Showing posts with label Jane Fonda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jane Fonda. Show all posts

Wednesday, 17 July 2019

DONALD SUTHERLAND, A CANADIAN REVOLUTIONARY

Donald Sutherland
Today, The Grandma has stayed at home watching some films of one of her favourite actors, Donald Sutherland. The Grandma admires Sutherland a lot and she loves his films.

It is impossible to choose only one work of Sutherland but The Grandma remembers his great performance in Revolution, a 1985 British historical drama film directed by Hugh Hudson, written by Robert Dillon, and starring Al Pacino and Nastassja Kinski. The film stars Pacino as a New York fur trapper who involuntarily gets enrolled in the Revolutionary forces during the American Revolutionary War. In this film, Donald Sutherland plays Sargent Major Peasy character.

The Grandma has gone to the library to search the book Revolution, a wonderful novel written by Jann Huizenga and Linda Huizenga that explains the events of the American Revolution in the 18th century.

Before going to the library and before watching Donald Sutherland's films, The Grandma has continued studying her Ms. Excel course.

Chapter 6. The Functions (VI) (Spanish Version)

Donald McNichol Sutherland, CC (born 17 July 1935) is a Canadian actor whose film career spans more than five decades.

Sutherland rose to fame after starring in a series of successful films including The Dirty Dozen (1967), M*A*S*H (1970), Kelly's Heroes (1970), Klute (1971), Don't Look Now (1973), Fellini's Casanova (1976), 1900 (1976), Animal House (1978), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Ordinary People (1980), Eye of the Needle (1981) and Revolution (1985) with Al Pacino. He subsequently established himself as one of the most respected, prolific and versatile character actors of Canada.

He later went on to star in many other successful films where he appeared either in leading or supporting roles such as A Dry White Season (1989), JFK (1991), Outbreak (1995), A Time to Kill (1996), Without Limits (1998), The Italian Job (2003), Cold Mountain (2003), Pride & Prejudice (2005), Aurora Borealis (2006) and The Hunger Games franchise (2012–2015).

Donald & Kiefer Sutherland
Sutherland has been nominated for eight Golden Globe Awards, winning two for his performances in the television films Citizen X (1995) and Path to War (2002); the former also earned him a Primetime Emmy Award.

Inductee of Hollywood Walk of Fame and Canadian Walk of Fame, he also received a Canadian Academy Award for the drama film Threshold (1981). Several media outlets and movie critics describe him as one of the best actors who have never been nominated for an Academy Award. In 2017, he received an Academy Honorary Award for his contributions to cinema.

He is the father of actors Kiefer Sutherland, Rossif Sutherland and Angus Sutherland.

Sutherland was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, the son of Dorothy Isobel and Frederick McLea Sutherland (1894–1983), who worked in sales and ran the local gas, electricity and bus company. He is of Scottish, German and English ancestry. As a child, he had rheumatic fever, hepatitis, and poliomyelitis. His teenage years were spent in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. He obtained his first part-time job, at the age of 14, as a news correspondent for local radio station CKBW.

More information: BFI Film Forever

Sutherland graduated from Bridgewater High School. He then studied at Victoria University, an affiliated college of the University of Toronto, where he met his first wife Lois Hardwick, not to be confused with the child star of the same name, and graduated with a double major in engineering and drama. He had at one point been a member of the UC Follies comedy troupe in Toronto. He changed his mind about becoming an engineer, and left Canada for Britain in 1957, studying at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

After quitting the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), Sutherland spent a year and a half at the Perth Repertory Theatre in Scotland.

In the early to mid-1960s, Sutherland began to gain small roles in British films and TV such as a hotel receptionist in The Sentimental Agent (1963). He featured alongside Christopher Lee in horror films such as Castle of the Living Dead (1964) and Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965). He also had a supporting role in the Hammer Films production Die! Die! My Darling! (1965), with Tallulah Bankhead and Stefanie Powers. In the same year, he appeared in the Cold War classic The Bedford Incident and appeared in the TV series The Saint and in the TV series Gideon's Way.

In 1966, Sutherland appeared in the BBC TV play Lee Oswald-Assassin, playing a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles Givens even though Givens himself was an African-American.

Donald Sutherland
In 1967, he appeared in The Avengers. He also made a second, and more substantial appearance in The Saint.

In 1968, after the breakthrough in the UK-filmed The Dirty Dozen, Sutherland left London for Hollywood. He then appeared in two war films, playing the lead role as Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman's MASH in 1970; and, again in 1970, as hippie tank commander Oddball in Kelly's Heroes.

Sutherland starred with Gene Wilder in the 1970 comedy Start the Revolution Without Me. During the filming of the Academy Award-winning detective thriller Klute, Sutherland had an intimate relationship with co-star Jane Fonda. Sutherland and Fonda went on to co-produce and star together in the anti-Vietnam War documentary F.T.A. (1972), consisting of a series of sketches performed outside army bases in the Pacific Rim and interviews with American troops who were then on active service. A follow up to their teaming up in Klute, Sutherland and Fonda performed together in Steelyard Blues (1973), a freewheeling, Age-of-Aquarius, romp-and-roll caper from the writer David S. Ward.

Sutherland found himself as a leading man throughout the 1970s in films such as the Venice-based psychological horror film Don't Look Now (1973), co-starring Julie Christie, a role which saw him nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor, the war film The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Federico Fellini's Casanova (1976) and the thriller Eye of the Needle which was filmed on location on the Isle of Mull, West Scotland. His role as Corpse of Lt. Robert Schmied in the Maximilian Schell's 1976 German film-directed End of the Game is listed in crazy credits. and as the ever-optimistic health inspector in the science fiction/horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) alongside Brooke Adams and Jeff Goldblum.

More information: DW

He helped launch the internationally popular Canadian television series Witness to Yesterday, with a performance as the Montreal doctor Norman Bethune, a physician and humanitarian, largely talking of Bethune's experiences in revolutionary China. Sutherland also had a role as pot-smoking Professor Dave Jennings in National Lampoon's Animal House in 1978, making himself known to younger fans as a result of the movie's popularity.

He won acclaim for his performance in the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci's 1976 epic film 1900 and as the conflicted father in the Academy Award-winning family drama Ordinary People (1980), alongside Mary Tyler Moore and Timothy Hutton. In 1981, he narrated A War Story, an Anne Wheeler film. He played the role of physician-hero Norman Bethune in two biographical films in 1977 and 1990.

Some of Sutherland's better known roles in the 1980s and 1990s were in the South African apartheid drama A Dry White Season (1989), alongside Marlon Brando and Susan Sarandon; as a sadistic warden in Lock Up (1989) with Sylvester Stallone; as an incarcerated pyromaniac in the firefighter thriller Backdraft (1990) alongside Kurt Russell and Robert De Niro, as the humanitarian doctor-activist Norman Bethune in 1990's Bethune: The Making of a Hero, and as a snobbish New York City art dealer in Six Degrees of Separation (1993), with Stockard Channing and Will Smith.

Donald Sutherland & Jane Fonda
In the 1991 Oliver Stone film JFK, he played a mysterious Washington intelligence officer, reputed to have been L. Fletcher Prouty, who spoke of links to the military–industrial complex in the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. He played psychiatrist and visionary Wilhelm Reich in the video for Kate Bush's 1985 single, Cloudbusting.

In 1992, he played the role of Merrick in the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with Kristy Swanson. In 1994, he played the head of a government agency hunting for aliens that take over people's bodies similar to the premise of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the movie of Robert A. Heinlein's 1951 book The Puppet Masters.

In 1994, Sutherland played a software company's scheming CEO in Barry Levinson's drama Disclosure opposite Michael Douglas and Demi Moore, and in 1995 was cast as Maj. Gen. Donald McClintock in Wolfgang Petersen's Outbreak. He was later cast in 1996 for only the second time with his son Kiefer in Joel Schumacher's A Time to Kill.

Sutherland played famous American Civil War General P.G.T. Beauregard in the 1999 film The Hunley. He played an astronaut in Space Cowboys (2000), with co-stars Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones and James Garner.

Sutherland was a model for Chris Claremont and John Byrne to create Donald Pierce, the character in the Marvel Comics, which the last name comes from Sutherland's character in the 1970 film's M*A*S*H, Hawkeye Pierce.

More information: Alamy

In more recent years, Sutherland was known for his role as Reverend Monroe in the Civil War drama Cold Mountain (2003), in the remake of The Italian Job (2003), in the TV series Commander in Chief (2005–2006), in the movie Fierce People (2005) with Diane Lane and Anton Yelchin, and as Mr. Bennet in Pride & Prejudice (2005), starring alongside Keira Knightley.

Beginning in 2012, Sutherland portrayed President Snow, the main antagonist of The Hunger Games film franchise, in The Hunger Games (2012), The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay-Part 1 (2014), and Part 2 (2015). His role was well received by fans and critics.

In 2016, he was a member of the main competition jury of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. On 6 September 2017, it was announced that Sutherland, along with 3 other recipients, will receive an Honorary Oscar, from Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Sutherland's first Academy Award in six decades.

Sutherland was made an Officer of the Order of Canada on 18 December 1978 and promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada in 2019. He was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame in 2000. He maintains a home in Georgeville, Quebec.

More information: VOA News


 I don't think I'm an actor who takes their characters home with him.
But I certainly do take the preparation home.

Donald Sutherland

Friday, 21 December 2018

JANE SEYMOUR FONDA, SOCIAL ACTIVISM IN CINEMA

Jane Fonda
December, 21. The Grandma has an intensive day of activities. Because of this, she wrote this post yesterday to be published today.

Political activism is necessary if you want to live in a society where freedom, democracy, justice, equality and civil rights are respected. Unfortunately, we have lots of examples today of false democracies which run under the appearance of true ones.

You must fight for your rights every day because if you are a passive citizen, you are going to lose them and you are not going to have enough time to recover them. It is a constant struggle, but perhaps, the most wonderful one, since the moment that you realize you are not alone fighting for your civil rights and you realize that if you work in community, you are fighting against one of the most terrible enemies of our century, the individualism, as Julius Caesar said: Divide et Impera, Divide and You Will Win.

Today, one of the best actresses and one of the strongest activists celebrates her birthday. She is someone who The Grandma admires a lot, as an actress and as an activist, and she has an intense life and some interesting opinions to be known.

Congratulations, Jane Fonda in your 81st anniversary!

Yesterday, before writing this post, The Grandma studied a new lesson of her
Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 49).


Jane Seymour Fonda, born December 21, 1937, is an American actress, writer, political activist, former fashion model and fitness guru. She is the recipient of various accolades including two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, the AFI Life Achievement Award, and the Honorary Golden Lion.

Born to actor Henry Fonda and socialite Frances Ford Seymour, Fonda made her Broadway debut in the 1960 play There Was a Little Girl, for which she received the first of two Tony Award nominations, and made her screen debut later the same year in Tall Story.

She rose to prominence in 1960s with such films as Period of Adjustment (1962), Sunday in New York (1963), Cat Ballou (1965), Barefoot in the Park (1967) and Barbarella (1968). Her first husband was Barbarella director Roger Vadim.

Jane Fonda
A seven-time Academy Award nominee, she received her first nomination for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) and went on to win two Best Actress Oscars in the 1970s for Klute (1971) and Coming Home (1978). Her other nominations were for Julia (1977), The China Syndrome (1979), On Golden Pond (1981) and The Morning After (1986). Consecutive hits Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), California Suite (1978), The Electric Horseman (1979) and 9 to 5 (1980) sustained Fonda's box-office drawing power, and she won an Primetime Emmy Award for her performance in the 1984 TV film The Dollmaker.

In 1982, she released her first exercise video, Jane Fonda's Workout, which became the highest-selling VHS of all time. It would be the first of 22 workout videos released by her over the next 13 years which would collectively sell over 17 million copies.

Divorced from second husband Tom Hayden, she married billionaire media mogul Ted Turner in 1991 and retired from acting, following a row of commercially unsuccessful films concluded by Stanley & Iris (1990).

More information: Jane Fonda Official Site

Fonda divorced Turner in 2001 and returned to the screen with the 2005 hit Monster-in-Law. Though Georgia Rule (2007) was the star's only other movie during the 2000s, in the early 2010s she fully re-launched her career. Subsequent films have included The Butler (2013), This Is Where I Leave You (2014), Youth (2015), Our Souls at Night (2017) and Book Club (2018).

In 2009, she returned to Broadway after a 45-year absence from the stage, in the play 33 Variations which earned her a Tony Award nomination, while her major recurring role in the HBO drama series The Newsroom (2012–2014) earned her two Primetime Emmy Award nominations. She also released another five exercise videos between 2010 and 2012.

Fonda currently stars in the Netflix original series Grace and Frankie, which premiered in 2015 and has brought her nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Jane Fonda
Fonda was a visible political activist in the counterculture era during the Vietnam War and later became involved in advocacy for women.

She was famously and controversially photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun on a 1972 visit to Hanoi, during which she became widely known under the nickname Hanoi Jane. She has also protested the Iraq War and violence against women, and describes herself as a feminist.

In 2005, she, Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem co-founded the Women's Media Center, an organization that works to amplify the voices of women in the media through advocacy, media and leadership training, and the creation of original content. Fonda serves on the board of the organization.

More information: Women's Media Center

Jane Seymour Fonda was born in New York City on December 21, 1937. According to her father, their surname came from an Italian ancestor who immigrated to the Netherlands in the 1500s. There, he intermarried, and the family began to use Dutch given names, with Jane's first Fonda ancestor reaching New York in 1650. She also has English, Scottish, and French ancestry. She was named for the third wife of Henry VIII, Jane Seymour, to whom she is distantly related on her mother's side.

Fonda became interested in acting as a teenager, while appearing with her father in a charity performance of The Country Girl at the Omaha Community Playhouse.

Fonda's stage work in the late 1950s laid the foundation for her film career in the 1960s. She averaged almost two movies a year throughout the decade, starting in 1960 with Tall Story, in which she recreated one of her Broadway roles as a college cheerleader pursuing a basketball star, played by Anthony Perkins. Frequent collaborator Robert Redford also made his debut in that film.

Fonda attended the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, and Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. Before her acting career, she was a model, appearing twice on the cover of Vogue.

Jane Fonda
In 1963, she appeared in Sunday in New York. Newsday called her the loveliest and most gifted of all our new young actresses. Fonda's career breakthrough came with Cat Ballou (1965), in which she played a schoolmarm turned outlaw. This comedy Western received five Oscar nominations, with Lee Marvin winning best actor, and was one of the year's top ten films at the box office. It was considered by many to have been the film that brought Fonda to bankable stardom.

The following year, she had a starring role in The Chase opposite Robert Redford, in their first film together, and two-time Oscar winner Marlon Brando. The film received some positive reviews and they said that: Jane Fonda, as Redford’s wife and the mistress of wealthy oilman James Fox, makes the most of the biggest female role.

After this came the comedies Any Wednesday (1966), opposite Jason Robards and Dean Jones, and Barefoot in the Park (1967), again co-starring Redford.

Fonda won her first Academy Award for Best Actress in 1971, again playing a prostitute, the gamine Bree Daniels, in the Alan J. Pakula's murder mystery Klute.

Fonda announced that she would make only films that focused on important issues, and she generally stuck to her word. She turned down An Unmarried Woman because she felt the part was not relevant.

More information: Screen Daily

In 1978, Fonda was at a career peak after she won her second Best Actress Oscar for her role as Sally Hyde, a conflicted adulteress in Coming Home, the story of a disabled Vietnam War veteran's difficulty in re-entering civilian life.

In 1980, Fonda starred in 9 to 5 with Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton. The film was a huge critical and box office success, becoming the second highest-grossing release of the year. Fonda had long wanted to work with her father, hoping it would help their strained relationship. She achieved this goal when she purchased the screen rights to the play On Golden Pond, specifically for her father and her.

Jane Fonda
Fonda continued to appear in feature films throughout the 1980s, winning an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress for The Dollmaker (1984), and starring in the role of Dr. Martha Livingston in Agnes of God (1985). The following year, she played an alcoholic actress and murder suspect in the 1986 thriller The Morning After, opposite Jeff Bridges.

In the early 1990s, after three decades in film, Fonda announced her retirement from the film industry.

Fonda starred in her fourth collaboration with Robert Redford in the 2017 romantic drama film Our Souls at Night. The film and Fonda's performance received critical acclaim upon release.

In 2018, she starred opposite Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen, and Candice Bergen in the romantic comedy film Book Club.

During the 1960s, Fonda engaged in political activism in support of the Civil Rights Movement, and in opposition to the Vietnam War. Fonda's visits to France brought her into contact with leftist French intellectuals who were opposed to war, an experience that she later characterized as small-c communism. Along with other celebrities, she supported the Alcatraz Island occupation by American Indians in 1969, which was intended to call attention to the failures of the government with regards to treaty rights and the movement for greater Indian sovereignty.

More information: The Lily

She supported Huey Newton and the Black Panthers in the early 1970s, stating: Revolution is an act of love; we are the children of revolution, born to be rebels. It runs in our blood. She called the Black Panthers our revolutionary vanguard... we must support them with love, money, propaganda and risk." 

She has been involved in the feminist movement since the 1970s and dovetails her activism in support of civil rights.

In 1994, the United Nations Population Fund made Fonda a Goodwill Ambassador.

On February 16, 2004, Fonda led a march through Ciudad Juárez, with Sally Field, Eve Ensler and other women, urging Mexico to provide sufficient resources to newly appointed officials in helping investigate the murders of hundreds of women in the rough border city.

Fonda went to Seattle, in 1970 to support a group of Native Americans who were led by Bernie Whitebear. The group had occupied part of the grounds of Fort Lawton, which was in the process of being surplussed by the United States Army and turned into a park. The group was attempting to secure a land base where they could establish services for the sizable local urban Indian population, protesting that Indians had a right to part of the land that was originally all theirs. The endeavor succeeded and the Daybreak Star Cultural Center was constructed in the city's Discovery Park.

Jane Fonda
In addition to environmental reasons, Fonda has been a critic of oil pipelines because of their being built without consent on Native American Land.

In 2017, Fonda responded to American President Donald Trump's mandate to resume construction of the controversial North Dakota Pipelines by saying that Trump does this illegally because he has not gotten consent from the tribes through whose countries this goes and pointing out that the U.S. has agreed to treaties that require them to get the consent of the people who are affected, the indigenous people who live there.

Fonda argued that the military campaign in Iraq will turn people all over the world against America, and asserted that a global hatred of America would result in more terrorist attacks in the aftermath of the war.

More information: Flashbak

In 2015, Fonda expressed disapproval of President Barack Obama's permitting of Arctic drilling, Petroleum exploration in the Arctic, at the Sundance Film Festival. In July, she marched in a Toronto protest called the March for Jobs, Justice, and Climate, which was organized by dozens of nonprofits, labor unions, and environmental activists, including Canadian author Naomi Klein. The march aimed to show businesses and politicians alike that climate change is inherently linked to issues that may seem unrelated.

In addition to issues of Civil Rights, Fonda has been an opponent of oil developments and their adverse effects on the environment. In 2017, while on a trip with Greenpeace to protest oil developments, Fonda criticized Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau saying at the summit on climate change in Paris, known as the Paris agreement, Trudeau talked so beautifully of needing to meet the requirements of the climate treaty and to respect and hold to the treaties with indigenous people... and yet he has betrayed every one of the things he committed to in Paris.

More information: Time


I feel like my honesty gives people the freedom
to talk about things they wouldn't otherwise.

Jane Fonda

Wednesday, 27 December 2017

CAROL BEAN: A HEART IN NY, BAREFOOT IN THE PARK

Barefoot in the park poster with Carol Bean
Carol Bean had a dream. She wanted to visit Central Park and today her dream has come true. Carol has visited this wonderful place accompanied by her family. All together have spent a nice day in the park visiting the real places where Robert Redford and Jane Fonda filmed Barefoot in the park in 1967 and have assisted to the Simon & Garfunkel Concert.

Central Park is an urban park in Manhattan, New York City. It comprises 341 ha between the Upper West Side and Upper East Side, roughly bounded by Fifth Avenue on the east, Central Park West (Eighth Avenue) on the west, Central Park South (59th Street) on the south, and Central Park North (110th Street) on the north. Central Park is the most visited urban park in the United States, with 40 million visitors in 2013, and one of the most filmed locations in the world.

More information: Central Park Conservancy
The park was established in 1857 on 315 ha of land acquired by the city. In 1858, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and architect/landscape designer Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they titled the Greensward Plan

The Beans in Central Park, New York City
Construction began the same year, and the park's first area was opened to the public in the winter of 1858. Construction north of the park continued during the American Civil War in the 1860s, and the park was expanded to its current size in 1873. 

After a period of decline in the early 20th century, Robert Moses started a program to clean up Central Park. Another decline in the late 20th century spurred the creation of the Central Park Conservancy in 1980, which refurbished many parts of the park during the 1980s and 1990s.

Central Park was designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1962, which in April 2017 placed it on the tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage Sites

More information: Central Park

The park, managed for decades by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, is currently managed by the Central Park Conservancy under contract with the municipal government in a public-private partnership. The Conservancy is a non-profit organization that contributes 75 percent of Central Park's $65 million annual budget and is responsible for all basic care of the 341 ha park.


New York, lookin' down on Central Park
Where they say you should not wander after dark.

New York, like a scene from all those movies
but you're real enough to me, but there's a heart,
a heart that lives in New York.

Simon & Garfunkel