HOLLYWOOD HUES
Car seva

THE 77-year-old Paul Newman hasn’t exactly walked into his golden sunset. In fact, the star of films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting is on the fast lane ever since he took a semi-retirement from acting. He has his own multi-million car racing team called the Newman-Haas.

The adrenalin-surging bug of car racing bit Newman almost three decades ago when he took to the wheel at the age of 46. He was in big budget films then and producers would watch with baited breath as he diced wheel-for-wheel at speeds exceeding 300 kmph.

"The danger is over-rated," he would claim. "It’s more dangerous crossing the street in New York. At least, on the track you know drivers are not drunk."

But races proved too dangerous for him and he was involved in a series of crashes and he gave active racing and set up the Newman-Haas team with the cigar-chewing Carl Haas, a veteran of all forms of motor racing in America. "For most of my life I’ve been hooked to films," says Newman, "but now racing is my life. I’m now a speed junkie."

Hollywood hulk Patrick Swayze still gets excited while doing a love scene in front of the camera. He has confessed in an interview that when it comes to steamy scenes he gets so carried away that he actually begins to fantasise about his leading ladies. In fact, the situation becomes so embarrassing that many leading actresses wince at scripts which include a sizzling scene with the Dirty Dancer.

Sensing the hostility, clever Swayze has hit upon on idea which has saved him from going out of business. Now, whenever a love scene has to be shot he brings along his wife, Lisa Miemi to keep a vigil. And the remedy has worked wonders. Swayze is known to be so much in love with Lisa that all the lust for his leading ladies disappears. "It’s a miracle cure," he says candidly. "Before I began bringing Lisa along, I was having a lot of problems with all the stunning girls of Hollywood."

Waiting for Marilyn

Marilyn Monroe, one of the most enigmatic actresses, has always excited public interest and generated sizzling gossip. And now, the film world is agog with the news that some long-lost clips of Marilyn Monroe, including one in the nude, have now been discovered and are being made into a film proving false the long-held belief that she was unable to work during the last few months of her life.

The clips are from her last film Something’s Got to Give. The movie could not be completed due to Monroe’s sudden death. Now, the old clips are being put together as a short film which would also have other scenes from the life of Marilyn. All of which is likely to be the most anticipated film venture the world over.

Frankly speaking

If Marilyn’s magic has stood the test of times so has that of legendary singer Frank Sinatra’s. In a new book Why Sinatra Wasn’t Frank author Warren Oates writes that the singer once narrowly missed a violent death at the hands of the mafia boss Sam Giancana when he failed to become his secret agent at the White House during the Kennedy days.

The book says that Ol’ Blue Eyes — as friends called Sinatra — escaped death because the Godfather Giancana was a fan of his music.

"It made all the sense in the world to ‘hit’ the man,’" says the author. "To let him get away with a botched job would mean losing the respect of your men. But the big fellow relented at the last moment sighing: I guess I like the guy. I like his singing. But if I didn’t like him, you can be goddamn sure he’d be a dead man".

Unlike his contemporaries, there’s hardly been any news about the man who set the secreens afire in the sixties with Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago. For years now, Omar Sharif has stayed out of the limelight preferring a life devoted to the game of bridge.

But now the 72-year-old Egyptian-born Sharif is back in circulation and has just completed a stunning film that could put him in the category of the greatest actors of our times and also make him equally controversial.

Monsieur Ibrahim is a tender love story set in Paris in the sixties between a lonely old Muslim shopkeeper and a Jewish teenager.

Calling it his comeback film, Sharif says he received plenty of offers during his years in hibernation but he wanted to pick up something that suited his style. And seeing him perform it would appear the good old days are back for Sharif.

"More than a movie it is a message," says Sharif who plays a silent exotic looking shopkeeper. "It’s an appeal to the world that life’s too short to be wasted in war and hatred. The Palestinians and Israelis should sit on a table and work out their differences." Are the two countries listening to this new peacenik?

— Newsmen Features

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