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From the instant Borat Subsequent Moviefilm launched on Amazon at the end of October, Maria Bakalova was the girl of the moment. In a matter of days, she went from total unknown to the top of IMDB STARMeter, signed up with CAA, one of the largest agencies in Hollywood, and her character, Tutar, became a household name in popular culture among young fans.

The name of her company says it all: Made Up Stories. And producer Bruna Papandrea is good at finding them and turning them into huge hits.

At the end of Mardi Gras season in February, the cast and producers of Queen Sugar relocated to New Orleans, just like they had done for the previous four years. With the exception of Rutina Wesley, one of the show’s three lead actors, who owns a home in Nola, they all rented apartments or houses, some upgrading their personal living spaces from previous years.

From architect to actor - in a few years Yahya Abdul-Mateen II has become a well-known leading man. His first acting job was in Baz Luhrmann’s TV series The Get Down and this year he won an Emmy for his performance on the series Watchmen.

Stephanie Levi-John stars in the historical drama, The Spanish Princess, which follows the life of Catherine of Aragon (Charlotte Hope) who becomes Queen of England. Stephanie plays the much-coveted role as her loyal lady-in-waiting, Lina, who struggles to adapt to the English way of life.

British director and writer, Mark Tonderai, known for The Passage (2019), Locke & Key (2020), and The Five (2016) talks about his latest offering, Spell. This supernatural horror movie is about a man who wakes up after surviving an airplane crash to be found by an elderly couple who are seemingly kind until he finds their real and sinister intentions.

Between 1948 and 1983 Golden Globes were awarded in a special category of “New Star of the Year” conceived to recognize young actors making a mark in their early roles. In this series, the HFPA’s Phil Berk highlights those that would follow their auspicious starts with distinguished careers.

Before the idea of Hollywood, a small town in Indiana was the first to experience the magic of motion pictures in the United States.  On June 6, 1894 inventor Charles Francis Jenkins created history by projecting a filmed motion picture by way of reeled film and electric light before a live audience.

On October 21, 1916, the La Crosse Tribune carried a full-page advertisement for the next day’s release of Thomas Ince’s epic silent movie Civilization. Under a black and white picture of a listing ship going down in a storm as a lifeboat full of people foundered nearby, the breathless headline proclaimed: Thos.

Kate Winslet plays 19th-century British paleontologist Mary Anning in Ammonite, written and directed by Francis Lee, her mother is played by Gemma Jones, who had also played her mother in Sense and Sensibility (1995) directed by Ang Lee from the novel by Jane Austen. She spoke to HFPA journalists back then about working with Emma Thompson, who had written the screenplay adaptation of that film and was playing her older sister.