NAME: Tippi Hedren OCCUPATION: Animal Rights Activist, Film Actress, Television Actress BIRTH DATE: January 19, 1930 (Age: 83) PLACE OF BIRTH: New Ulm, Michigan ORIGINALLY: Nathalie Hedren
BEST KNOWN FOR: Actress Tippi Hedren was discovered by Alfred Hitchcock, who cast her in her two most notable films The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964).
Nathalie Kay “Tippi” Hedren (born January 19, 1930) is an American actress and former fashion model. She is primarily known for her roles in two Alfred Hitchcock films, The Birds and Marnie (in which she played the title role), and her extensive efforts in animal rescue at Shambala Preserve, an 80-acre (320,000 m2) wildlife habitat which she founded in 1983.
Hedren is the mother of actress Melanie Griffith, and they share credits on several productions, notably Pacific Heights (1990).
A Louis Vuitton ad campaign in 2006 paid tribute to Hedren and Hitchcock with a modern-day interpretation of the deserted railway station opening sequence of Marnie. Her 1963 publicity picture from The Birds was the cover for Jean-Pierre Dufreigne’s book Hitchcock Style (2004). In interviews, Naomi Watts has stated that her character interpretation in Mulholland Drive (2001) was influenced by the look and performances of Hedren and Kim Novak in Hitchcock films. Watts and Hedren later acted in I Heart Huckabees (2004) but didn’t share any scenes together onscreen. Off-screen, the film’s director David O. Russell introduced them both, and Watts has said about Hedren, “I was pretty fascinated by her then because people have often said that we’re alike.” Watts was once expected to star in a remake of The Birds (1963) and has dressed up as Hedren’s title character from Marnie for a photo shoot for March 2008 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. In the same issue, Jodie Foster dressed up as Hedren’s character, Melanie Daniels from The Birds (1963).
In another issue of Vanity Fair, the magazine referred to January Jones‘s character in Mad Men as “Tippi Hedren’s soul sister from Marnie”. The New York Times television critic earlier had echoed the same sentiment in his review of Mad Men. January Jones said that she “takes it a compliment of sorts” when compared to Grace Kelly and Hedren. Actress Tea Leoni said that her character in the film Manure (2009) is made up to look like Hedren.
Memories of my father are misty soft-focused outlines of events. They seem more like memories of photographs I haven’t seen recently. My father vanished completely from my life 19 years ago, he started to vanish 12 years before that, if he was ever actually there, that is. He is alive. A girl from the neighborhood sees him my home town occasionally and I hear he socializes with the father of one of my sister’s high school friends. He just stopped wanting to see my sister and me, I guess.
I am sure he has his reasons or what he thinks are reasons, but when you are 12 years old and your father never calls you and rarely returns your calls, you know it’s because there is something wrong with you. There is something that he can see, maybe all adults can see, that makes you unworthy, less than, not enough. Through his inaction, and sadly even some of his actions, I grew up thinking that I was not worth his time.
For quite a few years, he was a little league coach and I watched him interact with the kids on his team, being much more interested and excited and engaged with them than he ever was with me.
Once, after reviewing a less-than-favorable junior high report card, he commented that my mother and sister got the brains in the family.
He sold my car (that i paid for myself) for me to one of his friends and kept the money. I asked about it a few times and he would say that he traded it for something that he was selling and that I would get it soon, but it never happened.
When I told him that his father raped me repeatedly when I was four and five years old, his only response was to ask me why I agreed to move in and look after the same grandfather.
My advice to fathers on Father’s Day is to either step up or stay away. You cannot half-ass it with a kid. If you can’t do it, just go away and let the memories fade.
My advice to kid on Father’s day is that you do not have to forgive to forget. Hopefully, your father didn’t fuck up on purpose. He probably just didn’t know how to be an adult and that is his fault for not sorting his shit out before having a kid. If you have kids of your own, it stops with you. Be the parent you wanted, not the one you had. It is probably scary and ego-crushingly hard, but you owe it to them, you owe it to yourself.
1. What is your favorite word? Indeed. Use it when agreeing with someone, it guarantees a double-take from the person. It’s classy and underused. (Plus, I found this giraffe saying it, so it must be classy.)
2. What is your least favorite word? Can’t. There are very few things that we can’t do and I feel like it is a lazy person’s excuse for not trying and a scared person’s excuse to avoid possible failure.
3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally? Conversation. Exchange of ideas where one is not trying to convince the other that they are right or wrong is exceptionally energizing. Expressing passion. And being a bit crazy never hurt anyone.
4. What turns you off creatively, spiritually or emotionally? Ego. Nothing is more tiresome to me than arrogance and fear.
5. What sound or noise do you love? Rain. Rebirth, cleansing, nourishment.
6. What sound or noise do you hate? Garbage trucks or any large truck beeping as they reverse into your early morning slumber.
7. What is your favorite curse word? Fuck. Not original, but popular for all the right reasons. Add it to your favorite sentence, not a lot, just enough. It is the cilantro of words. (I would love it if I could just get myself to start using “Horse Shit” at times of exclamation, but it just hasn’t caught on in my brain.)
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?Doctors Without Borders. Using knowledge to improve the human experience is the greatest act of selflessness in my opinion.
9. What profession would you not like to do? The universally and rightly so hated Corporate Attorney. Protecting a business against people rapes your soul.
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? ”Wow, damn fine run. Wanna go again? Oh, and ya, that guy isn’t my son, I am not sure where they got that idea.”
BEST KNOWN FOR: Louise Brooks was a silent-film actress known for bringing a sense of corrupt sensuality to her roles.
Mary Louise Brooks (November 14, 1906 – August 8, 1985), generally known by her stage name Louise Brooks, was an American dancer, model, showgirl and silent film actress, noted for popularizing the bobbed haircut. Brooks is best known for her three feature roles including two G. W. Pabst films: in Pandora’s Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and Prix de Beauté (Miss Europe) (1930). She starred in 17 silent films and, late in life, authored a memoir, Lulu in Hollywood.
French film historians rediscovered her films in the early 1950s, proclaiming her as an actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as a film icon (Henri Langlois: “There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!”), much to her amusement. It would lead to the still ongoing Louise Brooks film revivals, and rehabilitated her reputation in her home country. James Card, the film curator for the George Eastman House, discovered Louise living as a recluse in New York City about this time, and persuaded her to move to Rochester, New York to be near the George Eastman House film collection. With his help, she became a noted film writer in her own right. A collection of her witty and cogent writings, Lulu in Hollywood, was published in 1982. She was profiled by the film writer Kenneth Tynan in his essay, “The Girl With The Black Helmet”, the title of which was an allusion to her fabulous bob, worn since childhood, a hairstyle claimed as one of the ten most influential in history by beauty magazines the world over.
“I found that the only well-paying career open to me, as an unsuccessful actress of thirty-six, was that of a call girl…and (I) began to flirt with the fancies related to little bottles filled with yellow sleeping pills.”
Brooks had also been a heavy drinker since age 14, but she remained relatively sober to begin writing about film, which became her second career. During this period she began her first major writing project, an autobiographical novel called Naked on My Goat, a title taken from Goethe’s Faust. After working on the novel for a number of years, she destroyed the manuscript by throwing it into an incinerator.
In an interview with James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio, Liza Minnelli related her preparation for portraying Sally Bowles in the film Cabaret: “I went to my father, and asked him, what can you tell me about thirties glamour? Should I be emulating Marlene Dietrich or something? And he said no, I should study everything I can about Louise Brooks.”
In 1991 the British new wave group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark released a single named “Pandora’s Box” as a tribute to Brooks. The video for the single used extensive footage of Brooks from the movie and included a text intro which explained who Brooks was. And, for the 1988 Siouxsie and The Banshees album (Peepshow) and tour, singer Siouxsie Sioux sported a hairdo and costumes in Brooks’s style.
An exhibit titled “Louise Brooks and the ‘New Woman’ in Weimar Cinema” ran at the International Center of Photography in New York City in 2007, focusing on Brooks’ iconic screen persona and celebrating the hundredth anniversary of her birth.
On August 8, 1985, Brooks was found dead of a heart attack after suffering from arthritis and emphysema for many years. She was buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Rochester, New York.
Sir Cecil Beaton was an English fashion photographer. As a child, he adored the picture postcards of society ladies that came with the the Sunday newspaper. In the 1920s, he was hired as a staff photographer for Vanity Fair and Vogue, where he developed a unique style of posing sitters with unusual backgrounds. He was also a diarist, interior designer and Oscar-winning stage and costume designer.
I was lucky enough to sit in on a Master Class given by Colleen Dewhurst at Interlochen and was blown away by her life and career. To be honest, I had only known her from the Anne of Green Gables series, but her stories and inspiration that day compelled me to see more. That voice! She was an amazing example of how life should be spent. Ladies and Gentlemen, Colleen Dewhurst. Style Icon.
Colleen Rose Dewhurst (June 3, 1924 — August 22, 1991) was a Canadian-American actress known for a while as “the Queen of Off-Broadway.” In her autobiography, Dewhurst wrote: “I had moved so quickly from one Off-Broadway production to the next that I was known, at one point, as the ‘Queen of Off-Broadway’. This title was not due to my brilliance but rather because most of the plays I was in closed after a run of anywhere from one night to two weeks. I would then move immediately into another.” She was a renowned interpreter of the works of Eugene O’Neill on the stage, and her career also encompassed film, early dramas on live television, and Joseph Papp‘s New York Shakespeare Festival. She was also renowned for her television work playing Marilla Cuthbert in the Kevin Sullivan TV movie adaptations of the Anne of Green Gables series and her reprisal of the role in the subsequent TV series Road to Avonlea (marketed as just Avonlea in the US).
Her most significant achievement was the 1974 Broadway revival of O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten as the farm girl Josie Hogan opposite Jason Robards’s Jamie. Dewhurst won a Tony Award for her work. Dewhurst played Katharina in a 1956 production of Taming of the Shrew for Papp. She (as recounted in her posthumous obituary in collaboration with Tom Viola) wrote:
With Brooks Atkinson’s blessing, our world changed overnight. Suddenly in our audience of neighbors in T-shirts and jeans appeared men in white shirts, jackets and ties, and ladies in summer dresses. We were in a hit that would have a positive effect on my career, as well as Joe’s, but I missed the shouting.
Dewhurst played Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth for Papp and, years later, Gertrude in a production of Hamlet at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park.
Dewhurst and Scott met while working together in 1958, in Children of Darkness, while they were both married to other people. Dewhurst and Scott married and divorced twice. They had two sons, Alexander Scott and actor Campbell Scott. Colleen Dewhurst won two Tony Awards and four Emmy Awards.
She appeared with Ingrid Bergman in a production of O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions on Broadway in 1967. Quintero also directed her in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and Mourning Becomes Electra. She appeared in Edward Albee‘s adaptation of Carson McCullers’ Ballad of the Sad Cafe, and she played Albee’s Martha in a Broadway revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf which Albee directed himself. She won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in 1961 for All The Way Home.
She appeared in 1962 as Joanne Novak in the episode “I Don’t Belong in a White-Painted House” in NBC’s medical drama, The Eleventh Hour, starring Wendell Corey and Jack Ging. Dewhurst appeared opposite her then-husband, Scott, in a 1971 television adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Price, on Hallmark Hall of Fame, an anthology series, and there is another television recording of them together when she played Elizabeth Proctor to his unfaithful John in Miller’s The Crucible (with Tuesday Weld. In 1977, Woody Allen cast her in his film Annie Hall as Annie’s mother.
In 1972 she played a madam, Mrs. Kate Collingwood, in The Cowboys (1972), which starred John Wayne. In 1985, she played the role of Marilla Cuthbert in Kevin Sullivan’s adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novel Anne of Green Gables, and reprised the role in 1987′s Anne of Avonlea (also known as Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel), and in several episodes of Kevin Sullivan’s Road to Avonlea. Dewhurst died before the character of Marilla could be written out and her final scenes were picked up off the editing-room floor and pieced together for her death scene.
During 1989 and 1990, she appeared in a supporting role on the television series Murphy Brown playing the feisty mother of Candice Bergen’s title character; this role earned her two Emmy Awards.
Dewhurst was president of the Actors’ Equity Association from 1985 until her death from cervical cancer in 1991. Dewhurst’s Christian Science beliefs[citation needed] led to her refusal to countenance any kind of surgical treatment. Maureen Stapleton wrote about Dewhurst:
Colleen looked like a warrior, so people assumed she was the earth mother. But in real life Colleen was not to be let out without a keeper. She couldn’t stop herself from taking care of people, which she then did with more care than she took care of herself. Her generosity of spirit was overwhelming and her smile so dazzling that you couldn’t pull the fucking reins in on her even if you desperately wanted to and knew damn well that somebody should.
Dewhurst was married to James Vickery from 1947 to 1960. Later she was twice married and divorced from stage, film and television actor George C. Scott for a total of approximately 10 years. The couple had two sons, Alexander and Campbell, an actor. She co-starred with Campbell in Dying Young (1991), one of her last performances.
During the last years of her life, she lived on a farm in South Salem, New York, with her partner, Ken Marsolais. They also had a summer home on Prince Edward Island, Canada.
NAME: Pablo Neruda OCCUPATION: Poet BIRTH DATE: July 12, 1904 DEATH DATE: September 23, 1973 EDUCATION: Temuco Boys’ School PLACE OF BIRTH: Parral, Chile PLACE OF DEATH: Santiago, Chile
BEST KNOWN FOR: Pablo Neruda was a Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet who was active in world politics through his role as a diplomat.
Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973) was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda.
Neruda became known as a poet while still a teenager. He wrote in a variety of styles including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and erotically-charged love poems such as the ones in his 1924 collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.” Neruda always wrote in green ink as it was his personal color of hope.
On July 15, 1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, he read to 100,000 people in honor of Communist revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes. During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions and served a stint as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When Conservative Chilean President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda’s arrest. Friends hid him for months in a house basement in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close collaborator to socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.
Neruda was hospitalized with cancer at the time of the Chilean coup d’état led by Augusto Pinochet. Three days after being hospitalized, Neruda died of heart failure. Already a legend in life, Neruda’s death reverberated around the world. Pinochet had denied permission to transform Neruda’s funeral into a public event. However, thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew and crowded the streets.
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
NAME: Paul Newman OCCUPATION: Film Actor, Theater Actor, Television Actor, Race Car Driver, Entrepreneur BIRTH DATE: January 26, 1925 DEATH DATE: September 26, 2008 EDUCATION: Kenyon College, Yale School of Drama PLACE OF BIRTH: Cleveland, Ohio PLACE OF DEATH: Westport, Connecticut
BEST KNOWN FOR: Paul Newman came to be known as one of the finest actors of his time. He also started the Newman’s Own food company, which donates all profits to charity.
Paul Leonard Newman (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008) was an American actor, film director, entrepreneur, humanitarian, professional racing driver and auto racing enthusiast. He won numerous awards, including an Academy Award for best actor for his performance in the 1986 Martin Scorsese film The Color of Money and eight other nominations, three Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Cannes Film Festival Award, an Emmy award, and many honorary awards. He also won several national championships as a driver in Sports Car Club of America road racing, and his race teams won several championships in open wheel IndyCar racing.
Newman was a co-founder of Newman’s Own, a food company from which Newman donated all post-tax profits and royalties to charity. As of July 2011, these donations exceeded $300 million.
Why He’s A Style Icon
Few American film actors transcend a role, character or film to become icons on the global stage. However, Paul Newman achieved his vaulted place in the pantheon of men to place somewhere between matinee idol/Academy Award winner, and even turned his focus to philanthropy and motor racing. You may not have seen his earlier films, but you certainly know his work in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the penultimate guy film Cool Hand Luke. Made in a time when stories drove actors to work harder and reveal more, these films secured Paul Newman as a star while ensuring his iconic status in fashion. In a sense, his is the one and only example of American minimalism in acting and fashion. Though he leans toward the traditional, he does not need wild hairstyles or facial hair to imbue his characters with pathos. Instead, he utilizes the clothes on his back and the way he moves in them to translate for all of us what a man should be.
Dress The Newman Way
You could choose a slim-cut charcoal suit with skinny lapels, a dark tie and cufflinks reminiscent of Newman’s Fast Eddie Felson from The Hustler, or the crisp Oxford button-downs from Cat On a Hot Tin Roof to emulate Newman’s fastidious on-screen look. Then again, you could pull on a denim Oxford in a pale blue much like the one he wore in Cool Hand Luke. We know you don’t want to work on a chain gang and tar roads, but the masculine and rugged casualness of the denim Oxford speaks directly to the hard-edged character that lies beneath all of Paul Newman’s portrayals. Long before Ralph Lauren revived this look for himself and his RL line with this denim western shirt, Paul Newman had men lining up to drape themselves in denim and to imagine themselves as tough and as cool as the man they saw on the silver screen.
Best Known For: Cole Porter was a U.S. composer and lyricist who created songs like “I Get a Kick Out of You” and his own series of Broadway musicals including Anything Goes.
Cole Porter was born today in Peru, Indiana (1891). He was a composer and lyricist, and he wrote a string of hit songs: “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Night and Day,” “You’re the Top,” “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall In Love,” “I’ve got You Under My Skin,” and “Let’s Misbehave.” All of these songs were written within a 10-year period: between his first popular Broadway musical, Paris (1928) — his first musicals had been complete flops — and a terrible riding accident in 1937. Porter was at a party at the New York home of the Countess Edith di Zoppola when his horse rolled and crushed his legs. He claimed that he didn’t realize how badly he was hurt and that while someone ran for help he finished up the lyrics to “You Never Know.” But he was in fact seriously injured — the doctors insisted that his right leg be amputated, maybe his left as well. Porter refused. He preferred to be in intense pain than be missing a leg.
He lived with the pain for more than 20 years, and he continued to write songs, but never at the same rate of success as he had before his accident. In 1958, after 34 operations on his leg, he finally agreed to have it amputated. The playwright Noel Coward went to visit Porter in the hospital, and he said: “He has at last had his leg amputated and the lines of ceaseless pain have been wiped from his face. He is a bit fretful about having to manage his new leg but he will get over that. I think if I had had to endure all those years of agony I would have had the damned thing off at the beginning, but it is a cruel decision to have to make and involves much sex vanity and many fears of being repellent. However, it is now done at last and I am convinced that his whole life will cheer up and that his work will profit accordingly.” But Porter never recovered. He told friends, “I am only half a man now.” And never wrote another song. He died in 1964 at the age of 73.
The critic Alfred Kazin said of Porter: “The wit of his words depended on his ability to raise the audience immediately to his own level — and keep it there. The instant happiness that Porter gave his audience is the kind that becomes history.”
Charles James (18 July 1906 in Sandhurst – September 23, 1978 in New York City) was a fashion designer known as America’s first couturier. He is considered a master of cutting and is known for his highly structured aesthetic.
His father was a British officer and his mother a Chicago ‘patrician’. In 1919 he attended Harrow School, where he met Evelyn Waugh, Francis Rose and, most importantly Cecil Beaton, with whom he formed a longstanding friendship. He was expelled from Harrow for a ‘sexual escapade’.
At the age of nineteen in 1926, Charles James opens his first hat shop in Chicago, using the name of a schoolfriend, ‘Charles Boucherdon’.
In 1928 he left Chicago for Long Island with 70 cents, a Pierce Arrow and a number of hats as his only possessions. He later opened a hat shop above a garage in Murray Hill, New York, beginning his first dress designs.
James showed one of his most successful collections in Paris in 1947. In the 1950s he spent most of his time in New York.
James looked upon his dresses as works of art, as did many of his customers. Year after year he reworked original designs, ignoring the sacrosanct schedule of seasons. The components of the precisely constructed designs were interchangeable so that James had a never-ending fund of ideas on which to draw. He is most famous for his sculpted ball gowns made of lavish fabrics and to exacting tailoring standards, but is also remembered for his capes and coats, often trimmed with fur and embroidery, his spiral zipped dresses, and his white satin quilted jackets.
After the birth of his son, Charles James Jr. in 1956, he also produced a children’s collection.
He designed the interior and several pieces of furniture for the Houston home of John and Dominique de Menil.
After returning to New York City from Paris, Scaasi worked for James for two years. James retired in 1958.
He died alone, of bronchial pneumonia, at the Chelsea Hotel in New York.
NAME: Tippi Hedren
