Today's Birthdays 11/09<--- 1869 Marie Dressler is awesome. She gave one of the most aggressive Best Actress winning performances evah. If you haven't seen Min & Bill (1933), you must. You must, you must, you must.
1883 Edna May Oliver feisty character actress
1886 Ed Wynn Uncle Albert from Mary Poppins. He loves to laugh... long and loud and clear. Audiences were always ready to laugh along with him
1922 Dorothy Dandridge first black woman to be nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars (Carmen Jones) and what a neat coincidence that she was portrayed by the first black actress to eventually win the Best Actress Oscar (Halle Berry) in the bio Introducing Dorothy Dandridge
1948 Bille August Danish director of The Best Intentions and Pelle the Conqueror fame
1955 Fernando Meirelles director of declining films: City of God, The Constant Gardner, Blindness. I'm not trying to be mean. But... um... do you have faith he'll pull out of it? Discuss.
1974 Giovanna Mezzogiorno of Vincere (2009) hoopla
1988 Nikki Blonsky I don't know about you but I could hear the bells when she sang in Hairspray
And finally let's hear some love in the comments for Hedy Lamarr, one of the most beautiful actresses of the 40s and one of the first to go nude on film in Ekstase (1933)
Where's her biopic? Or miniseries even. Seriously... you can practically see the scenes spanning the genres: (war drama) Austrian-Jewess Hedy drugs her own maid to escape her husband and Vienna in the 30s, then helps invent frequency hopping. I mean, how many actresses can claim the origins of modern ubiquitous technology? (romance) Hedy marries and divorces six men. (movies about movies) Hedy films one of the cinema's first sex scenes, Hedy's movie banned in Hollywood but they recruit her anyway, Hedy loses the "Ilsa" role to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, Hedy stars in Samson and Delilah! This is a biopic I would gladly watch... even if they framed it in that stupid end of her life looking back way.
