I don’t care about gossip but do you know any strange or quirky celebrity trivia? Odd coincidences, weird factoids, oddball occurrences? I’ll give two. The first one because I just heard it during an interview on The Nerdist podcast. The second because I was introducing my daughter to Star Wars in anticipation of the new movie coming this year.
Prolific character actor Stephen Tobolowsky was one of the credited writers on David Byrne’s movie True Stories. Stephen believes that he is psychic. If he is in the way he describes he should march up to James Randi and demand the prize money. But that isn’t important to the story. What is important is he told David Byrne about his ability. Byrne found it so interesting that he wrote a song about it. That song was “Radio Head” which appeared on the Talking Heads album for the movie. The band Radiohead took their name from the song. So the band Radiohead is named after Stephen Tobolowsky.
This one probably isn’t that obscure to Star Wars fans. Denis Lawson played the minor character of Wedge in the first three filmed Star Wars movies. I know him more for his more prominent role in the movie Local Hero especially since he is wearing a flight helmet and speaking with an American accent in Star Wars. His sister has a son who happens to be Ewan McGregor. So Wedge Antilles is the uncle of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Cazale was dying from cancer and was fired from the Deer hunter but Streep said if you fire him, then I quit so he stayed in the film. She was not a big name when that movie came out.
Keith Morrison, the delightfully ghoulish reporter most well-known from Dateline, married Suzanne Perry in 1981, which makes him Matthew Perry’s stepfather.
Sigourney Weaver’s uncle is Winstead Sheffield Glenndenning Dixon (known professionally as “Doodles”) Weaver, an actor and vocalist with Spike Jones and His City Slickers.
The rebel general on Hoth at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back is played by Bruce Boa. I recognize him as the demanding American guest who arrives late and bribes Basil to keep the kitchen open in the “Waldorf Salad” episode of Fawlty Towers. He also plays military roles in Full Metal Jacket (“Son, all I’ve ever asked of my marines is that they obey my orders as they would the word of God.”) and Octopussy.
The two most famous American newspaper advice columnists from the mid-1950’s to the early 2000’s were identical twin sisters:
After his death, left-over footage from the first two Godfather films with John Cazale was used in The Godfather Part III, which also was nominated for Best Picture.
Somewhat more obscure is the fact that there are actually two Wedges. The one in the cockpit during the Death Star battle, and who appears in Empire and Jedi, is indeed Ewan McGregor’s uncle, Denis Lawson.
The one who’s sitting next to Luke in the pre-battle briefing, complaining that hitting a two-meter target is impossible, even for a computer (giving Luke the chance to brag about all those womp-rats he used to bull’s-eye), is Colin Higgins. He apparently was the first choice for the role of Wedge, but didn’t have his lines memorized and so was fired after one day of shooting. Second-choice Lawson was brought in, and the rest is motion picture history.
Fawlty Towers was filmed in 75 and 79. The stars John Cleese and Connie Booth were married but got divorced in 78 but still worked together in 79. Booth played the maid Polly.
Booth left acting to become a therapist and for many years refused to talk about her work as an actress. She finally did an interview on acting a few years back. And she’s American not British.
The UK group Scaffold had a couple of minor UK hits in the early 60s, most notably “Lily the Pink” and “Thank U Very Much.” One of the members of the group, Roger McGough, was a respected poet; his lyrics to “Goodbat Nightman” are in the Oxford Anthology of Modern English Verse.
A second member of the group was Mike McGear – Paul McCartney’s younger brother.
He aslo appears in “Gandhi” as the jeep driver who takes Candice Bergen to see Mahatma. However all his dialogue was overdubbed by another actor!
Actor Jon Pertwee - famous as the third Doctor in “Doctor Who” was a genuine secret agent man for Britain during WWII, reported to Winston Churchill himself.
