'Sopranos' cast mum on final season
PASADENA -- Remember The Sopranos? The little mob drama was a bit of a hit a few years back. Fans will have waited 22 months before the next new episode airs March 12 at 9 p.m. on The Movie Network.
And, yes, this is it. Creator/writer/producer David Chase confirmed that there will be 12 new episodes, then eight, then that's it.
James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano), Edie Falco (Carmela), Lorraine Bracco (Dr. Melfi) and Michael Imperioli (Christopher) all joined Chase at HBO's portion of yesterday's press tour. Did they spill the beans about the finale?
Fuggeddaboudit.
In the half-hour session and again later out in the hall of the hotel, critics tried every which way to squeeze the actors for info. Gandolfini was mobbed like a rock star, backed against a wall and surrounded by digital recorders. Might as well try to get Paulie Walnuts to sing. Chase has them all sworn to secrecy.
Critics were shown a terrific clip reel with the juicy voice-over from Richard III, "Now is the winter of our discontent..." Was this some sort of Shakespearean clue to Tony's final fate?
"Nah, it's just a stupid line of dialogue," Chase said after the session.
Here's what we do know: After the next 12 episodes, the series will take another six-month break before coming back in January of 2007 with the final eight.
Production on episode 11 starts next week in New York. After shooting No. 12, the actors will break until June before shooting the final eight. Chase will keep writing. All swore they didn't know how it would end -- including Chase, although obviously he has some idea.
Will Tony and the gang stop going on, or just go on without us, asked the clever critic from Miami. "They're going on without you," quipped Chase, who admired the question but wanted the dude whacked for asking it.
"Truth is, both really. Obviously, they're not all going to go up in a nuclear cloud." Here's what we do know:
* Among the guest stars this season will be Ben Kingsley, who plays Ben Kingsley. Chase hinted after the session that it all has to do with a movie being made. Maybe Christopher finally sold that script.
* Julianna Margulies plays a real estate agent. Does she have an affair with Tony -- or even Carmela? "Can't say," Falco said.
* Hal Holbrook plays a scientist who becomes involved with the mob. "That happens to Hal Holbrook all the time," Chase said.
* Anthony Jr. (Robert Iler), along with Christopher, will have big years. So will Paulie, if the clip reel rings true.
Will guys get whacked? You bet. Does the cast have some sort of ritual when somebody is killed off?
"We take them to dinner," Imperioli said. "When you're asked to go out to dinner, it's not such a good thing."
The story will pick up in real time, nearly two years after the fifth season finale. After the capture and trial of rival boss Johnny Sack (Vincent Curatola), there is a ripple effect. People are dissatisfied, suggested Imperioli. "Disquieted," Chase corrected.
Discontented? Viewers may be after such a long wait. Has the show lost its thunder? "Nobody signed anything to watch this show," Falco said. "If they find something else to watch, God bless them."
And what about Gandolfini? He didn't sound as discontented yesterday as he has in the past. He's developing other projects (including a spin as Ernest Hemingway). Will he forever be typecast as Tony? Gandolfini shrugged. "What am I gonna do?"
Besides, he was a virtual unknown, along with the rest of the cast (except Bracco), when The Sopranos began. The show has changed his life, both good and bad, and he can live with that. He says he's learned all he needs to know about "success and money and celebrity." At this point, he knows what's important.
Sure, there were times inside his trailer in Long Island in the middle of the night when he felt "mobbed out." Then he sees yesterday's clever clip reel and goes, "Wow! This is good stuff. It's been a great ride in many ways."
Rapper Eminem, ex-wife remarry
ROCHESTER HILLS, Michigan (Reuters) - Rapper Eminem and his former wife remarried on Saturday, five years after an ugly divorce ruptured their turbulent relationship.
Eminem, whose real name is Marshall Mathers III, and Kimberly Mathers exchanged vows in a small and tightly guarded ceremony at Meadow Brook Hall in Rochester Hills, near Detroit.
Journalists and fans crowded the entrance to the grounds around the hall -- a popular wedding site on the Oakland University campus -- as guests began arriving in the afternoon.
Little information was available from inside but Eminem's publicist, Dennis Dennehy, confirmed to Reuters that the wedding had taken place.
Among other guests, rapper 50 Cent's G-Unit hip-hop group arrived in an entourage of four sport utility vehicles.
Eminem, 33, arrived in a black limousine, sporting a red baseball hat.
The hip-hop superstar, whose 2000 hit "Kim" is a graphic rap fantasy about his wife's death, told a Detroit radio station last month the couple had reconciled and would probably remarry.
The Mathers first married in 1999 and their divorce, which prompted a custody battle over their 10-year-old daughter, was finalized in 2001.
Last year, Eminem was treated for addiction to a sleep medication and had to cancel his European tour. His greatest hits collection, "Curtain Call," was released in December.
Eminem has denied he plans to retire but suggested he could take a break from recording and performing.
"I'm at a point in my life right now where I feel like I don't know where my career is going right now," he told Detroit radio station WKQI-FM last month in the only interview he granted to promote the album.
Oscar Winner Shelley Winters Dies at 85
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Shelley Winters, the forceful, outspoken star who graduated from blond bombshell parts to dramas, winning Academy Awards as supporting actress in "The Diary of Anne Frank" and "A Patch of Blue," has died. She was 85.
Winters died of heart failure early Saturday at The Rehabilitation Centre of Beverly Hills, her publicist Dale Olson said. She had been hospitalized in October after suffering a heart attack.
The actress sustained her long career by repeatedly reinventing herself. Starting as a nightclub chorus girl, advanced to supporting roles in New York plays, then became famous as a Hollywood sexpot.
A devotee of the Actors Studio, she switched to serious roles as she matured. Her Oscars were for her portrayal of mothers. Still working well into her 70s, she had a recurring role as Roseanne's grandmother on the 1990s TV show "Roseanne."
"I am so sad. She was a great person and a genius to work with," Roseanne Barr said in a statement. "We will all miss her."
"Shelley was an idol of mine — and many — an extraordinary woman with powerful charisma, enormous talent and a keen, perceptive mind," said longtime friend and actress Connie Stevens.
In 1959's "The Diary of Anne Frank," she was Petronella Van Daan, mother of Peter Van Daan and one of eight real-life Jewish refugees in World War II Holland who hid for more than a year in cramped quarters until they were betrayed and sent to Nazi death camps. The socially conscious Winters donated her Oscar statuette to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
In 1965's "Patch of Blue," she portrayed a hateful, foul-mouthed mother who tries to keep her blind daughter, who is white, apart from the kind black man who has befriended her.
Ever vocal on social and political matters, Winters was a favored guest on television talk shows, and she demonstrated her frankness in two autobiographies: "Shelley, Also Known as Shirley" (1980) and "Shelley II: The Middle of My Century" (1989).
Winters wrote openly in them of her romances with Burt Lancaster, William Holden, Marlon Brando, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable and other leading men. She also said after she came to Hollywood in the mid-1940s she was roommates with another rising starlet — Marilyn Monroe.
"I've had it all," she exulted after her first book became a best seller. "I'm excited about the literary aspects of my career. My concentration is there now."
Typically Winters, she also had a complaint about her literary fame: While reviewers treated her book as a serious human document, she said, talk show hosts Phil Donohue and Johnny Carson "only want to know about my love affairs."
Winters, whose given name was Shirley Schrift, was appearing in the Broadway hit "Rosalinda" when Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn offered her a screen test. A Columbia contact and a new name — Shelley Winters — followed, but all the good roles at the studio were going to Jean Arthur in those days.
Winters' early films included such light fare as "Knickerbocker Holiday," "Sailor's Holiday," "Cover Girl," "Tonight and Every Night" and "Red River."
When her contract ended, Winters returned to New York as Ado Annie in "Oklahoma!"
She would soon be called back and signed to a seven-year contract at Universal, where she was transformed into a blonde bombshell. She vamped her way through a number of potboilers for the studio, including "South Sea Sinner," with Liberace as her dance-hall pianist, and "Frenchie," as wild saloon owner Frenchie Fontaine, out to avenge her father's murder.
The only hint of her future as an actress came in 1948's "A Double Life" as a trashy waitress strangled by a Shakespearian actor, Ronald Colman. The role won Colman an Oscar.
"A Place in the Sun" in 1951 brought her first Oscar nomination and established her as a serious actress. She desperately sought the role of the pregnant factory girl drowned by Montgomery Clift so he could marry Elizabeth Taylor. The director, George Stevens, rejected her at first for being too sexy.
"So I scrubbed off all my makeup, pulled my hair back and sat next to him at the Hollywood Athletic Club without his even recognizing me because I looked so plain. That got me the part," she recalled in a 1962 interview.
Winters received her final Oscar nomination, for 1972's "The Poseidon Adventure," in which she was one of a handful of passengers scrambling desperately to survive aboard an ocean liner turned upside down by a tidal wave. By then she had put on a good deal of weight, and following a scene in which her character must swim frantically she charmed audiences with the line: "In the water I'm a very skinny lady."
Although she was in demand as a character actress, Winters continued to study her craft. She attended Charles Laughton's Shakespeare classes and worked at the Actors Studio, both as student and teacher. She appeared on Broadway as the distraught wife of a drug addict in "A Hatful of Rain" and as the Marx Brothers' mother in "Minnie's Boys."
Among her other notable films: "Night of the Hunter," "Executive Suite," "I Am a Camera," "The Big Knife," "Odds Against Tomorrow," "The Young Savages," "Lolita," "The Chapman Report," "The Greatest Story Ever Told," "A House Is Not a Home," "Alfie," "Harper," "Pete's Dragon," "Stepping Out" and "Over the Brooklyn Bridge."
During her 50 years as a widely known personality, Winters was rarely out of the news. Her stormy marriages, her romances with famous stars, her forays into politics and feminist causes kept her name before the public. She delighted in giving provocative interviews and seemed to have an opinion on everything.
Robert Mitchum once told her: "Shelley, arguing with you is like trying to hold a conversation with a swarm of bumblebees."
The revelations in her autobiographies provided endless material for interviewers and gossip writers. She wrote of an enchanted evening when she and Burt Lancaster attended "South Pacific" in New York, dined elegantly, then retired to his hotel room.
"This chance meeting proved to be the beginning of a long but painful romance," she wrote. "Despite the immediate and powerful chemistry between us, the love and the friendship, some wise part of me knew that he would never abandon his children while they were young and needed him."
She also told of a dalliance with William Holden after a studio Christmas party. In a glamorous, real-life version of the play "Same Time, Next Year," they continued their annual Yuletide rendezvous for seven years.
She wrote that despite their intimacy, they continued to refer to each other as "Mr. Holden" and "Miss Winters," and when they met on the set of the 1981 film "S.O.B." she said, "Hello, Mr. Holden." He smiled and replied, "Shelley, after your book, I think you should call me Bill."
Shirley Schrift was born on Aug. 18, 1920, and grew up New York, where she appeared in high school plays.
"My childhood is a blur of memories," she wrote in the first of her autobiographies. "Money was so scarce in my family that at the age of 9 I was selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door.
"It was during this stage of my life that I developed a whole fantasy world; reality was too unbearable. Every chance I got, I was at the movies. I adored them."
Working as a chorus girl and garment district model helped finance her drama studies. She gained practical training by appearing in plays and musicals on the summer Borscht Circuit in the Catskill mountains.
During the Detroit run of a musical revue, she married businessman Paul "Mack" Mayer on Jan. 1, 1942. He entered the Army Air Corps, and after the war, the pair found they had little in common. They divorced in 1948.
Winters' second and third marriages were brief and tempestuous: to Vittorio Gassman (1952-1954) and Anthony Franciosa (1957-1960). The combination of a Jewish Brooklynite and Italian actors seemed destined to produce fireworks, and both unions resulted in headlines.
A daughter, Vittoria, resulted from the marriage to Gassman. She became a successful physician.