JERRY LEWIS: [The anything but modest comedian summed himself up] ‘I’m a multi-faceted, talented, wealthy, internationally famous genius. I have an IQ of 190 – that’s supposed to be a genius. People don’t like that. My answer to all my critics is simple: I like me. I like […]
MYRNA LOY: [Issuing a challenge to MGM bosses in the 1930s, a challenge that fell upon deaf ears] ‘Why does every black person in the movies have to play a servant? How about a black person walking up the steps of a courthouse carrying a briefcase?’ [Referring to her being […]
Jerry Lewis (L) & Dean Martin One of Dean Martin’s & Jerry Lewis’s connected ‘friends’ in the fifties was the gangster Willie Moretti, a long-time associate of mob boss Frank Costello. Willie was the man who allegedly ‘convinced’ Tommy Dorsey to let Sinatra out of his contract with the […]
Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis circa 1950 According to Jerry, what set Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis above the other great comedy duos was simple enough. Burns & Allen, Abbott & Costello, Hope & Crosby, and all the rest, were vaudevillians, stage performers who worked with an audience and […]
Audrey Meadows – glamour shot I have been watching television since the mid-1950s, several hundred series, many of them sitcoms, yet I still rank The Honeymooners (1955-56) very near the top of the heap. Like most viewers, I appreciate witty, sharp scripts above anything else, yet the more […]
Ingrid Bergman & Alfred Hitchcock Ingrid Bergman told her first husband, Peter Lindstrom, that she could never work effectively without being in love with either her director or her leading man – hence her affairs with Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, Omar Sharif and Bing Crosby, to name […]
Down the decades I have developed a powerful dislike for certain actors and/or individual performances, players or portrayals that I felt detracted from some really good movies (and a few bad ones). So, I wrote out a list of the really irksome players (or moments) in all the films […]
Gregory Peck & Ava Gardner in On the Beach (1959) When Ava Gardner came to Australia to make On the Beach (1959), she did not exactly endear herself to the nation when she remarked that Melbourne was the most appropriate place on Earth to make a picture about the end of […]
Higgins as Benji (1974) The dog that played the title role in the 1974 family film Benji was a mongrel named Higgins, a mix of cocker spaniel, poodle and schnauzer. Animal trainer and breeder Frank Inn adopted him in 1960 from the Burbank Animal Shelter in Burbank, California. For seven seasons Higgins […]
River Phoenix By 1993, River Phoenix had become an icon for a generation. The height of political correctness, a representative of ‘Generation X’, he advocated a pro-life, pro-animals, vegetarian lifestyle, speaking out on issues that concerned many of his fans. More than anything else, he preached an anti-drugs […]
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