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(09/01/06 2:58am)
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- Actor Glenn Ford, who played strong, thoughtful protagonists in films such as "The Blackboard Jungle," "Gilda" and "The Big Heat," died Wednesday, police said. He was 90.\nParamedics called to Ford's home just before 4 p.m. found Ford dead, police Sgt. Terry Nutall said, reading a prepared statement. "They do not suspect foul play," he said.\nFord suffered a series of strokes in the 1990s.\n"It comes to mind instantly what a remarkable actor he was," actor Sidney Poitier, who also starred in "The Blackboard Jungle," said Wednesday evening. "He had those magical qualities that are intangible but are quite impactful on the screen. He was a movie star."\nFailing health forced Ford to skip a 90th birthday tribute May 1 at Hollywood's historic Grauman's Egyptian Theatre. He did send greetings via videotape, adding, "I wish I were up and around, but I'm doing the best that I can. ... There's so much I have to be grateful for."\nAt the event, Shirley Jones, who co-starred with him in the comedy "The Courtship of Eddie's Father," called Ford "one of the cornerstones of our industry, and there aren't many left."\nFord appeared in scores of films during his 53-year Hollywood career. The Film Encyclopedia, a reference book, lists 85 Ford films from 1939 to 1991.\nHe was cast usually as the handsome tough guy, but his acting talents ranged from romance to comedy. His more famous credits include "Superman," "Gilda," "The Sheepman," "The Gazebo," "Pocketful of Miracles" and "Don't Go Near the Water."\nAn avid horseman and former polo player, Ford appeared in a number of Westerns, including "3:10 to Yuma," "Cowboy," "The Rounders," "Texas," "The Fastest Gun Alive" and a remake of "Cimarron". His talents included lighter parts, with roles in "The Teahouse of August Moon" and "It Started With a Kiss."\nOn television, he appeared in "Cade's County," "The Family Holvak," "Once an Eagle" and "When Havoc Struck." He starred in the feature film "The Courtship of Eddie's Father," which later became a TV series featuring Bill Bixby.\nA tireless worker, Ford often made several films a year and continued working well into his 70s. In 1992, though, he was hospitalized for more than two months for blood clots and other ailments and at one point was in critical condition.\n"Noel Coward once told me, 'You will know you're old when you cease to be amazed.' Well, I can still be amazed," Ford said in a 1981 interview with The Associated Press.\nAfter getting his start in theater in the 1930s, he got a break when he was signed by Columbia Pictures mogul Harry Cohn.\nIn 1940, he appeared in five films, including "Blondie Plays Cupid" and "Babies for Sale." After serving with the Marines during World War II, Ford starred in 1946 as a small-time gambler in "Gilda," opposite Rita Hayworth.\nThe film about frustrated romance and corruption in postwar Argentina became a film noir classic. Hayworth plays Ford's former love, a sometime nightclub singer married to a casino operator, and sizzles onscreen performing "Put the Blame on Mame."\nFord speaks the memorable voiceover in the opening scene: "To me, a dollar was a dollar in any language. It was my first night in the Argentine, and I didn't know much about the local citizens. But I knew about American sailors, and I knew I'd better get out of there."\nTwo years later he made "The Loves of Carmen," also with Hayworth.\n"It was one of the greatest mistakes I ever made, embarrassing," Ford said of the latter film. "But it was worth it, just to work with her again."\nAmong his competitors for leading roles was William Holden. Both actors, Ford said, would stuff paper in their shoes to appear taller than the other. "Finally, neither of us could walk, so we said the hell with it."\nFord also played opposite Bette Davis in "A Stolen Life."\nOne of his best-known roles was in the 1955 "The Blackboard Jungle," where he portrayed a young, soft-spoken teacher in a slum school who inspires a class full of juvenile delinquents to care about life.\n"We did a film together, and it was for me a great experience because I had always admired his work," recalled Poitier. "When I saw him in films, I had always marveled at the subtlety of his work. He was truly gifted."\nIn "The Big Heat," 1953, a gritty crime story, Ford played a police detective.\n"Acting is just being truthful," he once said. "I have to play myself. I'm not an actor who can take on another character, like Laurence Olivier. The worst thing I could do would be to play Shakespeare."\nFord was born Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford on May 1, 1916, in Quebec, the son of a railroad executive. The first name reflected his family's Welsh roots. When Ford joined Columbia, Cohn asked him to change his name to John Gower; Ford refused but switched his first name to Glenn, after his father's birthplace of Glenford.\nHe moved to Southern California at 8 and promptly fell in love with show business, even sneaking onto a Culver City studio lot at night. He took to the stage at Santa Monica High School. His first professional job was as a searchlight operator in front of a movie house.\nHe started his career in theater as an actor with West Coast stage companies and as Tallulah Bankhead's stage manager in New York. In 1939, he made his first Hollywood film opposite Jean Rogers in the romance "Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence."\nHis director, Ricardo Cortez, told Ford he would never amount to anything, and the actor returned to New York. He didn't stay away from Hollywood long, though, signing a 14-year contract with Columbia Pictures.\nHe married actress-dancer Eleanor Powell in 1943; the two divorced in 1959. They had a son, Peter. A 1965 marriage to actress Kathryn Hays ended quickly. In 1977, he married model Cynthia Hayward, 32 years his junior. They were divorced in 1984.\n--Associated Press Writer Christina Almeida contributed to this report.
(01/26/06 4:56am)
LOS ANGELES - Fayard Nicholas, who with his brother Harold wowed the tap dancing world with their astonishing athleticism and inspired generations of dancers, from Fred Astaire to Savion Glover, has died. He was 91.\nNicholas died Tuesday at his home from pneumonia and other complications of a stroke, his son Tony Nicholas said.\n"My dad put heaven on hold and now they can begin the show," the younger Nicholas said Wednesday.\nThe Nicholas brothers were still boys when they were featured at New York's Cotton Club in 1932. Though young, they were billed as "The Show Stoppers" and despite the racial hurdles facing black performers, they went on to Broadway, then Hollywood.\nAstaire once told the brothers that the acrobatic elegance and synchronicity of their "Jumpin' Jive" dance sequence in "Stormy Weather" (1943) made it the greatest movie musical number he had ever seen. In the number, the brothers tap across music stands in an orchestra with the fearless exuberance of children stone-hopping across a pond. In the finale, they leap-frog seamlessly down a sweeping staircase.\nTap dancer Rusty Frank, who set up an emergency fund to help pay some of Nicholas' hospital bills after his stroke, said Nicholas had a unique style that changed the face of tap dance.\n"He and his brother, they didn't just use their feet to dance, they used their whole bodies. And it had an electrifying quality," she said. "They used ballet, they used jazz, they used acrobatics. ... They combined it all."\nThe two were vaudeville brats who toured with their musician parents, Fayard stealing dance steps as they went along and teaching them to his brother, who was seven years younger.\n"We were tap-dancers, but we put more style into it, more bodywork, instead of just footwork," Harold Nicholas recalled in a 1987 interview.\nHarold, who died in 2000, once said of his older brother's dancing, "He was like a poet ... talking to you with his hands and feet."\nTheir dancing betrayed not only creative genius but the athletic marvel of what no one else would dare attempt.\nTheir trademark no-hands splits -- in which they not only went down but sprang back up again without using their hands for balance -- left film audiences wide-eyed. The legendary choreographer George Balanchine called it ballet, despite their lack of formal training.\n"My brother and I used our whole bodies, our hands, our personalities and everything," Fayard Nicholas said in an interview last year. "We tried to make it classic. We called our type of dancing classical tap and we just hoped the audience liked it"
(08/30/05 5:24am)
LOS ANGELES -- Marlon Brando makes a posthumous appearance not in movie theaters, but in the nation's bookstores this month as co-author of "Fan-Tan," an adventure about a dashing, early 20th-century pirate.\nDue out Sept. 15, the 256-page book's jacket resembles the cover of a 1930s pulp magazine: an Asian woman in a blood-red, silk gown fills half the space; a seaman resembling Humphrey Bogart in "The African Queen" takes up the background.\nThe novel has already won praise from Publishers Weekly, which said in a review: "Throw in a typhoon, a double-cross, a scorching sex scene, hand-to-hand combat and a mad break for freedom, and enthralled readers will be swinging from the rigging along with the rest of the pirates in this rollicking high-seas saga."\nThe story is centered on pirate Annie (for Anatole) Doultry. While serving a six-month sentence in a Hong Kong jail, Doultry saves the life of a fellow prisoner. Upon release, Doultry finds his deed has won the favor of an underworld figure, the glamorous and hugely wealthy pirate, Madame Lai Choi San, who invites him to join the hijacking of a silver-laden British ship. He can't resist her charms or the adventure and he is plunged into battles, typhoons and sex.\nThe book's journey from pen to publisher was as circuitous as Doultry's voyages. It began in the late 1970s, when Brando was absurdly overweight and angry at the Hollywood system, taking occasional acting jobs with million-dollar paychecks to help support his family and his Tahitian real estate.\nNo longer inspired by acting, he turned to screenwriting and began "Fan-Tan," the title taken from the Chinese gambling game. The hero was strikingly akin to Brando: Both were middle-aged, overweight, mischievous and fond of Asian women.\nAs with many of Brando's later-life schemes, he reached an impasse and realized he needed help. Enter another enigmatic figure, Donald Cammell. Brando and Cammell had a lot in common: outrageous lifestyle, artistic temperament and a love of Asian women.\nThe handsome son of an aristocratic Scottish family, Cammell had studied painting, alcohol and drugs in Florence, Italy. He turned to film and directed 1970's over-the-top "Performance," starring James Fox and Mick Jagger, which drew mixed reviews and an X rating.\nBrando admired Cammell's film work and invited him to help write "Fan-Tan." They collaborated intensely, spending eight months on Tetiaroa, Brando's island in Tahiti. Brando was so disenchanted with the Hollywood system he refused to submit the treatment to the studios. In 1982, Sonny Mehta, then at Pan Books in London, gave the authors $100,000 to convert the treatment into a novel.\nThe pair had a falling out, and Brando returned the advance, paying Cammell's half. After Cammell's 1986 film, "The Wild Side," failed to find a distributor, he committed suicide at 62.\nFollowing Brando's death at 80 last year, Cammell's widow, China Kong, resurrected the manuscript, and it was bought by Mehta, now editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf. He assigned a Knopf regular, film historian David Thomson, to edit "Fan-Tan" and write the last chapter, which had only been outlined by Brando, and an epilogue.\n"The character of Annie Doultry is plainly a self-portrait of Brando," the London-born writer said in an interview from his home in San Francisco. "There are transcripts of conferences he and Cammell had, and Brando did a lot of improvising, playing the Annie Doultry character. Plainly he saw this as a part that he might play in a movie himself."\nThomson, 64, worked from the manuscript provided by Cammell's widow, eliminating repetition and "filling in gaps of the story."\nLongtime Brando friend and associate George Englund agrees the actor saw himself as the Annie Doultry character. Englund, who directed Brando in "The Ugly American," has an original "Fan-Tan" manuscript annotated by Brando. Last year, he published a reminiscence of his years with the actor.
(02/22/05 4:39am)
LOS ANGELES -- Actress Sandra Dee, the blond beauty who attracted a large teen audience in the 1960s with films such as "Gidget" and "Tammy and the Doctor" and had a headlined marriage to pop singer Bobby Darin, died Sunday at age 62. \nDee died Sunday morning at the Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, Calif., said Cynthia Mead, nursing supervisor. She died of complications from kidney disease after nearly two weeks in the hospital, said Steve Blauner, a longtime family friend who represents Darin's estate. Blauner said Dee had been on dialysis for about four years.\n"She didn't have a bad bone in her body," he told The Associated Press in a phone interview. "When she was a big star in the pictures and a top five at the box office, she treated the grip the exact same way she treated the head of the studio. She meant it. She wasn't phony."\nThe family is expected to hold private funeral services.\nAt Universal Studios, Dee was cast mostly in teen movies such as "The Reluctant Debutante," "The Restless Years," "Tammy Tell Me True" and "Take Her, She's Mine." Occasionally, she was able to do secondary roles in other films, such as "Imitation of Life," "A Portrait In Black" and "Romanoff and Juliet." At the height of her fame, Dee was arguably the biggest female teen idol of her time. "She was Gidget, and she was Tammy, and for a time she was young America's ideal," film critic Leonard Maltin once said of her.\nAfter a one-month courtship, Dee married Darin in Elizabeth, N.J., in 1960. A son, Dodd Mitchell, was born to the couple the following year. In 1965, with her divorce from Darin dampening her teen appeal, Dee was dropped by Universal.\n"I thought they were my friends," she said in an interview that year with the AP, referring to her former bosses. "But I found out on the last picture ('A Man Could Get Killed') that I was simply a piece of property to them. I begged them not to make me do the picture, but they insisted."\nBorn Alexandra Zuck on April 23, 1942, in Bayonne, N.J., Dee became a model while in grade school.\nIn a mid-career interview with the AP, she explained her name change:\n"I used to sign vouchers and sign-out sheets with 'Alexandra Dee.' Somehow it stuck." she said when she was signed to her first film. "'Sandra Dee' was the name they gave me."\nDee made an independent film "Rosie!" (1968), starring with Rosalind Russell, but her movie career dwindled after that. Her name was resuscitated in 1978 with the film "Grease," which featured the song "Look At Me, I'm Sandra Dee" mocking her squeaky-clean image. But Dee didn't mind, Blauner said.\n"She always had a big laugh about it. She had a great sense of humor," he said.\nBlauner said her favorite films were the ones she made with Darin. Despite their divorce, he remained the love of her life, Blauner said. In a March 1991 interview with People magazine, Dee said she was sexually abused as a child by her stepfather and pushed into stardom by her mother. Dee, who turned to pills and alcohol, said she hit bottom after her mother died in 1988.\n"I couldn't function," she told People, adding that she began drinking more than a quart of scotch a day as her weight fell to 80 pounds. She said she stayed home almost constantly for three years. Her last film credit was for the 1983 movie "Lost." Dee credited her son with helping her turn her life around. She began seeing a therapist regularly and hoped to land a job on a TV series.\nKate Bosworth portrayed Dee in last year's movie "Beyond the Sea," a biography of Darin. Actor Kevin Spacey, who directed and co-wrote the film and played Darin, has said Dee approved of the movie. "She called me ... and said she loved it," he said last year.
(11/08/04 5:49am)
LOS ANGELES--Howard Keel, the broad-shouldered baritone who romanced his way through a series of glittery MGM musicals such as "Kiss Me Kate" and "Annie Get Your Gun" and later revived his career with television's "Dallas," died Sunday. He was 85. Keel died Sunday morning of colon cancer, said` his son, Gunnar.\nKeel starred in Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals in New York and London before being signed to an MGM contract after World War II. The timing was perfect: He became a star with his first MGM film, playing Frank Butler to Betty Hutton's Annie Oakley in "Annie Get Your Gun."\nKeel's size and lusty voice made him an ideal leading man for such stars as Esther Williams ("Pagan Love Song," "Texas Carnival," "Jupiter's Darling"), Ann Blyth ("Rose Marie," "Kismet"), Kathryn Grayson ("Show Boat," "Lovely to Look At," "Kiss Me Kate") and Doris Day ("Calamity Jane").\nHis own favorite film was the exuberant "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers."\n"It was a fine cast and lots of fun to make," Keel said in a 1993 statement, "but they did the damn thing on the cheap. The backdrops had holes in them, and it was shot on the worst film stock ... As it turned out, the miracle worker was George Foley, the cinematographer. He took that junk and made it look like a Grandma Moses painting."\nWhen film studios went into a slump, MGM's musical factory was disbanded. Keel kept busy on the road in such surefire attractions of "Man of La Mancha," "South Pacific," "Annie Get Your Gun" and "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers." Keel was 66 and presumably nearing the end of his career when he suddenly became a star in another medium. From its start in 1978, "Dallas" with its combination of oil, greed, sex and duplicity had become the hottest series in television. Jim Davis, who had played the role of Jock Ewing, died in 1981, and the producers needed another strong presence to stand up to the nefarious J.R. Ewing Jr. (Larry Hagman). They chose Keel.\n"The show was enormous," Keel said in 1995. "I couldn't believe it. My life changed again. From being out of it, I was suddenly a star, known to more people than ever before. Wherever I went, crowds appeared again, and I started making solo albums for the first time in my career."\nAs Clayton Farlow, husband of "Miss Ellie" Ewing (Barbara Bel Geddes), Keel remained with "Dallas" until it folded in 1991.\nWhen Keel was born in Gillespie, Ill., his name was Harold Clifford Leek. His father, once a naval captain, became a coal miner and drank to soothe his bitterness. During drunken rages, he beat his children. His mother, a strict Methodist, forbade her two sons from having any entertainment.\n"I had a terrible, rotten childhood. My father made away with himself when I was 11. I had no guidance, and Mom was six feet tall, bucktoothed and very tough," Keel said in 1995. "I was mean and rebellious and had a terrible, bitter temper. I got a job as an auto mechanic, and I would have stayed in that narrow kind of life if I hadn't discovered art. Music changed me completely."\nAt 20, he was living in Los Angeles and he was befriended by a cultured woman who took him to a Hollywood Bowl concert featuring famed baritone Lawrence Tibbett. Keel was inspired, and he started taking vocal lessons at 25 cents an hour. His first semi-professional opportunity came as a singing waiter at the Paris Inn Restaurant in downtown Los Angeles at $15 a week and two meals a day.\nSix foot three and a gawky 140 pounds, Keel was painfully shy. He worked five years during World War II at Douglas Aircraft, and the experience helped his confidence. He sang in recitals and opera programs and was summoned to an audition with Oscar Hammerstein II, who was looking for young singers to play Curly in the growing number of touring "Oklahoma!" companies. Hammerstein approved, and soon under a new name Howard Keel he was singing "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" in New York eight times a week. He sometimes replaced John Raitt in Rodgers and Hammerstein's other hit, "Carousel." On occasion, he would appear in a matinee of "Oklahoma!" and an evening performance of "Carousel." He played "Carousel" for 18 months in London.\nRodgers and Hammerstein were notorious for underpaying their actors and denying them billing. Keel rankled at being paid $250 a week for the unbilled starring role in a sell-out musical. As soon as his contract expired, he hurried back to Los Angeles.\nDesperately in need of handsome, virile actors who could sing, MGM signed Keel to a contract that paid $850 a week. He made it big in musicals, but also appeared in westerns: "Waco," "Red Tomahawk," "The War Wagon" (with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas) and "Arizona Bushwhackers." After leaving MGM, he appeared as St. Peter in the unsuccessful "The Big Fisherman."\nKeel was married and then divorced twice: to actress Rosemary Cooper and dancer Helen Anderson, with whom he had three children: Kaija, Kristine and Gunnar. In 1970 he married former airline stewardess Magamoll. They had one daughter, Leslie.\nHe continued singing into his 80's. He explained his passion as something unmet by anything else. \n"As long as I can sing halfway decent, I'd rather sing (than act). There's nothing like being in good voice, feeling good, having good numbers to do and having a fine orchestra"
(10/01/03 5:56am)
LOS ANGELES -- Sophia Loren, returning to Hollywood to promote her son's directorial debut, recalled her first visit, which included an infamous encounter with Jayne Mansfield.\nTo welcome Italy's top star, Paramount Studios invited a stellar crowd to a reception in 1958 at Romanoff's, the town's toniest restaurant. The publicity-prone Mansfield, whose propensity for bearing cleavage pushed new limits, was among the guests.\nSomeone, perhaps her studio's press agent, seated the blond actress next to the guest of honor.\nAn alert -- or perhaps planted -- photographer snapped a shot just as Mansfield's bodacious bosom plunged over the bodice and Loren gazed down in astonishment.\nThe photo was too graphic for family newspapers and magazines, but it has had a long underground life. "They keep on sending me this picture, the fans," Loren said, "hoping that I would sign it. Never."\nDespite the dubious debut, Loren has returned to Hollywood many times since -- both to make movies and for some R&R at her ranch in suburban Thousand Oaks.\nThis most recent visit was for "Between Strangers," written and directed by her younger son, Edoardo Ponti. It premieres 8 p.m. EDT Sunday on the WE: Women's Entertainment cable channel.\n"We chose cable because today's theatrical market is not conducive to character-driven movies," said Ponti, a tall, lean 30-year-old. "On cable it could be seen by 80, 90 million people. We could never do that in theaters," although the film will appear in theaters overseas.\n"Between Strangers" tells the stories of three troubled women in Toronto, where it was shot on a budget of less than $7 million. Loren appears as an aging, frustrated artist in a loveless marriage with a violent, wheelchair-bound husband (Pete Postlethwaite). Others in the cast include Mira Sorvino, Gerard Depardieu, Malcolm McDowell and Klaus Maria Brandauer.\nLoren the first to win an Academy Award for a performance given entirely in a foreign language (1961's "Two Women") plays the role in a gray wig, frumpy dresses and little makeup.\nDid she rebel at abandoning her traditional glamour?\n"Every morning she would show up with a bit more lip gloss than she should," said Ponti during an interview. "Every morning I would tell her, 'Please take it off.' It would happen the next morning, and it became a joke."\n"He made me suffer so much I'm joking," Loren said with the sly laugh. "It was a very difficult role to sustain, because every day it was full of emotions, full of things you had to feel so deeply. Was it tiring? No, no, no. I love to act, I love to do good things, and this was one of them."\nThe mother-son relationship helped during the filming, Ponti explained. "I know her face so well that I can sometimes say something to her that I could not tell other actors. I could tell her: 'In this moment when you're not speaking, open your mouth slightly.' I know what kind of emotion she's going to give."\nLoren turned 69 on Sept. 20, but her age doesn't show. Her figure she's dressed in a red pantsuiton this day remains voluptuous, the classic Italian face unlined, surrounded by a swirl of dark curls.\n"I feel younger than I am sometimes," remarked Loren, who received an Oscar for career achievement in 1991. "The same drive, the same enthusiasm, eager to live, eager to do things. The drive that is inside of me helps me to go on and to remain young."\nThat drive keeps her working in films, mostly in Europe. She has completed two recent movies and plans another with Lina Wertmuller. By her own account, "Between Strangers" is her 100th.
(09/02/03 5:23am)
LOS ANGELES -- Hollywood's blacklist ended 40 years ago, but its notoriety simply will not die.\nThat dark era of movie history has been treated in films such as "The Way We Were" (1973), with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, and "The Front" (1976), with Woody Allen and Zero Mostel. Plays, television dramas and documentaries also have dealt with the blacklist, and it has produced shelves of memoirs, novels and histories.\nNow the U.S. PBS public television service is offering the two-hour "American Masters" documentary "Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan and the Blacklist: None Without Sin," airing Wednesday in the United States.\nBy coincidence, the following night marks the opening on a New York stage of "Trumbo," with Nathan Lane reading from the letters of Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a principal figure in the beginnings of the blacklist.\nDocumentarian Michael Epstein said his film stemmed from the awarding of an honorary Oscar in 1999 to Kazan. It caused an uproar of protests because he had named names of his fellow Communist Party members before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. Kazan won Academy Awards for directing "Gentleman's Agreement" and "On the Waterfront."\n"One of the unexpected voices that was supportive of the honorary Oscar was Arthur Miller," Epstein commented. He pointed out that Kazan and Miller had been considered "soul mates," Kazan having directed the Miller plays "All My Sons" and "Death of a Salesman."\nMiller had not been a communist, but he refused to tell congressional red hunters the names of those who were. Kazan's testimony ended their friendship.\n"I thought that Kazan was unfairly being asked to carry all of the sins of his generation," Epstein said of the 1999 protests. "There was no mention of members of the committee or of the moguls who ran the studios."\n"Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan and the Blacklist" traces the relationship of the two men as well as the bitter history of the blacklist and its victims. Among the victims appearing in the film: screenwriter Walter Bernstein and actors Kim Hunter, Madeleine Sherwood and Lee Grant. Epstein also relies heavily on biographers and historians who have no firsthand knowledge of the events.\nKazan and Miller are shown in their appearances before the committees but were not interviewed for the documentary.\n"I met with Kazan," said Epstein, "but he wasn't in good enough health to do an interview. It seemed unfair to have an interview with Miller but not one with Kazan.\n"But Miller was very open to the film and allowed us to excerpt 'The Crucible.'" That was Miller's 1953 play about the Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials, which he compared to the committee hearings.\nFifty years later, Grant can jest about her blacklisting.\n"I was a fool for love," she said, laughing, in a phone interview from New York.\nShe made the list because her husband, playwright Arnold Manoff, had been blacklisted and she refused to testify against him. Although she had received a supporting actress Oscar nomination for "Detective Story," the studios wouldn't hire her for 12 years.\n"Was it tough?" said Grant, 71. "There's one thing about being a kid: everything is new, everything is kind of thrilling. I was learning. I had not read in all those years Marx or Hegel; I didn't know what a communist was. But I learned to fight, I learned what the blacklist was, I learned what unfairness was."\nShe finally returned with a role in the TV series "Peyton Place." She found her niche as a character actress and won a supporting Oscar for 1975's "Shampoo."\nTrumbo's son, Chris, who compiled the play "Trumbo," was 7 when his father refused to answer congressmen's questions about his communist past and was sentenced to a year in prison for contempt of Congress, as were other members of the so-called Hollywood 10.\nThe son's boyhood memories include visiting his father at the federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky, spending two years in Mexico City while his father "bootlegged" scripts to Hollywood studios using an alias, living on a California ranch where the livestock supplied the family's food, then moving to a middle-class Los Angeles suburb.\n"I never thought my father had done anything wrong," says Trumbo, 62.\nThe blacklist, which had ruined dozens of lives, ended in 1960 when Dalton Trumbo was hired by Kirk Douglas to write "Spartacus" and by Otto Preminger for "Exodus." Both insisted Trumbo's name appear on the screen.\nTwo of Trumbo's scripts had won Academy Awards, although he was not credited. Shortly before his death in 1976, he was presented the Oscar for "The Brave One," made 20 years earlier. In 1993 his widow accepted the award for 1953's "Roman Holiday"
(08/28/03 5:49am)
LOS ANGELES -- Mourners reflecting the range of Bob Hope's impact on culture gathered at a North Hollywood church Wednesday for a memorial Mass.\nHollywood stars, golfers, politicians, generals and businessmen attended the ceremony celebrated by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church.\nEntering church, Barbara Eden said her memories of Hope were "happiness and laughter" along with the image of him hitting golf balls off decks of aircraft carriers wherever they were abroad to entertain servicemen.\n"I just loved working with him. He was very businesslike, but he had a calmness about him that made everyone else's talent come through. He was an elegant man, he was a gentleman," Eden said.\nHope died at age 100 of pneumonia July 27 at his Toluca Lake home and was entombed July 30 at San Fernando Mission Cemetery.\nEulogies were delivered by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and writer Larry Gelbart, creator of the "M-A-S-H" TV show.\nBefore the bells of St. Charles summoned the mourners into Mass, some paused outside to reflect on what Hope meant to them.\n"We're going to miss him," Connie Stevens said. "He was a tremendous force on Earth."\n"He was so special because he gave so much to everyone besides his humor," said Loni Anderson. "We've lost a giant, probably the greatest entertainer of our century."\nTom Selleck recalled how Hope recruited him to appear on some of his shows. "Bob always called personally when he wanted you to work with him. It meant a lot and it made it hard to say no," Selleck said.\nAlso among the 900 guests: Mickey Rooney, Dixie Carter, Hal Holbrook, Raquel Welch, Julie Newmar, Marie Osmond, Phyllis Diller, Ed McMahon, Gary Owens, Norm Crosby, retired Gen. William Westmoreland, former California Gov. Pete Wilson and businessman Lee Iacocca.
(07/28/03 12:48am)
LOS ANGELES -- You might think that Gore Vidal, the novelist, playwright, essayist, congressional candidate, TV personality and all-around American gadfly, would be mellowing at age 77.\nThink again. The tireless iconoclast, who published his first novel at 20 and has written 25 more, remains as feisty and prolific as ever.\nHis latest book is a paperback "pamphlet" called "Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta." And he's busy on another, "The Founding Fathers," in which he will claim that the leaders of the American Revolution were not as saintly as schoolbooks would have us believe.\nOther works in progress: a movie script, a reworking of his play "Visit to a Small Planet" and a possible Broadway musical about Oscar Wilde.\nHe's also the subject of an American Masters special, "The Education of Gore Vidal," which appears on PBS at 10 p.m. Wednesday. The hour-long show features a healthy dose of Vidal talking about himself, as well as comments by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., George Plimpton and others. There are also readings of Vidal's works by longtime chums Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon. \nVidal questions the title, "The Education of Gore Vidal."\n"I had no education," he declared in an interview. "I graduated from Exeter (prep school) at 17 and went directly into the Army. I came out of the war with a novel, 'Williwaw,' for which I found a publisher. So from the age of 17 my father and grandfather didn't have to support me. Which made them very happy."\nHis father became head of the Civil Aviation Administration; his grandfather was a powerful senator from Oklahoma, who was blind. Vidal read the Congressional Digest to him and gained an early education in politics by watching Capitol dealings.\nThe boy's mother, a Southern belle he calls "not my best friend," married three times (Vidal and Jackie Kennedy shared a stepfather).\nThe TV special supplies at least one revelation: During a first reading of the Broadway revival of his play "The Best Man" two years ago, Vidal takes over the lines of a pompous Southern senator. His delivery was impeccable and the cast applauded at the end.\nThe incident made one thing clear: Gore Vidal is an actor. Indeed, he has acted in four films and he learned to face the camera in the 1950s, when he made hundreds of appearances on TV talk shows to promote his books. He resorted to TV, he claims, because major critics refused to review his books for seven years because of his third book, "The City and the Pillar," which dealt with homosexuality.\nVidal and his companion, Howard Austen, spend part of the year in the Hollywood Hills and also own a sprawling villa at Ravello, Italy. The Hollywood house faces busy Outpost Drive, but entering the driveway you seem transported into a rain forest. Towering pines, verdant ferns, ivy everywhere. The foliage partially hides a traditional California white stucco and red tile-roof house that Vidal has owned for 30 years.\nWhy live in Hollywood when he has scant regard for the place?\n"Cedars-Sinai," he replies succinctly, referring to the hospital of choice for many Hollywood celebrities. He has been plagued with an arthritic knee, that for a time prevented him from walking. A knee operation, with daily swims and muscle massage, has allowed him to hobble, but more surgery may be needed. "I don't want a plastic knee," he insists.\nHis face is lined, but he has all his hair, which he says has become fine and unmanageable with age. His mind remains agile, and he tosses epigrams like confetti.\nVidal is reputed to have engaged in a number of famous feuds.\n"That's really not quite right," he responds. "What it comes from is I'm extremely sharp about politics. I'm not shy about mentioning crimes of politicians. This upsets not only the politicians, but those newspapers that love them. Suddenly you have a chorus: 'Oh, he's a terrible man!' Norman Mailer got upset about a review I wrote about one of his books, 'The Prisoner of Sex.' The argument was over feminism; it had nothing to do with Norman, it had to do with me."\nHis relations with Mailer have improved. Last summer Vidal flew east with his ailing leg to appear with Mailer in "Don Juan in Hell" at the Provincetown Theater in Massachusetts. They had done it for an Actors Studio benefit eight years before.\nAs a writer, Vidal's relations with Hollywood have been hit and miss- "my disasters are more famous than most people's good movies."\nVidal was asked if he had any regrets at this point in his life. He responded unflinchingly:\n"As somebody who has done exactly what he wants all his life, I don't see why I would have any"
(02/20/03 5:19am)
LOS ANGELES -- They pour out of Nia Vardalos' compact dressing room like a crowd leaving an ocean liner stateroom in a Marx Brothers comedy. They are her big fat Greek family.\nTruthfully, none of the actors is fat, few are Greek and none is related to Vardalos. They form the cast of the new CBS sitcom "My Big Fat Greek Life," premiering 9:30 p.m. Monday, before settling into its regular time slot at 8 p.m. Sunday, March 2.\nThe actors had reported to Vardalos' dressing room at CBS Studio Center at 9 o'clock Monday morning for what she planned as a weekly ritual to cement the familial feeling.\n"We're like a family," observes Vardalos after the cast had filed out. "We've been together for 2 1/2 years. We used to have lunches together, and then suddenly I disappeared to Europe and Australia for seven months to promote the film, writing the series by e-mail.\n"I decided every week we would have a cast meeting where I could tell them about their story lines and find out their concerns. We just taped our first episode, and I said, 'What do we change?' They said, 'Let's have music between the scenes,' 'Let's feed our (studio) audience.' Just stuff like that."\nThe Monday meeting adds another responsibility for Vardalos, who serves as co-executive producer of "My Big Fat Greek Life" and sits in on script conferences with the seven staff writers.\nVardalos remembers watching the pilot of "The Drew Carey Show," on which her husband, Ian Gomez, appears. She was impressed by how nicely Carey treated the actors and the audience and decided that if she ever had a series, she would do the same.\nBy now "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" has become legendary as the little feature that could. As every movie maven now knows, Vardalos started with a one-woman show and converted it into a screenplay that attracted the sponsorship of Tom Hanks and his wife, Greek-American actress Rita Wilson; it was filmed for $5 million, then grossed a stunning $240 million-plus (and still counting).\nThe lighthearted film focused on Toula's (Vardalos) courtship and her family's response to her suitor, a non-Greek teacher. The half-hour sitcom picks up after the couple's wedding, as they return from their honeymoon, and will expand the film's focus.\n"You can't just carbon-copy something. We have to be creatively interested in what we're doing," Vardalos says.\nThere are a few obvious changes: Vardalos' character has a new (but still familiar) name, Nia, and a new husband. Steven Eckholdt has replaced the film's John Corbett, who was committed to another TV series, the upcoming "Lucky" on FX.\nOther major cast members are back for the series, including Lainie Kazan, Michael Constantine, Louis Mandylor, Andrea Martin and Gia Carides.\nKazan, who plays Vardalos' mother, comes from a large, eccentric Brooklyn family - "My father was a bookmaker, my mother was like a Jewish Blanche DuBois, very neurotic, artistic and fragile." Although the name may sound Greek, it was originally Kazansky and she is Russian, Spanish and Jewish.\nKazan, a singer as well as an actress, was on the phone arranging appearances on weekends; the demand for singing dates has risen since "Wedding."\n"I figured it was just another little picture that cost very little and would be in a few art houses," she says. "I met this delightful young woman, Nia Vardalos, who was funny and clever and delicious, just a breath of fresh air.\n"Tom Hanks said to me after the first reading of the script, `If we ever make this movie, we'll call you.' I thought, `Yeah, sure.' I got a call from my agent a year and a half later that they were making this picture.\n"I went up to Canada (the film was shot in Toronto) and had a wonderful time, never, ever thinking it would be this kind of hit. I was in shock, very happily so."\nMichael Constantine, who plays Nia's father, feels Vardalos' Monday meetings are "a wonderful thing."\nLike others involved in "Wedding," Constantine -- a veteran of films and television (an Emmy winner for "Room 222," which ran from 1969 to '74) -- never thought it would turn into a phenomenon: "Because we loved working together, we hoped it would make a little bit of a profit so some day we could make a sequel. Whoever dreamed it was going to go crazy?"\nConstantine, whose parents were Greek immigrants, doesn't fear any negative reaction from Greek-Americans. He figures: "As long as we stay pretty honest about the Greek life, we should be OK."\nFor Vardalos, the joys of the "Wedding" achievement haven't dimmed. Her original screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award just last week.\n"I'm living in a constant state of being thrilled. Every day I cannot believe what has happened to me. I may be naive in this, but I think it's going to create opportunities for other people. Studios might be more willing to read a script from a complete unknown. Agents might take a chance on an actress who doesn't necessarily fit into the mold. I just have a feeling that the rules have changed.\n"It makes me happy to think that what happened to me could happen to other people too"