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Puerto Rico star and Golden Globe winner Benicio Del Toro has recently spent seven months with director Ben Stiller, working on a nine-episode limited series that recounts the well-publicized escape from the high-security prison of Dannemora of two inmates helped by a female prison worker. Del Toro is famous for choosing tough and deep roles.

Film Bios is an occasional series reviewing autobiographies of notable filmmakers.  “The 21st of October 1935 was my second birthday”, writes Otto Preminger at the very beginning of his memoirs, published in 1977and simply titled An Autobiography.

HFPA journalist Diederik van Hoogstraten met with renowned stage, film and TV actress and Golden Globe winner Glenn Close to talks about a variety of topics, ranging from her latest role to the #metoo movement, the constitution, mental health and our current administration.  In the drama, The Wife Close plays a woman who questions her own path in life after sacrificing so much to support her husband’ - a Nobel Prize-winning writer, career.

HFPA Grantee From specialty items for preemies to breakthroughs in heart surgery, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) is a nonprofit institution that provides pediatric healthcare and helps patients more than half a million times a year. CHLAs history began in a small house on the corner of Alpine and Castelar Streets (which is now Hill Street in DTLA’s Chinatown section) in 1901.

Blindspotting tackles issues of race, class, gun violence, police brutality and gentrification through the story of two Oakland best friends. Not coincidentally, the film is written and performed by two best friends from Oakland: Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal.

She stands just short of four feet tall in her Target dress and Steve Madden shoes, but for some she was the biggest presence at the HFPA Annual Grants Banquet red carpet.  Her name is Yasmine Leilah Malayeri -her mother is from Mexico, her father from Iran- and she was positioned at the head of the first row of press photographers covering the red carpet.

In the summer of 1975 audiences were thrilled by a film about a scary shark terrorizing beachgoers. It was called Jaws, it made Steven Spielberg a household name and it was followed by many other shark movies, including Deep Blue Sea, The Shallows in 2016 and, last year, 47 Meters Down.

Pink is popping, pants suits take on color, and yellow becomes interesting.

Documentary filmmaker Danny Ben-Moshe focuses on the Jewish community in India and their contributions to Indian cinema. In his latest endeavor Shalom Bollywood: The Untold Story of Indian Cinema.

Golden Globe winner for her amazing performance as Tina Turner in What’s Love Got to Do With it Angela Bassett is very much in love with music as a universal language: “We can be from different parts of the world and just hear a strain of music and it can make us both weep” , she told us as we met for her role in TV series 9-1-1 We agreed that it might very well be the language of the soul and when I asked her how much it intersect with her love for acting, she said: “I have used it often, doing a play or a particular character I'll listen to certain songs or instrumentals and they really hit my spirit or soul and they just take you there emotionally.   Music is able to do that in a way sometimes just the straight word on the page might not be able to, but it compliments it.