Happy Birthday, Doris Day! (b. April 3, 1922) All Her Films, Ranked and Annotated
When I wrote my piece in praise of Doris Day for Bright Lights back in December 2015, I had seen about half of her thirty-nine movies. Now that I’ve seen[…]
Category: Actors & Personalities
Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · LGBT & Queer
Get Real: How Much Reality Do We Want in Acting?
Isn’t it the job of an actor to play what he or she is not? * * * It was Jeffrey Tambor who got me thinking about authenticity in acting.[…]
Actors & Personalities · Essays
The Elephant in the Graveyard: The Testament of John Derek
Everywhere she was, there was Eden. – Mark Twain * * * So this is what it’s like on the other side. Not exactly how I pictured it. Nothing like[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Interviews
Ida Lupino: Demon Mother Night
“[H]er favorite expression of strained intensity would be less quickly relieved by a merciful death than by Ex-Lax.”
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.'”
Actors & Personalities · Exploitation & Erotica · Interviews
Happy Birthday, Pam Grier: Interview with the Accidental Action Heroine
It’s time again to tip our hat to Pam Grier, who’s 67 today (born May 26, 1949), by reposting Steve Ryfle’s interview. Here the incomparable star of Foxy Brown and[…]
Mary Astor (b. 5/3/1906) Birthday Tribute: Prisoner of Kicks
Mary Astor was born May 3, 1906 and died September 25, 1987. In honor of this superb star, who was also a gifted novelist and memoirist and a sexually adventurous free-thinker[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama
The Erotic Persona of Jimmy Stewart: From Visionary to Voyeur
You would never guess either from looking at him or from the “aw shucks” way in which he’s remembered that Stewart is responsible for some of the most erotic romantic[…]
Happy Birthday, Naomi Watts! Cinema’s Postmodern Mother of Mirrors
“There was a time in movies like The Purple Rose of Cairo when characters left the screen and came down to be incarnated into real life … Today, it would be reality that is transfused into the screen to be disincarnated. Nothing separates them anymore. The osmosis, the telemorphosis is complete.”
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Beautiful Dead Girl: On Early Hollywood Casualty Olive Thomas (Oct. 20, 1894-Sept. 10, 1920) and The Olive Thomas Collection on DVD
Note: Gordon Thomas’s review of the DVD set The Olive Thomas Collection, first published on November 1, 2005, is also a provocative profile of one of Hollywood’s most fascinating early scandals/tragedies. To[…]
Actors & Personalities · Books
Hollywood Royalty: Two Autobiographies by Anjelica Huston
She was never classically beautiful, at least by Hollywood’s exaggerated standards: a few too many sharp angles on her face, a few too many vertical inches on her frame. But[…]
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.”
Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · War
The Shame Is on the Aggressor: The Image of Rape in Films About Bosnia and in the Films of Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie may be among our best hopes to end the cruel and vile practice of mass rape in conflict. She has a bully pulpit as a rich and famous[…]
Actors & Personalities · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
Blu-ray Review: Recent Silent Film Releases from Flicker Alley
Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Mack Sennett, Harry Langdon, W. C. Fields, Ben Turpin – the gang’s all here. Flicker Alley, a home video company founded in 2007, is not solely dedicated[…]
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[…]
Actors & Personalities · Essays · LGBT & Queer
Fifty Shades of Ick: Gay Panic and Star Discourse/Star Panic and Gay Discourse
“The privileging of star persona over actor’s craft insists that sex within a narrative cannot, in fact, be a purely storytelling tool: it is required to be both a character[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews · TV & Streaming · Westerns
Happy Birthday, Richard Boone! Got Trouble? Wire Paladin! The Western for Existentialists
Today is actor Richard Boone’s birthday (June 18, 1917 – January 10, 1981). We’re celebrating it by reprinting Alan Vanneman’s pithy write-up (previously published in issue 48, May 2005) of[…]
Her Brilliant Career: Honoring Katrin Cartlidge (1961-2002)
Katrin Cartlidge, born May 15, 1961, died on September 7, 2002 at age 41. Julian Upton’s tribute to this remarkable actress first appeared in Bright Lights in November 2003. *[…]
Mary Astor (1906-1987) Birthday Tribute: A Lady’s a Lady
Mary Astor was born May 3, 1906 and died September 25, 1987. In honor of this superb star, we present Imogen Sara Smith’s profile, which originally appeared in Bright Lights in[…]
Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · Asian
“A Certain Slant”: A Brief History of Hollywood Yellowface
This article originally appeared in slightly different form in the March 1997 issue of Bright Lights. While limited to the history up to that time, it remains sadly relevant. *[…]
