Friday, March 19, 2021 at 8:00AM This one is from our vaults, first published 8 years ago but we're reupping it it with some additional bits of trivia to celebrate March 19th! If it's your birthday today you can brag that you share a birthday with the televised tradition of Oscar ceremonies. This particular ceremony, the 25th Academy Awards, held 68 years ago today was historic for many reasons...
Monday, September 28, 2020 at 9:00AM 9 random things that happened on this day, September 28th, in showbiz history:
1935 Comic actor Stan Laurel marries his second wife Virginia Ruth Rogers who will also become his fourth wife. Old Hollywood stars sure did get married and divorced and remarried a lot! The recent underseen biopic Stan & Ollie (2018) looked at Laurel & Hardy's final years after the heyday of their fame, with Steven Coogan as Stan Laurel and Nina Arianda giving yet another great supporting performance as Laurel's fifth and final wife Ida. When is Nina Arianda going to get her due in Hollywood?
1945 Seventy-five years ago today, noir classic Mildred Pierce starring Joan Crawford opened, reviving her career and winning her the Oscar. (The movie was nominated for 5 additional Oscars including Best Picture). It's a must-see.
Gregg Toland, Martin & Lewis, and Olivia Newton-John after the jump...
Friday, August 30, 2013 at 12:00PM For today's daily nooner leadup to the Supporting Actress Smackdown of 1952 -- and to get us all pumped up for the burst of Fall Film Oscar Madness, I thought we'd look at the Oscar ceremony itself and some really fun trivia. Ready?
Shirley Booth in NYC accepts her Oscar while the LA crowd looks on
• Did you know that the 1952 Oscars (held in March 1953) were the first televised Oscar ceremony ever? Now you do! They were also bi-coastal (!!!) with Bob Hope entertaining in LA and the great Fredric March working the crowd in New York.
• Shirley Booth, who won for Come Back Little Sheba, fell on the steps to the stage! You can watch it here. Jennifer Lawrence didn't invent that little attention grabbing Best Actress move this past February! MORE AFTER THE JUMP
Wednesday, August 28, 2013 at 12:00PM We're having daily nooners with the supporting actresses of '52 in preparation for this weekend's Smackdown. But I hope I'm not burning out all our comment juice with these lead-up posts. So today, an "artistic" detour. Though we sometimes lament that movies are made by committee or that artistic decisions are determined by bank ledgers at huge corporations, it's always been true that the movies have been been hybrid babies, born from both business decisions and artistic concerns. Still, even for the fame-craving, what draws (most) people to showbiz is some kind of creative urge or spirit. So the movies have more than their share of artistically inclined characters within them. Moulin Rouge (the 1952 version) is about a famous artist, Singin in the Rain is about (singing & dancing) actors, and The Bad and the Beautiful is about all sorts of creative types: actors, writers, directors. Which led me to this train of thought...
Gloria Grahame's character in The Bad and the Beautiful gets a Pulitzer winning novel written about her and Colette Marchand's character in Moulin Rouge gets her portrait painted by Henri Touluse-Latrec.
Which would you find most flattering: your portrait painted by a great artist or a book written about you by an esteemed writer? OR...
Are you the type who'd rather do the immortalizing yourself for someone else? That's what Terry Moore does as almost-horny college student "Marie" in Come Back Little Sheba when she brings Turk (Richard Jaeckel) local star jock home for a bit of live modelling.
Lola: That's a beautiful drawing Marie!"
CONFESS IN THE COMMENTS! Painting, Novel, or Do It Yourself?
P.S. After the jump we have to talk about that scene in Come Back Little Sheba cuz it is everything.
