler and Kevin McCarthy. The play was subsequently videotaped and directed by Paul Bogart, and is valuable today for the studied "Method" performances of its cast. It, however, received mixed reviews upon its release.
Returning to film in 1966, Sandy seemed to embellish every physical and emotional peculiarity she could muster for the role of the mousy wife Honey in the four-character powerhouse play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) by Edward Albee. It is a mouth-dropping, emotionally shattering performance, and both she and a more even-keeled George Segal as the drop over guests of the skewering cutthroat couple George and Martha (Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton) more than held their own. While the distaff cast won Oscars for this (Taylor for "Best Actress" and Dennis for "Best Supporting Actress"), this ferocious landmark film blew open the "Production Code" doors once and for all and a wave of counterculture filming tackling formerly taboo subjects came to be.
Firmly established now with her Oscar win, Sandy found highly affecting lead showcases for herself. She starred as a young, naive English teacher challenged by a New York "Blackboard Jungle"-like school system in Up the Down Staircase (1967). She also stirred up some controversy along with Anne Heywood playing brittle lesbian lovers whose relationship is threatened by a sexy male visitor (Keir Dullea) in another ground-breaking film The Fox (1967). Sandy remained intriguingly off-kilter in the odd-couple romantic story Sweet November (1968) opposite Anthony Newley, the bizarre Robert Altman thriller That Cold Day in the Park (1969), and the gloomy British melodrama A Touch of Love (1969) [aka Thank You All Very Much].
Off-camera, Sandy lived for over a decade with jazz musician and saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, which began in 1965 following his devoted relationship with actress Judy Holliday who had died of cancer earlier in the year. They eventually parted ways in 1976. Rumors that they had married at some point were eventually negated by Sandy herself. Sandy also went on to have a May-December relationship with the equally quirky actor Eric Roberts from 1980 to 1985. She had no children.
At the peak of her film popularity, Sandy began the 1970s in more mainstream fashion. She and Jack Lemmon were another odd-couple hit in Neil Simon's The Out of Towners (1970) as married George and Gwen Kellerman visiting an unmerciful Big Apple. Sandy is at her whiny, plain-Jane best ("Oh, my God...I think we're being kidnapped!") as disaster upon disaster befalls the miserable twosome. Both she and Lemmon were nominated for Golden Globes. Following this, however, Sandy again refocused on the stage with an avalanche of fine performances in "How the Other Half Loves," "And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little," "A Streetcar Named Desire" (as Blanche), "Born Yesterday" (as Billie Dawn), "Absurd Person Singular," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (as Maggie the Cat), "Same Time, Next Year," "The Little Foxes," "Eccentricities of a Nightingale," "The Supporting Cast" and even the title role in "Peter Pan".
A few TV and movie roles came Sandy's way in unspectacular fashion but it wasn't until the next decade that she again stole some thunder. After a moving support turn as a cast-off wife in the finely-tuned ensemble drama The Four Seasons (1981), Sandy proved terrific as a James Dean extremist in another ensemble film Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), which she played first to fine acclaim on Broadway. Reunited with director Robert Altman as well as her stage compatriots Cher, Karen Black, Kathy Bates, Sudie Bond and Marta Heflin, the film version was equally praised. Her last films included Another Woman (1988), 976-EVIL (1988) and Parents (1989).
Seen less and less in later years, she gave in to her eccentric tendencies as time went on. A notorious cat lover (at one point there was a count of 33 residing in her Westport, Connecticut home), close friends included actresses Brenda Vaccaro and Jessica Walter. Her father Jack died in 1990 and around that same time Sandy was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Undergoing chemotherapy at the time she filmed the part of a beaten-down mother in Sean Penn's The Indian Runner (1991), the role proved to be her last.
Sandy died in Westport on March 2, 1992. Her ashes were placed at the Lincoln Memorial Park in Lincoln, Nebraska. A foundation in her home state was set up to "memorialize the accomplishments of Sandy Dennis, to perpetuate her commitment to education and the performing arts, to promote cultural activities, and to encourage theatrical education, performance, and professionals". A book, "Sandy Dennis: A Personal Memoir," was published posthumously in 1997. - Actress
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Portia de Rossi was born and raised in Geelong, Australia. Originally born Amanda Rogers, at 15 she changed her name to Portia, saying that it was the most daring thing she had ever done up until that point. After graduating from high school, she attended the University of Melbourne, and studied law. Although she studied diligently, in 1993, Portia found herself giving special notice to a casting director who saw her in a commercial, and she soon auditioned for Sirens (1994), a low budget comedy starring Hugh Grant. She was cast in the role of Giddy, one of the three gorgeous models in the movie. It wasn't until 1997, however, that Portia at last began to attract real attention. She turned an unforgettable role as Murphy in Scream 2 (1997), and in 1998 she joined the cast of Ally McBeal (1997) as the "Ice Queen", Nelle Porter. She has also worked on such projects as Stigmata (1999), Girl (1998), and The Invisibles (1999), and she has appeared on several magazine covers, including Shape. After more than a decade of hard work, Portia is finally beginning to win real recognition, not only for her long golden tresses, but also for her wonderful talent.- Actress
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Wanda Sykes has been called one of the funniest stand-up comics by her peers and ranks among Entertainment Weekly's 25 Funniest People in America. Her smart-witted stand-up has sent her career in many different areas.
She was previously seen in Comedy Central's Wanda Does It (2004), where she tried various non-showbiz jobs. Her first book, "Yeah I Said It," published by Simon and Schuster, hit bookstores in September 2004, which is a hilarious collection of essays touching on life, family, and current events.
In 2003, she was seen on Fox's Wanda at Large (2003), in which she wrote, produced, and starred. She also has a one-hour Comedy Central special called Wanda Sykes: Tongue Untied (2003). In addition, she can be seen on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000) or heard on Comedy Central's Crank Yankers (2002) as the voice of Gladys Murphy.
Wanda was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, and raised in Maryland, the daughter of Marion Louise (Peoples), a banker, and Harry Ellsworth Sykes, a US Army colonel. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Hampton University. Her stand-up career began at a Coors Light Super talent Showcase in Washington, DC, where she performed for the first time in front of a live audience.
She spent 5 years as part of the HBO's critically acclaimed The Chris Rock Show (1997). As a performer and writer on the show, she was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards and in 1999 won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music, or Comedy Special. In 2001, she won the American Comedy Award for Outstanding Female Stand-Up Comic. She won a second Emmy in 2002 for her work on Inside the NFL (1977). In 2003, Wanda earned a Comedy Central Commie Award for Funniest TV Actress. Other writing credits include the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards (1999), The MTV Movie Awards, The 74th Annual Academy Awards (2002), The Keenen Ivory Wayans Show (1997), and Wanda at Large (2003).
She also appeared in the feature films Pootie Tang (2001), Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000), Down to Earth (2001), and Monster-in-Law (2005).- Actress
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Two-time 'Emmy Award' winner Judy Gold is a veteran of stand-up comedy, known for her edgy wit, sharp timing, and infamous crowd work. Consistently appealing to all generations and backgrounds, Judy can be found throughout most mediums of entertainment: TV; Film; Web-Series'; Stage; Storytelling; Radio/Podcasting; Writing and thanks to her music degree in piano from Rutgers University - Music:Combining many of her talents into two critically acclaimed Off-Broadway solo-shows: The Judy Show - My Life As A Sitcom and 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother. Off-Broadway: Clinton the Musical; Love, Loss and What I Wore; Disaster! the Musical; The Vagina Monologues; and most recently, Clinton the Musical at New World Stages.
You can find her on most episodes of 'truTV's:World's Dumbest,'many episodes of 'The View,' 'The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore,' 'Today with Katie Lee and Hoda' and 'The Wendy Williams Show.' She's appeared on The Food Network's 'Chopped All-Stars' as a competitor (don't ask), 'Rachel vs Guy: Celebrity Cook-Off' and 'The Next Food Network Star' as well as TLC's 'The Next Great Baker.'
Judy was also featured on 'Louie,' 'The Jim Gaffigan Show,' episodes of 'NBC's '30 Rock' and 'Morning Joe,' ABC's 'Melissa & Joey' and 'Celebrity Wife Swap,' (as the first same-sex couple in the show's history), CBS's '2 Broke Girls,' and 'The Doctors,' and Showtime's 'The Big C,' as well as 'Ugly Betty', 'Law & Order,' 'SVU,' 'Hollywood Squares,' and was featured in an episode of 'The Glades' on A&E and 'Are We There Yet?' on TBS.
She hosts a free, weekly podcast, 'Kill Me Now' that focuses on everything that annoys her and her guests & can be heard regularly on several other podcasts and radio programs including 'Opie & Anthony,' 'Keith and the Girl', 'WTF with Marc Maron', 'NPR's The Moth,' 'I Hate My Wife,' and more.
Gold's stand-up specials include 'Comedy Central Presents: Judy Gold', Comedy Central's 'Tough Crowd Stands Up,' and Judy's own HBO half-hour special for which she received 'The Cable Ace Award.' She's appeared on 'The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson,' 'The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,' 'The Conan O'Brien Show,' and in a half-hour comedy special for LOGO.
Along with stepping in as host for 'The Wendy Williams Show,' 'Anderson Cooper' and 'The View.' She's also hosted Comedy Central's '100 Greatest Stand-Ups of All Time,' 'NickMom Night Out,' 'The GLAAD Media Awards' on VH1 and HBO's 'At the Multiplex with Judy Gold,' which ran for nearly a decade. You can also see her in films, This is Where I Leave You,The Aristocrats and the documentaries Making Trouble, I am Comic and HBO;s All Aboard! You can also catch her in NYC hosting the Funny People Series at the 92Y.
Judy Gold won her two Emmy Awards for writing and producing 'The Rosie O'Donnell Show' and was nominated twice for The American Comedy Award's 'Funniest Female Stand-Up.'
In addition to her 2 plays, stand-up shows and at least a couple bar mitzvahs, Judy's opinions, interviews, blogs and articles have contributed to several notable publications including The Huffington Post, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wondertime Magazine, Momlogic and The Advocate.
A solo-performance instructor at ESPA Primary Stages, Judy also coaches privately, via skype and in group workshops focused on sharpening skills in public speaking, speech-writing and solo-performance. She also has a session focused on developing and creating dynamic communication and speech-writing for executive women.
Gold lives in New York City with her two children and fiancée. She frequently tours theaters and comedy clubs around the country with her stand-up and solo-shows.
Her CD, Judith's Roommate Had a Baby, is available on Amazon.com, as well as the printed version of 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother.
JudyGold.com @jewdygold
Kill Me Now free on iTunes & for download.- Actress
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Margaret Cho was born on December 5, 1968 in San Francisco. Her grandfather was a Methodist minister who ran an orphanage in Seoul during the Korean War. Ignoring the traditions of her patriarchal culture, her mother bravely resisted an arranged marriage in Korea & married Margaret's father, who writes joke books in Korean.
What she did know is that she didn't love being a kid. Racing toward adulthood to escape bullying, she began writing jokes for stand up at 14 & professionally performing at 16. Getting picked on & feeling disenfranchised's a subject that's very near to her heart. She has become a sort of patron saint for outsiders, speaking for them when they are not able to speak for themselves.
Soon after starting her career, she won a comedy contest where first prize was opening for Jerry Seinfeld. She moved to Los Angeles in the early '90s & hit the college circuit, where she immediately became the most booked act in the market, garnering a nomination for Campus Comedian of The Year. She performed over 300 concerts within 2 years. Arsenio Hall introduced her to late night audiences, Bob Hope put her on a prime time special & seemingly overnight, she became a national celebrity.
Her groundbreaking, controversial & short-lived ABC sitcom All-American Girl soon followed. Oddly, while chosen because of who she was-a non-conformist Korean-American woman w/ liberal views-the network decided it wanted her to tone it down for the show. Challenging her feelings for both who she was & how she looked, she soon realized that though she was an executive producer, it was a battle she wouldn't win.
The experience was a traumatic one, bringing up unresolved feelings left over from childhood. She developed an eating disorder as a response to criticism about her body. She was so obsessive in her goal to try to be what she thought others wanted, she landed in the hospital w/ kidney failure. Throughout a period of self-abuse, she continued performing to sold-out audiences across the country in comedy clubs, theaters & on college campuses, working to channel her anger in to something more positive.
In 1999, her groundbreaking, off-Broadway one-woman show, I'm The One That I Want, garnered national acclaim. It was made into a best-selling book & feature film. After her experience w/ All-American Girl, she wanted to make sure she would only have to answer to herself, making sure she was responsible for the distribution & sales of her film, taking a page from what music artist Ani DiFranco did w/ her Righteous Babe Records. The concert film, which garnered incredible reviews, broke records for most money grossed per print in movie history. In 2001, after the success of her first tour, she launched Notorious C.H.O., a smash-hit 37-city national tour that culminated in a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall. It was recorded & released as a feature film, hailed by the New York Times as "Brilliant!" Both films were acquired by Showtime Cable Networks & produced by her production company, a testament to the success of her bold business model.
In March of 2003, she embarked on her third sold-out national tour, Revolution. It was heralded by the Chicago Sun Times as "Her strongest show yet!" The CD recording was nominated for a Grammy for Comedy Album of the Year. In 2005, she released Assassin, which The Chicago Tribune crowed "Packs passion in to each punch." The concert film premiered in select theaters as well as on the gay & lesbian premium channel Here! TV in late 2005.
In 2007, she hit the road w/ Cyndi Lauper, Debbie Harry & Erasure, along w/ indie faves The Dresden Dolls & The Cliks, to host the True Colors Tour, benefiting the Human Rights Campaign. A true entertainment pioneer, she also created & starred in The Sensuous Woman, a live variety show featuring vaudevillian burlesque & comedy, which she took for an extended off-Broadway run that fall.
She returned to TV in 2008 on the VH1 series, The Cho Show. It followed her, her real parents & her eccentric entourage through a series of irreverent & outrageous experiences shaped by her 'anything goes' brand of stand-up. It was beloved for the audience it was intended for, the ones who maybe don't quite fit in.
The aptly titled Beautiful came next, exploring the good, bad & ugly in beauty as well as the unattractive politicians & marketers who shape our world. The concert premiered in Australia at The Sydney Theater, marking the first time she debuted a tour abroad. While touring through the U.S., the concert was filmed at the Long Beach theater, aired as a special on Showtime in 2009, then released as both a DVD & a book.
In 2009, she nabbed a starring role in the comedy/drama series Drop Dead Diva, which aired on Lifetime. She enjoys being part of a team, not necessarily having the sole responsibility for keeping things afloat.
Never one to shy away from a challenge, she stepped right up to the proverbial plate when asked to do Season 11 of Dancing with the Stars. Paired w/ pro Louie Van Amstel, she was on 1 of the show's most controversial seasons, dancing alongside Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino, David Hasselhoff, Jennifer Grey & Bristol Palin among others.
She got a very strong reaction to her Rainbow Dancing Dress during a time when the issue of bullying, especially among gay teens, was all over the media.
2010 culminated w/ another high honor, a second Grammy Award nomination for Comedy Album of the Year for Cho Dependent, her collection of music featuring collaborations w/ Fiona Apple, Andrew Bird, Grant Lee Phillips, Tegan & Sara, Ben Lee & more. The album received critical acclaim.
She self released Cho Dependent on her own Clownery Records & was encouraged by the acclaim, as there were only a handful of people putting out albums of comedy music-"Weird" Al Yankovic, Flight of the Conchords, The Lonely Island, to name a few-but no women. While thrilled that her hard work was rewarded w/ the nomination, she wasn't finished w/musical comedy yet, claiming to have more music in her.
In 2011, she released the live concert film of Cho Dependent, which also had its cable network debut on Showtime. Audiences who caught these performances live can attest that she hasn't lost any of her edge on Cho Dependent, her sixth live concert DVD. Shot at the Tabernacle in Atlanta. She remains uncensored, but never unhinged: taking aim at the Palin family, appearing on Dancing w/ the Stars, smoking pot & living in a world w/ sexting' The DVD's no-holds-barred Margaret & instantly a classic.
She then filmed the sixth & final season on Drop Dead Diva. She returned as "Teri" Girl Friday to Brooke Elliott's Jane Bingham, whose body's inhabited by the soul of a vapid model sent back to earth after Heaven judges her as a zero-zero for having committed no good & no bad deeds. Drop Dead Diva's not only beloved on Lifetime, but by the many stars who have lined up to guest on the show such as Paula Abdul, Wanda Sykes, Rosie O'Donnell, Vivica Fox & Kim Kardashian.
Not one to rest on her laurels, she spent whatever free time she had crafting her all new stand-up show Mother, which kicked off in September 2012, including both a U.S. & European tour.
Paradox not lost, she re-scheduled some of the shows she had booked mid-September so she could attend the Emmy Awards w/ her mother, having been nominated for a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her stint on 30 Rock as gender-bending North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il.
In 2014, she filmed a pilot for FOX & was thrilled to work w/Tina Fey as well as the producing team from 30 Rock. The multi-camera comedy takes place at a women's college that had just opened its doors to men for the first time.
While thrilled w/ her 2 Grammy & recent Emmy nomination, she has never turned away from the causes that are important to her. She's active in anti-racism, anti-bullying & gay rights campaign. She has been recognized for her unwavering dedication, receiving the Victory Fund's 2008 Leadership Award & the first ever Best Comedy Performance Award at the 2007 Asian Excellence Awards. She also received the First Amendment Award from the ACLU of Southern California & the Intrepid Award from the National Organization for Women (NOW). Throughout her career, she has been honored by GLAAD, American Women in Radio & Television, the Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund (AALDEF) & PFLAG for making a significant difference in promoting equal rights for all, regardless of race, sexual orientation or gender identity. In June 2011, she was honored by L.A. Pride w/ a Lifetime Achievement Award, recognizing an individual whose lifetime body of work has left a lasting major imprint on the LGBT community.
Through her hard work, she has had the opportunity to be heard, to extend her point of view & become regarded as a true pioneer in her field. She takes none of it for granted.- Actor
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Joel Grey's father, Mickey Katz, created "Borscht Capades" in the early 1950s. Mickey Katz was a musician -- a clarinetist and a saxophone player -- in bands around the east. Mickey was performing, playing in a band in Cleveland, Ohio, which is where Joel Grey was born. Musician and bandleader Spike Jones needed a clarinet player who could do bits, funny things. Mickey went on the road with Jones' band for about a year, the Katz family ending up, as the band all went to California.
One day his father Mickey was doing a recording session at the Sunset Boulevard RCA-Victor recording studio in Hollywood, and during a break, Mickey always wrote parodies to pop songs for fun and had just written this parody -- he was singing it to one of the other Jewish musicians. Unbeknownst to him the microphone was open in the control room and this group of non-Jewish, white-bread heads of RCA-Victor were sitting there and he's singing a Yiddish song. They didn't know what he was singing but they were laughing and laughing and they decided to record it. The recording became an enormous hit. The records were so successful Mickey put together a variety show that sold out every week in Los Angels at the Wilshire Ebell Theater. Joel knew, even at 9, that he was going to become an actor. When his father had this variety show, Joel said, "How can I be in it?" And his father said, "Well, what do you want to do?" Joel replied, "I don't know how to sing and I don't dance, but I'll run around and I'll move."
So Joel's aunt dropped him a song that was a big record in New York, a Yiddish song -- it was a million words and very fast and it was very popular with the audience -- and Joel learned it by rote. Joel had no idea what he was saying or singing and the next thing he knew, he was boxed in to being a song-and-dance man as opposed to an actor. "Romania, Romania." The song was like a Danny Kaye spectacular, fast, patter song that left a lot of room to dance and sing and mug and do all the things like his hero at the time -- Jerry Lewis. Maybe two years, Eddie Cantor saw Joel in Florida and put him on his "Colgate Comedy Hour' television show, and that was the end of the "Borscht Capades" for Joel, and the beginning of Joel's long tenure in night clubs all over the country.- Actress
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Actor Kristy McNichol is best known for her role as "Buddy" in the Spelling/Goldberg hit TV series Family (1976), where she won 2 Emmy awards and was nominated for a Golden Globe. McNichol began her career with guest appearances on such popular TV series as Starsky and Hutch, The Bionic Woman, Love American Style and The Love Boat, the list goes on. Her first role as a series regular came with the role of Patricia Apple in the CBS television series Apple's Way (1974). McNichol began her feature film career in the Burt Reynolds comedy "The End" and went on to star with Dennis Quaid and Mark Hamill in "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia", "Two Moon Junction" with Louise Fletcher, "The Pirate Movie" with Christopher Atkins, "Just the Way You Are", "The Forgotten One", and "You Can't Hurry Love". Her television movie credits include "Women of Valor", "Like Mom, Like Me", "Summer of My German Soldier", "Love, Mary", "My Old Man" and many more. Kristy also performed voice characters in several animated TV series including "Extreme Ghostbusters and Steven Spielberg's animated "Invasion America". Kristy starred in the hit movie "Little Darlings" with Tatum O'Neil which won her a People's Choice Award. Other TV credits include the Witt, Thomas, Harris hit series "Empty Nest". Kristy's films include Neil Simon's "Only When I Laugh" with Marsha Mason, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination, Alan Pakula's "Dream Lover" and Samuel Fuller's "White Dog".
Kristy devotes a lot of her time to charity work. Not only is Kristy McNichol a renowned actor but she is also a singer. Albums include The Pirate Movie (1982) soundtrack, The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia (1981) soundtrack and the Kristy and Jimmy McNichol album on RCA Records.- Writer
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Rosie O'Donnell was born into an Irish-American family in Commack, Long Island. She is the third of five children born to Roseann Teresa (Murtha) and Edward Joseph O'Donnell, an electrical engineer for the defense industry. Her mother died when she was 10. She said that she watched TV nearly 24 hours a day. When she was 18, she dropped out of college and went on to do shows like Gimme a Break! (1981), and she produced and hosted Stand-Up Spotlight (1988). She worked on her own down-to-earth syndicated daytime talk show: The Rosie O'Donnell Show (1996).- Actor
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Cheyenne David Jackson is an American actor and singer. His credits include leading roles in Broadway musicals and other stage roles, as well as film and television roles, concert singing, and music recordings.
After beginning his acting career in regional theatre in Seattle, Washington, Jackson moved to Manhattan and was an understudy in Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002) and Aida (2003). He next originated the role of Matthew in the workshop production of Altar Boyz (2004) for the New York Musical Theatre Festival, and was replaced by Scott Porter for the Off-Broadway run. Jackson's first leading role on Broadway was in All Shook Up (2005), which earned him a Theatre World Award for "Outstanding Broadway Debut". Since then, on the New York stage, he has starred in The Agony & the Agony (2006), Xanadu (2007; Drama League, Drama Desk nominations), Damn Yankees (2008), Finian's Rainbow (2010; Drama Desk nomination), 8 (2011), The Heart of the Matter (2012), and The Performers (2013).
He has also appeared in a number of films, including the 2006 Academy Award-nominated United 93, in which his portrayal of Mark Bingham earned him the Boston Society of Film Critics 2006 award for Best Ensemble Cast. He also had a leading role in the 2014 independent romantic comedy ensemble, Mutual Friends, and guest roles in television series such as NBC's 30 Rock and Fox's Glee. Beginning in 2015, Jackson starred in the FX horror anthology television series American Horror Story in its fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth seasons.
In concert, Jackson has sold out Carnegie Hall twice: The Power of Two in 2010 and Music of the Mad Men Era in 2011. He also performs in cabarets. In addition to his Broadway cast albums, he has released three albums of popular music, including a joint album called The Power of Two with Michael Feinstein in 2008. In 2012, Jackson released two singles, "Drive" and "Before You", from his 2013 album I'm Blue, Skies. In 2016, Jackson released his third studio album, Renaissance, an album adapted and expanded from his solo concert Music of the Mad Men Era.
He also stars as Hades in Disney Channel's Descendants 3, along with actors Booboo Stewart, Cameron Boyce, Dove Cameron, and Sofia Carson with director Kenny Ortega. In 2020, he reunited with Descendants alumni Ortega and Stewart in Netflix's Julie and the Phantoms.- Allison Case is known for The Young Pope (2016), Nurse Jackie (2009) and Life of an Actress: The Musical (2014).
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Gavin Creel was born on 18 April 1976 in Findlay, Ohio, USA. He is an actor and producer, known for Submissions Only (2010), The Ceiling Fan (2016) and She Loves Me (2016).- Actor
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Born in London, England, John Gielgud trained at Lady Benson's Acting School and RADA, London. Best known for his Shakespearean roles in the theater, he first played Hamlet at the age of 26. He worked under the tutelage of Lilian Bayliss with friend and fellow performer Laurence Olivier and other contemporaries of the National Theatre at the "Old Vic", London. He made his screen debut in 1924. Academy Award Best Supporting Actor, 1981, for Arthur (1981), Academy Award Nomination, 1964, for Becket (1964).- Actor
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Anthony Perkins was born April 4, 1932 in New York City, to Janet Esselstyn (Rane) and Osgood Perkins, an actor of both stage and film. His father died when he was five. Anthony's paternal great-grandfather was engraver Andrew Varick Stout Anthony. Perkins attended the Brooks School, the Browne & Nichols School, Columbia University and Rollins College. He made his screen debut in The Actress (1953), and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar Friendly Persuasion (1956). Four years later, he appeared in what would be his most noted role, Norman Bates in Psycho (1960), memorializing him into film history forever.- Actor
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Once told by an interviewer, "Everybody would like to be Cary Grant", Grant is said to have replied, "So would I."
Cary Grant was born Archibald Alec Leach on January 18, 1904 in Horfield, Bristol, England, to Elsie Maria (Kingdon) and Elias James Leach, who worked in a factory. His early years in Bristol would have been an ordinary lower-middle-class childhood, except for one extraordinary event. At age nine, he came home from school one day and was told his mother had gone off to a seaside resort. However, the real truth was that she had been placed in a mental institution, where she would remain for years, and he was never told about it (he would not see his mother again until he was in his late 20s).
He left school at age 14, lying about his age and forging his father's signature on a letter to join Bob Pender's troupe of knockabout comedians. He learned pantomime as well as acrobatics as he toured with the Pender troupe in the English provinces, picked up a Cockney accent in the music halls in London, and then in July 1920, was one of the eight Pender boys selected to go to the United States. Their show on Broadway, "Good Times", ran for 456 performances, giving Grant time to acclimatize. He would stay in America. Mae West wanted Grant for She Done Him Wrong (1933) because she saw his combination of virility, sexuality and the aura and bearing of a gentleman. Grant was young enough to begin the new career of fatherhood when he stopped making movies at age 62.
One biographer said Grant was alienated by the new realism in the film industry. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he had invented a man-of-the-world persona and a style - "high comedy with polished words". In To Catch a Thief (1955), he and Grace Kelly were allowed to improvise some of the dialogue. They knew what the director, Alfred Hitchcock, wanted to do with a scene, they rehearsed it, put in some clever double entendres that got past the censors, and then the scene was filmed. His biggest box-office success was another Hitchcock 1950s film, North by Northwest (1959) made with Eva Marie Saint since Kelly was by that time Princess of Monaco.
Although Grant retired from the screen, he remained active. He accepted a position on the board of directors at Faberge. By all accounts this position was not honorary, as some had assumed. Grant regularly attended meetings and traveled internationally to support them. The position also permitted use of a private plane, which Grant could use to fly to see his daughter wherever her mother Dyan Cannon, was working. He later joined the boards of Hollywood Park, the Academy of Magical Arts (The Magic Castle - Hollywood, California), Western Airlines (acquired by Delta Airlines in 1987) and MGM.
Grant expressed no interest in making a career comeback. He was in good health until almost the end of his life, when he suffered a mild stroke in October 1984. In his last years, he undertook tours of the United States in a one-man-show, "A Conversation with Cary Grant", in which he would show clips from his films and answer audience questions. On November 29, 1986, Cary Grant died at age 82 of a cerebral hemorrhage in Davenport, Iowa.
In 1999, the American Film Institute named Grant the second male star of Golden Age of Hollywood cinema (after Humphrey Bogart). Grant was known for comedic and dramatic roles; his best-known films include Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Notorious (1946), An Affair to Remember (1957), North by Northwest (1959) and Charade (1963).- Actor
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Laurence Olivier could speak William Shakespeare's lines as naturally as if he were "actually thinking them", said English playwright Charles Bennett, who met Olivier in 1927. Laurence Kerr Olivier was born in Dorking, Surrey, England, to Agnes Louise (Crookenden) and Gerard Kerr Olivier, a High Anglican priest. His surname came from a great-great-grandfather who was of French Huguenot origin.
One of Olivier's earliest successes as a Shakespearean actor on the London stage came in 1935 when he played "Romeo" and "Mercutio" in alternate performances of "Romeo and Juliet" with John Gielgud. A young Englishwoman just beginning her career on the stage fell in love with Olivier's Romeo. In 1937, she was "Ophelia" to his "Hamlet" in a special performance at Kronborg Castle, Elsinore (Helsingør), Denmark. In 1940, she became his second wife after both returned from making films in America that were major box office hits of 1939. His film was Wuthering Heights (1939), her film was Gone with the Wind (1939). Vivien Leigh and Olivier were screen lovers in Fire Over England (1937), 21 Days Together (1940) and That Hamilton Woman (1941).
There was almost a fourth film together in 1944 when Olivier and Leigh traveled to Scotland with Charles C. Bennett to research the real-life story of a Scottish girl accused of murdering her French lover. Bennett recalled that Olivier researched the story "with all the thoroughness of Sherlock Holmes" and "we unearthed evidence, never known or produced at the trial, that would most certainly have sent the young lady to the gallows". The film project was then abandoned. During their two-decade marriage, Olivier and Leigh appeared on the stage in England and America and made films whenever they really needed to make some money.
In 1951, Olivier was working on a screen adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's novel "Sister Carrie" (Carrie (1952)) while Leigh was completing work on the film version of the Tennessee Williams' play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). She won her second Oscar for bringing "Blanche DuBois" to the screen. Carrie (1952) was a film that Olivier never talked about. George Hurstwood, a middle-aged married man from Chicago who tricked a young woman into leaving a younger man about to marry her, became a New York street person in the novel. Olivier played him as a somewhat nicer person who didn't fall quite as low. A PBS documentary on Olivier's career broadcast in 1987 covered his first sojourn in Hollywood in the early 1930s with his first wife, Jill Esmond, and noted that her star was higher than his at that time. On film, he was upstaged by his second wife, too, even though the list of films he made is four times as long as hers.
More than half of his film credits come after The Entertainer (1960), which started out as a play in London in 1957. When the play moved across the Atlantic to Broadway in 1958, the role of "Archie Rice"'s daughter was taken over by Joan Plowright, who was also in the film. They married soon after the release of The Entertainer (1960).- Actor
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Marlon Brando is widely considered the greatest movie actor of all time, rivaled only by the more theatrically oriented Laurence Olivier in terms of esteem. Unlike Olivier, who preferred the stage to the screen, Brando concentrated his talents on movies after bidding the Broadway stage adieu in 1949, a decision for which he was severely criticized when his star began to dim in the 1960s and he was excoriated for squandering his talents. No actor ever exerted such a profound influence on succeeding generations of actors as did Brando. More than 50 years after he first scorched the screen as Stanley Kowalski in the movie version of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and a quarter-century after his last great performance as Col. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), all American actors are still being measured by the yardstick that was Brando. It was if the shadow of John Barrymore, the great American actor closest to Brando in terms of talent and stardom, dominated the acting field up until the 1970s. He did not, nor did any other actor so dominate the public's consciousness of what WAS an actor before or since Brando's 1951 on-screen portrayal of Stanley made him a cultural icon. Brando eclipsed the reputation of other great actors circa 1950, such as Paul Muni and Fredric March. Only the luster of Spencer Tracy's reputation hasn't dimmed when seen in the starlight thrown off by Brando. However, neither Tracy nor Olivier created an entire school of acting just by the force of his personality. Brando did.
Marlon Brando, Jr. was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Marlon Brando, Sr., a calcium carbonate salesman, and his artistically inclined wife, the former Dorothy Julia Pennebaker. "Bud" Brando was one of three children. His ancestry included English, Irish, German, Dutch, French Huguenot, Welsh, and Scottish; his surname originated with a distant German immigrant ancestor named "Brandau." His oldest sister Jocelyn Brando was also an actress, taking after their mother, who engaged in amateur theatricals and mentored a then-unknown Henry Fonda, another Nebraska native, in her role as director of the Omaha Community Playhouse. Frannie, Brando's other sibling, was a visual artist. Both Brando sisters contrived to leave the Midwest for New York City, Jocelyn to study acting and Frannie to study art. Marlon managed to escape the vocational doldrums forecast for him by his cold, distant father and his disapproving schoolteachers by striking out for The Big Apple in 1943, following Jocelyn into the acting profession. Acting was the only thing he was good at, for which he received praise, so he was determined to make it his career - a high-school dropout, he had nothing else to fall back on, having been rejected by the military due to a knee injury he incurred playing football at Shattuck Military Academy, Brando Sr.'s alma mater. The school booted Marlon out as incorrigible before graduation.
Acting was a skill he honed as a child, the lonely son of alcoholic parents. With his father away on the road, and his mother frequently intoxicated to the point of stupefaction, the young Bud would play-act for her to draw her out of her stupor and to attract her attention and love. His mother was exceedingly neglectful, but he loved her, particularly for instilling in him a love of nature, a feeling which informed his character Paul in Last Tango in Paris (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris") when he is recalling his childhood for his young lover Jeanne. "I don't have many good memories," Paul confesses, and neither did Brando of his childhood. Sometimes he had to go down to the town jail to pick up his mother after she had spent the night in the drunk tank and bring her home, events that traumatized the young boy but may have been the grain that irritated the oyster of his talent, producing the pearls of his performances. Anthony Quinn, his Oscar-winning co-star in Viva Zapata! (1952) told Brando's first wife Anna Kashfi, "I admire Marlon's talent, but I don't envy the pain that created it."
Brando enrolled in Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at New York's New School, and was mentored by Stella Adler, a member of a famous Yiddish Theatre acting family. Adler helped introduce to the New York stage the "emotional memory" technique of Russian theatrical actor, director and impresario Konstantin Stanislavski, whose motto was "Think of your own experiences and use them truthfully." The results of this meeting between an actor and the teacher preparing him for a life in the theater would mark a watershed in American acting and culture.
Brando made his debut on the boards of Broadway on October 19, 1944, in "I Remember Mama," a great success. As a young Broadway actor, Brando was invited by talent scouts from several different studios to screen-test for them, but he turned them down because he would not let himself be bound by the then-standard seven-year contract. Brando would make his film debut quite some time later in Fred Zinnemann's The Men (1950) for producer Stanley Kramer. Playing a paraplegic soldier, Brando brought new levels of realism to the screen, expanding on the verisimilitude brought to movies by Group Theatre alumni John Garfield, the predecessor closest to him in the raw power he projected on-screen. Ironically, it was Garfield whom producer Irene Mayer Selznick had chosen to play the lead in a new Tennessee Williams play she was about to produce, but negotiations broke down when Garfield demanded an ownership stake in "A Streetcar Named Desire." Burt Lancaster was next approached, but couldn't get out of a prior film commitment. Then director Elia Kazan suggested Brando, whom he had directed to great effect in Maxwell Anderson's play "Truckline Café," in which Brando co-starred with Karl Malden, who was to remain a close friend for the next 60 years.
During the production of "Truckline Café," Kazan had found that Brando's presence was so magnetic, he had to re-block the play to keep Marlon near other major characters' stage business, as the audience could not take its eyes off of him. For the scene where Brando's character re-enters the stage after killing his wife, Kazan placed him upstage-center, partially obscured by scenery, but where the audience could still see him as Karl Malden and others played out their scene within the café set. When he eventually entered the scene, crying, the effect was electric. A young Pauline Kael, arriving late to the play, had to avert her eyes when Brando made this entrance as she believed the young actor on stage was having a real-life conniption. She did not look back until her escort commented that the young man was a great actor.
The problem with casting Brando as Stanley was that he was much younger than the character as written by Williams. However, after a meeting between Brando and Williams, the playwright eagerly agreed that Brando would make an ideal Stanley. Williams believed that by casting a younger actor, the Neanderthalish Kowalski would evolve from being a vicious older man to someone whose unintentional cruelty can be attributed to his youthful ignorance. Brando ultimately was dissatisfied with his performance, though, saying he never was able to bring out the humor of the character, which was ironic as his characterization often drew laughs from the audience at the expense of Jessica Tandy's Blanche Dubois. During the out-of-town tryouts, Kazan realized that Brando's magnetism was attracting attention and audience sympathy away from Blanche to Stanley, which was not what the playwright intended. The audience's sympathy should be solely with Blanche, but many spectators were identifying with Stanley. Kazan queried Williams on the matter, broaching the idea of a slight rewrite to tip the scales back to more of a balance between Stanley and Blanche, but Williams demurred, smitten as he was by Brando, just like the preview audiences.
For his part, Brando believed that the audience sided with his Stanley because Jessica Tandy was too shrill. He thought Vivien Leigh, who played the part in the movie, was ideal, as she was not only a great beauty but she WAS Blanche Dubois, troubled as she was in her real life by mental illness and nymphomania. Brando's appearance as Stanley on stage and on screen revolutionized American acting by introducing "The Method" into American consciousness and culture. Method acting, rooted in Adler's study at the Moscow Art Theatre of Stanislavsky's theories that she subsequently introduced to the Group Theatre, was a more naturalistic style of performing, as it engendered a close identification of the actor with the character's emotions. Adler took first place among Brando's acting teachers, and socially she helped turn him from an unsophisticated Midwestern farm boy into a knowledgeable and cosmopolitan artist who one day would socialize with presidents.
Brando didn't like the term "The Method," which quickly became the prominent paradigm taught by such acting gurus as Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Brando denounced Strasberg in his autobiography "Songs My Mother Taught Me" (1994), saying that he was a talentless exploiter who claimed he had been Brando's mentor. The Actors Studio had been founded by Strasberg along with Kazan and Stella Adler's husband, Harold Clurman, all Group Theatre alumni, all political progressives deeply committed to the didactic function of the stage. Brando credits his knowledge of the craft to Adler and Kazan, while Kazan in his autobiography "A Life" claimed that Brando's genius thrived due to the thorough training Adler had given him. Adler's method emphasized that authenticity in acting is achieved by drawing on inner reality to expose deep emotional experience
Interestingly, Elia Kazan believed that Brando had ruined two generations of actors, his contemporaries and those who came after him, all wanting to emulate the great Brando by employing The Method. Kazan felt that Brando was never a Method actor, that he had been highly trained by Adler and did not rely on gut instincts for his performances, as was commonly believed. Many a young actor, mistaken about the true roots of Brando's genius, thought that all it took was to find a character's motivation, empathize with the character through sense and memory association, and regurgitate it all on stage to become the character. That's not how the superbly trained Brando did it; he could, for example, play accents, whereas your average American Method actor could not. There was a method to Brando's art, Kazan felt, but it was not The Method.
After A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which he received the first of his eight Academy Award nominations, Brando appeared in a string of Academy Award-nominated performances - in Viva Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953) and the summit of his early career, Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). For his "Waterfront" portrayal of meat-headed longshoreman Terry Malloy, the washed-up pug who "coulda been a contender," Brando won his first Oscar. Along with his iconic performance as the rebel-without-a-cause Johnny in The Wild One (1953) ("What are you rebelling against?" Johnny is asked. "What have ya got?" is his reply), the first wave of his career was, according to Jon Voight, unprecedented in its audacious presentation of such a wide range of great acting. Director John Huston said his performance of Marc Antony was like seeing the door of a furnace opened in a dark room, and co-star John Gielgud, the premier Shakespearean actor of the 20th century, invited Brando to join his repertory company.
It was this period of 1951-54 that revolutionized American acting, spawning such imitators as James Dean - who modeled his acting and even his lifestyle on his hero Brando - the young Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. After Brando, every up-and-coming star with true acting talent and a brooding, alienated quality would be hailed as the "New Brando," such as Warren Beatty in Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961). "We are all Brando's children," Jack Nicholson pointed out in 1972. "He gave us our freedom." He was truly "The Godfather" of American acting - and he was just 30 years old. Though he had a couple of failures, like Désirée (1954) and The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), he was clearly miscast in them and hadn't sought out the parts so largely escaped blame.
In the second period of his career, 1955-62, Brando managed to uniquely establish himself as a great actor who also was a Top 10 movie star, although that star began to dim after the box-office high point of his early career, Sayonara (1957) (for which he received his fifth Best Actor Oscar nomination). Brando tried his hand at directing a film, the well-reviewed One-Eyed Jacks (1961) that he made for his own production company, Pennebaker Productions (after his mother's maiden name). Stanley Kubrick had been hired to direct the film, but after months of script rewrites in which Brando participated, Kubrick and Brando had a falling out and Kubrick was sacked. According to his widow Christiane Kubrick, Stanley believed that Brando had wanted to direct the film himself all along.
Tales proliferated about the profligacy of Brando the director, burning up a million and a half feet of expensive VistaVision film at 50 cents a foot, fully ten times the normal amount of raw stock expended during production of an equivalent motion picture. Brando took so long editing the film that he was never able to present the studio with a cut. Paramount took it away from him and tacked on a re-shot ending that Brando was dissatisfied with, as it made the Oedipal figure of Dad Longworth into a villain. In any normal film Dad would have been the heavy, but Brando believed that no one was innately evil, that it was a matter of an individual responding to, and being molded by, one's environment. It was not a black-and-white world, Brando felt, but a gray world in which once-decent people could do horrible things. This attitude explains his sympathetic portrayal of Nazi officer Christian Diestl in the film he made before shooting One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Edward Dmytryk's filming of Irwin Shaw's novel The Young Lions (1958). Shaw denounced Brando's performance, but audiences obviously disagreed, as the film was a major hit. It would be the last hit movie Brando would have for more than a decade.
One-Eyed Jacks (1961) generated respectable numbers at the box office, but the production costs were exorbitant - a then-staggering $6 million - which made it run a deficit. A film essentially is "made" in the editing room, and Brando found cutting to be a terribly boring process, which was why the studio eventually took the film away from him. Despite his proved talent in handling actors and a large production, Brando never again directed another film, though he would claim that all actors essentially direct themselves during the shooting of a picture.
Between the production and release of One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Brando appeared in Sidney Lumet's film version of Tennessee Williams' play "Orpheus Descending," The Fugitive Kind (1960) which teamed him with fellow Oscar winners Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward. Following in Elizabeth Taylor's trailblazing footsteps, Brando became the second performer to receive a $1-million salary for a motion picture, so high were the expectations for this re-teaming of Kowalski and his creator (in 1961 critic Hollis Alpert had published a book "Brando and the Shadow of Stanley Kowalski"). Critics and audiences waiting for another incendiary display from Brando in a Williams work were disappointed when the renamed The Fugitive Kind (1960) finally released. Though Tennessee was hot, with movie versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) burning up the box office and receiving kudos from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, The Fugitive Kind (1960) was a failure. This was followed by the so-so box-office reception of One-Eyed Jacks (1961) in 1961 and then by a failure of a more monumental kind: Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), a remake of the famed 1935 film.
Brando signed on to Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) after turning down the lead in the David Lean classic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) because he didn't want to spend a year in the desert riding around on a camel. He received another $1-million salary, plus $200,000 in overages as the shoot went overtime and over budget. During principal photography, highly respected director Carol Reed (an eventual Academy Award winner) was fired, and his replacement, two-time Oscar winner Lewis Milestone, was shunted aside by Brando as Marlon basically took over the direction of the film himself. The long shoot became so notorious that President John F. Kennedy asked director Billy Wilder at a cocktail party not "when" but "if" the "Bounty" shoot would ever be over. The MGM remake of one of its classic Golden Age films garnered a Best Picture Oscar nomination and was one of the top grossing films of 1962, yet failed to go into the black due to its Brobdingnagian budget estimated at $20 million, which is equivalent to $120 million when adjusted for inflation.
Brando and Taylor, whose Cleopatra (1963) nearly bankrupted 20th Century-Fox due to its huge cost overruns (its final budget was more than twice that of Brando's Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)), were pilloried by the show business press for being the epitome of the pampered, self-indulgent stars who were ruining the industry. Seeking scapegoats, the Hollywood press conveniently ignored the financial pressures on the studios. The studios had been hurt by television and by the antitrust-mandated divestiture of their movie theater chains, causing a large outflow of production to Italy and other countries in the 1950s and 1960s in order to lower costs. The studio bosses, seeking to replicate such blockbuster hits as the remakes of The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959), were the real culprits behind the losses generated by large-budgeted films that found it impossible to recoup their costs despite long lines at the box office.
While Elizabeth Taylor, receiving the unwanted gift of reams of publicity from her adulterous romance with Cleopatra (1963) co-star Richard Burton, remained hot until the tanking of her own Tennessee Williams-renamed debacle Boom! (1968), Brando from 1963 until the end of the decade appeared in one box-office failure after another as he worked out a contract he had signed with Universal Pictures. The industry had grown tired of Brando and his idiosyncrasies, though he continued to be offered prestige projects up through 1968.
Some of the films Brando made in the 1960s were noble failures, such as The Ugly American (1963), The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). For every "Reflections," though, there seemed to be two or three outright debacles, such as Bedtime Story (1964), Morituri (1965), The Chase (1966), A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), Candy (1968), The Night of the Following Day (1969). By the time Brando began making the anti-colonialist picture Burn! (1969) in Colombia with Gillo Pontecorvo in the director's chair, he was box-office poison, despite having worked in the previous five years with such top directors as Arthur Penn, John Huston and the legendary Charles Chaplin, and with such top-drawer co-stars as David Niven, Yul Brynner, Sophia Loren and Taylor.
The rap on Brando in the 1960s was that a great talent had ruined his potential to be America's answer to Laurence Olivier, as his friend William Redfield limned the dilemma in his book "Letters from an Actor" (1967), a memoir about Redfield's appearance in Burton's 1964 theatrical production of "Hamlet." By failing to go back on stage and recharge his artistic batteries, something British actors such as Burton were not afraid to do, Brando had stifled his great talent, by refusing to tackle the classical repertoire and contemporary drama. Actors and critics had yearned for an American response to the high-acting style of the Brits, and while Method actors such as Rod Steiger tried to create an American style, they were hampered in their quest, as their king was lost in a wasteland of Hollywood movies that were beneath his talent. Many of his early supporters now turned on him, claiming he was a crass sellout.
Despite evidence in such films as The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) that Brando was in fact doing some of the best acting of his life, critics, perhaps with an eye on the box office, slammed him for failing to live up to, and nurture, his great gift. Brando's political activism, starting in the early 1960s with his championing of Native Americans' rights, followed by his participation in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's March on Washington in 1963, and followed by his appearance at a Black Panther rally in 1968, did not win him many admirers in the establishment. In fact, there was a de facto embargo on Brando films in the recently segregated (officially, at least) southeastern US in the 1960s. Southern exhibitors simply would not book his films, and producers took notice. After 1968, Brando would not work for three years.
Pauline Kael wrote of Brando that he was Fortune's fool. She drew a parallel with the latter career of John Barrymore, a similarly gifted thespian with talents as prodigious, who seemingly threw them away. Brando, like the late-career Barrymore, had become a great ham, evidenced by his turn as the faux Indian guru in the egregious Candy (1968), seemingly because the material was so beneath his talent. Most observers of Brando in the 1960s believed that he needed to be reunited with his old mentor Elia Kazan, a relationship that had soured due to Kazan's friendly testimony naming names before the notorious House un-American Activities Committee. Perhaps Brando believed this, too, as he originally accepted an offer to appear as the star of Kazan's film adaptation of his own novel, The Arrangement (1969). However, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Brando backed out of the film, telling Kazan that he could not appear in a Hollywood film after this tragedy. Also reportedly turning down a role opposite box-office king Paul Newman in a surefire script, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Brando decided to make Burn! (1969) with Pontecorvo. The film, a searing indictment of racism and colonialism, flopped at the box office but won the esteem of progressive critics and cultural arbiters such as Howard Zinn. He subsequently appeared in the British film The Nightcomers (1971), a prequel to "Turn of the Screw" and another critical and box office failure.
Kazan, after a life in film and the theater, said that, aside from Orson Welles, whose greatness lay in film making, he only met one actor who was a genius: Brando. Richard Burton, an intellectual with a keen eye for observation if not for his own film projects, said that he found Brando to be very bright, unlike the public perception of him as a Terry Malloy-type character that he himself inadvertently promoted through his boorish behavior. Brando's problem, Burton felt, was that he was unique, and that he had gotten too much fame too soon at too early an age. Cut off from being nurtured by normal contact with society, fame had distorted Brando's personality and his ability to cope with the world, as he had not had time to grow up outside the limelight.
Truman Capote, who eviscerated Brando in print in the mid-'50s and had as much to do with the public perception of the dyslexic Brando as a dumbbell, always said that the best actors were ignorant, and that an intelligent person could not be a good actor. However, Brando was highly intelligent, and possessed of a rare genius in a then-deprecated art, acting. The problem that an intelligent performer has in movies is that it is the director, and not the actor, who has the power in his chosen field. Greatness in the other arts is defined by how much control the artist is able to exert over his chosen medium, but in movie acting, the medium is controlled by a person outside the individual artist. It is an axiom of the cinema that a performance, as is a film, is "created" in the cutting room, thus further removing the actor from control over his art. Brando had tried his hand at directing, in controlling the whole artistic enterprise, but he could not abide the cutting room, where a film and the film's performances are made. This lack of control over his art was the root of Brando's discontent with acting, with movies, and, eventually, with the whole wide world that invested so much cachet in movie actors, as long as "they" were at the top of the box-office charts. Hollywood was a matter of "they" and not the work, and Brando became disgusted.
Charlton Heston, who participated in Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington with Brando, believes that Marlon was the great actor of his generation. However, noting a story that Brando had once refused a role in the early 1960s with the excuse "How can I act when people are starving in India?," Heston believes that it was this attitude, the inability to separate one's idealism from one's work, that prevented Brando from reaching his potential. As Rod Steiger once said, Brando had it all, great stardom and a great talent. He could have taken his audience on a trip to the stars, but he simply would not. Steiger, one of Brando's children even though a contemporary, could not understand it. When James Mason' was asked in 1971 who was the best American actor, he had replied that since Brando had let his career go belly-up, it had to be George C. Scott, by default.
Paramount thought that only Laurence Olivier would suffice, but Lord Olivier was ill. The young director believed there was only one actor who could play godfather to the group of Young Turk actors he had assembled for his film, The Godfather of method acting himself - Marlon Brando. Francis Ford Coppola won the fight for Brando, Brando won - and refused - his second Oscar, and Paramount won a pot of gold by producing the then top-grossing film of all-time, The Godfather (1972), a gangster movie most critics now judge one of the greatest American films of all time. Brando followed his iconic portrayal of Don Corleone with his Oscar-nominated turn in the high-grossing and highly scandalous Last Tango in Paris (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris"), the first film dealing explicitly with sexuality in which an actor of Brando's stature had participated. He was now again a top ten box office star and once again heralded as the greatest actor of his generation, an unprecedented comeback that put him on the cover of "Time" magazine and would make him the highest-paid actor in the history of motion pictures by the end of the decade. Little did the world know that Brando, who had struggled through many projects in good faith during the 1960s, delivering some of his best acting, only to be excoriated and ignored as the films did not do well at the box office, essentially was through with the movies.
After reaching the summit of his career, a rarefied atmosphere never reached before or since by any actor, Brando essentially walked away. He would give no more of himself after giving everything as he had done in Last Tango in Paris (1972)," a performance that embarrassed him, according to his autobiography. Brando had come as close to any actor to being the "auteur," or author, of a film, as the English-language scenes of "Tango" were created by encouraging Brando to improvise. The improvisations were written down and turned into a shooting script, and the scripted improvisations were shot the next day. Pauline Kael, the Brando of movie critics in that she was the most influential arbiter of cinematic quality of her generation and spawned a whole legion of Kael wannabes, said Brando's performance in Last Tango in Paris (1972) had revolutionized the art of film. Brando, who had to act to gain his mother's attention; Brando, who believed acting at best was nothing special as everyone in the world engaged in it every day of their lives to get what they wanted from other people; Brando, who believed acting at its worst was a childish charade and that movie stardom was a whorish fraud, would have agreed with Sam Peckinpah's summation of Pauline Kael: "Pauline's a brilliant critic but sometimes she's just cracking walnuts with her ass." He probably would have done so in a simulacrum of those words, too.
After another three-year hiatus, Brando took on just one more major role for the next 20 years, as the bounty hunter after Jack Nicholson in Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks (1976), a western that succeeded neither with the critics or at the box office. Following The Godfather and Tango, Brando's performance was disappointing for some reviewers, who accused him of giving an erratic and inconsistent performance. In 1977, Brando made a rare appearance on television in the miniseries Roots: The Next Generations (1979), portraying George Lincoln Rockwell; he won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for his performance. In 1978, he narrated the English version of Raoni (1978), a French-Belgian documentary film directed by Jean-Pierre Dutilleux and Luiz Carlos Saldanha that focused on the life of Raoni Metuktire and issues surrounding the survival of the indigenous Indian tribes of north central Brazil.
Later in his career, Brando concentrated on extracting the maximum amount of capital for the least amount of work from producers, as when he got the Salkind brothers to pony up a then-record $3.7 million against 10% of the gross for 13 days work on Superman (1978). Factoring in inflation, the straight salary for "Superman" equals or exceeds the new record of $1 million a day Harrison Ford set with K-19: The Widowmaker (2002). He agreed to the role only on assurance that he would be paid a large sum for what amounted to a small part, that he would not have to read the script beforehand, and his lines would be displayed somewhere off-camera. Brando also filmed scenes for the movie's sequel, Superman II, but after producers refused to pay him the same percentage he received for the first movie, he denied them permission to use the footage.
Before cashing his first paycheck for Superman (1978), Brando had picked up $2 million for his extended cameo in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) in a role, that of Col. Kurtz, that he authored on-camera through improvisation while Coppola shot take after take. It was Brando's last bravura star performance. He co-starred with George C. Scott and John Gielgud in The Formula (1980), but the film was another critical and financial failure. Years later though, he did receive an eighth and final Oscar nomination for his supporting role in A Dry White Season (1989) after coming out of a near-decade-long retirement. Contrary to those who claimed he now only was in it for the money, Brando donated his entire seven-figure salary to an anti-apartheid charity. He then did an amusing performance in the comedy The Freshman (1990), winning rave reviews. He portrayed Tomas de Torquemada in the historical drama 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), but his performance was denounced and the film was another box office failure. He made another comeback in the Johnny Depp romantic drama Don Juan DeMarco (1994), which co-starred Faye Dunaway as his wife. He then appeared in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), co-starring Val Kilmer, who he didn't get along with. The filming was an unpleasant experience for Brando, as well as another critical and box office failure.
Brando had first attracted media attention at the age of 24, when "Life" magazine ran a photo of himself and his sister Jocelyn, who were both then appearing on Broadway. The curiosity continued, and snowballed. Playing the paraplegic soldier of The Men (1950), Brando had gone to live at a Veterans Administration hospital with actual disabled veterans, and confined himself to a wheelchair for weeks. It was an acting method, research, that no one in Hollywood had ever heard of before, and that willingness to experience life.- Director
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Jamie Babbit was born on 16 November 1970 in Shaker Heights, Ohio, USA. She is a director and producer, known for But I'm a Cheerleader (1999), Only Murders in the Building (2021) and My Lady Jane (2024). She was previously married to Karey Dornetto.- Actor
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Growing up in Baltimore in the 1950s, John Waters was not like other children; he was obsessed by violence and gore, both real and on the screen. With his weird counter-culture friends as his cast, he began making silent 8mm and 16mm films in the mid-'60s; he screened these in rented Baltimore church halls to underground audiences drawn by word of mouth and street leafleting campaigns. As his filmmaking grew more polished and his subject matter more shocking, his audiences grew bigger, and his write-ups in the Baltimore papers more outraged. By the early 1970s he was making features, which he managed to get shown in midnight screenings in art cinemas by sheer perseverance. Success came when Pink Flamingos (1972) - a deliberate exercise in ultra-bad taste - took off in 1973, helped no doubt by lead actor Divine's infamous dog-crap eating scene.
Waters continued to make low-budget shocking movies with his Dreamland repertory company until Hollywood crossover success came with Hairspray (1988), and although his movies nowadays might now appear cleaned up and professional, they retain Waters' playfulness, and reflect his lifelong obsessions.- Actor
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Originally born Harris Glen Milstead just after the end of WWII, Baltimore's most outrageous resident eventually became the international icon of bad taste cinema, as the always shocking and highly entertaining transvestite performer, Divine.
Milstead met maverick film director & good friend, John Waters, at high school in Baltimore, and the two combined to star in and direct several ultra low budget, taboo breaking cult films of the early 1970s. Their first efforts included Roman Candles (1967), Eat Your Makeup (1968) and Mondo Trasho (1969)....however, their most infamous work together was the amazing Pink Flamingos (1972), in which Divine starred as "Babs Johnson", the "filthiest person alive" living in a pink trailer with her egg-eating grandmother, chicken-loving son and voyeuristic daughter.
Divine also starred as career criminal Dawn Davenport in Female Trouble (1974), as bored housewife Francine Fishpaw in Polyester (1981), as outlaw gal Rosie Velez in Lust in the Dust (1984) and in Waters' loving (but still slightly bizarre) salute to teen dance TV shows as Ricki Lake's mother in the superb Hairspray (1988).
Milstead's health deteriorated due to to his obese frame, and he passed away in his sleep from a combination of heart attack and apnea in 1988.- Actress
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Anna Paquin is the first millennial to have received an Academy Award nomination for acting, and the first to win.
She was born on July 24, 1982 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, to Mary (Brophy), an English teacher from Wellington, New Zealand, and Brian Paquin, a Canadian phys-ed teacher. Anna moved to her mother's native country when she was four years old. Her first acting job ever was at age nine in the movie The Piano (1993), which was shot in New Zealand. At age 16, she relocated to Los Angeles where she completed her last two years of high school (graduating in 2000). She then moved to New York where she attended Columbia University for one year. Between 2001 and 2004, she worked almost exclusively on stage in both New York and London. In 2007, Anna was cast in HBO's True Blood (2008), which concluded shooting its seventh and final season in 2014.- Actress
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Evan Rachel Wood was born September 7, 1987, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her father, Ira David Wood III, is a theatre actor, writer and director, and her mother, Sara Wood, is an actress and acting coach. She has two older brothers--Dana Wood, a musician, and Ira David Wood IV, who has also acted. Evan and her brothers sometimes performed at Theatre In The Park in Raleigh, which her father founded and where he serves as executive director.
At the age of five she screen-tested against Kirsten Dunst for the lead role in Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994) after a long auditioning process. She moved to Los Angeles with her mom and brother Ira in 1996 and has had success ever since, appearing in a TV series, TV movies and feature films. She has appeared in Practical Magic (1998), starred in the comedy S1m0ne (2002) as Al Pacino's daughter, and followed that with Thirteen (2003), with Holly Hunter. Her breakout role as Tracy in "Thirteen" garnered her a Golden Globes nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture: Drama and for a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role. At the time of this SAG nomination, she was the youngest actress to be nominated in the Leading Role category. She received a Golden Globe and Emmy nomination for "Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie" for her portrayal of Veda Pierce in the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011).
She also earned acclaim for her powerful performance as Stephanie, Mickey Rourke's estranged daughter, in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008).- Actress
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Amanda Bearse was born on 9 August 1958 in Winter Park, Florida, USA. She is an actress and director, known for Fright Night (1985), Married... with Children (1987) and Bros (2022). She has been married to Carrie Schenken since 2010. They have two children.- Actress
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Lily Tomlin was born September 1, 1939 in Detroit, Michigan, to Lillie Mae (Ford) and Guy Tomlin, who moved to Michigan from Paducah, Kentucky, during the Great Depression. Her mother was a nurse's aide and her father was a factory worker. She graduated from Cass Technical High School in 1957, and later enrolled at Wayne State University. She began career by doing stand-up comedy in nightclubs in Detroit and New York City. Her first television appearance was on "The Merv Griffin Show". She went on to have astronomical success with several characters, notably Ernestine, a nosy, condescending telephone operator who generally treated customers with little sympathy and regard, on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1967). Other notable characters are in film include Linnea Reese, a gospel-singing mother of two deaf children who has an affair with a womanizing country singer (played by (Keith Carradine) in Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), a performance for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. Violet Newstead who joins her on-screen coworkers (played by Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton) in seeking revenge on their monstrous and sexist boss, Franklin M. Hart Jr., (played by Dabney Coleman) in the comedy 9 to 5 (1980), The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), Doreen Piggot in Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), Cher's best-friend and American compatriot Georgie Rockwell in Tea with Mussolini (1999), deadpan private investigator, and existentialist Vivian Jaffe in I Heart Huckabees (2004), and Country-Western singer Rhonda Johnson in Robert Altman's final film A Prairie Home Companion (2006).- Music Artist
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The beat goes on ... and on ... and as strong as ever for this superstar entertainer who has well surpassed the half-century mark while improbably transforming herself from an artificial, glossy "flashionplate" singer into a serious, Oscar-worthy, dramatic actress ... and back again! With more ups and downs than the 2008 Dow Jones Industrial Average, Cher managed to rise like a phoenix from the ashes each time she was down, somehow re-inventing herself with every decade and finding herself on top all over again. As a singer Cher is the only performer to have earned "top 10" hit singles in four consecutive decades; as an actress, she and Barbra Streisand are the only two Best Actress Oscar winners to have a #1 hit song on the Billboard charts. At age 77, Cher has yet to decide to get completely off her fabulous roller coaster ride, although she has threatened to on occasion.
The daughter of Arkansas-born Georgia Holt (the former Jackie Jean Crouch) and truck driver John Sarkisian, Cher was born in El Centro, California, on May 20, 1946. She has a half-sister, Georganne LaPiere. Cher is of Armenian heritage on her father's side, and of English and German, with more distant Irish, Dutch, and French, heritage on her mother's side. Cher's parents divorced when she was an infant and her mother went on to marry six more times. Her mother, who aspired to be an actress and model, paid for Cher's acting classes. Cher had undiagnosed dyslexia, which acutely affected her studies; frustrated, she quit high school at 16 to pursue her dream. At that time, she had a brief relationship with actor Warren Beatty.
Meeting the quite older (by 11 years) Sonny Bono in November 1962 changed the 16-year-old's life forever. Bono was working for record producer Phil Spectorat Gold Star Studios in Hollywood at the time and managed to persuade Spector to hire Cher as a session singer. As such, she went on to record backup on such Spector classics as "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" and "Be My Baby". The couple's relationship eventually shifted from soulmates to lovers and she and Sonny married on October 27, 1964.
At first Cher sang solo with Sonny behind the scenes writing, arranging and producing her songs. When the records went nowhere, Sonny decided they needed to perform as a team so they put out two songs in 1964 under the recording names of Caesar and Cleo ("The Letter" and "Baby Don't Go"). Again, no success. The changing of their names, however, made a difference and in 1965, they officially took on the music world as Sonny & Cher and earned instant rewards.
The now 19-year-old Cher and 30-year-old Sonny became huge hits following the release of their first album, "Look at Us" (summer, 1965), which contained the hit single "I Got You Babe". With the song catapulting to #1, they decided to re-release their earlier single "Baby Don't Go", and it also raced up the charts to #8. An assembly line of mild hits dotted the airwaves over the next year or two, culminating in the huge smash hit "The Beat Goes On" (#6, 1967). Between 1965 and 1972 Sonny & Cher charted a total of six "Top 10" hits.
The kooky couple became icons of the mid-'60s "flower power" scene, wearing garish garb and outlandish hairdos and makeup. However, they found a way to make it trendy and were embraced around the world. TV musical variety and teen pop showcases relished their contrasting styles -- the short, excitable, mustachioed, nasal-toned simpleton and the taller, exotic, unflappable fashion maven. They found a successful formula with their repartee, which became a central factor in their live concert shows, even more than their singing. With all this going on, Sonny still endeavored to promote Cher as a solo success. Other than such hits with "All I Really Want to Do" (#16) and "Bang, Bang" (#2), she struggled to find a separate identity. Sonny even arranged film projects for her but Good Times (1967), an offbeat fantasy starring the couple and directed by future powerhouse William Friedkin, and Cher's serious solo effort Chastity (1969) both flickered out and died a quick death.
By the end of the 1960s, Sonny & Cher's career had stumbled as they witnessed the American pop culture experience a drastic evolutionary change. The couple maintained their stage act and all the while Sonny continued to polish it up in a shrewd gamble for TV acceptance. While Sonny on stage played the ineffectual object of Cher's stinging barbs on stage, he was actually the highly motivated mastermind off stage and, amazingly enough, his foresight and chutzpah really paid off. Although the couple had lost favor with the new 70s generation, Sonny encouraged TV talent scouts to catch their live act.
The network powers-that-be saw potential in the duo as they made a number of guest TV appearances in specials and on variety and talk shows and in what was essentially "auditioning" for their own TV vehicle. The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour (1971) was given the green light as a summer replacement series and was an instant sensation when it earned its own time spot that fall season. The show received numerous Emmy Award nominations during its run and the couple became stars all over again. Their lively, off-the-wall comedy sketch routines, her outré Bob Mackie fashions and their harmless, edgy banter were the highlights of the hour-long program. Audiences took strongly to the couple who appeared to have a deep-down sturdy relationship. Their daughter Chaz Bono occasionally added to the couple's loving glow on the show. Cher's TV success also generated renewed interest in her as a solo recording artist and she came up with three #1 hits during this time ("Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves," "Half-Breed" and "Dark Lady").
Behind the scenes, though, it was a different story. A now-confident Cher yearned to be free of husband Sonny's Svengali-like control over her life and career. The marriage split at the seams in 1974 and they publicly announced their separation. The show, which had earned Cher a Golden Globe Award, took a fast tumble as the separation and divorce grew more acrimonious. Eventually they both tried to launch their own solo variety shows, but both failed to even come close to their success as a duo. Audiences weren't interested in Cher without Sonny, and vice versa.
In late June of 1975, only four days after the couple's divorce, Cher married rock musician Gregg Allman of The Allman Brothers Band. That marriage imploded rather quickly amid reports of out-of-control drug use on his part. They were divorced by 1979 with only one bright outcome -- son Elijah Allman.
In 1976 Sonny and Cher attempted to "make up" again, this time to the tune of a second The Sonny and Cher Show (1976). Audiences, however, did not accept the "friendly" divorced couple after so much tabloid nastiness. After the initial curiosity factor wore off, the show was canceled amid poor ratings. Moreover, the musical variety show format was on its way out as well. Once again, another decade was looking to end badly for Cher.
Cher found a mild success with the "top 10" disco hit "Take Me Home" in 1979, but not much else. Not one to be counted out, however, the ever resourceful singer decided to lay back and focus on acting instead. At age 36, Cher made her Broadway debut in 1982 in what was essentially her first live acting role with "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean". Centering around a reunion of girlfriends from an old James Dean fan club, her performance was critically lauded. This earned her the right to transfer her stage triumph to film alongside Karen Black and Sandy Dennis. Cher earned critical raves for Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), her first film role since 1969.
With film #2 came a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe win for her portrayal of a lesbian toiling in a nuclear parts factory in Silkwood (1983), starring Meryl Streep and Kurt Russell. This in turn was followed by her star turn in Mask (1985) as the blunt, footloose mother of a son afflicted with a rare disease (played beautifully by Eric Stoltz). Once again Cher received high praise and copped a win from the Cannes Film Festival for her poignant performance.
Fully accepted by this time as an actress of high-caliber, she integrated well into the Hollywood community. Proving that she could hold up a film outright, she was handed three hit vehicles to star in: The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Suspect (1987), and Moonstruck (1987), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Along with all this newfound Hollywood celebrity came interest in her as a singer and recording artist again. "If I Could Turn Back Time (#3) and the Peter Cetera duet "After All" (#6) placed her back on the Billboard charts.
During the 1990s Cher continued to veer back and forth among films, TV specials and expensively mounted concerts. In January of 1998, tragedy struck when Cher's ex-husband Sonny Bono, who had forsaken an entertainment career for California politics and became a popular Republican congressman in the process, was killed in a freak skiing accident. That same year the duo received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for their contribution to television. In the meantime an astounding career adrenaline rush came in the form of a monstrous, disco-flavored hit single ("Believe"). The song became a #1 hit and the same-titled album the biggest hit of her career. "Believe" reached #1 in 23 different countries.
Having little to prove anymore to anyone, Cher decided to embark on a "Farewell Tour" in the early part of the millennium and, after much stretching, her show finally closed in 2005 in Los Angeles. It didn't take long, however, for Cher to return from this self-imposed exile. In 2008, she finalized a deal with Las Vegas' Caesars Palace for the next three years to play the Colosseum, and has since returned live on numerous "farewell" tour extravaganzas. Never say never. Cher returned films with her co-starring role opposite Christina Aguilera in Burlesque (2010), but has since only provided a glitzy cameo in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018). After keeping a low romantic profile for some time, she nearly out-cougared Madonna by embarking on a romance with four-decades-younger Def Jam executive Alexander "A.E." Edwards, father of rapper Amber Rose's second son. The couple celebrated their one-year anniversary in 2023, right before the release of Cher's first holiday album, simply titled Christmas.
In other facets of her life, Cher has been involved with many humanitarian groups and charity efforts over the years, particularly her work as National Chairperson and Honorary Spokesperson of the Children's Craniofacial Association, which was inspired by her work in Mask (1985).- Writer
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The most internationally acclaimed Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel was born in a small town (Calzada de Calatrava) in the impoverished Spanish region of La Mancha. He arrived in Madrid in 1968, and survived by selling used items in the flea-market called El Rastro. Almodóvar couldn't study filmmaking because he didn't have the money to afford it. Besides, the filmmaking schools were closed in early 70s by Franco's government. Instead, he found a job in the Spanish phone company and saved his salary to buy a Super 8 camera. From 1972 to 1978, he devoted himself to make short films with the help of of his friends. The "premieres" of those early films were famous in the rapidly growing world of the Spanish counter-culture. In few years, Almodóvar became a star of "La Movida", the pop cultural movement of late 70s Madrid. His first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom (1980), was made in 16 mm and blown-up to 35 mm for public release. In 1987, he and his brother Agustín Almodóvar established their own production company: El Deseo, S. A. The "Almodóvar phenomenon" has reached all over the world, making his films very popular in many countries.- Actress
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Born on May 29, 1975 in Leeds, England, Melanie Brown became a member of Spice Girls in 1994. Their three albums sold more than 40 million copies worldwide and they had nine singles at number 1 in the UK.
"Hot" was her first solo album, released on 9th October 2000. It entered the UK charts at #28. Despite producing 2 Top 5 singles (3, if you include the hit "I Want You Back"), the album only ever re-entered the chart once after dropping out of the Top 100 - peaking at #95 when "Feels So Good" was being promoted in February 2001. To date, the album has sold about 50,000 copies in the UK. The album sold 8,000 copies in its first week.
After she parted with Virgin Records, she started a new successful career as TV presenter and actress. In 2001, her own show This Is My Moment (2000) was a great success and, after the second series, she made a documentary about Africans voodoos.
In 2002, she was one of the protagonists of the BBC3's sit-com Burn It (2003) and made her theater debut with "The Vagina Monologues" in London.
She has a lead role in two upcoming movies: the horror LD 50 Lethal Dose (2003) and the comedy The Seat Filler (2004) (with Kelly Rowland of Destiny's Child).
From April to September 2004, she played the role of "Mimi" in the famous musical "Rent" on Broadway.
In 2005, Melanie released her second solo album, "L.A. State Of Mind", featuring the single "Today". Both the single and the album flopped...- Director
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Andrew Warhol's father, Ondrej, came from the Austria-Hungary Empire (now Slovakia) in 1912, and sent for his mother, Julia Zavackyová Warholová, in 1921. His father worked as a construction worker and later as a coal miner. Around some time, the family moved to Pittsburgh. During his teenage years, Andy suffered from several nervous breakdowns. Overcoming this, he graduated from Schenley High School in Pittsburgh in 1945, and enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University), graduating in June 1949. During college, he met Philip Pearlstein, a fellow student.
After graduation, Andy Warhol (having dropped the letter 'a' from his last name) moved to New York City, and shared an apartment with Pearlstein at St. Mark's Place off of Avenue A for a couple months. During this time, he moved in and out of several Manhattan apartments. In New York, he met Tina Fredericks, art editor of Glamour Magazine. Warhol's early jobs were doing drawings for Glamour, such as the Success is a Job in New York, and women's shoes. He also drew advertising for various magazines, including Vogue, Harper's Bazzar, book jackets, and holiday greeting cards.
During the 1950s, he moved to an apartment on East 75th Street. His mother moved in with him, and Fritizie Miller become his agent. In 1952, his first solo exhibition was held at Hugo Gallery, New York, of drawings to illustrate stories by Truman Capote. He started illustrating books, beginning with Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette. Around 1953-1955, he worked for a theater group on the Lower East Side, and designs sets. It is around that time that he dyed his hair silver. Warhol published several books, including Twenty Five Cats Named Sam, and One Blue Pussy. In 1956, he traveled around the world with Charles Lisanby, a television-set designer. In April of this year, he was included in his first group exhibition, Recent Drawings USA, held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He began receiving accolades for his work, with the 35th Annual Art Directors Club Award for Distinctive Merit, for an I.Miller shoe advertisement. He published In The Bottom Of My Garden later that year. In 1957, received 36th Annual Art Directors Club Medal and Award of Distinctive Merit, for the I.Miller show advertisements, and Life Magazine published his illustrations for an article, "Crazy Golden Slippers".
In 1960, Warhol began to make his first paintings. They were based on comic strips in the likes of Dick Tracy, Popeye, Superman, and two of Coca-Cola bottles. In 1961, using the Dick Tracy comic strip, he designed a window display for Lord & Taylor, at this time, major art galleries around the nation begin noticing his work. In 1962, Warhol made paintings of dollar bills and Campbell soup cans, and his work was included in an important exhibition of pop art, The New Realists, held at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. In November of this year, Elanor Ward showed his paintings at Stable Gallery, and the exhibition began a sensation. In 1963, he rented a studio in a firehouse on East 87th Street. He met his assistant, Gerard Malanga, and started making his first film, Tarzan and Jane Regained... Sort of (1964). Later, he drove to Los Angeles for his second exhibition at the Ferus Gallery. In November of that year, he found a loft at 231 East 47th Street, which became his main studio, The Factory. In December, he began production of Red Jackie, the first of the Jackie series. In 1964, his first solo exhibition in Europe, held at the Galerie Ileana Sonnebend in Paris, featured the Flower series. He received a commission from architect Philip Johnson to make a mural, entitled Thirteen Most Wanted Men for the New York State Pavilion in the New York World's Fair. In April, he received an Independent Film Award from Film Culture magazine. In November, his first solo exhibition in the US was held at Leo Castelli Gallery. And at this time, he began his self portrait series.
In the summer of 1965, Andy Warhol met Paul Morrissey, who became his advisor and collaborator. His first solo museum exhibition was held at the Institute of Contempary Art, at the University of Pennsylvania. During this year, he made a surprise announcement of his retirement from painting, but it was to be short lived. He would resume painting again in 1972. It was around this time that he met Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker (collectively known as The Velvet Underground), and a German-born model turned chanteuse called Nico. He paired Nico with the Velvets, and they developed a close bond with Warhol. This was an alliance that forever changed the face of world culture. Warhol produced the group's first album, The Velvet Underground and Nico, which has been called "the most influential record ever" by many critics. Later, a multimedia show developed (called The Exploding Plastic Inevitable), managed, and produced by Warhol, featuring the Velvet Underground.
In the summer of 1966, Warhol's film Chelsea Girls (1966) became the first underground film to be shown at a commercial theater. In 1967, Chelsea Girls opened in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and six of his Self Portraits were shown at Expo 67 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. In August of this year, he gave a lecture at various colleges in the Los Angeles area, his persona is so popular that some colleges hire Allen Midgette to impersonate him for lectures. Later, Warhol moved The Factory to 33 Union Square West, and met Fred Hughes, who later became President of Enterprises, and Interview Magazine. In 1968, Warhol's first solo European museum exhibition was held at Moderna Museet, Stockholm. But later that year on June 3, 1968, Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas, an ultra-radical and member of the entourage surrounding Warhol. Solanis was the founder of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Fortunately, Warhol survived the assassination attempt after spending two months in a hospital. This incident is the subject of the film, I Shot Andy Warhol (1996). Afterwards, Andy Warhol dropped out of the filmmaking business, but now and then continued his contribution to film and art. He never emotionally recovered from his brush with death.
During the 1970s and 80s, Andy Warhol's status as a media icon skyrocketed, and he used his influence to back many younger artists. He began publishing of Interview magazine, with the first issue being released in fall of 1969. In 1971, his play, entitled Pork, opened at London at the Round House Theatre. He resumed painting in 1972, although it was primarily celebrity portraits. The Factory was moved to 860 Broadway, and in 1975, he bought a house on Lexington Street. A major retrospective of his work is held in Zurich. In 1976, he did the Skulls, and Hammer and Sickle series. Throughout the late 70s and 80s, a retrospective exhibition was held, as Warhol began work on the Reversals, Retrospectives, and Shadows series. The Myths series, Endangered Species series, and Ads series followed through the early and mid 1980s. On 22 February 1987, a "day of medical infamy", as quoted by one biographer, Andy Warhol died following complications from gall bladder surgery. He was 58 years old.- Writer
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Jonathan Groff is known for Black-ish (2014), Late Night with Conan O'Brien (1993) and Happy Endings (2011). He has been married to Martha Chowning since 13 April 1996.- Actor
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Zachary Quinto was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Margaret J. (McArdle), an Irish-American office worker, and Joseph John Quinto, an Italian-American barber. Zachary graduated from Central Catholic High School in Pittsburgh, with the class of 1995, where he won Pittsburgh's Gene Kelly Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as the Major General in Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Pirates of Penzance". He then went on to attend Carnegie Mellon University, where he continued to hone his talents by performing in plays and musicals. He first appeared on numerous television series since 2000 and, in 2003, landed the role of computer expert "Adam Kaufman" on the Fox series, 24 (2001), during its third season. In 2006, Quinto portrayed serial killer "Sylar" on the science fiction series, Heroes (2006), until its cancellation in 2010, after four seasons. He was cast in his first main film role as "Spock", in the hugely successful franchise reboot, Star Trek (2009).- Actor
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Alan Cumming was born on January 27, 1965, in Aberfeldy, Scotland, to Mary (Darling), an insurance company secretary, and Alex Cumming. His family lived nearby in Dunkeld, where his father was a forester for Atholl Estate. The family (including his brother, Tom) moved to Fassfern near Fort William, before moving to the east coast of Scotland in 1969, where Alan's father took up the position of Head Forester of Panmure Estate; it was there that Alan grew up. He went to Monikie Primary School and Carnoustie High School, where he began appearing in plays, and soon after that began working with with the Carnoustie Theatre Club and Carnoustie Musical Society.
In 1981, he left high school with 8 'O' Grades and 4 Highers, but because he was too young to enter any university or drama school he worked for just over a year as a sub-editor at D.C. Thomson Publishers in Dundee. There he worked on the launch of a new magazine, "Tops", and was also the "Young Alan" who answered readers' letters. In September 1982 he began a three-year course at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. He graduated in 1985 with a B.A. (Dramatic Studies) and awards for verse speaking and direction. He also had formed a cabaret double act with fellow student Forbes Masson called Victor and Barry, which went on to become hugely successful with tours (including two Perrier Pick of the Fringe seasons in London and a month-long engagement at the Sydney Opera House as part of an Australian tour), records ("Hear Victor and Barry and Faint", "Are We Too Loud?") and many TV appearances throughout the UK. Before graduating Alan made his professional theater and film debuts in "Macbeth" at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow and in Gillies MacKinnon's "Passing Glory". After graduating, Alan worked extensively in Scottish theater and television, including a stint on the soap opera Take the High Road (1980) before moving to London when "Conquest of the South Pole", a play by German playwright Manfred Karge, transferred from the Traverse Theatre in, Edinburgh to the the Royal Court in London, earning him his first Olivier award nomination for Most Promising Newcomer of 1988. Alan performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company and then the Royal National Theatre, where he starred in "Accidental Death of an Anarchist", which he also adapted with director Tim Supple. The production was nominated for Best revival at the 1991 Olivier awards and Alan won for Comedy Performance of the Year.
His film career began with Ian Sellar's Prague (1992), in which he starred with Sandrine Bonnaire and Bruno Ganz. The film premiered at the 1992 Cannes film festival and went on to win him Best Actor award at the Atlantic Film Festival and a Scottish BAFTA Best Actor nomination. In the same year he made two films for the BBC - The Last Romantics (1992) and Bernard and the Genie (1991), the latter winning him the Top Television Newcomer award at 1992 British Comedy Awards. In the 1992 Olivier awards he was also nominated for Comedy Performance of the Year for "La Bete". In 1993 he played Hamlet for the English Touring Theare to great critical acclaim ("An actor knocking on the door of greatness" - Daily Mail; ranked first and second--with his performance in "Cabaret"--in the Daily Telegraph's performances of the year) and then immediately went on to play the Emcee in Sam Mendes' revival of "Cabaret" at the same venue (London's Donmar Warehouse). He received a 1994 Olivier award nomination for Best Actor in a Musical for "Cabaret", and for Hamlet he received the 1994 TMA Best Actor award and a Shakespeare Globe award nomination.
In 1994, he made his first Hollywood film, Circle of Friends (1995), and his performance as the oleaginous Sean Walsh along with those in two films released in quick succession (Emma (1996) and GoldenEye (1995)) brought him to the attention of American producers, and he appeared in several Hollywood films, such as Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997) and Buddy (1997). He returned to the UK in 1997 to work with Stanley Kubrick and the Spice Girls before returning stateside in 1998 to reprise his role in "Cabaret" on Broadway. The show and his portrayal were a sensation, and he received the Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics' Circle, Theatre World, FANY, New York Press and New York Public Advocate's awards for his performance. Since then he has alternated between theater and films, and also between smaller independent films and more mainstream fare. His theater work includes 2001's "Design for Living" on Broadway and the hugely successful off-Broadway "Elle" by Jean Genet, which he adapted and played the lead in 2002. His films include Julie Taymor's Titus (1999), Urbania (2000), the "Spy Kids" trilogy, Josie and the Pussycats (2001), X2 (2003), Nicholas Nickleby (2002), Son of the Mask (2005) and the Showtime movie musical Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical (2005).
He wrote, directed, produced and acted in The Anniversary Party (2001) with Jennifer Jason Leigh, which premiered at the Cannes Film festival in 2002 and went on to win a National Board of Review award and two Independent Spirit award nominations. More recently he has produced the documentary Show People (2004) and the films Sweet Land (2005) and Full Grown Men (2006) (and appears in both) and acted in Gray Matters (2006) opposite Heather Graham and Bam Bam and Celeste (2005), opposite Margaret Cho. In 2006, he returned to Broadway as Macheath in "The Threepenny Opera". He has also found the time to write a novel, "Tommy's Tale", in 2002.- Actor
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Jesse Tyler Ferguson was born on 22 October 1975 in Missoula, Montana, USA. He is an actor and producer, known for Cocaine Bear (2023), Modern Family (2009) and Ice Age: Collision Course (2016). He has been married to Justin Mikita since 20 July 2013. They have one child.- Actor
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David Burtka was born on 29 May 1975 in Dearborn, Michigan, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas (2011), Neil's Puppet Dreams (2012) and CSI: NY (2004). He has been married to Neil Patrick Harris since 6 September 2014. They have two children.- Actor
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Neil Patrick Harris was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on June 15, 1973. His parents, Sheila Gail (Scott) and Ronald Gene Harris, were lawyers and ran a restaurant. He grew up in Ruidoso, New Mexico, a small town 120 miles south of Albuquerque, where he first took up acting in the fourth grade. While tagging along with his older brother of 3 years, Harris won the part of Toto in a school production of The Wizard of Oz (1939).
His parents moved the family to Albuquerque in 1988, the same year that Harris made his film debut in two movies: Purple People Eater (1988) and Clara's Heart (1988), which starred Whoopi Goldberg. A year later, when Neil was 16, he landed the lead role in Steven Bochco's television series about a teen prodigy doctor at a local hospital, Doogie Howser, M.D. (1989), which launched Harris into teen-heartthrob status. The series lasted1989-1993 and earned him a People's Choice Award for Favorite Male Performer in a New Series (1990) and a Golden Globe Nomination (1990). Harris attended the same high school as Freddie Prinze Jr., La Cueva High School in Albuquerque. Neil acted on stage in a few plays while there, one of which was his senior play, Fiddler on the Roof (1971), in which he portrayed Lazar Wolf the butcher (1991).
When "Doogie Howser, M.D." stopped production in 1993, Harris took up stage acting, which he had always wanted to do. After a string of made-for-television movies, Harris acted in his first big screen roles in nine years, Starship Troopers (1997) with Casper Van Dien and then The Proposition (1998). In July 1997, Harris accepted the role of Mark Cohen for the Los Angeles production of the beloved musical, Rent (2005). His performance in "Rent" garnered him a Drama-League Award in 1997. He continued in the musical, to rave reviews, until January 1998. He later reprised the role for six nights in his hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, in December 1998.
In 1999, Harris returned to television in the short-lived sitcom Stark Raving Mad (1999), with Tony Shalhoub. He was also in the big-screen projects The Next Best Thing (2000) and Undercover Brother (2002), and he can be heard as the voice of Peter Parker/Spider-Man in the newest animated Spider-Man (2003) series. Harris has continued his stage work, making his Broadway debut in 2001 in "Proof." He has also appeared on stage in "Romeo and Juliet," "Cabaret," Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in Concert (2001), and, most recently, "Assassins." In 2005, Harris returned to the small screen in a guest-starring role on Numb3rs (2005) and a starring role in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother (2005). Neil played the title role in the web-exclusive musical comedy Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (2008), widely downloaded via iTunes to become the #1 TV series for five straight weeks, despite not actually being on television.- Actor
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Sean Patrick Hayes was born and raised in the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn, Illinois. His father, Ronald, a lithographer, left the family when Sean was a young child. His mother, Mary, works at a food bank, and raised Sean and his four siblings on her own. Sean supported himself as a classical pianist and as a member of a pop band for five years, while attending Illinois State University, where he majored in performance and orchestral conducting. He began his post-collegiate professional career in Chicago theatre, as musical director at the Pheasant Run Theater for several years, appearing on stage in several productions as well. He also appeared in the original production of "Role Play" at the Organic Theatre.
An alumnus of Chicago's famed Second City improvisational comedy group, Hayes had gigs as a stand-up comic, performing at The Comedy Club in Los Angeles. While still in Chicago, Hayes won roles in television shows as well as the television movie A & P (1996), based on a story by John Updike, before landing the role which earned him an Emmy Award in 2001 - Jack McFarland - on the hit NBC comedy series Will & Grace (1998). He has also been honored with a SAG Award, an American Comedy Award and a TV Guide Award as well as with two Golden Globe Nominations. Hayes made his feature film debut in 1998 in the title role of the art-house hit Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss (1998), which won critical acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival. He also co-starred in the box-office hit Cats & Dogs (2001) for Warner Bros Studios.
Of Irish descent, Sean Hayes makes his home in Los Angeles with his long time boyfriend, now husband (as of November 2014), Scott Icenogle, a Los Angeles music producer.- Actor
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Having grown up in Houston, and its northern suburb of Spring, he made his first stage appearance in a school play at the age of 6. Parsons then went on to study theater at the University of Houston. From there he won a place on a two-year Masters course in classical theater at the University of San Diego/The Old Globe Theater, graduating in 2001.
He moved to New York, working in Off-Broadway productions, appearing in TV commercials and in one episode of Ed (2000) before landing a recurring role in Judging Amy (1999) in 2004.
He was propelled to international fame and acclaim three years later when he starred as Sheldon in the award-winning sitcom, The Big Bang Theory (2007).- Actor
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Paul Lynde was born in 1926 in Mount Vernon, Ohio (one of six children and the middle of four boys). His father was a local police officer and the sheriff of the Mount Vernon Jail for two years. Lynde got his inspiration to become an actor at the age of four or five after his mother took him to see the original silent film Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925). After graduating from Northwestern University, Lynde relocated to New York City where his first break came from being a stand-up comedian at the Number One Fifth Avenue nightclub. Then came an appearance on a Broadway show, "New Faces of 1952".
Lynde also had a two-year run on TV with Perry Como's Kraft Music Hall (1948) and the Broadway and film versions of Bye Bye Birdie (1963). Throught his life, Lynde appeared in the Broadway plays "The Impossible Years", "Don't Drink the Water", and "Plaza Suite". His many film credits include New Faces (1954), Send Me No Flowers (1964), and Rabbit Test (1978). One of his most memorable roles was a recurring role on Bewitched (1964) playing the sneering, sarcastic Uncle Arthur. He appeared on TV's The Dean Martin Show (1965), The Kraft Music Hall (1967), Donny and Marie (1975), and both the prime-time and daytime versions of the game show The Hollywood Squares (Daytime) (1965) where he occupied the famous center square. He had two TV series of his own, The Paul Lynde Show (1972) and The New Temperatures Rising Show (1972). Paul Lynde's witty, wisecracking one-liners and his novel line delivery made him one of Hollywood's funniest and best loved entertainers. Paul Lynde died under mysterious circumstances when he was found dead in his bed after possibly suffering a heart attack in January 1982 at age 55. He had been in ill-health for over a year with cancer or some other illness that was never fully revealed to the public before or after his death.- Actress
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Alexis Arquette (born Robert Arquette) (death: September 11, 2016) was an American actress. Arquette was born in Los Angeles, the fourth of five children of Lewis Arquette, an actor and director, and Brenda Olivia "Mardi" (Nowak), a Jewish actress, poet, theater operator, activist, acting teacher, and therapist. Lewis's family's surname was originally "Arcouet"; Lewis's father was comedian Cliff Arquette, who went by the stage name of Charley Weaver. Arquette was distantly related to American explorer Meriwether Lewis. Actors Rosanna, Richmond, Patricia, and David Arquette are her siblings.- Actor
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Jack Plotnick was born in Columbus, Ohio, USA. He is an actor and producer, known for Girls Will Be Girls (2003), Gods and Monsters (1998) and Space Station 76 (2014).- Jaye was born in Riverside, California in 1968, the son of a Ghanaian father and English mother. The family left for England when Jaye was two and a half. Jaye left school at 16 and had been alternately unemployed and doing odd jobs (running for a production company, working in a factory) ever since. Jaye had no real acting experience when discovered by a casting associate at a wrap party for Derek Jarman's Edward II (1991). He was working as a fashion designer at that time and took the role for the money. He was cast to play Dil in The Crying Game (1992), which became a sleeper hit that shocked audiences worldwide and, in 1992, was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for Jaye. His overnight stardom earned him his next big role as the sun god Ra opposite James Spader and Kurt Russell in the blockbuster Stargate (1994). Since his brush with movie fame, Jaye has spent his time doing big-name fashion shoots: Steven Meisel for Italian Vogue, Michael Roberts for Joseph, and a GAP ad by Annie Leibovitz. He accompanied Kate Moss to the British Fashion Awards, and in Paris at Valentino's jet-set party in honor of Sharon Stone, he accompanied Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington.
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RuPaul Andre Charles is an American actor, model, singer, songwriter, television personality, and author. As executive producer and host of the reality competition TV series RuPaul's Drag Race, RuPaul has received fourteen Primetime Emmy Awards - the most wins for outstanding host of a reality or competition program and for any Black artist in history.
In 2022, RuPaul received a Tony Award as a producer of Best Musical A Strange Loop.
RuPaul is the most commercially successful drag queen of all time, and in 2017 was included in the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world.
RuPaul was born and raised in San Diego, CA and later moved to Atlanta, GA to study performing arts. After settling in New York City, RuPaul became a popular fixture on the nightclub scene before achieving international fame with the release of the 1993 song "Supermodel (You Better Work)."
In 1995, RuPaul became the first spokesperson for MAC Cosmetics, raising millions of dollars for the MAC AIDS Fund and becoming the first man to land a major cosmetics campaign.
In 1996, RuPaul landed a TV talk show on VH1, The RuPaul Show, taping more than 100 episodes with co-host Michelle Visage, while simultaneously co-hosting a morning drive radio show with Visage on WKTU.
As a recording artist, RuPaul has co-written and co-produced eighteen studio albums to date, including Foxy Lady (1996), Champion (2009), Glamazon (2011), Born Naked (2014), American (2017), and Black Butta (2023).
RuPaul's Drag Race has produced sixteen seasons to date and has inspired several international spin-off series, including RuPaul's Drag Race: UK and RuPaul's Drag Race: All Stars. RuPaul was also featured as a host on the series Skin Wars: Fresh Paint, Good Work, Gay for Play Game Show Starring RuPaul, Lingo, Celebrity Lingo, and was the guest host of NBC's Saturday Night Live on February 8th, 2020.
As an actor, RuPaul has appeared in more than 50 films and television shows, both in and out of drag, including Crooklyn (1994), The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), But I'm a Cheerleader (1999), the Comedy Central series Broad City (2017), Netflix originals Girlboss (2017) and Grace and Frankie (2019), and as the voice of Queen Chante in The Simpsons (2018). In 2020, RuPaul teamed up with Michael Patrick King (Sex in the City, 2 Broke Girls) to produce the Netflix original comedy series AJ & The Queen, in which RuPaul also starred.
As an author, RuPaul has published four books: the #1 New York Times bestseller The House of Hidden Meanings (Harper Collins, 2024), GuRu (Harper Collins, 2018), Workin' It! RuPaul's Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style (Harper Collins, 2010), and Lettin' It All Hang Out (Hyperion Books, 1995).
On March 16, 2018, Jane Fonda presented RuPaul with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6652 Hollywood Blvd.
RuPaul lives in New York, California, and Wyomin.- Actor
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John Epperson was born in 1955 in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for Another Gay Movie (2006), Kinsey (2004) and Black Swan (2010).- Actor
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Charles Busch is a writer in theater and writer of the film Psycho Beach Party (2000). He is famous for crossdressing in his films he appears in and theatrical presentations he does. Busch got a lot of attention in film and television work playing a prisoner named Nat Ginsberg for two seasons on HBO's Oz (1997).- Writer
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Edward Albee was born on 12 March 1928 in Washington, District of Columbia, USA. He was a writer, known for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), A Delicate Balance (1973) and Qui a peur de Virginia Woolf? d'Edward Albee (2011). He died on 16 September 2016 in Montauk, New York, USA.- Writer
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Terrence McNally was born on 3 November 1938 in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for American Playhouse (1980), Frankie and Johnny (1991) and The Ritz (1976). He was married to Thomas Kirdahy. He died on 24 March 2020 in Sarasota, Florida, USA.- Thornton Niven Wilder was the second of five children in the family of a newspaper editor and a U.S. diplomat, Amos Parker Wilder, and Isabella Niven Wilder. He spent part of his childhood with his father, who was a Consul General in Hong Kong and China between 1906 and 1914. Wilder finished high school in California, received his undergraduate degree at Yale, and went to study archeology at the American Academy in Rome. He earned his M.A. in French from Princeton in 1926.
Wilder published his first play "The Trumpet Shall Sound" (1920) in Yale Literary Magasine. His first novel, "The Cabala" (1926), reflects his experiences in Europe, alluding to American expatriates around Gertrude Stein. His second novel "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" brought him his first Pulitzer Prize in 1928. He also won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for his play "Our Town" (1938), and again for "The Skin Of Our Teeth" (1943).
During WWII he served in the Army Air Force, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. At that time Wilder wrote the screenplay for 'Shadow of a Doubt', a film by Alfred Hitchcock. His farcical play "The Matchmaker" (1954) was adapted in 1964 into a Broadway musical comedy Hello, Dolly! It was made into a film in 1969, starring Barbra Streisand as Dolly Levi. Wilder received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, and won the 1967 National Book Award for his novel "The Eighth Day". His numerous friends included Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Montgomery Clift. - Writer
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William (Motter) Inge brought small-town life in the American Midwest to Broadway with four successive dramatic triumphs: "Come Back Little Sheba" (1950), "Picnic" (1953; Pulitzer Prize), "Bus Stop" (1955) and "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs" (1957). With the exception of his Academy Award-winning screenplay for Splendor in the Grass (1961), his later plays and prose never achieved the success of his early work. Convinced he could no longer write, Inge fell into a paralyzing depression, which resulted in his suicide.- Writer
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Tennessee Williams met long-term partner Frank Merlo in the summer of 1948 (Merlo died of lung cancer in the fall of 1963). Though separated briefly in 1961 and again in 1962, the two were partners for 15 years. Merlo acted as his personal manager/secretary.
Williams spent much of his most prolific years in Rome, Italy, and his enduring friendship with Italian stage and screen legend Anna Magnani lasted 24 years and inspired both "The Rose Tattoo" and "Orpheus Descending". Magnani realized the lead parts of these two plays, which were written for her, in their film versions. The turbulent and inspirational friendship shared between Williams and Magnani is the subject of the internationally acclaimed play "Roman Nights" by Franco D'Alessandro.
Aside from his published "Memoirs", the only authorized biographical book on Williams is by Bruce Smith, entitled "Costly Performances - Tennessee Williams; The Last Stage." This book deals with the last four years of Williams' life (1979-1983).- Actor
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Robert Joy was born on 17 August 1951 in Montréal, Québec, Canada. He is an actor and writer, known for Land of the Dead (2005), The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007).- Music Artist
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Barry Manilow was born on 17 June 1943 in New York City, New York, USA. He is a music artist and actor, known for Thumbelina (1994), Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) and Transsiberian (2008). He has been married to Garry Kief since April 2014. He was previously married to Susan Deixler.- Actor
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David Hyde Pierce was born in Saratoga Springs, New York, USA. He is the youngest child of George and Laura Pierce (both deceased) and has two older sisters (Barbara and Nancy) and an older brother (Thomas). As a child, he was very interested in music (particularly piano) and regularly played the organ at his local church (Bethesda Episcopal Church). David discovered a love of drama in high school and, upon his graduation in 1977, he received the Yaddo Medal which is to honor academic achievement and personal character. However, his love of music was still strong so he decided to study classical piano at Yale University.
Unfortunately, he soon grew bored with music history lessons and found that he wasn't dedicated enough to practice the required amount of hours to become a successful concert pianist. Instead, he returned to his love of drama and graduated in 1981 with a double major in English and Theatre Arts. He then moved to New York where he worked several menial jobs (including selling ties at Bloomingdales and working as a security guard) while acting in the theater during the late 80s and early 90s. He appeared in small roles in films such as Bright Lights, Big City (1988) before his life and career changed forever when he landed the role of "Dr. Niles Crane" in the television series Frasier (1993). Throughout the show's eleven year run (1993-2004), David was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series each year (he won four times: 1995, 1998-1999 and 2004). David resides in Los Angeles with his romantic partner, Brian Hargrove, and their two Wheaton Terriers, Maude and Mabel. He remains very close to his three siblings.- Actor
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BD Wong was born and raised in San Francisco, California. He made his Broadway debut in "M. Butterfly." He is the only actor to be honored with the Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, Clarence Derwent Award, and Theater World Award for the same performance. He starred in the television series All-American Girl (1994), and has made guest appearances on Sesame Street (1969) and The X-Files (1993). He was in the off-Broadway musical revival of "As Thousands Cheer" and followed with a critically acclaimed performance as "Linus" in the revival of "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," returned to SVU, and is now starring in the revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Pacific Overtures."- Writer
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Tony Kushner's play "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes" earned him the Pulitzer Prize, among many other awards. His other acclaimed plays include "Slavs", "Homebody/Kabul" and "Caroline, or Change". He has collaborated with children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak on several books. In 2003, Kushner married his boyfriend, Mark Harris, editor at large of Entertainment Weekly; they were the first gay couple to be featured in The New York Times' "Vows" column.- Additional Crew
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Ailey was born in the rural town of Rogers, Texas, USA. His childhood memories and experiences often informed his choreography; the most notable of his works was "Blues Suite", "Cry" (choreographed for Judith Jamison), and "Revelations", a ballet based on Ailey's observations and experiences in Black Baptist churches that was set to traditional Negro Spirituals. "Revelations" has the distinction of being one of the most performed ballets in the world. Beginning his dance career in 1953 with Lester Horton's dance company, Ailey assumed the artistic direction of Horton's company after Horton's death in 1953. In 1958, Ailey's seven member dance company, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, made its debut at the 92nd Street YMHA in New York City. Keeping a unique perspective about dance, he did not use his dance company merely as a vehicle to showcase his own choreography; he developed the Ailey American Dance Theater into a repertory company that provided art and entertainment while institutionalizing modern dances, helping preserve and develop old and new works by a variety of choreographers. Before his death in 1989, he had choreographed seventy-nine ballets, received New York's Handel Medallion, the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for lifetime contributions to modern dance, and in 1988, the Kennedy Center honored him for lifetime achievement in the performing arts. Additionally, Ailey's company was sent on several world tours by the U. S. State Department performing in the Soviet Union, France, Denmark, Finland, Morocco, and throughout South America to enthusiastic audiences and critics. After his death in 1989, his protege and former principal dancer Judith Jamison became artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater furthering the Ailey dance tradition and artistic mission that is applauded and acknowledged throughout the world.- Stephen Spinella was born on 11 October 1956 in Naples, Campania, Italy. He is an actor, known for Ravenous (1999), Virtuosity (1995) and Rubber (2010).
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Gus Green Van Sant Jr. is an American filmmaker, painter, screenwriter, photographer and musician from Louisville, Kentucky who is known for directing films such as Good Will Hunting, the 1998 remake of Psycho, Gerry, Elephant, My Own Private Idaho, To Die For, Milk, Last Days, Finding Forrester, Promised Land, Drugstore Cowboy and Mala Noche.- Actress
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Laverne Cox is a three time Emmy-nominated actress, Emmy winning documentary film producer and a prominent equal rights advocate. Laverne's role of Sophia Burset in the critically acclaimed Netflix original series "Orange is The New Black" brought her to the attention of diverse audiences all over the world. This role lead to Laverne becoming the first openly transgender actress to be nominated for a Primetime acting Emmy.
An artist and an advocate with an empowering message of moving beyond gender expectations to live more authentically, Laverne is the first openly transgender person to appear on the covers of TIME Magazine, Cosmopolitan magazine and Essence magazines among others. She was named one of Glamour magazine's 2014 Women of the Year. Laverne also proudly holds two SAG Awards winning them with her Orange Is The New Black cast mates.
Laverne has been one of the faces of Beyonce's athleisure line, Ivy Park. She also collaborated with Orly to create "Celebrate Yourself" a Limited Edition collection of nail colors and teamed up with Ted Danson for Smirnoff's "Welcome To The Fun" campaign.
Laverne's Emmy winning documentary "Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word" helped lead her to Executive Producing two powerful documentaries. The upcoming "Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen" is an unprecedented, groundbreaking look at the depiction of transgender characters throughout the history of film and TV and "Free CeCe" which tells the story of CeCe McDonald, a transgender woman who was controversially sentenced to 41 months in a men's prison for second degree manslaughter after defending herself against a racist and transphobic attack. The documentary focuses on McDonald's case, her experiences while incarcerated and the larger implications of her case for the transgender community and for communities of color at large.- Actor
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Born December 27, 1962 in Rockford, Illinois, US as Joseph Mantello, he is an American actor, director, and producer, best known for his work in Broadway theatre. His mother Judy was of half Italian descent and his father Richard Mantello, an accountant, was of Italian descent. He graduated the North Carolina School of the Arts and in 1984 moved to New York City. His first acting roles were in the plays "Walking the Dead" and "The Baltimore Waltz" and in 1993 he played Louis in the original Broadway production of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America". The production won both Tony and Drama Desk awards, and Mantello himself was nominated for both as well. He later switched from acting to directing, winning the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play in 2003 for Richard Greenberg's "Take Me Out" and the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical a year later for Stephen Sondheim's "Assassins". He directs a wide variety of shows on Broadway, his directing credits include the hit musical "Wicked" and the play "The Boys in the Band", which was later made into the movie The Boys in the Band (2020). He also returns to acting from time to time, both on Broadway (as Ned in Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart" and as Tom in Tennessee Williams's "The Glass Menagerie") and in television (in a smaller role of Mickey in The Normal Heart (2014) and as Dick Samuels in Hollywood (2020), both directed by Mantello's friend Ryan Murphy). In 2018 he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. He lives in New York City with his partner Paul Marlow.- Writer
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Mr. Baitz was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, and grew up there, in Brazil and South Africa. Plays include: "Other Desert Cities", "The Substance of Fire", "A Fair Country", and "Ten Unknowns", (All produced at Lincoln Center), The Paris Letter", "The Film Society", "Mizlansky/Zilinsky" and "Three Hotels", as well as a new version of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. He is the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Award, a Drama Desk Award, is a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for "A Fair Country." He won a Humanitas Award for the PBS-TV's "American Playhouse" version of "Three Hotels" which he also directed.- Actress
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A veteran of stage and screen, award-winning actress Miriam Margolyes has achieved success on both sides of the Atlantic. Winner of the BAFTA Best Supporting Actress award in 1993 for The Age of Innocence (1993), she received Best Supporting Actress at the 1989 LA Critics Circle Awards for her role in Little Dorrit (1987) and a Sony Radio Award for Best Actress in 1993. She voiced "Fly, the dog" in Babe (1995).
Major credits include Yentl (1983), Little Shop of Horrors (1986), I Love You to Death (1990), End of Days (1999), Sunshine (1999), Cold Comfort Farm (1995), Cats & Dogs (2001), and Magnolia (1999). She played "Prof. Sprout" in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002). More recently, she appeared in Stephen Hopkins', The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004), Modigliani (2004), István Szabó's Being Julia (2004) and Ladies in Lavender (2004) (with Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench).
Memorable television credits include Old Flames (1990), Freud (1984), The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1986), Blackadder (1982), The Girls of Slender Means (1975), Oliver Twist (1985), The History Man (1981), Vanity Fair (2004), and Supply & Demand (1997).
Stage credits include Peter Hall's Los Angeles production of "Romeo & Juliet"; "She Stoops to Conquer" and "Orpheus Descending" (both also for Peter Hall); "The Threepenny Opera" (directed by Tony Richardson); "The White Devil" at The Old Vic (for Michael Lindsay-Hogg); the Bristol Old Vic production of "The Canterbury Tales"; and her own award-winning one-woman show, "Dickens' Woman".
In the 2002 Queen's New Years Honours List, Queen Elizabeth II awarded her the OBE for her services to Drama.- Actress
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Shaw was already an accomplished theater actress when director Jim Sheridan awarded her a role in his film, My Left Foot (1989). The film is a telling of Christy Brown (Daniel Day-Lewis), an Irishman disgruntled with his confinement to a body horribly crippled by cerebral palsy but who found incredible success as an artist and writer. Shaw portrayed Eileen Cole, the doctor largely responsible for Christy's education and physical rehabilitation. Since, Shaw has received several accolades for her film and television performances.- Writer
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Bruce Vilanch was born on 23 November 1948 in New York City, New York, USA. He is a writer and actor, known for You Don't Mess with the Zohan (2008), The Ice Pirates (1984) and The 64th Annual Academy Awards (1992).- Writer
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Pier Paolo Pasolini achieved fame and notoriety long before he entered the film industry. A published poet at 19, he had already written numerous novels and essays before his first screenplay in 1954. His first film Accattone (1961) was based on his own novel and its violent depiction of the life of a pimp in the slums of Rome caused a sensation. He was arrested in 1962 when his contribution to the portmanteau film Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963) was considered blasphemous and given a suspended sentence. It might have been expected that his next film, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) (The Gospel According to St. Matthew), which presented the Biblical story in a totally realistic, stripped-down style, would cause a similar fuss but, in fact, it was rapturously acclaimed as one of the few honest portrayals of Christ on screen. Its original Italian title pointedly omitted the Saint in St. Matthew). Pasolini's film career would then alternate distinctly personal and often scandalously erotic adaptations of classic literary texts: Oedipus Rex (1967) (Oedipus Rex); The Decameron (1971); The Canterbury Tales (1972) (The Canterbury Tales); Arabian Nights (1974) (Arabian Nights), with his own more personal projects, expressing his controversial views on Marxism, atheism, fascism and homosexuality, notably Teorema (1968) (Theorem), Pigsty and the notorious Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), a relentlessly grim fusion of Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy with the 'Marquis de Sade' which was banned in Italy and many other countries for several years. Pasolini was murdered in still-mysterious circumstances shortly after completing the film.- Actor
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Leonard Frey originally wanted to become an artist, but in college he became interested in acting. He made his stage debut in an off-Broadway production of "Little Mary Sunshine" and his film debut as a celebrant in Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1966), but he first rose to prominence in the role of Harold, the self-proclaimed "Jew fairy", in both the stage and screen versions of The Boys in the Band (1970). Frey is probably best known for the role of Motel, the timid tailor, in Fiddler on the Roof (1971); this performance landed him a nomination for a Supporting Actor Oscar. He continued to work on stage, in films and on TV throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but he never again attained the level of critical success he enjoyed in "Fiddler on the Roof". In 1988 he died from complications related to AIDS.- Actor
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Rock Hudson was born Roy Harold Scherer, Jr. in Winnetka, Illinois, to Katherine (Wood), a telephone operator, and Roy Harold Scherer, an auto mechanic. He was of German, Swiss-German, English, and Irish descent. His parents divorced when he was eight years old. He failed to obtain parts in school plays because he couldn't remember lines. After high school he was a postal employee and during WW II served as a Navy airplane mechanic. After the war he was a truck driver. His size and good looks got him into movies. His name was changed to Rock Hudson, his teeth were capped, he took lessons in acting, singing, fencing and riding. One line in his first picture, Fighter Squadron (1948), needed 38 takes. In 1956 he received an Oscar nomination for Giant (1956) and two years later Look magazine named him Star of the Year. He starred in a number of bedroom comedies, many with Doris Day, and had his own popular TV series McMillan & Wife (1971). He had a recurring role in TV's Dynasty (1981) (1984-5). He was the first major public figure to announce he had AIDS, and his worldwide search for a cure drew international attention. After his death his long-time lover Marc Christian successfully sued his estate, again calling attention to the homosexuality Rock had hidden from most throughout his career.- Actor
- Additional Crew
James Byron Dean was born February 8, 1931 in Marion, Indiana, to Mildred Marie (Wilson) and Winton A. Dean, a farmer turned dental technician. His mother died when Dean was nine, and he was subsequently raised on a farm by his aunt and uncle in Fairmount, Indiana. After grade school, he moved to New York to pursue his dream of acting. He received rave reviews for his work as the blackmailing Arab boy in the New York production of Gide's "The Immoralist", good enough to earn him a trip to Hollywood. His early film efforts were strictly small roles: a sailor in the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis overly frantic musical comedy Sailor Beware (1952); a GI in Samuel Fuller's moody study of a platoon in the Korean War, Fixed Bayonets! (1951) and a youth in the Piper Laurie-Rock Hudson comedy Has Anybody Seen My Gal (1952).
He had major roles in only three movies. In the Elia Kazan production of John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1955) he played Cal Trask, the bad brother who could not force affection from his stiff-necked father. His true starring role, the one which fixed his image forever in American culture, was that of the brooding red-jacketed teenager Jim Stark in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955). George Stevens' filming of Edna Ferber's Giant (1956), in which he played the non-conforming cowhand Jett Rink who strikes it rich when he discovers oil, was just coming to a close when Dean, driving his Porsche Spyder race car, collided with another car while on the road near Cholame, California on September 30, 1955. He had received a speeding ticket just two hours before. At age 24, James Dean was killed almost immediately from the impact from a broken neck. His very brief career, violent death and highly publicized funeral transformed him into a cult object of apparently timeless fascination.- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
George Chakiris made his film debut at the age of 12 singing in the chorus of Song of Love (1947). Following his graduation from high school, he supported his night-time dancing, singing and dramatic lessons with a daytime job clerking in a Los Angeles department store. Later he started his acting/dancing career appearing in musicals such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)--he is one of the ballet dancers escorting Marilyn Monroe in "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend"--White Christmas (1954), The Girl Rush (1955), There's No Business Like Show Business (1954), Brigadoon (1954), and Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956). In 1957, he made his debut as a dramatic actor in Under Fire (1957). In 1958 he traveled to New York hoping for a Broadway "break." Hearing that Jerome Robbins was casting the London company of "West Side Story", he auditioned and was awarded the co-starring role of Riff. He played the part for almost two years on the West End stage before acting, singing and dancing as Bernardo in the Robert Wise film version (West Side Story (1961)), a performance that earned him a Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Since then, he starred in a succession of films, including Diamond Head (1962) with Charlton Heston, Bebo's Girl (1964) with Claudia Cardinale, The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) with Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac and Gene Kelly, The Big Cube (1968) with Lana Turner, Why Not Stay for Breakfast? (1979), Jekyll and Hyde... Together Again (1982), and Pale Blood (1990). He is one of the most traveled stars in motion pictures, having been to such locations as Hawaii, Japan, Mexico, Italy, England, Spain, and France. His nightclub career was launched to rave reviews at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas and Harrah's Club in Lake Tahoe. In the 1970s and 1980s, his career focused on television and music. He appeared as guest star in several TV series such as Hawaii Five-O (1968) (Death is a Company Policy - 1972), Wonder Woman (1975) (Death in Disguise - 1978), CHiPs (1977) (Fox Trap - 1983), Scarecrow and Mrs. King (1983) (Lost and Found - 1984), Murder, She Wrote (1984) (Weave a Tangled Web - 1989), and he joined the cast of Dallas (1978) from 1985 to 1986. He has released several records: "George Chakiris," "Memories Are Made of These," "The Gershwin Song Book," "West Side Story's Dynamic...". Recently, he has appeared in several plays and stage musicals: after "The King and I" in the US in 1995, he performed in Britain the role of Rochester in "Jane Eyre".- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Above all, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a rebel whose life and art was marked by gross contradiction. Openly homosexual, he married twice; one of his wives acted in his films and the other served as his editor. Accused variously by detractors of being anticommunist, male chauvinist, antiSemitic and even antigay, he completed 44 projects between 1966 and 1982, the majority of which can be characterized as highly intelligent social melodramas. His prodigious output was matched by a wild, self-destructive libertinage that earned him a reputation as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema (as well as its central figure.) Known for his trademark leather jacket and grungy appearance, Fassbinder cruised the bar scene by night, looking for sex and drugs, yet he maintained a flawless work ethic by day. Actors and actresses recount disturbing stories of his brutality toward them, yet his pictures demonstrate his deep sensitivity to social misfits and his hatred of institutionalized violence. Some find his cinema needlessly controversial and avant-garde; others accuse him of surrendering to the Hollywood ethos. It is best said that he drew forth strong emotional reactions from all he encountered, both in his personal and professional lives, and this provocative nature can be experienced posthumously through reviewing his artistic legacy.
Fassbinder was born into a bourgeois Bavarian family in 1945. His father was a doctor and his mother a translator. In order to have time for her work, his mother frequently sent him the movies, a practice that gave birth to his obsession with the medium. Later in life, he would claim that he saw a film nearly every day and sometimes as many as three or four. At the age of 15, Fassbinder defiantly declared his homosexuality, soon after which he left school and took a job. He studied theater in the mid-sixties at the Fridl-Leonhard Studio in Munich and joined the Action Theater (aka, Anti-Theater) in 1967. Unlike the other major auteurs of the New German Cinema (e.g., Schlöndorff, Herzog and Wenders) who started out making movies, Fassbinder acquired an extensive stage background that is evident throughout his work. Additionally, he learned how to handle all phases of production, from writing and acting to direction and theater management. This versatility later surfaced in his films where, in addition to some of the aforementioned responsibilities, Fassbinder served as composer, production designer, cinematographer, producer and editor. [So boundless was his energy, in fact, that he appeared in 30 projects of other directors.] In his theater years, he also developed a repertory company that included his mother, two of his wives and various male and female lovers. Coupled with his ability to serve in nearly any crew capacity, this gave him the ability to produce his films quickly and on extremely low budgets.
Success was not immediate for Fassbinder. His first feature length film, a gangster movie called Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) was greeted by catcalls at the Berlin Film Festival. His next piece, Katzelmacher (1969), was a minor critical success, garnering five prizes after its debut at Mannheim. It featured Jorgos, an emigrant from Greece, who encounters violent xenophobic slackers in moving into an all-German neighborhood. This kind of social criticism, featuring alienated characters unable to escape the forces of oppression, is a constant throughout Fassbinder's diverse oeuvre. In subsequent years, he made such controversial films about human savagery such as Pioneers in Ingolstadt (1971) and Whity (1971) before scoring his first domestic commercial success with The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972). This moving portrait of a street vendor crushed by the betrayal and his own futility is considered a masterpiece, as is his first international success Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) (Fear Eats the Soul). With a wider audience for his efforts, however, some critics contend that Fassbinder began to sell out with big budget projects such as Despair (1978), Lili Marleen (1981) and Lola (1981). In retrospect, however, it seems that the added fame simply enabled Fassbinder to explore various kinds of filmmaking, including such "private" works as In a Year with 13 Moons (1978) and The Third Generation (1979), two films about individual experience and feelings. His greatest success came with The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) (The Marriage of Maria Braun), chronicling the rise and fall of a German woman in the wake of World War II. Other notable movies include The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Fox and His Friends (1975), Satan's Brew (1976) and Querelle (1982), all focused on gay and lesbian themes and frequently with a strongly pornographic edge.
His death is a perfect picture of the man and his legend. On the night of June 10, 1982, Fassbinder took an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills. When he was found, the unfinished script for a version of Rosa Luxemburg was lying next to him. So boundless was his drive and creativity that, throughout his downward spiral and even in the moment of his death, Fassbinder never ceased to be productive.- Director
- Writer
- Editor
Kenneth Anger grew up in Hollywood and started out as a child actor, but his interest in filmmaking was evident at an early age: he made his first film, Who Has Been Rocking My Dreamboat (1941) , at age 14.
Anger developed into one of the pioneers of the American underground film movement. His gritty, violent, often homosexual-themed films were too strong for American audiences of the time, and many of his productions were filmed in Europe, mainly France.
However, Anger is best known for authoring the landmark "Hollywood Babylon" book series, which detailed a far seamier side of the Hollywood film industry than most people were aware.- Actor
- Director
- Writer
Charles Nelson Reilly was born to Charles Joseph Reilly and Signe Elvera Nelson. His father was Irish-American and Catholic, his mother was Swedish-American and Lutheran. As a child he amused himself with improvised puppet theater performances.
He had a traumatic experience in 1944, when present for the Hartford circus fire in Hartford, Connecticut. A fire during a performance of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus killed 167 people and injured 700 people. While Reilly was one of the survivors, he was left with a life-long fear of fires. He never attended public performances of theater and circus again, as an audience member, for fear of another fire.
Reilly wanted to enter show business as a youth, and in particular to become an opera singer. He took lessons at the University of Hartford Hartt School, but eventually realized that his voice skills were inadequate. He turned to theater next, and debuted in film with a bit role in "A Face in the Crowd" (1957). During the late 1950s, Reilly appeared regularly in comic roles in theatrical performances off-Broadway. In 1960, Reilly first gained critical attention, for a small but noteworthy part in Broadway musical "Bye Bye Birdie". In 1961, Reilly joined the cast of the musical "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying". He won his first Tony Award in 1962 for that performance. He kept appearing in Broadway shows for the rest of the decade.
As a notable actor, Reilly started making television appearances in the 1960s. He started as a guest in panel shows and as a player in television advertisements. He eventually gained a key role in the television series "The Ghost & Mrs. Muir", where he appeared from 1968 to 1970. In the 1970s, Reilly was a regular in game shows and children's series, such as "Match Game" and "Uncle Croc's Block".
In 1976, Reilly started teaching acting to others, while shifting his own career from acting to directing. He directed Broadway shows regularly and was nominated for a Tony Award for directing in 1997. He also directed a number television episodes. In the 1990s, he had guest roles in television series such as "X-Files" and "Millennium".
In the 2000s, Reilly was primarily known for the autobiographical play "Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly", and for its film adaptation. While touring the United States, he developed respiratory problems which led to his retirement. His illness got worse, and he died due to pneumonia in 2007.- Director
- Writer
- Producer
The main part of his few movies were filmed in the quarter of a century in which he worked closely together with the Indian producer Ismail Merchant and the German writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. His first films are all set in India and are very much influenced by the style of Satyajit Ray and Jean Renoir. After this period, he filmed three stories in New York and then dedicated his work to the great works of the English literature which made him internationally famous. Examples of this period are The Europeans (1979) and The Bostonians (1984) by Henry James, Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980) by Jane Austen, Quartet (1981) by Jean Rhys or A Room with a View (1985) and Maurice (1987) by E.M. Forster.- Producer
- Director
- Actor
Ismail Merchant was born on 25 December 1936 in Bombay, Bombay Presidency, British India [now Mumbai, Maharashtra, India]. He was a producer and director, known for Howards End (1992), A Room with a View (1985) and The Remains of the Day (1993). He died on 25 May 2005 in London, England, UK.- Actor
- Director
- Writer
Ramon Novarro was born José Ramón Gil Samaniego on February 6, 1899 in Durango, Mexico, to Leonor (Gavilan) and Dr. Mariano N. Samaniego Siqueiros, a prosperous dentist. Ramon and his family moved to Los Angeles in 1913, as refugees from the Mexican Revolution. After stints as a ballet dancer, piano teacher and singing waiter, he became a film extra in 1917. For five years he remained an extra until director Rex Ingram cast him as Rupert in The Prisoner of Zenda (1922). He was cast with Lewis Stone and Ingram's wife, Alice Terry (Ingram was also the person who suggested that he change his name to Novarro). He worked with Ingram in his next four films and was again teamed with Terry in the successful Scaramouche (1923). Novarro's rising popularity among female moviegoers resulted in his being billed as the "New Valentino". In 1925 he appeared in his most famous role, as the title character in Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), and later co-starred with Norma Shearer in The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927). His first talking picture was Call of the Flesh (1930), where he sang and danced the tango. He continued to appear in musicals, but his popularity was slipping. He starred with Greta Garbo in the successful Mata Hari (1931), but his career began to fade fast. In 1935 he left MGM and appeared on Broadway in a show that quickly flopped. His later career, when he was able to find work in films, consisted mostly of cameos. On October 30th, 1968, Ramon Novarro was savagely beaten in his North Hollywood home by two young hustlers. They had heard - in error - that he had thousands of dollars locked away somewhere in his home. They never found any money, and Ramon was discovered dead the next day by his servant.- Actor
- Producer
Hollywood's original Latin Lover, a term that was invented for Rudolph Valentino by Hollywood moguls. Alla Nazimova's friend Natacha Rambova (nee Winifred Hudnut) became romantically involved with Rudy and they lived together in her bungalow from 1921 (during the filming of Camille) until they eloped to Mexico on May 13, 1922 believing that his divorce from Jean Acker was official. After their re-marriage two years later she left him because he signed a contract that barred her from being involved in his pictures and wasn't allowed on set. She went to Nice to live with her parents and never entered their new mansion, Falcon Lair. He began to date sexy Pola Negri and was also linked to Vilma Banky. While he was touring to promote his last film, an editorial in the Chicago Tribune accused him of "effeminization of the American male". He defended his manhood by challenging the article's writer to a boxing match; it never took place, but another writer for the paper did enter the ring on behalf of the author who would not be named, and Valentino defeated him. He died shortly afterward while he was in New York attending the premiere of his last film. He collapsed in his hotel on August 15, 1926 and died on August 23, after an operation that led to an infection. 80,000 mourners nearly caused a riot at his New York funeral. Another funeral followed in California.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Nancy Kulp wore many hats: Publicity person, actress, linguist, would-be politician, and teacher. Originally from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Kulp attended college in Florida, then headed for Hollywood to work in publicity for the movies, not star in them. Soon after arriving in Hollywood, Kulp was convinced by director George Cukor and casting director Billy Gordon that she should be in front of the camera, not behind the scenes. She then began a solid career as a character actress in films and television, including two memorable roles: on The Bob Cummings Show (1955) as bird-loving "Pamela Livingstone", and on The Beverly Hillbillies (1962) as the long-suffering, lovesick, and bird-loving "Miss Jane Hathaway". After the Hillbillies ended its 9-year run, Kulp found work in theater, Broadway, and television, and dabbled in politics, making an unsuccessful 1984 run for Congress in Pennsylvania. Later, she taught acting and retired to a farm in Connecticut and, later, Palm Springs, where she died of cancer in 1991.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Her father was a minister, and when she joined a local stock company as a youngster she changed her name to avoid embarrassing her family. She worked in vaudeville and debuted on Broadway in 1916. Her film debut was in A House Divided (1931). She repeated her stage role in Dead End (1937) as Baby Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart)'s mother, which led to a number of slum mother parts. She played very strong role of Lucy, the dude ranch operator in The Women (1939). She achieved popularity as a comedienne in six 1940s movies made with Wallace Beery e.g., Barnacle Bill (1941). The character which would dominate her remaining career was established when she played Ma Kettle in The Egg and I (1947), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. She began her co-starring series with Percy Kilbride the following year in Feudin', Fussin' and A-Fightin' (1948) and continued through seven more. Her last movie was a "Kettle" without Kilbride: The Kettles on Old MacDonald's Farm (1957).- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Alan Bates decided to be an actor at age 11. After grammar school in Derbyshire, he earned a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. Following two years in the Royal Air Force, he joined the new English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre. His West End debut in 1956, at 22, was also the company's first production. In the same year Bates appeared in John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger," a play that gave a name to a generation of postwar "angry young men." It made Bates a star and launched a lifetime of his performing in works written by great modern playwrights -- Harold Pinter, Simon Gray, Storey, Bennett, Peter Shaffer and Tom Stoppard (as well as such classic playwrights as Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg and William Shakespeare). Four years later Bates appeared in his first film, a classic: The Entertainer (1960), in which he plays one of Laurence Olivier's sons. More than 50 film roles have followed, one of which, The Fixer (1968) (from a novel by Bernard Malamud) earned an Academy Award nomination for Bates. He married Victoria Ward in 1970. Their twin sons, Benedick and Tristan, were born in 1971. Tristan died during an asthma attack in 1990; Ward died in 1992. Bates threw himself into his work to get through these tragedies, and spoke movingly about the effects of his losses in interviews. He was the Patron of the Actors Centre in Covent Garden, London; Bates and his family endowed a theatre there in memory of Tristan Bates, who, like his father and brother, was an actor. With few exceptions, Bates performed in premium works, guided by intuition rather than by box office. For each role he created a three-dimensional, unique person; there is no stereotypical Alan Bates character. Women appreciate the sensitivity he brought to his romantic roles; gay fans appreciate his well-rounded, unstereotyped gay characters; and the intelligence, humor and detail - the smile that started in the eyes, the extra pat or squeeze, the subtle nuances he gave to his lines, his beautiful, flexible voice - are Bates hallmarks that made him special to all his admirers. The rumpled charm of his youth weathered into a softer but still attractive (and still rumpled) maturity. In his 60s Alan Bates continued to divide his time among films, theatre and television. His 1997 stage portrayal of a travel writer facing life's big questions at the bedside of his comatose wife in Simon Gray's "Life Support" was called "a magnificent performance, one of the finest of his career" (Charles Spencer, Sunday Telegraph, 10 August 97). His last two roles in New York earned critical praise and all the Best Actor awards Broadway can bestow. He was knighted in January 2003, and only a few weeks later began treatment for pancreatic cancer. He was positive that he would beat the disease, and continued to work during its course, only admitting to being "a bit tired." His courage and strength were remarkable, and even in his final days his humor remained intact. After his death, there was an outpouring of affection and respect. As Ken Russell said in his Evening Standard tribute, "The airwaves have been heavy with unstinted praise for Alan Bates since his untimely death . . . All the tributes were more than justified for one of the great actors ever to grace the screen and stage."- Additional Crew
- Production Designer
- Director
Franco Zeffirelli is an Italian director and producer of operas, films and television. He was also a senator from 1994 until 2001 for the Italian center-right Forza Italia party. Some of his operatic designs and productions have become worldwide classics.
He was known for several of the movies he directed, especially the 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet (1968), for which he received an Academy Award nomination. His 1967 version of The Taming of The Shrew (1967) with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton remains the best-known film adaptation of that play as well. His mini-series Jesus of Nazareth (1977) won both national and international acclaim.
In 1999, Zeffirelli received the Crystal Globe award for outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. In November 2004, he was awarded an honorary knighthood by the United Kingdom. He was awarded the Premio Colosseo in 2009 by the city of Rome.- Music Artist
- Actor
- Composer
David Bowie was one of the most influential and prolific writers and performers of popular music, but he was much more than that; he was also an accomplished actor, a mime and an intellectual, as well as an art lover whose appreciation and knowledge of it had led to him amassing one of the biggest collections of 20th century art.
Born David Jones, he changed his name to Bowie in the 1960s, to avoid confusion with the then well-known Davy Jones (lead singer of The Monkees). The 1960s were not a happy period for Bowie, who remained a struggling artist, awaiting his breakthrough. He dabbled in many different styles of music (without commercial success), and other art forms such as acting, mime, painting, and play-writing. He finally achieved his commercial breakthrough in 1969 with the song "Space Oddity", which was released at the time of the moon landing. Despite the fact that the literal meaning of the lyrics relates to an astronaut who is lost in space, this song was used by the BBC in their coverage of the moon landing, and this helped it become such a success. The album, which followed "Space Oddity", and the two, which followed (one of which included the song "The Man Who Sold The World", covered by Lulu and Nirvana) failed to produce another hit single, and Bowie's career appeared to be in decline.
However, he made the first of many successful "comebacks" in 1972 with "Ziggy Stardust", a concept album about a space-age rock star. This album was followed by others in a similar vein, rock albums built around a central character and concerned with futuristic themes of Armageddon, gender dysfunction/confusion, as well as more contemporary themes such as the destructiveness of success and fame, and the dangers inherent in star worship. In the mid-1970s, Bowie was a heavy cocaine abuser and sometime heroin user.
In 1975, he changed tack. Musically, he released "Young Americans", a soul (or plastic soul as he later referred to it) album. This produced his first number one hit in the US, "Fame". He also appeared in his first major film, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). With a permanently-dilated pupil and skeletal frame, he certainly looked the part of an alien. The following year, he released "Station to Station," containing some of the material he had written for the soundtrack to this film (which was not used). As his drug problem heightened, his behavior became more erratic. Reports of his insanity started to appear, and he continued to waste away physically. He fled back to Europe, finally settling in Berlin, where he changed musical direction again and recorded three of the most influential albums of all time, an electronic trilogy with Brian Eno "Low, Heroes and Lodger". Towards the end of the 1970s, he finally kicked his drug habit, and recorded the album many of his fans consider his best, the Japanese-influenced "Scary Monsters". Around this time, he appeared in the title role of the Broadway drama The Elephant Man, and to considerable acclaim.
The next few years saw something of a drop-off in his musical output as his acting career flourished, culminating in his acclaimed performance in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983). In 1983, he released "Let's Dance," an album which proved an unexpected massive commercial success, and produced his second #1 hit single in the United States. According to producer Nile Rodgers, the album was made in just 17 days and was "the easiest album" he'd ever made in his life. The tour which followed, "Serious Moonlight", was his most successful ever. Faced with this success on a massive scale, Bowie apparently attempted to "repeat the formula" in the next two albums, with less success (and to critical scorn). Finally, in the late 1980s, he turned his back on commercial success and his solo career, forming the hard rock band, Tin Machine, who had a deliberate limited appeal. By now, his acting career was in decline. After the comparative failure of Labyrinth (1986), the movie industry appears to have decided that Bowie was not a sufficient name to be a lead actor in a major movie, and since that date, most of his roles have been cameos or glorified cameos. Tin Machine toured extensively and released two albums, with little critical or commercial success.
In 1992, Bowie again changed direction and re-launched his solo career with "Black Tie White Noise", a wedding album inspired by his recent marriage to Iman. He released three albums to considerable critical acclaim and reasonable commercial success. In 1995, he renewed his working relationship with Brian Eno to record "Outside." After an initial hostile reaction from the critics, this album has now taken its place with his classic albums. In 2003, Bowie released an album entitled 'Reality.' The Reality Tour began in November 2003 and, after great commercial success, was extended into July 2004. In June 2004, Bowie suffered a heart attack and the tour did not finish its scheduled run.
After recovering, Bowie gave what turned out to be his final live performance in a three-song set with Alicia Keys at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York in November 2006. He also returned to acting. He played Tesla in The Prestige (2006) and had a small cameo in the comedy David Bowie (2006) for fan Ricky Gervais. In 2007, he did a cartoon voice in SpongeBob SquarePants (1999) playing Lord Royal Highness. He had a brief cameo in the movie ''Bandslam'' released in 2009; after a ten year hiatus from recording, he released a new album called 'The Next Day', featuring a homage cover to his earlier work ''Heroes''. The music video of ''Stars are Out Tonight'' premiered on 25 February 2013. It consists of other songs like ''Where Are We Now?", "Valentine's Day", "Love is Lost", "The Next Day", etc.
In 2014, Bowie won British Male Solo Artist at the 2014 Brit Awards, 30 years since last winning it, and became the oldest ever Brit winner. Bowie wrote and recorded the opening title song to the television miniseries The Last Panthers (2015), which aired in November 2015. The theme used for The Last Panthers (2015) was also the title track for his January 2016 release, ''Blackstar" (released on 8 January 2016, Bowie's 69th birthday) was met with critical acclaim. Following Bowie's death two days later, on 10 January 2016, producer Tony Visconti revealed Bowie had planned the album to be his swan song, and a "parting gift" for his fans before his death. An EP, No Plan, was released on 8 January 2017, which would have been Bowie's 70th birthday. The day following his death, online viewing of Bowie's music skyrocketed, breaking the record for Vevo's most viewed artist in a single day.
On 15 January, "Blackstar" debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart; nineteen of his albums were in the UK Top 100 Albums Chart, and thirteen singles were in the UK Top 100 Singles Chart. The song also debuted at #1 on album charts around the world, including Australia, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the US Billboard 200. At the 59th Annual Grammy Awards, Bowie won all five nominated awards: Best Rock Performance; Best Alternative Music Album; Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical; Best Recording Package; and Best Rock Song. The wins marked Bowie's first ever in musical categories. David Bowie influenced the course of popular music several times and had an effect on several generations of musicians.- Music Artist
- Composer
- Producer
Michael Philip Jagger was born in Dartford, Kent on 26th July 1943. When he was 4 he met Keith Richards until they went into secondary schools and lost touch. But one day in 1960 they accidentally met on the Dartford train line and both realized that they had an interest in rock n roll combined with blues. Between 1960 and 1962 The Rolling Stones formed. It was comprised of Mick on lead vocal and harmonica, Keith Richards on guitar, Bill Wyman on bass, Charlie Watts on drums and Brian Jones on guitar.
In 1964 they released their first album "The Rolling Stones". Eventually in 1965 they had their first number 1 hit in the UK with "The Last Time" which was followed by "I can't get no Satisfaction". Throughout 1966-1969 they toured the world with many great hits like "Let's Spend the night together" (1967) and "Sympathy for the Devil" (1968). But in 1969 Brian Jones committed suicide and Mick and Keith Richards were blamed for his death. But this fusion blew over and they got another guitarist to replace Brian in Mick Taylor. They released the album "Let it Bleed" (1969) with the track "Honky Tonk Woman". After they completed a North American tour Jagger finally went to star in Performance (1970) as the retired rock star Turner. The film was released in August 1970 with Mick starring opposite James Fox and Mick even had his first solo hit which was the soundtrack to the film "Memo from Turner".
In 1971 The Rolling Stones came back with the album "Sticky Fingers" which would be the most popular album they ever made. From this album there were songs like "Wild Horses" and "Brown Sugar" and were major hits all over the world. While this was happening Bianca Jagger gave birth to Jaggers daughter Jade Jagger. Throughout the 70s The Rolling Stones made thousands of live performances and achieved endless record sales with hits like "Angie" (1973), "It's Only Rock and Roll" (1974), "Hot Stuff" (1976) and "Respectable" (1978). In 1974 Ronnie Wood had replaced Mick Taylor on guitar and Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood both played lead guitar. In 1980 Jagger divorced Bianca Jagger and went on to record and release "Emotional Rescue" with The Rolling Stones and it was a platinum album. In 1981 "Tattoo You" was released and the group went on a major world tour, their first in three years, which filled stadiums in the US and arenas in Europe. After the tour ended in 1982 Jagger was starting to like other music. In 1983 The Rolling Stones recorded the album "Undercover" at the Compass Point in Nassau. But recording sessions didn't go well as during this time Mick and Keith Richard were having arguments about the kind of music the group should be playing. Even though the album was a success it seemed like The Rolling Stones were now going over the edge.
In May 1984 Mick recorded "State of Shock" with The Jacksons which led Mick wanting to try out a solo career. So in September he recorded his first solo album with guests like Pete Townshend and Jeff Beck. Shortly before the album was released The Rolling Stones decided to record their first album under a new Sony records contract. Keith Richards didn't approve of the solo efforts - he wanted Mick to stick to The Rolling Stones. In July 1985 Jagger made his first solo live appearance at the Live Aid benefit concert in Philadelphia. The Rolling Stones were going to perform but decided not to as things weren't going well for them at the time. During 1986 Mick worked on his second solo album "Primitive Cool" which he hoped would be a success but this was not to be. However, his 1988 tour proved to be a success, selling out in Japan.
But Mick accepted the fact that the only way to carry on with success was to get back with The Rolling Stones so in January 1989 he and Keith Richards reformed and they wrote songs for what was to be the "Steel Wheels" album. After the album was released The Rolling Stones went on a major worldwide tour with special concerts at London's Wembley Stadium. Sadly though in 1992 bassist of The Rolling Stones Bill Wyman announced his departure from the group which was to be the following year. Even though The Rolling Stones were upset to see him leave they accepted the fact that he'd been in there too long and they had to let go. Jagger released some more solo material during this time but it wasn't such a success. In 1994 The Rolling Stones released the album "Voodoo Lounge" and they went back on tour. The first The Rolling Stones project without Bill Wyman. The tour was the biggest tour in rock history raising over 300 million. As this tour was a success they returned yet again in 1997 with the "Bridges to Babylon" album and tour which lasted for two years which was combined with the "No Security" live album and tour. After the tour was finished Jagger's marriage was on the line as he had another child from a secret love affair. Soon after this was found out the marriage between him and Jerry Hall had ended. Since then Jagger's been a film producer and a solo artist. He has produced the film Enigma (2001) and has recorded his 2001 album "Goddess in the Doorway" - another commercial flop. But never fear because just recently the Stones announced a 40th Anniversary tour and that it will start in September, 2002.- Actress
- Producer
- Writer
Megan Denise Fox was born on May 16, 1986 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and raised in Rockwood, Tennessee to Gloria Darlene Tonachio (née Cisson), a real estate manager and Franklin Thomas Fox, a parole officer. She began her drama and dance training at age 5 and at age 10, she moved to Port St. Lucie, Florida where she continued her training and finished school. Megan began acting and modeling at age 13 after winning several awards at the 1999 American Modeling and Talent Convention in Hilton Head, South Carolina. At age 17, she tested out of school using correspondence and eventually moved to Los Angeles, California. Megan made her film debut as Brianna Wallace in the Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen film, Holiday in the Sun (2001). Her best-known roles are as Sam Witwicky's love interest, Mikaela Banes in Transformers (2007) and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), as April O'Neil in the remake Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) and its sequel Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016), and as Jennifer Check in the horror comedy Jennifer's Body (2009).- Actress
- Producer
- Writer
Kathy Najimy was born and raised in San Diego, California. She is the daughter of Samia (Massery) and Fred Najimy, a postal worker, both of Lebanese ancestry. Kathy attended Crawford High School, and began her film career in the early 1990s, with several minor roles. Kathy got her breakthrough screen role as "Sister Mary Patrick" in Sister Act (1992). She reprised this role in 1993 in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993). She is most notably known as the voice of "Peggy Hill" on King of the Hill (1997).
Kathy lives in Los Angeles with her husband, actor/singer Dan Finnerty (the Dan Band) and their daughter, Samia Najimy Finnerty.- Actress
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Kelly Ann McGillis was born in Newport Beach, California, to Virginia Joan (Snell), a homemaker, and Donald Manson McGillis, a general practitioner of medicine. She has English, Welsh, Scots-Irish, and German ancestry. McGillis dropped out of high school to pursue a career as an actress, and attended Juilliard in Manhattan and Pacific Conservatory of Performing Art in Santa Monica, CA.
She held a variety of jobs while pursuing her career, such as waitressing, and snagged a few stage roles before landing a supporting part in the Academy Award-nominated Reuben, Reuben (1983). This led to a lot of TV work and a lead role opposite Harrison Ford in the highly acclaimed thriller Witness (1985). This box office hit, directed by Peter Weir, got her noticed around Hollywood and producers took note of her. One of them was Jerry Bruckheimer, who cast her as Charlie Blackwood in the mega-hit Top Gun (1986) which became the highest-grossing film of the year and gave her some major name recognition.
Ironically, that breakthrough role didn't help her career in terms of high-profile work. She played prosecutor Kathryn Murphy in The Accused (1988) with Jodie Foster who won an Academy Award for her role, but unfortunately for McGillis she was overlooked for any major nomination. Never interested in being box-office gold, she remained loyal to the theater, even after being established as a major star during the mid to late 1980s, taking such various stage roles in such William Shakespeare plays as "The Merchant of Venice", "Don Juan", "Twelfth Night", "The Merry Wives of Windsor", "Mourning Becomes Electra" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream". In 1994 she scored the title role in the Broadway production of "Hedda Gabler" but unfortunately it only played for 33 performances before closing.
She had two daughters in the early 1990s, and worked more sporadically on TV and film so she could spend time with her family and owned her business, a restaurant in Florida. She worked on Winter People (1989), Cat Chaser (1989), The Babe (1992), North (1994), At First Sight (1999) and The Monkey's Mask (2000) as well as a string of made-for-TV films.
She has completed a national stage tour of "The Graduate", playing the infamous Mrs. Robinson, and continues to act as she begins study on Addiction Studies and raising her children in Pennsylvania.- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Michael Urie is a native Texan who was active in Speech and Drama all through high school at Plano Senior High School. He trained in theater studies at Collin County Community College in Plano before going to The Juilliard School where he was recipient of the John Houseman prize for excellence in classical theater and the Laura Pels award for a career in the theater.- Music Artist
- Actor
- Composer
Kurt Cobain was born on February 20 1967, in Aberdeen, Washington. Kurt and his family lived in Hoquiam for the first few months of his life then later moved back to Aberdeen, where he had a happy childhood until his parents divorced. The divorce left Kurt's outlook on the world forever scarred. He became withdrawn and anti-social. He was constantly placed with one relative to the next, living with friends, and at times even homeless. Kurt was not the most popular person in high school as he was in public school. In 1985 Kurt left Aberdeen for Olympia where he formed the band Nirvana in 1986. In 1989 Nirvana recorded their debut album Bleach under the independent label Sub-Pop records. Nirvana became very popular in Britain and by 1991 they signed a contract with Geffen. Their next album Nevermind became a 90s masterpiece and made Kurt's Nirvana one of the most successful bands in the world. Kurt became trampled upon with success and found the new lifestyle hard to bear. In February 1992 Kurt married Courtney Love, the woman who was already pregnant with his child, Frances Bean Cobain. Nirvana released their next album Incesticide later that year. The album appealed to many fans due to the liner notes, which expressed Kurt's open-mindedness. In September 1993 Nirvana released their next album, 'In Utero', which topped the charts. On March 4, 1994, Kurt was taken to hospital in a coma. It was officially stated as an accident but many believe it to have been an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Family and friends convinced Kurt to seek rehab. Kurt was said to have fled rehab after only a few days from a missing person's report filed by Courtney Love. On April 8th Kurt's body was found in his Seattle home. In his arms was a shotgun, which had been fired into his head. Near him laid a suicide note written in red ink. It was addressed to his wife Courtney Love and his daughter Frances Bean Cobain. Two days after Kurt's body was discovered people gathered in Seattle, they began setting fires, chanting profanities, and fighting with police officers. They also listened to a tape of Courtney reading sections of the suicide note left by Kurt. The last few words were "I love you, I love you".- Director
- Writer
- Editor
Dorothy Arzner, the only woman director during the "Golden Age" of Hollywood's studio system--from the 1920s to the early 1940s and the woman director with the largest oeuvre in Hollywood to this day--was born January 3, 1897 (some sources put the year as 1900), in San Francisco, California, to a German-American father and a Scottish mother. Raised in Los Angeles, her parents ran a café which featured German cuisine and which was frequented by silent film stars including: Charles Chaplin and William S. Hart, and director Erich von Stroheim. She worked as a waitress at the restaurant, and no one could have foreseen at the time that Arzner would be one of the few women to break the glass ceiling of directing and would be the only woman to work during the early sound era.
In her 15-year career as a director (1928-43), Arzner made three silent movies and 14 "talkies". Her path to the director's chair was different than that of women directors in the future (indeed, different than most male directors too). Directors nowadays are typically graduates of film schools or were working actors prior to directing. Like most of the directors of her generation, Arzner gained wide training in most aspects of filmmaking by working her way up from the bottom. It was the best way to become a filmmaker, she later said.
After graduating from high school in 1915, she entered the University of Southern California, where she was in the pre-med program for two years. When the US entered World War I in 1917, Arzner was unable to realize her ambition of serving her country in a military capacity, as there were no women's units in the armed forces at the time, so she served as an ambulance driver during the war.
After the cessation of hostilities, Azner got a job on a newspaper. The director of her ambulance unit introduced her to film director William C. de Mille (the brother of Cecil B. DeMille, one of the co-founders of Famous Players-Lasky, which eventually became known by the title of its distribution unit--Paramount Pictures). She decided to pursue a film career after visiting a movie set and being intrigued by the editing facilities. Arzner decided that she would like to become a director (there was no strict delineation between directors and editors in the immediate postwar period as the movie studios matured into a "factory" industrial production paradigm).
Though she was the sole member of her gender to direct Hollywood pictures during the first generation of sound film, in the silent era a woman behind the camera was not unknown. The first movie in history was directed by a Frenchwoman, and many women were employed in Hollywood during the silent era, most frequently as scenario writers (some research indicates that as many as three-quarters of the scenario writers during the silent era--when there was no requirement for a screenplay as such as there was no dialogue--were women). Indeed, there were women directors in the silent era, such as Frances Marion (though she was more famous as a screenwriter) and Lois Weber, but Arzner was fated to be the only female director to have made a successful transition to "talkies". It wasn't until the 1930s and the verticalization of the industry, as it matured and consolidated, that women were squeezed out of production jobs in Hollywood.
The introduction to William deMille paid off when he hired her for the sum of $20 a week to be a stenographer. Her first job for DeMille was typing up scripts at Famous Players-Lasky. She was reportedly a poor typist. Ambitious and possessed of a strong will, Arzner offered to write synopses of various literary properties, and eventually was hired as a writer. Impressing DeMille and other Paramount powers-that-be, Arzner was assigned to Paramount's subsidiary Realart Films, as a film cutter. She was promoted to script girl after one year, which required her presence on the set to ensure the continuity of the script as shot by the director. She then was given a job editing films. She excelled at cutting: as an editor (she was the first Hollywood editor professionally credited as such on-screen), she labored on 52 films, working her way up from cutting Bebe Daniels comedies to assignments on "A" pictures within a couple of years. She came into her own as a filmmaker editing the Rudolph Valentino headliner Blood and Sand (1922), about a toreador. Her editing of the bullfighting scenes was highly praised, and she later said that she actually helmed the second-unit crew shooting some of the bullfight sequences. Director James Cruze was so impressed by her work on the Valentino picture that he brought her on to his team to edit The Covered Wagon (1923). Arzner eventually edited three other Cruze films: Ruggles of Red Gap (1923), Merton of the Movies (1924) and Old Ironsides (1926). Her work was of such quality that she received official screen credit as an editor, a first for a cutter of either gender.
While collaborating with Cruze she also wrote scenarios, scripting her ideas both solo and in collaboration. She was credited as a screenwriter (as well as an editor) on "Old Ironsides", one of the more spectacular films of the late silent era, being partially shot in Magnascope, one of the earliest widescreen processes. She would always credit Cruze as her mentor and role model. "Old Ironsides" proved to be the last film on which she was credited as an editor, as her ambitions to become a director would finally come to fruition. To indulge her, Paramount gave her a job as an assistant director, for which she was happy--until she realized it was not a stepping stone to the director's chair, and she was determined to sit in that chair.
Arzner pressured Paramount to let her direct, threatening to leave the studio to work for Columbia Pictures on Poverty Row, which had offered her a job as a director. Unwilling to lose such a talented filmmaker, the Paramount brass relented, and she made her debut with Fashions for Women (1927). It was a hit. In the process of directing Paramount's first talkie, Manhattan Cocktail (1928), she made history by becoming the first woman to direct a sound picture. The success of her next sound picture, The Wild Party (1929), starring Paramount's top star, Clara Bow, helped establish Fredric March as a movie star.
Arzner proved adept at handling actresses. As Budd Schulberg related in his autobiography "Moving Pictures", Clara Bow--a favorite of his father, studio boss B.P. Schulberg--had a thick Brooklyn accent that the silence of the pre-talkie era hid nicely from the audience. She was terrified of the transition to sound, and developed a fear of the microphone. Working with her sound crew, Arzner devised and used the first boom mike, attaching the microphone to a fish pole to follow Bow as she moved around the set. Arzner even used Bow's less-than-dulcet speaking tones to underscore the vivaciousness of her character.
Though Arzner made several successful films for Paramount, the studio teetered on the edge of bankruptcy due to the Depression, eventually going into receivership (before being saved by the advent of another iconic woman, Mae West). When the studio mandated a pay cut for all employees, Arzner decided to go freelance. RKO Radio Pictures hired her to direct its new star, headstrong young Katharine Hepburn, in her second starring film, Christopher Strong (1933). It was not a happy collaboration, as both women were strong and unyielding, but Arzner eventually prevailed. She was, after all, the boss on the set: The director. The fiercely independent Hepburn complained to RKO, but the studio backed its director against its star. Eventually the two settled into a working relationship, respecting each other but remaining cold and distant from one another. Ironically, Arzner would display her directorial flair in elucidating the kind of competitive rivalries between women she experienced with Hepburn.
The Directors Guild of America was established in 1933, and Arzner became the first woman member. Indeed, she was the only female member of the DGA for many years.
Arzner's films featured well-developed female characters, and she was known at the time of her work, quite naturally, as a director of "women's pictures". Not only did her movies portray the lives of strong, interesting women, but her pictures are noted for showcasing the ambiguities of life. Since the rise of feminist scholarship in the 1960s, Arzner's movies have been seen as challenging the dominant, phallocentric mores of the times.
Arzner was a lesbian, who cultivated a masculine look in her clothes and appearance (some feel as camouflage to hide the boy's club that was Hollywood). Many gay critics discern a hidden gay subtext in her films, such as "Christopher Strong". Whereas feminist critics see a critique of gender inequality in "Christopher Strong", lesbian critics see a critique of heterosexuality itself as the source of a woman's troubles. The very private Azner, the woman who broke the glass ceiling and had to survive, and indeed thrived, in the all-male world of studio filmmaking, refused to be categorized as a woman or gay director, insisting she was simply a "director." She was right.
Arzner did have less troubled and more productive collaborations with other actresses after her experience with Hepburn. She developed a close friendship with one of her female stars, Joan Crawford, whom she directed in two 1937 MGM vehicles, The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1937) and The Bride Wore Red (1937). Arzner later directed Pepsi commercials as a favor to Crawford's husband, Pepsi-Cola Company's Chairman of the Board Alfred Steele.
In 1943 Arzner joined other top Hollywood directors such as John Ford and George Stevens in going to work for the war effort during World War Two. She made training films for the US Army's Women's Army Corps (WACs). That same year her health was compromised after she contracted pneumonia. After the war she did not return to feature film directing, but made documentaries and commercials for the new television industry. She also became a filmmaking teacher, first at the Pasadena Playhouse during the 1950s and 1960s and then at the University of California-Los Angeles campus during the 1960s and 1970s. At UCLA she taught directing and screenwriting, and one of her students was Francis Ford Coppola, the first film school grad to achieve major success as a director. She taught at UCLA until her death in 1979.
She was honored in her own lifetime, becoming a symbol and role model for women filmmakers who desired entry into mainstream cinema. The feminist movement in the 1960s championed her. In 1972 the First International Festival of Women's Films honored her by screening "The Wild Party", and her oeuvre was given a full retrospective at the Second Festival in 1976. In 1975 the DGA honored her with "A Tribute to Dorothy Arzner." During the tribute, a telegram from Katharine Hepburn was read: "Isn't it wonderful that you've had such a great career, when you had no right to have a career at all?"- Actor
- Music Department
- Producer
Raúl Eduardo Esparza is an American stage, screen, and voice actor. Considered one of Broadway's leading men since the 2000s, he is best known for his Tony Award-nominated performance as Bobby in the 2006 Broadway revival of Company and for his television role as New York Assistant District Attorney (ADA) Rafael Barba in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, where he had a recurring role in Season 14 and was promoted to a series regular in Seasons 15 to 19.- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Russell Tovey was born on 14 November 1981 in Billericay Essex, England, UK. He is an actor and producer, known for The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012), The Good Liar (2019) and Grabbers (2012).