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.
The Hollywood Knickerbocker Apartments, formerly the Knickerbocker Hotel, is a senior home located at 1714 Ivar Avenue in Los Angeles, California. Built in 1925 by E.M. Frasier in Spanish Colonial Revival style, the historic hotel catered to the region’s nascent film industry, and is the site for some of Hollywood’s most famous dramatic moments. Rudolf Valentino was a regular at the bar before his death in 1926. On Halloween 1936, Harry Houdini‘s widow held her tenth séance to contact the magician on the roof of the hotel. Frances Farmer was arrested in her room at the hotel in 1943, after skipping a visit with her parole officer. In 1948, studio head D. W. Griffith died of a cerebral hemorrhage on the way to a Hollywood hospital, after being discovered unconscious in his room at the Knickerbocker.
The hotel retained its glamor through the 1950s. Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio often met in the hotel bar. Elvis Presley stayed at the hotel (Room 1016) while making his first film, Love Me Tender (1956).
On December 1, 1954, a camera crew from the NBC program “This is Your Life” surprised retired comedy legends Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy in room 205 of the hotel. The duo was relaxing there with a couple of friends who were in on the gag. While both comedians were polite throughout the show, Stan Laurel was apparently privately somewhat displeased to be put on television without his consent or prior notice.
In 1962 celebrated Hollywood costume designer Irene, believed to be despondent over Gary Cooper’s death, committed suicide by jumping from her 11th floor room window.
On March 3, 1966, veteran character actor William Frawley was strolling down Hollywood Boulevard after seeing a film when he suffered a major heart attack. His male nurse dragged him to the hotel where he died in the lobby. Contrary to popular belief, Frawley did not live in the hotel at the time. Although Frawley had spent nearly 30 years living in a suite upstairs, he had moved to the nearby El Royale Apartments several months before.
By the late 1960s, the neighborhood had deteriorated, and the hotel became a residence primarily for drug addicts and prostitutes. In 1970, a renovation project converted the hotel into housing for senior citizens; it continues in this capacity today. In 1999, a plaque honoring Griffith was placed in the lobby.
For millions of American women, Edith Head became the authority on what was chic, what was of the moment, and how to wear it: she was every bit as influential as her fashion editor counterparts in New York City. Edith Head became a celebrity in her own right, known for a rather severe flat-top hairdo, oversized sunglasses, and a reluctance to smile when she knew she was on camera. She was a frequent guest on Art Linkletter’s House Party, and played herself in several films and a memorable episode of “Columbo.” She also designed the uniforms that were worn for decades by Paramount security guards on the lot. She died two weeks after finishing her last film, “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” and left her estate to charity.
The following excerpt is from “Let’s Bring Back”:
EDITH HEAD (1897-1981)
Legendary costume designer, Ms. Head–aka the “Dress Doctor“–was as glamorous as the stars she dressed, and she dressed countless major Old Hollywood stars in some of their most memorable roles. If you loved Grace Kelly’s iconic look in “Rear Window” or Audrey Hepburn‘s lavish wardrobe in “Funny Face,” one of Hollywood’s ultimate fashion movies, take your hat off to Edith.
The winner of eight Oscars (she was nominated for an astonishing thirty-four), Ms. Head also had a heavy appetite for glamour and absolutely heaped it on the stars of “Notorious”, “All About Eve”, “To Catch a Thief”, “A Place in the Sun”, and over four hundred other films. (“I’ve designed films I’ve never seen,” she once admitted.)
On the flamboyance of the times, Ms. Head once described Old Hollywood as a “Barnum & Bailey World,” filled with gold bathtubs, ermine bathrobes, and film actresses draped in satins and minks. “I caught the flavor and the fever,” she recalled.
Ms. Head’s snippets of advice and witticisms were as closely heeded as those attributed to Coco Chanel, and they remain relevant today:
• “You can have anything you want in life if you dress for it.”
• “Life is competition; clothes gird us for the competition.”
• “The cardinal sin is not being badly dressed, but wearing the right thing in the wrong place.”
• “Your dresses should be tight enough to show you’re a woman and loose enough to prove you’re a lady.”
• “Clothes not only can make the woman; they can make her several different women.”
• “I say sacrifice style any day for becomingness.”
If you have a chance, you should really rent the movie “Madame Sin.” If for only because Bette Davis is serving up crazy paint-by-number face. IMDB describes it as:
“Bette Davis is Madame Sin, a sinister-looking, totally evil, half-Chinese woman who indulges in endless machinations. Ensocnced in a Scottish castle that is packed with an array of spy gadgetry, she runs afoul with counter spy, AmericanCIA agent Anthony Lawrence (Robert Wagner), who is out to counter her plots for control of a Polaris submarine.”
I totally didn’t pick up on her being half-Chinese, just real bossy. But I forgot that a heavy lid is as good as Chinese for Hollywood of that era. Basically, this movie is what the Austin Powers movies are spoofing.
Joseph Mankiewicz is has had a direct influence in making films that rank amongst the best ever made. Just running through his list is like reading off everyone’s favorite movies. Seeing his name at the beginning of a film calmed you, reassured you and let you know that you were about to witness something special. His words and his direction are the reasons that you love some of the movie stars that you love. Ladies and gentlemen, Joseph Leo Mankiewicz. Style Icon.NAME: Joseph Leo Mankiewicz OCCUPATION: Director, Producer, Screenwriter BIRTH DATE: February 11, 1909 DEATH DATE: February 05, 1993 EDUCATION: Columbia University PLACE OF BIRTH: Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania PLACE OF DEATH: Mount Kisco
BEST KNOWN FOR: American producer, director, and screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz was known for creating memorable characters. He worked with many major Hollywood stars.
Joseph Leo Mankiewicz (11 February 1909 – 5 February 1993) was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. Mankiewicz had a long Hollywood career and is best known as the writer-director of All About Eve (1950), which was nominated for 14 Academy Awards and won six. He was brother to screenwriter and drama critic Herman J. Mankiewicz who also won an Oscar for co-writing Citizen Kane (1941).
Comfortable in a variety of genres and able to elicit career performances from actors and actresses alike, Joseph L. Mankiewicz combined ironic, sophisticated scripts with a precise, sometimes stylised mise en scène. Mankiewicz worked for seventeen years as a screenwriter for Paramount and as a producer for MGM before getting a chance to direct at Twentieth Century-Fox. Over six years he made 11 films for Fox, reaching a peak in 1950 and 1951 when he won consecutive Academy Awards for Screenplay and Direction for both A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve.
During his long career in Hollywood, Mankiewicz wrote forty-eight screenplays, including All About Eve, for which he won an Academy Award. He also produced more than twenty films including The Philadelphia Story which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1941. However, he is best known for the films he directed, twice winning the Academy Award for Best Director. In 1944, he produced The Keys of the Kingdom, which starred Gregory Peck, and featured Mankiewicz’s then-wife, Rose Stradner, in a supporting role as a nun.
In 1951, Mankiewicz left Fox and moved to New York, intending to write for the Broadway stage. Although this dream never materialised, he continued to make films (both for his own production company Figaro and as a director-for-hire) that explored his favourite themes — the clash of aristocrat with commoner, life as performance and the clash between people’s urge to control their fate and the contingencies of real life.
In 1953, he directed Julius Caesar for MGM, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. It received widely favorable reviews, and David Shipman, author of the book The Great Movie Stars: The Hollywood Years, called it “perhaps the finest Shakespeare film ever made”. The film serves as the only record of Marlon Brando in a Shakespearean role; he played Mark Antony, and received an Oscar nomination for his performance.
In 1958, Mankiewicz directed The Quiet American, an adaptation of Graham Greene‘s 1955 novel about the seed of American military involvement in what would become the Vietnam War. Mankiewicz, under career pressure from the climate of anti-Communism and the Hollywood blacklist, distorted the message of Greene’s book, changing major parts of the story to appeal to a nationalistic audience. A cautionary tale about America’s blind support for “anti-Communists” was turned into, according to Greene, a “propaganda film for America”.
Cleopatra consumed three years of Mankiewicz’s life and ended up both derailing his career and causing severe financial losses for the studio, Twentieth Century-Fox. Mankiewicz made more films, however, garnering an Oscar nomination for Best Direction in 1972 for Sleuth, his final directing effort, starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. In 1983, he was a member of the jury at the 33rd Berlin International Film Festival.
He was the younger brother of Herman J. Mankiewicz. His sons are Eric Reynal (from his first marriage), the late writer/director Tom Mankiewicz and producer Christopher Mankiewicz. He also has a daughter, Alex Mankiewicz. His great-nephew is radio & television personality Ben Mankiewicz, currently on TCM.
Mankiewicz, who died in 1993, six days before his 84th birthday, was interred in Saint Matthew’s Episcopal Churchyard cemetery, Bedford, New York.
“The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they’re going to have some pretty annoying virtues.” – Elizabeth Taylor
There are so many movies that you should watch, quite a few of them are directed by Billy Wilder. See “Sunset Boulevard,” Wilder’s tale of the true Hollywood that no one had dared to tell before. Make sure you watch the making of the film portion of the DVD, it is brilliant. Ladies and gentlemen, Billy Wilder. Style Icon.
NAME: Billy Wilder OCCUPATION: Director, Producer BIRTH DATE: June 22, 1906 DEATH DATE: March 27, 2002 EDUCATION: University of Vienna PLACE OF BIRTH: Sucha, Poland PLACE OF DEATH: Beverly Hills, California ORIGINALLY: Samuel Wilder
BEST KNOWN FOR: Billy Wilder is best known for the many films he directed and produced, like Some Like It Hot.
Billy Wilder (22 June 1906 – 27 March 2002) was an Austro-Hungarian born American filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, artist, and journalist, whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood’s golden age. Wilder is one of only five people to have won Academy Awards as producer, director, and writer for the same film (The Apartment).
Wilder became a screenwriter in the late 1920s while living in Berlin. After the rise of Nazi Party, Wilder, who was Jewish, left for Paris, where he made his directorial debut. He relocated to Hollywood in 1933, and in 1939 he had a hit when he co-wrote the screenplay to the screwball comedy Ninotchka. Wilder established his directorial reputation after helming Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir he co-wrote with mystery novelist Raymond Chandler. Wilder earned the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the adaptation of a Charles R. Jackson story The Lost Weekend, about alcoholism. In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the critically acclaimed Sunset Boulevard.
From the mid-1950s on, Wilder made mostly comedies. Among the classics Wilder created in this period are the farces The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959), satires such as The Apartment (1960), and the drama comedy Sabrina (1954). He directed fourteen different actors in Oscar-nominated performances. Wilder was recognized with the American Film Institute (AFI) Life Achievement Award in 1986. In 1988, Wilder was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. In 1993, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Wilder has attained a significant place in the history of Hollywood censorship for his role in expanding the range of acceptable subject matter.
lder holds a significant place in the history of Hollywood censorship for expanding the range of acceptable subject matter. He is responsible for two of the film noir era’s most definitive films in Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. Along with Woody Allen and the Marx Brothers, he leads the list of films on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 funniest American films with 5 films written and holds the honor of holding the top spot with Some Like it Hot. Also on the list are The Apartment and The Seven Year Itch which he directed, and Ball of Fire and Ninotchka which he co-wrote. The American Film Institute has ranked four of Wilder’s films among their top 100 American films of the 20th century: Sunset Boulevard (no. 12), Some Like It Hot (no. 14), Double Indemnity (no. 38) and The Apartment (no. 93). For the tenth anniversary edition of their list, the AFI moved Sunset Blvd. to #16, Some Like it Hot to #22, Double Indemnity to #29 and The Apartment to #80.
Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba said in his acceptance speech for the 1993 Best Non-English Speaking Film Oscar: “I would like to believe in God in order to thank him. But I just believe in Billy Wilder… so, thank you Mr. Wilder.” According to Trueba, Wilder called him the day after and told him: “Fernando, it’s God.” French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius also thanked Billy Wilder in the 2012 Best Picture Oscar acceptance speech for The Artist by saying “I would like to thank the following three people, I would like to thank Billy Wilder, I would like to thank Billy Wilder, and I would like to thank Billy Wilder.” Wilder’s 12 Academy Award nominations for screenwriting were a record until 1997 when Woody Allen received a 13th nomination for Deconstructing Harry.
“My Man Godfrey” is on of my favorite movies and part of that reason is because of Carole Lombard. She is perfection. Her life story is one of those that even Hollywood couldn’t make up and have people believe it. Ladies and gentlemen, Carole Lombard. Style Icon.
BEST KNOWN FOR: Carole Lombard starred in comedic films during the 1930s. She married actor Clark Gable in 1939, but died in a tragic plane accident a few years later.
Carole Lombard (October 6, 1908 – January 16, 1942) was an American actress. She is particularly noted for her comedic roles in the screwball comedies of the 1930s. She is listed as one of the American Film Institute’s greatest stars of all time and was the highest-paid star in Hollywood in the late 1930s, earning around US $500,000 per year[citation needed] (more than five times the salary of the US President). Lombard’s career was cut short when she died at the age of 33 in a plane crash while returning from a World War II Bond tour.
Queen of the 1930s screwball comedies, she personified the anxiety of a nervous age. Graham Greene praised the “heartbreaking and nostalgic melodies” of her faster-than-thought delivery. “Platinum blonde, with a heart-shaped face, delicate, impish features and a figure made to be swathed in silver lamé, she wriggled expressively through such classics of hysteria as Twentieth Century and My Man Godfrey.”
In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Lombard 23rd on its list of the 50 greatest American female screen legends. She received one Academy Award for Best Actress nomination, for My Man Godfrey. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6930 Hollywood Blvd.
Lombard’s Fort Wayne childhood home has been designated a historic landmark. The city named the nearby bridge over the St. Mary’s River the Carole Lombard Memorial Bridge.
Personal Quotes:
“I can’t imagine a duller fate than being the best dressed woman in reality. When I want to do something I don’t pause to contemplate whether I’m exquisitely gowned. I want to live, not pose!” – Carole Lombard
Carole Lombard’s Golden Rules:
1. Play Fair.
“You’ll find that men usually play fair,” Carole said. “It’s all very well to say that you want to back out of a bargain because you’ve changed your mind. That’s supposed to be a woman’s privilege. But men don’t play the game that way. A man who says he’ll do a thing and then reneges, is soon put where he belongs, out in the cold.
“If I say I’ll do something, I make it stick.”
2. Don’t Brag.
“Men can brag,” Carole points out, “but that’s where a woman can’t do what men do, and still be feminine. No man will endure listening to a girl boast about how smart she is.”
3. Obey the Boss.
“A career girl who competes with men has to learn that rule — or else. If she won’t accept discipline, or bow to the rules of the institution and take orders, she can’t succeed. I know that the picture director knows best. I remember when I was making ‘My Man Godfrey’ with William Powell. Gregory La Cava was directing. One day he was ill, but he insisted that work go on while he rested.
“‘You know what to do,’ he told us. ‘Just pretend I’m there and go ahead.’
“Well, it didn’t work. Bill and I were used to taking orders because it’s part of the discipline of the studio. It was a simple scene, we knew what to do, but the director wasn’t there and we felt lost. Somebody has to be the boss in every big enterprise, and if the boss is absent the business soon comes to a halt.”
4. Take Criticism.
“Men have learned to take criticism, that is, the successful men. The ones who flare up and go home mad are the kind who never get the last installment paid on the radio.
“Here again the movies have taught me. I have learned to take criticism and stand up to it like a man. Yet a woman will simply burn if you hint that the hat she’s got on doesn’t look quite perfect, or that she might, just might, have led from the queen, jack, ten instead of tossing in an eight spot.
“I went to a showing of the first rough cut of ‘Swing High, Swing Low,’ in a small college town.
“In the tragic scene, where I screwed up my face to cry (I can’t help it if I look that way when I cry), the audience laughed. When I really turned it on and emoted, they howled. It was heartbreaking. I felt like crawling under the seats and losing myself among the gum and other useless things.
“But I had to take it. If you’re playing according to masculine rules, which is required of any girl with a career, you’ve got to accept criticism and profit by it. Otherwise how could you become a singer, decorator, painter or private secretary? I learned something from that experience, too. I’m best if I top off tears with a laugh. A star who is too big for criticism sooner or later loses out. That goes for working women, too.”
5. Love is Private.
“When it comes to your personal life, such as love and romance, girls should take a tip from the men and keep their affairs to themselves. Any man worth his salt regards his private life as his own. To kiss a girl and run and tell would mark him as a cad. Why doesn’t that apply to girls also?”
6. Work — And Like It!
All women should have something worthwhile to do,” says Carole, “and cultivate efficiency at it, whether it’s housekeeping or raising chickens.
“Working women are interesting women. And they’re easier to live with. Idle women who can think of nothing to do with their time are dangerous to themselves and to others. The only ‘catty’ women I’ve known were idlers, with nothing to do but gossip and make trouble.”
7. Pay Your Share.
“Nobody likes a man who is always fumbling when it’s time to pay the check,” Carole points out. “I think the woman who assumes that the man can afford to pay for everything is making a mistake. More and more the custom of the Dutch treat is coming in vogue, particularly among working men and women. You don’t have to surrender your femininity if you pay your share of the bills.”
8. The Cardinal Virtue
“–Is a sense of humor,” says Carole. “Do you laugh in the right places? Then, you’ll get along, in fair weather or foul. Humor is nothing less than a sense of the fitness of things. Something that’s out of proportion, like an inflated ego, should strike you funny, particularly if it’s your own inflated ego. Otherwise you are pathetic and quite hopeless.”
9. Be Consistent.
“By that,” remarks Carole, “I mean you should take a hint from the men. They are terribly consistent, as a rule. You can tell what they’ll do in any given circumstance.
“If a girl puts her best foot forward at the office, she shouldn’t change steps when she gets home. A career girl must be neatly turned out, even-tempered and willing to take orders at work, and there’s no reason why she must check these virtues with her hat and coat when she leaves her place of business.
“I manage to add enough inconsistency to my behavior at the studio so that I’m the same there as at home; inclined to blow off steam at odd moments or be very demure and sweet-tempered — just to keep ‘em guessing. In fact I’ve got myself guessing. I don’t quite know which way I am. That’s being consistently inconsistent, anyway.
“Men are about the same at home as they are at work. Don’t say it’s because they lack the imagination to be otherwise — just take the hint. Men are creatures of habit and comfort, and they are puzzled and disturbed by change. That’s why so many of them marry their stenographers; it’s in hope of finding the same efficiency at home as at the office. They are supreme optimists.
“If you go into the business world to meet male competition, then you’ve got to play the game more or less according to their rules.
“By doing that, I’ve found that any intelligent girl can get along very well. About the only important difference I’ve noticed is in the problem of travel; men can travel alone easier than women. However, old habits of transportation are changing and the comfort of women is more and more the concern of air, railroad and bus travel.” 10. Be Feminine.
“All of this,” Carole declares, “does not keep you from preserving your femininity. You can still be insane about a particular brand of perfume, and weep when you get a run in your favorite pair of stockings.
“You can still have fits when the store sends out the very shade of red drapes you did not order, and which swear horribly at the red in the davenport. But when you go down to complain, be a man about it.
“All of which sums up to this. Play fair and be reasonable. When a woman can do that, she’ll make some man the best manager he ever found, or wind up running a whole department store. And being a woman, thank heaven you still have that choice!”
If you are a fan of classic movies and pay attention to scenery and costuming, you already know Edith Head. She had THE influence on American style before clothing designers were known. A quick search for her on IMDB will soon have you realizing that her touch was added to most of the films that you know and love. Ladies and gentlemen, Edith Head. Style Icon
BEST KNOWN FOR: Edith Head was one of the most prolific costume designers in 20th century film, winning a record eight Academy Awards.
Edith Head (born October 28, 1897) became chief designer at Paramount Pictures in 1933 and later worked at Universal. Hollywood’s best-known designer, her costumes ranged from the elegantly simple to the elaborately flamboyant. She won a record eight Academy Awards for her work in films such as All About Eve (1950), Roman Holiday (1953), and The Sting (1973).
She became chief designer at Paramount Pictures in 1933 and later worked at Universal. Hollywood’s best-known designer, she was noted for the wide range of her costumes, from the elegantly simple to the elaborately flamboyant. She won a record eight Academy Awards for her work in films such as All About Eve (1950), Roman Holiday (1953), and The Sting (1973).
As part of a series of stamps issued by the U.S. Postal Service in February 2003, commemorating the behind-the-camera personnel who make movies, Head was featured on one to honor costume design.
The band They Might Be Giants recorded the song “She Thinks She’s Edith Head,” which was included in the 1999 album Long Tall Weekend and the 2001 album Mink Car. The song is about a girl from the singer’s past, who had changed her persona to be more sophisticated, and compares her new attitude to Head and longtime Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown.
To many viewers of the 2004 Pixar/Disney computer-animated film The Incredibles, the personality and mannerisms of the film’s fictional superhero costume designer Edna Mode suggest a colorful caricature of Edith Head. Edna Mode’s sense of style, round glasses, and assertive no-nonsense character are very likely a direct homage to Head’s legendary accomplishments and personal traits. But the film’s director, Brad Bird, has not yet confirmed or denied this.
Personal Quotes:
“Your dresses should be tight enough to show you’re a woman and loose enough to show you’re a lady.” – Edith Head
“You can have whatever you want if you dress for it.” ― Edith Head
There isn’t a bad movie that Judy Holliday doesn’t make better and honestly, I cannot think of one that she does not make great. Watch “Born Yesterday” and “It Should Happen To You” and she will steal your heart for the rest of your life. Watch some of the clicks below. I can never choose a favorite actor or movie, but she and hers are in the top ten somewhere. Ladies and gentlemen, Judy Holliday. Style Icon.
BEST KNOWN FOR: Actress Judy Holliday was know for playing dumb but good-natured characters. She won an Academy award for best actress in the film Born Yesterday.
In 1952, Holliday was called to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to answer claims that she was associated with communism. Although not blacklisted from films, she was blacklisted from radio and television for almost three years.
Holliday died from breast cancer on June 7, 1965. She was survived by her young son, Jonathan Oppenheim, and by her ex-husband, clarinetist, conductor and educator, David Oppenheim, whom she had married in 1948 and divorced in 1958. She also had a long-term relationship with jazz musician Gerry Mulligan. Holliday was interred in the Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
Jonathan Oppenheim grew up to become a documentary film editor of note, editing Paris Is Burning, Children Underground, and Arguing the World.
