It’s unfortunate that Greta Garbo’s apartment—the place she famously tried to keep clear of publicity, looking much the same as when she lived there—has just sold for $8.5 million, because it is my ideal living space and I would like to move in tomorrow, thanks.
In early 1937, director Gregory La Cava sent an assistant named Winfrid Thackrey to embed herself in a home for aspiring actresses, the Hollywood Studio Club, to gather material for a movie about theater life. He told Thackrey:
We are currently being inundated with stories of sexual harassment and assault from the entertainment industry, and part of the reason there are so many is that this has been going on forever. For instance, in 1945, Maureen O’Hara spoke out about being harassed on set.
If you spend a lot of time roaming the vintage fashion/Old Hollywood corners of the internet, you may have noticed something funny: a weird number of seasonal publicity shots of actresses. Who put these women in these corny Halloween setups?
It’s the week before Halloween, and yet it still doesn’t feel like fall. Let’s spend the week catapulting ourselves into the spooky mood by watching holiday-adjacent old movies. I’m sorry, but we’ve all seen Hocus Pocus too damn many times.
The writers of Feud: Bette and Joan are working on a movie about the life of Vivien Leigh, star of A Streetcar Named Desire and Gone With the Wind. Better watch out for Olivia de Havilland this time!
As sexual harassment and assault accusations mount against Harvey Weinsten, the old trope of the casting couch—a tidy way of referring to female actors sleeping with powerful producers to get better roles—has been once again brought into focus. But is the phrase itself merely a cute rephrasing of the abuse women…
“I’m angry, not just at him and the conspiracy of silence around his actions, but also that the ‘casting couch’ phenomenon, so to speak, is still a reality in our business and in the world,” said Glenn Close in response to the flood of accusations against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Olivia de Havilland is not done feuding with FX over her portrayal by Catherine Zeta-Jones in Ryan Murphy’s Feud.
The Venn Diagram mapping people of considerable wealth and people enamored with Audrey Hepburn surely has at least some overlap. And if you are one of those who falls in the middle, take note: now you can purchase a variety of the actress’s personal belongings.
As you might imagine from a pair of women who were each Hollywood legends in their own right, Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher collected quite a lot of memorabilia over the decades. It’s now being auctioned off, with part of the proceeds going to charity.
One of the people taking over for the TCM hosting duties of dearly departed, widely beloved host Robert Osborne will be Alec Baldwin. I guess it would have been hard to find anybody with Osborne’s ability to project amiability even if you were tuning in at 3 a.m. due to insomnia.
Please be informed that Doris Day’s long-form birth certificate has been unearthed and she is 95, not 93. Said Day in a statement, “I’ve always said that age is just a number and I have never paid much attention to birthdays, but it’s great to finally know how old I really am!” Decades since her Hollywood glory days…
Robert Osborne—longtime Turner Classic Movies host, having been with the channel from its 1994 beginning, and a beloved mainstay who singlehandedly made cable worthwhile—has died at 84.
In her new memoir, Tippi Hedren reportedly goes into greater detail than ever before about her awful experiences working with Alfred Hitchcock—including accusing the director of what today would be described as sexual assault.
On this day in history, Marilyn Monroe filmed her iconic subway-grate sequence from The Seven Year Itch, inspiring decades’ worth of imitators and God alone knows how many weirdos.
Mae West was born on this day, in Brooklyn, in 1893. This is a great excuse to take yourself out somewhere saucy, throw a fur stole across your shoulder—faux is fine—and raise a glass of champagne.
Warner Bros has just green lit a long-percolating remake of A Star Is Born, directed by Bradley Cooper, who also plans to star with Lady Gaga. Expect to see some A C T I N G in this picture.
Gloria DeHaven, an MGM player who appeared in several of the studio’s midcentury musicals alongside stars including Fred Astaire, has died at 91. Her bio and long list of screen credits suggest she was a real trooper or, as one obit puts it, “a stalwart of show business.”
Olivia de Havilland, legendary star of classics like Gone With the Wind and (my personal favorite) Lady In a Cage, was born on this day in 1916. The newly minted centenarian has called three continents her home (she was born in Japan), lived through two world wars, had two husbands, and won two Oscars.
