By Joe Valdez

Harry Dean Stanton was born July 14, 1926 in West Irvine, Kentucky. His father was a tobacco farmer — supplementing income with work as a barber — and his mother was a hairdresser. Attending LaFayette Senior High School in Lexington, Stanton joined choral groups and sang in a barbershop quartet with his two brothers. Right out of high school, Stanton tried joining the Merchant Marines, but missed the enlistment deadline by a day. With World War II raging, he was drafted into the U.S. Navy, where his uncle — a chief petty officer — got him a job as ship’s cook. Stanton would serve on an LST (a troop landing ship) during the Battle of Okinawa.

Returning home after the war, Stanton enrolled at the University of Kentucky, studying journalism, then radio arts, before trying a role as Alfred Doolittle in a staging of Pygmalion. Stanton recalled, “I understood it. I was at home on stage. At that point I was trying to decide if I wanted to be a singer, musician or an actor. But I thought that by being an actor I could dabble in a little bit of everything, because I’ve always been interested in lots of things.” Urged to go to New York, Stanton instead settled in Los Angeles for two years of study at the Pasadena Playhouse. He followed this by answering the ad of a Baptist revival preacher who was touring with a band.

Finally making it to New York, Stanton studied under esteemed Method acting teacher Stella Adler, but was put back on the road touring with the Strawbridge Children’s Theatre. Television got him next. Stanton’s role as a cop killer on an episode of The Walter Winchell File won him the job of a bad guy in the Alan Ladd flick The Proud Rebel in 1957. Stanton would appear in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (with Burt Reynolds) in 1960 and two episodes of The Untouchables the following year. He was credited as “Dean Stanton” to avoid confusion with Harry Stanton, whom Harry Dean would do an episode of Petticoat Junction with in 1969.

Stanton was best man at the 1962 wedding of Jack Nicholson. In 1965, Stanton was cast in a western written by and starring Nicholson titled Ride in the Whirlwind. Nicholson advised his friend to let the wardrobe do the acting and to just be himself. ”After Jack said that, my whole approach to acting opened up. I was the head of a gang, I had a patch over one eye and a derby hat, and my name was Blind Dick Reilly … It dawned on me that the crew, the writers, the director, and the thousands and thousands of people who watch it all know that I’m the head of a gang. I can be indecisive, I can make mistakes, but I’m still the head of a gang. So that just freed me.”

Amid the ensemble of Cool Hand Luke (1967), Stanton picked a guitar and sang three songs for the Paul Newman chain gang classic. From there, Stanton’s careless rambler would find his way into some of the classic films of the next 15 years: as a burned out musician in Cisco Pike (1972), a desperado in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), gunman Homer Van Meter in Dillinger (1973), an FBI agent in The Godfather, Part II (1974), an outlaw gunned down by Marlon Brando in The Missouri Breaks (1976), a stick-up man opposite Dustin Hoffman in Straight Time (1978), a space trucker in Alien (1979) and the idiosyncratic Brain in Escape From New York (1981).

1984 was a career milestone in for Harry Dean Stanton. He accepted a lead role in Paris, Texas, playing a mysterious drifter reunited with his family, directed by Wim Wenders from a script by Sam Shepard. Stanton would then play Emilio Estevez’s laconic mentor in the cult classic Repo Man. Both remain favorites among the actor’s own work. Stanton recalled, “Both were low budget films, which makes it tough. But I thought Repo Man was a brilliant satire on the whole culture, on everything: violence, religion, desperation of the whole society trying to make it. How a man’s got to have a ‘code.’ Some wonderful lines in that. Alex Cox did a wonderful job.”

Encouraged by blues guitarist Ry Cooder during his Paris, Texas period, Stanton would go on to sing and play rhythm guitar and harmonica for The Harry Dean Stanton Band, performing pickup gigs around Los Angeles over the next three decades. He counts Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, ‘30s jazz, mariachi songs and Cole Porter tunes among favorites to perform. Stanton was even asked to sing at the funeral of his friend Hunter S. Thompson in 2005. The following year, he accepted the role of a polygamist cult leader on the HBO series Big Love. The series –now in its fourth season — is drawing Stanton some of the best notices of his career.

Film critic Roger Ebert went as far as to coin “The Stanton-Walsh Rule”, which stated that no movie featuring Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh could be altogether bad (Ebert amended his rule after Stanton appeared in Dream A Little Dream and Walsh popped up in Wild Wild West, but you can bank on it 98% of the time). Stanton’s unlikely charisma lies in his droopy sincerity. Like ‘A’ Number One, king of the hoboes, Stanton exudes the abandon of a wanderer — guitar case in one hand, cigarette in the other — most content with wherever he’s standing. He currently lives tucked away in the Hollywood Hills and is addicted to the Game Show Channel.

Your thoughts?

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Harry Dean Stanton” By Alex Simon. Venice Magazine, August 1997

“Wild At Heart” By Karen Valby. Entertainment Weekly. 26 May 2006

By Joe Valdez

Frances McDormand was born June 23, 1957 in Chicago, Illinois. Adopted by a Disciples of Christ minister and his wife, McDormand grew up in towns across Illinois, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee due to her foster father’s work setting up congregations. At the age of 8, the family settled in Pittsburgh. McDormand attended high school in Monessing, a voracious reader, but otherwise unremarkable student. An English teacher noted her passion for Shakespeare and suggested she consider theater arts.

Playing Lady Macbeth, McDormand recalled, “I did the sleepwalking scene and it was the first time I’d ever done anything that I felt was mine. I took it much more seriously than the other kids. When we were backstage, for example, I knew it was important to be quiet when other people were acting. It seemed like I knew the ethics of the theater environment intuitively. It became clearer and clearer to me that acting was the only thing I knew how to do.”

McDormand earned her Bachelor’s Degree in theater at Bethany College, a liberal arts school in West Virginia affiliated with the Disciples of Christ. She recalled, “I was completely naive about the business of being an actor. My family didn’t go to the theater or to the movies. We watched television, like every 1960’s small-town American family, and I certainly never thought about being on TV. I thought I was going to be a classical actor in the grand tradition.” McDormand was accepted into Yale Drama School, where she befriended a classmate named Holly Hunter.

Receiving her master’s degree in theater, McDormand moved to New York in 1982, where she shared an apartment with Hunter in the Bronx and eked out a living waiting tables. Hunter had already made a Broadway splash in Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart and had even been offered the female lead in a low budget film noir shooting in Texas. Hunter informed rookie director Joel Coen and co-writer/ producer Ethan Coen that she wasn’t available, but suggested to her roommate that she go read for the part.

In 1984, McDormand made her film debut in Blood Simple – the critically acclaimed debut from the Coen brothers — and launched her New York stage career in Tina Howe’s Painting Churches. 16 years later, the actress would muse, “It’s a scary thing going into the workforce with a $50,000 debt and you’ve been trained as a classical theatre actor. There’s always a depression in the theatre. There’s only two givens with choosing acting as a profession: one is you will always be unemployed, always, and it doesn’t matter how much money you make, you’re still always going to be unemployed; and that you have no power. The only power you have is the word ‘no.’”

In short order, McDormand would say ‘yes’ to a six episode arc on one of television’s most prestigious dramas (Hill Street Blues, 1984), a tongue-in-cheek drive-in flick written by the Coens and directed by Sam Raimi (Crimewave, 1985) and a Coen brothers comedy (Raising Arizona, 1987). By this time, McDormand was also married to Joel Coen. While McDormand’s run on a promising cop show called Leg Work only lasted seven episodes on CBS in 1987, the following year, she would reap a lion’s share of attention playing the battered wife of a Klansman (Brad Dourif) in Mississippi Burning, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the age of 31.

Accepting work in a number of high profile movies — the female lead in Sam Raimi’s big studio ticket (Darkman, 1990), Demi Moore’s gal pal (The Butcher’s Wife, 1991), a part in a Robert Altman ensemble (Short Cuts, 1993) – McDorman would be impossible to miss in ‘96. She played a boozing hooker in the heist comedy Palookaville and had an unforgettable scene as the “highly strung” football crazed ex-wife of Chris Cooper in John Sayles’ Lone Star. Appearing as a criminal psychiatrist in Primal Fear that same year, McDormand virtually disappeared into the fabric of the legal thriller starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney and Edward Norton.

McDormand would receive an Emmy nomination for her performance as a soulful mechanic in the 1996 Showtime movie Hidden In America. Holly Hunter had this to say about her friend at that time: “Frances always had wonderful instincts. She’s grown into herself mightily over the last several years, but even when I first knew her I felt she had a real strong sense of who she was. Some actors say they don’t know themselves at all and that’s why they act, because they can disappear into other people. But with Frances I think it comes from a sense of self.”

McDormand had popped up in four of her husband and brother-in-law’s films, but her starring role as Marge Gunderson — the very pregnant police chief of Brainerd, Minnesota — in the Coen brothers 1996 masterwork Fargo cemented her place in film history, earning McDormand an Academy Award for Best Actress in the process. Frances McDormand has grown into an actress whose exuberance and subtle willpower are impossible to miss, or forget: as a German Jew interned in a Japanese prison camp in Paradise Road (1997), a Tony nominated turn as Blanche Dubois in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire staged in Dublin in 1998, starring off-Broadway opposite Billy Cudrup in Dare Clubb’s Oedipus, or Academy Award nominated performances in Almost Famous (2000) and North Country (2005).

McDormand has also stayed active in the 52nd Street Project, a non-profit theater group that mentors kids from Hell’s Kitchen. She summed up her career in 1998 by commenting, “By saying I’m a character actor and that I play supporting roles in films, I’m not being self-deprecating. That’s my agenda — because character actors work until they decide not to work. Leading women can work forever on stage, but they have peaks and valleys in film work. By saying this is what I am, I have control.”

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“How Frances McDormand Got Into ‘Minnesota Nice’” By Graham Fuller. The New York Times, 17 March 1996

“I’d Love To Play A Psycho Killer” By Michael Ellison. The Guardian, 26 January 2001

Frances McDormand. Turner Classic Movies

John Goodman was born June 20, 1952 in Afton, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. His father — a mail carrier — died shortly before Goodman turned two, leaving his mother to raise him and two siblings with whatever she could earn working as a cashier at Globe Drug, a waitress at Jack and Phil’s Bar-B-Cue and taking on babysitting or ironing chores. Goodman recalled his entrance into acting. “The first moment was in eighth grade. Doing a play. I forgot my lines. I couldn’t look down and say I forgot my lines. So I got up from the dinner table, walked around, improvising, until I got the thread back. It just seemed natural. We had a good-looking acting teacher, and she gave me a big hug and a kiss.” Attending a local community college, Goodman transferred to Southwest Missouri State on a football scholarship.

When a knee injury landed him on the DL, Goodman gravitated toward Missouri State’s noted drama program, which counted Kathleen Turner and Tess Harper as students. Harper recalled, ”You could see even then that there was an intense struggle going on in his characters. And he was very handsome. He looked like the star football player cast in the lead for the school play.” Graduating in 1975 with a BFA in theatre, he borrowed $1,000 from his brother and lit out for New York. Within a month, Goodman had a job: the role of Thomas Jefferson in a touring dinner theater production of 1776. His New York theater debut came in 1978 alongside another struggling actor named Nathan Lane. Goodman recalled, ”I was Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. People didn’t seem to like the play too much, maybe because we did a disco version.”

At 6’3” and more than 200 pounds, Goodman won work in commercials; including a popular spot for Mennen Skin Bracer. “The people were nice, the money was nice, but I just kept telling myself, ‘I’m drowning here. This is not what I want.’ I started to develop this snotty attitude so I wouldn’t get cast. Sometimes I’d show up hung over. I was drinking a lot back then.” Goodman made his Broadway debut in 1979 in Michael Weller’s Loose Ends, starring Kevin Kline. More regional theater would follow before Goodman landed bit parts in a feature film (Eddie Macon’s Run, 1982) and a TV movie (The Face of Rage, 1983). His break came in 1985, when Goodman was cast as Pap Finn in the Broadway musical Big River.

In search of a big man who could belt out a tune, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne tapped Goodman for his directorial debut, True Stories (1986). More film work followed: an escaped convict in the Coen brothers comedy Raising Arizona (1987) and a crooked New Orleans cop in The Big Easy (1987). Goodman returned to the stage for a Los Angeles production of Antony and Cleopatra in 1987. In the audience was an ABC talent scout searching for someone to play Roseanne Barr’s husband on the sitcom Roseanne. Goodman’s role as Dan Conner would run 10 seasons. During hiatuses, he played Sally Field’s homely hubby in Punchline (1988) and an NYPD detective opposite Al Pacino in Sea of Love (1989). A pair of starring roles — in the comedy King Ralph (1991) and Babe Ruth in The Babe (1992) – were not well received, but Goodman found a fan in Steven Spielberg.

Interviewed for Inside the Actor’s Studio in 2003, Goodman recalled, “I did a movie called Always with Steven Spielberg and the first meeting, the first reading, got the whole cast together, and the first thing out of his mouth was, ‘Ladies and gentleman, I have found my Fred Flintstone.’ … I tried to talk myself out of it. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to hear ‘Yabba dabba do’ for the rest of my life. Then I lightened up and decided to have a little fun with it and we had a great time.” Goodman’s starring role in The Flintstones (1994) was eclipsed by 13 stints as the host of Saturday Night Live from 1989 to 2001. Buck Henry would later remark, “There were people outside the cast that I look at and say, ‘They could have been cast members’ — Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin, John Goodman and Steve Martin. Those four people were essentially cast members, because they really fit into the format and they understood their work, and they were really great guest hosts.”

John Goodman’s natural affability and the apparent ease with which he improvises with other actors has extended from theater (he returned to Broadway in 2009 opposite Nathan Lane in Waiting For Godot), to TV (Goodman finally won an Emmy Award in 2006, for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series on Studio 60 at the Sunset Strip) to his voice work for Monsters, Inc (2001) and Bee Movie (2007). The Coen brothers wrote the part of the volcanic Charlie Meadows in Barton Fink (1992) for Goodman, as well as the role that remains the actor’s favorite: bitter Vietnam veteran Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski (1998). Goodman commented, “When I look at myself on film, I just see shit I should’ve done. I’m incapable of watching myself objectively. Unless it’s The Big Lebowski. The writing is so goddamned good, you can just enjoy it, go along for the ride like everybody else.”

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Being the Big Guy; Actor John Goodman: Funny and Formidable” By Peter de Jonge. New York Magazine, 10 February 1991

“Bat Man” By Allen Barra. Entertainment Weekly, 1 May 1992

“Down Mean Alleys with John Goodman” By Franz Lidz. The New York Times, 8 March 1998

“Big Man Tries Beckett” By Charles McGrath. The New York Times, 16 April 2009

Photo courtesy Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images

Josh Brolin was born February 12, 1968 in Santa Monica, California, but grew up in Templeton, a town in San Luis Obispo County hidden between Paso Robles and Morro Bay. His father was TV and film actor James Brolin, his mother was an aspiring actress. Their son had little interest in the family business.

Speaking to The Hollywood Interview in January 2008, Brolin recalls, “I wasn’t one of these kids that was running around doing scenes for people, until I took an elective in high school called ‘improvisation.’ They told me to get up and create a character. So I got up on stage and created this middle-aged, balding man and just started riffing on it. I didn’t see the creative process. I thought it was easy. It took some time for me to realize that it’s a make or break thing that completely works, or doesn’t work at all. There’s no ‘pretty good.’ If you were pretty good, that means you probably weren’t very good. You’ve got to nail it.”

Still only a teenager, Brolin toughed out auditions. His first professional job was playing Brand Walsh, big brother to a gang of pre-teen treasure hunters in the Steven Spielberg production The Goonies. The movie was a huge hit in the summer of 1985 but it would be uphill for Brolin the next 20 years.

Speaking to The Deadbolt in 2007, the actor recalled, “I did a movie – and people actually like the movie – called Thrashin’ a long time ago. I did Goonies and then I did Thrashin’. And I went to the premiere of Thrashin’ and I cried because I watched myself. Even though people look back at that movie now and go ‘God, I loved that movie, dude’, I couldn’t stand myself; I just thought it was awful. And I went, ‘Okay, go do theater. Go figure out how to do this. Go travel. Learn. Get experience, and then go see if you can do it. If you can’t, go do something else because this is unacceptable. If you’re going to do it, do it well. And if you can’t, go find the thing that you do well.’”

In 1987, Brolin was in the running for the lead in the Fox TV series 21 Jump Street. After the last audition, he went back to the apartment of the other finalist to wait for word; Johnny Depp got the part. Brolin instead took a sidekick role in a retro detective series for NBC called Private Eye but the show lasted only seven episodes.

He had better luck with an adventure series loosely based on the Pony Express called The Young Riders. Running on ABC for 67 episodes beginning in 1989, Brolin found a friend and mentor in his co-star, veteran actor Anthony Zerbe. “While people looked at me and saw the arms and the square jaw and wanted me to play the jock, Anthony was giving me characters. Real characters. He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself.” As the series was winding down in 1991, Zerbe & Brolin co-founded a new-play festival at the GeVa Theatre in Rochester, New York they called Reflections. For the next four years, Brolin programmed plays and performed in a variety of them.

Playing a bi-sexual FBI agent that Ben Stiller catches licking Patricia Arquette’s armpit in David O. Russell’s screwball comedy Flirting With Disaster (1996) was the highlight of Brolin’s film career for the next dozen years. He got the chance to work with Woody Allen in Melinda and Melinda (2004) and landed the lead in another TV series; Mister Sterling, a modern take on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington that lasted nine episodes on NBC in 2003.

Brolin was nominally cast as the bad guy in Hollywood fare like The Mod Squad (1996) and Into the Blue (2005), or in the sidekick role, as with Mimic (1997) and Hollow Man (2000). Brolin divested his time by continuing his stage work – making his Broadway debut in 2000 opposite Elias Koteas in a production of Sam Shepard’s True West – and spinning his affinity for day trading into his own website, MarketProbability, which offered investors five to ten-day “stock baskets” based on trends and the current state of the market.

Brolin credited his career resurgence to the sale of his Paso Robles ranch in 2005. “I knew that if I sold the ranch, it was going to create a hole in my life that I would have to fill by pursuing acting work. And it did. And suddenly things started to happen.” After ICM had dropped him as a client in 2001, a young William Morris agent named Michael Cooper stepped up to rep Brolin. “He would call – and not be annoying – but say, ‘See him. I’m not telling you he’s it, I’m not telling you that he’s the guy, I just need you to meet with him. Just meet him.’”

The night before the last day of casting, directors Joel & Ethan Coen agreed to see Brolin for the role of a West Texas welder who takes $2 million in found drug money in No Country For Old Men. Within two days, Brolin had the job. Two days after that, he shattered his collarbone in a motorcycle accident on Highland Avenue in L.A. Afraid he would lose the part, Brolin kept news of the accident from the Coens and reported to work injured.

With No County For Old Men, four acclaimed movies featuring Brolin opened in 2007. He also played a malevolent doc turned zombie in Grindhouse, a small town police chief in In the Valley of Elah and a treacherous narc in American Gangster. Brolin’s productivity got the attention of Oliver Stone – who offered him the role of George W. Bush in W. – and Gus Van Sant, who cast him as infamous San Francisco city supervisor Dan White in Milk. The latter earned Brolin his first Academy Award nomination. Also in 2008, Brolin debuted as a writer-director-producer with X, a gritty 15-minute short starring his teenage daughter Eden.

Brolin contrasted day trading with his approach to acting by stating, “If you’re stressing or thinking about other things, you won’t be fluid. You cannot be an emotional trader. If you are, you will lose. So I sit there and do the opposite of what I would do if I were acting, looking at it objectively and having total discipline. Which is how I get into a part, and then I let it go. It’s all emotional, all visceral.”

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“The Candidate“. By Jenelle Riley. Backstage, November 2008

Photo courtesy Collider.com

Jennifer Lee Morrow was born February 5, 1962 in Hollywood, CA. Her father was film and TV actor Vic Morrow. Her mother Barbara Turner was an actress turned screenwriter. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 1997 to promote her roles in Washington Square and A Thousand Acres, their daughter would recall, “I had a very happy childhood. I mean, in many, many ways. My sister had a rough go, my older sister and so I saw that and I think that I … sort of formed in opposition to that, because I saw how much pain she was in. But I think that also meant probably suppressing a lot of my own, um, anger, or my own fears about things and so acting was maybe a way to experience them in a safe way.” She received her SAG card at the age of 16 for appearing in an episode of Baretta, but discovered someone was already using her intended stage name of “Jennifer Leigh”. She added “Jason” in honor of actor Jason Robards, a friend of her mother’s.

Jennifer Jason Leigh made her TV debut in the Disney movie The Young Runaways in 1978. To continue working, she legally declared herself an emancipated minor and dropped out of Pacific Palisades High School six weeks short of graduation. At the age of 19, Leigh made her film debut in Eyes of a Stranger, playing a deaf, blind and mute teenager stalked by a psycho. Also in 1981, she slimmed to 86 pounds to play an anorexic teen in the TV movie The Best Little Girl in the World. Vic Morrow and Barbara Turner had divorced when Leigh was 2 and she had not spoken to her father in nearly two years when in 1982, Morrow was killed on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie. The tragedy overwhelmed attention Leigh might have received that summer playing a sexually active high school freshman in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. When one of her scenes was trimmed to spare the picture an X rating, Leigh objected, stating at the time, “It was a classic scene and should have been left in the picture uncut. It had humor, pathos, sweetness and sadness. It showed the loneliness and hollowness of sex at that age.”

Leigh spent the next eight years in made for TV movies with titles like The First Time or Girls of the White Orchid, as well as B-movies, playing a medieval princess joyously debauched by Rutger Hauer in Flesh + Blood and a character ripped apart by two trucks in The Hitcher. 1990 was Leigh’s breakout year. She made her New York stage debut off-Broadway at the Circle Repertory Theatre as the title character in William Mastrosimone’s Sunshine. New York Times theater critic Laurie Winer observed, “If her character is desperate to be loved, Ms. Leigh is not; she makes Sunshine’s neediness annoying.” Two movies Leigh had completed also opened that year. In the gritty Last Exit to Brooklyn, Leigh was cast as an emotionally dissonant hooker, while she played a sweeter and steelier prostitute opposite Alec Baldwin in Miami Blues. These earned Leigh Best Supporting Actress nods by the New York Film Critics Circle and the Boston Society of Film Critics.

The ’90s were spent winning over critics but seemingly alienating audiences. Leigh played a narc who succumbs to drug addiction in Rush (1991), a rapid tongued reporter in the Coen Brothers screwball comedy The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) and celebrated writer and wit Dorothy Parker in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994). While some complained about the “ragged dagger of a voice” Leigh conjured for her uncanny portrayal of Parker, the actress maintained, “I had a tape loop of her that I played constantly. I mapped every chuckle, stutter, and pause, almost like you’d learn a foreign language song.” Leigh managed to top that performance in 1995 with Georgia. From a script her mother wrote, Leigh played Sadie Flood, a bitter, heroin addicted barroom singer burdened by the success of her sister (Mare Winnigham). Leigh dropped to 90 pounds for the role and recorded her songs live, most memorably an 8 1/2 minute rendition of Van Morrison’s “Take Me Back”.

In 1997, Leigh filmed a role in Eyes Wide Shut, but when Stanley Kubrick’s extensive reshoots conflicted with her commitment to eXistenZ for David Cronenberg, her part was given to Marie Richardson. Leigh is rumored to have turned down roles taken by Laura San Giacomo in sex, lies, and videotape, Lori Petty in A League of Their Own, Kyra Sedgwick in Singles, Julianne Moore in Boogie Nights and the role in L.A. Confidential that Kim Basinger would parlay into an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Leigh’s most notable career accolade to date has been an MTV Movie Award for Best Villain in Single White Female (1992). Speaking to New York Magazine in 2005, she admitted, “I’ve overworked things or over-researched things. I think I’ve been too removed at times. If I had done some of the roles that I turned down stupidly, which ended up being awfully good movies – I just couldn’t see it at the time – I’d be in a position today where I had more opportunities. But, you know, the truth is there aren’t a lot of movies I want to go see.”

Instead, Leigh co-wrote, co-starred and co-directed (with actor Alan Cumming) The Anniversary Party (2001), a wry drama/comedy shot in 19 days on digital video and featuring many of Leigh’s friends, including Phoebe Cates, Kevin Kline, Parker Posey, Jennifer Beals and John C. Reilly. In 2007, she was back on critics’ year-end best lists, playing a blissfully naïve bride opposite Nicole Kidman in Margot at the Wedding. Speaking to The Onion A.V. Club, Leigh offered, “There was a kind of purity with Margot that I had in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, just kind of being young, in a way. And I was nothing like that girl in Fast Times either, though I did get a job at Perry’s Pizza, and I did do this ‘research’ or whatever I was doing, but I was using a lot of myself, because I didn’t have a lot else to draw on. I wasn’t out interviewing lots of people, and I wasn’t doing that kind of stuff. And there’s a kind of purity to that that I’m kind of interested in again. To disappear, but also not disappear, in a way.”

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Jennifer Jason Leigh” Wikipedia

“Lone Star“. By Boris Kachka. New York Magazine, December 4, 2005

“Jennifer Jason Leigh“. By Scott Tobias. The Onion A.V. Club, November 21, 2007

David Patrick Kelly was born January 23, 1951 in Detroit, Michigan. His father was an accountant, his mother a homemaker. Kelly grew up with four sisters and two brothers and recalled his path to the performing arts by stating, “I was an altar boy in the ’50s, and saw all that ritual, and the costumes, and – it wasn’t costumes, you know – all the vestments and everything else. There was something about it that was mysterious and great. But I think, you know, my father was a painter and so we always had painting going on in our basement. There were big scenes. He painted the furnace to look like a tree, and the walls were always covered with paintings. So I think it was just an environment. And then, my mother taught me music. And it was a combination of these twin things in my family, were art and music. So I think that combination made it obvious.”

Moving on from Bishop Gallagher High School in Harper Woods, Kelly enrolled at the University of Detroit and made his Michigan stage debut in 1970 as the lead in Hair. He took a detour through Paris to study at the International School of Mime with Marcel Marceau, and after completing his scholarship at the University of Detroit, headed to New York. “I played guitar, and played all the cabarets in rock. It was a wonderful scene, actors and songwriters in the ’70s in New York, and that new music, or punk, if you wanna call it that, that thing was going on. And it was very creative. It was a wonderful time, in theater too. There were a lot more theaters then.”

After serving as an understudy for the 1975 production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Kelly made his Broadway debut in 1978 in the musical Working. He found time to audition for a movie scheduled to shoot in New York that summer titled The Warriors. “I went in for one meeting with Walter Hill and Larry Gordon and I think they were first considering me for one of the Warriors. Then they both came to see me on Broadway in Working that I and Lynne Thigpen were in. My part in that was Charlie Blossom, a funny, scary homicidal maniac, so I think they began thinking about me as Luther. When I went for my second meeting I remember Walter saying, ‘I think you are in the spirit of this movie.’” With miniature beer bottles and kooky verve, Kelly would immortalize Luther as one of the great bad guys in movie history.

While Kelly was back on Broadway for The Suicide (1980) and Is There Life After High School (1982), director Walter Hill and producer Lawrence Gordon did not cast the net far looking for someone to play “Luther”, a sniveling bad guy chased by Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in 48 HRS. Kelly soon became a go-to character actor for creeps and psychos in action movies: Dreamscape, Commando and The Crow would follow. After hiring him as a hitman in Wild At Heart, David Lynch came back to Kelly to play one of the wack jobs populating the 1992 mini-series Twin Peaks. A bit part as a schoolteacher in Malcolm X prompted Spike Lee to give Kelly a bigger role in his next picture, as an electric organ playing, bifocal wearing neighbor from hell in Crooklyn.

In addition to gracing the Broadway stage in 1994 for the comedy The Inspector General, and as the jester Feste in a 1998 Lincoln Center revival of Twelfth Night, Kelly has appeared Off Broadway throughout his career. In 1998, he received an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance for his work in classic, avant garde and new plays. Back in psycho land menacing Adam Sandler for the 2005 remake of The Longest Yard, Kelly was by now showing his range in movies like Flirting With Disaster (as a Michigan truck driver Ben Stiller thinks is his father), K-Pax (a psych patient opposite Kevin Spacey) and Flags of Our Fathers (President Harry S. Truman). In the last year, he’s popped up in episodes of Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Gossip Girl.

In 2008, five folk/rock tunes Kelly recorded in 1975 during gigs at Reno Sweeney’s and CBGB’s were packaged with four new songs and released on CD as Rip Van Boy Man. Writing a review on CD Baby, Max Cheney commented, “Had he not gone into theater and film, I believe DPK would have had a successful career in commercial music.” When Cheney sat down to interview Kelly, the performer had this to say about his iconic turn in The Warriors: “That was really a blast, y’ know. Nobody got paid much; we all got dressed in one big trailer. I’d walk home every day, from that big thing where Cyrus is speaking. We’d shoot that all night, then I’d walk from Riverside Park down to my little apartment in SoHo, at the time, in the ’70s. Yeah, it wasn’t fancy. But it came out good.”

© Joe Valdez

Jason Bateman was born January 14, 1969 in Rye, New York. Bateman’s father Kent was a TV writer and director who ran a postproduction facility. Bateman’s mother was a flight attendant. At the age of 10, Bateman was living in Los Angeles, helping his dad wash the car when a neighbor on his way to audition – for the role of a father in an educational film – stopped in front of the house. Bateman recalls, “He asked me if I wanted to go along, and I said yes, and fortunately for me they were reading for the role of the son that day as well. So he told me to sneak in there and make it look like I knew what I was doing, and that I was supposed to be there. And so I did, and I got the part, and thought, ‘Well, this is fun and maybe I’m good at this.’ And so my dad took some pictures of me and sent them into an agency. They liked the pictures, and signed me up.”

Bateman landed in commercials for Honeynut Cheerios, Coca Cola and McDonald’s. In 1981, he began a ubiquitous decade on TV by joining the final season of Little House on the Prairie. Bateman found a bigger audience the following year, as Ricky Schroeder’s smarmy pal Derek Taylor on Silver Spoons. Bateman’s rising popularity got him a lead in another NBC sitcom – It’s Your Move – in 1984. Playing a teenage scam artist to a single mom (Caren Kaye), his character’s hijinks sparked so much protest from parents that the network white washed the sociopathic behavior mid-season. It’s Your Move was cancelled after 18 episodes. Interviewed by The Onion in 2004, Bateman stated, “I get a lot of really nice comments about that show. I guess there were a lot more people watching TV back then, and there were only three networks, and we were all 14 or 15 and doing nothing but watching TV and staring at girls. It was a good time to be on TV.”

While his sister Justine Bateman was being featured on the hit sitcom Family Ties, Jason was onto his fourth series for NBC, beginning a five season run as Valerie Harper’s oldest son on the sitcom Valerie in 1986. For his summer hiatus, Bateman was offered the lead in a movie, Teen Wolf Too. It was justifiably shunned by audiences. Shortly after Valerie/ Valerie’s Family/ The Hogan Family was finally cancelled in 1991, Bateman starred in another little seen flick – Breaking the Rules - playing a cancer patient who heads cross country to compete in Jeopardy! before he dies. “I load up a van with my two best friends, Jonathan Silverman and C. Thomas Howell, and we end up meeting Annie Potts, and I get married to her, and, it’s not bad, but, you know, I was 19 when I did it.” The movie did little to raise the actor’s visibility as a screen actor.

Bateman spent the 1990s in near anonymity on television. In addition to Movies of the Week with titles like Confessions: Two Faces of Evil and Hart to Hart: Secrets of the Hart, the actor was living from pilot season to pilot season. Simon lasted one season on the WB in 1995. George & Leo – starring Bob Newhart & Judd Hirsch – only taped five episodes on CBS in 1997. Some of My Best Friends, in which Bateman starred as a gay writer who takes on a straight roommate, made it to eight episodes on CBS in 2001. Bateman recalls, “There are certain networks that are better for liberal fare, and CBS, at least at the time, was not leading in that race as far as their audience and demographic. If it had been on NBC, on a more liberal night – like a Thursday – it probably would’ve had a better shot. Will & Grace was certainly having a good time there.”

Bateman’s 2003 pilot season audition was for a Fox comedy series titled Arrested Development. Describing his career resurgence to NPR in 2008, Bateman commented, “My mother is British and so she gave me this very sort of dry, sarcastic sense of humor. And that works in some projects better than others, it’s more appropriate … And that was also coupled with getting older, and having a different sense of humor, and becoming a bit more cynical or sarcastic or adult, and the writing supported that, and almost, most importantly, I had Jeffrey Tambor. And this is a guy who taught me a lot about – to quote him – not winking.” Bateman was cast as Michael Bluth – the sane character in a family of reprobates – and though Arrested Development was not a ratings success during its three season run, it grew into one of the more prestigious shows on TV.

By the time Bateman hosted Saturday Night Live in February 2005, film offers were pouring in. He appeared as a color commentator in Dodgeball, a bunny suit wearing wacko in Smokin’ Aces and a sarcastic FBI intelligence agent in The Kingdom. The critical and commercial cinematic sensation of 2007 – Juno – featured Bateman as an adoptive parent opposite Jennifer Garner. In 2008, he starred with Will Smith and Charlize Theron in the summer blockbuster Hancock. Remaining self-depreciating about his career rejuvenation, Bateman told The Collider in 2007: “It has less and less to do with your talent, I think. And I don’t mean to sound cynical. But a big part of being hired is what you add or detract from the project as far as pedigree goes. And that show was very well-received. And so I’m just trying to, you know, take the good roles that are coming my way, and try to perpetuate that level of whatever it is.”

© Joe Valdez

Patricia Clarkson was born December 29, 1959 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her father was an administrator for Louisiana State University School of Medicine, her mother Jackie Clarkson a New Orleans city councilwoman and later, state legislator. The youngest of five girls all less than eighteen months apart, Clarkson was thirteen years old when her fuse for performing arts was lit. Speaking with Hollywood Interview in March 2008, Clarkson says, “I gave a speech in speech class, and my teacher said ‘You know, I think you’re an actress. You should join the drama department.’ And I did! And that was it. I did a play called F.L.I.P.P.E.D.: Feminist Liberation Idealist Party for Permanent Equality and Democracy. The drama teacher was a major feminist. It was 1974 or ’75 and we did this rockin’ play!”

Clarkson attended O. Perry Walker High School, where her classmates included future New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. After spending two years as a speech pathology major at LSU, Clarkson talked her parents into letting her transfer to Fordham University’s College at Lincoln Center. “They agreed to let me go to New York if I finished my bachelor’s degree. So it was a real stretch for my parents, putting their fifth child through school, and they weren’t rich by any means. We were middle, or upper-middle class, but New York has always been incredibly expensive. So the sacrifices they made to send me there were enormous.” Clarkson graduated summa cum laude with a degree in theater arts in 1982 and was accepted into the graduate program at Yale School of Drama.

In 1985, Clarkson had her Master of Fine Arts and made her New York stage debut in Oliver Oliver. The following year, she was tapped to take over for Julie Haggerty in the Broadway revival of John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves. Clarkson found time to audition for a movie role, that of Eliot Ness’ wife in a film version of The Untouchables to be directed by Brian DePalma. “I went in and read for a great old casting director and he said, ‘I think you might be right for this but that dress you have on is too sexy. Come back in something plainer and read for Brian.’ And I did and that was it.” While The Untouchables became a summer blockbuster, roles opposite Clint Eastwood in The Dead Pool and Timothy Hutton in Everybody’s All American did anything but rocket Clarkson to stardom.

Clarkson spent most of the next decade in TV, appearing in Movies of the Week with titles like Legacy of Lies or Caught In The Act. Joining the cast of Steven Bochco’s legal drama Murder One in 1996 was a step up in prestige, even though she played another loyal wife. It took an audition for Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art for Clarkson’s film career to take off. The actress recalls, “I almost didn’t go in. I was like, ‘Oh my God, a German lesbian heroin addict: who would ever buy me as that?’ But I loved the part. High Art changed things because it was such a dramatic departure. Sometimes, you need to shake people up, and High Art definitely, dramatically shook things up.”

At the Sundance Film Festival in January 2003, three movies Clarkson had finished – All the Real Girls, Pieces of April and The Station Agent – were featured in competition, while a fourth (The Baroness and the Pig) screened in World Cinema. The title “Queen of the Indies” – previously held by Parker Posey – was bestowed on Clarkson in the press. Sundance awarded her the Jury Prize for Outstanding Performance, while Clarkson’s work as a terminally ill, acid tongued mom in the comedy Pieces of April garnered nominations for an Academy Award, Golden Globe, Broadcast Film Critics Award, SAG Award and Independent Spirit Award. Pieces of April director Peter Hedges stated, “There is a difference between celebrity actress and being a great actress, and Patty is a great actress. There are a couple of directors, and we have made a pact to do whatever it takes to make the world know about her. She is incredible, and I can’t think of anyone more deserving.”

Clarkson has since won an Emmy Award for her recurring role as Lauren Ambrose’s bohemian Aunt Sarah on Six Feet Under, played Blanche DuBois in the 2004 Kennedy Center production of A Streetcar Named Desire and appeared in moves ranging from Good Night and Good Luck to Lars and the Real Girl to Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Asked about blossoming late, Clarkson says, “There were some movies I passed on early on, and some movies I didn’t get, some big studio films. But now I look back and I realize that I really came later in life to a kind of career. I was somewhat typecast as suburban ‘mom’ type roles early on. But I’ve always had this deep voice, so I think it was tough sometimes for directors to cast me as the ingénue. Because I’d walk in and look a certain way, then open my mouth and have this … voice! So I think I sort of grew into my voice, my face, my body as I got older.”

© Joe Valdez

Daryl Hannah was born December 3, 1960 in Chicago, Illinois. Her father owned a barge building company and her mother was a schoolteacher. In an interview with the L.A. Times in 2006, Hannah recalled her early childhood by stating, “I had a normal city kid’s life. In the summers, which was sort of my saving grace, my father sent us to the same camp that he went to as a kid. It was in the Rockies. You lived in a covered wagon. There was no electricity. You backpacked for two months. You’d groom horses, dig latrines, pitch tents and that kind of stuff. It really taught me about nature and the value of and beauty of being connected to all things. Until that experience, I really felt like an alien in the world. Nothing made sense to me. Once I went to camp, everything made sense.”

Hannah’s parents divorced when she was seven. Her mother remarried real estate magnate Jerrold Wexler. Hannah responded by retreating into her own interior world. “It got me nowhere at school. I was a skinny kid who was picked on. I went to the library in my free time, had insomnia and watched movies on my own. I was a different kind of kid. When I began to get attention through films, everyone presumed I had been some sort of cheerleader – all blonde and long legs. I didn’t tell anyone I was a total weirdo.” Enrolled for a time at the Francis W. Parker School – where Jennifer Beals was a classmate – Hannah took gymnastics, ran track and was the only girl on the soccer team. She also studied acting with Stella Adler at the Goodman Theater.

A bit part in Brian DePalma’s sci-fi thriller The Fury brought Hannah to Los Angeles at the age of 18 to enroll at the University of Southern California. She ended up sharing a one-room apartment with Rachel Ward. In 1980, the roommates both auditioned for Blade Runner. While Ward was passed over for the part awarded to Sean Young, Hannah was one of five finalists selected to screen test for the role of a hunted Replicant named Pris. She recalls, “Everybody who was screen testing got to create their own character, you know, had days to meet with the makeup team and the wardrobe team and I remember that I had found that wig in a basket full of stuff and it looked cool and it kind of built from that. And I had seen Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu and remembered the sort of puddied out eyebrows and the black circle, the black hollow eyes of Klaus Kinski and so I was inspired by that.” Hannah was the consensus choice for the part in Ridley Scott’s masterpiece.

Through the 1980s, Hannah portrayed one quirky demigoddess after another. Casting her as a mermaid opposite Tom Hanks in Splash, Ron Howard discovered Hannah could dolphin kick better than the doubles he was auditioning; the actress ended up doing virtually all of her own swimming. She held her own against Mickey Rourke in The Pope of Greenwich Village and Robert Redford in Legal Eagles before taking on what could have been the role of her career: Jean Auel’s blonde haired, blue eyed, stone slinging cavewoman Ayla in The Clan of the Cave Bear. Released quietly January 1986 in the United States, the film version of the bestselling novel vanished from theaters. Hannah fared much better returning to contemporary times opposite Steve Martin (Roxanne), a thankless role in a great movie (Wall Street) and a memorable part in the ensemble of another box office hit (Steel Magnolias).

In the 1990s, Hannah appeared as Jack Lemmon’s daughter in Grumpy Old Men and its sequel, but other than a small role as an attorney for director Robert Altman in The Gingerbread Man, her film roles were forgettable. In 2000, Hannah was working in the first play of her professional career – taking Marilyn Monroe’s role in The Seven Year Itch on London’s West End – when she was visited backstage by Quentin Tarantino. Hannah recalls, “All he told me about it was that he was writing something with me in mind, and he told me her name and that I was going to be The Bride’s nemesis. It was months and months before I got the script after I first met Quentin and he told me that, and I was so excited right from the beginning.” Arriving in theaters in 2003 and 2004, Kill Bill and its second book was a reminder of Hannah’s physical prowess and delicious quirk.

In May 2006, Hannah discovered the plight of South Central Urban Garden, a 14-acre community garden in Los Angeles threatened with demolition. “I make a weekly video blog on sustainable issues for my website. I went down to the farm to shoot a segment on it and fell in love with it and the farmers and committed myself to stand in solidarity with them and on principles to save the farm.” For 23 days, Hannah and protest organizer John Quigley sat in a large walnut tree 40 feet above the ground. She was ultimately arrested and booked on suspicion of resisting a court order. Speaking in 2004 about her proclivity for being typecast, Hannah commented, “Whatever role the public becomes aware of you in, that’s you, period. I’ll always be seen as a non-verbal mermaid. My manager is constantly being told, ‘She’s good for those ethereal kinds of parts.’ As if that’s all I’m capable of.”

© Joe Valdez

Famke Beumer was born November 5, 1965 in Amstelveen, part of metropolitan Amsterdam in North Holland. Both her sisters – one older, one younger – are blonde haired and blue eyed, and as a hazel eyed brunette who would grow to 5’11” in height, Beumer had little aspiration to enter the performing arts. As a teenager, she was enrolled in the University of Amsterdam majoring in economics, an experience she later referred to as “the stupidest idea I ever had.” Beumer was approached on the street by a man who introduced himself as a talent scout for a modeling agency. Realizing economics was not her passion and that the modeling agency was actually legit, Beumer dropped out of school and spent the next year traveling Europe on photo shoots.

Settling in New York at age 19 – and changing her name to Famke Janssen – she began thinking about a career in acting. “I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but I was a model before, and I knew a lot of models had tried it and they all had this big stigma, like oh, the model turned actress, and they can’t do it … And I thought I’ll go about it a little bit differently than most of them.” Janssen quit modeling in 1988 and spent four years at Columbia University, completing a fine arts degree in creative writing and literature, and studying acting in a workshop instructed by Harold Guskin. Janssen recalls, “I think in the beginning I had to prove that I could act. I think everybody just automatically assumed I couldn’t. And I thought that I would at least have a better chance by having taken a distance from, you know, my modeling career, so that I didn’t have to deal with that stigma so much.”

Moving to Los Angeles, Janssen’s screen debut came in 1992 with a part in the virtually unseen thriller Fathers & Sons starring Jeff Goldblum. She made a memorable appearance that year on Star Trek: The Next Generation playing an otherworldly “metamorph” encouraged to choose between servitude and her own free will. Guest spots on The Untouchables and Melrose Place followed, as did a starring role in the Fox TV movie Model By Day, in which Janssen played a super acrobatic vigilante named Lady X by night … and a model by day. Winning the female lead in a feature film – Clive Barker’s Lord of Illusions – positioned Janssen for the break of her career: the role of Russian assassin Xenia Onatopp in the 1995 relaunch of the James Bond franchise, Goldeneye. Onatopp’s villainous feature was crushing men between her thighs.

Janssen recalls, “I had no idea if that was going to be the last thing I ever did, and I would have gone down in history as the Bond girl that never went anywhere, like everyone else. I was very much reminded by every single press person that that was going to happen to me. But I went with it, I went with it all the way. And it actually made everything possible for me. All these doors opened that would never have been opened.” Resisting job offers that catered to her physical skills, Janssen took a year off and appeared opposite Harvey Keitel in the gritty crime thriller City of Industry. 1998 then saw eight films featuring Janssen hit screens. She played an alcoholic Southern wife for director Robert Altman in The Gingerbread Man, a Gotham poker ace in Rounders, a blue collared Bostonian in Monument Avenue and a Manhattan publicist in Woody Allen’s Celebrity.

Janssen spent 21 days starring with Jon Favreau in the indie romantic comedy Love & Sex before transitioning into six months of work as telepathic mutant Jean Grey in X-Men, both of which opened in 2000. Love & Sex remains a favorite of Janssen’s. “I loved how unapologetic this woman was about her sex life, love life, messy life in general. It was very refreshing. She had a great sense of humor. She’s a goofball. She’s a lot of things that I really am in life. But it’s not the way people have seen me before.” Returning as Jean Grey for X2 (2003) and X3 (2006), Janssen also joined the cast of Nip/Tuck for nine episodes in 2004, playing a life coach who seduces Julian McMahon’s teenaged son, and is later revealed to be a transsexual. She’s starred in thrillers opposite Michael Douglas (Don’t Say A Word) and Robert DeNiro (Hide and Seek) and was part of the comic ensemble for director David Wain in The Ten.

In 2007, Janssen received the best critical notices of her career, playing a pool hustler who reconciles with her with adolescent son in Turn the River, the directorial debut of actor Chris Eigeman. Research into prostitution and corruption she conducted following her work in Taken – one of three films featuring Janssen set for release in 2008 – led to the United Nations naming her a Goodwill Ambassador for Integrity. Interviewed in 2006 about her tendency to be cast as super women, the actress commented, “I’m in a business where 99 percent of casting is typecasting and people compartmentalize me into a specific area – maybe as a powerful alien, because they don’t know where to put me – but it’s up to me to fight against it. I don’t want to be typecast, that’s my big mission in life and it makes it a harder path in this business for me.”