Oh, and as long as I am on the Golden Girls, here is an interesting couple of tidbits from Wikipedia:
“Estelle Getty played Dorothy’s mother (although Getty is actually two months younger than Arthur so was heavily made up to seem much older). In the early days of casting, McClanahan auditioned for the role of Rose, while White auditioned for the role of Blanche, only to switch roles before the pilot. All the lead actresses won Emmy Awards for their performances on the show. The Golden Girls, along with All In The Family and Will & Grace, are the only shows where all the principal actors have won Emmy Awards.”
The actor James Woods has an IQ between 180-190, placing him in the 1 in a billion category. He was going to become an eye doctor but an injury to his hand prevented him from going to medical school because he couldn’t perform surgery.
Before the 9/11 hijackings James Woods and 4 of the 9/11 hijackers were the only passengers in a first class cabin in a transnational flight. Woods noticed they were ‘acting like hijackers’ and tried to report this fact, but nobody really listened to him.
One of the practice flights may have occurred in August. Actor James Woods was so shaken by a flight he took from Boston to Los Angeles about a month before the attacks that he told an attendant and authorities of his suspicions when he landed. Woods was in first-class and the only other passengers in the section were four men who appeared to be Middle Eastern in origin.
During the entire six-hour flight, Woods noticed the men neither ate nor drank. They talked to each other in whispers and did not read or sleep. On Sept. 12, Woods called the FBI to tell investigators about his experience. He was interviewed by agents on Sept. 13. Woods’s spokesman told Reuters the actor thought it ‘‘prudent not to comment on this and let the FBI continue to do their job, which they seem to be doing superbly right now.’’
I don’t know if it’s still true or not, but William Shatner suffers from tinnitus (sp?), a persistent ringing in the ear from an explosion on the set of Star Trek.
The reason Kirstie Alley never appeared on Fraser is because she is a devote Scientologist and disapproves of the main character, a psychiatrist.
Ben Affleck was the 2004 State of California poker champion, winning over $350,000. At the final table, he beat professional Stan Goldstein in heads-up play to win it.
Bill Murray played Peter Venckman in the “Ghostbusters” films. When they made it a cartoon, the character was voiced by Lorenzo Music. Music also voiced the cartoon voice of Garfield. When they made Garfield a movie, Music’s voice was replaced by… Bill Murray.
He also had a live-in relationship with Loni Anderson from early in the series through the first couple of seasons. Their break-up was by all accounts a really nasty one that made the set a difficult place. Loni later claimed he was abusive due to jealousy of her popularity; he refuses to comment on his private life. (He’s now married, living in NYC and the father of teenaged daughters, while Richard “Les Nessman” Sanders lives in Seattle with teenaged daughters who are good friends to Sandy’s [source: Where are they Now? segment on ET.)
The actor George Hearn (big star on B’way, a “there’s what’s his name” character actor on film, once disastrously married to Dixie Carter) told a story on one talk show about an old man named Alex he used to talk who had a thick foreign accent and occupied a bench in Central Park. On days when he was blue and thinking of leaving NYC and show business he said he always bucked her up by telling stories about his own life and how he’d persevered and tales of his grandkids, etc… When Hearn was cast in 1776 he wasn’t sure whether to take the part (Dickinson) and said Alex went into a fife & drum sermon on how he had to take this part, this was the story of America and people needed to know what a great land they lived in, etc…
He assumed the old man left when the Communists took over and he was right, but with a difference: he ruled Russia before Lenin’s takeover (he was Alexander Kerensky.
Speaking of married to Dixie Carter, Hal Holbrook (who may have played the first sympathetically portrayed homosexual main character on TV in a 1972 movie) is only one degree of separation from his character Mark Twain. As a young man in the 50s developing his one man show, Holbrook listened to the few scratchy recordings of Twain’s voice and then sought out everyone who would talk to him who could remember Twain: Twain’s secretaries (who HATED his surviving daughter), Twain’s daughter Clara (who HATED his surviving secretaries), surviving servants, etc., all so that he could get every detail possible on Twain’s speech, mannerisms, hand gestures, etc… He has many hours of Twain material memorized so that his show is never the same twice and because of his research with Twain’s survivors is considered to be as accurate as we’ll ever see, with one exception:
Twain only gave one known speech in his life while wearing a white suit, and ths speech was about the color white. He usually dressed in anything from gray to black to plum depending on his mood. Holbrook knew this but loved the photos of Holbrook in white, plus it really really worked on stage- it’s the only really ahistorical thing about his act. Some while ago there were lawsuits between him and another Twain impersonator (obviously Holbrook doesn’t have exclusive rights to the character and the work is public domain) and the outcome was that Holbrook alone has the right to impersonate Twain in a white suit because it is uniquely his take on the character.
Dan Aykroyd has webbed toes (2 webs between 3 consecutive toes).
Cousins:
Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggert
Jules Feiffer and Roy Cohn
Maryam d’Abo and Olivia d’Abo
George Clooney and Miguel Ferrer
Nicholas Cage and Sofia Coppolla
Actually, the story I’ve heard in this regard is that Holbrook, on his own research, proved that the commonly-circulating recording of Twain’s voice (reading part of “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”) was actually a recording of the legendary stage actor (and Twain neighbor and friend) William Gillette, made during an lecture at Yale in 1934.
