UPDATED: The marketing executive is the first African-American and third woman to head the 86-year-old organization. Plus, Disney/Pixar's John Lasseter elected first vice president.
Cheryl Boone Isaacs has been elected president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences by the organization’s board of governors. The Academy announced her election Tuesday night via Twitter.
Boone Isaacs, a marketing executive who has served stints at Paramount and New Line, is the first African-American to head the 86-year-old Academy and only the third woman to serve as president. Actress Bette Davis held the post for just two months in 1941, and screenwriter Fay Kanin served for four years from 1979-83.
In addition at the July 30 board of governors meeting, John Lasseter was elected first vice president; Jeffrey Kurland and Leonard Engelman were elected to vp posts; Dick Cook was elected treasurer; and Phil Robinson was elected secretary.
Boone Isaacs succeeds Hawk Koch, who served as Academy president for the past year, but ran up against term limits after completing nine successive years on the board. A longtime Academy insider, Boone Isaacs represents the public relations branch on the board and is currently serving her 21st year as a governor, having returned to the board in 2011 after a hiatus. For the past year, she served as first vp while also producing the fourth annual Governors Awards in December.
Boone Isaacs currently heads CBI Enterprises, where she has consulted on such films as The Artist, The King’s Speech and Precious. She previously served as president of theatrical marketing for New Line Cinema and before that executive vp worldwide publicity at Paramount Pictures.
Lasseter, chief creative officer at Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Animation Studios and a governor from the short films and feature animation branch, previously served one-year terms as treasurer and as secretary.
Engelman (from the makeup and hairstylists branch), Kurland (costume designers) and Cook (the former Disney Studios chairman who reps the executives branch) are all first-time officers.
Robinson, the screenwriter, director and governor from the writers branch, served as vp during the past year, his fourth consecutive year in that office.
Academy board members may serve up to three consecutive three-year terms, while officers serve one-year terms, with a maximum of four consecutive years in any one office.
The most recognized trophy in the world, the Oscar statuette has stood on the mantels of the greatest filmmakers in history since 1929.
Shortly after the formation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927, the fledgling organization held a dinner in the Crystal Ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles to set out its goals. Among the topics discussed that night was how best to honor outstanding moviemaking achievements and thereby encourage excellence in all facets of motion picture production.
Agreeing to institute an annual award, the group turned its attention to creating a suitably majestic trophy. MGM art director Cedric Gibbons designed a statuette of a knight standing on a reel of film gripping a crusader’s sword. The Academy tapped Los Angeles sculptor George Stanley to realize the design in three dimensions – and the world-renowned statuette was born.
Siedah Garrett Congratulating Cheryl Boone Isaacs on her recent re-election as President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (Oscars). Sisters are doin’ it!!!
Mrs. Peter Finch accepts ACADEMY Award for her Husband 1977
Peter Finch Wins Best Actor: 1977 Oscars
Peter Finch & Eletha Barrett (Wife) View VIDEO Above
The sultry and sexy actress was electric in the 1940s films “To Have and Have Not” and “Key Largo” opposite her husband, Humphrey Bogart
By Mike Barnes and Duane Byrge
Lauren Bacall, the willowy actress whose husky voice, sultry beauty and all-too-short May-December romance with Humphrey Bogart made her an everlasting icon of Hollywood, has died, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. She was 89.
Bacall died Tuesday morning of a stroke in her longtime home in the Dakota, the famous Upper West Side building that overlooks Central Park in Manhattan.
Bogart and Bacall were one of the most popular Hollywood couples, onscreen and off, and their 11-year marriage was the stuff of romantic lore. In 1981, their love provided the lyrics for Bertie Higgins’ 1981 pop hit “Key Largo” — “We had it all, just like Bogie and Bacall.”
They met just before they filmed her first movie, To Have and Have Not (1944), directed by Howard Hawks, her mentor. Although only 19, Bacall and her smoldering cool was the perfect match for the 44-year-old Bogart and his tough guy-persona.
Her best-remembered films, many of them considered classics, were with Bogart: To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948).
After Bogart died at age 57 of esophageal cancer in January 1957, Bacall had a romance with Frank Sinatra. Days after she accepted his marriage proposal in 1958, The Los Angeles Herald reported on the impending nuptial on page 1 and Sinatra broke things off, refusing to speak to her for two decades.
She then was married to Oscar-winning actor Jason Robards from 1961 until their divorce in 1969. Their son, actor Sam Robards, survives them.
Bacall received her only Oscar nomination for her supporting role as BarbraStreisand’s mother in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996). She was the recipient of an honorary Academy Award in 2010 “in recognition of her central place in the Golden Age of motion pictures,” but that moment did not lead to pleasant memories — she said she always regretted failing to mention her children Sam, Stephen and Leslie in her acceptance speech.
Bacall also enjoyed a splendid stage career. She captured two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical: in 1970 for Applause, the adaptation of All About Eve, in which she played Margo Channing, the role created by her idol Bette Davis; and in 1981 for Woman of the Year in a part originated by Katharine Hepburn, a good friend whom she once called “the female counterpart to Bogie.”
Bacall also received the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Career Achievement from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in 1992.
Bacall penned two memoirs, By Myself (1978), which won a National Book Award in 1980, and Now (1994), in which she mused about getting older and living alone.
She admitted that being a “legend” and “special lady of film” unnerved her because “in my slightly paranoiac head, legends and special ladies don’t work, it’s over for them; they just go around being legends and special ladies.”
She was born Betty Jean Perske in the Bronx on Sept. 16, 1924, the only child of Jewish immigrants. Her father left the family when she was 6, and her mother struggled to make ends meet. She attracted attention as a teenage model while studying acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.
Crowned Miss Greenwich Village in 1942, Bacall made her stage debut in George S. Kaufman’s Franklin Street in Washington, then appeared in March 1943 on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar.
That cover photo was noticed by Hawks’ wife Nancy, who showed it to the celebrated director, and he called Bacall for a screen test. Based on the test, Hawks told her she would star in something with either Bogart or Cary Grant.
“I thought Cary Grant, great. Humphrey Bogart‚ yuck,” she later said. Nonetheless, Hawks had her meet with Bogart and could not help but notice their immediate chemistry, casting her as the femme fatale Marie in To Have and Have Not, an adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel. (Bogart’s character, Steve, nicknamed her “Slim,” which Hawks also called his wife.)
In By Myself, she described meeting Bogart for the first time, on the set of Passage to Marseille (1944).
“Howard told me to stay put, he’d be right back — which he was, with Bogart,” she wrote. “He introduced us. There was no clap of thunder, no lightning bolt, just a simple how do you do. Bogart was slighter than I imagined‚ 5-foot-10 and a half, wearing his costume of no-shape trousers, cotton shirt and scarf around his neck. Nothing of import was said‚ we didn’t stay long‚ but he seemed a friendly man.”
But soon, Bacall and Bogart — who at the time was married to his third wife, actress Mayo Methot — began an affair during the filming of To Have and Have Not.
One particular scene in the film stands out: As Bacall stood fetchingly just inside Bogart’s hotel room door, readying to leave, she noticed his tongue-tied interest in her: “You don’t have to say anything, Steve, just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?” … You just put your lips together and blow.” She closed the door, leaving Bogart’s character awestruck.
The two married in 1945 on a farm in Lucas, Ohio, owned by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Louis Bromfield, a friend of Bogart’s, and regularly hosted parties at their Holmby Hills mansion.
“I fairly often have thought how lucky I was,” she told Vanity Fair in a 2011 interview. “I knew everybody because I was married to Bogie, and that 25-year difference was the most fantastic thing for me to have in my life.”
Bacall later admitted her so-called cool was just a way of concealing her jangled, first-movie insecurity. “I used to tremble from nerves so badly that the only way I could hold my head steady was to lower my chin practically to my chest and look up at Bogie,” she said.
That was the beginning of what admirers called “The Look.”
Her legendary low, sexy voice, however, hampered a scene in To Have and Have Not, where she was supposed to sing. It has always been a point of speculation whether it was Andy Williams, then a teenager, who dubbed in the signing voice for Bacall’s rendition of Hoagy Carmichael’s “How Little We Know.”
Her distinctive throaty voice did make her a natural for commercials, and later in her career, Bacall voiced numerous spots, including plugs for PBS.
Following To Have and Have Not, her next film was opposite Charles Boyer in Graham Greene’s Confidential Agent (1945) in which she played an English girl. Bacall considered the experience horrible. “It was the worst movie, a nightmare, and I was terrible in it,” she said. “And as quickly as I had been placed on a pedestal, I fell off.”
But she was cast opposite Bogart again in Hawks’ classic The Big Sleep, a steamy adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novel in which Bogart plays the classic private eye Philip Marlowe while Bacall sizzled as the lithesome daughter of Bogart’s rich, sinister employer.
Bacall followed with two more starring roles opposite Bogart, Dark Passage and Key Largo, John Huston's classic noir film.
She followed in 1950 in a film without Bogart titled Bright Leaf and did her first comedy, How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), starring with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable. Perhaps her most memorable film from the 1950s was DouglasSirk’s melodrama Written on the Wind (1956) with Rock Hudson. The following year, Bogart died of cancer, leaving her with their children Stephen and Leslie. Bacall was 32 at the time.
Following Bogart’s death, Bacall dated Sinatra and was set to marry him, but he broke things off. “Frank did me a great favor. He saved me from the complete disaster our marriage would have been,” she told People magazine in 1979. “But the truth is that he behaved like a complete shit.”
She starred in Designing Women (1957) opposite Peck and in The Gift of Love (1958) with Robert Stack. She moved back to New York and appeared in a number of Broadway plays, then married Robards in 1961.
She summed up that relationship in the People interview:
“When I invited a few friends over to celebrate [Robards’] 40th birthday, Jason showed up at 2 a.m., loaded. I grabbed a bottle of vodka, smashed it into the cake and yelled, ‘Here’s your goddamn cake!’ The marriage ended when I came across a letter written to him by his girlfriend.”
Bacall did not make another film until Shock Treatment (1964), a murder mystery set in a mental institution. She followed up with a light comedy, Sex and the Single Girl (1964), which also starred Henry Fonda, Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood.
Bacall had a supporting role in the noir private eye thriller Harper (1966) with Paul Newman, played in the star-studded ensemble Murder on the Orient Express (1974), based on the Agatha Christie play, and co-starred with John Wayne in his final film, The Shootist (1976).
In 1981, she starred in The Fan, a riveting story about an actress being stalked by an obsessed fan (Michael Biehn), but spent the major part of the decade back on Broadway, winning the Tony in 1981 for Woman of the Year. She also starred on Broadway in Cactus Flower and Goodbye Charlie while venturing to London and Australia for Sweet Bird of Youth.
Film historians ascribe her relative lack of movie credits during this period as one of the unfortunate results of the demise of the studio system, an enterprise that for all its faults turned out strong female stars. Admitting that scripts were not “exactly piling up at my door,” she nevertheless returned to the screen with Mr. North (1988) and then RobReiner’s Misery (1990), the Stephen King adaptation starring Kathy Bates.
Later, she performed in several made-for-TV movies, in Robert Altman’s farce Pret-a-Porter (1994) and with Jack Lemmon and James Garner in the comedy romp My Fellow Americans (1996).
Altman talked about her longevity in a 1997 interview. “She never got locked in any time warp,” he said. “Think about how many social and attitudinal changes that have occurred, and yet Bacall as always remained unique.”
Most recently, Bacall appeared in the French film Le Jour et la Nuit (1997); in Diamonds with Kirk Douglas and in Presence of Mind with Harvey Keitel, both released in 1999; in the TV miniseries Too Rich: The Secret Life of Doris Duke (1998) as the billionaire tobacco heiress; in Dogville (2003) with Nicole Kidman; and in The Forger (2012).
In a 2006 episode of The Sopranos, Bacall played herself getting accosted by a mugger who tried to swipe her swag bag as she left an awards show.
Thursday nights on ABC now officially belong to Shonda Rhimes: The 44-year-old writer/producer will premiere How to Get Away With Murder next week, an hourlong show starring Viola Davis that will round out a beyond impressive three-hour block of ShondaLand programming. (See also: Grey's Anatomy and Scandal.) But how did she get here? Where did she come from, and what came first? From Crossroads to Scandal, here's a rundown of Shonda Rhimes and how she became television's most celebrated writer.
Pre–Grey’s Anatomy
1970 Shonda is born in Chicago, Illinois — the daughter of a university administrator (her mother, who got her Ph.D. after Shonda left for college) and a college professor. She’s the youngest of the family’s six children: "I always thought that I would end up being a novelist. I was making up stories and recording them into a tape recorder and my mom was transcribing them before I knew how to write ... When I was 17, I saw Whoopi Goldberg live on Broadway and George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum. Both made me absolutely fall in love with the theater."
1980 Ten-year-old Shonda spends all of her free time “in a tree reading books” or “[speaking] only French, pretending her real family lived in Paris and were due any minute now to come whisk her off to the Sorbonne.” But she's still a Midwesterner at heart: "Being from the middle of the country … I’m a TV watcher. Growing up in the suburbs, in the middle of the country, my taste might be more normal than someone who grew up in New York or Los Angeles, maybe less snooty. It makes it possible for me to constantly be amazed that I’m doing [Grey's Anatomy]."
(Meanwhile, a slew of ShondaLand characters will always wear Dartmouth paraphernalia ...)
1991 Shonda quits advertising to get anMFA at USC film school — after reading an article in the New York Times that said it was“harder than getting into Harvard Law and [I] thought, ‘This sounds like a really competitive thing to do. I’m going to do it.’” After school, she works as a development assistant while working on spec scripts on the side. One calledHuman Seeking Same is about an older white woman who falls in love with a younger black man after answering the wrong personals ad.” It doesn't get made, but it gets her name out there ...
1999 ... which eventually gets her a gig writing the teleplay for HBO’sIntroducingDorothy Dandridge.
Later, she writes scripts for 1998’sBlossoms and Veils, 2004’sThe Princess Diaries 2 ...
"Meredith is a lot of me. I’m not white or blonde or thin, but she went to Dartmouth; I went to Dartmouth. She's competitive; I'm competitive. We both have very formidable mothers. My mother has a Ph.D in education; her mother is a surgeon." In fact, all of Grey’s have a little Shonda in them: "Whenever people say I can't stand Cristina, I'm always a little bit hurt. [But] Cristina says things that I say all the time. Like a line from the script when George is talking about how excited he is about his job, and Cristina cuts him off with, 'Now, Bambi, don't say another word until after the hunter shoots your mother.'”
2006–2007 The drama years: Isaiah Washington is kicked off Grey's Anatomy after using a homphobic slur against a castmate, and Katherine Heigl complains about her job a lot. Shonda perseveres, and her Grey's Anatomy spinoff, Private Practice, debuts in the fall.
2010 Rhimes releases Heigl from her contract in 2010 based on an “agreement”; Izzie is written off Grey’s Anatomy. (Heigl will later tellGood Housekeeping that she left “to pursue her family dreams with her singer husband Josh Kelley.) Winner: Shonda.
2011 Shonda’s medical drama,Off the Map, about doctors working in a remote South American village, airs on ABC from January to April and is then canceled.She will later be suedby “struggling writer” Debra Feldman for supposedly ripping off her script,The Red Tattoo.
Scandal
2012 In April, Scandal, a show about a Washington, D.C., “fixer” named Olivia Pope, premieres on ABC right after Grey’s Anatomy. It’s huge: “More than 90 [percent] of Grey’s viewers stay tuned for Scandal ... a time slot it has owned in the ratings since its debut.” Furthermore, the tweets of Scandal fans make it an unprecedented social media coup, causing an estimated “3,000 tweets a minute during broadcasts.”
Not only doGrey’s and Scandal“pull in more than $13 million in advertising for ABC each week — just shy of $300 million a season, or about 5 percent of the network’s total revenue,”but Scandal is also“the highest rated scripted drama among African-Americans, with 10.1 percent of black households, or an average of 1.8 million viewers, tuning in during the first half of the season.”Shonda responds: “The question was: Are audiences ready to have the stories that we tell on television to be more inclusive? Are we ready for our protagonists to represent people of all different genders and ethnicities?”
Basically, everyone is obsessed:
2014 ShondaLand’s latest,How to Get Away With Murder, created by Peter Nowalk, premieres on September 25 — making Thursday nights on ABC a fully stacked ShondaLand lineup. And ABC isn't afraid to shout it from the rooftops:
Matthew McConaughey's Family Steals Spotlight at Hollywood Walk of Fame Ceremony
Matthew McConaughey, his wife Camila Alves, and their three children, Livingston, Levi, and Vida.
Matthew McConaughey celebrated his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame with a little help from his adorable (and super fashionable) family.
The Interstellar actor received the 2,534th star on Monday and had plenty of A-list pals in attendance— including Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, director Christopher Nolan, and Don Phillips (who cast Matthew in his first film, Dazed and Confused) — but it was his loved ones that stole the show. Matthew was joined by wife Camila Alves, 32, and their three children, Livingston, nearly 2; Levi, 6; and Vida, 4.
Dolce & Gabbana dressed McConaughey and his brood for the ceremony proving that they really could be the first family of fashion (sorry, Kim, Kanye, and North West).
Who knows, maybe Vida will follow in her model mother's famous footsteps? She gave the camera quite a pout, looking chic in a floral frock and braided hair.
This isn't the first time the 45-year-old Oscar winner's kids have snagged the spotlight. At the 2014American Cinematheque Award Ceremony in October, Vida ran up on stage during her father's acceptance speech to give him a hug. The adorable moment was certainly a highlight from the night.
During McConaughey's recent Interstellar press tour, he stressed how family comes before work.
"Family — having a wife and kids to come home to brings you back down to the common denominator," Matthew told U.K.'s The Mail on Sunday earlier this month. "I think I have a pretty healthy balance being able to appreciate accolades and attention and wealth and opportunity and knowing that those things come second to family. I don’t respect those other things any less, I just don’t revere them. And I know they are fickle — they come and they go. Family is the most important thing."
Gender: Male Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orientation: Straight Occupation: Actor
Nationality: United States Executive summary:Contact
Father: James Donald McConaughey (former Green Bay Packer, d. Aug-1992) Mother: Kay (schoolteacher) Brother: Michael McConaughey ("Rooster", rancher, b. 2-Aug-1954) Girlfriend:Sandra Bullock Girlfriend:Ashley Judd Girlfriend:Patricia Arquette Girlfriend:Penelope Cruz (dated in 2004) Wife: Camila Alves (model, together since 2005, m. 10-Jun-2012, one son, one daughter) Son: Levi Alves McConaughey (b. 7-Jul-2008) Daughter: Vida Alves McConaughey (b. 3-Jan-2010)
The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce is proud to announce that Jennifer Hudson was honored with a STAR on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on WEDNESDAY, November 13, at 6262 Hollywood Boulevard in front of the W Hollywood Hotel. “We are so happy to honor Jennifer Hudson with a STAR on the Walk of Fame. She is a great talent and a great addition to our Walk of Fame,” stated Ana Martinez, Producer ...of the Walk of Fame ceremonies. “Fans from all over the world have been waiting for this special day since we announced Jennifer’s selection for the STAR,” added Martinez
Souvenir from Jennifer Hudson's STAR Ceremony Reception.
More Academy Award trivia: Did you know that the woman who has won the most Oscars is costume designer Edith Head? She won eight!
For more than fifty years, Edith Head designed the wardrobes of Hollywood stars, defining cinema style through the Golden Era and into the early 1980s. She won eight Academy Awards, designing for Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress, Hedy Lamarr in Samson and Delilah, Bette Davis in All About Eve, Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun, Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and Sabrina, Lucille Ball in The Facts of Life, and Eileen Brennan in The Sting. Her familiar screen credit, "Gowns by Edith Head", graced such classics as Sunset Blvd, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. She won more Oscars than any other woman, was Oscar-nominated a remarkable thirty-five times -- and perhaps even more remarkably, had no formal training for her career.
James Baskett (February 16, 1904 – July 9, 1948) was an American actor known for his portrayal of Uncle Remus, singing the song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" in the 1946 Disney feature filmSong of the South. In recognition of his warm portrayal of the famous black storyteller he was given an Honorary Academy Award,[1] making him the very first black male performer to receive an Oscar.[2]
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WHO Do You ADMIRE? Sometimes it's disturbing to see who People Admire and/or why they Admire Them. I admire EVERYONE who Loves their Neighbor as much as they Admire/Love Themselves! I admire PEOPLE who Respect Themselves & also Show Respect & Courtesy to OTHERS! Ann Dandridge
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Prince
Grace Kelly 
AKA Matthew David McConaughey
