Golden Globe History

Born in Beech Grove, Indiana, on March 24, 1930, Steve McQueen was the epitome of 1960s cool. An avid car and motorcycle racer who performed his own stunts (worth checking out – the 1963 war drama The Great Escape, the 1968 crime thriller Bullitt and the racing adventure Le Mans, 1971 – all the while keeping in mind that it’s McQueen right there on the screen, all the time…).

Can you feel the unspoken story in this photo? The obvious tension between these two? This is a pivotal moment in Jayne Mansfield’s career: after a tentative start with Warner Brothers, who signed her for a seven year contract in 1955, Mansfield had changed her mind when her two initial projects proved to be less than ideal. Jayne had the contract rescinded and fled for Broadway, where she starred alongside Walter Matthau in a successful production of George Axelrod’s comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?On the night of the 13th Golden Globes, February 23, 1956, Jayne was starting anew.

Anyone who watches the Golden Globe-nominated Netflix series Bloodline is familiar with the formidable Sally Rayburn, the matriarch of the extremely complicated Rayburn clan. That mix of warmth and menace, frailty and strength is the very essence of Sissy Spacek’s work as an actress, a talent that has shone through a long list of iconic roles, starting with her breakthrough moment as the shy, psychic teenager from Brian De Palma’s Carrie.

At the 13th Golden Globes, held February 23, 1956, at the Cocoanut Grove of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Grace Kelly (seated with producer Joe Pasternak (Anchors Aweigh, The Merry Widow, Please-Don’t Eat the Daisies)  received our special award as World Film Favorite-Female. It was one of Kelly's last - if not THE last - public appearance in Hollywood.

Ghosts of all kinds were very much in the minds of Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray when they came to see us back in June 1984. “Beyond American cinema, even Bergman loves the use of ghosts and devils visiting the Earth and that kind of thing”, Dan Aykroyd told us.

When we interviewed Tom Hanks for the first time, in September of 1986, he was mere two and a half years away from his first Golden Globe. Hanks was finally making strides in his career as a feature film actor, after a false start in 1980 in the horror flic He Knows You’re Alone (his character was supposed to die at the hands of the psycho killer, but director Armand Mastroianni found him so engaging that he decided to ax the death scene in the editing suite).

“To tell the entire story would be like 50,000 words”, Sylvester Stallone told us on November 15, 1976. “But a brief summary would be that my career had come to a sputtering standstill.

Keanu Reeves has been making some interesting choices lately - voicing a namesake cat in Key & Peele’s feline-in-the-hood movie, joining the exodus of A-list movie stars to TV with the series Rain. Or playing against type in The Neon Demon, director Nicolas Winding Refn’s stylish, nightmarish meditation on fame, beauty and sex that split the Cannes Film Festival in two.

This week’s opening of Matthew McConaughey’s new movie, director Gary Ross’ Civil War drama Free State of Jones, is the perfect occasion to recall our first encounter with our future Golden Globe winner. It was exactly 20 years ago, in July of 1996, and McConaughey’s breakthrough movie, director Joel Schumacher’s legal drama A Time to Kill, was weeks away from its premiere.

Fans of the 2010 Australian movie Animal Kingdom are probably excited and curious to see how that terse crime drama will translate into a TV show – starting June 14 the series will launch on TNT, transposed from Down Under to a Southern California beach town. Here’s a piece of good news: the pivotal role of implacable matriarch Janine “Smurf” Cody, which earned Jackie Weaver a Golden Globe nomination, has been taken over by another Golden Globe nominee, the talented Ellen Barkin.