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Jessica Alba’s a Mama-to-Be

Posted by Vogt
at June 9, 2008

Jessica Alba and boyfriend Cash Warren will soon be a fantastic three.

The couple is expecting their first child together in late spring or early summer, Alba's rep Brad Cafarelli confirmed Wednesday.

People was first to report news of the pregnancy. 

Alba, 26, and Warren, the 28-year-old son of former Hill Street Blues star Michael Warren, have dated on and off since the fall of 2004, after meeting on the set of The Fantastic Four, in which she starred and he worked as a director's assistant. 

So far, there's no word on how the impending addition may affect Alba's upcoming production schedule.

She recently wrapped filming on The Love Guru, opposite Mike Myers and Justin Timberlake, and is attached to star in the long delayed Sin City sequel.

She'll also be seen in the horror film The Eye, slated for release Feb. 1.

Alba also recently confirmed she was in talks to make her Broadway debut in a revival of David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, playing the role originated by Madonna in the 1988  production.

"Well, there's a rumor. Yeah, I've been asked to do it," she said last month on Live with Regis and Kelly.

"But this is just talk. It's not really happening yet," she added.

At the time, Alba said that taking the role next summer might work out to be "perfect timing," should a potential strike by the Screen Actors Guild become a reality in June.

Now, it looks like said strike might coincide with her maternity leave instead.

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Totally New Releases: Speed, Cameron and Jujitsu

Posted by Vogt
at June 3, 2008

Redbelt

The second big summer movie weekend has something for everyoneif you like candy-colored race cars, kitschy anime remakes, Ashton Kutcher, martial-arts flicks or even David Mamet. Here's what's out, and what we thought:

Redbelt:  Martial-arts trainer Chiwetel Ejiofor gets pulled into a prize-money tourney against his will. Kickass thinking-man's fight flick from writer-director Mamet. A-

What Happens in Vegas:  Goofy cuties Cameron Diaz and Kutcher are equally matched in a rom-com, as silly and pleasant as it needs to beno more, no less. B

Speed Racer:  Go, Speed Racer, go! Go find a story more worthy of your mind-blowing visuals! If you don't already have ADD, you will by the finish line. Lookshiny object! C

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Felicity Huffman Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

Felicity Huffman.jpg

Often lauded for her stage work, Felicity Huffman won a new round of fans as the smart, competent producer Dana Whitaker on the ABC series “Sports Night” (1998-2000). Although born in Westchester County, New York, she was raised in Colorado. Returning east to attend NYU, Huffman joined the Atlantic Theater Company, co-founded by David Mamet and William H Macy. Mamet offered the actress her first screen role, a bit part in “Things Change” (1988), and she was also tapped as Madonna’s understudy and successor in Mamet’s Broadway play “Speed-the-Plow” (also 1988).

Over the course of the next ten years, Huffman alternated between acclaimed stage roles (most often with the Atlantic Theater Company) and TV roles. She made her small screen debut as a series regular portraying the government security officer who aids an elderly man who seems to be growing younger in “Stephen King’s ‘Golden Years’” (CBS, 1991). Guest roles on series like “Law & Order” and “The X-Files” followed. Huffman was tapped to play Edward Asner’s daughter in the ABC sitcom “Thunder Alley” but was replaced after the pilot. She bounced back from that disappointment with a stage success in Mamet’s “The Cryptogram” (1995) and in a supporting turn in the playwright’s film “The Spanish Prisoner” (1998) before landing “Sports Night,” the Aaron Sorkin-penned sit-com that made her a well-known name.

Her real-life husband Macy, whom she married in 1997, joined the series in its second season, sparking an on-screen partnership that would endure through many projects: they also co-starred in the cable telepic “A Case of Murder” (1999), a comedy-mystery Macy adapted from the Donald Westlake novel; they both appeared in director Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” (1999); she had an uncredited turn in Macy’s award-winning TNT telepic “Door To Door,” which he also co-wrote; they reunited in the Showtime mini-series “Out of Order” (2003); and co-starred in the legal potboiler telepic “Reversible Errors” (2004).

After “Sports Night” and away from Macy, Huffman also kept busy solo on the small screen with parts in the telepics “The Heart Department” (2001), “Snap Decision” (2001) and, most impressively, in director John Frankenheimer’s acclaimed HBO drama “The Path to War” (2002), playing First Lady “Lady Bird” Johnson. She also scored a pair of high-profile recurring roles, playing Julia Wilcox, Frasier Crane’s caustic co-worker and eventual love interest on the hit sit-com “Frasier” from 2003-2004, and Charlotte Ellis in the legal drama “The D.A.” After a stint on the big screen as Kate Hudson’s late older sister in the comedy “Raising Helen” (2004), Huffman returned to series drama in the offbeat serial drama “Desperate Housewives” (ABC, 2004 - ), playing Lynette Scavo, a former corporate ladder-climber turned stay-at-home mom who struggles with her insecurities when she can’t control her wild children and gets little support from her husband. The show’s mega-popularity provided Huffman’s career with fresh energy–she scored an Emmy as Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for the series’ debut season, as well as a 2006 Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series–though she continued to remain the most private and low-profile of her co-stars.

Later that same year Huffman had an astonishing turn on the big screen in the indie “Transamerica” (2005) playing a pre-operative transsexual who, on the brink of her transforming surgery, discovered that in her youth she had fathered a son, who contacts her as a troubled teen hustler on the run. Despite the gender-bending premise, the film followed a traditional road movie dynamic, and Huffman won widespread praise for her nearly unrecognizable, fully formed performance. All the attention she received resulted in a Golden Globe award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, which almost guaranteed the actress a nomination from the Academy Awards. And she was indeed one of the nominees for Best Actress in a Leading Role when they were announced the morning of January 31, 2006.

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Cate Blanchett Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

cate-blanchett.jpg

This engaging blonde Australian actress found herself thrust in the spotlight with her third feature, “Oscar and Lucinda” (1997), in which she starred opposite Ralph Fiennes. As the headstrong proto-feminist heiress whose penchant for gambling draws her to a clergyman with the same predilections, Cate Blanchett delivered a star-making performance. Possessing an innate intelligence and talent coupled with her malleable features—she can seem plain and then beautiful, sometimes in the same shot—the actress quickly rose to international fame.

A product of Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Arts where her performance as “Electra” has become something of a local legend, Blanchett found a berth at the Sydney Theatre Company, appearing in “Top Girls” and winning raves for her turn in “Kafka’s Dances”. She went on to earn accolades for her turn as the female student in David Mamet’s “Oleanna” (1993) opposite Geoffrey Rush, and later added the Shakespearean roles of Ophelia and Miranda to her credits. In 1997, she played Nina in “The Seagull” in Australia and made her London stage debut in 1999 in a revival of David Hare’s “Plenty”.

Blanchett made her film debut in the short “Parklands” (1996) but landed her first feature role as one of the females interned in a Japanese camp in Bruce Beresford’s WWII-era drama “Paradise Road” (1997). She further garnered attention (and the 1997 Australian Film Institute Best Supporting Actress Award) as one leg of a romantic triangle (completed by Richard Roxburgh and Frances O’Connor) in the darkly comic “Thank God He Met Lizzie” (also 1997). Her rising star status was confirmed when she landed the leading role of the Tudor monarch in the biopic “Elizabeth” (1998). Holding her own in a cast that included Geoffrey Rush, Richard Attenborough, Joseph Fiennes and Christopher Eccleston, Blanchett delivered a brilliant turn as the young woman who grows into the stature of her office. By turns an emotional girl and a driven women, her Elizabeth was a multi-dimensional creation that earned numerous accolades including an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

After carrying a major film, it perhaps came as a bit of a surprise that her follow-up roles were predominantly supporting ones Blanchett exhibited her comic side, replete with a New Jersey accent as the wife of air traffic controller John Cusack in “Pushing Tin” (1999). Later that same year, she was back in period clothes, first as the wife of a titled man being blackmailed in Oliver Parker’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” and then as Meredith, a character created especially for the film “The Talented Mr. Ripley”, a 50s-era drama about a slick American (Matt Damon) who plots to kill a playboy (Jude Law) in order to assume his identity in Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel.

Blanchett continued to alternate between showy supporting roles and strong leads. She was terrific as a gold-digging Russian chorus girl in “The Man Who Cried” (screened at Venice in 2000 and released in the USA in 2001), and demonstrated her chameleonic abilities essaying a Southern widow with psychic abilities in the gothic thriller “The Gift” (2000). The latter was co-written by her “Pushing Tin” co-star Billy Bob Thornton who based her character on his own mother. The actress remained busy and constantly employed, reuniting with Thornton in the comedy “Bandits” and playing Kevin Spacey’s ex-wife in “The Shipping News”, as well as undertaking the title role in “Charlotte Gray” (all 2001), opposite Billy Crudup under Gillian Armstrong’s direction. Blanchett also squeezed in a turn as the elf queen Galadriel in the three films comprising “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy: “The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001), “The Two Towers” (2002) and “The Return of the King” (2003). Additionally, she acted opposite her “The Gift” co-star Giovanni Ribisi in “Heaven” (2002), Tom Tykwer’s English-language debut.

Blanchett next received rave reviews for her turn as the real-life crusading Irish journalist whose life is endangered when she pursues her mob investigation too far in “Veronica Geurin” (2003), and her dual performance as “herself” and a jealous relative was hailed as the best sequence in Jim Jarmousch’s long-awaited anthology “Coffee & Cigarettes” (2003). Blanchett, who Leonardo DiCaprio referred to as “the female Daniel Day-Lewis” for her chameleon-like qualities, tackled two wildly different roles in 2004: first she played a pregnant female journalist caught in a off-kilter romantic triangle between an undersea explorer (Bill Murray) and his possible son (Owen Wilson) in Wes Anderson’s comedy “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”. Next she captured the coltish, often haughty charisma and unforgettable New England cadences of Hollywood superstar Katharine Hepburn, one of Howard Hughes’ (DiCaprio) more serious paramours in director Martin Scorsese’s impressive Hughes biopic “The Aviator.” Blanchett was widely recognized for her performance and earned several nominations for Best Actress in a Supporting Role—including a Golden Globe nomination, and victories at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, BAFTA Awards and ultimately, the Oscar at the Academy Awards. Blanchett’s victory gave her the unique distinction of becoming the first actress to win an Oscar for playing an Oscar-winning actress.

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