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Sandra Reaves-Phillips, the actress and singer who appeared in the films ’Round Midnight and Lean on Me and portrayed six legendary divas in a one-woman, tour de force stage show, has died. She was 79.

Reaves-Phillips died Friday at her home in Queens, family spokesperson Sandra Lanman told The Hollywood Reporter. She had been in failing health since falling off a stage during a performance of Raisin in St. Louis in 2004 and enduring serious auto accidents in 2014 and ’15 in New York.

The South Carolina native worked opposite Maurice Hines in his 2006 Broadway musical Hot Feet, and she portrayed Mama Younger and Bertha Mae Little, respectively, in Raisin on Broadway and national and European tours and in a 1999 off-Broadway production of Rollin’ on the T.O.B.A.

Reaves-Phillips was featured with saxophonist Dexter Gordon in Bertrand Tavernier’s ’Round Midnight (1986) in the role of Buttercup, and in the Morgan Freeman-starring...

The Best Supporting Actor Oscar category is seeing double yet again. Brendan Gleeson and Barry Keoghan received nominations as expected for their turns in Martin McDonagh‘s “The Banshees of Inisherin” on Tuesday, marking the fourth consecutive year a film has received double bids in the category.

“Banshees” is the 22nd film to achieve this, but most remarkably, five of them have occurred in the last six years after a 26-year dry spell. “Bugsy” (1991) produced noms for Harvey Keitel and Ben Kingsley, but the category went without co-star nominees until McDonagh’s “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017) yielded bids for Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson. After none the following year, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci garnered comeback noms for “The Irishman” (2019). Two years ago, Oscar voters shocked us all by nominating Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield — you know, they who played the title characters in that two-hander “Judas and the Black Messiah” — in supporting.

It took a little longer than we thought after her initial surge in October, but Jamie Lee Curtis has finally infiltrated the top five in the Best Supporting Actress Oscar odds. The “Everything Everywhere All at Once” star has jumped from sixth to third place, even leapfrogging over her own co-star Stephanie Hsu.

Curtis’ rise isn’t surprising after she earned Golden Globe and Critics Choice Awards nominations this week and is one of three people — the others being Angela Bassett (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) and Kerry Condon (“The Banshees of Inisherin”) — who was shortlisted at both in the still very messy but very fun supporting actress race. The Golden Globe category was rounded out by Dolly de Leon (“Triangle of Sadness”) and Carey Mulligan (“She Said”), while Critics Choice’s six-person field also included Hsu, Jessie Buckley (“Women Talking”) and Janelle Monáe (“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”).

See...

Ever since “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017) ended a 26-year drought, double Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominees from one film have been all the rage. And this season, the category could very well tread new territory with a double set of double nominees.

“The Fabelmans” and “The Banshees of Inisherin” are both vying to field two supporting actor nominees — Paul Dano and Judd Hirsch for the former, and Brendan Gleeson and Barry Keoghan for the latter. Three of them are in the current top five in the odds and all four are in the top six. Ke Huy Quan (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) leads the way in first place, followed by Gleeson, Ben Whishaw (“Women Talking”), Dano, Hirsch and Keoghan.

Should all four get in, this would be the second time in Oscar history in which two films score double nominations in the same acting category and the first time in supporting actor.

A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, classic novels by Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie and hundreds of thousands of pre-1923 sound recordings are among the works that entered that public domain on New Year’s Day 2022.

Dorothy Parker’s first poetry collection Enough Rope, William Faulkner’s first novel Soldiers’ Pay, and books by Langston Hughes, Willa Cather, T.E. Lawrence and more also joined Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in the public domain, the Associated Press reported.

“When works go into the public domain,...

Best Supporting Actress has always been the Oscar acting category that’s kindest to having multiple nominees from the same film. There have been 35 instances of one film scoring more than one bid in the category, compared to 20 in Best Supporting Actor, 12 in Best Actor and just five in Best Actress. The category is also the only one of the four that has ever featured two pairs of double bids in the same year — and that could just happen again this year.

A long 72 years ago, in the 1949-50 race, the Oscars nominated four women from two films: Ethel Barrymore and Ethel Waters from “Pinky,” and Celeste Holm and Elsa Lanchester from “Come to the Stable.” The fifth nominee was “All the King’s Men” star Mercedes McCambridge, who won the supporting actress award and whom you could argue benefited from the double vote-split (“All the King’s Men” also won Best...

In film history, the anthology genre is the most challenging. Episodic films often have several directors and screenwriters which gives them an inconsistent tone and quality. But the genre’s pitfalls haven’t stopped such filmmakers including Akira Kurosawa (“Dreams”), the Coens (“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”), Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez (“Sin City”); Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese (“New York Stories”); and Joe Dante, John Landis, George Miller and Steven Spielberg (“Twilight Zone: The Movie”).

Wes Anderson joined them with his latest film “The French Dispatch,” which received a nine-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. The comedy brings to life three stories from an American magazine published in a fictional French city and features his stock company of actors including Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson.

If you are a fan of the genre, here are the best anthology movies that...

“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” based on August Wilson’s 1982 play, is set in Chicago the summer of 1927 during a particularly contentious recording session between Ma Rainey and her band. It is a crucial time in her career. Ma has been usurped by blues singers Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters and “Queen of the Moaners” Clara Smith. Jazz has also become more popular than the blues. In fact, the 20s was known as the “Jazz Age.” Levee realizes that and wants to add jazz to Ma’s repertoire.

Produced by Denzel Washington, the Netflix release was directed by George C. Wolfe, who won Tony Awards for his helming of 1992’s “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” and 1996’s “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk.” Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who picked up a Tony in 1996 for his performance in Wilson’s “Seven Guitars,” penned the adaptation. Viola Davis portrays the famed blues singer and...

“The Dark Knight,” “Shrek,” “Grease,” “The Blues Brothers,” “Lillies of the Field,” “The Hurt Locker,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “The Joy Luck Club” and “The Man With the Golden Arm” are among this year’s additions to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

“This is not only a great honor for all of us who worked on ‘The Dark Knight,’ this is also a tribute to all of the amazing artists and writers who have worked on the great mythology of Batman over the decades,” said Christopher Nolan, director of “The Dark Knight.”

“Lillies of the Field” star Sidney Poitier, who became the first Black person to win the Oscar for best actor, said, “‘Lilies of the Field’ stirs up such great remembrances in our family, from the littlest Poitiers watching a young and agile ‘Papa’ to the oldest – Papa Sidney himself!”

Janet Yang, producer of “The Joy Luck Club,...

Paul Phillips, whose long career as a Broadway stage manager included work on such notable productions as Sweet Charity, Mame, Chicago and, in 1967, the now historic Judy Garland at Home at the Palace, died Dec. 5 of natural causes in Naples, Florida. He was 95.

His death was announced by publicist Harlan Boll.

Born in Pleasantville New York, Phillips enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard and was deployed to fight in the South Pacific during WWII. After the war he moved to Hollywood for an acting career, but soon returned to New York, where he would shift from acting to Broadway stage management, beginning in 1959 with director George Abbott’s Fiorella.

Abbott brought Phillips over to stage manage his next play, 1961’s Take Her, She’s Mine starring Art Carney.

Phillips’ next show was producer David Merrick’s short-lived production of The Rehearsal, and a 1965 City Center Revival of Guys and Dolls.

How the 1940s standard “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe” failed to be adapted into a Joe Biden campaign song until now is a mystery, but Cher recognized the obvious pairing of classic song and candidate and has recorded her rewrite of the tune, which was originally sung by Ethel Waters in the 1943 film “Cabin in the Sky.”

The song, with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E.Y. Harburg, was nominated for an Oscar after Waters sang it in the Black-themed Vincente Minnelli film. Many of the original lyrics would not do — Waters refers to “little Joe” in the film version, which sounds more like a nickname Donald Trump would apply to the candidate than something they’d want in a campaign anthem. So that reference gets changed to “president Joe” in Cher’s version, among other alterations.

Cher introduced the song Sunday night in closing “I Will Vote,...

Cher gave the finale performance on Sunday night’s I Will Vote livestream concert, reworking an old Hollywood showtune from the 1943 movie musical Cabin in the Sky to show her support for Joe Biden.

The song, aptly titled “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe,” was originally written by Harold Arlen and Yip Hapburn and sung by Ethel Waters in one of the earliest Hollywood musicals to feature an all-black cast.

For her performance of “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe,” Cher reworked the lyrics to fit the message of the presidential campaign.

Black Americans saw very little representation of their lives and culture on TV during the 1950s. The only mainstay was Eddie Anderson, who played Jack Benny’s sardonic valet Rochester on CBS’ “The Jack Benny Program.” In 1937, he’d became the first Black performer to be a regular on the radio version of the beloved comedy series and played Rochester on television from 1950-65. Terry Carter played Pvt. Sugie Sugerman for 98 episodes of CBS’ Emmy Award-winning “The Phil Silvers Show.’ And Black singers and performers would occasionally appear on various musical-variety series.

Pianist Hazel Scott was given her own summer series “The Hazel Scott Show” on DuMont in 1950. But she was soon named as a Communist by “Red Channels”. Though she denied the charges, the series couldn’t attract a sponsor and was history after four episodes. Likewise, NBC’s 1957-58 “The Nat King Cole Show” couldn’t find a...

Coming to Film Forum in New York City is “Black Women,” a 70-film screening series that spotlights 81 years – 1920 to 2001 – of trailblazing African American actresses in American movies.

Scheduled to run from January 17 to February 13, the series is curated by film historian and professor Donald Bogle, author of six books concerning blacks in film and television, including the groundbreaking “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films” (1973).

“Last year, Bruce Goldstein, the repertory programmer at Film Forum, asked me if there was something I was interested in doing, and this was a topic that I had been thinking about, because I recently updated my book on the subject, ‘Brown Sugar,’ which dealt with African American women in entertainment from the early years of the late 19th century to the present,” said Bogle. “That’s really the way it came about, and it just developed from there.

Tony Sokol Oct 4, 2019

Richard Rodgers wrote a musical for Diahann Carroll to star in after hearing her sing on The Tonight Show.

Pioneering TV, film and stage actor Diahann Carroll, who broke barriers as the star of the 60s series Julia, died of Friday in Los Angeles at 84 due to cancer, according to the Associated Press.

Carroll performed on stages in Las Vegas nightclubs, Broadway theaters, and feature film adaptations like Carmen Jones and Porgy & Bess before she was cast in the title role on the comedy Julia. Her character was the first time an African-American was cast as the star of a show in a non-servant role. Julia Baker was a nurse raising a young son as a single mother following the death of her husband in the Vietnam War. The series ran for 86 episodes on NBC between 1968 and 1971.

Carol Diahann Johnson was born in the Bronx, but grew up in Harlem,...

Singer and Tony-winning, Oscar-nominated actress Diahann Carroll, the first African American woman to star in her own TV series, has died at at her home in Los Angeles after a long bout with cancer. She was 84.

Her daughter, Suzanne Kay, confirmed the news.

Carroll is perhaps best remembered by younger audiences for her role as the conniving Dominique Deveraux on the nighttime soap “Dynasty” in the mid-’80s. But her first major television assignment was starring as the middle-class single mother Julia in a 1968 sitcom that was praised for featuring an African American in the title role — as much as it was criticized for ignoring the civil rights struggle. The series, which ran for three years, was a trailblazer in leading to greater visibility for African American characters on series television.

The actress characterized by svelte cosmopolitan sophistication had come to television via the musical theater. In the early 1960s...

In today’s film news roundup, Patty Jenkins is honored, “Waves” will close the Hamptons Film Festival, Ellen Burstyn and Emma Thompson are cast, and “The Cotton Club” has been expanded.

Jenkins Honored

The International Cinematographers Guild will honor “Wonder Woman” director Patty Jenkins with its inaugural Distinguished Filmmaker Award.

The award will be presented at the 2019 Emerging Cinematographer Awards on Oct. 6 at the Saban Media Center in North Hollywood.

“The Distinguished Filmmaker Award was created to honor filmmakers who best understand the crucial role cinematographers play in capturing their vision, and who exemplify the best in that working collaboration,” said Lewis Rothenberg, national president. “Ms. Jenkins is truly a ground-breaking auteur widely known for appreciating the detailed contributions of her craft departments, and particularly her camera team. She is an incredible inspirational and educational role model for our emerging cinematographers.”

Hamptons Closing Film

The Hamptons International Film Festival has...

Lionsgate will release Francis Ford Coppola’s recut of his 1984 film The Cotton Club in select theaters on Oct. 11, with a screening at the New York Film Festival prior on Oct. 5. The pic will arrive on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital on Dec. 10 with exclusive new bonus material.

The pic which stars Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Gregory Hines, Bob Hoskins, Laurence Fishburne and Nicolas Cage is set against 1930s Harlem and the legendary Cotton Club which was a crossroads for entertainers and gangsters. When the film was released, it was seen as a crime drama centering around Gere’s Dixie Dwyer character, but Coppola meant for it to be a story of two main characters, one white and one black, navigating life in and around the Cotton Club with their families. The film was deemed too long during post production in 1984, with stakeholders forcing Coppola to minimize Hines’ character and lose many musical numbers.

Nearly two decades after he helped bring back the movie musical with Best Picture Oscar winner “Chicago,” director Rob Marshall has made Hollywood history again. By casting 19-year-old singer Halle Bailey as Ariel in his upcoming remake of the 1989 animated film “The Little Mermaid,” he’s about to give the big-screen its first black live-action Disney princess.

What took Hollywood’s casting agents so long to appreciate what’s always been right in front of them? We’ve seen one animated black Disney princess before, but Tiana in 2009’s “The Princess and the Frog” came only after other princesses of color — Chinese Mulan, Native American Pocahontas, and “Aladdin” Arabic heroine Jasmine — made their debuts.

Although black women have been a vital part of the American fabric since the first Independence Day, they continue to be far too under-represented and misrepresented on screen. For years, they were relegated to thankless maid and mammy roles,...

It has been 80 years since Ethel Waters became the first black person to host a television show, The Ethel Waters Show, in 1939, 56 years since Cicely Tyson was the first black person to star in a television drama (CBS' East Side/West Side) and 30 years since Arsenio Hall made history as the first

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Other Links From TVGuide.com Sterling K. BrownCandice PattonDavid Alan GrierLorraine ToussaintPhoebe RobinsonLa La AnthonyTichina ArnoldJustin SimienRobert Townsend...

Elia Kazan would have celebrated his 109th birthday on September 7, 2018. Years after his death in 2003, the two-time Oscar-winning director remains both an influential and controversial figure, respected and reviled in equal measure. In honor of his birthday, let’s take a look back at 15 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Kazan started his career as a stage actor, soon transitioning into directing. He mounted several landmark productions, including the original run of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Throughout his career he received three Tony awards for Best Director of a Play: “All My Sons” in 1947, “Death of a Salesman” in 1949, and “J.B.” in 1959.

He transitioned into filmmaking with “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1945). Two years later, he won his first Oscar for Best Director for “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1947), which also took home Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress (Celeste Holm). A taboo-shattering drama about antisemitism, the film established...

Nostalgia just ain’t what it used to be.

When the poster for American Graffiti (1973) asked the question “Where were you in ’62?” it was marketing a trend, spiked by the increasing popularity of the theatrical musical Grease, for audiences of a certain age to look backward to a time when life wasn’t ostensibly so complicated, when your life was still out there waiting to be lived, to a time when America hadn’t yet “lost its innocence.” The demarcation point for that alleged loss is often assigned to the upheaval of grief and national confusion experienced in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, so it was no accident that the setting for American Graffiti’s night of cruising, romancing and soul-searching was placed a little over a year before that cataclysmic event. The interesting thing about Graffiti was the aggressiveness with which that...

Anne Marie is tracking Judy Garland's career through musical numbers...

Today's clip is a plea for the importance of audio preservation. Unlike last week's short, which survives as only 3 minutes of grainy footage of Judy Garland singing to a statue, Andy Hardy Meets Debutante has been remastered and restored several times since its 1940 release. However, Judy completists who watch the movie may be surprised at what a musical it's not. That's because two songs are missing from the film. The Movie: Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (MGM, 1940)

The Songwriters: Benny Davis, Milton Ager, and Lester Stanley

The Players: Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Lewis Stone, Ann Rutherford, directed by George B. Seitz

The Story: Judy Garland only sings two songs in the entirety of her second Andy Hardy film. Unlike most Mickey/Judy pairings, Andy Hardy Meets Debutante does not follow the "let's put on a show" plotline. Instead, the film...

There's a semi-hidden Hollywood treasure in Deadpool. No, it's not star Ryan Reynolds, although he is perfectly cast; it's prolific, award-winning actress Leslie Uggams, who plays Deadpool's no-nonsense elderly roommate, Blind Al. Uggams' entertainment career spans six decades, countless stages and screens. One which began at the ripe old age of 6 and includes a Tony, an Emmy and performances with icons like Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Charlton Heston. "I was a ham at 5, I was working at 6," Uggams, 72, tells People via a phone call from Chicago, where she is currently filming a guest arc on Empire.

Rex Ingram in 'The Thief of Bagdad' 1940 with tiny Sabu. Actor Rex Ingram movies on TCM: Early black film performer in 'Cabin in the Sky,' 'Anna Lucasta' It's somewhat unusual for two well-known film celebrities, whether past or present, to share the same name.* One such rarity is – or rather, are – the two movie people known as Rex Ingram;† one an Irish-born white director, the other an Illinois-born black actor. Turner Classic Movies' “Summer Under the Stars” continues today, Aug. 11, '15, with a day dedicated to the latter. Right now, TCM is showing Cabin in the Sky (1943), an all-black musical adaptation of the Faust tale that is notable as the first full-fledged feature film directed by another Illinois-born movie person, Vincente Minnelli. Also worth mentioning, the movie marked Lena Horne's first important appearance in a mainstream motion picture.§ A financial disappointment on the...

This year's Emmy nominations saw a historic first: Orange Is the New Black star Laverne Cox was nominated for the outstanding guest actress in a comedy series award, making her the first openly transgender person nominated in an acting category. (Conductor Angela Morley won several Emmys for music direction.)

The award ultimately went to Cox's Orange costar, Uzo "Crazy Eyes" Aduba – the win was announced during the Creative Arts portion of the awards, which took place on Aug. 16 – but Cox's nomination is a first nonetheless. Now in their 66th year, the Emmy Awards have seen many famous firsts. Have a...

Six months into its run and still knockin’ the crowd out, the dance-packed jazz revue After Midnight has proven an enduring threat come awards time. One of the reasons behind this is the uniquely chosen guest artists who have added new luster to the already bright show, most recently Toni Braxton, k.d. lang and original guest star Fantasia (who is coming back May 13-June 8).

But if you’re seeing the show between now and May 11, you are in for a treat, as stage-and-screen star Vanessa Williams (a multiple Tony, Grammy and Emmy nominee) essays the guest spot, and in the EW exclusive clip below,...

Last week, Oprah Winfrey missed out on a second potential Oscar nomination, and with it, the chance of becoming the oldest African American actress ever to win an Academy Award (the current oldest was also the first - Hatty McDaniel at the tender age of 44). No black women over 50 have ever been nominated for Best Actress, and only two have been honored in the supporting category. Given that Ruby Dee’s 2007 nomination was for a 6-minute role in “American Gangster”, and the only other previous nominee is Ethel Waters in 1949, it’s fair to say that it is not a demographic that has much history of registering with Oscar voters. Not that the Oscars are the be-all and end-all, but they are certainly a useful gauge for the quality of substantial mainstream film roles available to American actresses. Cast the net wider, and a similarly bleak picture emerges. Cora Lee Day...

Gong for 12 Years a Slave nominee would follow year of real progress, but history shows such breakthroughs are illusive

Steve McQueen may not be the favourite to win the Oscar for best director when the statuettes are handed out on 2 March, but if he does it will represent a historic breakthrough for black film-makers: none has ever been honoured in this category and only two others have even been nominated – John Singleton in 1992 for Boyz n the Hood and Lee Daniels in 2009 for Precious.

The claims of Alfonso Cuarón, director of space-walk thriller notwithstanding, we may witness a moment equal to that of Kathryn Bigelow's, when in 2009 she became the first woman to win the best director Oscar for The Hurt Locker (defeating Daniels as she did so).

McQueen's prominence arrives on the back of a year that saw real progress for black film-makers, particularly in the Us.

Fruitvale Station,...

She sauntered into Chalky White's Onyx Club in the third episode of Boardwalk Empire's fourth season wearing a long, fur-lined coat and a magnetic stare – and we haven't been able to take our eyes off of her since. Her name is Margot Bingham, and she has transformed what could have been a one-note performance into the breakout role of the season. Bingham's character, Harlem jazz-and-blues chanteuse Daughter Maitland, clocked in at a total of two minutes of screen time during her first appearance on the 1920s HBO drama,...

We are pleased to welcome StinkyLulu back to Smackdowning. Give him a warm welcome in the comments! - Editor

It has been a while since I dropped into a random year’s field of Supporting Actress nominees. Still, as I have re/screened the relevant films in preparation for Saturday afternoon's Supporting Actress Smackdown, it’s startling how familiar the 1952 roster feels. Remember that “Best Supporting Actress” was only in its 15th year or so (having been introduced in 1936, almost ten years after the Oscar game got started) but, already by 1952, the category seemed to have established some of its most enduring quirks.

1952’s nominated roles are definitely cut from Oscar’s favorite cloth: the hooker with a heart; the hale helpmeet; the full force of youth; the long (briefly) suffering wife; and the shrewish “ex.”

Oscar loves a type - you see these types still!

The field we'll be...

Jeanne Crain: Lighthearted movies vs. real life tragedies (photo: Madeleine Carroll and Jeanne Crain in ‘The Fan’) (See also: "Jeanne Crain: From ‘Pinky’ Inanity to ‘Margie’ Magic.") Unlike her characters in Margie, Home in Indiana, State Fair, Centennial Summer, The Fan, and Cheaper by the Dozen (and its sequel, Belles on Their Toes), or even in the more complex A Letter to Three Wives and People Will Talk, Jeanne Crain didn’t find a romantic Happy Ending in real life. In the mid-’50s, Crain accused her husband, former minor actor Paul Brooks aka Paul Brinkman, of infidelity, of living off her earnings, and of brutally beating her. The couple reportedly were never divorced because of their Catholic faith. (And at least in the ’60s, unlike the humanistic, progressive-thinking Margie, Crain was a “conservative” Republican who supported Richard Nixon.) In the early ’90s, she lost two of her...

Jeanne Crain: From Pinky to Margie Jeanne Crain, one of the most charming Hollywood actresses of the ’40s and ’50s, is Turner Classic Movies’ "Summer Under the Stars" featured player on Monday, August 26, 2013. Since Jeanne Crain was a top 20th Century Fox star for about a decade — a favorite of Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck — TCM will be showing quite a few films from the Fox library. And that’s great news. (Photo: Jeanne Crain ca. 1950.) (See also: “Jeanne Crain Movies: TCM’s ‘Summer Under the Stars’ Schedule.”) Now, my first recommendation is actually an MGM release. That’s Russell Rouse’s 1956 psychological Western The Fastest Gun Alive, an unusual movie in that the hero turns out to be a "coward" at heart: quick-on-the-trigger gunslinger Glenn Ford is reluctant to face an evil challenger (Broderick Crawford) in a small Western town. But why? Jeanne Crain is his serious-minded wife...

Award-winning actor renowned for her work on Broadway and roles in classic films such as East of Eden and The Haunting

Unable to make sufficient money from her novels, the great American writer Carson McCullers took advice from Tennessee Williams and allowed one of her masterpieces to be adapted for the theatre. The resultant success of The Member of the Wedding (1950) widened her fame, and made a Broadway star of Julie Harris, who has died aged 87.

The play's main character is Frankie Addams, a gawky 12-year-old who longs for companionship and the "we of me". Although the second juvenile role, in what is essentially a three-hander, went to a child actor, Brandon de Wilde, the complex part of Frankie fell to Harris, who was then 24. Born in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, and trained at the Yale School of Drama, Harris had made her Broadway debut in It's a Gift in...

Julie Harris, one of Broadway's most honored performers, whose roles ranged from the flamboyant Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera to the reclusive Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst died Saturday. She was 87. Harris died at her West Chatham, Mass., home of congestive heart failure, actress and family friend Francesca James said. The actress won five Tony Awards for best actress in a play, displaying a virtuosity that enabled her to portray an astonishing gallery of women during a theater career that spanned almost 60 years and included such plays as The Member of the Wedding (1950), The Lark (1955), Forty Carats...

New York (Associated Press) — Julie Harris, one of Broadway's most honored performers, whose roles ranged from the flamboyant Sally Bowles in "I Am a Camera" to the reclusive Emily Dickinson in "The Belle of Amherst," died Saturday. She was 87.

Harris died at her West Chatham, Mass., home of congestive heart failure, actress and family friend Francesca James said.

Harris won five Tony Awards for best actress in a play, displaying a virtuosity that enabled her to portray an astonishing gallery of women during a theater career that spanned almost 60 years and included such plays as "The Member of the Wedding" (1950), "The Lark" (1955), "Forty Carats" (1968) and "The Last of Mrs. Lincoln" (1972).

She was honored again with a sixth Tony, a special lifetime achievement award in 2002. Her record is up against Audra McDonald, with five competitive Tonys, and Angela Lansbury with four Tonys in the best actress-musical category and one for best supporting actress in a play.

Julie Harris: Best Actress Oscar nominee, multiple Tony winner dead at 87 (photo: James Dean and Julie Harris in ‘East of Eden’) Film, stage, and television actress Julie Harris, a Best Actress Academy Award nominee for the psychological drama The Member of the Wedding and James Dean’s leading lady in East of Eden, died of congestive heart failure at her home in West Chatham, Massachusetts, on August 24, 2013. Harris, born in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, on December 2, 1925, was 87. Throughout her career, Julie Harris collected ten Tony Award nominations, more than any other performer. She won five times — a record matched only by that of Angela Lansbury. Harris’ Tony Award wins were for I Am a Camera (1952), The Lark (1956), Forty Carats (1969), The Last of Mrs. Lincoln (1973), and The Belle of Amherst (1977). Harris’ tenth and final Tony nomination was for The Gin Game (1997). In 2002, she was honored with a Special Lifetime Achievement Tony Award.

Hattie McDaniel: Best Supporting Actress Oscar competition and missing Academy Award plaque (See previous post: “Hattie McDaniel Oscar Speech.”) Besides Hattie McDaniel for Gone with the Wind, the 1939 Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominees were Geraldine Fitzgerald for Wuthering Heights, Edna May Oliver for Drums Along the Mohawk, Maria Ouspenskaya for Love Affair, and Olivia de Havilland for Gone with the Wind. It should be noted that de Havilland, who, according to some, was not at all happy at having lost the Oscar, had much more screen time than Hattie McDaniel. In fact, de Havilland had lobbied David O. Selznick to list her as a lead actress, alongside Vivien Leigh. Selznick, however, balked, fearing that de Havilland might steal away votes from her fellow Gone with the Wind player. In the next decade, Olivia de Havilland would receive four more Academy Award nominations, all in the Best Actress category, including...

Dule Hill will be tapping into his dancing roots when he joins Broadway’s After Midnight, a musical celebrating Duke Ellington’s years at the famous Cotton Club nightclub in Harlem.

Producers said Wednesday the actor and trained tap dancer best known for starring in USA’s hit detective series Psych, will play the host of the show, presenting the sound and glamor of the Harlem Renaissance.

Performances start Oct. 18 at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, with an official opening night set for Nov. 3.

Hill was last on Broadway as Spoon, a lawyer-turned-budding novelist, in Lydia R. Diamond’s thoughtful family...

Elia Kazan is one of my top five favourite American filmmakers of all time, and so I decided to ask our staff to rank his films. If you are not yet familiar with the filmmakers work, now would be a good time to start. Kazan was one of the most honoured and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history and introduced a new generation of unknown young actors to the world, including Marlon Brando, James Dean, Warren Beatty, Carroll Baker, Julie Harris, Andy Griffith, Lee Remick, Rip Torn, Eli Wallach, Eva Marie Saint, Martin Balsam, Fred Gwynne, and Pat Hingle. Noted for drawing out the best dramatic performances from his cast, he directed 21 actors to Oscar nominations, resulting in nine wins. The source for his inspired directing was the revolutionary acting technique known as the Method, and Kazan quickly rose to prominence as the preeminent proponent of the technique. During his career,...

This week at Trailers from Hell, director John Landis takes a look at Vincente Minnelli's musical, "Cabin in the Sky," released in 1943. The hit 1940 Broadway musical version of the Faust legend made it to the screen three years later, with original stars Ethel Waters and Rex Ingram heading an all-star African-American cast and first-time director Vincente Minnelli behind the camera. Jack Benny foil Eddie Anderson replaced Casablanca pianist Dooley Wilson in the lead because "Rochester" was popular enough to allay objections from exhibitors in some of the race-averse Southern states. Released in "glorious Sepiatone."...

Trey Parker and Matt Stone's hit musical is a savage, brilliant satire, and is making millions. So why do musicals thrive in a recession?

This week, the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon opened in London. Even before a single review had appeared, tickets were being resold at up to £350. The show has already earned millions for its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who also gifted the world with South Park. It's enough to make you ask: "Crisis? What crisis?"

There's no mystery about the show's recession-busting success, in the Us and – one feels safe in predicting – here. It's simply a work of genius, so brilliantly conceived and executed that it makes astonishingly savage and sophisticated satire into joyous, hilarious, literally all-singing, all-dancing fun and glamour.

Remarkably, despite the fact that there's barely a moment's respite from robust engagement with issues generally guaranteed to provoke hysterical controversy, The...

Tags: The Member of the WeddingAnna PaquinAlfre WoodardIMDbBlack History Month

If you ever felt like a misfit, The Member of the Wedding is a story you can identify with. The Carson McCullers novel was adapted into a successful play and then two films, once in 1952 and another in 1997, with Anna Paquin and Alfre Woodard in the staring roles. The queer Southern writer put a little bit of herself into the work, as the story follows 12-year-old tomboy Frankie who wants so badly to fit in somewhere that she wants to leave town on a honeymoon with her older brother who is getting married. The voice of reason, though, is Berenice, the maid and caretaker of Frankie and her younger brother.

The 1997 adaptation starring the bisexual actress Anna Paquin is playing on Starz for Black History Month and it's a great chance to watch the film if you've never seen productions of the work before.

Today we are talking to a Tony Award-winning star known for her many impressive appearances on Broadway in Jellys Last Jam, Play On, The Wild Party and her tremendous title turn in the towering Caroline, Or Change - the one and only Tonya Pinkins. Opening up about her career and many of her most memorable roles, Pinkins lets us in to her world and shares experiences of working with some of the most noted names in theatre - George C. Wolfe, Harold Prince, August Wilson, Stephen Sondheim, Lloyd Richards, Daniel Sullivan, David Esbjornson and many more among them - on everything from Merrily We Roll Along, her Broadway debut, to her many musical roles to August Wilsons The Piano Lesson and Radio Golf all the way to last seasons Shakespeare In The Park double-header of The Merry Wives Of Windsor and Measure For Measure. Most importantly, Pinkins fills us in...

At the SXSW Festival 2012, HBO rolled out the red carpet, screened three episodes of Lena Dunham's Girls, and viewers wandered into a bona fide hit. Whose time, incidentally, had come.

What writer/actress/director, Lena Dunham has written is good and true. At least in my opinion as a single person perpetually amazed by cutting-edge social and romantic horrors.

Mostly, Girls makes me glad.

I'm a student of sitcom (and, all right, sometimes a teacher of its evolution). World War II, coming conveniently near the beginning of popularly available television programming, allowed room for a Gertrude Berg (in 1949 the writer, star & producer of television's first sitcom, The Goldbergs); an Ethel Waters (The Beulah Show, 1950); and a Lucille Ball (who in 1951 set sitcom standards still in use by many: shoot film, 3 cameras, live audiences).

Meanwhile the guys were back from war (not that there's anything wrong with that), but the...

Fred Zinnemann began his career during the studio era, but kept on going, however sporadically, long after most of his contemporaries had retired. Even so, today his name means little to most moviegoers and critics alike. But why? Quite possibly because, like William Wyler, Zinnemann covered just about every film genre there is. His relatively small oeuvre — 21 narrative feature films — encompasses the following: Western (High Noon, The Sundowners [sort of]), romance (From Here to Eternity), socially conscious drama (The Search, The Men, A Hatful of Rain), historical drama (A Man for All Seasons), adventure (The Seventh Cross, Five Days One Summer), religion (The Nun's Story), thriller (The Day of the Jackal), crime (Eyes in the Night, Kid Glove Killer, Act of Violence), war (Behold a Pale Horse), comedy (My Brother Talks to Horses), melodrama (Little Big Jim) psychological drama (Teresa, The Member of the Wedding), musical (Oklahoma), pseudo-"historical" drama (Julia, whose...

James Dean, Jo Van Fleet, East of Eden Elia Kazan: Oscar Actors' Director Pt.1 Elia Kazan-directed movies: twenty-four acting nominations; nine wins. (s) supporting category. (*) Academy Award winner 1945 * James Dunn (s), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Additionally, Peggy Ann Garner won a Juvenile Oscar for her 1945 performances, including the one in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) 1947 Gregory Peck, Gentleman's Agreement Dorothy McGuire, Gentleman's Agreement * Celeste Holm (s), Gentleman's Agreement Anne Revere (s), Gentleman's Agreement 1949 Jeanne Crain, Pinky (co-directed with John Ford) Ethel Barrymore (s), Pinky Ethel Waters (s), Pinky 1951 Marlon Brando, A Streetcar Named Desire * Vivien Leigh, A Streetcar Named Desire * Karl Malden (s), A Streetcar Named Desire * Kim Hunter (s), A Streetcar Named Desire 1952 Marlon Brando, Viva Zapata * Anthony Quinn (s), Viva Zapata 1954 * Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront Lee J. Cobb (s), On the Waterfront Karl Malden (s), On the Waterfront Rod Steiger (s), On the Waterfront...

Dorothy McGuire, Gregory Peck, Gentleman's Agreement Elia Kazan is best remembered today for two things: his association with Marlon Brando during the first half of the 1950s, and the fact that he claimed to be unrepentant about naming names — and ruining careers and lives — during the Red-baiting hysteria of the post-World War II years. Kazan's 19 feature films as a director are wildly uneven. For every great A Streetcar Named Desire there is a dreadful America, America, in addition to everything in between. Yet, probably as a result of his Broadway training, Kazan was undeniably an outstanding actors' director. Tough-guy Brando remains the best-remembered Kazan star for his performances in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront (less so for his Emiliano Zapata in Viva Zapata!). Even so, the director elicited superb performances from a wide range of players, from child actress Peggy Ann Garner, who won a Juvenile Oscar...

With Duke Ellington's music as the centerpiece, Cotton Club Parade reimagines one of the composer's Cotton Club floor shows. Ellington and his orchestra began a four-year residency at the Club in 1927 and continued making guest appearances throughout the 1930s. Legendary performers such as the Nicholas Brothers, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Snake Hips Tucker, Peg Leg Bates and a 16-year old Lena Horne all performed at the Club.

Hal Kanter (see photo), creator of the groundbreaking television series Julia, starring Diahann Carroll (photo) as a nurse, died Sunday, Nov. 6, of complications from pneumonia at Encino Hospital in the Los Angeles suburb of Encino. Kanter was 92. Julia (1968-71) marked the first time a black actress had an important role in an American television series playing something other than a maid (e.g., Ethel Waters and Louise Beavers in the 1950s series Beulah). As quoted in the Los Angeles Times obit, Kanter said he didn't want to make profound political statements with each Julia episode. But political statements were made all the same, as Kanter explained: There is a fallout of social comment. Every week we see a black child playing with a white child with complete acceptance and without incident. One of the recurring themes in the thousands of letters we get is from people who thank us for...