Word: starlet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...boned face. She speaks of the album's inspiration in a voice whose honeyed drawl seems to have all the Old South in it. "I met Billy Strayhorn in 1942," she says, "in Los Angeles at an Ellington show called Jump for Joy. I was MGM's token black starlet, getting no parts, and a divorced mother of two. Billy was homosexual, but I fell in love. He was the thoughtful side of Ellington, and he saw how lonely I was in Hollywood. I'd never wanted to be in show business; I'd wanted to be a schoolteacher...
...different. It sounds so mellifluous, so venerable, so upper-crust American. In the early 1960s, a pretty junior high classmate of mine served as a harbinger of the future by answering to Tiffany. Her we-should-have-seen-i t-coming destiny: a brief career as a braless starlet on a now forgotten TV sitcom...
...certainty we will not find it without." Celebration, not cerebration, was his thing: even in old age he was young enough to set about listing all the books & he'd ever enjoyed, to fill his pages with reminiscences of his friends, to dash off 1,500 letters to a starlet named Brenda Venus (with whom, just before his death, he enjoyed an unlikely but passionate friendship). And even when inspiration failed him, Miller simply kept writing and writing till he broke into epiphany. No one who ever wrote so badly wrote so well...
...image of the Reagans' wholesome, all-American marriage takes a thorough beating. Before marrying Nancy, Kelley claims, Reagan was one of Hollywood's busiest woman chasers; one former starlet even claims Reagan forced himself on her one night in her apartment. "They call it date rape today," the actress is quoted as saying. When Reagan married Nancy in 1952, it was only after his proposal to another actress, Christine Larson, had been rejected. On the day Nancy was in the hospital giving birth to daughter Patti, Kelley says, Reagan was at Christine's, sobbing that his life was ruined...
...keep marrying and separating, that redeems the picture. The film is so quick and busy that most of the time one forgets they are essentially no-accounts, not entirely bright or likable. Indeed, Simon's admission that they are based on historical models -- shoe magnate Harry Karl and starlet Marie ("the Body") McDonald, whose misadventures in multiple marriage titillated tabloid readers four decades ago -- renders the jolliness of his writing, and Rees' direction, all the more astonishing. They were, perhaps, a very odd couple, but not necessarily a fun couple...