crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2023-11-15 16:49:00

1388) Robert Duvall

Details

Robert Selden Duvall (born January 5, 1931) is an American actor and filmmaker. With a career spanning eight decades, he is regarded as one of the greatest actors of all time.[4] He is the recipient of an Academy Award, four Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

Duvall began his career on TV with minor roles in 1960 on Playhouse 90 and the Armstrong Circle Theater TV series before transitioning to Broadway and film. Duvall made his Broadway debut in the play Wait Until Dark in 1966. He returned to the stage in David Mamet's play American Buffalo in 1977, earning a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Play nomination. He made his feature film acting debut portraying Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Other early roles include Captain Newman, M.D. (1963), Bullitt (1968), True Grit (1969), M*A*S*H (1970), THX 1138 (1971), Joe Kidd (1972), and Tomorrow (1972), the last of which was developed at the Actors Studio and is his personal favorite.

Duvall won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the film Tender Mercies (1983). His other Oscar-nominated films include The Godfather (1972), Apocalypse Now (1979), The Great Santini (1979), The Apostle (1997), A Civil Action (1998), and The Judge (2014). Other notable roles include The Outfit (1973), The Godfather Part II (1974), The Conversation (1974), Network (1976), True Confessions (1981), The Natural (1984), Days of Thunder (1990), The Handmaid's Tale (1990), Rambling Rose (1991), Falling Down (1993), The Paper (1994), The Scarlet Letter (1995), Slingblade (1996), Open Range (2003), Crazy Heart (2009), Get Low (2010), Jack Reacher (2012), and Widows (2018).

Throughout his career, he has starred on numerous television programs. He won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Limited Series and Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series for the AMC limited series Broken Trail (2007). His other Emmy-nominated roles are in the CBS miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989), the HBO film Stalin (1992), and the TNT film The Man Who Captured Eichmann (1996).

Details

Robert Duvall, (born January 5, 1931, San Diego, California, U.S.), is an American actor noted for his ability to quietly inhabit any characters, particularly average working people, bringing them fully but subtly to life. In the words of critic Elaine Mancini, Duvall was “the most technically proficient, the most versatile, and the most convincing actor on the screen in the United States.”

Born to a U.S. Navy admiral, Duvall graduated from Illinois’s Principia College in 1953 and served two years in the army during the Korean War. In the years that followed, he studied drama under the noted acting teacher Sanford Meisner at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse and appeared in Off-Broadway and Broadway plays.

A brief but memorable film debut came in 1962 when Duvall played the reclusive Arthur (“Boo”) Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. For the next several years, he continued to appear in small film and television roles. That path led to major supporting parts in films with large ensemble casts, such as the repressed and self-righteous Major Frank Burns in M*A*S*H (1970) and the business-minded Mafia attorney Tom Hagen in The Godfather (1972) and its sequel, The Godfather, Part II (1974). The original 1972 role earned Duvall his first Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actor.

In the late 1970s Duvall received two additional Oscar nominations for affecting portrayals of military men. His Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979) maniacally declares that he loves “the smell of napalm in the morning,” but Duvall convinces the audience of Kilgore’s compassion for his own soldiers. His nuanced depiction earned him a second Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. Bull Meechum, the career marine of The Great Santini (1980), is a warrior without a war who during peacetime inflicts an often severe discipline on his family. Duvall was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor.

Duvall wrote many of his own songs for his beautifully nuanced performance as a faded country music star running a motel and filling station in Tender Mercies (1983). For that role, he won the Academy Award for best actor. He ended the 1980s with his highly praised performance in the Emmy Award-winning TV miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989).

In the 1990s Duvall’s credits included successful Hollywood pictures such as Days of Thunder (1990), Phenomenon (1996), and A Family Thing (1996). He wrote, directed, and starred in The Apostle (1997), a pet project he spent years developing and that earned him his third Oscar nomination for best actor. Duvall’s performance in A Civil Action (1998) was honoured with his third Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. In 2002 he returned to directing with Assassination Tango, in which he played a hit man who, while on an assignment, becomes interested in the tango; he also wrote the drama.

Duvall continued his prolific acting career, appearing as Robert E. Lee in the Civil War saga Gods and Generals (2003) and as a wealthy eccentric old man who takes custody of his young nephew in Secondhand Lions (2003). Duvall won an Emmy for his role as a rancher who rescues five young Chinese girls sold into prostitution in the Old West in the television miniseries Broken Trail (2006). After taking on supporting roles in several films—including We Own the Night (2007), Four Christmases (2008), and Crazy Heart (2009)—Duvall starred as a hermit who plans his own funeral party in the whimsical Depression-era comedy Get Low (2009). He portrayed a sagacious rancher in the inspirational golf drama Seven Days in Utopia (2011), a shooting-range owner in the action movie Jack Reacher (2012), and a judge accused of vehicular homicide in The Judge (2014). Duvall received his fourth Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor for the latter role.

His later movies included the crime drama Wild Horses (2015), which he also directed and cowrote, and the thriller Widows (2018). In 2021 he appeared in 12 Mighty Orphans, a football drama based on a true story from the 1930s.

Additional Information

Veteran actor and director Robert Selden Duvall was born on January 5, 1931, in San Diego, CA, to Mildred Virginia (Hart), an amateur actress, and William Howard Duvall, a career military officer who later became an admiral. Duvall majored in drama at Principia College (Elsah, IL), then served a two-year hitch in the army after graduating in 1953. He began attending The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre In New York City on the G.I. Bill in 1955, studying under Sanford Meisner along with Dustin Hoffman, with whom Duvall shared an apartment. Both were close to another struggling young actor named Gene Hackman. Meisner cast Duvall in the play "The Midnight Caller" by Horton Foote, a link that would prove critical to his career, as it was Foote who recommended Duvall to play the mentally disabled "Boo Radley" in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). This was his first "major" role since his 1956 motion picture debut as an MP in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), starring Paul Newman.

Duvall began making a name for himself as a stage actor in New York, winning an Obie Award in 1965 playing incest-minded longshoreman "Eddie Carbone" in the off-Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's "A View from the Bridge", a production for which his old roommate Hoffman was assistant director. He found steady work in episodic TV and appeared as a modestly billed character actor in films, such as Arthur Penn's The Chase (1966) with Marlon Brando and in Robert Altman's Countdown (1967) and Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People (1969), in both of which he co-starred with James Caan.

He was also memorable as the heavy who is shot by John Wayne at the climax of True Grit (1969) and was the first "Maj. Frank Burns", creating the character in Altman's Korean War comedy M*A*S*H (1970). He also appeared as the eponymous lead in George Lucas' directorial debut, THX 1138 (1971). It was Francis Ford Coppola, casting The Godfather (1972), who reunited Duvall with Brando and Caan and provided him with his career breakthrough as mob lawyer "Tom Hagen". He received the first of his six Academy Award nominations for the role.

Thereafter, Duvall had steady work in featured roles in such films as The Godfather Part II (1974), The Killer Elite (1975), Network (1976), The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976) and The Eagle Has Landed (1976). Occasionally this actor's actor got the chance to assay a lead role, most notably in Tomorrow (1972), in which he was brilliant as William Faulkner's inarticulate backwoods farmer. He was less impressive as the lead in Badge 373 (1973), in which he played a character based on real-life NYPD detective Eddie Egan, the same man his old friend Gene Hackman had won an Oscar for playing, in fictionalized form as "Popeye Doyle" in The French Connection (1971).

It was his appearance as "Lt. Col. Kilgore" in another Coppola picture, Apocalypse Now (1979), that solidified Duvall's reputation as a great actor. He got his second Academy Award nomination for the role, and was named by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most versatile actor in the world. Duvall created one of the most memorable characters ever assayed on film, and gave the world the memorable phrase, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning!"

Subsequently, Duvall proved one of the few established character actors to move from supporting to leading roles, with his Oscar-nominated turns in The Great Santini (1979) and Tender Mercies (1983), the latter of which won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. Now at the summit of his career, Duvall seemed to be afflicted with the fabled "Oscar curse" that had overwhelmed the careers of fellow Academy Award winners Luise Rainer, Rod Steiger and Cliff Robertson. He could not find work equal to his talents, either due to his post-Oscar salary demands or a lack of perception in the industry that he truly was leading man material. He did not appear in The Godfather Part III (1990), as the studio would not give in to his demands for a salary commensurate with that of Al Pacino, who was receiving $5 million to reprise Michael Corleone.

His greatest achievement in his immediate post-Oscar period was his triumphant characterization of grizzled Texas Ranger Gus McCrae in the TV mini-series Lonesome Dove (1989), for which he received an Emmy nomination. He received a second Emmy nomination and a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Soviet dictator Iosif Stalin in Stalin (1992), and a third Emmy nomination playing Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in The Man Who Captured Eichmann (1996).

The shakeout of his career doldrums was that Duvall eventually settled back into his status as one of the premier character actors in the industry, rivaled only by his old friend Gene Hackman. Duvall, unlike Hackman, also has directed pictures, including the documentary We're Not the Jet Set (1974), Angelo My Love (1983) and Assassination Tango (2002). As a writer-director, Duvall gave himself one of his most memorable roles, that of the preacher on the run from the law in The Apostle (1997), a brilliant performance for which he received his third Best Actor nomination and fifth Oscar nomination overall. The film brought Duvall back to the front ranks of great actors, and was followed by a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod for A Civil Action (1998).

Robert Duvall will long be remembered as one of the great naturalistic American screen actors in the mode of Spencer Tracy and his frequent co-star Marlon Brando. His performances as "Boo Radley" in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), "Jackson Fentry" in Tomorrow (1972), "Tom Hagen" in the first two "Godfather" movies, "Frank Hackett" in Network (1976), "Lt. Col. Kilgore" in Apocalypse Now (1979), "Bull Meechum" in The Great Santini (1979), "Mac Sledge" in Tender Mercies (1983), "Gus McCrae" in Lonesome Dove (1989) and "Sonny Dewey" in The Apostle (1997) rank as some of the finest acting ever put on film. It's a body of work that few actors can equal, let alone surpass.

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Jai Ganesh · 2023-11-16 16:34:06

1389) F. Murray Abraham

Summary

F. Murray Abraham (born Murray Abraham, October 24, 1939) is an American actor. Known for his roles on stage and screen, he came to prominence for his acclaimed leading role as Antonio Salieri in the drama film Amadeus (1984) for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama as well as a BAFTA Award nomination.

Abraham made his Broadway debut in the 1968 play Man in the Glass Booth. He received the Obie Award for Outstanding Performance for his roles in Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (1984) and William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (2011). He returned to Broadway in the revival of Terrence McNally's comedy It's Only a Play (2014), receiving a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play nomination.

He has appeared in many roles, both leading and supporting, in films such as All the President's Men (1976), Scarface (1983), The Name of the Rose (1986), Last Action Hero (1993), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Dillinger and Capone (1995), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998), Finding Forrester (2000), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Isle of Dogs (2018) and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019).

He was a regular cast member on the Showtime drama series Homeland (2012–2018), which earned him two nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series. He also starred in Mythic Quest (2020–2021), Moon Knight (2022) and The White Lotus (2022), with the latter earning him a nominations for the Golden Globe Award and the Primetime Emmy Award.

Details

F. Murray Abraham, (born October 24, 1939, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.), is an American actor who performed generally in small parts and character roles onstage and in film before coming to wider notice after winning an Academy Award for his portrayal of Antonio Salieri in Amadeus (1984).

Abraham grew up in El Paso, Texas, and was introduced to acting by a teacher in high school. He studied theatre at the University of Texas at El Paso for two years and then moved to Los Angeles. He made his first professional stage appearance in the premiere of Ray Bradbury’s play The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1965) in Los Angeles. Abraham then moved to New York City to study under Uta Hagen. He made his Off-Broadway debut in 1966 in The Fantasticks and first appeared on Broadway in 1968 in The Man in the Glass Booth. While he continued to make stage appearances during the early 1970s, including a part in the 1972–73 Broadway comedy 6 Rms Riv Vu, he also began working in film and television during that time. Abraham appeared in the 1971 movie They Might Be Giants and on TV in Nightside (1973), a pilot for a series that was not produced. He appeared in the Broadway farce The Ritz (1975–76) and played the same role in the 1976 film version of the play. Abraham performed in the Off-Broadway production of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1976) and in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s productions of John Guare’s Landscape of the Body (1977) and of The Master and Margarita (1978).

Abraham had the lead role in the short Broadway run of Teibele and Her Demon (1979), and in 1980 he starred in a Baltimore production of Cyrano de Bergerac and Off-Broadway in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. He won critical notice for his performances in Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker in 1982 and in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in 1983. Abraham played Omar in Brian De Palma’s film Scarface (1983) before his surprise casting in Amadeus. His controlled multidimensional performance in the latter movie won him both the Oscar and the Golden Globe Award for best actor.

Following his wins, Abraham’s stage career nevertheless continued to outstrip his film career. He had leading parts in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1986) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1987) Off-Broadway and played the title character in Macbeth on Broadway (1986–87). He also he played Pozzo in a 1988 revival of Waiting for Godot. His later stage credits included the Broadway production It’s Only a Play (2014–15).

After performing as Bernardo Gui in the film The Name of the Rose (1986), Abraham returned to a career of mostly small parts in minor movies, punctuated by appearances in more notable films, among them Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998), and Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). He also appeared in Wes Anderson’s comedies The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and the stop-motion animated Isle of Dogs (2018), and he provided the voice of the villainous Grimmel in How to Train Your Dragon: Hidden World (2019). His later films included Lady and the Tramp (2019) and The Magic Flute (2022).

In addition, Abraham had recurring roles in the TV shows The Good Wife (2009–16) and Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet (2020– ). He also played a CIA operative in the series Homeland (2011–18), which starred Claire Danes. In 2022 Abraham appeared in the second season of the anthology series The White Lotus, portraying a flirtatious grandfather on vacation with his son and grandson.

Additional Information

Academy Award-winning actor F. Murray Abraham was born on October 24, 1939 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and raised in El Paso, Texas. His father, Fred Abraham, was a Syrian (Antiochian Orthodox Christian) immigrant. His mother, Josephine (Stello) Abraham, was the daughter of Italian immigrants. Born with the first name "Murray", he added an "F." to distinguish his stage name.

Primarily a stage actor, Abraham made his screen debut as an usher in George C. Scott's comedy They Might Be Giants (1971). By the mid-1970s, Murray had steady employment as an actor, doing commercials and voice-over work. He can be seen as one of the undercover police officers along with Al Pacino in Sidney Lumet's Serpico (1973), and in television roles including the villain in one third-season episode of Kojak (1973). His film work of those years also included the roles of a cabdriver in The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975), a mechanic in The Sunshine Boys (1975), and a police officer in All the President's Men (1976).

Beyond these small roles, Abraham continued to do commercials and voice-over work for income. But in 1978, he decided to give them up. Frustrated with the lack of substantial roles, Abraham said, "No one was taking my acting seriously. I figured if I didn't do it, then I'd have no right to the dreams I've always had". His wife, Kate Hannan, went to work as an assistant and Abraham became a "house husband". He described, "I cooked and cleaned and took care of the kids. It was very rough on my macho idea of life. But it was the best thing that ever happened to me". Abraham appeared as drug dealer Omar Suárez alongside Pacino again in the gangster film Scarface (1983). He also gained visibility voicing a talking bunch of grapes in a series of television commercials for Fruit of the Loom underwear.

In 1985, he was honored with as Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role for the acclaimed role of envious composer Antonio Salieri in Amadeus (1984), an award for which Tom Hulce, playing Mozart in that movie, had also been nominated. He was also honored with a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama, among other awards, and his role in the film, is still considered to be his most iconic as the film's director Milos Forman inspired the work of the role with Abraham's wide range of qualities as a great stage and film actor.

After Amadeus, he next appeared in The Name of the Rose (1986), in which he played Bernardo Gui, nemesis to Sir Sean Connery as William of Baskerville. In the DVD audio commentary, his director on the film, Jean-Jacques Annaud, described Abraham as an "egomaniac" on the set, who considered himself more important than Sean Connery, since Connery did not have an Oscar. That said, the film was a critical success. Abraham had tired of appearing as villains and wanted to return to his background in comedy, as he also explained to People Weekly magazine in an interview he gave at the time of its release.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-11-17 16:53:44

1390) William Hurt

Summary

William McChord Hurt (March 20, 1950 – March 13, 2022) was an American actor. Known for his performances on stage and screen, he received various awards including an Academy Award, BAFTA Award and Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor.

Hurt studied at the Juilliard School and began acting on stage in the 1970s. His film debut, in Ken Russell's science-fiction feature Altered States, was released in 1980, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination for New Star of the Year. In 1981, he had a leading role in the neo-noir Body Heat, co-starring Kathleen Turner. His starring roles in a series of critically acclaimed films garnered three consecutive nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor: Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), which he won; Children of a Lesser God (1986), and Broadcast News (1987). During this time he also starred in The Big Chill (1983), The Accidental Tourist (1988), Alice (1990), and One True Thing (1998).

Hurt earned his fourth Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in David Cronenberg's crime thriller A History of Violence (2005). His later character roles include A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), The Village (2004), Syriana (2005), The Good Shepherd (2006), Mr. Brooks (2007), Into the Wild (2007), The Yellow Handkerchief (2008), and Robin Hood (2010). In 2008, he portrayed Thaddeus Ross in The Incredible Hulk, a role he reprised in other Marvel Cinematic Universe films until his final appearance in Black Widow (2021).

Hurt's various television projects included the FX legal drama Damages, which earned him a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. In 2011, he portrayed Henry Paulson in the HBO movie Too Big to Fail and received another Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie.

On stage, Hurt appeared in off-Broadway productions including Henry V, Fifth of July, Richard II and A Midsummer Night's Dream; and made his Broadway debut in David Rabe's dark comedy Hurlyburly, for which he received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play.

Details

William Hurt, (born March 20, 1950, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died March 13, 2022, Portland, Oregon), was an American actor who transitioned from roles as a leading man to a series of distinctive character roles in the latter portion of his career.

Hurt acted in repertory companies before making his screen debut in Altered States (1980). He became a leading actor with Body Heat (1981), in which he played a lawyer who kills his lover’s husband. He then appeared in the ensemble drama The Big Chill (1983). In 1986 he won an Academy Award for best actor for his portrayal of a prisoner in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985).

Hurt also received Oscar nominations for best actor for his roles in Children of a Lesser God (1986) and Broadcast News (1987) and a nod for best supporting actor in A History of Violence (2005). Other notable films included The Accidental Tourist (1988), Smoke (1995), Chantal Akerman’s A Couch in New York (1996), One True Thing (1998), Syriana (2005), Into the Wild (2007), Robin Hood (2010), Winter’s Tale (2014), Days and Nights (2014), and Race (2016). He portrayed the Marvel comic character Thaddeus (“Thunderbolt”) Ross in the films The Incredible Hulk (2008), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Avengers: Endgame (2019), and Black Widow (2021).

On television Hurt appeared in the miniseries Dune (2000), Moby Dickinson (2011; as Captain Ahab), Bonnie and Clyde (2013), and Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands (2016). He made appearances in the TV movies Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story (2002) and Too Big to Fail (2011; as Henry Paulson) and had roles in the series Damages, Humans, Trial, Goliath, and Condor.

Additional Information

William McChord Hurt was born in Washington, D.C., to Claire Isabel (McGill) and Alfred McChord Hurt, who worked at the State Department. He was trained at Tufts University and The Juilliard School and has been nominated for four Academy Awards, including the most recent nomination for his supporting role in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence (2005). Hurt received Best Supporting Actor accolades for the role from the Los Angeles Film Critics circle and the New York Film Critics Circle.

Hurt spent the early years of his career on the stage between drama school, summer stock, regional repertory and off-Broadway, appearing in more than fifty productions including "Henry V", "5th of July", "Hamlet", "Uncle Vanya", "Richard II", "Hurlyburly" (for which he was nominated for a Tony Award), "My Life" (winning an Obie Award for Best Actor), "A Midsummer's Night's Dream" and "Good". For radio, Hurt read Paul Theroux's "The Grand Railway Bazaar", for the BBC Radio Four and "The Shipping News" by Annie Proulx. He has recorded "The Polar Express", "The Boy Who Drew Cats", "The Sun Also Rises" and narrated the documentaries, "Searching for America: The Odyssey of John Dos Passos", "Einstein-How I See the World" and the English narration of Elie Wiesel's "To Speak the Unspeakable", a documentary directed and produced by Pierre Marmiesse. In 1988, Hurt was awarded the first Spencer Tracy Award from UCLA.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-11-18 17:00:25

1391) Paul Newman

Summary

Paul Leonard Newman (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008) was an American actor, film director, race car driver, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, three Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, a Silver Bear, a Cannes Film Festival Award, and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

Born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, Newman showed an interest in theater as a child and at age 10 performed in a stage production of Saint George and the Dragon at the Cleveland Play House. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in drama and economics from Kenyon College in 1949. After touring with several summer stock companies including the Belfry Players, Newman attended the Yale School of Drama for a year before studying at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg. His first starring Broadway role was in William Inge's Picnic in 1953.

Newman won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in The Color of Money (1986). His other Oscar-nominated performances were in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Absence of Malice (1981), The Verdict (1982), Nobody's Fool (1994), and Road to Perdition (2002). He also starred in such films as Harper (1966), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Sting (1973), The Towering Inferno (1974), Slap Shot (1977); and Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981). He also voiced Doc Hudson in Cars (2006).

Newman won several national championships as a driver in Sports Car Club of America road racing. He was a co-founder of Newman's Own, a food company from which he donated all post-tax profits and royalties to charity. As of May 2021, these donations have totaled over US$570 million. Newman continued to found such charitable organizations such as the SeriousFun Children's Network in 1988 and the Safe Water Network in 2006. Newman was married twice and fathered six children. He was the husband of the actress Joanne Woodward.

Details

Screen legend, superstar, and the man with the most famous blue eyes in movie history, Paul Leonard Newman was born on January 26, 1925, in Cleveland, Ohio, the second son of Arthur Sigmund Newman (died 1950) and Theresa Fetsko (died 1982). His elder brother was Arthur S. Newman Jr., named for their father, a Jewish businessman who owned a successful sporting goods store and was the son of emigrants from Poland and Hungary. Newman's mother (born Terézia Fecková, daughter of Stefan Fecko and Mária Polenak) was a Roman Catholic Slovak from Homonna, Pticie (former Austro-Hungarian Empire), who became a practicing Christian Scientist. She and her brother, Newman's uncle Joe, had an interest in the creative arts, and it rubbed off on him. He acted in grade school and high school plays. The Newmans were well-to-do and Paul Newman grew up in affluent Shaker Heights. Before he became an actor, Newman ran the family sporting goods store in Cleveland, Ohio.

By 1950, the 25-year-old Newman had been kicked out of Ohio University, where he belonged to the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity, for unruly behavior (denting the college president's car with a beer keg), served three years in the United States Navy during World War II as a radio operator, graduated from Ohio's Kenyon College, married his first wife, Jacqueline "Jackie" Witte (born 1929), and had his first child, Scott. That same year, his father died. When he became successful in later years, Newman said if he had any regrets it would be that his father was not around to witness his success. He brought Jackie back to Shaker Heights and he ran his father's store for a short period. Then, knowing that wasn't the career path he wanted to take, he moved Jackie and Scott to New Haven, Connecticut, where he attended Yale University's School of Drama.

While doing a play there, Newman was spotted by two agents, who invited him to come to New York City to pursue a career as a professional actor. After moving to New York, he acted in guest spots for various television series and in 1953 came a big break. He got the part of understudy of the lead role in the successful Broadway play "Picnic". Through this play, he met actress Joanne Woodward (born 1930), who was also an understudy in the play. While they got on very well and there was a strong attraction, Newman was married and his second child, Susan, was born that year. During this time, Newman was accepted into the much admired and popular New York Actors Studio, although he did not actually audition.

In 1954, a film Newman was very reluctant to do was released, The Silver Chalice (1954). He considered his performance in this costume epic to be so bad that he took out a full-page ad in a trade paper apologizing for it to anyone who might have seen it. He had always been embarrassed about the film and reveled in making fun of it. He immediately wanted to return to the stage, and performed in "The Desperate Hours". In 1956, he got the chance to redeem himself in the film world by portraying boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), and critics praised his performance. In 1957, with a handful of films to his credit, he was cast in The Long, Hot Summer (1958), co-starring Joanne Woodward.

During the shooting of this film, they realized they were meant to be together and by now, so did his then-wife Jackie, who gave Newman a divorce. He and Woodward wed in Las Vegas in January 1958. They went on to have three daughters together and raised them in Westport, Connecticut. In 1959, Newman received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). The 1960s would bring Newman into superstar status, as he became one of the most popular actors of the decade, and garnered three more Best Actor Oscar nominations, for The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963) and Cool Hand Luke (1967). In 1968, his debut directorial effort Rachel, Rachel (1968) was given good marks, and although the film and Woodward were nominated for Oscars, Newman was not nominated for Best Director. However, he did win a Golden Globe Award for his direction.

1969 brought the popular screen duo of Newman and Robert Redford together for the first time when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) was released. It was a box office smash. Through the 1970s, Newman had hits and misses from such popular films as The Sting (1973) and The Towering Inferno (1974) to lesser known films as The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) to a cult classic Slap Shot (1977). After the death of his only son, Scott, in 1978, Newman's personal life and film choices moved in a different direction. His acting work in the 1980s and on is what is often most praised by critics today. He became more at ease with himself and it was evident in The Verdict (1982) for which he received his sixth Best Actor Oscar nomination and, in 1987, finally received his first Oscar for The Color of Money (1986), almost thirty years after Woodward had won hers. Friend and director of Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), Robert Wise accepted the award on Newman's behalf as the actor did not attend the ceremony.

Films were not the only thing on his mind during this period. A passionate race car driver since the early 1970s (despite being color-blind), he was co-founder of Newman-Haas racing in 1982, and also founded "Newman's Own", a successful line of food products that has earned in excess of $100 million, every penny of which Newman donated to charity. He also started The Hole in the Wall Gang Camps, an organization for children with serious illness. He was as well known for his philanthropic ways and highly successful business ventures as he was for his legendary actor status.

Newman's marriage to Woodward lasted a half-century. Connecticut was their primary residence after leaving Hollywood and moving East in 1960. Renowned for his sense of humor, in 1998 he quipped that he was a little embarrassed to see his salad dressing grossing more than his movies. During his later years, he still attended races, was much involved in his charitable organizations, and in 2006, he opened a restaurant called Dressing Room, which helps out the Westport Country Playhouse, a place in which Newman took great pride. In 2007, while the public was largely unaware of the serious illness from which he was suffering, Newman made some headlines when he said he was losing his invention and confidence in his acting abilities and that acting was "pretty much a closed book for me". A smoker for many years, Newman died on September 26, 2008, aged 83, from lung cancer.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-11-19 17:37:08

1392) Michael Douglas

Summary

Michael Kirk Douglas (born September 25, 1944) is an American actor and film producer. He has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and the AFI Life Achievement Award.

The elder son of Kirk Douglas and Diana Dill, Douglas received his Bachelor of Arts in drama from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His early acting roles included film, stage, and television productions. Douglas first achieved prominence for his performance in the ABC police procedural television series The Streets of San Francisco, for which he received three consecutive Emmy Award nominations. In 1975, Douglas produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, having acquired the rights to the Ken Kesey novel from his father. The film received critical and popular acclaim, and won the Academy Award for Best Picture, earning Douglas his first Oscar as one of the film's producers.

Douglas went on to produce films including The China Syndrome (1979) and Romancing the Stone (1984), for which he received the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, and The Jewel of the Nile (1985). Douglas received critical acclaim for his portrayal of Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor (a role he reprised in the sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps in 2010). Other notable roles include in Fatal Attraction (1987), The War of the Roses (1989), Basic Instinct (1992), Falling Down (1993), The American President (1995), The Game (1997), Traffic (2000), and Wonder Boys (2000).

In 2013, for his portrayal of Liberace in the HBO film Behind the Candelabra, he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie. Douglas starred as an aging acting coach in the Netflix comedy series The Kominsky Method (2018–2021), for which he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Musical or Comedy. He has portrayed Hank Pym in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beginning with Ant-Man (2015).

Douglas has received notice for his humanitarian and political activism. He sits on the board of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, is an honorary board member of the anti-war grant-making foundation Ploughshares Fund and he was appointed as a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 1998. He has been married to actress Catherine Zeta-Jones since 2000.

Details

Michael Douglas, (born September 25, 1944, New Brunswick, New Jersey, U.S.), is an American film actor and producer who is best known for his intense portrayals of flawed heroes.

Early life and career

Douglas, the son of film legend Kirk Douglas and British actress Diana Dill, received much of his education in filmmaking by accompanying his father to various film locations. After studying drama at the University of California at Santa Barbara (B.A., 1968), Douglas made his screen debut in Hail, Hero! (1969), a Vietnam-era antiwar film now regarded as hyperbolic and dated. He made a handful of mostly forgettable films—the best of which was the Disney-produced family adventure Napoleon and Samantha (1972)—before landing the role of Steve Keller on the popular television series The Streets of San Francisco (1972), costarring with veteran actor Karl Malden.

Success as a producer: One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Douglas became a driving force in the entertainment industry when he produced a screen rendering of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). Douglas’s father had acquired the rights to Cuckoo’s Nest when he starred in a Broadway adaptation during the early 1960s, and for many years he tried to interest a producer in a film version. When his efforts failed, he sold the rights to his son, who in turn produced the second film in Hollywood history to win Academy Awards in all five major categories: best picture, best actor (Jack Nicholson), best actress (Louise Fletcher), best director (Miloš Forman), and best screenplay. From this triumph, Douglas went on to both produce and star in some of the biggest box-office hits of the next two decades. Other films Douglas produced included Starman (1984), Flatliners (1990), Face/Off (1997), and The Rainmaker (1997).

Noteworthy acting roles

Douglas coproduced and costarred in The China Syndrome (1979), a taut thriller set in a nuclear power plant that was ironically and fortuitously released the same week as the real-life nuclear crisis at Three Mile Island. He appeared with Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito in the highly successful action-adventure Romancing the Stone (1984) and its sequel, The Jewel of the Nile (1985), and again teamed with the same costars for the popular dark comedy The War of the Roses (1989). One of Douglas’s most memorable roles was in Fatal Attraction (1987), in which he portrayed a family man terrorized by a woman (memorably portrayed by Glenn Close) with whom he has an adulterous affair. In the same year, Douglas delivered an Oscar-winning performance as a ruthless, morally empty financier in Wall Street (1987). Douglas’s screen persona was well showcased in this film, in that his antiheroic character of Gordon Gekko—whose personal credo is “greed is good”—is both unctuous and charismatic. Several of Douglas’s performances flaunt this dichotomy: his villainous characters exhibit personal magnetism, and his heroes are often victim to their own inadequacies. He (like his father) was one of the few actors to build a successful career out of portraying less-than-virtuous characters.

Basic Instinct (1992), a film as controversial as it was successful, was in the same genre as Fatal Attraction and served to pigeonhole Douglas as an actor specializing in violent or sexual fare. Such films as Black Rain (1989), Falling Down (1993), and Disclosure (1994) added to this characterization. Endeavouring to change his image, Douglas starred in the romantic comedy The American President (1995), in which he portrayed a widowed chief executive.

Later films

In 2000 Douglas received widespread praise for his performances as a depressive college professor in Wonder Boys and as the recently appointed American drug czar in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic; he costarred with Catherine Zeta-Jones in the latter film, and the couple married that same year. Douglas starred alongside his father, Kirk, and his son, Cameron, in It Runs in the Family (2003), about three generations of a dysfunctional Manhattan family. He later played a secret service agent wrongly accused of being part of an assassination attempt in The Sentinel (2006), and in King of California (2007) he portrayed a patient recently released from a mental hospital who is looking for gold underneath a discount store.

Douglas reprised the role of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), a sequel set in 2008 amid the global financial crisis. Reuniting with Soderbergh, he appeared as a shady government official in the action thriller Haywire (2011) and starred as Liberace in Behind the Candelabra (2013), a witty account of the entertainer’s private life near the end of his career; Douglas won an Emmy Award for his work on the latter production. He joined Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, and Kevin Kline in the buddy comedy Last Vegas (2013). Douglas again displayed his comic skills as a curmudgeonly realtor in the romantic comedy And So It Goes (2014). He then produced and starred in the critically panned thriller Beyond the Reach (2014), in which he hammed it up as a psychotic big-game hunter who, after accidentally shooting a man, turns the only witness into his next quarry. Douglas then appeared as Dr. Hank Pym in the superhero movie Ant-Man (2015) and its sequel, Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018). He also played the character in Avengers: Endgame (2019).

In 2018 Douglas returned to television, appearing as an aging actor turned acting teacher in the Netflix series The Kominsky Method; the show ended in 2021. He later lent his voice to the animated series Green Eggs and Ham (2019– ), which was based on Dr. Seuss’s children’s classic; it also aired on Netflix.

Personal life

In 2010 Douglas announced that he had been diagnosed with advanced throat cancer; the following year he announced that the disease was in remission. He revealed in 2013 that he had actually been suffering from tongue cancer but had misrepresented his condition because it was known that the surgical treatment of tongue cancer was sometimes disfiguring. He had worried that public knowledge of that possibility would affect his career prospects. He was ultimately treated with chemotherapy and radiation rather than surgery.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-11-20 15:45:47

1393) Daniel Day-Lewis

Summary

Sir Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis (born 29 April 1957) is an English retired actor. Often described as one of the preeminent actors in the history of cinema, he received numerous accolades throughout his career which spanned over four decades, including three Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. In 2014, Day-Lewis received a knighthood for services to drama.

Born and raised in London, Day-Lewis excelled on stage at the National Youth Theatre before being accepted at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which he attended for three years. Despite his traditional training at the Bristol Old Vic, he is considered a method actor, known for his constant devotion to and research of his roles. Protective of his private life, he rarely grants interviews, and makes very few public appearances.

Day-Lewis shifted between theatre and film for most of the early 1980s, joining the Royal Shakespeare Company and playing Romeo Montague in Romeo and Juliet and Flute in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Playing the title role in Hamlet at the National Theatre in London in 1989, he left the stage midway through a performance after breaking down during a scene where the ghost of Hamlet's father appears before him—this was his last appearance on the stage. After supporting film roles in Gandhi (1982), and The Bounty (1984), he earned acclaim for his breakthrough performances in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), A Room with a View (1985), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988).

He earned Academy Awards for his roles in My Left Foot (1989), There Will Be Blood (2007), and Lincoln (2012). His other Oscar-nominated roles were in In the Name of the Father (1993), Gangs of New York (2002), and Phantom Thread (2017). Other notable films include The Last of the Mohicans (1992), The Age of Innocence (1993), The Crucible (1996), and The Boxer (1997). He retired from acting from 1997 to 2000, taking up a new profession as an apprentice shoe-maker in Italy. Although he returned to acting, he announced his retirement again in 2017.

Details

Daniel Day-Lewis (born April 29, 1957, London, England) is a British actor known for his on-screen intensity and for his exhaustive preparation for roles.

Day-Lewis was the second child of Cecil Day-Lewis, one of the leading British poets of the 1930s, and actress Jill Balcon and was the grandson of motion-picture producer Sir Michael Balcon. He began acting at Bedales, a liberal school in Petersfield, England, and at age 13 he landed a small role in the film Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). He then went on to perform with the Bristol Old Vic and Royal Shakespeare theatrical companies before appearing in his first adult roles in the films Gandhi (1982) and The Bounty (1984). In 1985 Day-Lewis displayed his versatility by playing a gay hooligan in My Beautiful Laundrette and a staid Edwardian-era Englishman in an adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View; the films brought him international acclaim, as did his performance as an adulterous surgeon in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988). His portrayal of Christy Brown, an artist almost completely disabled by cerebral palsy, in the film My Left Foot (1989) won him numerous awards, including an Academy Award for best actor. In the course of making the film, Day-Lewis spent the entire time in a wheelchair and learned to paint with his left foot.

Day-Lewis subsequently starred in a number of successful films, including The Last of the Mohicans (1992), as the frontiersman Natty Bumppo; The Age of Innocence (1993), Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel; In the Name of the Father (1993), which earned him an Academy Award nomination; and The Crucible (1996), based on Arthur Miller’s play. After appearing in The Boxer (1997), Day-Lewis took a break from acting and worked for a time as a cobbler’s apprentice in Italy.

In 2002 he returned to the screen as a murderous anti-immigrant gang leader in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, a drama set in the mid-19th century. He subsequently starred in the intimate The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005), which was written and directed by Miller’s daughter Rebecca, whom he had married in 1996. In 2008 Day-Lewis won a second Academy Award, for his transformative performance as self-made oil tycoon Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007). His later film roles included an Italian film director in the star-studded musical Nine (2009) and U.S. Pres. Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s biographical Lincoln (2012). For his nuanced performance in the latter film, he won an unprecedented third best-actor Oscar. Day-Lewis next starred as a fashion designer whose pursuit of perfection begets tension in his romantic relationships in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017). For this role, which he had previously announced would be his last, Day-Lewis earned his sixth Oscar nomination.

Day-Lewis was named a knight bachelor in 2014.

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Jai Ganesh · 2023-11-21 16:49:15

1394) Jeremy Irons

Summary

Jeremy John Irons (born 19 September 1948) is an English actor and activist. He is known for his roles on stage and screen having won numerous accolades including an Academy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, three Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Tony Award. He is one of the few actors who have achieved the "Triple Crown of Acting" having won Oscar, Emmy, and Tony Awards for Film, Television and Theatre.

Irons received classical training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and started acting career on stage in 1969. He appeared in many West End theatre productions, including the Shakespeare plays The Winter's Tale, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, and Richard II. In 1984, he made his Broadway debut in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, receiving the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play.

His first major film role came in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), for which he received a BAFTA nomination for Best Actor. After starring in dramas such as Moonlighting (1982), Betrayal (1983), The Mission (1986), and Dead Ringers (1988), he received the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune (1990). Other notable films include Kafka (1991), Damage (1992), M. Butterfly (1993), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), Lolita (1997), The Merchant of Venice (2004), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Appaloosa (2008), and Margin Call (2011). He voiced the role of Scar in Disney's The Lion King (1994) and played Alfred Pennyworth in the DC Extended Universe (2016–2023) series of films.

On television, Irons's break-out role came in the ITV series Brideshead Revisited (1981). He received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie for his performance for his performance in the miniseries Elizabeth I (2005). He starred as Pope Alexander VI in the Showtime historical series The Borgias (2011–2013) and as Adrian Veidt / Ozymandias in HBO's Watchmen (2019). In October 2011, he was named the Goodwill Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Details

Jeremy Irons (born September 19, 1948, Cowes, Isle of Wight, England) is a British actor whose performances were noted for their sophistication and gravitas.

Irons made his London stage debut in Godspell (1973) and appeared on Broadway in The Real Thing (1984, Tony Award). After his screen debut in Nijinsky (1980), Irons won notice for his performance in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) and became widely popular after appearing in the television series Brideshead Revisited (1981), which was based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh. Irons offered deliciously wicked turns in Dead Ringers (1988) and Reversal of Fortune (1990). In the latter film he starred as Claus von Bülow, a wealthy socialite convicted of the attempted murder of his wife. For his portrayal of the enigmatic von Bülow, Irons won an Academy Award.

Irons subsequently appeared in the sensual drama Damage (1992), the action movie Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995), and as Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1997), a controversial adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel. In the animated blockbuster The Lion King (1994), Irons provided the voice of a villainous lion.

Irons’s film roles in the early 21st century included supporting characters in Being Julia (2004), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Appaloosa (2008), Margin Call (2011), The Words (2012), Race (2016), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), and Justice League (2017); a different cut of the latter film was released in 2021 as Zach Snyder’s Justice League. He also costarred as mathematician G.H. Hardy in the Srinivasa Ramanujan biopic The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015); as the architect of a tower that becomes the site of a class war in High-Rise (2015), an adaptation of a J.G. Ballard novel; and as a villain in the fantasy adventure Assassin’s Creed (2016), based on a video game. Irons later appeared in the spy thriller Red Sparrow (2018). His credits from 2021 included Munich: The Edge of War, in which he portrayed Neville Chamberlain, and House of Gucci, a true-crime drama involving a family and its luxury fashion brand.

In addition, Irons acted in several made-for-television movies, notably Longitudes (2000) and The Colour of Magic (2008), and he won an Emmy Award for his performance as the earl of Leicester in the miniseries Elizabeth I (2005). In the Showtime series The Borgias (2011–13), he starred as another Renaissance-era historical figure, Pope Alexander VI. Irons returned to television in 2019, playing a former superhero in the HBO series Watchmen.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-11-22 16:30:58

1395) Anthony Hopkins

Summary

Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins CBE (born 31 December 1937) is a Welsh actor, director, and producer. One of Britain's most recognisable and prolific actors, he is known for his performances on the screen and stage. Hopkins has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Laurence Olivier Award. He has also received the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2005 and the BAFTA Fellowship for lifetime achievement in 2008. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to drama in 1993.

After graduating from the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in 1957, Hopkins trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He was then spotted by Laurence Olivier, who invited him to join the Royal National Theatre in 1965. Productions at the National included King Lear (his favourite Shakespeare play), Coriolanus, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. In 1985, he received great acclaim and a Laurence Olivier Award for his performance in the David Hare play Pravda. His last stage play was a West End production of M. Butterfly in 1989.

Hopkins early film roles include The Lion in Winter (1968), A Bridge Too Far (1977), and The Elephant Man (1980). He won two Academy Awards for Best Actor for playing Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and an octogenarian with dementia in The Father (2020), becoming the oldest Best Actor Oscar winner for the latter. His other Oscar-nominated films include The Remains of the Day (1993), Nixon (1995), Amistad (1997), and The Two Popes (2019). Other notable films include 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), Howards End (1992), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), Shadowlands (1993), Legends of the Fall (1994), The Mask of Zorro (1998), and the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Thor franchise (2011–2017).

For his work on television, Hopkins received a British Academy Television Award for Best Actor for his performance in War and Peace (1972). He won two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series for The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case (1976) and The Bunker (1981). Other notable projects include the BBC film The Dresser (2015), PBS's King Lear (2018), and the HBO series Westworld (2016–2018).

Details

Anthony Hopkins, (born December 31, 1937, Port Talbot, West Glamorgan, Wales), is a Welsh stage and film actor of burning intensity, often seen at his best when playing pathetic misfits or characters on the fringes of insanity.

Early life and career

Hopkins had early ambitions to be a concert pianist. He began acting at age 18 when he joined a YMCA dramatic club. He received a scholarship to the Cardiff College of Music and Drama, and he toured with the Arts Council as a stage manager and actor after his graduation. He then spent two years with the Royal Artillery. Upon his demobilization he resumed his acting career, making his professional debut in 1960. A self-described “actor of instinct,” he gained needed training by enrolling at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1961 and graduated as a silver medalist two years later. He first appeared on the London stage in Lindsay Anderson’s production of Julius Caesar (1964). It was during this period that he appeared in his first film, the Anderson-directed short subject The White Bus (released in 1967).

Initial success

Hopkins was accepted into Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre company in 1965, and he understudied Olivier in several productions before attracting critical attention with his performances as Edgar in August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death and as Andrey Prozorov in Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters (both 1967). At last attracting the attention of the critics, he soon found himself being promoted as the “new Olivier,” and it was during this initial burst of adulation that he landed the juicy role of Prince Richard the Lionheart in the 1968 film version of James Goldman’s play The Lion in Winter. In 1974 he enjoyed a double professional triumph when he starred in the American television miniseries QB VII and also played the role of Dr. Martin Dysart in the original Broadway production of Equus.

Despite years of promise and glowing reviews, Hopkins found his career impeded by his recalcitrant attitude and battles with alcoholism. After waking up in a Phoenix hotel room in 1975 and not being able to remember how he got there, Hopkins resolved to reform: “I led a pretty self-destructive life for a few decades. It was only after I put my demons behind me that I was able to fully enjoy acting.” His career gained momentum, and his subsequent screen credits included acclaimed performances as a mentally unhinged ventriloquist in Magic (1978) and as Joseph Merrick’s doctor in The Elephant Man (1980), as well as sharply etched portrayals of two roles previously associated with Charles Laughton: Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1982) and Captain Bligh in The Bounty (1984). During this period Hopkins won Emmy Awards for his performances as Bruno Richard Hauptmann in The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case (1976) and as Adolf Hitler in The Bunker (1981). In 1989 he made his West End stage debut in the musical drama M. Butterfly.

Hannibal Lecter, Richard M. Nixon, and John Quincy Adams

While critical acclaim has been lavished upon Hopkins’s rich, full-blooded characterizations of such real-life personalities as Yitzhak Rabin, John Quincy Adams, Richard M. Nixon, C.S. Lewis, and Pablo Picasso, the film role with which he is most identified, and for which he received an Academy Award, was that of the horrifyingly brilliant serial killer Hannibal (“the Cannibal”) Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). He received subsequent Oscar nominations for his roles as a duty-bound butler in Remains of the Day (1993), as the 37th U.S. president in Nixon (1995), and as Adams in Amistad (1997). Other notable roles in the 1990s included 20th-century patriarchs in Howards End (1992), Legends of the Fall (1994), and Meet Joe Black (1998) as well as storied adventurers in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and The Mask of Zorro (1998).

Hopkins revived his celebrated portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal (2001) and Red Dragon (2002) before leading the cast of a 2003 adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain. In 2005 he starred as a brilliant mathematician afflicted with mental illness in Proof and as a New Zealand motorcycle racer in The World’s Fastest Indian. After enlivening the legal thriller Fracture (2007), Hopkins appeared in several big-budget movies rooted in mythology, including Beowulf (2007; as King Hrothgar) and The Wolfman (2010).

Later movie and television roles

Hopkins played the Norse god Odin in Thor (2011) and its sequels, Thor: The Dark World (2013) and Thor: Ragnarok (2017). He also starred in the kaleidoscopic drama 360 (2011) and as film director Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock (2012), which centred on the making of the classic suspense movie Psycho (1960). In the ensemble action comedy Red 2 (2013) Hopkins stole scenes as an eccentric nuclear scientist, and in the biblical drama Noah (2014) he dispensed wisdom to the title character as Methuselah. In 2015 he starred in the crime drama Solace, playing a doctor who is assisting in the hunt for a serial killer. After playing a string of villainous characters, Hopkins appeared in Transformers: The Last Knight in 2017. Hopkins later portrayed the eponymous hero in a televised adaptation (2018) of William Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Hopkins then starred as Benedict XVI in the Netflix film The Two Popes (2019), about the friendship between Benedict and the future Pope Francis. For his performance, Hopkins earned his fifth Oscar nomination. He garnered further acclaim—including his second Academy Award—for his portrayal of a man struggling with dementia in The Father (2020). In 2022 Hopkins appeared in several movies, including Armageddon Time, a coming-of-age tale that addresses issues of bigotry and privilege. His other notable credits included the HBO TV series Westworld (2016– ), a sci-fi thriller in which he was cast as the creator of an adult theme park featuring humanlike robots.

Directorial efforts

In addition to acting, Hopkins also wrote and directed the film August (1996) and the surreal Slipstream (2007). The former was adapted from Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya, and the latter followed an aging screenwriter as he encountered his characters in real life. Hopkins played the lead in both films.

Awards and honours

For lifetime achievement, Hopkins received a Golden Globe Award (2006) and a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award (2008). After being made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1987, he was knighted in 1993.

Additional Information

Anthony Hopkins was born on December 31, 1937, in Margam, Wales, to Muriel Anne (Yeats) and Richard Arthur Hopkins, a baker. His parents were both of half Welsh and half English descent. Influenced by Richard Burton, he decided to study at College of Music and Drama and graduated in 1957. In 1965, he moved to London and joined the National Theatre, invited by Laurence Olivier, who could see the talent in Hopkins. In 1967, he made his first film for television, A Flea in Her Ear (1967).

From this moment on, he enjoyed a successful career in cinema and television. In 1968, he worked on The Lion in Winter (1968) with Timothy Dalton. Many successes came later, and Hopkins' remarkable acting style reached the four corners of the world. In 1977, he appeared in two major films: A Bridge Too Far (1977) with James Caan, Gene Hackman, Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Elliott Gould and Laurence Olivier, and Maximilian Schell. In 1980, he worked on The Elephant Man (1980). Two good television literature adaptations followed: Othello (1981) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1982). In 1987 he was awarded with the Commander of the order of the British Empire. This year was also important in his cinematic life, with 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), acclaimed by specialists. In 1993, he was knighted.

In the 1990s, Hopkins acted in movies like Desperate Hours (1990) and Howards End (1992), The Remains of the Day (1993) (nominee for the Oscar), Legends of the Fall (1994), Nixon (1995) (nominee for the Oscar), Surviving Picasso (1996), Amistad (1997) (nominee for the Oscar), The Mask of Zorro (1998), Meet Joe Black (1998) and Instinct (1999). His most remarkable film, however, was The Silence of the Lambs (1991), for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor. He also got a B.A.F.T.A. for this role.

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Jai Ganesh · 2023-11-26 17:17:28

1396) Al Pacino

Details

Alfredo James Pacino (born April 25, 1940) is an American actor. Considered one of the greatest and most influential actors of the 20th century, Pacino has received numerous accolades: including an Academy Award, two Tony Awards, and two Primetime Emmy Awards achieving the Triple Crown of Acting. He has also been honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2001, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2007, the National Medal of Arts in 2011, and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2016.

A method actor, Pacino studied at HB Studio and the Actors Studio, where he was taught by Charlie Laughton and Lee Strasberg. Pacino went on to receive the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Scent of a Woman (1992). His other Oscar-nominated roles include The Godfather (1972), Serpico (1973), The Godfather Part II (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), ...And Justice for All (1979), Dickinson Tracy (1990), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), and The Irishman (2019). He also acted in The Panic in Needle Park (1971), Scarface (1983), The Godfather Part III (1990), Carlito's Way (1993), Heat (1995), Donnie Brasco (1997), The Devil's Advocate (1997), The Insider (1999), Any Given Sunday (1999), Insomnia (2002), and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

On television, Pacino has acted in several productions for HBO, including Angels in America (2003) and the Jack Kevorkian biopic You Don't Know Jack (2010), winning a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for each. Pacino starred in the Amazon Prime Video series Hunters (2020–23). He has also had an extensive career on stage. He is a two-time Tony Award winner, winning Best Featured Actor in a Play in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? (1969) and Best Actor in a Play for The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1977).

Pacino made his directing debut with the documentary Looking for Richard (1996); Pacino had played the lead role on stage in 1977. He has also acted as Shylock in a 2004 feature film adaptation and 2010 stage production of The Merchant of Venice. Pacino directed and starred in Chinese Coffee (2000), Wilde Salomé (2011), and Salomé (2013). Since 1994, he has been the joint president of the Actors Studio.

Additional Information

Al Pacino (born April 25, 1940, New York, New York, U.S.) is an American actor best known for his intense, explosive acting style.

Early career

After growing up in East Harlem and the Bronx, Pacino moved at age 19 to Greenwich Village, where he studied acting at the Herbert Berghof Studio and appeared in many Off-Broadway and out-of-town productions, including Hello, Out There (1963) and Why Is a Crooked Letter (1966). He took further acting lessons from Lee Strasberg and played a small part in the film Me, Natalie in 1969. The same year, he made his Broadway debut and won a Tony Award for his performance in the play Does the Tiger Wear a Necktie? Pacino’s first leading role in a film came with The Panic in Needle Park (1971), a grim tale of that became something of a cult classic.

Stardom: The Godfather, Serpico, and Scarface

Director Francis Ford Coppola cast Pacino in the film that would make him a star, The Godfather (1972). The saga of a family of gangsters and their fight to maintain power in changing times, The Godfather was a wildly popular film that won the Academy Award for best picture and earned Pacino numerous accolades—including his first of many Oscar nominations—for his intense performance as Michael Corleone, a gangster’s son who reluctantly takes over the “family business.” Pacino solidified his standing as one of Hollywood’s most dynamic stars in his next few films. In Scarecrow (1973), he teamed with Gene Hackman in a bittersweet story about two transients, and his roles in Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975) displayed Pacino’s characteristic screen qualities of brooding seriousness and explosive rage. He also repeated the role of Michael Corleone for Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II (1974), a film that, like its predecessor, won the best picture Oscar.

Pacino’s next few films did not fare as well. Bobby Deerfield (1977) was notable as his first box-office failure since he had become a star. The dark comedy …And Justice for All (1979) featured some of Pacino’s most memorable scenes, but Cruising (1980) and the light comedy Author! Author! (1982) were critical and popular disasters.

In Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983), Pacino returned to the kind of combustible, high-intensity role that had made him famous. As gangster Tony Montana, Pacino gave a highly charged, unrestrained performance that, although loved by some and deplored by others, ranks among his most unforgettable. His next film, Revolution (1985), was an expensive flop, and Pacino did not appear in another film for four years.

Academy Award and later films

Sea of Love (1989), his biggest hit in years, reestablished Pacino as a major film star. In 1990 he reprised the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part III and gave a hilarious portrayal of grotesque gangster Big Boy Caprice in Dickinson Tracy. Frankie and Johnny (1991) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), both adaptations of plays, continued his string of well-received films, and he won a best actor Oscar for his portrayal of a bitter blind man in Scent of a Woman (1992). Pacino’s other notable films of the 1990s included Carlito’s Way (1993); Heat (1995), a crime drama in which he played a detective hunting a thief (Robert De Niro); Donnie Brasco (1997), in which he starred as a low-level mobster who unknowingly befriends an FBI agent (Johnny Depp); and Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday (1999). Also in 1999 Pacino appeared opposite Russell Crowe in The Insider; based on real-life events, it examines tobacco companies and their efforts to conceal the dangerous side effects of cigarettes.

Pacino’s prolific acting career continued into the 21st century. In 2002 he starred with Robin Williams in the thriller Insomnia, and he later appeared in Ocean’s Thirteen (2007), the final installment of a popular comedy trilogy that featured George Clooney and Brad Pitt. After skewering his public persona with a role as himself in the Adam Sandler comedy Jack and Jill (2011), Pacino played an aging gangster in Stand Up Guys (2012). He evinced the isolation of a small-town locksmith in Manglehorn (2014) and the late-life epiphany of a rock star in Danny Collins (2015). After a series of roles in unremarkable movies, Pacino joined a cast of colourful characters in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019). He then costarred with De Niro in The Irishman (2019), his first film with director Martin Scorsese. In the mob drama, which received a theatrical release before airing on Netflix, Pacino played labour leader Jimmy Hoffa, whose disappearance in 1975 caused much speculation. For his performance, Pacino earned his 10th Oscar nomination. In 2021 he appeared as a lawyer in American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally, which was based on the true story of Mildred Gillars, a radio propagandist for the Nazi government during World War II. That year Pacino was also cast in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, which centres on the true story of the murder of Maurizio Gucci, who headed his family’s luxury fashion brand.

TV and stage work

In between his big-screen work, Pacino appeared in several television productions for HBO. For his role as homophobic lawyer Roy Cohn in Angels in America (2003), an adaptation of Tony Kushner’s two-part play about AIDS in the 1980s, he won an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award. His performance as Jack Kevorkian, a doctor who assisted in the suicide of terminally ill patients, in the movie You Don’t Know Jack (2010) earned him the same awards. He later starred as another controversial figure in David Mamet’s Phil Spector (2013), which was set during the embattled record producer’s first trial for murder. In Paterno (2018) Pacino played legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, whose reputation was tarnished by a gender-abuse scandal that occurred during his tenure. In the Amazon series Hunters (2020–23), he portrayed a Holocaust survivor who leads a group of people searching for Nazis in the 1970s.

Pacino frequently returned to the stage throughout his career, notably winning a Tony Award for his leading role in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1977). He also starred in such plays as William Shakespeare’s Richard III (1973 and 1979), Julius Caesar (1988), and The Merchant of Venice (2010); Mamet’s American Buffalo (1980, 1981, and 1983) and Glengarry Glen Ross (2012); and Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1992, 2003, and 2006). In 1992 Pacino originated the role of Harry Levine, a washed-up writer who is depressed about his lack of success, in the Broadway drama Chinese Coffee; he later directed and starred in a 2000 film adaptation. He also directed the documentary films Looking for Richard (1996) and Wilde Salomé (2011), which offered behind-the-scenes looks at two of his stage productions.

In 2001 Pacino received the Cecil B. DeMille Award (a Golden Globe for lifetime achievement). His other awards included the National Medal of Arts (2011) and a Kennedy Center Honor (2016).

Math Is Fun Forum

#1426 2023-11-15 16:49:00

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#1427 2023-11-16 16:34:06

Re: crème de la crème

#1428 2023-11-17 16:53:44

Re: crème de la crème

#1429 2023-11-18 17:00:25

Re: crème de la crème

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Re: crème de la crème

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Re: crème de la crème

#1432 2023-11-21 16:49:15

Re: crème de la crème

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Re: crème de la crème

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