Industry

If the first rule of ‘acting club’ is to lie to filmmakers when you really want to get a part, Simon Helberg proudly displays his entry card with aplomb. During the auditions for Florence Foster Jenkins, director Stephen Frears asked the 35 year-old actor if he was adept enough to play opera pieces on the piano.

Commenting recently about one of his fellow actors, Tom Hanks said, “Jonah Hill is probably the busiest actor on the planet. He was great in War Dogs.

After winning the Tony Award in 2010 for playing the lead character, Troy, in August Wilson’s Pulitzer winning play, Fences, Denzel Washington reprises the role in the play’s film adaptation, which he also directed. Yet again, his performance was greeted with critical praise and garnered him an 8th Golden Globe nomination (Washington has won twice and received the Cecil B.

As an adoptive mother, Nicole Kidman felt a special connection with Sue Brierley, whom she plays in the Golden Globes nominated Lion, which tells the story of an Indian child, Saroo Brierley (played by Sunny Pawar), who gets lost in the country’s vast train system and is unable to return to his family. He ends up being adopted by an Australian couple, Sue and her husband, John Brierley (played by David Wenham).

Following a space detour on Mars in The Martian, a transcendental inter-galactic experience in Interstellar, and a detour in a fantasy world with The Huntsman 2, Jessica Chastain returns to Earth with the very political and ever so current Miss Sloane, directed by John Madden, which brings her fourth Golden Globe nomination (following her win for Zero Dark Thirty by Kathryn Bigelow). In Miss Sloane, for which she is nominated as Best Actress, Drama, Chastain plays top Washington lobbyist Elizabeth Sloane, whose will power and drive to win don't stop for anything or anybody.

Jeff Bridges was introduced to acting as a child by his actor father Lloyd Bridges, as was his older brother Beau Bridges. “My dad was very enthusiastic about show business and wanted all his kids to go into it,” he told the HFPA.

He was Andy Hardy in a TV movie from 1962 with Mickey Rooney, was cast twice to act with Elvis Presley between 1965 and 1966 and worked regularly in many TV shows from the 50s and 60s, like The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, Annie Oakley, Ichabod and Me and The Donna Reed Show. But Jim Hawkins will be always remembered as the youngest of the four children that Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed had in It's a Wonderful Life, the 1946 film by Frank Capra that went from commercial failure to revered classic.

We celebrate the 100th birthday of Kirk Douglas, Hollywood icon, three-time nominee who won a Golden Globe as Best Actor for Lust for Life (1957), as well as the HFPA's highest honor, the Cecil B. deMille award in 1968.

The Caffe Trieste still stands in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. There in 1970, Francis Ford Coppola, 31 at the time, spent many an afternoon typing away on his yellow Olivetti Lettera 32, working on what he calls a “prompt book”: the voluminous and extensively detailed blueprint that would serve as the basis of his screenplay for The Godfather.