Taste the Blood of Showbiz History

5 random things that happened on this day in showbiz history...

1941 Citizen Kane has its world premiere in NYC

1969 Wes Anderson born in Houston, Texas

1970 Happy 50th anniversary to Hammer Horror's Taste the Blood of Dracula starring Christopher Lee which opened on this day.

1998 Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke get hitched, two days after Uma's 28th birthday and two months before the birth of their daughter Maya (who is now an actress, see Stranger Things season 3). They had co-starred in the previous year's sci-fi drama Gattaca and will make two more films together (Chelsea Walls and Tape) as well as a second child before separating in 2003 - a very big year for Uma, professionally. Yes Uma has been on our brains this week.

2000 Gladiator has its world premiere in Los Angeles before opening nationwide the following weekend and becoming an enormous hit. Later it competed for Best Picture at the big awards show and when the envelope was opened it was always...

GLADIATOR!"

Great Moments in Horror Actressing

by Jason Adams

It's hard not to walk out of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood without Sharon Tate on your mind. Whether it's because you thought the film needed more of what Margot Robbie was serving or if like me it's because you thought what Robbie did serve was A+ First Class stuff, the specter of that real woman, rightfully, lords over the entire experience. Sharon Tate only got to make six films before she was murdered, and two of them were horror films -- not an unlikely statistic for any young beautiful actress, but one that's linked itself arm in arm with Tate's fate nonetheless. 

I've never seen her 1967 British occult flick Eye of the Devil, which had her playing a witch opposite David Niven and Deborah Kerr. But I've seen her other horror flick of that same year, Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers, more times than I can count, and it's Tate's under-valued performance that I always think of when I think of the film. She's barely in it but she walks away with it -- a pale fire piled in soap bubbles and snow...

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Joan Fontaine Centennial: The Witches (1966)

by Jason Adams

Tell me if you've heard this plot before: a closed-minded outsider with a sordid spiritual history comes to a rural UK village where they slowly unravel a plot involving each and every member of the town being in on the ritual sacrifice of a virginal young woman, with a twist. You're thinking The Wicker Man, right? Well seven years before Christopher Lee did his exuberant little dance beside that infamous flaming totem Joan Fontaine got there first in 1966's The Witches, an actual Hammer production (I always think The Wicker Man is from Hammer, but it ain't) that really doesn't get the love it earns...

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