KATHARINE HEPBURN (1907-2003) Borne one of six kids from Hartford, Connecticut, Kate was thirteen when she found her fifteen year-old brother Tom hanging from an attic beam in a relative’s house. The family said he had accidentally hanged himself while attempting a trick his father had taught him. Kate […]
ULZANA’S RAID (1972) This is a particularly brutal film at times, but Ulzana’s Raid is, in my opinion, one of the better westerns to come out of the seventies. Critics appear divided on this, however. The story has no basis in fact. The green Lieutenant DeBuin (played by Bruce […]
HAROLD SAKATA (1920-82) His name might not ring many bells for cinema fans, but his face usually does. Harold Sakata achieved cinematic immortality portraying Auric Goldfinger’s personal bodyguard Oddjob, steel-rimmed bowler hat and all, in the third of the James Bond franchise films Goldfinger (1964). Born in Hawaii of Japanese […]
Barbara Stanwyck & husband Frank Fay Thirty-seven year-old comedian Frank Fay married 21 year-old chorus girl Barbara Stanwyck in August 1928, their stormy union ending in divorce in 1935. Fay was an egotist and an abusive, unpopular drunk. A standing joke around Hollywood begged the question, ‘Who has […]
WOODY HARRELSON: [Regarding a scary night in Dubrovnik] ‘These guys were coming down from the hillside. They were the toughest-looking motherfuckers you ever saw – some kind of Croatian judo gang or something – and they were coming down basically to kill me for being with these red-hot girls. They […]
Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in GWTW (1939) The Academy Awards is a competition, but it is one that has seldom been conducted on a level playing field. A winner one year may very well not even have been nominated in a stronger year. Historically, the two […]
A scene from the 1952 feature Scaramouche Stewart Granger and Mel Ferrer fought a duel early in Scaramouche (1952), and part of the sequence required Granger to lie on the wooden floorboards as an iron chandelier dropped towards him. It was rigged to stop just inches from his face. The […]
Florence Lawrence – the first ever movie star Florence Lawrence was born in Canada in 1886 and started her stage career as ‘Baby Florence the Kid Wonder’. She made her first movie The Automobile Thieves (1906) and soon became known as ‘The Vitagraph Girl’. Then Biograph started putting her […]
L to R – James Darren, Greg Peck, David Niven & Anthony Quinn in The Guns of Navarone (1961) The problem with the WW2 action flick The Guns of Navarone (1961) should be immediately apparent to just about everyone. Of the six commandos sent to disable the mighty guns of the […]
Marion Davies Marion Davies acquired a reputation for showing kindness to actors down on their luck. She was always writing cheques to help out struggling careers and to rejuvenate many. ‘You’re rich’, she said many times, ‘not because of money, but only through what you give.’ She also built […]
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