On this day: Dietrich Ascends, Elvis Screen-Tests, and Leslie Cheung Dies
Saturday, April 1, 2017 at 12:00PM on this day in history as it relates to showbiz...
Lon Chaney as The Phantom of the Opera1776 Pioneering mathematician Sophie Germain born. She's mentioned in the movie Proof but where's her biopic? There are so many 'hidden figures' out there to tell stories about
1883 Silent film star and "Man of a Thousand Faces" Lon Chaney is born. Becomes legendary doing monstrous film roles with early horror makeup: clowns, phantoms, hunchbacks, you name it...
1886 Wallace Beery (Dinner at 8, The Champ) born in Kansas City.
1920 Japanese movie star, Toshiro Mifune, Akira Kurosawa's main muse, is born in China
1926 Best selling fantasy novelist Anne McAffrey born in Cambridge. Weird that her books have never become cinematic franchises
1929 Happy 88th birthday to movie musical star Jane Powell !
1930 Marlene Dietrich becomes a superstar with the premiere of Blue Angel in Germany. "Falling in Love Again" from that movie becomes her signature song which she'd perform for years to come
1932 America's Sweetheart Debbie Reynolds born in El Paso. We just lost her of course. *sobs*
1934 Bonnie & Clyde kill two highway patrolmen which turns public perception against the Barrow gang
1939 Ali MacGraw of Love Story fame born
1941 Watch on the Rhine by Lillian Hellman premieres on Broadway. It would become an Oscar nominated Bette Davis movie just two years later
1954 Korean director Lee Chang-dong (Secret Sunshine, Poetry), who is just crazy talented with actors, is born
1956 Elvis Presley records this number, his first screen test, with a stringless guitar as prop. He's thrown into movies immediately to much success.
1965 Director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) born in Stockholm. He's finally made another movie, the crime thriller The Snowman with Michael Fassbender which opens in October
1976 David Oyelowo (Selma, A United Kingdom) born in England
1978 Anamaria Marinca (4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Fury) born in Romania
1988 The Michael J Fox drama Bright Lights Big City and the Demi Moore thriller The Seventh Sign and Tim Burton's Beetlejuice face off for their opening weekends.
1994 The House of the Spirits, with an all star cast including Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Winona Ryder, Antonio Banderas crashes and burns in movie theaters
1997 Happy 20th birthday to Asa Butterfeld (Hugo, Ender's Game, Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children) born in London on this day
Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu Wai in HAPPY TOGETHER (1998)2003 Hugely popular Hong Kong movie star Leslie Cheung (Days of Being Wild, Temptress Moon, Farewell My Concubine, Happy Together) commits suicide. He was only 46 but had been suffering from depression. His last film was the supernatural thriller Inner Senses (2002).
2007 The Tudors premieres with erotic fantasy Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as a portly king who looked nothing like him historically. (It goes on to win two costume design Emmys blocking Mad Men each time, damnit! I'll never get over the Television Academy pretending that Mad Men's costuming wasn't genius. They only nominated that show's designs 5 times from 8 eligible ceremonies and never gave it the trophy.)
2011 Animated film Hop opens in movie theaters
2017 The rest of the internet tells April Fool Jokes about fake movie news but to be honest, we've never been into this holiday...
Reader Comments (10)
Now the inclusion of 'Hop' seems a peculiarily random inclusion...
I feel like throwing in Edgar Wallace, born in 1875, best remembered in Germany as the man whose crime novels were adapted to a string of wonderfully curious films starring, amongst others, Klaus Kinski, and best remembered in the rest of the world as the creator of King Kong.
I love Tomas Alfredson. Love chilly thrillers.
And I love humanist oriental dramas. That's why I think Lee Chang Dong is one of the 5 best directors of this century. He should make more films!
MrW -- re: Hop. None of these are ever strictly "endorsements"... just finding what i can find out about the dates ;)
Still miss Leslie Cheung.
Am I the only person in the world who loved The House Of The Spirits?
La Dietrich had a true love affair with the camera- her life would make an interesting movie.
Has it really been 14 years since Leslie Cheung killed himself? I remember hearing about it as a senior in high school and thinking it was an April Fool's joke. :(
Merian C Cooper created King Kong- he hired Edgard Wallace for publicity to write the screenplay- they both get story by credit in the 1933 classic
Outside of Best Drama and Writing, the Emmys were so strangely stingy with Mad Men. NO actor ever won until Hamm's last season? Hendricks season 4 losing to Smith season 2 still stings. And no Costume Emmy for costumes that were indeed genius? I just don't get it.
@Marek -- I, too love Bille August's adaptation of Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits. Maybe I love it for the wrong reasons, but the starry cast still did it for me. Years later, Glenn Close admitted in an interview that they were all miscast since August may have transformed Latinidad identity into something more introspective, more brooding. I thought Glenn Close's Ferula was the film's MVP. She deftly delineated Ferula's attraction to Clara with the right shade and subtlety thw way Judith Anderson shaded her Mrs Danvers in Rebecca.
Love Anna Maria Marinca too. She has a small part in The Girl With All the Gifts.
Finally, much love to the much-missed Leslie Cheung.