Natalie Portman’s NYC Screening

Natalie Portman’s NYC Screening

She’s back on the promotional trail, and Natalie Portman couldn’t be cuter.  She was spotted last night in New York City for the special event.

The Regal Cinemas were the place to be for the special screening of “The Other Boleyn Girl,” where the “Garden State” actress charmed the many clamoring paparazzi in search of a winning photo.

Portman sported a gorgeous black velvet gown along with a half-curly-half-straight coif and some sparse-yet-sophisticated accessory jewelry.

According to a new MSNBC report, part of Natalie’s success has to do with the fact that her mom/manager isn’t after her own glory, but rather the furthering of her daughter’s career.

The report states, “There’s nothing wrong with having a mom-ager, as long as she makes good decisions and isn’t trying to stage-mother her way to fame on your back. Portman’s mother, Shelley Stevens, has served as her agent, and the array of Portman’s film and stage work shows that her mother isn’t frightened by controversy and that she also steers clear of projects that reek of pointless commerciality. Every young actress should have such a guiding influence in her corner.”

Felicity Huffman Biography

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.

Family
Significant Others
Education
Milestones

Pirates Of The Caribbean 4 Rumblings

I can remember reading something similar to this before, but I will talk about it anyway as it has come from the Disney know it all, Jim Hill

Now given that Bruckheimer & Disney do eventually hope to put a “Pirates 4″ into production (A film that — I hear — would toss the Elizabeth & Will characters over the side in favor of doing a bawdy buddy picture which would star Jack Sparrow & Barbossa. Where both captains of the Black Pearl would initially be competing for the exact same prize. But eventually all the double crossing would have to stop as these two rivals were then forced to join forces in order to defeat some supernatural terror)

This seems the logical way to go as Keira Knightly has said she was done with the pirate world, Orlando Bloom seems to have taken a break from big budget movies by doing some stage work and a few people complained about the love story in the third film. So maybe a film filled with fun pirate action will be a breathe of fresh, or should I say sea, air.

Jack Sparrow and Barbossa

While watching At Worlds End I grew to like Barbossa more and more. I hadn’t seen Geoffrey Rush in anything before the first Pirate movie, so I didn’t see him as an actor, I saw him as Barbossa. He was great in the role and to see him on screen again would be treat. Johnny Depp performs as always and is the natural entertainer, putting a possible fourth movie in the ‘eagerly awaiting’ category. Of course practically nothing is official or confirmed as of yet, only ideas being thrown around. The end of the last movie saw Jack Sparrow on the search for the Fountain Of Youth, which could be a rather cool storyline. However, apparently the third National Treasure movie may focus on the same topic, which is rather weird. Although the writers of Book Of Secrets just happen to have written the Pirates trilogy, so we can conclude that Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio have a fetish for fountains.

What are your thoughts on a possibly fourth outing?