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7 articles from 2008

28 September 2008 4:04 AM, PDT | From Digitalspy | See recent digitalspy news

Paul Newman, the World War II Navy hero, Hollywood actor and director, philanthropist and entrepreneur, was born in 1925, the son of a Jewish father who owned a sporting goods store and a Slovak mother. His family converted to a strand of Christianity when he was five, although Newman would later insist that he was Jewish. "It's more of a challenge," he remarked. Newman was interested in the stage early in his life, taking part in school productions, but his acting ambitions were put on hold when the Us entered World War II. He was sent to Hawaii in 1944 and Okinawa, Japan, in 1945, where he served as a torpedo bomber gunner and rearseat radioman. Newman became one of many Hollywood icons, including James Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Clark Gable and Richard Burton, who built a career on playing believable, world-weary parts on screen after serving their country in the (more)

By Michael Thornton

25 September 2008 11:30 AM, PDT | From Digitalspy | See recent digitalspy news

Hollywood stars of the 1930s and '40s were paid thousands of dollars by tobacco companies to endorse their brands, research has found. More than 200 stars benefited from the arrangement, with one firm paying more than £1.6 million in today's money every year. John Wayne, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy are among those said to have reaped the cash rewards. In return, the tobacco firms funded print and radio adverts for the studios, stars and their films. The University of California study, published in the journal Tobacco Control, claimed that more young people took up smoking because they were influenced by the era's stars. The researchers, led by (more)

By Sarah Rollo

25 September 2008 5:04 AM, PDT | From wenn.com | See recent WENN news

Acting veterans Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and John Wayne were paid to promote smoking during Hollywood's "Golden Age", it has emerged.

The stars received huge cash sums from their film studios to advertise tobacco, according to researchers at the University of California at San Francisco.

One of the key documents uncovered by the researchers was a list of payments for a single year in the late 1930s detailing how much stars were paid by American Tobacco, the makers of Lucky Strike.

Actresses Carole Lombard, Barbara Stanwyck and Myrna Loy were handed $10,000 (GBP5,500) - equal to around $150,000 (GBP83,300) in modern money - to endorse the brand.

American Tobacco also sponsored The Jack Benny Show from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s.

The authors of the study conclude the deals led to a rise in the number of young people who took up smoking in that era.

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7 September 2008 4:02 PM, PDT | From wenn.com | See recent WENN news

Silent movie star Anita Page has died at the age of 98.

The veteran actress passed away in her sleep at her Los Angeles home on Saturday morning.

Page - real name Anita Pomares - broke into Hollywood in 1928, at the age of 18, when she landed a role alongside Joan Crawford in Our Dancing Daughters.

She went on to win a role in the musical The Broadway Melody in 1929, and the film became the first spoken word movie to win an Academy Award in 1930 for Best Picture.

Page wed her first husband, The Broadway Melody composer Nacio Herb Brown, in 1934, but the union was annulled the following year.

In 1936, she married second husband Herschel House, six weeks after they met, and took a near 30-year break from acting to became a doting housewife to the U.S. Navy officer.

But she returned to the limelight in 1994, three years after House's death, with a part in thriller Sunset After Dark.

Throughout her career, Page starred alongside the likes of Lon Chaney, Walter Huston, Clark Gable and silent film legend Buster Keaton, with whom she appeared in 1930's Free and Easy, and 1931's Sidewalks of New York.

Her last film appearance came in Frankenstein Rising, a horror due for release later this year.

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19 August 2008 6:27 PM, PDT | From wenn.com | See recent WENN news

Jarhead star Brian Geraghty has his sights set on playing tragic surfer dude Bunker Spreckels in a new biopic.

The former surfing teacher is fighting to play the playboy, who died at 27 in 1977 after becoming a party animal.

Geraghty says, "He was like a surfing Jim Morrison. He lived in the fast lane, but had an incredibly dark side to his character - I'd really like to explore that.

"I mean he was the stepson of Clark Gable and he inherited a vast fortune as the heir to the Spreckels sugar millions, but there was this other side to him.

"There's this great documentary about his short life, called Bunker 77. He was a fascinating guy."

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13 July 2008 1:16 AM, PDT | From NYPost.com | See recent New York Post news

America, land of the free - home of the grave. After somebody goes to that great big planet in the sky, next up comes a street, a park, a bowling alley named for them.

The Triborough is now suddenly osmosing into the Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. Not a bad idea. This way, tourists looking to drive to Radio City and then Queens will ask locals for the Avenue of the Americas followed by the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive so they can go over the Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Bridge

By CINDY ADAMS

25 March 2008 7:58 AM, PDT | From wenn.com | See recent WENN news

Veteran comedian Gene Wilder has called on Hollywood to cut back on excessive swearing in films.

The Stir Crazy star is fed up with hearing curse words in modern movies, and wishes writers would try and pen less predictable dialogue that relies more on invention than vulgarity.

Wilder, 74, says, "I'm so tired of the 'F' word in movies. Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable - they didn't have to swear and they were powerful. You got everything.

"There's a film... I saw that if you didn't read or hear the dialogue, it is a good story. And then every third sentence, every 2.5 sentence, they start (swearing) and it puts me off."

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7 articles from 2008