Showbiz History: Monty Dies, Amy Debuts, Detroit Divides...
Monday, July 23, 2018 at 8:00AM 10 random things that happened on this day (July 23rd) in showbiz history.
1884 Emil Jannings born in Switzerland. In 1928 he will become the first man to ever win the Best Actor Oscar. He won for his roles in the silent films The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh. He was the only man to ever win for a silent film until Jean DuJardin took the Oscar for The Artist (2011)
Montgomery Clift, Amy Adams, Woody Harrelson, Vanessa Williams and more after the jump...
1961 Woody Harrelson born in Texas. He is a frequent nominee for acting awards at SAG, The Globes, The Emmys, and Oscars but has only ever won one major showbiz prize for his (individual) acting: Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for his role as Woody on "Cheers" in 1990.
1966 Montgomery Clift dies at just 45 years of age of a heart attack, ending the career of one of the greatest screen actors of all time. He had been scheduled to reteam with his dear friend Liz Taylor for a fourth time in Reflections on a Golden Eye (1967) before the untimely death. His last film The Defector (1966) was released four months after his death.
1967 The Detroit riots begin. Kathryn Bigelow's recent film Detroit (2017) attempted to look at just one particular incident within one of the most destructive riots in American history (and was heavily criticized for it) but there are surely hundreds since the riots lasted for five days and left 43 people dead and thsouands of buildings destroyed. We suspect someone else will someday make another movie about it. (On this same day Philip Seymour Hoffman is born in Fairport, New York)
←1984 Vanessa Williams, the first black woman to become Miss America resigns following pressure from the Miss America organization to do so after nude photos were published in Penthouse. But that's okay. She'll find more lasting fame than any other Miss America and not from that photoshoot but from her acting and singing.
1982 Three of that year's ten Oscar-nominated supporting turns make their debuts on the same day: The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (with nominee Charles Durning) begins its successful theatrical run and The World According to Garp (with nominees Glenn Close and John Lithgow) premieres in NYC. These famous films were nominated for no Oscars outside of their supporting actors.
1989 Daniel Radcliffe born in London. Eleven years later he will be cast as Harry Potter and become globally famous.
1993 Happy 25th anniversary to Poetic Justice, starring Janet Jackson and Tupac Shakur, released on this day.
1999 Drop Dead Gorgeous opens in movie theaters, introduces Amy Adams to the world. It was not a success initially, failing to recoup its moderate budget but has long outlasted many other '99 films in pop culture.
2010 Salt debuts in movie theaters, another action hit for Angelina Jolie.
Reader Comments (7)
Harrelson looks like the Prometheus architects in that picture.
Vanessa Williams is one of my all-time favorite stars.
I hope she gets a platform worthy of the size of her talent. She deserves a one-woman show on Broadway, a Netflix special, a supporting role in an Oscar contender (Lee Daniels—what's next?) and beyond.
I love her playing brassy divas on network TV but she can do more.
Hayden, I totally agree. After Soul Food I realized her depth and range as an actress, which I don't think have been tapped into like that since then.
Ugh. Clift. So beautiful and so heartbreaking.
I'll just say it - I think Janet is good in Poetic Justice. It's a tough character to make cinematic (characters with depression usually are) and a tough character to base a film around (since she's so internal) but I think she pulls it off.
Drop Dead Gorgeous is just astoundingly quotable. I’d argue it has a stronger fan base here in MN than Fargo.
Anyone who watched DROP DEAD GORGEOUS in 1999 was fully aware of the eventual 2018 Oscar win of Allison Janney :-)
Dunning nomination for Whorehouse always seemed so odd. It is practically a cameo and why overlook Dom Deluise if they wanted to honor Whorehouse?