| Caption | in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) |
|---|---|
| Birth date | February 01, 1901 |
| Birth place | Cadiz, Ohio, U.S. |
| Death date | |
| Death place | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Birth name | William Clark Gable |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 1923–1960 |
| Spouse | (divorced) (divorced) (her death) (divorced) (his death) 1 child |
Gable's most famous role was Rhett Butler in the 1939 Civil War epic film Gone with the Wind, in which he starred with Vivien Leigh. His performance earned him his third nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor; he won for It Happened One Night (1934) and was also nominated for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). Later performances were in Run Silent, Run Deep, a submarine war film, and his final film, The Misfits (1961), which paired Gable with Marilyn Monroe, also in her last screen appearance.
During his long film career, Gable appeared opposite some of the most popular actresses of the time. Joan Crawford, who was his favorite actress to work with, and Adeline (née Hershelman), who was of German and Irish descent. He was mistakenly listed as a female on his birth certificate. His original last name was Goebel, but this was considered too German during World War I because of anti German sentiment. Birth registrations, school records and other documents contradict one another. "William" would have been in honor of his father. "Clark" was the maiden name of his maternal grandmother. In childhood he was almost always called "Clark"; some friends called him "Clarkie," "Billy," or "Gabe".
When he was six months old, his sickly mother had him baptized Roman Catholic. She died when he was ten months old, probably of an aggressive brain tumor. Following her death, Gable's father's family refused to raise him as a Catholic, provoking enmity with his mother's side of the family. The dispute was resolved when his father's family agreed to allow Gable to spend time with his mother's Catholic brother, Charles Hershelman, and his wife on their farm in Vernon, Pennsylvania.
In April 1903, Gable's father Will married Jennie Dunlap, whose family came from the small neighboring town of Hopedale. Gable was a tall shy child with a loud voice. After his father purchased some land and built a house, the new family settled in. Jennie played the piano and gave her stepson lessons at home; later he took up brass instruments. She raised Gable to be well-dressed and well-groomed; he stood out from the other kids. Gable was very mechanically inclined and loved to strip down and repair cars with his father. At thirteen, he was the only boy in the men's town band. Even though his father insisted on Gable doing "manly" things, like hunting and hard physical work, Gable loved language. Among trusted company, he would recite Shakespeare, particularly the sonnets. Will Gable did agree to buy a seventy-two volume set of The World's Greatest Literature to improve his son's education, but claimed he never saw his son use it. In 1917, when Gable was in high school, his father had financial difficulties. Will decided to settle his debts and try his hand at farming and the family moved to Ravenna, just outside of Akron. Gable had trouble settling down in the area. Despite his father's insistence that he work the farm, Gable soon left to work in Akron's B.F. Goodrich tire factory.
At seventeen, Gable was inspired to be an actor after seeing the play The Bird of Paradise, but he was not able to make a real start until he turned 21 and inherited money. By then, his stepmother Jennie had died and his father moved to Tulsa to go back to the oil business. He toured in stock companies and worked the oil fields and as a horse manager. Gable found work with several second-class theater companies and worked his way across the Midwest to Portland, Oregon, where he found work as a necktie salesman in the Meier & Frank department store. While there, he met actress Laura Hope Crews, who encouraged him to go back to the stage and into another theater company. His acting coach was a theater manager in Portland, Oregon, Josephine Dillon (seventeen years his senior). Dillon paid to have his teeth repaired and his hair styled. She guided him in building up his chronically undernourished body, and taught him better body control and posture. She spent considerable time training his naturally high-pitched voice, which Gable slowly managed to lower, and he gained better resonance and tone. As his speech habits improved, Gable's facial expressions became more natural and convincing. After the long period of rigorous training, she eventually considered him ready to attempt a film career.
In 1930, Gable and Josephine Dillon were divorced. A few days later, he married Texas socialite Ria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham. After moving to California, they were married again in 1931, possibly due to differences in state legal requirements.
"His ears are too big and he looks like an ape," said Warner Bros. executive Darryl F. Zanuck about Clark Gable after testing him for the lead in Warner's gangster drama Little Caesar (1931). After several failed screen tests for Barrymore and Zanuck, Gable was signed in 1930 by MGM's Irving Thalberg. He became a client of well-connected agent Minna Wallis, sister of producer Hal Wallis and very close friend of Norma Shearer.
Gable's timing in arriving in Hollywood was excellent as MGM was looking to expand its stable of male stars and he fit the bill. Gable then worked mainly in supporting roles, often as the villain. MGM's publicity manager Howard Strickland developed Gable's studio image, playing up his he-man experiences and his 'lumberjack in evening clothes' persona. To bolster his rocketing popularity, MGM frequently paired him with well-established female stars. Joan Crawford asked for him as her co-star in Dance, Fools, Dance (1931). He built his fame and public visibility in such movies as A Free Soul (1931), in which he played a gangster who slapped the character played by Norma Shearer (Gable never played a supporting role again after that slap). The Hollywood Reporter wrote "A star in the making has been made, one that, to our reckoning, will outdraw every other star... Never have we seen audiences work themselves into such enthusiasm as when Clark Gable walks on the screen". He followed that with Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) (1931) with Greta Garbo, and Possessed (1931), in which he and Joan Crawford (then married to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) steamed up the screen with some of the passion they shared for decades to come in real life. Adela Rogers St. John later dubbed the relationship as "the affair that nearly burned Hollywood down." Louis B. Mayer threatened to terminate both their contracts and for a while they kept apart and Gable shifted his attentions to Marion Davies. On the other hand, Gable and Garbo disliked each other. She thought he was a wooden actor while he considered her a snob.
According to legend, Gable was lent to Columbia Pictures, then considered a second-rate operation, as punishment for refusing roles; however, this has been refuted by more recent biographies. MGM did not have a project ready for Gable and was paying him $2000 per week, under his contract, to do nothing. Studio head Louis B. Mayer lent him to Columbia for $2500 per week, making a $500 per week profit. Filming began in a tense atmosphere, in the trailer for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)]] Gable won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his 1934 performance in the film. He returned to MGM a bigger star than ever.
The unpublished memoirs of animator Friz Freleng mention that this was one of his favorite films. It has been claimed that it helped inspire the cartoon character Bugs Bunny. Four things in the film may have coalesced to create Bugs: the personality of a minor character, Oscar Shapely and his penchant for referring to Gable's character as "Doc", an imaginary character named "Bugs Dooley" that Gable's character uses to frighten Shapely, and most of all, a scene in which Clark Gable eats carrots while talking quickly with his mouth full, as Bugs does.
Gable also earned an Academy Award nomination when he portrayed Fletcher Christian in 1935's Mutiny on the Bounty. Gable once said that this was his favorite film of his own, despite the fact that he did not get along with his co-stars Charles Laughton and Franchot Tone.
In the following years, he acted in a succession of enormously popular pictures, earning him the undisputed title of "King of Hollywood" in 1938. The title 'King' was first offered by Spencer Tracy, probably in jest but soon Ed Sullivan started a poll in his newspaper column and more than 20 million fans voted Gable 'King' and Myrna Loy 'Queen' of Hollywood. Though the honorific certainly helped his career, Gable grew tired of it and later stated, "This 'King' stuff is pure bullshit...I'm just a lucky slob from Ohio. I happened to be in the right place at the right time". Throughout most of the 1930s and the early 1940s, he was arguably the world's biggest movie star.
During the filming of the movie, Vivien Leigh complained about Gable's bad breath, which was apparently caused by his false teeth. Otherwise, they got along quite well. Gable's most famous line in any film was his closing, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn".
Gable was also reportedly friends with the African-American actress Hattie McDaniel, and he even slipped her a real alcoholic drink during the scene they were supposed to be celebrating the birth of Scarlett and Rhett's daughter. Gable also tried to boycott the premier of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, Georgia, because McDaniel was not allowed to attend it, and he only went after she pleaded with him to go. Gable remained friends with McDaniel, and he always attended her Hollywood parties, especially when she was raising funds for World War II.
Gable did not want to shed tears for the scene after Scarlett (Leigh) has a miscarriage. Olivia de Havilland made him cry, later commenting, "... Oh, he would not do it. He would not! Victor (Fleming) tried everything with him. He tried to attack him on a professional level. We had done it without him weeping several times and then we had one last try. I said, "You can do it, I know you can do it and you will be wonderful ..." Well, by heaven, just before the cameras rolled, you could see the tears come up at his eyes and he played the scene unforgettably well. He put his whole heart into it."
Decades later, Gable said that whenever his career would start to fade, a re-release of Gone with the Wind would soon revive his popularity, and he continued as a top leading actor for the rest of his life. In addition, Gable was one of the few actors to play the lead in three films that won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Gone with the Wind was given theatrical re-releases in 1947, 1954, 1961, 1967 (in a widescreen version), 1971, 1989, and 1998.
On January 16, 1942, Lombard was a passenger on Trans-World Airlines Flight 3. She had just finished her 57th movie, To Be or Not to Be, and was on her way home from a successful war bond selling tour when the flight's DC-3 airliner crashed into a mountain near Las Vegas, Nevada, killing all aboard, including Lombard, her mother, and her MGM staff publicist Otto Winkler (who had been the best man at Gable's wedding to Lombard). Gable flew to the crash site, and he saw the forest fire that had been ignited by the burning airliner. Lombard was declared to be the first war-related American female casualty of World War II, and Gable received a personal condolence note from President Roosevelt. The Civil Aeronautics Board investigation into the crash concluded that "pilot error" was its cause.
Gable returned to his and Lombard's empty house, and a month later, he returned to the studio to work with Lana Turner in the movie, Somewhere I'll Find You. Gable was devastated by the tragic death of his wife for many months afterwards, and he began to drink heavily. However, he carried out his performances professionally on the movie sets. Gable was seen to break down for the first time in public when Lombard's funeral request note was given to him. For a while, Joan Crawford returned to his side to offer her support and friendship.
Gable resided for the rest of his life at his and Lombard's house in Encino. He acted in twenty-seven more movies, and he re-married twice. "But he was never the same," said Esther Williams. "His heart sank a bit."
However, shortly after his enlistment, he and McIntyre were sent to Miami Beach, Florida, where they entered USAAF OCS Class 42-E on August 17, 1942. Both completed training on October 28, 1942, commissioned as second lieutenants. His class of 2,600 fellow students (of which he ranked 700th in class standing) selected Gable as their graduation speaker, at which General Arnold presented them their commissions. Arnold then informed Gable of his special assignment, to make a recruiting film in combat with the Eighth Air Force to recruit gunners. Gable and McIntyre were immediately sent to Flexible Gunnery School at Tyndall Field, Florida, followed by a photography course at Fort George Wright, Washington, and promoted to first lieutenants upon completion.
After Joan Crawford's third divorce, she and Gable resumed their affair and lived together for a brief time. Gable was acclaimed for his performance in The Hucksters (1947), a satire of post-war Madison Avenue corruption and immorality. A very public and brief romance with Paulette Goddard occurred after that. In 1949, Gable married Sylvia Ashley, a British divorcée and the widow of Douglas Fairbanks. The relationship was profoundly unsuccessful; they divorced in 1952. Soon followed Never Let Me Go (1953), opposite Gene Tierney. Tierney was a favorite of Gable and he was very disappointed when she was replaced in Mogambo (due to her mental health problems) by Grace Kelly. Mogambo (1953), directed by John Ford, was a Technicolor remake of his earlier film Red Dust, which had been an even greater success. Gable's on-location affair with Grace Kelly sputtered out after filming was completed.
Gable became increasingly unhappy with what he considered mediocre roles offered him by MGM, while the studio regarded his salary as excessive. Studio head Louis B. Mayer was fired in 1951 amid slumping Hollywood production and revenue, due primarily to the rising popularity of television. Studio chiefs struggled to cut costs. Many MGM stars were fired or not renewed, including Greer Garson and Judy Garland. In 1953, Gable refused to renew his contract, and began to work independently. His first two films were Soldier of Fortune and The Tall Men, both profitable though only modest successes. In 1955, Gable married his fifth wife, Kay Spreckels (née Kathleen Williams), a thrice-married former fashion model and actress who had previously been married to sugar-refining heir Adolph B. Spreckels Jr.
In 1955, Gable formed a production company with Jane Russell and her husband Bob Waterfield, and they produced The King and Four Queens, Gable's one and only production. He found producing and acting to be too taxing on his health, and he was beginning to manifest a noticeable tremor particularly in long takes. His next project was Band of Angels, with relative newcomer Sidney Poitier and Yvonne De Carlo; it was a total disaster. Newsweek said, "Here is a movie so bad that it must be seen to be disbelieved." Next he paired with Doris Day in Teacher's Pet, shot in black and white to better hide his aging face and overweight body. The film was good enough to bring Gable more film offers, including Run Silent, Run Deep, with co-star and producer Burt Lancaster, which featured his first on screen death since 1937, and which garnered good reviews. Gable started to receive television offers but rejected them outright, even though some of his peers, like his old flame Loretta Young, were flourishing in the new medium. At 57, Gable finally acknowledged, "Now it's time I acted my age". His next two films were light comedies for Paramount: But Not for Me with Carroll Baker and It Started in Naples with Sophia Loren (his last film in color). Both received poor reviews and flopped at the box office.
Gable's last film was The Misfits, written by Arthur Miller, directed by John Huston, and co-starring Marilyn Monroe, Eli Wallach, and Montgomery Clift. This was also the final film completed by Monroe. Many critics regard Gable's performance to be his finest, and Gable, after seeing the rough cuts, agreed.
According to Lewis, Gable visited her home once, but he didn't tell her that he was her father. Neither Gable nor Young would ever publicly acknowledge their daughter's real parentage, but this fact was so widely known that, in Lewis' autobiography Uncommon Knowledge, she wrote that she was shocked to learn of it from other children at school. Loretta Young never officially acknowledged the fact, which she said would be the same as admitting to a "venial sin." However, she finally gave her biographer permission to include it only on the condition that the book not be published until after her death.
On March 20, 1961, Kay Gable gave birth to Gable's son, John Clark Gable, born four months after Clark's death.
Longtime friend, eight time co-star and on-again, off-again romance Joan Crawford concurred, stating on David Frost's TV show in 1970, "he was a king wherever he went. He walked like one, he behaved like one, and he was the most masculine man that I have ever met in my life."
Actor Robert Ryan, in character as Nathan Stark in the 1955 film: "The Tall Men" paid Gable what is probably his best tribute: "He's what every boy thinks he's going to be when he grows up, and wishes he had been when he's an old man."
Robert Taylor said Gable "was a great, great guy and certainly one of the great stars of all times, if not the greatest. I think that I sincerely doubt that there will ever be another like Clark Gable, he was one of a kind."
Gable is known to have appeared as an extra in 13 films between 1924 and 1930. He then appeared in a total of 67 theatrically released motion pictures, as himself in 17 "short subject" films, and he narrated and appeared in a World War II propaganda film entitled Combat America, produced by the United States Army Air Forces.
In the film Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937) 15-year-old Judy Garland sings "You Made Me Love You" while looking at a composite picture of Clark Gable. The opening lines are: "Dear Mr. Gable, I am writing this to you, and I hope that you will read it so you'll know, my heart beats like a hammer, and I stutter and I stammer, every time I see you at the picture show, I guess I'm just another fan of yours, and I thought I'd write and tell you so. You made me love you, I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it..."
Bugs Bunny's nonchalant carrot-chewing standing position, as explained by Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Bob Clampett, originated in a scene in the film It Happened One Night, in which Clark Gable's character leans against a fence, eating carrots rapidly and talking with his mouth full to Claudette Colbert's character. This scene was well known while the film was popular, and viewers at the time likely recognized Bugs Bunny's behavior as satire.
The Postal Service's album Give Up (2003) features a track entitled "Clark Gable."
In the 1999 pop song Girl on TV by LFO he is referenced in the song:
I wished for you on a falling star wondering where you are do I ever cross your mind in the warm sunshine? She's from the city of angels like Bette Davis, James Dean, and Gable.
Category:1901 births Category:1960 deaths Category:20th-century actors Category:People from Cadiz, Ohio Category:Actors from Ohio Category:American film actors Category:American military personnel of World War II Category:Recipients of the Air Medal Category:American Roman Catholics Category:American silent film actors Category:Best Actor Academy Award winners Category:Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Glendale) Category:California Republicans Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:American actors of German descent Category:American people of Irish descent Category:Kentucky colonels Category:Ohio Republicans Category:People from Akron, Ohio Category:Recipients of the Distinguished Flying Cross (United States) Category:United States Army Air Forces officers Category:First Motion Picture Unit personnel
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| Name | Carole Lombard |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Jane Alice Peters |
| Birth date | October 06, 1908 |
| Birth place | Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S. |
| Death date | |
| Death place | Mount Potosi, near Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. |
| Resting place | Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California |
| Spouse | William Powell (1931–1933; divorced)Clark Gable (1939–1942; her death) |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Years active | 1921–1942 |
Carole Lombard (October 6, 1908 – January 16, 1942) was an American actress. She was particularly noted for her comedic roles in several classic films of the 1930s, most notably in the 1936 film My Man Godfrey. She is listed as one of the American Film Institute's greatest stars of all time and was the highest-paid star in Hollywood in the late 1930s, earning around US$500,000 per year (more than five times the salary of the US President). Lombard's career was cut short when she died at the age of 33 in the crash of TWA Flight 3.
Lombard achieved a few minor successes in the early 1930s in 1930's Safety in Numbers with Charles "Buddy" Rogers and 1932's No Man of Her Own with Clark Gable, but she was continuously cast in second-rate films. It was not until 1934 that her career began to take off. That year, director Howard Hawks encountered Lombard at a party and became enamored with her saucy personality, thinking her just right for his latest project. He hired her for Twentieth Century, alongside stage legend John Barrymore. Lombard was at first intimidated by Barrymore, but the two quickly developed a good working rapport. The film bolstered Lombard's reputation immensely and brought her a level of fame that her previously lackluster career had eschewed her from. in Swing High, Swing Low (1937)]]
Also in 1934, she starred in Bolero with George Raft and it was for this film that she turned down the role of Ellie Andrews in It Happened One Night. In 1935 she starred in Mitchell Leisen's Hands Across the Table which helped to establish her reputation as a top comedy actress. 1936 proved to be a big year for Lombard with her casting in the screwball comedy My Man Godfrey alongside ex-husband William Powell. Her performance earned Lombard an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. It was followed by Nothing Sacred in 1937, casting her opposite Fredric March and under the direction of William A. Wellman. It was Lombard's only film in Technicolor and was regarded a critical and commercial smash. Nothing Sacred put Lombard at the top of the Hollywood tier and established her one of the highest paid actresses in the business.
(1940).]] In 1938, Lombard suffered a flop with Fools for Scandal and moved on to dramatic films for the next few years. In 1939, Lombard took roles opposite James Stewart in producer David O. Selznick's Made for Each Other (1939) and Cary Grant in In Name Only (1939). She also starred in the dramatic Vigil in the Night in 1940.
Audiences did not respond as well to Lombard in dramatic roles and she made a return to comedy, teaming with director Alfred Hitchcock in Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941). The film gave Lombard's career a much needed boost and she followed her success with what proved to be her last film, and one of her most successful, To Be or Not to Be (1942).
In 1934, following her divorce from Powell, Lombard moved into a house on Hollywood Boulevard. She lived with a friend from the days of Mack Sennett, Madalynne Fields, who became Lombard's personal secretary and whom Lombard called "Fieldsie." Lombard became known as one of Hollywood's great hostesses for her outrageous parties with unconventional themes. During this time she carried on relationships with actors Gary Cooper and George Raft, as well as the screenwriter Robert Riskin.
Also during 1934, Lombard met and began a serious affair with crooner Russ Columbo. Columbo reportedly proposed marriage, but was killed in a freak shooting accident at the age of 26. To reporters Lombard said Columbo was the love of her life.
Lombard's most famous relationship came in 1936 when she became involved with actor Clark Gable. They had worked together previously in 1932's No Man of Her Own, but at the time Lombard was still happily married to Powell and knew Gable to have the reputation of a roving eye. They were indifferent to each other on the set and did not keep in touch.
It was not until 1936, when Gable came to the Mayfair Ball that Lombard had planned, that their romance began to take off. Gable, however, was married at the time to oil heiress Rhea Langham, and the affair was kept quiet. The situation proved a major factor in Gable accepting the role of Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, as MGM head Louis B. Mayer sweetened the deal for a reluctant Clark Gable by giving him enough money to settle a divorce agreement with Langham and marry Lombard. Gable divorced Langham on March 7, 1939 and proposed to Lombard in a telephone booth at the Brown Derby.
During a break in production on Gone With the Wind, Gable and Lombard drove out to Kingman, Arizona on March 29, 1939 and were married in a quiet ceremony with only Gable's press agent, Otto Winkler, in attendance. They bought a ranch previously owned by director Raoul Walsh in Encino, California and lived a happy, unpretentious life, calling each other "Ma" and "Pa" and raising chickens and horses. Although they attempted, their efforts to have a child were ultimately unsuccessful.
Off-screen, Lombard was much loved for her unpretentious personality and well known for her earthy sense of humor and blue language. Friends of Lombard's included Alfred Hitchcock, Marion Davies, William Haines, Jean Harlow, Fred MacMurray, Cary Grant, Jack Benny, Jorge Negrete, William Powell, and Lucille Ball.
(1937).]]
Shortly after her death at the age of 33, Gable (who was inconsolable and devastated by her loss) joined the United States Army Air Forces. After officers training, Gable headed a six-man motion picture unit attached to a B-17 bomb group in England to film aerial gunners in combat, flying five missions himself. Gable attended the launch of the Liberty ship , named in her honor, on January 15, 1944.
On January 18, 1942, Jack Benny did not perform his usual program, both out of respect for Lombard and grief at her death. Instead, he devoted his program to an all-music format.
Lombard's final film, To Be or Not to Be (1942), directed by Ernst Lubitsch and co-starring Jack Benny, a satire about Nazism and World War II, was in post-production at the time of her death. The film's producers decided to cut the part of the film in which her character asks, "What can happen on a plane?" as they felt it was in poor taste, given the circumstances of Lombard's death.
At the time of her death, Lombard had been scheduled to star in the film They All Kissed the Bride; when production started, her role was given to Joan Crawford. Crawford donated all of her pay for this film to the Red Cross.
Lombard is interred at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. The name on her crypt marker is "Carole Lombard Gable". Although Gable remarried, he was interred next to her when he died in 1960. Bess Peters was also interred beside her daughter .
Lombard's Fort Wayne childhood home has been designated a historic landmark. The city named the nearby bridge over the St Mary's River the "Carole Lombard Memorial Bridge." (1937)]]
Category:20th-century actors Category:Accidental deaths in Nevada Category:Actors from Indiana Category:American Bahá'ís Category:American film actors Category:American silent film actors Category:Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Glendale) Category:California Democrats Category:Fairfax High School (Los Angeles) alumni Category:American actors of German descent Category:American actors of English descent Category:Indiana Democrats Category:People from Fort Wayne, Indiana Category:Victims of aviation accidents or incidents in the United States Category:1908 births Category:1942 deaths
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| Name | Loretta Young |
|---|---|
| Caption | from the trailer for She Had to Say Yes (1933) |
| Birth name | Gretchen Michaela Young |
| Birth date | January 06, 1913 |
| Birth place | Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S. |
| Death date | August 12, 2000 |
| Death place | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Years active | 1917–2000 |
| Spouse |
Loretta Young (January 6, 1913 – August 12, 2000) was an American actress. Starting as a child actress, she had a long and varied career in film from 1917 to 1953. She won the 1948 best actress Academy Award for her role in the 1947 film The Farmer's Daughter, and received an Oscar nomination for her role in Come to the Stable, in 1950.
Young then moved to the relatively new medium of television, where she had a dramatic anthology series called The Loretta Young Show, from 1953 to 1961. The series earned three Emmy Awards, and reran successfully on daytime TV and later in syndication. Young, a devout Catholic, later worked with various Catholic charities after her acting career.
Young and her sisters Polly Ann and Elizabeth Jane (screen name Sally Blane) worked as child actresses, of whom Loretta was the most successful. Young's first role was at the age of three, in the silent film The Primrose Ring. The movie's star Mae Murray so fell in love with Young that she wanted to adopt her. Although her mother declined, Young was allowed to live with Murray for two years. During her high school years, Young was educated at Ramona Convent Secondary School.
In 1930, Young, then 17, eloped with 26-year-old actor Grant Withers and married him in Yuma, Arizona. The marriage was annulled the next year, just as their second movie together (appropriately titled Too Young to Marry) was released. (1951)]]
During the Second World War, Young made Ladies Courageous (1944; reissued as Fury in the Sky), the fictionalized story of the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron. It depicted a unit of female pilots during WWII who flew bomber planes from the factories to their final destinations.
Young made as many as seven or eight movies a year. In 1947, she won an Oscar for her performance in The Farmer's Daughter. The same year she co-starred with Cary Grant and David Niven in The Bishop's Wife, a perennial favorite.
In 1949, Young received another Academy Award nomination (for Come to the Stable). In 1953, she appeared in her last theatrical film, It Happens Every Thursday, a Universal comedy about a New York couple who move to California to take over a struggling weekly newspaper. Her costar was John Forsythe.
The program, which earned her three Emmys, was based on the premise that each drama was in answer to a question asked in her fan mail. The program's original title was Letter to Loretta. The title was changed to The Loretta Young Show during the first season (as of the February 14, 1954 episode), and the "letter" concept was dropped at the end of the second season. At this time, Young's hospitalization, due to overwork towards the end of the second season, required that there be a number of guest hosts and guest stars; her first appearance in the 1955–56 season was for the Christmas show. From then on, Young appeared in only about half of each season's shows as an actress, and served as the program's host for the remainder. Minus Young's introductions and conclusions, the series was rerun as the Loretta Young Theatre in daytime by NBC from 1960 to 1964. It also appeared in syndication into the early 1970s, before being withdrawn. In the 1990s, selected episodes from Loretta's personal collection, with the opening and closing segments (and original title) intact, were released on home video, and frequently shown on cable television.
In the 1962–1963 television season, Young appeared as Christine Massey, a free-lance magazine writer and mother of seven children, in CBS's The New Loretta Young Show. It fared poorly in the ratings on Monday evenings against ABC's Ben Casey. It was dropped after twenty-six weeks. Dack Rambo, later a co-star of CBS's Dallas, appeared as one of her twin sons in the series.
She married fashion designer Jean Louis in 1993. Louis died in 1997.
According to Lewis' autobiography Uncommon Knowledge, she was made fun of because of the ears that she received from her father, Clark Gable. She states that, at seven, she had an operation to "pin back" her large ears and that her mother always had her wearing bonnets as a child. Over the years, she had heard rumors that Clark Gable was her biological father. In 1958, Lewis' future husband Joseph Tinney told her "everybody" knew that Gable was her father. The only time she remembered Gable visiting Lewis was once at her home when she was a teenager; she had no idea he was her biological father. Several years later, he turned up at the Loretta Young show after Young had been in hospital for several months. Lewis was an assistant and was right behind her mother when she noticed Gable.
Several years later, after becoming a mother herself, Lewis finally confronted her mother. After promptly vomiting, Young admitted her true parentage, stating that she was "just a walking mortal sin."
In 1972, a jury in Los Angeles awarded Young $550,000 in her breach of contract suit against NBC. Filed in 1966, the suit contended that NBC had allowed foreign television outlets to rerun old episodes of The Loretta Young Show without excluding, as agreed by the parties, the opening segment where Young would make her entrance. Young testified that her image had been damaged by portraying her in "outdated gowns," and a jury agreed to less than the $1.9 million sought.
Young has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; one for motion pictures, at 6104 Hollywood Boulevard, and another for television, at 6141 Hollywood Boulevard.
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| Name | The Walls |
|---|---|
| Landscape | yes |
| Background | group_or_band |
| Origin | Ireland |
| Genre | Rock |
| Years active | 1998 – present |
| Label | Dirtbird Records |
| Associated acts | The Stunning |
| Url | The Walls Official Website |
| Current members | Joe WallSteve WallJon O'ConnellRory DoylePastCarl Harms |
The Walls are an Irish rock band. They were formed in 1998 by two ex-members of The Stunning.
In February 2004, original member Carl Harms decided to leave the band to make his own record. They recruited bassist Jon O’Connell, who had just 2 weeks to learn all the songs before a two week tour of the new EU accession states: Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. "To the Bright and Shining Sun" also featured on the EA Sports soundtrack for the UEFA Euro 2004 official licenced game.
In October 2004, they released a taster - "Drowning Pool" - a blistering, spleen-venting, blues explosion, 2min 52sec long. It took people by surprise and divided opinion - exactly what the band wanted. They supported Bob Dylan to a capacity crowd in Galway that summer and played a storming set that showed there were changes afoot in The Walls sound. They christened the album New Dawn Breaking after the final track on the record. It went straight into the Irish charts at No. 5 in its first week of release in June 2005 and has produced four hit singles: "To the Bright and Shining Sun", "Passing Through", "Drowning Pool" and "Black and Blue".
Category:Musical groups established in 1998 Category:1990s music groups Category:2000s music groups Category:Irish rock music groups
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| Name | Jamieson Price |
|---|---|
| Birthname | Jamieson Kent Price |
| Birth date | April 28, 1961 |
| Birth place | West Palm Beach, Florida |
| Occupation | Actor: Voice,Screen,TV,Stage |
| Alias | Taylor Henry, James Lyon |
Price was born in West Palm Beach, Florida. He is most well known for his deep and booming voice and can be heard in numerous anime shows and video games. He is also known as Taylor Henry and James Lyon. Price will likely be known to most fans as the voice of Walter Bernhard in or Seraph Lamington in ; or in more recent years, his role as Largo "The Black Lion" in Tales of the Abyss, the iconic Lu Bu in the Dynasty Warriors series, the Count of Monte Cristo in Gankutsuou,or as Ovan in .hack//G.U., and even more recently, the role of Duke in Tales of Vesperia, or in the 2000 movie, The Patriot as Captain Bordon, second in command of the British Cavalry.
Category:1961 births Category:American voice actors Category:Living people Category:People from Florida
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Caption | circa 1930 |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Harlean Harlow Carpenter |
| Birth date | March 03, 1911 |
| Birth place | Kansas City, Missouri, U.S. |
| Death date | June 07, 1937 |
| Death place | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Spouse | Charles McGrew (1927–1929) (divorced)Paul Bern (1932) (his death)Harold Rosson (1933–1934) (divorced) |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Years active | 1928–1937 |
| Website | http://www.jeanharlow.com/ |
Jean Harlow (March 3, 1911 – June 7, 1937) was an American film actress and sex symbol of the 1930s. Known as the "Platinum Blonde" and the "Blonde Bombshell" due to her platinum blonde hair, Harlow was ranked as one of the greatest movie stars of all time by the American Film Institute. Harlow starred in several films, mainly designed to showcase her magnetic sex appeal and strong screen presence, before making the transition to more developed roles and achieving massive fame under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Harlow's enormous popularity and "laughing vamp" image were in distinct contrast to her personal life, which was marred by disappointment, tragedy, and ultimately her sudden death from renal failure at age 26.
Harlean was nicknamed "The Baby", which would stick with her for the rest of her life. She was spoiled to the point that she did not learn that her name was actually Harlean and not "Baby" until the age of five, when she began to attend Miss Barstow's Finishing School for Girls in Kansas City. Harlean and her mother were both only children who remained very close to each other; the relationship fulfilled Mother Jean's empty existence and unhappy marriage. "She was always all mine," she said of her daughter. Her mother was extremely protective and coddling, instilling a sense that her daughter owed everything she had to her mother.
With her daughter at school, Mother Jean became increasingly frustrated and filed for divorce, which was finalized, uncontested, September 29, 1922. She was granted sole custody of Harlean, who loved her father but would rarely see him for the rest of her life.
Mother Jean, as she became known when Harlean became a film star, moved with Harlean to Hollywood in 1923 with hopes of becoming an actress. Harlean attended the Hollywood School for Girls and met some of Hollywood's future figures, including Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Joel McCrea and Irene Mayer Selznick. Mother Jean's dream of stardom did not come true; she was too old at age 34 to begin a film career in an era when major roles were usually assigned to teenage girls. Facing dwindling finances, they returned to Kansas City within two years after Skip Harlow issued an ultimatum: either they returned or he would disinherit her. Harlean dropped out of her school in Hollywood in the spring of 1925. Several weeks later, Skip Harlow sent her to a summer camp called Camp Cha-Ton-Ka in Michigamme, Michigan. It was there that Harlean became ill with scarlet fever. Mother Jean traveled to Michigan to care for Harlean, rowing herself across the lake to the camp when she was told that she could not get to her daughter.
The sixteen-year-old Harlean and twenty-year-old McGrew eloped on September 21, 1927. McGrew turned 21 two months after the marriage and received part of his large inheritance. The couple moved to Los Angeles in 1928, settling into a home in Beverly Hills, where Harlean thrived as a wealthy socialite. McGrew hoped to distance Harlean from her mother with the move. Neither of them were working, and both, especially McGrew, were thought to drink heavily.
In Los Angeles, Harlean befriended Rosalie Roy, a young aspiring actress. Lacking a car, Roy asked Harlean to drive her to Fox Studios for an appointment. It was there that Harlean was noticed by Fox executives, while sitting in the car waiting for her friend. Harlean was approached by the executives, but stated that she was not interested. She was given dictated letters of introduction to Central Casting. Recounting this story a few days later, Rosalie Roy made a wager with Harlean that she did not have the nerve to go back and audition for roles. Unwilling to lose a wager and pressed by her enthusiastic mother, Harlean drove to Central Casting and signed in under her mother's maiden name, Jean Harlow.
After her separation from McGrew, Harlow worked as extra in several movies, and was cast as an extra in The Love Parade (1929), followed by small roles in This Thing Called Love and The Saturday Night Kid (1929), a Clara Bow movie. Her next extra work was in Weak But Willing (1929). During filming of Weak But Willing in 1929, she was spotted by James Hall, an actor filming a Howard Hughes film called Hell's Angels. Hughes, re-shooting the film from silent into sound, needed a new actress because the original actress, Greta Nissen, had a Norwegian accent that proved undesirable for a talkie. Harlow made a test and got the part.
Hughes signed her to a five-year, $100 per week contract on October 24, 1929. Hell's Angels premiered in Hollywood on May 27, 1930 at Grauman's Chinese Theater. During the shooting, Harlow met MGM executive Paul Bern, who escorted her, dressed all in white, to the premiere. The movie made Harlow an international star and a sensation with audiences, but critics were less than enthusiastic. The New Yorker called Harlow "plain awful".
(1931)]]
With no projects planned for Harlow, Hughes sent her to New York, Seattle and Kansas City for Hell's Angels premieres. In 1931, loaned out by Hughes' Caddo Company to other studios, Harlow began to gain more attention when she appeared in The Secret Six with Wallace Beery and Clark Gable, Iron Man with Lew Ayres and Robert Armstrong, and The Public Enemy with James Cagney. Though the films ranged from moderate to smash hits, Harlow's acting ability was damned by critics as awful and was mocked. Concerned, Hughes sent her on a brief publicity tour, which was not a success, as Harlow dreaded such personal appearances.
Harlow was next cast in Platinum Blonde (1931) with Loretta Young. Hughes convinced the producers of Platinum Blonde to rename it from its original title of Gallagher in order to promote Harlow's image, for whom the tag had just been invented by Hughes's publicity director. Many of Harlow's female fans were dyeing their hair platinum to match hers. To capitalize on this craze, Hughes' team organized a series of "Platinum Blonde" clubs across the nation, with a prize of $10,000 to any beautician who could match Harlow's shade. For some reason, Harlow denied her hair was dyed.
Harlow next filmed Three Wise Girls (1932), after which, Paul Bern arranged to borrow her for The Beast of the City (1932). When the shooting wrapped, Bello booked a ten-week personal appearance tour in the East Coast. To the surprise of many, especially Harlow herself, she packed every theatre she appeared in, often appearing multiple nights in one venue. Despite critical disparagement and poor roles, Harlow's popularity and following was large and growing, and in February 1932 the tour was extended for additional six weeks.
Apprised of this, Paul Bern, by now romantically involved with Harlow, spoke to Louis B. Mayer about buying out Harlow's contract from Hughes and signing her to MGM. Mayer would have none of it. MGM's leading ladies were presented in an elegant way, and Harlow's silver screen image was that of a floozy, which was abhorrent to Mayer. Bern then began urging close friend Irving Thalberg, production head of MGM, to sign Harlow, noting Harlow's pre-existing popularity and established image. After initial reluctance, Thalberg agreed, and on March 3, 1932, Harlow's twenty-first birthday, Bern called her with the news that MGM had bought Harlow's contract from Hughes for $30,000. Harlow would afterwards report to MGM and officially joined the studio on April 20, 1932. Her first task at MGM would be a screen test for Red-Headed Woman.
According to Fay Wray, who played Ann Darrow in the classic King Kong (1933), Harlow had been the original choice to play the screaming blonde heroine. Because MGM put Harlow under exclusive contract during the pre-production phase of the film, she became unavailable for Kong, and the part went to the brunette Wray, wearing a blonde wig.
Harlow became a superstar at MGM. She was given superior movie roles to show off not only her beauty but also what turned out to be a genuine comedic talent. In 1932, she had the starring role in Red-Headed Woman, for which she received $1,250 a week, and Red Dust, her second film with Clark Gable. These films showed her to be much more at ease in front of the camera and highlighted her skill as a comedienne. Harlow and Gable worked well together and co-starred in a total of six films. She was also paired multiple times with Spencer Tracy and William Powell. As her star ascended, sometimes the power of Harlow's name was used to boost up-and-coming male co-stars, such as Robert Taylor and Franchot Tone.
At this point MGM began creating a distance between Harlow and her screen characters, changing her childhood surname from common "Carpenter" to chic "Carpentier", claiming that writer Edgar Allan Poe was one of her ancestors and published photographs of Harlow doing charity work. MGM tried to change her image from a brassy, exotic platinum blonde to the more mainstream, all-American type preferred by studio boss Mayer. Her early image proved difficult to change and once Harlow was heard muttering, "My God, must I always wear a low-cut dress to be important?" The screen Harlow at the end of her life was quite different from that of 1930, when audiences first took notice of her. One constant was that Harlow always seemed to have a sense of humor.
During the making of Red Dust, Harlow's second husband, MGM producer Paul Bern was found dead at their home, creating a scandal that still reverberates. Initially, the Hollywood community whispered that Harlow had killed Bern herself, though this was just rumor, and Bern's death was officially ruled a suicide. Harlow kept silent and survived the ordeal, and became more popular than ever.
(1936)]]
After Bern's death, Harlow began an indiscreet affair with boxer Max Baer. Although he was separated from his wife, Dorothy Dunbar, at the time of their affair, Dunbar threatened divorce proceedings, naming Harlow as a correspondent for "alienation of affection", a legal term for adultery. MGM defused the situation by arranging a marriage between Harlow and cinematographer Harold Rosson. Still feeling the aftershocks of Bern's mysterious death, the studio didn't want another Harlow scandal on its hands. Rosson and Harlow were friends, and Rosson went along with the plan. They quietly divorced seven months later.
After the box office hits Hold Your Man and Red Dust, MGM realized it had a goldmine in the Harlow-Gable teaming and paired them in two more films: China Seas with Wallace Beery and Rosalind Russell and Wife vs. Secretary with Myrna Loy and young James Stewart. Other co-stars included Spencer Tracy, Robert Taylor and William Powell.
By the mid-1930s, Harlow was one of the biggest stars in America and hopefully MGM's next Greta Garbo. She was still a young woman with her star continuously in the ascendant, while the popularity of other female stars at MGM, such as Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer, was waning. Harlow's movies continued to make huge profits at the box office, even during the middle of the Depression. Some credit them with keeping MGM profitable at a time when other studios were falling into bankruptcy.
Following the end of her third marriage in 1934, Harlow met William Powell, another MGM star, and quickly fell in love. Reportedly, the couple were engaged for two years, but differences kept them from formalizing their relationship (she wanted children; he did not). Harlow also said that Louis B. Mayer would never allow them to marry.
On May 30, Powell checked on Harlow, and when she did not feel any better, her mother was recalled from a holiday trip and Dr. Fishbaugh visited Harlow at her home. Harlow even felt better on June 3. Co-workers expected her back on the set by Monday, June 7. Press reports were contradictory with headlines like "Jean Harlow seriously ill" and "Harlow past illness crisis". When Harlow said on June 6 that she could no longer see Powell properly, he called a doctor. When she slipped into a deep slumber and had difficulties in breathing, the doctor finally realized that she was suffering from something other than gall bladder infection and flu. Hospital records mention uremia.
For years, rumors circulated about Harlow’s death. It was claimed that her mother had refused to call in a doctor because she was a Christian Scientist, or that Harlow herself had declined hospital treatment or surgery. It was also rumored that Harlow had died because of alcoholism, botched abortion, over-dieting, sunstroke, poisoning due to platinum hair dye or various venereal diseases. However, based on medical bulletins, hospital records and testimony of her relatives and friends, it was proven to be a case of kidney disease. However, Harlow’s mother prevented some people from seeing her, such as the MGM doctor who later stated that it was because they were Christian Scientists. It has been suggested that she still wanted to control her daughter, but it is untrue that she refused Harlow medical care.
Harlow had suffered serious kidney failure which could not have been cured in the 1930s. Death rate from acute kidney failure has decreased to 25% only after antibiotics, dialysis and kidney transplantation, and Harlow’s grey complexion, recurring illnesses and severe sunburn were signs of the disease. Her kidneys had been slowly failing and toxins started to build up in her body, exposing her to other illnesses and causing symptoms included swelling, fatigue and lack of appetite. Toxins also adversely impacted her brain and central nervous system.
News of Harlow’s death spread fast. Spencer Tracy wrote in his diary, "Jean Harlow died today. Grand gal." One of the MGM writers later said: ”The day Baby died there wasn’t one sound in the commissary for three hours.” MGM was closed down on the day of Harlow’s funeral on June 9. She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California in the Great Mausoleum in a private room of multicoloured marble, which William Powell had bought for $25,000. She was buried in the gown she wore in Libeled Lady, and in her hands she had a white gardenia and a note in which Powell had written: ”Goodnight, my dearest darling.” Drawers in the same room were reserved for Harlow’s mother and William Powell. but Powell remarried in 1940 and was buried elsewhere when he died in 1984. There is a simple inscription on Harlow’s grave, "Our Baby".
MGM planned to replace Harlow in Saratoga with another actress, but because of public objections the film was finished by using three doubles (one for close-ups, one for long shots and one for dubbing Harlow’s lines) as well as writing her character off some scenes. The film was proclaimed to be her best film. Ever since, viewers watching the film have tried to spot these stand-ins and signs of Harlow’s illness.
{| class="wikitable sortable" |+ Short subjects |- ! Year ! Title ! Role ! class="unsortable" | Notes |- | 1928 | Chasing Husbands | Bathing beauty | Uncredited |- | 1929 | Liberty | Woman in cab | as Harlean Carpenter |- | 1929 | Why Is a Plumber? | | |- | 1929 | | | Uncredited |- | 1929 | Double Whoopee | Swanky blonde | |- | 1929 | Thundering Toupees | | |- | 1929 | Bacon Grabbers | Mrs. Kennedy | |- | 1929 | Weak But Willing | | |- | 1932 | Screen Snapshots | Herself | |- | 1933 | Hollywood on Parade No. A-12 | Herself | |- | 1933 | Hollywood on Parade No. B-1 | Herself | |- | 1934 | Hollywood on Parade No. B-6 | Herself | |- | 1937 | | Herself | Uncredited |}
Category:American film actors Category:American silent film actors Category:Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Glendale) Category:Deaths from renal failure Category:Former Christian Scientists Category:People from the Kansas City metropolitan area Category:1911 births Category:1937 deaths Category:People from Los Angeles, California Category:20th-century actors
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| Name | Henry Fonda |
|---|---|
| Caption | Fonda in the 1937 film Slim. |
| Birth date | May 16, 1905 |
| Birth place | Grand Island, Nebraska, U.S. |
| Death date | August 12, 1982 |
| Death place | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Birth name | Henry Jaynes Fonda |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 1935–1982 |
| Spouse | Margaret Sullavan (1931-1932) Frances Ford Seymour (1936-1950) Susan Blanchard (1950-1956) Afdera Franchetti (1957-1961) Shirlee Mae Adams (1965-1982) |
Henry Jaynes Fonda (May 16, 1905 – August 12, 1982) was an American film and stage actor.
Fonda made his mark early as a Broadway actor. He also appeared in 1938 in plays performed in White Plains, New York, with Joan Tompkins. He made his Hollywood debut in 1935, and his career gained momentum after his Academy Award-nominated performance as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, a 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about an Oklahoma family who moved west during the Dust Bowl. Throughout six decades in Hollywood, Fonda cultivated a strong, appealing screen image in such classics as The Ox-Bow Incident, Mister Roberts and 12 Angry Men. Later, Fonda moved toward both more challenging, darker epics as Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (portraying a villain who kills, among others, a child) and lighter roles in family comedies like Yours, Mine and Ours with Lucille Ball.
Fonda was the patriarch of a family of famous actors, including daughter Jane Fonda, son Peter Fonda, granddaughter Bridget Fonda, and grandson Troy Garity; his family and close friends called him "Hank". In 1999, he was named the sixth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute.
Fonda was brought up as a Christian Scientist, though he was baptized an Episcopalian at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Grand Island, and claimed that "my whole damn family was nice". They were a close family and highly supportive, especially in health matters, as they avoided doctors due to their religion. Fonda was a bashful, short boy who tended to avoid girls, except his sisters, and was a good skater, swimmer, and runner. He worked part-time in his father's print plant and imagined a possible career as a journalist. Later, he worked after school for the phone company. He also enjoyed drawing. Fonda was active in the Boy Scouts of America, Teichmann reports that he reached the rank of Eagle Scout. When he was about fourteen, his father took him to observe a lynching, from the window of his father's plant, of a young black man accused of rape. This so enraged the young Fonda that a keen social awareness of prejudice was present within him for his entire adult life. By his senior year in high school, he grew suddenly to over six feet but remained a shy teenager. He then attended the University of Minnesota, majoring in journalism, but he did not graduate. He took a job with the Retail Credit Company.
At age 20, Fonda started his acting career at the Omaha Community Playhouse when his mother's friend Dodie Brando (mother of Marlon Brando) recommended that he try-out for a juvenile part in You and I, in which he was cast as Ricky. When he received the lead in Merton of the Movies, he realized the beauty of acting as a profession, as it allowed him to deflect attention from his own tongue-tied personality and create stage characters relying on someone else's scripted words. Fonda decided to quit his job and go East in 1928 to strike his fortune. He arrived on Cape Cod and had just finished a role at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts when a friend took him over to Falmouth where he instantly became a valued member of the new University Players, an intercollegiate summer stock company, where he worked with Margaret Sullavan, his future wife, and which would be responsible for a lifelong friendship with James Stewart. He landed his first professional role in the University Players production of The Jest, by Sem Benelli, when Joshua Logan, a young sophomore at Princeton who had been double-cast in the show, gave Fonda the part of Tornaquinci, "an elderly Italian with long, white beard and heavy wig." Also in the cast of The Jest with Fonda and Logan were Bretaigne Windust, Kent Smith, and Eleanor Phelps.
Fonda's film career blossomed as he costarred with Sylvia Sidney and Fred MacMurray in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936), the first Technicolor movie filmed outdoors. He also starred with ex-wife Margaret Sullavan in The Moon's Our Home, and a short re-kindling of their relationship led to a brief consideration of re-marriage. Sullavan then married Fonda's agent Leland Hayward and Fonda married socialite Frances Ford Seymour, who had little interest in the movies or the theater. Fonda got the nod for the lead role in You Only Live Once (1937), also costarring Sidney, and directed by Fritz Lang. Fonda's first child Jane Fonda was born on December 21, 1937. A critical success opposite Bette Davis, who had picked Fonda, in the film Jezebel (1938) was followed by the title role in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), his first collaboration with director John Ford and as Frank James in Jesse James (1939). Another 1939 film was Drums along the Mohawk directed by John Ford where he played Gil Martin.
Fonda's successes led Ford to recruit him to play "Tom Joad" in the film version of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath (1940), but a reluctant Darryl Zanuck, who preferred Tyrone Power, insisted on Fonda's signing a seven-year contract with the studio, Twentieth Century-Fox. Fonda agreed, and was ultimately nominated for an Academy Award for his work in the 1940 film, which many consider to be his finest role, but his friend James Stewart won the Best Actor award for his role in The Philadelphia Story. Second child Peter Fonda was born in 1940. He starred in The Return of Frank James (1940) with Gene Tierney.
Fonda then enlisted in the Navy to fight in World War II, saying, "I don't want to be in a fake war in a studio." Previously, he and Stewart had helped raise funds for the defense of Britain. Fonda served for three years, initially as a Quartermaster 3rd Class on the destroyer . He was later commissioned as a Lieutenant Junior Grade in Air Combat Intelligence in the Central Pacific and was awarded a Presidential Citation and the Bronze Star.
Refusing another long-term studio contract, Fonda returned to Broadway, wearing his own officer's cap to originate the title role in Mister Roberts, a comedy about the Navy, where Fonda, a junior officer, wages a private war against the captain. He won a 1948 Tony Award for the part. Fonda followed that by reprising his performance in the national tour and with successful stage runs in Point of No Return and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. After a few years almost completely absent from films, he starred in the 1955 film version of Mister Roberts opposite James Cagney, William Powell and Jack Lemmon, continuing a pattern of bringing his acclaimed stage roles to life on the big screen. On the set of Mister Roberts, Fonda came to blows with John Ford, who punched him during filming, and vowed never to work for him again. He never did (though he appeared in Peter Bogdanovich's acclaimed documentary "Directed by John Ford" and spoke glowingly of Ford therein).
Fonda followed Mr. Roberts with Paramount Pictures's production of the Leo Tolstoy epic War and Peace, in which he played Pierre Bezukhov opposite Audrey Hepburn, and which took two years to shoot. Fonda worked with Alfred Hitchcock in 1956, playing a man falsely accused of robbery in The Wrong Man, an unusual semi-documentary work of Hitchcock's based on an actual incident and partly filmed on location.
]] In 1957, Fonda made his first foray into production with 12 Angry Men, based on a teleplay and a script by Reginald Rose and directed by Sidney Lumet. The low budget production was completed in only seventeen days of filming mostly in one claustrophobic jury room and had a strong cast including Jack Klugman, Lee J. Cobb, Martin Balsam, and E. G. Marshall. The intense film about twelve jurors deciding the fate of a young Puerto Rican man accused of murder was well-received by critics worldwide. Fonda shared the Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations with co-producer Reginald Rose and won the 1958 BAFTA Award for Best Actor for his performance as "Juror #8", who with logic and persistence eventually sways all the jurors to an acquittal. Early on the film drew poorly, but after winning critical acclaim and awards, it proved a success. In spite of the good outcome, Fonda vowed that he would never produce a movie again, fearing that failing as a producer might derail his acting career. After western movies The Tin Star (1957) and Warlock (1959), Fonda returned to the production seat for the NBC western television series The Deputy (1959–1961), in which he starred as Marshal Simon Fry. His co-stars were Allen Case and Read Morgan. About this time, Fonda's fourth troubled marriage was unraveling.
The 1960s saw Fonda perform in a number of war and western epics, including 1962's The Longest Day and How the West Was Won, 1965's In Harm's Way and Battle of the Bulge. In the Cold War suspense film Fail-Safe (1964), Fonda played the President of the United States who tries to avert a nuclear holocaust through tense negotiations with the Soviets after American bombers are mistakenly ordered to attack the USSR. He also returned to more light-hearted cinema in Spencer's Mountain (1963), which was the inspiration for the TV series, The Waltons.
Fonda appeared against type as the villain 'Frank' in 1968's Once Upon a Time in the West. After initially turning down the role, he was convinced to accept it by actor Eli Wallach and director Sergio Leone, who flew from Italy to the United States to persuade him to take the part. Fonda had planned on wearing a pair of brown-colored contact lenses, but Leone preferred the paradox of contrasting close-up shots of Fonda's innocent-looking blue eyes with the vicious personality of the character Fonda played.
Fonda's relationship with Jimmy Stewart survived their disagreements over politics — Fonda was a liberal Democrat, and Stewart a conservative Republican. After a heated argument, they avoided talking politics with each other. The two men teamed up for 1968's Firecreek, where Fonda once again played the heavy. In 1970, Fonda and Stewart costarred in the western The Cheyenne Social Club, a minor film in which they humorously argued politics. They had first appeared together on film in On Our Merry Way (1948), a comedy which also starred William Demarest and Fred MacMurray and featured a grown-up Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer.
Fonda made a return to both foreign and television productions, which provided career sustenance through a decade in which many aging screen actors suffered waning careers. He starred in the ABC television series The Smith Family between 1971 and 1972. 1973's TV-movie The Red Pony, an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel, earned Fonda an Emmy nomination. After the unsuccessful Hollywood melodrama, Ash Wednesday, he filmed three Italian productions released in 1973 and 1974. The most successful of these, My Name Is Nobody, presented Fonda in a rare comedic performance as an old gunslinger whose plans to retire are dampened by a "fan" of sorts.
Fonda continued stage acting throughout his last years, including several demanding roles in Broadway plays. He returned to Broadway in 1974 for the biographical drama, Clarence Darrow, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award. Fonda's health had been deteriorating for years, but his first outward symptoms occurred after a performance of the play in April 1974, when he collapsed from exhaustion. After the appearance of a heart arrhythmia brought on by prostate cancer, a pacemaker was installed following surgery and Fonda returned to the play in 1975. After the run of a 1978 play, First Monday of October, he took the advice of his doctors and quit plays, though he continued to star in films and television.
In 1976, Fonda appeared in several notable television productions, the first being Collision Course, the story of the volatile relationship between President Harry Truman (E.G. Marshall) and General MacArthur (Fonda), produced by ABC. After an appearance in the acclaimed Showtime broadcast of Almos' a Man, based on a story by Richard Wright, he starred in the epic NBC miniseries Captains and Kings, based on Taylor Caldwell's novel. Three years later, he appeared in ABC's , but the miniseries was overshadowed by its predecessor, Roots. Also in 1976, Fonda starred in the World War II blockbuster Midway.
Fonda finished the 1970s in a number of disaster films. The first of these was the 1977 Italian killer octopus thriller Tentacoli (Tentacles) and Rollercoaster, in which Fonda appeared with Richard Widmark and a young Helen Hunt. He performed once again with Widmark, Olivia de Havilland, Fred MacMurray, and José Ferrer in the killer bee action film The Swarm. He also acted in the global disaster film Meteor (his second role as a sitting President of the United States after Fail-Safe), with Sean Connery, Natalie Wood and Karl Malden, and then the Canadian production City on Fire, which also featured Shelley Winters and Ava Gardner. Fonda had a small role with his son, Peter, in 1979's Wanda Nevada, with Brooke Shields.
As Fonda's health continued to suffer and he took longer breaks between filming, critics began to take notice of his extensive body of work. In 1979, the Tony Awards committee gave Fonda a special award for his achievements on Broadway. Lifetime Achievement awards from the Golden Globes and Academy Awards followed in 1980 and 1981, respectively.
Fonda continued to act into the early 1980s, though all but one of the productions he was featured in before his death were for television. These television works included the critically acclaimed live performance of Preston Jones' The Oldest Living Graduate and the Emmy nominated Gideon's Trumpet (co-starring Fay Wray in her last performance).
On Golden Pond in 1981, the film adaptation of Ernest Thompson's play, marked one final professional and personal triumph for Fonda. Directed by Mark Rydell, the project provided unprecedented collaborations between Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, along with Fonda and his daughter, Jane. The elder Fonda played an emotionally brittle and distant father who becomes more accessible at the end of his life. Jane Fonda has said that elements of the story mimicked their real-life relationship, and helped them resolve certain issues. She bought the film rights in the hope that her father would play the role, and later described it as "a gift to my father that was so unbelievably successful."
Premiered in December 1981, the film was well received by critics, and after a limited release on December 4 On Golden Pond developed enough of an audience to be widely released on January 22. With eleven Academy Award nominations, the film earned nearly $120 million at the box office, becoming an unexpected blockbuster. In addition to wins for Hepburn (Best Actress), and Thompson (Screenplay), On Golden Pond brought Fonda his only Oscar - for Best Actor (he would become the oldest recipient of the award; it also earned him a Golden Globe Best Actor award). Fonda was by that point too ill to attend the ceremony, and his daughter Jane Fonda accepted on his behalf. She said when accepting the award that her dad would probably quip, "Well, ain't I lucky."
After Fonda's death, some film critics called this performance "his last and greatest role".
Fonda's relationship with his children has been described as "emotionally distant." In Peter Fonda's 1998 autobiography Don't Tell Dad, he described how he was never sure how his father felt about him, and that he did not tell his father he loved him until his father was elderly and he finally heard the words, "I love you, son." His daughter Jane rejected her father's friendships with Republican actors such as John Wayne and James Stewart, and as a result, their relationship was extremely strained.
Jane Fonda also reported feeling detached from her father, especially during her early acting career. Henry Fonda introduced her to Lee Strasberg, who became her acting teacher, and as she developed as an actress using the techniques of "The Method", she found herself frustrated and unable to understand her father's effortless acting style. In the late 1950s, when she asked him how he prepared before going on stage, she was baffled by his answer, "I don’t know, I stand there, I think about my wife, Afdera, I don't know."
Writer Al Aronowitz, while working on a profile of Jane Fonda for The Saturday Evening Post in the 1960s, asked Henry Fonda about Method acting: "I can't articulate about the Method", he told me, "because I never studied it. I don't mean to suggest that I have any feelings one way or the other about it...I don't know what the Method is and I don’t care what the Method is. Everybody's got a method. Everybody can’t articulate about their method, and I can't, if I have a method—and Jane sometimes says that I use the Method, that is, the capital letter Method, without being aware of it. Maybe I do; it doesn’t matter."
Fonda's daughter shared this view: "My father can't articulate the way he works." Jane said. "He just can't do it. He's not even conscious of what he does, and it made him nervous for me to try to articulate what I was trying to do. And I sensed that immediately, so we did very little talking about it...he said, 'Shut up, I don't want to hear about it.’ He didn’t want me to tell him about it, you know. He wanted to make fun of it."
Fonda himself once admitted in an interview that he felt he wasn't a good father to his children . In the same interview, he explained that he did his best to stay out of the way of Jane and Peter's careers, citing that he felt it was important to them to know that they succeeded because they worked hard and not because they used his fame to achieve their goals.
In the years since his death, Fonda's career has been held in even higher regard than during his life. He is widely recognized as one of the Hollywood greats of the classic era. On the centenary of his birth, May 16, 2005, Turner Classic Movies honored him with a marathon of his films. Also in May 2005, the United States Post Office released a 37-cent postage stamp with an artist's drawing of Fonda as part of their "Hollywood legends" series. Henry Fonda Theater is located at 6126 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, Los Angeles, California.
Henry Fonda received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1978. |rowspan=4|Academy Awards |1940 |Best Actor |The Grapes of Wrath |Nominated |- |1957 |Best Picture |12 Angry Men |NominatedProducer |- |1981 |Best Actor |On Golden Pond |Won |- |1980 |Honorary Award | |Lifetime Achievement |- |rowspan=2|BAFTA Awards |1958 |Best Actor |12 Angry Men |Won |- |1981 |Best Actor |On Golden Pond |Nominated |- |rowspan="3"|Emmy Awards |- |1973 |Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Movie |The Red Pony |Nominated |- |1980 |Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Movie |Gideon's Trumpet |Nominated |- |rowspan="3" |Golden Globes |1958 |Best Motion Picture Actor - Drama |12 Angry Men |Nominated |- |1980 |Cecil B. DeMille Award |Lifetime Achievement |Honorary |- |1982 |Best Motion Picture Actor - Drama |On Golden Pond |Won |- |rowspan="3"|Tony Awards |1975 |Best Actor |Clarence Darrow |Nominated |- |1979 |Special Award |Lifetime Achievement |Honorary |- |1948 |Best Actor |Mister Roberts |Won |}
Category:1905 births Category:1982 deaths Category:20th-century actors Category:Academy Honorary Award recipients Category:Actors from Omaha, Nebraska Category:American Christian Scientists Category:American film actors Category:American military personnel of World War II Category:American people of Dutch descent Category:American stage actors Category:American television actors Category:BAFTA winners (people) Category:Beekeepers Category:Best Actor Academy Award winners Category:Best Drama Actor Golden Globe (film) winners Category:Best Foreign Actor BAFTA Award winners Category:California Democrats Category:Cardiovascular disease deaths in California Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Kennedy Center honorees Category:Nebraska Democrats Category:Recipients of the Bronze Star Medal Category:Spaghetti Western actors Category:Tony Award winners Category:United States Navy officers Category:Vaudeville performers Category:Western (genre) film actors
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| Name | Elizabeth Taylor |
|---|---|
| Caption | Taylor photographed for Argentinean Magazine in 1947 |
| Birth place | Hampstead, London, England |
| Birth name | Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor |
| Birth date | February 27, 1932 |
| Other names | Liz Taylor |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Years active | 1942–2003 |
| Spouse | Conrad Hilton Jr. (1950–1951)Michael Wilding (1952–1957)Mike Todd (1957–1958)Eddie Fisher (1959–1964)Richard Burton (1964–1974)Richard Burton (1975–1976)John Warner (1976–1982)Larry Fortensky (1991–1996) |
| Children | Michael Howard Wilding, born on January 06, 1953Christopher Edward Wilding, born on February 28, 1955Elizabeth Frances Todd, born on August 06, 1957Maria Burton, born on August 01, 1961 |
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, DBE (born 27 February 1932), also known as Liz Taylor, is an English-American actress. She is known for her acting talent and beauty, as well as her Hollywood lifestyle, including many marriages. Taylor is considered one of the great actresses of Hollywood's golden age.
The American Film Institute named Taylor seventh on its Female Legends list.
At the age of three, Taylor began taking ballet lessons with Vaccani. Shortly before the beginning of World War II, her parents decided to return to the United States to avoid hostilities. Her mother took the children first, arriving in New York in April 1939, while her father remained in London to wrap up matters in the art business, arriving in November. They settled in Los Angeles, California, where Sara's family, the Warmbrodts, were then living.
Through Hopper, the Taylors were introduced to Andrea Berens, a wealthy English socialite and also fiancée of Cheever Cowden, chairman and major stockholder of Universal Pictures in Hollywood. Berens insisted that Sara bring Elizabeth to see Cowden who, she was adamant, would be dazzled by Elizabeth's breathtaking dark beauty; she was born with a mutation that caused double rows of eyelashes, which enhanced her appearance on camera. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer soon took interest in the British youngster as well but she failed to secure a contract with them after an informal audition with producer John Considine had shown that she couldn't sing. However, on 18 September 1941, Universal Pictures signed Elizabeth to a six-month renewable contract at $100 a week.
Taylor appeared in her first motion picture at the age of nine in There's One Born Every Minute, her only film for Universal Pictures. Less than six months after she signed with Universal, her contract was reviewed by Edward Muhl, the studio's production chief. Muhl met with Taylor's agent, Myron Selznick (brother of David), and Cheever Cowden. Muhl challenged Selznick's and Cowden's constant support of Taylor: "She can't sing, she can't dance, she can't perform. What's more, her mother has to be one of the most unbearable women it has been my displeasure to meet." Universal cancelled Taylor's contract just short of her tenth birthday in February 1942. Nevertheless on 15 October 1942, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed Taylor to $100 a week for up to three months to appear as Priscilla in Lassie Come Home.
National Velvet grossed over US$4 million at the box office and Taylor was signed to a new long-term contract that raised her salary to $30,000 per year. To capitalize on the box office success of Velvet, Taylor was shoved into another animal opus, Courage of Lassie, in which a different dog named "Bill", cast as an Allied combatant in World War II, regularly outsmarts the Nazis, with Taylor going through another outdoors role. The 1946 success of Courage of Lassie led to another contract drawn up for Taylor earning her $750 per week, her mother $250, as well as a $1,500 bonus. Her roles as Mary Skinner in a loan-out to Warner Brothers' Life With Father (1947), Cynthia Bishop in Cynthia (1947), Carol Pringle in A Date with Judy (1948) and Susan Prackett in Julia Misbehaves (1948) all proved to be successful. Her reputation as a bankable adolescent star and nickname of "One-Shot Liz" (referring to her ability to shoot a scene in one take) promised her a full and bright career with Metro. Taylor's portrayal as Amy, in the American classic Little Women (1949) would prove to be her last adolescent role. In October 1948, she sailed aboard the RMS Queen Mary travelling to England where she would begin filming on Conspirator, where she would play her first adult role.
In late 1949, Taylor had begun filming George Stevens' A Place In The Sun. Upon its release in 1951, Taylor was hailed for her performance as Angela Vickers, a spoiled socialite who comes between George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) and his poor, pregnant factory-working girlfriend Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters).
The film became the pivotal performance of Taylor's career as critics acclaimed it as a classic, a reputation it sustained throughout the next 50 years of cinema history. The New York Times' A.H. Weiler wrote, "Elizabeth's delineation of the rich and beauteous Angela is the top effort of her career," and the Boxoffice reviewer unequivocally stated "Miss Taylor deserves an Academy Award." "If you were considered pretty, you might as well have been a waitress trying to act – you were treated with no respect at all", she later bitterly reflected.
Even with such critical success as an actress, Taylor was increasingly unsatisfied with the roles being offered to her at the time. While she wanted to play the leads in The Barefoot Contessa and I'll Cry Tomorrow, MGM continued to restrict her to mindless and somewhat forgettable films such as: a cameo as herself in Callaway Went Thataway (1951), Love Is Better Than Ever (1952), Ivanhoe (1952), The Girl Who Had Everything (1953) and Beau Brummel (1954).
Taylor had made it perfectly clear that she wanted to play the role of Lady Rowena in Ivanhoe, but the part had already been given to Joan Fontaine and she was handed the thankless role of Rebecca. When she became pregnant with her first child, MGM forced her through The Girl Who Had Everything (even adding two hours to her daily work schedule) so as to get one more film out of her before she became too heavily pregnant. Taylor lamented that she needed the money, as she had just bought a new house with second husband Michael Wilding and with a child on the way things would be pretty tight. Taylor had been forced by her pregnancy to turn down Elephant Walk (1954), though the role had been designed for her. Vivien Leigh, to whom Taylor bore a striking resemblance, got the part and went to Ceylon to shoot on location. Leigh had a nervous breakdown during filming, and Taylor finally reclaimed the role after the birth of her child Michael Wilding, Jr. in January 1953.
Taylor's next screen endeavor, Rhapsody (1954), another tedious romantic drama, proved equally frustrating. Taylor portrayed Louise Durant, a beautiful rich girl in love with a temperamental violinist (Vittorio Gassman) and an earnest young pianist (John Ericson). A film critic for the New York Herald Tribune wrote: "There is beauty in the picture all right, with Miss Taylor glowing into the camera from every angle...but the dramatic pretenses are weak, despite the lofty sentences and handsome manikin poses."
Taylor's fourth period picture, Beau Brummell, made just after Elephant Walk and Rhapsody, cast her as the elaborately costumed Lady Patricia, which many felt was only a screen prop—a ravishing beauty whose sole purpose was to lend romantic support to the film's title star, Stewart Granger.
The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) fared only slightly better than her previous pictures, with Taylor being reunited with The Big Hangover costar Van Johnson. The role of Helen Ellsworth Willis was based on that of Zelda Fitzgerald and, although pregnant with her second child, Taylor went ahead with the film, her fourth in twelve months. Although proving somewhat successful at the box office, she still yearned for meatier roles.
In 1960, Taylor became the highest paid actress up to that time when she signed a one million dollar contract to play the title role in 20th Century Fox's lavish production of Cleopatra,
Taylor won her first Academy Award, for Best Actress in a Leading Role, for her performance as Gloria Wandrous in BUtterfield 8 (1960), which co-starred then husband Eddie Fisher.
Her second and final Academy Award, also for Best Actress in a Leading Role, was for her performance as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), playing opposite then husband Richard Burton. Taylor and Burton would appear together in six other films during the decade – The V.I.P.s (1963), The Sandpiper (1965), The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Doctor Faustus (1967), The Comedians {1967} and Boom! (1968).
Taylor appeared in John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) opposite Marlon Brando (replacing Montgomery Clift who died before production began) and Secret Ceremony (1968) opposite Mia Farrow. However, by the end of the decade her box-office drawing power had considerably diminished, as evidenced by the failure of The Only Game in Town (1970), with Warren Beatty.
Taylor continued to star in numerous theatrical films throughout the 1970s, such as Zee and Co. (1972) with Michael Caine, Ash Wednesday (1973), The Blue Bird (1976) with Jane Fonda and Ava Gardner, and A Little Night Music (1977). With then-husband Richard Burton, she co-starred in the 1972 films Under Milk Wood and Hammersmith Is Out, and the 1973 made-for-TV movie Divorce His, Divorce Hers.
Taylor has also acted on the stage, making her Broadway and West End debuts in 1982 with a revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes. She was then in a production of Noel Coward's Private Lives (1983), in which she starred with her former husband, Richard Burton. The student-run Burton Taylor Theatre in Oxford was named for the famous couple after Burton appeared as Doctor Faustus in the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) production of the Marlowe play. Taylor played the ghostly, wordless Helen of Troy, who is entreated by Faustus to 'make [him] immortal with a kiss'.
In 2005, Taylor was a vocal supporter of her friend Michael Jackson in his trial in California on charges of sexually abusing a child. He was acquitted.
On 30 May 2006, Taylor appeared on Larry King Live to refute the claims that she has been ill, and denied the allegations that she was suffering from Alzheimer's disease and was close to death.
In late August 2006, Taylor decided to take a boating trip to help prove that she was not close to death. She also decided to make Christie's auction house the primary place where she will sell her jewellery, artwork, clothing, furniture and memorabilia (September 2006).
The February 2007 issue of Interview magazine was devoted entirely to Taylor. It celebrated her life, career and her upcoming 75th birthday.
On 5 December 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and California First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Taylor into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts.
Taylor was in the news recently for a rumoured ninth marriage to her companion Jason Winters. This has been dismissed as a rumour. However, she was quoted as saying, "Jason Winters is one of the most wonderful men I've ever known and that's why I love him. He bought us the most beautiful house in Hawaii and we visit it as often as possible," to gossip columnist Liz Smith. Winters accompanied Taylor to Macy's Passport HIV/AIDS 2007 gala, where Taylor was honoured with a humanitarian award. In 2008, Taylor and Winters were spotted celebrating the 4th of July on a yacht in Santa Monica, California. The couple attended the Macy's Passport HIV/AIDS gala again in 2008.
On 1 December 2007, Taylor acted on-stage again, appearing opposite James Earl Jones in a benefit performance of the A. R. Gurney play Love Letters. The event's goal was to raise $1 million for Taylor's AIDS foundation. Tickets for the show were priced at $2,500, and more than 500 people attended. The event happened to coincide with the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike and, rather than cross the picket line, Taylor requested a "one night dispensation." The Writers Guild agreed not to picket the Paramount Pictures lot that night to allow for the performance.
In October 2008, Taylor and Winters took a trip overseas to England. They spent time visiting friends, family and shopping.
Taylor started designing jewels for The Elizabeth Collection, creating fine jewellery with elegance and flair. The Elizabeth Taylor collection by Piranesi is sold at Christie's. She has also launched three perfumes, "Passion," "White Diamonds," and "Black Pearls," that together earn an estimated US$200 million in annual sales. In fall 2006, Taylor celebrated the 15th anniversary of her White Diamonds perfume, one of the top 10 best selling fragrances for more than the past decade.
Taylor has devoted much time and energy to AIDS-related charities and fundraising. She helped start the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) after the death of her former costar and friend, Rock Hudson. She also created her own AIDS foundation, the Elizabeth Taylor Aids Foundation (ETAF). By 1999, she had helped to raise an estimated US$50 million to fight the disease.
In 2006, Taylor commissioned a "Care Van" equipped with examination tables and X Ray equipment and also donated US$40,000 to the New Orleans Aids task force, a charity designed for the New Orleans population with AIDS and HIV. The donation of the van was made by the Elizabeth Taylor HIV/AIDS Foundation and Macy's.
In the early 1980s, Taylor moved to Bel Air, Los Angeles, California, which is her current home. She also owns homes in Palm Springs, London and Hawaii. The fenced and gated property is on tour maps sold at street corners and is frequently passed by tour guides.
Taylor was also a fan of the soap opera General Hospital. In fact, she was cast as the first Helena Cassadine, matriarch of the Cassadine family.
Taylor is a supporter of Kabbalah and member of the Kabbalah Centre. She encouraged long-time friend Michael Jackson to wear a red string as protection from the evil-eye during his 2005 trial for molestation, where he was eventually cleared of all charges. On 6 October 1991, Taylor had married construction worker Larry Fortensky at Jackson's Neverland Ranch. In 1997, Jackson presented Taylor with the exclusively written-for-her epic song "Elizabeth, I Love You", performed on the day of her 65th birthday celebration.
In October 2007, Taylor won a legal battle, over a Vincent van Gogh painting in her possession, View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint Remy. The US Supreme Court refused to reconsider a legal suit filed by four persons claiming that the artwork belongs to one of their Jewish ancestors, regardless of any statute of limitations.
Taylor attended Michael Jackson's private funeral on 3 September 2009.
With Todd (1 daughter)
With Burton (1 daughter)
In 1971 Taylor became a grandmother at the age of 39. She has 9 grandchildren.
Taylor was the second actress to win two Academy Awards both for Best Actress, the first award from a color film and the second from a black and white film. The first was Vivien Leigh. In 1999, Taylor was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Category:1932 births Category:Living people Category:20th-century actors Category:21st-century actors Category:Academy Honorary Award recipients Category:Actresses awarded British damehoods Category:AIDS activists Category:Alumni of University High School (Los Angeles, California) Category:American child actors Category:American film actors Category:American Jews Category:American stage actors Category:American television actors Category:BAFTA winners (people) Category:Best Actress Academy Award winners Category:Best Drama Actress Golden Globe (film) winners Category:British child actors Category:British film actors Category:British Jews Category:British stage actors Category:British television actors Category:Converts to Judaism Category:Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire
Category:Jewish actors Category:Kennedy Center honorees Category:People from Hampstead Category:People from the Greater Los Angeles Area Category:People self-identifying as alcoholics Category:Presidential Citizens Medal recipients Category:Skin cancer survivors Category:Spouses of United States Senators
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