When Tony Met Janet. And Other Stories...
Saturday, June 4, 2016 at 10:20AM Today in movie related history...
1907 Cracking Rosalind Russell is born. Stars in many classics including: His Girl Friday, Gypsy, and Auntie Mame and is nominated for 4 Best Actress Oscars. The only actresses that share her fate of 4 Best Actress nominations w/out a win: Greta Garbo, Marsha Mason, and Barbara Stanwyck. Of the four only Marsha Mason didn't receive an Honorary later on.
1913 Suffragette Emily Davison runs onto the track at the Epson Derby and is trampled by King George V's horse. It's a huge turning point in the court of public opinion and the suffragette movement. It was reenacted in last year's Suffragette.
1936 Bruce Dern is born and never stops acting thereafter. Also donates Laura Dern to the world for which he has our undying gratitude
1940 The last allied soldiers leave Dunkirk. Britain's PM vows that his forces will "never surrender". Christopher Nolan is currently filming a movie about Dunkirk called, you guessed it, Dunkirk
1942 The Battle of Midway begins in World War II. John Ford directed an Oscar winning documentary about it that you can watch for free online. If you're interested in the topic you should definitely read Mark Harris's book "Five Came Back" about famous Hollywood directors during the war.
1951 Rising actors Janet Leigh (23) and Tony Curtis (26) are married. Much bigger stardom is thrown at them like so much rice via iconic films like Psycho, A Touch of Evil, and The Manchurian Candidate (Hers) and Some Like It Hot, Spartacus and The Defiant Ones (His) shortly thereafter. They break up in '62 but not before gifting us with Jamie Lee Curtis.
1952 70s TV star Parker Stevenson is born. Later becomes half of The Hardy Boys and marries Kirstie Alley who famously refers to his junk "giving me the big one" in her 1991 Emmy speech. This was long before the days when the internet made bulge-watching a national pasttime. (Music cue: "Class" from Chicago here, please. Whatever happened to it? It's all Kirstie Alley's fault!)
1964 Kōji Yamamura is born. Later nominated for an Oscar for the Animated Short Mount Head. It's worth your ten minutes, it's so trippy.
1975 Angelina Jolie emerges. The world is never the same.
1978 Deniz Gamze Ergüven is born in Turkey. She was Oscar nominated last season for her debut film Mustang, which made our top ten list.
They're here.
1982 Poltergeist and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan both open in theaters
1984 Bruce Springsteen releases his classic "Born in the USA" album the title track of which is used in many movies since. The first video "Dancin' in the Dark" introduces the world to soon to be household name actress Courtney Cox.
1989 The Tiananmen Square protests come to a violent end in Beijing with hundreds of young protesters killed. Hollywood has ignored it despite their love of historical event movies and Chinese films usually ignore it too due to the topic being taboo with the government. But two sexually controversial movies released in the Aughts used it as part of the narrative: the gay drama Lan Yu (2001) which won four Golden Horse awards and, more prominently, the college student drama Summer Palace (2006) which was banned at home, and withdrawn from competition at Cannes. Both films are worth seeing.
Reader Comments (4)
Poltergeist is an underrated work of cinema.
It's sad Rosalind Russell isn't more revered today. An enormous talent and one of the few Golden Age actresses who managed to remain in the above the title star spot until the end of their career.
I guess I'm super shallow, but my favorite is the Parker Stevenson/Kirstie Alley thing. I completely forgot they were married. I like Kirstie. Remember Veronica's Closet?
Greta Garbo only has 3 nominations. For quite a number of years now the Academy has considered that even if actors were nominated for two films the same year (something that was possible only until 1930), that counted as a single nomination. It started with Janet Gaynor (3 films) and Emil Jannings (2). All the other cases took place in the 3rd year of the Oscars (1929/1930): Greta Garbo for Anna Christie and Romance, Maurice Chevalier for The Big Pond and The Last Parade and Ronald Colman for Bulldog Drummond and Condemned. Curiously and inconsistently enough, both winners that year were also nominated for two performances, but received the award for only one of them. George Arliss was nominated for Disraeli and The Green Goddess but won for the former, and Norma Shearer was up for The Divorcee and Their Own Desire and also won only for the former.
This is the explanation that appears in the offical AMPAS database: "NOTE: As allowed by the award rules for this year, a single nomination could honor work in one or more films. Though the final awards ballot listed both The Divorcee and Their Own Desire in her nomination, the award was announced for only the The Divorcee performance. It has never been established as to why this was, but it possibly could have been because the original report from the Acting Branch Board of Judges only listed The Divorcee performance in the results of the nominations voting, or it could have been because on some of the final ballots, the voters had indicated the The Divorcee performance over the other."
They may try to explain it away, but this should justify the notion that all the above performers actually received two nominations each!
Another interesting story concerns write-in nominees, but let's leave that for some rainy night by the fire!