Arthur Penn, the stage and film director whose iconic Bonnie and Clyde ushered in the post-classical age of Hollywood, has died. He was 88.
Penn died Tuesday — the day after his 88th birthday — his friend and accountant, Evan Bell, told The New York Times. Bell said Penn had been sick for a year, but did not disclose the cause of death.
See other celebrities we've lost this year
A Philadelphia native and brother of the late still photographer Irving Penn, Penn first made his name directing television dramas and Broadway plays in the 1950s and '60s. He earned Tony nominations for his stage productions of Two for the Seesaw, The Miracle Worker and All the Way Home, winning for The Miracle Worker. Star Anne Bancroft also won a Tony.
Penn first directed ...
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Jean Simmons, whose film career spanned from 1944 to 2008, died Friday after battling lung cancer, the Los Angeles Times reported. She was 80.
Originally from London, Simmons shared the screen with many of Hollywood's leading men, including...
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Question I saw and liked Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow but was wondering What was the source of Sir Laurence Oliviers performance Ive always wanted to know JayFlickChick The late Sir Laurence Oliviers performance as Professor Totenkopf dead head in German in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow 2004 was digitally built from archival BBC footage of Olivier giving a speech at some fund-raising event The movements of his mouth were manipulated to match the films dialogue and the footage was processed to look like a staticky video holograph The same basic technology was used to alter existing footage of Marlon Brando from Superman 1978 so he could speak new dialogue for Superman Returns 2006 But in Superman Returns the Brando footage looks as real as the rest so its another step toward being truly able to have a living actor appear alongside a dead one the way singers can now do thoroughly convincing duets by integrating their new tracks
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Once upon a not very long time ago, Saturday Night Live had character — make that characters. Wayne and Garth, Hans and Franz, Linda Richman, Mary Katherine Gallagher, the sexually ambiguous Pat, Mango, the Cheerleaders. And so on. "It was the Yankees," remembers Chris Rock of a cast so stuffed with talent that the competition to get on air and create new comic icons and catchphrases was ferocious. (Eddie Murphy once advised Rock to create "Weekend Update" pieces delivered straight to the camera to help him break through. Which he did.) Anecdotes like these make the frankly funny and admirably frank Saturday Night Live in the '90s: Pop Culture Nation (May 6, 9 pm/ET, NBC) so much more than a nostalgic clip job. There's plenty that's celebratory in this two-hour special, but also much that's self-critical — especially in addressing the mid-'90s cast upheaval that led to falling ratings,
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Question: I know actors improvise their lines all the time in comedies, but recently I learned that Anthony Hopkins improvised many of Hannibal's lines. I also recently learned from the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse that Marlon Brando improvised much of his dialogue in Apocalypse Now. So now I'm curious: How often do actors, outside of comedies, improvise their lines?
Answer: All the time. OK, not all actors all the time, but the practice of ad-libbing or altering lines is an entrenched part of film acting and one of the things that drives screenwriters out of their minds. Especially if they come from the theater: In theater, the script is sacrosanct and no one messes with it except with the express consent of the playwright (assuming someone dares to ask). In film, scripts are usually treated as a kind of outline — not
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