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Rachel McAdams Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

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Blonde for one role, brunette the next, actress Rachel McAdams has used more than appearances to conceal herself in the characters she has played. Though in her early career she often played the bitchy girl with a cruel streak to rival any teenaged pom-pommer—or third-world dictator—McAdams has also effectively played warm, genuine kind and high-spirited. And while still relatively unknown to mainstream audiences, McAdams possesses both the look and talent to become a major star.

Originally from London, Ontario—a picturesque Canadian town—McAdams craved the spotlight at an early age. At 4, she began competing as an ice skater, but over the years the pressure from competition, and her mother, soon wore the young McAdams out. All the while, McAdams was traveling to nearby Stratford to attend local theater and soon developed an interest in acting. At 12, she performed Shakespeare at the Original Kids Theatre in her hometown. She won her first acting award in 1995 for her role in I Live In A Little Town, a high school play that was featured in the Ontario Showcase of the Sears Drama Festival. After gaining valuable skills and experience as an Original Kid and in high school performances, McAdams attended York University where she performed in numerous student films and stage productions. She graduated with honors with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in theater.

McAdams made her first on screen performance in “The Famous Jett Jackson” (Disney, 1998-2002) as Hannah, the bulimic older sister of one of the main characters. She went on to star in several movies-of-the-week, including “Guilt By Association” (2002), the first original movie to be produced by Court TV. McAdams also had a starring role in “Shotgun Love Dolls” (MTV, 2001), a pilot shot for the music network that ultimately collected dust on the shelf. Her feature debut came with “My Name is Tanino” (2001), a comedy helmed by Italian director Paolo Virzi, about a young, carefree Italian (Corrado Fortuna) who chases after an American tourist (McAdams) to the U.S. after their romantic liaison in his hometown. A breakout role in the Canadian feature “Perfect Pie” (2002) helped cement McAdams as an acting force to be reckoned with—her performance as the best friend of a small town girl who makes it big won her a nomination for a Genie Award, Canada’s equivalent to the Oscar.

After a successful stint in Canada’s entertainment industry, McAdams set her sights on Hollywood. Though many actors who try to transfer success from their native lands to America usually suffer years of struggle, McAdams managed to land a big role right out of the gate. She starred in “The Hot Chick” (2002), a teen comedy about a mean-spirited high school girl—popular, captain of the cheerleading squad and dating the quarterback—who gets a heavy dose of comeuppance when, though the workings of a spell, wakes up to find herself trapped in the body of a 30-something man played by Rob Schneider. McAdams did another turn as a mean-spirited high schooler in “Mean Girls” (2004), written by “Saturday Night Live” veteran Tina Fey. Though similar to her role in “The Hot Chick”, McAdams delved deep into character by exploring the machine-like quality of wanting to hurt people just for the fun of it, and she also brought a surprisingly level of sympathy to the character.

Despite her penchant for playing mean girls, McAdams was always on the hunt for imaginative scripts with challenging characters. Her search paid off when she was cast in “The Notebook” (2004), a star-crossed period romance between a spunky Southern debutante and a poor but charming small town man (Ryan Gosling). An effectively sentimental and emotional film, “The Notebook” proved to be McAdams’ breakout performance—the actress popped off the screen in nearly every scene she was in, running the full spectrum of emotion, and demonstrated the promise for a long and fruitful career.

She followed up with the popular Owen Wilson-Vince Vaughn comedy “Wedding Crashers” (2005), adding sparkle and verve to what might have otherwise been a thankless role as the woman who finally snares the inveterate wedding invader Wilson’s heart. Then she took center stage in the Wes Craven thriller “Red Eye” (2005), playing a resourceful hotel employee who finds herself trapped on an airline flight with a menacing stranger (Cillian Murphy) who terrorizes her to switch the room of a political guest at her hotel in exchange for her father’s life. Again McAdams demonstrated a strong on-screen magnetism and proved she could create a believable, relatable character in the midst of the most high-concept situation. She was then part of the ensemble cast in “The Family Stone” (2005), relationship drama about the eldest son (Dermot Mulroney) of a bohemian family bringing his controlling New York girlfriend (Sarah Jessica Parker) home for the holidays. The ensuing battle of conflicting attitudes mixed with awkwardness and hostility causes relationships to split and secrets to be revealed.

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Marcia Gay Harden Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

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This attractive, dark-haired, stage-trained player of film and TV made her feature debut in “Miller’s Crossing” (1990), Joel and Ethan Coen’s stylish take on the gangster genre. Marcia Gay Harden scored with her sultry, husky-voiced portrayal of Verna whom she described as “a gun-toting, cigarette-smoking, poker-faced moll.”

One of five children born to a US Naval captain and his homemaker wife, Harden spent a peripatetic childhood, in which “I changed my identity all the time”, even pretending to be a boy for a time while living in Japan. Intending to enter diplomatic service, Harden changed her plans while attending college in Greece. After a stint at the University of Maryland, she eventually graduated from the University of Texas where she was directed by Edward Dmytryk in a film school production. After some success in regional theater in Washington, DC, Harden moved to Manhattan and joined the ranks of every other struggling actress, taking waitressing jobs and auditioning without much success. It perhaps didn’t help when a casting agent informed Harden that her “flaring-nostril look” would preclude her from ever being hired. Ignoring the rude comments, Harden enrolled in the graduate program at NYU. She went on to star in the short film “Florence” (1990), director Rebecca Miller’s portrait of an empathetic woman who develops amnesia just like her neighbor. That same year, she made her feature debut as Verna in “Miller’s Crossing”, although it took a while before her career kicked into gear.

In 1991’s “Late for Dinner”, Harden successfully portrayed a woman who ages from her twenties to her fifties and demonstrated her flair for character work that would become her hallmark. Harden offered a successful embodiment of classic Hollywood beauty Ava Gardner in the biographical miniseries “Sinatra” (CBS, 1992) and then held her own amid a bevy of Oscar-winning actresses (Shirley MacLaine, Jessica Tandy and Kathy Bates) in “Used People” (1992), as a grieving, neurotic, Hollywood-obsessed mother who reenacts celebrated performances of famous leading ladies (e.g., Audrey Hepburn, Monroe, Streisand). That same year, Harden received excellent notices for her portrayal of the erotic anti-heroine of “Crush”, an unconventional road picture from New Zealand, in which she essayed a careless American who ingratiates herself into the lives and beds of a writer and his grown daughter.

While carefully building her film career (which she has admitted in interviews was always her goal), Harden continued to hone her craft on stage. She headlined a 1992 Chicago production of “The Skin of Our Teeth” and acted alongside Paul McCrane and Frank Whaley in the Off-Broadway “The Years” in 1993. Later that year, she earned a Tony nomination for her portrait of a fragile Mormon wife who develops an addiction to Valium as her marriage crumbles in Tony Kushner’s landmark two-part epic “Angels in America”. Harden then segued to supporting Ed Harris and Beverly D’Angelo in Sam Shepard’s “Simpatico”, produced at NYC’s The Public Theatre in 1994.

Returning to the big screen, the actress earned praise as the timid wife of a local businessman who blossoms when she begins working at “The Spitfire Grill” (1996). She more than held her own opposite the manic Robin Williams in “Flubber” (1997) and managed to make the brittle daughter of a wealthy man (Anthony Hopkins) likable in “Meet Joe Black” (1998). On TV, Harden excelled as a single woman who asks her gay best friend to father her child in the soapy but entertaining “Labor of Love” (Lifetime, 1998) and then found newfound fans as Susan Silverman, the detective’s love interest in a series of Spenser movies for A&E (”Small Vices” 1999; “Thin Air” 2000; “Walking Shadow” 2001).

Harden lent intelligence and a sultriness to her turn as a NASA engineer romanced by over-the-hill astronaut Tommy Lee Jones in “Space Cowboys” (2000), but had one of her best screen roles yet as Lee Krasner in “Pollock” (also 2000), Ed Harris’ labor-of-love biopic of the tempestuous artist. Sporting a thick Brooklyn accent and forceful screen presence, Harden perfectly matches director-star Harris’ portrayal of the tortured title artist. Netting a couple of end-of-year critics’ awards, Harden was the suprise winner of that year’s Best Supporting Actress Academy Award. Not content to rest on her laurels, though, the actress remained busy appearing in TV projects such as “Guilty Hearts,” “See You In My Dreams” and, opposite Patrick Stewart as one of the devilish daughters in TNT’s Old West retelling of Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” “King of Texas” (all in 2002) as well as co-starring with Judy Davis in “Gaudi Afternoon,” and her post-Oscar choices demonstarted a decidely maverick sensibility, co-starring in Richard Dreyfuss’ short-lived series “The Education of Max Bickford” as his former student and lover turned professorial rival, and in indie writer-director John Sayles’ “Casa de los Babys” (2003), where she delivered a rich and unsentimental performance as the critical, bullying Nan, one of six American women travelling to South America to adopt babies who are forced by law to live there briefly. As the Ugly American in an otherwise sympathetic ensemble, Harden digs under the abrasive surface to suggest childhood traumas that have both hardened her character and may be visited upon her offspring if she does indeed receive a child. Harden reunited with Clint Eastwood for one of the director’s most accomplished and acclaimed films, “Mystic River” (2003), to play Celeste, the soul-lost wife of Dave (Tim Robbins), one of three childhood friends caught up in a murder that threatens to unravel their entire lives. Her harrowing performance was one of the film’s best, and earned her a second Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.

The actress also had a well-measured role opposite Julia Roberts in “Mona Lisa Smile” (2003) as a prim instructor of deportment, grooming and table setting in the repressive 1950s environment of Wellesley College, but was less well-served by the script in the middling Ray Romano-Gene Hackman comedy “Welcome to Mooseport” (2004) as the long-suffering, overly doting aide to Hackman’s former U.S. President. A supporting turn in the admired indie “P.S.” (2004), playing the best friend of a woman (Laura Linney) who believes her new 20-year beau (Topher Grace) is an identical ringer–including his name–for the deceased boy she loved when she was 20. Simultaneously, she appeared in the Lifetime cable film “She’s Too Young” (2004) as the mother of a teen girl facing extreme high school pressures to have sex to be popular. She then winkingly played a prissy, lawsuit-happy single mother who forces the Little League to add a team to accommodate her son and other less-than-stellar young players, only to be beguiled by the bad boy charms of their boozy coach (Billy Bob Thornton) in Richard Linklater’s 2005 remake of “The Bad News Bears.”

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Andie MacDowell Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

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A Southern belle who’s seemingly pure, virtuous, farm-girl sexy and city-woman sophisticated all at the same time, Andie MacDowell has persevered in an industry that wanted to write her off from the start. The model-turned-actress made her feature debut as Jane in “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes” (1984), suffering the indignity of having her inappropriate Southern accent dubbed over by Glenn Close. Writers like critic John Simon, who labeled her “that horse-faced pseudo-sultry jeans model . . . who cannot act and cannot even read lines”, had a field day, but MacDowell dug in rather than quit. Using her own voice for Joel Schumacher’s brat-pack flick “St. Elmo’s Fire” (1985), she began demonstrating that some models were more than just skin deep. Her dead-on portrayal of the sexually repressed wife of Peter Gallagher in the acclaimed “sex, lies and videotape” (1989), winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes that year, earned her several Best Actress prizes but no Oscar nomination, an oversight deemed “incomprehensible” by The New York Times.

In the 1990s, MacDowell hit her stride in light, entertaining fare, giving touching performances with her patented down-home charm in “Green Card” (1990), opposite Gerard Depardieu, and “The Object of Beauty” (1991), in which she played a spoiled socialite more in love with her Henry Moore statue than boyfriend John Malkovich. MacDowell’s considerable charisma also enabled her to escape unscathed from the notorious bomb “Hudson Hawk” (1991). That same year, she delivered a tour-de-force performance in a segment of HBO’s “Women and Men II” entitled “A Domestic Dilemma”, playing the embittered alcoholic wife of Ray Liotta, a part that was radically different from her preceding nice-girl roles. Similarly, her distraught mother of a hospitalized little boy was one of the highlights of Robert Altman’s panoramic “Short Cuts” (1993). The perfect foil for Bill Murray’s smug TV weatherman in the popular romantic-comedy “Groundhog Day” (1993), MacDowell enjoyed another whimsical success opposite Hugh Grant in the surprise blockbusting English import “Four Weddings and a Funeral” (1994), though many underestimated her as “window dressing” on both and gave all the credit to her co-stars.

“Bad Girls (1994), a quasi-feminist but shallow revisionist Western (1994) was a troubled project she admittedly took for the money and one that did not add a degree of toughness to McDowell’s airy charm, but she was luminous as an adored mother stricken with cancer in Diane Keaton’s comedy-drama “Unstrung Heroes” (1995) and as Michael Keaton’s confused wife in “Multiplicity” (1996), a project which rejoined her with “Groundhog Day” director Harold Ramis. She fared less well as a mysterious but sassy woman claiming to be an “angel expert” in “Michael” (also 1996) and as Bill Pullman’s unhappy wife in Wim Wenders’ “The End of the Violence” (1997). Although “Shadrach” seemed a perfect opportunity to stretch playing Southern white trash, the weak script and slack helming by first-time director Susanna Styron (adapting her father William’s story) only offered her as unglamorous, and a problematic script also doomed her debut as executive producer of “Just the Ticket” (both 1998), in which she co-starred opposite producer Andy Garcia but failed to exhibit the charm and charisma of her best work.

MacDowell realized her dream of acting with Miss Piggy in “Muppets from Space” and was the supportive, eagerly accommodating Hollywood wife of blocked screenwriter Albert Brooks in Brooks’ comedy “The Muse” (both 1999). “Town & Country” (2000), which rejoined her with Diane Keaton (this time as an actor), again signaled a change from the glowingly gentle, sweet women she has played best. She assessed what makes the role so juicy for Biography Magazine, (March 2000): “I lie a lot. I get to wear amazing clothes, and I sleep with Warren Beatty.” MacDowell also acted in “Harrison’s Flowers” (lensed 1999-2000), about a woman who travels to Yugoslavia to find her husband, a photojournalist who’s been reported dead. She then appeared in the oft-delayed and over-budgeted flop, “Town & Country” (2001), as the beautiful daughter of an Idaho gun lover (Charlton Heston) who has an illicit affair with a down-and-out New York architect (Warren Beatty). In “Crush”, MacDowell played an American expatriate in charge of a British private school who carries on with a former student fifteen years her junior. She then played one of the loyal clients of Gina Norris (Queen Latifah), who introduces her cutting-edge hairstyles from Chicago to Atlanta in “Beauty Shop” (2005), a spin-off of the popular “Barbershop” franchise.

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Juliette Lewis Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

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Anxious to get on with her acting career, precocious Juliette Lewis dropped out of high school at age 14, passed a proficiency course and became an emancipated minor a year later, unbound by child labor laws. Despite having no training, she had already landed daughter roles in the Showtime miniseries “Home Fires” (1987) and the ABC series “I Married Dora” (1987-88), and though she would return as a series regular in “A Family For Joe” (NBC, 1990), starring Robert Mitchum, she found sitcoms constraining, resenting her directors’ insistence that she do nothing with her hands while standing stiffly, geared for the punchline. The TV-movie “Too Young to Die?” (NBC, 1990), which teamed her with longtime love interest Brad Pitt, provided a sample of the dramatic work to come, casting her as 15-year-old facing the death penalty for murder, but her feature debut as Chevy Chase’s daughter in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” (1989) confined her to emotional territory very much in keeping with the sitcoms she loathed.

Lewis’ breakout role as the thumb-sucking nymphet struggling for independence from her warring parents in Martin Scorsese’s remake of “Cape Fear” (1991) rescued her from sitcom purgatory and earned her an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress. Her sensuous scenes with a psychotic killer (played by Robert De Niro) were the sensation of the movie, and Lewis’ small, brightly piercing eyes and pouty mouth suggested a waifish but free-spirited and sexually–indeed, sometimes dangerously–provocative young woman questing for answers and emotional fulfillment, shattering any notion that she would ever be sitcom fodder again. She stepped in for Emily Lloyd as the college student who becomes involved with her professor in Woody Allen’s “Husbands and Wives” (1992), sympathetically essaying the would-be “other woman” role in a film whose story of a crumbling marriage and the husband’s affair with a much younger woman mirrored the Allen-Mia Farrow breakup.

Expanding on her child-woman of “Cape Fear”, Lewis began her “psychotic waif” period as Gary Oldman’s peroxide blonde moll in Peter Medak’s hopped-up contemporary film noir “Romeo Is Bleeding” (1993) and adopted a horrifically hilarious spastic laugh and adolescent gawkiness for that year’s “Kalifornia”. On the road with homicidal partner Pitt and yuppies David Duchovny and Michelle Forbes, her clueless trailer-park Lolita was a perfect “enabler” for Pitt’s serial killer. Back on the road for “Natural Born Killers” (1994), more closely matched in sociopathic tendencies with fellow love-thug Woody Harrelson as they terrorized the Southwest on their killing spree, she captured the frighteningly odd emptiness of her character’s moral inattention. Tucked amidst these on-the-edge roles was an atypically sweet, reflective turn with Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio in the offbeat “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” (also 1993), but a reteaming with DiCaprio in “Basketball Diaries” (1995) returned her to familiar low-life terrain as a scuzzy hooker.

Unfortunately, the fast pace of Lewis’ personal life was mimicking her out-of-control onscreen reality, and she could no longer hide her drug addiction by the time “The Evening Star” (1996) required her life-imitating-art portrayal of a substance abuser. Taking an 18-month hiatus from movies, she cleaned herself out with the help of Scientology and returned to pictures in the independent film “Some Girls” (1998), acting for the first time with Giovanni Ribisi. Her next project was Garry Marshall’s much more ambitious “The Other Sister” (1999), which starred her opposite Ribisi as a mentally-challenged female coming of age sexually. Though many critics objected to the picture’s sitcom-like script, Lewis had chosen it for the compelling parallels between the life of her character (who had spent an extended period in an institution) and her own life as both were reentering the world after an absence. Opinion varied regarding her performance, but no one could deny the risk she took in taking the part or that she was completely honest in its creation.

Lewis was featured in some lighter fare, as a tough New Jersey girl in the 1980s period piece “Hysterical Blindness” (2002), the HBO original movie co-starred Emmy nominee Gena Rowlands and Golden Globe recipient Uma Thurman. She was next seen in the thriller “Enough” (2002), which starred Jennifer Lopez as an abused wife and mother who with the help of Lewis’ character tries unsuccessfully to escape her abusive husband (played by Billy Campbell). Thier bootless attempts result in a plot for Lopez to kill her abuser. Then, the following year, Lewis took the turn from serious to comical when she was cast as the girlfriend of Luke Wilson’s character in the hilarious feature, “Old School” (2003), a raucous comedy about a trio of thirtysomething buddies who try to recapture their college years by starting their own off-campus fraternity.

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