Jacqueline Bisset sips an orange juice in her hotel room in the Four Seasons, 49 stories above Manhattan and thinks out loud.
“Can you be an artist and a control freak?” she says. “After all, being an artist is about your private vision, about taking control of it and bringing it to fruition. Yet at the same time, it needs to be about abandon, doesn’t it? It’s an interesting subject: As you get more articulate in your craft, you hope for control – and yet you long to relinquish it as well.”
She looks up and notices the reporter taking notes. “That’s not worth writing down,” she says with a smile.
At the age of 64, Bisset has the gray-blue eyes, skeptical smile and gorgeous build that graced posters in college dorms around the world three decades ago. There are smile lines at her mouth and eyes, but she remains a hauntingly beautiful woman – and one who seems unaware of the effect she still has on men. (More…)
It’s the day after Election Day 2008 and Dennis Hopper sits in a publicist’s conference room a dozen stories above Manhattan’s 42nd Street, recalling meeting President-elect Barack Obama in Chicago on the day he announced his candidacy in 2007.
Hopper’s wife, Victoria, had been a long-time supporter of Obama, having met him shortly after he’d been elected to the U.S. Senate. So she dragged Hopper along to watch Obama make his announcement to an audience of 8,000 people.
“So I wound up on an elevator with him,” Hopper recalls. “And he turned to me and said, ‘Dennis, I’m so remiss. Your mother died recently and I never offered condolences.’
“We talked about the fact that both our mothers were from Kansas. But what I thought was, This is a very human man, to think of someone else at this moment, right after he’s announced he’s running for president. His election is the best thing that could possibly happen. I marched with Martin Luther King and this was King’s dream. It’s amazing, in my lifetime, to see the changes that have happened.” (More…)
Robert Davi inspects the contents of a freezer in the Green Room at the Sirius Radio studios in midtown Manhattan on a recent evening, examining several varieties of Klondike Bars, then asks, “Which is the best one?”
He selects a chocolate-covered frozen treat and unwraps it, eating with delicacy as he waits to begin a whirlwind tour around the satellite radio networks, to promote his film, “The Dukes,” which he directed, co-wrote and stars in.
A solid 6-foot-3, the 57-year-old actor looks unprepossessing in a pristine leather bomber jacket and soft brown fedora. But just walking through the halls at Sirius, he draws stares: Isn’t that the guy … you know … the guy from “The Goonies”? “Die Hard”? “Licence to Kill”? (More…)
Yes, says Amy Redford with a laugh, she’s directed a movie called “The Guitar” – but no, she doesn’t play the guitar herself.
“But I’m really good at air guitar,” she offers by telephone. “My brother (James) plays guitar. We grew up waiting around to go to dinner. And he vowed never to be a victim of anybody’s lateness. So I remember him practicing while we waited. That was a feature in my life from an early age.”
Anybody’s lateness? Her father, actor/director/producer Robert Redford is notorious for his allergy to punctuality. Is this who her brother can thank for all that extra practice time on guitar?
“Well, I was sort of going down that road, but decided not to,” Redford admits. “My father has actually gotten a lot better about that. Still, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” (More…)
When I enter the hotel room where she’s doing her chatting, Vera Farmiga is sitting at a table, her hand casually rubbing the round mound of baby at her midsection.
She’s due in January; it’s her first baby, she says, and she knows it’s going to be a boy. And yes, she has chosen a name, but isn’t letting that cat out of the bag. She winces for a second, then smiles.
“At the moment, he’s tap-dancing on my cervix,” she offers.
She’ll be seen later this year in “Nothing But the Truth,” Rod Lurie’s take on the Valerie Plame story of a reporter protecting a source after outing a CIA agent. But she’s here to talk about “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” opening Friday. (More…)
