Gerard Butler
Gerard James Butler is a Scottish actor, producer and musician. After studying law, Butler turned to acting in the mid-1990s with small roles in productions such as Mrs Brown, the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, Tale of the Mummy. In 2000, he starred as Dracula in the horror film Dracula 2000 with Christopher Plummer and Jonny Lee Miller, he subsequently played Attila the Hun in the miniseries Attila and appeared in the films Reign of Fire with Christian Bale and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life with Angelina Jolie, before playing André Marek in the adaptation of Michael Crichton's science fiction adventure Timeline. He was cast as the role of Erik, The Phantom in Joel Schumacher's 2004 film adaptation of the musical The Phantom of the Opera alongside Emmy Rossum; that role earned him a Satellite Award nomination for Best Actor. Although Attila and The Phantom of the Opera were important breaks, it was only in 2007 that Butler gained worldwide recognition for his portrayal of King Leonidas in Zack Snyder's fantasy war film 300.
That role earned him nominations for an Empire Award for Best Actor and a Saturn Award for Best Actor and a win for MTV Movie Award for Best Fight. In the 2010s, he voiced the role of Stoick the Vast in the animated action-fantasy film How to Train Your Dragon, a role he reprised in Legend of the Boneknapper Dragon, Gift of the Night Fury, How to Train Your Dragon 2, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, he played military leader Tullus Aufidius in the 2011 film Coriolanus, a modernized adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy of the same name. He played Sam Childers in the 2011 action biopic Machine Gun Preacher. Gerard James Butler was born on 13 November 1969 in Paisley, Scotland, the youngest of three children of Margaret and Edward Butler, a bookmaker, he is from a Catholic family of Irish descent. Butler's family moved to Montreal, when he was six months old; when her marriage broke down, his mother left Quebec and returned to Scotland with baby Gerard aged 18 months. Butler was head boy at St Mirin's & St Margaret's High School in Paisley and won a place at University of Glasgow School of Law.
He attended Scottish Youth Theatre while a teenager. Butler did not see his father again until he was 16 years old, when Edward Butler called to meet him at a Glasgow restaurant. After this meeting, Butler cried for hours, recalled later: "That emotion showed me how much pain can sit in this body of yours. Butler became close to his father after this reunion. During his time as a student, he was the President of the university law society, a position Butler said he "kind of blagged my way into", he sang in a rock band called Speed. While Butler was a 22-year-old student, his father died, he said of this period in his life: "I had gone from a 16-year-old who couldn't wait to grasp life to a 22-year-old who didn't care if he died in his sleep."Before his final year of law school, Butler took a year off to live in California. He lived in Venice Beach, working at different jobs, travelling and, according to him, drinking at one point being arrested for alcohol-related disorderly conduct. Butler described this year as, "I was out of control, justifying it with this idea that'I'm young, this is life.
This is me just being boisterous." After his time off in America, he returned to Scotland to take his final year at law school. Butler had an ear surgery, he still is hard of hearing in his right ear. Upon graduation, he took a position as a trainee lawyer at an Edinburgh law firm. However, he continued to stay out late drinking and he missed work because of this. One week before he qualified as a lawyer, he was fired. At the age of 25, an unqualified lawyer, Butler moved to London to pursue his dream of becoming famous, he admitted, "When I started out, I'm not sure I was in it for the right reasons. I wanted much to be famous."Unable to win any acting roles he worked in a variety of jobs including as a waiter, a telemarketer and a demonstrator of how toys work at fairs. Whilst in London, he met an old friend from his teenage days in the Scottish Youth Theatre, now a London casting director. At that time, he was her assistant, she took him to an audition for Steven Berkoff's play of Coriolanus. The director said of Butler's audition, "When he read, he had such vigour and enthusiasm—so much that it made the other actors seem limp—that I decided to cast him in the ensemble."Then aged 27, Butler had his first professional acting job.
Less than a year he won a part in a theatre adaptation of Trainspotting, which he performed at the Edinburgh Festival. At age 30, Butler decided to move to Los Angeles. In London, Butler held a series of odd jobs until being cast by actor and director Steven Berkoff in a stage production of Coriolanus, he was cast as Ewan McGregor's character Renton in the stage adaptation of Trainspotting, the same play that had inspired him to become an actor. His film debut was, his film career continued with small roles, first in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies and Russell Mulcahy's Tale of the Mummy. In 2000, Butler was cast in two breakthrough roles, the first being Attila the Hun in the American TV miniseries Attila; the film's producers wanted a k
Charlize Theron
Charlize Theron is a South African and American actress and film producer. She is the recipient of several accolades, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, the Silver Bear for Best Actress. Theron came to international prominence in the 1990s by playing the leading lady in the Hollywood films The Devil's Advocate, Mighty Joe Young, The Cider House Rules. In 2003, she received critical acclaim for her portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the first South African to win an Oscar in a major acting category, she received another Academy Award nomination for playing a sexually abused woman seeking justice in the drama North Country. Theron has since starred in several top-grossing action films, including Hancock, Snow White and the Huntsman, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Fate of the Furious, Atomic Blonde, she received praise for playing troubled women in Jason Reitman's comedy-dramas Young Adult and Tully, receiving Golden Globe Award nominations for both films.
Since the early 2000s, Theron has ventured into film production with her company Denver and Delilah Productions. She has produced numerous films, in many of which she had a starring role, including The Burning Plain and Dark Places. Theron became an American citizen while retaining her South African citizenship. In 2016, Time named her in their annual Time 100 listing of the most influential people in the world. Theron was born in Benoni, in the then-Transvaal Province of South Africa, the only child of Gerda and Charles Theron. Second Boer War figure Danie Theron was her great-great-uncle, she is from an Afrikaner family, her ancestry includes Dutch as well as French and German. "Theron" is an Occitan surname pronounced in Afrikaans as. She grew up on her parents' farm near Johannesburg. On 21 June 1991, Theron's father, an alcoholic, threatened both teenaged Charlize and her mother while drunk, physically attacking her mother. Theron's mother shot and killed him; the shooting was adjudged to have been self-defence, her mother faced no charges.
Theron attended Putfontein Primary School, a period during which she has said she was not "fitting in." At thirteen, Theron was sent to boarding school and began her studies at the National School of the Arts in Johannesburg. Although Theron is fluent in English, her first language is Afrikaans. Although seeing herself as a dancer, Theron at 16 won a one-year modelling contract at a local competition in Salerno and with her mother moved to Milan, Italy. After Theron spent a year modelling throughout Europe and her mother moved to the US, both New York City and Miami. In New York, she attended the Joffrey Ballet School, where she trained as a ballet dancer until a knee injury closed this career path; as Theron recalled in 2008: I went to New York for three days to model, I spent a winter in New York in a friend's windowless basement apartment. I was broke, I was taking class at the Joffrey Ballet, my knees gave out. I realized I couldn't dance anymore, I went into a major depression. My mom came over from South Africa and said,'Either you figure out what to do next or you come home, because you can sulk in South Africa'.
At 19, Theron flew to Los Angeles, on a one-way ticket her mother bought for her, intending to work in the film industry. During the initial months there, she went to a Hollywood Boulevard bank to cash a cheque her mother had sent to help with the rent; when the teller refused to cash it, Theron engaged in a shouting match with him. Upon seeing this, talent agent John Crosby, waiting behind her, handed her his business card and subsequently introduced her to casting agents and an acting school, she fired him as her manager after he kept sending her scripts for films similar to Showgirls and Species. After several months in the city, Theron made her film debut with a non-speaking role in the horror film Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, her first speaking role was that of a hitwoman in 2 Days in the Valley. Though it was a small role, a lingerie-clad Theron was prominently featured on the movie poster, film offers for hot-chick parts followed, but Theron turned them down. "A lot of people were saying, ‘You should just hit while the iron’s hot,’" she remarked.
"But playing the same part over doesn't leave you with any longevity. And I knew it was going to be harder for me, because of what I look like, to branch out to different kinds of roles." Larger roles in released Hollywood films followed, her career expanded by the end of the 1990s. In the horror drama The Devil's Advocate, credited to be her break-out film, Theron starred alongside Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino as the haunted wife of an unusually successful lawyer, she subsequently starred in the aventure film Mighty Joe Young as the friend and protecter of a giant mountain gorilla, in the drama The Cider House Rules, as a woman who seeks an abortion in World War II-era Maine. While Mighty Joe Young flopped at the box office, The Devil's Advocate and The Cider House Rules were commercially successful, she was on the cover of the January 1999 issue of Vanity Fair as the "White Hot Venus". She appeared on the cover of the May 1999 issue of Playboy magazine, in photos taken several years earlier when she was an unknown model.
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Beyoncé
Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter is an American singer, actress, record producer and dancer. Born and raised in Houston, Beyoncé performed in various singing and dancing competitions as a child, she rose to fame in the late 1990s as lead singer of the R&B girl-group Destiny's Child. Managed by her father, Mathew Knowles, the group became one of the best-selling girl groups in history, their hiatus saw Beyoncé's theatrical film debut in Austin Powers in Goldmember and the release of her first solo album, Dangerously in Love. The album established her as a solo artist worldwide, debuting at number one on the US Billboard 200 chart and earning five Grammy Awards, featured the Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles "Crazy in Love" and "Baby Boy". Following the break-up of Destiny's Child in 2006, she released her second solo album, B'Day, which contained her fourth number-one single, "Irreplaceable", as well as the top ten singles "Déjà Vu", "Beautiful Liar". Beyoncé continued her acting career, with starring roles in The Pink Panther and Obsessed.
Her marriage to rapper Jay-Z and portrayal of Etta James in Cadillac Records influenced her third album, I Am... Sasha Fierce, which saw the introduction of her alter-ego Sasha Fierce and earned a record-setting six Grammy Awards in 2010, including Song of the Year for "Single Ladies". Beyoncé took over management of her career, her critically acclaimed eponymous album, released in 2013 with no prior announcement, was distinguished from previous releases by its experimental production and exploration of darker themes. Her sixth album, Lemonade received widespread critical acclaim, with many referring to it as her most personal and political work to date, subsequently became the best-selling album of 2016. In 2018, she released Everything Is a collaborative album with husband Jay-Z, as The Carters. Throughout her career, Beyoncé has sold over 100 million records worldwide as a solo artist, a further 60 million records with Destiny's Child, making her one of the best-selling music artists of all time.
She is a multi-platinum, Grammy-Award winning recording artist, acclaimed for her thrilling vocals and live concert shows. The Recording Industry Association of America recognized Beyoncé as the Top Certified Artist in America during the 2000s decade. In 2009, Billboard named her the Top Radio Songs Artist of the Decade and the Top Female Artist of the 2000s decade. Among numerous awards and accolades, Beyoncé has won 23 Grammy Awards and is the most nominated woman in the award's history, she is the most awarded artist at the MTV Video Music Awards, with 24 wins, including the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award. In 2008, she was awarded the Legend Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Arts at the World Music Awards. In 2011, Beyoncé was presented with the inaugural Millennium Award at the Billboard Music Awards. In 2014, she became the highest-paid black musician in history and was listed among Time's 100 most influential people in the world for a second year in a row. Forbes ranked her as the most powerful female in entertainment on their 2015 and 2017 lists, in 2016, she occupied the sixth place for Time's Person of the Year.
In 2016, she was awarded the Fashion Icon lifetime achievement award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. With the release of Lemonade, Beyoncé became the first and only musical act in Billboard chart history to debut at number one with their first six solo studio albums. Beyoncé Giselle Knowles was born in Houston, Texas, to Celestine "Tina" Knowles, a hairdresser and salon owner, Mathew Knowles, a Xerox sales manager. Beyoncé's name is a tribute to her mother's maiden name. Beyoncé's younger sister Solange is a singer and a former backup dancer for Destiny's Child. Solange and Beyoncé are the first sisters to have both had No. 1 albums. Mathew is African American. Through her mother, Beyoncé is a descendant of Acadian leader Joseph Broussard. Beyoncé attended St. Mary's Montessori School in Houston, her singing talent was discovered when dance instructor Darlette Johnson began humming a song and she finished it, able to hit the high-pitched notes. Beyoncé's interest in music and performing continued after winning a school talent show at age seven, singing John Lennon's "Imagine" to beat 15/16-year-olds.
In fall of 1990, Beyoncé enrolled in Parker Elementary School, a music magnet school in Houston, where she would perform with the school's choir. She attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and Alief Elsik High School. Beyoncé was a member of the choir at St. John's United Methodist Church as a soloist for two years; when Beyoncé was eight and childhood friend Kelly Rowland met LaTavia Roberson while at an audition for an all-girl entertainment group. They were placed into a group called Girl's Tyme with three other girls, rapped and danced on the talent show circuit in Houston. After seeing the group, R&B producer Arne Frager brought them to his Northern California studio and placed them in Star Search, the largest talent show on national TV at the time. Girl's Tyme failed to win, Beyoncé said the song they performed was not good. In 1995 Beyoncé's father resigned from his job to manage the group; the move reduced Beyoncé's family's income by half, her parents were forced to move into separated apartments.
Mathew cut the original line-up to four and the group conti
Sharon Stone
Sharon Vonne Stone is an American actress and former fashion model. After modelling in television commercials and print advertisements, she made her film debut as an extra in Woody Allen's comedy-drama Stardust Memories, her first speaking part was in Wes Craven's horror film Deadly Blessing, throughout the 1980s, Stone went on to appear in films such as Irreconcilable Differences, King Solomon's Mines, Cold Steel, Action Jackson, Above the Law. She found mainstream prominence with her part in Paul Verhoeven's action film Total Recall. Stone became a sex symbol and rose to international recognition when she starred as Catherine Tramell in another Verhoeven film, the erotic thriller Basic Instinct, for which she earned her first Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, she received further critical acclaim with her performance in Martin Scorsese's crime drama Casino, garnering the Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Stone received two more Golden Globe Award nominations for her roles in The The Muse.
Her other notable film roles include Sliver, The Specialist, The Quick and the Dead, Last Dance, Catwoman, Broken Flowers, Alpha Dog, Basic Instinct 2, Lovelace, Fading Gigolo, The Disaster Artist. In 1995, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in 2005, she was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in France. On television, Stone has had notable performances in the mini-series War and Remembrance and the made-for-HBO film If These Walls Could Talk 2, she made guest-appearances in The Practice, winning the Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series, in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. She has starred in the action drama series Agent X, the murder mystery series Mosaic and the series Better Things, The New Pope and Ratched. Sharon Vonne Stone was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, to Dorothy Marie, an accountant, Joseph William Stone II, a tool and die manufacturer and factory worker, she has an older brother, Michael, a younger sister, a younger brother, Patrick.
She is of part Irish ancestry. Stone was considered academically gifted as a child and entered the second grade when she was 5 years old, she graduated from Saegertown High School in Saegertown, Pennsylvania, in 1975. While attending Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, Stone won the title of Miss Crawford County and was a candidate for Miss Pennsylvania. One of the pageant judges told her to quit school and move to New York City to become a fashion model. In 1977, Stone moved in with an aunt in New Jersey, she was signed by Ford Modeling Agency in New York City. Stone, inspired by Hillary Clinton, went back to Edinboro University to complete her degree in 2016. Stone moved to Europe. While living there, she decided to pursue acting. "So I packed my bags, moved back to New York, stood in line to be an extra in a Woody Allen movie," she recalled. Stone was cast for a brief role in Allen's Stardust Memories and had a speaking part a year in the horror film Deadly Blessing. French director Claude Lelouch cast her in Les Uns et les Autres.
She did not appear in the credits. On December 4, 1982, she played a ditsy bimbo meter maid in the first season of the television series Silver Spoons. In 1983, she appeared in the short-lived sports-themed television series Bay City Blues, playing Cathy St. Marie, the wife of baseball player Terry St. Marie played by actor Patrick Cassidy; that year she appeared in the Remington Steele episode "Steele Crazy After All These Years", first aired on February 18, 1983. In 1985 she appeared in an episode of T. J Hooker opposite William Shatner, her next film role was in Irreconcilable Differences, starring Ryan O'Neal, Shelley Long, a young Drew Barrymore. Stone played a starlet who breaks up the marriage of a successful director and his screenwriter wife. In 1984, she appeared in "Echoes of the Mind", a two-part episode of Magnum, P. I. playing identical twins, one a love interest of Tom Selleck's character. Through the remainder of the 1980s, she had roles in such films as King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, played Steven Seagal's wife in Above the Law.
In 1988, she played Janice Henry for the filming of the miniseries Remembrance. In Dutch film director Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi action film Total Recall, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, she played the role of Lori Quaid, the loving wife of Schwarzenegger's character revealed to be an agent sent by a corrupt and ruthless governor to monitor him; the film received favorable reviews and made $261.2 million worldwide, giving Stone's career a major boost. She appeared in five feature films the following year, though those were smaller-scale productions than that of Total Recall, she starred opposite Forest Whitaker in the dramatic thriller Diary of a Hitman, screened at the Deauville Film Festival in September. And next, played a sexually provocative young photojournalist in the little-seen Year of the Gun, she obtained the role of a literary agent
Eva Mendes
Eva de la Caridad Méndez, known professionally as Eva Mendes, is an American actress and businesswoman. Her acting career began in the late 1990s, with a series of roles in B films such as Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror and Urban Legends: Final Cut. Mendes's performance in Training Day marked a turning point in her career, led to parts in the commercially successful films 2 Fast 2 Furious and Hitch, the latter of which made her one of the first minority actors to play the lead in a mainstream romantic comedy, she starred in Ghost Rider and The Spirit, both film adaptations of comics, ventured into more dramatic territory with We Own the Night, Bad Lieutenant, Last Night, The Place Beyond the Pines. Her other films include Out of Time, The Women, The Other Guys, Girl in Progress. Mendes has appeared in several music videos for artists like Will Smith, has been an ambassador for brands, including Calvin Klein, Reebok, Pantene shampoo and Peek & Cloppenburg, she has designed for New York & Company and is the creative director of CIRCA Beauty, a makeup line sold at Walgreens.
Mendes was born in Miami, Florida, to Cuban parents Eva Pérez Suárez and Juan Carlos Méndez, raised by her mother in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Silverlake after her parents' divorce. Mendes was raised a Roman Catholic and at one time considered becoming a Catholic nun, her mother worked at Mann's Chinese Theatre and for an aerospace company, her father ran a meat distribution business. Mendes had Jr. who died from throat cancer. She has an older sister, a younger paternal half-brother, Carlos Alberto "Carlo" Méndez, she attended Hoover High School in Glendale, studied marketing at California State University, but left college to pursue acting under Ivana Chubbuck. Mendes began her acting career, her first film role was that of one in a group of young people who become lost in middle America in the direct-to-video horror film Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror. Mendes soon hired an acting coach, she subsequently took on the roles of a bridesmaid in the comedy A Night at the Roxbury, with Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan, a housekeeper in the fantasy family film My Brother the Pig, with Scarlett Johansson, that of an ill-fated film student in the slasher film Urban Legends: Final Cut.
Mendes starred opposite Steven Seagal in the action thriller Exit Wounds, which made over US$73 million worldwide. According to Mendes, her voice was dubbed in the editing, with a producer telling her that she "didn’t sound intelligent enough", her breakthrough though came in 2001 with her performance as the mistress of a corrupt cop in Antoine Fuqua's crime thriller Training Day, alongside Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke. She described her role as "privotal" in her career, stating that it motivated her to keep going as an actress, as she was "bored" doing "terrible cheesy horrible" films before she obtained it. Training Day was a box office hit, grossing US$104.5 million. Her role in Training Day led to larger film parts and Mendes soon established herself as a Hollywood actress. While her sole film release in 2002 was the crime comedy All About the Benjamins, in which she played the girlfriend of a con artist, Mendes had roles on four studio feature films released throughout 2003. 2 Fast 2 Furious teamed her with Paul Walker and Tyrese Gibson, portraying a United States Customs Service agent working undercover for a notorious Argentine drug lord.
The film gave Mendes a much wider exposure, grossing over US$236 million globally. The Western action film Once Upon a Time in Mexico saw her star with Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek, as the daughter of a Mexican drug lord. While reviews for the film were mixed, it made US$98.1 million. Mendes reunited with Denzel Washington for the thriller Out of Time, in which she played the soon-to-be ex-wife of a well-respected chief of police; the film was a moderate commercial success, Roger Ebert, in his review for the film, described Mendes' role as a "curiously forgiving character, who feels little rancor for the straying and still likes him. Her last 2003 film was the comedy Stuck on You, with Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear, in which she played an aspiring actress, she starred with Will Smith, as the love interest of a professional dating consultant, in her next film, making her one of the first minority actors to play the lead in a mainstream romantic comedy. USA Today described it as "her best screen role to date", Detroit Free Press remarked: "Smith and Mendes are terrific together.
He brings her game up so high you'd think she has had as many good parts as Smith". Hitch was the highest-grossing comedy in North America until 2018, made US$368.1 million in its global theatrical run. In 2005, Mendes starred in the little-seen films The Wendell Baker Story and Guilty Hearts. In the romantic comedy Trust the Man, Mendes starred with David Duchovny, Billy Crudup, Julianne Moore, Maggie Gyllenhaal, playing what The A. V. Club described as a "vapid sexpot"; the much criticized Ghost Rider, based on the Marvel Comics character, featured Mendes as the love interest of the titular character. The film fared well commercially, opening atop at the North American box office, with earnings of more than US$45 million, she starred opposite Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg in
Halle Berry
Halle Maria Berry is an American actress. Berry won the 2002 Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the romantic drama film Monster's Ball; as of 2019, she is the only woman of African-American descent to have won the award. Berry was one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood during the 2000s, has been involved in the production of several of the films in which she performed. Berry is a Revlon spokesmodel. Before becoming an actress, she started modeling and entered several beauty contests, finishing as the 1st runner-up in the Miss USA Pageant and coming in 6th place in the Miss World Pageant in 1986, her breakthrough film role was in the romantic comedy Boomerang, alongside Eddie Murphy, which led to roles in films, such as the family comedy The Flintstones, the political comedy-drama Bulworth and the television film Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award, among other awards. In addition to her Academy Award win, Berry garnered high-profile roles in the 2000s, such as Storm in X-Men, the action crime thriller Swordfish, the spy film Die Another Day, where she played Bond girl Jinx.
She appeared in the X-Men sequels, X2 and X-Men: The Last Stand. In the 2010s, she appeared in a number of films, including the science-fiction film Cloud Atlas, the crime thriller The Call and X-Men: Days of Future Past. Berry was married to baseball player David Justice and singer-songwriter Eric Benét. Berry was born Maria Halle Berry, her parents selected her middle name from Halle's Department Store, a local landmark in her birthplace of Cleveland, Ohio. Her mother, Judith Ann, of English and German ancestry, was a psychiatric nurse, her father, Jerome Jesse Berry, was an African-American hospital attendant in the psychiatric ward where her mother worked. Berry's parents divorced. Berry has said in published reports that she has been estranged from her father since her childhood, noting in 1992, "I haven't heard from him since. Maybe he's not alive." Her father was abusive to her mother. Berry has recalled witnessing her mother being beaten daily, kicked down stairs and hit in the head with a wine bottle.
Berry grew up in Oakwood and graduated from Bedford High School where she was a cheerleader, honor student, editor of the school newspaper and prom queen. She worked in the children's department at Higbee's Department store, she studied at Cuyahoga Community College. In the 1980s, she entered several beauty contests, winning Miss Teen All American in 1985 and Miss Ohio USA in 1986, she was the 1986 Miss USA first runner-up to Christy Fichtner of Texas. In the Miss USA 1986 pageant interview competition, she said she hoped to become an entertainer or to have something to do with the media, her interview was awarded the highest score by the judges. She was the first African-American Miss World entrant in 1986, where she finished sixth and Trinidad and Tobago's Giselle Laronde was crowned Miss World. According to the Current Biography Yearbook, Berry "...pursued a modeling career in New York... Berry's first weeks in New York were less than auspicious: She slept in a homeless shelter and in a YMCA".
In 1989, Berry moved to New York City to pursue her acting ambitions. During her early time there, she ran out of money and had to live in a homeless shelter, her situation improved by the end of that year, she was cast in the role of model Emily Franklin in the short-lived ABC television series Living Dolls, shot in New York and was a spin-off of the hit series Who's the Boss?. During the taping of Living Dolls, she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. After the cancellation of Living Dolls, she moved to Los Angeles, she went on to have a recurring role on the long-running primetime serial Knots Landing. Berry's film debut was in a small role for Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, in which she played Vivian, a drug addict; that same year, Berry had her first co-starring role in Strictly Business. In 1992, Berry portrayed a career woman who falls for the lead character played by Eddie Murphy in the romantic comedy Boomerang; the following year, she caught the public's attention as a headstrong biracial slave in the TV adaptation of Queen: The Story of an American Family, based on the book by Alex Haley.
Berry was in the live-action Flintstones movie playing the part of "Sharon Stone", a sultry secretary who seduced Fred Flintstone. Berry tackled a more serious role, playing a former drug addict struggling to regain custody of her son in Losing Isaiah, starring opposite Jessica Lange, she portrayed Sandra Beecher in Race the Sun, based on a true story, shot in Australia, co-starred alongside Kurt Russell in Executive Decision. Beginning in 1996, she was a Revlon spokeswoman for seven years and renewed her contract in 2004, she starred alongside Natalie Deselle Reid in the 1997 comedy film B*A*P*S. In 1998, Berry received praise for her role in Bulworth as an intelligent woman raised by activists who gives a politician a new lease on life; the same year, she played the singer Zola Taylor, one of the three wives of pop singer Frankie Lymon, in the biopic Why Do Fools Fall in Love. In the 1999 HBO biopic Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, she portrayed the first black woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, it was to Berry a heart-felt project that she introduced, co-produced and fought intensely for it to
Jon Voight
Jonathan Vincent Voight is an American actor. He is the winner of one Academy Award, he has won four Golden Globe Awards and has so far been nominated for eleven. He is the father of actor James Haven. Voight came to prominence in the late 1960s with his Oscar-nominated performance as Joe Buck, a would-be gigolo in Midnight Cowboy. During the 1970s, he became a Hollywood star with his portrayals of a businessman mixed up with murder in Deliverance, his output became sparse during the 1980s and early 1990s, although he won the Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award for his iconic performance as the ruthless bank robber Oscar "Manny" Manheim in Runaway Train. Voight made a comeback in Hollywood during the mid-1990s, starring in Michael Mann's crime epic Heat opposite Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, he portrayed Jim Phelps in Mission: Impossible, a corrupt NSA agent in Enemy of the State, the unscrupulous attorney Leo F. Drummond in Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Voight gave critically acclaimed biographical performances during the 2000s, appearing as legendary sportscaster Howard Cosell in Ali for which his supporting performance was nominated for the Academy Award, the Golden Globe and a Critics Choice Award, as Nazi officer Jürgen Stroop in Uprising, as Franklin D. Roosevelt in Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor and as Pope John Paul II in the eponymous miniseries. Voight appears in Showtime's Ray Donovan TV series, now in its sixth season as Mickey Donovan, a role that brought him newfound critical and audience acclaim and his fourth Golden Globe win in 2014. Voight was born on December 29, 1938, in Yonkers, New York, the son of Barbara and Elmer Voight, a professional golfer, he has two brothers, Barry Voight, a former volcanologist at Pennsylvania State University, Wesley Voight, known as Chip Taylor, a singer-songwriter who wrote "Wild Thing" and "Angel of the Morning." Voight's paternal grandfather and his paternal grandmother's parents were Slovak immigrants, while his maternal grandfather and his maternal grandmother's parents were German immigrants.
Joseph P. Kamp was his great-uncle through his mother. Voight was raised as a Catholic and attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, New York, where he first took an interest in acting, playing the comedic role of Count Pepi Le Loup in the school's annual musical, The Song of Norway. Following his graduation in 1956, he enrolled at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D. C. where he majored in art and graduated with a B. A. in 1960. After graduation, Voight moved to New York City. In 1962, Voight married actress Lauri Peters, who he met when they both appeared in the original Broadway production of The Sound of Music, they divorced in 1967. He married actress Marcheline Bertrand in 1971, they separated in 1976, filed for divorce in 1978, divorced in 1980. Their children, James Haven and Angelina Jolie, would go on to enter the film business as actors and producers. Voight was estranged from his children for several years, but they reconciled in 2007 after Bertrand's death.
In the early 1960s, Voight found work in television, appearing in several episodes of Gunsmoke, between 1963 and 1968, as well as guest spots on Naked City, The Defenders, both in 1963, Twelve O'Clock High, in 1966. His theatre career took off in January 1965, playing Rodolfo in Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge in an Off-Broadway revival. Voight's film debut did not come until 1967, when he took a part in Phillip Kaufman's crimefighter spoof, Fearless Frank. Voight took a small role in 1967's western, Hour of the Gun, directed by veteran helmer John Sturges. In 1968 Voight took a role in director Paul Williams's Out of It. In 1969, Voight was cast in a film that would make his career. Voight played a naïve male hustler from Texas, adrift in New York City, he comes under the tutelage of Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo, a tubercular petty thief and con artist. The film explored late 1960s New York and the development of an unlikely, but poignant friendship between the two main characters. Directed by John Schlesinger and based on a novel by James Leo Herlihy, the film struck a chord with critics and audiences.
Because of its controversial themes, the film was released with an X rating and would make history by being the only X-rated feature to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Both Voight and co-star Hoffman were nominated for Best Actor, but lost out to John Wayne in True Grit. In 1970, Voight appeared in Mike Nichols' adaptation of Catch-22, re-teamed with director Paul Williams to star in The Revolutionary, as a left wing college student struggling with his conscience. Voight next starred in 1972's Deliverance. Directed by John Boorman, from a script that poet James Dickey had helped to adapt from his own novel of the same name, it tells the story of a canoe trip in a feral, backwoods America. Both the film and the performances of Voight and co-star Burt Reynolds received great critical acclaim, were popular with audiences. Voight appeared at the Studio Arena Theater, in Buffalo, New York in the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire from 1973-74 as Stanley Kowalski. Voight played a directionless young boxer in 1973's The All American Boy appeared in th
