0

Watchmen Cast List

Posted by Vogt
at May 24, 2008

WatchmenOur friends at dTheatre have posted a complete list of the rumored (but not confirmed) cast for Zach Snyder’s big screen adaptation of Watchmen.

What do you guys think?

Celebrity Film
0

Maggie Gyllenhaal Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

Maggie Gyllenhaal.jpg
A versitile and intriguing actress, whose penetrating acting and off-kilter beauty were initially relegated to supporting roles, Maggie Gyllenhaal broke out to the forefront with the edgy S&M themed drama “Secretary.” Despite this being her first starring role, she did not spend much time in the trenches, having a relatively painless decade paying dues before getting her first major role at the age of 24.

Having grown up in a family of entertainment professionals, it is no surprise Gyllenhaal decided to pursue a career in acting. Her mother is successful screenwriter Naomi Foner (Oscar nominated for her 1988 screenplay for “Running on Empty,” starring River Phoenix) and her father is accomplished film and television director Stephen Gyllenhaal (nominated for an Emmy for 1990 telepic “A Killing in a Small Town” and directed feature “Losing Isaiah” in 1995). Adding a healthy dose of sibling rivalry to go along with these parental expectations, her brother is successful actor Jake Gyllenhaal (”Moonlight Mile” 2002).

Gyllenhaal was born in New York City but grew up in Los Angeles where she and her brother attended the prestigious Harvard-Wakeland prep school, known as a “who’s who among who’s whose kids” in the Hollywood circle. Here Gyllenhaal was an excellent student and active in the drama program. At the age of 15, Gyllenhaal had her feature debut in the nostalgic drama “Waterland” (1992), directed by her father and starring Jeremy Irons and Ethan Hawke. She next had another small role in “A Dangerous Woman” (1993), also directed by her father. In 1995, Gyllenhaal moved to New York to attend Columbia University. While she was busy studying Eastern religion and literature in school, she also found the time to further her professional acting career. She appeared in two more television movies directed by her father as well as the feature “Homegrown” (1998), also written and directed by her father.

After graduating from Columbia in 1999, Gyllenhaal certainly had ample exposure to the film and television world. However, in order to really break into the business, Gyllenhaal would need a stand-out role to get her in the running for the high-profile parts. That break came in the form of her role as Raven, a Satanic make-up artist in the eccentric John Waters film “Cecil B. Demented.” (2000). This gave Gyllenhaal enough recognition that she landed a string of supporting roles the following year. She played her brother’s sister in the far-out sci-fi movie “Donnie Darko” (2001), appeared in “Riding in Cars with Boys” (2001) and was featured in the teen romance “40 Days and 40 Nights.”

Not the kind of actress meant to lay wait in obscurity for very long, Gyllenhaal had a breakout performance with “Secretary” in 2002. Playing a timid young woman recovering from a mental breakdown who engages in a S&M relationship with her boss, Gyllenhaal brought the depth and delicacy called for in the role. The movie won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance and was promptly picked up for theatrical distribution. Gyllenhaal’s indie actress, star-on-the-rise status was solidified with awards nominations–including a Golden Globe– and her next projects, Charlie Kaufman’s mind-bending film-about-writing-a-film “Adaptation” (2002) and the John Sayles directed “Casa de Los Babys” (2003). She also joined fellow up-and-comers Julia Stiles and Kirsten Dunst as students of a liberal-minded instructor (Julia Roberts) at 1950s Wellesley College, nearly stealing the entertaining but routine movie as Giselle Levy, the wised-up class rebel who sleeps around and almost loses her bearings. Quickly gaining a reputation as a cerebral actress, often compared to the likes of Cate Blanchett, Emily Watson or a young Diane Keaton, Maggie Gyllenhaal has stepped out from the shadow of her parents and her brother and to shine alone in the spotlight.

The actress continued to deliver a string of unflinching, unselfconscious performances, including Sidney Lumet’s harrowing HBO telepic “Strip Search” (2004), in which two parallel plotline exploring post-9/11 issues of civil liberties and personal freedoms. Gyllenhaal played an American woman detained in China on suspicion of terrorisim, forced to defend her own rights to an interrogator (Ken Leung) in a sweltering basement prison, stripped bare both physically and emotionally. After compellingly playing a hustling con artist in the otherwise middling crime drama “Criminal” (2004), Gyllenhaal turned in one her most winning performances to date in director Don Roos’ seriocomic “Happy Endings” (2005). As the morally ambiguous singer Jude, who seduces a closeted gay youth (Jason Ritter) then turns her sights on his lonely, wealthy father (Tom Arnold) Gyllenhaal dazzled with her subtle, shifting behaviors, creating a compelling, fully realized character than was neither fully good or fully bad.

Family
Significant Others
Education
Milestones
Celebrity Biography
0

Glenn Close Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

Glenn_Close.jpg

A strong-featured, coolly patrician blonde, Glenn Close spent her childhood and adolescence involved in the conservative Moral Re-Armament movement. As she entered her teenaged years, she was sent to boarding schools in Switzerland and Connecticut while her physician father operated medical clinics in the Congo (later Zaire). Close spent a couple of years traveling with the folk singing group Up With People before she decided to attend college. After graduating from William and Mary, she headed to NYC where she almost immediately found work with the Phoenix Theatre Company, appearing in “Love for Love” and “The Member of the Wedding”. Close was cast as Mary Tudor in the Richard Rodgers’ musical “Rex” (1976) and she had her breakthrough Broadway role in another musical, “Barnum” (1980), playing the patient wife of showman P T Barnum.

Close was 35 when she made her first film, “The World According to Garp” (1982), cast as Robin Williams’ prim, hard-nosed mother, a role that earned her the first of three consecutive Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations. She was among the final five for her warmly wise physician wife of Kevin Kline in “The Big Chill” (1983) and again as Robert Redford’s virginal girlfriend in “The Natural” (1984). Close returned to Broadway and won a Tony Award opposite Jeremy Irons in Mike Nichols’ staging of “The Real Thing”, a romantic comedy by Tom Stoppard. Throughout the 1980s, she alternated between high profile features, TV-movies and occasional stage roles. As she ascended to leading lady, she attempted to undertake parts with depth. In the groundbreaking ABC special “Something About Amelia” (1984), Close delineated a woman who gradually comes to realize her husband has been molesting their daughter.

Her Hollywood presence improved with her turn as a lawyer romantically entangled with her client in “Jagged Edge” (1985) and the actress solidified her position and forever altered her screen persona as the vengeful rejected lover in Adrian Lyne’s controversial “Fatal Attraction” (1987). The role earned Close her first Best Actress Oscar nomination and she followed with another nomination for her sexually manipulative aristocrat in “Dangerous Liaisons” (1988). She brought surprising sympathy to the role of the pathetic, frivolous society matron Sunny von Bulow in “Reversal of Fortune” (1990) and proved effective as the rather youthful Gertrude to Mel Gibson’s “Hamlet” (also 1990).

In 1991, Close made her first foray into TV-movie producing with the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” presentation “Sarah, Plain and Tall” (CBS, 1991) which proved so popular two sequels, “Skylark” (CBS, 1993) and “Sarah, Plain and Tall: Winter’s Edge” (CBS, 1999), were produced. Sandwiched between was a return to Broadway opposite Gene Hackman and Richard Dreyfuss in the politically charged “Death and the Maiden” (1992), which earned her a second Tony Award. While she lost the film version of that play to Sigourney Weaver, Close remained busy, but the quality of the films varied. She was fine as the tough managing editor of a tabloid who engages in fisticuffs with a reporter in “The Paper” but was miscast as a repressed spinster Latina in “The House of the Spirits” (both 1994).

Attempting her first leading musical role, silent screen star Norma Desmond in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Sunset Boulevard”, Close achieved diva status reincarnating this larger-than-life tragic character immortalized onscreen by Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder’s 1950 classic. While it was a personal triumph for her, there was some controversy. Patti LuPone who originated the role in London had originally been announced for the Broadway production but her reviews were less favorable than Close’s in Los Angeles. and Close was chosen to open in New York. Some critics did find fault with Close’s singing and over-the-top acting, but audiences were enchanted and she received her third Tony Award.

Following closely on her stage triumph, Close won an Emmy for her shaded portrayal of real-life US Army colonel who disclosed her lesbianism and fought to remain in the military in “Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story” (NBC, 1995). Perhaps as a nod to her Norma Desmond, the actress embodied outsized flamboyant characters and chewed the scenery as a Nancy Reagan-like First Lady in “Mars Attacks!” (1996) and as the live action cartoon Cruella De Vil in Disney’s “101 Dalmatians” (1996), a role she reprised in the 2000 sequel “102 Dalmatians” (her Disney ties were also revived when she voiced Kala, the she-ape who raised the Lord of the Jungle, for the studio’s 1999 animated adaptation of “Tarzan”). Close reined it in to depict a mother whose AIDS-afflicted son has come home to die in HBO’s “In the Gloaming” (1997) with director Christopher Reeve; and as a female prisoner of war in a Japanese camp in “Paradise Road” (1997). As a female US Vice President coping with the kidnapping of the First Family in “Air Force One” (also 1997), the actress once again proved her capability at depicting forceful women, an image Close swiftly tweaked when she played one of her richest roles, the devious Camille Dixon of director Robert Altman’s sunny ensemble comedy “Cookie’s Fortune” (1999), playing the niece of the deceased titular character who discovers Cookie’s dead body and rearranges the death scene to make it look like a break-in and a murder.

Close also scored with her role in “Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her” (2000), an anthology of five loosely connected stories dealing with a variety of very different women in dealing with life problems. In the segment titled “This is Dr. Keener” Close played a successful physician who, at midlife, finds herself alone and perplexed that a new love interest will not return her phone calls. When a remarkably accurate tarot card reader makes a house call, Dr. Keener begins to assess the true emptiness of her own condition.

With challenging roles for actresses of her age often hard to come by on the big screen, Close found challenging work on the small screen, including the 2001 CBS telepic “The Ballad of Lucy Whipple,” playing a recently widowed mother of three who travels to California during the Gold Rush of 1850 to start a new life, clashing with her spirited 13-year-old daughter who does not share her mother’s dream. She also tackled the role of Nelly Forbush in an ABC TV adaptation of the famed Rogers & Hammerstein musical “South Pacific” (2001), had a hilariously high camp guest spot on the NBC sitcom “Will & Grace” which earned her an Emmy nomination as a guest performer, and starred in a CBS Hallmark Hall of Fame production “Brush with Fate” (2003), an adaptation of Susan Vreelands’s collection of stories that trace the history and ownership of what may be an undiscovered work of art by 17th century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer. She also tackled a role made famous by Katharine Hepburn: Eleanor of Aquitaine (opposite Patrick Stewart’s Henry VII) in a television version of “The Lion in Winter” (2003-2004).

In 2005, Close earned her first Golden Globe Award, for Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television, for her performance in “The Lion in Winter,” along with a Screen Actors Guild Award as Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries, and she received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie. Close followed up as part of the ensemble of the 2004 telepic “Strip Search,” which explored themes surrounding the loss of personal freedom in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2002 terrorist attacks.

Back on the big screen, she essayed a series of supporting roles, playing a dutiful mother obsessively tending to her comatose son in “The Safety of Objects” (2001) and a warm, experienced and practical American academic living in Paris who quietly and knowingly observes her naive young assistant (Kate Hudson) enter into an affair with an older, married Frenchman in the Merchant Ivory production of “Le Divorce” (2003). Segueing into a full-blown comedic role, Close grandly hit all the right notes as too-perfect Claire Wellington, the grand dame of the Stepford society of subservient spouses in the otherwise failed satirical remake of the thriller “The Stepford Wives” (2004). The actress then took on her first regular role in a television series, joining the cast of FX’s gritty crime drama “The Shield” in its fourth season in 2005, playing the shrewd new precinct commander Capt. Monica Rawling, offering redemption to the series’ antihero Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis). Producers credited a 30% vise in viewers to her presence, but the actress chose to depart the series at the conclusion of her first season.

Stepping back into the more comfortable realm of character-drive drama, she appeared in the weighty “Heights” (2005), playing the mother of a New York City photographer (Elizabeth Banks) who begins to rethink her open marriage, while her daughter has second thoughts about her pending nuptials with her lawyer fiancée (James Marsden). Questions soon force answers, as all involved make life decisions in the course of a single night. “Heights” received good reviews from most critics, with the typical kudos Close has been given throughout her career. She then appeared in a strong ensemble cast in “Nine Lives” (2005), playing a widowed mother whose life has been taken over by her precocious young daughter (Dakota Fanning).

Family
Significant Others
Education
Milestones
Celebrity Biography
0

Stephanie Beacham Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

Stephanie Beacham.jpg

A British stage actress who migrated to the USA to play the bitchy Sable Coolly on “Dynasty II: The Cloys” (ABC, 1985-87), Stephanie Beacham has often been cast in roles that vary between nasty vixens and cool, take-charge women. The London native began her career on stage in Liverpool in 1964 where she was a founding member of the Everyman Theatre. She debuted there in “The Servant of Two Masters” and as the First Witch in “Macbeth”. By 1970, Beacham was working on the London stage in “The Basement” and later appeared opposite Ian McKellen in “Venice Preserved” (1985) and Jeremy Irons in “The Rover” (1988). She belatedly made her Broadway debut in 1996 in a production of Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband”.

Beacham debuted in films in 1969’s “The Games” as an Olympic hopeful opposite Michael Crawford. She subsequently appeared as a swinger alongside Ava Gardner in Roddy McDowell’s “The Devil’s Widow” (1971). More recently, she was a nemesis to Shelly Long in the pallid comedy “Troop Beverly Hills” (1989). Beacham has feared better on the small screen, She reprised her role as the bitch-goddess Sable on “Dynasty” for the 1988-89 season. She switched to comedy in the title role of “Sister Kate” (NBC, 1989-90), a nun more familiar with work in the high echelons of power now assigned to run an orphanage. Beacham had the recurring role of Luke Perry’s mother on Fox’s “Beverly Hills, 90210″ and later played the very able Dr. Westphalen for two seasons (1993-95) on NBC’s “seaQuest DSV”.

Family
Significant Others
Education
Milestones
Celebrity Biography