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- Actress
- Soundtrack
Dominique Ellen Dunne was born in Santa Monica, California, the daughter of Ellen Beatriz Griffin Dunne and Dominick Dunne, a producer, actor, and writer. Actor Griffin Dunne is her brother. After her parents' divorce, she moved first to New York, and then to Beverly Hills. Upon graduation from high school, Dominique went to the University of Colorado to study acting, leaving after one year to pursue her career. Three weeks after arriving in Hollywood, she landed her first gig. Other roles soon followed, notably her role as Dana Freeling, the eldest daughter in Poltergeist (1982), and Dominique was soon well known in the Hollywood social scene. Well-liked by all who knew her, Dominique seemed to be at the top of the world. Then, at a party, she met John Thomas Sweeney, the chef at popular LA nightspot "Ma Maison." The two began a relationship, which turned stormy. Sweeney was uncontrollable and abusive (so abusive that Dominique did not need makeup to play the role of an abuse victim on Hill Street Blues (1981)). Dominique ended the relationship on October 30, 1982. That same night, a distraught Sweeney raced to her house, where she and actor David Packer were rehearsing a scene from V (1983), dragged her outside, and strangled her, leaving her brain-dead. Five days later, she was removed from life support and died, cutting short a brilliant career and leaving behind scores of shocked and angry loved ones.- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
Robin McLaurin Williams was born on Saturday, July 21st, 1951, in Chicago, Illinois, a great-great-grandson of Mississippi Governor and Senator, Anselm J. McLaurin. His mother, Laurie McLaurin (née Janin), was a former model from Mississippi, and his father, Robert Fitzgerald Williams, was a Ford Motor Company executive from Indiana. Williams had English, German, French, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish ancestry.
Robin briefly studied political science at Claremont Men's College and theater at College of Marin before enrolling at The Juilliard School to focus on theater. After leaving Juilliard, he performed in nightclubs where he was discovered for the role of "Mork, from Ork", in an episode of Happy Days (1974). The episode, My Favorite Orkan (1978), led to his famous spin-off weekly TV series, Mork & Mindy (1978). He made his feature starring debut playing the title role in Popeye (1980), directed by Robert Altman.
Williams' continuous comedies and wild comic talents involved a great deal of improvisation, following in the footsteps of his idol Jonathan Winters. Williams also proved to be an effective dramatic actor, receiving Academy Award nominations for Best Actor in a Leading Role in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Dead Poets Society (1989), and The Fisher King (1991), before winning the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in Good Will Hunting (1997).
During the 1990s, Williams became a beloved hero to children the world over for his roles in a string of hit family-oriented films, including Hook (1991), FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992), Aladdin (1992), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Jumanji (1995), Flubber (1997), and Bicentennial Man (1999). He continued entertaining children and families into the 21st century with his work in Robots (2005), Happy Feet (2006), Night at the Museum (2006), Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009), Happy Feet Two (2011), and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014). Other more adult-oriented films for which Williams received acclaim include The World According to Garp (1982), Moscow on the Hudson (1984), Awakenings (1990), The Birdcage (1996), Insomnia (2002), One Hour Photo (2002), World's Greatest Dad (2009), and Boulevard (2014).
On Monday, August 11th, 2014, Robin Williams was found dead at his home in Tiburon, California USA, the victim of an apparent suicide, according to the Marin County Sheriff's Office. A 911 call was received at 11:55 a.m. PDT, firefighters and paramedics arrived at his home at 12:00 p.m. PDT, and he was pronounced dead at 12:02 p.m. PDT.- Heather Michele O'Rourke was born on December 27, 1975 in Santee, San Diego, California, to Kathleen, a seamstress, and Michael O'Rourke, a construction worker. She had German, Danish, English, and Irish ancestry.
Heather entered American cinematic pop-culture before first grade. She was sitting alone in the MGM Commissary waiting for her mother when a stranger approached her asking her name. "My name is Heather O'Rourke," she said. "But you're a stranger, and I can't talk to you". When her mother returned, the stranger introduced himself as Steven Spielberg. She failed her first audition when she laughed at a stuffed animal Spielberg presented her with. He thought she was just too young (she had just turned five), and he was actually looking for a girl at least 6 years old, but he saw something in her and asked her to come in a second time with a scary story book. He asked her to scream a lot. She screamed until she broke down in tears. The next day at the commissary, Spielberg told her and her family, "I don't know what it is about her, but she's got the job." She instantly became a star overnight and was easily recognized at her favorite theme park, Disneyland, and everywhere in California. In the years that followed, Heather was a familiar face on TV in Happy Days (1974) (1982-1983), Webster (1983) (1983-1984), and The New Leave It to Beaver (1983) (1986-1987), three shows in which she had recurring roles. In 1986, the highly anticipated sequel to her first movie, Poltergeist (1982), Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) debuted in theaters; it was her riveting performance in this film that cemented her a place in Hollywood history. In January 1987, Heather began to have flu-like symptoms and her legs and feet swelled. She was taken to Kaiser Hospital, and they confirmed it was only the flu, but when symptoms continued, they diagnosed her as having Crohn's Disease, a chronic inflammation of the intestine. She was on medication throughout the filming of her next project, Poltergeist III (1988), and her cheeks were puffy in some scenes. She never complained during filming and did not appear sick to fellow cast members.
When filming was completed in June, Heather and her family went on a road trip from Chicago, to New Orleans, to Orlando and all the way back to Lakeside where they lived at the time. Heather was well until January 31, 1988, Super Bowl Sunday. She was unable to keep anything in her stomach and crawled into bed with her parents that night, saying that she didn't feel well. The next morning, February 1, sitting at the breakfast table, she couldn't swallow her toast or Gatorade. Her mother noticed her fingers were blue and her hands were cold. Kathleen called the doctor's and was getting ready to put her clothes on when Heather fainted on the kitchen floor. When the paramedics came in, Heather insisted that she was "really okay" and was worried about missing school that day. In the ambulance, Heather suffered cardiac arrest and died on the operating table at 2:43 p.m. at the tender age of 12. Of all her achievements, Heather was proudest of being elected student body president of her 5th grade class in 1985. - Production Designer
- Production Manager
Jose Menendez was born to a prosperous family in Havana, Cuba. His father was a well-known soccer player who owned his own accounting firm. His mother was a swimmer who had been elected to Cuba's sports hall of fame. Although the family was not among the elite, Jose's parents were celebrity athletes and he and his two sisters wanted for nothing. But in 1959, this seemingly idyllic life was uprooted. Fidel Castro overthrew the ruling government and seized the property of the wealthy and upper-middle class. In 1960, a 16 year-old Jose left the country to live in the United States, flying with his sister's fiancé. In high school, he was a high achiever and won an athletic scholarship, but could not afford to attend an Ivy League college. While attending Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, he met his future wife, Mary Louise Anderson, nicknamed Kitty to those who knew her. They married in 1964. After graduating, he passed the CPA exam and he became a successful businessman. In all of his workplaces, he was credited with being an highly intelligent and diligent, but was widely disliked as arrogant and rude to co-workers and abrasive to subordinates. He became the father of two sons, Lyle Menendez and Erik Menendez, and was a stern and demanding father. He was also an unfaithful husband, with a string of mistresses. His family moved to southern California and he became an executive for RCA, and became acquainted with a number of show business celebrities. But he was experiencing marital problems and his relationship with both sons was deteriorating. In 1989, while he and his wife were watching television, they were shot to death by their sons.- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
A native of New Jersey and son of a mechanic, African-American John Amos has relied on his imposing build, eruptive nature and strong, forceful looks to obtain acting jobs, and a serious desire for better roles to earn a satisfying place in the annals of film and TV. He has found it a constant uphill battle to further himself in an industry that tends to diminish an actor's talents with severe and/or demeaning stereotypes and easy pigeonholing. A tough, often hot-headed guy with a somewhat tender side, John would succeed far better on stage than on film and TV...with one extremely noteworthy exceptions.
Born on December 27, 1939, John was first employed as an advertising copywriter, a social worker at New York's Vera Institute of Justice, and an American and Canadian semi-professional football player before receiving his calling as an actor. A stand-up comic on the Greenwich Village circuit, the work eventually took him West and, ultimately, led to his hiring as a staff writer on Leslie Uggams' musical variety show in 1969. Making his legit stage debut in a 1971 L.A. production of the comedy "Norman, Is That You?", John went on to earn a Los Angeles Drama Critics nomination for "Best Actor". As such, he formed his own theater company and produced "Norman, Is That You?" on tour.
The following year he returned to New York to take his first Broadway bow in "Tough To Get Help". By this time he had secured secondary work on the classic The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970) as Gordy the weatherman. His character remained on the periphery, however, and he left the show after three discouraging seasons. On the bright side, he won the recurring role of the sporadically-unemployed husband of maid Florida Evans (played by Esther Rolle) on Norman Lear's Maude (1972) starring Bea Arthur. The two characters were spun-off into their own popular series as the parental leads in Good Times (1974).
Good Times (1974), a family sitcom that took place in a Chicago ghetto high-rise, initially prided itself as being the first network series ever to be created by African-Americans. But subsequent episodes were taken over by others and John was increasingly disgruntled by the lack of quality of the scripts and the direction Lear was taking the show. Once focused on the importance of family values, it was shifting more and more toward the silly antics of Jimmie 'JJ' Walker, who was becoming a runaway hit on the show as the aimless, egotistical, jive-talking teenage son JJ. John began frequently clashing with the higher-ups and, by 1976, was released from the series, with his character being killed in an off-camera car accident while finding employment out of state.
Amos rebounded quickly when he won the Emmy-nominated role of the adult Kunte Kinte in the ground-breaking epic mini-series Roots (1977), one of the most powerful and reverential TV features ever to hit television. It was THE TV role of his career, but he found other quality roles for other black actors extremely difficult to come by. He tried his best to avoid the dim-headed lugs and crime-motivated characters that came his way. Along with a few parts (the mini-movie Willa (1979) and the films The Beastmaster (1982) and Coming to America (1988)), he had to endure the mediocre (guest spots on The Love Boat (1977), "The A-Team", "Murder, She Wrote" "One Life to Live"). John also toiled through a number of action-themed films that focused more on grit and testosterone than talent.
He found one answer to this acting dilemma on the proscenium stage. In 1985, the play "Split Second" earned him the NAACP Award as Best Actor. He also received fine reviews in a Berkshire Theater festival production of "The Boys Next Door", a tour of O'Neill's towering play "The Emperor Jones", and in a Detroit production of Athol Fugard's "Master Harold...and The Boys". In addition, John directed two well-received productions, "Miss Reardon Drinks a Little" and "Twelve Angry Men", in the Bahamas. He took on Shakespeare as Sir Toby Belch in "Twelfth Night" at Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare and earned strong notices in the late August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Fences" at the Capital Repertory Company in Albany, New York. Overseas he received plaudits for his appearance in a heralded production of "The Life and Death of a Buffalo Soldier" at the Bristol's Old Vic in England. Capping his theatrical career was the 1990 inaugural of his one-man show "Halley's Comet", an amusing and humanistic American journey into the life of an 87-year-old who recalls, among other things, World War II, the golden age of radio, the early civil rights movement, and the sighting of the Comet when he was 11. He wrote and has frequently directed the show, which continues to play into the 2007-2008 season.
In recent years, John has enjoyed recurring parts on "The West Wing" and "The District", and is more recently appearing in the offbeat series Men in Trees (2006) starring Anne Heche. John Amos has two children by his former wife Noel Amos and two children. Son K.C. Amos director, writer, producer, editor and daughter Shannon Amos a director, writer and producer. Amos has one grand child,a grand-daughter, Quiera Williams.- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Christopher Shannon Penn was born on October 10, 1965 in Los Angeles, California, the third son of actress Eileen Ryan (née Annucci) and director, actor, and writer Leo Penn. His siblings are musician Michael Penn and actor Sean Penn. His father was from a Lithuanian Jewish/Russian Jewish family, and his mother is of half-Italian and half-Irish descent.
Penn set out to follow in his parents' footsteps and started acting at age twelve in the Loft Studio. While in high school he and his brother Sean made several shorts with their classmates, which included such would-be stars as Emilio Estevez and Rob Lowe. Penn made his onscreen debut in the Christopher Cain movie, Charlie and the Talking Buzzard (1979). After a few years Penn caught the eye of acclaimed director Francis Ford Coppola, who cast him in a supporting role in the teen drama Rumble Fish (1983). Although the film was a flop critically and commercially, Penn's career was well under way.
That same year he acted in All the Right Moves (1983), a high school drama film starring a young Tom Cruise. The next year Penn gave a performance in Footloose (1984), starring Kevin Bacon and dealing with a small town which bans rock & roll music. The movie was a smash hit, and remains a classic to this day. Penn followed this up with a villainous role in Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider (1985), and the crime movie At Close Range (1986), starring Christopher Walken.
Penn acted in a few smaller productions until he was cast as Travis Brickley in the sports drama Best of the Best (1989). Penn's character is a martial arts fighter who joins the other main characters when they enter a taekwondo tournament against the Korean team. The movie spawned several sequels, though Penn only appeared in the first and second films. A few more jobs followed until Penn landed what is known as his most famous movie: Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992). The indie crime film concerned a heist gone wrong, as the criminals search for a rat in their midst. Penn played the role of Nice Guy Eddie, the son of the old gangster that arranges the heist. The film continues to receive acclaim as a classic movie and as the start of Tarantino's directing career. Penn also acted in the Tarantino-scripted Tony Scott crime movie True Romance (1993), albeit in a much smaller role. Penn also took a supporting role in the ensemble film Short Cuts (1993) by Robert Altman.
After participating in these acclaimed films, Penn took on several smaller projects, including a role as the villain in the second "Beethoven" movie. In this period of time, Penn acted in such films as the crime film Mulholland Falls (1996), set in the 1950s. Penn then gave one of his greatest performances in the Abel Ferrara crime drama The Funeral (1996). The movie starred Christopher Walken, Penn, and Vincent Gallo as three brothers who are involved in the world of crime, even as it threatens to take them all down. Penn plays Chez, the middle brother, who has a very short temper. Penn also sang a song in the film as his character. While the film was well received critically and Penn received an award for Best Supporting Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his excellent performance, The Funeral (1996) went largely unseen. Penn followed up with the Canadian film The Boys Club (1996), the crime thriller One Tough Cop (1998), and a supporting role in the hit comedy Rush Hour (1998).
Following his latest success, Penn acted in the drama-comedy The Florentine (1999), the English comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2001), and the crime thriller Murder by Numbers (2002). Penn was also one of the many stars that acted in the box office failure Masked and Anonymous (2003), starring Bob Dylan. The last few years of his career mainly featured supporting roles in such movies as After the Sunset (2004), Starsky & Hutch (2004), and the Canadian crime film King of Sorrow (2007), his last film appearance. Throughout his life Penn had had battles with heart disease and multiple drug use. He was found dead in his home on January 24, 2006. He was only forty years old.
Penn left behind a career that featured many roles in small, independent productions as well as several very well-known films. Penn worked with several esteemed directors and fellow actors, lending his talent to both television and film. Although he never received nearly as much attention or as many awards as his brother Sean, Chris Penn will always be remembered by those who watch movies and appreciate his work.- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Incisive, intense, multi-talented American actor Lance Solomon Reddick was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the younger of two sons, to Solomon Reddick and public schoolteacher Dorothy Gee. Having opted initially for a career in music, he attended first the Peabody Preparatory Institute and the Walden School before studying classical composition at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music, qualifying with a Bachelor's Degree. By the early '90s, however, Reddick was forced to re-evaluate his career plans because of a severe back injury suffered while pulling a double shift waiting on tables and delivering newspapers. A pressing need to make ends meet made him enroll at the Yale School of Drama, from where he went on to graduate in 1994 with a Master of Fine Arts Degree. He derived much inspiration from his classmate Paul Giamatti and came to regard Daniel Day-Lewis as his quintessential acting role model.
Possessed of an athletic build and a deep, resonant voice, Reddick also had a self-declared affinity for accents. Preparing himself for his roles, he immersed himself fully into his characters as a "transformational performer", often rehearsing his lines in front of a mirror. He made his television debut in an episode of New York Undercover (1994). Though he played a couple of drug addicts early on, he soon found himself much in demand-- and ultimately typecast -- as powerful authority figures, from police detectives (Johnny Basil in Oz (1997)) to FBI agents (Law & Order (1990)) to senior police officer (Cedric Daniels in The Wire (2002)). One of his best known roles on the big screen was as the mysterious Mr. Charon, concierge at the Continental Hotel, scene of much of the action in the John Wick (2014) franchise.
Arguably, his most memorable character was that of Phillip Broyles, special agent-in-charge with the Department of Homeland Security, heading a team of experts investigating paranormal events in the outstanding science fiction drama series Fringe (2008). Broyles was a no-nonsense tough guy, who, nevertheless, remained steadfastly loyal in defense of his team against insidious forces from within and without. Unlike Broyles, Reddick's other important recurring TV character, Chief Irving in Bosch (2014), was a morally ambiguous man motivated chiefly by political ambition. Both were flawless performances.
Prior to his sad and untimely passing in March 2023 at the age of 60, Reddick was much sought-after as a voice actor for animations and video games. He also never lost his lifelong passion for music, and, in 2007, released an album of his compositions entitled "Contemplations & Remembrances". In private life, the twice-married Reddick was said to have been very much devoted to his three dogs.- Actor
- Soundtrack
River Phoenix was born River Jude Bottom in Madras, Oregon. His mother, Arlyn (Dunetz), a Bronx-born secretary, and his father, John Bottom, a carpenter, met in California in 1968. They worked as itinerant fruit pickers, and later joined the Children of God religious group (John was originally Catholic, while Arlyn was born Jewish). By the time River was two, they were living in South America, where John was the sect's Archbishop of Venezuela. They later left the group and, in 1977, moved back to the United States, changing their last name to "Phoenix". They lived with River's maternal grandparents in Florida, and later moved to Los Angeles. His parents encouraged all of their children to get into movies and, by age ten, River was acting professionally on TV. His film debut was in Explorers (1985), followed rapidly by box-office successes with Stand by Me (1986) and The Mosquito Coast (1986), and as young Indiana in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). His role as Danny Pope in Running on Empty (1988) earned him an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor. His best role was probably Mike, the hustler in My Own Private Idaho (1991).
A dedicated animal-rights activist and environmentalist, River was a strict vegetarian and a member of PeTA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). River was a talented musician as well as an actor, and he played guitar, sang, and wrote songs for his band, Aleka's Attic, which also included his sister Rain Phoenix, while living in Gainsville, Florida. Although the band never released its own album, their song "Across the Way" can be found on PeTA's "Tame Yourself" album, used to fight animal abuse. River was in the middle of filming Dark Blood (2012), playing the character Boy when he died. The film couldn't be finished due to too many unfilmed crucial scenes. His mother was later sued.
River died of acute multiple drug intoxication involving lethal levels of cocaine and morphine at age 23 outside the Viper Room, Johnny Depp's Los Angeles club.- Actor
- Director
- Writer
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.- Actor
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Bill Paxton was born on May 17, 1955 in Fort Worth, Texas. He was the son of Mary Lou (Gray) and John Lane Paxton, a businessman and actor (as John Paxton). Bill moved to Los Angeles, California at age eighteen, where he found work in the film industry as a set dresser for Roger Corman's New World Pictures. He made his film debut in the Corman film Crazy Mama (1975), directed by Jonathan Demme. Moving to New York, Paxton studied acting under Stella Adler at New York University. After landing a small role in Stripes (1981), he found steady work in low-budget films and television. He also directed, wrote and produced award-winning short films including Barnes & Barnes: Fish Heads (1980), which aired on Saturday Night Live (1975). His first appearance in a James Cameron film was a small role in The Terminator (1984), followed by his very memorable performance as Private Hudson in Aliens (1986) and as the nomadic vampire Severen in Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark (1987). Bill also appeared in John Hughes' Weird Science (1985), as Wyatt Donnelly's sadistic older brother Chet. Although he continued to work steadily in film and television, his big break did not come until his lead role in the critically acclaimed film-noir One False Move (1991). This quickly led to strong supporting roles as Wyatt Earp's naive younger brother Morgan in Tombstone (1993) and as Fred Haise, one of the three astronauts, in Apollo 13 (1995), as well as in James Cameron's offering True Lies (1994).
Bill died on February 25, 2017, in Los Angeles, from complications following heart surgery. He was 61.- Actress
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Glynis Johns was the daughter of actor Mervyn Johns. Best known for her light comedy roles and often playful flirtation, Glynis was born in South Africa while her parents were on tour there (her mother was a concert pianist) but was always proud of her Welsh roots and took delight in playing the female lead (opposite Richard Burton) in the classic Under Milk Wood (1971). She was probably best known for her role as the suffragette mother in Mary Poppins (1964) although she is probably best loved for her fishy roles in Miranda (1948) and Mad About Men (1954). She had earlier showed she could take on the serious roles as well as in Frieda (1947). Most recently seen (at the time of writing) in Superstar (1999). Johns died in 2024, aged 100, having never received the damehood she had richly deserved for decades. Predeceased by her only son, she was survived by a grandson,Thomas Forwood, and three great-grandchildren.- Actress
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Brittany Murphy was born Brittany Anne Bertolotti on November 10, 1977 in Atlanta, Georgia, to Sharon Kathleen Murphy and Angelo Joseph Bertolotti. Her father's ancestry is Italian, and her mother is of Irish and Slovak descent. Her father moved the family back to Edison, New Jersey as a native New Yorker and to be closer to other siblings from previous marriages. While dining out one night in the presence of Hollywood royalty, Brittany at the age of 5 approached an adjoining table when Academy Award nominee Burt Reynolds and George Segal were seated. Brittany introduced herself to the Hollywood legends and confidently told them that someday she too would be a star.
She comes from a long line of international musicians and performers with three half-brothers and a sister. Angelo Bertolotti was torn from their tight-knit family as a made-man with the Italian Mafia. The Senior Bertolotti, who coined the nickname of "Britt" for his daughter, was also an entrepreneur and diplomat for organized crime families and one of the first to be subjected to a RICO prosecution. Brittany's interests and well-being were always her father's first goal and objective. To distance his talented daughter from his infamous past, Angelo allowed Sharon to use her maiden name for Brittany's, so that her shining star would not be overshadowed by a father's past, with the couple divorcing thereafter.
Brittany began receiving accolades and applause in regional theater at the early age of 9. At the age of 13, she landed several national commercials. She appeared on television and caught the attention of a personal manager and an agent. Soon, Brittany's mother Sharon turned full-time to being a "Stage Mom" where Angelo provided financial support throughout and their relationship is memorialized with a long and close history in pictures. The hopeful daughter and mother moved to Burbank, CA, where Brittany landed her first television role on Blossom (1990). Hearts and doors opened up for a starring role on Drexell's Class (1991), a short lived TV series.
Brittany's big screen movie debut started with Clueless (1995), where she was co-starring with Alicia Silverstone. Britt soared, demonstrating her musical and artistic talents with dramatic and comedic roles landing a nomination for best leading female performance in the Young Artist Awards for her role in the television film David and Lisa (1998). She garnered tremendous attention for her role in Girl, Interrupted (1999) with Academy Award winner Angelina Jolie. Brittany's band, "Blessed Soul" was growing with her as lead singer and Britt lent her vocal talents to the TV hit, cartoon sensation, King of the Hill (1997) as the voice of Luanne.
She is alleged to have been a witness in the case of the former Department of Homeland Security employee and persecuted whistleblower Julia Davis. According to Davis, Brittany and her fiancée Simon Monjack were then targeted for retaliation that included land and aerial surveillance and a threatened prosecution. Monjack was arrested and detained by the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Brittany and Simon confided in Alex Ben Block of the Hollywood Reporter, telling him in an interview that they were under surveillance by helicopters and their telephones have been wiretapped. This information was published by THR posthumously, in an article entitled "The Last Difficult Days of Brittany Murphy."
On December 20, 2009, Brittany Murphy died an untimely death. The LAPD and Los Angeles County Coroner closed the case within one hour, attributing her death to pneumonia and anemia. Five months after Brittany's unexpected demise, her husband Simon Monjack was found dead in the house he shared with Brittany. The chief/spokesperson at the Los Angeles County Dept of Coroner, Craig Harvey, stated that Simon also died from the same exact causes as his wife, namely pneumonia and anemia. Neither Brittany, nor Simon, were given a thorough and complete forensic autopsy for poisons. Brittany's father, Angelo "AJ" Bertolotti, is pursuing the investigation of the true reasons behind Brittany's and Simon's sudden demise, as he believes that the two were murdered. Abnormally high levels of heavy metals and poisons were discovered in Brittany's hair, tested by two other independent forensic labs with famed Pathologist, attorney Cyril Wecht concluded from the appearances, Brittany could have been murdered and should be exhumed. Her father Angelo is preparing court actions to ensure she obtains justice.- This talented actress was born Anne Marie Wersching and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. She opted early on for a life in the entertainment industry, performing in community theatre and later as a dancer for some fourteen years with a troupe called the St. Louis Celtic Stepdancers. After moving to Chicago, she acted in several touring plays and at the Utah Shakespearean Festival. In 1999, Wersching graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Musical Theatre from the Millikin University School of Theater and Dance in Decatur, Illinois. Moving to Los Angeles, two years later, she appeared in a revival of the Stephen Sondheim-Richard Rodgers-Arthur Laurents musical "Do I Hear a Waltz?" at the Pasadena Playhouse, as well as making her screen debut in an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise (2001).
Testament to her acting skill have been lengthy stints on popular prime time series like 24 (2001) (as the valiant but ill-fated FBI Special Agent Renee Walker), The Vampire Diaries (2009) (Lily Salvatore), Timeless (2016) (as time traveler Emma Whitmore) and Marvel's Runaways (2017) (as charismatic villain turned ally Leslie Dean). She also gave a thoroughly convincing performance as extrovert rookie police officer Julia Brasher, involved with (Harry) Bosch (2014) at LAPD's Hollywood Division on both a professional and a personal level. Their relationship eventually soured in season two, although Brasher returned briefly for two episodes in season 7. Wersching became the third actress to play the dreaded Borg Queen (following in the footsteps of Alice Krige and Susanna Thompson) and did so to chilling effect in season two of Star Trek: Picard (2020). Her steady volume of television work has included guest appearances on Charmed (1998), Supernatural (2005), NCIS (2003), Hawaii Five-0 (2010) and Castle (2009).
Very much at the peak of her career, Annie Wersching was diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 2020, but kept her illness private and continued to work afterwards. She passed away at her home in Los Angeles, California on January 29, 2023, at age 45. - Director
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Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, Essex, England. He was the son of Emma Jane (Whelan; 1863 - 1942) and East End greengrocer William Hitchcock (1862 - 1914). His parents were both of half English and half Irish ancestry. He had two older siblings, William Hitchcock (born 1890) and Eileen Hitchcock (born 1892). Raised as a strict Catholic and attending Saint Ignatius College, a school run by Jesuits, Hitch had very much of a regular upbringing. His first job outside of the family business was in 1915 as an estimator for the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company. His interest in movies began at around this time, frequently visiting the cinema and reading US trade journals.
Hitchcock entering the film industry in 1919 as a title card designer. It was there that he met Alma Reville, though they never really spoke to each other. It was only after the director for Always Tell Your Wife (1923) fell ill and Hitchcock was named director to complete the film that he and Reville began to collaborate. Hitchcock had his first real crack at directing a film, start to finish, in 1923 when he was hired to direct the film Number 13 (1922), though the production wasn't completed due to the studio's closure (he later remade it as a sound film). Hitchcock didn't give up then. He directed The Pleasure Garden (1925), a British/German production, which was very popular. Hitchcock made his first trademark film in 1927, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) . In the same year, on the 2nd of December, Hitchcock married Alma Reville. They had one child, Patricia Hitchcock who was born on July 7th, 1928. His success followed when he made a number of films in Britain such as The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Jamaica Inn (1939), some of which also gained him fame in the USA.
In 1940, the Hitchcock family moved to Hollywood, where the producer David O. Selznick had hired him to direct an adaptation of 'Daphne du Maurier''s Rebecca (1940). After Saboteur (1942), as his fame as a director grew, film companies began to refer to his films as 'Alfred Hitchcock's', for example Alfred Hitcock's Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot (1976), Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972).
Hitchcock was a master of pure cinema who almost never failed to reconcile aesthetics with the demands of the box-office.
During the making of Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock's wife Alma suffered a paralyzing stroke which made her unable to walk very well. On March 7, 1979, Hitchcock was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award, where he said: "I beg permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation, and encouragement, and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter Pat, and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen and their names are Alma Reville." By this time, he was ill with angina and his kidneys had already started to fail. He had started to write a screenplay with Ernest Lehman called The Short Night but he fired Lehman and hired young writer David Freeman to rewrite the script. Due to Hitchcock's failing health the film was never made, but Freeman published the script after Hitchcock's death. In late 1979, Hitchcock was knighted, making him Sir Alfred Hitchcock. On the 29th April 1980, 9:17AM, he died peacefully in his sleep due to renal failure. His funeral was held in the Church of Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. Father Thomas Sullivan led the service with over 600 people attended the service, among them were Mel Brooks (director of High Anxiety (1977), a comedy tribute to Hitchcock and his films), Louis Jourdan, Karl Malden, Tippi Hedren, Janet Leigh and François Truffaut.- Actress
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Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was considered one of the last, if not the last, major star to have come out of the old Hollywood studio system. She was known internationally for her beauty, especially for her violet eyes, with which she captured audiences early in her youth and kept the world hooked with ever after.
Taylor was born on February 27, 1932 in London, England. Although she was born an English subject, her parents, Sara Taylor (née Sara Viola Warmbrodt) and Francis Taylor, were Americans, art dealers from St. Louis, Missouri. Her father had moved to London to set up a gallery prior to Elizabeth's birth. Her mother had been an actress on the stage, but gave up that vocation when she married. Elizabeth lived in London until the age of seven, when the family left for the US when the clouds of war began brewing in Europe in 1939. They sailed without her father, who stayed behind to wrap up the loose ends of the art business.
The family relocated to Los Angeles, where Mrs. Taylor's own family had moved. Mr. Taylor followed not long afterward. A family friend noticed the strikingly beautiful little Elizabeth and suggested that she be taken for a screen test. Her test impressed executives at Universal Pictures enough to sign her to a contract. Her first foray onto the screen was in There's One Born Every Minute (1942), released when she was ten. Universal dropped her contract after that one film, but Elizabeth was soon picked up by MGM.
The first production she made with that studio was Lassie Come Home (1943), and on the strength of that one film, MGM signed her for a full year. She had minuscule parts in her next two films, The White Cliffs of Dover (1944) and Jane Eyre (1943) (the former made while she was on loan to 20th Century-Fox). Then came the picture that made Elizabeth a star: MGM's National Velvet (1944). She played Velvet Brown opposite Mickey Rooney. The film was a smash hit, grossing over $4 million. Elizabeth now had a long-term contract with MGM and was its top child star. She made no films in 1945, but returned in 1946 in Courage of Lassie (1946), another success. In 1947, when she was 15, she starred in Life with Father (1947) with such heavyweights as William Powell, Irene Dunne and Zasu Pitts, which was one of the biggest box office hits of the year. She also co-starred in the ensemble film Little Women (1949), which was also a box office huge success.
Throughout the 1950s, Elizabeth appeared in film after film with mostly good results, starting with her role in the George Stevens film A Place in the Sun (1951), co-starring her good friend Montgomery Clift. The following year, she co-starred in Ivanhoe (1952), one of the biggest box office hits of the year. Her busiest year was 1954. She had a supporting role in the box office flop Beau Brummell (1954), but later that year starred in the hits The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) and Elephant Walk (1954). She was 22 now, and even at that young age was considered one of the world's great beauties. In 1955 she appeared in the hit Giant (1956) with James Dean.
Sadly, Dean never saw the release of the film, as he died in a car accident in 1955. The next year saw Elizabeth co-star with Montgomery Clift in Raintree County (1957), an overblown epic made, partially, in Kentucky. Critics called it dry as dust. In addition, Clift was seriously injured during the film, with Taylor helping save his life. Despite the film's shortcomings and off-camera tragedy, Elizabeth was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Southern belle Susanna Drake. However, on Oscar night the honor went to Joanne Woodward for The Three Faces of Eve (1957).
In 1958 Elizabeth starred as Maggie Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). The film received rave reviews from the critics and Elizabeth was nominated again for an Academy Award for best actress, but this time she lost to Susan Hayward in I Want to Live! (1958). She was still a hot commodity in the film world, though. In 1959 she appeared in another mega-hit and received yet another Oscar nomination for Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). Once again, however, she lost out, this time to Simone Signoret for Room at the Top (1958). Her Oscar drought ended in 1960 when she brought home the coveted statue for her performance in BUtterfield 8 (1960) as Gloria Wandrous, a call girl who is involved with a married man. Some critics blasted the movie but they couldn't ignore her performance. There were no more films for Elizabeth for three years. She left MGM after her contract ran out, but would do projects for the studio later down the road. In 1963 she starred in Cleopatra (1963), which was one of the most expensive productions up to that time--as was her salary, a whopping $1,000,000. The film took years to complete, due in part to a serious illness during which she nearly died.
This was the film where she met her future and fifth husband, Richard Burton (the previous four were Conrad Hilton, Michael Wilding, Mike Todd--who died in a plane crash--and Eddie Fisher). Her next films, The V.I.P.s (1963) and The Sandpiper (1965), were lackluster at best. Elizabeth was to return to fine form, however, with the role of Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Her performance as the loudmouthed, shrewish, unkempt, yet still alluring Martha was easily her finest to date. For this she would win her second Oscar and one that was more than well-deserved. The following year, she and Burton co-starred in The Taming of The Shrew (1967), again giving winning performances. However, her films afterward were box office failures, including Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), The Comedians (1967), Boom! (1968) (again co-starring with Burton), Secret Ceremony (1968), The Only Game in Town (1970), X, Y & Zee (1972), Hammersmith Is Out (1972) (with Burton again), Ash Wednesday (1973), Night Watch (1973), The Driver's Seat (1974), The Blue Bird (1976) (considered by many to be her worst), A Little Night Music (1977), and Winter Kills (1979) (a controversial film which was never given a full release and in which she only had a small role). She later appeared in some movies, both theatrical and made-for-television, and a number of television programs. In February 1997, Elizabeth entered the hospital for the removal of a brain tumor. The operation was successful. As for her private life, she divorced Burton in 1974, only to remarry him in 1975 and divorce him, permanently, in 1976. She had two more husbands, U.S. Senator John Warner and construction worker Larry Fortensky, whom she met in rehab.
In 1959, Taylor converted to Judaism, and continued to identify herself as Jewish throughout her life, being active in Jewish causes. Upon the death of her friend, actor Rock Hudson, in 1985, she began her crusade on behalf of AIDS sufferers. In the 1990s, she also developed a successful series of scents. In her later years, her acting career was relegated to the occasional TV-movie or TV guest appearance.
Elizabeth Taylor died on March 23, 2011 in Los Angeles, from congestive heart failure. Her final resting place is Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in Glendale, California.- Lance Kerwin was born on 6 November 1960 in Newport Beach, California, USA. He was an actor, known for Outbreak (1995), Enemy Mine (1985) and Salem's Lot (1979). He was married to Yvonne Kerwin and Kristen Lansdale. He died on 24 January 2023 in San Clemente, California, USA.
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Luke Perry was an American actor, primarily remembered as a teen idol throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s. Perry was born in Mansfield, Ohio in 1966. Mansfield was known at the time as a center for the home appliances and stove manufacturing industries. The city's largest employer used to be the Westinghouse Electric Corporation.
Perry's parents were the steelworker Coy Luther Perry Jr. (1944-1980) and his wife Ann. Perry's parents divorced in 1972, when he was 6-years-old. Ann gained custody over her children, and later married construction worker Steve Bennett. Luke was mostly raised by his mother and stepfather, and did not have a close relationship with his biological father. Coy Perry suffered a heart attack in 1980 and died, when Luke was 14-years-old. Luke attended his funeral.
Perry was mostly raised in the village of Fredericktown, Ohio, and attended the Fredericktown High School. In his high school years, Perry served in the role of the school mascot, the "Freddie Bird".
In 1984, the 18-year-old Perry moved to Los Angeles, with the intention of becoming a professional actor. For several years, Perry kept auditioning for various roles without ever being hired. He supported himself financially by working at odd jobs, and serving as an extra for music videos. His most notable role in this period was in the 1986 music video for the song "Be Chrool to Your Scuel" (1985) by the heavy metal band "Twisted Sister".
Perry's first successful audition landed him the role of a recurring character in the soap opera Loving (1983) (1983-1995). From 1987 to 1988, he played the character of Ned Bates. In Perry's own words: "Ned was a dirt-poor mechanic from Tennessee who always got taken advantage of".
Perry next received a recurring role in another soap opera, Another World (1964) (1964-1999). From 1988 to 1989, he played the character of Kenny, the manager of aspiring model and actress Josie Watt (played by Alexandra Wilson).
In 1990, Perry landed the most significant role of his career, depicting the character of Dylan McKay in the teen drama Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990) (1990-2000). He played the character for a total of 199 episodes. Dylan was the teenage rebel son of business tycoon Jack McKay and hippie ex-wife Iris McKay. He started the series as a loner, but he offered help to nerdy schoolmate Scott Scanlon (played by Douglas Emerson) against the local bullies. This act of bravery gained him new friends and the romantic attention of Brenda Walsh (played by Shannen Doherty).
Perry's success in his new role gained him a huge following among teenage girls, and guaranteed that he would receive more job offers. His first starring role in a film was the drama Terminal Bliss (1990) (1992), where he played the self-destructive rich kid John Hunter. The film was a box-office flop.
Perry had a more memorable role in the horror comedy film Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), as the character Oliver Pike. Pike was a hard-drinking slacker youth in Los Angeles, and had a hostile relationship with high school girl Buffy Summers (played by Kristy Swanson). After Pike's best friend gets turned into a vampire, Pike assists Buffy in her battles with the vampire lord Lothos (played by Rutger Hauer) and his subordinate vampires. Pike is Buffy's sidekick and main love interest in the film, and has appeared in various adaptations, though not in the spin-off television series.
Perry had his first voice acting role in the episode, Krusty Gets Kancelled (1993) of the animated sitcom The Simpsons (1989). He played a parody version of himself as a sidekick of the character Krusty the Clown in a show-within-the-show. Perry had more voice acting roles in other animated television series of this era. He played the Detroit-based crime lord Napoleon Brie in Biker Mice from Mars (1993) (1993-1996), the master ninja Sub-Zero in Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm (1995) (1996), Bruce Banner's best friend and sidekick Rick Jones in The Incredible Hulk (1996) (1996-1997), and Nicky Little's boyfriend Stewart Waldinger in Pepper Ann (1997) (1997-2000).
In live-action films, Perry played the starring role of professional bull-rider Lane Frost (1963-1989) in the biographical drama 8 Seconds (1994). He played a version of himself in the Italian comedy film Vacanze di Natale '95 (1995) ("Christmas Vacation '95", 1995), where he is the love interest of infatuated teenager Marta Colombo (played by Cristiana Capotondi). Perry played the police officer and bank robber Chris Anderson in the crime drama Normal Life (1996), while his wife and partner-in-crime Pam Anderson was played by Ashley Judd. He played the suicidal character Johnny in the comedy-drama American Strays (1996), which features the character hiring a professional hit-man to provide him with an assisted suicide.
In 1997, Perry played a small role in the science fiction film The Fifth Element (1997). In a scene set in 1914, Perry plays the assistant archaeologist Billy Masterson. Masterson sees his mentor being knocked out by Mondoshawan aliens, and reacts by shooting one of the aliens. Masterson's fate is left uncertain in the film, though the novelization features him as the victim of a poisoning plot.
In the late 1990s, Perry appeared frequently in television films and various direct-to-video films. He had guest roles in several television series, but mostly playing one-shot characters. Following the end of Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990) in 2000, his first major role was the recurring character Jeremiah Cloutier in the crime-drama Oz (1997) (1997-2003). Introduced in 2001 episodes of the series, Jeremiah was an Evangelical preacher who was imprisoned for embezzling funds from his church. He used his charisma and preaching skills to convert fellow prisoners to Evangelical Christianity, He was eventually assassinated by his own convert Timmy Kirk (Sean Dugan) and several of Kirk's friends, after Jeremiah denounced Kirk using Christianity as an excuse to murder people.
Perry next gained a starring role in the post-apocalyptic series Jeremiah (2002) (2002-2004). The series is set c. 2021, 15 years after a plague killed nearly everyone over the age of thirteen. Most of the adult characters of the show were children at that time, and survived the event. Now they are troubled adults, trying to survive in a harsh world. Perry's character Jeremiah is a wanderer who finds himself recruited into a Colorado-based secretive organization. He fights a war against a West Virginia-based organization which seeks to either conquer or wipe out all remaining outposts of humanity. The series lasted two seasons. A third season was planned, but plans for it were aborted due to disagreements between the production companies co-financing the series.
Perry returned to playing mostly guest star roles in television. In 2006, he was cast as one of the main characters in the short-lived drama series Windfall (2006). Only 13 episodes were produced, as the series failed to find an audience and one of the show's co-creators had left before the season's completion.
In 2007, Perry played businessman Linc Stark in the surf-themed series John from Cincinnati (2007). Despite relatively high ratings, the series only lasted for one season.
In the late 2000s, Perry played guest roles in police procedural a series: the rapist Noah Sibert in Trials (2008) and the cult leader Benjamin Cyrus in Minimal Loss (2008).
For much of the 2010s, Perry continued mostly appearing in guest roles and relatively obscure films. In 2015, a colonoscopy test revealed pre-cancerous growths in Perry's body, that could have developed into colorectal cancer. Perry received medical treatment, and became a spokesperson for campaigns requiring early testing for cancer.
In 2017, Perry returned to prominence in a live-action adaptation of a comic book series, Riverdale (2017) (2017-2019). It was an adaptation of Archie Comics' characters, but in a mystery series instead of their traditional comedy setting. Perry played Frederick "Fred" Andrews, Archie Andrews's father, depicted here as the owner of a successful construction company. Fred is depicted as a single father, as his wife Mary Andrews abandoned him and moved to Chicago. The series also depicts Fred as the ex-boyfriend of Hermione Gomez-Lodge (Veronica Lodge's mother).
On February 27, 2019, Perry suffered a massive ischemic stroke within his home in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles. He was hospitalized, but suffered a second stroke days later. He died on March 4, 2019, having never recovered from the two strokes. He was only 52 years old. His body was buried near his home in Vanleer, Tennessee, where he had bought a farm and the associated house in 1995, and spent time living there when not working on film or television projects.
Perry's will reportedly left his son Jack Perry (b. 1997) and daughter Sophie Perry (b. 2000) as the only heirs to his estate. The press noted that the will excludes Perry's mother, his stepfather, his siblings, his ex-wife, and his last fiancée from having inheritance claims, and there was some speculation on Perry's motivation for this decision. His net worth was estimated at over $10 million.- Actor
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Patrick Wayne Swayze was born on August 18, 1952 in Houston, Texas, to Patsy Swayze (née Yvonne Helen Karnes), a choreographer, and Jesse Wayne Swayze, a chemical plant engineer draftsman. His mother owned a dance school in Houston, where Patrick was also a student. His father passed away in 1982. He graduated from Waltrip High School in Houston, and attended San Jacinto College in Pasadena, Texas. He married actress/dancer Lisa Niemi on June 12, 1975, whom he had known when she was 15 and a student at his mother's dance school. His New York City dance training included the Harkness Ballet School and Joffrey Ballet School. He first danced professionally as "Prince Charming" in "Disney on Parade". After a stint as "Danny Zuko" in the original Broadway production of "Grease", he made his film debut with a small role in Skatetown U.S.A. (1979). He made his television debut in 1981 on M*A*S*H (1972), as a soldier diagnosed with leukemia.
After many supporting roles in films and a lead role in the TV mini-series North & South: Book 1, North & South (1985), he landed his breakthrough role as dance instructor "Johnny Castle" in the hit film Dirty Dancing (1987), for which he received a Golden Globe nomination. He received a second nomination for his portrayal of "Sam Wheat" in the blockbuster Ghost (1990). Ghost (1990) was the highest-grossing film of 1990, and at one point, the fourth highest-grossing film of all time. Unfortunately, he did not capitalize on its success. His subsequent films like City of Joy (1992), Tall Tale (1995), Black Dog (1998), and Waking Up in Reno (2002) did not fare well with critics or audiences. In December 2003, he returned to Broadway as a replacement for the lead role of "Billy Flynn" in the acclaimed revival of John Kander & Fred Ebb's musical, "Chicago". The production also went on tour in several cities of the United States, including Los Angeles. In January 2008, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He fought the illness for well over a year and was able to continue working, but died on September 14, 2009.- Actress
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Carolyn Sue Jones was born in 1930, in Amarillo, Texas, to homemaker Chloe (or Cloe) Jeanette Southern (1906-1979), and Julius Alfred Jones (1897-1979), a barber. Her sister was Bette (later Mrs. Moriarty). Carolyn was an imaginative child, much like her mother; she and her mother shared the same birthday (April 28).
In 1934, her father abandoned the family and her mother moved them in with her own parents, also in Amarillo. As a child, Carolyn suffered from severe asthma. Although she loved movies, she was often too sick to attend, so she listened to her favorites, Danny Kaye and Spike Jones and read as many movie fan magazines as she could. She dreamed of attending the famed Pasadena Playhouse and received many awards at school for speech, poetry, and dramatics. In 1947, she was accepted as a student at the Pasadena Playhouse, and her grandfather agreed to pay for her classes. She worked in summer stock to supplement her income, graduating in 1950.
She gave herself a complete head-to-toe makeover, including painful cosmetic nose surgery to make herself ready for movie roles. Working as an understudy at the Players Ring Theater, she stepped in when the star left to get married. She was seen by a talent scout from Paramount and given a screen test, which went well. She made her first appearance in The Turning Point (1952). She did some other work during her 6-month contract, but when it ended, Paramount, suffering from television's impact, let it lapse. She quipped, "They let me and 16 secretaries go!"
She started working in television but kept busy on stage as well. There, she met a fellow Texan, a young man named Aaron Spelling, and they became a couple. She made a breakthrough in the 3-D movie House of Wax (1953) and garnered excellent reviews. Aaron was still struggling, so he felt he wasn't able to propose to Carolyn; she finally proposed to him. They were married in April 1953. Neither was earning much, but they really enjoyed each other and their life. Many saw them as an ideal couple. She decided against having children as she felt she could not juggle the demands of both a career and a family.
Columbia Pictures saw her and wanted to test her for the part of prostitute Alma Burke in From Here to Eternity (1953), but she got extremely sick with pneumonia and the part went to Donna Reed, nine years older, who won an Academy Award. Jones did, however, achieve success in the science-fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), a subtle allegory of the times (McCarthyism). And the famous filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock cast her in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) opposite James Stewart and Doris Day. Meanwhile, Aaron had little success as an actor and Carolyn pushed him to become a writer, even threatening to leave him. She constantly promoted his scripts whenever she could and he was ultimately hired by Dick Powell. Carolyn, meanwhile, was successful once more in The Bachelor Party (1957) (famous line, "Just say you love me--you don't have to mean it!"). For this role, she surprised cast members by dyeing her hair black and cutting it short. This stunning look served her well for a number of roles. For her eight minutes on screen, she received glowing reviews and was nominated for an Academy Award but lost. However, she did win the Golden Globe Award and the Laurel Award for Marjorie Morningstar (1958). She followed this with an impressive appearance in King Creole (1958), generally regarded as Elvis Presley's best film. She then gave arguably her best performance ever in Career (1959), but the film was not commercially successful. She played a serious role in this, leaving the kooky role she might have played to Shirley MacLaine.
As Aaron's career soared, the marriage started to fail. They separated in October 1963 and amicably divorced in August 1965, with Carolyn asking for no alimony. They remained friends. She worked at various roles including two episodes of Burke's Law (1963) for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. Soon, she got the part for which she will best be remembered, that of Morticia Addams in The Addams Family (1964). She spent two years in this role. Her costume was designed to copy the cartoon drawings and no doubt inspired such imitators as Cassandra Peterson (Elvira, Mistress of the Dark). The show went head-to-head with The Munsters (1964) and Bewitched (1964).
The show was a hit and she received all the fame she had craved. However, the network decided to cancel the show, despite its success, after only two years. Typecast as Morticia but without the income that a few more years would have provided, she found life difficult and roles few. While acting on the road, she married her voice coach, Herbert Greene, a well-known and respected Broadway conductor and musical director, and they moved together to Palm Springs, California. After seven years, she left him and returned to Hollywood, determined to try to restart her career. She was surprisingly successful and performed in several shows, including Wonder Woman (1975), where she played Hippolyta, the mother of Wonder Woman (Lynda Carter) and Wonder Girl (Debra Winger). She also appeared in the landmark miniseries Roots (1977). She appeared in four episodes of Fantasy Island (1977) and one episode of The Love Boat (1977), two shows produced by her former husband, Aaron Spelling. In 1979, both of Jones's parents died; her mother from pancreatic cancer. She took on the role of Myrna Clegg on the soap Capitol (1982) from 1982 to 1983, despite having been diagnosed with colon cancer in 1981. She underwent aggressive treatment for the cancer, but it returned during her time on the show and she was told it was terminal.
She played some scenes despite being confined to a wheelchair and working in great pain. Knowing time was short, she married her boyfriend of five years, Peter Bailey-Britton, in September 1982. She died on August 3, 1983, aged 53. She had told her sister Bette that she wanted her epitaph to be "She gave joy to the world." She certainly had many friends who loved her greatly, and many fans who enjoyed her wonderful performances.- Actor
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Jeff Conaway was born on 5 October 1950 in New York City, New York, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for Grease (1978), Taxi (1978) and Jawbreaker (1999). He was married to Kerri Young and Rona Newton-John. He died on 27 May 2011 in Encino, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
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Matthew Perry was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, to Suzanne Marie (Langford), a Canadian journalist, and John Bennett Perry, an American actor. His ancestry includes English, Irish, German, Swiss-German, and French-Canadian.
Perry was raised in Ottawa, Ontario, where he became a top-ranked junior tennis player in Canada. However, after moving to Los Angeles at the age of 15 to live with his father, he became more interested in acting. In addition to performing in several high school stage productions, he remained an avid tennis player. Perry ranked 17th nationally in the junior singles category and third in the doubles category. Upon graduating from high school, Perry intended to enroll at the University of Southern California. However, when he was offered a leading role on the television series, Boys Will Be Boys (1987), he seized the opportunity to begin his acting career.
Perry appeared in the hit comedy film The Whole Nine Yards (2000), as the neighbor of a hit man, played by Bruce Willis. His other feature film credits included Fools Rush In (1997), A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (1988), She's Out of Control (1989) and Parallel Lives (1994). He also co-starred with Chris Farley in the buddy comedy Almost Heroes (1998) and in the romantic comedy, Three to Tango (1999), opposite Neve Campbell. Perry resided in Los Angeles. He enjoyed playing ice hockey and softball in his spare time.- Actress
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Anne Celeste Heche was an American actress, director, and screenwriter. She came to recognition portraying Vicky Hudson and Marley Love in the soap opera Another World (1964), which won her a Daytime Emmy Award and two Soap Opera Digest Awards. She came to mainstream prominence in the late 1990s with roles in the crime drama film Donnie Brasco (1997), the disaster film Volcano (1997), the slasher film I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), the action comedy film Six Days Seven Nights (1998), and the drama-thriller film Return to Paradise (1998).- Actor
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John Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison in Iowa, to Mary Alberta (Brown) and Clyde Leonard Morrison, a pharmacist. He was of English, Scottish, Ulster-Scots, and Irish ancestry.
Clyde developed a lung condition that required him to move his family from Iowa to the warmer climate of southern California, where they tried ranching in the Mojave Desert. Until the ranch failed, Marion and his younger brother Robert E. Morrison swam in an irrigation ditch and rode a horse to school. When the ranch failed, the family moved to Glendale, California, where Marion delivered medicines for his father, sold newspapers and had an Airedale dog named "Duke" (the source of his own nickname). He did well at school both academically and in football. When he narrowly failed admission to Annapolis he went to USC on a football scholarship 1925-7. Tom Mix got him a summer job as a prop man in exchange for football tickets. On the set he became close friends with director John Ford for whom, among others, he began doing bit parts, some billed as John Wayne. His first featured film was Men Without Women (1930). After more than 70 low-budget westerns and adventures, mostly routine, Wayne's career was stuck in a rut until Ford cast him in Stagecoach (1939), the movie that made him a star. He appeared in nearly 250 movies, many of epic proportions. From 1942-43 he was in a radio series, "The Three Sheets to the Wind", and in 1944 he helped found the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a Conservative political organization, later becoming its President. His conservative political stance was also reflected in The Alamo (1960), which he produced, directed and starred in. His patriotic stand was enshrined in The Green Berets (1968) which he co-directed and starred in. Over the years Wayne was beset with health problems. In September 1964 he had a cancerous left lung removed; in 1977 when Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope was being made, John Waynes archive voice was used for the character Garindan ezz Zavor, later in March 1978 there was heart valve replacement surgery; and in January 1979 his stomach was removed. He received the Best Actor nomination for Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and finally got the Oscar for his role as one-eyed Rooster Cogburn in True Grit (1969). A Congressional Gold Medal was struck in his honor in 1979. He is perhaps best remembered for his parts in Ford's cavalry trilogy - Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950).- Actor
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Born in Danbury, Connecticut, USA, to Greg and Mary, Jonathan Brandis began his career at age 5, acting in several television commercials. He also appeared in small parts in several films and TV shows before his first starring role in the 1990 film The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter (1990). He starred in popular films such as Ladybugs (1992) and starred as Lucas Wolenczak in Steven Spielberg's television series SeaQuest 2032 (1993). He doubled up his high school courses so he could finish a year early for his role on SeaQuest. After his career stalled for a bit, he was hoping his role in serious drama film Hart's War (2002) would relaunch it. However, most of his scenes ended up being cut from the finished film. This caused him to fall into a deep depression in which he would drink heavily and tragically end his own life on November 12th, 2003.- Actress
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A new reigning 1960s international sex symbol took to the cinematic throne as soon as Raquel Welch emerged from the sea in her purposely depleted, furry prehistoric bikini. Tantalizingly wet with her garb clinging to all the right amazonian places, One Million Years B.C. (1966), if nothing else, captured the hearts and libidos of modern men (not to mention their teenage sons) while producing THE most definitive and best-selling pin-up poster of that time.
She was born Jo Raquel Tejada on September 5, 1940 in Chicago, Illinois, the first of three children of Bolivian-born Armando Carlos Tejada, an aerospace engineer, and his wife, Josephine Sarah (Hall). The family moved to San Diego, California (her father was transferred) when Raquel was only two. Taking dance lessons as a youngster, she grew up to be quite a knockout and nailed a number of teen beauty titles ("Miss Photogenic," "Miss La Jolla," "Miss Contour," "Miss Fairest of the Fair" and "Miss San Diego").
With her sights set on theater arts, she studied at San Diego State College on a scholarship starting in 1958 and married her first husband, high school sweetheart James Welch, the following year. They had two children: Damon Welch (born 1959), who later became an actor/production assistant, and actress Tahnee Welch (born 1961). Tahnee went on to take advantage of her own stunning looks as an actress, most notably with her prime role in Cocoon (1985).
Off campus, she became a local TV weather girl in San Diego and eventually quit college. Following the end of her marriage in 1962 (although Raquel and James Welch didn't divorce until 1964), she packed up her two children and moved to Dallas, Texas, where she modeled for Neiman-Marcus and worked as a barmaid for a time.
Regrouping, she returned to California and made the rounds of film/TV auditions. She found work providing minor but sexy set decoration on the small screen (Bewitched (1964), McHale's Navy (1962) and The Virginian (1962)) as well as the large screen (Elvis Presley's Roustabout (1964) and Doris Day's Do Not Disturb (1965)). Caught in the midst of the "beach party" craze, it's not surprising to find out that her first major film role was A Swingin' Summer (1965), which concentrated more on musical guests The Righteous Brothers and Gary Lewis & The Playboys than on Welch's outstanding assets. But 20th Century-Fox certainly took notice and signed her up.
With her very first film under contract (actually, she was on loan out to Britain's Hammer Studios at the time), she took on One Million Years B.C. (1966) (the remake of One Million B.C. (1940), in the role originated by Carole Landis), and the rest is history. Welch remained an international celebrity in her first few years of stardom. In England, she was quite revealing as the deadly sin representing "lust" for the comedy team of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in their vehicle Bedazzled (1967), and as the title secret agent in the spy spoof Fathom (1967). In Italy, she gained some exposure in primarily mediocre vehicles opposite such heartthrobs as Marcello Mastroianni.
Back in the U.S., however, she caused quite a stir in her groundbreaking sex scenes with black athlete Jim Brown in the "spaghetti western" 100 Rifles (1969), and as the transgender title role in the unfathomable Myra Breckinridge (1970). Adapted from Gore Vidal's novel, she created some unwelcome notoriety by locking horns with septuagenarian diva Mae West on the set. The instant cult movie certainly didn't help Welch's attempt at being taking seriously as an actress.
Box office bombs abounded. Try as she might in such films as Kansas City Bomber (1972) and The Wild Party (1975), which drew some good reviews for her, her sexy typecast gave her little room to breathe. With determination, however, she partly offset this with modest supporting roles in larger ensemble pieces. She showed definite spark and won a Golden Globe for the swashbuckler The Three Musketeers (1973), and appeared in the mystery thriller The Last of Sheila (1973). She planned on making a comeback in Cannery Row (1982), even agreeing to appear topless (which she had never done before), but was suddenly fired during production without notice. She sued MGM for breach of contract and ultimately won a $15 million settlement, but it didn't help her film career and only helped to label her as trouble on a set.
TV movies became a positive milieu for Welch as she developed sound vehicles for herself such as The Legend of Walks Far Woman (1980) and Right to Die (1987), earning a Golden Globe nomination for the latter project. She also found a lucrative avenue pitching beauty products in infomercials and developing exercise videos (such as Jane Fonda).
Welch took advantage of her modest singing and dancing abilities by performing in splashy Las Vegas showroom acts and starring in such plausible stage vehicles as "Woman of the Year" and "Victor/Victoria". She spoofed her own image on occasion, most memorably on Seinfeld (1989). Into the millennium, she co-starred in the Hispanic-oriented TV series American Family (2002) and the short-lived comedies Welcome to the Captain (2008) and Date My Dad (2017), along with the movies Tortilla Soup (2001), Legally Blonde (2001), Forget About It (2006) and How to Be a Latin Lover (2017).
Her three subsequent marriages were to producer/agent Patrick Curtis (who produced her TV special, Raquel (1970)), director André Weinfeld (who directed her in several fitness videos), and pizza parlor owner Richie Palmer, who was 14 years her junior. All these unions ended in divorce.
She died at 2:25 a.m. on February 15, 2023, aged 82, at her Los Angeles home after suffering a cardiac arrest. She had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease.