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Kelly McGillis Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

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This leading lady’s first two film appearances, as the love interest to a drunken writer in “Reuben, Reuben” (1982) and the soft-spoken Amish widow in “Witness” (1985), displayed a promising mix of talent and earthy beauty. Kelly McGillis’ career, however, stumbled a bit after playing Tom Cruise’s love interest in “Top Gun” (1986) as her forays into straightforwardly glamorous roles have earned relatively lukewarm critical responses.

McGillis dropped out of high school to pursue a career as an actor and eventually attended Juilliard in Manhattan. She understudied the role of Dona Elvire in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of “Don Juan” but had little other professional experience when director Robert Ellis Miller “discovered” her and cast her opposite Tom Conti in “Reuben, Reuben”. Notices were good, and McGillis then moved to “Witness” and “Top Gun.” (In the latter, her 5′10″ height was quite evident as she stood next to the shorter Tom Cruise.) Attempts to put her in the position to carry a picture resulted in “Made in Heaven” (1986), in which McGillis was matched with Timothy Hutton as the as-yet-unborn beauty he meets in heaven, who is yet unborn, and “The House on Carroll Street” (1988), in which McGillis was a blacklisting victim who stumbles on an espionage plot. Both films were box office disappointments. “The Accused” (1988) had McGillis as the assistant district attorney who is moved to put three rapists behind bars by the pathos of Jodie Foster, but it was Foster who got the reviews–and the Oscar. McGillis then did “Winter People” (1989), an Ozark-based Sturm und Drang, which also flopped. In 1991, she produced the film “The Awakening”, which did not receive wide-spread release, and the following year played the woman who marries and tries to tame John Goodman’s “The Babe”. McGillis joined “Witness” co-star Alexander Godunov in reprising their characters in a brief, amusing cameo for “North” (1994).

McGillis appeared in her first TV-movie in 1984, playing a sister who seeks to punish her sister’s tormentor in “Sweet Revenge” (CBS). She followed with “Private Sessions” (NBC, 1985), a busted pilot. In 1993, McGillis played a woman in love with a retarded man in “Bonds of Love” (CBS) and in the 1994 CBS miniseries “In the Best of Families: Marriage, Pride and Madness”, she was a woman obsessed with destroying her ex-husband.

McGillis’ theater career was interrupted by “Reuben, Reuben”, but she returned to the stage in 1988 playing Portia in the Folger Shakespeare Theatre production of “The Merchant of Venice.” She has since continued an association with that company, appearing in “Twelfth Night”, “Mary Stuart” and “Measure for Measure”, among others. In 1994, McGillis made her Broadway debut in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of “Hedda Gabler”.

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Diane Lane Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

Diane Lane.jpg

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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Mischa Barton Biography

Posted by Vogt
at May 9, 2008

Mischa Barton.jpg

Most nine-years-old kids, without doubt, have not yet seriously thought about what they want to be in the future, but Mischa Anne Barton amazingly had already started to build a solid acting career at such age. With her talent, skills, and striking look, she afterwards had compiled an impressive resume either on screen or stage, making her one of the most potential actresses of her generation.

Coming from a conservative family of an English father and Irish mother, Mischa shared more liberal attitude which often led to some arguments with her parents. It was likely because of the family’s migration to New York City that had been carried out as her father continued his work on Wall Street. Previously raised in London, England, where she was born on January 24, 1986, four-years-old Mischa quickly adopted American values while her parents had not yet adjusted to the culture shock.

She was barely eight when an agent noticed her talent after the girl performed a monologue she had written at a summer camp. Informed about her potentiality by the agent, her parents were at first doubtful whether it was appropriate for their daughter to be involved in acting. Mischa, therefore, tried to push aside their uncertainty and successfully convinced them as she passed an audition for an off-Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s “Slavs!” in 1995. Sharing the stage with Marisa Tomei, she brilliantly gained huge praise for her portrayal of Vodya Domik.

This initial achievement at the New York Theatre Workshop certainly opened a wider way for her to be included in other theatrical productions. She soon earned a major role in “Twelve Dream” at Lincoln Center Theater by 1995, then playing opposite Dianne Wiest in “One Flea Spare” at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theatre two years later. These two performances also received rave reviews from the press, making people began to take notice on her.

Looking for another chance to flourish he career, Mischa turned her attention to screen production. Briefly appeared in “All My Children” (1970) which was her first experience on TV show, she made her film debut in 1997 through “Lawn Dogs” opposite Sam Rockwell. Not only won several film festival awards around the world, this particular feature also earned positive response at Sundance. During this period, she used some of her time to be a model under Ford Modeling Agency, doing campaigns for Calvin Klein, Gitano and Vogue.

As Mischa returned to the big screen in 1999 through “Pups,” she once again garnered critical acclaim for her excellent performance as a teenage bank robber. Still in the same year, she made her way to appear in two blockbuster movies, “Notting Hill” and “The Sixth Sense.” Although only got the minor roles, she managed to display a fabulous acting, especially when she played the ghost of a sickly girl who seeks help from Haley Joel Osment in the latter one.

The next couple years saw Mischa actively involved herself in both film and TV productions. She starred alongside Jennifer Jason Leigh and Drew Barrymore in “Skipped Parts” (2000) while also became one of the title characters in a TV movie entitled “Frankie and Hazel” (2000). However, she still yet gained more recognition as she only secured the supporting roles, including in “Paranoid” (2000), “Tart” and “Julie Johnson” which both came up in 2001.

After obtaining a recurring role in ABC’s drama, “Once and Again” (1999-2002), Mischa was finally able to get the top billing like she had before in “Lawn Dogs” and “Pups” through Disney’s TV movie, “A Ring of Endless Light” (2002). However, it was “The O.C” (2003) that later catapulted her to fame. Portraying a wealthy, popular, yet problematic high school student named Marissa Cooper-Nichol, she helped this soap opera of Fox to strive as a popular melodrama in U.S. In the same year, she also began to date Brandon Davis, the oil heir to billionaire Marvin Davis. Sadly, the love relationship did not last long as she decided to break-up in July 2005. Continuing her career, she satisfyingly joined the cast of “The OH in Ohio” (2005) and “Decameron: Angels & Virgins” (2006). With this growing status, it would not be a surprise if she could rise as one of the most celebrated superstars in the movie industry.

Celebrity Biography