TOMMY KIRK – A TALENT UNTAPPED
TOMMY KIRK (1941 – 2021) Tommy was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1941. His interest in acting was ignited at the age of thirteen when he was cast in […]
walt disney
‘MAMMA MIA!’ & ‘MARY POPPINS’
MAMMA MIA! (2008) It will probably come as a shock to readers (it certainly did to me) to learn that this bloody awful musical became, in December 2008, the highest-grossing movie in UK history, surpassing Titanic (1997)! It has, however, since been passed by Avatar in 2009. […]
RANDOM QUOTES – PT30.
HARPO MARX: [The famous harp-playing Marx Brother recalled the act performing in vaudeville] ‘If an audience didn’t like us we had no trouble finding it out. We were pelted with sticks, bricks, spit-balls, cigar butts, peach pits and chewed-out stalks of sugar cane. We took all this without flinching […]
HOLLYWOOD & THE ‘COMMUNIST CONSPIRACY’.
To understand how the US Government came to investigate possible links between Hollywood and the Communist Party, we need to go back as far as 1938, when the Moscow show trials preceded the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, […]
Three old comics.
Jack Benny (1894 – 1974) In his will Jack Benny left instructions for a single red rose to be delivered to Mary Livingstone, his widow and co-star from his radio days, every morning […]
The Magical Fifties.
I remember being taken in the fifties by my grand-parents to the open-air cinema nearby to watch black and white dramas starring the likes of Joan Crawford, George Raft, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Dana Andrews, Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, Ida Lupino and many others. For some reason a handful […]
More tragic Hollywood.
I fell in love for the first time when I was nine. It was 1957 and the object of my infatuation was a brunette with a cute smile and Mouseketeer ears on TV’s Mickey Mouse Club. Her name was Annette Funicello and to me she was perfection with a […]
MAUREEN O’HARA – The Queen of Technicolor.
On October 24, 2015 the movie world lost one of its icons, the Irish-born beauty Maureen O’Hara. She was 95 years old. Having fallen in love with her screen image […]
Gay/Bisexual Actors in Old TV Shows ( Pt 3 )
Nigel Hawthorne (1929 – 2001) The most surprising fact about the superbly written (and acted) Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister is that only 38 episodes in total were made, 22 in the first show and just 16 in the second. Hawthorne was quite brilliant as Sir Humphrey Appleby […]
Ronald Reagan – FBI spy in Hollywood?
One of the funnier exchanges that takes place in the 1985 blockbuster Back to the Future occurs when Dr Emmett Brown questions Marty’s statement that he is from the future: ‘Then tell me, future boy’, he says. ‘Who’s President of the United States in 1985?’ ‘Ronald Reagan’, Marty replies. […]