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Jenny McCarthy Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

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This voluptuous blonde became a media phenomenon based on her co-hosting duties of “Singled Out”, the MTV Generation-X version of “The Dating Game”. Jenny McCarthy was able to parlay her success on that show into a sitcom career, beginning with the sketch series “The Jenny McCarthy Show” (MTV, 1996) and her own NBC series “Jenny” (1997-98).

The second of four daughters, McCarthy was raised in Chicago and had always harbored dreams of a showbiz career. When she ran out of tuition money for nursing school, she attempted to find work as a model but was rejected by the local agencies. According to McCarthy, she approached Playboy magazine in 1993 as a last ditch effort to earn some much needed cash. Within a few months she was Miss October and went on to earn the title of Playmate of the Year. Taking her earnings (about $100,000), she decamped to L.A. to pursue an acting career. On the West Coast, she eventually hooked up with manager Ray Manzella who had guided the early careers of Vanna White and Pamela Anderson Lee. He sent her to an audition at MTV where she was quickly hired. During her two-year stint (1995-97) as co-host of “Singled Out”, she quickly established her onscreen comic persona; rowdy and obnoxious and willing to make a fool of herself, particularly by making odd faces. McCarthy became an almost overnight sensation and MTV put her to work on other shows (i.e., “Beach House”).

In 1997, the network offered her a limited episode sketch comedy series, “The Jenny McCarthy Show”, in which she was given carte blanche. While McCarthy has cited Lucille Ball and Goldie Hawn as two of her influences, it would be hard to imagine either comedienne utilizing the low-brow, bathroom humor that McCarthy employed. Many were not impressed by sketches that had her eating her own vomit or wearing extra long armpit hair. Despite questions of her ability, McCarthy landed a sitcom deal with Paramount. Based on a guest appearance as a date from hell on the NBC sitcom “Wings”, that network agreed to shape a series around her talents. “Jenny,” with the blonde comic as a small-town girl who moves to Hollywood, debut to a mixed critical and audience reception.

Despite her small screen popularity, especially with young males, McCarthy has not yet been able to translate her popularity to the big screen. She made her acting debut as the private nurse of Christopher Walken in the little-seen “Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead” (1995) and played a glamour girl in the appropriately titled “The Stupids” (1996), co-starring Tom Arnold, followed by an unsuccessful bid for movie stardom as the female lead in the David Zucker-directed “BASEketball” (1998) opposite “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Perhaps her best role to date was as Sugar, a working girl in a Las Vegas brothel in the Kirk Douglas starrer “Diamonds” (1999), which was helmed by her husband-to-be John Asher, the son of veteran TV director John Asher (”I Love Lucy”) and actress Joyce Bulifont. She was cast as a haughty actress, one of the latest victims of the Ghostface Killer in the popular horror sequel “Scream 3″ (2000), and she would reunite with director Zucker for the third spoof of that film series, “Scary Movie 3″ (2003), in an amusing and provocative scene opposite her one-time off-screen rival and fellow Playmate-turned-star Pamela Anderson.

After giving birth to her first child and recounting her preganancy experiences in her bestselling 2004 book Belly Laughs: The Naked Truth About Pregnancy and Childbirth (she previously penned a 1997 biography, Jen-X), McCarthy returned to the pages of Playboy a decade after her first appearance looking as sexy as ever, and she was tapped to star in the UPN sitcom “The Bad Girls’ Guide” (2005). She also accepted the inagural hosting duties for E! Entertainment’s Vegas-based bacchanal series “Party at the Palms” (2005), and wrote and produced the indie feature “Dirty Love” (2005), an over-the-top, gross-out-style relationship comedy directed by her husband and co-starring Carmen Electra. As a photographer driven to dating an assortment of weirdos and losers to push the buttons of her studly ex, McCarthy continually demonstrated her willingness to do just about anything to sell her jokes (including lifting her ban on nude scenes for a humorous sequence involving her bare breasts, and a maxipad-related sequence that would give even the Farrelly brothers pause), but her efforts were too frequently undercut by lackluster direction and production values, and a lack of genuine human emotion to fuel the otherwise amusing story. Shortly before the movie hit theaters in fall 2005, McCarthy announced her split from Asher.

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Diane Lane Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

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A stage veteran before she made her first films as a teenager, Diane Lane landed on the cover of TIME magazine in a 1979 profile of rising child stars. Few of those featured, however, were as lucky as Lane in making the transition to adult roles, and while her career has had the requisite peaks and valleys, she has continued to land challenging and diverse roles ranging from a frontier prostitute in the acclaimed miniseries “Lonesome Dove” (CBS, 1989) to sexually awakening Jewish housewife of “A Walk on the Moon” (1999) to her Oscar-nominated turn as a straying wife in the provocative “Unfaithful” (2002) .

The only daughter of parents who split within weeks of her birth, the petite blonde Lane was raised by her father in NYC. By the age of six, she had begun her showbiz career in earnest with a role in “Medea” staged by the famed LaMaMa theater company. Throughout the remainder of the 1970s, Lane amassed numerous stage credits, including a world tour with LaMaMa and in various productions at the New York Shakespeare Festival (most notably Elizabeth Swados’ “Runaways”). While she was deemed inappropriate model material, the poised, attractive teenager quickly made the transition to films. Her breakthrough role came in “A Little Romance” (1979), as a precocious American girl who experiences first love with an equally gifted French boy, abetted by an eccentric Englishman. That she shared screen time with Laurence Olivier and proved a strong and engaging presence helped propel her career and made her the “It girl” of the moment.

Lane capitalized on her growing fame with TV-movies (e.g., “Miss All-American”, CBS 1982) and the femme lead opposite Matt Dillon in a pair of films adapted from S E Hinton novels, “The Outsiders” and Rumble Fish” (both 1983), both directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The helmer has admitted to being infatuated with the starlet which is a possible explanation for his hiring her to co-star with Richard Gere in the ill-fated “The Cotton Club” (1984). A sprawling would-be epic, the movie suffered greatly from the lack of chemistry between Gere and Lane (although she looked fabulous in the period clothing) as well as from her miscasting–at 18, she was clearly too young to play a world-weary gangster’s moll who tempts a musician into an affair. It didn’t help her career, either, when she declined the part of the mermaid in “Splash” in favor of portraying a rock star diva in Walter Hill’s muddled musical “Streets of Fire” (also 1984).

After a hiatus to regroup, Lane attempted to forge a screen persona but the fickleness of Tinseltown reduced her to appearing in drivel like “Lady Beware” (1987), She did have a moderately good turn as a stripper opposite Matt Dillon in the noirish “The Big Town” (also 1987), but few saw the flick in its theatrical release. One of her best 80s roles came on the small screen as the prostitute who accompanies a group of men on a cattle drive in the award-winning adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s novel “Lonesome Dove”.

Despite her fine work and an Emmy nomination, good follow-up roles failed to materialize in the early 90s. Lane co-starred as the daughter of a man who may have been a Nazi sympathizer in the 1990 HBO drama “Descending Angel” and made the most of her limited screen time as Paulette Goddard in Richard Attenborough’s reverent biopic “Chaplin” (1992). Once again television provided a pair of fine roles: as the young version of the titular “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All” (CBS, 1994) and as Stella to Alec Baldwin’s Stanley Kowalski in a remake of “A Streetcar Named Desire” (CBS, 1995). In between, the actress attempted to raise her international stock by hitching on to Sylvester Stallone’s renown, but the resulting film, “Judge Dredd” (1995) was a dismal mess. A reteaming with director Walter Hill as a luminous woman from the past of “Wild Bill” (also 1995) showcased her gifts but that film proved a box-office disappointment as well. Lane slowly rebounded as the mother of a boy with a rare genetic disease that aged him rapidly (and turned him into Robin Williams!) in “Jack”, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and by playing a competent Secret Service agent in the thriller “Murder at 1600″ (1997).

The 1969-set indie “A Walk on the Moon” (1999), Tony Goldwyn’s directorial debut, however, allowed her to fully realize her screen potential. As a vaguely unhappy Jewish wife and mother who embarks on an affair, Lane earned some of the best reviews of her career and rejuvenated her standing in Hollywood. She subsequently began the millennium co-starring opposite Bill Pullman in the TV remake of “The Virginian” (TNT, 2000) and portrayed Mark Wahlberg’s land-bound girlfriend in “The Perfect Storm” (2000). Even as audiences were growing ever aware that her acting abilities were equal to her enduring beauty, she still found herself cast in relatively minor roles in films of varying quality, from the terrific such as “My Dog Skip” (2000) to the terrible, like the thriller “The Glass House” (2001).

Finally, in 2002 Lane was cast in a role that perfectly showcased her remarkable talents when she took the lead in “Unfaithful,” director Adrian Lyne’s psychological and often erotic look at a mature woman who has no reason to upset her happy home life but nevertheless embarks on a torrid affair with a young lover that ultimately results in tragedy. Lane’s sensual, natural and conflicted performance–better, actually, than the movie itself–won her heaps of accolades, including an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress, and marked a new high point in her career.

At last established as a bankable leading lady, Lane’s follow-up was the lighter-weight romantic comedy “Under the Tuscan Sun” (2003), based on the popular book by author Frances Mayes, in which Lane played a 35-year-old San Francisco writer who makes an impulsive home purchase in Tuscany and discovers romance as she renovates her dilapidated new house.

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