Joan Tewkesbury | |
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Born | Redlands, California, United States | April 8, 1936
Occupation(s) | Film and television actress, director, and screenwriter |
Joan Tewkesbury (born April 8, 1936) is an American film and television director, writer, producer, choreographer and actress. She had a long association with the celebrated director Robert Altman, writing the screenplays for Thieves Like Us (1974), and Nashville (1975), widely regarded as "Altman's masterpiece", and which earned her a nomination for the BAFTA Award for Best Screenplay. [1]
Tewkesbury was born in Redlands, California, the daughter of Frances M. (née Stevenson), a registered nurse, and Walter S. Tewkesbury, an office machine repairman.[ citation needed ] She began her career at age ten as a dancer in The Unfinished Dance with Margaret O'Brien and Cyd Charisse. One of her early television acting roles was in a guest appearance on the short-lived NBC drama It's a Man's World .
Tewkesbury collaborated with Altman on several of his films, including McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971, as a script supervisor) and Thieves Like Us (1974, her first credit as a feature writer). She then wrote Nashville, which she had proposed to Altman prior to his filming of McCabe & Mrs. Miller; he became interested in the setting and sent Tewkesbury to Nashville in the fall of 1973 to observe the area and its citizenry. [2] Tewkesbury's diary of her trip provided the basis for the screenplay, with many observations making it into the finished film, such as the highway pileup. [3] Tewkesbury wrote and directed numerous hours of episodic television, including for Disney, HBO, CBS, TNT, and NBC. She has also directed off-Broadway, co-choreographed and directed for the Oregon Ballet Theatre and performed, written and directed for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Her play, The Retrospective, was presented at the Manhattan Theatre Source.
In 2011, Tewkesbury published her first novel, Ebba and the Green Dresses of Olivia Gomez in a Time of Conflict and War. [4]
She has also taught screenwriting, at the University of Southern California, with her workshop “Designed Obstacles, Spontaneous Response” travelling throughout the United States, Israel, and Japan. [5] Since 2003, Tewkesbury has lived in Tesuque, New Mexico.
Robert Bernard Altman was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He was a five-time nominee of the Academy Award for Best Director and is considered an enduring figure from the New Hollywood era. His most famous directorial achievements include M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Nashville (1975), 3 Women (1977), The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993), Gosford Park (2001), and The Company (2003).
McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a 1971 American revisionist Western film directed by Robert Altman and starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. The screenplay by Altman and Brian McKay is based on the 1959 novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton. Altman referred to it as an "anti-Western" film because it ignores or subverts a number of Western conventions. It was filmed in British Columbia, Canada in the fall and winter of 1970, and premiered on June 24, 1971.
Nashville is a 1975 American satirical musical comedy-drama film directed and produced by Robert Altman. The film follows various people involved in the country and gospel music industry in Nashville, Tennessee, over the five-day period leading up to a gala concert for a populist outsider running for president on the Replacement Party ticket.
Gloria Rose "Barbara" Turner was an American screenwriter and actress. The actress Jennifer Jason Leigh is her daughter.
Estelle Louise Fletcher was an American actress. She is best known for her portrayal of the antagonist Nurse Ratched in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), which earned her numerous accolades, including the Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress.
Keith Ian Carradine is an American actor. In film he is known for his roles as Tom Frank in Robert Altman's Nashville, E. J. Bellocq in Louis Malle's Pretty Baby, and Mickey in Alan Rudolph's Choose Me. On television he is known for his roles as Wild Bill Hickok on the HBO series Deadwood, FBI agent Frank Lundy on the Showtime series Dexter, Lou Solverson in the first season of FX's Fargo, Penny's father Wyatt on the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, and U.S. President Conrad Dalton on the CBS political drama Madam Secretary.
Shelley Alexis Duvall is an American actress known for her portrayal of distinctive, often eccentric characters. She is the recipient of several accolades, including a Cannes Film Festival Award and a Peabody Award and nominations for a British Academy Film Award and two Primetime Emmy Awards.
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A Mom for Christmas is a 1990 American made-for-television Christmas fantasy-comedy film starring Olivia Newton-John, Juliet Sorci, Doug Sheehan and Doris Roberts, directed by George T. Miller and produced by Walt Disney Television. The film marked Newton-John's television film debut and her first film appearance in seven years since Two of a Kind (1983). It was written by Gerald Di Pego based on the book A Mom by Magic by Barbara Dillon and originally premiered on NBC on December 17, 1990. Production was centred around the former Shillito's Department Store in Cincinnati.
3 Women is a 1977 American psychological drama film written, produced and directed by Robert Altman and starring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek and Janice Rule. Set in a dusty California desert town, it depicts the increasingly bizarre relationship between an adult woman (Duvall), her teenage roommate and co-worker (Spacek) and a middle-aged pregnant woman (Rule).
Cristina Raines is an American former actress and model who appeared in numerous films throughout the 1970s, mainly horror films and period pieces. She went on to have a prolific career as a television actress throughout the 1980s.
Lily Mariye is an American television director, filmmaker and actress.
Graeme Clifford is an Australian film director. His directing credits include the Academy Award-nominated film Frances, Gleaming the Cube and the mini-series The Last Don, which received two Emmy nominations.
Herbert Birchell "Bert" Remsen was an American actor and casting director. He appeared in numerous films and television series.
Randy Stuart, was an American actress in film and television. A familiar face in several popular films of the 1940s and 1950s, and later in Western-themed television series, she is perhaps best remembered as Louise Carey, the wife of Scott Carey, played by Grant Williams, in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957).
Lou Lombardo was an American filmmaker whose editing of the 1969 film The Wild Bunch has been called "seminal". In all, Lombardo is credited on more than twenty-five feature films. Noted mainly for his work as a film and television editor, he also worked as a cameraman, director, and producer. In his obituary, Stephen Prince wrote, "Lou Lombardo's seminal contribution to the history of editing is his work on The Wild Bunch (1969), directed by Sam Peckinpah. The complex montages of violence that Lombardo created for that film influenced generations of filmmakers and established the modern cinematic textbook for editing violent gun battles." Several critics have remarked on the "strange, elastic quality" of time in the film, and have discerned the film's influence in the work of directors John Woo, Quentin Tarantino, Kathryn Bigelow, and the Wachowskis, among others. While Lombardo's collaboration with Peckinpah lasted just a few years, his career was intertwined with that of director Robert Altman for more than thirty years. Lombardo edited Altman's 1971 film McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), which had "a radical approach to the use of dialogue and indeed other sound, both in and beyond the frame." Towards the end of his career Lombardo edited Moonstruck (1987) and two other films directed by Norman Jewison. While his editing is now considered "revolutionary" and "brilliant", Lombardo was never nominated for editing awards during his career.
Edmund Naughton (1926–2013) was an American writer and journalist whose first novel, McCabe (1959), was the basis for the 1971 film McCabe & Mrs. Miller. The film, directed by Robert Altman, is now considered a masterpiece. After 1958, Naughton lived in France and England. Between 1959 and 1984, Naughton published six novels in the genres of westerns and crime fiction. The first two were published in French translation as well as English; the last two were published only in translation.
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Nightmare in Chicago is a 1964 suspense thriller crime television film produced and directed by Robert Altman, based on the novel Death on the Turnpike by William P. McGivern. It was originally filmed as an episode of the NBC series Kraft Suspense Theatre titled "Once Upon a Savage Night" before being expanded into the TV movie.
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