Showbiz History: Shyamalan Twists and Steppenwolf Alum
Thursday, August 2, 2018 at 10:20AM 10 random things that happened on this day in showbiz history...
we just called to say we loved you, Myrna1905 Charismatic Myrna Loy is born in Montana. She'll come to epitomize urbane style and wit at the movies as one half of The Thin Man's glorious marrieds with William Powell. Though she was never Oscar nominated she was given an Honorary Oscar in '91.
1914 Beatrice Straight is born in New York. In her sixties she'll make history by becoming the actor with the least amount of screentime to win an Oscar. She rages through Network (1976) for all of five to six minutes as a betrayed wife, but that was enough...
1924 Famous writer James Baldwin is born in New York. He's recently had a resurgence in public interest with the Oscar nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016) a big success in theaters and director Barry Jenkins opting to adapt his novel If Beale Street Could Talk to film as the follow up to the Oscar-winning Moonlight.
1932 Peter O'Toole born in England. He'll become one of the great movie stars and hold the still-hard-to-believe Oscar record of most acting nominations without a win (8). He was given an Honorary Oscar about ten years before his death.
1967 In the Heat of the Night premieres in NYC, on its way to winning Best Picture, in one of Hollywood's most significant years as immortalized by Mark Harris in "Pictures at a Revolution," only the most fascinating book on the Oscars ever written.
1979 Gilda Radner - Live From New York opens on Broadway, with the comedienne reprising many of her famous Saturday Night Live characters. The show is filmed and released in movie theaters the following year as Gilda Live.
Steppenwolf in the early 80s. From left: Joan Allen, Robert Biggs, Glenne Headley, Francis Guinan and John Malkovich
1982 John Malkovich and Glenne Headly, rising stage stars in Chicago's famed Steppenwolf Theatre, marry in their late twenties, a few years before movie fame reaches them. They're divorced in 1988, a huge year for both, while Headley stars in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Malkovich has an affair with Michelle Pfeiffer on Dangerous Liaisons.
1999 The Sixth Sense holds its premiere in Philadelphia, four days later it will open in movie theaters and become a word of mouth sensation, the year's biggest non-Star Wars hit. It receives exactly six Oscar nominations, a perfect number for its promotional ads.
2002 M Night Shyamalan's cleverly shot sci-fi film Signs, starring Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix, opens to huge box office, though it's mocked for its strained "twist" as future Shyamalan films will also be... because what could live up to The Sixth Sense?
2019 The long-delayed possibly troubled superhero flick The New Mutants is due in theaters on this day starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams, and Alice Braga. They're pitching it like it's the next Saw or something. Strange.
Reader Comments (13)
Young Joan Allen from the profile pic above resembles Julianne Moore.
Myrna's lifelong snubbing remains one of the worst Oscar injustices of all time. She deserved a nomination for The Best Years of Our Lives--a Best Picture winner in which she was top-billed. Maybe AMPAS was confused by this as she was playing the loyal, devoted wife, which typically defaults to supporting (aka supporting wife/actress). She's superb in The Thin Man, which earned William Powell a Best Actor nod but she was left out in the cold, even though she's clearly his equal. Certainly she should have been in the conversation for From the Terrace as Paul Newman's alcoholic mom.
That surprise triumph for Beatrice Straight--more great acting per second than any other actress that year. One of my favorite BSA winners.
Well to be fair, Myrna came up 5th in voting for Best Actress for The Thin Man. Unfortunately, they only had 3 nominees back then.
Arlo: Where do you get informations about the ranking of not nominated performances?
They used to release the tallies for votes in the early years. This was before PricewaterhouseCoopers took over voting.
Thanks, Arlo! That makes me feel better.
OK, The New Mutants trailer looks interesting and feels different. Alrighty then.
I'm always curious about what happened to the non-famous people in these photos?
Robert Biggs has 3 IMDB credits, most notably "Continental Divide" with John Belushi and Blair Brown.
Francis Guinan has lots of credits .... https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0347341/#self ... but no star making ones.
What is that je ne sais pas that made 3 of them famous and 2 of them not?
Glenne Headley had such a warm screen presence...what a loss.
Myrna Loy is a classic movie star - in her early roles she was a sexy vamp as in the delirious " The Mask of Fu Manchu" (1932
@forever1267 - Guinan also works a lot on the stage in Chicago, mostly with Steppenwolf but with other theater companies as well. Not sure he's the type to really seek out fame, or even get offers that would lead to fame, as he's very much a character actor who's based in Chicago.
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