My Past Loves - October 2004

Here's a story about an actor was suppose to work with Love, Kip Pardue and PATRICK (Sleeping With The Enemy) BERGIN---remember that movie: WHITER SHADE OF PALE

From The Longford Leader in Dublin, Ireland - October 21, 2004

LOCAL ACTOR MAKING WAVES ACROSS THE ATLANTIC

by Robert Cox

A local FAS worker has followed his dream and is making significant waves in America, appearing on coast to coast ads and being cast in a movie that was to star Jennifer Love-Hewitt and Patrick Bergin.

Ken Shedwell, of St Mel’s Road is a well-known face around Longford who works in the Mall as part of the FAS scheme.

He was encouraged by his FAS Supervisor Micky Nevin to take part in a Dublin training course with renowned acting teacher John Cantwell, who spends six months of the year in LA.

That acting course has three levels: foundation, advanced and masters. And Ken is close to completing his masters already, having also achieved an Equity - the actor’s union - card, one of very few Longfordians to have ever had that distinction.

He has already appeared on TG4 in a program called ‘Fear an Phoist’, and is currently filming a second series of the popular comedy series, which will appear after Christmas.

But it is his success in America which has really got Ken noticed, with ads for prestigious products like the Kentucky Derby and Aquafin - a spring water - going all over the USA.

He was also recently cast in a Jennifer Love-Hewitt movie, which fell through due to financing problems. More recently still, Neil Jordan picked Ken out for a one to one auditon for a part in the movie of the Pat McCabe novel “Breakfast at Pluto”.

And there is still a chance that he may be called up by the director to fill a role in the movie. Ken would have previously been in a number of Backstage and St. Mel’s Musical Society productions including most recently ‘Red Haired Mary’, a one act play produced earlier this year, in which he played an unlucky individual who gets stuck in a series of unfortunate circumstances.

However in real life that character couldn’t be further from the truth. “You can do all the courses in the world and have all the ability, but there isn’t enough work in this country to keep a person going, unless you get a part in a TV series or movie. There are tons of people with the talent in this country. What you need is a bit of luck, and the face that they are looking for,” Ken told the Longford Leader explaining he hoped his modest success would encourage young people interested in acting to follow their dream.

His FAS supervisor Micky Nevin is delighted with the progress of Ken’s career: “This is major. It is very real progress. Ken came into us with no qualifications. Now he has done two courses, he has his equity card, and he will sail through his masters. His talent is unreal”.

Reeve broke his neck in May 1995 when he was thrown from his horse during an equestrian competition in Culpeper, Virginia.

Enduring months of therapy to allow him to breathe for longer and longer periods without a respirator, Reeve emerged to lobby Congress for better insurance protection against catastrophic injury and to move an Academy Award audience to tears with a call for more films about social issues.

He returned to directing, and even returned to acting in a 1998 production of "Rear Window," a modern update of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller about a man in a wheelchair who becomes convinced a neighbor has been murdered. Reeve won a Screen Actors Guild award for best actor in a television movie or miniseries.

"I was worried that only acting with my voice and my face, I might not be able to communicate effectively enough to tell the story," Reeve said. "But I was surprised to find that if I really concentrated, and just let the thoughts happen, that they would read on my face. With so many close-ups, I knew that my every thought would count."

In his public appearances, he was as handsome as ever, his blue eyes bright and his voice clear.

"Hollywood needs to do more," he said in the March 1996 Oscar awards appearance. "Let's continue to take risks. Let's tackle the issues. In many ways our film community can do it better than anyone else. There is no challenge, artistic or otherwise, that we can't meet."

In 2000, Reeve was able to move his index finger, and a specialized workout regimen has made his legs and arms stronger. He has also regained sensation in other parts of his body.

From Red Beetle Road for My Love Hewitt Websites - October 9, 2004

Posted September 26, 2004 @ http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/redbeetle/20040926#my_umbrella_with_jennifer_love

MY UMBRELLA WITH JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT

I've had a crush on Jennifer Love Hewitt for years. Then a funny thing happened on my way back to the Hyatt last Saturday.

It was nearly 3:00 pm when the weather went sour in Manhattan. I had walked for miles that day already and had just finished doing the flea market on the Avenue of the Americas. The wind kicked up and most everyone went into the shops when the rain started. I bought an umbrella from a street vendor and made my way back to 42nd Street.

She was standing in front of the Kenneth Cole store looking nervously at the sky in her floppy engineers cap. At first, I did a double-take because she was so attractive, but then I saw that sharp little angular nose of hers. I slowed a bit, but I was getting wet with the blowing rain and proceeded to the corner.

That is when it started pouring. About a dozen of us were standing there waiting to cross the busy intersection when I looked to my left. Jennifer was standing right next to me with her arms crossed.

I raised my umbrella a bit and moved it over to my left. She looked over with those sparkling eyes and smiled.

With all the people standing there, I didn't want to blow her cover, so I just tilted my head a bit to the left and said, "Love your work."

"Thanks," she said as the light changed. She dashed off into the rain.

I thought about snapping a photo just then with my phone, but that would have meant taking my eyes off of her. Instead, I just let the umbrella drop to my side and looked up and thanked the rain.

From Rolling Stone Magazine - October 8, 2004

ELTON ROCKS THE OSBOURNES
John puts the stars on their feet at the Beverly Hills mansion

"Be fabulous," the invitation instructed on the topic of dress. Elton John, the guest of honor and performer at "An Evening at Home With the Osbournes," always dresses with fabulous in mind, and he arrived Thursday night in a black suit with a zipper stretching across the back and down the left sleeve. The crowd also obliged. For men, it meant suits without ties; for women, it meant colorful outfits accented with major cleavage.

About 250 people showed up, walking up the flower-lined stairs of the iconic Osbournes' Beverly Hills home -- made famous by the MTV reality show -- each paying $2,500 to benefit John's AIDS foundation and Sharon Osbourne's Colon Cancer Program at nearby Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

All the Osbournes were present and mingling: Kelly's strapless black dress revealing angel wing tattoos on her shoulder blades, Jack opting for a more conservative look in suit and tie, and Ozzy sporting black tie with tails. Sharon Osbourne, elegantly dressed in black with spiky, magenta hair, came up onstage to introduce the evening and the entertainment. "You're stuck with me and a couple of my friends," she said. "I hope tonight will educate and entertain you."

The educational portion of the evening featured a speaker on colon cancer as well as a video on AIDS orphans: a heartbreaking story about two children in South Africa who represent just a tiny fraction of the 14 million children worldwide orphaned by the disease.

Osbourne returned to the small stage, set up in front of the guest house, to introduce the entertainment portion of the night. "The best, the legendary Elton John!" she announced. "I want to see you on your feet!"

Sir Elton has been in the news quite a bit lately -- less for his music than his profanity-laced tirades against the press and Madonna. So it was nice to see him doing what he does best: performing music, this time beneath stately palm trees in the backyard of the Osbourne mansion. Backed by a band featuring drummer Nigel Olsson and guitarist Davey Johnstone -- who have been with him longer than his current hair -- John rocked through a stripped-down set.

John opened the show with oldies including a rollicking "The Bitch Is Back" and an impassioned, solo piano rendition of "Your Song." Then, shifting gears, he said, "We're gonna do something new: you might as well be the guinea pigs for it," introducing "Answer in the Sky," a tune from his forthcoming album, Peach Tree Road. The new number, a classic John power ballad, generated a clap-along response from the crowd. Another new song, "All That I'm Allowed," showed gospel influences. The band was predictably tight and John was in strong form and voice, seated at his keyboard and pounding out two-fisted rhythms.

"When we did this event last year," John said in a serious moment, "Sharon was ill and had to watch from her bedroom upstairs. I was frightened, but she survived. It's a lesson to all of us. I dedicate this next song to her," he continued, launching into "Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word." Sharon stood, arms around a seated Ozzy, watching the show. John then closed with a raucous "Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)," and he had the whole crowd up and dancing by the end.

The moneyed attendees -- who included 'N Sync's Lance Bass, Quincy Jones, Robin Williams and Jennifer Love Hewitt (pic below) -- sipped bubbly from Perrier Jouet and dined on miso-cured Alaskan butterfish and five-spice sirloin steak from Asia de Cuba, the trendy fusion restaurant just a few blocks away on the Sunset Strip. Will & Grace's Eric McCormack and Megan Mullally led a live auction, including the sale of an Aston Martin DB 9, purchased by Bass for $220,000. An estimated $1 million was raised by evening's end, to be split between the two charities.

She's the mother of actress JAMIE LEE CURTIS who worked with Love in "HOUSE ARREST" (1996)

From The Los Angeles Times - October 5, 2004

JANET LEIGH DIES

By Myrna Oliver Times Staff Writer

Janet Leigh, Hollywood's perfect "nice girl" ingenue who memorably changed her acting image and earned an Academy Award nomination with her bloodcurdling screams as she was stabbed to death in Alfred Hitchcock's classic "Psycho," has died. She was 77.

Leigh, who appeared in more than 60 motion pictures, died Sunday in her Beverly Hills home of vasculitis, an inflammation of the blood vessels.

At her bedside were her husband of more than 40 years, stockbroker and producer Robert Brandt, and her two daughters from her marriage to actor Tony Curtis, actresses Kelly and Jamie Lee Curtis. Leigh's death was announced Monday by Heidi Schaeffer, a spokeswoman for Jamie Lee Curtis.

Of her scores of motion pictures and movies for television, Leigh was proudest of three, all made within four years, she noted in her chatty 1984 autobiography, "There Really Was a Hollywood."

Actors, and husband and wife TONY CURTIS and JANET LEIGH (Jamie's Parents)

-Circa 1961-

They happened to be her most critically acclaimed films and three that were often included on lists of best all-time movies: Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" with Charlton Heston and Welles in 1958, "Psycho" in 1960 and, in 1962, "The Manchurian Candidate," which was directed by John Frankenheimer and starred Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey.

"Touch of Evil" has been called by film historian Leonard Maltin a "stylistic masterpiece," even though Leigh and Heston agreed with Welles that Universal studio executives, in an effort to court 1950s' mainstream audiences, damaged the picture by re-cutting it.

She preferred the newly restored version of the film that was cut according to Welles' 58-page memo and released on the film's anniversary in 1998.

Perhaps presaging her "Psycho" role, Leigh played the wife of Heston's detective, terrorized by thugs in the Mexican border murder saga.

The Cold War political thriller "The Manchurian Candidate" — remade this year with Denzel Washington in the Sinatra role — was to Leigh a "dynamite film," and critics at the time agreed.

Maltin rates it in his 2004 Movie & Video Guide as a "harrowing presentation of the Richard Condon story." Leigh, who read Condon's novel about the Korean War hero on the way to John F. Kennedy's presidential inauguration, quoted Philip Strick's evaluation in her autobiography: "intelligent, funny, superbly written, beautifully played, and brilliantly directed study of the all-embracing fantasy in everyday social, emotional, and political existence."

But "Psycho," with its fatal shower scene that tantalized viewers' imaginations, was unquestionably the zenith of Leigh's prolific motion pictures.

Leigh, offered the script by Hitchcock, was so convinced the role as embezzling office worker Marion Crane would establish her as a major dramatic actress that she agreed to work for one-quarter of her usual $100,000 fee. The gamble paid off.

Her 45 minutes on screen, ending with her dramatic stabbing death in the shower, earned Leigh a Golden Globe award as well as an Oscar nomination and a slot in Hollywood history. "That scene in 'Psycho' alone established Janet as one of the stars every movie fan in the world will always remember," Paramount producer A.C. Lyles, a longtime friend as well as colleague of Leigh's, said Monday.

Film buffs recall Leigh nude in the Bates Motel shower stall. She actually wore a flesh-colored moleskin bikini.

Fans forever "see" the knife wielded by Anthony Perkins' madman Norman Bates piercing her flesh. In reality, the blade never touched her body, and the slashing sounds were made by plunging a knife into a melon. "In those days, we had the Hays Code, censorship, and we couldn't show what actually happened," Leigh told an audience in Newport Beach when she was promoting her book "Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller" in 1995. "So it all had to be done with cleverness, split-second editing, surprise elements, music — to create the atmosphere of fear.

"By the time 'Psycho' got to the moment of crescendo — the attack — the audience was primed and ready," she said. "They saw what they didn't see. When you have to create something in your own mind, the impression lasts."

To shoot the scene, Leigh spent seven days in the shower on camera while Hitchcock amassed more than 70 takes of two and three seconds each. The work was easy, she said in her book, until the last 20 seconds, when her face had to reflect her realization that her bloody death was imminent.

Once she saw the finished picture, Leigh often said, she abandoned showers for life.

Born Jeannette Helen Morrison in Merced on July 6, 1927, she was studying music and psychology at College of the Pacific in Stockton when fate fit for a Hollywood script intervened.

Former MGM star Norma Shearer saw a photo of the 19-year-old on the desk of her doting father at the ski lodge where he worked. Shearer took the photo to agent Lew Wasserman, who signed her to a contract at MGM — then known for developing actors — for $50 a week.

Louis B. Mayer, impressed with the stunning blond, renamed her Janet Leigh and set about making her a star.

"I don't know of anyone who contributed more to the business than Norma Shearer when she discovered Janet and brought her to MGM," Lyles said Monday.

Leigh made her debut as the ingenue lead in the 1947 "The Romance of Rosy Ridge" opposite Van Johnson, then MGM's top male lead. The next year, she played the future Mrs. Richard Rodgers in "Words and Music," with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. Other sweet, "nice girl" roles followed — most notably as Meg March in the 1949 "Little Women," which also starred Elizabeth Taylor, June Allyson and Margaret O'Brien. Leigh was the pretty "My Sister Eileen" in 1955.

The actress worked prodigiously for more than 20 years — comedies, costume epics, mysteries, suspense and even song and dance — with such leading men of the era as Johnson and Heston, Van Heflin, Ezio Pinza, Robert Mitchum, James Stewart, John Wayne, Dick Van Dyke and Victor Mature.

In the 1950s and early '60s, she made five pictures with Curtis, whom she married in Hollywood fan magazine splendor in 1951: "Houdini," "The Black Shield of Falworth," "The Vikings," "The Perfect Furlough" and "Who Was that Lady?"

The actors' respective studios, MGM and Universal, fretted that their marriage would hurt both Leigh's and Curtis' popularity as Hollywood heartthrobs. Instead, the union only enhanced their following as they were photographed everywhere they went. They became Hollywood's reigning perfect couple.

Leigh moved into television later than many — first appearing on "The Rosemary Clooney Show" in 1956 and making her television movie debut in 1969 with "The Monk" on ABC.

She rarely ventured into live theater but did appear on Broadway in 1975 in "Murder Among Friends" and later on stage in the popular two-person reading, "Love Letters," with former co-star Johnson.

Leigh decreased her acting over the decades, although she appeared in the CBS television movie "In My Sister's Shadow" in 1997 and with daughter Jamie Lee Curtis in the 1998 motion picture "Halloween H20."

Her final film was "A Fate Totally Worse Than Death" in 2000.

In addition to her autobiography and the book about the making of "Psycho," Leigh published two novels, "House of Destiny" in 1995 and "The Dream Factory" in 2002.

The actress married four times. In 1942, at age 14, she eloped to Reno with John K. Carlyle, but that marriage was annulled. She was married to bandleader Stanley Reames in 1946 and divorced in 1948, and to Curtis from 1951 to 1962, when she married Brandt.

In addition to her husband and daughters, Leigh is survived by a grandson and a granddaughter.

From Scenic Views for Yale Daily News - October 1, 2004

CAN YOU SURGE-PROTECT YOUR EMOTIONS?

by Haley Edwards

My computer is my personal assistant, my confidant, my therapist, and my boyfriend, all rolled into one beautiful, malfunctioning excuse of a machine.

I realize that projecting such vital human roles upon a Dell Inspiron 4000 does make me sound a bit like a late-'90s hacker-geek living in her mother's basement. But really, let's be honest with ourselves. How much time do we really spend with our computers every week? Who do we turn to when we're unsure where our next meeting is? To whom do we appeal when something horrible/hilarious/harrowing occurs and cries to be written down? Who calms us and organizes our lives in times of crises? Who is always there on a Saturday night when we stumble home and realize it's just us and our duvet again in an under-crowded bed?

Our computers, that's who. They've supplanted the furrier former version and taken center stage as man's best friends in most of our collective lives. Every last one of us wakes up each day checking our e-mail and falls asleep each night having neatly tucked quality time with our computers into the routine of our nightly ablutions. Every last one of us knows our own computer's idiosyncrasies -- we know how it sounds when it turns on, we know just when it needs to be restarted, and know to put in a CD just so for it to play correctly. Every last one of us spends more time each day staring into the four-sided cycloptic eye of our computer screens than we do hanging out with our roommates. And every last one of us would be devastated if our own "best friend" bit the dust.

With the understanding that such aforementioned dependency upon one's computer is manifestly normal, I'll break the chilling news:

On a dark, unholy night two weeks ago, my little Dell clicked once, flickered a bit, then teetered away toward The Light, holding its heart and gasping like a badly-acted villain from a made-for-TV Western. At the time, I was working on a paper due the next day, and I did the only sane thing I could think of doing: I panicked.

First I prodded at the little guy's power button, checked all its plugs, then waited for 30 seconds on a superstitious whim before trying to turn it on again. Because my knowledge of electronic devices remains staggeringly contemptible in this newly digital age, my next line of offense was to blow in all the orifices of my computer and then try to turn it on again -- a technique I learned from playing Super Mario Brothers on a quirky '91 Nintendo.

After about four minutes, I had exhausted my paltry list of mechanical quick-fixes and decided to appeal to the Computer Assistants for help. Regardless of the fact that it was 3:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, I called every CA I could think of on his or her cell phone.

Waiting for their arrival, I began compiling a mental list of everything in my life that had just vanished into the ether with an insultingly anti-climactic "click." Every last academic paper I've written -- gone. Every shred of correspondence nestled safely in congested Eudora folders -- missing. Every song I've worked so patiently to download while composing odes of flagrant insolence to Metallica -- vanished. Every single picture any one had ever sent me on a Sunday morning beneath the subject line: "do you remember doing this?" -- disappeared. By the time I had finished making my list, I had been reduced to a deplorable state of self pity: I was sitting on my floor, cradling my laptop's cold carcass, and gently stroking the blackened computer screen, repeating with increasingly pitiful fervency, "Don't leave me now --"

Eventually a CA from across the hall saw the proverbial bat-signal and staggered to my room in his pajamas, bleary-eyed and mumbling, having been roused from a semi-erotic dream about Macs taking over the world. He took one look at my computer, poked at my baby with abject indifference, then delivered the excruciating news: My hard-drive had been called home by the gods of expired warranties. About three minutes later, two more CAs showed up and concurred with CA #1, determining as a group that my little computer had saved its last MP3. CA #3 sprinkled some holy water, said a prayer, and took the little guy away to "run some tests."

My desk conspicuously empty, I had nothing to do, and I was feeling desperately, yet irrationally, betrayed. I had been taken for a fool by a computer I had trusted so completely! Without warning, without a friendly pop-up reminder, without so much as having acquired a particularly tenacious virus -- my computer (the mechanical embodiment of my very being!) simply abandoned me! Had I neglected him? Had I not sufficiently catered to his persnickety digital needs? What had I done wrong?

I was at that early stage in a particularly painful break-up where one blames herself for everything. Scenes from mid '90s teen-horror flicks swam to mind; I briefly considered running to the nearest courtyard, falling to my knees, and with clenched fists, beseeching the heavens, "take me instead!!!" Thankfully, I decided that such action was much too Jennifer Love Hewitt for my tastes. And anyway, I was sitting on the floor of my room in an old T-shirt at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday morning weeping over an inanimate object. If that wasn't enough, I had already roused the first infantry of the CA Army from their beds, who, upon arriving on the scene, had discovered me cooing at my lifeless computer. I decided that was pretty much all my ego could take for one night.

It was at that moment of agonizing self reflection that I realized the crucial role such an undependable and un-alive thing had become to me. It was pathetic really. Why had I allowed myself to become so irrationally dependent upon something so -- so -- breakable? So temporary? I chastised myself for my own impertinence and decided I would endure the following week of computer-less purgatory with stoic grace.

Without my computer beside my bed, checking my e-mail became a harrowing lesson on the social politics of computer clusters. Writing a paper became a test of my roommate's patience as I surreptitiously commandeered her computer if she so much as left her desk for a snack. Filling the four to five hours a day usually spent aimlessly perusing the Internet, became a sore realization that I had extra time to do the things habitually left to die without a check-mark at the very end of my to-do list.

As I conclude this account, I'd really like to leave you with a positive moral. I'd like to tell you, for example, that I've discovered the errors of my ways, reduced the level of dependency I have on my computer, and stepped out into a new world, ready to embrace the possibility of meaningful interactions with real live people. Yet, alas, this is not a happy tale I tell today. The moment my little computer was returned to me, I settled happily into the routines of my former life. I began writing new e-mails, saving new papers, and downloading new pieces of virtual crap, the loss of which will most likely devastate me the next time my computer staggers toward The Light.

Haley Edwards still would rather sleep with her computer than her editor.