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eastcoastgirl Julie Newmar Sep 27, 2009 4:05 PM BIOGRAPHY Julie's version of accurate nonsense As an eleventh generation American and a Mayflower descendent, Julie Newmar has beauty, brains and a charming sense of humor. Born Julia Chalene Newmeyer in Los Angeles, her father, Donald, was an engineering professor, head of the Phys Ed. Department, and head football coach at LACC. He was on the U.C. Berkeley Wonder Team. Her mother, Helen Jesmer, was a Ziegfeld Follies girl, said by Eddie Cantor to have the most beautiful legs in the Follies. From an early age, Julie studied classical piano, ballet, and every form of dance her mother would drive her to lessons for, graduating high school at 15, then spending a year in Europe with her mother and brother John. On her UCLA entrance exam, she scored a 99, staying only six weeks, switching to Universal Studios as choreographer, teacher, and dance double. Not yet 18, she was the original “Golden Girl,” a statue-come-to-life dancing in “Serpent of the Nile”, often times seen on MySpace, UTube, and was one of the brides in the classic MGM musical “Seven Brides for Seven “Brothers”. “Silk Stockings” was her first role on Broadway at 19. Then the very “Stupefyin’ Jones” in “Li’l Abner”. She won a Tony for her first speaking role in the hit comedy “Marriage-Go-Round” (Claudette Colbert and Charles Boyer). A contract with 20th Century Fox provided Marilyn Monroe/Jayne Mansfield-type roles in “The Rookie”, “The Maltese Bippy”, . . . . . . . In London, she played the ubiquitous love interest of Zero Mostel in the unfinished film “Monsieur Le Coq”. She also toured in the National Company, opposite Joel Grey, in “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off”. Her legs were insured for $10 million (except in the event of theft). Making the transition to TV, Julie had many memorable song and dance routines (a Jonathan Winters Special, The Danny Kaye Show, Mike Douglas Show) but is best known for her comedic as well as supernatural roles. She was the complex and alluring motorcycle babe on two episodes of “Route 66” (a role created for her by Stirling Silliphant) and starred in a “Twilight Zone” episode as The Devil. She was claimed again by Jim Aubrey, President of CBS for the lead in “My Living Doll” as Rhoda the robot, still a cult sitcom favorite. In 1966, urged by her brother at Harvard, she created the role of Catwoman in “Batman”. Her sense of humor and physicality made her this show’s most popular villain. Similarly popular was her appearance as April the Laundress in “The Monkees Get Out More Dirt”. On Wide, Wide World of Sports she made three parachute jumps. She was killed off in “Columbo” but slayed audiences as Lola in “Damn Yankees”. She was given a chapter in the book, “Mothers of Invention” for having created “Nudemar”, a new design in pantyhose, appearing in People Magazine. In the 1980’s, Julie appeared in nine films of “presumptive” value while raising her son. She attended UCLA and took courses so she could more effectively run her own real estate business. In 1991, Julie took on the Rosalind Russel role in “The Women”, then astonished Broadway in a revival of “Li’l Abner”, 42 years after performing in the original production, same role, same costume, as Stupefyin’ Jones. She became a Paris model for Thierry Mugler and appeared among the fashion world’s most gorgeous divas in George Michael’s music video “Too Funky”. Few women have had a movie named after them. Julie’s name literally became box office via “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar”, a film from Stephen Spielberg’s company. Literary types from John D. MacDonald to Harlan Coben have written characters based on Julie or alluding to Julie’s “special…beautiful and animated…incomparable feminine” personality. She was persuaded by Adam West to re-make Catwoman in his “Return to the Batcave”.� She also appeared in her own “A & E Biography”. A feud over “quality of life” issues with neighbor Jim Belushi ended amicably in a historic and hysteric guest spot on “According to Jim”, which once again proved she’s as active and attractive as ever. Batman’s formidable feline, Belushi’s archly attractive enemy.

Denise1212 The Beverly Hills HOTel- Hollywood Glamour! yay! Jul 27, 2009 10:46 PM Hey you guys Im planning to stay at the beverly hills hotel to celebrate my 18th birthday and i was wondering if you guys have any history details of the place or if you have suggesting on where i should visit that has old hollywood history. Thanks So much!!

eastcoastgirl Jane Greer May 14, 2009 9:31 AM Jane Greer (September 9, 1924 – August 24, 2001) was a film and television actress who was perhaps best known for her role as femme fatale Kathie Moffat in the 1947 film noir Out of the Past. The five-foot five Greer began life as Bettejane Greer in Washington, D.C. A beauty-contest winner and professional model from her teens, Greer began her show business career as a big band singer. Howard Hughes spotted Greer modeling on the cover of Life magazine of June 8, 1942 and sent her to Hollywood to become an actress. She married Rudy Vallee, her senior by 22 years, in 1943. Hughes lent out the actress to RKO to star in many films, including Dick Tracy (1945), Out of the Past (1947), They Won't Believe Me (1947), and the comedy/suspense film The Big Steal (1949), alongside Out of the Past co-star Robert Mitchum. Hughes refused to let her work for a time; when she finally began film acting again, she appeared in You're in the Navy Now (1951), The Prisoner of Zenda (1952), Run for the Sun (1956), and The Man of a Thousand Faces (1957). In 1984, she was cast in Against All Odds, a remake of Out of the Past, as the mother of the character she had played in 1947. She also participated in an Out of the Past parody on TV's Saturday Night Live with Robert Mitchum. She also played the part of Norma Jennings' mother, Vivian Niles, in Twin Peaks.Jane Greer married Rudy Vallee in 1943, but they divorced the following year. She remarried in 1947, to Edward Lasker (1912-1997), a Los Angeles lawyer and businessman, with whom she had three children. Her son Lawrence Lasker is a movie producer who has co-produced several films, including WarGames (1983) and Sneakers (1992). Edward Lasker had been an owner/breeder of thoroughbred racehorses since 1929, and Greer also became an owner of race horses under her own name. Among her graded stakes race wins were the 1966 Withers and Jim Dandy Stakes and the 1967 Fall Highweight Handicap with the colt Indulto. Greer died of cancer at the age of 76 in 2001 and was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. Pan-Americana (1945) (uncredited) Two O'Clock Courage (1945) (as Bettejane Greer) George White's Scandals (1945) (as Bettejane Greer) Dick Tracy (1945) The Falcon's Alibi (1946) Sunset Pass (1946) Bamboo Blonde (1946) Sinbad the Sailor (1947) They Won't Believe Me (1947) Out of the Past (1947) Station West (1948) The Big Steal (1949) The Company She Keeps (1951) You're in the Navy Now (1951) Down Among the Sheltering Palms (1952) You for Me (1952) The Prisoner of Zenda (1952) Desperate Search (1952) The Clown (1953) Run for the Sun (1956) Man of a Thousand Faces (1957) Where Love Has Gone (1964) Billie (1965) The Outfit (1973) The Shadow Riders (1982) (TV) Against All Odds (1984) Just Between Friends (1986) Immediate Family (1989) Perfect Mate (1996)

eastcoastgirl Jean Simmons Mar 21, 2009 1:27 PM Jean Merilyn Simmons, OBE (born 31 January 1929) is an Oscar-nominated English actress. Simmons was named an Officer in the Order of the British Empire in 2003.Born in Crouch Hill, London, England, to Charles Simmons (gymnast) and his wife Winifred nee Loveland - Jean Simmons began acting at the age of 14.In 1950 Britain lost their young star to America - and Rank sold her to Howard Hughes who then owned RKO studios.In 1950, she married the English actor Stewart Granger, with whom she appeared in several films, successfully making the transition to Hollywood. She made four films for Howard Hughes, including Angel Face directed by Otto Preminger. In 1953 she made The Actress, starring alongside Spencer Tracy - a film that is one of her personal favourites. Among her best-known leading roles are The Robe (1953) The Egyptian (1954), Guys and Dolls (1955), The Big Country (1958), Elmer Gantry (1960) (directed by her second husband, Richard Brooks), Spartacus (1960), and The Happy Ending, again directed by Brooks and for which she received her second Oscar nomination.By the 1970s, Simmons turned her focus to stage and television acting. She toured the United States in the well-reviewed A Little Night Music, then took the show to London, and thus originated the role of Desirée Armfeldt on the West End[4] . Doing the show for three years, she said she never tired of Stephen Sondheim's music; ' No matter how tired or 'off ' you felt, the music would just pick you up.' For her appearance in the mini-series The Thorn Birds, she won an Emmy Award. In 1985 and 1986 she appeared in North & South. In 1988 she starred in The Dawning with Anthony Hopkins and Hugh Grant and in 1989 she again starred in a miniseries, this time a version of Great Expectations, in which she played the role of Miss Havisham, Estella's adoptive mother. Simmons made a late career appearance in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Drumhead" as a witch-hunt inspiring investigator named Admiral Nora Satie.She was married twice: in 1950 to Stewart Granger, divorcing in 1960, and in 1960 to director Richard Brooks, divorcing in 1977. Both men were significantly older than Simmons but she has denied she was looking for a father figure. Her father had died when she was just fourteen but she's said: "They were really nothing like my father at all. My father was a gentle, soft-spoken man. My husbands were much noisier and much more opinionated ... it's really nothing to do with age ... it's to do with what's there - the twinkle and sense of humour." [5] And in a 1984 interview, given in Copenhagen at the time she was shooting the film Yellow Pages, she had elaborated slightly on her marriages. "It may be simplistic, but you could sum up my two marriages by saying that, when I wanted to be a wife, Jimmy (Stewart Granger) would say:'I just want you to be pretty.' And when I wanted to cook, Richard would say: ' Forget the cooking. You've been trained to act - so act!' Most people thought I was helpless - a clinger and a butterfly - during my first marriage. It was Richard Brooks who saw what was wrong and tried to make me stand on my own two feet. I'd whine :'I'm afraid.' And he'd say: 'Never be afraid to fail. Every time you get up in the morning, you are ahead." She has two daughters, Tracy Granger (born 1956) and Kate Brooks, one by each marriage. Simmons moved to the East Coast in the late 1970's, briefly renting a home in the Litchfield County town of New Milford, Connecticut. Simmons sought treatment for alcohol addiction in 1986 and currently lives in Santa Monica, California. Sports Day (1944) Give us the Moon (1944) Mr. Emmanuel (1944) Kiss the Bride Goodbye (1945) Meet Sexton Blake (1945) The Way to the Stars (1945) Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) Great Expectations (1946) The Woman in the Hall (1947) Uncle Silas (1947) Black Narcissus (1947) Hungry Hill (1947) Hamlet (1948) The Blue Lagoon (1949) Adam and Evelyne (1949) So Long at the Fair (1950) Cage of Gold (1950) Trio (1950) The Clouded Yellow (1951) Angel Face (1952) Androcles and the Lion (1952) Young Bess (1953) Affair with a Stranger (1953) The Robe (1953) The Actress (1953) She Couldn't Say No (1954) (AKA Beautiful but Dangerous ) Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) The Egyptian (1954) A Bullet Is Waiting (1954) Désirée (1954) Footsteps in the Fog (1955) Guys and Dolls (1955) Hilda Crane (1956) The Big Country (1958) Home Before Dark (1958) This Earth Is Mine (1959) Elmer Gantry (1960) Spartacus (1960) The Grass Is Greener (1960) All the Way Home (1963) Life at the Top (1965) Mister Buddwing (1966) Divorce American Style (1967) Rough Night in Jericho (film) (1967) Heidi (1968) The Happy Ending (1969) Say Hello to Yesterday (1971) Mr. Sycamore (1975) The Dain Curse (TV) (1978) Dominique (1978) A Small Killing (TV) (1981) The Thorn Birds (TV) (1983) December Flower (TV) (1984) Midas Valley (TV) (1985) Yellow Pages (1985) North and South (1985) North and South Book II (1986) The Dawning (1988) Great Expectations (1989) Star Trek: The Next Generation (1991) Dark Shadows (1991) They Do It with Mirrors (1991) How to Make an American Quilt (1995) Daisies in December (TV) (1995) Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) (voice) Jean Simmons: Rose of England (2004) (documentary) Howl's Moving Castle (Hauru no ugoku shiro) (2004) (voice) Through the Moebius Strip (2005) Shadows in the Sun (2008)

eastcoastgirl Vera Miles Mar 18, 2009 10:53 AM Vera Miles (born Vera June Ralston; August 23, 1929) is an American actress known from such classic films as The Searchers, Psycho and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.Miles was born in Boise City, Oklahoma. She was crowned Miss Kansas in 1948.Her success as a beauty queen prompted Miles' move to Los Angeles where, in 1950, she soon began landing small roles in film and television. These included a minor part as a chorus girl in Two Tickets to Broadway (1951), a musical starring Janet Leigh, with whom Miles would go on to co-star nine years later in the classic Alfred Hitchcock film, Psycho. Attracting the attention of several producers, she was put under contract at various studios where she posed for cheesecake and publicity photographs, as was standard procedure for most up-and-coming Hollywood starlets of the era. Under contract to Warner Bros., Miles was cast in films such as The Charge At Feather River in 3-D, but lost out on doing a big 3-D hit starring Vincent Price, House of Wax, for which she was considered. She once recalled: "I was dropped by the best studios in town." In "Tarzan's Hidden Jungle," filmed in 1954 and released in 1955, she played Tarzan's love interest (not named "Jane" in this film). In 1954, she wed the muscular actor who had played Tarzan, Gordon Scott. They divorced in 1959. Legendary motion picture director John Ford picked Miles to star as Jeffrey Hunter's spirited love interest in The Searchers (1956), starring John Wayne. Widely considered one of the screen's definitive and most influential Westerns, The Searchers was recently voted by Entertainment Weekly as the "greatest Western of all time" and the "13th greatest film of all time." Although Miles' other films that year included Autumn Leaves with Joan Crawford and Cliff Robertson, and 23 Paces to Baker Street with Van Johnson, it was The Searchers that accounted for a dramatic upswing in her career. A year later, Miles began a five-year personal contract with Alfred Hitchcock and was widely publicized as the director's potential successor to the sophisticated and supremely elegant cool blonde Grace Kelly. Miles' new mentor directed her in the role of the emotionally troubled new bride of Ralph Meeker in a memorable episode of his popular television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (titled "Revenge"). Suitably impressed, Hitchcock directed her on the big screen in another strong performance as the emotionally devastated wife of Henry Fonda (who played a New York musician falsely accused of a crime) in The Wrong Man (1957). New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, writing of the performances of Miles and her esteemed co-star Fonda, singled out Miles' performance for greater praise, writing that she "does convey a poignantly pitiful sense of fear of the appalling situation into which they have been cast". Hitchcock responded not only to Miles' blonde beauty and intelligent sex appeal but also to her very obvious acting talent. He undertook a reinvention of his new star through grooming and wardrobe supervised by Oscar-winning costume designer Edith Head. In a 1956 feature article in Look magazine, Miles said of Hitchcock, "He has never complimented me, or even told me why he signed me." Hitchcock commented in the same article, "She's an attractive, intelligent and sexy woman. That about rolls it up." In a far more effusive mood, he told a reporter, referring to the similarities between Miles and Grace Kelly, "I feel the same way directing Vera that I did with Grace. She has a style, an intelligence, and a quality of understatement." Production delays and her pregnancy (a son, Michael, with then-husband Gordon Scott) cost Miles the dual leading role in the project Hitchcock designed as a showcase for his new star, Vertigo (1958), a film considered by many to be one of the director's masterworks. Miles recalled that when she told Hitchcock that she could not star in his deeply personal and melancholic thriller for which costumes and makeup tests had already been completed, "He was overwhelmed." The director replaced Miles with Kim Novak, with whom he clashed. When asked years later about Miles by director François Truffaut in the book Hitchcock/Truffaut, Hitchcock explained their professional falling-out this way: "She became pregnant just before the part that was going to turn her into a star. After that, I lost interest. I couldn't get the rhythm going with her again." Miles reflected, "Over the span of years, he's had one type of woman in his films, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly and so on. Before that, it was Madeleine Carroll. I'm not their type and never have been. I tried to please him but I couldn't. They are all sexy women, but mine is an entirely different approach." In 1959, Miles and Van Johnson worked together again in Web of Evidence, which was adapted from A.J. Cronin's novel, Beyond This Place. A year later, Hitchcock cast her as Janet Leigh's sister Lila Crane in Psycho (1960), in which her character discovers the shocking truth about Norman Bates and his mother. Miles, while making the thriller, called it "the weirdy of all times". Despite her role being a supportive one, Miles' tense, tightly-coiled performance made a strong and lasting impression. On January 7, 1960, Miles appeared as Jenny Breckenridge in the "Miss Jenny" episode of Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theater Western television series on CBS, opposite Ben Cooper in the role of Darryl Thompson and Jack Elam as Little Jimmy Lehigh. She also co-starred with Susan Hayward and John Gavin in a glossy remake of the melodrama about adultery, Back Street (1961), directed by David Miller and based on the much-filmed 1931 novel by Fannie Hurst. Following another stint in another classic John Ford film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), opposite John Wayne and James Stewart (who compete for her attention), she won a Bronze Wrangler citation from Western Heritage Awards, which she shared with director Ford, writer James Warner Bellah and her fellow actors, including Lee Marvin and Edmond O'Brien. She would play opposite John Wayne again in Hellfighters (1968). In 1962 and 1963, she appeared on NBC's medical drama about psychiatry, The Eleventh Hour, in two episodes entitled "Beauty Playing a Mandolin Underneath a Willow Tree", as Kate Sommers, and "Ann Costigan: A Duel on a Field of White", as the title character Ann. Miles' career took an unexpected turn when she landed her first roles at the Disney studio, in A Tiger Walks (1964), Those Calloways (1965), and Follow Me, Boys! (1966). She continued to play roles for Disney into the 1970s. Miles then continued extensive work in television, before reprising her most famous role of Lila Crane in Psycho II in 1983. This sequel saw Miles' character vociferously protesting the proposed parole of Norman Bates (played, as in the original, by Anthony Perkins). In later years, Miles lamented that Psycho had become the film with which Hitchcock's name remained most associated with in the eyes of the public, considering that he had directed so many other superior films. Throughout the 1980s and thereafter, Miles continued to work in both television and film until her retirement in 1995. Miles resides in California and refuses any public relations offers (including interviews and public appearances) and has maintained a low profile since her retirement. Miles' first husband was Bob Miles; they were wed from 1948-1954 and had two daughters: Debra Miles, born in 1950, and Kelley Miles, born in 1952. After their divorce, she was married to Gordon Scott from 1954-1959, and they had one son, Michael Scott, born in 1957. Upon that divorce, she was married to actor Keith Larsen from 1960-1971, and they had one son, Erik Larsen, born in Burbank, California on April 30, 1961. Larsen remarried after their divorce in 1971, but Miles remained single.

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