Mary Steenburgen was formerly married to Malcolm McDowell. They met on the set of Time After Time.
Actor Malcolm McDowell has two notable connections to the Star Trek franchise. He played Torian Solan, a villainous scientist who was responsible for the death of Captain James Kirk in the 1994 film Star Trek Generations. McDowell is also the uncle of actor Alexander Siddig, who played Dr. Julian Bashir on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
Frankie Muniz, best known for playing Malcolm “Nolastname” on Malcolm in the Middle, played a murderer in an episode of Criminal Minds, the twist being that he was in a psychotic break and tracking down the gang bangers who forced him to watch as they raped and killed his pregnant girlfriend and then knifed him. He would then slice and dice them, killing them all. As Agent Prentice remarked at the end. “It’s confusing. It’s the first case I’ve seen where the unsub wasn’t the back guy.”
Frankie Valli, lead singer of The Four Seasons, was born in 1934 in Newark, New Jersey. He was inspired to take up a singing career at the age of seven after his mother took him to see the young Frank Sinatra in New York City. However, until he could support himself with music, Valli worked as a barber.
I didn’t know that. Good trivia!
Did you mebbe misspell something? Please explain.
In play:
The character Johnny Favorite, a popular crooner during World War II in the Mickey Rourke horror movie Angel Heart, is loosely based on Frank Sinatra.
Lounge singer Al Martino played Johnny Fontane, also based on Frank Sinatra, in The Godfather.
Frank Sinatra was so angry about the apparent similarities between him and Johnny Fontane that he berated author Mario Puzo in a Los Angeles restaurant. A mutual friend tried to introduce them but Sinatra said “I don’t want to meet him” and verbally abused Puzo instead.
*“I remember that, contrary to his reputation, he did not use foul language at all. The worst thing he called me was a pimp, which rather flattered me since I’ve never been able to get girlfriend to squeeze blackheads out of my back, much less hustle for me,” Puzo wrote in '72.
While letting him have it, Sinatra also told Puzo “that if it wasn’t that I was so much older than he, he would beat the hell out of me.”*
The unsub wasn’t the BAD guy.
In play: When Jacqueline Susann met her long time infatuation Dean Martin, he was so absorbed in reading a comic book that he barely responded to her. She got her revenge by using the incident as the basis for the mentally challenged actor Tony Polar in Valley of the Dolls
“Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”, despite the title, was not a sequel to “Valley of the Dolls”. This piece of dreck was co-written by Roger Ebert.
When Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert were hired a few years later to work on an ill-fated Sex Pistols movie called “Who Killed Bambi?” they were both a little nonplussed to hear Johnny Rotten explain that he liked “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” because it was so true to life.
Tura Satana played the lead in Russ Meyer’s film of women’s empowerment, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. The plot has been called a “loose remake of The Desperate Hours, or possibly The Virgin Spring” by one prominent film critic and a “pop-art setting of Aeschylus’s Eumenides” by one classical scholar.
Rachel Carson was the author of the 1962 book Silent Spring, which was one of the first publications to document the adverse environmental effects caused by the use of pesticides. This, of course, led to much criticism by those in the chemical industry and their supporters. Ezra Taft Benson, former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, wrote a letter to former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in which he reportedly concluded that because she was unmarried despite being physically attractive, she was “probably a Communist.”
Woody Allen starred in “The Front”, one of the few movies he didn’t write or direct. The movie is about the communist scare of the 50s, and Woody stars as a front, the public persona of blacklisted writers using his name.
“The Front Page,” a comedic play about newspaper reporters on the police beat, who are covering an execution, was written by two Chicago reporters, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.
The play, which was first produced in 1928, has been revived a number of times, and has also seen adaptions for TV, radio, and film. The film adaptations include “His Girl Friday” (in which the character of Hildy is female), and “Switching Channels” (in which the reporters are modern-day television reporters).
Mary Higgins Clark has written several stories about a husband-and-wife sleuthing team, Henry Parker Britland IV, the 44-year-old former president of the U.S., and his recent bride, plucky congresswoman Sandra (""Sunday’’) O’Brien Britland. Four of them have been published in a collection called My Gal Sunday.
Nick and Nora Charles (and their dog Asta) are the husband-wife detectives in Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man. In the film series, they were played by William Powell and Myrna Loy. The thin man was actually the victim in the novel, not Nick Charles.
Nick and Nora were parodied as Dick and Dora Charleston in the movie, Murder by Death. Other parodied sleuths included Sam Diamond and Jessica Marbles.
Russia is the world’s largest diamond-producing country. Second on the list is Botswana, followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo, Australia, and Canada.
The only active diamond mine in the United States is the Crater of Diamonds Mine near Murfreesboro, Pike County, Arkansas.
Jack Diamond, the infamous mobster supposedly got his moniker ‘Legs’ by being able to escape from his enemies (or maybe from his dancing skills).
In the end, his legs didn’t help him run faster then the bullets speeding toward his skull. His murderer remains unknown although speculation abounds.
Jack Kennedy liked clam chowder and very cold milk, but disliked ice water. When he praised Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, their sales jumped in the U.S. Kennedy rarely watched a movie through to the end.