Showbiz History: God bless Lily St. Cyr 🎵... and Joan Crawford
Sunday, June 3, 2018 at 12:00PM Here's what happened on this day, June 3rd, in showbiz related history...
1910 Paulette Goddard born in Long Island. She becomes a star in the 1930s and 1940s making multiple films with Charlie Chaplin and Bob Hope among many others and is Oscar nominated for So Proudly We Hail (1943). Famously screen tests and is publicly considered as Scarlett O'Hara but loses the role to then unknown Vivien Leigh.
1918 BURLESQUE CENTENNIAL ~ Stripping star Lili St Cyr was born on this day. Her short lived film career kicked off with B movie Son of Sinbad (1955) but mostly she was famous for burlesque performances. She's name-checked in the famous 'Floor Show' number in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1976) with Susan Sarandon warbling "god bless Lili St Cyr 🎵"...
1924 Colleen Dewhurst star of TV and stage born in Montreal
1925 Tony Curtis born in the Bronx
1929 Douglas Fairbanks Jr (19) and Joan Crawford (23) marry after co-starring in Our Modern Maidens (1928). It's the first of multiple marriages for both of these young rising actors, one the son of a bonafide superstar, the other a hard worker from a hard knock life who had just willed herself into screen sensation status in a film called Our Dancing Daughters (1928). Our Modern Maidens was, we believe (but please correct us if we're wrong) the first Crawford film in which Crawford's name was both first and above the title. Fairbanks Jr was third billed.
Andrea Riseborough and Madonna in the W.E. year1937 Wallis Simpson marries Edward VIII becoming the Duchess of Windsor. This infamous relationship costs Edward the crown as mentioned as sidebar texture in many films about the royal family but Madonna gave it the full movie treatment in W.E. with Andrea Riseborough as Wallis Simpson.
1950 Screenwriter Melissa Mathison born in Los Angeles. Among her accomplishments: writing E.T. (Oscar nomination) and marrying Harrison Ford. Sadly she died a few years ago of cancer.
1969 Director Tate Taylor (The Help, The Girl on the Train) born in Mississippi
1983 "Into the mud scum queen!" Steve Martin and Kathleen Turner star in the very silly comedy The Man With Two Brains opening this day in theaters. But the surprise hit debuting the same day is War Games
1988 The comedy Big opens in theaters cementing Tom Hanks' ascendance into a major box office star with his biggest hit to date (then). He wins his first Oscar nomination for it, too, playing a young boy in a grown man's body.
1989 Daniela Vega born in Santiago, Chile. She goes on to inspire and star in the Oscar-winning Chilean film A Fantastic Woman (2017)
1995 "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?" from the Johnny Depp movie Don Juan de Marco hits #1 on the US Pop charts and stays there for over a month. The song is then Oscar-nominated but Bryan Adams loses to "Colors of the Wind" from Pocahontas. It's the second of his three Oscar nominations for Best Original Song, all of them in the 1990s.
2001 The 55th annual Tony Awards are basically one giant commercial for The Producers with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane hosting and their musical winning all the prizes (12 actually, which is still the record. Even Hamilton couldn't beat it, managing 'just' 11). We always think it's tacky when the host is the frontrunner.
2005 Ron Howard's Cinderella Man opens in theaters. It starts with a lot of Oscar buzz but the buzz peters out by Christmas and it receives only three nominations including Paul Giamatti in supporting actor, presumably to make up for his insane snub the year before for Sideways.
Reader Comments (2)
I love Paulette Goddard. So much. Watching all the screen tests for Gone With the Wind is a fascinating exercise. Most of them are horrible! Including Goddard's first test. But they kept trying and she improved so much that she was 2nd choice for the part after Vivien Leigh.
Also, can someone give Andrea Riseborough a movie? If she can turn that forgetful Tom Cruise Oblivion movie into a Greek Tragedy she deserves so much more.
Goddard was THE Scarlett up till the 11th hour when Myron Selznick intro Leigh to David O Selznick.
She get to play a make up feisty Southern Belle in Reap the Wild Wind 3 yrs later, but she's most famous nowsaday for the role she ALMOST get!
Check her out in Kitty! She luminous n v witty 😁