Thursday, April 26, 2012

04/26 Robert Conrad


The show is all about you! Your letters, your emails and YOUR calls! It's a love-fest between you and Robert Conrad!

Thursday, April 19, 2012

04/19 Jane Badler

Badler spent her teen years in Great Neck, New York, moving to Manchester, New Hampshire, when she was in high school. Badler won the title Miss New Hampshire and competed at the 1973 Miss America Pageant. Subsequently, she enrolled at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, to study drama.

Badler's first television role was Melinda Cramer Janssen on the American daytime soap opera One Life to Live, which she played from 1977 to 1981 and again in 1983. During her run, she also appeared in a 1979 episode of the primetime series Fantasy Island. Badler also starred on the daytime soap opera The Doctors as Natalie Bell from 1981-82.

Badler then won her most prominent role, that of the villainous alien Diana in the 1983 NBC sci-fi miniseries V. She reprised the role in the 1984 sequel miniseries V: The Final Battle and again in V: The Series, which ran for one season from 1984 to 1985.


Following V, Badler co-starred with José Ferrer in the made-for-TV supernatural thriller Covenant. The following year she guest-starred as Meredith Braxton throughout the 1986-87 season of the CBS primetime soap opera Falcon Crest. Her other guest appearances during the 1980s included Riptide, Hotel, and Murder, She Wrote. In 1987, she played the role of Tania Winthrop in the short-lived action-adventure series The Highwayman. She then traveled to Australia to play agent Shannon Reed in the 1980s revival of Mission: Impossible, joining the series midway through its first season (replacing actress Terry Markwell, and her character of Casey Randall); then stayed with the series for its second season before it was cancelled in early 1990. After the series ended, Badler moved to Australia permanently and married businessman Stephen Hains. They have two sons, Sam and Harry. She later appeared on the Australian game show Cluedo from 1992 to 1993, and had a guest-starring role in Snowy River: The McGregor Saga in 1995.

In March 2010, Badler was cast as the villainous Diana Marshall in the Australian soap opera Neighbours. She had a four-month guest contract with the show.
A remake of V premiered in late 2009, and although this version did not include the character of Diana, the series' executive producer, Scott Peters, suggested that Badler and other stars from the original version may be offered guest roles as new characters. In August 2010, it was announced that Badler would be joining the series as a new character named Diana, the mother of the Visitors' evil leader Anna (Morena Baccarin). Badler appeared in nine of the second season's ten episodes, commencing in January 2011. In the second season finale, her character was apparently killed by Anna, and ABC decided to not renew the series for a third season (although the fan campaign "Project Alice" is reported to be campaigning to Warner Bros. to renew the show on a different network).
Music and theatre career

Already an able singer when she competed in the Miss New Hampshire and Miss America Pageants, Badler forged a career in cabaret and on the stage in the 2005 Magnormos production of archy & mehitabel, directed by Aaron Joyner and based on Don Marquis's books of poetry, The Great Gatsby, Sextet, The Singing Forest, Big Hair in America, and her one-woman show, Shakin' the Blues Away in which she also sang. Other productions in which she appeared for Magnormos included a concert of the musical Rebecca and OzMade Musicals.

Badler released her debut album (backed by the Melbourne-based band Sir) on June 1, 2008. Titled The Devil Has My Double, it is an autobiographical album which has been described as "a compulsive mix of fame, sex and solitude, set to a sweeping soundtrack of cold soul and passionate synthetics." As part of promotion for the album, she gave an extensive interview about her work to the Boxcutters podcast.
Badler released her second album, Tears Again, in 2011 and was also signed by 1house Management in 2011 in which she is listed on the website. Jane is currently writing her Third album with Matt Thomas (Matt Doll) and Byron Bouboulas (Byron St John) of bands The Blow Waves.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

04/12 Frances Fisher

Frances Fisher (born 11 May 1952) is a British-American actress. She is known for her work on television, in theater and in films, including roles as Strawberry Alice, the madame in Unforgiven (1992), and Ruth DeWitt Bukater, the mother of Kate Winslet's Rose DeWitt Bukater in Titanic (1997).

Fisher was born in Milford on Sea, Hampshire, England, the daughter of Olga (née Moen), a homemaker, and William I. "Bill" Fisher, Sr., an oil refinery construction superintendent. Before she reached the age of fifteen, she had moved nine times because of her father's job. Upon completing high school in Orange, Texas, she worked as a secretary, until she moved to Virginia to perform at the Barter Theatre.

Fisher first made a name for herself playing Detective Deborah Saxon on the soap opera The Edge of Night from 1976 to 1981; she later was in the cast of Guiding Light as Suzette Saxon. She then spent the next 10 years working on stage in New York and in regional theatres all over the East Coast. Fisher was cast as Lucille Ball in the television film Lucy & Desi: Before the Laughter, which aired to strong ratings and good reviews in 1991.

Fisher has played numerous roles on American television, including parts in the series Strange Luck, Becker, and Titus. She also played a key role in the recent television drama The Lyon's Den and Glory Days. She was the producers' first choice to play Jill Taylor on the ABC sitcom Home Improvement, but was replaced by Patricia Richardson due to a lack of chemistry with Tim Allen. She also had a guest spot on The Young Riders in 1991. Fisher has guest starred as a bartender, Suzanna, at "The Lobo" in the first season of Roseanne. However, her most famous role has been that of society matron Ruth DeWitt Bukater, the mother of Rose DeWitt Bukater (played by Kate Winslet), in the 1997 blockbuster film Titanic.

In 1999, Fisher portrayed Audrey Hepburn's mother, Ella Hepburn, in the biographical film of the actress's life. She has appeared in two other Academy Awarded films, House of Sand and Fog and Unforgiven. Her numerous theatre credits make up the bulk of her resume: Most recently, she appeared in the last play written by Arthur Miller, Finishing the Picture at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and The Cherry Orchard, at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2006.

Fisher worked on four films in 2006, including Peter Berg's The Kingdom, and Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah, in addition to a pilot for NBC/USA entitled To Love and Die. In 2008, she appeared in a guest-starring role on the Sci-Fi Channel television series Eureka, portraying the character of Eva Thorne. In 2011, she appeared in Torchwood: Miracle Day.

She served on the national board of directors of the Screen Actors Guild.

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Thursday, April 5, 2012

04/05 Ed Asner

Asner was born Eddie Asn. in Kansas City, Missouri, but was raised in nearby Kansas City, Kansas. His Russian-born parents, Lizzie (née Seliger), a housewife, and Morris David Asner, ran a second-hand shop. He was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family. Asner attended Wyandotte High School and the University of Chicago. He served with the U.S. Army Signal Corps and appeared in plays that toured Army camps in Europe.

Following his military service, Asner joined the Playwrights Theatre Company in Chicago, but left for New York before members of that company regrouped as the Compass Players in the mid-1950s. He later made guest appearances with the successor to Compass, The Second City, and is considered part of The Second City extended family. In New York, Asner played Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum in the acclaimed Broadway revival of Threepenny Opera, and began to make inroads as a television actor.

Before he landed his role with Mary Tyler Moore, Asner guest-starred in such television series as NBC's The Outlaws (1962), in the series finale of CBS's The Reporter, Mission: Impossible and The Invaders.

Asner is best known for his character Lou Grant, who was first introduced on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970. In 1977, after the end of the Mary Tyler Moore show, Asner's character was given his own show, Lou Grant, which ran from 1977-1982. In contrast to the Mary Tyler Moore show, which was a thirty minute comedy, the Lou Grant show was an hour long award-winning drama about journalism. (For his role as Grant, Asner is the only actor to win the Emmy award for a sitcom and a drama for the same role.) Other TV series starring Asner in regular roles include Thunder Alley, The Bronx Zoo, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. He also portrayed diamond smuggler August March in a 1975 episode of the original Hawaii Five-O and, recently, he reprised the role in the Hawaii Five-0 remake.

Asner was acclaimed for his role in the miniseries Roots, as Captain Davies, the man who kidnapped Kunta Kinte and sold him into slavery, despite his own moral conflicts. The role that earned Asner an Emmy Award, and for a similarly dark role as Axel Jordache in the mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man. In contrast, he played Pope John XXIII in Papa Giovanni: Ioannes XXIII, an Italian miniseries for RAI.

Asner has also had an extensive voice acting career. He provided the voices for J. Jonah Jameson on the 1990s animated television series Spider-Man, Hudson on Gargoyles, Jabba the Hutt on the radio version of Star Wars, Master Vrook from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel, Roland Daggett on Batman: The Animated Series, Cosgrove on Freakazoid!, Ed Wuncler on The Boondocks, and Granny Goodness in various DC Comics animated series. Asner has also provided voice-over narration for many documentaries and films of social activism.

More recently, Asner provided the voice of Carl Fredricksen in the Academy Award winning 2009 Pixar film Up. He received great critical praise for the role, with one critic going so far as to suggest "They should create a new category for this year's Academy Award for Best Vocal Acting in an Animated Film and name Asner as the first recipient."
He has appeared in a recurring segment, on Jay Leno's The Tonight Show, entitled "Does This Impress Ed Asner?"

He was cast in a Country Music Television comedy pilot, Regular Joe.
In 2001, Asner was the recipient of the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award.
Asner has won more Emmy Awards for performing than any other male actor (seven, including five for the role of Lou Grant). In 2003, he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame.

In July 2010, Asner completed recording sessions for Shattered Hopes: The True Story of the Amityville Murders which is a forthcoming documentary on the 1974 DeFeo murders in Amityville, New York. Asner serves as the narrator for the film, which covers a forensic analysis of the murders, the trial in which 23-year old DeFeo son Ronald DeFeo Jr., was convicted of the killings, and the subsequent "haunting" story which is revealed to be a hoax. In January 2011, Asner took a supporting role on CMT's first original sitcom Working Class. He made an appearance in the independent comedy feature Not Another B Movie, and had a small but pivotal role as billionaire Warren Buffett in HBO's 2011 economy drama Too Big to Fail .