Today in History: Page's Second Globe, Larry & Viv's Affair, Etc...

Looking for something to celebrate today? On this day in history as it relates to showbiz...

1874 Oscar nominee Henry Travers (Mrs Miniver) was born in England
1908 Future Oscar winner, "Henry Higgins" and "Dr Dolittle" himself Sir Rex Harrison is born 
1922 FW Murnau's silent classic Nosferatu premieres in its home country of Germany. On the same day in Italy the future super controversial auteur Pier Paolo Pasolini (120 Days of Sodom, The Gospel According to St Matthew) is born
1936 Dean Stockwell is born in California. He will go on to have an epically lengthy career starting as a child star in the 40s and still working occasionally today. On the same day the '35 Oscars were held with Mutiny on the Bounty taking Best Picture and Bette Davis winning her first Oscar for Dangerous. Oscar was already doing "sorry about last time" awards as that one was obviously for her far superior work in Of Human Bondage.  

Geraldine Page, Larry & Viv, and Harrison Ford after the jump...

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Tues Top Ten: Helen Reddy on TV and at the Movies

Appropos of nothing let's celebrate Helen Reddy's 75th Birthday today! The Pete's Dragon star (the original not this year's remake) was an Australian pop star who had a ton of hits in the 1970s. The only one that gets much airplay today is "I Am Woman" which still shows up in movies and on TV for an instant time capsule. You know how some songs become cultural shorthand. For a time Reddy was a movie and TV presence, too, including at awards shows -- and you know how we love those here at The Film Experience. She was Golden Globe nominated as "Most Promising Newcomer" a now defunct category for the disaster flick Airport '75 and she sang multiple movie theme songs, too!

Let's look back at 10 moments from her TV/Movie history just for kicks and star sightings...

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Olivia @ 100: Airport '77

Don't get on the plane! It's a Disaster Movie!Team Experience is looking at highlights and curios from the filmography of Olivia de Havilland for her Centennial this Friday. Here's guest contributor Sean Donovan...

Airport ’77, the third film of the Airport franchise, capitalized on the immense success of the 70s disaster movie craze in the twilight of its years. Just one year later in 1978, the critical and box office failure of Irwin Allen’s The Swarm showed how much audiences had sobered up, no longer excited by disaster movies and more interested in openly mocking them, based on their cheesy acting and overwrought destruction (a movement chronicled by Ken Feil in his worth-the-read book Dying for a Laugh: Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination). So if something feels lacking and obligatory about Airport ’77- in which a botched hijacking lands a Boeing 747 in the ocean, the passengers struggling to get back to land safely- that’s only because the film presents a crew of movie stars eager to cash their checks and get out as quick as possible. 

Among them is our honored centennial, Ms. Olivia de Havilland! And who can blame her for dipping into the disaster movie depths?

Her generational cohort Shelley Winters scored an Oscar nomination for being the token old lady to brave disaster (at the age of 52, but that’s Hollywood), in the genre-defining The Poseidon Adventure. Older actresses like Helen Hayes, Gloria Swanson, and Myrna Loy had already wandered into the Airport franchise, Hayes walking away with an Oscar for her efforts. As an aging member of Hollywood royalty in the 1970s, it seems one of your duties was to class up a trashy disaster film with your mere presence... 

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Mercedes McCambridge in "The Concorde... Airport '79"

Tim here. Now we come to the sad part of our centennial tribute to Mercedes McCambridge. For like so many movie stars, her career ended with a damp fizzle, not with any last triumphs. Worse yet, her career started rolling to a close in the 1970s, when Hollywood hit upon its most degrading scheme ever for what to do with its old legends and workhorses: stuff them into the enormous ensembles of tacky disaster films. At its most prestigious, this phenomenon resulted in Fred Astaire getting his solitary career Oscar nomination for The Towering Inferno. At its least prestigious, you have living legends Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland, and Fred MacMurray in a death race to see who can embarrass themselves the worst in The Swarm.

Or, for that matter, you have McCambridge herself, grossly misused and discarded in The Concorde... Airport '79. It's the fourth and final film in the rather dimwitted Airport franchise, which had once upon a time been kinder to its storied old troupers: 1970's Best Picture nominee Airport, the film that essentially got the disaster movie cycle rolling, netted Helen Hayes her second Oscar. But those days were long gone by the time McCambridge was called up to squander her talents along with the rest of a distressingly high-quality cast, including Alain Delon, Cicely Tyson, and David Warner. [More...]

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