Happy Happy Birthday Baby! Steve McQueen (b. 3/24/30): Fifty Years of the King of Cool
“Steve understood real people, particularly misfits, like nobody else.It was just the Hollywood brass he loathed.”
Author: Christopher Sandford
Christopher Sandford is the author of three novels and a series of rock and movie biographies including Mick Jagger (1992), Eric Clapton (1994), Kurt Cobain (1995), David Bowie (1996), Bruce Springsteen (1999), Steven McQueen (2001), Paul McCartney (2005), and Roman Polanski (2007). His biography of Polanski is now out in paperback. One or two of the above, notably Cobain, have been optioned for film. His latest book is Harold and Jack: The Remarkable Friendship of President Kennedy and Prime Minister Macmillan (Prometheus Books, 2014) and Masters of Mystery: The Strange Friendship of Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). The British-born author calls Seattle and London home.
Actors & Personalities · Interviews
Happy Birthday, James Mason (b. 5/15/1909): Odd Man Out
Mason was “equally at home playing small, brooding anti-heroes, camping it up in a toga, or doing a nice line in late career self-parody.”
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Happy Birthday to Cinema’s Great Bad Boy: Peter O’Toole (8/2/32-12/14-13)
“Arriving in Los Angeles for the film’s premiere there, he quickly blotted his copybook by hurling a drink at the producer Sam Spiegel, the most powerful man in Hollywood at the time. Spiegel had ‘massacred’ Lawrence, O’Toole remarked, by cutting twenty minutes of it in order ‘to sell more fucking ice cream to the punters.'”
Quiet Hero: Happy (Belated) Birthday to British Actor Kenneth More (September 20, 1914-July 12, 1982)
The centenary of the English film and stage actor Kenneth More’s birth falls on September 20 2014. I knew him slightly, and I’m confident in saying he wouldn’t have minded[…]
Play-Actor: On Trevor Howard
“The whole point of Howard’s screen persona was surely its combination of the ramrod-straight and the slyly subversive, and its creation of a façade that was eternally gruff yet perpetually seemed to be in on some wonderful joke.”
The King of Chutzpah: On the Singular Pleasures of Phil Silvers
“Silvers raised the smart-aleck, rapid-fire monolog to high art.”
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Florence Lawrence: “The First Movie Star”
“Lawrence had become a movie star for many reasons — gentleness, grace, that silky hair, and what Laemmle assessed as ‘sensational bubbies.'”
David Niven: “P. G. Wodehouse with Tears”
“What you got was what you saw, a man with a soldier’s training speaking ever so nicely and trying not to stretch himself beyond his abilities as an actor.” ~ David Niven
Sean Connery: A “Natural Thruster”
“Connery, never a martyr to false modesty, remains as voluble and combative as ever.”
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