Thursday, December 1, 2011

Mindy Mccready Pregnant








Mindy McCready, who was allegedly missing with her son as recently as yesterday, has been found, alive and well ... and is pregnant with twins! Yikes!

The troubled singer set off alarms yesterday by not bringing her 5-year-old son, of whom she does not have legal custody, back home to her parents.

She ultimately cleared that up ... and then revealed via her rep that she is five months along. No other details, such as who the father is, are known.

Mindy McCready Image

McCready is in Nashville with the boy, who she took without permission, and will likely miss the deadline the court set (5 p.m. today) for her to return Zander.

A warrant may be issued for her the pregnant star's arrest if she doesn't show up at her parents' house with Zander in tow. But it looks like that won't happen.

Police confirmed that they were not treating McCready and her son Zander's absence as a missing persons case any longer and that the pair were safe.

So that's good at least. Congrats on the impending arrivals ... although we are a little scared based on her track record about her ability to handle it.

[Photo: http://www.mindymccready.com]

Read more celebrity gossip at: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2011/12/mindy-mccready-pregnant-with-twins/#ixzz1fIOiz1S6

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Pneumonia puts George Michael in hospital

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LONDON (Reuters) - British singer George Michael has postponed a series of concerts after falling ill with pneumonia, his website said on Wednesday.

The 48-year-old former Wham! frontman called off a planned gig in Vienna on Monday and another in Strasbourg on Wednesday, and now his Cardiff dates have been put on hold.

"With great regret, George Michael has been forced to postpone his November 26 and 27 shows in Cardiff, Wales, due to his ongoing illness.

"George was recently forced to postpone tour dates in Vienna and Strasbourg under doctor's orders after being diagnosed with pneumonia. He is currently receiving treatment," a statement read.

Michael, whose chart-topping hits as a solo artist include "Faith" and "Careless Whisper", also announced that an earlier cancellation, an October 26 concert at London's Royal Albert Hall, would be rescheduled for May 2, 2012.

Details of other postponed shows will follow.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

Queen Freddie Mercury

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Although Freddie Mercury's speaking voice naturally fell in the baritone range, he delivered most songs in the tenor range. His vocal range extended from bass low F (F2) to soprano high F (F6). He could belt up to tenor high F (F5). Biographer David Bret described his voice as "escalating within a few bars from a deep, throaty rock-growl to tender, vibrant tenor, then on to a high-pitched, perfect coloratura, pure and crystalline in the upper reaches". Spanish soprano Montserrat Caballé, with whom Mercury recorded an album, expressed her opinion that "the difference between Freddie and almost all the other rock stars was that he was selling the voice". She adds, "His technique was astonishing. No problem of tempo, he sung with an incisive sense of rhythm, his vocal placement was very good and he was able to glide effortlessly from a register to another. He also had a great musicality. His phrasing was subtle, delicate and sweet or energetic and slamming. He was able to find the right colouring or expressive nuance for each word." As Queen's career progressed, he would increasingly alter the highest notes of their songs when live, often harmonising with seconds, thirds or fifths instead. Mercury was said to have "the rawest vocal fold nodules" and claimed never to have had any formal vocal training.
Songwriter

Mercury wrote 10 of the 17 songs on Queen's Greatest Hits album: "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Seven Seas of Rhye", "Killer Queen", "Somebody to Love", "Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy", "We Are the Champions", "Bicycle Race", "Don't Stop Me Now", "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and "Play the Game".

The most notable aspect of his songwriting involved the wide range of genres that he used, which included, among other styles, rockabilly, progressive rock, heavy metal, gospel and disco. As he explained in a 1986 interview, "I hate doing the same thing again and again and again. I like to see what's happening now in music, film and theatre and incorporate all of those things." Compared to many popular songwriters, Mercury also tended to write musically complex material. For example, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is acyclic in structure and comprises dozens of chords. He also wrote six songs from Queen II which deal with multiple key changes and complex material. "Crazy Little Thing Called Love", on the other hand, contains only a few chords. Despite the fact that Mercury often wrote very intricate harmonies, he also claimed that he could barely read music. He wrote most of his songs on the piano and used a wide variety of different key signatures.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Inside Natalie Wood

It's an odd passage to stumble across. Gavin Lambert's biography of Natalie Wood includes more or less an appeal from the Wagner family that Christopher Walken tell his version of what happened on board the boat that fatal weekend the actress drowned. Another lingering question is whether he and Wood actually had an affair.

"Only Walken … knows for certain what the flirtation led to, and whether he played an Iago-like role in provoking RJ's [Wood's husband Robert Wagner] jealously, or whether it was justified," Lambert writes.

According to his book, jealousy and excessive amounts of alcohol were the guest demons on the boat, stoking explosive scenes in the hours and days before Wood died off the coast of Catalina on Nov. 29, 1981.

Wood's life, and certainly her death at 43, were covered more sensationally in Suzanne Finstad's 2001 "Natasha." But Lambert had been close to Wood since she starred in the film of his novel "Inside Daisy Clover." While much of what he reveals has been told before, Lambert brings the perspective of a Hollywood insider and family intimate.

Wood (who grew up Natasha Gurdin) was stage-mothered as a child actor by a Russian émigré so histrionic and grasping it's easy to picture her with talons. But as a 15-year-old, Natalie launched herself in another direction, fighting for a role in "Rebel Without a Cause" opposite James Dean. Lambert also recounts how she carried on simultaneous affairs with the film's director, Nicholas Ray, and co-star Dennis Hopper.

Wood made the transition from screen moppet to glamorous movie star, but her career was a curious hybrid. She held title and court in old Hollywood, but craved a place in the grittier new school of serious filmmaking.

Her life-long love affair with the insistently debonair Wagner (whom she divorced, then remarried after a brief marriage to Richard Gregson) meant she really belonged to the world of Modern Screen magazine.

Lambert portrays Wood as desperate to reignite her career as she becomes middle-aged - in fact, she is desperate in general.

His respect for Wood's talent is genuinely expressed, but it is clear that in her 40s she masked her fear of being eclipsed by renewing her creative drive.

She threw herself into her role in "Brainstorm," and at her co-star Walken. Sleeping pills and alcohol became mainstays. Almost as intoxicating, Lambert writes, were Walken's lectures on "freedom and dedication to art."

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Inside Natalie WoodLink

"Walken's voice was obviously the most persuasive for someone disturbed, overmedicated, and obviously attracted to him," Lambert writes. That was the state of affairs when the three boarded the boat on Thanksgiving weekend 1981. There's no little irony in dying torn between two men who represented the opposing Hollywood polarities that magnetized Wood throughout her life.

Gavin Lambert has written a sensitive account of the actress' life and death

Natalie Wood: A Life
By Gavin Lambert
Knopf, $25.95

The life and death of Natalie Wood

Natalie Wood’s colourful life began and ended in mystery. Her curious death at sea in 1981 brought a telegram of condolence from Queen Elizabeth to Wood’s husband, the movie star Robert Wagner, and had the scandal sheets talking of murder and suicide. She was born in San Francisco in 1938, but there are considerable doubts over her paternity. Her story reaches back to the Russian Revolution and the eastward flight of Wood’s mother with her family when the news of the Romanovs’ demise reached their estate in southern Siberia. This could be the stuff of a Kitty Kelly showbiz biography or a Jerome Robbins roman-à-clef dishing the dirt on Hollywood. But though this book doesn’t stint on sordid revelations about daily life in Tinseltown, Wood’s life and career are safe in the hands of Gavin Lambert, who has a rare combination of talents. He is an outstanding film critic, a gifted biographer, the author of some of the shrewdest fiction written about Hollywood, and has been closely involved in moviemaking as a screenwriter.

Moreover, they have something in common. Both had sex with the charismatic bisexual Nicholas Ray on the day they met him. Lambert’s encounter was in London and he followed Ray to Los Angeles as his assistant. Shortly after his arrival he encountered Natalie Wood, who earlier that same year had lost her virginity at the age of sixteen to Ray while he was testing her for Rebel Without a Cause, a film that would change the course of her career. Lambert became one of her many gay friends, and a decade later, in 1965, she appeared in a film version of Lambert’s novel Inside Daisy Clover as the eponymous troubled movie star.

Wood’s mother Maria was a manipulative monster, even worse than the stage mother Rosalind Russell played to Wood’s Gypsy Rose Lee in Gypsy. A romantic fantasist obsessed with her lost Russian heritage, she had a brief marriage to an army officer in China (which produced a daughter), before crossing the Pacific to San Francisco. There she contracted a hypergamous relationship with a Russian émigré from a more humble background, a dockworker who also felt cut off from his roots and was violent when drunk. “What did your father die of?” someone was later to ask Natalie. “My mother”, she replied. Natalie was born four months after the marriage, and though she was never to know it, her real father was almost certainly a brutish Russian-born captain in the American merchant navy with whom Maria conducted a lifelong affair. The mother was determined to turn one of her three daughters into a star, and in 1943 she ordered the five-year-old Natalie to go and sit on the knee of Irving Pichel, who was directing a movie in Santa Rosa, the little town north of San Francisco where they lived. She and her older sister Olga got walk-on roles in crowd scenes, and immediately Maria shifted the family down to Los Angeles and began grooming Natalie for the screen.

After an impressive debut as Orson Welles’s ward in the 1945 weepie, Tomorrow Is Forever (Welles recalled “something very sad and lonely about this compelling child”), she became an established child performer and the family’s meal ticket. She played orphans, brat sisters, plucky victims of divorce; her characteristic role, Lambert observes, was “an emotionally displaced child whose problems are resolved by understanding adults (thanks, of course, to the understanding filmmakers who contrive a happy ending)”. Over the next few years her film mothers were Gene Tierney, Margaret Sullivan, Joan Blondell, Maureen O’Hara and Bette Davis, her screen fathers James Stewart, Bing Crosby, Walter Brennan and Fred McMurray. In the greatest film of her early days she was unhappily cast as John Wayne’s niece in John Ford’s The Searchers.

Maria pushed and pushed, became the keeper of her daughter’s fan mail, and, using Natalie as a lever, got her husband a job as a carpenter at 20th-Century Fox. One day he came onto the set of a film she was appearing in, and (in something resembling a scene from a Joan Crawford tearjerker) she called out “Daddy”. Everyone was shocked, and Maria told her she must never again acknowledge her father’s presence at the studio.

Natalie grew up in Hollywood at a time when the big studio system was reluctantly giving way to independent production. She found herself under contract to Warner Brothers, whose penny-pinching production boss, Jack Warner, supervised her career, making ten times her weekly contract payment by hiring her out to other studios. The House Un-American Activities Committee stalked the movie colony and everyone was in thrall to the suffocating conformity of the Eisenhower era. In this enclosed world Natalie had to play the game, kow-towing to the vindictive gossip columnists Loella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. She also had to cope with the near-insanity of Maria, whose account of a Russian Gypsy’s curse induced a lifelong terror of “dark waters” in her daughter. Anticipating the horror movies of Wes Craven by some forty years, Maria told Natalie of a figure called “Jack the Jabber” who stabbed errant girls through the backs of cinema seats. She didn’t, however, offer information about menstruation, and Natalie never recovered from the shock of her first period.

Unlike most child stars, Natalie made the transition to adult performer: she became a piercingly brown-eyed, black-haired beauty and an actor of feeling and subtlety. Rebel without a Cause was the turning point that preceded key roles in Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass opposite Warren Beatty and Robert Mulligan’s Love with the Proper Stranger opposite Steve McQueen. Playing desperate victims of a repressive culture, she attained Hollywood star status, and was Oscar-nominated for all three performances. In between the last two there was West Side Story, which made her bankable. She worked under constant pressure from family, studio and filmmakers, and it would seem that sex became her principal act of rebellion, recreation and self-assertion. Lambert uses that curious old-fashioned term “highly sexed” to describe her, and suggests that her sex drive was part of the Russian heritage she readily embraced. But her conduct didn’t differ markedly from that of Sinatra, Beatty, McQueen and other male stars acclaimed for their arrogant concupiscence. They figure among several dozen famous lovers, including our own gently retiring Tom Courtenay, who happened to be in Hollywood making King Rat in 1965. Like Princess Diana, Natalie had an inner circle, which she called her “nucleus” (the equivalent of Diana’s “rocks”), a larger group she called her friends, and within it a special section known as “friends you occasionally sleep with”.

This permissiveness was subject to limits. When her second husband, the British talent agent Richard Gregson, father of the first of her three children, was revealed as having had a fling with her secretary, Natalie called the police, who escorted him off her Beverly Hills mansion with his bags and baggage. She herself expected to be forgiven for her transgressions and flirtations during her first and third marriages to the same man, the charming Robert Wagner, who had broken away from his upper-middle-class background to become a movie actor. It was a turbulent relationship the second time around, their reputations shifting month by month through the successes and failures of their work in television, and not helped by alcohol and Natalie’s increasing reliance on prescription drugs to calm her nerves and prepare her for social occasions.

Neither had any serious professional training, and their shared insecurity appears to have been played on by the brilliant, demonic Christopher Walken, who starred with Natalie in the misconceived science-fiction melodrama Brainstorm in 1981, and was probably her lover. He seems, quite legitimately from his position as a committed New York stage actor, to have challenged them to address their professional careers with greater seriousness. During a holiday break from shooting, Walken joined the Wagners on their yacht. They cruised to the holiday island of Catalina; immoderate amounts of booze were consumed and dangerous words exchanged. The next day the ship’s motorized dinghy was retrieved along the coast and Natalie’s body (filled with alcohol and prescription drugs) was fished out of the sea. The coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death: she had slipped on a greasy strip of teak while preventing the banging of the dinghy that was keeping her awake. As far as Tinseltown history is concerned, the jury is still out.

The yacht was named Splendor after the movie that was Natalie’s greatest triumph, and the dinghy was called Valiant, an ironic reference to the Arthurian comic-strip epic Prince Valiant which made Wagner a star in 1954. The celebrated golden couple were mocked and patronized in much the same way that the Beckhams are today, and glib judgements are unfair in both cases. Lambert rightly claims that Natalie was on the point of regaining control of her own career at the time of her death. She had always wanted to play Blanche Du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire, and regularly interrogated Lambert about Vivien Leigh, whom he had come to know as a result of writing the screenplay for The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone. Natalie had performed creditably with Robert Wagner in a television version of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the weakest element of which was Laurence Olivier’s Big Daddy. Natalie had acquired the rights to Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, and was preparing to make her stage debut (at the age of forty-three) in Anastasia with Wendy Hiller. This all suggests sanity and ambition. But she seems also to have seen her life as a split screen; towards the end, she took to leaving different messages on her agent’s phone as, variously, “Natalie”, “Natalie Wood” and “Mrs Wagner”. Perhaps this was a joke, for she had become a mistress of irony.

Living in Hollywood all her life, Natalie must have become aware that most childhood stars would, sooner or later, sink into painful obscurity. Robert and Natalie entertained to dinner an elderly, drunken Bette Davis. Talking of her performance in The Star, Davis said: “But of course, you’re too young to remember it”. “Bette,” Natalie replied, “I played your daughter in that picture.” Davis went on unheeded.


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The death of Natalie Wood had a predictably sordid aftermath in legal actions, family squabbles and old acquaintances spilling dubious beans to ensure their moment of fame and a few tarnished dollars. This Gavin Lambert scrupulously records. But he also takes away the sour taste in our mouths and the guilty feeling that we may have been engaged in a prurient exercise. His sensitive, sympathetic book ends with a coda that reviews Wood’s movies and the development of her career over a period of thirty years. It guarantees her position in movie history.