Need to feel festive today? Think on these anniversaries or birthdays today in showbiz history and celebrate accordingly.
1914 Director Morton DaCosta was born in Philly. Though most of his career was on the stage he did direct three features: Auntie Mame, The Music Man, and Island of Love, the first two of which were Best Picture nominees!
1933 The game "Monopoly" was invented -remember that time when it seemed like every "brand" was going to become a movie and Ridley Scott was going to make this one?
1942 Televangelist wife and pop culture makeup icon Tammy Faye Baker is born.
Much more after the jump...
1945 Character actor John Heard is born. What's he been up to? He was in everything in the 1980s but I loved him most in Beaches I think, as Bette Midler's theater hubby.
1946 the 18th Academy Awards are held. Joan Crawford wins for Mildred Pierce. She isn't at the ceremony; She accepts the prize from her bed with a photo-op. What. A. Diva. Yes, yes, we will be discussing Feud: Bette and Joan each week. I'll try to get the first post up tonight.
1955 Loretta Young, who had won the Best Actress Oscar in the 1940s wins the Emmy for The Loretta Young Show at the 7th annual Primetime Emmy Awards. But even though her Emmy win came so very early in Emmy history, she wasn't even the first to win the Emmy after the Oscar. The first was Helen Hayes who won the Emmy two years before Loretta, after having won the Oscar for The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931). Hayes would eventually EGOT, Young would not.
1956 Bryan Cranston is born. Later wins too many Emmys for the same performance.
1959 Two time Tony winner and absolute goddess Donna Murphy was born on this day in Queens NY. Frustratingly the movies never caught on to her but she is marvelous as the voice of Mother Gothel in Tangled
1965 "Bloody Sunday" on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, so memorably captured by Ava DuVernay and cinematographer Bradford Young in the Best Picture nominated Selma
1970 Her lady of perpetual cry face Rachel Weisz is born. She has a ton of movies coming out soon including Jewish drama Disobedience (from the director of Chile's terrific Gloria), 60s drama The Mercy (from Theory of Everything director James Marsh), and the remake of My Cousin Rachel in the Olivia de Havilland title role
1971 One of the most overdue non-Oscar nominated actors Peter Sarsgaard was born on this day in Illinois. He'd later marry Maggie Gyllenhaal forming one of Hollywood's most talented couples
1986 "There can be only one" immortal decapitaters fantasy drama Highlander premieres in movie theaters starring Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery and quickly becomes a cult favorite
Bel Powley and fellow rising star Douglas Booth are dating. Pictured here last fall at TIFF.
1992 Rising British actress Bel Powley, so memorable in Diary of a Teenage Girl, is born. She has a ton of movies lined up over the next 24 months: the title role of female genius Carrie Pilby (opening at the end of this month), the lead role in the fantasy horror drama Wildling as a girl raised in captivity who is finally freed but terrified of 'The Outside'; the lead role in the World War II drama Ashes in the Snow about a Lithuanian woman in the Siberian labor camps; and a few supporting roles too including parts opposite Elle Fanning in Mary Shelley, Dakota Fanning in The Bell Jar, and Matthew McConaughey in the crime drama White Boy Rick. The latter wouldn't sound that appetizing except that the director is Yann Demange who directed the rather amazing Irish troubles drama '71 as his debut.
1999 Stanley Kubrick dies at 70, just four months before the release of his final picture Eyes Wide Shut starring then-married Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman
2002 A revival of The Crucible (there have been many) opens on Broadway starring Oscar nominees Liam Neeson (his second of two Tony nods) and The Lovely Laura Linney (her first of three Tony nominations). Neither star has ever won either of those showbiz prizes though Linney has won 4 Emmys.
2003 Queen Latifah and Missi Pyle brawl over Steve Martin in Bringing Down the House, new in theaters
2010 The 82nd Academy Awards are held crowning the first and still only female winner of Best Director Kathryn Bigelow and her film The Hurt Locker. Her ex-husband James Cameron was up for the same categories with the 3D blockbuster Avatar
2014 Jon Favreau's well liked star-studded indie Chef premieres at the SXSW festival