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- Emiko Yagumo was born on 15 August 1903 in Osaka, Japan. She was an actress, known for A Story of Floating Weeds (1934), Tokyo Chorus (1931) and Fue no shiratama (1929). She died on 13 January 1979.
- Sachiko Murase was born on 21 March 1905 in Tokyo, Japan. She was an actress, known for Rhapsody in August (1991), A Promise (1986) and Ojôsan kanpai (1949). She died on 9 October 1993.
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Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born on May 12, 1907 in Hartford, Connecticut to a suffragist, Katharine Martha (Houghton), and a doctor, Thomas Norval Hepburn, who both always encouraged her to speak her mind, develop it fully, and exercise her body to its full potential. An athletic tomboy as a child, she was very close to her brother Tom; at 14 she was devastated to find him dead, the apparent result of accidentally hanging himself while practicing a hanging trick their father had taught them. For many years afterward, she used his November 8 birth date as her own. She became shy around girls her age and was largely schooled at home. She did attend Bryn Mawr College, where she decided to become an actress, appearing in many of their productions.
After graduating, she began getting small roles in plays on Broadway and elsewhere. She always attracted attention, especially for her role in "Art and Mrs. Bottle" (1931). She finally broke into stardom when she took the starring role of the Amazon princess Antiope in "A Warrior's Husband" (1932). The inevitable film offers followed; after making a few screen tests, she was cast in A Bill of Divorcement (1932), opposite John Barrymore. The film was a hit, and after agreeing to her salary demands, RKO signed her to a contract. She made five films between 1932 and 1934. For her third, Morning Glory (1933), she won her first Academy Award. Her fourth, Little Women (1933), was the most successful picture of its day.
But stories were beginning to leak out, of her haughty behavior off- screen and her refusal to play the Hollywood Game, always wearing slacks and no makeup, never posing for pictures or giving interviews. Audiences were shocked at her unconventional behavior instead of applauding it, and so when she returned to Broadway in 1934 to star in "The Lake", the critics panned her, and the audiences, who at first bought up tickets, soon deserted her. When she returned to Hollywood, things didn't get much better. From 1935-1938, she had only two hits: Alice Adams (1935), which brought her her second Oscar nomination, and Stage Door (1937); the many flops included Break of Hearts (1935), Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Mary of Scotland (1936), Quality Street (1937), and the now-classic Bringing Up Baby (1938).
With so many flops, she came to be labeled "box-office poison". She decided to go back to Broadway to star in "The Philadelphia Story" (1938) and was rewarded with a smash. She quickly bought the film rights and so was able to negotiate her way back to Hollywood on her own terms, including her choice of director and co-stars. The Philadelphia Story (1940) was a box-office hit, and Hepburn, who won her third Oscar nomination for the film, was bankable again. For her next film, Woman of the Year (1942), she was paired with Spencer Tracy, and the chemistry between them lasted for eight more films, spanning the course of 25 years, and a romance that lasted that long off-screen. (She received her fourth Oscar nomination for the film.) Their films included the very successful Adam's Rib (1949), Pat and Mike (1952), and Desk Set (1957).
With The African Queen (1951), Hepburn moved into middle-aged spinster roles, receiving her fifth Oscar nomination for the film. She played more of these types of roles throughout the 1950s, and won more Oscar nominations for many of them, including her roles in Summertime (1955), The Rainmaker (1956), and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). Her film roles became fewer and farther between in the 1960s, as she devoted her time to the ailing Tracy. For one of her film appearances in this decade, in Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), she received her ninth Oscar nomination. After a five-year absence from films, she then made Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), her last film with Tracy and the last film Tracy ever made; he died just weeks after finishing it. It garnered Hepburn her tenth Oscar nomination and her second win. The next year, she did The Lion in Winter (1968), which brought her her eleventh Oscar nomination and third win.
In the 1970s, she turned to making made-for-TV films, with The Glass Menagerie (1973), Love Among the Ruins (1975), and The Corn Is Green (1979). She still continued to make an occasional appearance in feature films, such as Rooster Cogburn (1975) with John Wayne and On Golden Pond (1981) with Henry Fonda. This last brought her her twelfth Oscar nomination and fourth win - the latter still the record.
She made more TV-films in the 1980s and wrote her autobiography, 'Me', in 1991. Her last feature film was Love Affair (1994), with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, and her last TV- film was One Christmas (1994). With her health declining, she retired from public life in the mid-1990s. She died at 96 at her home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.- Actress
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Joan Geraldine Bennett was born on February 27, 1910, in Palisades, New Jersey. Her parents were both successful stage actors, especially her father, Richard Bennett, and often toured the country for weeks at a time. In fact, Joan came from a long line of actors, dating back to the 18th century. Often, when her parents were on tour, Joan and her two older sisters, Constance Bennett, who later became an actress, and Barbara were left in the care of close friends. At the age of four, Joan made her first stage appearance. She debuted in films a year later in The Valley of Decision (1916), in which her father was the star and the entire Bennett clan participated. In 1923 she again appeared in a film which starred her father, playing a pageboy in The Eternal City (1923). It would be five more years before Joan appeared again on the screen. In between, she married Jack Marion Fox, who was 26 compared to her young age of 16. The union was anything but happy, in great part because of Fox's heavy drinking. In February of 1928 Joan and Jack had a baby girl they named Adrienne. The new arrival did little to help the marriage, though, and in the summer of 1928 they divorced. Now with a baby to support, Joan did something she had no intention of doing--she turned to acting. She appeared in Power (1928) with Alan Hale and Carole Lombard, a small role but a start. The next year she starred in Bulldog Drummond (1929), sharing top billing with Ronald Colman. Before the year was out she was in three more films--Disraeli (1929), The Mississippi Gambler (1929) and Three Live Ghosts (1929). Not only did audiences like her, but so did the critics. Between 1930 and 1931, Joan appeared in nine more movies. In 1932 she starred opposite Spencer Tracy in She Wanted a Millionaire (1932), but it wasn't one she liked to remember, partly because Tracy couldn't stand the fact that everyone was paying more attention to her than to him. Joan was to remain busy and popular throughout the rest of the 1930s and into the 1940s. By the 1950s Joan was well into her 40s and began to lessen her film appearances. She made only eight pictures, in addition to appearing in two television series. After Desire in the Dust (1960), Joan would be absent from the movie scene for the next ten years, resurfacing in House of Dark Shadows (1970), reprising her role from the Dark Shadows (1966) TV series as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Joan's final screen appearance was in the Italian thriller Suspiria (1977). Her final public performance was in the TV movie Divorce Wars: A Love Story (1982). On December 7, 1990, Joan died of a heart attack in Scarsdale, New York. She was 80 years old.- Actress
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Tanaka Kinuyo was a highly regarded and prolific actress best known for her films with director Mizoguchi Kenji. She was immersed in the world of film having received her start in the world of entertainment at age fourteen, being a filmmaker herself, being the cousin of director Kobayashi Masaki and, very much like Hara Setsuko and Ozu Yasujiro, being anecdotally romantically linked with the aforementioned Mizoguchi. The director would later recommend against her being hired as a director, which caused a rift between the two. She received her first known credit in Shochiku's Genroku Onna in 1924. She stayed to become the studio's biggest actress, and a paradigm of beauty, until approximately 1949 when she travelled to the United States Of America as an ambassador of Japanese culture. Upon her return from the US the Japanese detected a change of attitude in her, as well as noting a new short hairdo, which momentarily lead to some criticism. She had married director Shimizu Hiroshi, with whom she had worked, in 1929. Sources claim this was a mere cohabitation however. The marriage lasted a matter of months, but the two worked together beyond their romantic union. She married another one of her directors Gosho Heinosuke, but not before also starring in several Ozu films. It looked like films like Aizen Katsu and Naniwa Onna would be the height of her fame with all their popularity, but post-war films like Life Of Oharu, Sansho The Bailiff and Ugetsu were even bigger classics and immortalized the actress. Another of her many other noteworthy performances was in The Ballad Of Narayama based on a tradition and folklore of Japan. As if to complete her tour de force of Japanese cinema she directed several films and even worked with Kurosawa Akira in Red Beard. She died of a brain tumor in 1977.- Actress
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Ingrid Bergman was one of the greatest actresses from Hollywood's lamented Golden Era. Her natural and unpretentious beauty and her immense acting talent made her one of the most celebrated figures in the history of American cinema. Bergman is also one of the most Oscar-awarded actresses, tied with Meryl Streep and Frances McDormand, all three of them second only to Katharine Hepburn.
Ingrid Bergman was born on August 29, 1915 in Stockholm, Sweden, to a German mother, Frieda Henrietta (Adler), and a Swedish father, Justus Samuel Bergman, an artist and photographer. Her mother died when she was only two and her father died when she was 12. She went to live with an elderly uncle.
The woman who would be one of the top stars in Hollywood in the 1940s had decided to become an actress after finishing her formal schooling. She had had a taste of acting at age 17 when she played an uncredited role of a girl standing in line in the Swedish film Landskamp (1932) in 1932 - not much of a beginning for a girl who would be known as "Sweden's illustrious gift to Hollywood." Her parents died when she was just a girl and the uncle she lived with didn't want to stand in the way of Ingrid's dream. The next year she enrolled at the Royal Dramatic Theatre School in Stockholm but decided that stage acting was not for her. It would be three more years before she would have another chance at a film. When she did, it was more than just a bit part. The film in question was The Count of the Old Town (1935), where she had a speaking part as Elsa Edlund. After several films that year that established her as a class actress, Ingrid appeared in Intermezzo (1936) as Anita Hoffman. Luckily for her, American producer David O. Selznick saw it and sent a representative from Selznick International Pictures to gain rights to the story and have Ingrid signed to a contract. Once signed, she came to California and starred in United Artists' 1939 remake of her 1936 film, Intermezzo (1939), reprising her original role. The film was a hit and so was Ingrid.
Her beauty was unlike anything the movie industry had seen before and her acting was superb. Hollywood was about to find out that they had the most versatile actress the industry had ever seen. Here was a woman who truly cared about the craft she represented. The public fell in love with her. Ingrid was under contract to go back to Sweden to film Only One Night (1939) in 1939 and June Night (1940) in 1940. Back in the US she appeared in three films, all well-received. She made only one film in 1942, but it was the classic Casablanca (1942) opposite Humphrey Bogart.
Ingrid was choosing her roles well. In 1943 she was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), the only film she made that year. The critics and public didn't forget her when she made Gaslight (1944) the following year--her role of Paula Alquist got her the Oscar for Best Actress. In 1945 Ingrid played in Spellbound (1945), Saratoga Trunk (1945) and The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), for which she received her third Oscar nomination for her role of Sister Benedict. She made no films in 1947, but bounced back with a fourth nomination for Joan of Arc (1948). In 1949 she went to Italy to film Stromboli (1950), directed by Roberto Rossellini. She fell in love with him and left her husband, Dr. Peter Lindstrom, and daughter, Pia Lindström. America's "moral guardians" in the press and the pulpits were outraged. She was pregnant and decided to remain in Italy, where her son was born. In 1952 Ingrid had twins, Isotta and Isabella Rossellini, who became an outstanding actress in her own right, as did Pia.
Ingrid continued to make films in Italy and finally returned to Hollywood in 1956 in the title role in Anastasia (1956), which was filmed in England. For this she won her second Academy Award. She had scarcely missed a beat. Ingrid continued to bounce between Europe and the US making movies, and fine ones at that. A film with Ingrid Bergman was sure to be a quality production. In her final big-screen performance in 1978's Autumn Sonata (1978) she had her final Academy Award nomination. Though she didn't win, many felt it was the most sterling performance of her career. Ingrid retired, but not before she gave an outstanding performance in the mini-series A Woman Called Golda (1982), a film about Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. For this she won an Emmy Award as Best Actress, but, unfortunately, she did not live to see the fruits of her labor.
Ingrid died from cancer on August 29, 1982, her 67th birthday, in London, England.- Director
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Maya Deren came to the USA in 1922 as Eleanora Derenkowsky. Together with her father Solomon Derenkowsky, a psychiatrist, and her mother Maria Fidler, an artist, she fled the pogroms organized by the Bolsheviks against the Jews. She studied journalism and political science at the Syracuse University in New York, finishing her BA at the New York University (NYU) in June 1936, and then received her MA in English literature from the Smith College in 1939.
In 1943, she made her first film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), co-starring with Alexander Hammid. Through this association, at Hammid's suggestion, she changed her name to Maya, meaning "illusion." Overall, she made six short films and several incomplete films, including Witch's Cradle (1944) starring Marcel Duchamp.
Deren is the author of two books, "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film" 1946 (reprinted in "The Legend of Maya Deren," vol 1, part 2) and "Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti" (1953)--a book that was made after her first trip to Haiti in 1947 and which is still considered one of the most useful on Haitian Voudoun. Deren wrote numerous articles on film and on Haiti. Maya Deren shot over 18,000 feet of film in Haiti from 1947 to 1954 on Haitian Voudoun, parts of which can be viewed in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1993) made after her death by her then-husband Teiji Ito and his new wife Cherel Ito.
In 1947, Maya Deren became the first filmmaker to receive a Guggenheim grant for creative work in motion pictures. She wrote film theory, distributed her own films, traveled across the USA, and went to Cuba and Canada to promote her films using the lecture-demonstration format to teach film theory, and Voudoun and the interrelationship of magic, science, and religion. Deren established the Creative Film Foundation in the late 1950s to reward the achievements of independent filmmakers.- Actress
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Setsuko Hara became one of Japan's best-loved stars over her 30-year film career. Her signature character type, variations on a daughter devoted to her parents and home, inspired the nickname that stayed with her until retirement: the Eternal Virgin. To some extent, reality mirrored her roles in these films. In a society that considers marriage and parenting almost obligatory, she remained single and childless, something of a controversy in Japan in the 1950s. Fortunately she was popular enough to avoid criticism, but the 1950s were still a hard decade. She was plagued by ill health, missing out on several top roles as a result, and she witnessed the death of her camera-man brother in a freak train accident on set.
In 1963, shortly after the death of her mentor, director Yasujirô Ozu, she suddenly walked away from the film industry. At age 43, and at the height of her popularity, she bluntly refused to perform again, angering her fans, the industry, and the press. She implied acting had never been a pleasure and that she had only pursued a career in order to provide for her large family; this explanation is seen as the cause of her popularity backlash. She moved to a small house in picturesque Kamakura where she remained, living alone (though apparently sociable with friends), and refusing all roles offered.
She is undoubtedly known mostly for her work with Yasujiro Ozu, making six films with the great director, including the so-called Noriko trilogy, of which Tokyo Story (1953) is probably the best-known. She also worked with Akira Kurosawa, Mikio Naruse, Hiroshi Inagaki, and many others.- Actress
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Enigmatic, dark-haired foreign import Alida Valli was dubbed "The Next Garbo" but didn't live up to postwar expectations despite her cool, patrician beauty, remote allure and significant talent. Born in Pola, Italy (now Croatia), on May 3, 1921, the daughter of a Tridentine journalist and professor and an Istrian homemaker, she studied dramatics as a teen at the Motion Picture Academy of Rome and Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia before snaring bit roles in such films as Il cappello a tre punte (1935) ["The Three-Cornered Hat"] and I due sergenti (1936) ["The Two Sergeants"]. She made a name for herself in Italy during WWII playing the title role in Manon Lescaut (1940), won a Venice Film Festival award for Piccolo mondo antico (1941) ["Little Old World"] and was a critical sensation in We the Living (1942) ["We the Living"]. She briefly abandoned her career, however, in 1943, refusing to appear in what she considered fascist propaganda, and was forced into hiding. The next year she married surrealist painter/pianist/composer Oscar De Mejo. They had two children, and one of them, Carlo De Mejo, became an actor. She divorced in 1955, then she came back to Italy,
Following her potent, award-winning work in the title role of Eugenie Grandet (1946), she was discovered and contracted by David O. Selznick to play the murder suspect Maddalena Paradine in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947). She was billed during her Hollywood years simply as "Valli," and Selznick also gave her top femme female billing in Carol Reed's classic film noir The Third Man (1949), but for every successful film--such as the ones previously mentioned--she experienced such failures as The Miracle of the Bells (1948), and audiences stayed away. In 1951 she bid farewell to Hollywood and returned to her beloved Italy. In Europe again, she was sought after by the best directors. Her countess in Luchino Visconti's Senso (1954) was widely heralded, and she moved easily from ingénue to vivid character roles. Later standout films encompassed costume dramas as well as shockers and had her playing everything from baronesses to grandmothers in such films as Eyes Without a Face (1960) ["Eyes Without a Face"], Le gigolo (1960), Oedipus Rex (1967) ["Oedipus Rex"], The Big Scare (1974), 1900 (1976), Suspiria (1977), Luna (1979), Inferno (1980), Aspern (1982), A Month by the Lake (1995) and, her most recent, Angel of Death (2001).- Actress
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Yvonne De Carlo was born Margaret Yvonne Middleton on September 1, 1922 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She was three when her father abandoned the family. Her mother turned to waitressing in a restaurant to make ends meet--a rough beginning for an actress who would, one day, be one of Hollywood's elite. Yvonne's mother wanted her to be in the entertainment field and enrolled her in a local dance school and also saw that she studied dramatics. Yvonne was not shy in the least. She was somewhat akin to Colleen Moore who, like herself, entertained the neighborhood with impromptu productions. In 1937, when Yvonne was 15, her mother took her to Hollywood to try for fame and fortune, but nothing came of it and they returned to Canada. They came back to Hollywood in 1940, where Yvonne would dance in chorus lines at night while she checked in at the studios by day in search of film work. After appearing in unbilled parts in three short films, she finally got a part in a feature.
Although the film Harvard, Here I Come! (1941) was quite lame, Yvonne glowed in her brief appearance as a bathing beauty. The rest of 1942 and 1943 saw her in more uncredited roles in films that did not quite set Hollywood on fire. In The Deerslayer (1943), she played Wah-Tah. The role did not amount to much, but it was much better than the ones she had been handed previously. The next year was about the same as the previous two years. She played small parts as either secretaries, someone's girlfriend, native girls or office clerks. Most aspiring young actresses would have given up and gone home in defeat, but not Yvonne. She trudged on. The next year, started out the same, with mostly bit parts, but later that year, she landed the title role in Salome, Where She Danced (1945) for Universal Pictures. While critics were less than thrilled with the film, it was at long last her big break, and the film was a success for Universal. Now she was rolling.
Her next film was the western comedy Frontier Gal (1945) as Lorena Dumont. After a year off the screen in 1946, she returned in 1947 as Cara de Talavera in Song of Scheherazade (1947), and many agreed that the only thing worth watching in the film was Yvonne. Her next film was the highly regarded Burt Lancaster prison film Brute Force (1947). Time after time, Yvonne continued to pick up leading roles, in such pictures as Slave Girl (1947), Black Bart (1948), Casbah (1948) and River Lady (1948). She had a meaty role in Criss Cross (1949), a gangster movie, as the ex-wife of a hoodlum. At the start of the 1950s, Yvonne enjoyed continued success in lead roles. Her talents were again showcased in movies such as The Desert Hawk (1950), Silver City (1951) and Scarlet Angel (1952). Her last film in 1952 was Hurricane Smith (1952), a picture most fans and critics agree is best forgotten.
In 1956, she appeared in the film that would immortalize her best, The Ten Commandments (1956). She played Sephora, the wife of Moses (Charlton Heston). The film was, unquestionably, a super smash, and is still shown on television today. Her performance served as a springboard to another fine role, this time as Amantha Starr in Band of Angels (1957). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Yvonne appeared on such television series as Bonanza (1959) and The Virginian (1962). With film roles drying up, she took the role of Lily Munster in the smash series The Munsters (1964). However, she still was not completely through with the big screen. Appearances in such films as McLintock! (1963), The Power (1968), The Seven Minutes (1971) and La casa de las sombras (1976) kept her before the eyes of the movie-going public. Yvonne De Carlo died at age 84 of natural causes on January 8, 2007 in Woodland Hills, California.- Actress
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Machiko Kyô was born on 25 March 1924 in Osaka, Japan. She was an actress, known for Rashomon (1950), The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956) and Gate of Hell (1953). She died on 12 May 2019 in Tokyo, Japan.- Actress
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Nobuko Otowa was born on 1 October 1924 in Tottori, Japan. She was an actress, known for The Strange Tale of Oyuki (1992), Onibaba (1964) and Epitome (1953). She was married to Kaneto Shindô. She died on 22 December 1994.- Actress
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Florinda Chico was born on 24 April 1926 in Don Benito, Badajoz, Extremadura, Spain. She was an actress, known for The House of Bernarda Alba (1987), Cría Cuervos (1976) and Jarrapellejos (1988). She was married to Santos Pumar. She died on 19 February 2011 in Madrid, Spain.- Actress
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Gracita Morales was born on 11 November 1928 in Madrid, Spain. She was an actress, known for La chica del gato (1964), Operación Mata Hari (1968) and Operación Secretaria (1966). She was married to Martín Zerolo. She died on 3 April 1995 in Madrid, Spain.- Actress
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Audrey Hepburn was born as Audrey Kathleen Ruston on May 4, 1929 in Ixelles, Brussels, Belgium. Her mother, Baroness Ella Van Heemstra, was a Dutch noblewoman, while her father, Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston, was born in Úzice, Bohemia, to English and Austrian parents.
After her parents' divorce, Audrey went to London with her mother where she went to a private girls school. Later, when her mother moved back to the Netherlands, she attended private schools as well. While she vacationed with her mother in Arnhem, Netherlands, Hitler's army took over the town. It was here that she fell on hard times during the Nazi occupation. Audrey suffered from depression and malnutrition.
After the liberation, she went to a ballet school in London on a scholarship and later began a modeling career. As a model, she was graceful and, it seemed, she had found her niche in life--until the film producers came calling. In 1948, after being spotted modeling by a producer, she was signed to a bit part in the European film Nederlands in zeven lessen (1948). Later, she had a speaking role in the 1951 film, Young Wives' Tale (1951) as Eve Lester. The part still wasn't much, so she headed to America to try her luck there. Audrey gained immediate prominence in the US with her role in Roman Holiday (1953). This film turned out to be a smashing success, and she won an Oscar as Best Actress.
On September 25, 1954, she married actor Mel Ferrer. She also starred in Sabrina (1954), for which she received another Academy Award nomination. She starred in the films Funny Face (1957) and Love in the Afternoon (1957). She received yet another Academy Award nomination for her role in The Nun's Story (1959). On July 17, 1960, she gave birth to her first son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer.
Audrey reached the pinnacle of her career when she played Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), for which she received another Oscar nomination. She scored commercial success again playing Regina Lampert in the espionage caper Charade (1963). One of Audrey's most radiant roles was in the fine production of My Fair Lady (1964). After a couple of other movies, most notably Two for the Road (1967), she hit pay dirt and another nomination in Wait Until Dark (1967).
In 1967, Audrey decided to retire from acting while she was on top. She divorced from Mel Ferrer in 1968. On January 19, 1969, she married Dr. Andrea Dotti. On February 8, 1970, she gave birth to her second son, Luca Dotti in Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland. From time to time, she would appear on the silver screen.
In 1988, she became a special ambassador to the United Nations UNICEF fund helping children in Latin America and Africa, a position she retained until 1993. She was named to People's magazine as one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world. Her last film was Always (1989).
Audrey Hepburn died, aged 63, on January 20, 1993 in Tolochnaz, Vaud, Switzerland, from appendicular cancer. She had made a total of 31 high quality movies. Her elegance and style will always be remembered in film history as evidenced by her being named in Empire magazine's "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time".- Actress
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On November 12, 1929, Grace Patricia Kelly was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to wealthy parents. Her girlhood was uneventful for the most part, but one of the things she desired was to become an actress which she had decided on at an early age. After her high school graduation in 1947, Grace struck out on her own, heading to New York's bright lights to try her luck there. Grace worked some as a model and made her debut on Broadway in 1949. She also made a brief foray into the infant medium of television. Not content with the work in New York, Grace moved to Southern California for the more prestigious part of acting -- motion pictures. In 1951, she appeared in her first film entitled Fourteen Hours (1951) when she was 22. It was a small part, but a start nonetheless. The following year she landed the role of Amy Kane in High Noon (1952), a western starring Gary Cooper and Lloyd Bridges which turned out to be very popular. In 1953, Grace appeared in only one film, but it was another popular one. The film was Mogambo (1953) where Grace played Linda Nordley. The film was a jungle drama in which fellow cast members, Clark Gable and Ava Gardner turned in masterful performances. It was also one of the best films ever released by MGM. Although she got noticed with High Noon, her work with director Alfred Hitchcock, which began with Dial M for Murder (1954) made her a star. Her standout performance in Rear Window (1954) brought her to prominence. As Lisa Fremont, she was cast opposite James Stewart, who played a crippled photographer who witnesses a murder in the next apartment from his wheelchair. Grace stayed busy in 1954 appearing in five films. Grace would forever be immortalized by winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Georgie Elgin opposite Bing Crosby in The Country Girl (1954). In 1955, Grace once again teamed with Hitchcock in To Catch a Thief (1955) co-starring Cary Grant. In 1956, she played Tracy Lord in the musical comedy High Society (1956) which also starred Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. The whimsical tale ended with her re-marrying her former husband, played by Crosby. The film was well received. It also turned out to be her final acting performance. Grace had recently met and married Prince Rainier of the little principality of Monaco. By becoming a princess, she gave up her career. For the rest of her life, she was to remain in the news with her marriage and her three children. On September 14, 1982, Grace was killed in an automobile accident in her adoptive home country. She was just 52 years old.- Emma Penella was born on 2 March 1930 in Madrid, Spain. She was an actress, known for Fortunata y Jacinta (1970), The Executioner (1963) and Fedra, the Devil's Daughter (1956). She was married to Emiliano Piedra. She died on 27 August 2007 in Madrid, Spain.
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After acting studies at the Gothenburg City Theatre from 1950-52, she made her breakthrough debut in Gustaf Molander's Kärlek (1952). When Ingmar Bergman became head of the Malmö City Theatre he asked her to join him there and with him as a director she played the role of Margareta in Goethe's 'Faust'. Bergman also gave her supporting roles in his movies, most notably the mute woman in The Seventh Seal (1957). She followed up on a few offers from abroad but the roles wasted her screen presence. Bergman once again gave her an offer she couldn't refuse, to direct a movie. Paradistorg (1977) received a lot of praise from all over the world. Time Magazine considered it one of the four best non-US movies of 1978. Her appearances in movies has been rare but she gave a wonderful appearance in the children's TV show Kaspar i Nudådalen (2001). Lindblom has for many years worked for The Royal Dramatic Theatre, appearing in plays by August Strindberg or William Shakespeare. In 2002 she received a Guldbagge award for her lifetime achievements in movies.- Actress
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Carmen Rossi was born in 1932 in Málaga, Andalucía, Spain. She was an actress, known for La forja de un rebelde (1990), Estudio 1 (1965) and Paco y Veva (2004). She died on 2 October 2007 in Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain.- Actress
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Discovered at age 20 by celebrated director Ingmar Bergman, she became part of Bergman's regular stable of performers; in fact, he wrote Summer with Monika (1953) especially for her breakthrough. Extraordinary and versatile as an actress, her roles have ranged from the naive young wife in Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) to the mad visionary in Through a Glass Darkly (1961). Andersson also appeared in Fanny and Alexander (1982), Bergman's last film. After that she has appeared in a number of feature films and TV series in Sweden. Her autobiography was published in 2005.- Actress
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Mariko Okada was born on 11 January 1933 in Tokyo, Japan. She is an actress and producer, known for Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (1956), Akitsu Springs (1962) and This Year's Love (1962). She was previously married to Yoshishige Yoshida.- Actress
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Kim Novak was born in Chicago, Illinois on February 13, 1933 with the birth name of Marilyn Pauline Novak. She was the daughter of a former teacher turned transit clerk and his wife, also a former teacher. Throughout elementary and high school, Kim did not get along well with teachers. She even admitted that she didn't like being told what to do and when to do it.
Her first job, after high school, was modeling teen fashions for a local department store. Kim, later, won a scholarship in a modeling school and continued to model part-time. Kim later worked odd jobs as an elevator operator, sales clerk, and a dental assistant. The jobs never seemed to work out so she fell back on modeling, the one job she did well.
After a stint on the road as a spokesperson for an appliance company, Kim decided to go to Los Angeles and try her luck at modeling there. Ultimately, her modeling landed her an uncredited role in the RKO production of The French Line (1953). The role encompassed nothing more than being seen on a set of stairs.
Later a talent agent arranged for a screen test with Columbia Pictures and won a small six month contract. In truth, some of the studio hierarchy thought that Kim was Columbia's answer to Marilyn Monroe. Kim, who was still going by her own name of Marilyn, was originally going to be called "Kit Marlowe". She wanted to at least keep her family name of Novak, so the young actress and studio personnel settled on Kim Novak.
After taking some acting lessons, which the studio declined to pay for, Kim appeared in her first film opposite Fred MacMurray in Pushover (1954). Though her role as "Lona McLane" wasn't exactly a great one, it was her classic beauty that seemed to capture the eyes of the critics. Later that year, Kim appeared in the film, Phffft (1954) with Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday. Now more and more fans were eager to see this bright new star. These two films set the tone for her career with a lot of fan mail coming her way.
Her next film was as "Kay Greylek" in 5 Against the House (1955). The film was well-received, but it was her next one for that year that was her best to date. The film was Picnic (1955). Although Kim did a superb job of acting in the film as did her co-stars, the film did win two Oscars for editing and set decoration. Kim's next film was with United Artists on a loan out in the controversial Otto Preminger film The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). Her performance was flawless, but it was was Kim's beauty that carried the day. The film was a big hit.
In 1957, Kim played "Linda English" in the hit movie Pal Joey (1957) with Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth. The film did very well at the box office, but was condemned by the critics. Kim really didn't seem that interested in the role. She even said she couldn't stand people such as her character.
That same year, Novak risked her career when she started dating singer/actor Sammy Davis Jr.. The interracial affair alarmed studio executives, most notably Harry Cohn, and they ended their relationship in January of the following year. In 1958, Kim appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's, now classic, Vertigo (1958) with James Stewart. This film's plot was one that thoroughly entertained the theater patrons wherever it played. The film was one in which Stewart's character, a detective, is hired to tail a friend's wife (Kim) and witnesses her suicide. In the end, Stewart finds that he has been duped in an elaborate scheme.
Her next film was Bell Book and Candle (1958) which was only a modest success. By the early 1960s, Kim's star was beginning to fade, especially with the rise of new stars or stars that were remodeling their status within the film community. With a few more nondescript films between 1960 and 1964, she landed the role of "Mildred Rogers" in the remake of Of Human Bondage (1964). The film debuted to good reviews.
In the meantime, Kim broke off her engagement to director Richard Quine and embarked on a brief dalliance with basketball player Wilt Chamberlain. While filming The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965), she had a romance with co-star Richard Johnson, whom she married, but the marriage failed the following year.
Kim stepped away from the cameras for a while, returning in 1968 to star in The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968). It was a resounding flop, perhaps the worst of her career. However, after that, Kim, basically, was able to pick what projects she wanted. After The Great Bank Robbery (1969) in 1969, Kim was away for another four years until she was seen with then-boyfriend Michael Brandon in a television movie called The Third Girl from the Left (1973), playing a veteran Las Vegas showgirl experiencing a midlife crisis.
In a personal development, Novak met equine veterinarian Robert Malloy in October 1974 and the couple married in 1976. Subsequent films were not the type to get the critics to sit up and take notice, but afforded her the opportunity to work with strong talent. She appeared to good effect in Satan's Triangle (1975), Just a Gigolo (1978), The Mirror Crack'd (1980) and Malibu (1983).
In 1986 and 1987, Kim played, of all people, "Kit Marlowe" in the TV series Falcon Crest (1981). In 1990, she starred alongside Ben Kingsley in The Children (1990), a fine independent film shot in Europe. It was not widely distributed, thus few got to see Novak giving one of her most powerful performances.
Her last film, on the silver screen, was Liebestraum (1991), in which she played a terminally ill woman with a past. The film was a major disappointment in every aspect. Kim clashed with director Mike Figgis over how to play her character. Consequently, the role was cut to shreds. Kim has ruled out any plans for a comeback and says she just isn't cut out for Hollywood.
Fortunately, she has found long-lasting happiness outside her career. Today she lives in Eagle Point, Oregon with her husband Bob, on a ranch where they raise horses and llamas. Kim is also an accomplished artist and has exhibited her painting in galleries around the country. She enjoys riding, canoeing and expressing herself through paint, poetry and photography.- Ayako Wakao was born on 8 November 1933 in Tokyo, Japan. She is an actress, known for Seisaku's Wife (1965), Women Are Born Twice (1961) and A Wife Confesses (1961).
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Sophia Loren was born as Sofia Scicolone at the Clinica Regina Margherita in Rome on September 20, 1934. Her father Riccardo was married to another woman and refused to marry her mother Romilda Villani, despite the fact that she was the mother of his two children (Sophia and her younger sister Maria Scicolone). Growing up in the slums of Pozzuoli during the second World War without any support from her father, she experienced great sadness in her childhood. Her life took an unexpected turn for the best when, at age 14, she entered into a beauty contest and placed as one of the finalists. It was here that Sophia caught the attention of film producer Carlo Ponti, some 22 years her senior, whom she later married. Perhaps he was the father figure she never experienced as a child. Under his guidance, Sophia was put under contract and appeared as an extra in ten films beginning with Le sei mogli di Barbablù (1950), before working her way up to supporting roles. In these early films, she was credited as "Sofia Lazzaro" because people joked her beauty could raise Lazzarus from the dead.
By her late teens, Sophia was playing lead roles in many Italian features such as La favorita (1952) and Aida (1953). In 1957, she embarked on a successful acting career in the United States, starring in Boy on a Dolphin (1957), Legend of the Lost (1957), and The Pride and the Passion (1957) that year. She had a short-lived but much-publicized fling with co-star Cary Grant, who was nearly 31 years her senior. She was only 22 while he was 53, and she rejected a marriage proposal from him. They were paired together a second time in the family-friendly romantic comedy Houseboat (1958). While under contract to Paramount, Sophia starred in Desire Under the Elms (1958), The Key (1958), The Black Orchid (1958), It Started in Naples (1960), Heller in Pink Tights (1960), A Breath of Scandal (1960), and The Millionairess (1960) before returning to Italy to star in Two Women (1960). The film was a period piece about a woman living in war-torn Italy who is raped while trying to protect her young daughter. Originally cast as the more glamorous child, Sophia fought against type and was re-cast as the mother, displaying a lack of vanity and proving herself as a genuine actress. This performance received international acclaim and was honored with an Academy Award for Best Actress.
Sophia remained a bona fide international movie star throughout the sixties and seventies, making films on both sides of the Atlantic, and starring opposite such leading men as Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck, and Charlton Heston. Her English-language films included El Cid (1961), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), Arabesque (1966), Man of La Mancha (1972), and The Cassandra Crossing (1976). She gained wider respect with her Italian films, especially Marriage Italian Style (1964) and A Special Day (1977), both of which co-starred Marcello Mastroianni. During these years she received a second Oscar nomination and won five Golden Globe Awards.
From the eighties onward, Sophia's appearances on the big screen came few and far between. She preferred to spend the majority of her time raising sons Carlo Ponti Jr. (b. 1968) and Edoardo Ponti (b. 1973). Her only acting credits during the decade were five television films, beginning with Sophia Loren: Her Own Story (1980), a biopic in which she portrayed herself and her mother. She ventured into other areas of business and became the first actress to launch her own fragrance and design of eyewear. In 1982 she voluntarily spent nineteen days in jail for tax evasion.
In 1991 Sophia received an Honorary Academy Award for her body of work, and was declared "one of world cinema's greatest treasures." That same year, she experienced a terrible loss when her mother died of cancer. Her return to mainstream films in Ready to Wear (1994) was well-received, although the film as a whole was not. She followed this up with her biggest U.S. hit in years, the comedy Grumpier Old Men (1995), in which she played a sexy divorcée who seduces Walter Matthau. Over the next decade Sophia had plum roles in a few independent films like Soleil (1997), Between Strangers (2002) (directed by Edoardo), and Lives of the Saints (2004). Still beautiful at 72, she posed scantily-clad for the 2007 Pirelli Calendar. Sadly, that same year she mourned the death of her 94-year-old spouse, Carlo Ponti. In 2009, after far too much time away from film, she appeared in the musical Nine (2009) opposite Daniel Day-Lewis. These days Sophia is based in Switzerland but frequently travels to the states to spend time with her sons and their families (Eduardo is married to actress Sasha Alexander). Sophia Loren remains one of the most beloved and recognizable figures in the international film world.- Actress
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Her artistic dreams came early in life and were further supported by her older sister Gerd Andersson who became a ballet dancer at the Royal Opera and made her acting debut in 1951. Bibi, on the other side, had to make do with bit parts and commercials. She debuted in Dum-Bom (1953), playing against Nils Poppe. Eventually, she was able to start at the Royal Dramatic Theatre's acting school in 1954. A brief relationship with Ingmar Bergman made her quit school and follow him to the Malmö city theatre, where he was a director, performing in plays by August Strindberg and Hjalmar Bergman. Bergman also gave her a small part in his comedy Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), and larger roles in his Wild Strawberries (1957) and The Seventh Seal (1957). From the the 1960s she got offers from abroad, with best result in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977). During the civil war in Yugoslavia she has worked with several initiatives to give the people of Sarajevo theatre and other forms of culture.- Hitomi Nozoe was born on 11 February 1937 in Tokyo, Japan. She was an actress, known for Onna no kyôshitsu (1959), Danryû (1957) and Three Bosses (1960). She was married to Hiroshi Kawaguchi. She died on 4 May 1995.
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Liv Ullmann's father was a Norwegian engineer who used to work abroad, so as a child she lived in Tokyo, Canada, New York and Oslo. In the mid-1950s she made her stage debut and in 1957 made her film debut. She really became successful, however, when she began to work for Swedish director Ingmar Bergman in such films as Persona (1966), The Passion of Anna (1969) and Face to Face (1976). She also had a successful film career away from Bergman (The Abdication (1974), Dangerous Moves (1984).- Jitsuko Yoshimura was born on 18 April 1943 in Tokyo, Japan. She is an actress, known for Onibaba (1964), Pigs and Battleships (1961) and The Insect Woman (1963). She was previously married to Tetsuo Ishidate.
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Catherine Fabienne Deneuve was born October 22, 1943 in Paris, France, to actor parents Renée Simonot and Maurice Dorléac. She made her movie debut in 1957, when she was barely a teenager and continued with small parts in minor films, until Roger Vadim gave her a meatier role in Vice and Virtue (1963). Her breakthrough came with the excellent musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), in which she gave an unforgettable performance as a romantic middle-class girl who falls in love with a young soldier but gets imprisoned in a loveless marriage with another man; the director was the gifted Jacques Demy, who also cast Deneuve in the less successful The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). She then played a schizophrenic killer in Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and a married woman who works as a part-time prostitute every afternoon in Luis Buñuel's masterpiece Belle de Jour (1967). She also worked with Buñuel in Tristana (1970) and gave a great performance for François Truffaut in Mississippi Mermaid (1969), a kind of apotheosis of her "frigid femme fatale" persona. In the seventies she didn't find parts of that caliber, but her magnificent work in Truffaut's The Last Metro (1980) as a stage actress in Nazi-occupied Paris revived her career. She was also very good in the epic drama Indochine (1992), for which she earned her first Academy Award nomination (Best Actress). Although the elegant and always radiant Deneuve has never appeared on stage, she is universally hailed as one of the "grandes dames" of French cinema, joining a list that includes such illustrious talents as Simone Signoret, Jeanne Moreau, Isabelle Huppert, Isabelle Adjani and the younger Juliette Binoche.- Actress
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Sondra Locke was born May 28, 1944 as Sandra Louise Smith, in Shelbyville, Tennessee, a quiet little town about 60 miles southeast of Nashville. She was the daughter of Raymond Smith, a military man stationed at nearby Tullahoma, and Pauline Bayne. Smith departed the scene before Sondra's birth. In 1945, her mother wed William B. Elkins, and together they had a son, Donald, on April 26, 1946. The short union ended in divorce. In 1948, Bayne remarried. Alfred Locke bestowed his surname on Pauline's children and raised them as his own. Sondra's stepfather was a carpenter; her mother worked in a pencil factory. For the smart, fanciful Locke, "My childhood felt as if I had been dropped off at an extended summer camp from which I was waiting to be picked up." The bright girl loved to read, which puzzled her simple mother, who was always pushing her to spend more time outside. Sondra's happiest moments occurred on weekend visits to the local movie theater.
Locke was a cheerleader in junior high and graduated valedictorian of Shelbyville Mills' 1957-1958 eighth grade class. At Shelbyville Central High School, the "classroom was the one place where I felt like I had a chance to prove myself and I continued to excel. I felt safe there and I liked it." Her best friend was classmate Gordon Anderson, the son of a teacher, whose family had relocated to the area from Arkansas around 1953. He was a fey young man, who shared many of Sondra's fanciful hopes about the future and was her collaborator in devising harmless ways to make their lives in Shelbyville more magical. One of the duo's frequent activities was making home movies with Gordon's Super 8 camera.
When Gordon attended Middle Tennessee State University (in Murfreesboro, about 30 miles from Nashville) in 1962, Sondra enrolled there too. Upon completing freshman year, Sondra had a blowup with her mother, left home, and did not return to college. Instead, she worked in Nashville as a promotions assistant for WSM-TV, with occasional modeling and voiceover work. While in Nashville, Locke began acting in community theater as a member of Circle Players Inc. Along the way she dated George Crook, a cameraman from WSM, and Brad Crandall, head of the station's public relations department. She also enjoyed a romance with law student Gary Gober, whom she had been in plays with. Meanwhile, Gordon revealed to her that he was homosexual. He went off to Manhattan to study acting and, for a while, had a lover there. Anderson was talented but unfocused about his theater craft and eventually returned to Tennessee. Because of Locke's spiritual kinship with Anderson, she and Gordon decided to wed. The mixed-orientation couple were married at First Presbyterian Church in Nashville on September 25, 1967. (Reputedly, the marriage was never consummated.)
If Gordon was unable to launch his own acting career, he had no such problems igniting Sondra's. Months before their wedding, he learned that Warner Bros. was holding a nationwide search for a young actress to play a key role in the screen adaptation of Carson McCullers' novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968). Anderson helped Locke research the part of Mick, a teenage waif in a southern town who befriends a suicidal deaf-mute (Alan Arkin) boarding at the house where she lives. For the audition, in Birmingham, Alabama, Gordon bleached her eyebrows, bound her bosom and carefully fixed her hair, makeup and outfit so that she would instantly impress casting agents. The ploy succeeded, and, after several callbacks, Locke -- who lied about her age to seem younger -- was hired. The movie was released in the summer of 1968 and earned respectful reviews from critics, although many filmgoers found the picture too arty. Sondra was Oscar-nominated for her sensitive portrayal.
Next, Sondra moved to Los Angeles, with Gordon in tow. She hoped to parlay her Academy Award nomination into further movie assignments. The big-eyed, wiry bottle blonde found it difficult to win choice roles, making her accept lesser projects, the most famous of which was Willard (1971), a film about marauding rats. Cover Me Babe (1970), A Reflection of Fear (1972) and The Second Coming of Suzanne (1974) faded into cinematic obscurity. In the lattermost, Locke played a Christ figure and had torrid love scenes with Paul Sand. Episodic television provided steadier acting opportunities: the anthology program Night Gallery (1969) and dramatic series including The F.B.I. (1965), Cannon (1971), Kung Fu (1972) and Barnaby Jones (1973). Thanks in part to the limited media of the time, she was able to maintain the ruse of younger age, which no doubt extended her shelf-life amid professional lulls. It was in 1972 that she first met rising kingpin Clint Eastwood when he was preparing to direct his second feature film, Breezy (1973). For the title role, Locke was passed over in favor of nine-years-younger Kay Lenz.
For half of the 1970s, the Andersons resided at West Hollywood's Andalusia condominium complex whilst seeing other people. For a time, Sondra was involved with Bruce Davison, her co-star from Willard (1971). While working on the teleplay Gondola (1974), she gained a new boyfriend, sandy-haired actor Bo Hopkins. He was once divorced and shared her penchant for falsifying birthdates. In the spring of 1974, she visited the set of Hopkins' current project, The Killer Elite (1975), and networked with composer Jerry Fielding, who was about to score a new Western showcase for Clint Eastwood. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) had a role that Locke thought could revitalize her career. This time, Eastwood was responsive and hired the 31-year-old to play his romantic interest. In early October 1975, the complementary pair fell hard for each other on location in Page, Arizona. "We were almost living together from the very first days of the film," Locke remembered. Besotted Clint confided he'd never been in love before and wrote a poem for his new mate: "She made me monogamous." This serially philandering megastar was 14 years her senior and a foot taller than she.
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) was indeed a hit, with Sondra sparking a flurry of interest among male viewers as virtually nonspeaking eye candy. Yet she stopped pursuing film roles on her own initiative to assume wifely duties, appearing on the big screen exclusively in Eastwood-controlled projects thereon. The sole exception to this was The Shadow of Chikara (1977), an Arkansas-lensed Western with burly Joe Don Baker. (The home invasion thriller Death Game (1977), though released after Locke and Eastwood became an item, was actually shot in 1974.) "Clint wanted me to work only with him," she said. "He didn't like the idea of me being away from him."
Over the next few years, Locke had two abortions from her relationship with Eastwood. In 1979, she underwent a tubal ligation at UCLA to prevent further pregnancies. She and Clint settled into a $1.12 million, seven-bedroom Spanish-style Bel-Air mansion originally built in 1931, which she spent months renovating and decorating, and which she believed would be hers for life. She continued to spend platonic time with Gordon, whom she never divorced, nurtured by their spiritual relationship. Gordon moved in and out of gay relationships, and sometimes he and a boyfriend would socialize with Clint and Sondra. As for the professional side of things, Locke and Eastwood reteamed for his action opus The Gauntlet (1977), slapstick adventure-comedy Every Which Way But Loose (1978), its sequel Any Which Way You Can (1980), the quirky satire Bronco Billy (1980) and the fourth, darkest, most ambitious "Dirty Harry" vehicle, Sudden Impact (1983). All were stellar box office performers and cemented the twosome as filmdom's most visible couple.
During this period, Sondra took a few TV roles when Clint was starring in a movie that had no part for her to play (such as Escape from Alcatraz (1979) or Firefox (1982)). The first time she worked apart from him for any length of time since The Shadow of Chikara (1977) in 1976 was Rosie: The Rosemary Clooney Story (1982). (Rosemary Clooney personally asked Locke to star in the CBS biopic on the strength of her performance in Bronco Billy (1980).) She later made an appearance on Britain's Tales of the Unexpected (1979) series. For the most part, however, she found herself sitting on the sidelines waiting for Eastwood to cast her in something.
By the mid-1980s, Sondra, over 40 but still refusing to admit it, was acutely aware that in Hollywood terms her leading lady days were just about finished. She had long been interested in film directing and had observed carefully how Eastwood and others directed the pictures she was in. With his blessing, she found a property that intrigued her and that his Malpaso production company would package, and developed it into a project for Warner Bros. She made Ratboy (1986), but despite good reviews, the film received scant distribution. In retrospect, Locke concluded that her exertion of authority over the project caused her longtime paramour to turn away from her, to find someone who was more compliant. (In an unpublicized affair with stewardess Jacelyn Reeves, Eastwood sired two legally fatherless children born in 1986 and 1988, in Monterey -- an "evil betrayal" Locke was unaware of.)
The showdown between Sondra and Clint occurred on December 29, 1988 at their mountain hideaway in Sun Valley, Idaho. After an unpleasant screaming match, Eastwood suggested Locke go back to Los Angeles. She sensed their relationship had passed a point of reconciliation, a fact confirmed when she scarcely saw Eastwood in subsequent months and when industry friends they knew in common shunned her. As she admitted later, "In my head I guess I knew it was over, but in my heart Clint and I were still not severed." On April 10, 1989, while she was directing a demanding sequence in a new police procedural, Impulse (1990), Eastwood had the locks changed on their house in Bel-Air. He also ordered her possessions to be boxed and put in storage. A letter addressed to "Mrs. Gordon Anderson," imperatively telling her not to come home, was delivered to her lawful husband's doorstep. When Gordon telephoned Sondra on the set and read her the letter, she fainted dead away in front of the cast and crew.
On April 26, 1989, Sondra filed a palimony lawsuit against her domestic partner of 14 years. Her "brazenness" in taking on the powerful Eastwood amazed and shocked Tinseltown and titillated the public. Her action sought unspecified damages and an equal division of the property she and Eastwood had acquired during their relationship. Locke asked for title to the Bel-Air home they had shared and to the Crescent Heights (West Hollywood) place Eastwood had purchased in 1982 (in which Gordon lived). The closed hearing was held on May 31, 1989, before a private judge. Before any court decision could be made, a private settlement was reached between the parties. Locke received $450,000, the Crescent Heights property, and a $1.5 million multiyear development-directing pact at Warner Bros. In return, she dropped her suit. By then, the fall of 1990, she was happy to end the hassle. (In the past months she had been diagnosed with cancer, undergone a double mastectomy, and endured chemotherapy.)
For the next three years Locke submitted over 30 projects to Warner Bros., but none received a green light to move ahead. Moreover, the studio refused to assign her to direct any of their in-house projects. In the mid-1990s, Sondra discovered evidence that Eastwood had arranged to reimburse Warner Bros. for her three-year studio contract -- a matter that he had never mentioned to her. It became obvious that the studio's negative professional attitude toward her had little or nothing to do with her directing or project-finding abilities. On June 5, 1995, Locke sued Eastwood again, alleging fraud and breach of fiduciary duty. She claimed that Clint's behind-the-scene actions had sent a message "to the film industry and the world at large ... that Locke was not to be taken seriously." (According to Sondra's lawyer, the situation was Clint's "way of terminating the earlier palimony suit.")
While Locke's case was revving up at the Burbank Courthouse, Eastwood begged her to settle. On September 24, 1996 -- the morning jurors were set to begin a second day of deliberation -- Sondra announced her decision to drop her suit against Clint for an undisclosed monetary reward. One contingency was laid down: she would not reveal the settlement amount. The jubilant plaintiff said, "This was never about money. It was about my fighting for my professional rights." According to the victor, "I didn't enjoy it. But sometimes you have to do things you don't enjoy." Locke added, "In this business, people get so accustomed to being abused, they just accept the abuse and say, 'Well, that's just the way it is.' Well, it isn't."
But Locke was not finished. She had a pending action against Warner Bros. for allegedly harming her career by agreeing to the sham movie-directing deal that Eastwood had purportedly engineered. On May 24, 1999, just as jury selection was beginning (and four days before Locke turned 55), the studio reached an out-of-court settlement with Sondra.
In the decade following her courtroom saga, Sondra did not direct another movie. She did make a brief return to acting with cameo roles in back-to-back low-budget independent features, The Prophet's Game (2000) and Clean and Narrow (2000), both of which failed to secure a theatrical release. In 2001, she sold her home in the Hollywood Hills and moved to another part of L.A. After interim flings with producer Hawk Koch and John F. Kennedy's nephew Robert Shriver, she had a live-in relationship with one of the physicians who had treated her during her cancer siege. Dr. Scott Cunneen, described by Locke as "Herculean," was 17 years her junior, his mother only three years older than Sondra. She eventually split up with him.
In 2016, preceded by a protracted absence from the public eye, trade press reported that Locke would come out of retirement to co-star in Alan Rudolph's Ray Meets Helen (2017) opposite Keith Carradine. The film was booked for a limited run in spring 2018. No longer able to hide her true year of birth in the post-internet era, Sondra was playing a romantic lead at the unheard of age of 74.
Locke died on November 3, 2018, of cardiac arrest stemming from metastatic breast cancer. It was not publicized until mid-December. The mysterious six-week delay raised a lot of eyebrows, especially since the belated news leaked opening day of the latest Eastwood blockbuster, The Mule (2018). According to a death certificate obtained by the media, her cancer had returned in 2015 and spread to her bones. Locke's remains were cremated at Westwood (Village) Mortuary and the ashes entrusted to her husband of 51 years. Rosanna Arquette, Frances Fisher and Evan Rachel Wood were among the celebrities who paid tribute. Despite the acrimony that followed the collapse of her famous relationship, Locke will be long remembered for her prominent roles in some of Eastwood's most popular works -- and perhaps dichotomously, as a pioneer for the rights of independent working women.- Born in Kyoto the 160 cm tall Nogawa Yumiko's first claim to fame was being the runner-up in the Miss Kimono competition in her hometown. She would later get married to Tsutomu Osaka, a theatre director, who had been married before and become the stepmother to voice actress Kaori Yamagata.
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Diane Keaton was born Diane Hall in Los Angeles, California, to Dorothy Deanne (Keaton), an amateur photographer, and John Newton Ignatius "Jack" Hall, a civil engineer and real estate broker. She studied Drama at Santa Ana College, before dropping out in favor of the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. After appearing in summer stock for several months, she got her first major stage role in the Broadway rock musical "Hair". As understudy to the lead, she gained attention by not removing any of her clothing. In 1968, Woody Allen cast her in his Broadway play "Play It Again, Sam," which had a successful run. It was during this time that she became involved with Allen and appeared in a number of his films. The first one was Play It Again, Sam (1972), the screen adaptation of the stage play. That same year Francis Ford Coppola cast her as Kay in the Oscar-winning The Godfather (1972), and she was on her way to stardom. She reprized that role in the film's first sequel, The Godfather Part II (1974). She then appeared with Allen again in Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975).
In 1977, she broke away from her comedy image to appear in the chilling Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), which won her a Golden Globe nomination. It was the same year that she appeared in what many regard as her best performance, in the title role of Annie Hall (1977), which Allen wrote specifically for her (her real last name is Hall, and her nickname is Annie), and what an impact she made. She won the Oscar and the British Award for Best Actress, and Allen won the Directors Award from the DGA. She started a fashion trend with her unisex clothes and was the poster girl for a lot of young males. Her mannerisms and awkward speech became almost a national craze. The question being asked, though, was, "Is she just a lightweight playing herself, or is there more depth to her personality?" For whatever reason, she appeared in but one film a year for the next two years and those films were by Allen. When they broke up she was next involved with Warren Beatty and appeared in his film Reds (1981), as the bohemian female journalist Louise Bryant. For her performance, she received nominations for the Academy Award and the Golden Globe. For the rest of the 1980s she appeared infrequently in films but won nominations in three of them. Attempting to break the typecasting she had fallen into, she took on the role of a confused, somewhat naive woman who becomes involved with Middle Eastern terrorists in The Little Drummer Girl (1984). To offset her lack of movie work, Diane began directing. She directed the documentary Heaven (1987), as well as some music videos. For television she directed an episode of the popular, but strange, Twin Peaks (1990).
In the 1990s, she began to get more mature roles, though she reprized the role of Kay Corleone in the third "Godfather" epic, The Godfather Part III (1990). She appeared as the wife of Steve Martin in the hit Father of the Bride (1991) and again in Father of the Bride Part II (1995). In 1993 she once again teamed with Woody Allen in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), which was well received. In 1995 she received high marks for Unstrung Heroes (1995), her first major feature as a director.- Actress
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Haji was a Cando-American actress renowned for starring in Russ Meyer's sexploitation classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), in which she made her theatrical film debut. Barbarella Catton was born in Quebec City, Quebec on January 24, 1946, and at the age of 14, began dancing topless. The renamed Haji caught the eye of cinema's "King Leer" while performing as an exotic dancer.
He also cast her as one of three go-go dancers who turn into avenging furies in "Pussycat" Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) after her theatrical film debut in Motorpsycho! (1965) technically released before Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). She also appeared in Meyer's potboiler Good Morning... and Goodbye! (1967), his big budget Hollywood sextravaganza Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), and his cartoonish amalgamation of sex and violence, Supervixens (1975).
Haji died on August 10, 2013 at the age of 67.- Actress
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Meiko Kaji was born on March 24, 1947 in the Kanda area of Tokyo, Japan. Following graduation from the Yakumo Academy High School in Meguro, Tokyo, Japan in 1965, Kaji first began acting in films in the mid-1960's under her real name of Masako Ôta. She was given the stage name Meiko Kaji by director Masahiro Makino. Meiko achieved her greatest enduring cult cinema popularity with her fierce portrayals of various tough outlaw characters which include young rebellious delinquents in the Stray Cat Rock series, the lethal Sasori from the Female Prisoner Scorpion pictures, and, most famously, the ruthless and driven titular assassin in the Lady Snowblood films. Kaji won a plethora of awards for her stand-out performance in Double Suicide of Sonezaki (1978). In the 1980's Meiko started acting more on television. Moreover, Kaji has also eked out a career as a singer: She not only sang the haunting theme song "Flower of Carnage (Shura No Hana)" for Lady Snowblood (1973) and the theme song "Urami-Bushi" for Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972), but also has recorded and released several albums and singles. ("Flower of Carnage (Shura No Hana)" and "Urami-Bushi" were both featured on the soundtracks to Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) and Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), respectively.) In addition, Meiko has turned down offers to act in Hollywood movies because she believes she can't give a good performance in a language other than Japanese.- Actress
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Barbara Hershey was born Barbara Lynn Herzstein in Hollywood, California, to Melrose (Moore) and Arnold Nathan Herzstein, a horse racing columnist. Her father, born in Manhattan, was from a Jewish family (from Hungary and Russia), and her mother, originally from Arkansas, had English and Scots-Irish ancestry. Hershey was raised in a small bungalow, and had aspirations of being an actress from her earliest memories.
The multi-award-winning actress has been in some of Hollywood's most memorable films. She has been a winner of an Emmy and a Golden Globe for A Killing in a Small Town (1990). She won two consecutive Best Actress awards at the Cannes Film Festival, (which is unprecedented) for Shy People (1987) and A World Apart (1988). She won a Gemini Award for Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning (2008) for PBS and a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Vienna International Film Festival.
Hershey was nominated for an Academy Award for The Portrait of a Lady (1996).
She's worked with some of the world's great directors, among them: Martin Scorsese, William Wyler, Woody Allen, Jane Campion and Darren Aronofsky.
The versatile actress was first discovered by a talent agent while she was attending Hollywood High School. She began working in television, The Monroes (1966), and film, With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), with Doris Day. And with roles in The Baby Maker (1970) and Boxcar Bertha (1972), Hershey quickly advanced to starring roles.
The 1980's catapulted Hershey's film career, when she starred in The Stunt Man (1980) with Peter O'Toole, The Entity (1982), The Right Stuff (1983), The Natural (1984) with Robert Redford, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) with Woody Allen, Hoosiers (1986) with Gene Hackman, Tin Men (1987), Shy People (1987), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), A World Apart (1988) and Beaches (1988) with Bette Midler.
Hershey returned to television in 1990 with her highly-lauded performance in A Killing in a Small Town (1990), Paris Trout (1991), Return to Lonesome Dove (1993), the British mini-series, Daniel Deronda (2002) and the last season of Chicago Hope (1994).
During the same period, Hershey remained active in features. She was nominated for an Oscar and Golden Globe for The Portrait of a Lady (1996). She also starred in Merchant-Ivory's A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (1998) and the award-winning Australian film, Lantana (2001).
In the 2010 years, Hershey has performed in James Wan's cult-hit, Insidious (2010) and Darren Aronofsky's award-winning Black Swan (2010), playing Natalie Portman's insane mother.
Hershey resides in Los Angeles.- Actress
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Jennifer O'Neill was born on 20 February 1948 in Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is an actress, known for Scanners (1981), Summer of '42 (1971) and The Innocent (1976). She has been married to Mervin Sidney Louque, Jr. since 1996. She was previously married to Richard Alan Brown, Neil Leonard Bonin, John Lederer, Jeff Barry, Nick De Noia, Joseph Roster and Deed Rossiter.- Actress
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Edwige Fenech was born Edwige Sfenek on December 24, 1948, in Bone, Constantine, France, to a Maltese father and an Italian mother. She began her show-business career as a participant in beauty contests (she won the title of "Miss Mannequin de la Cote d'Azur" at age 16 and even won a Miss France beauty contest) and worked as a photo model prior to making her film debut in the comedy Toutes folles de lui (1967). She appeared in such saucy West German sex farces as Alle Kätzchen naschen gern (1969) and Sexy Susan Sins Again (1968).
With her lustrous and long black hair, lovely and sensuous face, full shapely figure and smoldering screen presence, Edwige soon became a very popular and much sought-after actress in a diverse array of European productions made in Italy, France, Spain and West Germany. She achieved her greatest enduring cult cinema popularity by starring in several superior Italian giallos for director Sergio Martino: The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971), They're Coming to Get You! (1972) and Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) (she was the onetime girlfriend of Martino's producer brother, Luciano Martino).
Edwige also acted for Martino in a handful of racy Italian sex comedies and the Italian mini-series Delitti privati (1993). Other noted Italian film directors Fenech has worked for are Mario Bava (Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970)), Giuliano Carnimeo (The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972)), Andrea Bianchi (Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975)), Umberto Lenzi (The Biggest Battle (1978)), Steno (Dr. Jekyll Likes Them Hot (1979)), Dino Risi (Sono fotogenico (1980)) and Ruggero Deodato (Phantom of Death (1987)).
She demonstrated her exceptional range and skill as an actress with enjoyably uninhibited performances in such amusingly bawdy Italian comedic romps as Quel gran pezzo della Ubalda tutta nuda e tutta calda (1972) and The School Teacher (1975). Edwige became a television personality in the 1980s and made frequent appearances on an Italian chat show along with fellow giallo goddess Barbara Bouchet. Moreover, Fenech launched her own fashion line and founded her own film production company, Immagine e Cinema S.r.l., with her son Edwin Fenech (she co-produced the 2004 film The Merchant of Venice (2004) as well as various Italian TV mini-series and made-for-TV features).
In the mid-1990s Edwige was engaged to famous Italian industrialist Luca Cordero di Montezemolo. She made a welcome return to acting with a small but funny part as an alluring art class professor in Eli Roth's Hostel: Part II (2007).- Actress
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Pam Grier was born in Winston-Salem, NC, one of four children of Gwendolyn Sylvia (Samuels), a nurse, and Clarence Ransom Grier Jr., an Air Force mechanic. Pam has been a major African-American star from the early 1970s. Her career started in 1971, when Roger Corman of New World Pictures launched her with The Big Doll House (1971), about a women's penitentiary, and The Big Bird Cage (1972). Her strong role put her into a five-year contract with Samuel Z. Arkoff of American-International Pictures, and she became a leading lady in action films such as Jack Hill's Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974), the comic strip character Friday Foster (1975) and William Girdler's 'Sheba, Baby' (1975). She continued working with American-International, where she portrayed William Marshall's vampire victim in the Blacula (1972) sequel, Scream Blacula Scream (1973).
During the 1980s she became a regular on Miami Vice (1984) and played a supporting role as an evil witch in Ray Bradbury's and Walt Disney Pictures' Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), then returned to action as Steven Seagal's partner in Above the Law (1988). Her most famous role of the 1990s was probably Jackie Brown (1997), directed by Quentin Tarantino, which was an homage to her earlier 1970s action roles, She occasionally did supporting roles, as in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! (1996), In Too Deep (1999) and a funny performance in Jawbreaker (1999). She also appeared in John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001) and co-starred with Snoop Dogg in Bones (2001). Her entire career of over 30 years has brought only success for this beautiful and talented actress.
A sister of Grier's died from cancer in 1990 and the son of that sister committed suicide because of his mother's illness. Pam herself was diagnosed with cancer in 1988 and given 18 months to live, which has had an effect on how she has chosen to live. She has never been wed, although she has been romantically linked to Richard Pryor and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the past.- Actress
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Sigourney Weaver has created a host of memorable characters, both dramatic and comic, ranging from Ripley in Alien to Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist to Gwen/Tawny in Galaxy Quest and most recently, 14-year-old Kiri in Avatar: The Way of Water. With a career spanning over 50 years, Weaver has captivated audiences and won acclaim as one of the most gifted and versatile actresses on stage and screen.
Born and educated in New York City, Weaver graduated from Stanford University and went on to receive a master's degree from the Yale School of Drama. Her first professional job was in Sir John Gielgud's production of The Constant Wife working with Ingrid Bergman.
After a walk-on in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, Weaver made her motion picture debut in Ridley Scott's 1979 blockbuster Alien. She later reprised the role of Warrant Officer Ripley in James Cameron's 1986 Aliens; her performance earned her Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress. In 1992, she again brought Ripley back to life in David Fincher's Alien 3, which she co-produced, and in 1997 she starred in and co-produced Alien: Resurrection for director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. In 1985, Weaver starred in Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters alongside Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd playing Dana Barrett and her possessed counterpart Zuul.
In 1988 Weaver portrayed primatologist Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist and Katharine Parker in the Mike Nichols comedy Working Girl. Both performances earned her Academy Award Nominations, and she was awarded two Golden Globes for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture. Other films include Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously (1983) with Linda Hunt and Mel Gibson, Eyewitness (1981) with William Hurt, Half Moon Street (1986) with Michael Caine, Ridley Scott's 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) with Gerard Depardieu, Roman Polanski's gripping film adaptation of Death and the Maiden (1994), the thriller Copycat (1995) and Paul Rudnick's comedy Jeffery (1995). Weaver also starred in Showtime's live-action film Snow White (1997) based on the original Grimm's fairy tale, which earned her an Emmy nomination and a Screen Actors Guild nomination.
In 1997 Weaver joined the ensemble of Ang Lee's critically acclaimed film The Ice Storm alongside Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Elijah Wood and Christina Ricci. Her performance garnered her a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe nomination and a Screen Actors Guild nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She later gave a galvanizing performance in A Map of the World (1999), Scott Elliott's powerful drama based on the novel by Jane Hamilton, which earned her universal critical praise and a Golden Globe nomination for best actress. Also in 1999, Weaver appeared in the science fiction comedy Galaxy Quest directed by Dean Parisot alongside Tim Allen and Alan Rickman. She delighted audiences with her flair for comedy, and the film proved to be a hit of the 1999 holiday season. She followed this with the popular comedies Company Man (2000) written and directed by Douglas McGrath and David Mirkin's Heartbreakers (2001) opposite Gene Hackman, Jennifer Love-Hewitt and the late Ray Liotta.
In 2002 Weaver starred in the film version of The Guys, with Anthony LaPaglia, directed by Jim Simpson, and in 2003 she portrayed the cold-blooded, red-headed warden in the hit comedy Holes directed by Andy Davis. The next year, Weaver appeared in M. Night Shyamalan's The Village and received rave reviews for her performance in Imaginery Heroes written and directed by Dan Harris.
In 2006 she appeared in three films - as Babe Paley in Douglas McGrath's Infamous, in Jake Kasdan's The TV Set, and in Snow Cake opposite Alan Rickman. In the following years, Weaver lent her voice to Pixar's 2008 box office smash WALL-E as well as The Tale of Despereaux (2008) with Matthew Broderick, Dustin Hoffman and Emma Watson. She also starred in the Tina Fey/Amy Poehler comedy Baby Mama (2008) and Andy Fickman's comedy You Again (2010) with Jamie Lee Curtis. In December 2009 Weaver starred as Dr. Grace Augustine in Jim Cameron's groundbreaking film Avatar, which went on to be the highest grossing film of all time. The film won a Golden Globe for Best Picture and an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture.
Other credits include Drew Goddard's The Cabin in the Woods (2012), Miguel Arteta's Cedar Rapids (2011), Paul (2011), Amy Heckerling's Vamps (2012), and Neil Blomkamp's Chappie (2015). In December 2016 she starred in Focus Features' A Monster Calls alongside Liam Neeson, Felicity Jones and newcomer, Lewis MacDougall, followed by Lionsgate's The Assignment (2017) with Michelle Rodriguez directed by Walter Hill.
After coming to New York in the fall of 1975, Weaver performed Off-Off Broadway in Christopher Durang's The Nature and Purpose of the Universe (1974), Titanic (1976) and Das Lusitania Songspiel (1980). She and Durang co-wrote Das Lusitania which earned them both Drama Desk nominations. She has appeared in numerous Off-Broadway productions in New York, working with writers such as John Guare, Albert Innaurato, Richard Nelson and Len Jenkin. In regional repertory she has performed works by Pinter, Williams, Feydeau and Shakespeare. Weaver also appeared in the PBS mini-series "The Best of Families" (1977) and John Cheever's The Sorrows of Gin (1979), adapted by Wendy Wasserstein for PBS.
Weaver received a Tony Award nomination for her starring role in Hurlyburly (1984) on Broadway, directed by Mike Nichols. She played Portia in the Classic Stage Company of New York's production of The Merchant of Venice (1986). In 1996 Weaver returned to Broadway in the Lincoln Center production of Sex and Longing, written by Christopher Durang. In the Fall of 2012, she starred in the Lincoln Center production of Christopher Durang's Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike which moved to Broadway in 2013. That year Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike took home the Tony award for Best Play.
Weaver originated the female lead in Anne Nelson's The Guys (2001) at The Flea where it was commissioned and directed by Jim Simpson. The Guys tells the story of a fire captain played by Bill Murray dealing with the aftermath of 9/11. In 2002 she starred in Neil LaBute's play The Mercy Seat opposite Liev Schreiber - which John Lahr of The New Yorker described as offering "performances of a depth and concentration that haven't been seen in New York for many seasons." Weaver also originated roles in two A.R. Gurney world premieres, Mrs. Farnsworth (2004) at the Flea Theater (New York Times 10 Best Plays for 2004), and Crazy Mary (2007) at Playwrights Horizons.
In television Weaver received Emmy, Screen Actors' Guild and Golden Globe nominations for her role as Mary Griffith in Lifetime's "Prayers for Bobby," which was also Emmy nominated for Outstanding Made for Television Movie. In 2012 she was seen in USA Network's miniseries "Political Animals," for which she received SAG, Golden Globe, and Emmy nominations. Weaver also appeared in the Marvel series "The Defenders," released globally on Netflix in August 2017.
Ms. Weaver was honored to receive the GLAAD Media Award for her work in "Prayers for Bobby" as well as the Trevor Life Award in 2011. She has been the Honorary Chair of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund for the last 33 years. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, and she also served on the Board of Human Rights First for 25 years. Weaver was proud to receive the National Audubon Society's Rachel Carson Award in 2009 for her environmental work. She was also a co-founder of the original Flea Theater on White Street which championed young artists and new work.
Weaver appeared in season 4 of the French television series "Call My Agent!" which was released globally on Netflix in 2021 and won the International Emmy for Comedy Series. Additionally, she starred in Philippe Falardeau's My Salinger Year which opened the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival. In April 2021 Weaver narrated James Cameron's "Secrets of the Whales," which debuted on Disney+ and garnered an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Narrator. The series also won the Emmy for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series.
Weaver's recent film work includes Phyllis Nagy's drama Call Jane alongside Elizabeth Banks, Maya Forbes and Wallace Wolodarsky's The Goos House alongside Kevin Kline. James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of Water premiered at the end of 2022 with Weaver playing Kiri, Grace Augustine's Na'vi daughter. A2 received "Best Picture" nominations for the Oscars, Golden Globe, and Critics Choice awards and has grossed almost 2.5 billion dollars. Upcoming projects include Amazon Studios' drama series, "The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart," which she also executive produced, and Paul Schrader's Master Gardener, opposite Joel Edgerton, which premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival.- Actress
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Isabella Rossellini, the Italian actress and model who has made her home in America since 1979 and holds dual Italian and American citizenship, was born cinema royalty when she made her debut on June 18, 1952 in Rome. She is the daughter of two legends, three-time Oscar-winning Swedish-born actress Ingrid Bergman and neo-realist master Italian director Roberto Rossellini. She was also the third wife of Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese from 1979 to 1982 and the partner of legendary director David Lynch.
She made her movie debut in Vincente Minnelli's A Matter of Time (1976), which starred her mother. She then made a couple of Italian pictures and worked as an American correspondent for Italian television network RAI before appearing in Taylor Hackford's Cold War drama White Nights (1985) in 1985. She followed that up with her most memorable role, as the abused chanteuse in Lynch's masterpiece Blue Velvet (1986), she earned an Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead. She then went on to win a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress, for her performance as Lisle, the mysterious socialite, forever in her youth in Death Becomes Her (1992). In 1997, she was nominated for an Emmy Award as Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for a guest appearance on Chicago Hope (1994).- Catriona MacColl was born on October 3, 1954 in London, England. MacColl was initially a ballerina who trained at a top ballet school in England before suffering an injury that abruptly curtailed her burgeoning career as a dancer. In the wake of said injury Catriona joined a repertory company which eventually led to her moving to Paris, France where she acted in French television shows and played her first lead role as the titular character in Lady Oscar (1979). MacColl acquired her greatest enduring cult cinema popularity by playing the female leads in three gruesome and atmospheric Italian horror films directed by Lucio Fulci: City of the Living Dead (1980), The Beyond (1981), and The House by the Cemetery (1981). Catriona still continues to act in both movies and TV shows alike with pleasing regularity.
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Frances Louise McDormand was born on June 23, 1957, in Gibson City, Illinois. She was adopted by Canadian-born parents Noreen Eloise (Nickleson), a nurse from Ontario, and Rev. Vernon Weir McDormand, a Disciples of Christ minister from Nova Scotia, who raised her in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. She earned a BA in theater from Bethany College in 1979 and an MFA from Yale University in 1982. Her career after graduation began onstage, and she has retained her association with the theater throughout her career. She soon obtained prominent roles in movies as well, first starring in Blood Simple (1984), in which she worked with filmmaker Joel Coen, whom she married that year. She frequently collaborated with Coen and his brother, Ethan Coen, in their films.
McDormand's skilled and versatile acting has been recognized by both the critics and the Academy, and in addition to many critics' awards, she has been nominated for an Academy Award six times - Supporting in Mississippi Burning (1988), Almost Famous (2000), and North Country (2005), and Lead in Fargo (1996), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), and Nomadland (2020), winning the Oscar for the latter three. She also won a Best Picture Oscar as co-producer of "Nomadland." Keenly intelligent and possessed of a sharp wit, McDormand is the antithesis of the Hollywood starlet - rather than making every role about Frances McDormand, she dissolves into the characters she plays. Accordingly, she has expressed some reservations about the iconic recognition she has gained from her touching and amusing portrayal of Police Chief Marge Gunderson, the quintessential Minnesota Scandinavian, in Fargo (1996).
McDormand and Coen adopted a son, Pedro McDormand Coen, who was born in Paraguay, in 1994. They live in New York.- Actress
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Madeleine Stowe was born in Los Angeles, California, to Mireya Maria (Mora Steinvorth) and Robert Alfred Stowe, a civil engineer. Her mother was a from a prominent political family in Costa Rica. Stowe grew up in Eagle Rock, a working-class neighborhood of Los Angeles. At age ten she started practicing for a career as a concert pianist and trained every day for hours. However, when her instructor died in 1976 she more or less quit playing.
She went to University of Southern California and studied cinema and journalism before taking up acting at Beverly Hills' Solaris Theater. She made a few appearances in TV and on film but her breakthrough came in 1987 with Stakeout (1987). Other major credits include The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Short Cuts (1993).
When not filming, she spends her time at her ranch in Texas, which she shares with her husband Brian Benben.- Actress
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Jamie Lee Curtis was born on November 22, 1958 in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of legendary actors Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. She got her big break at acting in 1978 when she won the role of Laurie Strode in Halloween (1978). After that, she became famous for roles in movies like Trading Places (1983), Perfect (1985) and A Fish Called Wanda (1988). She starred in one of the biggest action films ever, True Lies (1994), for which she won a Golden Globe Award for her performance. Curtis also appeared on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979), and starred in Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story (1981) as the title role. Her first starring role was opposite Richard Lewis on the ABC situation comedy Anything But Love (1989). In 1998, she starred in Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) in which she reprised her role that made her famous back in 1978.
Jamie Lee served as an honorary chairperson for the Building Resilience for Young Children Dealing with Trauma program held at the Shakespeare Theatre - Harman Center for the Arts in Washington, D.C. She was an inspiration for the youth that were celebrated. Curtis was also given an award from US Department of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman for her work on behalf of children through her charities and children's books.- Actress
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Rebecca De Mornay was born 1959 as Rebecca Jane Pearch, in Santa Rosa, CA, to Wally George and Julie Eager. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother moved to Pasadena and married Richard De Mornay, who adopted her. After her stepfather's untimely death in 1962, Rebecca's mother moved her and her half-brother Peter to Europe, where she was raised primarily in England and Austria. In 1977, Rebecca graduated "summa cum laude" from a German-speaking high school in the Austrian alps, and still speaks fluent German and French.
She began her acting training in Los Angeles at Lee Strasberg's Institute, became an apprentice at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Film Studio, and soon thereafter made her film debut in One from the Heart (1981). Her breakthrough came in the box office hit Risky Business (1983), in which she gave a seductive and critically acclaimed performance as a streetwise prostitute opposite Tom Cruise. She went on to international stardom with her portrayal of a chillingly twisted nanny in the hugely popular The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992). Other acclaimed film work includes Runaway Train (1985) (with Jon Voight), The Trip to Bountiful (1985) (with Geraldine Page), Backdraft (1991) (with Kurt Russell).
Network television work includes the tour-de-force role of Arlie in the stellar Getting Out (1994) (based on Marsha Norman's play), the tragic title character in Dominick Dunne's An Inconvenient Woman (1991) (with Jason Robards), the remake of The Shining (1997) (produced by Stephen King), a multi-episode story arc about a cancer survivor on ER (1994) and Hallmark Hall of Fame's Night Ride Home (1999) (with Ellen Burstyn).
On stage, she starred as Billie Dawn in "Born Yesterday" (1988) at the Pasadena Playhouse, as Charlotte Corday in "Marat/Sade" (1990) at the Williamstown Festival, and as Anna in "Closer" (2000) at the Mark Taper Forum.
Rebecca's directing debut was with a segment of Showtime's The Outer Limits (1995) starring John Savage and Frank Whaley. Divorced from producer/screenwriter Bruce Wagner, Rebecca has two daughters, Sophia DeMornay-O'Neal and Veronica De Mornay-O'Neal, both fathered by sportscaster Patrick O'Neal, who is eight years her junior.- Adriana Vega was born on 25 February 1960 in Madrid, Madrid, Spain. She is an actress, known for La masajista vocacional (1981), Vicious and Nude (1980) and The Sex Sense (1981).
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Jennifer Jason Leigh was born Jennifer Lee Morrow in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of writer Barbara Turner and actor Vic Morrow. Her father was of Russian Jewish descent and her mother was of Austrian Jewish ancestry. She is the sister of Carrie Ann Morrow and half-sister of actress Mina Badie.
Jennifer's parents divorced when she was two. Jennifer worked in her first film at the age of nine, in a nonspeaking role for the film Death of a Stranger (1973). At 14 she attended summer acting workshops given by Lee Strasberg and later landed a role in the Disney TV movie The Young Runaways (1978). She received her Screen Actors Guild membership for an episode of the TV series Baretta (1975) when she was 16. Jennifer performed in several TV movies and dropped out of Pacific Palisades High School six weeks short of graduation for her major role in the film Eyes of a Stranger (1981). Her first major success came as the female lead in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).
Jennifer was married to writer/director Noah Baumbach from 2005 to 2013, and the two have a son.- Actress
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Since making her uncredited debut as a dancer in Beatlemania (1981), Gina Gershon has established herself as a character actress and one of the leading icons of American camp. For it was fourteen years after her movie debut that Gina made movie history as the predatory bisexual who was the leading light of a Las Vegas leg-line in director Paul Verhoeven's kitsch classic Showgirls (1995). Exploding out of a plaster-of-Paris volcano clad in nothing but body makeup and a G-string, Gina Gershon obtained cinema immortality. After Showgirls (1995), she solidified her reputation, playing a lesbian sexpot in the Wachowskis' neo-noir Bound (1996).
Gina Gershon was born in the Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills, the last in a brood of three kids. Her mother, Mickey (Koppel), worked as an interior decorator, and her father, Stanley Gershon, was a salesman and worked in the import/export business. Her paternal grandparents were from Russian Jewish families, and her maternal grandparents were born in Holland and Belgium, both of them to Jewish families from Poland. Gina was raised in the San Fernando Valley, and got the acting bug early, appearing at the age of seven in a school production of Bye Bye Birdie (1963). Because of her acting ambitions, her parents moved to Beverly Hills so Gina could attend Beverly Hills High, where she indulged her acting jones by appearing in a student production of The Music Man (1962). Her first love, she says, is singing.
After graduating from high school in 1980, she attended Emerson College in Boston, but took a part in the musical "Runaways". She transferred to New York University, where her official biography says she studied philosophy and psychology, but she graduated from the Tisch School of the Arts, taking a bachelor of fine arts degree in drama in 1983. In New York City, while perfecting her craft, she co-founded the theater company Naked Angels with Helen Slater.
Her big-screen breakthrough came with a part in the 1986 "Brat Pack" teenage hit Pretty in Pink (1986). She also had parts in the Tom Cruise vehicle Cocktail (1988) and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Red Heat (1988). Of this period, she says, "One of my first gigs, a movie called Cocktail (1988), I found myself at 8 in the morning, in bed, practically naked, having to make out with Tom Cruise; hmmmm... movie business - so far, so good".
Citing Frank Sinatra's song "My Way" as an inspiration, she says that following Cocktail (1988), "I was fortunate enough to play many diversified roles in film, television and stage. Not always to the liking of my managers and agents, but I always did what I wanted...." She played Nancy Barbato Sinatra, Frank's first wife, in the TV miniseries Sinatra (1992).
Gina Gershon became a celebrity in Showgirls (1995). The following year, Gershon solidified her claim on second-tier stardom playing the calculating lesbian "Corky" in the crime movie Bound (1995). She never did capitalize on her mid-1990s breakthrough, but Gershon is established as a character actress and is never out of work, unlike most of her female peers who started out in the industry at the same time. Though no classic beauty, the talented thespian remains gainfully employed while many actresses of her vintage are out of work as she is possessed of a unique look and smoldering sex appeal that comes across on camera.
Gershon is versatile, too, as at home on stage as she is in front of the camera. After appearing in off-Broadway and regional theater productions, she made her Broadway debut as a replacement in Sam Mendes' revival of Cabaret (1972) in January 2001. For six months, she played the key role of "Sally Bowles", returning that October to reprise the role for another month. In 2008, she once again appeared on Broadway in the revival of the farce "Boeing Boeing" on Broadway, which won the Tony award for Best Revival.
Gina Gershon also is a children's book writer. In 2008, Putmam Juvenile published her "Camp Creepy Time", a tale of a boy who discovers aliens at his summer camp, which she co-wrote with her brother, Dann Gershon. "Camp Creepy Time" recently was optioned by DreamWorks, which plans to turn it into a movie. In 2008, she also released "In Search Of Cleo", a CD featuring nine songs which she wrote or co-wrote.- Actress
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Hardly the dumb blonde of Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997), Lisa was born in Encino, California on July 30, 1963. Her mother, Nedra S. (Stern), worked as a travel agent, and her father, Lee N. Kudrow, is a physician. Her parents are both from Jewish families (from Belarus, Russia, and Hungary). Lisa was raised in Tarzana and played varsity-level tennis in high school and college, and is a pool shark who has mastered some of the more difficult trick shots (so beware). She graduated from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, with a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychobiology. At first, she wanted to pursue a career in research, so she returned to Los Angeles to begin working with her father. However, Lisa got inspired to perform by one of her brother's friends, comedian Jon Lovitz, and so the tall (5' 8") blonde-haired, green-eyed beauty entered show biz. Lisa auditioned for the improv theater group, The Groundlings, based in Los Angeles. Cynthia Szigeti, a well-known improv teacher, took Lisa under her wing. In that class, Lisa became a friend of Conan O'Brien. Graduating with honors in 1989, Lisa became a full-fledged member of The Groundlings. Breaking into TV, she got a recurring role as Ursula, the ditsy waitress on Mad About You (1992). This led to her starring role on Friends (1994). In the debut season (1994-95) of Friends (1994), Lisa earned an Emmy nomination as Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series; in 1998, she won that award for her role as Phoebe, the ditsy but lovable folk singer. Lisa has also been nominated for Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and American Comedy Awards for her performances.
Lisa made the transition to the big screen with a lot of success. In 1997, she starred opposite Oscar winner Mira Sorvino in the above-mentioned Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997). Lisa garnered more praise for her film work when she got the New York Film Critics Award for her starring role in The Opposite of Sex (1998).
Lisa married Michel Stern, an advertising executive, on May 27, 1995. On May 7, 1998, they were blessed with a son, Julian Murray; they live in Los Angeles.- Actress
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Courteney Cox was born on June 15th, 1964 in Birmingham, Alabama, into an affluent Southern family. She is the daughter of Courteney (Bass) and Richard Lewis Cox (1930-2001), a businessman. She was the baby of the family with two older sisters (Virginia and Dottie) and an older brother, Richard, Jr. She was raised in an exclusive society town, Mountain Brook, Alabama. Courteney was the archetypal daddy's girl, and therefore was understandably devastated when, in 1974, her parents divorced, and her father moved to Florida.
She became a rebellious teen, and did not make things easy for her mother, and new stepfather, New York businessman Hunter Copeland. Now, she is great friends with both. She attended Mountain Brook High School, where she was a cheerleader, tennis player and swimmer. In her final year, she received her first taste of modeling. She appeared in an advert for the store, Parisians. Upon graduation, she left Alabama to study architecture and interior design at Mount Vernon College. After one year she dropped out to a pursue a modeling career in New York, after being signed by the prestigious Ford Modelling Agency. She appeared on the covers of teen magazines such as Tiger Beat and Little Miss, plus numerous romance novels. She then moved on to commercials for Maybeline, Noxema, New York Telephone Company and Tampax.
While modeling, she attended acting classes, as her real dream and ambition was to be an actress. In 1984, she landed herself a small part in one episode of As the World Turns (1956) as a young débutante named Bunny. Her first big break, however, was being cast by Brian De Palma in the Bruce Springsteen video "Dancing in The Dark". In 1985, she moved to LA to star alongside Dean Paul Martin in Misfits of Science (1985). It was a flop, but a few years later, she was chosen out of thousands of hopefuls to play Michael J. Fox's girlfriend, psychology major Lauren Miller in Family Ties (1982).
In 1989, Family Ties (1982) ended, and Cox went through a lean spell in her career, featuring in unmemorable movies such as Mr. Destiny (1990) with Michael Caine. Fortunes changed dramatically for Cox, when in 1994, she starred alongside Jim Carrey in the unexpected hit Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), and a year later she was cast as Monica Geller on the hugely successful sitcom Friends (1994). It was this part that turned her into an international superstar and led to an American Comedy Award nomination. In 1996 Cox starred in Wes Craven's horror/comedy Scream (1996) . This movie grossed over $100 million at the box office, and won Cox rave reviews for her standout performance as the wickedly bitchy and smug TV reporter Gale Weathers. She went on to play this character again in each of the three sequels. Not only did her involvement in this movie lead to critical acclaim, but it also led to her meeting actor husband David Arquette. He played her on-screen love interest Dewey, and life imitated art as the two fell in love for real. Their wedding took place in San Francisco, at the historic Grace Cathedral atop Nob Hill, on June 12th, 1999. Joined by 200 guests, including Cox's film star friends Liam Neeson and Kevin Spacey, the happy couple finally became Mr. and Mrs. Arquette.- Actress
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Maggie Cheung was born on September 20, 1964, in Hong Kong, and moved at the age of eight with her family to England. After finishing secondary school, she returned to Hong Kong, where she began modeling and appearing in commercials. In 1983 she participated in the Ms. Hong Kong pageant, winning first runner-up, which proved not to be a detriment since she went on to become a star of both Hong Kong television and film.- Actress
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The sultry, versatile, petite (5' 4") beauty Sherilyn Fenn was born Sheryl Ann Fenn in Detroit, Michigan, into a family of musicians. The youngest of three children, her mother, Arlene Quatro, played keyboard in rock bands, her aunt is rock-star Suzi Quatro, and her grandfather, Art Quatro, was a jazz musician. Her father, Leo Fenn, was the manager of such bands as The Pleasure Seekers (the all-girl band formed by the Quatro sisters), Alice Cooper, and The Billion Dollar Babies. Sherilyn's ancestry includes Irish, Italian, Hungarian, German, and Bohemian Czech.
Sherilyn traveled a lot with her divorced mother and two older brothers before the family settled in Los Angeles when she was seventeen. Fenn, who says herself she's demure didn't want to start with a new school again and soon enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute.
Fenn began her career with a number of B-movies including The Wild Life (1984) (alongside Chris Penn), skater film Thrashin' (1986) (opposite Josh Brolin) and teen-fantasy movie The Wraith (1986) (opposite Charlie Sheen). She had a memorable part in the cult teen-comedy Just One of the Guys (1985) in which she tries to seduce a teenage girl disguised as a boy, played by Joyce Hyser. Fenn landed her first starring role, as an engaged heiress to an old Southern family experiencing her sexual awakening in Zalman King's erotic drama film Two Moon Junction (1988), after which she said she wanted to hide for a year. Fenn won her most outstanding role and made an indelible impression on the public when she was cast by David Lynch and Mark Frost as the tantalizing Audrey Horne, the high-school femme fatale from the critically acclaimed TV series Twin Peaks (1990). The series ran from 1990 to 1991, and the character of Audrey was one of the most popular with fans, in particular for her unrequited love for FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan) and her style from the '50s (with her saddle shoes, plaid skirts and tight sweaters). Sherilyn made a memorable impression as the cherry stem-twisting siren. This was her breakout role; even now she says of her Twin Peaks (1990) experience: "It still makes me feel kind of proud and special to be part of something like that". In the show's second season, when the idea of pairing Audrey and Cooper was abandoned, Audrey was paired with other characters like Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) and John Justice Wheeler (Billy Zane). Sherilyn hit cult status when Lynch filmed her dancing on Angelo Badalamenti's music and with another memorable scene in which her character knotted a cherry stem with her tongue.
Shortly after shooting Twin Peaks' pilot episode, David Lynch gave her a small but impressive part in Wild at Heart (1990), as a girl injured in a car wreck, obsessed by the contents of her purse, opposite Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern. According to Fenn, the turning point in her career was when she met veteran acting coach Roy London in 1990. She credits him with instilling confidence and newfound enthusiasm.
After two nominations (Emmy and Golden Globe) and covers for Rolling Stone and Playboy magazines, Fenn was propelled to stardom and became a major sex symbol. She was chosen as one of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People in the World", was named one of the "10 Most Beautiful Women in the World" by Us magazine, and one of the "100 Sexiest Women in the World" by FHM magazine. Fenn's classic looks - with her lily-white skin, vertiginous boomerang eyebrows, beauty mark next to her left eye and topaz eyes - were highlighted by renowned photographers like George Hurrell Sr., Steven Meisel, and Bettina Rheims, and led her to be compared to the ones like Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner. Fenn has had an eclectic career with a significant body of work following Twin Peaks (1990). She chose to focus on widening her range of roles and was determined to avoid typecasting. She turned down the Audrey Horne spin-off series that was offered to her, and unlike most of the cast, chose not to return for the 1992 prequel movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), as she was then shooting Of Mice and Men (1992). She proved her mettle as an actress with varied roles in neo-noir black comedy Desire and Hell at Sunset Motel (1991) (as a sultry femme fatale, opposite Whip Hubley and David Hewlett), huis-clos Diary of a Hitman (1991) (the directorial debut of her acting coach Roy London, in which she plays a fragile mother who confronts hitman Forest Whitaker), John Mackenzie's fictionalized biopic Ruby (1992), (as stripper Sheryl Ann DuJean, a Marilyn Monroe look-alike fictional character, who is a composite of several real-life women from Jack Ruby and president John Kennedy's entourage; opposite 'Danny Aiello' and Arliss Howard), romantic comedy Three of Hearts (1993) (as Kelly Lynch and William Baldwin's love interest), Carl Reiner's 1940s detective parody Fatal Instinct (1993) (as Armand Assante's lovesick secretary and Sean Young and Kate Nelligan's rival) and Showtime's biblical Slave of Dreams (1995), directed by Robert M. Young (as Potiphar's seductive wife Zulaikha, opposite Adrian Pasdar and Edward James Olmos, and produced by Dino De Laurentiis).
A highlight of Fenn's film career is Gary Sinise's film adaptation of Of Mice and Men (1992), in which she brought nuance to the role of a seductive and lonely country wife, desperately in need to talk to somebody, opposite Sinise and John Malkovich. In 1993, Fenn teamed up with David Lynch's daughter Jennifer Lynch and starred in her directorial debut Boxing Helena (1993) as a haughty seductress forced to live in a box after her limbs were amputated by love-obsessed surgeon Julian Sands in an effort to possess her (a role Kim Basinger backed out of). Both Lynch and Fenn were proud of their work in it but the film - which was overshadowed by the lawsuits against Kim Basinger after she dropped out - ultimately was a critical and commercial failure. Another outstanding performance was in NBC's miniseries Liz: The Elizabeth Taylor Story (1995). During the shooting, Fenn fought to keep integrity in the script. Her priority was to respectfully and accurately portray Taylor, and she supported the original screenwriter's effort to concentrate on Taylor the person, not the legend. The same year she starred in an episode of Tales from the Crypt (1989) directed by Robert Zemeckis, alongside Isabella Rossellini and John Lithgow, as the lover of Humphrey Bogart, who appeared in the episode via CGI special effects. She went on to star in independent films that have been well received on the festival circuit like Jon Harmon Feldman's Lovelife (1997) (as a low self-esteemed waitress, along with Bruce Davison, Jon Tenney, Carla Gugino and Saffron Burrows), romantic comedy Just Write (1997) (as the dream actress of Hollywood tour bus driver Jeremy Piven, who mistakes him for a famous screenwriter) and Adrian Pasdar's neo-noir directorial debut Cement (2000), a contemporary re-telling of "Othello", in which she played a tempting but imprudent femme fatale, alongside Chris Penn, Jeffrey Wright and Henry Czerny.
Tired of Hollywood, Fenn contemplated starting a European career when she starred opposite Ray Winstone in the British psychological drama and huis-clos Darkness Falls (1999) (as a wealthy, neglected wife, sequestered with her husband by a man determined to understand the events that led to his wife ending up in a coma). She eventually decided to return to the United-States and gained newfound enthusiasm with the lead role in Showtime's dark comedy Rude Awakening (1998) as Billie Frank, an alcoholic ex-soap actress who struggles with her self-destructive habits. Based upon creator/executive producer Claudia Lonow's experience, the series ran from 1998 to 2001 and co-starred Lynn Redgrave, Jonathan Penner and Mario Van Peebles. Following Rude Awakening (1998), Fenn's film and television credits have included Showtime's family comedy Off Season (2001), directed by Bruce Davison (along with Hume Cronyn, Rory Culkin, Adam Arkin and Davison; as a singer who takes care of her orphaned nephew), Matthew Ryan Hoge's The United States of Leland (2003) (as a woman who represents happiness and joie de vivre to Ryan Gosling), Showtime's Cavedweller (2004) (2004, along with Kyra Sedgwick and directed by Lisa Cholodenko), Geretta Geretta's Whitepaddy (2006) (opposite Lisa Bonet and Hill Harper, as a woman who struggles with her dysfunctional family after she reluctantly returned home and tries to fit in with her new neighborhood that has become predominantly black), Emily Skopov's Novel Romance (2006) (as a pregnancy shop owner, opposite Traci Lords and Paul Johansson), psychological thriller Presumed Dead (2006) (as a female detective working on a missing person case, who has to outwit crime novelist Duncan Regehr in order to get to the truth), and The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning (2007) (as a flirtatious version of Lulu Hogg).
Fenn has appeared along with Rob Estes and Milo Ventimiglia in a 2003 episode of Amy Sherman-Palladino's Gilmore Girls (2000), which was the pilot for a California-set spin-off, eventually dropped by the network. Sherman-Palladino brought her back in the series with a different part as Scott Patterson's ex-girlfriend and protective mother to his daughter (2006-2007). Fenn had previously had recurring parts on Dawson's Creek (1998), (2002, as Joshua Jackson's seductive boss) and Boston Public (2000) (2003-2004, as a porn star turned tutor). Other notable guest appearances have included 21 Jump Street (1987) (opposite her then-fiancé Johnny Depp), Friends (1994) (1997, as Matthew Perry's wooden-legged girlfriend), The Outer Limits (1995) (2001, as a duplicated scientist), Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999) (2002, as a manipulative actress), and The 4400 (2004) (2005, as Jean DeLynn Baker, a 4400 who has the ability to grow deadly toxin-emitting spores on her hands).
Fenn's interest in directing and children led her to step behind the camera to direct in 2006 a documentary film about the child enrichment program CosmiKids and Judy Julin, the program's founder. She subsequently joined its executive team as executive director of the film and television division.
On set, Sherilyn is noted for having a quirky sense of humor and a joie de vivre. Off-screen, Sherilyn is proud of the friendship she has maintained with her ex-hubby Toulouse Holliday, a musician and film technician. Sherilyn lives with her son, Myles, and two cats: Ophelia and Redmond. Sherilyn practices meditative kundalini yoga, and every room in her house has feng shui elements-- crystals in one corner, water in another. Sherilyn enjoys biking, swimming and cooking, and of course being a mom: "After I had my son, I found life much funnier and brighter".- Ann Bridgewater is known for Full Contact (1992), The Fatal Game (1991) and Ba wang nu fu xing (1988).
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Emmanuelle Seigner is the daughter of a well known photographer and her mother is a journalist. She was born in Paris, France on June 22, 1966. Her grandfather was Louis Seigner, chairman of the Comédie Française and who also appeared in several movies. Emmanuelle was raised at a convent school . At age fourteen she became a model. Her mysterious beauty made her an international cover-model. Jean-Luc Godard gave her a part in his crime movie Detective (1985), starring Johnny Hallyday and Nathalie Baye. In 1986 Emmanuelle played the part of Zanon a young girl in the movie Cours privé (1986) (by Pierre Granier-Deferre). She met Roman Polanski and married him. He gave her a part in the thriller Frantic (1988) with Harrison Ford. Four years later Polanski gave her the leading part in the movie Bitter Moon (1992).- Actress
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Ana Torrent was born on 12 July 1966 in Madrid, Spain. She is an actress, known for The Nest (1980), Thesis (1996) and The Other Boleyn Girl (2008).- Actress
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"Dead, wrapped in plastic" is how Sheryl Lee entered onto the scene as Laura Palmer, the doomed homecoming queen on the cult TV series Twin Peaks (1990).
Lee was born April 27, 1967 in Germany. She grew up in Boulder, Colorado, spending much of her youth studying dance before knee injuries ended her hope of becoming a dancer. She began acting in school plays, graduated from Fairview High School, and attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Pasadena, California. Lee also spent time at the North Carolina School of Arts, the National Conservatory Theater in Denver, and Colorado University before pursuing stage work in Seattle, Washington.
Here Lee landed the role of Laura Palmer, and she later appeared on Twin Peaks (1990) as Laura's cousin, Madeleine Ferguson. Madeleine was a brunette and wore glasses, but of course bore a striking resemblance to her late relative. Lee worked with Twin Peaks (1990) mastermind David Lynch again on the film, Wild at Heart (1990), and resurrected Laura Palmer one last time for Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992).
Lee has gone on to have a long and adventurous career since then. Appearances have included the Stuart Sutcliffe biopic Backbeat (1994), the John Carpenter film Vampires (1998), and the TV series L.A. Doctors (1998).- Actress
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Joey Lauren Adams is an American actress and director. Adams appeared in several Kevin Smith View Askewniverse films, including Chasing Amy, for which she was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. Adams was born in North Little Rock, Arkansas, the youngest of three children. Her father was a lumber yard owner. Adams grew up in the Overbrook neighborhood of North Little Rock and graduated from North Little Rock Northeast High School in 1986. She announced her intention to pursue acting after one year as an exchange student in Australia.- Actress
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Lara Flynn Boyle was born in Davenport, Iowa on March 24, 1970 to 21-year old Sally Boyle. For Sally and young Lara, money was not plentiful so Sally was required to work three jobs in addition to raising baby Lara by herself. Since Lara was mostly around Sally, they developed a bond that still binds Lara and Sally today. Until recently, Sally lived with Lara. Now they only live 10 minutes away from each other. Growing up, Lara had many struggles including dyslexia and a learning disability. Still, she could not let that get to her and she knew she had to be strong. She finally graduated, and, the day after doing so, she and her mother, Sally, moved. They drove on what would be "the road to fame". She soon landed roles in movies like Poltergeist III (1988) and Wayne's World (1992). Since then, she has become a prolific actress on both the small screen and the big screen.- Actress
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Uma Karuna Thurman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, into a highly unorthodox and internationally-minded family. She is the daughter of Nena Thurman (née Birgitte Caroline von Schlebrügge), a fashion model and socialite who now runs a mountain retreat, and of Robert Thurman (Robert Alexander Farrar Thurman), a professor and academic who is one of the nation's foremost Buddhist scholars. Uma's mother was born in Mexico City, Mexico, to a German father and a Swedish mother (who herself was of Swedish, Danish, and German descent). Uma's father, a New Yorker, has English, Scots-Irish, Scottish, and German ancestry. Uma grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father worked at Amherst College.
She and her siblings all have names deriving from Buddhist mythology; and Middle American behavior was little understood, much less pursued. And so it was that the young Thurman confronted childhood with an odd name and eccentric home life -- and nature seemingly conspired against her as well. She is six feet tall, and from an early age towered over everyone else in class. Her famously large feet would soon sprout to size 11 -- and even beyond that -- and although they would eventually be lovingly filmed by director Quentin Tarantino, as a child she generally wore the biggest shoes in class, which only provided another subject of ridicule. Even her long nose moved one of her mother's friends to helpfully suggest rhinoplasty -- to the ten-year-old Thurman. To make matters worse yet, the family constantly relocated, making the gangly, socially inept Thurman perpetually the new kid in class. The result was an exceptionally awkward, self-conscious, lonely and alienated childhood.
Unsurprisingly, the young Thurman enjoyed making believe she was someone other than herself, and so thrived at acting in school plays -- her sole successful extracurricular activity. This interest, and her lanky frame, perfect for modeling, led the 15-year-old Thurman to New York City for high school and modeling work (including a layout in Glamour Magazine) as she sought acting roles. The roles soon came, starting with a few formulaic and forgettable Hollywood products, but immediately followed by Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) and Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons (1988), both of which brought much attention to her unorthodox sensuality and performances that intriguingly combined innocence and worldliness. The weird, gangly girl became a sex symbol virtually overnight.
Thurman continued to be offered good roles in Hollywood pictures into the early '90s, the least commercially successful but probably best-known of which was her smoldering, astonishingly-adult performance as June, Henry Miller's wife, in Henry & June (1990), the first movie to actually receive the dreaded NC-17 rating in the USA. After a celebrated start, Thurman's career stalled in the early '90s with movies such as the mediocre Mad Dog and Glory (1993). Worse, her first starring role was in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993), which had endured a tortured journey from cult-favorite book to big-budget movie, and was a critical and financial debacle. Fortunately, Uma bounced back with a brilliant performance as Mia Wallace, that most unorthodox of all gangster's molls, in Tarantino's lauded, hugely successful Pulp Fiction (1994), a role for which Thurman received an Academy Award nomination.
Since then, Thurman has had periods of flirting with roles in arty independents such as A Month by the Lake (1995), and supporting roles in which she has lent some glamorous presence to a mixed batch of movies, such as Beautiful Girls (1996) and The Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996). Thurman returned to smaller films after playing the villainess Poison Ivy in the reviled Joel Schumacher effort Batman & Robin (1997) and Emma Peel in a remake of The Avengers (1998). She worked with Woody Allen and Sean Penn on Sweet and Lowdown (1999), and starred in Richard Linklater's drama Tape (2001) opposite Hawke. Thurman also won a Golden Globe award for her turn in the made-for-television film Hysterical Blindness (2002), directed by Mira Nair.
A return to the mainstream spotlight came when Thurman re-teamed with Quentin Tarantino for Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), a revenge flick the two had dreamed up on the set of Pulp Fiction (1994). She also turned up in the John Woo cautioner Paycheck (2003) that same year. The renewed attention was not altogether welcome because Thurman was dealing with the break-up of her marriage with Hawke at about this time. Thurman handled the situation with grace, however, and took her surging popularity in stride. She garnered critical acclaim for her work in Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) and was hailed as Tarantino's muse. Thurman reunited with Pulp Fiction (1994) dance partner John Travolta for the Get Shorty (1995) sequel Be Cool (2005) and played Ulla in The Producers (2005).
Thurman had been briefly married to Gary Oldman, from 1990 to 1992. In 1998, she married Ethan Hawke, her co-star in the offbeat futuristic thriller Gattaca (1997). The couple had two children, Levon and Maya. Hawke and Thurman filed for divorce in 2004.- Actress
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Najwa Nimri Urrutikoetxea is a Spanish actress and singer of Navarrese and Jordanian descent.
Nimri's mother is Navarrese and her father is Jordanian; his name is Karam Nimri. She has a brother named Karim Nimri, a half-brother named Andre Nimri and two half-sisters named Sara and Nadia Nimri. Najwa also has a cousin who is a singer named (Antix) Alexander Nimier. When she was a child she moved to Bilbao and now lives in Madrid.
Her first important film role was in Salto al vacío, the first movie by film director Daniel Calparsoro. Her career as a singer started with small groups. In 1996, she formed the band Najwajean with Carlos Jean. She has also released three solo albums. She was married to Daniel Calparsoro and in 2004, she had a son, Teo.
Several of her film roles won her praise: as Ana in Lovers of the Arctic Circle, and as Elena in Sex and Lucia (Spanish title Lucía y el sexo). Both films were directed by Julio Medem. She starred next to Eduardo Noriega in Abre los ojos and El Método (The Method).- Actress
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Juliette Lewis has been recognized as one of Hollywood's most talented and versatile actors of her generation since she first stunned audiences and critics alike with her Oscar-nominated performance as "Danielle Bowden" in Cape Fear (1991). To date, she has worked with some of the most revered directors in the industry, including Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Lasse Hallström, Oliver Stone, and Garry Marshall. Whether lending dramatic authenticity or a natural comedic flair to her roles, Lewis graces the screen with remarkable range and an original and captivating style.
Lewis was born in Los Angeles, Californa, to Glenis (Duggan) Batley, a graphic designer, and Geoffrey Lewis, an actor. By the age of six, she knew she wanted to be a performer. At twelve, Lewis landed her first leading role in the Showtime miniseries Home Fires (1987). After appearing in several TV sitcoms including The Wonder Years (1988), she made her move to film, starring with Chevy Chase in National Lampoon's National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989) and with Jennifer Jason Leigh in the drama Crooked Hearts (1991). At 16, Lewis starred opposite Brad Pitt in the critically acclaimed television movie Too Young to Die? (1990), catching the attention of Martin Scorsese, who cast her in his thriller Cape Fear (1991). Her powerful scenes with Robert De Niro captured the quiet complexities of adolescence and earned her an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe nomination for "Best Supporting Actress". Her auditorium scene with De Niro went down in movie history as one of cinema's classic scenes.
Lewis next worked with Woody Allen in Husbands and Wives (1992), playing a self-assured college coed with a penchant for older men and, particularly, her married professor. She quickly followed suit with a succession of starring roles in a variety of blockbusters and critically acclaimed projects including Kalifornia (1993), Romeo Is Bleeding (1993), What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), and Natural Born Killers (1994), Oliver Stone's controversial media satire about two mass murderers who become legendary folk heroes. Lewis's other credits include the Nora Ephron comedy Mixed Nuts (1994), with Steve Martin and Adam Sandler; the sci-fi action film Strange Days (1995) with Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett; Quentin Tarantino's vampire tale From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) with George Clooney; The Evening Star (1996) with Shirley MacLaine; the Garry Marshall-directed The Other Sister (1999), and Todd Phillips' Old School (2003), co-starring opposite Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughn, and Will Ferrell as well as Starsky & Hutch (2004). In addition to her film career, Lewis has continued to add roles to her growing list of television credits with a performance in Showtime's My Louisiana Sky (2001), for which she secured an EMMY nomination, and a starring role in the Mira Nair-directed HBO's film Hysterical Blindness (2002), alongside Uma Thurman and Gena Rowlands.
After a six-year hiatus from film to pursue her burgeoning music career exclusively, Lewis announced her return to acting with a handful of upcoming movies. Juliette starred alongside Elliot Page, Marcia Gay Harden, Kristen Wiig and Jimmy Fallon in the comedy Whip It (2009). The film was released by Fox Searchlight on October 2nd, 2009. Directed by Drew Barrymore, the film tells the story of an ex-beauty pageant contestant that leaves her crowns behind after joining a roller derby team. Lewis plays "Iron Maven", the star of a top derby team. Next, she joined the cast of the acclaimed European animated thriller Metropia (2009), as the voice of "Nina". She also appeared in the romantic comedy The Switch (2010), opposite Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman, and Patrick Wilson. The film tells the story of a single mother (Aniston) who decides to have a child using a sperm donor. Juliette plays "Debbie Epstein", the best friend of Aniston's character. Lewis also appears in Sympathy for Delicious (2010), Mark Ruffalo's directorial debut. The film follows a paralyzed DJ, struggling to survive on the streets of LA who turns to faith healing and mysteriously develops the ability to cure the sick. Juliette plays "Ariel", costarring alongside Orlando Bloom, Mark Ruffalo, and Laura Linney. The film took home the US Dramatic Special Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Most recently, Juliette Lewis appears in the indie-drama Conviction (2010), which stars Hilary Swank, Melissa Leo, Minnie Driver, and Sam Rockwell. She plays "Roseanna Perry" in the true story of an unemployed single mother (Swank) who saw her brother begin serving a life sentence in 1983 for murder and robbery. The role has won Lewis praise from audiences and critics, alike, for her performance, with USA Today saying, "Juliette Lewis has an indelible role" and the San Francisco Chronicle saying "Her character work should be studied in schools. Just remarkable". In addition to Conviction (2010), Lewis also makes a cameo in Todd Phillips's comedy, Due Date (2010), starring Robert Downey Jr., Michelle Monaghan, and Zach Galifianakis.
Beginning in 2004, Juliette took a hiatus from acting to embark on a musical journey. After six years, two full length albums and countless high profile tours and festival gigs with her band, 'Juliette & the Licks', Juliette set out on a solo career. Releasing "Terra Incognita" last fall, the album has taken her all across the world from Europe to Japan to Turkey, Australia, North America and Canada. For more information on Juliette Lewis' music, please visit her MySpace page. Juliette Lewis resides in Los Angeles.- Nanako Matsushima has starred in leading roles in Japan for over 20 years. She began her career as a fashion model while still in her teens. By 1996, she played the heroine in NHK Japan's serial TV drama "Himawari", catapulting her to stardom. Since then she has played leading roles in numerous hit TV dramas and has captivated audiences with her performances. Among her film credits is the main character in "Ring", a movie that sparked a boom in the horror genre, and a role that was later reprised by Naomi Watts in a Hollywood remake.
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Miki Nakatani was born on 12 January 1976 in Tokyo, Japan. She is an actress, known for Kiraware Matsuko no isshô (2006), Ring 2 (1999) and Ringu (1998).- Eihi Shiina was born on 3 February 1976 in Fukuoka, Japan. She is an actress, known for Audition (1999), Sky High (2002) and Tokyo Gore Police (2008).
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Emmy Award-winning actress Jaime Pressly is known for her wide range of film and television roles. Pressly appeared in Welcome to Flatch (2022) from 2022 to 2023. Previously, she played Jill Kendall, opposite Anna Faris and Academy Award winner Allison Janney, on Chuck Lorre's hit CBS comedy Mom (2013).
Before that, Pressly starred as Jennifer Doyle in TV Land's original sitcom Jennifer Falls (2014). The first-ever single camera comedy for TV Land, the show revolved around Jennifer, a former high-powered executive who had fallen from grace and hit every bump on the way down to rock bottom. Best known for her role as Joy Turner, on the hit show "My Name Is Earl," Pressly was nominated for her first Golden Globe and won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2007. Additionally, Jaime was nominated for a SAG Actor Award in both 2006 and 2007, and an Emmy in 2006. She has previously starred the DreamWorks film "I Love You, Man" directed by John Hamburg, opposite Paul Rudd, Jason Segel and Jon Favreau. Other film credits include cult classics such as "Joe Dirt" with David Spade, "Not Another Teen Movie" with Chris Evans, and "Can't Hardly Wait", among others.