Ava Gardner in 55 Days at Peking (1963) Ava Gardner had a long-running nervous breakdown during the making of 55 Days at Peking (1963). She was drunk on several days, continually demanded rewrites, and was extremely difficult to deal with. Charlton Heston stated that her character, Baroness Natalie Ivanoff, was killed off […]
Lee Marvin (L), John Wayne (C) & James Stewart When we watch the John Ford 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, there is a certain irony in the casting. Jimmy Stewart was a genuine World War Two USAAF hero, yet he plays a bookish weakling opposed to […]
On-screen Henry Fonda came across as a man of integrity, common sense, gentleness and affability. Off-screen he was a private man, cold to his family, aloof, frequently angry […]
In the 1955 Hitchcock picture To Catch a Thief, there is a scene in which John Robie (Cary Grant) is discussing the cook’s ‘sensitive hands’ with an insurance agent and casually mentions that those hands once strangled a German general without a sound. For German audiences, however, the words were […]
Richard Jaeckel was a terrific character actor who racked up a total of 190 screen credits in his 51-year career. In 1943 he was a 17 year-old messenger boy at 20th Century Fox when he was cast as a US Marine private in his first picture Guadalcanal Diary. If you […]
It is generally conceded that Orson Welles’ 1941 classic Citizen Kane is loosely based on the career of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. What is not so generally known is that a sub-plot in which Susan Kane has an extra-marital affair was deleted late in the day by Welles himself. […]
Olivia de Havilland with Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood While making The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Errol Flynn told his co-star Olivia de Havilland that his marriage to Lili Damita was […]
Annette Kellerman and naked in Daughter of the Gods (1916) When Australian swimming star Annette Kellerman appeared naked in the […]
The third and final segment regarding ‘Katharine the Great’, the controversial Darwin Porter biography of Katherine Hepburn. Eleanor Roosevelt *Eleanor Roosevelt had a heavy crush on Kate although it was not reciprocated. In the early 1940s the First Lady wrote her many passionate letters, but it was a one-way love […]
Major Glenn Miller 1944 Bernie Woods was the Music Editor of Variety during the Big Band Era. In that capacity he got to know all the bandleaders, singers and musicians. His 1994 memoir titled ‘When the Music Stopped’ pulls no punches when he discusses individuals, and he had little […]
Copyright © 2024 | WordPress Theme by MH Themes
