7 random things that happened today, February 10th, in showbiz history...
1940 The first Tom & Jerry cartoon, Puss Gets the Boot debuts. Tom & Jerry would go on to become major stars of the short film format and super stars of Oscar's animated short category! The series received 13 nominations (starting with Puss Gets the Boots) and 7 wins.
1972 David Bowie debuts his character Ziggy Stardust at a London pub...
2008 The 61st BAFTAs are held with Atonement winning Best Film plus Production Design. Curiously it lost Best Score, which it later won at the Oscars, to a movie that's primary music focus was classic Edith Piaf songs, La Vie En Rose.
2011 The 61st annual Berlinale begins with the Coen brothers True Grit as opening night film and Isabella Rossellini serving as Jury President. At festival's end Asghar Farhadi's A Separation takes the Golden Bear, the first in a long line of honors for that true masterpiece. We love that movie here.
2013 The 66th BAFTAs are held with Argo winning Best Film and Skyfall making do with Best British Film. Though the BAFTAs are sometimes as shameless as other awards bodies in trying to predict the Oscars they were kind enough to give Emmanuelle Riva the Best Actress prize (which she would lose at the Oscars... on her actual birthday no less). Remember David O. Russell's much discussed reaction face?
2014 Shirley Temple Black, the biggest child star of all time, passes away at 85.
2019 The 72nd BAFTAs are held with Roma taking Best Picture and The Favourite settling for Best British Film.
Today's Birthday Suit
Happy 54th today to Queen Laura Dern (Marriage Story, Big Little Lies, Blue Velvet, Mask, Jurassic Park, and much much much much more). Do you ever randomly stop to think of how brilliant and inventive and, well, wild her performance in Wild at Heart was? Probably shoulda been Oscar-nominated! She and her mother Diane Ladd were both Oscar nominated the following year for co-starring in Rambling Rose but they were even better the year before in this.
You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt.
Other showbiz birthdays today: Robert Wagner (Hart to Hart, With a Song in My Heart), Oscar nominee Judith Anderson (Rebecca, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Trevante Rhodes (Moonlight) who you will ahem see much more of in United States vs Billie Holliday - yum, Documentarian Michael Apted (Seven up), Uzo Aduba (Mrs America, Orange is the New Black), Writer/Director Alexander Payne (Nebraska, Sideways), Elizabeth Banks (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Pitch Perfect), Chloe Grace Moretz (Let Me In, Kick-Ass), Keeley Hawes (High-Rise, Death at a Funeral), Emma Roberts (Holidate, American Horror Story), Jimmy Durante (It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World) Karen Fukuhara (Suicide Squad, The Boys), Barry Sloane (Revenge, Longmire), Yara Shahidi (Black-Ish, Salt), Lon Chaney Jr (The Wolf Man, High Noon), Cho Yo-Jeong (Parasite, Obsessed), Max Brown (The Royals, The Tudors), The Netherlands Hannah Hoekstar (Hemel, Charlie's Angels), Germany's Tom Schilling (A Coffee in Berlin, Never Look Away), Oscar winning composer Jerry Goldsmith (The Omen, LA Confidential), Italy's Francesca Neir (Hannibal, Live Flesh), influential acting teacher Stella Adler, and Australia's fabulous Peter Allen who Hugh Jackman won a Tony playing on Broadway in The Boy from Oz.