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Producer David O. Selznick was always looking for the next big thing. He had scored an enormous hit — it was a cultural phenom — with his 1939 Civil War drama “Gone with the Wind,’ which won eight Oscars including best picture, director, actress and supporting actress. And for those fashion-minded, “Gwtw” also caused an uptick in sales of the women’s headgear called the snood.

The following year, Selznick produced the best picture winner, Alfred Hitchcock’s romantic mystery “Rebecca.” Four years after ‘Rebecca” on July 20, 1944, Selznick released the sentimental, home-fires-burning drama “Since You Went Away,” which he hoped would the next “Gwtw” in terms of box office and Oscar love.

The world was war weary in 1944. In fact, World War II seemed never ending. The Allied troops launched its invasion of Europe on the beaches of Normandy on June 6th. But even with the success of D-day, the war wouldn’t...

With the long-delayed 74th Tony Awards set for Sept. 26 at the Winter Garden and streaming on Paramount + and a CBS special, let’s take a deep dive into Tony Awards history and look back at the first decade. Broadway was bristling with excitement post World War II. Young playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and William Inge breathed new life into the Great White Way. And new talents electrifying audiences included Marlon Brando, Julie Harris and Gwen Verdon. It was the perfect time for the creation of the Tony Awards in 1947. The Antoinette Perry Awards or Theatre Excellence were named after the legendary theater actress who was co-founder of the American Theatre Wing; she had died in 1946.

The first annual Tony Awards took place on April 6, 1947 at the Waldorf Astoria and was broadcast on radio on Wor and Mutual Network radio. There was no categories for best play or musical,...

Christopher Plummer, the Canadian-born Shakespearean actor who starred in films including “The Sound of Music” and “Beginners,” died on Friday morning at his home in Connecticut. He was 91.

“Chris was an extraordinary man who deeply loved and respected his profession with great old fashion manners, self deprecating humor and the music of words,” said Lou Pitt, his longtime friend and manager of 46 years. “He was a national treasure who deeply relished his Canadian roots. Through his art and humanity, he touched all of our hearts and his legendary life will endure for all generations to come. He will forever be with us.”

An imposing theatrical presence with a well-cultivated, resonant voice, that critic John Simon once observed, “in its chamois mode, can polish mirrors,” Plummer was best known for playing Captain von Trapp in the Oscar-winning musical “The Sound of Music.” He also won an Oscar in 2012 for his supporting turn in the film “Beginners,...

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

The 70th Tony Awards are in just a few days. I certainly can't be trusted with predictions, but I’ll make one guess. The award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play probably won’t be split three ways. That sort of near-impossible result has only occurred once, all the way back in 1948. The 2nd Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play was shared by Judith Anderson, Katharine Cornell, and Jessica Tandy. Tandy won for the original broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Of course, she didn’t get to be in the movie and so we will leave her behind. Elia Kazan’s film of Tennessee Williams’s masterpiece premiered less than two years after its Broadway run ended. Its success was that instant. It won four Oscars, though all but one was for acting.

'Father of the Bride': Steve Martin and Kimberly Williams. Top Five Father's Day Movies? From giant Gregory Peck to tyrant John Gielgud What would be the Top Five Father's Day movies ever made? Well, there have been countless films about fathers and/or featuring fathers of various sizes, shapes, and inclinations. In terms of quality, these range from the amusing – e.g., the 1950 version of Cheaper by the Dozen; the Oscar-nominated The Grandfather – to the nauseating – e.g., the 1950 version of Father of the Bride; its atrocious sequel, Father's Little Dividend. Although I'm unable to come up with the absolute Top Five Father's Day Movies – or rather, just plain Father Movies – ever made, below are the first five (actually six, including a remake) "quality" patriarch-centered films that come to mind. Now, the fathers portrayed in these films aren't all heroic, loving, and/or saintly paternal figures. Several are...

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By Barbara Lovenheim

It seems improbable for a new slant on Katharine Hepburn to emerge, but the upcoming exhibit Katharine Hepburn: Dressed for Stage and Screen at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and the five excellent essays in the new Skira/Rizzoli companion book "Katharine Hepburn: Rebel Chic" are provocative and eye-opening. Contrary to Hepburn’s public image as an indifferent fashion rebel who wore slacks in public years before pant suits came into vogue, Hepburn cultivated her counter-culture image deliberately and with great precision when she became aware of its publicity value, eventually ordering custom-made slacks and shoes and, on the sly, ordering handmade French lingerie.

“I think you should pretend you don’t care,” she once remarked to Garbo, who captivated Hollywood with her mannish suits, hats, and Ferragamo flat-heeled shoes. “But it’s the most outrageous pretense.

The Letter (1929) Review Pt.1. [Photo: Jeanne Eagels as jealous murderess Leslie Crosbie.] Low-key, however, is hardly the appropriate manner to describe Jeanne Eagels' bombastic talkie début in a role played in London by Gladys Cooper and on Broadway by Katharine Cornell. Eagels, a sensation on stage as Sadie Thompson in W. Somerset Maugham's Rain and the star of a handful of silent films (e.g., The World and the Woman; The Fires of Youth; Man, Woman and Sin, opposite John Gilbert), acts the part of the adulteress-murderess as if she were playing to the far corners of the gallery. (Rain was unavailable for a film adaptation at the time because Gloria Swanson had produced and starred in Raoul Walsh's Sadie Thompson the year before.) Eagels' performance is all mannerisms — hand to forehead to show distress, trembling voice to show despair — and no emotional core. While Bette Davis' 1940 Leslie looks and acts like a cool, calculating vixen,...

The staff of New York City's Drama Book Shop assembled this list of inspiring biographies and memoirs of theater and film people. From the legendary Eleonora Duse to the wild-living Jack Nicholson, the subjects of these books offer diverse views of a life in the performing arts."Tennessee Williams in Provincetown" by David Kaplan (Hansen Publishing Group)No matter how much drinking and carousing he indulged in the night before, Tennessee Williams would get up the next morning at the crack of dawn, sit down at his trusty typewriter, and go right to work again. That's how gifted young playwrights become icons, of course, and how titles like "The Glass Menagerie," "A Streetcar Named Desire," and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" become part of the American cultural vernacular. And that's just one of the many inspiring things I learned about Williams from this concise, fast-moving, and eminently readable book.

"Listening" is the key to good acting, according to Helen Stenborg. Co-starring Off-Broadway at the DR2 Theatre in Morris Panych's "Vigil" gives her the chance to exercise that talent. This two-hander centers on the evolving relationship between a misanthropic young man (Malcolm Gets) and his dying, estranged aunt Grace (Stenborg), who barely speaks.While the 84-year-old Minneapolis native has never played a silent character before, her preparation for this part is basically the same as for any other. There is one major difference: She will not share certain elements of Grace's inner life with Gets or the director, Stephen Dimenna. "Sometimes they ask me, 'What are you thinking?' That's my secret. But it's interesting: If I change my thoughts, I'll get a different reaction from Malcolm." She adds she is able to offer variety in her silent responses, by registering his change of mood.At this point in her six-decade career,...

Christopher Plummer has written "In Spite of Myself," a Knopf memoir. "Took eight years," he told me. "I maybe could've done it in two, but when you, thank God, get a job - you stop. By page 1,000, I figured I'll never finish but, eventually, you get on a roll and just do it. I wrote in pen, longhand, because I'm too old-fashioned to control computers and the Internet, so if I didn't like what I'd just done, I just crumpled up the whole page and started over."

The early names dropped run from Katharine Cornell ("she traveled...