Okay, all you Meryl Streep superfans out there. You may think you know everything there is to know about the acclaimed three-time Academy Award winner. But can you name which of her Oscar-nominated roles she claims she was not “sexy enough” for until she “stuffed” her bra with paper towels for the director? Streep has been nominated a whopping 21 times throughout her career, an academy record, so we’ll help you narrow it down by giving you a few hints.
Hint #1: The film is based on a 1937 memoir.
Hint #2: Streep portrays the memoir’s author.
Hint #3: The movie won seven Oscars, including Best Picture.
Have you figured it out yet, or has the lion got your tongue? If you guessed “Out of Africa” (1985), you are correct!
Streep’s role of Isak Dinesen (the pseudonym of author Karen von Blixen) earned her a fifth Best Actress Oscar nomination,...
Hint #1: The film is based on a 1937 memoir.
Hint #2: Streep portrays the memoir’s author.
Hint #3: The movie won seven Oscars, including Best Picture.
Have you figured it out yet, or has the lion got your tongue? If you guessed “Out of Africa” (1985), you are correct!
Streep’s role of Isak Dinesen (the pseudonym of author Karen von Blixen) earned her a fifth Best Actress Oscar nomination,...
- 4/19/2024
- by Marcus James Dixon
- Gold Derby
Who will be included for the special “In Memoriam” segment for Sunday night’s Oscars 2021 ceremony? With last year’s Academy Awards happening over 14 months ago, it means an even larger number of film veterans have died. Producers will hopefully be offering a longer remembrance and not leaving out people for the sake of time.
Superstar actor Chadwick Boseman died late last summer and is a nominee as Best Actor for his role in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Previous Oscar winners from acting categories show who will likely be honored include Sean Connery, Olivia de Havilland, Cloris Leachman and Christopher Plummer. Past acting nominees include Hal Holbrook, Ian Holm, Shirley Knight, George Segal, Cicely Tyson, Max von Sydow and Stuart Whitman.
SEE2021 Oscars presenters: Last year’s winners Renee Zellweger, Joaquin Phoenix, Laura Dern, Brad Pitt returning
Almost all of the near 100 people on the list below were Academy members.
Superstar actor Chadwick Boseman died late last summer and is a nominee as Best Actor for his role in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Previous Oscar winners from acting categories show who will likely be honored include Sean Connery, Olivia de Havilland, Cloris Leachman and Christopher Plummer. Past acting nominees include Hal Holbrook, Ian Holm, Shirley Knight, George Segal, Cicely Tyson, Max von Sydow and Stuart Whitman.
SEE2021 Oscars presenters: Last year’s winners Renee Zellweger, Joaquin Phoenix, Laura Dern, Brad Pitt returning
Almost all of the near 100 people on the list below were Academy members.
- 4/23/2021
- by Chris Beachum
- Gold Derby
Screenwriter Kurt Luedtke, known for his Oscar-winning adapted screenplay Out of Africa, died on Sunday. He was 80. The Detroit Free Press reported that the Luedtke, who worked at the newspaper during the 1960s and ’70s, passed away after a long illness in a Michigan hospital.
Luedtke, a Michigan native, first worked in journalism before turning his attention to Hollywood in the 1980s with screenwriting credits that include Absence of Malice and Random Hearts. After graduating from Brown University, the reporter-turned-screenwriter pursued a law degree at the University of Michigan and took on journalism courses at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
After Medill, Luedtke went on to report for the Miami Herald as an intern. In 1965, Luedtke moved to the Free Press as a general reporter. During his time at the paper, he reported a number of stories including the Free Press’ Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Detroit riots...
Luedtke, a Michigan native, first worked in journalism before turning his attention to Hollywood in the 1980s with screenwriting credits that include Absence of Malice and Random Hearts. After graduating from Brown University, the reporter-turned-screenwriter pursued a law degree at the University of Michigan and took on journalism courses at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
After Medill, Luedtke went on to report for the Miami Herald as an intern. In 1965, Luedtke moved to the Free Press as a general reporter. During his time at the paper, he reported a number of stories including the Free Press’ Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Detroit riots...
- 8/11/2020
- by Alexandra Del Rosario
- Deadline Film + TV
Kurt Luedtke, who left journalism for Hollywood and won an Academy Award for his “Out of Africa” screenplay, died Sunday in Michigan after a long illness. He was 80.
The Michigan native died at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, the Detroit Free Press reported. He had worked at the newspaper starting in 1965 and was part of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the deadly 1967 riots in that city. He became its executive editor before departing at the age of 33 to pursue a career as a screenwriter.
Luedtke was able to sell Orion Picture his idea about a liquor warehouse owner whose life is almost destroyed by a reporter relying on an anonymous source. The film became Sydney Pollack’s “Absence of Malice,” starring Paul Newman, Sally Field, Melinda Dillon and Wilford Brimley, leading to Academy Award nominations to Newman for actor, Dillon for supporting actress and Leudtke for original screenplay.
The Michigan native died at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, the Detroit Free Press reported. He had worked at the newspaper starting in 1965 and was part of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the deadly 1967 riots in that city. He became its executive editor before departing at the age of 33 to pursue a career as a screenwriter.
Luedtke was able to sell Orion Picture his idea about a liquor warehouse owner whose life is almost destroyed by a reporter relying on an anonymous source. The film became Sydney Pollack’s “Absence of Malice,” starring Paul Newman, Sally Field, Melinda Dillon and Wilford Brimley, leading to Academy Award nominations to Newman for actor, Dillon for supporting actress and Leudtke for original screenplay.
- 8/10/2020
- by Dave McNary
- Variety Film + TV
Will there ever be another great journalism film? Given the chaos in both movies and the news media—audiences polarized, anonymous sourcing resurgent, Twitter rampant, prevailing narratives debunked (or not)—the temptation is to say, no, probably not.
But common sense says the next great media movie is bound to happen, sooner or later. And when it does, that film will probably look a lot more like Absence Of Malice than All The President’s Men.
Other films—Broadcast News, Network, The Insider, Shattered Glass, Truth, to name a few—have taken a serious cut at journalism in the years since classics like The Front Page, Citizen Kane, and The Sweet Smell Of Success put a framework around the genre.
But no movies in the last half-century have better defined inherent polarities in journalism—good reporter/bad reporter, fearless investigator/flawed newshound, bearer of truth/purveyor of damaging falsehood—than those two dramas,...
But common sense says the next great media movie is bound to happen, sooner or later. And when it does, that film will probably look a lot more like Absence Of Malice than All The President’s Men.
Other films—Broadcast News, Network, The Insider, Shattered Glass, Truth, to name a few—have taken a serious cut at journalism in the years since classics like The Front Page, Citizen Kane, and The Sweet Smell Of Success put a framework around the genre.
But no movies in the last half-century have better defined inherent polarities in journalism—good reporter/bad reporter, fearless investigator/flawed newshound, bearer of truth/purveyor of damaging falsehood—than those two dramas,...
- 3/29/2019
- by Michael Cieply
- Deadline Film + TV
Robert Redford: 'The Great Gatsby' and 'The Way We Were' tonight on Turner Classic Movies Turner Classic Movies' Star of the Month Robert Redford returns this evening with three more films: two Sydney Pollack-directed efforts, Out of Africa and The Way We Were, and Jack Clayton's film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby. (See TCM's Robert Redford film schedule below. See also: "On TCM: Robert Redford Movies.") 'The Great Gatsby': Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby Released by Paramount Pictures, the 1974 film version of The Great Gatsby had prestige oozing from just about every cinematic pore. The film was based on what some consider the greatest American novel ever written. Francis Ford Coppola, whose directing credits included the blockbuster The Godfather, and who, that same year, was responsible for both The Godfather Part II and The Conversation, penned the adaptation. Multiple Tony winner David Merrick (Becket,...
- 1/21/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Robert Redford: 'The Great Gatsby' and 'The Way We Were' tonight on Turner Classic Movies Turner Classic Movies' Star of the Month Robert Redford returns this evening with three more films: two Sydney Pollack-directed efforts, Out of Africa and The Way We Were, and Jack Clayton's film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby. (See TCM's Robert Redford film schedule below. See also: "On TCM: Robert Redford Movies.") 'Out of Africa' Out of Africa (1985) is an unusual Robert Redford star vehicle in that the film's actual lead isn't Redford, but Meryl Streep -- at the time seen as sort of a Bette Davis-Alec Guinness mix: like Davis, Streep received a whole bunch of Academy Award nominations within the span of a few years: from 1978-1985, she was shortlisted for no less than six movies.* Like Guinness, Streep could transform...
- 1/21/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Hollywood script doctor favoured by Sydney Pollack
Like certain potentates who travel with a personal physician, the director Sydney Pollack almost always had his own script doctor close at hand to revitalise a sick screenplay. David Rayfiel, who has died of congestive heart failure aged 87, was called in on the majority of Pollack's features, usually for a few weeks, in order to fix specific problems, rewrite here and there, and add and subtract lines. Though well remunerated for his work, Rayfiel was usually given no screen credit.
However, the spotlight was sometimes turned on him, such as when Robert Redford called Rayfiel "the unsung hero of almost every picture Sydney Pollack and I have made together". When Out of Africa (1985) won the Oscar for best picture, Pollack thanked Rayfiel for "keeping us honest" and Kurt Luedtke, upon accepting the Academy award for his screenplay of the same film, also acknowledged Rayfiel.
Like certain potentates who travel with a personal physician, the director Sydney Pollack almost always had his own script doctor close at hand to revitalise a sick screenplay. David Rayfiel, who has died of congestive heart failure aged 87, was called in on the majority of Pollack's features, usually for a few weeks, in order to fix specific problems, rewrite here and there, and add and subtract lines. Though well remunerated for his work, Rayfiel was usually given no screen credit.
However, the spotlight was sometimes turned on him, such as when Robert Redford called Rayfiel "the unsung hero of almost every picture Sydney Pollack and I have made together". When Out of Africa (1985) won the Oscar for best picture, Pollack thanked Rayfiel for "keeping us honest" and Kurt Luedtke, upon accepting the Academy award for his screenplay of the same film, also acknowledged Rayfiel.
- 7/1/2011
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
"Random Hearts" is a picture divided against itself. The central love story is an unconvincing emotional stretch that two intense, if not overwrought, performances by Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas cannot salvage. But of equal concern is the film's desire to build romance out of tragedy and despair. While certainly not impossible, the effort misfires here when logic and chemistry dictate against such an outcome.
It almost feels as if director-producer Sydney Pollack, one of the most accomplished pros in the business, needed to challenge himself with the impossible romance contained in Warren Adler's 1984 novel of the same name. But the very spit and polish of a Pollack production with its glistening surfaces and the careful calculations of its screenwriting work against the spontaneous combustion in Adler's love story.
"Random Hearts" should do well with older female audiences, but it looks like a tough sell to others, with the under-25 set mostly ignoring the romantic drama.
Light years removed from the "meet cute" of many movie romances, "Random Hearts" has a "meet tragic" as the springboard for its story. Ford plays a married Internal Affairs sergeant in the Washington police department. Scott Thomas is a married congresswoman from New Hampshire running for re-election.
There's no reason why they should ever meet -- until a commercial airliner crashes into Chesapeake Bay, leaving no survivors. Both their spouses were on that jet.
Ford quickly realizes that neither of the spouses, sitting next to each other and traveling on "Mr. and Mrs". tickets, had any business reason to travel to the plane's destination, Miami. So he launches a gut-wrenching investigation into his own life -- and his wife's apparent secret one.
On the other hand, Scott Thomas, with an election campaign and teenage daughter, wants to know as little as possible about her husband's clandestine affairs. But Ford's out-of-control persistence draws her against her will into the investigation.
The next thing you know -- and it's that abrupt -- the two are falling into something like love. A certain desperation draws them together, with the central issue being one of trust.
"I don't trust this (affair) any more than you do," he tells her. "But you're the only thing that's real."
Ford is so tightly wound, even before he learns of the deaths, that his fixations are convincing even if his furtive feelings for the congresswoman are not. Scott Thomas' politician does a better job of masking the pain in her heart. But you see it in her eyes and feel it in her brusque, businesslike manner. Yet there simply is no logic in her positive response to Ford's sexual overtures.
The screenplay, written by longtime Pollack collaborator Kurt Luedtke with an adaptation credit going to novelist-screenwriter Darryl Ponicsan, relies heavily on the actors to supply motivation for their characters' erratic behavior. But this forces Ford and Scott Thomas into hysterical, obsessional realms. They do nothing to embarrass themselves as actors, but the roles defeat them nonetheless.
The betrayed lovers soon enough realize the impossibility of their relationship. In a climax and denouement, the viewer is meant to understand they have pacified the inner demons that torment them, and the possibility exists that down the road the two may yet get together for a more relaxed relationship.
But this is no more convincing than their tempestuous affair. The film has taken the form of a mystery that neither detectives will ever solve. Neither enjoys an epiphany. Nor does a clue surface as to what motivated the dead couple.
"Random Hearts" verges uncomfortably close to melodrama where plot drives character. The people in this film are so buffeted by events that when they do finally act, those actions feel as contrived as do the events that swirl about them.
There are excellent supporting performances, in particular Charles S. Dutton as Ford's increasingly concerned partner and Pollack himself as Scott Thomas' cynical campaign manager. Peter Coyote and Susanna Thompson appear briefly but effectively as the doomed spouses.
Dave Grusin's unobtrusive music, Philippe Rousselot's often brooding cinematography and Barbara Ling's meticulous production design are first class.
RANDOM HEARTS
Columbia Pictures
Rastar/Mirage Enterprises
Credits: Producers: Sydney Pollack, Marykay Powell; Director: Sydney Pollack; Writer: Kurt Luedtke; Adaptation by: Darryl Ponicsan; Based on the novel by: Warren Adler; Executive producers: Ronald L. Schwary, Warren Adler; Director of photography: Philippe Rousselot; Production designer: Barbara Ling; Music: Dave Grusin; Costume designer: Bernie Pollack; Editor: William Steinkamp. Cast: Dutch Van Den Broeck: Harrison Ford; Kay Chandler: Kristin Scott Thomas; Alcee: Charles S. Dutton; Wendy Judd: Bonnie Hunt; Detective George Beaufort: Dennis Haysbert; Carl Broman: Sydney Pollack; Truman Trainor: Richard Jenkins. MPAA rating: R. Color/stereo. Running time -- 131 minutes.
It almost feels as if director-producer Sydney Pollack, one of the most accomplished pros in the business, needed to challenge himself with the impossible romance contained in Warren Adler's 1984 novel of the same name. But the very spit and polish of a Pollack production with its glistening surfaces and the careful calculations of its screenwriting work against the spontaneous combustion in Adler's love story.
"Random Hearts" should do well with older female audiences, but it looks like a tough sell to others, with the under-25 set mostly ignoring the romantic drama.
Light years removed from the "meet cute" of many movie romances, "Random Hearts" has a "meet tragic" as the springboard for its story. Ford plays a married Internal Affairs sergeant in the Washington police department. Scott Thomas is a married congresswoman from New Hampshire running for re-election.
There's no reason why they should ever meet -- until a commercial airliner crashes into Chesapeake Bay, leaving no survivors. Both their spouses were on that jet.
Ford quickly realizes that neither of the spouses, sitting next to each other and traveling on "Mr. and Mrs". tickets, had any business reason to travel to the plane's destination, Miami. So he launches a gut-wrenching investigation into his own life -- and his wife's apparent secret one.
On the other hand, Scott Thomas, with an election campaign and teenage daughter, wants to know as little as possible about her husband's clandestine affairs. But Ford's out-of-control persistence draws her against her will into the investigation.
The next thing you know -- and it's that abrupt -- the two are falling into something like love. A certain desperation draws them together, with the central issue being one of trust.
"I don't trust this (affair) any more than you do," he tells her. "But you're the only thing that's real."
Ford is so tightly wound, even before he learns of the deaths, that his fixations are convincing even if his furtive feelings for the congresswoman are not. Scott Thomas' politician does a better job of masking the pain in her heart. But you see it in her eyes and feel it in her brusque, businesslike manner. Yet there simply is no logic in her positive response to Ford's sexual overtures.
The screenplay, written by longtime Pollack collaborator Kurt Luedtke with an adaptation credit going to novelist-screenwriter Darryl Ponicsan, relies heavily on the actors to supply motivation for their characters' erratic behavior. But this forces Ford and Scott Thomas into hysterical, obsessional realms. They do nothing to embarrass themselves as actors, but the roles defeat them nonetheless.
The betrayed lovers soon enough realize the impossibility of their relationship. In a climax and denouement, the viewer is meant to understand they have pacified the inner demons that torment them, and the possibility exists that down the road the two may yet get together for a more relaxed relationship.
But this is no more convincing than their tempestuous affair. The film has taken the form of a mystery that neither detectives will ever solve. Neither enjoys an epiphany. Nor does a clue surface as to what motivated the dead couple.
"Random Hearts" verges uncomfortably close to melodrama where plot drives character. The people in this film are so buffeted by events that when they do finally act, those actions feel as contrived as do the events that swirl about them.
There are excellent supporting performances, in particular Charles S. Dutton as Ford's increasingly concerned partner and Pollack himself as Scott Thomas' cynical campaign manager. Peter Coyote and Susanna Thompson appear briefly but effectively as the doomed spouses.
Dave Grusin's unobtrusive music, Philippe Rousselot's often brooding cinematography and Barbara Ling's meticulous production design are first class.
RANDOM HEARTS
Columbia Pictures
Rastar/Mirage Enterprises
Credits: Producers: Sydney Pollack, Marykay Powell; Director: Sydney Pollack; Writer: Kurt Luedtke; Adaptation by: Darryl Ponicsan; Based on the novel by: Warren Adler; Executive producers: Ronald L. Schwary, Warren Adler; Director of photography: Philippe Rousselot; Production designer: Barbara Ling; Music: Dave Grusin; Costume designer: Bernie Pollack; Editor: William Steinkamp. Cast: Dutch Van Den Broeck: Harrison Ford; Kay Chandler: Kristin Scott Thomas; Alcee: Charles S. Dutton; Wendy Judd: Bonnie Hunt; Detective George Beaufort: Dennis Haysbert; Carl Broman: Sydney Pollack; Truman Trainor: Richard Jenkins. MPAA rating: R. Color/stereo. Running time -- 131 minutes.
- 9/28/1999
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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