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Lisa Marie Presley to be laid to rest at Graceland

Reuters published this article:Singer Lisa Marie Presley will be laid to rest at Graceland, the Memphis mansion she inherited from her father Elvis Presley, the "King of Rock 'n' Roll," a representative for her daughter said on Friday.Presley died on Thursday at the age of 54 after being rushed to a Los Angeles area hospital after reportedly suffering cardiac arrest at her home."Lisa Marie’s final resting place will be at Graceland, next to her beloved son Ben," said a representative for her 33-year-old daughter Riley Keough, an actress. She is also survived by twin 14-year-old daughters Finley and Harper.Two days earlier, Lisa Marie Presley had appeared with her mother Priscilla Presley at the Golden Globe Awards, where actor Austin Butler won the best actor award for portraying her father in the film "Elvis" and paid tribute to both women in his acceptance speech."My heart is completely shattered for Riley, Finley, Harper and Priscilla at the tragic and unexpected loss of Lisa Marie," Butler said in a statement on Friday."I am eternally grateful for the time I was lucky enough to be near her bright light and will forever cherish the quiet moments we shared. Her warmth, her love and her authenticity will always be remembered."Benjamin Keough died in 2020 at age 27, a death ruled a suicide by the Los Angeles County coroner.Lisa Marie Presley remembered her son in an essay this year for People magazine that she posted on Instagram, describing herself as "destroyed" by his death.As the only daughter of Elvis Presley, Lisa Marie became the owner of her father's Graceland mansion, a popular tourist attraction in the city. She was nine when Elvis died there of heart failure in August 1977, aged 42.Elvis Presley and other members of his family are buried at Graceland's Meditation Garden.Tributes to Lisa Marie Presley continued to pour in on Friday."Over the last year, the entire Elvis movie family and I have felt the privilege of Lisa Marie’s kind embrace," Baz Luhrmann, the director of "Elvis", said on Instagram."Her sudden, shocking loss has devastated people all around the world."In the celebrity spotlight since her birth, Lisa Marie began her own music career with a 2003 debut album "To Whom It May Concern."That was followed by 2005's "Now What," and both hit the top 10 of the Billboard 200 album chart. A third album, "Storm and Grace," was released in 2012. Singer Billy Idol posted a picture of them together on Twitter and said she had been "very loving 2 me", adding, "In Memphis in the 90’s she gave me a viewing of the private sections of Graceland which was very special."Lisa Marie Presley is survived by her mother, daughter Riley Keough, and 14-year-old twin daughters Harper and Finley Lockwood.

14-01-2023 11:19

13 Actors Who Turned Down Movie Roles Then Massively Regretted It

The Independent published this article:Brad Pitt as Neo? Josh Hartnett as Batman? Halle Berry as the lady that drives the bus in Speed? Believe it or not, all of the above would have happened if those actors had said “yes”. Dive into the history of Hollywood and most incredibly famous characters were nearly played by someone else. Those early and ultimately aborted casting decisions just don’t tend to get talked about.Sometimes, though, actors are very open about the high-profile parts they turned down, and the pangs of regret left behind once those films are actually made.Imagine a world in which Leonardo DiCaprio was the star of a beloved drama about the porn industry and not Titanic, or Reese Witherspoon didn’t play Legally Blonde’s Elle Woods. Shudder. Here are 13 actors who turned their nose up at iconic movies, only to feel very silly about it later on.Denzel Washington in Se7enAsked in 2012 if there were roles he turned down that he should have taken, Washington answered quickly: “Se7en and Michael Clayton”. The Oscar winner said that Tony Gilroy’s corporate thriller Michael Clayton “was the best material I had read in a long time … I was nervous about a first-time director, and I was wrong”. George Clooney ended up playing the role instead.While Washington didn’t offer an explanation as to why he turned down Se7en (it is unclear if he would have played the veteran detective or the cocky rookie, embodied in the end by Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, respectively), it may have been for a similar reason: director David Fincher had only directed one film before Se7en, and that was the disastrous Alien 3.Oddly, Washington ended up starring in a number of Se7en-esque serial killer thrillers made in the aftermath, including 1999’s The Bone Collector and 2021’s The Little Things.Leonardo DiCaprio in Boogie NightsLeonardo DiCaprio as prolific porn star Dirk Diggler? It could have happened. In 2008, DiCaprio confirmed that he turned down the starring role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights – which ultimately made Mark Wahlberg a star – in order to do Titanic instead. He had a meeting with Anderson about the role, but got spooked by the filmmaker’s relative lack of experience at the time. Boogie Nights was Anderson’s second film after 1996’s little-seen Hard Eight.“Boogie Nights is a movie I loved and I wish I would’ve done,” DiCaprio told GQ. Asked whether he’d reject Titanic instead if he could go back in time, DiCaprio was stumped. “I’m not saying I would have. But it would have been a different direction, career wise. I think they’re both great and wish I could have done them both … The truth is, if I’d not done Titanic, I wouldn’t be able to do the types of movies or have the career I have now, for sure. But it would have been interesting to see if I had gone the other way.”Madonna in The MatrixMadonna has never been one for regrets, instead admirably sticking by creative decisions even if they get her jeered at, laughed at or criticised. But she did fess up to one movie role she shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss. “I turned down the role in The Matrix,” she told Jimmy Fallon during a TV appearance this year. “Can you believe that? I wanna kill myself. That’s, like, one of the best movies ever made. A teeny-tiny part of me regrets just that one moment in my life.”Madonna didn’t confirm which role she turned down in the 1999 film, but presumably it was the female lead Trinity, who was ultimately played by Carrie-Anne Moss. During the same interview, Madonna also confirmed rumours that she turned down the role of Catwoman in Batman Returns, and Nomi Malone in the notorious Showgirls. “I saw them both, and I regret that I turned down Catwoman, that was pretty fierce. Showgirls? No.”Brad Pitt in The MatrixSpeaking of The Matrix, Brad Pitt has also expressed regret about turning down the role of Neo. “I took the red pill,” he joked in 2020, referencing the choice in the film between having total clarity or remaining in blissful ignorance. “I come from a place, maybe it’s my upbringing, [where] if I didn’t get it, then it wasn’t mine. I really believe [the role] was never mine. It was someone else’s.”Keanu Reeves ended up playing Neo, of course, while Pitt suggested during the same interview that The Matrix is just one of the massive movies he said “no” to. “If we were doing a show on the great movies I’ve passed on, we would need two nights,” he joked.Will Smith in The MatrixAnd just to drive home the fact that very few actors seemed to any faith in The Matrix, Will Smith also turned down the starring role. In 2019, Smith confirmed a long-standing rumour that he rejected the Neo part in favour of a far less adored movie.On his YouTube channel, Smith recalled meeting directors Lana and Lily Wachowski but struggling to understand their ideas for bullet-time, or the slow-motion effect that Neo masters in the movie.“So I made Wild Wild West [instead],” Smith confessed, referencing the notorious 1999 flop that he has spent more than 20 years regretting. “I’m not proud of it.”He did, however, argue that he wouldn’t have been as good in the role as Reeves. “Keanu was perfect, Laurence Fishburne was perfect, so I probably would have messed The Matrix up. I would have ruined it, so I did y’all a favour.”Matt Damon in AvatarWhile Damon hasn’t explicitly said that he regrets turning down James Cameron’s Avatar, he references the decision enough to suggest it still stings. In 2007, Damon was wooed by Cameron with the promise of not only starring in the film but also pocketing 10 per cent of the film’s gross. Avatar, which eventually starred Sam Worthington, ended up becoming the highest-grossing film in history. Meaning – drumroll, please – Damon lost out on an estimated $200m (£148m).“I’ve left more money on the table than any actor,” he told GQ in 2019. He added that his biggest regret is that it may have been his only opportunity to work with Cameron. “He works so infrequently … I realised in having to say no that I was probably passing on the chance to ever work with him. So that sucked and that’s still brutal. But my kids are all eating. I’m doing OK.”Christina Applegate in Legally BlondeIt’s hard to imagine Legally Blonde’s Elle Woods as anyone other than Reese Witherspoon, but it was actually Christina Applegate who was first approached to play her. Applegate revealed in 2015 that she turned down the part as she thought it was too similar to the character she played on the long-running sitcom Married… with Children.“I got scared of repeating myself,” she said. “What a stupid move that was, right? [But] Reese deserved that. She did a much better job than I ever could, and so that’s her life, that’s her path.”In a strange twist of fate, both Witherspoon and Applegate ended up playing sisters to Jennifer Aniston’s Rachel on Friends.Michael Keaton in Groundhog DayLike a Legally Blonde without Reese Witherspoon, it’s also difficult to imagine Groundhog Day without Bill Murray. But he wasn’t the studio’s first choice for the part of an acerbic weatherman stuck in a time loop. Rather, Michael Keaton was approached.Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2014, Keaton admitted that he had read the script in the early Nineties but “didn’t get it”. Of the character, Keaton said: “This guy sounds like the kind of wry, sardonic, glib young man I’ve played – and it ended up being so great. But you can’t do it better than Bill Murray did it.”Josh Hartnett in Batman BeginsJosh Hartnett has been open about turning down a role that would have transformed his life and career. In 2015, he admitted that Christopher Nolan had sought him out to play Batman, but that fear got the better of him. “I was so focused on not being pigeonholed and so scared of being considered only one thing as an actor,” he told Playboy Magazine.He realised he’d made a mistake when Nolan cast his eventual Batman, Christian Bale, in his Batman Begins follow-up The Prestige. “I decided [Batman] wasn’t for me. Then he didn’t want to put me in The Prestige. They not only hired their Batman for it, they also hired my girlfriend [Scarlett Johansson] at the time. That’s when I realised relationships were formed in the fire of that first Batman film, and I should have been part of the relationship with this guy Nolan, who I felt was incredibly cool and very talented.”Michelle Pfeiffer in The Silence of the LambsIn the early Nineties, Michelle Pfeiffer reportedly turned down a long list of massive roles, from Thelma & Louise and Pretty Woman to Basic Instinct and Sleepless in Seattle. While she said in 2017 that she had to turn down Thelma & Louise due to a scheduling conflict (“I still can’t watch it … it still kills me”), she’s admitted to regretting turning down The Silence of the Lambs, as it meant she didn’t get to work with the late filmmaker Jonathan Demme more than once.Demme directed Pfeiffer in 1988’s Married to the Mob, and always envisioned her for the role of rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling. But Pfeiffer got cold feet. “I was trepidatious,” she told The New Yorker earlier this year. “There was such evil in that film. It was that evil won in the end, that at the end of that film evil ruled out. I was uncomfortable with that ending. I didn’t want to put that out into the world.”Jodie Foster ended up winning an Oscar for the role.Halle Berry in SpeedSandra Bullock has Halle Berry to thank for inadvertently making her a star. While promoting the 2019 sequel John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, Berry admitted that she could have starred alongside Keanu Reeves decades earlier, as she was nearly cast in the runaway bus thriller Speed.“I was offered Speed before Sandra Bullock,” Berry told Entertainment Tonight. “I stupidly said no. But in my defence, when I read the script the bus didn’t leave the parking lot.”Bullock ended up playing Annie, who is tasked with driving a bus rigged with explosives. Berry said that she came to regret turning down the part. “I see the movie and I’m like, arrrghhh.”Bruce Willis in GhostWillis and Demi Moore were a couple at the time they were both sent the script for the romantic drama Ghost in 1989 – but only one of them ended up doing it. While Moore starred alongside Patrick Swayze and Whoopi Goldberg in the film, which became the highest-grossing film of 1990, Willis found the whole concept confusing. A dead man attempting to help his grieving girlfriend move on while simultaneously solving his own murder? Pfft.

15-01-2023 16:57

Italian Screen Star Gina Lollobrigida Dies at 95

BBC published this article:Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, one of the biggest stars of European cinema in the 1950s and '60s, has died at the age of 95.Often described as "the most beautiful woman in the world", her films included Crossed Swords, the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Beautiful But Dangerous.She co-starred alongside the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra, Rock Hudson and Errol Flynn.Her career faded in the 1960s and she moved into photography and politics.Nicknamed Lo Lollo, she was one of the last surviving icons of the glory days of film, who Bogart said "made Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple".Movie mogul Howard Hughes showered her with marriage proposals. Off camera, she enjoyed a feud with fellow Italian star Sophia Loren.Culture minister Gennaro Sangiuliano wrote on Twitter: "Farewell to a diva of the silver screen, protagonist of more than half a century of Italian cinema history. Her charm will remain eternal."She died in a Rome clinic, her former lawyer Giulia Citani told the Reuters news agency.Colourful life storyLuigina Lollobrigida was born on 4 July, 1927. The daughter of a furniture manufacturer, Gina spent her teenage years avoiding wartime bombing raids before studying sculpture at Rome's Academy of Fine Arts.A talent scout offered her an audition at Cinecitta - then the largest film studio in Europe and Italy's thriving "Hollywood on the Tiber".Lollobrigida wasn't keen. "I refused when they offered me my first role," she recalled. "So, they said they would pay me a thousand lire. I told them my price was one million lire, thinking that would put a stop to the whole thing. But they said yes!"In 1947, she entered the Miss Italia beauty pageant - a competition that launched many notable careers - and came third. Two years later, she married a Slovenian doctor, Milko Skofic.Skofic took some bikini-clad publicity shots of his new - and still relatively unknown - wife. Six thousand miles away in Hollywood, the world's richest man sat up.InfatuationHughes had just taken control of a major studio. He was more than 20 years older than Lollobrigida and famous for a string of affairs with the most glamorous women of the age - including Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner.He tracked Lollobrigida down and offered a screen test. She accepted, expecting her husband to accompany her to America. On the day of departure, only one of the tickets Hughes had promised showed up.Hughes had divorce lawyers waiting at the airport. She was installed in a luxury hotel, given a secretary and a chauffeur, and bombarded with proposals.He had prepared everything. Even the screen test turned out to be a scene about the end of a marriage.The trip lasted nearly three months. She saw him daily - fending off pass after pass. To avoid the press, they often ate at cheap restaurants or in the back of his car.Although the behaviour was clearly abusive, Lollobrigida said she enjoyed the attention. "He was very tall, very interesting," she later recalled. "Much more interesting than my husband."Before she departed for Rome, Hughes presented her with a seven-year contract. It made it hugely expensive for any other US studio to hire her. "I signed it because I wanted to go home," she said.Hughes didn't give up. His lawyers pursued her as far as the Algerian desert - where she was making a film. Her husband was understanding about the decade-long infatuation. He'd even play the lawyers at tennis.StardomAvoiding Hollywood, Gina worked in France and Italy - making films such as The Wayward Wife and Bread, Love and Dreams.Her first English-language picture - opposite Bogart in John Huston's Beat the Devil - was shot on the Amalfi coast, and was the beginning of a series of starring roles alongside the world's most glamorous men.In Crossed Swords it was Flynn; in the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Antony Quinn. She realised her celebrity was global when 60,000 turned up to greet her in Argentina. They included the country's dashing president, Juan Peron.She won awards for Beautiful But Dangerous - as an orphan opposite one of Italy's finest actors, Vittorio Gassman. She played a manipulative circus performer in Trapeze, with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis.She disliked Sinatra, with whom she starred in Never So Few - a wartime romance shot in Myanmar and Thailand. He was late on set and got shirty when she complained. "Zero sense of humour," she said.And disaster struck her next project. Two-thirds of Solomon and Sheba had been filmed when her co-star, Tyrone Power, had a heart attack filming a sword fight in Madrid.One version of the story says Power died in Lollobrigida's car on the way to hospital. Another suggests he passed away in his dressing room and was "walked" out of the studio - a scarf tied round his jaw to stop it sagging.Whatever the truth, Power's scenes were reshot with Yul Brynner. The film shocked late-1950s Hollywood with an orgy scene, albeit one where all were fully clothed.

16-01-2023 15:22

Jay Briscoe, US pro wrestling star, dead at 38

CNN published this article:Professional wrestler Jay Briscoe has died at age 38.The US wrestling world is in shock following the announcement of the death of the Ring of Honor (ROH) star, whose real name was Jamin Pugh.Tony Khan, CEO of All Elite Wrestling and owner of ROH, announced the news on Twitter.He wrote: “Sadly, Jamin Pugh has passed away. Known to fans as Jay Briscoe, he was a star in ROH for over 20 years, from the first show until today.“Jay and his brother Mark dominated ROH, reigning as champions to this day.“We’ll do whatever we can to support his family.“Rest In Peace Jamin.”A statement on ROH’s website said: “It is with a heavy heart that we mourn the tragic passing of Jamin Pugh, known to wrestling fans around the world as Jay Briscoe. Our thoughts are with his family, his friends, and his fans.”Numerous wrestling sites have reported that Pugh died in a car accident in Laurel, Delaware on Tuesday.CNN affiliate WMDT reports that two people were killed in the crash, citing Delaware State Police.Delaware police tweeted about the accident, but didn’t identify those involved. The tweet, posted late Tuesday, said: “Laurel Road at Little Hill Road will be closed for an extended period due to a fatal accident. DSP on-scene.”CNN has contacted Delaware State Police for comment.Laurel School District posted on Facebook on Tuesday that it would be closed on Wednesday following the incident. It said: “Due to an unthinkable tragedy in our community this evening, The Laurel School District will be closed for tomorrow, Wednesday January 18, 2023. Schools will reopen on Thursday. Please keep the Pugh family in your thoughts and prayers.”Pugh and his brother Mark, known as Dem Boys, were 12-time ROH World Tag Team Champions.

18-01-2023 18:01

Lisa Marie Presley to be laid to rest at Graceland

13 Actors Who Turned Down Movie Roles Then Massively Regretted It

Italian Screen Star Gina Lollobrigida Dies at 95

Jay Briscoe, US pro wrestling star, dead at 38

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Grey's Anatomy star Eric Dane dies at 53

Harry Styles is curating a London festival

Dawson's Creek stars lead tributes to James Van Der Beek

Britney Spears Sells Rights to Entire Music Catalogue

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Lisa Marie Presley to be laid to rest at Graceland

13 Actors Who Turned Down Movie Roles Then Massively Regretted It

Italian Screen Star Gina Lollobrigida Dies at 95

Jay Briscoe, US pro wrestling star, dead at 38

{{ article.title }}

{{safeHTML(article.Text)}}

Grey's Anatomy star Eric Dane dies at 53

Harry Styles is curating a London festival

Dawson's Creek stars lead tributes to James Van Der Beek

Britney Spears Sells Rights to Entire Music Catalogue

{{ article.title }}

{{safeHTML(article.Text)}}