View allAll Photos Tagged actor
Since today's Movie Saturday, here's my top ten actors! I'm also going to include the film (or 1 TV show in this case) where this actor shined the most along side their name, check it out!
1. Paul Rudd (Ant-Man)
2. John C. Reilly (Check it Out! With Dr. Steve Brule) (yeah it's a TV show, but I love him in this role so much!)
3. Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy)
4. Will Ferrell (Anchorman)
5. John Goodman (The Big Lebowski)
6. Michael Shannon (Midnight Special)
7. Jeff Bridges (The Big Lebowski)
8. Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction)
9. Sylvester Stallone (Rocky)
10. Michael Keaton (Birdman)
Modelo: Alfredo Zapata, actor
Si te gusta esta imagen puedes seguirme en www.facebook.com/photodrama.es
British postcard by Santoro Graphics Ltd, no. C245.
American actor Rob Lowe (1964) was one of the members of the Brat Pack. He is known for the television series The West Wing, in which he played the role of Sam Seaborn.
Robert Hepler (Rob) Lowe was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1964. He was the son of Charles Lowe and Barbara Hepler and grew up in Dayton (Ohio) and Los Angeles. Lowe has one brother, the actor Chad Lowe (1968), and a younger half-brother from his father's second marriage, Justin. His career began when he was eight years old, with appearances on the local television station and summer theatre. After his parents' divorce, Lowe moved with his mother and brother to Los Angeles where, along with Emilio Estevez and others, he was educated at Santa Monica High School. In 1979, Lowe got the role of Tony Flanagan in the television sitcom A New Kind of Family (1979-1980). The series ended after only 11 episodes. However, his name stuck when the media noticed him and compared him to up-and-coming members of the Brat Pack. Along with Judd Nelson, Mare Winningham, Anthony Michael Hall, Demi Moore, Andrew McCarthy, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez and Ally Sheedy, he was among the nine original members of the Brat Pack. He did a number of television films and earned his first Golden Globe nomination for the teen drama Thursday's Child (David Lowell Rich, 1983). Lowe appeared alongside Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Emilio Estevez and Tom Cruise in The Outsiders (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983). The following year, he got the lead role in the film The Hotel New Hampshire (Tony Richardson, 1984), alongside Jodie Foster and Nastassja Kinski. Lowe starred with his fellow "Brat packers" in the coming-of-age film St. Elmo's Fire (Joel Schumacher, 1985). For this film, Lowe won his first award: a Razzie Award for worst male supporting actor. Partly because of his looks, Lowe became one of the Pack's most popular members. In between, Lowe starred in less noteworthy productions. In 1988, Lowe received his second Golden Globe nomination for the film Square Dance (Daniel Petrie, 1987). In 1988, however, his popularity suffered serious damage when a video emerged showing Lowe filming himself having sex with two girls, one of whom appeared to be underage. This happened in Atlanta, where Lowe was attending the 1988 Democratic National Convention. Lowe claimed he did not know she was underage, which was confirmed by the doorman of the bar where they met. She had also lied to get into the bar. For this, Lowe performed 20 hours of community service in Dayton. Around the same time, a leaked home video, in which Lowe could be seen with a model called Jennifer and a boyfriend, Justin Morris, while they were doing a threesome in a hotel room in Paris, was commercially marketed. This was one of the first celebrity sex videos to be sold commercially. Both videos caused a lot of damage to Lowe's career.
After these scandals, Rob Lowe sought treatment at a clinic for alcohol and sex addiction. After the scandals faded into oblivion, Lowe's career revived. This was partly because he mocked his irresponsible behaviour during an appearance as host of Saturday Night Live. In one of his appearances with the church lady, played by Dana Carvey, the latter promises to keep quiet about sex videos during the interview. In return, Lowe gets spanked by her live on TV. When Lowe is also spanked at the end of the skit, it turns out that, to the dismay of the church lady, this gets him sexually aroused. She starts exclaiming that Satan should be expelled from Lowe's buttocks, to which Lowe tells reporters, "I love getting spanked. I love the feeling of a glowing ass so much". In 1989, he sang the song 'Proud Mary' with the band Snow White at the Academy Awards, which was not a success. His role in the film Bad Influence (1990), in which he had to portray a villain, brought Lowe positively back into the limelight. In 1992, he made his Broadway debut in the play 'A Little Hotel on the Side'. The roles he was offered improved and in the same year Lowe appeared in Wayne's World. For his portrayal of the deaf-mute Nick Andros in the miniseries The Stand (Mick Garris, 1994) based on a book by Stephen King, Lowe received rave reviews. After this, Lowe temporarily disappeared behind the camera, where he produced the Western Frank & Jesse in 1994. In 1997, he wrote and directed the television film Desert's Edge. Also in 1997, he played the role of the right-wing leader of a Christian movement in the film Contact. In the film Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), he imitated the voice of Robert Wagner for the role of Young Number Two.
In 1999, Rob Lowe was back on television regularly when he got the role of acting head of communications Sam Seaborn in the NBC hit series The West Wing, about the life of President Bartlett (Martin Sheen). Basically, the series was supposed to revolve around his role, which was then the focus of the pilot episode, but the reviews for the complete cast were so raved, that a shift was made in the role assignment. In 2000 and 2001, Lowe received Golden Globe nominations in the "Best Actor" category for this, and in 2001 he also received an Emmy Award in the same category. In 2002, however, Lowe left the series because he could not agree on his role and salary. He wanted a more prominent role in the series with an accompanying salary than NBC was willing to give him. Although the other actors and especially Martin Sheen tried to keep him in the series, the episode featuring his departure was aired in February 2003, earlier than expected. During the final season of The West Wing, Lowe returned to his role of Sam Seaborn, appearing in two of the final four episodes. After this, he featured in the series Lyon's Den (2003), where he plays an idealistic attorney trying to get out of the shadow of his father, who is a senator. The series flopped and was taken off TV after 13 episodes. The same happened with the series Dr Vegas, also produced by Lowe. It stopped after 10 episodes due to a lack of success. Lowe starred in the remake of the Stephen King miniseries Salem's Lot (2004). In 2005, Lowe played the role of Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee in the theatre production of Aaron Sorkin's play 'A Few Good Men' in West End London. Lowe played a supporting role as a movie agent in the satirical black comedy Thank You for Smoking (Jason Reitman, 2006) starring Aaron Eckhart. In 2013, Lowe played a notable role as the evil plastic surgeon Dr Jack Startz in Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh, 2013), the successful film about the last decade of pianist and entertainer Liberace's life. In 2017, Lowe began a reality series with his two sons, the then 24-year-old Matthew and 22-year-old Jon Owen, The Lowe Files. With the exception of the hour-long pilot, the series featured 30-minute road trips with the Lowe boys, and occasional TV guest stars known in the field, investigating common urban myths and legends that Rob has loved since he was a young boy and has shared with his boys throughout their growth. In 2015, Lowe received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Lowe has been married to makeup artist Sheryl Berkoff since 1991. They met on a blind date in 1983.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Mock magazine cover from 1963 with an image of myself as Chantal Thierry, a 1960s French secret agent from my "Absolutely Smashing" franchise.
Spanish postcard by Bergas, no. 773. Photo: publicity still for the TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968) with David McCallum.
American actor Robert Vaughn died yesterday after a brief battle with acute leukemia. Vaughn's elegant, dark-haired Napoleon Solo on the Spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968) was television’s answer to James Bond. Together with his partner in the series, David McCallum as blond Russian Illya Kuryakin, Vaughn set 1960s TV’s standard for suavity and crimebusting cool. It’s international popularity led to back-to-back of Golden Globe nominations for Vaughn as Best TV Star in 1965-1966.
Robert Francis Vaughn was born in 1932 in New York City, to Gerald Walter Vaughn, a radio actor, and his wife, Marcella Frances (Gaudel), a stage actress. His ancestry included Irish, French, and German. His first film appearance was as an uncredited extra in The Ten Commandments (1956). Vaughn also had another early role as war veteran Chester A. Gwynn in The Young Philadelphians (1959). For this part he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor. He then played a gunman in The Magnificent Seven (1960), earning another Globe nomination for Most Promising Newcomer.
Later, Robert Vaughn had memorable parts in such popular pictures as Steve McQueen car-chase classic Bullitt (1968), The Towering Inferno (1974), S.O.B. (1981), Superman III (1983) and as the uncredited voice of Proteus IV, the computer villain of Demon Seed (1977). More recently, Vaughn played grifter and card sharp Albert Stroller on the British series Hustle (2004-2012). During the first two months of 2012, he took on the role of Milton Fanshaw in the long-running British soap opera Coronation Street, as Milton Fanshaw, a love interest for Sylvia Goodwin, played by veteran English actress Stephanie Cole. His memoir, A Fortunate Life, was published in 2009. Robert Vaughn was 83. He is survived by wife Linda, son Cassidy and daughter Caitlin.
Sources: Greg Evans and Erik Pedersen (Deadline), Wikipedia and IMDb.
Terracotta figurine of actors with masks. During the Hellenistic age comedy grew so popular that its theatrical types became the subjects of mosaics, wall-paintings and a common non expensive motif figurines. All favorite subjects of comedy (the pedagogue, the villager, Heracles and old Silen) are often depicted as humorous, rotund figures wearing mask.
The actors wore tights that covered them from neck to wrists and ankles; under the tights they had heavy padding fixed over the belly and backside, and sometimes breasts as well. The seams down the sides of sleeves or leggings were often made clear by painters. On the outside of the tights at the front was affixed a large leather phallus.
Source: Gregory W. Dobrov, “Brill’s Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy”
Terracotta figurine
Ca. 4th century BC
Thessaloniki, Archaeological Museum
From a visit to Højris Castle. As a visitor you were invited to solve a 'murder crime'. They have live actors roaming the castle and a different story/crime to solve each year. Very popular and a good way to engage visitors of all ages.
Photo by Poul-Werner Dam / bit.ly/PWD_Flickr
James Gandolfini, whose portrayal of a brutal, emotionally delicate mob boss in HBO's The Sopranos helped create one of TV's greatest drama series and turned the mobster stereotype on its head, died Wednesday in Italy. He was 51.
Photoshoot with Matthew Raetz
Actor/Model
Learn more about Matt here
and here
Lake Vista
New Orleans, Louisiana
Sindicato de actores de #EEUU realizó su entrega de premios número 23 t.co/A0X7kwJ9N4 #Espectáculos #ACN t.co/8w58gh3P1D (via Twitter twitter.com/AgenciaCN/status/826254428395204608)
Actor
Learn more about Bryan here
www.imdb.com/name/nm6882080/?ref_=nmmd_md_nm
Rivertown
Kenner, Louisiana
Explore: Jul 5, 2008 #280. A promotional shot for Oliver O'Dea, the former Cambridge boxer who is now focussing again on his acting career. I wanted to convey a sense of the future, with him looking to the future and the path ahead! He tells me he has a role in The Hunt for Gollum, a Lord of the Rings fan film, which is due out by the end of the year.
More on Oliver at www.oliverodea.com/index.html
and the film at www.hunt4gollum.com/ .
Italian postcard by B.F.F. Edit., no. 2255. Photo: RKO Radio.
Blue-eyed American actor Henry Fonda (1905-1982) exemplified not only integrity and strength, but an ideal of the common man fighting against social injustice and oppression. He is most remembered for his roles as Abe Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), for which he received an Academy Award Nomination, and more recently, Norman Thayer in On Golden Pond (1981), for which he received an Oscar for Best Actor in 1982. Notably he also played against character as the villain 'Frank' in Sergio Leone's classic Spaghetti Western Once upon a time in the West (1968). Fonda is considered one of Hollywood's old-time legends and his lifelong career spanned almost 50 years.
Henry Jaynes Fonda was born in Grand Island, Nebraska in 1905. His parents were Elma Herberta (Jaynes) and William Brace Fonda, who worked in advertising and printing and was the owner of the W. B. Fonda Printing Company in Omaha, Nebraska. His distant ancestors were Italians who had fled their country around 1400 and moved to Holland, presumably because of political or religious persecution. In the early1600's, they crossed the Atlantic and were among the early Dutch settlers in America. They established a still-thriving small town in upstate New York named Fonda, named after patriarch Douw Fonda, who was later killed by Indians. In 1919, young Henry was a first-hand witness to the Omaha race riots and the brutal lynching of Will Brown. This enraged the 14 years old Fonda and he kept a keen awareness of prejudice for the rest of his life. Following graduation from high school in 1923, Henry got a part-time job in Minneapolis with the Northwestern Bell Telephone Company which allowed him at first to pursue journalistic studies at the University of Minnesota. In 1925, having returned to Omaha, Henry reevaluated his options and came to the conclusion that journalism was not his forte, after all. For a while, he tried his hand at several temporary jobs, including as a mechanic and a window dresser. At age 20, Fonda started his acting career at the Omaha Community Playhouse, when his mother's friend Dodie Brando (mother of Marlon Brando) recommended that he try out for a juvenile part in You and I, in which he was cast as Ricky. Then he received the lead in Merton of the Movies and realized the beauty of acting as a profession. It allowed him to deflect attention from his own tongue-tied personality and create stage characters relying on someone else's scripted words. The play and its star received fairly good notices in the local press. It ran for a week, and for the rest of the repertory season, Henry advanced to assistant director which enabled him to design and paint sets as well as act. A casual trip to New York, however, had already made him set his sights on Broadway. In 1926, he moved to the Cape Cod University Players, where he met his future wife Margaret Sullavan. His first professional role was in The Jest, by Sem Benelli. James Stewart joined the Players a few months after Fonda left, but he would become his closest lifelong friend. In 1928, Fonda went east to New York to be with Margaret Sullavan, and to expand his theatrical career on Broadway. His first Broadway role was a small one in A Game of Love and Death with Alice Brady and Claude Rains. Henry played leads opposite Margaret Sullavan, who became the first of his five wives in 1931. They broke up in 1933. In 1934, he got a break of sorts, when he was given the chance to present a comedy sketch with Imogene Coca in the Broadway revue New Faces. That year, he also hired Leland Hayward as his personal management agent and this was to pay off handsomely. Major Broadway roles followed, including New Faces of America and The Farmer Takes a Wife. The following year he married Frances Seymour Brokaw with whom he had two children: Jane Fonda and Peter Fonda, also to become screen stars.
The 29-year old Henry Fonda was persuaded by Leland Hayward to become a Hollywood actor, despite initial misgivings and reluctance on Henry's part. Independent producer Walter Wanger, whose growing stock company was birthed at United Artists, needed a star for The Farmer Takes a Wife (Victor Fleming, 1935) opposite Janet Gaynor. I.S. Mowis at IMDb: “With both first choice actors Gary Cooper and Joel McCrea otherwise engaged, Henry was the next available option. After all, he had just completed a successful run on Broadway in the stage version. The cheesy publicity tag line for the picture was "you'll be fonder of Fonda", but the film was an undeniable hit.” Wanger, realizing he had a good thing going, next cast Henry in a succession of A-grade pictures which capitalized on his image as the sincere, unaffected country boy. Pick of the bunch were the Technicolor outdoor Western The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (Henry Hathaway, 1936) with Sylvia Sidney, and the gritty Depression-era drama You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1937) with Henry as a back-to-the-wall good guy forced into becoming a fugitive from the law by circumstance). Then followed the screwball comedy The Moon's Our Home (William A. Seiter, 1936) with ex-wife Margaret Sullavan, the excellent pre-civil war-era romantic drama Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938) featuring Bette Davis, and the Western Jesse James ( Henry King, 1939) starring Tyrone Power. Fonda rarely featured in comedy, except for a couple of good turns opposite Barbara Stanwyck and Gene Tierney - with both he shared an excellent on-screen chemistry - in The Mad Miss Manton (Leigh Jason, 1938), The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941) and the successful Rings on Her Fingers (Rouben Mamoulian, 1942). Henry gave his best screen performance to date in Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939), a fictionalized account of the early life of the American president as a young lawyer facing his greatest court case. Henry made two more films with director John Ford: the pioneering drama Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) with Claudette Colbert, and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about an Oklahoma family who moved west during the Dust Bowl. In his career-defining role as Tom Joad, Fonda played the archetypal grassroots American trying to stand up against oppression. His relationship with Ford would end on the set of Mister Roberts (John Ford, Mervyn LeRoy, 1955) when he objected to Ford's direction of the film. Ford punched Fonda and had to be replaced.
The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940) set the tone for Henry Fonda’s subsequent career. In this vein, he gave a totally convincing, though historically inaccurate, portrayal in the titular role of The Return of Frank James (Fritz Lang, 1940), a rare example of a sequel improving upon the original. He projected integrity and quiet authority whether he played lawman Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946) or a reluctant posse member in The Ox-Bow Incident (William A. Wellman, 1943). In between these two films, Fonda enlisted in the Navy to fight in World War II, saying, and served in the Navy for three years. He then starred in The Fugitive (John Ford, 1947), and Fort Apache (John Ford, 1948), as a rigid Army colonel, along with John Wayne and Shirley Temple in her first adult role. The following years, he did not appear in many films. Fonda was one of the most active, and most vocal, liberal Democrats in Hollywood. During the 1930s, he had been a founding member of the Hollywood Democratic Committee, formed in support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal agenda. In 1947, in the middle of the McCarthy witch hunt, he moved to New York, not returning to Hollywood until 1955. His son Peter Fonda writes in his autobiography Don't Tell Dad: A Memoir (1999) that he believes that Henry's liberalism caused him to be gray-listed during the early 1950s. Fonda returned to Broadway to play the title role in Mister Roberts for which he won the Tony Award as best dramatic actor. In 1979, he won a second special Tony, and was nominated for a Tony Award Clarence Darrow (1975). Later he played a juror committed to the ideal of total justice in 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957) which he also produced, and a nightclub musician wrongly accused of murder in The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956). During the next decade, he played in The Longest Day (Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton a.o., 1962), How the West Was Won (John Ford, Henry Hathaway, George Marshall, 1962) and as a poker-playing grifter in the Western comedy A Big Hand for the Little Lady (Fielder Cook, 1966) with Joanne Woodward. A big hit was the family comedy Yours, Mine and Ours (Melvillle Shavelson, 1968), in which he co-starred with Lucille Ball. The same year, just to confound those who would typecast him, he gave a chilling performance as one of the coldest, meanest stone killers ever to roam the West, in Sergio Leone's Western epic C'era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) opposite Charles Bronson and Claudia Cardinale. With James Stewart, he teamed up in Firecreek (Vincent McEveety, 1968), where Fonda again played the heavy, and the Western omedy The Cheyenne Social Club (Gene Kelly, 1970). Despite his old feud with John Ford, Fonda spoke glowingly of the director in Peter Bogdanovich's documentary Directed by John Ford (1971). Fonda had refused to participate until he learned that Ford had insisted on casting Fonda as the lead in the film version of Mr. Roberts (1955), reviving Fonda's film career after concentrating on the stage for years. Illness curtailed Fonda’s work in the 1970s. In 1976, Fonda returned in the World War II blockbuster Midway (Jack Smight, 1976) with Charlton Heston. Fonda finished the 1970s in a number of disaster films wilth all-star casts: the Italian killer octopus thriller Tentacoli/Tentacles (Ovidio G. Assonitis, 1977), Rollercoaster (James Goldstone, 1977) with Richard Widmark, the killer bee action film The Swarm (Irwin Allen, 1978), the global disaster film Meteor (Ronald Neame, 1979), with Sean Connery, and the Canadian production City on Fire (Alvin Rakoff, 1979), which also featured Shelley Winters and Ava Gardner. His final screen role was as an octogenarian in On Golden Pond (Mark Rydell, 1981), in which he was joined by Katharine Hepburn and his daughter Jane. It finally won him an Oscar on the heels of an earlier Honorary Academy Award. Too ill to attend the ceremony, Henry Fonda died soon after at the age of 77, having left a lasting legacy matched by few of his peers. His later wives were Susan Blanchard (1950-1956), Leonarda Franchetti (1957-1961) and Shirlee Fonda (1965- till his death in 1982). With Blanchard he had a daughter, Amy Fishman (1953). His grandchildren are the actors Bridget Fonda, Justin Fonda, Vanessa Vadim and Troy Garity.
Sources: Laurence Dang (IMDb), I.S. Mowis (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
Actor, Model, Musician, Poet
Learn more about Jason here
www.youtube.com/channel/UCcB7xTFDdsV-n_1l3eVZo3A
and here
www.instagram.com/itsjaysykes/
and here
and here
www.facebook.com/jasonsykes00?fref=ts
Fort St. John
Mid City
New Orleans, Louisiana
Aspiring actor and model. I've been stepping out of my comfort zone and doing more photo shoots lately. Watch out for Matthew, I believe he has it in him to do well in the business. Learn more about him here
City Park
New Orleans, Louisiana
French postcard by Viny, no. 6. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).
William Powell (1892-1984) was an American actor, whose career began in silent film. He is best known for the Thin Man film series in which he starred opposite Myrna Loy. Powell was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Leading Actor a total of three times.
William Horatio Powell was born in Pittsburgh in 1892. He always wanted to act. When he was 18, he started studying drama at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. He graduated in 1912. He then went to Broadway. In 1922 he began a career in Hollywood with a role alongside Marion Davies in When Knighthood Was in Flower (Robert G. Vignola, 1922). In 1924 he signed a studio contract with Paramount Pictures and went on to star in numerous productions, including the now-lost 1926 premiere of The Great Gatsby (Herbert Brenon, 1926), starring Warner Baxter and Lois Wilson. In the silent era, he primarily played sinister characters such as thieves, blackmailers, and bad husbands. He finally attracted attention as Leo, the arrogant film director in Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command (1928) alongside Emil Jannings. The big success for Powell came with the advent of the talkies in the late 1920s, which also showcased his pleasant voice. The crime film The Canary Murder Case (Malcolm St. Clair, Frank Tuttle, 1929), in which he portrayed Philo Vance, the private detective best known from the novels of S. S. Van Dine, who investigates the death of Louise Brooks, "the Canary." It established him in more positive roles. Together with Kay Francis, Powell formed an on-screen pair in six films from 1930 to 1932. In 1931, he married actress Carole Lombard, whom he divorced in 1933.
In 1934, William Powell went to MGM, where he was teamed with Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934). While Philo Vance made Powell a star, another detective, Nick Charles, made him famous. Powell received an Academy Award nomination for the role of the wealthy amateur detective Nick Charles in the crime comedy The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934) with Myrna Loy as his wealthy wife Nora. Between 1934 and 1947 he appeared in 14 films as Loy's partner. In 1935, he had a relationship with Jean Harlow and they got engaged. However, they never married. Harlow died in 1937. Powell starred in the Best Picture winner for 1936, The Great Ziegfeld (Robert Z. Leonard, 1936). He received his second Academy Award nomination for My Man Godfrey (1936) and his third for his work in Life with Father (Michael Curtiz, 1947) with Irene Dunne and Elizabeth Taylor. His screen appearances became less frequent after that, and his last role was in Mister Roberts (John Ford, Mervyn LeRoy, 1955). William Powell died of natural causes in Palm Springs in 1984. He was married three time. His wives were Eileen Wilson (1915-1930), Carole Lombard (1931-1933) and Diana Lewis (1940-1984 - his death). With Wilson, he had a son, William Powell. His son stabbed himself to death while taking a shower. He left a four-page good-bye letter to his father, with whom he was very close.
Sources: Tony Fontana (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Austrian postcard by B.K.W.I. (Brüder Kohn, Wien). Feodor Chaliapin as Don Quixote
Russian opera singer Feodor Chaliapin (1873–1938) was an international sensation and is considered as the greatest Russian singer of the twentieth century, as well as the greatest male operatic actor ever. The possessor of a large, deep and expressive basso profundo, he was celebrated at major opera houses all over the world and established the tradition of naturalistic acting in operas. The only sound film which shows his acting style is Don Quixote (Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1933).
Feodor Ivanovich Chaliapin (Russian: Фёдор Ива́нович Шаля́пин, or Fyodor Ivanovich Shalyapin) was born in 1873, into a poor peasant family in Omet Tawi, near Kazan, Russia. His childhood was full of suffering, hunger, and humiliation. From the age of 10, he worked as an apprentice to a shoemaker, a sales clerk, a carpenter, and a lowly clerk in a district court before joining, at age 17, a local operetta company. In 1890, Chaliapin was hired to sing in a choir at the Semenov-Samarsky private theatre in Ufa. There he began singing solo parts. In 1891, he toured Russia with the Dergach Opera. In 1892, he settled in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia), because he found a good teacher, Dmitri Usatov, who gave Chaliapin free professional opera training for one year. He also sang at the St. Aleksandr Nevsky Cathedral in Tbilisi. In 1893, he began his career at the Tbilisi Opera, and a year later, he moved to Moscow upon recommendation of Dmitri Usatov. In 1895 ,Chaliapin debuted at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre as Mephistopheles in Charles Gounod’s Faust, in which he was a considerable success. In 1896 he also joined Mamontovs Private Russian Opera in Moscow, where he mastered the Russian, French, and Italian roles that made him famous. Savva Mamontov was a Russian industrialist and philanthropist, who staged the operas, conducted the orchestra, trained the actors, taught them singing and paid all the expenses. At Mamontov's, he met in 1897 Sergei Rachmaninoff, who started as an assistant conductor there. The two men remained friends for life. With Rachmaninoff he learned the title role of Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, which became his signature character. Rachmaninoff taught him much about musicianship, including how to analyse a music score, and insisted that Chaliapin learn not only his own roles but also all the other roles in the operas in which he was scheduled to appear. When Chaliapin became dissatisfied with his performances, Chaliapin began to attend straight dramatic plays to learn the art of acting. His approach revolutionised acting in opera. In 1896, Savva Mamontov introduced Chaliapin to a young Italian ballerina Iola Tornagi, who came to Moscow for a stage career. She quit dancing and devoted herself to family life with Chaliapin. He was very happy in this marriage. From 1899 until 1914, he also performed regularly at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. The couple settled in Moscow and had six children. Their first boy died at the age of 4, causing Chaliapin a nervous breakdown.
In 1901, Feodor Chaliapin made his sensational debut at La Scala in the role of the devil in Mefistofele by Arrigo Boito under the baton of conductor Arturo Toscanini. Other famous roles were Boris Godunov in Mussorgsky's opera, King Philip in Giuseppe Verdi's Don Carlos. Bertram in Giacomo Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable, and Ivan the Terrible in The Maid of Pskov by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. His great comic characterizations were Don Basilio in Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia and Leporello in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In 1906, Chaliapin started a civil union with Maria Valentinovna Petzhold (also called: Maria Augusta Eluchen) in St. Petersburg, Russia. She had three daughters with Chaliapin in addition to 2 other children from her previous family. He could not legalize his second family, because his first wife would not give him a divorce. Chaliapin even applied to the Emperor Tsar Nicholas II with a request of registering his three daughters under his last name. His request was not satisfied. In 1913, Chaliapin was introduced to London and Paris by the brilliant entrepreneur Sergei Diaghilev. He began giving well-received solo recitals in Paris in which he sang traditional Russian folk songs as well as more serious fare, and also performed at the Paris Opera. His acting and singing was sensational to the western audiences. He made many sound recordings, of which the 1913 recordings of the Russian folk songs Vdol po Piterskoi and The Song of the Volga Boatmen are best known. In 1915, he made his film debut as Czar Ivan IV the Terrible in the silent Russian film Tsar Ivan Vasilevich Groznyy/Czar Ivan the Terrible (Aleksandr Ivanov-Gai, 1915) opposite the later director Richard Boleslawski. Fourteen years later, he appeared in another silent film, the German-Czech coproduction Aufruhr des Blutes/Riot of the blood (Victor Trivas, 1929) with Vera Voronina and Oscar Marion.
Feodor Chaliapin was torn between his two families for many years, living with one in Moscow, and with another in St. Petersburg. With Maria Petzhold and their three daughters, he left Russia in 1922 as part of an extended tour of western Europe. They would never return. Ther family settled in Paris. A man of lower-class origins, Chaliapin was not unsympathetic to the Bolshevik Revolution and his emigration from Russia was painful. Although he had left Russia for good, he remained a tax-paying citizen of Soviet Russia for several years. Finally he could divorce in 1927 and marry Maria Petzhold. Chaliapin worked for impresario Sol Hurok and from 1921 on, he sang for eight seasons at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. His debut at the Met in the 1907 season had been disappointing due to the unprecedented frankness of his stage acting. In 1921, the public in New York had grown more broad-minded and the eight seasons were a huge success. According to Steve Shelokhonov at IMDb, Chaliapin was the undisputed best basso in the first half of the 20th century. He had revolutionised opera by bringing serious acting in combination with great singing. His first open break with the Soviet regime occurred in 1927 when the government, as part of its campaign to pressure him into returning to Russia, stripped him of his title of 'The First People’s Artist of the Soviet Republic' and threatened to deprive him of Soviet citizenship. Prodded by Joseph Stalin, Maxim Gorky, Chaliapin’s longtime friend, tried to persuade him to return to Russia. Gorky broke with him after Chaliapin published his memoirs, Man and Mask: Forty Years in the Life of a Singer (Maska i dusha, 1932), in which he denounced the lack of freedom under the Bolsheviks.
The only sound film which shows Chaliapin's acting style is Don Quixote/Adventures of Don Quixote (Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1933). He had also starred onstage as the knight in Jules Massenet's 1910 opera, Don Quichotte, but the 1933 film does not use Massenet's music, and is more faithful to Miguel de Cervantes' novel than the opera. In fact there were three versions of this early sound film. Georg Wilhelm Pabst shot simultaneously with the German language version also English and French versions. Feodor Chaliapin Sr. starred in all three versions of Don Quixote, but with a different supporting cast. Sancho Pansa was played by Dorville in the German and French versions but by George Robey in the English version. Benoit A. Racine at IMDb: "These films (the French, English and German versions) were an attempt to capture his legendary stage performance of this character even though the songs are by Jacques Ibert. Ravel had also been asked to compose the songs for the film but he missed the deadline and his songs survive on their own with texts that are different from those found here. The interplay between the French and English versions is fascinating. Some scenes are done exactly the same for better or worse, some use the same footage, re-cut to edit out performance problems, while others have slight variants in staging and dialogue. (The English version was doctored by Australian-born scriptwriter and director John Farrow, Mia's father, by the way.) Even though the films are short and they transform, reduce and simplify considerably the original novel, they still manage to carry the themes and the feeling that would make Man of La Mancha a hit several decades later and to be evocative of Cervantes' Spain." In the late 1930s, Feodor Chaliapin Sr. suffered from leukaemia and kidney ailment. In 1937, he died in Paris, France. He was laid to rest is the Novodevichy Monastery Cemetery in Moscow. Chaliapin was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Recording at 6770 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California. In 1998, the TV film Chaliapin: The Enchanter (Elisabeth Kapnist, 1998) followed. His son Boris Chaliapin became a famous painter. who painted the portraits used on 414 covers of the Time magazine between 1942 and 1970. Another son Feodor Chaliapin Jr. became a film actor, who appeared in character roles in such films as the Western Buffalo Bill, l'eroe del far west/Buffalo Bill (Mario Costa, 1965) with Gordon Scott, and Der Name der Rose/The Name of the Rose (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1986), starring Sean Connery. His first wife, Iola Tornagi, lived in the Soviet Union until 1959, when Nikita Khrushchev brought the 'Thaw'. Tornagi was allowed to leave the Soviet Union and reunited with her son Feodor Chaliapin Jr, in Rome, Italy.
Sources: Steve Shelokhonov (IMDb), Benoit A. Racine (IMDb), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia and IMDb.
French postcard in the 'Les geants du cinema' series, by Editions et Impression Combier, Mâcon (Cim), no. 2. Illustration: Jean-Pierre Gillot.
French actor of Spanish origin Louis de Funès (1914-1983) was one of the giants of French comedy alongside André Bourvil and Fernandel. In many of his over 130 films, he portrayed a humorously excitable, cranky man with a propensity to hyperactivity, bad faith, and uncontrolled fits of anger. Along with his short height (1.63 m) and his facial contortions, this hyperactivity produced a highly comic effect, especially opposite Bourvil, who always played calm, slightly naive, good-humored men.
Louis de Funès (French pronunciation: [lwi də fynɛs]) was born Louis Germain David de Funès de Galarza in Courbevoie, France in 1914. His father, Carlos Luis de Funès de Galarza had been a lawyer in Seville, Spain, but became a diamond cutter upon arriving in France. His mother, Leonor Soto Reguera was of Spanish and Portuguese extraction. Since the couple's families opposed their marriage, they settled in France in 1904. Known to friends and intimates as ‘Fufu’, the young De Funès was fond of drawing and piano playing and spoke French, Spanish, and English well. He studied at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet in Paris. He showed a penchant for tomfoolery, something which caused him trouble at school and later made it hard for him to hold down a job. He became a pianist, working mostly as a jazz pianist at Pigalle, the famous red-light district. There he made his customers laugh each time he made a grimace. He studied acting for one year at the Simon acting school. It proved to be a waste of time except for his meeting with actor Daniel Gélin, who would become a close friend. In 1936, he married Germaine Louise Elodie Carroyer with whom he had a son, Daniel (1937). In 1942, they divorced. During the occupation of Paris in the Second World War, he continued his piano studies at a music school, where he fell in love with a secretary, Jeanne Barthelémy de Maupassant, a grandniece of the famous author Guy de Maupassant. They married in 1943 and remained together for forty years until De Funès' death in 1983. The pair had two sons: Patrick (1944) and Olivier (1947). Patrick became a doctor who practiced in Saint-Germain en Laye. Olivier was an actor for a while, known for the son roles in his father's films, including Le Grand Restaurant/The Big Restaurant (Jacques Besnard, 1966), Fantômas se déchaine/Fantomas Strikes Back (André Hunebelle, 1965) starring Jean Marais, Les Grandes Vacances/The Big Vacation (Jean Girault, 1967), and Hibernatus (Edouard Molinaro, 1969) with Claude Gensac as De Funès’ wife, a role she played in many of his films. Olivier later worked as an aviator for Air France Europe.
Through the early 1940s, Louis de Funès continued playing piano at clubs, thinking there wasn't much call for a short, balding, skinny actor. His wife and Daniel Gélin encouraged him to overcome his fear of rejection. De Funès began his show business career in the theatre, where he enjoyed moderate success. At the age of 31, thanks to his contact with Daniel Gélin, he made his film debut with an uncredited bit part as a porter in La Tentation de Barbizon/The Temptation of Barbizon (1945, Jean Stelli) starring Simone Renant. For the next ten years, de Funès would appear in fifty films, but always in minor roles, usually as an extra, scarcely noticed by the audience. Sometimes he had a supporting part such as in the Fernandel comedy Boniface somnambule/The Sleepwalker (Maurice Labro, 1951) and the comedy-drama La vie d'un honnête homme/The Virtuous Scoundrel (Sacha Guitry, 1953) starring Michel Simon. In the meanwhile, he pursued a theatrical career. Even after he attained the status of a film star, he continued to play theatre. His stage career culminated in a magnificent performance in the play Oscar, a role which he would later reprise in the film version of 1967. During this period, De Funès developed a pattern of daily activities: in the morning he did dubbing for recognized artists such as Renato Rascel and the Italian comic Totò, during the afternoon he worked in film, and in the theater in the evening. A break came when he appeared as the black-market pork butcher Jambier (another small role) in the well-known WWII comedy, La Traversée de Paris/Four Bags Full (Claude Autant-Lara, 1956) starring Jean Gabin and Bourvil. In his next film, the mediocre comedy Comme un cheveu sur la soupe/Crazy in the Noodle (Maurice Régamey, 1957), De Funès finally played the leading role. More interesting was Ni vu, ni connu/Neither Seen Nor Recognized (Yves Robert, 1958). He achieved stardom with the comedy Pouic-Pouic (Jean Girault, 1963) opposite Mireille Darc. This successful film guaranteed De Funès top billing in all of his subsequent films.
Between 1964 and 1979, Louis de Funès topped France's box office of the year's most successful films seven times. At the age of 49, De Funès unexpectedly became a superstar with the international success of two films. Fantômas (André Hunebelle, 1964) was France's own answer to the James Bond frenzy and lead to a trilogy co-starring Jean Marais and Mylène Demongeot. The second success was the crime comedy Le gendarme de Saint-Tropez/The Gendarme of St. Tropez (Jean Girault, 1964) with Michel Galabru. After their first successful collaboration on Pouic-Pouic, director Girault had perceived De Funès as the ideal actor to play the part of the accident-prone gendarme. The film led to a series of six 'Gendarme' films. De Funès's collaboration with director Gérard Oury produced a memorable tandem of de Funès with Bourvil, another great comic actor, in Le Corniaud/The Sucker (Gérard Oury, 1964). The successful partnership was repeated two years later in La Grande Vadrouille/Don't Look Now - We're Being Shot At (Gérard Oury, 1966), one of the most successful and the largest grossing film ever made in France, drawing an audience of 17,27 million. It remains his greatest success. Oury envisaged a further reunion of the two comics in his historical comedy La Folie des grandeurs/Delusions of Grandeur (Gérard Oury, 1970), but Bourvil's death in 1970 led to the unlikely pairing of de Funès with Yves Montand in this film. Very successful, even in the USA, was Les aventures de Rabbi Jacob/The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob (Gérard Oury, 1973) with Suzy Delair. De Funès played a bigoted Frenchman who finds himself forced to impersonate a popular rabbi while on the run from a group of assassins. In 1975, Oury had scheduled to make Le Crocodile/The Crocodile with De Funès as a South American dictator, but in March 1975, the actor was hospitalised for heart problems and was forced to take a rest from acting. The Crocodile project was canceled.
After his recovery, Louis de Funès collaborated with Claude Zidi, in a departure from his usual image. Zidi wrote for him L'aile ou la cuisse/The Wing and the Thigh (Claude Zidi, 1976), opposite Coluche as his son. He played a well-known gourmet and publisher of a famous restaurant guide, who is waging a war against a fast-food entrepreneur. It was a new character full of nuances and frankness and arguably the best of his roles. In 1980, De Funès realised a long-standing dream to make a film version of Molière's play, L'Avare/The Miser (Louis de Funès, Jean Girault, 1980). In 1982, De Funès made his final film, Le Gendarme et les gendarmettes/Never Play Clever Again (Tony Aboyantz, Jean Girault, 1982). Unlike the characters he played, de Funès was said to be a very shy person in real life. He became a knight of France's Légion d'honneur in 1973. He resided in the Château de Clermont, a 17th-century monument, located in the commune of Le Cellier, which is situated near Nantes in France. In his later years, he suffered from a heart condition after having suffered a heart attack caused by straining himself too much with his stage antics. Louis de Funès died of a massive stroke in 1983, a few months after making Le Gendarme et les gendarmettes. He was laid to rest in the Cimetière du Cellier, the cemetery situated in the grounds of the château. Films de France: “Although fame was a long time coming, Louis de Funès is regarded today as not just a great comic actor with an unfaltering ability to make his audience laugh, but practically an institution in his own right. His many films bear testimony to the extent of his comic genius and demonstrate the tragedy that he never earned the international recognition that he certainly deserved.”
Sources: Steve Shelokhonov (IMDb), Films de France, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.