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Oscar-winning legend Paul Newman appeared in dozens of films throughout his lengthy career, but how many of those titles are classics? Let’s take a look back at 20 of Newman’s greatest movies, ranked worst to best.

For years Newman was the perpetual Oscar bridesmaid, racking up failed Best Actor nominations for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958), “The Hustler” (1961), “Hud” (1963), “Cool Hand Luke” (1967), “Absence of Malice” (1981), and “The Verdict” (1982), as well as a Best Picture bid for producing “Rachel, Rachel” (1968). The Academy handed him an Honorary Award in 1985, only to give him a competitive prize the very next year for “The Color of Money” (1986). He scored subsequent bids in lead for “Nobody’s Fool” (1994) and supporting for “Road to Perdition” (2002).

The actor enjoyed a lengthy career behind the camera as well, winning the Golden Globe and competing at the Directors Guild Awards for helming “Rachel, Rachel,” which brought his wife,...

Actors David Rasche and Mare Winningham have joined the previously announced production of Leslye Headland’s Cult of Love and a cast that includes Zachary Quinto, Shailene Woodley, Molly Bernard, Roberta Colindrez, Rebecca Henderson, Christopher Lowell, Christopher Sears, and Barbie Ferreira.

The Second Stage Theater production will be directed by Trip Cullman and begins previews November 20 at the Helen Hayes Theater, with an official opening on December 12.

Rasche and Winningham will play Bill and Ginny Dahl, the parents of a fractured family. The synopsis: “It’s the holiday season for the Dahl family! The four adult children return to their childhood home with partners in tow. The Dahl traditions include singing carols in harmony at the drop of a hat, but the gathering is anything but harmonious. Old conflicts resurface, new issues battled, and dinner is taking absolutely forever to be served.

I am a sucker for movies about Broadway and those who spend their lives in the theatre. Of course the crown jewel of the genre is the Oscar-winning All About Eve, but there are so many others including 1933’s Morning Glory which won a young Katherine Hepburn her first Academy Award, as well as its rarely seen remake, 1958’s underrated Stage Struck. Ginger Rogers did a good one, too: Forever Female. The list goes on and on and now includes a stellar new entry, The Great Lillian Hall which gives the great Jessica Lange a challenging role worth her talents.

Premiering on HBO May 31, just barely under the wire for Emmy consideration, Lange’s performance as a stage legend facing dementia should send chills down the spine of any other contenders for Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie this season. This veteran star simply knocks it out of the park.

Jessica Lange is perfection as the fictional actress Lillian Hall, known for decades as a revered star of the theater. During rehearsals for her starring role in The Cherry Orchard, she is having unusual difficulty memorizing her lines, and before long learns that the cause is early dementia. Despite that ominous theme, The Great Lillian Hall is a lovely tribute to life in the theater, with all its personal compromises, and a showcase for Lange, who deftly shows the character as a vulnerable woman and also displays the distinct style of Lillian the bravura actress.

Lillian is such a star that she is the key to the box office in the Broadway revival of Chekhov. The film’s trajectory takes her through rehearsals, and in and out of her personal life as she grapples with her diagnosis, in a plot driven by the question of whether she’ll make it to opening night.

Carrie Robbins, whose more than 30 years as a Broadway costume designer saw her involvement in 1972’s Grease, for which she contributed the production’s signature poodle skirts, and the nuns’ habits of 1983’s Agnes of God, died following a brief illness with Covid on Friday, April 12, at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. She was 81.

Her death was announced by her friend Daniel Neiden.

Robbin’s Broadway career began somewhat inauspiciously with Leda and the Little Swan, a play that closed on Broadway before its scheduled opening at the Cort Theatre in 1968. Written by Amber Gascoigne and dealing with sex between generations of one family, Leda was called by William Goldman in his classic theater book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway “the hardest show of the season to sit through.”

Robbins rebounded quickly on Broadway with a revival of You Can’t Take It With You the following year, and,...

Rose Gregorio, who received a Tony nomination for her performance as the browbeaten daughter of Geraldine Fitzgerald’s declining old woman in the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama The Shadow Box, has died. She was 97.

Gregorio died Aug. 17 of natural causes in her Greenwich Village home, her nephew Robert Grosbard told The Hollywood Reporter.

Gregorio was married to Belgium-born stage and film director Ulu Grosbard from 1965 until his death in 2012, and she appeared for him as the ex-wife of Dustin Hoffman’s character in Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971); as a local madam in True Confessions (1981); and as the mother of Treat Williams’ character in The Deep End of the Ocean (1999).

On television, she had a recurring role on NBC’s ER as Nurse Carol Hathaway’s (Julianna Margulies) mom from 1996-99.

Gregorio also landed a Drama Desk nom and a Clarence Derwent...

Carol Locatell, who had a memorable turn as the foulmouthed mother Ethel Hubbard in Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning and worked alongside Burt Reynolds in three films, has died. She was 82.

Locatell died April 11 at her home in Sherman Oaks after a long battle with cancer, her husband, songwriter and record producer Gregory Prestopino, told The Hollywood Reporter. They were together for 50 years.

Locatell moved from Los Angeles to New York in the mid-1980s to shake up her career, and from her first audition there she landed a part on Broadway in Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound, which premiered in 1986. She then appeared in The Shadow Box in 1994 and in The Rose Tattoo a year later.

She first met Reynolds when she auditioned for him for a role in Simon’s Chapter Two at his dinner theater in Jupiter, Florida. She worked with him in Paternity...

Mary Alice, an Emmy-winning actor for I’ll Fly Away and a Tony winner for her performance in 1987’s Broadway production of August Wilson’s Fences, died yesterday in New York City.

Her age has been variously reported as 80, 84 and 86. Her death was confirmed to Deadline by the New York Police Department. No additional details were immediately available.

Hollywood & Media Deaths In 2022: Photo Gallery

“A shoulder we all stood on,” tweeted actor Colman Domingo today.

A prolific character actor on screen and stage, and a pioneer in the representation of Black actors on the Off Broadway and Broadway scenes, Alice is perhaps most widely known to TV audiences for her two-season run as a main character on NBC’s Cosby Show spin-off A Different World, in which she played dorm director Leticia “Lettie” Bostic. In 2003, she featured prominently in The Matrix Revolutions, portraying The Oracle, who imparts words of wisdom to Keanu Reeves’ Neo.

Patricia Elliott, the Tony winner who became a fixture on ABC's One Life to Live, died of cancer Sunday in Manhattan. Playbill confirmed the 77-year-old actress's death with her niece. Elliott, who found success both on stage and onscreen, began her career in the ’60s with plays and small TV parts. Her Broadway musical debut came with 1973's A Little Night Music, for which she played Countess Charlotte Malcolm and nabbed a Tony as best featured actress. Other theater credits included roles on The Elephant Man (opposite David Bowie), Tartuffe, The Shadow Box (nominated for a best featured actress Tony), and King Lear. (More on her stage work here and here.) Onscreen she would have been most recognizable as One Life to Live's Renee Divine Buchanan, a character she played for 23 years. She also appeared as a guest on a slew of other TV shows, such as Kojak and...

Tony-winning actress and soap opera star Patricia Elliott died at her home in Manhattan Sunday following a battle with cancer, her niece Sally Fay confirmed the news to The Associated Press. She was 77.

Elliott began her career on Broadway in the original production of Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music, playing Countess Charlotte Malcolm, a role that would earn her a best featured actress Tony in 1973. She would go on to receive a nomination in 1977 for "The Shadow Box," with other major Broadway credits including "A Doll's House," "A Month of Sundays," "Hedda Gabler and "The Elephant Man.

She...

Tony-winning actress and soap opera star Patricia Elliott died at her home in Manhattan Sunday following a battle with cancer, her niece Sally Fay confirmed the news to The Associated Press. She was 77. Elliott began her career on Broadway in the original production of Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music, playing Countess Charlotte Malcolm, a role that would earn her a best featured actress Tony in 1973. She would go on to receive a nomination in 1977 for "The Shadow Box," with other major Broadway credits including "A Doll's House," "A Month of Sundays," "Hedda Gabler and "The Elephant Man. She...

Tony-winning actress and soap opera star Patricia Elliott died at her home in Manhattan Sunday following a battle with cancer, her niece Sally Fay confirmed the news to The Associated Press. She was 77. Elliott began her career on Broadway in the original production of Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music, playing Countess Charlotte Malcolm, a role that would earn her a best featured actress Tony in 1973. She would go on to receive a nomination in 1977 for "The Shadow Box," with other major Broadway credits including "A Doll's House," "A Month of Sundays," "Hedda Gabler and "The Elephant Man. She...

Happy Birthday, Mandy Patinkin Mandy Patinkin won the Tony Award for his Broadway debut in Evita and was again nominated for Sunday in the Park with George and The Wild Party. He also appeared on Broadway in Trelawny of the 'Wells,' The Shadow Box, The Secret Garden, Falsettos, and his solo concerts Dress Casual, Celebrating Sondheim, and Mamaloshen. Other theatre credits include The Split, Savages, Enemy of the People, and most recently The Tempest at Classic Stage Company. Mandy continues to tour his concerts Dress Casual, Celebrating Sondheim, Mamaloshen, and An Evening with Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin.

Happy Birthday, Mandy Patinkin Mandy Patinkin won the Tony Award for his Broadway debut in Evita and was again nominated for Sunday in the Park with George and The Wild Party. He also appeared on Broadway in Trelawny of the 'Wells,' The Shadow Box, The Secret Garden, Falsettos, and his solo concerts Dress Casual, Celebrating Sondheim, and Mamaloshen. Other theatre credits include The Split, Savages, Enemy of the People, and most recently The Tempest at Classic Stage Company. Mandy continues to tour his concerts Dress Casual, Celebrating Sondheim, Mamaloshen, and An Evening with Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin.

Modern-day relationships seem to be continuously defined by technological interactions, which is why Livia De Paolis' directorial debut "Emoticon ;)" feels all the more appropriate. Fortunately for contemporary audiences, the film will soon be released by Indican Pictures on May 30. De Paolis does double duty in the film, taking on the story's lead role of Elena, an anthropology grad student trying to dissect the role technology plays in communication and relationships. The film also stars Michael Cristofer ("The Shadow Box," "American Horror Story"), Miles Chandler ("Six Degrees"), Diane Guerrero ("Orange is the New Black"), Carol Kane ("Taxi"), Sonia Braga ("Alias"), Christine Ebersole ("American Horror Story," "Grey Gardens") and Daphne Rubin-Vega ("Rent"). Check out the trailer, exclusive to Indiewire, below:...

Happy Birthday, Mandy Patinkin Mandy Patinkin won the Tony Award for his Broadway debut in Evita and was again nominated for Sunday in the Park with George and The Wild Party. He also appeared on Broadway in Trelawny of the 'Wells,' The Shadow Box, The Secret Garden, Falsettos, and his solo concerts Dress Casual, Celebrating Sondheim, and Mamaloshen. Other theatre credits include The Split, Savages, Enemy of the People, and most recently The Tempest at Classic Stage Company. Mandy continues to tour his concerts Dress Casual, Celebrating Sondheim, Mamaloshen, and An Evening with Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin.

Happy Birthday, Mandy Patinkin Mandy Patinkin won the Tony Award for his Broadway debut in Evita and was again nominated for Sunday in the Park with George and The Wild Party. He also appeared on Broadway in Trelawny of the Wells,' The Shadow Box, The Secret Garden, Falsettos, and his solo concerts Dress Casual, Celebrating Sondheim, and Mamaloshen. Other theatre credits include The Split, Savages, Enemy of the People, and most recently The Tempest at Classic Stage Company. Mandy continues to tour his concerts Dress Casual, Celebrating Sondheim, Mamaloshen, and An Evening with Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin.

Primary Stages previously announced program details for their annual Gala tonight, November 14, 2012 at 630Pm at The Edison Ballroom 240 W. 47th Street. The event, which honors Tony Award winner Tyne Daly Master Class, Rabbit Hole, Gypsy, and producers and Primary Stages Board members Jamie deRoy and Ted Snowdon, features performances by Tony Award nominee Tom Wopat Sondheim on Sondheim, A Catered Affair, actordirectorproducer Tamara Tunie Law amp Order Svu, As The World Turns, Lewis Cleale The Book of Mormon, Spamalot, Call Me Madam, and Garrett Sorenson Master Class. Speakers will include Julie Halston Anything Goes, Olive and the Bitter Herbs, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter Michael Cristofer The Shadow Box, The Witches of Eastwick, and Executive Director of Broadway CaresEquity Fights AIDS Bcefa Tom Viola. The Gala Chairs are Barry Feirstein and Tom Kirdahy.

Primary Stages Casey Childs, Founder amp Executive Producer Andrew Leynse, Artistic Director Elliot Fox, Managing Director have announced program details for their annual Gala on Wednesday, November 14, 2012 at 630Pm at The Edison Ballroom 240 W. 47th Street. The event, which will honor Tony Award winner Tyne Daly Master Class, Rabbit Hole, Gypsy, and producers and Primary Stages Board members Jamie deRoy and Ted Snowdon, will feature performances by Tony Award nominee Tom Wopat Sondheim on Sondheim, A Catered Affair, actordirectorproducer Tamara Tunie Law amp Order Svu, As The World Turns, Lewis Cleale The Book of Mormon, Spamalot, Call Me Madam, and Garrett Sorenson Master Class. Speakers will include Julie Halston Anything Goes, Olive and the Bitter Herbs, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter Michael Cristofer The Shadow Box, The Witches of Eastwick, and Executive Director of Broadway CaresEquity Fights AIDS Bcefa Tom Viola. The Gala Chairs are Barry Feirstein and Tom Kirdahy.

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There are renaissance men in this world, and then there's Michael Cristofer.

He's currently kicking keister on Rubicon as eccentric intelligence czar Truxton Spangler — a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a trench coat — but acting hasn't always been his thing. In fact, Cristofer is way better known as a playwright (he won the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony for "The Shadow Box") and film scribe (The Witches of Eastwick), and he's also an acclaimed director (his HBO movie Gia made Angelina Jolie world famous). Now he's penning his first opera...

Read More >...

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There are renaissance men in this world, and then there's Michael Cristofer.

He's currently kicking keister on Rubicon as eccentric intelligence czar Truxton Spangler — a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a trench coat — but acting hasn't always been his thing. In fact, Cristofer is way better known as a playwright (he won the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony for "The Shadow Box") and film scribe (The Witches of Eastwick), and he's also an acclaimed director (his HBO movie Gia made Angelina Jolie world famous). Now he's penning his first opera...

Read More >...

Have a question about gay male entertainment? Send it to aftereltonflyingmonkey@yahoo.com! (Please include your city and state and/or country.)

Q: I can't help feeling a little tingle when watching George Clooney. He seems so gay even though he never played a gay role. It's the twinkle in his eyes. His male friends are all dreamy and the women he's been attached to seem like they could care less. Is he the big gay secret in Hollywood, like Rock Hudson was? – Price, West Palm Beach, Fl

George Clooney

A: That little tingle you feel is called “being alive.” That said, Clooney seems unbelievably straight to me – the kind of man we here in Seattle call a “Seattle Straight Guy.” That means he’s thoughtful, articulate, fit, liberal as hell, well-dressed and well-groomed, but thoroughly straight, even as he’s totally cool with gay people.

If you mistake a Seattle Straight Guy for gay,...

 Prescott Fine Arts Association opens The Shadow Box on  November 5th with a champagne reception following that  performance.  The director is Jonathan (Jp) Perpich. The dates  and times are November 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, and 14 at 7:30 pm, and two matinees on November 8 and 14 at 2:00 pm.

Michael Cristofer's The Shadow Box presents a life-affirming view of the lessons learned and unexpected pleasures experienced by the terminally ill and their families. Three separate tales of hospice patients are poetically intertwined in this 1977 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, which brings together comedy and tragedy, laughter and tears.  In 1994, New York's Circle in the Square revived this uplifting drama demonstrating the play's power once again as a celebration of life and beauty and a gentle reminder that there is nothing more precious that the present moment.

Prescott Fine Arts is supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the City of Prescott, Bucky's & Yavapai Casinos, Murphy's Restaurant,...

Long Wharf Theatre Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein will be lecturing about Athol Fugard, described by the New York Times as "the greatest playwright writing in English since Shakespeare," Sunday, November 15 from 5 to 6 p.m. at the Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library, 146 Thimble Island Road, Stony Creek.

Edelstein is directing the world premiere of Fugard's Have You Seen Us?, running from Nov. 24 through Dec. 20 at Long Wharf Theatre, the site of many of Fugard's world premieres in the 1970s.

Fugard, born in 1932 in Middelburg, in the Karoo desert region of South Africa, battled to bring the stories of all South Africans to the world, even under the darkest years of apartheid, that abusive system that had one set of laws for whites, and another for people of color. For his service, he was awarded South Africa's highest award, the Ikhamanga Medal in 2005. His best-known plays include Bloodknot (1961); Boesman and Lena (1969); Sizwe Bansi...

Warm up your holiday season with Long Wharf Theatre. Experience the essence of the holidays with a healthy dose of humor - find yourself and your family in our stories My Mother's Italian, My Father's Jewish and I'm Home for the Holidays, the all new play by Steve Solomon, and the hit Sister's Christmas Catechism, by Maripat Donovan.

In Sister's Christmas Catechism, written by the author of Late Nite Catechism, Sister takes on the mystery that has intrigued historians throughout the ages - whatever happened to the Magi's gold? Employing her own scientific tools and assisted by local choirs as well as a gaggle of audience members, Sister creates a living nativity unlike any ever seen. With gifts galore and bundles of laughs, Sister's Christmas Catechism is sure to become a new holiday tradition. The show runs from Dec. 1-20. Tickets are $28.

Travel back home for the holidays with Steve Solomon...

Paul Newman, who combined Method training with matinee idol looks to become the personification of the cool '60s rebel in such iconic roles as the reckless Hud, the defiant Cool Hand Luke and the hotshot Butch Cassidy, died Friday. Surrounded by friends and family, including his wife, Joanne Woodward, the actor and philanthropist passed away at his farmhouse home near Wesport, Conn., after a long battle with cancer. He was 83.

In a film career that spanned nearly six decades, Newman received seven Oscar nominations before he was finally presented with an Honorary Oscar in 1986 "in recognition of his many and memorable and compelling screen performances and for his personal integrity and dedication to his craft."

But then he pulled out a trump card of his own, winning the best actor Academy Award the following year for "The Color of Money," in which he reprised the role of pool shark Fast Eddie Felsen,...

In The Tempest, one of the last plays William Shakespeare fully authored, the character of Prospero is a conundrum. For 12 years he's been marooned on an island with his young daughter, Miranda. Struggling to survive, he blackmails the spirit Ariel into being his servant and compels the mortal Caliban to be his slave. For reasons equally simple and complex, Prospero is hero and antihero, protagonist and antagonist. Perhaps it's those contradictions that make him the perfect role for Mandy Patinkin to play.For seven months Patinkin has enjoyed a luxury afforded very few actors: He's done little but prepare to play perplexing Prospero, in this case for Classic Stage Company's Off-Broadway production of The Tempest. For the first three months, he logged three to four hours a day, including Saturdays and Sundays, meeting with Shakespeare scholar Rachel Chavkin and analyzing each line of the play, "translating it into English,...

Michael Christofer has adapted Michael Connelly's best-selling crime novel Void Moon for Nu Image/Millennium Films. Director Yves Simoneau is attached to direct.

Producer Avi Lerner said no one is cast yet. "Offers are out for all the main roles," he said.

The 2000 novel centers on Cassie Black, a former robber of casino gamblers who leaves her life of crime to become a Porsche saleswoman. But when a dark secret from her past threatens to be exposed, she returns to her former line of work and faces her old nemesis: a shady private investigator who moonlights doing dirty work for casino owners.

The project once was in development at Warner Bros. but was put in turnaround and is now being produced by Bill Gerber and Lerner.

Pulitzer Prize- and Tony-winning playwright Christofer (The Shadow Box) adapted the novel after a previous screenplay was written by Connelly, so writing credits are yet to be determined.

Simoneau won an Emmy this year for directing the HBO film Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

Christofer is repped by ICM and attorney John LaViolette.