Industry

Having started acting in the theater, which remained a lifelong passion, Henry Fonda (born May 16, 1905, died August 12, 1982), nicknamed Hank, had a long and varied Hollywood career, spanning historical dramas like Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) by John Ford, comedies like The Lady Eve (1941) by Preston Sturges, westerns like My Darling Clementine (1946) by John Ford AND political thrillers like Fail Safe (1964) by Sidney Lumet.

A legendary icon of classic Hollywood cinema, Ruth Elizabeth Davis changed the spelling of her nickname, Betty, to Bette after Honoré de Balzac's La Cousine Bette. Born on April 5, 1908 in Lowell, Massachusetts, she had acted in Broadway plays before signing a contract with Warner Bros in 1932.

One of the great pleasures of the past Sundance film festival was screening A Most Wanted Man at the Eccles, on January 19. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance in Anton Corbijn’s taut adaptation of the Le Carré thriller is nothing short of exceptional, as we noted at the time, the sort of intense interpretation which was his hallmark, and now sadly his legacy: He is in almost every scene of that film and yet you want to see more of him! Hoffman, 46, who was found dead in his New York apartment, was a five-time Golden Globe nominee and had won the Award for best actor in 2006 for his role in Capote.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has always believed that preserving the world’s film heritage is a cultural mission of vital importance and film restoration efforts have always been a primary beneficiary of HFPA grants. That mission continued this year with a donation of $350,000 to the Film Foundation, which was accepted at the HFPA’s Installation and Grants lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel by Steven Spielberg.

Marilyn Monroe received her first Golden Globe in a ceremony at the Club Del Mar, Santa Monica California, in 1952, when she was 25 years old. More accurately it was the Henrietta award, an almost two foot tall statuette of a woman, but named after a man, Henry Gris, one of the first presidents of the Foreign Press Association of Hollywood, a predecessor of the HFPA.

Cho-Cho San (Japanese actress Mariko Wordell), is a young geisha who survived the atomic bomb that leveled the city and marked the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II. She is seduced and later abandoned by a handsome American pilot, Pinkerton (played by a very seductive Edoardo Ponti, son of Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti).

The man speaking is a hood who comes to retrieve his lost bag of money, and 'Tiger', the woman he is talking to, is the one who found the bag and won't let go. And you know right away that you are in film noir territory, where the women are indeed beautiful, and smart, and hard.