Showbiz History: Audrey's Wedding, Will's Birthday, Denzel's Debut
Tuesday, September 25, 2018 at 7:28AM 5 random things that happened on this day, Sept 25th, in showbiz history
1954 Exactly six months to the day after winning Best Actress for Roman Holiday, Audrey Hepburn marries fellow actor Mel Ferrer in Switzerland. They would divorce the year after her final nomination for Best Actress in Wait Until Dark (1967), her hit film that he produced...
1979 Evita opens on Broadway, becoming an iconic hit, running for 4 years, and winning 7 Tony Awards including Best Musical, Best Actress for Patti Lupone, and Best Featured Actor for Mandy Patinkin. Every major actress with pipes (including Streep and Pfeiffer) wanted the movie role but after many false starts it finally becomes a movie in 1996 with Madonna in the lead role, winning the Golden Globe for Best Actress.
click to embiggen← 1981 Carbon Copy opens in movie theaters, a comedy about a businessman (George Segal) whose life starts falling apart when he learns he has a grown black son. That son is future legend Denzel Washington, just 27 years old, in his feature film debut.
1983 The 35th Primetime Emmy Awards are held with Cheers (debut season) and Hill Street Blues reigning in Comedy and Drama, respectively. This is also notable as the last Emmys to feature M*A*S*H (though it went home empty-handed). It had been nominated for Best Comedy Series for every one of its eleven seasons but won only once. Major luminaries that won for acting that night included four former Oscar nominees Barbara Stanwyck and Jean Simmons (both for The Thorn Birds), James Coco (St Elswhere), and Carol Kane (Taxi), future Oscar winner Tommy Lee Jones (The Executioner's Song), and Emmy darlings Tyne Daly (Cagney & Lacey, first of 6 Emmys) and Doris Roberts (St Elsewhere, first of 5 Emmys). Shelley Long also won for the first season of Cheers but would strangely never win again.
1992 Michael Mann's handsome epic The Last of the Mohicans opens in movie theaters starring the lusty gorg' pairing of Daniel Day Lewis and Madeleine Stowe. Very strangely Oscar stiffs it with just one nomination (which it wins for Sound). It fares better with BAFTA with six nominations and two wins but still no nod for Best Picture. I wish I'd been paying more attention in 1992. What was going on? Why wasn't the movie embraced during awards season? Anyone know or remember?
Today's Birthdays
If it's your birthday today, you share it with a ton of superstars.
Oscar Winners: Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones (yes, they share a birthday), Auteur Pedro Almodóvar, and Oscar's current favorite costume designer Colleen Atwood.
Oscar Nominees: Will Smith
Actors: Alix Bénézech, March Chao, Tate Donovan, Clea DuVall, Jason Flemyng, Donald Glover, Jayne Houdyshell, Mimi Kennedy, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Heather Locklear, Mark Hamill, T.I., Michael Madsen, Mikael Persbrandt, Juliet Prowse, Christopher Reeve, Hal Sparks, Aida Turturro, Zach Woods,
Other Showbiz People: Writer David Benioff (Game of Thrones), Writer William Faulkner, Director Robert Bresson (Au Hazard Balthazar), Director Sergei Bondarchuk (War and Peace), and TV Personality Barbara Walters.
Today's Birthday Suit
Happy 50th to Will Smith today
Which of these anniversaries will you be thinking of today?
Reader Comments (7)
LONG4EVA
Maybe LOTM was seen more as a commercial hit than an Awards movie or maybe with Unforgiven in the mix only room for 1 Epic,Jodhi May was an early supporting actress fave but once they decided on 6 possibilities she was forgotten.
“The Last of the Mohicans” seems to have had a good box office and a good critical reception. Perhaps it’s lack of Oscar noms was due to the recency effect of Kevin Costner’s “Dances With Wolves” being Oscar rewarded/ over-rewarded just two years before. Hey, how many movies about American Native People do you need?
Not many, apparently. Chief Dan George was nominated for a supporting Oscar for “Little Big Man” with Dustin Hoffman in 1970. In 1972, Sacheen Littlefeather appeared on the podium of the Oscar ceremonies to decline Marlon Brando’s Oscar, at Marlon’s request because of his sympathy with American Native civil rights. Scandal! Outrage! No more nominations for First Nations actors for 18 years, with Graham Greene in the sweeper of “Dances With Wolves”.
So 2 years after “Dances With Wolves”, “The Last of the Mohicans” appears. If this movie got a lot of nominations, you’d actually have to talk about the movie, and that could be very uncomfortable. On the one hand, you have Wes Studi giving a scary, terrifying performance. On the other hand, oh yes, you have Russell Means as the Native American hero.
Russell Means was an activist, an extremely successful activist, with AIM, the American Indian Movement. You can imagine how well that would go over with the conservative members of the Academy. And their nightmares of what an Oscar ceremony could be.
First Nations actors have it extremely tough. It’s as if viewers just don’t see them, as if they are invisible. Even when they are so good that they MAKE the audience look at them and acknowledge them, they are shoved out of most minds after. Gil Birmingham in “Hell or High Water”, Lily Gladstone in “Certain Women”, Michael Greyeyes in “Woman Walks Ahead”.
Shelley Long's Diane was one of the all-time great tv performances. Will someone please give her another good role?
Long's nominations all occurred during the time when blue ribbon pa els decided the winners based solely on episode submissions. I remember reading that she often choice more dramatic episodes to submit which undoubtedly hurt her chances in the Comedy category.
Oops. Panels and chose. Sorry about the misspellings.
Michael, that's so interesting about Shelly Long! In the '90s-2000's, it seemed the trend was to do the opposite; Helen Hunt often won for dramatic episodes, Roseanne won for the episode where her father dies, and the producers of "Will & Grace" were quoted as giving Debra Messing a serious episode so she would finally get an Emmy.