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Nastassja Kinski Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

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This strikingly attractive lead, with pouty lips and a slightly haughty manner, is best known for her performance in the title role in Roman Polanski’s sumptuous “Tess” (1979) as well as for her screen collaborations with Wim Wenders: a silent role in “Falsche Bewegung/Wrong Move” (1975); the estranged wife of Harry Dean Stanton (her most affecting performance to date) in “Paris, Texas” (1984); and an angelic presence in “Faraway, So Close” (1993).

The daughter of actor Klaus Kinski (with whom she had little contact after the age of 10) and sister of actress Pola Kinski, Nastassja (billed as Nastassia in the USA in the early 80s) was a teenager when she met and fell in love with director Roman Polanski, 25 years her senior. Under his spell, she went to the USA for six months to study “The Method” with Lee Strasberg. Then, Polanski put Kinski in her star-making role, of “Tess”. In the film based on the Thomas Hardy novel “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”, Kinski played a girl from a poor background whose fortunes rise and fall after she is thrust into “polite” society. The film established her and she furthered raised her profile by posing for photographer Richard Avedon, who shot a nude poster of the actress and a snake that became the rage of college dorm rooms.

Kinski moved into American films, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s uneven “One From the Heart” and opposite Malcolm McDowell in “Cat People” (both 1982), both of which made her raw, reactive sensuality briefly the rage. But Kinski’s free-spirited, sex-charged yet aloof screen persona did not click with US audiences. She seemed content to retain a low-key presence and appeared in films on both sides of the Atlantic. The same year she played pianist Clara Wieck in “Frulingssinfonie/Spring Symphony” (1983), Kinski starred in “The Moon in the Gutter” for French director Jean-Jacques Beineix, with whom she was linked romantically. But her performance–as a wealthy woman involved with Gerard Depardieu–was almost universally panned. She fared better with the critics as the wife in Wenders’ “Paris, Texas”, but that film was limited to an art-house crowd.

In 1984, she starred in two Hollywood productions, neither of which won widespread audience attention. Kinski was cast as the wife whom Dudley Moore thought was philandering in the unsatisfying remake “Unfaithfully Yours” and was alongside Jodie Foster and Rob Lowe in Tony Richardson’s “The Hotel New Hampshire”. She was miscast as the love interest to Al Pacino caught up into the colonial dispute with Britain in Hugh Hudson’s box-office dud “Revolution” (1985). Most of her subsequent films in the 80s and into the early 90s were little seen in the USA including the American ones.

But Kinski’s profile in American gossip columns and tabloids skyrocketed in the 90s when she gave birth and named Quincy Jones as the father of her daughter, Kenya Julia. Their relationship became fodder for tabloid reports and made Kinski more well-known than all her films combined. Her acting services were in greater demand and she scored a critical success as the skydiving student of Charlie Sheen’s who appears to have died on her first jump–but has not–in “Terminal Velocity” (1994). Her work in US films then became more mainstream. She was the mother of a runaway teen who may be the son of either Robin Williams or Billy Crystal in the genial comedy “Father’s Day” (1997). That same year, the busy actress co-starred with Ryan Phillippe and John Savage in “Little Boy Blue”, a study of incest and dysfunction in a Texas family, and was opposite Wesley Snipes in Mike Figgis’ study of marriage and infidelity, “One Night Stand”.

In the mid-90s, Kinski also began to appear with some regularity on American TV. She was involved in a diamond heist in “Crackerjack” (HBO, 1994) and played a German war widow who flees to the USA to start life anew in “Danielle Steel’s ‘The Ring’” (NBC, 1996).

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Scarlett Johansson Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

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A pouty and pretty strawberry blonde New Yorker who commenced her career a child actor with instincts, skills and a streetwise grace that far outpaced her age, Scarlett Johansson first came to attention playing the daughter of Sean Connery and Kate Capshaw terrorized by Blair Underwood in “Just Cause” (1995). Having made her stage debut at age eight in 1993’s “Sophistry” at Playwrights Horizons Theatre, the young player also studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute. Her screen debut in Rob Reiner’s disastrous “North” (1994) was less than memorable, but Johansson has maintained an even career, impressing with her fully-realized characterizations in nearly every showing.

She got noticed as one of Eric Schaeffer’s wise charges in “If Lucy Fell” and took a co-starring role in the understated independent “Manny & Lo” (both 1996), a perfect vehicle for the actress to prove her talents. Johansson’s finely crafted portrayal of Amanda (Manny), a rather sensible 11-year-old who escapes from a foster home and runs away with her 16-year old sister Laurel (Lo) earned her critical praise and led directly to her casting in the high profile but disappointing 1997 release “Home Alone 3″ and the highly-anticipated romance “The Horse Whisperer” (1998). In the latter, Johansson landed the coveted role of Grace, a youngster who suffers a physically and emotionally debilitating riding accident. When her mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) turns to a horse trainer (Robert Redford) for assistance, romance blooms, and as Johansson turned what could have been little more than a two-dimensional plot device into a full-fledged character, an actress bloomed.

All but disappearing after this film-saving turn, the performer resurfaced three years later in the independent favorite “Ghost World” (2001), starring alongside Thora Birch as the more pragmatic of two best friends who have just graduated from high school and are making plans for the future amidst their own adventures, both real and invented. Snarky but somehow sweet, her Rebecca didn’t get the screen time and controversial storyline of compatriot Enid (Birch) but nonetheless impressed in her smaller role. Later that year, she played a young Hungarian girl left behind when her refugee family flees their homeland in a Cold War political climate in “An American Rhapsody” and earned even more indie cred as a piano-playing teenager who catches the attention of a crafty barber (Billy Bob Thornton) in the Coen brothers’ acclaimed period noir “The Man Who Wasn’t There”. Taking a break from this more heady material, Johansson would next battle giant spiders in the surprisingly fun sci-fi comedy “Eight-Legged Freaks” (2002).

Johansson’s true breakout performance would come–like gangbusters–in “Lost in Translation” (2003), writer-director Sophia Coppola’s wonderfully romantic film about Charlotte, an emotionally adrift young married tourist in her 20s, left to her own devices in Tokyo while her self-involved photographer husband is on a shoot, who meets and forms a deep, complex relationship with Bob Harris (Bill Murray) an equally disaffected 50-something Hollywood actor. The actress–only 18 during filming–is a revelation in the picture, displaying a rare, multilayered chemistry with Murray despite their age difference. Their rapport, a first tenative, then confident and cozy and then suddenly awkward and sexual, fuels the movie and carries many scenes completely without dialogue. Her subtle yet knockout performance, wildly praised by critics, was posied to rocket Johansson to new career heights. Hot on the heels of that role, Johansson also dazzled audiences in the indie “Girl With a Pearl Earring” (2003), a speculative account of the life of Griet, a 16-year-old girl who appears in Johannes Vermeer’s (Colin Firth’s) most famous painting. As a result of her two strong 2003 performances, at age 19 Johansson received a pair Golden Globe nominations–one for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture Drama (for “Girl With a Pearl Earring”) and another for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy (for “Lost In Translation”).

Johansson’s next vehicle, made before her big breakout, was the limp teen caper movie “The Perfect Score” (2004) in which she played the thrillseeking, daddy-loathing member of a gang of high school students plotting an ambitious scheme to swipe the key to the SAT exam, and she voiced Mindy in the animated “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie” (2004). She was better served with a pair of challenging roles released simultaneously at the end of 2004: first, she added depth to her supporting role as the daughter of a middle-aged ad salesman (Dennis Quaid) who becomes involved with her father’s new young boss (Topher Grace) in writer-director Paul Weitz’s adult comedy “In Good Company”; next, she played the headstrong teen Pursy Will, who returns to her late mother’s home to unexpectedly share it with a pair of booze-soaked intellecutal boarders (John Travolta and Gabriel Macht) for the Southern-influenced character drama “A Love Song for Bobby Long.” In both films Johansson’s potent combination of adolencent freshness and wise-beyond-her-years maturity helped breath a compelling realism into her roles.

Johannson next tried the sci-fi action genre with director Michael Bay’s missfire “The Island” (2005), playing a woman living in an orderly envrionment in a post-Apocalyptic world hoping to win relocation to the only remaining pure bio-zone on the planet, only to discover her world is a facade for a more sinister scenario. The actress fared better with a more accomplished autuer when she appeared in Woody Allen’s serious-minded film “Match Point” (2005) playing Nola, a sensual but struggling American actress in London who takes up an affair with her ex-beau’s brother-in-law (Jonathan Rhys-Myers), and her demanding nature soon forces the man to chose between her and his comfortable, status-granting marriage. The result was one of Allen’s best works in years, and the writer-director quickly drafter Johansson to star in his next project “Scoop” (lensed 2005), a romantic comedy that cast her as an American student in London who becomes involved with an aristocrat.

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Amy Jo Johnson Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

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Amy Jo Johnson (born October 6, 1970) is an actress and entertainer. She was born on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, USA, and her most notable roles have been as Kimberly Ann Hart the Pink Power Ranger (1993-1996) on the television series Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and as “Julie Emrick” (1998-2000) on the college drama series Felicity.

In her early life, Johnson became interested in gymnastics and, after training for years, decided to aim for the Olympic Games. She eventually reached Class One - the highest status in gymnastics - and participated in competitions hosted both in the United States and in Europe but was forced to abandon her career as a professional gymnast due to a severe injury.

At the age of eighteen, she left Cape Cod and moved to New York in order to pursue her acting career. She attended the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute (See Lee Strasberg.) and the American Musical and Acting Academy. When Johnson felt comfortable with her skills, she left for Los Angeles to audition for her first part.

Her gymnastics background was a clear advantage for her in being chosen for the role of Kimberly Ann Hart in the Power Rangers series (Mighty Morphin Power Rangers) in its first three seasons 1993-1995. The series achieved unexpected success, and Johnson had a fair share of media exposure, both as the character of Kimberly Hart and as herself. After her character left the series, she went on to star in the indie film Susie Q in 1996. In 1997, she participated in NBC’s adaptation of Lois Duncan’s novel Killing Mr. Griffin and also played a bulimic gymnast in the movie Perfect Body. She also reprised her role as Kimberly Hart in Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie, a 1997 movie in which her character temporarily turned evil after being sacrified to Divatox’s fiancee Maligore.

In 1998, she played the part of a vampire in the cult indie movie Cold Hearts. Soon after, she was invited to play the second most notable role of her acting career: Julie Emrick, a college freshman who becomes the best friend of the lead actress of The WB series Felicity. She was in the series for two and a half years.

Her character in the series was originally cast as a dancer, but Johnson managed to convince the producers to turn the role into that of a singer and guitarist, which eventually led her to being able to play a song of her own composition, entitled “Puddle of Grace.” The song was added to the show’s official soundtrack. Her talent in music also led her to star in the movie Sweetwater: A True Rock Story, a biography about the life of Nansi Nevins, lead singer from Sweetwater, the band that opened the Woodstock festival.

Johnson then took roles in a number of indie movies, namely Interstate 60, Pursuit of Happiness (in her sole nude scene, distinctive as a Power Rangers actor for a kids show), and Hard Ground. She also had a role in the final season of the television crime drama The Division.

As of 2001, she has dedicated herself mostly to music (after her fellow MMPR co-star Thuy Trang’s untimely death), releasing her debut album, titled The Trans-American Treatment, and performing live in the Los Angeles area alongside “The Amy Jo Johnson Band.” She later dropped the band and limited the instrumental presence in her shows to her acoustic guitar and her voice. She has released another album titled Imperfect, released on March 2005.

In 2006, Johnson co-starred in Magma: Volcanic Disaster, a Sci-Fi Channel original made for TV movie. “I play a college student who really, really wants to go on an expedition he’s going on, and she begs him, and he finally lets her go,” Johnson stated.

Johnson has also taken roles on ABC Family’s original show Wildfire as the famous jockey Tina Sharp.

Johnson also appeared in the pilot episode of What About Brian as Karen - Car Girl.

She currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

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Angelina Jolie Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

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With her long legs, ample bee-stung lips and striking deep-set blue eyes, Angelina Jolie may have been destined for screen stardom even without the benefit of her acting lineage or her considerable talent. The daughter of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand, she began studying acting at age 11 at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute in NYC. Even before commencing her formal training, Jolie made her screen debut as a tyke in a bit part in the Hal Ashby-directed comedy “Lookin’ to Get Out” (filmed in 1980; released 1982). Co-scripted and co-produced by her father, the movie was savaged by reviewers but its littlest thespian emerged unscathed.

Abandoning her youthful plans to become a funeral director, Jolie segued to show business as a professional model and actress in music videos. She went on to appear in five student films directed by her older brother, James Haven Voight, and as part of the Met Theater in Los Angeles honed her craft alongside such veteran players as Holly Hunter, Ed Harris and Amy Madigan. Jolie returned to the screen in “Cyborg II: Glass Shadows” (1993), a better than average direct-to-video sci-fi actioner in which she played a heroic human-machine hybrid but garnered more attention and better notices in the cyber-thriller “Hackers” (1995). Playing Kate (a.k.a. ‘Acid Burn’), she was paired with rising young British actor Jonny Lee Miller as teen computer whizzes battling an evil genius. The film fizzled at the box office but the romantic leads sizzled and were briefly married from 1996 to 1999.

More film work readily followed, initially in small-scale character-driven indies including an indifferently received adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel “Foxfire” (1996), where she played a mysterious outsider named Legs Sadovsky–described in Variety as “sort of a female James Dean”–who helps some other teenaged girls stand up for their rights. Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna’s romantic comedy-drama “Love Is All There Is” (also 1996) displayed Jolie in a humorous and innocent light as half of a pair of star-crossed lovers divided by their families’ feud. That same year, she appeared in the high-minded suspense drama “Without Evidence”, playing a drug-addicted teen, and “Mojave Moon”, opposite car dealer Danny Aiello as what Variety called “a male fantasy figure who rapidly alternates between nymphomaniac and ice maiden”. “Playing God” (1997) was next, and Jolie capably essayed a woman torn between her gangster boyfriend (Timothy Hutton) and a discredited doctor (David Duchovny) in his employ. While the films remained unseen by most moviegoers, Jolie received strong notices for each of these projects.

As with many performers, Jolie had no compunction about working on the small screen and, in fact, has appeared in a handful of exceptional productions, including a co-starring role alongside Annabeth Gish and Dana Delany as Texas pioneers in the 1997 CBS historical miniseries “True Women”. Jolie then brought a fiery passion to her portrayal of Cornelia Wallace, the politician’s first wife, in the biographical miniseries “George Wallace” (TNT, 1997). But it was her dazzling turn as another real-life figure that catapulted her into public consciousness. Her brave, sensitive performance as the drug-addicted, AIDS-stricken model Gia Carangi in HBO’s “Gia” (1998) brought her widespread critical acclaim. Jolie was twice Emmy-nominated in 1998 in the supporting category for “George Wallace” (losing to co-star Mare Winningham) and as in the leading one for “Gia” (losing to Ellen Barkin). She did, however, win back-to-back Golden Globe Awards for the performances.

After this spate of acclaimed appearances in highly-rated television productions, Jolie found her way to roles in films that similarly showcased her acting strength. She received special notice for her work in the comedy-drama “Playing By Heart” (1998), as Joan, an outgoing club kid smitten with the sullen Keenan (Ryan Phillippe). Vivid and engaging, Jolie easily held her own among an ensemble cast featuring such luminaries as Gena Rowlands and Sean Connery. The actress joined John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton in Mike Newell’s NYC-set comedy about air traffic controllers, “Pushing Tin” (1999), playing Thornton’s raucous wife, and played a tough detective assisting a quadriplegic colleague (Denzel Washington) in the search for a serial killer in the crime thriller “The Bone Collector”. Jolie rounded out the year landing the sought after co-starring role of a sociopathic inmate in a psychiatric hospital in “Girl, Interrupted”, based on Susanna Kaysen’s best-selling memoir of her own two-year stay in a similar institution. Her showy co-starring turn netted her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar and her equally showy personal life–which included a eyebrow-raising close relationship with her lookalike brother James Haven, exotic tattoos, knife collections, provocative revalations and intimations of a profoundly edgy sex life–captivated the public.

Media saturation ensued when she became the fifth wife the equally eccentirc and significantly older actor Billy Bob Thornton, a match made in tabloid heaven, in May of 2000–the couple’s constant declarations of love and erotic devotion to each other was capped by the revelation that they wore vials of one another’s blood around their necks. On-screen, the actress continued portraying tough young women, this time a car thief, in the flashy but unfulfilling car heist thriller “Gone in 60 Seconds” (2000) opposite Nicolas Cage and as the flesh-and-blood embodiment of the titular, wildly popular, shorts-wearing video game action heroine “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” (2001), an Indiana Jones-style adventure which failed to impress critics but racked up a healthy box office take–the action flick also marked her first adult collaboration with her father, who played her character’s father in the film. Jolie was unable to capitalize on her goth sex goddess image when she played opposite Antonio Banderas in the dismal wannabe noir “Original Sin” (2001) despite some steamy–and heavily hyped–erotic sequences, and her follow-up dramatic vehicle “Life or Something Like It” (2002), in which she played a superficial, platinum blonde newscaster forced to examine her existence more closely, also fizzled quickly.

Jolie subsequently took a significant hiatus from film but continued to make headlines in her personal life, including taking a significant interest in the plight of violence-torn nations, and publicly feuding with her father after he suggested on television that she was having emotional problems and ultimately divorcing Thornton in 2003 amid rumors of his infidelity (which he denied). The actress returned to familiar territory for her comeback screen vehicle, the sequel “Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life” (2003), a lackluster follow-up to a lackluster first outing; followed by a turn in the too-righteous political/romantic drama “Beyond Borders” (2003); then a dangerous foray into Ashley Judd territory by starring the routine thriller “Taking Lives” (2004) as an FBI profiler caught up in dangerous and erotic intrigue. Slowly squandered in subpar films, Jolie remained an actress who excites interest but whose projects to not capitalize on her potential. The actress adopted another arch accent as she winkingly played the eyepatch-sporting Captain Frankie Cook, the leader of an all-female amphibious attack squadron, in the retro action-adventure “Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow” (2004) opposite Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, battling giant robots in an Art Deco, 1930s-era envionment. Then she lent her voice to the finny femme fatale Lola in DreamWorks’ CGI-animated underwater underworld opus “Shark Tale” (2004) and has a bizarrely seductive turn as Alexander the Great’s mother Olympias, who raises her son to believe in his impressive destiny, in Oliver Stone’s epic historical drama “Alexander the Great”–despite being only one year older than the actor playing her son, Colin Farrell.

Jolie’s profile as both a movie star and public figure was raised to more epic proporions when she co-starred with the equally gorgeous actor Brad Pitt in the Doug Liman-helmed action-fest “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” (2005), in which the actors played a bored married couple surprised to learn that they are each secretly assassins, ultimately hired to kill each other. Rumors quickly abounded that a on-set romance between Jolie and Pitt was a contributing factor to Pitt’s subsequent spit from his high-profile marriage to Jennifer Aniston. Though both actors initially refuted the rumors–and, after frequently being photographed together in their private lives, took a coyer stance later on–the intense media and public interest in their possible relationship propelled the film to huge box office receipts, thanks in large part to their palpable on-screen chemistry. Their “are they or aren’t they?” coupling captivated star watchers and was the most written-about celebrity story of 2005 (prompting the coining of the term “Brangelina”) as their relationship gradually emerged in the public eye as Pitt accompanied Jolie on her missions of mercy to third world nations, petitioned to adopt her two adopted children, and ultimately revealed that he and Jolie were expecting their own biological child together as well.

Away from the screen, Jolie’s expressed a dedication and commitment to increasing awareness and aid to counties devastated by internal and external conflicts, disease and third world conditions. In 2001, after the actress made several trips to the war-torn nations of Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Pakistan, Jolie was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2002 she adopted a baby boy from a Cambodian orphange whom she named Maddox, and in 2005 she adopted an infant daughter from an Ethiopian orphanage whom she named Zahara.

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