Movie Film Trivia

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Roobs321 said:
Yeah it’s interesting isn’t it. Singer Holiday Sidewinder’s stepparents are Aden Young (mother Carmen) and Claudia Karvan (father Jeremy Sparks) respectively. Aden & Claudia were an item in that mid 90s period funnily enough.

Noah and Ben also popped up together again in Lover Boy, True Love and Chaos (brothers) and The New World (although I don’t recall them sharing screentime in the latter). Noah has also popped up in a few Nick Cavey things over the years (scripts, music vids, in-film references, etc.).
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I never knew Claudia Karvan was the stepmother of Lo Carmen's oldest daughter, nor that she and Aden Young were an item in the mid 1990s. It makes this all the more interesting as Ben Mendelsohn and Claudia Karvan played boyfriend and girlfriend in 1990 comedy 'The Big Steal'. Ben Mendelsohn's character in this film was called Danny - the same name as Noah Taylor's character in The Year My Voice Broke - while Claudia Karvan played Johanna Johnson. Her strict father Mr. Johnson (who hated Danny, threatening to belt the living daylights out of him and chasing him on several occasions), was played by Tim Robertson, who had played the father of Ben Mendelsohn's character Trevor in The Year My Voice Broke.

Noah Taylor and Ben Mendelsohn look similar enough to be brothers; I didn't know that they had been in so many films together.

I mentioned in another thread that Ben Mendelsohn is one of the best actors I've ever seen at portraying fear. This was evident in The Big Steal with his terror of Mr. Johnson; in the 1997 movie 'Idiot Box' where he and his stupid mates stole a car, only realizing later that the car belonged to an enormous bikie when the car's rightful owner reclaimed his property; and years later in Rogue One where he played the evil Director Krennick his fear of his Imperial superiors Grand Moff Tarkan and Darth Vader was evident.
 
During the filming of Titanic movie 'A Night to Remember' in 1958, a now-elderly survivor Lawrence Beesley arrived on set, requesting to be one of the extras who went down with the ship.

IIRC the request was politely refused because of Mr. Beesley's advancing age and associated health problems. By the time the next Titanic movie was made, SOS Titanic in 1979, Mr. Beesley had been dead well over a decade, and this role in the film was portrayed by the late David Warner. Having survived the disaster like his real life counterpart, 18-years-later David Warner got another turn on the Titanic this time playing a fictional character Mr. Lovejoy in James Cameron's epic Titanic, and this time he went down with the ship, dying a spectacular and gruesome death when he is in the wrong place at the wrong time and the ship splits into two.

David Warner had a few spectacular death scenes in his career, there was this one in Titanic and the infamous decapitation scene in The Omen in 1976. However when David Warner died at age 81 in 2022, his death was a peaceful one, and he passed away in his sleep at a home for retired actors in London.
 

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emuboy said:
David Warner had a few spectacular death scenes in his career, there was this one in Titanic and the infamous decapitation scene in The Omen in 1976. However when David Warner died at age 81 in 2022, his death was a peaceful one, and he passed away in his sleep at a home for retired actors in London.
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This nursing home piqued my interest. Denville Hall is the place and it looks very nice.

Denville_Hall.JPG

It has a long list of distinguished former residents, including inter alia, Richard Attenborough and his wife Sheila Sim. However, one name caught my attention and is very relevant to the present discussion: Billie Whitelaw played Mrs. Baylock, the demonic nanny in The Omen.
 
Rat Saw God said:
David Warner was in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
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David Warner was also in Scream 2 in 1998, playing Sidney's college drama teacher/director. I remember watching the movie in the cinema and had him picked as one of the Ghostface killers along with Mickey, him controlling the younger killer as would a theatre director. While I correctly picked Mickey as one of the killers, I was wrong with Warner's character, he wasn't involved. However the second Ghostface killer was revealed to be an older adult controlling a younger killer - journalist Debbie Salt, who turned out to be Billy Loomis's estranged mother - so I was on the right track.
 
Rising star American actress Sydney Sweeney has been in a number of movies in recent months. In sleeper hit rom-com 'Anyone But You' and the dark and foreboding horror film 'Immaculate' Sydney Sweeney plays a woman aged in her 20s, as she is in real life. However, in the middle of thees two films' releases she was also in the poorly received superhero movie 'Madame Web', but playing a 16-year-old girl.

While having actors and actresses well into their 20s play teenagers is far from uncommon and is often referred to as 'Dawson's Creek Casting', this is quite an unusual case given Sydney Sweeney's other roles around this particular one.

Another similar example is English actress Lucy Punch, who had a prominent career both in the UK and America from the mid 2000s to the late 2010s, although she hasn't had many high profile roles since then. In 2007 Lucy Punch played the role of a married woman aged around 30 in 'Hot Fuzz' which was around her actual age at the time, and the same year she played the role of the school bully, a girl aged in her late teens in 'St Trinians'. In no other film or TV roles for Lucy Punch around this time did she ever play such a young character, and in fact was never a child or teenage actress, with her first credited roles not coming until she was in her early 20s.

Even more astonishing is the case of Kate Beckinsale, who in 1999 along with Claire Danes played two recent high school graduates from the American Midwest in 'Brokedown Palace'. The girls iie to their parents about going on a graduation trip with their class to Hawaii, and instead go to Thailand. There the two girls meet a handsome and charming Australian, but he turns out to be a drug smuggler who sets them up as mules and they wind up in prison on serious narcotics charges.

With her blonde hair, blue eyes and fair skin and aged 19 at the time, Claire Danes looks the perfect fit for a Midwestern high school graduate. However, Kate Beckinsale was over 8 years older than her co-star and from England, and oddly enough her character is depicted as naive and young for her age, while Danes' character was portrayed as devious and streetwise. In all of Beckinsale's other roles around this time, she generally played a young married woman with a young family.
 
When the 1953 Oscar nominees for Best Actor are arranged in alphabetical order, their character names also appear in alphabetical order.

Marlon Brando as Mark Antony (Julius Caesar)
Richard Burton as Marcellus Gallio (The Robe)
Montgomery Clift as Robert E. Lee Prewitt (From Here to Eternity)
William Holden as J. J. Sefton (Stalag 17)
Burt Lancaster as Milton Warden (From Here to Eternity)
 
Roobs321 said:
now that’s in the spirit of the thread lol

Fk man what a lineup of legends. Brando, Burton, Clift, Holden, Lancaster. 26 acting nominations between the five of them.

By the way, Brando would’ve turned 100 tomorrow.
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Montgomery Clift is just about the best actor I've ever seen. His performance in Judgement At Nuremberg was absolutely harrowing.

Dead at 45. What a loss!
 
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Directors have all sorts of interesting quirks, and one of the most interesting ones was from Alfred Hitchcock, who apparently loved casting left-handed actresses in his movies. Kim Novack, Tippi Hedren and Eva Marie Saint among others are/were all left handed, and apparently Grace Kelly played a left-handed character in some Hitchcock movies, although she herself was right-handed.

More recently, the Edgar Wright film 'Last Night In Soho' had a left-handed actress Thomasin McKenzie and a right-handed actress Anya Taylor Joy mirroring each other in some scenes, with a set of identical mirror image male twins playing a porter who escorts them into the club.
 

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This one is for (The Poster Formerly Known As) GG.

In Any Given Sunday, Dennis Quaid plays Cap Rooney, the aging QB for the fictional Miami Sharks. All the scenes in his house were actually filmed in the real-life house of the former QB of the very real Miami Dolphins.

That's right GG. It's Dan Marino.

Here's DQ on the subject - at the 8:05 mark.

 
Kirsten Dunst played the lead female role in the 2005 movie 'Elizabethtown' but her character in the movie was not named Elizabeth, but Claire.

in her long career Kirsten has never played a character directly named Elizabeth, but in three movies she has played characters who have names that are often variations of Elizabeth. She played a girl named Betsy in 'Dick' in 1999, her character in 'Mona Lisa Smile' from 2003 was called Betty, and in 2004 film Wimbledon Dunst played a tennis player named Lizzie.
 
I've mentioned interesting cases of 'Dawsons Creek Casting' in the past, movies and TV shows where adults well into their 20s (and on some occasions into their 30s) play teenagers attending high school. Sometimes you see a case where actors in their early 20s are portraying teenagers, but among the cast of 'teens' is an actor much older than the rest of the cast, who would probably have been learning calculus and trigonometry at high school and learning to drive a car while his or her castmates learned their times tables at elementary school.

The 2023 horror movie 'Thanksgiving' cast actors aged in their early 20s to play the teenage characters, but all were a consistent age born around 2000/2001. However, of the older characters one of them Amanda, a wife/mother seemingly aged in her 40s and pregnant again (but not showing) was played by Gina Gershon who was born in 1962 and over 60 years old by the time the movie was made.
 
American actress Frances Lee McCain has played the mother and grandmother of a number of well-known characters in some very famous movies:

Footloose (1984) - Mother of Ren McCormack (Kevin Bacon)

Gremlins (1984) - Mother of Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan)

Back to the Future (1985) - Mother of Lorraine Baines (Lea Thompson) and various other siblings, grandmother of Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) and his siblings Dave (Mark McClure) and Linda (Wendy-Jo Sperber).

Scream (1997) - Mother of Dewey and Tatum Riley (Played by David Arquette and Rose McGowan)
 
This year marks 30 years since New Zealand director Peter Jackson made 'Heavenly Creatures', a film based on the infamous 1954 Christchurch homicide case in which two teenage girls - Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme - murdered Parker's mother. It was certainly a bizarre case that started out with such innocent and good intentions by parents and teachers. It was thought Pauline and Juliet would be good for each other given both girls endured unhappy childhoods marred by serious illness - polio for Pauline and TB for Juliet, so them spending time together was actively encouraged. The girls quickly became best friends and all seemed well and good, but then both became obsessive, morbid and weird, and the murder took place in a vain attempt to stop them being separated.

For the two roles, Jackson cast an unknown Christchurch local named Melanie Lynskey to play Pauline, and an equally unknown British actress named Kate Winslett to play posh English girl Juliet. The movie would be the break-out roles for both, but interestingly each girl's most famous role in the future would be a character named Rose. This would be Rose in Titanic in 1997 for Winslett, and Charlie's crazy stalker Rose in the sitcom 'Two and a Half Men' for Lynskey.

And talking about Rose and Titanic, I have seen the movie many times, but only just noticed recently the similarity of the names of Rose's fiancee and the man she would later marry. The name of her fiancee was Caledon Hockley often abbreviated to 'Cal', while the man Rose would eventually marry had the surname 'Calvert'. Given that Caledon and Calvert are not particularly common names, I wonder if this was intentional or coincidental?
 
Following the passing of actor Dabney Coleman at age 92, I was looking at his films and discovered something interesting about science fiction comedy 'Meet the Applegates'. The film is billed as a 1990 movie, but while it was released in some markets late that year it was not released in its major markets (USA, Canada, UK, Europe) until 1991. I remember watching it way back around 1992 and thinking that something seemed a little anachronistic about it, like it was set five minutes in the past.

As it turns out, the movie was made in 1988, but due to financial instability of its now-defunct production company New World Entertainment, its release was delayed for close to two years. While there isn't a huge difference between the worlds of 1988 and 1991, this delay in release does explain the very small things that make the movie seem ever so slightly dated when comparing the early 1990s with the late 1980s.
 
Robert de Niro is an interesting guy. He has a reputation for being a bit crotchety, but did you know he was also a time-travelling hero? No? Well, I have proof.

Let me explain. There was a very well known actor in 1860s America named Edwin Booth. At a railway station in New Jersey a young man stumbled off the platform and was saved from serious injury and perhaps even death by the quick actions of Edwin Booth. The young man's name was Robert Todd Lincoln, son of then President Abraham Lincoln. Sadly, this tremendous good-will between the Booth and Lincoln families would evaporate later when Edwin's brother John Wilkes murdered President Lincoln.

So, that covers the 'hero' bit - saving the President's son. But what about the time-travelling? Do you know what Mr Booth looked like? Prepare yourself ...

32877.jpg
 
STFU Donnie said:
Robert de Niro is an interesting guy. He has a reputation for being a bit crotchety, but did you know he was also a time-travelling hero? No? Well, I have proof.

Let me explain. There was a very well known actor in 1860s America named Edwin Booth. At a railway station in New Jersey a young man stumbled off the platform and was saved from serious injury and perhaps even death by the quick actions of Edwin Booth. The young man's name was Robert Todd Lincoln, son of then President Abraham Lincoln. Sadly, this tremendous good-will between the Booth and Lincoln families would evaporate later when Edwin's brother John Wilkes murdered President Lincoln.

So, that covers the 'hero' bit - saving the President's son. But what about the time-travelling? Do you know what Mr Booth looked like? Prepare yourself ...

View attachment 2003738
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that resemblance is just unCady
 
STFU Donnie said:
Robert de Niro is an interesting guy. He has a reputation for being a bit crotchety, but did you know he was also a time-travelling hero? No? Well, I have proof.

Let me explain. There was a very well known actor in 1860s America named Edwin Booth. At a railway station in New Jersey a young man stumbled off the platform and was saved from serious injury and perhaps even death by the quick actions of Edwin Booth. The young man's name was Robert Todd Lincoln, son of then President Abraham Lincoln. Sadly, this tremendous good-will between the Booth and Lincoln families would evaporate later when Edwin's brother John Wilkes murdered President Lincoln.

So, that covers the 'hero' bit - saving the President's son. But what about the time-travelling? Do you know what Mr Booth looked like? Prepare yourself ...

View attachment 2003738
Click to expand...
Looks more like Phil Collins with hair IMO
 

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Movie Film Trivia

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