Paradise Beach

Paradise Beach is an Australian television series made by Village Roadshow Pictures. It is associated with New World Television for the Nine Network that aired between 1993 and 1994. The series is set around characters living and working on Queensland's Gold Coast and was filmed largely on location, offering views of crashing waves, golden beaches and scantily clad young women and men. Paradise Beach was intended not only as a rival to Australian soaps Neighbours and Home and Away but also to be the first breakthrough Australian soap to make it in America.

History

Production

Veteran Australian producer Jock Blair was the driving force behind Paradise Beach, with Nick McMahon as Executive Producer, and the first episodes of the soap were aimed at the American audience. Australian actress Tiffany Lamb used an American accent in her role as Lisa Whitman, and her opening storyline revolved around her childhood sweetheart Cooper Hart (played by Olivia Newton-John's husband Matt Lattanzi). Also appearing from the start were Robert Coleby (Chopper Squad, The Young Doctors) as Tom Barsby, and another familiar face was Andrew McKaige (Sons and Daughters, Prisoner) as Tom's younger brother Nick.

Blake Lively

Blake Lively (born Blake Ellender Brown; August 25, 1987) is an American actress, model, and celebrity homemaker. She starred as Serena van der Woodsen in the CW drama Gossip Girl (2007–12), and has co-starred in such films as The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005), Accepted (2006), The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009), The Town (2010), Green Lantern (2011), Savages (2012) and The Age of Adaline (2015).

Early life

Lively was born in the Tarzana neighborhood of Los Angeles, to actor Ernie Lively (né Ernest Wilson Brown, Jr.) and his wife, Elaine (née McAlpin), a talent scout. She was named after her grandmother's brother. She has an older brother, Eric, two half-sisters, Lori and Robyn, and a half-brother, Jason. Both of her parents and all of her siblings are, or have been, in the entertainment industry. Blake and her four older siblings/half-siblings were raised as Southern Baptists.

During her childhood, her parents took her with them to acting classes that they taught because they did not want to leave her with a babysitter. Lively said that watching her parents teach acting classes helped her learn the "drills" of acting and gain confidence as she got older. She was initially not particularly interested in acting, and wanted to attend Stanford University. During the summer between her junior and senior years of high school, her brother Eric asked his agent to send her on a few auditions over a period of a few months. From these few auditions, she got the role of Bridget for The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Lively filmed her scenes in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants between her junior and senior years at Burbank High School.

Paradise

Paradise (Persian: پردیس, Paradise garden) is the term for a place of timeless harmony. The Abrahamic faiths associate paradise with the Garden of Eden, that is, the perfect state of the world prior to the fall from grace, and the perfect state that will be restored in the World to Come.

Paradisaical notions are cross-cultural, often laden with pastoral imagery, and may be cosmogonical or eschatological or both, often compared to the miseries of human civilization: in paradise there is only peace, prosperity, and happiness. Paradise is a place of contentment, a land of luxury and idleness. Paradise is often described as a "higher place", the holiest place, in contrast to this world, or underworlds such as Hell. In eschatological contexts, paradise is imagined as an abode of the virtuous dead. In Christian and Islamic understanding, Heaven is a paradisaical relief. In old Egyptian beliefs, the otherworld is Aaru, the reed-fields of ideal hunting and fishing grounds where the dead lived after judgment. For the Celts, it was the Fortunate Isle of Mag Mell. For the classical Greeks, the Elysian fields was a paradisaical land of plenty where the heroic and righteous dead hoped to spend eternity. The Vedic Indians held that the physical body was destroyed by fire but recreated and reunited in the Third Heaven in a state of bliss. In the Zoroastrian Avesta, the "Best Existence" and the "House of Song" are places of the righteous dead. On the other hand, in cosmological contexts 'paradise' describes the world before it was tainted by evil.