Lifestyle
Carol Burnett Honored in Star-Studded Hollywood Handprint Ceremony
Carol Burnett‘s a living legend who’s going to live on forever … ’cause she got the cement treatment at TCL Chinese Theater while some of Hollywood’s biggest stars looked on.
The actress-comedian dipped her hands and feet into wet cement outside the Hollywood landmark Thursday … an honor only bestowed upon H’wood’s brightest stars — and, ya gotta see everyone who attended.
Of course, there’s Carol — who looks great for 91 BTW — with her hands down in the muck, big grin on her face, but also in attendance are Bob Odenkirk, Laura Dern, Allison Janney, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, and one of the few people perhaps more famous than even Burnett … Dick Van Dyke.
Several of Burnett’s costars spoke at the event including Odenkirk and Dern … while Jimmy Kimmel walked over from his studio across the street to honor Carol with a touching speech.
Believe it or not … Carol’s still a little shocked at all this hoopla despite her decades as one of the biggest bold-faced names in Hollywood — telling Entertainment Tonight receiving the honor was “bizarre.”
There’s no doubt Burnett’s earned it … she’s lit up stages since the mid-1950s — becoming the first woman to host her own variety show “The Carol Burnett Show.”
And, that’s just the tip of the iceberg … Carol’s also starred in “Better Call Saul,” “Annie,” “All My Children,” “Mama’s Family,” “Toy Story 4,” and “Palm Royale” which just finished its first season.
Carol’s only an Oscar away from full-blown EGOT status — a tall task for any actor, but if anyone can manage the feat in their 90s, it’s gotta be her.
Anyhoo … congrats, Carol!
Lifestyle
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Lifestyle
Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker Bring Baby Rocky on Blink-182 Tour
Travis Barker and Kourtney Kardashian are traveling with all the small things as they hit the road for the Blink-182 tour … because baby Rocky is riding the tour bus too!!!
Rocky was all snuggled up in a brown onesie Friday as Kourtney carried him in her arms … and they boarded the tour bus with Travis.
The family of 3 was in New York City this morning before hitting the road and heading south to Ocean City, Maryland … where Blink-182 is about to play a concert.
Kourtney gave birth to Rocky back in November in Los Angeles, so the kid is already getting accustomed to the rockstar lifestyle … he’s not even a year old and he’s already a roadie.
Rocky’s been spotted in some of Kourtney’s social media snaps from the tour — riding a miniature flying saucer around backstage — but this is the first time we’ve seen them all together as a family between shows.
Get this kid some drumsticks, STAT!!!
Lifestyle
Sharp-tongued, indomitable, and beloved actress Dame Maggie Smith dies at 89
Dame Maggie Smith – whose acting career spanned seven decades and traversed the stage and screen – has died at age 89. She passed away peacefully surrounded by family and friends on Friday morning, her publicist confirmed.
Smith was once so slender and delicate as Desdemona that Laurence Olivier’s Othello could easily smother her with a pillow. By the end of her career, no one would’ve dared try.
Though she was fine-featured and stood barely five-foot-five, casting directors realized early-on that her characters would inevitably appear indomitable, whether she was bristling with epithets in Shaw, casting spells as Harry Potter’s Professor McGonagall, or silencing opposition with sideways glances as Downton Abbey‘s formidable Lady Violet.
Act One: Precise diction in her prime
What Maggie Smith learned about holding audiences rapt, she learned early. She arrived on the professional stage in her teens, and graduated quickly to Britain’s National Theater, the West End and Broadway, where her precise diction proved ideal for delivering the barbs of restoration comedy, and the epigrams of Noel Coward. Let her play the sort of chatterbox that George Bernard Shaw wrote in The Millionairess, and it was sometimes hard for her co-stars to get a word in edgewise.
Almost as nonstop was the title role that won her a Best Actress Oscar in 1970 — her deluded teacher at a Scottish girls’ school in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
“Give me a gherll at an impressionable age,” she purred, “and she is mine for life.”
The character was not, in fact, in her prime, but Smith most definitely was. In the next eight years, she starred in six films, including Travels With My Aunt and Death on the Nile, triumphed on TV in everything from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to The Carol Burnett Show, and on stage, held title roles from Hedda Gabler to Peter Pan.
All of this before winning another Oscar in Neil Simon’s California Suite, for playing multiple characters including a conniving actress who is herself up for an Oscar, and who practices a delicious, hammily self-deprecating acceptance speech at one point, saying she doesn’t want to “sob all over Burt Reynolds.”
No sobs in Smith’s actual acceptance speech at the Oscars. She thanked her writer, director and co-star.
Act Two: Best exotic roles, some written just for her
All of this was well before a sort of second act in Smith’s career that found her prim and proper as a chaperone in A Room with a View, primly comic as the mother superior in Sister Act with Whoopi Goldberg, cranky in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movies, crankier still as the woman who came to stay in Alan Bennett’s driveway in The Lady in the Van, and downright viperish as mother to Ian McKellen’s King in Shakespeare’s Richard III.
Though he’d been slaughtering all comers for most of the movie at that point, there was such venom in her declaration that he was “proud, subtle, sly and bloody,” that McKellen looked shaken. As well he might.
Contemporary playwrights had also taken note. Peter Shaffer, the author of Amadeus and Equus, remembered he was once asked by Smith at a party why he kept writing plays about two men talking. He responded by going home and writing Lettice and Lovage specifically for her, about an extravagantly over-imaginative tour guide “to celebrate her glee and glitter and perfect timing,” he told interviewers. “And above all wit — her presence is witty. ”
Act Three: From Harry Potter to Downton
And then Smith’s career — for which she’d been made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and later a Dame and a member of the Order of the Companions of Honor — had a third act. One in which her fame grew out of all proportion to what she’d known before. Children recognized her on the street from the Harry Potter movies (she was in all but one of them).
And while she was casting spells on kids, their parents and grandparents awaited her every utterance on TV’s Downton Abbey, where for six seasons, she brought a capricious sense of humor to the sort of woman she never was in real life — aloof, entitled, un-diplomatic, impatient, argumentative, hidebound, and so thoroughly winning, audiences couldn’t get enough of her.
That, at least, Lady Violet had in common with the woman who played her. Maggie Smith left audiences craving more of her presence for seven decades, though she worked so constantly that the dowager countess’ most famously clueless question — “what is a weekend?” — might almost have been her own.
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