Celebrity Gossip
It’s a wrap for ‘Gardens’
If you watched the Golden Globes you saw Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange giggling and having a ball together. That’s because these worthy talents are so happy at having their “Grey Gardens” movie finished amid rumors that it will change Drew’s career and make her not just a Hollywood business success, as she has been in the past, but a r-e-a-l-l-y big acting star again. And the formidable Oscar winner Lange is right on the “comeback” success road with Drew!
Last week, Lee Radziwill was offered a private screening of the film about her eccentric East Hampton cousins, the women who lived in cat-ridden squalor among the rich of eastern Long Island. (This story has been told by a documentary, in a recent Broadway musical and is now a feature movie.)
At one point, this recent effort shows the late Jacqueline Kennedy visiting her cousins. At the time, Jackie was wed to Aristotle Onassis and he offered up $30,000 to clean up the “Grey Gardens” property. (It is today privately owned by Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee and is a Hamptons landmark showplace.)
Lee went to the screening with her friend Billy Norwich of Vogue and they say the magazine will be covering the film “Grey Gardens” in its April issue. Onward and upward with the arts!
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If you want to see acting chops, grab a ticket for the Richard Greenberg play “The American Plan,” which the Manhattan Theater Club is proudly re-presenting on Broadway. You’ll see a luminous young star, Lily Rabe, at her best. (In the audience opening night were her proud parents — playwright David Rabe and Oscar-nominated actress Jill Clayburgh — Lily’s guy, actor Nicky Hoge, and his mother Olivia.)
The very married Matthew Brodericks were applauding on the aisle. Also glimpsed Marian Seldes, Joan Rivers, Phyllis Newman, John Guare, Patricia Clarkson, Donna Murphy, Joan Hamburg and people like that.
I don’t pretend to understand what happens onstage in this play one little bit. But it was a fascinating mysterious night and the cast is riveting. Biggest mystery of all? The German accent of Mercedes Ruehl. (Frankly, it doesn’t matter. Ms. Ruehl made the movie “Married to the Mob” and after that, I would forgive her anything!)
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The Texas Film Hall of Fame prizes go this year to TV star Larry Hagman and the powerful actor Powers Boothe down in Austin on March 12. Also honored will be Catherine Hardwicke, a Texas native who has made history with “Twilight,” the highest grossing theatrical opening ever by a female director. This event, with movie stars galore and famous honorees ranging from Marcia Gay Harden, Forest Whitaker, Sissy Spacek, Bill Paxton, Morgan Fairchild and Ann-Margret, to name a few, is always a down-home informal kick.
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I don’t know about you but I don’t care exactly when it was that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt fell in love and he decided to leave his famous wife, Jennifer Aniston, and become a father of five or six or a dozen kids. I enjoy these people on the screen and their private excuses, explanations, rationalizations, don’t apply.
Do go see Brad in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” because he’s great in this overlong, overwrought but fascinating film. But leave his private life to heaven.
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