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“I was sure none of these people at the Actors Studio actually considered me an actor. I was a pretty boy, a real conventional kid who somehow had staggered into this mélange." - Paul Newman, The Extraordinary Life Of An Ordinary Man

For Montgomery Clift, there was Howard Hawks’ Red River...

Throughout the 1970s, audiences couldn’t get enough of disaster movies. The decade began with the all-star blockbuster bomb-on-a-plane thrill ride Airport, based on Arthur Hailey’s best-seller. Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Maureen Stapleton, Van Heflin, Jean Seberg, and Jacqueline Bisset headlined Airport, which became the second-biggest box-office hit of the year and earned nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and winning Best Supporting Actress for Hayes. Airport also established the template for subsequent movies: trapping all-star casts on a plane, a ship, or a high-rise.

SEEFred Astaire movies: 20 greatest films ranked worst to best

Producer-director-writer Irwin Allen took disaster movies to the next level — so much so he was dubbed “The Master of Disaster.” Allen, who enjoyed great success on the small screen in the 1960s with the series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Time Tunnel, and Lost in Space, brought his disaster savvy to the...

Norby Walters, a music agent who worked with Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye, Kool & the Gang and Public Enemy before gaining renown in Hollywood for his annual “Night of 100 Stars” Oscar party and weekly poker game, has died. He was 91.

Walters died Dec. 10 of natural causes at an assisted living facility in Burbank, his son, producer Gary Michael Walters (Whiplash), told The Hollywood Reporter.

Walters hosted his first Oscar night gala in 1990 and the last in 2017, most often inside the Beverly Hilton’s Crystal Ballroom. Among those who attended were Shirley Jones, Robert Forster, Charles Bronson, Patricia Neal, Richard Dreyfuss, Eva Marie Saint, Martin Landau, Louis Gossett Jr., J.K. Simmons, Cliff Robertson, Red Buttons, Jon Voight and Allison Janney.

Walters for years also presided over a weekly poker game at his West Hollywood high-rise condo. The low-stakes $2 game was, his son said, “designed to be a place where actors could kibbutz,...

Big George Foreman Photo: Sony For historical context (and for fans of boxing when boxing mattered), in 1968, 19-year-old George Edward Foreman of Marshall, Texas, represented the United States in the heavyweight division of the Mexico City Olympic Games. He won a gold medal and then turned professional. Meanwhile, in the stateside boxing world,...

Big George ForemanPhoto: Sony

For historical context (and for fans of boxing when boxing mattered), in 1968, 19-year-old George Edward Foreman of Marshall, Texas, represented the United States in the heavyweight division of the Mexico City Olympic Games. He won a gold medal and then turned professional. Meanwhile, in the stateside boxing world,...

The full title of the George Foreman biopic provides a not-so-subtle clue as to the film’s prosaicness. The movie about Jake Lamotta vividly signaled the personality of its lead character with Raging Bull. The one about Rocky Graziano jauntily indicated its upbeat nature with Somebody Up There Likes Me. So what does Foreman merit? Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World. It sounds like the title of a biography for young readers, and that’s pretty much how the by-the-numbers film plays.

It’s not surprising that Affirm Films is one of the film’s producers, since Foreman famously underwent a religious epiphany and became a born-again Christian. He retired from boxing for many years and became a minister, preaching first on street corners before becoming working at a Houston church. He also opened a youth community center, and, as the film portrays it,...

Paul Newman admitted that his career could have been overshadowed by James Dean if the Rebel Without a Cause star hadn’t been killed in a car crash.

The Hollywood actor’s thoughts on his career and personal life are being published posthumously in a memoir, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, which will be released on 27 October.

Newman, who died in 2008, remarked: “I know there are some people who attribute my career breakthroughs to Jimmy’s death. Yes, there were elements of luck— and a lot of my success has indeed involved what I call ‘Newman’s luck’.

“Luck recognised me. If Jimmy hadn’t been killed, half of me says, ‘You could have done it anyway. It would have been a hair slower, but it would have happened.”

Newman took over Dean’s role as the fighter in the TV drama, The Battler, when Dean was killed...

In the 1970s, Marlon Brando was unforgettable as “The Godfather” and shocked filmgoers with his powerful performance in “Last Tango in Paris.” The two-time Oscar winner, who would have turned 97 on April 3, made the role of Colonel Kurtz his own in “Apocalypse Now” and negotiated a stunning payday to play Superman’s father Jor-el.

But long before those marquee roles, 1950s critics sometimes had a hard time embracing the young stage performer who developed his highly naturalistic style of acting after training with Stella Adler and being guided by director Elia Kazan, who founded the Actor’s Studio. He modeled his Stanley Kowalski character in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” on Broadway after boxer Rocky Graziano, and the rawness of his performances were sometimes confusing to observers more attuned to formal, old-fashioned acting. Long before “mumblecore” became a film genre, critics complained about Brando’s speech patterns until it...

By Giacomo Selloni

From 1937 to 1971 Look magazine was a bi-weekly publication, a "general interest” publication that along with its main competitor, Life magazine, were the upscale forerunners of all the supermarket tabloids.. Both mainly consisted of pictorial essays on sundry subjects; politics, sports, entertainment, news of the day, even up-close-and-personal celebrity featurettes.

In 1945, a 17-year old high school student from the Bronx, Stanley Kubrick, sold his first photograph to Look. It's subject was a dejected newsstand operator sitting amidst newspapers announcing the death of F.D.R.. For all of its candid appearance, the young Mr. Kubrick gave the news seller direction to "look sadder." A star was born.

From then into 1950 Stanley Kubrick was a staff photographer for Look. His assignments were generally to go out in the streets and take photographs that fit a particular essay a staff writer would pen. He also took many other photographs on...

Despite some heavyweight performances, this pugilist biopic is overshadowed by some very distinguished forebears

Related: Bleed for This review – Miles Teller boxing biopic is flattened by cliche

Another weekend, another boxing biopic, another young star looking to make a name for himself. Stepping into the ring has been a rite of passage for talented, mostly method-friendly young actors for six decades or so now, starting with (non-method) Errol Flynn as “Gentleman Jim” Corbett in 1942 and Paul Newman as Rocky Graziano in Robert Wise’s Somebody Up There Likes Me (a role inherited from James Dean) in 1956. The most influential, of course, were Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky (not a biopic, but no matter) and Robert De Niro’s Jake Lamotta in Raging Bull, but in recent years all manner of pretenders have taken a shot at the crown.

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It's ring-a-ding time, with producer-star Frank Sinatra and his cooperative director Gordon Douglas doing a variation on the hipster detective saga. The two Tony Rome pictures are lively and fun and chock-ful of borderline offensive content, like smash-zooms into women's rear ends. Tony Rome & Lady in Cement Blu-ray Twilight Time 1967, 1968 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 110 and 93 min. / Street Date September 8, 2016 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store / 29.95 Starring Frank Sinatra, Richard Conte; Tony Rome: Jill St. John, Sue Lyon, Gena Rowlands, Simon Oakland, Lloyd Bochner, Robert J. Wilke, Virginia Vincent, Joan Shawlee, Lloyd Gough, Rocky Graziano, Elisabeth Fraser, Shecky Greene, Jeanne Cooper, Joe E. Ross, Tiffany Bolling, Deanna Lund. Lady in Cement: Raquel Welch, Dan Blocker, Martin Gabel, Lainie Kazan, Paul Mungar, Richard Deacon, Joe E. Lewis, Bunny Yeager. Cinematography Joseph Biroc Original Music Billy May, Hugo Montenegro; song by Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra Written by Richard L. Breen...

For a guy who starred in only three movies, James Dean has had an oversized impact on pop culture.

Eighty-five years after his birth (on February 8, 1931) and 60 years after the release of his final film ("Giant"), Dean is still our top poster boy for teen angst. And it didn't hurt his legend that his death in a car crash at age 24 meant we never had to watch him grow old, lose his looks, sell out, or make a bad film.

As iconic and familiar as Dean has remained for six decades, there's still plenty of mystery behind this lost-too-soon idol. In honor of his 85th, here are 10 things you need to know about the "Rebel Without a Cause" star.

1. Though he typically played the brooding outsider, Dean was a jock and a team player as a teen. He excelled at baseball, basketball, and pole vaulting in high school and took up fencing in college.

Frank Albanese, who played Tony Soprano’s uncle Pat Blundetto in HBO’s The Sopranos, has passed away at the age of 84, The New York Times reports. Albanese died on Monday, Oct. 5, in Staten Island, N.Y. According to his friend Eddie Canlon, Albanese lost his battle to metastatic prostate cancer. Prior to becoming an actor, Albanese, who also appeared in the 1990 crime film Goodfellas, was a heavyweight prizefighter who trained under champion Rocky Graziano. After scar tissue developed on Albanese’s brain, Graziano helped Albanese secure his first [...]...

Frank Albanese, a boxer-turned-actor who played Tony Soprano’s farm-owning “Uncle Pat” on The Sopranos and appeared in Goodfellas among other films, died Monday at a hospice on Staten Island, NY. He was 84. His death was confirmed by a local mortuary. A protégé of former middleweight champ Rocky Graziano, Albanese won more than a dozen fights before he career was cut short by a brain injury. Graziano eventually got him a bit role in the 1968 Kirk Douglas mafia pic The Brot…...

Frank Albanese, a boxer-turned-actor who played Tony Soprano’s farm-owning “Uncle Pat” on The Sopranos and appeared in Goodfellas among other films, died Monday at a hospice on Staten Island, NY. He was 84. His death was confirmed by a local mortuary. A protégé of former middleweight champ Rocky Graziano, Albanese won more than a dozen fights before he career was cut short by a brain injury. Graziano eventually got him a bit role in the 1968 Kirk Douglas mafia pic The Brot…...

'Million Dollar Baby' movie with Hilary Swank and Clint Eastwood. 'Million Dollar Baby' movie: Clint Eastwood contrived, overlong drama made (barely) watchable by first-rate central performance Fresh off the enthusiastically received – and insincere – Mystic River, Clint Eastwood went on to tackle the ups and downs of the boxing world in the 2004 melo Million Dollar Baby. Despite the cheery title, this is not the usual Rocky-esque rags-to-riches story of the determined underdog who inevitably becomes a super-topdog once she (in this case it's a “she”) puts on her gloves, jumps into the boxing ring, and starts using other women as punching bags. That's because about two-thirds into the film, Million Dollar Baby takes a radical turn toward tragedy that is as unexpected as everything else on screen is painfully predictable. In fact, once the dust is settled, even that last third quickly derails into the same sentimental mush Eastwood and...

For Robert Wise's centennial, we're looking back on a random selection of his films beyond the familiar mega-hits (The Sound of Music & West Side Story) which we are far more prone to talk about. Here's Nathaniel on the Paul Newman boxing drama...

The poster art for Robert Wise's 1956 biopic on Rocky Graziano reminds us that the more things change the more they stay the same. We're still getting taglines like "A girl can lift a fella to the skies!" (see: Theory of Everything) but Pier Angeli's role as Rocky's wife Norma in the Paul Newman boxing pic is actually fairly minor. She straightens him out primarily by giving him something consistent to hold on to in a life that's been previously totally adrift in noncommittal boxing matches for money and petty crimes. Not that his crimes were always petty, mind you, but we'll get to that in a minute.

A quarter-century ago, Kevin Costner hit a double-play, following up "Bull Durham" with "Field of Dreams" and becoming king of the sports movie. Twenty-five years later, as "Field of Dreams" marks its 25th anniversary (it was released on April 21, 1989), Costner is back with "Draft Day." The movie's about football, not baseball, and Costner's character plays in the executive suite, not on the field, but his mere presence still offers a reminder of great sports movies past.

And after all, isn't nostalgia a key element of sports movies? "Field of Dreams" makes this explicit -- we long for the sports heroes of our childhood, for a supposed long-gone golden age of our preferred sport, as a way of connecting with our past and bridging the generational divide that separates us as adults from our parents. Sports movies offer more than just the drama of winners and losers, or the journey from dream to achievement,...

From a silent Hitchcock movie to the story of a boxer who dreams of being a great violinist, Danny Leigh explores cinema's enduring love of the fight game

Boxing was there at the very dawn of cinema. As early as 1894, film-makers were shooting prize fights: the fast and furious physical spectacle was perfect for the new medium of motion pictures. Soon, scores of directors had been drawn to boxing – not just for the violence but for the drama of fighters' lives. In 1927, Hitchcock made The Ring, a silent tale of a pugilistic love triangle that is his one and only original screenplay. While many boxing movies reached greatness, even the most ordinary could still thrill with a canny sprinkling of what became genre staples: wise old trainers, crooked promoters, fixes, comebacks, wives who can't bear to look. In fact, plenty of boxing films are really about the women behind the men.

If he didn’t find security in being one of our finest filmmakers, Martin Scorsese might almost be annoyed with Raging Bull II. But total confusion about an unneeded, bizarre, William Forsythe-led follow-up to his 1980 masterpiece — a follow-up, it should be said, that neither he nor Robert De Niro will have any involvement or say in — is the extent of his own reaction. That’s one of the few things Scorsese and I have in common. (Supreme talent is… it’s not one of them.)

Now, Variety reports that unknown director Martin Guigui (he’s got the first name!) has a full cast; lo and behold, it’s a decent lineup that, amazingly, is filled with people I’ve actually heard of. Joining Forsythe, we have Joe Mantegna, Tom Sizemore, Penelope Ann Miller, Natasha Henstridge, Alicia Witt, Ray Wise, Harry Hamlin, Bill Bellamy, James Russo — the lattermost of whom...

Chariots of Fire, directed by Hugh Hudson 30 years ago and featuring Colin Welland's landmark screenplay, is still top of my podium when it comes to sport on the big screen

Radio 5 Live has been excelling itself with some reflective features far from the madding crowd of its usual breathless hurly-burly. Acclaim for Steve Bunce's revealing monograph of the recent Amir Khan contest was followed last week by The Glasgow School, a fascinating study of Glasgow football managers' extraordinary domination of England's Premier League, and a telling homage to the boxing film Raging Bull, in which both leading protagonists, actor Robert de Niro and director Martin Scorsese, persuasively relived their input.

The producers and crucial backroom gang at Radio 5 too often modestly decline to give themselves a credit; the latter two features were both presented by the excellent Mark Chapman, an appealingly lucid enthusiast, who let George Graham and...

Many say he remains the finest pound for pound boxer to ever step into the ring. The arguing barbers in Coming to America may not think so, but consider the following: he defeated Jake Lamotta, Rocky Graziano and Carmen Basillio. He held the welterweight title from ’46 to ’51, had an 85-0 record as an amateur and won 128 of his first 131 fights as a pro (84 by knock-outs).

After a three year retirement he returned to win the middleweight title at the age of 34. He makes a strong case and a difficult one to argue against.

In any event, whether you think he’s the greatest or not, his life is going to get the biopic treatment, like Ali, La Motta and Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter before him. Producer Rachael Horovitz is teaming up with screenwriter Danny Strong to get an option on the book Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson.

Rachael Horovitz, the producer who originally set up the Michael Lewis book Moneyball at Columbia about overachieving Oakland A's Gm Billy Beane, has found a new sports figure to hang a picture on. Horovitz has teamed with Recount screenwriter Danny Strong to option the Wil Haygood biography Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson. Haygood will write the screenplay. He met Strong on The Butler, the Sony Pictures Entertainment film that has Lee Daniels attached to direct and Laura Ziskin to produce a film about Eugene Allen, who observed the civil rights struggle as an eight-term White House butler and was brought back after retirement to see Barack Obama inaugurated as the first African American president. Strong wrote that script, based on a series of articles that Haygood’ wrote for the Washington Post. Robinson is still considered pound for pound the greatest boxer ever. Aside from taking...

Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor in Richard Brooks‘ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Paul Newman on TCM: Hud, Rachel Rachel, The Prize Schedule (Pt) and synopses from the TCM website: 3:00 Am Rack, The (1956) A Korean War veteran is accused of cracking under enemy torture. Cast: Paul Newman, Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis. Dir: Arnold Laven. Bw-100 mins 4:45 Am Until They Sail (1957) Four sisters in New Zealand fall for Allied sailors en route to World War II. Cast: Jean Simmons, Joan Fontaine, Paul Newman. Dir: Robert Wise. Bw-95 mins. 6:30 Am Prize, The (1963) An American Nobel Prize-winner mixes it up with spies when he travels to Stockholm to collect his award. Cast: Paul Newman, Elke Sommer, Edward G. Robinson. Dir: Mark Robson. C-135 mins. 8:45 Am Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) True story of boxer Rocky Graziano’s rise from juvenile delinquent to world champ. Cast: Paul Newman, Pier [...]...

Oscar winner, philanthropist, film legend, and the coolest guy in the world, Paul Newman, has passed away at the age of 83, following a bout with cancer.

Newman, whose career spanned 60 years, earned ten Academy Award nominations, winning in 1987 for The Color of Money, a year after picking up the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award. The Academy also bestowed the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award on Newman for his charitable works.

After years on stage and in television, Newman broke through as a leading man in film in Somebody Up There Likes Me from 1956, in which he played boxer Rocky Graziano.

Two years later, his work in the adaptation of Tennesse Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof garnered Newman his first Oscar nomination, at the age of 33.

Newman and Oscar had an interesting relationship; although he was nominated four times in the 1960s - The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke,...

On the 26th day of January in 1925, the world was given a gift they wouldn't realize for another 29 years or more.  His first film The Silver Chalice (1954) was not  critically well received, but two years later, he portrayed boxer, Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me.  That performance gained him respect. Of course then we all know he would go on to bring unforgettable characters to life in films such as Cool Hand Luke (my personal favorite) , Can on a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Long Hot Summer, The Towering Inferno a...

In the acclaimed 1956 film Somebody Up There Likes Me, director Robert Wise traces the real-life ascent of Rocky Graziano from New York street kid to world boxing champion. In one scene early in the story, Sal Mineo says to Paul Newman (as Graziano), "Guys like us, we ain't got no chance, have we?" Graziano did indeed get his chance, and it's that opportunity to overcome sociological barriers to achieve success that has made boxing and its gladiators rich material for some of Hollywood's most celebrated storytelling. Fresh off Million Dollar Baby's knockout performance at the Academy Awards, reality TV guru Mark Burnett looks to bring the tried-and-true elements of the fight game to success on the small screen with his series The Contender, which debuts tonight on NBC. Burnett acknowledges that a big part of the show's appeal is the theme of upward social mobility that has been the backdrop of many a Hollywood boxing film.

Revered Hollywood legend James Dean was planning to ditch his glittering acting career, when his life was cut tragically short in a 1955 car accident. The Rebel Without A Cause hero told close pal and co-star Dennis Hopper that he wanted to become a film director, as he couldn't stand being treated like a puppet. Apocalypse Now actor Hopper recalls, "Jimmy was going to try directing. It was going be a movie called The Actor, about being a movie star. Jimmy wanted to be in charge. He was going to stop acting in films and be a director, but he died before any of this could happen. We had pretty much seen the end of James Dean on the screen, even if he had lived." Hopper continues, "He couldn't stand being interrupted every five seconds by some idiot behind the camera. He was too caught up in the role to be stopped abruptly and made to start again. He was going to do just one more acting part - as Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me - and then stop acting. That part ultimately went to Paul Newman, after Jimmy died in the car wreck."...