8 random things that happened on this day, March 14th, in history...
1885 The Mikado, Gilbert & Sullivan's beloved comic opera, premieres in London. The Oscar winning film Topsy Turvy (1999) depicts its production in exquisite detail. Topsy-Turvy was a very late entry in the 1999 Oscar race and threw a lot of categories out of whack -- proving a formidable competitor to design heavy films like The Talented Mr Ripley and Sleepy Hollow. In the end it won Costume Design and Makeup and received nominations for Screenplay and Production Design. 1999 was a damn good film year, even if the actual Best Picture list was a sorry sorry slate...
1940 The Road to Singapore opens in movie theaters starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour. It's the first of seven "Road to..." films the three of them made togethe -- an early comedy franchise in film history.
marriage #1 or #2?
1943 Lana Turner remarries Stephen Crane just one month after their first marriage was annulled. That woman and offscreen drama! (She married eight times, as often as Liz!)
1966 The highly storied British adventure film Born Free about a couple adopting an orphaned lion, receives a Royal Film Performance in London a few days before its release.
1975 An untimely death for one of the biggest stars of the 1950s. Best Actress Oscar winner Susan Hayward dies at just 57 of brain cancer. Roughly half the cast and crew of Hollywood's Genghis Khan biopic The Conqueror (1956) were later diagnosed with various forms of cancer and speculation arose that they'd all been fatally exposed to fallout from atomic bomb testing in the 1950s in Utah (where the film was shot).
1975 Same Time Next Year opens on Broadway. A few months later Ellen Burstyn wins the Tony Award for Best actress (just 12 days after she had won the Best Actress Oscar for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.) Someone was having a good month!
1991 Howard Ashman dies of AIDS at 40 but his work lives on forever. Such awesome musicals: The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Little Shop of Horrors. Have you watched the documentary about him yet on Disney plus, Howard?
1997 The "special edition" of Return of the Jedi opens in theaters, adding yet more millions to the Lucasfilm coffers and amping up audiences for the prequels which arrived between 1999 and 2005
Today's Birthday Suit
Happy 45th to the sexiest bald man in Hollywood, Corey Stoll.
He's great in everything but we're especially fond of his turns in Midnight In Paris (2011), as Andrew Rannell's bossy bottom boyfriend on Girls (2016), as a sympathetic union member in North Country (2005) and as Buzz Aldrin in First Man (2017). 2021 is a stuffed year for him (though sadly no leading roles). He's in three films: the remake West Side Story, the Soprano's prequel Saints of Newark, and something called What We Do Next. Plus two TV projects, the miniseries Scenes from a Marriage, and voicework in the sci-fi series Pantheon.
Other showbiz birthdays today: Johnny Flynn, pictured left, who we were just talking about as a "sexpot" nominee for Emma and in regards to Emma's underpants free scenes in costume design, TFE favourite Jamie Bell (Billy Elliott, Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool), Oscar winner Michael Caine (Hannah and Her Sisters, Alfie), frequent Oscar host Billy Crystal (When Harry Met Sally, City Slickers), Bollywood's Aamir Khan (Lagaan, 3 Idiots), Mercedes McNab (Buffy, Addams Family Values), German director Wolfgang Peterson (Das Boot, Troy), Chris Klein (American Pie, Election), Meredith Salenger (Journey of Natty Gann, Lake Placid), Ansel Elgort (Fault in Our Stars, West Side Story remake), voice actor Gary Anthony Williams (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, American Dad), Johnny Flynn (Emma, Clouds of Sils Maria), Jaimie Alexander (Thor, Blindspot), Grace Park (Battlestar Galactica, Hawaii Five-O), James Frain (Star Trek Discovery, Tron Legacy), Daniel Gillies (The Originals, Bride & Prejudice) , Adrian Zmed (Grease 2, TJ Hooker), Corey Stoll (Midnight in Paris, Ratched), and 7 times Oscar nominated composer/producer Quincy Jones (The Color Purple, In Cold Blood)