The decades-long history of the Oscars is filled with numerous records. And the acclaimed Hollywood star Cate Blanchett has also earned a place in the history of the prestigious awards with her remarkable performance in the 2004 crime drama The Aviator. Starring alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, she took on the role of Katharine Hepburn, a four-time Best Actress Oscar winner, who graced the silver screen for over six decades.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett in The Aviator
Based on Charles Higham’s 1993 Howard Hughes: The Secret Life, the film follows Howard Hughes, a pioneering aviator, and film producer, showcasing his rise to success, struggles with mental health, and passionate pursuits in aviation and filmmaking during the golden age of Hollywood.
Cate Blanchett’s Singular Achievement at the Oscars
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett, Martin Scorsese’s 2004 film The Aviator received critical acclaim and numerous accolades. It received 11 nominations at the 77th Academy Awards,...
Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett in The Aviator
Based on Charles Higham’s 1993 Howard Hughes: The Secret Life, the film follows Howard Hughes, a pioneering aviator, and film producer, showcasing his rise to success, struggles with mental health, and passionate pursuits in aviation and filmmaking during the golden age of Hollywood.
Cate Blanchett’s Singular Achievement at the Oscars
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett, Martin Scorsese’s 2004 film The Aviator received critical acclaim and numerous accolades. It received 11 nominations at the 77th Academy Awards,...
- 3/10/2024
- by Laxmi Rajput
- FandomWire
If Everything Everywhere All at Once‘s Michelle Yeoh wins the best actress Oscar on March 12, she will become the first Asian to do so. But she’s not the first to be nominated: Merle Oberon preceded Yeoh 87 years ago — though no one knew it at the time.
The star of 1935’s The Dark Angel, for which she was nominated, kept her Indian heritage hidden her entire life. Born in Bombay to a Sri Lankan-Maori mother and white father, Oberon grew up in poverty in Calcutta. When she was 17, she moved to England to pursue acting; fearing backlash from a racist entertainment industry, she claimed she was born in Tasmania and that her birth certificate was lost in a fire.
She broke out playing Anne Boleyn in director Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933, which led to her being cast in Sidney Franklin’s World War I drama The Dark Angel,...
The star of 1935’s The Dark Angel, for which she was nominated, kept her Indian heritage hidden her entire life. Born in Bombay to a Sri Lankan-Maori mother and white father, Oberon grew up in poverty in Calcutta. When she was 17, she moved to England to pursue acting; fearing backlash from a racist entertainment industry, she claimed she was born in Tasmania and that her birth certificate was lost in a fire.
She broke out playing Anne Boleyn in director Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933, which led to her being cast in Sidney Franklin’s World War I drama The Dark Angel,...
- 3/12/2023
- by Hilton Dresden
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
When Katharine Hepburn made her final big-screen appearance in Warren Beatty's 1994 romantic drama, "Love Affair," it marked the first time in her 62-year film career that she played a supporting role (aside from a cameo in 1943's "Stage Door Canteen") -- and this is all the more amazing when you consider how much she struggled at various junctures to maintain her leading lady status.
Hepburn's options were plentiful at birth. The Connecticut-born daughter of a wealthy urologist and a suffragette campaigner, Hepburn was raised in a permissive environment where societal limitations existed to be disregarded. She cut her hair short, excelled at sports like tennis and golf, wore pants, and smoked cigarettes. She pursued social justice causes at an early age, and received a liberal arts education at Bryn Mawr College (graduating with decidedly unladylike degrees in history and philosophy).
There was nothing performative about Hepburn's interests. She was appreciative of her good fortune,...
Hepburn's options were plentiful at birth. The Connecticut-born daughter of a wealthy urologist and a suffragette campaigner, Hepburn was raised in a permissive environment where societal limitations existed to be disregarded. She cut her hair short, excelled at sports like tennis and golf, wore pants, and smoked cigarettes. She pursued social justice causes at an early age, and received a liberal arts education at Bryn Mawr College (graduating with decidedly unladylike degrees in history and philosophy).
There was nothing performative about Hepburn's interests. She was appreciative of her good fortune,...
- 3/11/2023
- by Jeremy Smith
- Slash Film
The Queen may be Great Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, but there’s another woman who forever changed the country’s monarchy: Wallis Simpson.
The American-born Duchess of Windsor, who died this week in 1986, is the reason Queen Elizabeth eventually took the throne. As any fan of The Crown could tell you, Simpson’s eventual husband, King Edward VIII, gave up the throne after less than a year because his family (and parliament) wouldn’t accept Simpson, the woman he loved (and a two-time divorcée) as Queen.
Edward’s abdication (after which he was known as the Duke of Windsor) put his brother,...
The American-born Duchess of Windsor, who died this week in 1986, is the reason Queen Elizabeth eventually took the throne. As any fan of The Crown could tell you, Simpson’s eventual husband, King Edward VIII, gave up the throne after less than a year because his family (and parliament) wouldn’t accept Simpson, the woman he loved (and a two-time divorcée) as Queen.
Edward’s abdication (after which he was known as the Duke of Windsor) put his brother,...
- 4/27/2017
- by Diana Pearl
- PEOPLE.com
Part I.
In 1963, Film Quarterly published an essay entitled “Circles and Squares.” It addressed the French auteur theory, introduced to America by The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris. Auteurism holds that a film’s primary creator is its director; Sarris’s “Notes on the Auteur Theory” further distinguished auteurs as filmmakers with distinct, recurring styles. Challenging him was a California-based writer named Pauline Kael.
Kael attacked Sarris’s obsession with trivial links between filmmaker’s movies, whether repeated shots or thematic preoccupations. This led critics to overpraise directors’ lesser films, as when Jacques Rivette declared Howard Hawks’ Monkey Business a masterpiece. “It is an insult to an artist to praise his bad work along with his good; it indicates that you are incapable of judging either,” Kael wrote.
She criticized auteurist preoccupation with Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, claiming critics “work embarrassingly hard trying to give some semblance of intellectual respectability to mindless,...
In 1963, Film Quarterly published an essay entitled “Circles and Squares.” It addressed the French auteur theory, introduced to America by The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris. Auteurism holds that a film’s primary creator is its director; Sarris’s “Notes on the Auteur Theory” further distinguished auteurs as filmmakers with distinct, recurring styles. Challenging him was a California-based writer named Pauline Kael.
Kael attacked Sarris’s obsession with trivial links between filmmaker’s movies, whether repeated shots or thematic preoccupations. This led critics to overpraise directors’ lesser films, as when Jacques Rivette declared Howard Hawks’ Monkey Business a masterpiece. “It is an insult to an artist to praise his bad work along with his good; it indicates that you are incapable of judging either,” Kael wrote.
She criticized auteurist preoccupation with Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, claiming critics “work embarrassingly hard trying to give some semblance of intellectual respectability to mindless,...
- 5/10/2015
- by Christopher Saunders
- SoundOnSight
dashingstock / Shutterstock.com
Forget for a moment everything you’ve heard about Hollywood being a shark tank where new is best and you can can never be too rich or too greedy, pay no attention to Marilyn Monroe’s remark that she received a thousand dollars for a screen kiss and fifty cents for her soul, and look at the Hollywood sign.
Those nine letters, 45 feet tall and constructed from sheet metal, tell you everything you need to know about the town they overlook. Restored in 1978 at a cost of $250,000, the metal expands in the California sun, the sound carrying through the hills. That’s Hollywood to a tee – expensive and noisy.
Described by Charles Higham as “a clump of shacks at the end of a poisoned rainbow”, Hollywood is less a mass-market fantasy factory than a soulless machine whose operators have one goal: making money. “The pursuit of making...
Forget for a moment everything you’ve heard about Hollywood being a shark tank where new is best and you can can never be too rich or too greedy, pay no attention to Marilyn Monroe’s remark that she received a thousand dollars for a screen kiss and fifty cents for her soul, and look at the Hollywood sign.
Those nine letters, 45 feet tall and constructed from sheet metal, tell you everything you need to know about the town they overlook. Restored in 1978 at a cost of $250,000, the metal expands in the California sun, the sound carrying through the hills. That’s Hollywood to a tee – expensive and noisy.
Described by Charles Higham as “a clump of shacks at the end of a poisoned rainbow”, Hollywood is less a mass-market fantasy factory than a soulless machine whose operators have one goal: making money. “The pursuit of making...
- 4/16/2015
- by Ian Watson
- Obsessed with Film
The history of Tinseltown is littered with allegations of espionage, as the revelations about the successful producer have reminded us. Welcome to the world of 'thespionage'
The history of Hollywood is littered with spies. So it should come as no surprise that the producer Arnon Milchan began his working life as an Israeli secret agent and arms dealer. The billionaire behind Fight Club, Pretty Woman and Heat confirmed rumours of his shady past in an interview broadcast on Israeli television on Monday. At one point, we learned, he ran 30 companies worldwide on behalf of the Israeli government.
He joins a long line of Hollywood power-brokers who have dabbled in the spying game. In the early 1950s, the head of foreign and domestic censorship at Paramount was a CIA employee named Luigi Luraschi. Among Luraschi's many covert triumphs was the insertion of "well-dressed" respectable "negroes" into Us movies, to undermine Soviet...
The history of Hollywood is littered with spies. So it should come as no surprise that the producer Arnon Milchan began his working life as an Israeli secret agent and arms dealer. The billionaire behind Fight Club, Pretty Woman and Heat confirmed rumours of his shady past in an interview broadcast on Israeli television on Monday. At one point, we learned, he ran 30 companies worldwide on behalf of the Israeli government.
He joins a long line of Hollywood power-brokers who have dabbled in the spying game. In the early 1950s, the head of foreign and domestic censorship at Paramount was a CIA employee named Luigi Luraschi. Among Luraschi's many covert triumphs was the insertion of "well-dressed" respectable "negroes" into Us movies, to undermine Soviet...
- 11/28/2013
- by Tom Meltzer
- The Guardian - Film News
Like Night of the Hunter, Tod Browning’s Freaks or Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers, The Road to Yesterday can be ranked among the UFOs of cinema. It’s place in the heart of Cecil B. DeMille’s work proves to be in itself very distinctive. We know that, during his entire life, DeMille had virtually only one producer—Paramount (the former Famous Players Lasky)—just like Minnelli was MGM’s man and Corman American International’s. Sixty-three of his films (out of seventy) were produced at Paramount. And, oddly enough, it is among the seven outsiders, situated within a brief period from 1925 to 1931, that his best activity is to be found (I’m thinking of Madam Satan, The Godless Girl, and The Road to Yesterday)–his most audacious undertakings. To top it off, for this uncontested king of the box office, his best films were his biggest commercial failures.
- 3/18/2013
- by Luc Moullet
- MUBI
Charles Higham, the prolific author of best-selling and sometimes controversial biographies of film stars and political figures, died April 21 at his home in Los Angeles of an apparent heart attack. He was 81 and had broken his hip in a fall. Photos: Hollywood's Notable Deaths of 2012 Among Higham’s most notable books were Kate: The Life of Katharine Hepburn, his first best-seller, in 1975, and The Duchess of Windsor (1988). Certainly his most controversial was Errol Flynn: The Untold Story (1980), in which the author offered evidence that the actor had worked as a Nazi spy, stirring
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- 5/3/2012
- by Todd McCarthy
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Many may not know that director, Chris Nolan, had a biopic film on Howard Hughes in development the same time as Martin Scorcese. When The Aviator beat him to the punch, he decided to shelve his project for a later date. New details have emerged now that he wants to direct a biopic on Howard Hughes soon after he wraps the final chapter of his Batman trilogy.
Nolan originally scrapped his plans for this biopic after Scorsese beat him to the punch with the 2004 movie The Aviator. That film was based off the biography “Howard Hughes: The Secret Life,” written by Charles Higham, Nolan’s project was to be based off a different book titled “Citizen Hughes: The Power, The Money and the Madness” by Michael Drosnin.
This book differs in a few areas than the Aviator‘s source material, as it delves mainly into Howard Hughes’ later years,...
Nolan originally scrapped his plans for this biopic after Scorsese beat him to the punch with the 2004 movie The Aviator. That film was based off the biography “Howard Hughes: The Secret Life,” written by Charles Higham, Nolan’s project was to be based off a different book titled “Citizen Hughes: The Power, The Money and the Madness” by Michael Drosnin.
This book differs in a few areas than the Aviator‘s source material, as it delves mainly into Howard Hughes’ later years,...
- 2/14/2011
- by Kevin Coll
- FusedFilm
Speaking of Christopher Nolan, what exactly will he do with himself once he wraps the third (and final) “Batman” movie? The blokes at Vulture thinks they know the answer to that: Nolan wants to re-visit his Howard Hughes bio pic, which he shelved back in 2004 when Martin Scorsese beat him to it with “The Aviator” starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Says the site named after a bird that picks on the carcasses of dead things: But while Scorsese’s film is understood to have been heavily based on Charles Higham’s biography Howard Hughes: The Secret Life and centered largely on the early years of Hughes’ life up to 1947, we hear Nolan’s movie is based on Michael Drosnin’s Citizen Hughes: The Power, the Money and the Madness (first published in 1985), and would focus on the freakier decades of Hughes remarkably secretive and Ocd-addled life. The plan, Vulture is told,...
- 2/14/2011
- by Nix
- Beyond Hollywood
And it looks like Chris Nolan’s obsession with making films about obsession is to continue…
Almost a decade ago, just after he announced himself on the Hollywood stage with his experimental thriller Memento, Chris Nolan had eyed a biopic of the complex & fascinating 20th century figure of Howard Hughes as a dramatic follow-up. Unfortunately for the Brit director, he wasn’t the only one who saw Hughes’ life as being ripe for a cinematic translation – the other was the legendary Martin Scorsese – and a pre-production rat race ensued between the two men over who would get their project off the ground first.
Scorsese’s version was to star his Gangs of New York actor Leonardo DiCaprio and would focus heavily on the early years of Hughes’ tumultuous life and finish with his public battle with Congress over the infamous Spruce Goose, foreshadowing a troubled future for it’s protagonist.
Almost a decade ago, just after he announced himself on the Hollywood stage with his experimental thriller Memento, Chris Nolan had eyed a biopic of the complex & fascinating 20th century figure of Howard Hughes as a dramatic follow-up. Unfortunately for the Brit director, he wasn’t the only one who saw Hughes’ life as being ripe for a cinematic translation – the other was the legendary Martin Scorsese – and a pre-production rat race ensued between the two men over who would get their project off the ground first.
Scorsese’s version was to star his Gangs of New York actor Leonardo DiCaprio and would focus heavily on the early years of Hughes’ tumultuous life and finish with his public battle with Congress over the infamous Spruce Goose, foreshadowing a troubled future for it’s protagonist.
- 2/12/2011
- by Matt Holmes
- Obsessed with Film
Christopher Nolan is planning on going from one billionaire (Bruce Wayne) to another (Howard Hughes).
Nolan is already looking forward to life after Batman (and who can blame him? It must be a drag making these big awesome comic book movies that make you filthy rich). The final installment in his trilogy, “The Dark Knight Rises,” will keep him busy at least through its release in July 2012… but Nolan is already thinking beyond that.
So where will the “Memento” mastermind go once Bruce Wayne has hung up his cape and cowl? According to Vulture, he’ll be venturing into the mind of another eccentric and very rich man: Howard Hughes.
Nolan had plans for a Hughes biopic several years ago but abandoned the idea once it was certain that Martin Scorsese was going to beat him to the punch with “The Aviator,” which starred Nolan’s “Inception” hero, Leonardo DiCaprio,...
Nolan is already looking forward to life after Batman (and who can blame him? It must be a drag making these big awesome comic book movies that make you filthy rich). The final installment in his trilogy, “The Dark Knight Rises,” will keep him busy at least through its release in July 2012… but Nolan is already thinking beyond that.
So where will the “Memento” mastermind go once Bruce Wayne has hung up his cape and cowl? According to Vulture, he’ll be venturing into the mind of another eccentric and very rich man: Howard Hughes.
Nolan had plans for a Hughes biopic several years ago but abandoned the idea once it was certain that Martin Scorsese was going to beat him to the punch with “The Aviator,” which starred Nolan’s “Inception” hero, Leonardo DiCaprio,...
- 2/12/2011
- by Bryan Enk
- NextMovie
After Batman Begins he did The Prestige. After The Dark Knight he did Inception. You may wonder what Christopher Nolan will do after his final film in the Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises. Vulture has our first hint, as they exclusively report Nolan is interested in dusting off a long-shelved Howard Hughes biopic.
With Martin Scorsese already making his Hughes biopic The Aviator, how will this differ? They report it will be based on Michael Drosnin’s 1985 novel Citizen Hughes: The Power, the Money and the Madness, which used “over three thousand pages of Hughes’s own handwritten memoranda.” Scorsese’s film was “heavily based” on Charles Higham’s biography Howard Hughes: The Secret Life, which looked at Hughes’ earlier years. Nolan’s project would focus on when he went crazy with Ocd and secrecy. If you want a more in-depth look at what we may see, check...
With Martin Scorsese already making his Hughes biopic The Aviator, how will this differ? They report it will be based on Michael Drosnin’s 1985 novel Citizen Hughes: The Power, the Money and the Madness, which used “over three thousand pages of Hughes’s own handwritten memoranda.” Scorsese’s film was “heavily based” on Charles Higham’s biography Howard Hughes: The Secret Life, which looked at Hughes’ earlier years. Nolan’s project would focus on when he went crazy with Ocd and secrecy. If you want a more in-depth look at what we may see, check...
- 2/11/2011
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
What does Christopher Nolan want to do after The Dark Knight Rises? Apparently he wants to get to work on his Howard Hughes biopic. A while back, Nolan wanted to do a biopic on Mr. Hughes but decided to shelve it when he realized that Martin Scorsese's The Aviator would make it to the big screen first. Don't think that Nolan is doing a repeat though. Scorsese's film was based on Charles Higham.s biography Howard Hughes: The Secret Life, which covered the early years of Hughes' life up to...
- 2/11/2011
- by Niki Stephens
- JoBlo.com
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