RANDOM QUOTES – PT88
AVA GARDNER (1922 – 90) [On her time at MGM]: ‘I thought I was making fifty dollars a week, but it turned out to be $35 because twelve weeks of the year you were on layoff. It was white […]
ava gardner
PETER LAWFORD (1923-84) – PT1
Peter Lawford (1923-84) Peter Lawford was still a teenager in 1943, not yet twenty, when he was offered the dream of every aspiring actor and actress – an MGM contract! It was a one-year agreement with an option for a second year, and it paid him $100 a week […]
WORLD WAR TWO – The stars & their stories – PT51.
MICKEY ROONEY (1920-2014) He was born Joe Yule Junior in Brooklyn, New York City at the commencement of the Roaring Twenties and took the stage in his parents’ vaudeville act at the tender age of seventeen months. At the age of six he made his first movie, a short, […]
MOVIE TRIVIA – PT161.
Frobe & Connery in Goldfinger (1964) In Goldfinger (1964) there is a golf game between James Bond (Sean Connery) and his nemesis Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe). The two men end up playing the match for a bar of solid gold. Anyone who has ever picked up a club could see that Connery […]
MOVIE TRIVIA – PT140.
Gregory Peck & Ava Gardner in On the Beach (1959) I was about 16 when I first saw On the Beach (1959) at a theatre in Perth, Western Australia. I hated it. Too depressing. I got the impression that my grandparents dragged me along to see the thing, because they […]
RANDOM QUOTES – PT1
From time to time I will insert an article consisting of randomly selected quotes from movie people. This is the first of them. One of my books, The Skeletons are Out, consists entirely of quotes by actors and actresses taking shots at each other, but the quotes on these […]
WAR PICTURES WORTH WATCHING – PT2.
Cate Blanchett in the title role CHARLOTTE GRAY (2001) World War Two – Espionage in Nazi-occupied France Sebastian Faulks’ based his 1999 novel Charlotte Gray on the exploits of Nancy ‘the White Mouse’ Wake, the Allies’ most successful female agent operating behind Nazi lines during the war. Nancy […]
MOVIE TRIVIA – PT86.
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 […]
MOVIE TRIVIA – PT84
Marlon Brando & Karl Malden in One-Eyed Jacks (1961) One-Eyed Jacks (1961) was to have been directed by Stanley Kubrick at a budgeted cost of $1.8 million, but then Kubrick left and the picture’s star, Marlon Brando, took over as director. Day one, ominously, saw him throw away the script […]
ITALIAN/AMERICAN SINGERS/ACTORS PT1
Frank Sinatra recording on Capitol as Maggio in From Here to Eternity with his wife Ava Gardner There has never been a shortage of Italian/American singer/actors down the decades, so I thought I might write a little about the more accomplished ones. It would be fair to say that […]