When Yellowstone took a long hiatus, Grimes stayed busy with his music career. Blending elements of country, folk and Americana, Grimes released his self-titled debut album in 2024. The Dayton, Ohio, native and his wife, Brazilian model Bianca Rodrigues Grimes, recently welcomed a baby boy. For the past seven years, the couple has shuttled between Montana (where the series films) and Nashville, but now that the show is over, Grimes is writing a second album and headed across the country on his “Playin’ on the Tracks” tour, which kicked off in November. We caught up with the actor and musician before he hit the road.

You’ve been married to Bianca since 2018. How has it been to have been with someone since breaking out on the show?

I felt like my life really started when I met her—it sounds cheesy but it’s true. I know where my priorities lie now and what’s most important and I get to enjoy my career more because I take it a lot less seriously now.

You recently had your first child. How has it been to become a parent? Is there anything you learned from the show about parenthood?

I think the hardest thing to relate to with Kayce was the fact that he was a dad, because I wasn’t one, so there was a lot of me asking my friends who are fathers how certain things made them feel. Taylor [Sheridan, the show’s creator] is such a good writer that it made it a lot easier to play the role on the show, but in no way did that actually prepare me for fatherhood.

You’ve played Kayce for seven years. How have you approached this part?

I think Kayce was sort of the outsider of the family. He’s dealing with a lot of demons—it’s not super fun to be the guy in the Western who’s feeling his feelings all the time, so there’s a challenge to that, but I fell in love with him. He’s a good heart and a good soul and he is trying to do the right thing, so for me it was always justifiable playing Kayce.

Who in the cast are you closest with outside of work?

Definitely Kelsey, who plays my wife—there’s a lot of different worlds on this show, and we kind of had our own, so we spent a lot of time together. Really since Day 1 we got along really well. I’ve said it before, she’s the coolest actress I’ve ever worked with—she’s so good at what she does and so easy to work with.

What will you miss most about the show?

Well, I don’t have to miss the location luckily because I live there now. I’ll miss the cast and crew, I’ll miss playing Kayce, I’ll miss the world and the imaginary ranching work of it all. Some of the relationships I made on this show are really special and I think they will last a long time.

What was it like returning to the set in Montana without having Kevin Costner there?

It was something we all knew was going to happen at some point in the story—just narratively, there had to be a moment where we would see if the family could keep the ranch without the patriarch. I don’t think we expected it to happen this way, but it’s an ensemble cast; there were enough people carrying the weight [that] I don’t think it will affect how the audience sees the story. It was definitely different without him. Kevin is an icon, but we’re all professionals, it didn’t really affect how we did our jobs.

What’s your favorite memory from set?

Something that always comes to mind when I think about that is the days when we’d do the cattle drive scenes and we’re cowboyed up. There’s no way to fake that, you just have to do it—so we’d all be on horseback and in our cowboy gear, you’re somewhere gorgeous and the sun is setting and you’re running out of time because you’re losing the light, so everyone is gunning around. There’s some beautiful chaos there—in those moments it feels like you’re really cowboying, which is not something a lot of people get to experience. Those days made me feel really lucky.

The post Cool Hand Luke appeared first on DuJour.

It’s a welcome return for Hilty, a one-time Glinda from Wicked and mother of two. The last few years have been challenging for the 43-year-old actress, after she tragically lost her sister and brother-in-law and their son in a plane crash in 2022. After a hiatus doing mostly voice-over work, she has also returned to television in Amazon’s The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh.

You haven’t been on Broadway in a while. What are you most looking forward to?

I’m really looking forward to being a part of a company again and feeling like, as a group, we’re doing something magical together. As physically taxing as it can be, I love the regularity of an eight-show week and seeing the same people every day, on- and offstage.

Is there anything you’re not looking forward to?

Seeing cell phones and recording devices lit up in the audience. We can see everything that’s happening in the house, and the lights are extremely distracting to us onstage, not to mention how awful it is for everyone who is sitting near lit-up phones in the audience.

You probably get offered every musical that’s being cast. What made you want to do Death Becomes Her?

Death Becomes Her is one of my absolute favorite movies, and it’s one of the few films that makes sense to reimagine as a musical because of its campy, heightened reality. When I read the brilliant script and listened to the incredible songs, I was completely sold!

Have you spent time with Meryl Streep? How do you feel about the possibility of her coming to see the show?

Like everyone else in the galaxy, I am a huge fan of hers, and I would be so delighted if she were to come to the show. My hope is that anyone who is affiliated with the iconic movie would see our show and feel the love and reverence we have for the work they did. I’d also hope they’d appreciate our interpretation of this big, fun, fabulous story, which is simply, “What if they sang and danced while they tried to kill each other?”

How do you wind down these days after a performance?

During our Chicago run, I’d take a long bath, drink a cup of Sleepytime tea, and watch as many episodes of Traitors, Below Deck or Selling Sunset as I could manage until I fell asleep. Now that my family is with me in NYC, each night will probably consist of packing school lunches for my kids and complaining to my husband about how many lit-up cell phones I counted in the audience.

Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard in Death Becomes Her

The post Great Performances: Megan Hilty appeared first on DuJour.

Francis, a mere 25, won the Olivier Award for the London production, and he’s has already started his own path in Hollywood, as a cast member on the final season of You on Netflix.

“I had the best time ever on set,” says Francis. “It’s 100 percent something I want to pursue.”

For now, though, it’s all Broadway all the time, which the actor describes as a “wonderful whirlwind.” New York audiences, he explains, “find things funny that UK audiences didn’t necessarily respond to. They are definitely more vocal here for sure. I’ve never heard a cheer like that for the final bow of our opening night.”

A centerpiece of Francis’ performance involves singing the complicated and wordy second act opening number while walking backstage, outdoors and back into the theater. The feat is so seamless it’s often mistaken for being a taped feed. “Every single night people would question me about it at the stage door,” Francis says. “Singing in ⅞ time and walking is quite tricky.”

Of course, the song had to be re-blocked for West 44th Street. (The show played at the Savoy Theatre in London.) “I would say the route is slightly longer, so we had to figure out what pace to walk at to hit all the points we need to hit,” he explains.

To cool down from a show, Francis says he watches some television and uses a steamer before bed “for 20 minutes.” But other than that he’s looking to enjoy New York City as much as, at least, Joe Gillis probably would.

Says Francis: “I want to catch as much theater as possible, try as many good restaurants as possible and fully embrace the New York City lifestyle.”

Grace Hodgett Young and Tom Francis in Sunset Boulevard

The post Great Performances: Tom Francis appeared first on DuJour.

I saw The Hills of California in London, and I thought it was absolutely terrific. Told everyone to go. What’s it like performing dual roles, a mother and a daughter?

It’s a very satisfying challenge to take on. Both characters really informed each other in terms of making them as different and distinct from one another as possible but also figuring out in what ways they should be similar, from physicality and vocal quality to what drives each of them and why. They should reflect each other, since the decisions of the mother, Veronica, get played out in the grown up daughter, Joan. Now that we’re in performance I can put all of that to the back of mind and just enjoy the fact that I get to do something completely different in the last part of the play to the first two acts.

What does it feel like to have someone write a play for you?

It’s a huge privilege and I feel incredibly grateful. It allows me to have a deep understanding of who my characters are and what the story is telling the audience right from the start, and the process feels very organic and effortless. Still, the writing is just so good. I know I would be having a wonderful experience in any of his plays, written with me in mind or not. I don’t usually read anything until he has enough he wants to formally workshop with a bunch of actors. And then my process begins and that doesn’t have a lot to do with him. We don’t cross over a lot.

What kind of impact has this play had on you as a mother, and a mother of daughters?

The main impact is that I’ve seen a lot less of my children in the last year! In terms of the themes of the play, I’m not sure it has. Of course it makes me think about the kind of mother I want to be remembered as, but I was always giving that constant consideration anyway. I’d like to think I’m a very different parent to Veronica in the play. For a while now I’ve believed that the best I could do for my girls is get out of their way and allow them to be exactly who they are. It makes me think more about my relationship with my own mother and with my siblings, and in that regard it has taught me a lot about acceptance and allowing things to be as they are without trying to bend and change people or circumstances.

What did you learn from doing The Ferryman in New York City that you’ll try to apply to doing The Hills?

I’ll try to look for all the ways I can to unwind and switch off from the craziness of the experience. Doing a big, emotional, challenging play on Broadway is beyond exciting but that can also become overwhelming. If I focus on regulating and resetting when I can, I’ll enjoy the experience all the more.

The play is very emotional. How do you come down from a performance?

I usually come home, eat and watch live court trials on TV for a few hours. I’m a natural night owl, so I love the peace of being awake at 2am knowing there’s nothing else I can be doing. I should probably have an herbal tea and do some yoga and meditate, but I guess that’s Imaginary Me. A long soak in a bath at the end of the eight show week does me a lot of good.

Donnelly in The Hills of California

The post Great Performances: Laura Donnelly appeared first on DuJour.

The role of the tough-as-nails Winnifred the Woebegone, who is unafraid to climb castle walls or swim a moat, was famously created by Carol Burnett. She made her Broadway debut in the musical, a comic retelling of “The Princess and the Pea,” back in 1959. (Sarah Jessica Parker played the role in 1996.) Here, Foster talks about her decision to return to the role and how much she misses her stint as the lead of Younger, Darren Star’s genius half-hour comedy that ended in 2021.

What made you want to bring Once Upon a Mattress to Broadway?

I had an absolute blast doing the show when we did it at New York City Center earlier this year, so bringing it to Broadway felt like a no-brainer for me. It’s such a joyful show, and there’s something in it for everyone—no matter what age. It’s nice to exist in that joyful world and provide that escapism to audiences right now.

What do you enjoy most about playing Winnifred?

She’s the zaniest character I have ever played. She’s so self-assured in who she is, even though she is unusual! I love playing characters who own their uniqueness, and it gives me so much freedom as an actress to really go there and do the craziest things. She is basically an unleashed version of myself.

How do you feel about the idea of “happily ever after” and fairy tales?

I have a 7-year-old daughter, and sometimes, when we read the more classic fairy tales, I’m like, huh! Evil queens, princesses and finding your prince…the messaging that you must behave or you’ll be thrown in an oven and eaten was what I had when I was growing up. I’m excited that my daughter now experiences much broader and more complex messaging with heroines who aren’t looking for love, but for friendship and community; heroines who are strong, independent and unique. I think in many ways, Princess Fred was way ahead of her time. Even though she is looking for love, she is doing it completely in her own way, one that is truly authentic to her. One of my favorite lines from the show is “Princess Winnifred is unusual and Prince Dauntless is unusual—maybe they can be unusual together.”

What are the challenges of Once Upon a Mattress in comparison to, say, Sweeney Todd or Anything Goes or The Music Man?

Winnifred is an incredibly physical character, and there is a lot of physical comedy, so really maintaining my body is the thing I’m most concerned about.

We all have our “Princess and the Pea” things we’re precious about. I, for one, have a hard time sleeping without a really good pillow and a water bottle next to my bed, even if I don’t drink from it. Do you have any eccentric sleeping habits?

I sleep with earplugs and two white noise machines. I always have a glass of water by my bed but never drink from it. I remember an old wives’ tale that if you leave a glass of water by your bed it will catch the bad dreams, so you never want to drink from it.

I, for one, really miss Younger. Do you? What do you imagine Liza is up to these days?

I miss the cast so much. Working on that series was seven years of our lives! I’d be curious what Liza is up to. She’s almost 50! Maybe it’s time for a reboot?

Liza worked in publishing. Any books you’ve read you’re telling friends to read?

I recently read Kelly Bishop’s memoir, The Third Gilmore Girl, and I loved it. Her story is so inspiring. I’m a huge Gilmore Girls fan and I worked with Kelly on Bunheads, so it was amazing to learn more about her and hear her tell her story.

How do you unwind from a performance?

I love watching a little television. I’m a big fan of all reality TV. I just did a serious binge of The Traitors. And every single night I light candles and take a bath. That’s my ultimate come-down ritual. 

The post The Princess Diaries appeared first on DuJour.

But amid the many second acts of his career, Lowe, 60 and still a looker, has reversed the tables and become the interviewer.

On his popular weekly podcast Literally!, Lowe goes toe-to-toe with subjects like Oprah Winfrey; his good friends Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr.; Ed Zwick, who directed him in his 1986 breakout About Last Night; Netflix head Ted Sarandos; Arnold Schwarzenegger; and Lowe’s own family members, including his wife, Sheryl, a jewelry designer, and their sons Matthew (a “civilian” who has a law degree and works in venture capital) and John (an actor with whom Lowe currently stars on the Netflix comedy series Unstable).

Lowe gets the most anxious when his family members appear as guests on the podcast. “I don’t know what to ask them. I don’t know what they’re going to do,” he explains. Non-Hollywood types like billionaire tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen also make him anxious. “I get nervous when I have super smart people on,” Lowe says.

“What I love about the podcast is it’s more about listening than questioning. You have to listen when you interview, just like when you act,” he says. “People are interesting, and if you follow what they’re saying, they’ll reveal a lot. You go down all the rabbit holes.”

Lowe says part of the reason he started the podcast was as an antidote to the often silly viral moments that come out of late-night television, like Carpool Karaoke or Lip Sync Battle. Lowe appreciates old-school interviews and old-school talent.

“I watch [old episodes of] The Tonight Show, and they were raconteurs. They knew how to be self-deprecating and charming. They knew how to land a joke,” Lowe says. Now, he explains, a talk show producer will call and ask something like, “Can you get in a go-kart with me?”

“I want to vomit in my mouth,” he says.

Lowe’s guests know he’s a “safe zone,” but he still wants his conversations to be “real, with ebbs and flows.”

“I’m not out there looking for salacious stuff, and I’m not looking to pile on,” he continues. “If I have Tom Brady on my podcast, I don’t need to ask him about his divorce. There’s always more value in moving people away from the stuff that makes them uncomfortable.”

That said, Lowe admits: “I don’t think I’m a pushover. I make fun of my guests plenty.”

Despite having recorded more than 200 episodes, Lowe finds it’s easier to be interviewed than it is to interview.  Doing the podcast, “I have to have my producing and editing hat on, wondering, When is it time to move on from this subject? Is this getting slow? Is this getting boring?”

It’d be hard to imagine anything Lowe doing these days as boring. Sure, over the years he’s had plenty of clunkers—from dancing with Snow White at the 1989 Oscars to a handful of movies better left unmentioned—but he covered all that in his 2011 memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends. We’re drowning in a sea of celebrity memoirs these days, but Lowe’s stands out as ushering in a new age of the Hollywood confessional.

“Of all the things that I’ve done, I choose my memoir over the best episodes of television I’ve made,” Lowe says, ranking it above canonical shows like The West Wing and Parks and Recreation. “The degree of difficulty and the upside versus downside is off the charts. You have to be authentic and honest. If you’re going to dance around things, you have no credibility.”

When Lowe started writing the book, “the celebrity memoir was dead. It was dead!” he says. “Now, when I talk to people in the publishing world, they say that Stories I Tell My Friends is the first thing they give to someone when they’re writing a book.”

In the memoir, Lowe dissects his bad-boy image, substance abuse problems and the decision to raise his family in Santa Barbara instead of Los Angeles. Looking at his career trajectory following the book’s publication, it seems now that the memoir may have exorcised any unnecessary self-consciousness and brought on the Golden Age of Lowe.

Lowe has long seemed to poke fun at his image (see Wayne’s World and Austin Powers), but stints on later seasons of Parks and Recreation, The Grinder (which lasted one memorable season on Fox in 2015) and now Unstable have given us a Lowe that is admirably loose, a bit mischievous—even goofy. He seems to be having a great time.

“He’s an actor to his bones and also so, so experienced that his approach is always playful, always truthful and he always makes it look effortless,” says his Unstable co-star Sian Clifford, who stars as chief of staff to Lowe’s tech god Ellis Dragon, a kind of Elon Musk doppelganger. “He’s certainly shown me how to approach my work with a much lighter touch.”

Lowe believes that one of the tricks to a successful character-driven comedy is lots and lots of episodes, so he’s grateful that a second eight-episode season of Unstable drops on Netflix in August. He’d like to see much longer seasons, but “you can never argue with the mysterious [Netflix] algorithm. Still, one of the things I love about the show is it’s fun and has laughs and it still won’t take you as long to watch as The Irishman.” (That’s Netflix’s notoriously expensive Scorsese movie, which runs 209 minutes long.)

“You have to get to know the characters and you need to spend time with them,” Lowe explains of growing a sitcom. “It’s a proven fact that Parks and Recreation wasn’t even funny until the second year. It didn’t become Parks and Rec until episode 40! Eight episodes is not enough time to get to know characters. I stake everything on that. There’s a reason that people are liking season two of Unstable. They know the characters now. It’s a mathematical thing.”

The show also provides an opportunity to work opposite his son John, with whom he co-created the series. “He’s really coming into his own,” says Lowe. “As you go along, you learn the strengths of the actor, and we adjusted his character to make him less of a dweeb. The writing got crisper.”

The goal for Unstable, says Lowe, is “absurdist and heartwarming. Arrested Development is the North Star.” But it can’t all be absurd. “You have to care about the characters. If they’re not grounded, you’re watching a cartoon. At the end of the day, you don’t really care about Homer Simpson, but live-action comedy has to come out of real emotion and real conflict and real relationships and something you believe is plausible, even if it’s just barely sometimes.”

On top of Unstable and his podcast, Lowe is always working. “When I became an empty nester, I decided I could commit to more things.” In addition to the Fox series 9-1-1: Lone Star, he recently created a game show he sold to the network.

“It sounds really stupid, but the idea came to me in a dream,” Lowe says of the game show. “You’ve gotta keep yourself learning, and that’s how the spirit stays young. I love to work. It keeps me vital. I’m also aware of how few people are working into their sixth decade in this business, and you don’t get there by not working.”

At this point, there’s not much in Hollywood Lowe hasn’t done, and there aren’t many people he doesn’t know. “You’d have to dig pretty deep. The truth is, I can get anybody on the phone, and that’s sick. It’s amazing to do,” Lowe says. (It also makes booking his podcast a lot easier.) “But there’s always some new mandate or idea that Hollywood concocts that makes me have to learn or stumble.”

All that work means Lowe doesn’t have a lot of time to enjoy the other stuff his industry produces. “When I actually find something that compels me to watch from the beginning to the end, I want to weep,” he says, noting The Iron Claw and Saltburn as recent works that held his interest. “Though, here’s the problem: I liked Saltburn a lot more when it was called The Talented Mr. Ripley, which is one of my favorite movies.” Succession gets his gold star. “I’d give my fucking eyeteeth to be on a show like that,” Lowe says. “I’d be so down for Succession: The Musical.”

Until the Roys start singing on Broadway, we’ll have to be satisfied with The Outsiders, which Lowe has not yet seen.

“I’m flattered, though,” Lowe says, acknowledging the new generation that will get to experience S.E. Hinton’s “amazing” story. “How could you not be? I can think of so many movies or TV shows or moments that are lost to the mists of time five years later, let alone 40. To be a part of something for 40 years? Wow.”

Hair: Grooming: Jason Schneidman for Solo Artists at The Men’s Groomer Salon, Los Angeles
Production: Arzu Koçman by Productionising
Production assistant: Nathan Waters
Shot at the Corazza House in Los Angeles

The post Rob Lowe Aims High appeared first on DuJour.

She’s got a new show on Apple TV+, Land of Women, which launches in June. She’ll be in the fourth season of the hit series Only Murders in the Building, set to debut on Hulu in late August. She’s got a tequila brand, Casa del Sol, which she launched in 2021. She recently announced that she would become a strategic advisor and investor in Siete Foods, the fastest-growing Hispanic food company in the United States, known primarily for its gluten-free tortilla chips. (Longoria met Siete co-founder Veronica Garza at a cheerleading camp when they were growing up in Texas.)

Longoria has worked steadfastly with the Television Academy Foundation to help encourage inclusion in the entertainment industry. She’s an investor in a women’s soccer team (Angel City Football Club), a men’s soccer team (Club Necaxa) and is co-owner of the ElevenEleven padel team. There’s also her philanthropy. She founded Eva’s Heroes, based in San Antonio, Texas, in 2006 and was just awarded the 2024 Courage and Civility Award by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez.

With a schedule that packed, you can imagine her nonstop travel. A few weeks ago, she was in London for two days for her friend Victoria Beckham’s birthday. While there, she also filmed for an upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol (called Christmas Karma) directed by Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham), in which she plays the Ghost of Christmas Past. She lives between the U.S., Mexico City and Spain, she says, but on the day we connect, Longoria is about to board a flight from Los Angeles—the home base of her company, appropriately named Hyphenate Entertainment—to Miami, where she and her husband, the media mogul José Bastón, keep an apartment.

“I recently was in an airport in Poland and I saw myself in a big L’Oréal ad. And all I could think was, That’s so crazy. That’s me. I’m still really confused, and I’m always surprised,” Longoria recalls. She’s referring to yet another one of her many jobs—global ambassador for the beauty company—which she has held for the last two decades.

“What can I say?” she asks. “I’m the ultimate multitasker.”

Longoria suggests her ubiquity is the result of just hanging around the entertainment industry for more than two decades. She started as Flight Attendant #3 on an episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 but moved quickly on, in 2004, to Desperate Housewives, one of the last huge shows of network television.

Oh, and, at 49, she’s also a mom to 5-year-old Santiago. “The other day I heard [my son] say, ‘No, my mom’s an actress.’ And I looked at him and I thought, How did he even know that word and what it meant?” Longoria says. “He’s still unimpressed.”

He might be the only one unimpressed by Longoria’s ability to juggle it all.

Coming off of directing the film Flamin’ Hot, which garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Song for “The Fire Inside,” Longoria needed a break. That’s why she’s only producing and starring in Land of Women, soon to debut on Apple TV+.

At the beginning of the series, Gala (Longoria) has just opened a sexy wine shop in New York City. She quickly discovers that her husband owes some bad people a lot of money, and they’re coming to collect. So Gala runs away to Spain with her annoyed daughter (newcomer Victoria Bazua) and her slightly cuckoo mom Julia (Carmen Maura, a favorite of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar).

“I usually reverse-engineer my projects,” says Longoria of her work as a producer. “I start with a place I want to shoot.”

For Land of Women, Longoria told her friend, the writer/producer Ramón Campos, that she wanted to film in Spain’s wine country. She wanted something “super female forward,” she explained, and suggested Under the Tuscan Sun as a reference point. A month later, Campos came back with a pitch based on a bestselling Spanish novel by Sandra Barneda.

“So much of television is set in a dystopian future, and I can’t watch television set in a dystopian future,” says Longoria, who admits to “watching everything,” especially on plane rides. “I don’t want to worry and then start setting up my doomsday bunker after watching a television show.”

Land of Women, she explains, is optimistic, “very blue skies and fish-out-of-water. You just want to be there.”

Filming did, indeed, take place in Spain in the small medieval city of Figueres, birthplace of Salvador Dalí. It’s at “the complete other end” of the country from Marbella, where Longoria is relocating. To get to Figueres, at the eastern edge of Catalonia near the French border, “You need to take a plane, a train, a car, and then scale down a mountain,” Longoria jokes.

One last trick: The show is bilingual. (Actually, some of the characters speak Catalan, too.) “What’s the most authentic storytelling? I would talk to my daughter in English and my mother in Spanish,” says Longoria. “This wasn’t possible 10 or 15 years ago, but streaming has made content more global. The No. 1 show is Squid Game in Korean. Subtitles are very acceptable, and so is the idea of Spanglish. We’ve changed the way we seek out storytellers and points of view.”

Easier said than done. “I’d never acted in Spanish,” Longoria admits. “My brain hurt at the end of the day. But I’m the American in the show. I make a lot of mistakes in Spanish, like I do in life. I say the wrong word at the wrong moment.”

“Watching Eva act is like watching Messi play soccer,” says Land of Women creator Campos. “Above all, she’s a natural and tireless worker who always supports the team and understands that she’s a crucial part of it—but just one part of it. She’ll get her hands dirty when needed, without worrying about appearances.”

It helps that Longoria could identify completely with her onscreen double. “I’m literally my character,” Longoria says, all the way down to being an oenophile. “I love wine. I love everything about it. I love the different grapes. During COVID, all I did was read about wine. I decided that I was going to study for the sommelier test.” She didn’t end up taking the exam, “but I still want to.”

See? Always multitasking.

After the success of Flamin’ Hot, Longoria decided to take a break from directing. “You could not have stopped me from making that movie,” she says. But even for someone who’s always steering the ship, it was a lot of work.

“I’m not rushing to make my sophomore movie because I’m looking for something to speak to me,” she says. Currently, “I’m reading everything,” including lots of potential biopics. “I’ll know it when I see it. I’ll know it when I read it.”

But this year, she says, “I’m only acting. This year is: Let me go back in front of the camera.”

First up: Land of Women. Next in line: Only Murders in the Building. “I’m most comfortable in television comedy,” Longoria says. “It was the first thing I learned, so I have probably worked the 10,000 hours. You find confidence through that many at-bats.”

But Only Murders in the Building isn’t your everyday television comedy. It’s a television comedy alongside the legendary Meryl Streep. No sweat, Longoria says. Streep is actually her distant relative, a link she discovered when they were both on Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“We actually call each other ‘cousin,’” Longoria laughs. The first time they made the connection in person was at an AFI tribute to Jane Fonda. Longoria sheepishly said hello to Streep. Since then, whenever they see each other, Longoria says, “We’ll say, ‘How are you, cousin?’ and ‘I’m good, cousin.’”

In the first Zoom table read for Only Murders, attended by 100 people from Zach Galifianakis to Molly Shannon to Selena Gomez, Streep introduced Longoria as her cousin.

“She tells the story and everyone’s so confused, because I’m the most Latina person in the industry and she’s Meryl Streep,” Longoria recalls.

Working on set in New York was, indeed, like family. “We talked a lot about democracy and politics,” Longoria says. “But when you have leaders like Steve Martin and Martin Short, you’re never not laughing. Watching them make a lunch order is a show in itself. It’s a constant roast about a sandwich, a 30-minute comedy about mustard.”

In addition to working with Streep, Longoria also had the opportunity this year to star opposite Eddie Murphy in The Pickup, a heist comedy that also stars Keke Palmer and Pete Davidson.

The movie, for Amazon MGM, is directed by another of Longoria’s longtime pals, Tim Story. She auditioned years ago for Story’s Fantastic Four, but didn’t get the role. “I think it was [the Invisible Woman, the role that went to] Jessica Alba, but it was one of those situations where they say, ‘We can’t tell you the story or let you read the script,’” Longoria says.

Longoria doesn’t often get starstruck, but that’s how she felt about working with Murphy. “He’s my Hollywood,” she explains, describing how she was inspired by Murphy’s classic projects from Harlem Nights to Beverly Hills Cop. “He’s my kind of funny. He’s a comedy savant.”

“And of course the first day on set, we have to kiss,” Longoria says. “So it was like, ‘Nice to meet you,’ and then mwah.”

Well, is Murphy a good kisser? “We didn’t have makeout scenes,” Longoria demurs. “It was just a good-morning kiss.” Do they have a texting relationship now? “He’s very private,” Longoria says, adding that no, they don’t send each other Netflix recommendations. “I just sat and listened.”

In addition to 1) ordering a sandwich with Martin Short and Steve Martin; 2) being introduced to 100 people as Meryl Streep’s cousin; and 3) kissing Eddie Murphy—a major year for anyone, no doubt—Longoria also got to see Tom Cruise do the splits on the dance floor at Victoria Beckham’s 50th birthday party in London in April.

Of all of those experiences, which was the most entertaining?

“It’s a toss-up,” Longoria says, adding that Cruise “is the kindest human being and the best dancer. I’ve seen him dance at many parties.” She didn’t recall him doing the splits at any of those other parties, though. This was special. “I danced for five hours at the party and we didn’t leave till 3 a.m.,” Longoria says. “I woke up sore wondering if I’d worked out [too hard] the day before. No, we just danced a lot.”

Longoria insists that she doesn’t actually know everyone in Hollywood. It just seems like she does.

“There are so many people I don’t know and I want to work with, and I’m old,” she says. “But I’m lucky. I’m definitely lucky.”

Her secret recipe is relatively simple, actually.

“I don’t like wasting time,” Longoria says as her airplane is called for boarding. “I consider time like money. You’re either spending it or you’re wasting it, and I choose to spend it.”

Hair: DJ Quintero for L’Oréal Paris
Makeup: Genevieve Herr for L’Oréal Paris
Manicure: Julie Kandalec
Producer: Mariana Suplicy
Fashion Stylist Assistant: Francesca Lazaro
Shot at the WSA Building in New York City

The post The Land of Eva Longoria appeared first on DuJour.

A Rough Way To Go by Sam Garonzik

Once Upon a Time by Elizabeth Beller

The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon by Heath Hardage Lee

Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan

Magic Pill by Johann Hari

All That Glitters by Orlando Whitfield

The post Must Read Books Of Summer 2024 appeared first on DuJour.

Firebrand is named for the king’s sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr, played by Academy Award winner Alicia Vikander. Directed by Karim Aïnouz, the film chronicles Parr’s perseverance as a Protestant sympathizer who survived her husband’s deadly Catholic regime. Law, in a near-monstrous supporting role, plays the king’s violent last gasp with sneering resentment and a secret sense of remorse.

“He’d been a highly attractive and sought-after golden boy,” says Law, 51. “He was a romantic in a way, believing each time that he’d found the right woman. The murder and the mayhem that ensued was part of his sense that they had let him down.” Lumbering around shadowy halls on swollen legs, Law’s Henry VIII is a sour and spiteful menace. “He’s full of regret, self-medicating with alcohol and trying to deal with intense pain and the madness that it brings on.”

Law says that his approach to a role depends on the project and the director. He’s worked with a legendary set of the latter, including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson and Mike Nichols. Law’s wide-ranging body of work includes prestige period dramas like Road to Perdition, Cold Mountain (for which he landed his second Academy Award nomination in 2004), and The Aviator; sci-fi thrillers like Gattaca and A.I. Artificial Intelligence; and, more recently, major franchise installments like Fantastic Beasts (as the young wizard Dumbledore) and Captain Marvel.

For Firebrand, embracing the physical embodiment of Henry VIII and all that it entailed was essential to Law’s process. “It took so much time every morning to get into this huge, weighted costume and I would stay in it for the rest of the day,” Law says. “You could rehearse in jeans and a T-shirt, but then you would turn up in this enormous outfit and realize you’re going to knock everyone over. So you might as well maintain that sense of Henry’s shape and size.” That went for the king’s stench, too: Law collaborated with historians to conjure up a scent of bodily decay and wore it during the shoot inside a Derbyshire castle.

“It was so terrible that some days you couldn’t help but laugh,” Vikander says. “Jude was trying to make you go down a new path, try different things. What these characters went through was so tough, but we also had a lot of fun working together,” Vikander says. The Swedish actress recalls admiring Law during production on 2012’s Anna Karenina, her first English-language film, where “he proved the work ethic and kind personality you need to bring to set,” she says. “He’s the most humble and down-to-earth person, which makes working with him extremely joyful.”

Many of Law’s early, career-defining performances hinged on an inescapable charm—Alfie’s solipsistic womanizer, lovers with secrets behind their dazzling smiles in Closer and The Holiday—that hypnotized audiences and heroines alike. “I didn’t feel like I really ever leaned into playing handsome, but there were roles that required an attractive energy,” Law says. “I was trying to play against my looks in my early 20s, and now that I’m saggy and balding, I wish I had played it up.” He’s being at least somewhat facetious: A trailer for the 2020 HBO series The New Pope, for example, shows a taut, chiseled Law striding slow-motion across a beach in a white Speedo.

Still, parts have recently come the actor’s way that “have not leaned in to any sort of attraction,” he says. “It’s been satisfying not having to turn that switch on.” Law scowls over a thick mustache as Captain Hook in Disney’s Peter Pan & Wendy;  later this year, he will star in Ron Howard’s Eden, based on the true story of a group of people who retreat to the Galápagos to flee facism, and as an Idaho FBI agent pursuing a white supremacist group in The Order.

Law is also stepping into another entertainment juggernaut, as a Jedi shepherding a band of kids through harrowing adventures in the Star Wars series Skeleton Crew. Law, who grew up admiring the original films but “wasn’t a Star Wars geek, or whatever the polite way to say it is,” describes his character as “contradictory, complicated, mischievous and at times heroic,” though not very paternal. “He has no time for someone crying because they’re 11 and really scared,” Law says, “He’s like, ‘Pull yourself together and get on with it.’”

Law’s own parents were teachers who retired young and pursued their dreams of founding a theater troupe that travels around Europe. “Their love of the arts—film, theater, dance, music—was hugely influential” on Law and his sister, the painter Natasha Law, he says.

A father of seven, Law describes himself as an “excessive” dad, “because I think about them all the time.” His wife, Phillipa Coan, and their two kids have been traveling with Law for the past couple of years, living in seven or eight countries, an itinerant period he calls “wonderful but hard.” “I’ve never been someone who’s comfortable going off to film for weeks on my own. Having the reality to return to makes you feel normal again before going back to playing someone like Henry VIII.”

Acting is proving to be a family trade: Law’s eldest son, Rafferty, with his first wife Sadie Frost, appears in the Apple TV+ series Masters of the Air, released earlier this year. “It’s complicated because I’m aware of how hard it is,” Law says of watching his son get into the industry. “When I came into this business, I didn’t have the comparison, but with him, people might always say, ‘Oh, you’re just like your dad.’ Which is nonsense; his career is his career.”

“I’m thrilled because we get to share our enthusiasm, and I get to give him advice if he wants to hear it,” Law continues. “I’m immensely proud that he’s put himself out there because he found something that he loves. He’s obviously seen the way I work, and it’s rubbed off on him.”

The post Jude Law Fires Up appeared first on DuJour.

The post Center Stage With Ruthie Ann Miles appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Brightest Light On Broadway: Ricky Ubeda appeared first on DuJour.

How did you find Stereophonic, or how did it find you?

It was one of the last auditions that I got before the pandemic shut down. The production didn’t move forward at the time so when I got the audition in my inbox last May, I jumped at the chance to tape for it again. It was one of those scripts that you don’t forget. The material is so rich. I’d like to think I’ve grown as a person and performer over the past few years so I was thrilled to bring that to it. A couple months later we began our rehearsals at Playwrights Horizons.

In the show, we only hear snippets of the songs the band is recording. What’s that like as a performer?

The snippets of the songs allow for the process of songwriting to do the storytelling. The songs aren’t these theatrically transcendent moments like they would be in a traditional musical. In Stereophonic, the characters are listening, commenting on the tempo, watching whether or not they’re playing in the right key. At least that’s what I try to keep in mind when those moments reveal themselves in the show. It also allows for a catharsis once we finally make it through a full song. We occasionally practice the full song in band rehearsal to remind us that the tiny parts we are working on in the play will ultimately gel into a could-be 70’s hit rock song.

Will the Stereophonic band of the play release an actual album?

During our break before our Broadway transfer, we put a record together. It got all of us excited and gave us a chance to reflect on how far we had come as a band since our first rehearsals. The process was also a helpful reminder that this is what our characters were living every day for years. Constantly listening, re-recording, spending hours killing time in between takes. The record will be out soon. We still need to figure out our band name.

There’s a scene where your character sings certain phrases of a song over and over, and you can’t quite hit a high note. How do you do that?

These characters are constantly seeking perfection in their music, the mood and tone and what evokes the world of the song. “East of Eden,” the song at the top of Act II, is Diana’s most personal, tortured song. It speaks so clearly to the dynamics in her and Peter’s relationship. Making my voice crack is the last thing I’m thinking about. I’m thinking of how fatigued Diana is, how tense her relationship is at the moment, and, more than anything, I’m trying to do the opposite of cracking and actually land the note.

What do you feel about bringing the show to Broadway?

Out of the seven cast members, six of us are making our Broadway debut alongside the playwright David Adjmi. When I signed on for our Playwrights run, I had no idea we might transfer a few months later. And now that it’s happening, it all feels like kismet.

The post The Brightest Light On Broadway: Sarah Pidgeon appeared first on DuJour.

Why is Vladimir Putin an interesting character to play?

His stillness, his mask; what I can observe of how performative that is has been really helpful. Imagining the inner tension through the outer stillness has really interested me. I love the physicality. More generally, I’ve found the crossover between the personal and the political a really rewarding area to explore. It’s a paradox that someone who has such a massive role and presence, such tremendous influence on the world stage might be reduced in people’s (or my?) mind to something two-dimensional, morally speaking, almost mythologically speaking. But to be afforded space to think into that head or to experience that journey imaginatively is a privilege and a revelation to me. I’ve found myself thinking a lot about medieval ideas of kingship; whether in such a position you could come to believe that your will is, intrinsically, the land’s will, the nation’s will, that in some sense your body is the land. And then I’m fascinated by how that impacts on the intimate sense of loyalty and betrayal, of duty and responsibility, then of ambition, of appetite of what it feels like to grow into a power you might perhaps never have expected.

What’s the most intimidating thing about playing the role?

I expected to be more intimidated by Putin’s presence in the collective imagination; by the pressure to live up to an audience’s collective idea of him. In actual fact, that’s never felt like a problem; quite the contrary. It’s a huge privilege to play someone who is so alive in an audience’s imagination. It creates a really dynamic dialogue; a conversation which feels new every day, because of the daily news cycle. There’s always a new perspective, what feels like a new pattern to discern. Even though the play finishes in 2013, we’re examining formative events.

How has your performance and relationship to the material changed as you’ve moved from the Almeida to the West End and now to New York?

Like I say, it feels like such a living relationship. The material allows it to land minutely differently every day. We’ve moved from a small space progressively into bigger spaces. While the intimacy of its beginnings was a joy to play, it feels hugely enriching painting on bigger canvasses. And the material is so big, so epic, I think it grows in a bigger space. The hope is that it’s always growing and deepening.

Will you miss Tom Hollander on Broadway?

I love Tom as a friend and I admire him so much as a colleague. I’ve just been so lucky to share a stage with him in every way. His work was so dazzling on this, so rich. It always is. And now Michael Stuhlbarg, who is mercurial and meticulous and powerful, and intelligent, and intense, and organic, and surprising, capable of such huge depths and such delights. What an enormous privilege! It’s a whole new dream. I’m just loving working with him. I’m in awe of his rigor and his virtuosity. It’s a real joy to be playing a whole new dynamic. Michael’s making something very special indeed.

What do you expect to be different in New York as you start performances?

To be honest, I just don’t know what to expect! I’m so interested to see how the play lands here. Every nation has its own psychology. How will a play about patriotism, power, money, ambition, single mindedness, opportunism, friendship, rivalry ignite in the mind here? Obviously, America has a different relationship with Russia from the UK’s relationship with Russia, so I imagine an American will be coming to the play from a slightly different angle to a British person. Is Putin’s place in the imagination in some way different here from there? I’m so excited to find out.

Why should New Yorkers come see the show?

Rupert’s production is so astonishingly agile, so captivating. It’s slick and witty and disturbing and profound, and he makes it feel so effortless. And at the simplest level it’s really entertaining! I won’t start enumerating the whole cast, but  I’m very proud to be a part of it.

What’s your favorite thing about working with Peter Morgan?

Peter is masterful at making a complex argument dramatically clear; taking on big ideas and putting them within our grasp without debasing or simplifying them. He’s a brilliant examiner of power, both in the world and in the domestic space. It’s really exciting watching how he molds a story. And he’s very generous and unprecious about listening to the actors, being in conversation with what an actor feels they need from the inside, in terms of rhythm for example. He’s collaborative and supportive and infectiously enthusiastic and funny!

The post The Brightest Light On Broadway: Will Keen appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Brightest Light On Broadway: Gayle Rankin appeared first on DuJour.

The post Catching Up With Suzan-Lori Parks appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Brightest Light On Broadway: Celia Keenan-Bolger appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Brightest Lights On Broadway: Eden Espinosa appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Brightest Lights On Broadway: Isabelle McCalla & Grant Gustin appeared first on DuJour.

This March, in the Netflix fantasy film Damsel, Wright plays a similarly intimidating character. She is Queen Isabelle, mother to Prince Henry (Nick Robinson), who will stop at nothing to continue a grisly tradition: sacrificing a young woman to a dragon in order to repay an ancient debt.

Isabelle meets her match in Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown), the titular damsel who is not going to let some fire-breathing beast take her down without a fight. Wright describes the 20-year-old Stranger Things star, who also produced the movie, as a “little whippersnapper” with “quite a presence on screen.”

“You’re either born with it or you’re not,” says Wright of Brown’s talent. “And she was.”

The Texas-born Wright, 57, was clearly born with it, too. She grew up in San Diego and began modeling at age 14. By her late teens, she was already acting on the daytime soap Santa Barbara, and a transition to feature films like The Princess Bride came soon afterward.

Damsel is a particularly cool fairy tale for contemporary audiences, says Wright. “It’s not the classic ‘damsel in distress’ story. It’s very modernized,” she explains. “The dragon is not just evil; it’s not just trying to kill and maim. It’s doing it for a female reason that’s beautiful. We could also tap into the metaphor that the dragon is the state of our world we’re all trying to fight.”

Wright’s not sure how the script for Damsel arrived in her inbox, though she did quite like director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later, a 2007 standalone sequel to 2002’s 28 Days Later. Wright surmises that, when casting, Netflix executives thought of her because they were well aware of her work on House of Cards and thought, “She knows how to play an evil queen.”

In Damsel, Queen Isabelle “absolutely believes you have to continue this tradition” of human sacrifice, says Wright. In contemporary terms, she affirms, “We would call her a sociopath.”

“Robin manages with very nuanced craft to portray the most evil behavior. The audience can feel and understand where this evilness comes from,” says Fresnadillo. “She takes you with her heart, and a mesmerizing performance, on a path that can lead you to the darkest places.”

Wright laughs at the idea that she’s been typecast, first as a deceitful POTUS-in-waiting and now as a manipulating queen. In fact, during our interview, the actress—thrice married and divorced, most recently to Clément Giraudet, who worked at the time in VIP relations for Saint Laurent—is refreshingly warm.

“These are just fun to play,” Wright says. “It’s a hoot playing characters like that.”

Scheming swindlers are quite a change from the gentle characters Wright played in the early days of her career. There was Jenny, the angelic best friend-turned-wife of Tom Hanks’ title character in 1994’s Academy Award–winning Forrest Gump. And, of course, there was her breakout role as the farm girl-turned-princess in 1987’s The Princess Bride, which, even 35 years later, remains an unparalleled and charming mainstay.

“It’s so funny,” recalls Wright. “I was doing an interview about Damsel, and one of the questions was, ‘Can you imagine Princess Buttercup growing up to become Queen [Isabelle]?’ I said, ‘Don’t even say it! Let Princess Buttercup be innocent!’”

Wright admits that over the following years she was often typecast as another kind of woman, “the pained mother-slash-wife.” But when House of Cards came along, “that kind of opened up a new vein. It was so nice to break out.”

House of Cards also encouraged Wright to try her hand at directing, and she ended up behind the camera for 10 of the series’ episodes. With an experienced crew behind her, adding to her duties on the show “wasn’t really that much harder. You do sleep less. I’d stay up till midnight because we were shooting in Baltimore and our editors were in L.A., then at 4:30, get in the gym with my trainer, then the makeup trailer around 6 a.m.”

Directing herself was kind of like turning on a light switch: “I would call ‘Cut!’ in the middle of a scene when I thought I was shite.”

Still, Wright adds, “I’m probably a really annoying actor to direct. I’m always inserting myself inappropriately into the conversation: ‘Why don’t we try this? What if we did that?’” She’d often ask Gary Jay, the late camera operator on House of Cards, about the lenses he was using. He became Wright’s directing mentor and was the one who suggested she give directing an episode a shot.

“I was petrified, but we had so much fun,” Wright says. Now, she says, “I sure do love directing. I love seeing the evolution of a performance; how you can throw a little piece of a novella at an actor and watch the transformation happen in front of you.” Yes, every actor’s different, but “we know what we need, and I love the collaboration. There’s nothing more fun than building. I don’t care what kind of project we make, even if it’s, ‘Let’s go make a papier-mâché house.’”

“She’s a very curious woman,” adds Damsel director Fresnadillo. “She has a humbleness and an openness to absorb and learn from everything and everyone. She’s a strong creative collaborator and a true team player.”

At a Netflix Emmy party, Jason Bateman asked Wright if she would direct some episodes of his series Ozark. She said yes. “It was one of my favorite shows,” she says. A producer sent her the script for the film that became her feature directorial debut, Land, about a woman who decides to live off the grid after her husband and son are killed in a terrorist attack. She shot it in 29 days in and around a cabin at the top of a mountain in Alberta, Canada.

“It was an incredible experience and incredibly challenging,” Wright says. “I learned a lot from the mistakes I made, and I’m hoping I won’t make the same mistakes again.”

Wright has moved on to speaking about her next project, a series for Amazon she’s currently prepping in London called The Girlfriend, based on the novel by Michelle Frances. It’s a psychological thriller about a strange love triangle between a mother (Wright), her son and her son’s new girlfriend (Olivia Cooke).

“I really want to feel the textures of tension between these two women,” Wright says about her approach, which includes using Saltburn as an inspiration. “In another world, my character and Olivia’s would have been BFFs. They’re really wily, strong alpha females, and they’re both in love with the same boy. One who just happens to be my character’s son. It’s twisted. He’s caught in the middle, wondering who to believe.”

Wright hopes she can make something surprising with The Girlfriend. With “400 other television shows” to compete with these days, “it’s so hard to be original,” she says.

That said, she has no interest in mining Forrest Gump or The Princess Bride for a new story with familiar characters and IP.  “They talked about doing a sequel to The Princess Bride, meeting Westley and Buttercup 25 years later, but maybe Rob Reiner pooh-poohed the idea. I agree. Just keep that sweet piece of cinema alone.”

Only in the last decade did Wright’s own children, Dylan and Hopper—with her ex-husband Sean Penn, now both in their early 30s—even watch The Princess Bride.

“We probably tried to show them when they were younger,” Wright says. “They never wanted to watch our movies.”

Now, both kids are pursuing careers in the arts. Hopper is currently producing a music video in Thailand. Dylan is developing her own projects. “I’ve a feeling she’ll be a director,” Wright says.

As kids, both said they’d never act. “They thought it was boring,” Wright says. “But they knew acting from watching on a set where they weren’t working. That’s boring.”

As they’ve grown, “we both have worked with them on scenes or run lines for auditions all the time,” Wright explains, referring to Penn. “They’re both so good. I love it whenever they ask. It’s fun to see them growing at it. They’re still finding their way, but they’ll find it. They definitely have the creative gene.”

Meanwhile, Wright recently reteamed with her Forrest Gump family—Hanks, director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Eric Roth—to film a movie called Here, based on a graphic novel by Robert McGuire. “Actually, we all live around the corner from each other [in California],” Wright says. “It was like no time had passed getting the band back together.”

The film takes place in a single room and tells the story of the different people who have lived there. “It spans the entirety of civilization,” Wright says. Both she and Hanks had to play themselves in their 20s. “I’m almost 60 and Tom’s 60-something. We’re never looking 32 or 19 ever again.”

But, as when they de-aged Harrison Ford in the latest Indiana Jones movie,  Zemeckis used a “deep fake” camera that “downloaded every piece of data [the stars had] ever had on screen,” Wright says, including Hanks on Bosom Buddies and Wright on Santa Barbara and being interviewed on Entertainment Tonight at 20.

“You could see the innocence in my eyes, and they’re translating all of that youth onto my 57-year-old-face,” Wright says. “It’s so trippy. Oh, my God. Both of our mouths fell to the ground. My first question was, ‘How dangerous is that?’ But it’s happening anyway. It’s moving so fast.”

And in all likelihood, that new technology will just inform Wright’s continuing career, in front of and behind the camera.

“You know what? A director can’t make anything without a team. The best idea wins. There’s no ego,” Wright says. “And I love the teamwork.”

Hair: Daniel Martin
Makeup: Joey Choy
Manicure: Edyta Betka
Contributing Visuals Producer: Catherine Gargan Hall
Photography Assistants: Ben Kyle, Isaak Hest
Fashion Stylist Assistant: Olivia Bellamy
Shot at the 1 Hotel Mayfair in London

The post Robin Wright: Right Here, Right Now appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Brightest Light On Broadway: Michael Imperioli appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Brightest Lights On Broadway: Jamestown Revival appeared first on DuJour.

Makeup by Chelsea Gehr for Exclusive Artists using Make Up For Ever

The post The Brightest Light On Broadway: Ingrid Michaelson appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Brightest Light On Broadway: Zoe Kazan appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Brightest Light Off Broadway: Josh Radnor appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Brightest Light Off Broadway: Taylor Schilling appeared first on DuJour.

She realized that making art in Hollywood didn’t have to be a competition between herself and her peers. It could be collaborative.

“It could be a team sport,” Lyonne says. “You need all your pals to make things.”

Russian Doll was the first time in Lyonne’s career that “I had any real power to bring in my people, and that was across the board,” she explains.

That career has been a long one. Lyonne got her start in 1986 at the age of 6 on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Though there were a few blackout years in her mid-twenties, Lyonne might now be at a career peak with the hit show Poker Face on Peacock and her own production company.

As Lyonne spent time behind the scenes with Russian Doll, she realized that it wasn’t all about her. She found great fulfillment in supporting the friends and colleagues she was collaborating with to make really good work. “To see someone crush it and know that they did it, that’s a win for me and a win for them,” Lyonne says.

She’s since tried to infuse that dynamic into the rest of her life with more directing and producing. There’s The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy, an animated series Lyonne produced with Maya Rudolph about a pair of alien doctors, created by Cirocco Dunlap, a writer Lyonne worked with on Russian Doll. It airs on Amazon Prime starting in February, featuring additional voice talent from the likes of Sam Smith, Kieran Culkin and Keke Palmer, “and the show’s fucking amazing,” Lyonne says. “But to see Cirocco get her own show over the course of a few years? It’s just so satisfying.”

This month, Lyonne is shepherding another talented friend to fame and fortune, this time on Netflix. Lyonne directed the filmed version of comedian Jacqueline Novak’s one-woman show Get On Your Knees, an autobiographical deconstruction of oral sex that was an Off-Broadway hit in 2019.

Lyonne saw it live several times and fell for both it and Novak. (It was directed for the stage by another funny guy, John Early.) “I was just a massive fan, and I wanted to produce the Netflix special,” Lyonne says. “You’re so in it with her brain. She stalks across the stage, just dropping gem after gem after gem.”

There’s not a ton you can do with a standup special, admits Lyonne, but she tried to give the piece some texture. “We tried to give it the feeling of shooting on film,” she says. “I prefer a feast for the eyes and the mind all at once. It makes me happier.”

Among the references Lyonne brings up when discussing Novak’s Netflix special: 1982’s Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip; 1979’s Town Bloody Hall, the famed documentary by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus of a panel discussion between feminist advocates and Norman Mailer that took place on the same Town Hall stage where Lyonne filmed Get On Your Knees; 1974’s Lenny, Bob Fosse’s Lenny Bruce biopic starring Dustin Hoffman; and even The Red Shoes. (The reference to that 1948 fable came from her cinematographer, Sam Levy, who also worked on Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird.)

Lyonne, as you may have guessed, has an encyclopedic brain and a thirst for knowledge. “My teenage years, I was like a sponge,” she says. “I had such a love of cinema and for books.”

She also has a love of puzzles. She’ll occasionally contribute a crossword to The New York Times—as in, write one. And even if she’s the busiest now that she’s ever been, “the one thing I make time to do,” she says, is complete the newspaper of record’s daily games, including Spelling Bee, Connections and Wordle.

Lyonne is also a big reader. She ticks off just a few of the books she’s currently reading that are floating around in her Los Angeles bedroom, including but not limited to: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, about sustainability, by the American architect Buckminster Fuller; The Comet, by W.E.B. Dubois; Labyrinths, a collection of the writings of Jorge Luis Borges; Celestial Heirs: A Space Age Interpretation of the Bible; and the intense-sounding Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe.

This isn’t pretension or a put-on. Lyonne is really into all this stuff.

“Is my brain atrophying in Los Angeles?” Lyonne asks. “I don’t think so. For better or worse, I’ll always be wired the way I am. I’m always wanting more information. I’m always gravitating to new ideas and new music and new thinkers.”

But it’s not all work and intellectual pursuits. Surprising even herself, Lyonne says she’s started surfing. “It’s a real get-it-while-you-can kind of thing,” she says. “It’s fun and it’s hard and I think I’m too old to be scared. Plus, I love the ocean and swimming and I have very good balance.” (At some point in her youth, Lyonne was a gymnast, she says.)

She splits her time between New York and L.A., which, she says, automatically “eliminates the conversation of ‘Do you prefer L.A. or New York?’ since I knew I would be in both for the rest of my life.”

Still, she adds, “Every time I land in New York, I feel immediately energized. The city is still in my bones. It’s insane to live anywhere else. New York has intellectualism. Los Angeles has road trips.”

Part of reaching this point in her career, with multiple stops and starts along the way, has been figuring out how to meet her needs and wants. “I had a really good run as an actress between 6 and 16. I started with Pee-wee Herman and ended with Woody Allen, who was a very popular figure in 1995,” Lyonne says. After filming Allen’s musical Everyone Says I Love You, she transitioned to NYU Tisch’s filmmaking program. Though she dropped out, she always knew she’d find her way to being a producer or director somewhere down the road. It also provided a solution to the age-old-Hollywood fear of, well, aging and not getting work because you’re getting old.

“The next generation comes up,” says Lyonne, who will turn 45 in April, “and time doesn’t go backward. It is what it is.”

Lyonne has found it’s much easier to “wake up at 5 a.m. for someone else than myself,” she says. “Over time, we lose interest in ourselves and gain interest in other people. I find it much more satisfying to see Jacqueline alive and getting to sing her song.”

“I’ve hit a lot of personal markers of achievement. I feel spoken for,” Lyonne adds. “In my golden years, the thing that brings me the most happiness is watching other people realize their dreams.”

Hair: Coree Moreno
Makeup: Molly Stern
Manicure: Sreynin Peng
Set Designer: Evan Jourden
Production: Viewfinders
Digital Tech: DJ Dohar
Photo Assistants: Danya Morrison, Ricky Steel
Fashion Stylist Assistant: Victoria Cameron
Shot on location at 1034 North Orlando Avenue in Los Angeles, represented by The Fridman Group at Compass

The post Getting Ahead With Natasha Lyonne appeared first on DuJour.

There’s the old version of Dove Cameron. That Dove burst onto the scene a decade ago in the Disney Channel hit Liv and Maddie. She played both Liv, a teen actress who returns home from Hollywood to Wisconsin after her TV series ends, and Maddie, the tomboyish twin sister she left behind.

That Dove also starred, in 2015, as Mal, the daughter of Maleficent (Kristin Chenoweth) in the hit television movie musical Descendants. It’s one of those canonical Disney films that has influenced an entire generation of kids through two sequels, Halloween costumes and trillions of soundtracks and replays. It also turned Cameron into a household name with, yes, 48 million Instagram followers.

That was Dove Cameron 1.0. Or, as she describes it, “Back when I was still blonde, dating boys, wearing pink and smiling more.”

The new Dove Cameron—call her Dove Cameron 2.0, or maybe the real Dove Cameron—performs in operatic musical theater in London, lives on the Lower East Side, is openly queer, readily discusses her struggles with mental health and might just be the next great American pop star.

“The entire Disney thing,” as Cameron calls it, “is an old-fashioned studio network. You join when you’re a child. You keep that hair for four years. You have to freeze yourself in time. You share a brand with your characters on television. Nobody tells you that, but that’s what you do. I thought people knew that it was a brand more about the Disney Channel than it was about me.”

That Cameron was known for her music, with hits like “If Only,” but “none of those songs were written by me.”

Defining her “me” is of particular importance to the 27-year-old multihyphenate. “I experienced such backlash after Disney that I didn’t know who I was. What if I don’t want to rock the boat? I’d never been able to be myself in the public eye. Could I come out as queer and still feel safe in the world? Was I going to feel so picked apart again? It’s one of those things you can’t take back.”

But Cameron knew what choice she had to make, and she chose herself. “You can be the person everyone wants you to be and feel safer and be trapped by that,” she says, “or you can step into yourself as an energy and risk that it doesn’t work. But at least you get to sleep at night knowing you’re not cosplaying as someone else.”

In conversation, Cameron seems like a wise soul. Hollywood parties, she says, make her uncomfortable, “but there’s no secret door that leads you to nirvana and the dimension where everyone is like-minded.” Maybe it’s years of therapy. Maybe it’s learning from her mother, a poet. Maybe it’s the books about grief she likes to read. Maybe it’s the idea that she’s finally getting to be herself. Maybe it’s the years’ worth of sci-fi movies and television shows she watches on a regular basis.

“When I couldn’t find myself in the community around me, I could always find myself in music and movies,” says Cameron, who grew up near Seattle and started acting in community theater at the age of 8 before moving to Los Angeles a few years later.

Music and film have “always made me feel like I wasn’t from a different planet,” Cameron says. “I was always afraid that I could never find my people growing up. I was always on the periphery. But a sci-fi movie makes me remember how the brain works. It makes me feel the walls aren’t caving in. In fact, I have one of the Avengers movies playing right now.”

Cameron cites movies that “feel strange,” or “disturbing films that are pleasant and romantic,” as her favorites, films like Ex Machina, David Lynch’s Elephant Man, Pan’s Labyrinth and Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Those exotic worlds resonate with her. “I think there’s something really inherently human in dystopia,” she says. “I think movies about robots reveal things about humanity. There’s this dichotomy of striving for perfection but knowing that perfection marks the end of humanity.”

“I’m not pro-AI or pro-robot,” Cameron qualifies, somewhat humorously. “I’m actually a huge, huge fan of human beings. I’m very social, actually. I’m a huge cuddler.”

That’s why she moved from the West Coast to New York two years ago. “I’m a walking city girl,” Cameron says. “I like to be in the middle of everything. I have so much noise and chaos going on in my brain and my nervous system; New York City matches my energy. I can process myself here more. I don’t hate Los Angeles; I just don’t feel like my best self there. I feel like the scary person in the corner that everyone’s wondering, ‘What’s going on with her?’”

In New York, Cameron says, she rarely feels lonely. “I talk to people and make friends and I sit outside of shops and strike up conversations with strangers,” she explains. “It makes me think [about] how wonderful it is to be alive. How many humans there are still to meet. I’m such a person that feeds off connecting with humans. I love having mini romances for an hour every once in a while.”

Even though she went to high school in Los Angeles, most of her friends, at least the ones “that are on that same equilibrium wave” as she is, live in New York. Of course, when she started writing her new album, Cameron discovered that most of the music industry is based in Hollywood, which she’d just left.

“The music industry is the Wild, Wild West. What a crazy feat it is to get an album finished. It’s been such a shocking, overwhelming process,” Cameron says. “I was really naive going into it.”

That’s in part because Cameron says she did the music thing “backward.” The very first song she wrote for herself—at least the first as Dove Cameron 2.0—was “Boyfriend.” It’s sung to a female crush. Cameron alluringly sings why she’d make a better lover: “ I could be a better boyfriend than him/ I could do the shit that he never did/ Up all night, I won’t quit/ Thinking I’m gonna steal you from him/ I could be such a gentleman/ Plus all my clothes would fit.”

In truth, Cameron says of the song, “I thought it was trash. I was going to delete it off my phone.”

But her team suggested she put it on her TikTok, and it exploded. “It just took me by my hair and pulled me around the world,” she says. “My entire 2022 was chasing this runaway car that was this song.”

Cameron says that the experience was inspiring. “To see people embrace this song, to have them feel it expressed in their bodies was really emotional for me,” she says. “I thought, maybe this secret dark fantasy of being a musician is something I can do. Plus, it would be weird if I walked away after a song this big.”

After that monster hit, she had to work backward and try to develop her sound. “‘Boyfriend,’” she explains, “was a one-time experience. I had to do a lot of deep diving to find what sounds make me feel connected to myself. Everything I do comes from my personal life and my experience first.”

Even though Cameron says she “floats toward things that are melancholic,” baring her soul in writing sessions “freaked me out. I’ve always been prone to depression and contended with my trauma, but I’d mask up and wall up and go to work. Now I was telling stories about things that were very private and painful.”

The result comes in two parts; Alchemical Volume 1 was recently released. There’s a Billie Eilish quality to the music. Some of the songs are “high production bangers,” she says, “but I think it’s genreless. It’s getting back to what I would make if I could make whatever I wanted. It’s about deciding that the only person’s opinion that matters was mine.”

Though Cameron loves to support her friends and has been listening to “Olivia [Rodrigo’s] album, Taylor [Swift’s] album, Sabrina [Carpenter], Renée Rapp, Conan [Gray’s] new stuff,” she wants to keep her sound as pure as possible.

“I love what’s successful on radio, but I don’t want to start thinking about metrics or trends or what people are loving. I don’t want to get insecure about my own process. I’ve done the whole this is what people want from me [thing],” Cameron says, referring, no doubt, to the first Dove Cameron skin she shed and has left, it seems, long behind her. “I want to focus on what I want to say. What lights me up. But I’m still trying to find my voice.”

Hair: Jacob Rozenberg at The Wall Group
Makeup: Maki Ryoke
Manicure: Pattie Yankee
Producer: Mariana Suplicy
Fashion Stylist Assistant: Amber Rana
Shot at Studios by SK in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

The post Dove Cameron Takes Flight appeared first on DuJour.

Henry Purcell’s opera, “The Fairy Queen,” performed by Les Arts Florissants (Julien Gazeau)

The post Inside A New Production Of “The Fairy Queen” At Lincoln Center appeared first on DuJour.

“Light Cloud, Dark Cloud” (1957) © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023

“No. 14” (1960-2)© 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023

“The Ochre (Ochre, Red on Red)” (1954-2) © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023

The post A Major Mark Rothko Exhibition Opens in Paris appeared first on DuJour.

Something that comes up a lot in the show is: How did you get to be here? So, how did you get to be here, on Broadway, in Merrily?

Oh man, it has really been a journey. I have always loved Sondheim but I really didn’t know the history or full story of this show until I auditioned in May 2022. I saw the audition material, and I just knew that Gussie Carnegie and I had a lot in common, which is scary, because Gussie is extremely complicated. But when the sides for the audition said ‘I’ve been in five Broadway shows… I’m inches away from the top… success isn’t happening fast enough’ something really resonated with me and this character. My audition was an hour and I was with Jonathan Groff doing the scenes and just laughing and crying and having the best time. When I walked out, the casting director said ‘unless I’m crazy you booked this.’ Two days later, I booked it! Now Merrily will be my sixth Broadway show, which I can’t even believe. So many things have happened to get to this moment, some amazing and some heartbreaking but this is my first Sondheim show and it feels like a true manifestation a year and a half in the making. But when I really think of it, it’s a lifetime in the making. I think Gussie, this cast and this role is a once in a lifetime experience and it’s taken a lot to get here, but there’s nothing I would change to be where I am now.

The show is a lot about success, failure, the roads we didn’t take, the roads we did. What feeling does that bring up in you every time you perform it?

It is so deeply personal. It is about an artist trying to make it in New York City and the friendships that we have, the friendships we lose, true determination, the price of success, and it does make you reevaluate every choice you’ve ever made. It can be very cathartic to experience this every day, and find new ways to dig in deeper, but it can also be very emotionally exhausting because this show is so intimate in a lot of ways. It questions our perceptions of success and love. To me, Gussie is a woman, who had to fight very hard for everything she has. She’s had to make a lot of non-emotional decisions to gain success. She’s had to sacrifice a lot of who she was to create who she is now, a person who is palatable for the general public and who is profitable for all of the people around her. That is a very heavy crown to wear especially in a world where, as this is set in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, we are in the civil rights era and Black people are very rarely seen for the depth and humanity that we have.

Krystal Joy Brown and Jonathan Groff in Merrily We Roll Along (Matthew Murphy)

What’s your relationship like with Sondheim’s canon of music? Do you have a favorite song of his?

I’ve always loved his work, the complexity and the depth of his compositions. I grew up, watching the PBS specials of shows like Into The Woods, Company and, of course, Westside Story. His music is infectious, intoxicating and thought-provoking and always makes you see that musical theater can be extremely complex. I have to say “Being Alive” from Company is my favorite Sondheim song. It was actually my audition song for college. I just think that the music and the words of that song are so beautiful, moving and poignant. My second favorite would be “Not a Day Goes By” because of the drama!

What are some of your cult classics: movies, books, theater that took the public a long time to appreciate?

I truly love that Purlie Victorious is getting another life. I was blown away when I saw this new on Broadway production in previews. It is so amazing and to think that Ossie Davis wrote that script in 1961; it is astounding for how much it resonates now. I always find it amazing when things that are seemingly of a very specific time resonate in today’s landscape. That can be wonderful and it can also be slightly jarring when you see the same issues occurring today. Even Merrily is based off of a play that was written in 1934 and the themes hit today just as hard…and that’s almost 90 years ago!

How are things different between performing the show off Broadway and on Broadway?

I think we tried to keep the show pretty similar, and as intimate as possible, even though we’ve multiplied the space times five. Off Broadway, our theater was 199 seats and our backstage space was incredibly tight. Katie Rose Clarke, Lindsay Mendez, and I all shared a dressing room. Reg Rogers, Jonathan Groff, and Daniel Radcliffe all shared a dressing room. And then the entire women’s ensemble were in one dressing room, and the men’s ensemble was in another, and they were separated by barely a curtain, so we were really all in it together. I think that’s where the deep bonds were created. When you’re just that close to one another in that amount of time you can’t help, but become very close personally. I think that the connections with this cast are really special. I really do hope
that I have made some lifelong friends here. I definitely think that doing the show off-Broadway first created that foundation.

Has the cast become more familial because you’ve been together so long?

This cast is very connected. There is a level of depth that is created in these relationships. I believe that we are very protective over each other in a lot of ways, and I have felt so supported by this company, in ways that I could never express. In this time, people have gotten engaged, had babies, some castmates have become roommates, we have dealt with family/personal loss and other challenges, but I hope that my castmates feel just as supported by me in the ways that they have supported me through all kinds of endeavors that have happened in the last year that we have known each other. The show and the story is so
unique for a musical, we’ve had to be extremely vulnerable and express so much of ourselves to each other.

The post The Brightest Lights On Broadway: Krystal Joy Brown appeared first on DuJour.

Brittany Adebumola and Dominique Thorne in Jaja’s African Hair Braiding

The post “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” Opens On Broadway appeared first on DuJour.

For the last two decades, Peter Cincotti’s albums have been produced by music icons such as Phil Ramone and 16-time Grammy winner David Foster. “Since my debut album 20 years ago, I’ve followed a winding musical road that curved around genres, from jazz to pop to rock and more,” says Cincotti.  “That road was sharp and flat, black and white and held together by one thing: the piano. Killer On the Keys celebrates the power of the piano, the greats who have played it and the unexpected stories it has inspired me to tell.” Peter has performed in some of the world’s most prestigious venues, from Carnegie Hall to L’Olympia in Paris, collaborated with artists ranging from Andrea Bocelli to David Guetta, shared the stage with legends such as Ray Charles, has been featured in films and television series such as Spiderman 2 and House Of Cards. Cincotti has morphed genres and blended influences in a variety of ways, creating an upbeat blend of musical styles that brings active, rhythmic piano playing back into the landscape of modern music.

The post Peter Cincotti Is A “Killer On The Keys” appeared first on DuJour.

The post Cannes Confidential appeared first on DuJour.

“It must have been terrible and I didn’t really understand it, but the whole experience was a revelation,” says Mirren. It was her first real exposure to the theater, and it made her realize she needed to be an actor.

“The play, the lights going down, the amazing story being told, the complexity of the dialogue—it all just exploded in my mind, the way things can do when you’re a prepubescent teenager,” she recalls.

When Mirren got home, she started reading a set of the complete works of Shakespeare that her parents had in the house. “You know those books where there are thousands of pages and the print is really tiny?” she says. “I found that and started reading about these incredible characters, from Caliban to Queen Margaret.”

Shakespeare, she adds, is a “lifetime of work” and has perhaps become her own lifetime of work. “Even then, it’s the great wonder of Shakespeare that you never quite get to the end of it. I’m a great believer that Shakespeare shouldn’t be read until you’ve seen it. I still love to go.” She estimates that she’s seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream at least 10 times and has played nearly every role, from Titania, the queen of the fairies, to both young lovers Helena and Hermia.

That Mirren can slip into nearly any role is a testament to her incredible flexibility as an actor. In her decades of work, Mirren has won a Tony, an Oscar and five Emmys. Now 78, she has been a Calendar Girl, a detective (on television’s Prime Suspect, before doing television was cool), a faithful servant (2001’s Gosford Park), and the Irish wife of a ranch hand (on Paramount Plus’ Yellowstone spin-off 1923, opposite Harrison Ford). She’s been an action star (2010’s Red) and a cockeyed narrator for a famous doll (this summer’s Barbie), as well as a vast number of real-life individuals, including Alma Reville, aka Lady Hitchcock; Catherine the Great; Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper; Queen Elizabeth I; and Queen Elizabeth II. It was the latter of these that won her the Oscar, for 2006’s The Queen, and the Tony, for 2015’s The Audience.

This fall, Mirren takes on yet another world leader: Golda Meir, the first and only female head of the Israeli government. The film, Golda, directed by Oscar winner Guy Nattiv, follows Meir during the 19 days of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973.

Mirren, who is not Jewish, has been criticized for taking on the role. She has called the controversy “utterly legitimate.”

“It was certainly a question that I had, before I accepted the role,” Mirren told the Daily Mail last year. “I said, ‘Look Guy, I’m not Jewish, and if you want to think about that, and decide to go in a different direction…I will absolutely understand.’”

Nattiv says the idea to cast Mirren as Meir originated with the late politician’s grandson Gideon. “And it’s a brilliant idea,” Nattiv says. “Helen has the perfect combination of an authoritative, commanding figure but also this huge well of emotion and humanness. I’d live in any country that chose Helen as their prime minister.”

As for Mirren’s own interest in the role, “It’s an incredible challenge to play someone who was alive and well known,” she says. “Women in positions of great power are rare in history. There’s not many of them. I think they have to be twice as good as any man—or even 10 times. It’s absolute, total commitment. Golda had it. Catherine the Great had it. Elizabeth I had it. Elizabeth II did, too. There’s no casualness about their approach.”

Besides, Mirren continues, life is always more interesting than fiction. “You find extraordinary eccentricities and complexities,” she says. “Real characters are much denser than any sort your imagination can produce. Any person you meet at a bus stop has more in their life story.”

In preparing to take on a role, Mirren says she does a certain amount of research—but not too much. For her role as Clara Dutton in 1923, she read autobiographies of pioneer women in the American West. “But I’m terribly lazy about preparation,” she explains.

What to Mirren is laziness is complete submersion to her fellow actors. “Her concentration is absolute,” says French actress Camille Cottin, who plays Meir’s longtime assistant Lou Kaddar. “Every inch of her body turns into the character. She tells so much with her eyes. I loved her patience, her calm energy, and I greatly admired how easily she could switch from her character to herself again.”

Mirren’s physical transformation into Meir was equally remarkable. The politician—who smoked more than 80 cigarettes a day, including in her hospital bed, and died of cancer in 1978—had a very specific look. Thanks to the use of prosthetics, Mirren, who plays Meir around age 75, a few years before her death, looks older and wearier in the film than her own offscreen years.

“We went through various manifestations; going further, taking pieces away,” recalls Mirren. “Eventually we got to a point where we felt it was sufficient but hopefully not too much. With that sort of makeup, you’re wandering into dangerous territory. Obviously, it’s there and you can’t say it’s not there. But on the other hand, the audience knows I’m not an Irish woman living in Montana.”

During the two to three hours she spent daily in the makeup chair, Mirren would meditate on the character and listen to Meir’s many speeches. Mirren loved becoming this woman, she says, wrinkles and all: “I’ve never done anything like that before. It was an adventure. I got so used to being that person in the daytime that when the makeup all came off and I saw myself as I am, I’d forgotten that was what I looked like. It’s that acting thing—am I becoming her or is she becoming me? There’s a picture the crew made of me and Golda, and we’re in identical outfits. She’s turning to me and saying something, and I’m looking forward with a cigarette. It’s really powerful.”

Nattiv says that he never saw Mirren out of costume during the whole shoot. “She was Golda. Working with her was a dream come true.”

Mirren says her desire to act has ebbed and flowed over the years. “You’re so driven when you’re young, and as time goes on, you don’t have the same mad drive and desire.” The anticipatory anxiety before playing a character doesn’t get worse, she adds, but “it certainly doesn’t go away.”

“It’s a leap into the unknown each time,” she says. “You’re having to create a new family, a new set of relationships. You don’t know if the elements are going to come together. You’re cooking a meal, but without a recipe.”

Still, Mirren adds, “I’m always very excited if I’m being asked to do something I’ve never done before. It’s a fear and a thrill at the same time, like going on a bungee jump.”

When she was offered her role in 1923, there was no script, but the prospect of working with Ford and series creator Taylor Sheridan was exciting, as was being part of the Yellowstone universe.

“It’s soap opera in the best possible sense, like War and Peace. It’s this huge trajectory of American history through the eyes of a family,” she says. “The best literature is great soap opera.”

That role also gave Mirren the opportunity to do something new: drive a buggy. “It’s both easier and more difficult than it looks,” she says. “It all depends on the horse. I’ve never really understood horses, but I got to understand them a bit better. They’re unpredictable and predictable at the same time. They’re funny. They make me laugh.”

Having been married to the filmmaker Taylor Hackford for 25 years has given Mirren even more comfort on film sets. “It’s put me very much on the director’s side, doing my absolute utmost to make the director’s life bearable and to fulfill my actor’s end of the bargain,” she says. “I have a much greater sense of patience.”

She directed a short film in 2001 that made her want to direct more herself, but, “at my heart, I’m an actress. To become a director, I’d have to stop acting, and I didn’t want to give up my acting career. I’m blown away by people who act and direct. I don’t know how they do it.” As she explains it, she appeared in one scene in her short “and I found it almost impossible to concentrate on acting, which takes all of your imagination, while at the same time being practical about where the camera is. I couldn’t do it.”

Instead, she siphons much of her extra energy into gardening, whether it’s at home in the U.K, in Lake Tahoe, where she lives with Hackford, on set or in a hotel room—wherever there happens to be an opportunity.

“It’s meditative,” she says. “It’s a huge body of knowledge which I don’t have and I’m always trying to add to. The beauty of nature is so fantastic. It’s wonderful to watch something grow that you’ve taken a cutting of. My husband is a tree person, and I’m bushes and flowers. It’s a classic division of labor. It’s amazing to see trees we’ve planted.”

“I think gardening probably helps me be a better actor,” Mirren explains. “It kind of cleans your brain. You can’t have an ego with a garden. The fucking plant just won’t grow where you want it to grow. It’s good for an actor to have the cobwebs and ego and insecurity go away for a little.”

Helen Mirren participated in this cover shoot and interview in June before the SAG-AFTRA strike.

Hair: Charley McEwen
Makeup: Neil Young
Manicure: Lucy Tucker
Seamstress: Siobhan Dillon
Producer: Catherine Gargan

The post Helen Mirren’s Prime Time appeared first on DuJour.

What have you learned about Imelda Marcos in the course of appearing in Here Lies Love?

Oh my goodness, so much. My mother came from the Philippines as a teenager, but we never talked about the history of the country when I was growing up. So, the main thing that I knew about Imelda Marcos was that she had an immense shoe collection. While researching this role I’ve learned so much. In the show, I play her during her rise and fall over a 40 year time period, from ages 17 to 57, until the People Power Revolution where she, and her husband Ferdinand Marcos, were ousted from power and the country. So, there’s a lot in there. But, the most important thing that I learned about in my research for Here Lies Love was the People Power Revolution. The heroic people of the Philippines reclaimed their democracy in a completely peaceful 4-day protest. Learning about their strength and courage has been so inspiring. Getting to share that story with the world every night is a dream come true.

How do you feel about the immersive aspect of the production?

It is a journey for audiences like nothing they’ve ever experienced in a theatre before. The audience, due to the immersive nature of the show, is cast in the role of “The People of the Philippines” over that 40 year era. So, it’s truly incredible to be telling this story with a new audience as my scene partner every night! I get to interact with them throughout the show, shaking their hands during the presidential campaign, singing to them at the Marcos’s wedding reception, and again later when the audience becomes the protestors in the People Power Revolution itself. As someone who has spent a lifetime in this beautiful theatre community, I truly believe that this show is absolutely the most inventive Broadway show that has ever existed. I am so honored to get to share it with audiences and cannot wait to welcome audiences into this immersive experience every night.

Does the immersive aspect of the production ever affect a night’s performance?

Yes! Because the audience is basically my scene partner over the course of the evening, playing the role of the Filipino people throughout the 40 year timeline of the show, my performance is definitely affected by their energy and presence. The way that we connect as I am immersed in the audience, singing 3 feet away, shaking their hands… it allows me to experience each moment through their eyes, which affects what I bring to each moment. It’s a massive challenge, a thrill, and a gift, to have these special moments of connection with different audience members every night. It is the honor of a lifetime.

What was your experience with theater in New York while you were growing up in Princeton?

I was raised in the Bay Area in California, but was so fortunate when my family moved to Princeton when I was a teenager. I loved living so close to Broadway in NYC!  My parents, who were never involved in the arts (my Mom was a nurse and my Dad was a publisher), were avid theater and music lovers. So they took my brother, Adam Jacobs, and I to see shows a lot!  I guess that made a mark on both of us, since we both wound up starring on Broadway!

The post The Brightest Lights On Broadway: Arielle Jacobs appeared first on DuJour.

In addition to the house’s support of dance institutions and festivals around the world, Chanel is the sponsor of the Baand Together Dance Festival in its third year as part of Lincoln Center’s outdoor Summer for the City event. From July 25-29, renowned dance companies Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, Ballet Hispánico, Dance Theatre of Harlem and New York City Ballet will share the spotlight. Each of the five free evening performances are curated collaboratively by the artistic directors of the companies, featuring works that are quintessential of each company’s style and brilliance, as well as the world premiere of “Pas de O’Farill” by Pedro Ruiz, a new duet featuring dancers from Ballet Hispánico and New York City Ballet, commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Ballet Hispánico is performing “Lnea Recta” by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, American Ballet Theatre “Other Dances” by Jerome Robbins, Dance Theatre of Harlem “Nyman String Quartet #2” by Robert Garland, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater “Dancing Spirit” by Ronald K. Brown and the New York City Ballet “The Times Are Racing” by Justin Peck.

The post The Baand Together Dance Festival Returns To Lincoln Center appeared first on DuJour.

Nevertheless, it’s understandable if she feels otherwise. She’s maintained a nonstop schedule lately, with several projects awaiting release this year, most notably the certain-to-be-a-hit comedy The Out-Laws, which will premiere on Netflix July 7.

She’s had an enduring career after gaining recognition in 2006 for her three-year stint on the long-running TV series Degrassi: The Next Generation. She garnered next-level fame and recognition with her follow-up series The Vampire Diaries (and, later, its spin-off The Originals). Playing a dual role on the hit nocturnal drama, Dobrev developed a fervent fan following that continues to this day.

“I was very lucky,” she recalls of that period. The series was filmed in Atlanta, where she and her fellow cast members, including Ian Somerhalder and Kat Graham, weren’t constantly stalked by paparazzi. “We were able to live relatively normal lives until we flew out for some big press event. I think that was a really healthy way to grow up, considering that we were on a very popular show.”

Jumpsuit, $13,300, HERMÈS, hermes.com. Sandals, $795, DOLCE & GABBANA, dolcegabbana.com. Earrings in 18k white gold with diamonds, $254,000, bracelet in 18k white gold with diamonds, price upon request, rings in 18k white gold with diamonds, $11,600–$24,200, VAN CLEEF & ARPELS, vancleefarpels.com

During the series’ eight-year run, Dobrev found time for many other projects, including the buddy comedy Let’s Be Cops, the contemporary queer classic The Perks of Being a Wallflower and the big-screen blockbuster XXX: Return of Xander Cage. And she hasn’t stopped working since its finale, appearing in the action thriller Lucky Day and the popular Netflix rom-com Love Hard. Simultaneously, her online profile has grown exponentially, and she currently has bragging rights to more than 26 million Instagram followers. To put it into perspective, that’s 7 million more followers than Madonna.

When informed of this, Dobrev takes a long pause. “Wow, I’m still trying to absorb that,” she finally says. “I didn’t realize that. I’m such a fan of hers.”

With such recognition, there comes an equal amount of responsibility to be a positive role model for her impressionable fans. “I don’t take it that seriously, to be honest,” she admits. “I forget that I have that many followers. I try to lead an authentic life and post whatever is happening in my life, and also keep some privacy in some areas of my life if I can.”

She stops to consider her social media influence on others and its effect on her own life. “There are amazing things that come from it,” she says. “It can also be unhealthy in a lot of ways. You have to manage that and make sure that you don’t get too consumed by it. Taking breaks is also really important for mental health, I think, as a lot of people have highlighted in recent years.”

Her latest project will likely elevate Dobrev’s fame even further. The Out-Laws is a raucous Adam Sandler–produced crime comedy in which Dobrev stars alongside Adam Devine, Ellen Barkin and Pierce Brosnan. Dobrev plays Parker, a free-spirited yoga instructor who is engaged to Devine’s straight-laced bank manager Owen, who begins to suspect that his future in-laws are bank-robbing outlaws. It’s a character she considers a departure, one that required her to spend at least 45 minutes each morning having tattoos applied to her body.

Devine, an uninhibited comic actor who has been friendly with Dobrev since the two appeared together in 2015’s The Final Girls and in an episode of Devine’s Comedy Central series Workaholics, predicts a long career for Dobrev. “She is a fantastic actress, and I think she is going to be around after I’m kicked to the curb.”

When informed of this, Dobrev smiles. “There’s no way he’s ever getting kicked to the curb, so let’s just set the record straight there,” she says with a laugh. “But, yeah, I’ll keep doing it as long as people want to keep watching the things that I make.” She pauses for a moment to reflect. “I’m doing this more than anything for creative expression, and because I love it so much. But, of course, I have other aspirations to continue producing. I directed a short last year and it’s doing the festival circuit. I’d love to direct a feature at some point. My aspirations still lie within this industry.”

Necklace in 18k white gold with diamonds, earrings in platinum with diamonds, prices upon request, BAYCO, bayco.com

Demonstrating her devotion to the industry, Dobrev was recently seen marching alongside picketers in the Writers Guild of America strike. It was no mere photo op; the actress is genuinely on the side of the people who create her characters and put words in her mouth. But her support is also personal: “I’ve written something that hasn’t been made yet,” she reveals. “With the threat of AI coming, I think it’s a complicated issue, but I do think it’s really important that a fair outcome is reached for everyone.”

Another project she’s helped bring to life is The League. Dobrev is an executive producer on the powerful documentary about the early years of the Negro Baseball League alongside musician and Oscar-winning documentarian Questlove. The film has just begun to travel the festival circuit. “It’s such an important story to tell the history of the league forming, as well as segregation that ultimately led to integration,” she says.

On the rare day when she isn’t working, Dobrev likes to sleep in late as late as her body will allow her. “I’ll have a matcha and walk my dog, Maverick, go to the gym or do a Pilates class, steam and sauna, watch a movie, order takeout and go to bed early. That’s like my perfect, perfect day.”

Unlike other influencers of her stature, there’s one thing Dobrev wants to keep private: her three-year relationship with three-time Olympic gold medal–winning snowboarder Shaun White.

In April, when asked about the possibility of an engagement to Dobrev, White replied that, after finishing his Olympic career in 2022, he finally has the freedom to do whatever he wants and claimed the two were just enjoying their time together. “But you never know,” he added coyly. “We’ll see what happens.”

Although the couple has reportedly begun cohabitating, their families have spent holidays together, and they attended the L.A. premiere of The Out-Laws arm-in-arm, Dobrev is cautious about discussing their relationship.

Whatever the future may bring, Dobrev has jam-packed her summer with plans. “I have trips to Europe planned and friends’ weddings to attend,” she says. “I want to walk my dog and hopefully get some sleep.”

It will be a well-earned rest.

Blazer, $2,995, DOLCE & GABBANA, dolcegabbana.com. Earrings in 18k white gold with diamonds, price upon request, KARMA EL KHALIL, karmaelkhalil.com

Bodysuit, $1,005, PHILOSOPHY, philosophyofficial.com. Ear cuff in 18k white gold with diamonds, bracelet and ring in platinum with diamonds, prices upon request, JACOB & CO., jacobandco.com

Jacket, $4,000, blouse, $7,500, skirt, $7,000, shoes, $1,690, VALENTINO, valentino.com. Bra, $98, CHANTELLE, chantelle.com. Earrings in 18k gold and platinum with rock crystal and diamonds, $42,000, bracelet in 18k gold and platinum with rock crystal and diamonds, $48,000, ring in 18k gold and platinum with rock crystal and diamonds, $34,000, DAVID WEBB, davidwebb.com. Rings in white gold with diamonds, $2,850–$3,350, POMELLATO, pomellato.com

Jacket, $3,590, blouse, $1,390, skirt, $1,950, shoes, $1,090, SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO, ysl.com. Watch, price upon request, PIAGET, piaget.com. Earrings and ring in 18k white gold with diamonds, prices upon request, CHOPARD, chopard.com. Ring, $5,420, DINH VAN, dinhvan.com

Top and bralette, price upon request, DIOR, dior.com. Pants, $2,495, boots, $2,495, BRUNELLO CUCINELLI, brunellocucinelli.com. Watch, $7,500, BULGARI, bulgari.com. Ring in white gold with rock crystal and diamonds, price upon request, BOUCHERON, boucheron.com. Ring in 18k white gold with diamonds, $7,885, LIONHEART, lionheartjewelry.com

Coat, $2,190, briefs, $895, SPORTMAX, sportmax.com. Bra, $68, CUUP, shopcuup.com. Earrings and necklace, prices upon request, MESSIKA, messika.com

Hair: Christopher Naselli at The Wall Group
Makeup: Lisa Aharon at The Wall Group
Manicure: Gina Edwards
Producer: Mariana Suplicy
Fashion Stylist Assistant: Hillary Sproul
Shot at the Hard Rock Hotel New York

The post Naturally Nina Dobrev appeared first on DuJour.

One Dance performs July 20-22 at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City

The post Sejong Center’s One Dance Premieres At Lincoln Center appeared first on DuJour.

The post 24 Hours With Scott Pask appeared first on DuJour.

There are her roles in some of the best (and most rewatched) comedies of the past decade, like Bridesmaids, Neighbors, Spy and, most recently, Spirited, opposite Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell.

There are the family films she’s lent her voice to, from the hugely successful Peter Rabbit movies to this summer’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, out in early August.

There are the charming, underrated indie movies in which she’s made a particularly relatable impression, including The Meddler, opposite Susan Sarandon, and Juliet, Naked, with Ethan Hawke.

She’s also starred in horror movies, including most of the Insidious franchise—the fifth installment, subtitled The Red Door, comes out in July—and on stage, including a revival of You Can’t Take It With You with James Earl Jones on Broadway and a production of Medea, opposite her real-life partner, actor Bobby Cannavale, at BAM in 2020, just before the pandemic.

And that’s not even taking into account her innumerable television roles, from her breakout on Damages, with Glenn Close, to her glowing personification of Gloria Steinem in FX’s limited series Mrs. America.

In the last few years, perhaps unexpectedly, Byrne has become, basically, a poster girl for Apple TV+. In August, she returns with a third season of her series Physical, a dark comedy in which she plays Sheila Rubin, a San Diego housewife with an eating disorder who finds solace in the world of aerobics in the early 1980s.

But before it comes Platonic, which premiered on Apple in late May. This series feels like a more obvious choice for Byrne, given her comedy past; she stars as Sylvia, a lawyer-turned-mom married to Luke MacFarlane, who reconnects with a newly divorced old friend, played by Byrne’s frequent collaborator Seth Rogen. Their relationship stays relatively, well, platonic, but, as happens in half-hour comedies, it ends up complicating the romantic elements in both of their lives.

Platonic was co-created and directed by Nicholas Stoller, who is a particularly important cog in the Rose Byrne metaverse. He directed her and Rogen in both Neighbors films, as well as in 2010’s Get Him to the Greek. Byrne describes the latter movie as “my break in comedy.”

“She’s just so game,” says Stoller of why he’s found Byrne to be something of a comic muse. “She’s probably the most game actor I’ve ever worked with. On Platonic, she’s having a midlife nervous breakdown. In another actor’s hands, it would have felt too heavy or too silly, but she’s somehow able to find the perfect balance and make it completely human.”

Perhaps a reason why Byrne is able to hop from project to project with such seeming ease is because she often collaborates with a team of regulars. “When you’ve worked with people before, you have a nice ability to fall back into rhythm within a few weeks,” says Byrne one afternoon at a café near her Brooklyn home. “You’re like, ‘Oh, that’s right. This is how this ecosystem works together.’”

Collaborating with Stoller and Rogen on this latest series was just “a nice space to be back in again.”

“We’re just happy to make people laugh,” she adds. “There were many days I couldn’t get through the scene [because I was] laughing [so hard].”

Byrne uses the same word to describe Rogen that Stoller used to describe her. “Seth is just always game,” Byrne says. “He’s always got a take on an idea that’s unique, subversive and very interesting. I love that about his work and his comedy. He’s a sweetheart. Just because you’re a funny person doesn’t mean you’re a funny actor, and vice versa.”

Byrne admits that the Neighbors films, in which she and Rogen play a married couple terrorized by their frat boy neighbor, played by Zac Efron, have a “raunchier” tone than Platonic. The new show, she explains, is a slightly more mature and “interesting examination of a male-female friendship. It’s very rare to see that other than in Seinfeld, really.”

She adds that the show “raises important questions about the friendships that existed in a time pre-marriage and career, and whether those friendships can still exist.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Byrne’s role on Physical is, well, a lot more physical. There’s a lot of working out, both on-set and off. “But that’s one of the perks of that job,” she says. “To have this big training three times a week. I see why it’s addictive, but it’s a show about addiction. That kind of exercise is really hard, but it’s the way [I get] into that character.”

“She makes it all seem so easy, but she works so hard,” says Zooey Deschanel, who appears opposite Byrne in the third season of Physical as a TV star who enters her aerobics sphere. “But she’s an absolute joy to work with. She’s extraordinarily easygoing and calm on set.”

Interestingly enough, both Physical and Platonic tackle the subjects of marriage, motherhood and work-life balance. These are the big issues Byrne must clearly grapple with off-screen, too. The 43-year-old actress lives with Cannavale in Brooklyn with their two sons, Rocco, 7, and Rafa, 5.

Clearly one solution for their partnership is working together, as in Medea. This fall, they’ll appear opposite Robert De Niro in Ezra, a drama that casts them as a divorced couple who disagree about how to raise their autistic son.

In a slight departure from her typical family, horror and comedic fare, Inappropriate Behavior is a drama. But Byrne is not intimidated.

As Stoller says, “She can switch between comedy and drama at the drop of a hat. She’s just a comedy and acting machine.”

“Rose has this extraordinary quality of being simultaneously gentle and fierce,” says Inappropriate Behavior director Tony Goldwyn, also an actor. “She always surprises with the subtlety and complexity of her choices.”

As for the complexity of Byrne’s off-screen choices, after spending much of the peak pandemic months in Australia while Cannavale filmed Nine Perfect Strangers, then going to Los Angeles for Physical and Platonic, she is quite happy to take a beat back in New York with her family.

“I really enjoy being back in the city,” she says. “What I love about New York is that you walk around and just run into people all day. That doesn’t really happen in California. We love the city and Bobby loves the city, so we’re not going to go any time soon.”

Being back in New York also means a more regular routine and day-to-day life. “I’m taking a break after having done jobs continuously,” Byrne says. “I’m enjoying the role of being a mom, and I’m looking forward to having a nice summer.”

As for how she handles that hugely important role of mom with two boys under 8, “I need structure,” she says, “otherwise they’ll just go stir crazy in the house. It’s fun to get out, and there’s always lots to do in the city with kids. Or we can just take them to the park.”

At the same time, Byrne is eager for the next thing. Some might even say she was “game” for anything.

Most of all, “I’d love to get back on stage. I would love to revisit that again,” Byrne says. “It’s such a rigorous muscle to work, and it’s also the most extraordinary experience to just exist in that moment. Every performance is different.”

But she’s also happy to continue to grow the Rose Byrne comedic metaverse. Now that she and Rogen have played spouses and best friends, what could be next? The possibilities are endless.

“I have such respect for comedy,” Byrne says, beaming. “I think it’s really hard. I think it’s hard to make it look effortless. I certainly work at it.”

Hair: Harry Josh at Statement Artists
Makeup: Hung Vanngo at The Wall Group
Manicure: Julie Kandalec
Producer: Mariana Suplicy
Styling Assistants: Francesca Lazaro, Kristen Setter, Dawson Hieger (Hair), Jayden Ho Pham (Makeup)
Shot on location at Olympia Dumbo in Brooklyn

The post La Vie En Rose Byrne appeared first on DuJour.

“Venice and the Doges” (Rizzoli)

The post An Inside Look at Venice’s Doges appeared first on DuJour.

Claude Monet “Charing Cross Bridge, The Thames (Charing Cross Bridge, la Tamise)” (1903)

Though they worked more than 50 years apart, impressionist painter Claude Monet and abstract artist Mark Rothko actually have a lot in common. The new book Monet/Rothko (Flammarion) examines these two artists who explored the frontiers of abstraction.

“Monet/Rothko” (Flammarion)

The post The Pioneering Work of Claude Monet and Mark Rothko appeared first on DuJour.

In the new musical New York, New York, Ryan, who turns 28 just before the Tony Awards in June, stars as Jimmy Doyle, an aspiring musician who falls in love with an aspiring singer named Francine Evans (an equally star-making role for co-star Anna Uzele).

If the title feels familiar, it’s probably because you know the old Kander and Ebb song backward and forward. The little town blues, the vagabond shoes, the city that never sleeps. The show, which also includes other classic Kander and Ebb tunes like “And the World Goes ‘Round,” “Marry Me” and “A Quiet Thing,” is based on the 1977 Martin Scorsese film of the same name. That movie starred a couple of no-names as Jimmy and Francine: Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli. Easy loafers to fill.

But Ryan is up for the challenge. First, there’s the dancing. He tap danced a bit in college, though not enough to score an A, he recalls. When the show’s creative team presented him with the big Act 1 tap number inspired by the iconic photograph “Lunch Upon a Skyscraper,” they told him that as the leading man, he could just step to the side and let the real dancers strut their stuff.

“I started doing the math in my head, and I just thought, ‘I’m on a skyscraper, Where am I going to go?’” Ryan says, laughing. “If I was in the audience, I know how critical I would be if someone was up there faking it.”

“I love an actor who is not scared to take chances, and that’s very much Colton,” says the show’s director, Susan Stroman.

So Ryan spent six months at Broadway Dance Center re-learning to tap. He also worked on the routine for umpteen hours alone with a choreographer. When the rest of the dancers came in to learn the number for the first time, Ryan was humbled yet again. “I had to leave the room. I’m watching these brilliant dancers pick up the choreography in five minutes. They were talking in this other language.”

“It was a real struggle,” Ryan adds, though you wouldn’t know it from his seamless steps onstage.

Then, he needed to learn the instruments. Jimmy is a jazz pianist, “and they wanted it to be so real,” Ryan says. Offstage, he plays the guitar, which was of no help, and he played the tuba in middle school. “[The creative team] thought that was hilarious.” They added in a little tuba action, but Ryan had to relearn how to play that—“It’s not like riding a bicycle,” he says—and spent months learning jazz piano.

“He’s constantly pushing himself to take risks and explore new possibilities,” says Lin-Manuel Miranda, who contributed lyrics to the show. “He leads with a fearlessness in his performance.”

“This whole thing has ended up being a lot of firsts. I’ve never prepped this hard in terms of learning new skills,” says Ryan. “It’s a strange exercise in doing everything I thought was the scariest thing. People ask me, ‘How do you do it?’ and in general, I just don’t know. The minute I start thinking about it, I might lose it all.”

When he was growing up in Kentucky, Ryan’s grandparents exposed him to lots of old movie musicals, West Side Story, Camelot and Li’l Abner among them. In grade school, he landed his first stage role as the Munchkinland coroner in The Wizard of Oz. Quickly, “theater became my everything, really,” he says, culminating in a high school performance in Les Miz.

“That’s the feeling I’m still chasing,” Ryan says of playing Jean Valjean at 17. “I felt something energetic beyond me. I imagine it’s what it’s like for a dancer to jump into the air and do a full tilt, more than 180 degrees. That must feel like the most incredible thing in the world.”

At 21, Ryan had already made it pro in New York as Ben Platt’s understudy in Dear Evan Hansen. He and Platt are still very good friends; Platt happens to be appearing in a revival of the musical Parade this season, just a block away from the St. James. Ryan also appeared on stage in the Bob Dylan musical Girl From the North Country, but after that closed due to COVID-19, “I tiptoed away from things Broadway, even though I missed home a little bit.”

Ryan got called to participate in a workshop of New York, New York while he was filming the Hulu true crime drama The Girl from Plainville in Savannah, Georgia. (He plays Elle Fanning’s boyfriend, who commits suicide. “It was a little heavy,” he says.)

When he read the title sheet on the New York, New York script, he recognized this was “a legends-only lineup” of Kander, Ebb, Miranda and Stroman, a five-time Tony winner.

“It was one thing on paper, but to hear the magnitude of the breadth of [Kander and Ebb’s] work—being inside of it, it lingered like nothing else,” Ryan recalls. The show is a call to arms, he explains, for loving a somewhat broken New York. “And to anyone who saw [the workshop], it was deeply emotional. I just put my hands up hoping we’d do it for real.”

“I knew Colton was right for the role the moment I met him,” recalls Stroman. “He’s got the confidence in his craft and a true passion for music that emanates from every part of his being. Plus, he’s charm personified.”

Miranda adds that Ryan’s voice “is from another era, in the best way. He sounds right at home in 1946.”

Says Uzele, his onstage love interest: “He knows exactly who he is. He doesn’t try to fill anyone’s shoes but his own, and he does it damn well.”

The role of Jimmy Doyle is one Ryan had always dreamed of—a melange, he explains, of “the goof who does a soft shoe like Gene Kelly and the guy who gets to sing the beautiful love ballad to the girl.”

Performing the show nightly, he says, is an “unbridled joy. It gets my blood racing.” It’s also nice to be back in New York with his fiancée, Adrian Grace Bumpas, an actor and producer.

“She is New York City to me. This whole thing is for her,” Ryan says. “We have a lot of dreams together.”

Achieving those dreams, at the moment, involves drinking two gallons of water a day and trying to get a nightly eight or nine hours of sleep before singing and dancing his heart out down in Times Square.

“As much as I’ve been hoping for this moment, I’ve been slowly tiptoeing away from it,” Ryan says. “But I’ve found myself readier than I ever thought. I’m hacking it and I’m hoofing it and I’m really happy where I’ve landed.”

__

Hair: Madison Sullivan
Grooming: Sandy Nicha

The post Colton Ryan’s Song appeared first on DuJour.

The truth is, explains Genao, with this first Broadway leading role, “the vocal stamina of this show is no joke.” It’s certainly more vocal stamina than her job, post-college, working at a private Lebanese bank, here in New York. She left after landing a role in the ensemble of On Your Feet, a Cinderella story of its own.

Bad Cinderella, retooled after a London run, is a campy, over-the-top spin on the classic fairy tale. Everyone is beautiful in the kingdom of Belleville, and Cinderella, here, just finds that completely annoying. She also finds herself in love with a somewhat nerdy Prince Sebastian who equally finds Belleville’s superficiality unsatisfying.

“I love that in our version of this fairytale, Cinderella does what’s best for her,” Genao says. “She doesn’t leave with the prince or need a man to fulfill or support her. She leaves on her own in search of a better life and in search of what makes her happy.”

Genao has gotten into a daily pre-show routine, which includes LED candles, her air purifier, a cup of ginger tea and the occasional episode of Succession in the background. (“It’s my favorite new obsession,” she says.) Oh, and she’s learning to trust herself more, both on and off-stage.

“Andrew has been a dream to work with,” says Geneo of Lloyd Webber. “He’s been so encouraging, consistently vocal with me about what he loves that I do, how proud he is of me, supporting me to sing the song however feels best to me.”

So, she adds, “if Andrew Lloyd Webber believes in me and trusts me, why shouldn’t I trust myself?”

Plus, she doesn’t need a glass slipper or a ball gown for that.

Linedy Genao in “Bad Cinderella”

The post Showstoppers: Linedy Genao appeared first on DuJour.

His early thirties, however, are returning him to his musical roots. This spring he plays King Arthur in Lincoln Center Theater’s revival of Camelot, and next year, he appears in a new live action musical version of Snow White, opposite Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot.

“I was a musicals fan as a kid,” says Burnap. But if you’d told him he’d be experiencing a musical renaissance, he wouldn’t have believed it. “I kind of put that dream on the shelf.”

Despite a few trepidations and some voice coaching, he’s discovered it’s not much different from classic drama. “In Shakespeare, they leap into verse. In musicals, they leap into song. It’s all an articulation of a complex emotion,” says Burnap.

Camelot is a particular pleasure, he adds, because he gets to work opposite actors Philipa Soo (as Guenevere) and Jordan Donica (as Lancelot). “They’re so deeply talented,” he says. And with director Bartlett Sher and writer Aaron Sorkin, who has provided a new book to the show. “I’ve been a fan of Aaron’s since my dad let me watch The West Wing,” Burnap adds.

“It’s a big playground,” Burnap says of rehearsing and performing Camelot at the Vivian Beaumont, “and it’s going to be so much fun.”

Phillipa Soo and Andrew Burnap in “Camelot”

The post Showstoppers: Andrew Burnap appeared first on DuJour.

Barely a decade into his professional acting career, the 28-year-old has already vividly portrayed blues great B.B. King in Baz Luhrmann’s Oscar-nominated fantasia Elvis and legendary activist Fred Hampton in Aaron Sorkin’s acclaimed The Trial of the Chicago 7, and will soon march across television screens as Martin Luther King Jr. in the forthcoming Disney +/National Geographic anthology series Genius: MLK/X. Next year, he’ll provide the voice for pre-villainous Taka (who later becomes the villain Scar) in Barry Jenkins’ highly anticipated prequel Mufasa: The Lion King. Later this year, he’ll offer his take on the short, tempestuous life of brilliant artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in a new film biopic titled Samo Lives.

“I don’t think about them as icons at all,” he says, seemingly taking these rare multidimensional characters he’s been assigned in his stride. “Because at the end of the day, I still see them eat lunch and pick shit out of their teeth and they just seem like dudes.”

He insists he doesn’t feel the responsibility when portraying real men that he did with some of his earlier fictional roles in films, such as Luce and Waves, which first garnered him attention for his intense screen magnetism and versatility.

“I think the common denominator is the fact that they believed in themselves and they weren’t afraid of opposition,” he offers. “They learned that adversity ultimately makes them stronger and more interesting and, ultimately, the individual always wins over conformity.”

As impressive as his résumé is (his debut was in the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave), consider his newest film, Chevalier (in theaters April 21), in which he plays another real-life trailblazer. It’s a lush, sweeping historical epic in which Harrison delivers a captivating performance as Joseph Bologne, the 18th-century musical prodigy known as Chevalier de Saint-Georges but more commonly referred to as the Black Mozart. The character offers a coveted role that required the actor to not only showcase his prowess with the violin but demonstrate precision fencing skills.

Fortunately for Harrison, he had previous experience with both the art and the sport that allowed him to nail the character. In director Joe Wright’s 2021 adaptation of Cyrano, he learned to wield a sword with expertise, although he shares that his grand fencing scene didn’t make the final cut. The romantic film also showcased his richly expressive singing voice.

“The first instrument I ever played was the violin, and I was pretty good when I was a kid,” Harrison recalls. “When Hurricane Katrina hit, the program that I was a part of was no longer there, so I stopped.”

His relationship with music didn’t end there, however; it’s in his blood, or at least absorbed through the walls of his childhood home. Born and raised in New Orleans, Harrison grew up in a musical household. His father was a popular music teacher who was close pals with Harry Connick Jr. and Wynton Marsalis.

Still, he decided to read everything he could find on Bologne to make his performance as credible as possible. He even showed up on set with binders filled with facts about the musician.

“Those details all matter when you’re trying to justify choices,” he says. “I made these big poster boards in the timeline so I would know what was happening when, but then I had to throw it out the window and just start to create a person, because, ultimately, it is not really active to act history.”

After considering several promising young actors for the film, director Stephen Williams was confident Harrison was the ideal choice.

“Once Kelvin had a sense of how he wanted to tackle the role, he dedicated himself tirelessly to peeling back the layers of the character in a uniquely compelling way,” Williams recalls. “I truly believe that he is the only actor who could have pulled off all that we asked of him for this film.”

It’s as if his previous roles have led to this pivotal film, particularly his brief but dazzling turn as King in Elvis, Luhrmann’s flamboyant take on the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s a film that he was thrilled to be a part of. “Baz is a firecracker,” Harrison shares. “When he speaks, pretty colors come out and you just get moved by anything that’s happening on that set.”

Many actors would be intimidated by playing Martin Luther King Jr., but Harrison says he wasn’t interested in playing the late activist as the iconic figure he’s become. He prefers to convey the man before the heroic character history has made him.

“I can’t play the Time magazine covers or the Nobel Peace Prize,” he says. “All I can do is breathe and go, ‘Well, how do I take care of my kids? How do I make sure my wife feels safe? How do I make sure my people feel seen?’ and make sure they have a sense of somebodiness.”

Still, the gravitas required to play such a mythic man must weigh on an actor.

“The biggest thing that I’ve learned from all of these men is being reminded to never try to fit into a mold, but always do something because it’s coming from the purest place of my heart,” he says. “I’m genuinely interested in sharing that and not trying to preach to the public.”

As for his own private life, it surely can’t be all work and zero play for this busiest of young actors. In 2020, while promoting the guiltiest pleasure on his CV, The High Note, Harrison told an interviewer that he wanted “to explore sexuality and sensuality.” Asked about his current relationship status, he laughs and offers a vague response. “Oh, you’re getting to the juicy stuff,” at which point his publicist asks him to skip this question. The guy is always moving on to the next subject, even in real life.

It’s intriguing to wonder where Harrison will go from here, having already portrayed many of the most dynamic characters any actor could hope for. Harrison longs for a rest.

“I’m well beyond what I could have dreamt of, and so now I’m just trying to work on sleeping more so I can dream more stuff and have something new to bring to the table before I burn out,” he says. “I’m already doing stuff that I just couldn’t believe I’d get the chance to do, and I’m blown away by the experiences. I’m just going to ride that wave.”

The post Kelvin Harrison Jr. Is Riding the Fame Wave appeared first on DuJour.

Like as a tiny backup singer and dancer behind Cher in the music video of “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss),” from the soundtrack of her film debut, the 1990 movie Mermaids. Or as disgruntled camper Wednesday Addams torturing camp counselor Christine Baranski in Addams Family Values—camp being the operative word here. As the steadfast lover to Charlize Theron’s serial killer Aileen Wuornos in the 2003 film Monster. As a nymphomaniac chained to a radiator in 2006’s controversial Black Snake Moan. As 19th-century ax murderer Lizzie Borden in The Lizzie Borden Chronicles, which earned her a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination in 2016.

And it just so happens that Ricci is breaking out again, this time in the hit series Yellowjackets, which returns to Showtime this spring. She plays Misty Quigley, a nurse whose behavior tends more sociopathic than empathetic. (She moonlights as an armchair internet sleuth.) Misty becomes caught up in a mystery related to her past, when her high school soccer team was involved in a deadly plane crash.

Critics have gone wild for Ricci’s performance. Just some of the headlines include “Misty Quigley Is Terrifying and Fascinating,” “In Defense of Misty Quigley, Yellowjackets’ Unsung Heroine” and “How Misty Quigley Became Yellowjackets’ Best Character.”

The Yellowjackets producers “came to me with this part,” says Ricci, who didn’t know much about Misty except for a short, poppy scene in the pilot. “But I read it and was super, super excited.”

“We can’t imagine anyone else in this role,” say series creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson. “We always knew that Misty needed to be played by an actress with both amazing comedic timing and incredible depth and humanity. It would have been all too easy for her to become a caricature, as opposed to a flesh-and-blood human for whom we can feel empathy, even as she says and does wild, unthinkable things. Luckily, Christina has an incredible ability to find the truth in even the most heightened circumstances.”

Another actress might be insulted by being recruited to play a psychopath. Not Ricci.

“It’s flattering. I’m very intrigued by people’s behavior who seem to be on the fringe, who don’t react like the norm,” Ricci says. “When someone comes to you and says, ‘This is a really strange character. Nobody seems to get her. Can you use your insight and intelligence to figure her out?’ I think it means I have an understanding of humanity and an observational ability. I’m proud of that. I enjoy playing characters that if you didn’t have a sideways way into it, you wouldn’t be able to do it.”

If you met her in real life, “you’d stay as far away from Misty as possible,” Ricci continues. She believes audiences have responded so positively to the character because “she’s so socially inept, and I think that’s funny to people.” Also, because she’s just a character in a television series, “we don’t really have to deal with her in person.”

Ricci also appears in the Netflix hit Wednesday, a contemporary spin on the character she so memorably played in the early 1990s. Jenna Ortega now plays Wednesday, while Ricci stars as her “normie” teacher, Marilyn Thornhill, who may not be exactly who she claims to be.

Ricci joined the series when there were only four episodes left to shoot. “I wasn’t hesitant at all. It was fun to be a part of the next generation of Wednesday Addams,” she explains. “And I love Tim [Burton] so much.” (Burton is an executive producer on Wednesday and directed four of the episodes. He and Ricci worked together on the 1999 movie Sleepy Hollow.)

Ricci thinks that people respond to her and Ortega’s Wednesday because they both have “so much integrity and are unwilling to bend to societal pressures. That’s really wonderful, especially in a little girl.” Audiences can live vicariously, she says, “and truly be themselves.”

Playing Wednesday Addams in her childhood was particularly important for Ricci, she says. “It made me aware that I could play characters I wouldn’t have to sacrifice myself for. I never liked the typical family fare. I never liked the kid who had to smile constantly and be fake and phony. To know that there was an option for me filled me with hope. I think a lot of people have felt like they were outsiders in different parts of their lives. They’ve felt lonely, like nobody understands them.”

Now 43 and the mom of two kids, Ricci does admit, “I’m not a typical person.”

“I can’t join groups,” she says. “I never agree. I have specific interests and feelings. My take will always be different. I’m very comfortable with it. I don’t need people to agree with me to be friends with them.”

Ricci continues, “I’ll always be the one that doesn’t like the person everyone else likes.” People tend not to ask her feelings about new movies and television shows. “They know I won’t give my opinion, because it’s always the opposite. My tastes differ. Usually it’s me not liking other things that people like.”

It just so happens that Ricci, who has about an hour a day to watch television, is currently enjoying HBO’s The Last of Us, which most people do, generally, seem to like. “OK, sometimes I do love things that everybody else likes,” she says.

As for the group thing, Ricci says she’s more of a “one-on-one friend. Most of my friends don’t know each other.” When I ask if she’s in a book club—Ricci starred as Zelda Fitzgerald in Amazon Prime’s Z: The Beginning of Everything, which she also produced—she responds quickly, “God, no.” (Recent favorite reads, though, include Circe by Madeline Miller and a collection of Shirley Jackson stories.)

That said, Ricci has found great camaraderie in her Yellowjackets cast, which also includes Hollywood lifers Juliette Lewis and Melanie Lynskey.

“This has been a great on-set experience. We all really, really love each other a lot,” Ricci says. “I’ve never been so close with people I’ve worked with. We’ve all been through similar things. We all share stories between set-ups. We bullshit. It’s great.”

Ricci thinks the closeness comes from being older “and not in our confusing, emotion-filled twenties. When you’re older, you settle a bit.”

“We’re all friends working on projects. We all support each other. We really want the best for the show,” she continues. “We’ve all been through similar things. A lot of us have kids.”

The support has been especially important because shooting season two in Vancouver, far from her family in Los Angeles, wasn’t the easiest. Ricci has an 8-year-old son, Freddie, from her first marriage, and a 14-month-old daughter, Cleopatra, from her second, to Los Angeles hairstylist Mark Hampton.

“I’m glad I waited,” says Ricci of choosing to have a second child. “I would feel so much guilt if I wasn’t fully attentive to her. When [Freddie] was younger, I gave him full attention. He got to have that special babyhood and childhood, and now he’s able to help with his sister. There’s not a lot of jealousy. He loves her.”

Freddie is now around the age Ricci was when her star began to rise, and he has a little bit of the acting bug. “Yes, he’s interested in acting, and I’m a believer that if a kid really wants to do it, and they’re being supported instead of being pushed, then they should be able to,” Ricci explains. “I see a lot of how I was in him. I know that he would be totally capable of being a child actor, but I’ve told him that there’s no one to take him. You have to take your child to auditions. You have to take them to set. I can’t do that.”

For now, Freddie has made due with watching his mom’s past performances, including as the original Wednesday and on Wednesday. “He loved it so much,” Ricci says. “He’s really proud of me. He always asks, ‘How did they do this scene?’ and ‘How did they do that sort of thing?’ I think it’s funny.”

The first time Freddie visited her on the Yellowjackets set, he wanted to watch the first season of the show, which has its share of gore and thrills. “I fast-forwarded through all the inappropriate parts,” Ricci laughs. “He has a lot of questions. He always needs me to tell him what happens, and he peppers me with nonstop—what do they call them?—fan theories.”

Most of the questions, of course, Ricci doesn’t know the answers to. “I suggested he go sit down with one of the writers and ask them,” she says.

The truth is, sometimes Ricci only reads the Yellowjackets scenes that involve the present-day characters and skims the rest. She doesn’t get to see a lot of the show being shot, and she likes to watch the episodes and be surprised. “I do enjoy watching it as an audience member. It’s really fun,” Ricci says. “Though my son tells me not to skim.”

Ricci is not surprised that, after more than 30 years, she continues to work steadily in film and television. “There’s always work to be found,” she says. “It’s my job. I’ve always supported myself and my family, and it feels more like my job than ‘I get to do a special project and then go back to my life.’”

That said, the success of Yellowjackets and our cultural obsession with Misty wasn’t something she had in her sightlines.

“I never would have predicted this,” Ricci says. “But I also never try to guess.”

Hair: Anh Co Tran at The Wall Group 
Makeup: Allan Avendano at A-Frame Agency 
Manicure: Zola Ganzorigt at The Wall Group 
Producer: Aiden Tyler Lee 
Styling Assistants: Cherry Wang, Gilbert Villa, Alexis Kossel
Shot on location in Bel Air, Los Angeles, at 1859 Bel Air Road

The post The Cult of Christina Ricci appeared first on DuJour.

The post Jessica Chastain’s Broadway Return appeared first on DuJour.

“How come you can’t be like the other moms?” Hayek Pinault recalls Valentina asking her at the time. “You’re just not cool and chic.”

Of course, when Salma Hayek Pinault shows up at the Spaniards Inn, a historic pub that appears in works by Bram Stoker and Charles Dickens and is not far from her home in Hampstead Heath, she’s the epitome of cool. Stepping out of a BMW, fashionably late and fierce, she comes in jeans and a Gucci jacket (her husband, Valentina’s father, is Kering CEO François-Henri Pinault), wearing no makeup, with a handsome driver in tow who’d fit in quite nicely with a crowd out of Kingsman.

But raising a teenager? That’s a different story. In that conversation, Hayek Pinault told her daughter that when Valentina was little, their friend and neighbor Charlotte Gainsbourg—whose mother, Jane Birkin, is the namesake of the covetable bag—would often carry and play with her. Isn’t that a lot cooler than knowing what a Birkin is?

Valentina asked her mom why she hadn’t told her earlier. Hayek Pinault felt that knowing about a Birkin at that age wasn’t necessary.

“I said, ‘I would never do that. You’re right, I’m not like other moms and I refuse,’” Hayek Pinault remembers, sipping on a late-afternoon cup of black coffee in a quiet corner of the pub. “We don’t talk a lot about brands at home with the family. It’s more about artistic expression.”

When she and her daughter are in the U.S., “we love going to Target,” Hayek Pinault adds. “It’s funny, because you end up spending a lot more than you thought you would.”

Still, with Kering owning such companies as Bottega Veneta, Gucci, Saint Laurent, Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen, Hayek Pinault must have a pretty serious wardrobe. She admits she does, and she’s proud to chime in that Valentina “steals from my closet all the time. If she didn’t, I would feel beat down.”

She elaborates. “I want to be angry about not finding a thing or two in there because I know she took it,” Hayek Pinault admits of her daughter’s occasional ransacking. “I want to have that contradiction in my life. It’s a passage of age. It’s a connection. I might not be cool, but at least she must have liked one thing I had in there.”

When Hayek Pinault told her kids (Valentina, her stepdaughter Mathilde, 21, and two stepsons) she’d been cast in the sequel Magic Mike’s Last Dance, which would involve the actress in potentially provocative scenes with a negligibly clothed Channing Tatum, they didn’t blink. A racy still from the film shows the actress with her hand on Tatum’s abs.

“They know Channing. They know [his girlfriend] Zoë Kravitz. They know what Magic Mike is. They knew I was going to make it. They grew up with me doing this job, and their father is so cool about it and understands it so well, so there’s never been an issue,” Hayek Pinault says.

There was just one concern about the movie: “As long as you don’t have to do the cheesy dance,” Valentina said. “As long as you don’t have to do the Pony,” referring to an iconic dance Tatum does to Ginuwine’s song “Pony” in the first Magic Mike. “I said, ‘No, I don’t have to. Don’t worry about it.’ I’d read the script, and I knew I wasn’t doing the Pony.”

Pony or not, says Tatum, “the fact that Salma was interested in our story was a blessing. She’s an icon.”

Tatum might have second thoughts were he to look at the bio on Hayek Pinault’s Instagram account. Valentina, for one, thinks it’s the “cheesiest thing in the world.” Instead of, say, “actress, activist, bombshell, recent Lady Gaga co-star in House of Gucci,” it’s a description of the actress told in a series of nearly 100 emojis. These include a fist bump, a unicorn, a crystal ball, a whale, a bottle of Champagne, two glasses of Champagne, a lipstick, a kiss, a squid…and it goes on. It’s really quite remarkable and sweet and, yes, cheesy.

Hayek Pinault, who has 22 million followers on the platform but says she often forgets to post, laughs when it comes up. “I like a lot of things, and it’s too complicated to think of a way to describe myself in words,” she says. She explains that, as an actress, an artist and a mother, she’s certainly sensitive, “but what saves me a lot is myself and my sense of humor. I don’t want to try to be cool. I want to laugh.”

Friends, in particular appreciate that about her. “I love her open, hearty, unselfconscious laugh, her dancing with freedom and mirth, and her commitment to her growth, creatively and personally,” says her pal Ashley Judd, who met Hayek Pinault in 1995 and played opposite the actress in Frida. “ I love her devotion to female alliances and her connected way of knowing just about everyone, it seems, and how she brings people together.”

Hayek Pinault doesn’t just bring people together; she also does it with animals. As a gift to her husband, she gave him a pet rescue owl and named the bird “Kering.” Wait. Back up. Did he ask for an owl? She shakes her head no.

“But that was my way of having one,” Hayek Pinault says, with a wink. “She loves me.” (She means the owl.)

Having an owl named Kering can’t possibly beat having a husband who runs Kering. But, especially as Gucci has surged in popularity these last few years, there is a downside. People are always asking her for a discount.

“Oh, my God, it’s a problem. It’s crazy,” Hayek Pinault says, while acknowledging that it is not the worst problem to have. “But it happens much more than you would think. I’ve had situations where a doctor I’ve seen for a long time brings it up. I’ve had journalists ask me for it. My daughter gets asked for it at school.”

Hayek Pinault says she understands the urge. “I would want it, too,” she says. But she makes a point to not interfere with her husband’s business. “I wouldn’t do that to him,” she explains. “I don’t want to be in a position of who I give it to and who I don’t. I feel so mortified and uncomfortable, and I don’t want these people to feel like they’re not appreciated. So I stay out of it. I don’t give Gucci discounts.”

The family lives in London because that’s where Valentina goes to school, and Pinault has offices in London and Paris. “I need green. I need nature,” she says. “I love this area. I like the plants. I like the good oxygen. I like to go walk in the park.”

Still, time zone-wise, it’s a full nine hours later than Hollywood, which means she has to do the “double shift.” She has a full day in London, which involves working on her philanthropic causes, among other things, but at 5 p.m. London time, Los Angeles starts to wake up and she shifts focus to her acting and producing projects. There are phone calls until midnight, she says; Hayek Pinault doesn’t use a computer or email (except for her daughter’s school communications).

“I’m either working or tired,” she says. Add in the fact that she enjoys spending time with her husband and family, and “that sometimes makes you very reclusive.”

Living in London also gives her a sense of freedom to do what she wants. “I don’t feel like I have to wear this or be this or do this movie. I don’t need to belong to a box,” she explains. “I like to do whatever I want to do.”

(One thing she does not want to do is theater. “I throw up. I get panic attacks.” She got her start playing Jasmine in a production of the story of Aladdin in Mexico. In rehearsals, everything was great. The first time she had an actual performance, which included being carried out from the wings on a bed, “I saw the audience, I jumped out and I started throwing up.”)

Besides the latest Magic Mike in February, directed by Steven Soderbergh, who also directed the actress in Traffic, she reprises her vocal role as Kitty Softpaws this holiday season opposite her friend Antonio Banderas in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, a decade after the original. Then there’s Without Blood, a drama about a war-torn country based on the 2002 novel by Alessandro Baricco, opposite Mexican actor Demián Bichir. Though the film does not yet have a release date, it’s particularly notable because it was directed by Angelina Jolie, with whom Hayek Pinault became friends while making the Marvel movie The Eternals.

“I’ve never met anyone in my life that was more different than the public image,” Hayek Pinault says of Jolie. “She cares about people. She’s very present. She’s very empathetic. No fakeness. And, oh, God, she could have made this movie with anyone in the world. I didn’t want to play the character; I was really scared of the character. She suffers the entire movie. But I did want her to direct me. So of course I said yes.”

Sure, they share tips on how to be Hollywood moms, but making Without Blood took their relationship to the next level. “We are closer than ever,” Hayek Pinault says. “For both of us it was an amazing, life-changing experience.”

“Really,” Hayek Pinault adds, “It made me fall in love deeper and stronger with being an actress.”

Another experience she had on a film set this year was also particularly empowering. Hayek Pinault won’t name the movie, but when she walked on set, “I started sobbing.” That’s because she looked around and noticed that 80 percent of the people in key positions were women, including the director of photography, the camera operator and the whole sound department.

“I don’t know how long I’ve done this, but it was the first time I’ve seen that in 30 years or more,” she explains. “I waited my entire life for that moment.”

Hayek Pinault has, of course, been on the forefront of advocating for women, and not just in Hollywood. One of the most public situations was a moving and terrifying essay she wrote in 2017 for the New York Times, in which she described the struggles and hurdles of making 2002’s Frida Kahlo biopic Frida under the oppressive and sadistic hand of Harvey Weinstein.

“It took me months and months to write, and I wrote it myself. But I’ve never read it since,” she says. The Times chose the piece to include in its Pulitzer Prize submission packet in 2018. “And we won,” Hayek Pinault says. “That’s really nice for a dyslexic Mexican with questionable English.”

In the article, Hayek Pinault describes how she felt it was her duty to bring Frida Kahlo’s story to the screen. She had to see the project, directed by Julie Taymor, to fruition. “And I was very, very strong in front of [Weinstein]. I stood up. I knew that was the only way,” she recalls. “Harvey was scary, but I think he was also attracted to people not letting him walk over them.”

They had plenty of professional fights, she says, “but I never really got to tell him everything I thought about him—I just kept it all smooth. I never went and said, ‘You know what? You really hurt me.’ You don’t do that to an aggressor because you lose. They see you break and you’re done.”

The thing is, she concedes, “my story is not that special. I put it in the right words, but it happens in every walk of life.”

Frida ended up being nominated for six Oscars, including for Best Actress. It won two (Best Original Score and Best Makeup), though not with any help from Miramax, which was pushing Chicago and Gangs of New York at the time.

When the film was released, Hayek Pinault says, “I didn’t feel supported. I thought, We have so much to offer as women, and why does it have to be so hard?” Two decades later, the industry has made great strides towards representation and inclusivity, but “art needs to be courageous. We need to go to new places.”

Does she feel supported now by her peers? “Yes, now I do. But I’m 56. It took a while.”

The post Salma Settles In appeared first on DuJour.

The post Showstoppers: Will Swenson appeared first on DuJour.

The post Showstoppers: Jordan E. Cooper appeared first on DuJour.

​​“Tom Cruise is one of the reasons I wanted to get into acting,” he says. “So many pilots became pilots because of Top Gun, and so many actors became actors because of Tom Cruise in this film.” So he did what any hungry actor would and chased his dream until it became a reality.

​​In Top Gun: Maverick, out this November, Powell plays Hangman, a character who, he says, is “the best pilot in the Navy” and has as much confidence as Maverick, the role Cruise is revisiting. Extreme training was required, and when Powell arrived on set (the movie was filmed in and around naval bases in Nevada and California), he was already ready to go. “We had to learn how to fly F-18 airplanes,” says Powell. “I was doing so much prep on this film, so when Day 1 came, Hangman was ready to go.” But stepping into such an iconic franchise wasn’t always easy. “I think whenever you’re trying to tread on hallowed ground, you feel like there’s no way to beat it,” Powell says. “But I’ll say this: I think this is the greatest movie ever made: it’s adventure, heart, comedy, it’s just epic. Plus we have 35 years and the benefit of Tom Cruise’s career behind us.”

​​The 32-year-old Powell is as charming and gregarious in person as he is on the screen. He’s shown range in roles such as astronaut John Glenn in Hidden Figures, a preppy frat boy in the horror comedy series Scream Queens and an assistant who sets up his demanding boss in the romantic comedy Set It Up, but now his action star status is cemented.

​​In addition to the impression he’s made on audiences, he’s also charmed his co-stars. “Besides his obvious talent, I loved the fact that he brought his family along with him,” says Octavia Spencer, Powell’s co-star in Hidden Figures. “I’ll never forget when we were working one day, during the cut, he introduced his family. He said, ‘The Powells are a traveling band. They come to all of my sets.’ They all laughed and lit up the room with their signature megawatt smiles.”

“There is a moment when you’re on set standing next to Tom Cruise next to a F-18 jet wearing aviators where you think, ‘this is as good as it gets.’ It was such an out-of-body experience.”

​​Growing up in Austin, Powell’s father regularly took him to the movies, and Powell started acting as a teenager. One of his early roles was in the 2007 film The Great Debaters, directed by Denzel Washington. Powell recounts some early encouragement from his director: “Denzel pulled me aside and said, ‘I think you should really give this a shot. I think you got it.’” He took the advice to heart and moved to Hollywood after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin (following in the footsteps of another proud Texan and fellow Longhorn, Matthew McConaughey—a comparison Powell doesn’t mind at all). “Watching Glen curate his resume has been impressive,” says his co-star Jon Hamm. “He’s a hard worker, smart and a super handsome guy with a great head of hair. He’s a classic leading man, but what I’m most impressed by is that he generates his own material. He doesn’t come off as privileged or entitled and he’s willing to put the sweat equity into his projects.”

Outside of acting, Powell is currently developing projects and producing. He’s collaborating with another Texan, director Richard Linklater, on two Texas-based films: the animated Apollo 10 ½ alongside Jack Black and a true-crime drama based on a Texas Monthly article that Powell and Linklater are writing together. “I love putting real figures on the map,” says Powell. “Kevin Costner told me that ‘movies are your epitaph,’ and people will still watch your movies after you’ve passed. I take that responsibility seriously. There’s an aspect of making sure that we’re putting out something in the world, and there’s a lot of power in that storytelling.”

​​The last 18 months have given him a break from movie sets, but he hasn’t been sitting around doing nothing. “I got my pilot’s license right before COVID-19 hit,” he says. “And I was saved by the bell, because I was able to fly all over when other people were stuck at home. Palm Springs, Napa, Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe—I thought, ‘Man, this is the life.’ It definitely taught me how to thrill seek and get the most out of every day.” But he hasn’t had to go it alone. Things have gotten serious with his girlfriend, Miami-bred model Gigi Paris, during lockdown—a time when new relationships can go either way. “My little sister, Leslie, was living with me and my girlfriend in Los Angeles when shelter-in-place rules started and we were all quarantined together. Then Leslie moved out, and she’s so fun and hilarious that I was worried that my girlfriend wouldn’t like me anymore without her in the mix. But she did, and I feel I’m the beneficiary of a very positive COVID relationship.” Again, he cites his mentor and Top Gun: Maverick co-star Cruise, with whom he texts regularly, as the inspiration for a career and life well lived. “I love that adventurous spirit and fierce dedication that Tom has. He never wallows and manages to do it all.” And, clearly, so does Powell.

The post Absolute Powell appeared first on DuJour.

Dr. Rock Positano

In a new book, Street Smart: The Primer for Success in the New World, brothers John Positano (a successful lawyer) and Dr. Rock Positano (director of the Non-Surgical Foot and Ankle Service at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City) offer ideas on how to catch these lucky breaks, whether you’re a millennial or a boomer.

The post A New Book Helps You To Think Smarter appeared first on DuJour.

Styled by Sam Ratelle in a Randi Rahm dress and Oscar Heyman jewelry

The post Showstoppers: Luna appeared first on DuJour.

That’s mostly because of her spectacularly funny, Emmy-winning performance as the rich, kooky, emotionally unstable Tanya McQuoid in HBO’s The White Lotus. “You’ve reached the core of the onion,” Tanya says throughout the first season, infusing the statement with lopsided humor and pathos at the same time.

At first, Coolidge wasn’t sure she should go to Hawaii to make The White Lotus. “It was the pandemic, and I wasn’t in good shape. I was incredibly insecure during COVID, and I blame a lot of that on not having a big world,” she explains.

When she got the call to play the part, “It was as if you’re mud wrestling and someone says, ‘You know, there’s a church that’s open if you want to get married,’” remembers Coolidge, who regularly uses this kind of non sequitur in conversation. “You’re in so deep. At the time, it didn’t even seem possible to get on a plane.”

But a friend pushed her on it and said, “Jennifer, you can’t pick the timing of something cool that happens to you.” “And I thought, Well, yeah, I can. But she said, ‘You’re out of your mind, you’re out of your gourd.’ And somehow she convinced me I was insane, so I called up Mike and said that I was doing it.”

Mike is Mike White, the creator of The White Lotus and a longtime friend of Coolidge’s, at least since he played her dreadlocked, snake-friendly boyfriend in the 2009 movie Gentlemen Broncos. White has visited her in New Orleans and thrown parties with his fellow Survivor cast members at her house. They’ve even traveled to the Serengeti together on a “mindblowing” trip.

“But it’s not like I asked Mike for a big fat part that would change my life. It was like, ‘I hope you can make it to my Halloween party,’” Coolidge says, referring to an annual party she throws at her “big, scary house” in New Orleans.

The White Lotus was originally meant to be a standalone miniseries, but because it was so successful, White called on Coolidge, 61, to reprise her role in a second season, this time in Italy. The seven-episode season begins in late October on HBO.

“We couldn’t go to Italy without Jennifer. It seemed like bad karma,” White explains, adding that he envisioned Tanya’s arc this season as “kind of like How Stella Got Her Groove Back with some gay guys.”

“Jennifer literally said to me once, ‘I’ve always wanted to be on a Vespa wearing some iconic dress and some guy is trying to light my cigarette,’” White says. “I was just giving her this Italian dream to go on a yacht and stay in nice palazzos and have sex with some hot guy.”

Jon Gries, who plays Coolidge’s love interest in both seasons of The White Lotus, was driving the Vespa. It may not have been exactly what Coolidge expected. “That was a little scary. We were really doing it, and there were no knee pads in case we wiped out,” she says.

Gries describes Coolidge as an “alchemist.” “Working with Jennifer has been a gift—a welcome, fun challenge to play so closely with her. She is a gardener at play, weeding out the so-so and cultivating good invention. She augments as much as she acts,” Gries writes in an email. “We both used to hike to the top of the mountain in Taormina, Sicily, and feed the stray cats hanging around the old church. We talked about so many things, which allowed us to enjoy a deeper bond that seamlessly translated into our on-film relationship.”

For Coolidge, the trip to Italy was “beyond my expectations in every way. It was a real adventure,” she says. “My regret is not knowing Italian, you know, to just be able to say ‘Where am I?’ and get directions.” Coolidge also hints that she had an Italian fling on set, or “something like that”: “It was sort of a fleeting thing, but it gave me an incredibly hopeful feeling for the future.”

It doesn’t hurt that Coolidge also brought home an Emmy this year. Though award prognosticators predicted she would win, “I thought there was no way that was going to happen, even a second before it was announced,” Coolidge insists. (She was up against three of her White Lotus co-stars.)

Didn’t her friends tell her to be prepared? Yes, says Coolidge, “But how can you really believe them? Friends tell you a lot of things. Friends tell you your clothes look good, and you know they don’t. I didn’t expect it at all. Maybe that’s why I got it.”

Ignoring the forecasting meant Coolidge did not prepare an Emmy speech. If she’d believed the hype, “I wouldn’t have made a fool of myself,” Coolidge says. In her speech, she spoke about taking a lavender bath that made her swell up in her dress and said she was having a hard time speaking, before being played off by the band. Audiences at home weren’t clear if she was being real or doing a bit.

But that may be where her genius lies, says White. “It’s always a little bit of a bit, and it’s always a little bit true,” he explains. “She mines her struggle to find comedy.”

Speaking a month or so after the Emmys, Coolidge fears she truly botched her opportunity to thank all the people who have helped her along the way, including the Weitz brothers, who cast her in the American Pie movies, and Christopher Guest, who cast her in four movies, including, most memorably, as a trophy wife in Best in Show.

“Those people kept me alive,” Coolidge says. “I would never have survived without those jobs. Those people deserve huge thank yous.”

But when her category was announced, “I was in a state of shock, I couldn’t remember my own name. I felt like I was having a full-on anxiety attack. It was embarrassing that I didn’t whip out everyone’s name, but I didn’t expect to be up there. I was swelling up inside this dress, and I think I was having an allergic reaction. For all these years of not thinking something like this would ever come, it was all one big inarticulate moment.”

Ultimately, Coolidge is still scratching her head about the overnight success she’s now having, 30 years after moving from Massachusetts to Hollywood. “Jesus, I’ve been around a long time, and I think my odds for this moment were pretty slim,” she says.

After season one of The White Lotus, the calls started coming, including to star in Shotgun Wedding, a new Jennifer Lopez romantic comedy, and alongside Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale in The Watcher, a horror miniseries from Ryan Murphy on Netflix.

“She exceeded my expectations,” says Watts of working with Coolidge. “Every scene, you’re on the edge of your seat waiting for one of her signature golden moments that take you to a place that you never saw on the page. She beams light and empathy, as well as being wonderfully wacky and unique.”

Coolidge says that what she especially appreciates about Murphy and White is that they give their actors a wide berth to improvise way beyond what’s written. “These guys know who they are. They’re not threatened in any way by someone else’s ideas,” Coolidge explains. “They’re very generous. They let you try stuff out.”

It’s a long way from when Coolidge started out in Hollywood. Her first role was as Jodi, the masseuse girlfriend of Jerry Seinfeld on Seinfeld who won’t give Jerry a massage.

“I had grand thoughts. Massive. I thought I could come from my little town and have a lead in something like Pretty Woman,” says Coolidge. “I remember seeing that movie, thinking, I want that for myself. I truly believe you have to have insane thoughts like that to do well in this business. But I worked with a lot of people and those beliefs got squashed, and I didn’t try for anything bigger.”

Indeed, glancing through Coolidge’s filmography, you find roles with nonsensical names (“Roz Funkeyerdoder,” “Martha Kendoo,” “Principle Lonnatini”) and some with no name at all, like “White Bitch,” “White Faced Woman,” “American Designer,” “Woman at Football Game,” and, perhaps most famously, “Stifler’s Mom.”

“There are a lot of people that can really rain on your parade sometimes, and I haven’t been given a lot of chances,” Coolidge says. “I started to think, I’m really not going to be anything more than the third prostitute that gets turned down by the hideous cowboy at the brothel, which was one of my [early] parts. And I had to buy the airline ticket [to fly to set] in San Francisco myself.”

The whole thing snowballed. “You sort of silently agree to endorse the belief you think other people have about you. I didn’t really think beyond that,” Coolidge says. “Then you have Mike White, who says, ‘I think you can do more than that.’ I’m thrilled that this all makes Mike look like he was right, and people should listen to him.”

Playing Tanya McQuoid, the Emmy, working with Murphy, the fling she doesn’t want to talk about in Italy—it’s all helped Coolidge change her tune.

“I don’t think I’m a good fortune teller or a good judge of what’s going to be the big hit, but I also know you can’t believe their perception of you,” she says. “You have to go with your insane ideas of yourself. I’m going back to that way of thinking. Maybe expectations jinx everything.”

The post Jennifer Coolidge Gets The Last Laugh appeared first on DuJour.

The post Showstoppers: Solea Pfeiffer appeared first on DuJour.

The post Showstoppers: Katy Sullivan appeared first on DuJour.

The post Newcomers at the 75th Cannes Film Festival appeared first on DuJour.

When Danielle Brooks auditioned for Juilliard at 17, she performed a monologue from August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson. 15 years later, she’ll be playing the role on Broadway. “His work has completely transformed my life,” says Brooks. Working with Jackson as director is “refreshing,” Brooks explains. “She’s a straight shooter, no chaser. She’s going to tell you like it really is. She’s a black woman, born to a black woman, who also came from a black woman. That shared experience leaves room for us to discover so much more about the play.” With Jackson’s help, adds Brooks, “I’m realizing I can be an even stronger actress.”

The post Showstoppers: Danielle Brooks and LaTanya Richardson Jackson appeared first on DuJour.

The post Major Talent at the 75th Cannes Film Festival appeared first on DuJour.

Surfer magazine

After six decades in print, Grant Ellis has compiled a colorful anthology of the magazine’s most iconic covers, articles and more. Surfer Magazine: 1960-2020 (Rizzoli) includes a chronological progression of the magazine’s content from world-renowned photographers, writers and graphic designers. Surf stars like Miki Dora, Kelly Slater and Laird Hamilton are all highlighted in the new compilation, further cementing Surfer as a leading voice in the water and celebrating the surf subculture.

The post Surf’s Up This Summer appeared first on DuJour.

In 1943, a young girl asked her father, the inventor Edwin H. Land, why they could not see the pictures they took on vacation instantly. Land pondered her question and got to work in his lab for 5 years. His solution—the first Polaroid instant camera, which allowed any user to snap a picture and then remove a print that developed in about one minute. The original Polaroid camera was revolutionary, but it wasn’t as instant or user-friendly as it could be. Using the camera took some time to learn: there was a trial and error process that involved manually pulling out the layers of paper, developing chemicals and film from the camera. The user also had to time the development themselves and then peel the photo from the paper. After that they had to swab it with a protective coating and adhere it to a cardboard holder. The process generated a lot of waste, left hands sticky and was quite tedious while taking pictures on the go.

Land continually worked to streamline the Polaroid camera, and after 24 years he unveiled the Polaroid SX-70 in 1972. The camera’s “Absolute one-step photography” technology was revolutionary. In an Apple-like town hall meeting, Land snapped 5 photos in ten seconds that were all processed within the camera, ejected themselves, and then, as if by magic, developed before their eyes. The miniature photo lab was encased in a chic chrome and saddle brown leather design that folded up to fit in one’s pocket. Each pack of film contained its own battery, so the camera could be used without fear it would die in the middle of a photo session. The SX-70 was an instant success.

Polaroid image of Grace Jones and the artist Maripol with Madonna

This new, hand-held wonder immediately found its way into the hands of photographers and artists. The compact, easily operable device allowed Ansel Adams to beautifully capture the grandeur of  Yosemite even in the 3.108 × 3.024 format. Andy Warhol was rarely seen without his trusty SX-70, which he used to capture some of his most well known photographs, including many of himself. Maripol, the photographer and stylist who is often touted as having discovered Madonna, was a prolific user of the SX-70, capturing many well-known images of Madonna, Grace Jones and Debbie Harry. Her photos influenced Taylor Swift’s album cover for “1989”.

With the advent of one-hour photo development at drug stores and digital cameras, the Polaroid fell out of favor until recently. Refurbished SX-70s have become a coveted find, and photographers with an eye for nostalgia are buying digital versions of the instant camera. Just remember, never shake a Polaroid picture.

The post Instant Gratification appeared first on DuJour.

“Composition with Yellow and Blue” (1932) [Robert Bayer. ©2020 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust]

Piet Mondrian’s studio [Paul Delbo]

The post A Mondrian Moment appeared first on DuJour.

Katie Holmes poses in Valentino in one of the bedrooms

At 123 East 35th Street stands an imposing Beaux-Arts mansion that has remained a private residence since it was built in 1903. This rare vestige of grandeur was built by James F.D. Lanier and his wife Harriet. The two were old-monied, prominent members of East Coast society who purchased two 1854 brownstones and quickly razed them to make way for his new house. He chose the firm of Hoppin & Koen to design the double wide, eight-story home. A verdigris copper mansard roof, cast iron railing and ionic pilasters made the house stand out beautifully, but not ostentatiously, among its more dour brownstone neighbors. The Laniers’ guests would have been awed by the classically designed entrance hall that features an arched-rose medallion ceiling that flows into a bright columned gallery illuminated by three leaded-glass skylights and a marble wall fountain. A mahogany staircase led guests to a sumptuous green and gold salon across from the warm, inviting oak paneled library.

The grand marble entryway

Overnight visitors would stay in one of the equally grand nine bedrooms in the floors above with the staff nearby in their own wing. The James F.D. Lanier Residence stayed in the Lanier family until 1984, when it was purchased by its current owner. The home was recently listed by Edward F. Joseph of Christie’s International Real Estate for $33 million and, thanks to the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, it will remain a living link to New York’s Gilded Age.

The post Behind The Scenes With Katie Holmes appeared first on DuJour.

Louis I. Kahn (Phaidon)

Kahn’s final project, Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park in New York City, was posthumously constructed in 2012; this new edition features aerial and ground photography of the fully realized park.

Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park

The post An Essential Epilogue From Phaidon appeared first on DuJour.

Snake Houses in Vila Pouca de Aguiar, Portugal

This treehouse tour ranges from a hexagonal shelter in Mystic, Connecticut, to a Mongolian-inspired sanctuary in a cypress tree in Spicewood, Texas. Jodidio showcases a unique selection of treehouse interpretations along with the benefits of eco-friendly living and the stylish possibilities within these residences.

The post Branching Out With Rizzoli’s New Book appeared first on DuJour.

Katie Holmes wrote and directed a movie—her second. Alone Together had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in June and will be released in theaters and on demand on July 29.

In the movie, Holmes, now 43 and a full-time New Yorker herself, plays a food critic who leaves Manhattan just as COVID-19 has begun to shut down the city. She heads upstate to an AirBnB that was reserved by her boyfriend (Derek Luke), only to discover someone else, an artist (Jim Sturgess), is already living there.

But this isn’t a horror movie; it’s a romantic one. Though at first they’re the odd couple, sparks begin to fly after being stuck upstate. Holmes tells the story with a whimsical economy of scale that replicates the trapped feeling many New Yorkers felt during the early days of the pandemic. Holmes illuminates this feeling of isolation while also suggesting it’s a shared experience. In essence, we were all “alone together.”

“I was intrigued how it would play out working with a co-star that was also the writer and the director of the project. I’d never experienced that on set before,” Sturgess told DuJour, founded by Jason Binn. “But it turned out to be incredibly freeing and exciting. The three main people that I would need to communicate and collaborate with were all wrapped up into one person, and that person was right there in front of me, and thankfully was hugely open and generous.” For Holmes, there was a steep learning curve despite having been on sets for the last 20 years. “I’m always learning, and you’re just trying to figure out how to tell a story in every department,” Holmes said at the Tribeca premiere. “Doing it all at the same time is a little tiring.”

Sturgess also recognized that getting Alone Together off the ground in such a strange period was a feat in and of itself. “Getting any film off the ground is a logistic miracle,” says Sturgess, who broke out in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe in 2007 and more recently had a starring role on Apple TV’s Home Before Dark. “I was so impressed that Katie managed to not only write a screenplay during that time but organize herself and get the film financed and ready to go. That was something else.”

Holmes, who also directed the family drama All We Had in 2016, already has another film completed, which she wrote, directed and produced, a period drama called Rare Objects, based on the 2016 novel by Kathleen Tessaro.

“Katie is truly a great leader,” explains Sturgess. “She believes in the creative community of making a film and the importance of that group’s energy. She definitely heightened that sense of gratitude and positivity.”

Also: she knows the secret to a happy set. Says Sturgess, “She was forever buying vast amounts of pizza to keep morale high.”

___

On The Cover:

Top, $2,975, shorts, $2,175, socks, $1,475, socks, $1,550, HERMÉS, hermes.com. Clash de Cartier small earrings, $4,100, CARTIER, cartier.com. 18k yellow gold Classic Double-Band ring, $2,150, ROBERTO COIN, robertocoin.com. Tourmaline ring, $4,000, GUITA M, guitam.com

Hair: DJ Quintero for Living Proof at The Wall Group
Makeup: Genevieve Herr using Dior Beauty
Manicurist: Gina Edwards
Producer: Mariana Suplicy
Shot on location at the James F. D. Lanier Residence

The post Behind the Camera With Katie Holmes appeared first on DuJour.

The Gardener’s Garden: Inspiration Across Continents and Centuries

From the unparalleled grandiosity of Château de Villandry in France’s Loire Valley to the famed Italian Renaissance garden of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, Italy, this title is an international resource for gardeners and designers alike. With more than 1,000 vibrant images and vivid insight into each garden’s history, style and design by authoritative experts, The Gardener’s Garden celebrates all aspects of these internationally renowned living landmarks.

The post Flip Through The Pages of Garden Grandeur appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Best of the 75th Cannes Film Festival appeared first on DuJour.

The cover of Growing Up Getty: The Story of America’s Most Unconventional Dynasty

As 1983 drew to a close, the simmering tensions between the board of Getty Oil and Gordon exploded. The trigger had been pulled on November 14, when the lawsuit in his nephew Tara Getty’s name was filed in Superior Court of Los Angeles County. This action also compelled Harold Williams, the president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, to go into high gear: he had to protect the value of the 12 percent of the stock that the museum owned.

Gordon and Ann flew from San Francisco to New York to meet with new, high- powered members of the Getty Oil board who had been nominated by Gordon but recruited by Ann—including Laurence A. Tisch, chairman of the Loews Corporation, and A. Alfred Taubman, the Detroit real estate developer who had recently acquired Sotheby’s auction house.

With the apartment at 820 Fifth Avenue not yet ready, Ann and Gordon ensconced themselves in a suite at the Pierre Hotel, formerly owned by his father. The fate of Getty Oil hung in the balance. The stakes couldn’t have been higher. Just then, Ann gave the most fabulous party New York had seen in ages.

J. Paul Getty and Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll (Pierre Manevy/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The evening of November 30, a Wednesday, she put on a white satin Dior gown embroidered with gold and welcomed two hundred guests to a dinner in the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to celebrate Gordon’s fiftieth birthday. In addition to a squadron of Gettys, including Gloria, Aileen, Ariadne, and Mark, there was a contingent of forty leading San Franciscans, including the indomitable Denise Hale, all of whom Ann had flown in. Among the notable New Yorkers and Europeans were Brooke Astor, Vicomtesse Jacqueline de Ribes, Lynn Wyatt, Nan Kempner, Bianca Jagger, Ahmet and Mica Ertegun, Carolina and Reinaldo Herrera, Robin Hambro, Pat Buckley, and, of course, Greek-born financial advisor Alecko Papamarkou, Ann’s constant companion.

After a performance by violinist Isaac Stern, Luciano Pavarotti rushed over from the Metropolitan Opera as soon as the curtain fell on his performance of Ernani, and surprised everyone with his rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

“It was one of the best parties ever,” proclaimed Mrs. Buckley. Five nights later, Buckley presided over the other most glamorous party of the season, under the same roof—the opening of the Yves Saint Laurent retrospective at the Met’s Costume Institute, where Gordon’s late sister-in-law, Talitha, was extolled.

The very next night, many of the same guests, and about a thousand others, filled Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, to hear soprano Mignon Dunn of the Metropolitan Opera give a recital featuring eighteen songs from The White Election, composed by Gordon Getty, which incorporated poems by Emily Dickinson. The drama was only beginning. A couple weeks later, J. Hugh Liedtke, chairman of Houston-based Pennzoil, announced a tender offer for 20 percent of Getty Oil’s outstanding stock. The company was officially in play.

Sabine Getty on the family’s yacht, Talitha (Jason Schmidt, Trunk Archive)

In San Francisco, Ann and Gordon had barely unpacked; they rushed back to New York, checking into the Pierre again. An enormous cast of characters representing all sides of the deal took up their positions in the suites and conference rooms of every leading hotel, law firm, and investment bank in town. Following frantic negotiations, Pennzoil raised its offer—it was now a $110 per share leveraged buyout. Considering that GET had been trading at around $50 a year before, it was, in many eyes, a great deal for shareholders—Gettys and non-Gettys alike.

Then things hit an impasse. Liedtke was frustrated because he had been able to deal only with Gordon’s battery of bankers, lawyers, and advisors. He announced he would pull out if he couldn’t meet with the man himself. “I don’t want them telling Mr. Getty what I think or what I’m offering. I want to sit right across the table from him and tell him myself so there won’t be any question,” said the tough Texan, according to The Taking of Getty Oil by Steve Coll.

No way, Gordon’s people responded.

Liedtke pondered how to get a message directly to Gordon. On December 30, seeking advice, he phoned fellow Houstonian Fayez Sarofim, a stock fund manager and investment advisor who also owned a big block of Getty Oil. Though he was now a well-established Texan, the Cairo-born Sarofim descended from Egyptian nobility. His ancestry, combined with his tight-lipped inscrutability, had earned him the nickname “the Sphinx” in financial circles. (Though the Sarofim heritage stretches back seemingly to the pharaohs, the family name today is perhaps most widely known thanks to Fayez’s live-wire daughter, Allison, who throws New York’s most extravagant and exclusive annual Halloween party in her West Village townhouse.)

Joseph and Sabine Getty at home (Simon Watson)

Sarofim told Liedtke he knew how to handle it: he would call Papamarkou, who could in turn call Ann to ask her to pass Liedtke’s meeting request to Gordon. It worked. Close to midnight on New Year’s Eve, the chairman boarded the Pennzoil corporate jet in Houston, bound for New York. His meeting with Gordon was set for New Year’s Day. Liedtke turned his Texan charm on Getty, recalling his wildcat- ting days in Oklahoma and his acquaintance with J. Paul Getty. His son agreed to a $112.50 a share offer from Pennzoil. In essence, Ann and Alecko had gotten the biggest corporate acquisition in history back on track.

Then the whole thing jumped to a different track. Gordon’s niece Claire got a judge to temporarily block the deal, so she and other family members could evaluate it. During the two-day pause, Texaco chairman John K. McKinley swooped in and offered $125 a share. After wild, round-the-clock negotiations (and after Claire dropped her opposition), Texaco officially won the prize when the papers for the $10 billion deal were signed around 3 a.m. in Gordon’s suite at the Pierre.

Pennzoil promptly sued Texaco, claiming it had a deal with Getty Oil even if the contracts weren’t signed. Thanks to a clause that Gordon had requested in the negotiations—in which Texaco indemnified the Getty Trust and the J. Paul Getty Museum against any lawsuits that might arise from the sale—the Getty family was not a party to this suit; they banked their billions. After a jury in Houston decided there had been a binding agreement, Texaco was ordered to pay Pennzoil $10.5 billion in damages, the largest jury verdict in history. The two oil companies battled for four more years in court over the judgment. Eventually, Texaco paid a $3 billion settlement to Pennzoil, and went bankrupt.

Getty Oil ceased to exist; twenty thousand employees lost their jobs. Oil prices plunged. Having cashed out at the top of the market, the Getty family’s $4 billion fortune was secure.

That’s capitalism—as Gordon explained to an auditorium of University of San Francisco students a couple of years after the sale. “I’m in favor of takeovers, the more hostile the better,” he declared. “I like to look at takeovers, and hostile takeovers in particular, as efficiency and economic evolution in action.”

Whatever the explanation for their good fortune, the Gettys were, once again, on top. Gordon Getty was the richest man in America.

The post The Story of American Idols appeared first on DuJour.

The Bruce Weber-lensed photo shoot was Kardashian’s first shoot post-pregnancy announcement. Kardashian and Kanye West had been dating for less than a year at the time and the pregnancy announcement was, as Kardashian told DuJour, a nice surprise, as was the pregnancy itself. Doctors had told her that, like her sister Khloé, she would have a difficult time conceiving. “I just feel so blessed and excited and ready for the next phase,” she said, noting that 2012 was not her best year, and she’s grateful it’s over. At the time, Kardashian said of West: “My boyfriend has taught me a lot about privacy. I’m ready to be a little less open about some things, like my relationships. I’m realizing everyone doesn’t need to know everything. I’m shifting my priorities.” Since then, Kardashian and West were married and welcomed four children. In early 2021, it was announced that Kardashian had filed for divorce from West and most recently, Kardashian revealed she was in a relationship with Pete Davidson.

To celebrate the 2013 cover, Jason Binn had hosted a special luncheon for Kardashian where the mom-to-be at the time gushed about the experience. “I’m just so honored he wanted to work with me and humbled by the experience,” she said of Weber. “He shot Elizabeth Taylor and I’m obsessed with her so I was just really honored and this shoot came out so amazing!”

Weber said it was Kim’s complexities that drew him to her, and that her similarities to Taylor inspired much of the story. “I didn’t know Kim loved Elizabeth Taylor before we met, but I imagined she would,” said Weber, who regarded Taylor as a close friend. “The great thing about Kim is that she’s so strong and independent, but she also makes you want to take care of her. Working with her made me really miss Elizabeth.”

Like Elizabeth Taylor, Kardashian is a hopeless romantic, and her willingness to love, fail and love again is relatable. “Kimberly believes in fairy tales,” her sister Khloé told DuJour. “It’s the best part about her.”

The post A Look at Kim Kardashian’s Iconic <em>DuJour</em> Cover Shoot appeared first on DuJour.

Your one-woman show follows your career and personal life from before you got to New York City to the present day. What made you decide to tell your story this way?

One-woman shows tend to have an autobiographical element so it seemed like an essential part of the form. But mostly it’s a universal story—a person with big dreams comes to the city to make it. Naturally, there are ups and downs. And now, forty plus years later, there are still ups and downs. Life goes around and around like a hula hoop!

What was the most difficult thing to share with an audience?

People seem to think the show is very revealing, but it doesn’t feel that way to me, probably because it was originally about three hours, and I ended up cutting it down quite a bit. I still have lots and lots of material left for a memoir!

How does it feel to perform on stage?

It’s a lot easier than writing a novel! I’ve been doing lectures and appearances for years, so it’s not all that new, just much more structured. And it’s physical. I workout much more to be able to have the stamina to do it.

Do you get stage fright?

I don’t. At this time in my life, if something made me really uncomfortable, I wouldn’t do it.

“Is There Still Sex in the City?”

What part of the show do your audiences seem most intrigued by?

Probably the fact that my career encompasses much more than Sex and the City the television show. They’re impressed by how many best-selling novels I’ve written.

What have you been surprised about when it comes to your audience?

Mostly how young they are. There are lots of women in their twenties and thirties. They dress up and wear the shoes. I love it.

What have you learned about yourself performing the show?

Sometimes I think I should have pursued an acting career, which was something I thought about doing when I first came to New York and was quite young. I didn’t pursue it because it was so overwhelmingly sexist, and, of course, the casting couch situation was rampant and I didn’t want to deal with that. So it’s nice to be able to explore this part of myself at this time in life.

Your alter ego, Carrie Bradshaw, is also back in the spotlight now. Which of you is doing better in 2022?

I love seeing Carrie Bradshaw back in the spotlight, but she’s definitely going through a lot.

What do you feel is missing on television these days?

I’d love to see adaptations of my books Trading Up and One Fifth Avenue.

The post The Sex Education of Candace Bushnell appeared first on DuJour.

DuJour talked with the Los Angeles native about her own favorite road trip must haves.

Where have you road tripped?

I’ve taken a few road trips to Zion National Park that were so awesome. But other than that, my long periods of time spent in the car are usually driving to places like San Diego or San Francisco for gigs! 

What do you listen to on a road trip?

Well, my favorite podcast is Poog. Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak have kept me company on many a long drive. They are the funniest, smartest, most gorgeous women alive. Also love that vibey alt stuff in the realm of Beach House, Alvvays, Tops, The Marias, Mazzy Star, etc. Music I can play in the background of my thoughts.

What’s your fast food mainstay?

I hate to say this but Burger King wins by virtue of them having a vegan whopper!

Are you a good driver?

Define good. Like, if good means that I obey all traffic rules…no. But if good means resourceful and quick and aggressive, then yes. I am! Growing up in L.A. and learning to drive here has made me love driving so much. I’ve been called the best parallel parker south of the 405.

Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder in “Hacks” season 2

Who would you want to be stuck in a car with?

I’d want to do a road trip with my best friend Ellie. We never run out of stuff to talk about, and we love the same snacks and we’d both drink a lot of water so we’d have to stop to pee at the same time…she’s just the best person I’ve ever met. I love her, wow.

Do you think Coca-Cola is better from the fountain?

Absolutely.

Have you ever been on a cruise before?

Never been on a cruise! I’d love to go on one if it was like…a cool alt music festival and/or young queers!

What fashion tips have you learned from Jean Smart?

To know what colors are good on me! Every color is good on her, though. Isn’t she beautiful?

The post Hannah Einbinder Shifts Into Overdrive appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Brightest Light Off Broadway: Alex Edelman appeared first on DuJour.

The five previous Queen Consorts have had their coronation crowns designed especially for them, the last being Queen Elizabeth’s mother. She wore what has come to be known as “The Queen Mother’s Crown” to the coronation of her husband, King George VI, in 1937. Gone are the days of extreme excess for the Windsor family, so Camilla is likely to wear The Queen Mother’s Crown in lieu of a custom crown commission.

The Queen Mother’s Crown was designed in 1937 by Garrard & Co, the official crown jeweler at the time. It was created in platinum and set with 2,800 diamonds, many of which came from Queen Victoria’s Regal Circlet tiara. The four tapering arches were designed to be removable. When in place on the crown, they are surmounted by a pavé-set monde containing a replica of the 22.48-karat Lahore Diamond, presented to Queen Victoria in 1851. The front cross holds one of the most (in)famous diamonds in the world, the Koh-i-Noor (Mountain of Light), set into a removable platinum mount. The 105.6-karat stone is believed to have been mined in India as early as the 12th century. After changing hands several times, often as the spoils of war, the diamond was eventually acquired by Queen Victoria in 1850. She had concerns about wearing the diamond, and wrote to her daughter, “No one feels more strongly than I do about India or how much I opposed our taking those countries and I think no more will be taken, for it is very wrong and no advantage to us….You know also how I dislike wearing the Koh-i-Noor.” Nevertheless, Victoria had the diamond cut to better highlight its brilliance and wore it as a brooch, as seen in her 1856 portrait by Franz Xaver Winterhalter. It was believed to bestow bad luck to any male wearer, so it was passed on to Queen Alexandra, Queen Mary and then finally set into the Queen Mother’s Crown. The Duchess of Cornwall often sports jewels once worn by the Queen Mother, including the Delhi Durbar and Greville tiaras. It would be quite fitting for her to don the legendary crown in the years to come.

The Queen and Princess Elizabeth after the coronation of George VI, 1937

The post The Queen Mother’s Crown Affair appeared first on DuJour.

Often referred to as one of Rome’s best-kept secrets, the mansion boasts an abundance of Renaissance art. The lodge was named for a Guercino painting in its entrance hall that beautifully depicts the goddess Aurora in an incredible trompe l’oeil ceiling. The garden contains several statues, including of Pan, the god of fertility, by Michelangelo. The pièce de résistance of the collection was painted over and only discovered in 1968 after a crack in the paint revealed the hidden treasure beneath.

The cardinal was a patron of Renaissance bad boy Caravaggio and commissioned the artist to paint a 9-by-6-foot painting of Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto on the ceiling in his alchemy laboratory, the only known mural that the artist painted on a ceiling. It is believed Caravaggio depicted a very nude version himself in this mural, which could be the reason the mural was whitewashed over later in a more conservative era. Or it could be that the painting portrays the heretical notion that the sun, and not the Earth, is the center of our universe.

The Caravaggio mural, “Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto” (ca. 1597), was put up at auction for 376 million euros by the Boncompagni Ludovisi family under the protection of the Ministry of Culture earlier this year but so far hasn’t sold.

The post A Roman Villa Featuring the Only Ceiling Mural Caravaggio Ever Painted appeared first on DuJour.

The post Broadway Shows To See Before The 2022 Tony Awards appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Brightest Lights on Broadway: Chasten Harmon appeared first on DuJour.

The post Jane Lynch’s Broadway Homecoming appeared first on DuJour.

The post Lileana Blain-Cruz Is Trying Something Wilder appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Brightest Lights on Broadway: Patrick J. Adams appeared first on DuJour.

Among the fabled tycoons of the Gilded Age—Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt—is a forgotten figure: Miriam Leslie. For 20 years she ran the country’s largest publishing company, Frank Leslie Publishing, founded by her husband, which chronicled postbellum America in dozens of weeklies and monthlies. A pioneer in an all-male industry, she made a fortune and became a national celebrity and tastemaker in the process. But her name was also a byword for scandal: She flouted feminine convention, took lovers, married four times, and harbored unsavory secrets that she concealed through a skein of lies and multiple personas. Both before and after her lifetime, glimpses of the truth emerged, including an illegitimate birth and a checkered youth.

Diamonds & Deadlines reveals the unknown, sensational life of the brilliant and brazen “empress of journalism” who dropped a bombshell at her death: She left her entire multimillion-dollar estate to women’s suffrage—a never-equaled amount that guaranteed passage of the 19th Amendment. In this dazzling biography, cultural historian Betsy Prioleau draws from diaries, genealogies, and published works to provide an intimate look at the life of one of the Gilded Age’s most complex, powerful women and an unexpected feminist icon. Ultimately, Diamonds and Deadlines restores Leslie to her rightful place in history, as a monumental businesswoman who presaged the feminist future and reflected, in bold relief, the Gilded Age, one of the most momentous, seismic, and vivid epochs in American history.

Mrs. Frank Leslie was a Gilded Age superstar, an “Empress of Journalism” who ran the largest publishing company in America for twenty years and made a fortune. Her past was a closely guarded secret.

Miriam Follin was nearly seventeen, hungry in New York, and thrown on her own resources. Her choices were stark. Little wonder she came to believe that “life [was] cruel and experience [was] pitiless,” or that she lamented the plight of “the unprotected girl” in America and sought “loyal and manly protection.” Opportunities for women in the early [1850s] in Manhattan were few and thankless. Seamstresses, flower-makers, map-colorers, straw-braiders, and book folders endured “never-ending daily toil” under harsh bosses for as little as seventy-five cents a week. Volunteer societies, the House of Industry and Home for the Friendless, aided destitute women by reading them scripture and teaching these thankless trades.

Sex workers, on the other hand, earned an average of five dollars a night, and enjoyed a modicum of autonomy, especially if they freelanced part-time, which many did. An estimated fifty thousand women practiced prostitution in the city mid-century—20 percent of the female population. Successful demimondaines with sobriquets like “Princess Anna” and “Aspasia” promenaded down Broadway dressed in tight-corseted gowns of frilled ribbons and flounced satin petticoats in the latest French fashions.

There’s an off-chance Miriam resisted the call. Investigative reporters, however, entertained no doubts: She was, they charged, a conspicuous “Lais” (prostitute) who spent a “fiery youth” on the town and engaged in “wanton” doings. Everywhere “stories [were] afloat about her.”

When she looked in the mirror, she must have seen her qualifications. She wasn’t conventionally pretty; she had a hooked nose, square masculine jaw, wiredrawn mouth, and protrusive eyes. But she had filled out and boasted a figure that was the mid-nineteenth-century ideal: full, voluptuous breasts, a wasp waist, and tiny hands and feet. Plus masses of thick, dark fusilli curls. And whether she admitted it or not, she possessed a dusky, exotic “unfamiliar type of beauty.”

Her theatrical flair, fostered by New Orleans and her home life, would also have served her well. Putting identities on and off, performing a part, and “staging” herself came naturally. She had, too, the necessary do-or-die ambition, sharpened by want, fear, underclass spite, and rage for riches. There was much cash could rectify besides rent, such as shame and social exile.

But she needed guile to navigate New York’s mean streets and byzantine underworld. Dissimulation and appearance ruled in this subterranean Gomorrah, and costume was required armor—an explanation of Miriam’s celebrated fashion savvy. She quickly discarded her father’s admonitions on the “superabundance of jewelry” and ostentatious dress, and changed her name to “Minnie.”

Entry into the trade would have been easy. A Dr. Collyer on Broadway hired women to pose in “tableaux vivants,” after which the “model-artists” could arrange rendezvous with spectators at the Bowery Hotel, “no references required.” Popular assignation places, some semi-respectable, abounded: “naughty third tiers” in theaters, restaurants with private rooms, ice-creameries, concert halls, evening art galleries, and dances.

Each night an ambitious “Aphrodite” could choose from a dozen large public balls. Early in the fifties Miriam’s half-brother, Noel, remarked on her attendance: “I am glad to hear you so enjoyed the balls you attended.” But, he teased, “you did not name your escort,” and suggested several candidates: “our friend Lamp Umbrella or Mr. Denpexter or . . . [men] (of the like kind).” Clients she joked about?

He continued in a more mercenary vein. Be assured: She was “well up in the market. I cannot say less than two hundred thousand for you. If you are in luck you may catch half a million.” No mention of her Latin lessons. Susan, meanwhile, spoke often to her daughter “about [her] beaux.” They might have been their sole support. In 1854, her father abandoned all pretense of business.

Why at this moment Miriam embroiled herself in a scandal is a mystery. Contrary to her father’s admonition against “vulgar” bijouterie, she developed a passion for expensive jewelry. The recently built Tiffany might have been the catalyst—a white marble palazzo at 550 Broadway owned by the “King of Diamonds” whose show windows glittered with parures, bandeaux, rings, pendants, and corsage ornaments mounted on springs to increase the sparkle. For “Minnie” these gems assumed a talismanic significance, incarnating status, distinction, and wealth. “Within the heart of a diamond,” she maintained, was “a soul,” a glorified image of her own.

She didn’t pass Baldwin & Co. jewelers on Broadway without stopping. Inside, she met the dapper clerk, David C. Peacock, a “gay young fellow,” and one thing led to another. A bit of negotiation followed: favors in exchange for the loan of certain diamond pieces in the display case. This continued until her mother pried out the truth, and revealed a side of herself at variance with a “very refined and cultured gentlewoman.” She advanced on City Hall and demanded Peacock be arrested for criminal seduction. As of 1848 in New York State, “sexual intercourse by the defendant under promise of marriage” was a misdemeanor, punishable by up to five years in the Tombs, Manhattan’s foulest prison.

When Peacock received the arrest warrant the night of March 24, 1854, he expressed disbelief. He protested his innocence, grew “agitated and excited,” and asked to see his lawyer. Susan and the sheriff seemed to have anticipated this. Unfortunately, the lawyer couldn’t be reached, nor could Peacock “procure the $3,000 bail” (provided the sum existed) since banks were closed. Besides, the sheriff admonished, he had committed the crime of “carnal connection” with an unmarried female of “previous chaste character,” and would pay. Newspapers would publish the offense; he would lose his job and be locked in jail. Ruined.

However, the sheriff indicated, he could save himself. All would be forgiven if he married the young lady that night. Peacock recoiled and requested “time to consider the matter.” At this, the sheriff pulled him aside and impressed upon him the liberal terms: He didn’t have to cohabit with Miss Follin, support her, or see her again, and he could annul the union after two years. The lady just wanted his “name” and a marriage certificate. Still resistant, Peacock was taken from his rooms on Broome and Broadway and frog-marched to Tenth Street.

The night life in Tompkins Square was at its usual pitch when they arrived: drunks bawling “no, nay, never, no more”; a ghal crying, “Oh git out—you Mose!”; and a night cart of latrine waste drawn by Black men in bandannas lumbering by. When they reached number 319, “the mother of the girl appeared” and ushered them into a dim front room. She summoned her daughter and an awkward moment ensued. In the preparations, someone had forgotten to hire a justice of the peace. At last, Alderman Nathan C. Ely appeared on the stoop, and the ceremony began.

“Do you take this woman your lawful wife?”

No reply.

Nevertheless, the ceremony proceeded. The bridegroom sealed the “terms” with a dollar and left without a word to Miriam. From then on, the couple “passed each other in the public street without any recognition.”

Although the arrangement seemed a net loss for Miriam, there were benefits. Marriage in the 1850s offered few advantages; under the rule of coverture, women submitted to male authority and lost both “title to their earnings or property” and their independence. By living apart, Miriam preserved her autonomy and obtained marital status, which supplied instant respectability. In the world of strangers, establishing a good reputation was a crucial survival skill. And the “seduction” charge helped in another way. Since Peacock couldn’t be guilty unless Miriam was of “chaste character,” she was revirginated overnight.

Excerpted from Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age, by Betsy Prioleau. Published by Abrams March 29, 2022. Copyright © 2022 by Betsy Prioleau. All rights reserved.

“Diamonds and Deadlines”

The post The First Female Tycoon appeared first on DuJour.

“In Chicago, we are the home team,” says The Minutes director Shapiro, who served as artistic director of Steppenwolf Theatre Company from 2014 to 2021. “Oddly, [audiences there] can be harder on us.” That said, she adds, “Every time we work in New York, we always suspect no one will come. So we’re always pleasantly surprised.”

The post Broadway’s Power Duo: Tracy Letts And Anna Shapiro appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Brightest Lights On Broadway: Joaquina Kalukango appeared first on DuJour.

The point is: Miller knows a thing or two about making news.

“I mean, who doesn’t like a scandal?” she asks.

Ain’t that the truth?

Today, Miller is actually talking about Anatomy of a Scandal, the new six-part series on Netflix that debuted this spring. Based on the 2018 novel by Sarah Vaughan, Miller stars as Sophie Whitehouse, a mother of two and doting, unflinchingly loyal wife whose husband (Rupert Friend), a government minister, is suddenly accused of sexual assault. A trial ensues—Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey) is the tough-as-nails prosecuting attorney—and Miller’s character gets way more than she bargained for.

“Scandals,” says Miller. “They’re just compelling and propulsive.”

Especially when they’re adapted for the screen by David E. Kelley. “I loved Big Little Lies; I loved The Undoing,” says Miller of two of Kelley’s recent blockbuster event series, both of which appeared on HBO. “I binged them, and I don’t watch an awful lot of television. So that was a huge pull.”

Born in New York but raised in the U.K., Miller, now 40, returned to London to shoot this particular Scandal in late 2020, at the height of the pandemic. It was a particularly isolating time for everyone, Miller explains, “and it felt like a really nice opportunity to move back to England for a year and be near family. To sort of reset. It was really a no-brainer on all sorts of levels.”

“It was pretty dark stuff we were dealing with,” says S.J. Clarkson, who directed all six episodes. “What I love about Sienna is her sharp wit. She’s fucking funny. We share the same sense of humor, which allowed us to lean into the darker and less comfortable places without going down a rabbit hole.”

Adds her co-star Friend, “Time after time, take after take, through exhaustion and God knows what level of personal strife she may have been going through, she consistently gave of herself, not only to me, but to the entire cast and crew. She is a true leading lady in every sense.”

It also happens that Miller saw a bit of herself in the Oxford-educated Sophie. The character lives a somewhat charmed if isolated life in a gorgeous Mayfair townhouse, with what seems to be the perfect husband and two young children attending private school.

“I related to this idea of privilege,” Miller says of the milieu in which Anatomy of a Scandal takes place. “Probably because I had a kind of privileged upbringing.” It all made her wonder, “What is that leg up in life and how does that lead you to the places you go?”

Miller and her older sister, Savannah, now a successful fashion designer, attended the posh girls’ boarding school Heathfield in Ascot, Berkshire, an hour away from their mother’s home in the tony Parsons Green neighborhood of London. Miller’s mother, Josephine, was a South African model. Her father, Edwin, is an American banker-turned-Chinese art dealer. They divorced when both girls were young.

“I’ve been engaged a few times, but I’ve never been married. It’s better than three divorces, I think.” -Sienna Miller

After high school, Miller modeled and then studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York City. Dating and nearly marrying Jude Law in the early aughts, during and after Alfie, catapulted her to stratospheric levels of attention.

“I obviously have a lot of experience of kind of becoming well-known at a time when the tabloids really had all the power and the individual had very little. Anybody could really write anything,” Miller explains of her early and continuous attendance in the public eye. She was just 21. “It was a real frenzy,” she says. “A fever pitch of craziness.”

Since then, Miller adds, “I’ve dealt with very public heartbreak.”

Years after breaking it off with Law, she was engaged to actor Tom Sturridge, with whom she has 10-year-old daughter Marlowe. More recently, she almost said “I do” to art world scion Lucas Zwirner.

“I was never somebody who dreamt of getting married. I’ve been engaged a few times, but I’ve never been married,” she says of those three serious relationships. “It’s better than three divorces, I think.”

Like Zwirner, her new beau, 25-year-old English model and actor Oli Green, comes from art world stock. They recently walked the red carpet together at an Academy Awards party.

“I’m not a dater,” Miller attests. “I’ve never been one. Once I’m in, I’m in. And I’m also quite shy. My life has sort of unfolded in a different way and I’m fine with it. My life was never going to be orthodox.”

Besides those very public relationships, much of the media attention on Miller has centered around her personal style, an effortless bohemian chic. Her early days as a kind of updated Carnaby Girl likely ushered in an age of street-style influencers. Of course, celebrities are now much more in control of their image thanks to Instagram and TikTok, but Miller stays away from that.

“I feel like it would give me anxiety to really be active on social media,” she says. “I don’t even have the social media apps on my phone. I think in order to be really successful, you have to be very open about your life and your home and what you’re doing. And that doesn’t sit well with me. I need to separate my work and my home persona.”

Miller describes Sturridge as a “great father” and her “best friend.” Six years ago, when Sturridge was working on Broadway, Miller decided to put down roots in New York City so they could co-parent Marlowe.

“I always dreamt about having a place in New York,” she explains. “In London, I felt like everyone had seen my dirty laundry. I love how anonymous New York is. It’s the most exciting city on earth. I love going to SNL on a Saturday. I find it galvanizing as an energy.”

“I’ve dealt with very public heartbreak.” -Sienna Miller

Over the past decade, New York has also accepted her as an actress on Broadway in After Miss Julie and Cabaret, and has kept her in a circle of prestige cable roles (for instance, as Elizabeth Ailes in Showtime’s The Loudest Voice) and front and center with A-list directors like Bennett Miller (Foxcatcher), James Gray (The Lost City of Z) and Clint Eastwood (American Sniper).

“I love that I’ve had the opportunity to carve out a proper story with a trajectory and a character that was fully formed,” Miller says of her varied projects, especially the meatier ones that have come up more recently. “So, yeah—more of those always, but I’ll also make the tea on a Clint Eastwood set just to be there.”

In the early years of Miller’s career, “I didn’t strategize in a way that I could have done,” she says. “It was hard for people to see me as other than someone fashionable or somebody’s girlfriend or somebody slightly chaotic. I wish I’d had a movie out before I became famous.”

Though she’s piqued by looking back at her so-called past lives, she’s very happy she’s had several opportunities to reinvent herself. “It was a blessing post-motherhood to have that resurgence of a career that had slightly gone awry,” Miller explains. “I’m playing a long game and just trying to be good in things. I want to be doing this when I’m 80. Hopefully, when I’m an old lady and I look back at the choices I made, they’ll make sense. It’ll be a good meaty body of work.”

Figuring out that life is more of a “long game” gives her some helpful perspective on where she is now. “I just don’t really care anymore, which is so relieving,” Miller says with a laugh and a sigh. “A, I’m still alive. B, I’m still working and C, I’m incredibly happy in my personal life. So, yeah, things are pretty great, honestly.”

___

On The Cover:

Dress, $2,690, boots, $1,240, ALEXANDRE VAUTHIER, alexandrevauthier.com. Necklace, $1,290, SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO, ysl.com. Earrings, $525, VERSACE, versace.com. Ring in 18k rose gold with lacquered ceramic and diamonds, $11,400, DAVIDOR, davidor.com

Hair: Earl Simms at The Club New York
Makeup: James Kaliardos at The Wall Group
Producer: Mariana Suplicy
Models: Jean Chang @ Public Image, Zach and Darius at Fenton
Models’ Groomer: Marvin Alexander at Art Department
Shot at Cucina 8½ in New York City

The post It’s Sienna Miller Time appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Most Delectable Dishes From The New Julia Child Series appeared first on DuJour.

The 41-year-old Chicago native now lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.

What attracted you to the character of Vivian?

I had been yearning to play a journalist—someone unabashedly curious and unapologetically probing. I was absolutely crazy about Shonda’s intrigue into the relationship that develops between Vivian and Anna—how getting to know someone intimately enough to write an investigative article about them has to leave a mark. Getting to explore the shaping of that mark is what drew me in. Then on top of it, the gorgeous nuance and complexity with which Shonda [Rhimes] and our writers explore Vivian’s entire career and what it means to her. It’s just delicious as all get-go.

How much about the real Anna Delvey—and the people the show portrays—did you know going into filming? 

I didn’t know anything about Anna Delvey before the show. It was fun to discover just how many people did once I booked it.

Did working on the series change your take on Anna’s circumstances?

Almost daily.

What to you is the most outrageous part of her situation?

I think society has an outsized obsession with young females who win games. They immediately want to categorize them, own them, say they discovered them, call them supernatural, cash in on them—anything but just acknowledge all of the complex qualities that got them there. “Little girls” aren’t supposed to have any power and agency in the patriarchal system we’ve all been raised in. We see it in sports, in politics, in activism – in crime. The hype, on top of hype, on top of hype that surrounded Anna and her proposal, her feeds, and then her trial—that hype is a pretty outrageous, if albeit familiar, feeding frenzy that society plays into time and time again.

Julia Garner and Anna Chlumsky in “Inventing Anna”

There’s a sense that Anna is considered a con but if she were a man, she’d have been just another entrepreneur. Do you agree?

Absolutely. Heck, she could be elected to the highest office if she were a man and had done even more crimes. That unfairness doesn’t make what she did right, and it doesn’t change the fact that laws should be abided and victims brought to justice. However, it would be so nice if the dudes got 4-12 years, too.

Have you ever encountered a Ripley-type character like Anna in real life?

Yes. I try to keep that type at arm’s length. With a long arm.

What’s the biggest hoax you’ve ever gotten away with pulling?

I’m a terrible liar. I can’t recall ever pulling off any kind of hoax.

What did you learn about being a journalist to prepare for this role? 

I read a lot. Jessica Pressler—the writer of the article our show is based on and one of our co-producers—gave me access to copious notes and pointed me in the direction of some classic and engaging books on the craft of journalism. Vivian feels she expresses herself best and most vividly in the written word, so I enthusiastically consumed Jessica’s writing which gave me a beautiful and appropriately cerebral path into playing the character. In a show about storytelling, I had a wonderful time letting the pen-to-page guide me.

The post Anna Chlumsky Is a Bad Liar, But a Great Actress appeared first on DuJour.

Emma Crow in “The Music Man”

The post The Brightest Lights on Broadway: Emma Crow appeared first on DuJour.

The post Lynn Nottage Is Theater’s Boldest Voice appeared first on DuJour.

Kat Edmonson, Taylor Mac and El Beh in “The Hang”

The post Meet Downtown’s Dynamic Duo: Taylor Mac and Machine Dazzle appeared first on DuJour.

Clare Barron and Greg Keller in “Shhhh”

The post Meet Playwright Clare Barron appeared first on DuJour.

Joshua Boone and Chanté Adams in Skeleton Crew

The post Dominique Morisseau and Joshua Boone’s Broadway Debut appeared first on DuJour.

The post Spotlight on Choreographer Michelle Dorrance appeared first on DuJour.

Artworks from “Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances”

The post The New Mexico Life of Artist Agnes Martin appeared first on DuJour.

The post Inside Lucy Sparrow’s Florida Public Art Installation appeared first on DuJour.

“Frank Gehry: The Masterpieces”

The post The Masterworks of Architect Frank Gehry appeared first on DuJour.

Kara Young in “Clydes”

The post The Brightest Lights on Broadway: Kara Young appeared first on DuJour.

When in the early 1950s I began to make my first films, which were mostly about historic cities, artists, and painting, the Oscar statuette was not the most famous statue in the world. Picasso, Matisse, and Braque were still at work then; Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s greatest artist, was putting together the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue; and Charlie Chaplin continued to make his films. But I think we can now say that painting is one of the sleeping arts, and so is sculpture, despite the gargantuan clamor of Richard Serra’s monoliths. Since I started working, however, the reputation of the Oscar statuette has grown and grown until it has become the world’s most famous statue. Its fame eclipses even Michelangelo’s “David” and the Statue of Liberty.

So it seemed quite fantastic to me that in 2018, and at the age of 89, I was handed the most famous statue of modern civilization to keep as my own. Fantastic to me, too, that I was being given it for a piece of work I’d taken up almost casually as a favor for some friends, and for the fun of it. This was the screenplay of Call Me by Your Name, a film to be made in Italy, and which I had been asked to codirect by the director Luca Guadagnino.

I liked André Aciman’s story well enough; I liked the two young men in it, Elio and Oliver. I felt I could identify with them, and I felt I knew how they would think and act, having known the madness of first love myself. But it was the thought of taking up an Italian life again that really drew me in, and to even write the script on spec—that is, for nothing. I was soon making frequent trips to Crema, the northern Italian city where Luca lived. I was sleeping in his best guest room, which is also his library of film books. The church bells rang nearby in the early morning, and someone ran down stone steps next to my room every day, as I lay on a big, white, square pillow. Luca had a coterie of smart young men and women who shared his life and were fun to be with. They were part of his company, Frenesy, and were helping him finish his new film, A Bigger Splash. I was happy to be included in this attractive family. It was what I had signed on for. When I turned in my script to them, it was accepted without any changes or requests for rewrites, and soon money was found to make the film, and to pay me. I looked forward to the shoot. The last time I saw Luca was before it began, in New York, when I still believed I was codirecting with him; we joked about what might happen if we got into an argument on set, and laughed about it. I made plans to go to Crema after the Cannes Film Festival in May, where the restored Howards End was to be shown.

And then I was dropped. I was never told why I had been dropped, by Luca or anybody else: it was presented in an “it has been decided that…” sort of way. Luca would be the sole director. I didn’t care all that much. I could see that it might be very awkward sometimes to have two directors on the set. How would it look to the actors and crew if we had a dispute? Who then would be the real director when one of us had to give way? How many minutes of expensive shooting time would be lost as we argued? But I made plans to go to Crema anyway. I wanted to be there, and I was sure I could be useful. And was I not by this time also one of the producers? Luca was sending a car and driver to Cannes for me. But then I was informed that after the first day of shooting, which I’d been invited to witness, his production company would not pay my hotel bill, and that there would no longer be room for me in his apartment. All this from Emilie Georges, the very hard-nosed French producer, not Luca.

But why hadn’t Luca himself picked up the telephone to speak to the person he was dropping? It was a pattern, and by then I should have understood. Perhaps because this would constitute an admission of some sort of masculine weakness that his Sicilian constitution could not bear, or take the weight of. It was my feeling he had made a mistake, and had made others that I also knew of. I had—while still acting as his codirector—cast Greta Scacchi as the mother, and she had accepted the part. This didn’t please him, perhaps because he hadn’t thought of it himself. But from the point of view of this Italian French coproduction she was perfect. She had an Italian passport, she was fluent in Italian (she told me once that she had learned it from her father’s Italian mistresses), and she is a very good actress. But Luca cast another actress for the part and never called Greta or her agent. I kept begging: Luca, call Greta! Call her agent, at least! He would not.

“Solid Ivory” by James Ivory

Shia LaBeouf was also dropped like that. He had been contacted for the part of Oliver. At this, I was doubtful. I didn’t know much about him, so I watched some of his films. He’s an extremely good actor. But as an academic writing about the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, he would be a stretch. Well, I thought, he would be a sort of diamond-in-the-rough-scholar type, like my friend Bruce Anawalt. Shia came to read for us in New York with Timothée Chalamet, paying for his own plane ticket, and Luca and I had been blown away. The reading by the two young actors had been sensational; they made a very convincing hot couple. But then, too, Shia was dropped. He had had some bad publicity. He’d fought with his girlfriend; he’d fended off the police somewhere when they had tried to calm him down. And Luca would not call him, or his agent. I emailed Shia to offer reassurance, but then Luca cast Armie Hammer and never spoke to, or of, Shia again.

What upset me most over the breakup of my collaboration with Luca was that it destroyed the life—stretching over a couple of  years—that I had hoped to have again in Italy, a country I love and can never have enough of. Something like my life thirty years before, when I made A Room with a View.

I recall my days in Crema with a pang: the lively evening meals, usually cooked by Luca, his scant black hair flying, who made his own spaghetti in some contraption, putting the impasto (dough) through again and again; the sessions of movie watching, while he whispered in a kind of baby-talk over the phone with his absent, gifted young partner, with whom he lived in his big apartment, who was often away skiing with his aristocratic relatives and friends. These whispered conversations, which we all heard, were not off-putting to anybody; despite his sometimes aggressive behavior, they proved Luca  had a tender heart. When my services were dispensed with, I missed the trips we had taken to see possible locations for Call Me by Your Name. Once we went as far as Palermo, in Sicily. He was always good company, always generous, and a pleasure to travel with.

Despite being expelled by Luca from what was to have been my film, too, I found myself a couple of years later on a huge, garishly decorated stage, watched by millions—or was it billions?—where I was being presented with the most famous statue in the world for my work on our screenplay. Oscar was very heavy; I had to put him down on the floor beside me as I read my acceptance speech, which I held in one trembling hand, my cane in the other. I did not fail to thank Luca for hiring me, and afterward he pulled me close to him, though the bulky object I was holding, pressing up against his chest, could only I knew be felt by him as a dishonor.

I left the stage and was conducted behind it on the way back to my seat, holding my most famous statue in the world by its little gold plated head. I swung him along a bit nonchalantly, the realization that he was mine growing stronger, as pride—and satisfaction that I had won for writing—filled me while we sort of stumbled together through the wings in the dark.

Elio and Oliver’s lovemaking is explicitly described in my screenplay dated April 17, 2015, and features Elio’s bare foot moving rhythmically over Oliver’s left shoulder during the latter’s exertions. My script can no doubt be found on those sidewalk tables in midtown Manhattan selling old screenplays for a few dollars each. Such a shot, as described above, and if taken, would have said everything an audience might want to know. See my page 78. Luca Guadagnino’s seemingly decorous panning away through a window from the two boys in bed to some uninteresting trees needn’t have concluded the sequence of lovemaking as blandly as it did. If I had directed the film with Luca, I’m sure we could have come up with a better solution than that for the moment every member of the audience had been waiting for. Both Luca and I were blamed endlessly online when the film came out for the lack of male frontal nudity in it. But Armie Hammer’s and Timothée Chalamet’s agents made sure in their client’s contracts that they wouldn’t have to do that. American male actors, with the exception of Viggo Mortensen, maybe, refuse to do it. However, their European contemporaries fling everything off with abandon given the chance, as earlier films of Luca and mine show.

Excerpted from Solid Ivory: Memoirs by James Ivory, edited by Peter Cameron. Published by Farrar Straus and Giroux November 2, 2021. Copyright © 2021 by James Ivory. All rights reserved.

The post Call Him By His Name appeared first on DuJour.

When I was living alone in the loft, I often went to eat in the Horn and Hardart Automat, on Twenty-Third Street next to the Hotel Chelsea. I would often meet Rudy there, as he loved to observe the old ladies who would sit for hours nursing a single cup of coffee. At that time the New York City transit system ran an advertising campaign, choosing a “Miss Subways” each month from the pretty secretaries and newcomers to New York. Her smiling photograph and a brief biography were put in all the trains. Rudy chose a “Miss Automat” each month. He bought snacks for the old lady with the flowery hat and sneakers he had chosen secretly, who had to make do with a Social Security pittance. Sometimes the old people put sandwiches in their bags for others. The Automat, with cheap, nourishing food and its slogan “Less Work for Mother,” was a home away from home for us loft dwellers as well.

Because Elaine refused to cook, she and Bill always ate at the Automat. One day I saw the two of them alone together there. It was the first time Elaine talked to me. Now she was not the rich patron from uptown, but just Elaine, née Fried, from Brooklyn, the former art student eating her meat and potatoes.

She was a picture of the 1940s. Her bangs were rolled in, as was her shoulder-length pageboy bob, like a movie star’s. Her wavy reddish hair was held back by large white plastic daisies on bobby pins on each side of her face. Under finely arched brows her eyes were attentive and a little prominent. Her full, pretty mouth, always at play, was carefully outlined in lipstick red. She wore a clinging turtleneck sweater, and her waist was held tightly by a wide cinch belt over a ballerina skirt. This tightness and neatness was the style of the times, but not common with art world women. The purple of the high-heeled, all-encasing suede shoes against blue stockings was unusual. She was downtown smart, or street chic as it is called now. And she had poise.

Rudy and Elaine thought this could be put to use. His inheritance had run out, and he was trying his skill as a fashion photographer. But to get a job he needed to show samples and so, naively, he and Elaine went to Klein’s on Union Square and bought a batch of fancy dresses. Hiding the price tags in their folds, she posed, nostrils and skirts flaring. Then both of them took the dresses, price tags intact, back to Klein’s and got their money back. But there was something  not quite right about the photographs. Whether Elaine’s haughtiness was too mocking or Rudy had not thought of airbrushing the wrinkles, he never got the job. The strength of Rudy’s style has always been its truth. But if these photos still exist, they are a record of Elaine’s sharp New York bearing.

Her talk was smart and refined too. She had a way of enunciating carefully with a pronunciation quite her own, which didn’t quite cover the Brooklyn accent under it. No one else had that special way of saying “Oartist” or “World of Oart”—meaning the New York world of art, the only one that existed for Elaine—which still echoes in my ears. She spoke with a bright, “cultured,” knowledgeable air, which fooled the men who adored her, but not other women. Though I had left school at sixteen, I humorlessly prided myself on my civilized European background. Bill made no bones about being self-taught, but Elaine, who had only gone through high school before a few years of art school, put on such highfalutin intellectual airs that it irritated me. I didn’t appreciate her lively mind then.

Only when Bill spoke did Elaine fall silent. She listened demurely. In the Automat that day, their heads were turned toward each other. I see it still. Has there ever been a wife who was never once bored with her husband? She had a wonderful trust and respect that she maintained forever. Her Sylvia Plath hourglass silhouette was conventional, and I thought their marriage was conventional too. Why couldn’t they just live together like the rest of us artists did?

Rudy told me that Bill had said to him, “When you have a girlfriend, it takes up too much time. You have to talk to her, you have to take her home in the subway—and then you have to ride home yourself—two hours there, two hours back. Talking at least six hours (lovemaking was implied) and then you paint sixteen hours. So when do you sleep?” But it was not quite like that. Bill was the son of plain Dutch working-class people, Elaine the daughter of honest American immigrants, and both were brought up to do the right thing. Nor did either of them ever want a divorce, despite everything.

In those early days they were devoted to each other. They listened to each other all the time. Elaine remained devoted to Bill all her life, but she demanded constant attention, which was exceedingly difficult for him. Bill in his own particular way also remained devoted: he quoted Elaine’s opinions long after they ceased to live with each other, and Elaine quoted his, always.

How much was his in what he said? Wasn’t it Elaine who found the poetry in his words? Said raw, they could be puzzling—was it just lack of background, wily playing dumb, or a genuine directness? I was never sure, nor was I supposed to be. But Elaine knew best. Wasn’t it Elaine who wrote down all Bill’s remarks, and the famous lecture at the Modern in which he defined space as what was between his arms when he spread them lying stretched out? And those great titles of the paintings, didn’t they think them up together?

Elaine and Bill were desperately poor in those days because Bill had made a choice. He had been a wonderfully exacting craftsman. The cubicle or inner room of their loft and the famous shower stand at 116 were made with painstaking skill. The pieces were perfectly fitted, the paint put on—layer after layer—and smoothed down to a silken finish. He never took on anything he could not carefully bring to an end and be paid for.

Frank Safford, Edwin’s Harvard friend, and his wife, Sylvia, commissioned Bill to do easy chairs for their beach house in Wading River. They were beautifully original, with curving white armrests, like elephant tusks, and surfaces in purple and yellow, in a style postmodern before its time, which Bill had invented. Bill was always a perfectionist. Besides doing odd jobs as a carpenter, he also did posters and an ad in a glossy magazine for a brand-name gasoline, of faceted windmills in bright greens, oranges, and pinks, which I kept for a long time. Somehow he and Elaine managed to get along on this. Then one day he was asked to do some window displays for a fancy department store. When he finished, they offered him window designing as a steady job, something to the tune of $100 or $150 a week, a tremendous sum then. He and Elaine could have lived off this royally. But he thought about it. “As a window decorator, I would do a good job,” he said, “but then how could I do a good job as a painter at the same time?” It was one or the other. He had made a choice. He was a painter, and he would get by. He chose to do painting and did nothing else.

Not everybody was able to make that kind of decision. They painted and had a job on the side too, always an art-related job. Rudy took photographs for galleries, Elaine and I did art reviews. Some people made frames, others transported paintings from loft to gallery and back. In the end, almost everyone became a teacher, which was not always good for them. When someone chose weighty words, pontificated, and took himself too seriously, you knew at once he had become a teacher. Norman Rockwell’s son Peter once told me that Norman would not teach, because, as he said, “You give away your secrets.”

Just once there was a teaching job Bill was happy to accept. “Guess what,” he said excitedly to Elaine when he came home one day. “I got a job teaching. I got a job teaching at jail!”

“That’s nice,” she said soothingly, and went on painting.

“But aren’t you excited?” cried Bill. “It’s a job at jail!” She was still not excited. Then he explained it to her carefully—a friend had arranged for him to give a lecture at “Jail University.” Afterward he told us about his only teaching experience, at Yale University. “So I stood there and told them about everything, everything I knew and thought about art. I talked and talked to them very sincerely, I went on and on. Then I noticed how quiet they were. I suddenly looked at them. All of them, they didn’t look at me—every one of them was staring out the window. They looked up at the sky with nothing in their eyes, like saints in a Renaissance picture. This politeness, this lack of interest, this total daze . . . it was fantastic.”

“The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly: Portraits and Sketches, 1942-2011”

Another way of getting by was to receive a grant handed out by a benevolent foundation. It gave you prestige but usually only helped out for one year—a one-shot event, not often bestowed on people who deserved and needed them. Those with some kind of academic standing were always preferred. Many great artists never got them. Arnold Schoenberg, for instance, old and struggling in California, never got a Guggenheim. John Cage got one after his twelfth try. And after receiving a grant, many grantees were never heard of again.

It is amazing that a painter like Bill never received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He applied for it once because Buckminster Fuller, who had been told they were looking for avant-garde artists, had brought up his name and told Bill that this was his chance. Bill hated to fill out the forms, but most of all, as he put it, “I hate having to bother decent people. I don’t like to waste their time writing those recommendations.”

When I wanted to apply for a Guggenheim, I thought of asking Bill, already very famous, to be one of my sponsors. As I didn’t have his address, I wrote to Elaine, explaining why. She sent it back with a curt note: “Bill and I never got a Guggenheim so why you. But if you want to fill in all those dreary forms, go right ahead.”

But whether you lived off your work or not, “What is necessary is a little recognition,” said Elaine, “even a little keeps you going.” This came up in regard to the painter Earl Kerkam, who secretly elaborated a Cubism all his own. Embittered by lack of interest in his work, he became a recluse. When he was finally taken up by Tom Hess of ARTnews—because Elaine suggested it—it was too late. Kerkam was arid, old, and ill.

“It’s okay not to be pushy,” Elaine said, “but a little bit of appreciation by your peers goes a long way. You have to have a few people see what you are doing once in a while, or else you shrivel up.”

If you stuck to your work you had to make do with a loft, but if you stuck to a job you lost the art but had lots of comfort. The new commercial artists despised and envied their former pals.

Bill, long celebrated downtown and now celebrated uptown as well, once met a former painter at a party. The man was now a successful commercial illustrator. He had an easy but not very fulfilling life. That night he was drunk. Elaine saw how he suddenly advanced on Bill, a heavy brass candlestick in his hand.

“You bastard!” he yelled. “It’s not just me who has sold out—you, with all your phony stuff! It’s easy—you just go on slinging the paint.” And he hit him. “Take that, you phony!”

Bill was sitting in an easy chair. He did not move. He sat there, still and silent, blood running down his face while the man went on hitting him. Finally people pulled the crazed attacker away. Elaine said Bill sat there with an utterly astonished face without moving, not believing such white-hot hate could be streaming out at him.

Very few people bought his paintings at first. There were Janice Biala and her husband, Daniel Brustlein, painters themselves. They bought his fine Ingres-like silverpoint drawings and some of the oils. Then there were the Auerbachs, Edwin, and Rudy. Marie Marchowsky, the dancer, gave him a commission for a backdrop, and John Becker showed paintings of Bill’s once in a while in his gallery, the only one of modern art in Manhattan in the 1930s. Fairfield would occasionally buy paintings, and Bill just gave to his friends.

The few sales were never enough. Bill sometimes had to come over to our loft at 116 to borrow money for kerosene, or even for food. I didn’t like it. Dr. Frank Safford’s wife, Sylvia, didn’t like it, and once said, “I’d like to see the de Koonings pay in cash once in a while, not always with paintings. After all, who does Bill think he is, Gauguin?” Little did she know.

When visiting Rudy in his studio, I saw Bill come in and unwrap a painting he had brought for Fairfield. It was about ten by twenty inches, in wonderful cadmiums and slashes of green, inhabited by strange, curvy cuttlefish shapes and enigmatic taut insets—half interior, half landscape. Bill laid the piece of paper—beautifully covered with paint—on the table. Fairfield laid his checkbook next to it. Then he bent down and wrote out a sum. It was something like $150. I was thrilled. I had never witnessed such a transaction. It was the first time I saw a real live sale of a real live painting.

Another painter told Peggy Guggenheim about Bill, and she invited him to be in a group show of new talent at her famous Art of This Century gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street. Bill went into a fever of work. To meet the deadline, Bill and Elaine carried the painting uptown when it was still wet. But when Bill got back downtown, he got into a state worrying about it. He was not satisfied with it, and just before the opening he went back, took it off the wall, and brought it home again to work on it some more. In those days it was as difficult for him to finish a painting as it was to start it.

Later, in 1948, Bill’s friends convinced Charlie Egan, who had a tiny gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street, in which he slept, to give Bill his first one-man show. Charlie had an eye for what was then unusual. He had shown Yves Tanguy, Isamu Noguchi, and Joseph Cornell, who were not entirely unknown, but were relatively new to the few ordinary gallerygoers.

Bill’s first solo show was a wonder to his friends, who kept going back and back again to the smallish intense paintings, now—away from the studio—on clear walls. But there were no buyers, and there were no reviews. In the end, Emily Genauer mentioned the show, perhaps in the New York Post. She complained that de Kooning painted “abstractions with brash colors.”

“Someday you’ll be in the Modern,” we used to say to Bill encouragingly. “Oh yeah, you think so?” he asked, and cocked his head. We could not really imagine it, but he knew.

Excerpted from The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly: Portraits and Sketches, 1942-2011 by Edith Schloss. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2021 by the Estate of Edith Schloss. Editorial work copyright © 2021 by Mary Venturini. Foreword, Chronological Biography, and Glossary of Names copyright © 2021 by Jacob Burckhardt. Introduction copyright © 2021 by Mira Schor. All rights reserved.

The post Inside New York City’s Loft Generation appeared first on DuJour.

The post The Best Films Of 2021 appeared first on DuJour.