Birthday Suits: Nov 9th

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.

Amanda and friends @ the Beach

Amanda Seyfried (22, so pretty ~ I've entered a pretty trance ~ p r e t t y p r e t t y) ... and some other girls* walk along the beach for Vanity Fair


* Oh, don't take offense "other girls". It's just that I only have eyes for Amanda. And Anne and Kirsten and Lauren and Amy and Evan and Scarlett and... Amanda's photographic BFFs (they probably just met) would be Emma Roberts (17, Julia's niece and Nancy Drew), Blake Lively (20, of Gossip Girls) and scary Kristen Stewart (18, of Panic Room, Into the Wild, Jumper). What? She scares me. She just exudes need onscreen... whether it's the need to jump Emile Hirsch's bones or just the vague need for an undefinable something. I feel as if she might reach out of the screen and just >cling<>some gaping need' desperation kinda freaked me out in Jumper (previous post) and I think she was onscreen for about 16 seconds all told. s-c-a-r-y.

I get sick of hearing about Gossip Girls but I like Blake a little more upon hearing that her three favorite movies are Wizard of Oz, Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet. The girls are posing for Vanity Fair's annual Teen Hollywood issue. Which I had kind of forgotten about and which is vaguely distracting from my Vanity Fair retrospectives of plain ole' "Vanity Fair's Teen Hollywood". (Another one of those coming your way very soon)

You can see all eight of the photo spreads here... or, you know, buy the magazines. There are things called stores and they sell photos that you can touch on this stuff called "paper" it's really... well, it's something! I included this photo of Jonah Hill (Superbad, left) with Rachael Taylor (Transformers) and Amber Heard (Friday Night Lights) because it made me giggle in how well it illustrates that Hollywood top fetish 'schlub gets the hot chicks!'. Jonah can be hilarious but try to imagine this photo with Nikki Blonsky. It just wouldn't happen.

Now you can see rare celebrity portraits of larger women surrounded by hot men (I remember one of Rosie O'Donnell back in the day) and I'm sure there've been a few others but it's always portrayed as a kitschy gag and the men are of the nameless shirtless model variety. They'd never drape two of Nikki Blonsky's male peers over her. They just wouldn't. [insert Joan Cusack Addams Family Values voice here] "But what about Debbie's Nikki's needs?"

I've doctored a photo for you just to demonstrate the improbability.