Silver Badge Nomination Post 1 Invite 5 INVITE ONLY~Contest
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wow thank you so much ..faints and shocked . xx I can't thank you enough for this nomination . I will cherish this forever . I looked at the other nominations and they are truly amazing . Thank you for even considering me Dreamart fashion xxx
Public vote here :
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdwfggCvdRrCqzu5fXMQPe6n...
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Loretta Young
Loretta Young was an American actress. Starting as a child, she had a long and varied career in film from 1917 to 1953. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the film The Farmer's Daughter, and received her second Academy Award nomination for her role in Come to the Stable
2018 SAFAS AWARDS - Final Voting
The SL Academy of Fashion Arts and Sciences [SAFAS]©®
A Second Life professional honorary organization with open membership. Organization and staff positions are extended by our Board of Governors to distinguished contributors to the arts and sciences of SL fashion. A yearly awards program recognizes those who have advanced the fashion world of SL through their contributions.
After receiving thousands of individual nominations that span hundreds of categories, we have created this final form for you to vote for your favorites in the respective categories. The form below is provided for you to vote for who you feel has contributed to the world of SL and who should be recognized.
The final results of our winners will be announced LIVE at the 2018 SAFAS Awards in Second Life on Saturday, June 30, 2018.
Thank you for your vote and feel free to join our in-world group (free) in Second Life
[SL Academy of Fashion Arts&Science].
Please help us by voting for your favorites in each category. Voting from the TOP nominations will end on June 29, 2018 and the final results of our winners will be announced LIVE at the 2018 SAFAS Awards in Second Life on Saturday, June 30, 2018.
Who would you like to nominate for a 2018 SAFAS Awards?
Do you want to vote for me? Thank you !!!!
FINAL VOTING HERE: docs.google.com/forms/d/13k_t_VNPPz5X31dCIpJIaljqZ1f5iYJ_...
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I have been in avi heaven and thanking everyone for this unforgettable nomination; and I know I have been up against and proudly next to “the best”!
Strawberry Singh has been a silent mentor to me throughout my career as a Second Life Blogger and I humbly extend my Congratulations to her for winning in 2 Categories: Favorite Fashion Blog and Favorite Fashion Blogger! As I scour through her posts for information and updates, I am always amazed this Teacher has so much time to dedicate herself to publish astonishing material, photographs and tutorials!
I have received my Avi Choice Nominee Award Trophy and will proudly keep it rez’d at the entrance of my shops forever!
Although I was unable to attend the Avi Choice Fashion Award Event this past Saturday, I did make it to pick up the gifts and play around a bit within the gorgeous theatre and surrounding rooms!
And guess what?
The Paparazzi was still there waiting for me……
∻⊰҉♡҉⊱∻
An Oscar nomination animated short film titled paperman really struck me. I have been in kind of a rut, and have been struggling to produce ideas; not much inspiration. I came across this film a couple days ago and it instantly made me press replay. From the subtle realistic gestures, to the score by Christophe Beck, it really took me back in my chair with my hands on my head. Inspiration was instantly conveyed to the right side of my brain and will reside. Thank you Disney.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rog8ou-ZepE
Ice bucket challenge nominated by cold frog and Lisa Outsider.
My next nomination is Chaos. Lucifer and Miles Cantelou
Yes, I was going to be taking a little break from flickr but I've had a couple of pieces of lovely news over the last half a week. As you can probably guess from the above, I've been nominated for an award on the Hipstography website, for a portfolio of mine they published earlier last year. Some of you may remember that. Really chuffed to be included, especially amongst some really wonderful fellow photographers. Well, apparently once the nominations were chosen it is then a public vote. So, y'all should duck over there, take a gander at the fantastic nominations and vote for your faves! You can find the right page here .
Also, although many of you will have noticed, I was super pleased to get an honourable mention in the Mobile Photography Awards street category that was announced late last week, for this photo . Anyhoo, big thanks to all of you for your continued encouragement and company, I've learnt so much from keeping company with you all on this place. Appreciate it everyone!
NB: Although I did not win this category, the same shot of bathers at Bondi won the Hipstography monochrome photo of the year. Yay.
This is photo #1 for my 5-day black & white challenge. I will post one image per day for five days. Thanks Nomis. for the nomination.
This is a picture of Anna enjoying the sunshine. I took this with my new iPhone, which is supposed to have a pretty good camera.
Pompeo congratulates Nechirvan Barzani on KRG presidential nomination
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo congratulated Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani on his nomination for the KRG presidency, according to a State Department readout published Wednesday night.
During a surprise visit to Erbil on Wednesday evening, Pompeo congratulated PM Barzani on his nomination for the presidency – a post which has been frozen since Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) president Masoud Barzani resigned in 2017 following the Kurdistan independence referendum.
According to a readout from the US State Department, Pompeo also emphasized “strong US support for continued dialogue between the KRG and the central government in Baghdad.”
Following an unscheduled stop in the Iraqi capital Baghdad on Wednesday morning, Pompeo travelled on to Erbil, where he also met with Masoud Barzani and Kurdistan Region Security Council Chancellor Masrour Barzani – who has been nominated for the office of prime minister.
If approved, the two Barzani cousins will hold both the top seats of government. They will only be successful if the KDP gets its way in government formation talks with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Change Movement (Gorran) – their nearest rivals.
PM Barzani described his meeting with Pompeo as “productive”.
They “discussed the recent territorial defeat of ISIS in Syria” while underscoring “the value of our strategic relationship with Iraq and our longstanding friendship with the IKR [Iraqi Kurdistan Region], which is vital for ensuring mutual security and regional stability.”
Pompeo is touring several Middle Eastern states to drum up support for America’s anti-Iran campaign and to reassure allies in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s bombshell decision to withdraw troops from northern Syria
nrhp # 97000239- The old Fairview Bridge, located about 3.5 miles east of Fairview across the North Dakota border, is also a vertical lift structure, but its lift span cannot be moved. While now closed to both rail and vehicular travel, the Fairview Bridge also has another claim to fame-it adjoins the only tunnel in North Dakota. The 1,456 foot long tunnel was built in 1912 and 1913. Most of the digging was done by hand, although horse and mule-drawn scrapers and blasting powder were used in building the approaches. Both the Fairview Bridge and Cartwright Tunnel have been developed into a walking trail by the Fairview Chamber. The only time the 'lift' span on the Fairview Bridge over the Yellowstone River was raised was in 1914, shortly after it was constructed as part of an ambitious plan by the Great Northern Railroad for its never-completed Montana Eastern Railway. After all these years, it's still there, the powerful lifting machinery still in place atop 108-foot-high steel towers. The bridge is just over the line in North Dakota, about 3.5 miles east of Fairview and two miles west of Cartwright, N.D. It hasn't been used since 1986. In 1991, the state began a survey of historic bridges, and the Fairview Bridge was on the list of about 127 found eligible for the National Register. It was among 30 chosen for nomination. According to the nomination form prepared under contract with the state by Mark Hufstetler, an historian with Renewable Technologies Inc., of Butte, the bridge qualifies both for its historical significance and its unique engineering. The costly lift functions required on navigable waters were obsolete when construction got underway in 1913. The lift span never had to be raised to allow passage of a barge or boat. Commercial traffic on the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers in the two states had ceased years earlier. The huge bridge span necessitated by federal law was used only once - its test when construction was completed by Gerrick & Gerrick in 1914. According to the nomination form and other historical sources, the Fairview Bridge and its twin at Snowden, Montana, were built along the route of the Montana Eastern Railway. The railway was designed as a second mainline for the Great Northern connecting the vast open spaces between New Rockford, N.D., and Lewistown, Montana, according to Richard E. Johnson in a 1994 article published in 'Hoofprints', the publication of the Yellowstone Corral of the Westerners. The bridges, at $500,000 each, were the most expensive components of the plan. About the time World War I began, the economics of the Montana Eastern Railway stopped looking so promising and construction came to a halt. The Fairview Bridge, planned for much bigger things, served a little-used branchline, Hufstetler wrote in the nomination form. 'At its peak, the line probably saw no more than one passenger and one freight train each way per day,' his report said. 'Passenger service on the line ended in the late 1950s, and the last freight trains used the line in approximately 1986.' Planking was placed between the bridge rails so automobiles could use the bridge - a unique arrangement that lasted until a highway bridge was built nearby to accommodate traffic on North Dakota Highway 200 in 1955. According to Hufstetler, a watchman was stationed at the bridge to prevent trains and automobiles from colliding. He wrote that Great Northern charged a toll for cars using the bridge until 1937, when the state highway department assumed responsibility.
The Fairview Lift Bridge and Cartwright Tunnel are as enormous as they are historic. The Bridge stretches 1,320 feet across the Yellowstone River and hangs about 100 feet above the water. Automobiles stopped using the bridge when the Hjalmer Nelson Memorial Highway Bridge was built in 1956. In 1997, the bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Both the tunnel and the bridge remain structurally sound. Development of the 13-acre site, Sundheim Park, includes a ramp up the bridge trestle, hand rails and decking.
from visitmt.com
At the 97th Academy Awards, it received nominations for Best International Feature Film (the third animated film to do so) and Best Animated Feature, becoming the first Latvian film to be considered for multiple awards and nominations from major ceremonies.
"The Goundie House (/ˈɡʌndiː/ GUN-dee) is a historic building located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Constructed in 1810 for the Moravian town brewer John Sebastian Goundie, it is believed to be the first brick residence in Bethlehem and the first private home to reflect the American Federal style. The house is now used as a museum and exhibition space and for pop-up vintage shops. It is a contributing property to the Historic Moravian Bethlehem District, which was designated a National Historic Landmark District in 2012 and later named to the U.S. Tentative List in 2016 for nomination to the World Heritage List.
Bethlehem is a city in Northampton and Lehigh Counties in the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania. As of the 2020 census, Bethlehem had a total population of 75,781. It is Pennsylvania's seventh most populous city. Of this, 55,639 were in Northampton County and 19,343 were in Lehigh County. The city is located along the Lehigh River, a 109-mile-long (175 km) tributary of the Delaware River.
Bethlehem lies in the center of the Lehigh Valley, a metropolitan region of 731 sq mi (1,890 km2) with a population of 861,899 people as of the 2020 census that is Pennsylvania's third most populous metropolitan area and the 68th most populated metropolitan area in the U.S. Smaller than Allentown but larger than Easton, Bethlehem is the Lehigh Valley's second most populous city.
There are four sections to the city: central Bethlehem, the south side, the east side, and the west side. Each of these sections blossomed at different times in the city's development and each contains areas recognized under the National Register of Historic Places.
Norfolk Southern Railway's Lehigh Line (formerly the main line of the Lehigh Valley Railroad) runs through Bethlehem heading east to Easton and across the Delaware River to Phillipsburg, New Jersey. The Norfolk Southern Railway's Reading Line runs through Bethlehem and west to Allentown and Reading.
Bethlehem has a long historical relationship with the celebration of Christmas. The city was christened as Bethlehem on Christmas Eve 1741 by Nicolaus Zinzendorf, a Moravian bishop. In 1747, Bethlehem was the first U.S. city to feature a decorated Christmas tree. On December 7, 1937, at a grand ceremony during the Great Depression, the city adopted the nickname "Christmas City USA" in a large ceremony. It is one of several Lehigh Valley locations, including Emmaus, Egypt, and Allentown's Jordan Creek, whose names were inspired by locations referenced in the Bible. The Lehigh River, a 109-mile-long (175 km) tributary of the Delaware River, flows through the city.
Bethlehem borders Allentown to its west and is 48 miles (77 km) north of Philadelphia and 72 miles (116 km) west of New York City." - info from Wikipedia.
The fall of 2022 I did my 3rd major cycling tour. I began my adventure in Montreal, Canada and finished in Savannah, GA. This tour took me through the oldest parts of Quebec and the 13 original US states. During this adventure I cycled 7,126 km over the course of 2.5 months and took more than 68,000 photos. As with my previous tours, a major focus was to photograph historic architecture.
Now on Instagram.
NATIONAL REGISTER OF HISTORIC PLACES
INVENTORY -- NOMINATION FORM
Received: September 12, 1977
Entered: January 31, 1978.
The general plan for this building was described at the organizing conference of the Building Committee in June 1899, as follows:
The Chapel is designed to seat one hundred and thirty people and is 30 x 50 feet Inside, and of a composite gothic style of architecture. The foundation, walls and buttress are of stone masonry, above which walls are of open timber frame work to a height of 9 feet, lulled with stone, allowing the timbers to show on the wall. Above the roof, the walls will be finished with stained shingles. A small belfry will be mounted on the roof.
Windows and door of stained glass will add attractiveness to the interior which will be finished in oiled spruce with open roof trusses also oiled. The interior finish of the roof will also be ceiling spruce in panels, oiled in the same manner.
This is how it was envisioned, that is how it was built, and that is what it looks like to this day. There are some additional details, not mentioned above, such as the entry porch, but these are mere details, and were integrated into a design fully envisioned by the architect from the Instructions communicated to him in person by Peter Trimble Rowe, The Bishop of Alaska.
While the structure is in the Gothic style, it has little of Gothic structural elements, but embodies effectively the centre pointed design throughout its major interior and exterior elements in the major design finish and fenestration of the lights in the entrance (south) and altar (north) walls, in the parallel rows of stained glass small windows along the side (east and west) walls of the chapel.
A soft north light illuminates the altar through a large nine panel centre pointed window, while the view from the front steps is of the harbor and the sea, literally at the doorstep of this church, set here for the beauty of the site, which this building has enhanced since 1899.
This country church is deceptively simple in appearance. Its design at first glance appears similar to many other small country churches, and to a few others in Alaska. Upon further examination, it appears that the design has been executed with a unity of purpose, in complement to the site, that results in a building whose form is expressive of its function in every dimension.
At a later date an adjoining building lot, adjoining the church lot on the north, was acquired, and the See House was built to a design complementing the church building. The remains of the first Episcopal Bishop of Alaska, Peter Trimble Row, and those of his first wife and one of their sons, are buried on the front lawn of the Church, marked by unobtrusive ground level grave stones.
This country church is significant for its architectural design. It embodies design elements, and a unity of conception related to its distinctive site location, that give it high artistic value and represent the work of master builders of that time and place.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE:
Tradition relates that Episcopal lay services were held in Sitka, Alaska, between 1867 and 1885, first by an anonymous Army colonel and subsequently by a Mr. Austin. After 1885 there were no Episcopal services in Sitka until the arrival of the First Episcopal Bishop of Alaska, Peter Trimble Rowe, in 1896.
Bishop Rowe arrived in Sitka in April 1896, following his November 30, 1895, consecration in the Cathedral of St. John the Devine, New York City. The newly Installed Bishop immediately obtained quarters for his family, and departed for the Yukon River, via the Chilkoot Trail, to observe first-hand the nature of the responsibility which he had accepted. Upon returning to Sitka In November, Bishop Rowe conducted services on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 1896 — a year following, and a world distant, from the scene of his consecration. From then onward Bishop Rowe conducted services regularly when he was in Sitka. He Immediately saw the need for a church for his new Bishopric one that would be somewhat more imposing than the cabin-chapels he then had available, but not so expensive as to be unreachable.
An affluent couple from Utica, New York, who visited Sitka the summer of 1897, contacted Bishop Rowe upon returning to their home, and offered $2,000 toward the building of a church in Sitka. It was remarked, in later years, that the Bishop was "... such a darned human, lovable cuss, somehow, that wherever he goes he starts a stampede for heaven." This offer was the first move in what became a stampede to build this church.
A committee formed to locate and purchase a suitable site. The committee included the U.S. Attorney for Alaska, Burton E. Bennett, William Millmore, and Edward de Groff. A committee of women raised money for the purchase. These women included Mrs. Bennett and Mrs. DeGroff. A lot [fronting on] the crescent of the harbor was chosen and purchased for $800 (some accounts say $750) from Peter Panamarkoff.
The road along the crescent then called Beach Road, is now called Lincoln Street. While the largest individual contributors included Bennet, Millmore, deGroff, James Shoup, and W. P. Mills, the full list of donors was a long one, including such names as C. L. Andrews, later notable for his writings on Alaskan and Sitka history, and C. C. Georgeson, an official of the Department of Agriculture and pioneer experimenter in Arctic farming techniques.
Bishop Rowe prepared specifications of his conception of what the church should look like and how it should be designed, and what the Rectory (the "See House") should look like and contain. A meeting of a committee of the town's leading citizens convened early in September 1898 at the Bishop's house to discuss these ideas and their execution. Present were Messrs. deGroff, Bennett, and W. L. Distin; John W. Dudley, and G.D. Clayett. Following discussion, a motion carried unanimously that the Bishop's conceptions for the church and house be conveyed by the Bishop to an architect to translate into working drawings and specifications,
during the Bishop's forthcoming trip to the East Coast. The meeting also elected a building committee for the project, with deGroff as Chairman, Dudley as Secretary, and C. S. Johnson, Col. W. L. Distin, and W. P. McBride, completing the membership.
Soon after the meeting in Sitka, Bishop Rowe traveled to the East Coast on the business of his See. A Philadelphia philanthropist, George C. Thomas, engaged Philadelphia architect, H. L. Duhring, Jr., to prepare plans and specifications for the church and the See House. George C. Thomas, many times a benefactor of missionary work in Alaska, was Treasurer of the Board of Missions of the Episcopal Church. In his professional life he was Manager of the banking firm of Drexel, Morgan and Company, a major affiliate in Philadelphia of J.P. Morgan and Company. Mr. Thomas' interest in Alaska might have been related also to the investment activities in Seattle and in southeast Alaska of J.P. Morgan's little known, but most important, son-in-law, William Hamilton.
The cornerstone laying was scheduled for Thursday, June 29 -- St. Peter's Day, and the church would be called "St. Peter's-By-The-Sea". John W. Dudley, Recorder in Sitka for the General Land Office (now the Bureau of Land Management) had undertaken to supervise construction according to the architect's plans. Only the church was to be built at that time, the See House deferred to a later date.
Mr. Dudley had completed the foundation work by June 29, and had erected a temporary shelter over the foundation, large enough to accommodate the town's clergy and the congregation. This was fortunate, because rain fell, in typical Sitka fashion, all day, without intermission, and continued through the 4:00 p.m. hour set for the cornerstone ceremony. Consequently, in typical Sitka fashion, the turnout for the impressive and solemn service was relatively large and enthusiastic:
Forming with Bishop Rowe for the ceremony were Father Anthony and Father Kaiakokonok of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Rev. M. D. McClelland of the Presbyterian Church. Following the Order of Service — Psalm, Versicles, Special Prayers, Scripture Lesson, and Psalm 136 — Bishop Rowe introduced Lt. George T. Emmons, USN, who delivered a paper on the History of Sitka — written for deposit in the cornerstone.
Bishop Rowe then read a list of the materials to be deposited in the cornerstone of the church:
>The Alaskan issue of June 24, 1899.
>The Church Standard, June 3, 1899, published in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
>A list of Bishops of the American and Anglican branches of the Catholic Church from the Apostles to the present day.
>The historical sketch of Sitka, prepared and read that day by Lt. George T. Emmons, USN.
>A list of the clergy of Alaska.
>Names of the church building committee, contractor, etc.
>Coins of the National currency, a Queen's Jubilee crown, a Columbian half-crown, a cent of 1803, a half-cent of 1804 and other coins presented by Mr. F. Woodcock, a Russian coin presented by Father Anthony; an English penny, half-penny, and a Canadian five cent piece, presented by Miss M. G. Hindshaw.
>A shell from the Sea of Galilee.
>Two small size American flags.
Rev. W. M. Partridge next delivered a short address relative to cornerstones and the historical significance of laying cornerstones. The choir and congregation sang, "All Hail the Power of Jesus Name," and the service closed, with the Benediction, pronounced by the Bishop.
In September 1899, as the church construction near completion, an offer was accepted from a Mr. and Mrs. Bauer to furnish three stained glass windows, and from Miss Mary Rhinelander, of New York City, to provide a communion service. Miss Rhinelander, like Mr. Thomas, shared family and business interests with J. P. Morgan and Company, and was a benefactor of many good causes.
As construction progressed. Bishop Rowe, in his characteristic way, did much of the stone work himself, and the front wall of the church he built entirely with his own hands. The Bishop's biographer, Thomas Jenkins, wrote that one day while Bishop Rowe worked at the wall a man came sauntering along. "Well, Bishop," he remarked, "you are working to beat the devil." Replied the Bishop, "Yes, he's the very one I'm trying to beat I"
The new church witnessed its initial service on November 26, 1899, a Thanksgiving Service in which Bishop Rowe shared the rostrum with Father Anthony of the Greek Cathedral, and at least 10 different denominations of Christians were in attendance.
A formal service of consecration for the building was held on Easter Sunday, April 15, 1900. As the home church of the Bishop, this was the most important Episcopal Church in Alaska. This picturesque building lost its importance with the decline of Sitka, when the capital was removed and all the courts and officials of the District were removed to Juneau, where the District would become a Territory. Due to other factors than merely the decline of Sitka with the removal of the capital to Juneau, Bishop Rowe moved his See to Seattle, and continued his yearly crusades from there, both to the farthest reaches of Alaska, and to the far reaches of the Eastern United States, from whence had to come his moral and legal support and the wherewithal for him to serve his flock throughout Alaska.
This lovely little church, conceived in the fertile brain of one of the most indescribably [ ] of men who ever served humanity in Alaska, Peter Trimble Rowe, continues its serene way, serving the Episcopal congregation now as in 1899, while continuing to draw attention to itself as an architectural jewel in the diadem of Sitka's Crescent Harbor shore.
One visitor, Ella Higginson, poetized her impressions of St. Peter's-By-The-Sea, and sent it to Bishop Rowe. It reads, in part;
The little Church at Sitka—
It is so dim and still!
The doors stand open to the sea.
The wind goes through at will
And bears the scent of brine and blue
To the far distant hill.
Vintage postcard, no. FA 328. Photo: Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992).
Sharon Stone (1958) is an American actress, producer, and former fashion model. With her role in Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct (1992), she became one of the most talked about actresses of the 1990s, earning both admiration and infamy for her on- and off-screen personae. Cast as an ex-prostitute in Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995), she won an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe for her work, as well as the general opinion that she was capable of dramatic acting.
Sharon Vonne Stone was born in 1958 in Meadville, a small town in Pennsylvania. Her parents were Dorothy Marie (née Lawson), an accountant, and Joseph William Stone II, a tool and die manufacturer and factory worker. She was the second of four children. At the age of 15, she studied in Saegertown High School, Pennsylvania, and at that same age, entered Edinboro State University of Pennsylvania, and graduated with a degree in creative writing and fine arts. While attending Edinboro University, Stone won the title of Miss Crawford County, Pennsylvania and was a candidate for Miss Pennsylvania. One of the pageant judges told her to quit school and move to New York City to become a fashion model. In 1977, Stone left Meadville and moved in with an aunt in New Jersey. She was signed by Ford Modeling Agency in New York City. Stone, inspired by Hillary Clinton, went back to Edinboro University to complete her degree in 2016. After modelling in television commercials and print advertisements, she made her film debut as "pretty girl in train" in Woody Allen's comedy-drama Stardust Memories (1980). Her first speaking part was in Wes Craven's horror film Deadly Blessing (1981), and French director Claude Lelouch cast her in Les Uns et les Autres (1982), starring James Caan. She had a supporting role in Irreconcilable Differences (Charles Shyer, 1984), starring Ryan O'Neal, Shelley Long, and a young Drew Barrymore. In 1984, she married Michael Greenburg, the producer of MacGyver (1985), but they divorced two years later. Throughout the 1980s, Stone went on to appear in films such as King Solomon's Mines (J. Lee Thompson, 1985) with Richard Chamberlain, Cold Steel (Dorothy Ann Puzo, 1987) with Brad Davis, and Above the Law (Andrew Davis, 1988) as the wife of Steven Seagal. Stone was often cast as the stereotypical blonde bimbo. She finally got a break with her part in Paul Verhoeven's Sci-Fi action film Total Recall (1990), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. She played the role of Lori Quaid, the seemingly loving wife of Schwarzenegger's character, later revealed to be an agent sent by a corrupt and ruthless governor to monitor him. The film received favourable reviews and made $261.2 million worldwide, giving Stone's career a major boost. She also posed nude for Playboy, a daring move for a 32-year-old actress. But it worked.
Sharon Stone became a sex symbol and international star when she played Catherine Tramell, a brilliant, bisexual author and alleged serial killer in the erotic thriller Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992). Several actresses at the time turned down the role, mostly because of the nudity required. Her interrogation scene has become a classic in film history and her performance captivated everyone, from MTV viewers, who honoured her with Most Desirable Female and Best Female Performance Awards, to a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress. She headlined the erotic thriller Sliver (Phillip Noyce, 1993), based on Ira Levin's eponymous novel about the mysterious occurrences in a privately owned New York City high-rise apartment building. The film was heavily panned by critics and earned Stone a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for Worst Actress but Sliver became a commercial success, grossing US$116.3 million at the international box office. She starred alongside Sylvester Stallone in the action thriller The Specialist (Luis Llosa, 1994), portraying May Munro, a woman who entices a bomb expert she is involved with (Stallone) into destroying the criminal gang that killed her family. Despite negative reviews, the film made US$170.3 million worldwide. In the Western The Quick and the Dead (Sam Raimi, 1995) with Gene Hackman and Russell Crowe, she obtained the role of a gunfighter who returns to a frontier town in an effort to avenge her father's death. She received critical acclaim with her performance as the beautiful but drug-crazy wife of Robert de Niro in Martin Scorsese's crime drama Casino (1995), garnering the Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. In 1998, she married newspaper editor Phil Bronstein but they divorced in 2004. Sharon Stone received two more Golden Globe Award nominations for her roles in The Mighty (Peter Chelsom, 1998) and The Muse (Albert Brooks, 1999).
In 2000, Sharon Stone starred opposite Ellen DeGeneres in the made-for-HBO drama If These Walls Could Talk 2 (Jane Anderson, Martha Coolidge, Anne Heche, 2000), portraying a lesbian trying to start a family. Stone appeared in two embarassing flops, Catwoman (Pitof, 2004), and the sequel Basic Instinct 2 (Michael Caton-Jones, 2006). In between, she played one of Bill Murray's ex-girlfriends in Jim Jarmusch's Golden Palm winner Broken Flowers (2005) - and walked away with the most memorable and endearing role in the picture - a role that showcases her skills as a disciplined thespian. She was also in the American drama Bobby (2006), written and directed by Emilio Estevez. In the biographical drama Lovelace (Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman, 2013), Stone obtained the role of the mother of porn actress Linda Lovelace, played by Amanda Seyfried. Later films include Fading Gigolo (John Turturro, 2013) with Woody Allen, the Italian dramedy Un ragazzo d’oro/A Golden Boy (Pupi Avati, 2014) and The Disaster Artist (James Franco, 2017). In 1995, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 2005, she was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in France. On television, Stone has had notable performances in the mini-series War and Remembrance (1987) and the made-for-HBO film If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000). She made guest-appearances in The Practice (2004), winning the Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series, and in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (2010). She has also starred in the action drama series Agent X (2015), Steven Soderbergh's murder-mystery Mosaic (2017) and the series The New Pope (Paolo Sorrentino, 2019) with Jude Law. Sharon Stone is the mother of three adopted sons: Roan (2000), Laird (2005) and Quinn (2006).
Sources: Johannes Prayudhi (IMDb), Rebecca Flint Marx (AllMovie), Wikipedia and IMDb.
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Hollande was born in Rouen, to a middle-class family. His mother, Nicole Frédérique Marguerite Tribert (1927–2009), was a social worker, and his father, Georges Gustave Hollande, an ear, nose, and throat doctor who "had once run on a far right ticket in local politics.The family moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine, a highly exclusive suburb of Paris, when Hollande was thirteen. Hollande was raised Catholic, but became an agnostic in later life,and now considers himself as an atheist[8] (In December 2011, Hollande told the French Christian magazine La Vie that he respects all religious practices but has none of his own).He attended Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-la-Salle boarding school, a private Catholic school in Rouen, the Lycée Pasteur, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, then graduated with a bachelor's degree in law from Panthéon-Assas University. Then he studied at HEC Paris where he graduated in 1975, before attending the Institut d'études politiques de Paris and the École nationale d'administration. He graduated from ENA in 1980[10][11] and chose to enter the prestigious Cour des comptes. He lived in the United States in the summer of 1974 while he was a university student. Immediately after graduating, he was employed as a councillor in the Court of Audit.Early political career: Five years after volunteering as a student to work for François Mitterrand's ultimately unsuccessful campaign in the 1974 presidential election, Hollande joined the Socialist Party. He was quickly spotted by Jacques Attali, a senior adviser to Mitterrand, who arranged for Hollande to stand for election to the French National Assembly in 1981 in Corrèze against future President Jacques Chirac, who was then the Leader of the Rally for the Republic, a Neo-Gaullist party. Hollande lost to Chirac in the first round. He went on to become a special advisor to newly elected President Mitterrand, before serving as a staffer for Max Gallo, the government's spokesman. After becoming a municipal councillor for Ussel in 1983, he contested Corrèze for a second time in 1988, this time being elected to the National Assembly. Hollande lost his bid for re-election to the National Assembly in the so-called "blue wave" of the 1993 election, described as such due to the number of seats gained by the Right at the expense of the Socialist Party.First Secretary of the Socialist Party (1997–2008)François Hollande in 2004: Hollande with his former partner Ségolène Royal, at a rally for the 2007 elections. As the end of Mitterrand's term in office approached, the Socialist Party was torn by a struggle of internal factions, each seeking to influence the direction of the party. Hollande pleaded for reconciliation and for the party to unite behind Jacques Delors, the president of the European Commission, but Delors renounced his ambitions to run for the French presidency in 1995, leading to Lionel Jospin's resuming his earlier position as the leader of the party. Jospin selected Hollande to become the official party spokesman, and Hollande went on to contest Corrèze once again in 1997, successfully returning to the National Assembly.
That same year, Jospin became the prime minister of France, and Hollande won the election for his successor as first secretary of the French Socialist Party, a position he would hold for eleven years. Because of the very strong position of the Socialist Party within the French government during this period, Hollande's position led some to refer to him the "vice prime minister". Hollande would go on to be elected mayor of Tulle in 2001, an office he would hold for the next seven years.The immediate resignation of Jospin from politics following his shock defeat by far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round of the 2002 presidential election forced Hollande to become the public face of the party for the 2002 legislative election but, although he managed to limit defeats and was re-elected in his own constituency, the Socialists lost nationally. In order to prepare for the 2003 party congress in Dijon, he obtained the support of many notable personalities of the party and was re-elected first secretary against opposition from left-wing factions.
After the triumph of the Left in the 2004 regional elections, Hollande was cited as a potential presidential candidate, but the Socialists were divided on the European Constitution, and Hollande's support for the ill-fated "Yes" position in the French referendum on the European constitution caused friction within the party. Although Hollande was re-elected as first secretary at the Le Mans Congress in 2005, his authority over the party began to decline from this point onwards. Eventually his domestic partner, Ségolène Royal, was chosen to represent the Socialist Party in the 2007 presidential election, where she would lose to Nicolas Sarkozy.
Hollande was widely blamed for the poor performances of the Socialist Party in the 2007 elections, and he announced that he would not seek another term as first secretary. Hollande publicly declared his support for Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, although it was Martine Aubry who would go on to win the race to succeed him in 2008.
Following his resignation as first secretary, Hollande was immediately elected to replace Jean-Pierre Dupont as the president of the General Council of Corrèze in April 2008, a position he holds to this day. In 2008 he supported the creation of the first European Prize for Local History (Étienne Baluze Prize), founded by the "Société des amis du musée du cloître" of Tulle, on the suggestion of the French historian Jean Boutier. François Hollande awarded the first prize on 29 February 2008 to the Italian historian Beatrice Palmero in the General Council of Corrèze.2012 presidential campaign: French presidential election, 2012. Following his re-election as president of the General Council of Corrèze in March 2011, Hollande announced that he would be a candidate in the upcoming primary election to select the Socialist and Radical Left Party presidential nominee.[13] The primary marked the first time that both parties had held an open primary to select a joint nominee at the same time. He initially trailed the front-runner, former finance minister and International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.Following Strauss-Kahn's arrest on suspicion of sexual assault in New York City in May 2011, Hollande began to lead the opinion polls. His position as front-runner was established just as Strauss-Kahn declared that he would no longer be seeking the nomination. After a series of televised debates throughout September, Hollande topped the ballot in the first round held on 9 October with 39% of the vote, not gaining the 50% required to avoid a second ballot, which he would contest against Martine Aubry, who had come second with 30% of the vote.The second ballot took place on 16 October 2011. Hollande won with 56% of the vote to Aubry's 43% and thus became the official Socialist and Radical Left Party candidate for the 2012 presidential election.[14] After the primary results, he immediately gained the pledged support of the other contenders for the party's nomination, including Aubry, Arnaud Montebourg, Manuel Valls and 2007 candidate Ségolène Royal.Hollande's presidential campaign was managed by Pierre Moscovici and Stéphane Le Foll, a member of Parliament and Member of the European Parliament respectively.[16] Hollande launched his campaign officially with a rally and major speech at Le Bourget on 22 January 2012 in front of 25,000 people.[17][18] The main themes of his speech were equality and the regulation of finance, both of which he promised to make a key part of his campaign.[On 26 January, he outlined a full list of policies in a manifesto containing 60 propositions, including the separation of retail activities from riskier investment-banking businesses; raising taxes on big corporations, banks and the wealthy; creating 60,000 teaching jobs; bringing the official retirement age back down to 60 from 62; creating subsidised jobs in areas of high unemployment for the young; promoting more industry in France by creating a public investment bank; granting marriage and adoption rights to same-sex couples; and pulling French troops out of Afghanistan in 2012.On 9 February, he detailed his policies specifically relating to education in a major speech in Orléans.On 15 February, incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he would run for a second and final term, strongly criticising Hollande's proposals and claiming that he would bring about "economic disaster within two days of taking office" if he won.Hollande visited Berlin, Germany, in December 2011 for the Social Democrats Federal Party Congress, at which he met Sigmar Gabriel, Peer Steinbrück, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Martin Schulz;[23][24] he also travelled to Belgium before the United Kingdom in February 2012, where he met with Opposition Leader Ed Miliband; and finally Tunisia in May 2012.Opinion polls showed a tight race between the two men in the first round of voting, with most polls showing Hollande comfortably ahead of Sarkozy in a hypothetical second round run-off.The first round of the presidential election was held on 22 April. François Hollande came in first place with 28.63% of the vote, and faced Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round run-off.[28] In the second round of voting on 6 May 2012, François Hollande was elected President of the French Republic with 51.7% of the vote.President of France (2012–present)[ François Hollande was elected President of France on 6 May 2012. He was inaugurated on 15 May, and shortly afterwards appointed Jean-Marc Ayrault to be his Prime Minister. He also appointed Benoît Puga to be the military's chief of staff, Pierre-René Lemas as his general secretary and Pierre Besnard as his Head of Cabinet. On his first official visit to a foreign country in his capacity as president of France, the airplane transporting him was hit by lightning.[31] The plane returned safely to Paris where he took another flight to Germany. The first measures he took were to lower the income of the president, the prime minister, and other members of the government by 30%, and to make them sign a "code of ethics".Budget: Hollande's economic policies are wide-ranging, including supporting the creation of a European credit rating agency, the separation of lending and investment in banks, reducing the share of electricity generated by nuclear power in France from 75 to 50% in favour of renewable energy sources, merging income tax and the General Social Contribution (CSG), creating an additional 45% for additional income of 150,000 euros, capping tax loopholes at a maximum of €10,000 per year, and questioning the relief solidarity tax on wealth (ISF, Impôt de Solidarité sur la Fortune) measure that should bring €29 billion in additional revenue. Hollande has also signalled his intent to implement a 75% income tax rate on revenue earned above 1,000,000 euros per year, to generate the provision of development funds for deprived suburbs, and to return to a deficit of zero percent of GDP by 2017.[33][34] The tax plan has proven controversial, with courts ruling it unconstitutional in 2012, only to then take the opposite position on a redrafted version in 2013.[35][36]
Hollande has also announced several reforms to education, pledging to recruit 60,000 new teachers, to create a study allowance and means-tested training, and to set up a mutually beneficial contract that would allow a generation of experienced employees and craftsmen to be the guardians and teachers of younger newly hired employees, thereby creating a total of 150,000 subsidized jobs. This has been complemented by the promise of aid to SMEs, with the creation of a public bank investment-oriented SME's, and a reduction of the corporate tax rate to 30% for medium corporations and 15% for small.Hollande's government has announced plans to construct 500,000 public homes per year, including 150,000 social houses, funded by a doubling of the ceiling of the A passbook, the region making available its local government land within five years. In accordance with long-standing Socialist Party policy, Hollande has announced that the retirement age will revert to 60, for those who have contributed for more than 41 years.LGBT rights: Further information: Law 2013-404; Hollande has also announced his personal support for same-sex marriage and adoption for LGBT couples, and outlined plans to pursue the issue in early 2013.[37] In July 2012, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault announced that "In the first half of 2013, the right to marriage and adoption will be open to all couples, without discrimination [...]", confirming this election promise by Hollande.The bill to legalize same-sex marriage, known as Bill no. 344, was introduced to the National Assembly of France on 7 November 2012. On 12 February 2013, the National Assembly approved the bill in a 329–229 vote.The Right-wing opposed the bill. The Senate approved the full bill with a 171–165 majority on 12 April with minor amendments. On 23 April, the National Assembly approved the amended bill, in a 331–225 vote, and following approval of the law by the Constitutional Council of France, it was signed into law by President François Hollande on 18 May 2013, with the first same-sex weddings under the law taking place eleven days later.Labour reform: As President, Hollande pursued labour reform to make France more competitive internationally. Legislation was introduced in late 2012 and after much debate passed the French lower and upper house in May 2013. The bill includes measures such as making it easier for workers to change jobs and for companies to fire employees. One of the main measures of the bill allows companies to temporarily cut workers' salaries or hours during times of economic difficulty. This measure takes its inspiration from Germany, where furloughs have been credited with allowing companies to weather difficult times without resorting to massive layoffs. Another measure that aims to simplify the firing process. Layoffs in France are often challenged in courts and the cases can take years to resolve. Many companies cite the threat of lengthy court action – even more than any financial cost – as the most difficult part of doing business in France. The law shortens the time that employees have to contest a layoff and also lays out a scheme for severance pay. The government hopes this will help employees and companies reach agreement faster in contentious layoffs.Another key measure introduced are credits for training that follow employees throughout their career, regardless of where they work, and the right to take a leave of absence to work at another company. The law will also require all companies to offer and partially pay for supplemental health insurance. Lastly, the law also reforms unemployment insurance, so that someone out of work doesn't risk foregoing significant benefits when taking a job that might pay less than previous work or end up only being temporary. Under the new law, workers will be able to essentially put benefits on hold when they take temporary work, instead of seeing their benefits recalculated each time.Pension reform: As President, Hollande pursued reform to the vast and expensive pension system in France. The process proved to be very contentious, with members of Parliament, Labor Unions, and general public all opposed. Mass protests and demonstrations occurred throughout Paris. Despite the opposition, the French Parliament did pass a reform in December 2013 aimed at plugging a pension deficit expected to reach 20.7 billion euros ($28.4 billion) by 2020 if nothing were to be done. Rather than raising the mandatory retirement age, as many economists had advised, Hollande pursued increases in contributions, leaving the retirement age untouched. The reform had a rough ride in parliament, being rejected twice by the Senate, where Hollande's Socialist Party has a slim majority, before it won sufficient backing in a final vote before the lower house of parliament. French private sector workers will see the size and duration of their pension contributions increase only modestly under the reform while their retirement benefits are largely untouched.[43] Several scholars and economists argue the reform did not go far enough.[who?] Foreign affairs: See also: List of presidential trips made by François Hollande
Leaders of Belarus, Russia, Germany, France, and Ukraine at the summit in Minsk, 11–12 February 2015. As President, Hollande promised an early withdrawal of French combat troops present in Afghanistan in 2012.He also pledged to conclude a new contract of Franco-German partnership, advocating the adoption of a Directive on the protection of public services. Hollande has proposed "an acceleration of the establishment of a Franco-German civic service, the creation of a Franco-German research office, the creation of a Franco-German industrial fund to finance common competitiveness clusters, and the establishment of a common military headquarters". As well as this, Hollande has expressed a wish to "combine the positions of the presidents of the European Commission and of the European Council (currently held by José Manuel Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy respectively) into a single office...and that it should be directly chosen" by the members of the European Parliament.Hollande made a state visit to the United States in February 2014; a state dinner was given in his honor by U.S. President Barack Obama.On 27 February 2014, Hollande was a special guest of honor in Abuja, received by Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan in celebration of Nigeria's amalgamation in 1914, a 100-year anniversary. In September 2015, Hollande warned former Eastern Bloc countries against rejecting the EU mandatory migrant quotas, saying: "Those who don't share our values, those who don't even want to respect those principles, need to start asking themselves questions about their place in the European Union".Intervention in Mali: Hollande reviews troops during the 2013 Bastille Day military parade. On 11 January 2013, Hollande authorised the execution of Operation Serval, which aimed to curtail the activities of Islamist extremists in the north of Mali.[44] The intervention was popularly supported in Mali, as Hollande promised that his government would do all it could to "rebuild Mali".During his one-day visit to Bamako, Mali's capital, on 2 February 2013, he said that it was "the most important day in [his] political life". In 2014, Hollande took some of these troops out of Mali and spread them over the rest of the Sahel under Operation Barkhane, in an effort to curb jihadists militants.Co-Prince of Andorra: The President of the French Republic is one of the two joint heads of state of the Principality of Andorra. Hollande hosted a visit from Antoni Martí, head of the government, and Vicenç Mateu Zamora, leader of the parliament.Approval ratings: An IFOP poll released in April 2014 showed that Hollande’s approval rating had dropped five points since the previous month of March to 18%, dipping below his earlier low of 20% in February during the same year.[57] In November 2014, his approval rating reached a new low of 12%, according to a YouGov poll.[58] Following the Charlie Hebdo shooting in January 2015, however, approval for Hollande increased dramatically, reaching 40% according to an IFOP poll two weeks after the attack,[59] though an Ipsos-Le Point survey in early February showed his rating declining back to 30%. Personal life: For over thirty years, his partner was fellow Socialist politician Ségolène Royal, with whom he has four children: Thomas (1984), Clémence (1985), Julien (1987) and Flora (1992). In June 2007, just a month after Royal's defeat in the French presidential election of 2007, the couple announced that they were separating.A few months after his split from Ségolène Royal was announced, a French website published details of a relationship between Hollande and French journalist Valérie Trierweiler. In November 2007, Trierweiler confirmed and openly discussed her relationship with Hollande in an interview with the French weekly Télé 7 Jours. She remained a reporter for the magazine Paris Match, but ceased work on political stories. Trierweiler moved into the Élysée Palace with Hollande when he became president and started to accompany him on official travel.On 25 January 2014, Hollande officially announced his separation from Valérie Trierweiler[63] after the tabloid magazine Closer revealed his affair with actress Julie Gayet.[64] In September 2014 Trierweiler published a book about her time with Hollande titled Merci pour ce moment (Thank You for This Moment). The memoir claimed the president presented himself as disliking the rich, but in reality disliked the poor. The claim brought an angry reaction and rejection from Hollande, who said he had spent his life dedicated to the under-privileged.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Hollande
Today will be the happiest day of François Hollande’s term as president of France. In the least surprising surprise result of the year, Hollande has defeated incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, with whom much of France had become frustrated and fed up. Public sentiment is easy enough to understand. Sarkozy rode into office on a wave of expectations which he seemed tempted to inflate at every turn. But he, like France, was ill-equipped to handle the economic crisis that now threatens to pull France into Europe’s troubled bottom tier, down with Italy, Spain, and Greece. Sarkozy’s brand of center-right nationalism had met its match. Now it’s time for Hollande’s, shall we say, socialist nationalism. Despite his reputation as a would-be “Mr. Normal,” Hollande offers an ideology far more grandiose in its self-regard than any associated with Sarkozy. Sarkozy’s egotism suited a party that believed it knew the future. Hollande’s apparent personal humility is an all-too-poetic fit with the animating spirit of his political creed — a wilfull ignorance of its own futility and obsolescence. There are many illustrations to come of why socialism is dead on arrival in twenty-first century France, and François Hollande will find no shortage of disappointments and calamities waiting for him at the peak of power. But right now, we can already identify five key reasons why Hollande is destined to fail: 1. No mandate. Whatever else can be said about socialism or François Hollande, there is no disputing the fact that his public support comprises a soberingly small slice of the French electorate. As it stands, he has not cracked 52% of the vote. What you may not know is that one in four voters rejected every candidate, with 20% casting no ballot and 5% casting a blank one. France’s radicals may tolerate him in a resigned sort of way, but the French right will simply bide their time and drum up some challenger who reminds no one of Sarkozy. The far right, on the other hand, will drive Hollande to distraction. He will be pushed toward the terrible choice either of demonizing them or trying to ignore them. Both alternatives will strengthen them, so long as Hollande actually advances his policies. Anything trans-nationalist will give the Front National fits, while anything else will be occasion for a pitched battle with Hollande over what nationalism is for. Hollande’s support is shallow and weak, fueled largely by a combination of dismayed hope and relief that at least one needn’t endure Sarkozy’s variety of failure anymore. To strengthen his support, Hollande will have to demagogue and cut left. The more he does this, the narrower his appeal will become. No matter what kind of changes in policy he achieves, they will be transitory. France, and Europe, are already waiting for the other shoe to drop. It will.
2. Nationalist nonsense. Barack Obama’s foreign policy has proven itself to be incoherent but acceptable to many Americans. François Hollande’s foreign policy will prove unacceptably incoherent. The French left has always favored greater European togetherness, but now associates the European project with Germany’s economic domination of the Continent. Hollande wants to square the circle by spearheading a European push for ‘more growth’, but he associates pro-growth economic reforms with so-called austerity. (Simply not spending substantial new sums counts as austerity.) As Gideon Rachman observes, France “is a country where the state already consumes 56 per cent of gross domestic product, which has not balanced a budget since the mid-1970s, and which has some of the highest taxes in the world.” And Hollande’s vision of growth is a product of his leftist view of nationalism:Mr. Hollande has vowed to restore social equilibrium in France, in part by pushing back against the austerity championed by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi. Mr. Hollande’s plans include rolling back tax breaks that Mr. Sarkozy gave to the wealthy, and increasing state-sponsored investment, in part by creating tens of thousands of civil sector jobs. 4 Essential Tips To Becoming A Better Leader Hollande is correct to realize that Germany lacks the political authority to successfully impose its fiscal habits upon Europe. But he is a fool to believe he ought to do more of precisely what caused Germany to try in the first place. Massive government spending is actually not the problem (although if Paul Krugman is right, France and Europe would require a volume of deficit spending that Hollande hasn’t a chance in hell of securing). The problem is not the amount of money that Hollande takes in, from whatever source, but how he will spend it: on government jobs. The secret killer of Europe’s economy has been government jobs, which have grown to absorb so much of Europe’s economies because so many European governments have functioned as if the EU had done nothing to weaken nationalism. There is little more nationalist than a government job, and little more hostile to European togetherness. The more government jobs, the farther away a common labor market. Civil sector jobs strengthen nationalism just at the moment of its most startling failure, yet they are the centerpiece of Hollande’s vision of normalcy. It’s a view that puts him on a collision course with the viability of the Eurozone and the EU itself. Once the left really accepts this, Hollande will become a scapegoat for whatever doesn’t work, which eventually will be everything. Left nationalism is as useless in the face of this crisis as Sarkozy’s center-right Gaullism. Sarkozy got off easy. Hollande won’t. 3. More globalization. Globalization will not reverse itself out of deference to François Hollande. For now, France is itself a globalizer, not a victim of globalization. But by the time Hollande is done with France, that may well change. The markets do not like Hollande — and why should they? — but, try as Hollande might, France is a market, and a big one. If he impairs the vitality of French business in Europe — and he will — he’ll make firms from around the world an offer they’ll be unlikely to refuse. This time, Germany won’t be first in line, especially if Hollande gets his way. The European left’s resistance to Germany is stronger than its resistance to China. China, meanwhile, is busy developing a new approach to Europe that can capitalize on this attitude. Just as the French left will find itself more nationalist, yet more beholden to foreign powers, it will be more antagonistic to globalization, yet more dependent upon it. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3: take Europe’s economic situation, add French socialism, and stir. 4. Focused opposition. France’s political right may be fraying and fragmenting now, but by the time Hollande is up for re-election, France’s needs — and the right’s — will become clear. Long gone will be the days when only a few isolated American and British commentators advance opinions concerning the necessity of one or another kind of new Napoleon in France. The heavyweight argument on that count involves a recognition that French nationalism and European togetherness can only be reconciled through a kind of French-led continental unity for which Napoleon’s First Empire is the only available inspiration. But a more easily digestible argument, capable of reuniting the right, looks something like this:Given the inevitable collapse of a future Hollande administration – either through economic failure or political ineptitude – what will save France from this poisonous consensus of decline and disorder? To return to the Napoleonic/Gaullist model, it needs a strong man (or woman) to advance bold, wholesale reform. It doesn’t require a dictator: the rule is that every successive great leader adopts and preserves the best of the constitution that came before. But France surely needs a president who will a) reject sectional politics that pits one class or region against another, b) resist pandering to the mob, and c) do what must be done to deregulate the French economy. Once the right accepts these things, an intelligible, coherent answer to Hollande will come into focus. The key piece will involve spanning the nationalist-versus-transnationalist divide. It will come as a matter of logic — before, not after, Hollande is replaced. The big picture for the French right is a realization that France cannot be kept strong and proud unless it asserts its political leadership over the whole of Europe. If it does not, failed states and hostile interests will hem it in on all sides, and unmet longings will bring chaos to its politics and its streets. 5. The force of history. The objection will be raised that the French right will never unite to beat Hollande unless the right individual — a truly remarkable individual — steps forward. Circumstances, however, have a habit of thrusting to the forefront someone who will do. By the time Hollande’s term is up, France will, historically speaking, have tried everything but a far-right government led from Paris. And the far right is too factional to swiftly step into effective command. Europe’s shambles and France’s limbo will form a vacuum reminiscent of the one that Napoleon stepped forward to fill. The people will be ready for it. After Hollande, they will be exhausted by politics and sick of themselves. Socialism will have proven itself completely unable to reconcile nationalism and transnationalism, as we already know it to be. The task will fall to the French right. Today, Hollande’s opponents seem incompetent to fulfill this task. But whatever the institutional preparedness of the French right appears to be, France will face the kind of historic moment that makes great statesmen, not waits on them. France’s savoir won’t be Hollande, thanks to the one-two punch of his orthodoxy and his disposition. His administration will exacerbate the troubles that already dwarf him. Whether he is aware of this or not, the outcome will be the same.
www.forbes.com/sites/jamespoulos/2012/05/06/five-reasons-...
French unemployment rose to near a record high in the third quarter, the latest sign that President Francois Hollande is struggling to meet a pledge to create jobs.Unemployment climbed to 10.6 percent in the three months through September from 10.4 percent the previous quarter, national statistics office Insee said in an e-mailed statement. That’s in contrast to Germany, where the jobless rate fell to a record-low 6.3 percent in November.While jobless claims have been steadily climbing for the past four years to reach a record 3.6 million in October, Hollande has been able to point to France’s growing population as part of the reason. The unemployment rate, by contrast, has stayed below the all-time high reached in 1997.The third-quarter increase now leaves unemployment at its highest in 18 years and just shy of the the 10.7 percent record. While the economy is showing some signs of sustained growth for the first time since Hollande took power in May 2012, the labor-market numbers represent a political defeat for the Socialist president, who has said that job creation is a condition for his own re-election in 2017.Separately on Thursday, Markit Economics said its composite manufacturing and services gauge fell to 51 in November from 52.6 in October. While that’s above the key 50 level indicating expansion, it lower than the initial estimate and signals the slowest growth of private sector output since August.
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-03/french-unemplo...
American postcard by Fotofolio, New York, N.Y., no. PH 18, 1981. Photo: Philippe Halsman, 1962 / Hastings Galleries Collection. Alfred Hitchcock at the set of The Birds (1963).
British director Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) was known as 'The Master of Suspense'. He is one of the most influential and extensively studied filmmakers in the history of cinema. He had his first major success with The Lodger (1926), a silent thriller loosely based on Jack the Ripper. Hitchcock came to international attention with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), and, most notably, The Lady Vanishes (1938). His first Hollywood film was the multi-Oscar-winning psychological thriller Rebecca (1940). Many classics followed including Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954), North by Northwest (1959) and The Birds (1963). In a career spanning six decades, he directed over 50 feature films which garnered a total of 46 Oscar nominations and 6 wins.
Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, on the outskirts of east London, in 1899. He was the son of Emma Jane Whelan and East End greengrocer William Hitchcock. His parents were both of half English and half Irish ancestry. He had two older siblings, William and Eileen Hitchcock. Raised as a strict Catholic and attending Saint Ignatius College, a school run by Jesuits, Hitch had very much of a regular upbringing. In 1914, his father died. To support himself and his mother—his older siblings had left home by then—Hitchcock took a job in 1915 as an estimator for the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company. His interest in films began at around this time, frequently visiting the cinema and reading US trade journals. In a trade paper, he read that Famous Players-Lasky, the production arm of Paramount Pictures, was opening a studio in London. They were planning to film The Sorrows of Satan by Marie Corelli, so Hitch produced some drawings for the title cards and sent his work to the studio. They hired him, and in 1919 he began working for Islington Studios as a title-card designer. Hitchcock soon gained experience as a co-writer, art director, and production manager on at least 18 silent films. After Hugh Croise, the director for Always Tell Your Wife (1923) fell ill, Hitchcock and star and producer Seymour Hicks finished the film together. When Paramount pulled out of London in 1922, Hitchcock was hired as an assistant director by a new firm run in the same location by Michael Balcon, later known as Gainsborough Pictures. He began to collaborate with the editor and "script girl" Alma Reville, his future wife. He worked as an assistant to director Graham Cutts on several films, including The Blackguard (1924), which was produced at the Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam. There Hitchcock watched part of the making of F. W. Murnau's film Der letzte Mann/The Last Laugh (1924). He was impressed with Murnau's work and later used many of his techniques for the set design in his own productions. In the summer of 1925, Balcon asked Hitchcock to direct The Pleasure Garden (1925), starring Virginia Valli, a co-production of Gainsborough and the German firm Emelka. Reville, by then Hitchcock's fiancée, was assistant director-editor. In 1927, Hitchcock made his first trademark film, the thriller The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) starring Ivor Novello. The Lodger is about the hunt for a serial killer who, wearing a black cloak and carrying a black bag, is murdering young blonde women in London, and only on Tuesdays. The Lodger was a commercial and critical success in the UK. In the same year, Hitchcock married Alma Reville. They had one child, Patricia Hitchcock (1928). Reville became her husband's closest collaborator and wrote or co-wrote on many of his films. Hitchcock made the transition to sound film with his tenth film, Blackmail (1929), the first British 'talkie'. Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences, with the climax taking place on the dome of the British Museum. He used early sound recording as a special element of the film, stressing the word "knife" in a conversation with the woman (Anny Ondra) suspected of murder. It was followed by Murder! (1930). In 1933 Hitchcock was once again working for Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British on The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). It was a success. His second, The 39 Steps (1935), with Robert Donat, made him a star in the USA. It also established the quintessential English 'Hitchcock blonde' (Madeleine Carroll) as the template for his succession of ice-cold, elegant leading ladies. His next major success was The Lady Vanishes (1938), with Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave. The film saw Hitchcock receive the 1938 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director.[
David O. Selznick signed Hitchcock to a seven-year contract beginning in March 1939, and the Hitchcocks moved to Hollywood. He directed an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1940), starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier. Rebecca won the Oscar for Best Picture, although Hitchcock himself was only nominated as Best Director. Hitchcock's second American film was the thriller Foreign Correspondent (1940), set in Europe, and produced by Walter Wanger. It was nominated for Best Picture that year Suspicion (1941) was the first of four projects on which Cary Grant worked with Hitchcock, and it is one of the rare occasions that Grant was cast in a sinister role. In one scene Hitchcock placed a light inside a glass of milk, perhaps poisoned, that Grant is bringing to his wife, played by Joan Fontaine. The light makes sure that the audience's attention is on the glass. Fontaine won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance. Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was Hitchcock's personal favourite. Charlotte "Charlie" Newton (Teresa Wright) suspects her beloved uncle Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten) of being a serial killer. Hitchcock was again nominated for the Oscar for Best Director for Lifeboat (1944) and Spellbound (1945), but he never won the award. Spellbound (1945), starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, explores psychoanalysis and features a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí. Notorious (1946) stars Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, both Hitchcock regulars, and features a plot about Nazis, uranium, and South America. After a brief lull of commercial success in the late 1940s, Hitchcock returned to form with Strangers on a Train (1951), based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith. In the film, two men casually meet, one of whom speculates on a foolproof method to murder. He suggests that two people, each wishing to do away with someone, should each perform the other's murder. Farley Granger played the innocent victim of the scheme, while boy-next-door" Robert Walker played the villain. I Confess (1953) was set in Quebec with Montgomery Clift as a Catholic priest. It was followed by three colour films starring Grace Kelly: the 3-D film Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), and To Catch a Thief (1955). From 1955 to 1965, Hitchcock was the host of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. With his droll delivery, gallows humour and iconic image, the series made Hitchcock a celebrity. in his films, Hitchcock often used the "mistaken identity" theme, such as in The Wrong Man (1956), and North by Northwest (1959). In Vertigo (1958), James Stewart plays Scottie, a former police investigator suffering from acrophobia. He develops an obsession with a woman he has been hired to shadow (Kim Novak). His obsession leads to tragedy, and this time Hitchcock does not opt for a happy ending. Vertigo is one of his most personal and revealing films, dealing with the Pygmalion-like obsessions of a man who crafts a woman into the woman he desires. Psycho (1960) was Hitchcock's great shock masterpiece, mostly for its haunting performances by Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins and its shower scene, and The Birds (1963) became the unintended forerunner to an onslaught of films about nature-gone-mad, and booth films were phenomenally popular. Film companies began to refer to his films as 'Alfred Hitchcock's': Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), and Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot (1976). During the making of Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock's wife Alma suffered a paralysing stroke which made her unable to walk very well. In 1979, Hitchcock was knighted, making him Sir Alfred Hitchcock. A year later, in 1980, he died peacefully in his sleep due to renal failure. Hitchcock was survived by his wife and daughter. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His remains were scattered over the Pacific Ocean.
Sources: Bruce Eder (AllMovie), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
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South-African postcard by East-West Publishers, Cape Town, no. 19.
American actor Gregory Peck (1916-2003) was one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s. Peck received five nominations for Academy Award for Best Actor and won once – for his performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He almost always played courageous, nobly heroic good guys who saw injustice and fought it. Among his best known films are Spellbound (1945), The Yearling (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Roman Holiday (1953), The Guns of Navarone (1961), and Cape Fear (1962).
Eldred Gregory Peck was born in 1916 in La Jolla, California (now in San Diego). His parents were Bernice Mary (Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, a chemist, and druggist in San Diego. His parents divorced when he was five years old. An only child, he was sent to live with his grandmother. He never felt he had a stable childhood. His fondest memories are of his grandmother taking him to the cinema every week and of his dog, which followed him everywhere. Peck's father encouraged him to take up medicine. He studied pre-med at UC-Berkeley and, while there, got bitten by the acting bug and decided to change the focus of his studies. He enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and debuted on Broadway after graduation. His debut was in Emlyn Williams' play 'The Morning Star' (1942). By 1943, he was in Hollywood, where he debuted in the RKO film Days of Glory (Jacques Tourneur, 1944). Stardom came with his next film, The Keys of the Kingdom (John M. Stahl, 1944), for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Tony Fontana at IMDb: "Peck's screen presence displayed the qualities for which he became well known. He was tall, rugged and heroic, with a basic decency that transcended his roles." He appeared opposite Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) as an amnesia victim accused of murder. In The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946), he was again nominated for an Oscar and won the Golden Globe. He was especially effective in Westerns and appeared in such varied fare as David O. Selznick's critically blasted Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), the somewhat better received Yellow Sky (William A. Wellman, 1948), and the acclaimed The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950). He was nominated again for the Academy Award for his roles in Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), which dealt with anti-Semitism, and Twelve O'Clock High (Henry King, 1949), a story of high-level stress in an Air Force bomber unit in World War II. In 1947, Peck, along with Dorothy McGuire, David O'Selznick, and Mel Ferrer, founded the La Jolla Playhouse, located in his hometown, and produced many of the classics there. Due to film commitments, he could not return to Broadway but whet his appetite for live theatre on occasion at the Playhouse, keeping it firmly established with a strong, reputable name over the years.
With a string of hits to his credit, Gregory Peck made the decision to only work in films that interested him. He continued to appear as the heroic, larger-than-life figures in such films as Captain Horatio Hornblower (Raoul Walsh, 1951) with Virginia Mayo, and Moby Dick (John Huston, 1956) with Richard Basehart. He worked with Audrey Hepburn in her debut film, Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953). While filming The Bravados (Henry King, 1958), he decided to become a cowboy in real life, so he purchased a vast working ranch near Santa Barbara, California - already stocked with 600 head of prize cattle. In the early 1960s, he gave a powerful performance as Captain Keith Mallory in The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson, 1961) opposite David Niven and Anthony Quinn. The film was one of the biggest box-office hits of that year. Peck finally won the Oscar, after four nominations, for his performance as lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962). He also appeared in two darker films than he usually made, Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962) opposite Robert Mitchum, and Captain Newman, M.D. (David Miller, 1963) with Tony Curtis, which dealt with the way people live. The financial failure of Cape Fear (1962) ended his company, Melville Productions. After making Arabesque (Stanley Donen, 1966) with Sophia Loren, Peck withdrew from acting for three years in order to concentrate on various humanitarian causes, including the American Cancer Society. In the early 1970s, he produced two films, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Gordon Davidson, 1972) and The Dove (Charles Jarrott, 1974), when his film career stalled. He made a comeback playing, somewhat woodenly, Ambassador Robert Thorn in the horror film The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) with Lee Remick. After that, he returned to the bigger-than-life roles he was best known for, such as MacArthur (Joseph Sargent, 1977) and the infamous Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele in the huge hit The Boys from Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978) with Laurence Olivier and James Mason. In the 1980s, he moved into television with the miniseries The Blue and the Gray (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1982) in which he played Abraham Lincoln, and The Scarlet and the Black (Jerry London, 1983) with Christopher Plummer and John Gielgud. In 1991, he appeared in the remake of his 1962 film, playing a different role, in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991). He was also cast as the progressive-thinking owner of a wire and cable business in Other People's Money (Norman Jewison, 1991), starring Danny DeVito. In 1967, Peck received the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He was also been awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. Always politically progressive, he was active in such causes as anti-war protests, workers' rights, and civil rights. In 2003, Peck's portrayal of Atticus Finch was named the greatest film hero of the past 100 years by the American Film Institute, only two weeks before his death. Atticus beat out Indiana Jones, who was placed second, and James Bond who came third. Gregory Peck died in 2003 in Los Angeles, California. He was 87. Peck was married twice. From 1942 till 1955, he was married to Greta Kukkonen. They had three children: Jonathan Peck (1944-1975), Stephen Peck (1946), and Carey Paul Peck (1949). His second wife was Veronique Passani, whom he met at the set of Roman Holliday. They married in 1955 and had two children: Tony Peck (1956) and Cecilia Peck (1958). The couple remained together till his death.
Sources: Tony Fontana (IMDb), and IMDb.
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French postcard by Spotlight Magazine.
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 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 the 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.
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French postcard by Editions P.I., Paris, no. 405. Photo: Warner Bros, 1953.
At 19, legendary film actress Lauren Bacall (1924-2014) became an overnight star as 'Slim' opposite Humphrey Bogart in her memorable film debut in Howard Hawks' To Have and Have Not (1942). She became known for her distinctive husky voice and glamorous looks in Film Noirs such as The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948), and the delicious comedy How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) with Marilyn Monroe. After a 50-year career, she received a Golden Globe and her first Oscar nomination for supporting actress for her role as Barbra Streisand’s mother in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1997).
Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske in 1924 in The Bronx in New York City. She was the daughter of Natalie Weinstein-Bacal, a Romanian Jewish immigrant, and William Perske, who was born in New Jersey, to Polish Jewish parents. Her family was middle-class, with her father working as a salesman and her mother as a secretary. They divorced when she was five and she rarely saw her father after that. Following a study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, she was crowned Miss Greenwich Village in 1942. Bacall gained nationwide attention by posing for a 1943 cover of Harper's Bazaar magazine. This photo was spotted by Nancy Gross "Slim" Hawks, the wife of film director Howard Hawks, and prompted Hawks to put her under personal contract. He wanted to "create" a star from fresh, raw material and changed her name to Lauren Bacall. For her screen debut, Hawks cast Bacall as Marie Browning opposite Humphrey Bogart in the thriller To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944). Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "The young actress was so nervous that she walked around with her chin pressed against her collarbone to keep from shaking. As a result, she had to glance upward every time she spoke, an affectation which came across as sexy and alluring, earning Bacall the nickname 'The Look'. She also spoke in a deep, throaty manner, effectively obscuring the fact that she was only 19-years-old. Thanks to the diligence of Hawks and his crew - and the actress' unique delivery of such lines as "If you want anything, just whistle..." - Bacall found herself lauded as the most sensational newcomer of 1944. She also found herself in love with Humphrey Bogart, whom she subsequently married." Bogie and Bacall co-starred in three more crime films, The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947), and Key Largo (John GHuston, 1948), also with Edward G. Robinson, and Lionel Barrymore. These films increased the actress' popularity, but also led critics to suggest that she was incapable of carrying a picture on her own. Bacall's disappointing solo turn opposite Charles Boyer in Confidential Agent (Herman Shumlin, 1945) seemed to confirm this.
Lauren Bacall was a quick study and good listener, and in 1950, she starred without her husband in Bright Leaf (Michael Curtiz, 1950), a drama set in 1894 with Gary Cooper. Before long she was turning in more first-rate performances in such films as Young Man With a Horn (Michael Curtiz, 1950) opposite Kirk Douglas and Doris Day, and the comedy How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco, 1953) with Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe. Her first comedy was a smash hit. Bogart's death in 1957 after a long and painful bout with throat cancer left Lauren Bacall personally devastated. At the funeral, she put a whistle in his coffin. It was a reference to the famous line she says to him in their first film together To Have and Have Not (1944): "You know how to whistle, don't you? You just put your lips together and blow." In the tradition of her show-must-go-on husband, she continued to perform to the best of her ability in films such as the sophisticated comedy Designing Woman (Vincente Minnelli, 1957) with Gregory Peck, and the drama The Gift of Love (Jean Negulesco, 1958) opposite Robert Stack. The latter turned out to be a big disappointment. Denny Jackson at IMDb: "Undaunted, Lauren moved back to New York City and appeared in several Broadway plays to huge critical acclaim. She was enjoying acting before live audiences and the audiences, in turn, enjoyed her fine performances."
Lauren Bacall was away from the big screen for five years, but she returned in 1964 to appear in the thriller Shock Treatment (Denis Sanders, 1964) with Stuart Whitman and Carol Lynley, and the comedy Sex and the Single Girl (Richard Quine, 1964) with Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood, and Henry Fonda. In 1966, Lauren starred in the crime film Harper (Jack Smight, 1966) with Paul Newman and Julie Harris. In the late 1960s, after Bacall's second marriage to another hard-case actor, Jason Robards Jr., she received only a handful of negligible film roles and all but dropped out of filmmaking. In 1970, Bacall made a triumphant comeback in the stage production 'Applause', a musical adaptation of All About Eve. For her role as grand dame Margo Channing, originally played by Bette Davis in the film version, Bacall won a Tony Award. Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "Her sultry-vixen persona long in the past, Bacall spent the '70s playing variations on her worldly, resourceful Applause role, sometimes merely being decorative (Murder on the Orient Express, 1974), but most often delivering class-A performances (The Shootist, 1976). After playing the quasi-autobiographical part of a legendary, outspoken Broadway actress in 1981's The Fan, she spent the next ten years portraying Lauren Bacall -- and no one did it better."
Lauren Bacall was away from films again, this time for seven years. In the interim, she again appeared on the stages of Broadway. In 1981, she won her second Tony for 'Woman of the Year', based on the film Woman of the Year (George Stevens, 1942) with Katharine Hepburn. When she returned, it was for the filming of the Agatha Christie mystery Appointment with Death (Michael Winner, 1988) with Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot, and Mr. North (Danny Huston, 1988), starring Anthony Edwards and Robert Mitchum. Then followed the Stephen King adaptation Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990) and several made for television film. In one of these, The Portrait (Arthur Penn, 1993, she and her Designing Woman co-star Gregory Peck played a still-amorous elderly couple. Once more, Bacall proved here that she was a superb actress and not merely a "professional personality". In 1994, she paid tribute to her first role as 'Slim' in To Have and Have Not with a character called 'Slim Chrysler' in Prêt-à-Porter (Robert Altman, 1994), released to theatres fifty years after the premiere of To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944). During the filming of The Mirror Has Two Faces (Barbra Streisand, 1996), Lauren Bacall traveled to France to accept a special César Award for her lifetime achievement in film. For her role in Mirror, which cast her as Barbra Streisand's mother, Bacall earned a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination. She continued to work on a number of projects into the next decade, including Diamonds (John Asher, 1999), in which she appeared alongside Kirk Douglas, with whom she last co-starred in the romantic drama Young Man with a Horn (Michael Curtiz, 1950). In the new century, she worked twice with internationally respected filmmaker Lars von Trier, appearing in his films Dogville and Manderlay. She was in the Nicole Kidman film Birth and appeared in the documentary Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff. Bacall won an Honorary Oscar in 2010. Her autobiography, 'By Myself and Then Some', won a National Book Award in 1980. Lauren Bacall died in 2014 in New York, at age 89. She was the mother of producer Stephen H. Bogart (1949), Leslie Bogart (1952), and actor Sam Robards (1961).
Sources: Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Denny Jackson (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
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Alicia Silverstone (born October 4, 1976) is an American actress. She made her film debut in The Crush (1993), earning the 1994 MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance, and gained further prominence as a teen idol when she appeared at the age of 16 in the music video for Aerosmith's "Cryin'". She starred in the comedy hit Clueless (1995), which earned her a multimillion-dollar deal with Columbia Pictures, and in the big-budget film Batman & Robin (1997), playing Batgirl. She has continued to act in film and television and on stage. For her role in the short-lived drama comedy Miss Match (2003), Silverstone received a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actress – Television Series Musical or Comedy. A vegan, Silverstone has endorsed PETA activities and has published two nutrition books.
Hi everyone,
The nominations for May's themes of S (Something Sheer), T (Tools of the Trade) and U (Upside Down) are here!
Whether you contribute frequently or sometimes just stop by to comment on others' photos, we hope you'll take a moment to vote.
To view the nominated photos and vote, please visit the following discussion post: www.flickr.com/groups/2962397@N20/discuss/72157714544246816/
The final day to vote is Wednesday, June 24.
Italian postcard by B.F.F. Edit., no. 2947. Collection: Marlene Pilaete.
American screen legend Gary Cooper (1901-1961) is well remembered for his stoic, understated acting style in more than one hundred Westerns, comedies and dramas. He received five Oscar nominations and won twice for his roles as Alvin York in Sergeant York (1941) and as Will Kane in High Noon (1952).
Frank James Cooper was born in Helena, Montana in 1901. His parents were English immigrants, Alice Cooper-Brazier and Charles Henry Cooper, a prominent lawyer, rancher, and eventually a state supreme court judge. Frank left school in 1918 and returned to the family ranch to help raise their five hundred head of cattle and work full-time as a cowboy. In 1919, his father arranged for his son to complete his high school education at Gallatin County High School in Bozeman, Montana. His English teacher, Ida W. Davis, played an important role in encouraging him to focus on academics, join the school's debating team, and become involved in dramatics. He was in a car accident as a teenager that caused him to walk with a limp the rest of his life. In the fall of 1924, Cooper's parents moved to Los Angeles to administer the estates of two relatives. Cooper joined them and there he met some cowboys from Montana who were working as film extras and stuntmen in low-budget Western films. Cooper decided to try his hand working as a film extra for five dollars a day, and as a stuntman for twice that amount. In early 1925, Cooper began his film career working as an extra and stuntman on Poverty Row in such silent Westerns as Riders of the Purple Sage (Lynn Reynolds, 1925) with Tom Mix, and The Trail Rider (W.S. Van Dyke, 1925) with Buck Jones. Cooper paid for a screen test and hired casting director Nan Collins to work as his agent. Collins changed his first name to ‘Gary’ after her hometown of Gary, Indiana. Cooper also worked in non-Western films. He appeared as a masked Cossack in The Eagle (Clarence Brown, 1925) with Rudolph Valentino, as a Roman guard in Ben-Hur (Fred Niblo, 1925) with Ramón Novarro, and as a flood survivor in The Johnstown Flood (Irving Cummings, 1926) with George O'Brien. Gradually he began to land credited roles that offered him more screen time, such as Tricks (Bruce M. Mitchell, 1925), in which he played the film's antagonist. As a featured player, he began to attract the attention of major film studios and in June 1926, Cooper signed a contract with Samuel Goldwyn Productions. His first important film role was in The Winning of Barbara Worth (Henry King, 1926) with Ronald Colman and Vilma Bánky. The film was a major success, and critics called Cooper a "dynamic new personality" and future star. Cooper signed a five-year contract with Jesse L. Lasky at Paramount Pictures for $175 per week. In 1927, with help from established silent film star Clara Bow, Cooper landed high-profile roles opposite her in Children of Divorce (Frank Lloyd, 1927) and Wings (William A. Wellman, 1927), the first film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. With each new film, Cooper's acting skills improved and his popularity continued to grow, especially among female movie-goers. He received a thousand fan letters per week. The studio placed him opposite popular leading ladies in films such as Beau Sabreur (John Waters, 1928) with Evelyn Brent, Half a Bride (Gregory La Cava, 1928) with Esther Ralston, and Lilac Time (George Fitzmaurice, 1928) with Colleen Moore. The latter introduced synchronized music and sound effects, and became one of the biggest box office hits of the year.
In 1929, Gary Cooper became a major film star with his first sound picture, The Virginian, (Victor Fleming, 1929). The Virginian was one of the first sound films to define the Western code of honour and helped establish many of the conventions of the Western genre. The romantic image of the tall, handsome, and shy cowboy hero that embodied male freedom, courage, and honour was created in large part by Cooper's performance in the film. Cooper transitioned naturally to the sound medium, with his deep, clear, and pleasantly drawling voice. One of the high points of Cooper's early career was his portrayal of a sullen legionnaire in Josef von Sternberg's Morocco (1930) with Marlene Dietrich in her American debut. Cooper produced one of his finest performances to that point in his career. In the Dashiell Hammett crime drama City Streets (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931) he played a misplaced cowboy in a big city who gets involved with gangsters to save the woman (Sylvia Sidney) he loves. After making ten films in two years Cooper was exhausted and had lost thirty pounds. In May 1931, he sailed to Algiers and then Italy, where he lived for the next year. During his time abroad, Cooper stayed with the Countess Dorothy di Frasso who taught him about good food and vintage wines, how to read Italian and French menus in the finest restaurants, and how to socialize among Europe's nobility and upper classes. In 1932, a healthy Cooper returned to Hollywood and negotiated a new contract with Paramount for two films per year, a salary of $4,000 per week, and director and script approval. He appeared opposite Helen Hayes in A Farewell to Arms (Frank Borzage, 1932), the first film adaptation of an Ernest Hemingway novel. Critics praised his highly intense and at times emotional performance, and the film went on to become one of the year's most commercially successful films. The following year, Cooper appeared in the Ernst Lubitsch comedy Design for Living (1933) with Miriam Hopkins and Fredric March, and based loosely on the successful Noël Coward play. Wikipedia: “The film received mixed reviews and did not do well at the box office, but Cooper's performance was singled out for its versatility and revealed his genuine ability to do light comedy”. Then, he appeared in his first of seven films by director Henry Hathaway, Now and Forever (1934), with Carole Lombard and Shirley Temple. The film was a box-office success. His next two Henry Hathaway films were the melodrama Peter Ibbetson (1935) with Ann Harding, about a man caught up in a dream world created by his love for a childhood sweetheart, and the romantic adventure The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), about a daring British officer and his men who defend their stronghold at Bengal against rebellious local tribes. The latter was nominated for six Academy Awards and became one of Cooper's most popular and successful adventure films.
Gary Cooper returned to Poverty Row for the first time since his early silent film days to make Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936) with Jean Arthur for Columbia Pictures. Cooper plays the character of Longfellow Deeds, an innocent, sweet-natured writer of greeting cards who inherits a fortune, leaves behind his idyllic life in Vermont, and travels to New York where he faces a world of corruption and deceit. For his performance in Mr. Deeds, Cooper received his first Oscar nomination. In the adventure film The General Died at Dawn (Lewis Milestone, 1936) with Madeleine Carroll, he plays an American soldier of fortune in China who helps the peasants defend themselves against the oppression of a cruel warlord. Written by playwright Clifford Odets, the film was a critical and commercial success. In Cecil B. DeMille's sprawling frontier epic The Plainsman (1936) with Jean Arthur—his first of four films with the director—Cooper portrays Wild Bill Hickok in a highly-fictionalized version of the opening of the American western frontier. That year, Cooper appeared for the first time on the Motion Picture Herald exhibitor's poll of top ten film personalities, where he would remain for the next twenty-two years. In Ernst Lubitsch's romantic comedy Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938) with Claudette Colbert, Cooper plays a wealthy American businessman in France who falls in love with an impoverished aristocrat's daughter and persuades her to become his eighth wife. In the adventure film Beau Geste (William A. Wellman, 1939) with Ray Milland, he joined the French Foreign Legion to find adventure in the Sahara fighting local tribes. Wikipedia: “Beau Geste provided Cooper with magnificent sets, exotic settings, high-spirited action, and a role tailored to his personality and screen persona.” Cooper cemented his cowboy credentials in The Westerner (William Wyler, 1940). He won his first Academy Award for Best Actor in 1942 for his performance as Alvin York, the most decorated U.S. soldier from the Great War, in Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941). Cooper worked with Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls (Sam Wood, 1943) which earned him his third Oscar nomination. The film was based on a novel by Ernest Hemingway, with whom Cooper developed a strong friendship. On 23 October 1947, he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, not under subpoena but responding to an invitation to give testimony on the alleged infiltration of Hollywood by communists. Although he never said he regretted having been a friendly witness, as an independent producer, he hired blacklisted actors and technicians. He did say he had never wanted to see anyone lose the right to work, regardless of what he had done. Cooper won his second Oscar for his performance as Marshal Will Kane in High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952), one of his finest roles and a kind of come-back after a series of flops. He continued to play the lead in films almost to the end of his life. His later box office hits included the influential Western Vera Cruz (Robert Aldrich, 1954) in which he guns down villain Burt Lancaster in a showdown, William Wyler's Friendly Persuasion (1956), in which he portrays a Quaker farmer during the American Civil War, Billy Wilder's Love in the Afternoon (1957) with Audrey Hepburn, and the hard-edged action Western Man of the West (Anthony Mann, 1958), with Lee J. Cobb. Cooper's final film was the British-American co-production The Naked Edge (Michael Anderson, 1961). In April 1960, Cooper underwent surgery for prostate cancer after it had metastasized to his colon. But by the end of the year the cancer had spread to his lungs and bones. On 13 May 1961, six days after his sixtieth birthday, Gary Cooper died. The young and handsome Cooper had affairs with Clara Bow, Lupe Velez, Marlene Dietrich and Tallulah Bankhead. In 1933, he married socialite Veronica Balfe, who, billed as Sandra Shaw, enjoyed a short-lived acting career. They had an ‘open’ marriage and Cooper also had relationships with the actresses Grace Kelly, Anita Ekberg, and Patricia Neal. Sir Cecil Beaton also claimed to have had an affair with him.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
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American postcard by Fotofolio, no. P430. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe.
American actress Julia Roberts (1967) won more than 30 other acting awards including an Academy Award for her leading role in Erin Brockovich (2000) plus Oscar nominations for Steel Magnolias (1989), Pretty Woman (1990) and August: Osage County (2013). Her films have grossed more than $3.9 billion globally, making her one of the most bankable film stars of all time.
Julia Fiona Roberts was born in Smyrna, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, in 1967. Julia is the youngest of three children of Walter Grady Roberts and Betty Lou Bredemus, one-time actors and playwrights. Her parents were close friends with Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King. Walter and Betty Lou Roberts ran the Actors and Writers Workshop, then the only integrated drama school in Atlanta, which the Kings' eldest daughter Yolanda King attended. The Kings paid the hospital bill for Julia's birth. When Roberts was four years old., her parents divorced. Her brother Eric stayed with his father and Julia and her sister Lisa continued to live with their mother in Atlanta. When Roberts was nine, her father died of cancer. As a child, due to her love of animals, Julia originally wanted to be a veterinarian, but later studied journalism. Her parents were in the drama club, so acting was soon in the cards. Her brother Eric was originally seen as the great acting promise of the family but ended up producing more quantity than quality in the eyes of critics. Sister Lisa is not actually a professional actress but has since appeared in twenty-four films in small supporting roles, mostly in titles by her younger sister. While at school, Roberts worked as a waitress in a pizzeria and spent some time behind the cash register in a supermarket. When Eric achieved some success in Hollywood, Julia decided to try acting. She started taking acting classes and went to live with her sister in New York where she signed with the Click Modeling Agency. She took speech lessons to get rid of her southern accent. She made her film debut with a bit role in Blood Red (Peter Masterson, 1989), starring her brother Eric Roberts, which was completed in 1986 but wouldn't be released until 1989. She appeared in several television features and series, including Miami Vice (1988). Her first break came in 1988 when she appeared in two youth-oriented films Mystic Pizza (Donald Petrie, 1988) and Satisfaction (Joan Freeman, 1988). It helped her earn the credentials she needed to land the part of Shelby, an ill-fated would-be mother in the comedy-drama Steel Magnolias (Herbert Ross, 1989). The tearjerker found her acting alongside Sally Field and Shirley MacLaine which culminated in an Oscar nomination for Roberts. Then followed the supernatural thriller Flatliners (Joel Schumacher, 1990) with her flame Kiefer Sutherland.
Julia Robert's biggest success was in the romantic comedy Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990) with Richard Gere. Originally intended to be a dark cautionary tale about class and prostitution in Los Angeles, the film was re-conceived as a romantic comedy with a large budget. Critic Roger Ebert: "Roberts does an interesting thing; she gives her character an irrepressibly bouncy sense of humor and then lets her spend the movie trying to repress it. Actresses who can do that and look great can have whatever they want in Hollywood." Julia got an Oscar nomination and also won the People's Choice award for Favorite Actress. It was widely successful at the box office and was the third-highest-grossing film of 1990. Julia's part as a good-hearted Hollywood prostitute who falls in love with a millionaire client was her definitive breakthrough role. Her role opposite Denzel Washington in the John Grisham adaptation The Pelican Brief (Alan J. Pakula, 1993), reaffirmed her status as a dramatic actress. Even though Julia would spend the next few years either starring in serious films or playing fantasy roles like Tinkerbell in Steven Spielberg's Hook (1991), filmgoers would always love Julia best in romantic comedies such as Notting Hill (Richard Curtis, 1999) with Hugh Grant, and Runaway Bride (Garry Marshall, 1999) with Richard Gere. In My Best Friend's Wedding (P.J. Hogan, 1997), she starred opposite Dermot Mulroney, Cameron Diaz and Rupert Everett, as a food critic who realizes she's in love with her best friend and tries to win him back after he decides to marry someone else. The cult comedy gave the genre some fresh life that had been lacking in Hollywood for some time. Roger Ebert: "One of the pleasures of Ronald Bass' screenplay is the way it subverts the usual comic formulas that would fuel a plot like this. It makes the Julia Roberts character sympathetic at first, but eventually her behavior shades into cruel meddling. Stories like this are tricky for the actors. They have to be light enough for the comedy, and then subtle in revealing the deeper tones. Roberts, Diaz and Mulroney are in good synch, and Roberts does a skillful job of negotiating the plot's twists: We have to care for her even after we stop sharing her goals. "
Julia Roberts' had her biggest success when she delivered an Oscar-winning performance playing the title role in Erin Brockovich (Steven Soderbergh, 2000). The film, based on the true story of Erin Brockovich, a single mother who, against all odds, won a heated battle against corporate environmental offenders, earned Roberts a staggering 20-million-dollar salary. The next year, Roberts starred in the crime caper Ocean's Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001), in which she acted with Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and George Clooney. A success with critics and at the box office alike, Ocean's Eleven became the fifth highest-grossing film of the year with a total of $450 million worldwide. In 2004, Roberts signed on for the sequel, the aptly titled Ocean's Twelve (Steven Soderbergh, 2004). In 2006, she made her Broadway debut alongside Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper in the revival of Richard Greenberg's play 'Three Days of Rain', but the production was not a success. Roberts teamed with Tom Hanks for Charlie Wilson's War (Mike Nichols, 2007), and then again for Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks, 2011). In between, she gave a critically acclaimed performance in Eat, Pray, Love (Ryan Murphy, 2010), in which she portrayed a divorcee on a journey of self-discovery. In 2012, she played Snow White's evil stepmother in Mirror, Mirror (Tarsem Singh, 2012). Roberts starred alongside Meryl Streep and Ewan McGregor in the black comedy drama August: Osage County (John Wells, 2013) about a dysfunctional family that reunites in the familial house when their patriarch suddenly disappears. Her performance earned her her fourth Academy Award nomination. Julia Roberts was in a relationship with actor Kiefer Sutherland for a while. In 1991, their relationship ended five days before they got married. She married country singer Lyle Lovett in 1993 but divorced him in 1995. She met her second husband, cameraman Danny Moder while shooting the film the road gangster comedy The Mexican (Gore Verbinski, 2000) with Brad Pitt. Roberts and Moder married in 2002 in Taos, New Mexico. Together they had twins in 2004, a daughter, Hazel Patricia, and a son, Phinnaeus 'Finn' Walter. In 2007, Roberts gave birth to their third child, Henry Daniel. All the children were given their father's surname. Julia Roberts also became involved with UNICEF charities and has made visits to many different countries, including Haiti and India, in order to promote goodwill. On-screen, she appeared in Jodie Foster's thriller Money Monster (2016), the coming-of-age drama Wonder (Steven Chbosky, 2017), and the romantic comedy Ticket to Paradise (Ol Parker, 2022) with George Clooney. She received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for the television adaptation of Larry Kramer's AIDS-era play The Normal Heart (Larry Murphy, 2014), had her first regular television role in the first season of the psychological thriller series Homecoming (2018), and portrayed Martha Mitchell opposite Sean in the political thriller series Gaslit (2022) about the Watergate Scandal.
Sources: Roger Ebert (Roger Ebert.com), Tracie Cooper (AllMovie), KD Haisch (IMDb), Wikipedia (Dutch and English) and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Nomination for Drisyam 2008 exhibition, Ernakulam Town Hall (26th - 30th December) Taken on Alleppey beach.
British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. W 599. Photo: Columbia.
Glenn Ford (1916-2006) was a Canadian-American actor whose career lasted more than 50 years. Although he played different types of roles in many film genres, Ford was best known for playing ordinary men in unusual circumstances. He was one of the biggest box-office draws of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Some of his most significant roles were in the Film Noirs Gilda (1946) and The Big Heat (1953), and the high school angst film Blackboard Jungle (1955). However, it was for comedies or Westerns which he received acting laurels, including three Golden Globe nominations for Best Actor in a Comedy, winning for Pocketful of Miracles (1961). He also played a supporting role as Clark Kent's adoptive father in Superman (1978).
Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford was born in 1916, in Sainte-Christine-d'Auvergne, Quebec. He was the son of Hannah Wood (née Mitchell) and Newton Ford, an engineer with the Canadian Pacific Railway. In 1922, when Ford was six, the family moved first to Venice and then to Santa Monica, California. Newton became a motorman for the Venice Electric Tram Company, a job he held until he died at age 50 in 1940. While attending Santa Monica High School, Glenn was active in school drama productions with other future actors such as James Griffith. After graduation, he began working in small theatre groups. While in high school, he took odd jobs, including working for Will Rogers, who taught him horsemanship. Ford became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939. Ford acted in West Coast stage companies before joining Columbia Pictures in 1939. His stage name came from his father's hometown of Glenford, Alberta. His first major film part was in Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence (Ricardo Cortez, 1939). Top Hollywood director John Cromwell was impressed enough with his work to borrow him from Columbia for the independently produced drama, So Ends Our Night (1941), where Ford delivered a poignant portrayal of a 19-year-old German exile on the run in Nazi-occupied Europe. Working with Academy Award-winning Fredric March and wooing (onscreen) 30-year-old Margaret Sullavan, recently nominated for an Oscar, Ford's shy, ardent young refugee riveted attention even in such stellar company. "Glenn Ford, a most promising newcomer," wrote The New York Times's Bosley Crowther, "draws more substance and appealing simplicity from his role of the boy than any one else in the cast." After 35 interviews and glowing reviews for him personally, Glenn Ford had young female fans begging for his autograph, too. However, the young man was disappointed when Columbia Pictures did nothing with this prestige and new visibility and instead kept plugging him into conventional films for the rest of his 7-year contract. His next picture, Texas (George Marshall, 1941), was his first Western, a genre with which he would be associated for the rest of his life. Set after the Civil War, it paired him with another young male star under contract, William Holden, who became a lifelong friend. More routine films followed, none of them memorable, but lucrative enough to allow Ford to buy his mother and himself a beautiful new home in the Pacific Palisades. So Ends Our Night (John Cromwell, 1941) also affected the young star in another way: in the summer of 1941, while the United States was still technically neutral, he enlisted in the Coast Guard Auxiliary. Ten months after Ford's portrait of a young anti-Nazi exile, the United States entered World War II. After playing a young pilot in his 11th Columbia film, Flight Lieutenant (Sidney Salkow, 1942), Ford went on a cross-country 12-city tour to sell war bonds for Army and Navy Relief. In the midst of the many stars also donating their time – from Bob Hope to Cary Grant to Claudette Colbert – he met the popular dancing star, Eleanor Powell. The two soon fell in love; they attended the official opening of the Hollywood USO together in October. Then, while making another war drama, Destroyer (William A. Seiter, 1943), with Edward G. Robinson, an ardent anti-fascist, Glenn impulsively volunteered for the United States Marine Corps Reserve in December 1942. The startled studio had to beg the Marines to give their second male lead four more weeks to complete shooting. In the meantime, Ford proposed to Eleanor Powell, who subsequently announced her retirement from the screen to be near her fiancé as he started boot camp.
Glenn Ford was assigned in March 1943 to active duty at the Marine Corps Base in San Diego. With his Coast Guard service, he was offered a position as an officer, but Ford declined, feeling it would be interpreted as preferential treatment for a movie star and instead entered the Marines as a private. He trained at the Marine base in San Diego, where Tyrone Power, the number-one male movie star at the time, was also based. Power suggested Ford join him in the Marines' weekly radio show 'Halls of Montezuma', broadcast Sunday evenings from San Diego. Ford excelled in training, winning the Rifle Marksman Badge and being named "Honor Man" of the platoon and promoted to sergeant by the time he finished. Awaiting assignment at Camp Pendleton, Marine Corps base, Ford volunteered to play a Marine raider – uncredited – in the film Guadalcanal Diary, made by Fox, with Ford and others charging up the beaches of Southern California. After being sent to Marine Corps Schools Detachment (Photographic Section) in Quantico, Virginia, three months later, Ford returned to the San Diego base in February 1944 and was assigned to the radio section of the Public Relations Office, Headquarters Company, Base Headquarters Battalion, where he resumed work on 'Halls of Montezuma'. Though without the combat duty he had been hoping for, Ford was awarded several service medals for his three years in the Marines Reserve Corps. The most memorable role of Ford's career came with his first postwar film, Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), in which he starred alongside Rita Hayworth. This was Glenn Ford's second pairing with Hayworth; his first was in The Lady In Question (Charles Vidor, 1940), a well-received courtroom drama in which Glenn plays a boy who falls in love with Rita Hayworth when his father, Brian Aherne, tries to rehabilitate her in their bicycle shop. Directed by Hungarian emigre Charles Vidor, the two rising young stars instantly bonded. Their on-screen chemistry was not immortalised, however, until Gilda, also directed by Charles Vidor, who knew a good thing when he saw it. Ford went on to be a leading man opposite Hayworth in a total of five films, and the two, after their location romance (his marriage survived, hers did not) became lifelong friends and next-door neighbors. Beautifully shot in black-and-white by cinematographer Rudolph Mate, Gilda has endured as a classic of Film Noir.
Both Glenn Ford and his friend William Holden flourished throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but Ford was frustrated that he was not given the opportunity to work with directors of the caliber that Holden did in his Oscar-winning career, such as Billy Wilder and David Lean. He missed out on From Here to Eternity when production was stalled by Columbia studio head Harry Cohn. He also made the mistake, which he bitterly regretted later, of turning down the lead in the brilliant comedy Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1950), which Holden then snatched up. He instead continued to turn in solid performances in thrillers; dramas such as A Stolen Life (Curtis Bernhardt, 1946) with Bette Davis; action films such as Appointment in Honduras (Jacques Tourneur, 1953) with Ann Sheridan, and Film Noirs such as The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953), co-starring Gloria Grahame, with whom he re-teamed the following year in Human Desire (Fritz Lang, 1954), loosely based on La Bête Humaine, the 1870 Emile Zola novel. Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955) was a landmark film of teen angst. It tackled racial conflicts head-on as Ford played an idealistic, harassed teacher at an urban high school that included a very young Sidney Poitier and other black and Hispanic cast members, while Vic Morrow played a dangerous juvenile delinquent. Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" under the opening credits was the first use of a rock and roll song in a Hollywood film. Richard Brooks, the film's writer and director, had discovered the music when he heard Ford's son Peter playing the record at Glenn Ford's home. In Interrupted Melody (Curtis Bernhardt, 1955), Ford starred with Eleanor Parker. The Westerns with which he always was associated included The Secret of Convict Lake (Michael Gordon, 1951) with Gene Tierney, Jubal (Delmer Daves, 1956), The Fastest Gun Alive (Russell Rouse, 1956), 3:10 to Yuma (Delmer Daves, 1957), and Cimarron (Anthony Mann, 1960) with Maria Schell. Ford's versatility allowed him to star in a number of popular comedies, almost always as the beleaguered, well-meaning but nonplussed straight man, set upon by circumstances as in The Teahouse of the August Moon (Daniel Mann, 1957), with Marlon Brando. He played an American soldier sent to Okinawa to convert the occupied island's natives to the American way of life and is instead converted by them. Also, he starred in Don't Go Near The Water (Charles Walters, 1957) with Gia Scala, and the romantic comedy The Courtship of Eddie's Father (Vincente Minnelli, 1963) with the young Ron Howard as his son Eddie. In 1958, Ford was ranked the number one box-office star in America. He starred in four films that year: the Western Cowboy (Delmer Daves, 1958), the Western The Sheepman (George Marshall, 1958), the comedy Imitation General (George Marshall, 1958), and the war film Torpedo Run (Joseph Pevney, 1958). After being nominated in 1957, 1958 and in 1962, Ford won a Golden Globe Award as Best Actor for his performance in Pocketful of Miracles (Frank Capra, 1961), a film he helped produce that was a remake of Capra's Lady for a Day (Frank Capra, 1933).
In 1971, Glenn Ford signed with CBS to star in his first television series, a half-hour comedy/drama titled The Glenn Ford Show. However, CBS head Fred Silverman noticed that many of the featured films being shown at a Glenn Ford film festival were Westerns. He suggested doing a Western series, instead, which resulted in the "modern-day Western" series, Cade's County (1971–1972). Ford played southwestern Sheriff Cade for one season in a mix of police mystery and Western drama. In The Family Holvak (1975–1976), Ford portrayed a Depression-era preacher in a family drama, reprising the same character he had played in the TV film, The Greatest Gift. In 1978, Ford had a supporting role in Superman (Richard Donner, 1978) as Clark Kent's adoptive father Jonathan Kent. In Ford's final scene in the film, "Rock Around the Clock" is heard on a car radio. In 1981, Ford co-starred with Melissa Sue Anderson in the slasher film Happy Birthday to Me (J. Lee Thompson, 1981). In 1991, Ford agreed to star in a cable network series, African Skies. However, prior to the start of the series, he developed blood clots in his legs which required a lengthy stay in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Eventually, he recovered, but at one time his situation was so severe that he was listed in critical condition. Ford was forced to drop out of the series and was replaced by Robert Mitchum. The film Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006) includes a scene where Ma Kent (played by Eva Marie Saint) stands next to the living room mantel after Superman returns from his quest to find remnants of Krypton. On that mantel is a picture of Glenn Ford as Pa Kent. Ford was married four times. His first wife was actress and dancer Eleanor Powell (1943–1959), with whom he had his only child, actor Peter Ford (1945). The couple appeared together on screen once in the short film Have Faith in Our Children (1955). When they married, Powell was more famous than Ford. She divorced him in 1959 on the grounds of adultery and mental cruelty. He subsequently married actress Kathryn Hays (1966–1969); Cynthia Hayward (1977–1984), and Jeanne Baus (1993–1994). All marriages ended in divorces, and Ford did not remain on good terms with any of his ex-wives. Ford was a notorious womaniser who had affairs with many of his leading ladies, including Rita Hayworth, Maria Schell, Geraldine Brooks, Stella Stevens, Gloria Grahame, Gene Tierney, Eva Gabor, and Barbara Stanwyck. He had a one-night stand with Marilyn Monroe in 1962 and a fling with Joan Crawford in the early 1940s. He also had a long-term relationship with actress Hope Lange in the early 1960s. According to his son Peter Ford's book 'Glenn Ford: A Life' (2011), Ford had affairs with 146 actresses, all of which were documented in his personal diaries, including a 40-year, on-and-off-again affair with Rita Hayworth that began during the filming of Gilda in 1946. Their affair resumed during the making of their film The Loves of Carmen (Charles Vidor, 1948). Ford impregnated Hayworth, and she later traveled to France to get an abortion. In 1960, Ford would move next door to Hayworth in Beverly Hills, and they continued their relationship for many years until the early 1980s. Ford also documented his many relationships by taping every phone conversation he ever had with all of his celebrity lovers and friends for 40 years. Ford installed the recording system to listen in on his first wife, Eleanor Powell's conversations, fearing that she would find out about his serial cheating and leave him. Ford retired from acting in 1991, at age 75, following heart and circulatory problems. Ford suffered a series of minor strokes which left him in frail health in the years leading up to his death. He died in his Beverly Hills home in 2006, at the age of 90.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
French postcard by Editions P.I., Paris, no. 511. Photo: Paramount, 1954. Ford's first name is mistakenly spelled as Glen.
Glenn Ford (1916-2006) was a Canadian-American actor whose career lasted more than 50 years. Although he played different types of roles in many film genres, Ford was best known for playing ordinary men in unusual circumstances. He was one of the biggest box-office draws of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Some of his most significant roles were in the Film Noirs Gilda (1946) and The Big Heat (1953), and the high school angst film Blackboard Jungle (1955). However, it was for comedies or Westerns which he received acting laurels, including three Golden Globe nominations for Best Actor in a Comedy, winning for Pocketful of Miracles (1961). He also played a supporting role as Clark Kent's adoptive father in Superman (1978).
Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford was born in 1916, in Sainte-Christine-d'Auvergne, Quebec. He was the son of Hannah Wood (née Mitchell) and Newton Ford, an engineer with the Canadian Pacific Railway. In 1922, when Ford was six, the family moved first to Venice and then to Santa Monica, California. Newton became a motorman for the Venice Electric Tram Company, a job he held until he died at age 50 in 1940. While attending Santa Monica High School, Glenn was active in school drama productions with other future actors such as James Griffith. After graduation, he began working in small theatre groups. While in high school, he took odd jobs, including working for Will Rogers, who taught him horsemanship. Ford became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939. Ford acted in West Coast stage companies before joining Columbia Pictures in 1939. His stage name came from his father's hometown of Glenford, Alberta. His first major film part was in Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence (Ricardo Cortez, 1939). Top Hollywood director John Cromwell was impressed enough with his work to borrow him from Columbia for the independently produced drama, So Ends Our Night (1941), where Ford delivered a poignant portrayal of a 19-year-old German exile on the run in Nazi-occupied Europe. Working with Academy Award-winning Fredric March and wooing (onscreen) 30-year-old Margaret Sullavan, recently nominated for an Oscar, Ford's shy, ardent young refugee riveted attention even in such stellar company. "Glenn Ford, a most promising newcomer," wrote The New York Times's Bosley Crowther, "draws more substance and appealing simplicity from his role of the boy than any one else in the cast." After 35 interviews and glowing reviews for him personally, Glenn Ford had young female fans begging for his autograph, too. However, the young man was disappointed when Columbia Pictures did nothing with this prestige and new visibility and instead kept plugging him into conventional films for the rest of his 7-year contract. His next picture, Texas (George Marshall, 1941), was his first Western, a genre with which he would be associated for the rest of his life. Set after the Civil War, it paired him with another young male star under contract, William Holden, who became a lifelong friend. More routine films followed, none of them memorable, but lucrative enough to allow Ford to buy his mother and himself a beautiful new home in the Pacific Palisades. So Ends Our Night (John Cromwell, 1941) also affected the young star in another way: in the summer of 1941, while the United States was still technically neutral, he enlisted in the Coast Guard Auxiliary. Ten months after Ford's portrait of a young anti-Nazi exile, the United States entered World War II. After playing a young pilot in his 11th Columbia film, Flight Lieutenant (Sidney Salkow, 1942), Ford went on a cross-country 12-city tour to sell war bonds for Army and Navy Relief. In the midst of the many stars also donating their time – from Bob Hope to Cary Grant to Claudette Colbert – he met the popular dancing star, Eleanor Powell. The two soon fell in love; they attended the official opening of the Hollywood USO together in October. Then, while making another war drama, Destroyer (William A. Seiter, 1943), with Edward G. Robinson, an ardent anti-fascist, Glenn impulsively volunteered for the United States Marine Corps Reserve in December 1942. The startled studio had to beg the Marines to give their second male lead four more weeks to complete shooting. In the meantime, Ford proposed to Eleanor Powell, who subsequently announced her retirement from the screen to be near her fiancé as he started boot camp.
Glenn Ford was assigned in March 1943 to active duty at the Marine Corps Base in San Diego. With his Coast Guard service, he was offered a position as an officer, but Ford declined, feeling it would be interpreted as preferential treatment for a movie star and instead entered the Marines as a private. He trained at the Marine base in San Diego, where Tyrone Power, the number-one male movie star at the time, was also based. Power suggested Ford join him in the Marines' weekly radio show 'Halls of Montezuma', broadcast Sunday evenings from San Diego. Ford excelled in training, winning the Rifle Marksman Badge and being named "Honor Man" of the platoon and promoted to sergeant by the time he finished. Awaiting assignment at Camp Pendleton, Marine Corps base, Ford volunteered to play a Marine raider – uncredited – in the film Guadalcanal Diary, made by Fox, with Ford and others charging up the beaches of Southern California. After being sent to Marine Corps Schools Detachment (Photographic Section) in Quantico, Virginia, three months later, Ford returned to the San Diego base in February 1944 and was assigned to the radio section of the Public Relations Office, Headquarters Company, Base Headquarters Battalion, where he resumed work on 'Halls of Montezuma'. Though without the combat duty he had been hoping for, Ford was awarded several service medals for his three years in the Marines Reserve Corps. The most memorable role of Ford's career came with his first postwar film, Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), in which he starred alongside Rita Hayworth. This was Glenn Ford's second pairing with Hayworth; his first was in The Lady In Question (Charles Vidor, 1940), a well-received courtroom drama in which Glenn plays a boy who falls in love with Rita Hayworth when his father, Brian Aherne, tries to rehabilitate her in their bicycle shop. Directed by Hungarian emigre Charles Vidor, the two rising young stars instantly bonded. Their on-screen chemistry was not immortalised, however, until Gilda, also directed by Charles Vidor, who knew a good thing when he saw it. Ford went on to be a leading man opposite Hayworth in a total of five films, and the two, after their location romance (his marriage survived, hers did not) became lifelong friends and next-door neighbors. Beautifully shot in black-and-white by cinematographer Rudolph Mate, Gilda has endured as a classic of Film Noir.
Both Glenn Ford and his friend William Holden flourished throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but Ford was frustrated that he was not given the opportunity to work with directors of the caliber that Holden did in his Oscar-winning career, such as Billy Wilder and David Lean. He missed out on From Here to Eternity when production was stalled by Columbia studio head Harry Cohn. He also made the mistake, which he bitterly regretted later, of turning down the lead in the brilliant comedy Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1950), which Holden then snatched up. He instead continued to turn in solid performances in thrillers; dramas such as A Stolen Life (Curtis Bernhardt, 1946) with Bette Davis; action films such as Appointment in Honduras (Jacques Tourneur, 1953) with Ann Sheridan, and Film Noirs such as The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953), co-starring Gloria Grahame, with whom he re-teamed the following year in Human Desire (Fritz Lang, 1954), loosely based on La Bête Humaine, the 1870 Emile Zola novel. Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955) was a landmark film of teen angst. It tackled racial conflicts head-on as Ford played an idealistic, harassed teacher at an urban high school that included a very young Sidney Poitier and other black and Hispanic cast members, while Vic Morrow played a dangerous juvenile delinquent. Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" under the opening credits was the first use of a rock and roll song in a Hollywood film. Richard Brooks, the film's writer and director, had discovered the music when he heard Ford's son Peter playing the record at Glenn Ford's home. In Interrupted Melody (Curtis Bernhardt, 1955), Ford starred with Eleanor Parker. The Westerns with which he always was associated included The Secret of Convict Lake (Michael Gordon, 1951) with Gene Tierney, Jubal (Delmer Daves, 1956), The Fastest Gun Alive (Russell Rouse, 1956), 3:10 to Yuma (Delmer Daves, 1957), and Cimarron (Anthony Mann, 1960) with Maria Schell. Ford's versatility allowed him to star in a number of popular comedies, almost always as the beleaguered, well-meaning but nonplussed straight man, set upon by circumstances as in The Teahouse of the August Moon (Daniel Mann, 1957), with Marlon Brando. He played an American soldier sent to Okinawa to convert the occupied island's natives to the American way of life and is instead converted by them. Also, he starred in Don't Go Near The Water (Charles Walters, 1957) with Gia Scala, and the romantic comedy The Courtship of Eddie's Father (Vincente Minnelli, 1963) with the young Ron Howard as his son Eddie. In 1958, Ford was ranked the number one box-office star in America. He starred in four films that year: the Western Cowboy (Delmer Daves, 1958), the Western The Sheepman (George Marshall, 1958), the comedy Imitation General (George Marshall, 1958), and the war film Torpedo Run (Joseph Pevney, 1958). After being nominated in 1957, 1958 and in 1962, Ford won a Golden Globe Award as Best Actor for his performance in Pocketful of Miracles (Frank Capra, 1961), a film he helped produce that was a remake of Capra's Lady for a Day (Frank Capra, 1933).
In 1971, Glenn Ford signed with CBS to star in his first television series, a half-hour comedy/drama titled The Glenn Ford Show. However, CBS head Fred Silverman noticed that many of the featured films being shown at a Glenn Ford film festival were Westerns. He suggested doing a Western series, instead, which resulted in the "modern-day Western" series, Cade's County (1971–1972). Ford played southwestern Sheriff Cade for one season in a mix of police mystery and Western drama. In The Family Holvak (1975–1976), Ford portrayed a Depression-era preacher in a family drama, reprising the same character he had played in the TV film, The Greatest Gift. In 1978, Ford had a supporting role in Superman (Richard Donner, 1978) as Clark Kent's adoptive father Jonathan Kent. In Ford's final scene in the film, "Rock Around the Clock" is heard on a car radio. In 1981, Ford co-starred with Melissa Sue Anderson in the slasher film Happy Birthday to Me (J. Lee Thompson, 1981). In 1991, Ford agreed to star in a cable network series, African Skies. However, prior to the start of the series, he developed blood clots in his legs which required a lengthy stay in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Eventually, he recovered, but at one time his situation was so severe that he was listed in critical condition. Ford was forced to drop out of the series and was replaced by Robert Mitchum. The film Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006) includes a scene where Ma Kent (played by Eva Marie Saint) stands next to the living room mantel after Superman returns from his quest to find remnants of Krypton. On that mantel is a picture of Glenn Ford as Pa Kent. Ford was married four times. His first wife was actress and dancer Eleanor Powell (1943–1959), with whom he had his only child, actor Peter Ford (1945). The couple appeared together on screen once in the short film Have Faith in Our Children (1955). When they married, Powell was more famous than Ford. She divorced him in 1959 on the grounds of adultery and mental cruelty. He subsequently married actress Kathryn Hays (1966–1969); Cynthia Hayward (1977–1984), and Jeanne Baus (1993–1994). All marriages ended in divorces, and Ford did not remain on good terms with any of his ex-wives. Ford was a notorious womaniser who had affairs with many of his leading ladies, including Rita Hayworth, Maria Schell, Geraldine Brooks, Stella Stevens, Gloria Grahame, Gene Tierney, Eva Gabor, and Barbara Stanwyck. He had a one-night stand with Marilyn Monroe in 1962 and a fling with Joan Crawford in the early 1940s. He also had a long-term relationship with actress Hope Lange in the early 1960s. According to his son Peter Ford's book 'Glenn Ford: A Life' (2011), Ford had affairs with 146 actresses, all of which were documented in his personal diaries, including a 40-year, on-and-off-again affair with Rita Hayworth that began during the filming of Gilda in 1946. Their affair resumed during the making of their film The Loves of Carmen (Charles Vidor, 1948). Ford impregnated Hayworth, and she later traveled to France to get an abortion. In 1960, Ford would move next door to Hayworth in Beverly Hills, and they continued their relationship for many years until the early 1980s. Ford also documented his many relationships by taping every phone conversation he ever had with all of his celebrity lovers and friends for 40 years. Ford installed the recording system to listen in on his first wife, Eleanor Powell's conversations, fearing that she would find out about his serial cheating and leave him. Ford retired from acting in 1991, at age 75, following heart and circulatory problems. Ford suffered a series of minor strokes which left him in frail health in the years leading up to his death. He died in his Beverly Hills home in 2006, at the age of 90.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
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British postcard by Editions Limited, no. PRT-010.
George Clooney (1961) is an American actor, director, screenwriter, and producer with more than thirty film awards and nominations to his name. Clooney gained wide recognition in his role as Dr. Doug Ross on the medical TV drama ER (1994-1999). In the cinema, he had his breakthrough roles in From Dusk till Dawn (1996), and the crime comedy Out of Sight (1998), in which he first worked with director Steven Soderbergh. In 2001 followed their biggest commercial success with the blockbuster Ocean's Eleven, the first of what became a trilogy. He won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for Syriana (2005). He also won an Oscar for best picture for the thriller Argo (Ben Affleck, 2012) as a producer. He also received Oscar nominations for his roles in the conspiracy thriller Michael Clayton (2007) and The Descendants (2011), and a European Film Award for Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), which he also wrote and directed.
George Timothy Clooney was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1961. Clooney is the son of television personality Nicholas Joseph "Nick" Clooney and Nina Bruce Warren. He has an older sister, Ada Zeidler. His father is the brother of singer-actress Rosemary Clooney, who was married to film star José Ferrer, and George is the cousin of their son, actor Miguel Ferrer. At a young age, Clooney learned how to handle the camera. His father often took his family to public appearances and at the age of five George held the text boards for his father Nick, then a television presenter in Illinois, on a quiz show. It looked like Clooney would follow in his father's footsteps, but that changed when his uncle José Ferrer, husband of his aunt Rosemary, came to Kentucky to make a film about horse racing with his sons Miguel and Rafael. In it, Clooney also got a role. The film And They're Off was never released, but Clooney had found his calling. At Augusta High School, Clooney was a gifted baseball player, but during a tryout with the Cincinnati Reds, he proved not good enough to turn pro. Clooney attended Northern Kentucky University from 1979 to 1981, where he studied radio journalism. After he broke off his studies, he held a few random jobs. His father, knowing how difficult it is to succeed as an actor, tried in vain to change his mind. In the summer of 1982, the determined Clooney spent harvesting tobacco in order to earn enough money to go to Hollywood. In California, he was allowed to live with his aunt Rosemary, although the latter did not wholeheartedly support his aspirations either. For several months, he was her chauffeur on her tour with singers like Martha Raye. After this, Clooney tried to get a job as an actor, but he was constantly rejected, which greatly affected his mood. Eventually, Rosemary felt compelled to ask her cousin to leave. Clooney moved in with a friend, rookie actor Tom Matthews. He did odd jobs on the sets of commercials and took acting classes at The Beverly Hills Playhouse. Under the guidance of Milton Katselas, he mastered the craft and, as a result of a school project, found an impresario. In the following years, he played several bigger and smaller roles, mostly in moderately received series, never-released films and B-movies like Return of the Killer Tomatoes! (John De Bello, 1988). He was not dissatisfied; he was doing what he loved most: acting and developing himself. Clooney's only longer-lasting role during this period was in the sitcom Roseanne. In it, he played Booker Brooks, Roseanne's supervisor and temporary boyfriend of her sister, in the first season (1989).
George Clooney's breakthrough came in 1994, through his role as Dr Douglas Ross in the hospital series ER (Emergency Room, 1994-1999). His popularity in this gave his film career a major boost. This series, which depicted everyday life in a Chicago teaching hospital in a realistic and dramatic manner and ran from 1994 to 1999, became a major international television success. Clooney rose to become one of the most famous television actors and was especially popular with female viewers. He portrayed the role in 109 episodes from 1994 to 1999 and made a guest appearance in the series in 2009. The Clooneys' sense of family was also expressed in guest appearances by Rosemary Clooney and his cousin Miguel Ferrer. Now film producers in Hollywood could no longer pass him over. From 1996, the actor established himself as a film star; he appeared in a wide variety of roles. He had great success with the leading role in the Robert Rodriguez-directed film From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), which soon achieved cult status. He also starred alongside Michelle Pfeiffer in the romantic comedy One Fine Day (Michael Hoffmann, 1996). His final breakthrough came in the role of Batman in the superhero film Batman & Robin (Joel Schumacher, 1997) with Chris O'Donnell. In the same year, he was voted "Sexiest Man Alive" by People Magazine. Clooney demonstrated a preference for whimsical roles such as in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) by the Coen brothers. However, he also took leading roles in commercially oriented films such as The Peacemaker (Mimi Leder, 1997) with Nicole Kidman, which featured him as an action hero. The thriller comedy Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998) with Jennifer Lopez and the war films The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998) and Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999) with Mark Wahlberg, all received excellent reviews and did well at the box-office.
George Clooney received $20,000,000 for the blockbuster Ocean's Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001), a remake of the heist comedy Ocean's 11 (Lewis Milestone, 1960), which also starred Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and Julia Roberts. Later, he also went on to work as a producer, screenwriter and director. His directorial debut was the spy drama Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (George Clooney, 2002). He also directed the multi-award-winning historical drama Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005), for which he also was a co-screenwriter and one of the actors. Ocean's Eleven drew two sequels, Ocean’s Twelve (Steven Soderbergh, 2004) and Ocean’s Thirteen (Steven Soderbergh, 2007), in which Clooney also starred. Important in this context was his friendship with director Steven Soderbergh, with whom he founded the company Section Eight. In 2006, it was announced that the company was wound up. Soon after, Clooney founded the production company Smoke House, with close friend Grant Heslov. Clooney appeared in several Coen Brothers films, including Burn After Reading (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, 2008) with Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, and Hail, Caesar! (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, 2016). He earned Oscar nominations for Best Actor for the legal thriller Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, 2007), the comedy-dramas Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, 2009) and The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011). A huge box office hit was the Science Fiction thriller Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) in which he co-starred with Sandra Bullock and which he also co-wrote. Clooney's directed the political drama The Ides of March (George Clooney, 2011), in which he also contributed to the screenplay and took on one of the leading roles. The film adaptation of Beau Willimon's play Farragut North focuses on a young idealistic press secretary (played by Ryan Gosling) who, as an employee of a presidential candidate (Clooney), is confronted with fraud and corruption in the Ohio primaries. His other productions as a director include the war film The Monuments Men (George Clooney, 2014), the crime drama Suburbicon (George Clooney, 2017), two episodes of the series Catch-22 (2019) and the Science-Fiction film The Midnight Sky (George Clooney, 2020). In 1989, George Clooney married actress Talia Balsam, from whom he divorced again in 1993. Clooney had several relationships in the past including with Lisa Snowdon (2000-2005), Sarah Larson (2007-2008), Elisabetta Canalis (2009-2011) and Stacy Keibler (2011-2013). Clooney vowed that he would never marry again. However, in 2014, Clooney married British-Lebanese human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin; they married in law two days later. They became parents to twins, a daughter and a son, in 2017. This year George Clooney reunited with Julia Roberts in the romantic comedy Ticket to Paradise (Ol Parker, 2022), for which they also served as executive producers.
Sources: Wikipedia (Dutch, German and English), and IMDb.
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German postcard by ISV, no. H 45.
American film actor Tony Curtis (1925-2010) played a variety of roles, from light comedy, such as the musician on the run from gangsters in Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959), to serious dramatic roles, such as an escaped convict in The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958), which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. From 1949, he appeared in more than 100 films and made frequent television appearances.
Tony Curtis was born Bernard Herschel Schwartz in 1925 in Manhattan, New York City. He was the eldest of three children of Helen (Klein) and Emanuel Schwartz, Jewish immigrants from Hungary. His mother was later in life diagnosed with schizophrenia. His brother Robert was institutionalised with the same mental illness. Curtis himself admits that while he had almost no formal education, he was a student of the "school of hard knocks" and learned from a young age that the only person who ever had his back was himself, so he learned how to take care of both himself and younger brother, Julius. Curtis grew up in poverty, as his father, Emanuel, who worked as a tailor, had the sole responsibility of providing for his entire family on his meager income. This led to constant bickering between Curtis's parents over money, and Curtis began to go to movies as a way of briefly escaping the constant worries of poverty and other family problems. The financial strain of raising two children on a meager income became so tough that in 1935, Curtis's parents decided that their children would have a better life under the care of the state and briefly had Tony and his brother admitted to an orphanage. During this lonely time, the only companion Curtis had was his brother, Julius, and the two became inseparable as they struggled to get used to this new way of life. Weeks later, Curtis's parents came back to reclaim custody of Tony and his brother, but by then Curtis had learned one of life's toughest lessons: the only person you can count on is yourself. In 1938, shortly before Tony's Bar Mitzvah, tragedy struck when Tony lost the person most important to him when his brother, Julius, was hit by a truck and killed. After that tragedy, Curtis's parents became convinced that formal education was the best way Tony could avoid the same never-knowing-where-your-next-meal-is-coming-from life that they had known. However, Tony rejected this because he felt that learning about literary classics and algebra wasn't going to advance him in life as much as some real hands-on life experience would. He was to find that real-life experience a few years later when he enlisted in the navy in 1942 after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Inspired by Cary Grant's role in Destination Tokyo (Delmer Daves, 1943) and Tyrone Power's in Crash Dive (Archie Mayo, 1943), he joined the Pacific submarine force. Tony spent over two years getting that life experience doing everything from working as a crewman on a submarine tender, the USS Proteus (AS-19), to honing his future craft as an actor performing as a sailor in a stage play at the Navy Signalman School in Illinois.
In 1945, Tony Curtis was honorably discharged from the navy, and when he realised that the GI Bill would allow him to go to acting school without paying for it, he now saw that his lifelong pipe dream of being an actor might actually be achievable. Curtis auditioned for the New York Dramatic Workshop and was accepted on the strength of his audition piece, a scene from 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' in pantomime. In 1947, he studied acting under the influential German stage director Erwin Piscator. His contemporaries included Elaine Stritch, Harry Belafonte, Walter Matthau, Beatrice Arthur, and Rod Steiger. He then began to pay his dues by appearing in a slew of stage productions, including 'Twelfth Night' and 'Golden Boy'. While still at college, Curtis was discovered by Joyce Selznick, the notable talent agent, casting director, and niece of film producer David O. Selznick. After seeing his potential, Selznick arranged an interview for Curtis to see David O. Selznick at Universal Studios, where the 23-years-old Curtis was offered a seven-year contract. He changed his name from Bernard Schwartz to what he saw as an elegant, mysterious moniker, Tony Curtis, named after the novel 'Anthony Adverse' (1936) by Hervey Allen and a cousin of his named Janush Kertiz. Curtis began making a name for himself by appearing in small, offbeat roles in small-budget productions. His first notable performance was a two-minute role as a rumba dancer in Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949), in which he makes Burt Lancaster jealous by dancing with Yvonne De Carlo. This offbeat role resulted in Curtis's being typecast as a heavy for the next few years, such as playing a gang member in City Across the River (Maxwell Shane, 1949), starring Stephen McNally. Curtis continued to build up a showreel by accepting any paying job, acting in a number of bit-part roles for the next few years. It wasn't until late 1949 that he finally got the chance to demonstrate his acting flair when he was cast in an important role in an action-Western, Sierra (Alfred E. Green, 1950) starring Audie Murphy. On the strength of his performance in that film, Curtis was finally cast in a big-budget movie, Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950). While he appears in that film only very briefly, it was a chance for him to act alongside a Hollywood legend, James Stewart.
Tony Curtis was receiving numerous fan letters, so Universal awarded him the starring role in The Prince Who Was a Thief (Rudolph Maté, 1951), a Swashbuckler set in the Middle East with Piper Laurie. It was a hit at the box office and Curtis was now established. He followed it up with a role as a boxer in the Film Noir Flesh and Fury (Joseph Pevney, 1952), with Jan Sterling. His next films were the comedy No Room for the Groom (Douglas Sirk, 1952), and Son of Ali Baba (Kurt Neumann, 1952), another film set in the Arab world with Piper Laurie. Curtis then teamed up with then-wife Janet Leigh in Houdini (George Marshall, 1953), in which Curtis played the title role. He reunited with Burt Lancaster in the prestigious action drama Trapeze (Carol Reed, 1956). It was one of the biggest hits of the year. As his career developed, Tony Curtis wanted to act in films that had social relevance, ones that would challenge audiences. He achieved his first serious recognition as a dramatic actor in Sweet Smell of Success (1957) with co-star Burt Lancaster. The following year he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958) alongside Sidney Poitier who was also nominated in the same category. Curtis then gave what could arguably be called his best performance: three interrelated roles in the now-classic comedy Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959) opposite Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe. That was followed by Operation Petticoat (Blake Edwards, 1959) with Cary Grant. These frantic comedies displayed his impeccable comic timing. He often collaborated with Edwards on later films. In 1960, Curtis played a supporting role in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960). He was advised against appearing as the subordinate sidekick in Spartacus, playing second fiddle to the equally famous Kirk Douglas. However, Curtis saw no problem with this because the two had recently acted together in dual leading roles in The Vikings (Richard Fleischer, 1958). Spartacus became another major hit for him.
Tony Curtis's stardom and film career declined considerably after 1960. Curtis took on the role of the Ukrainian Cossack Andrei in the historical action romance epic Taras Bulba (J. Lee Thompson, 1962) featuring Yul Bryner and also with German actress Christine Kaufmann, who became Curtis' second wife. Curtis then focused on comedies such as Sex and the Single Girl (Richard Quine, 1964), with Natalie Wood; The Great Race (Blake Edwards, 1965), with Wood and Jack Lemmon, and Boeing Boeing (John Rich, 1965) a sex farce with Jerry Lewis. His most significant dramatic part came in 1968 when he starred in the true-life drama The Boston Strangler (Richard Fleischer, 1968), which some consider his last major film role. The part reinforced his reputation as a serious actor with his chilling portrayal of serial killer Albert DeSalvo. He later starred alongside Roger Moore in the TV series The Persuaders!, with Curtis playing American millionaire Danny Wilde. The series ran twenty-four episodes. In 2008, he published his autobiography 'American Prince: A Memoir' in which he accused many people he worked with of holding anti-Semitic views. He settled in Henderson, Nevada, where he eventually died in 2010. He was 85. Tony Curtis was married six times and had six children. His wives were actress Janet Leigh (1951-1962), German actress Christine Kaufmann (1963-1968), Leslie Curtis (1968-1982), Andrea Savio (1984 - 1992), Lisa Deutsch (1993-1994), and Jill Vandenberg Curtis (1998-2019 - his death). He was the father of Jamie Lee Curtis and Kelly Curtis (with Janet Leigh), Allegra Curtis, and Alexandra Curtis (with Christine Kaufmann), Nicholas Curtis, and Benjamin Curtis (with Leslie Curtis). He became largely estranged from all six of his children. His son Nicholas Curtis, died of seizures due to an overdose of heroin in 1994. He disinherited all of his children from his will and left the bulk of his estate to his wife Jill Vandenberg Curtis, who was 46 years younger than he.
Source: James Briggs (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
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