Actors & Personalities · Documentaries
Ingrid Bergman In Her Own Words makes clear that her life was messy and episodic, but she earned great love from her directors, co-stars, and family. Don’t wait for Mommie[…]
Actors & Personalities · Noir · War
An examination of two of these émigrés – Fritz Kortner and Ernst Deutsch, major Central European actors, very well known in their home countries before leaving them in duress, both[…]
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[…]
Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · LGBT & Queer
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
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
“[H]er favorite expression of strained intensity would be less quickly relieved by a merciful death than by Ex-Lax.”
“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
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 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
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[…]
“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
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
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[…]
“Steve understood real people, particularly misfits, like nobody else.It was just the Hollywood brass he loathed.”
Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · War
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
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[…]
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
“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
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[…]
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. *[…]
