Stars Lifes: July 2011

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Angela Lindvall h&m

I usually don’t go that much at any H&M stores or even pay attention to their catalog, and furthermore, H&M has their own bi-annual magazine. Not exactly like Acne paper, the magazine is more like an editorial/trend catalog as they just use their own items and have some articles about celebrities/catwalks stories.

Angela Lindvall on the cover definitely caught my attention. A powerful cover really Vogue-like and a beautiful Angela as always reveal the fall Fashion trends. Curious that I am, I’ve decided to take a look at the interior pages. Their new collections are definitely – obviously – highly-inspired from the RTW F/W 2009 runways, you’ll find everything that are making the trends this fall but on the cheap side of the wallet.

Angela is featured in a very nice editorial, photographed by David Vasiljevic, wearing an 80′s and Balmain-ish inspired collection. Like a weather report I can forecast in a few months a storm of sequined jackets, deconstructed jeans, ankle boots and large shoulders all in black… thanks to the very affordable prices. I kind of liked the corsets, very feminine and will add some sexy to our cities..

Angela Lindvall

30-year-old supermodel Angela Lindvall is officially the face of H&M– and has graced the cover of the clothing retailer’s latest catalog. Having modeled since the age of 14, this middle-American beauty has worked with Victoria’s Secret, The Gap, Versace, Chanel and more. She’s dabbled in movies, appearing alongside Robert Downey Jr. in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, as well as some forthcoming film projects. Beyond her work in film and fashion, Lindvall is a dedicated environmentalist and vegetarian, running her own foundation promoting sustainable living in fashion and otherwise. She’s smart, talented and dead sexy, a combination which we’ll never turn down at StyleCrave…

Angela Lansbury Paul Mccartney

A few short years ago Paul McCartney was a dead-ringer for Angela Lansbury which even led to speculation that Lansbury had actually replaced Paul in The Beatles during the "Paul is Dead" thingie back in the most gear and fab Sixties.

However Macca's cast aside his Lansbury looks and now goes for something of a Stan Laurel with dyed hair look.

Angela LansburyPaul Mccartney

Angela LansburyPaul Mccartney

Angela LansburyPaul Mccartney

Angela LansburyPaul Mccartney

Angela LansburyPaul Mccartney

Angela LansburyPaul Mccartney

Angela LansburyPaul Mccartney

Angela Lansbury Miss Marple

Das kleine englische Dorf St. Mary Mead, Heimat von Miss Marple, ist hoch erfreut, als eine große amerikanische Filmgesellschaft entscheidet, dort einen Film zu drehen, der die Beziehung zwischen Maria Stuart und Elisabeth I., gespielt von den berühmten Schauspielerinnen Marina Rudd und Lola Brewster, erzählt. Marina reist mit ihrem Ehemann Jason an, und als sie erkennt, dass Lola auch im Film mitspielen wird, geht sie an die Decke, da sie und Marina sich unübersehbar nicht ausstehen können. Marina hat Todesdrohungen erhalten; kurz darauf stirbt Heather Babcock auf einer Feier im Herrenhaus, nachdem sie einen vergifteten Cocktail getrunken hat, der für Marina bestimmt war. Jeder glaubt nun, dass Marina das eigentliche Opfer hätte sein sollen, doch Inspektor Craddock, der den Fall bearbeitet, ist sich nicht sicher, weswegen er seine Tante Miss Jane Marple um Hilfe bittet.

Angela Lansbury Miss Marple

Angela Lansbury Miss Marple

Angela Lansbury Miss Marple

Angela Lansbury Miss Marple

Angela Lansbury Miss Marple

Angela Lansbury Miss Marple

Angela Lansbury Miss Marple

Angela Lansbury Young

One of my favorite things about watching BBC productions is that everyone is so familiar. I always recognize some of the actors from other movies or tv shows. The fun part is trying to guess where I saw them before. Emma was a wonderful example of this because I recognized half the cast!!! Here are the people I knew:

Last Sunday I had the pleasant surprise of stumbling across the new BBC version of Emma on “Masterpiece Classic”. As most of you know, I adore watching adaptations of Jane Austen’s books. Many Austen movies are among my favorites of all time. I really liked the Gwenyth Paltrow version of Emma (mainly because Toni Collette and Jeremy Northam are A-MAZING), so I didn’t know what I was going to think about this new one.

Well, I have only seen the first episode (there are three all together) but I love it!!!!! Romola Garai plays Emma and she is so adorable! She does a great job of making Emma likable and relate-able. As Laura Linney pointed out in her “Masterpiece Classic” introduction, Emma is not an easy character to like. She is rather stuck up, meddlesome, and does not really listen when people tell her she is wrong. But Romola makes Emma seem like a fun person to be around, and there is great chemistry between her and Johnny Lee Miller who plays Mr. Knightly. I am really excited to watch it tonight (I have actually been looking forward to it all week!!) I thought since there are only two hours left, that it would end tonight, but apparently they are playing one hour tonight and then the last hour next week. Curses! Those crafty PBS people are making me wait a whole nother week!!! (Nother is a word I picked up after reading A Whole Nother Story by Dr. Cuthbert Soup……very cool book, you should check it out.)

Whoa. I just tried to watch it again, but I only made it about a minute in before I lost it. Anyway, the trailer is for the movie Hachiko: A Dog’s Story, which I had never heard of before. Apparently it is being released straight to DVD, which is kind of sad considering it has Richard Gere and Joan Allen in it, who are pretty big names (not to mention a GORGEOUS dog). Well, I cried like a baby the first time I saw it, and then tried to forget about it and move on with my life.

Then I saw this post on EW that talked about the trailer and I couldn’t help but think, “I wonder if that is based on Greyfriars Bobby?” For those of you who don’t know, back in long ago Edinburgh a cute little dog named Bobby followed his owner (who happened to be a policeman) everywhere he went. Then, when his owner died (sniffle, sniffle) he spent most of the next 14 YEARS sitting next to his owner’s grave. The cemetery was named Grefriars Kirkyard and that is how he became known as Grefriars Bobby. Well, you can imagine how my mom and I looked after our nice tour guide told us this story while standing in front of the statue dedicated to this loyal little guy. Needless to say we were both sobbing hysterically enough that people were muttering “silly Americans.” Here is my very own picture of the statue. Luckily my tears did not interfere with the shot.

I've posted before about how I don't generally care how old an actor or actress is. If Rachel McAdams can convince me that she's 16 when she is in fact 25, more power to her, right? There is, however, a limit to my I-believe-you-are-whatever-age-you-claim-to-be stance. That limit appears when one character's age is relative to another character's age, and the relativity of said ages is important to the story.

Confusing?

Here, I'll give you some examples of the worst age discrepancies in Hollywood.

I know this is an oldie, but it's a goodie. In The Last Crusade (which was not, by the way, the "last" crusade, but that's beside the point), Sean Connery and Harrison Ford play father and son. They are eleven and a half years apart in age. Possible? Sure. Likely? Really not. Especially considering Daddy Jones is a PhD.

Angela Lansbury

Star of stage, television, and the silver screen, Angela Lansbury was born to an upper-class British family. Her father, a lumber dealer, died when Lansbury was nine, and at ten she saw Sir John Gielgud on stage at the Old Vic as Hamlet, and decided by intermission that she would become an actress. At 14, amid the blitz of London, her mother took Lansbury and her twin brothers to America.

She made her professional stage debut as a cabaret dancer at 16, after telling the club's management that she was 19. She made her Broadway debut playing Bert Lahr's wife in the 1957 bedroom farce Hotel Paradiso, and had her first starring role -- and her first hit -- in the 1960 play A Taste of Honey with Joan Plowright and Billy Dee Williams. She was Broadway's original Mame, and starred in New York productions of The King and I with Yul Brynner, as Gypsy Rose Lee's mother Mama Rose in Gypsy, and as the baker of human meat pies in Sweeney Todd. She won four Tonys over her stage career, winning every time she was nominated. She has been Oscar-nominated three times and Emmy-nominated a remarkable 18 times, and never won either award.

Her widest fame came on television as Jessica Fletcher, the retired English teacher who became a best-selling mystery writer, with a hobby of solving murders on Murder, She Wrote. Over a dozen seasons and hundreds of episodes, Fletcher was suspiciously always in the vicinity when murder most foul was committed, and the show became a haven for old-time movie and TV stars from Linda Blair to Cesar Romero. In very special episodes she traveled to England to assist the Scotland Yard, and to Hawaii to hobnob with Tom Selleck's Magnum, PI, and after the series was cancelled Lansbury returned as Fletcher in several made-for-TV movies.

Lansbury has said that her only regret is that she never had the opportunity to star in films, but she was occasionally a movie star, and turned in some unforgettable supporting roles. In her film debut at age 19, she played the Cockney, saucy maid in the haunting thriller Gaslight with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, and in the classic National Velvet she played 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor's older sister. In the 1945 film of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray with George Sanders, she played his the music hall singer who became his first conquest. In many of her films while under contract to MGM she played the other woman, the star's best friend, the nagging wife, and other characters that offered little to an actress. In the original Manchurian Candidate she played Laurence Harvey's deliciously wicked mother, and she was undoubtedly the star of Disney's delightful Bedknobs and Broomsticks as an apprentice witch who dazzles young children and dances in mid-air with David Tomlinson. She had the nominal lead as the detective Miss Marple in the all-star adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Mirror Crack'd, and she voiced the teapot, Mrs. Potts, in Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast -- and sang the movie's Oscar-winning theme song.

Lansbury's genealogy features numerous notable names. The family's show business tradition began with her great-uncle, Robert Mantell, a Broadway producer and star from the 1880s to the 1920s, who performed with Ethel Barrymore. Lansbury's mother was Moyna MacGill, a successful actress on the London stage and star of several silent films in the early 1920s. MacGill's first husband, before she married Lansbury's father, was movie director Reginald Denham, best known for directing Vivien Leigh's pre-Gone With the Wind comedy The Village Squire, and writing the thriller Ladies in Retirement starring Ida Lupino and Elsa Lanchester. MacGill and Denham's daughter Isolde Denham, Lansbury's half-sister, married actor Peter Ustinov and spawned well-known British stage actress Tamara Ustinov. After her children were grown, Lansbury's mother resumed her acting career, mostly appearing in small roles as eccentric Englishwomen in films from the 1944 Jane Eyre with Joan Fontaine to My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison, and she appeared on Broadway in the 1954 production of The Boy Friend with Julie Andrews.

Her brother is Bruce Lansbury, the long-time Hollywood producer of enjoyably fluffy TV shows such as The Wild Wild West with Robert Conrad, Mission: Impossible with Peter Graves, Wonder Woman with Lynda Carter, and Knight Rider with David Hasselhoff. Bruce Lansbury's twin, Edgar Lansbury, is a very successful stage producer whose biggest hits include the original New York production of Godspell and the Broadway debut of The Subject Was Roses with Jack Albertson and Martin Sheen. He also produced the feature films based on both plays, and won a Tony for The Subject Was Roses.

Angel Porrino

Born and raised in Las Vegas, Angel Porrino serves as Holly Madison's personal assistant, best friend and overall sidekick. With her big green eyes, blond hair and a voice that sounds like she swallowed a helium balloon, Angel is a bubbly—and at times bubble-brained—single mom to her adorable baby boy, Roman. Oh, and did we mention she still lives with her parents?

Friday, July 15, 2011

Amisha Patel 2009

Lately, she has been in the news for all the wrong reasons - her estranged relationship with her parents and actor brother, Ashmit Patel; her break up with filmmaker Vikram Bhatt, and now her romance with Kanav Puri. Amisha's only A-list film in hand is Yash Raj's co-production with Kunal Kohli, Thoda Pyar Thoda Magic, which is due for release on June 27.

"Just as this film was nearing completion, Aditya took up the responsibility of resurrecting Amisha's down-in-the-dumps career on himself," our source tells us.

"He signed her up for two more films under his Yash Raj banner and started guiding her career moves in Bollywood. One of the most important instruction he gave her was not to sign anymore films that featured her in small inconsequential roles.

Amisha Patel 2009
"Amisha was confirmed to play Irrfan Khan's wife in Billo Barber. She was excited abut the film despite her short role in it, because there was an opportunity to do a few scenes with King Khan. But Aditya was not willing to let his leading lady do such an insignificant part, and he told Amisha as much.

"Without wasting any time, Amisha told Priyadarshan that she was withdrawing. The Billo Barber producers, who had already faced a tough time finding their Barber's wife, were left helpless. Luckily for them, Lara Dutta stepped in.

"Thesedays, Amisha cannot hide her excitement over the special attention that she is getting from the Yash Raj scion. However, it is making Rani Mukerji a little insecure, because she only has the Yash Raj banner and special friend Aditya to fall back upon, now that her market value has plummeted," the source adds saucily.