Miss Daisy's Cousin

Saturday night saw the opening of Driving Miss Daisy at the Theatre Royal. The play stars Hollywood greats Angela Lansbury and James Earl Jones. The pair are joined on stage by Broadway actor Boyd Gaines.

And at the opening night party as our exclusive pic shows it was a chance for Angela to meet her famous Australian cousin, Parliamentarian Malcolm Turnbull MP. Incidentally, Malcolm and wife Lucy's daughter is named Daisy.
 Malcolm's mother was  radio actor, writer and academic Carol Lansbury although he was brought up by his father when his parents separated.

Stage Heavyweights attend Awards

                                       The winners of the 2012 Sydney Theatre Awards have been announced with around 300 members of the Sydney theatre community attending the auditorium at Paddington RSL to cheer on their fellow thespians.
 International stage royalty presented awards including Angela Lansbury, James Earl Jones and Barry Humphries.
Best Mainstage Production went to Belvoir Street's Medea while Best Actor in a Leading Role of a Mainstage Production was won by Josh McConville for Griffin’s The Boys.

Angela Lansbury

Lucy Durack

James Earl Jones & wife Cecilia Hart

 Caroline Brazier won Best Actress in a Leading Role in an Independent Production for I Want To Sleep With Tom Stoppard, while James Lugton won Best Actor in a Leading Role in an Independent Production for The Taming of the Shrew.
 South Pacific was awarded Best Production of a Musical, while Lucy Durack won the Judith Johnson Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical for Legally Blonde, and Ben Lewis was awarded the Judith Johnson Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical for Love Never Dies.


 Wacky Hairstyle of The Month

David Lynch.  New York Social Diary

Pictured : filmmaker David Lynch with his magnificent cockatoo parrot inspired thatch at a recent fundraiser in New York for the David Lynch Foundation. Fab!

Meet Darth Vadar

 To the Langham Hotel in The Rocks to meet the stars of the play Driving Miss Daisy on the first day of rehearsals.
 Hollywood greats Angela Lansbury and James Earl Jones are in town to reprise their Broadway hit of the original play by Alfred Uhry.

Angela with Boyd Gaines

 The 1987 movie version won Australian director Bruce Beresford a few Oscars and took around $300M at the box office.


  Angela has been here once befiore- in 1959 where she lived for 4 months in Point Piper while she filmed Summer of The Seventeenth Doll with Earnest Borgnine, Ann Baxter and her pal John Mills. At the time she hired a car and drove around NSW with her children exploring the state.
 On this visit she and James Earl Jones, who was famously the voice of Darth Vadar in the Star Wars flicks will be touring for 5 months visiting Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide.

James was here ten years ago as a tourist and it's the first visit for 4 times Tony Award winner Boyd Gaines who completes the cast. With tickets selling like hotcakes it's another winner for producer John Frost- known as Frostie on Broadway but Mr Frost in London's West End.

The Shuttle caused a minor commotion when James Earl Jones asked which was the most 'right wing newspaper' in town. "They all are " replied the Shuttle accurately which went down well with the other media attending with one even apologising to the actors for gifting the world Rupert Murdoch.

And the big question of the morning for which we received no answer : just what was that monkey doing in the mural on the wall behind our esteemed thespians ?. Had a mischievous interior designer been inspired by Richard Nevile and the School Kid's Oz magazine ala Rupert Bear?
Below is a video we have uncovered of James Earl Jones channeling Justin Beiber.

Ernest Borgnine & Ethel Merman- a Saucy Tale

One of the movies Ernest Borgnine starred in was the US production of Australian Ray Lawler's successful play Summer Of The Seventeenth Doll which was filmed in Sydney in 1959.
Despite being a hit in Australia and the UK and re-named Season Of Passion for the US market, the movie didn't exactly wow the US critics despite it's all star cast of Borgnine, Ann Baxter and Angela Lansbury. One thought The tale of 2 cane cutters who travel to Melbourne for a few months of frivolity was actually a recruiting film for migrants with British actor John Mills' odd Anglo Aussie vocals.

Frank Wilson

The supporting cast and crew were Australian and many friendships were forged between the US & UK stars.
One was actor Frank Wilson who remained friends with Borgnine and visited him in LA in 1967 where Borgnine recounted an anecdote about his short lived marriage to the singing star Ethel Merman, a union that raised eyebrows in Hollywood as most assumed Ethel played for the other team and was known for her sharp tongue and quick wit. Wilson would later repeat it for friends.

Borgnine told Wilson that Merman and he fought like cats and dogs and after 3 weeks detested each other with Ernie beginning to criticize Ethel about her age. She was 58 and he 46 at the time.

Ernest said : "One day she came off the set of a film and said- 'the director said today I looked sensational. He said I had the face of a 20 year old, and the body and legs of a 30 year old' !"
I said : "did he say anything about your old cunt ?"."No" replied Ethel, "he didn't mention you at all".

Malcolm : Call Your Cousin Angela Lansbury Now

Malcolm & Lucy Turnbull

Former Federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has been having a hard time lately with Liberal Party supporters of the leader, Tony Mad Monk Abbott out to ensure Turnbull never becomes leader again.

Turnbull was never popular with the hard right. The self made millionaire, former barrister and banker (estimated worth : $300M) is seen as a bit of a latte sipping elitist probably more suited to the Labor Party which it's reputed he once tried to join.

The problem for the party is that Turnbull is  popular amongst the rank and file members who see Malcolm as their best bet to return to power, if only he could act like a politician. He does have a tendency to cut to the chase having come lately to politics.

Perhaps he should turn to his cousin  the legendary actress Angela Lansbury for acting lessons on how to present himself as a politician rather than a man in a hurry to get to the top job so he can show the country just how it should be done.

Lansbury was out last week in New York and attended the Actors Fund Annual Gala at the New York Marriott Hotel. As our picture show, she is remarkably fit looking and as large as life at the fabulous age of 87.

Angela Lansbury & Hunter Ryan Herdicka (Rob Rich)

Turnbull's mother was the academic and actress Coral Lansbury who is Angela's cousin. She split with Malcolm's father when he was nine and went to live, like Angela in the USA.

Turnbull is not only the richest politician in the country, he's probably one of the smartest as well. He worked for a  number of years as Kerry Packer's personal lawyer before taking on the might of Margaret Thacher's government in the famous Spy Catcher trial when he successfully defeated the British government's attempts to block publication of the memoirs of the former MI5 officer Peter Wright.

He made a motza with the merchant bank he started with Nicholas Whitlam, the son of former Labor PM Gough Whitlam and then sealed his fortune during the dot.com boom. As chairman of the Republican Movement Turnbull really felt the loss of the referendum when the country voted in 1998 to keep the British royal family as head of state.

Turnbull blamed the loss on the machinations of then PM John Howard  but he joined Howard's Liberal Party as a minister which most perceived as Howard's attempt to 'keep his enemies closer'.
When Turnbull produced an excellent paper on housing affordability recommending the adoption of European style housing associations and co-ops plus spending more on government housing, the paper was quietly shelved by Howard.

Turnbull is clearly in the wrong political party. He should ask his cousin for some tips. The Lansburys have long been on the left of the political spectrum. Angela's father was a politician and member of the British Communist Party and her grandfather was the leader of the British Labour Party.

Angela now lives in a New York apartment having returned from Ireland where she lived for a number of years. She starred in the film Gaslight when she was just 19 and went on to make a string of Hollywood films co-starring with the leading Hollywood stars of the day. She's probably most famous for the long running TV series Murder She Wrote.

At the Actors Fund Gala Bebe Neuwirth was honoured while Al Pacino received The Lee Strasberg Artistic Achievement Award

an invite

A stiffy arrives with a request to share Christmas drinks at the splendiferous Point Piper mansion of Federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull and his charming wife Lucy, former Sydney Lord Mayor.

Rhodes scholar Turnbull, a cousin of the famous US based British actress Angela Lansbury and Lucy, the niece of art critic Robert Hughes are under attack from within the Liberal Party as the rather odd Kevin Andrews announces he will challenge Malcolm this week for the leadership role.

Andrews-who fortunately has a head of wavy hair that grows blacker as he ages, is one of the reasons his party was thrown into the wilderness 2 years ago. It was he that bungled the Dr Mohamed Haneef debacle when the hapless Indian doctor was arrested at Brisbane Airport on his way home to visit his new-born child and incarcerated illegally for nearly 3 weeks by Federal police, following the Glasgow Airport terrorist bombing.

Haneef was a distant relation of one of the bombers and despite a Scotland Yard terrorism expert visiting Oz and declaring there was nothing in the matter, Andrews solemnly intoned there was a case to answer-as the cards came crashing down around him.

Dr Haneef now lives in the Middle East and is still negotiating a compensation settlement some say will be as high as $5M.

Turnbull-urbane, intelligent and very very rich, inexplicably  incurs suspicion from his party colleagues and the public alike and is possibly more to the left of the political spectrum than the ruling Labor Party. As a former merchant banker and solicitor to media mogul Kerry Packer he is worth about $200M. As a barrister he successfully defended former MI5 boss Peter Wright when the UK government attempted to ban his 'Spycatcher' book about his life as a top spy and prosecuted the case in the English courts for compensation over the Maralinga nuclear bomb testing site.

Although it seems unlikely he will topple the most popular PM ever, Kevin Rudd, the Liberals would be foolhardy to ditch him this soon. RSVP-invite accepted !
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footnote : The Maralinga bomb site makes Australia the most nuclear weapon bombed country on the planet with 8 major devices and numerous small ones being exploded between 1955 and 1963.