by Vince Chiarelli | Oct 29, 2020 | Blog, Comedy, Film, Musicians, Television
Antonio Salvatore Iadanza (Tony Danza) was born in 1951 in Brooklyn, New York, to parents Anne Cammisa and Matty Anthony Iadanza. His mother was a bookkeeper and his father worked as a waste collector in Brooklyn. Danza’s father was of Italian ancestry and Danza’s mother was an immigrant from the town of Campobello di Mazara in the Sicilian province of Trapani. Danza attended Malverne Senior High School, graduating in 1968. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 1972 from the University of Dubuque, which he attended on a wrestling scholarship.
Danza was a professional boxer with a record of 9–3 (9 knockouts, 7 in the first round), with all but one of his fights, wins and losses, ending in a knockout, including three technical knockouts.
Shortly after his college graduation from the University of Dubuque, Danza was discovered by a producer at a boxing gymnasium in New York. He then earned a spot on the television show Taxi, playing a cab driver and part-time boxer Tony Banta, and later starred on Who’s the Boss?, in which he portrayed a former baseball player, housekeeper, and single father Tony Micelli. For his contribution to the television industry, in 1988, Danza was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Danza also plays the role of a baseball player in Angels in the Outfield (1994).
Danza also starred in the short-lived sitcoms Hudson Street (1995) and The Tony Danza Show (1997), not to be confused with his 2004–2006 talk show, The Tony Danza Show. He had a role in the TV drama Family Law from 2000 until 2002.
He was nominated for an Emmy Award for a guest-starring 1998 role in the TV series The Practice. His movie debut was in the comedy The Hollywood Knights (1980), which was followed by Going Ape! (1981). He received critical acclaim for his performance in the 1999 Broadway revival of the Eugene O’Neill play The Iceman Cometh. In 2002, Danza released his debut album The House I Live In as a 1950s-style crooner.
He starred on Broadway as Max Bialystock in The Producers, from December 19, 2006, to March 11, 2007, and reprised his role at the Paris Las Vegas from August 13, 2007, to February 9, 2008.
In 2008, Danza and his son Marc published a cookbook, “Don’t Fill Up on the Antipasto: Tony Danza’s Father-Son Cookbook.”
Source: Wiki
by Vince Chiarelli | Oct 28, 2020 | Blog, Film
Frank G. Mancuso (born July 25, 1933) is an Italian American former film studio executive. Mancuso was the chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures between 1984 and 1991, and of MGM between 1993 and 1999, when he retired.
Mancuso started as an usher in a theater in Buffalo, New York and eventually ran the programming for the company’s 50 theatres.
He joined Paramount Pictures in 1962 booking films from their Buffalo office. He worked his way up through their sales division before becoming vice-president of domestic distribution in March 1977. He became senior vice-president in August 1978. In 1983 he was promoted to president of Paramount’s motion picture division and in September 1984 he was chosen, instead of COO Michael Eisner, to take over for the departing Barry Diller as chairman and chief executive officer. Paramount became the number one studio again in 1986 and 1987 with hits including Top Gun, Crocodile Dundee (the top two grossing films of 1986), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Beverly Hills Cop II, The Untouchables and Fatal Attraction.
In 1986 he became a Governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and in 1992 became its secretary.
In 1993 he became chairman and CEO of MGM until his retirement in 1999. He is currently the chairman of the Motion Picture and Television Fund Corporate Board of Directors.
He is the father of executive producer Frank Mancuso Jr.,and executive producer Evan Mancuso. Mancuso lives in Los Angeles with his wife Fay. In 2010, Mancuso received a star on the Italian Walk of Fame in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Source: Wiki
by Vince Chiarelli | Oct 27, 2020 | Blog, Film, Television
Anna Maria Louisa Italiano was born in 1931 in the Bronx, New York. She was the middle of three daughters of parents Mildred DiNapoli, a telephone operator, and Michael G. Italiano a dress pattern maker.
Her parents were both children of Italian immigrants. In an interview, she stated that her family was originally from Muro Lucano, in the province of Potenza. After appearing in a number of live television dramas under the name Anne Marno, she was told to change her surname, as it was “too ethnic for movies”; she chose Bancroft “because it sounded dignified.”
In 1957, Bancroft was directed by Jacques Tourneur in a David Goodis adaptation, Nightfall. In 1958, she made her Broadway debut as lovelorn, Bronx-accented Gittel Mosca opposite Henry Fonda in William Gibson’s two-character play Two for the Seesaw. For this role, she won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play.
Bancroft won the Tony Award again in 1960, when she played Annie Sullivan, the young woman who teaches the child Helen Keller to communicate in The Miracle Worker. She appeared in the 1962 film version of the play and won the 1962 Academy Award for Best Actress, with Patty Duke repeating her own success as Keller alongside Bancroft.
Bancroft was widely known for her role as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (1967), for which she received a third Academy Award nomination. In the film, she played an unhappily married woman who seduces the son of her husband’s business partner, the much younger recent college graduate played by Dustin Hoffman.
Bancroft is one of ten actors to have won both an Academy Award and a Tony Award for the same role (as Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker), and one of very few entertainers to win an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony award. This rare achievement is also known as the Triple Crown of Acting. She followed that success with a second television special, Annie and the Hoods (1974), which was telecast on ABC and featured her husband Mel Brooks as a guest star. She received a fourth Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in 1977 for her performance in The Turning Point (1977) opposite Shirley MacLaine, and a fifth nomination for Best Actress in 1985 for her performance in Agnes of God (1985) opposite Jane Fonda.
Bancroft made her debut as a screenwriter and director in Fatso (1980), in which she starred with fellow Italian American Dom DeLuise.
In the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s, Bancroft took supporting roles in a number of films in which she co-starred with major film stars—including Honeymoon in Vegas (1992) with Nicolas Cage, Love Potion No. 9 (1992) with Sandra Bullock, Malice (1993) with Nicole Kidman, Point of No Return (1993) with Bridget Fonda, Home for the Holidays (1995) and Heartbreakers (2001) with Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sigourney Weaver and Gene Hackman. She also lent her voice to the animated film Antz (1998).
Bancroft’s final appearance was as herself in a 2004 episode of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Her last project was the animated feature film Delgo, released posthumously in 2008. The film was dedicated to her. Bancroft received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her work in television.
Anne Bancroft died of uterine cancer at age 73 on June 6, 2005 in Manhattan.
Source: Wiki
by Vince Chiarelli | Oct 26, 2020 | Podcasts
On this episode of The Italian American Entertainment Podcast, Vince Chiarelli, of the Vince Chiarelli Band, interviews the great singer and performer Anastasia Lee. Anastasia performed with Josh Groban in 2011 and since then she has been crowned a Three-Time Italian Idol Winner. She has almost 10 MILLION views on YouTube and in 2016 she received her first best selling, #1 Single on Amazon “Sano e Salvo” – making the charts in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan.
Follow Anastasia at the links below:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAnastasiaLee
Website: http://www.anastasialee.com/
by Vince Chiarelli | Oct 23, 2020 | Blog, Film, Television
Alphonso Joseph D’Abruzzo was born in 1936 in the Bronx, New York City. Alda spent his childhood with his parents travelling around the United States in support of his father’s job as a performer in burlesque theatres. His Italian father Robert Alda (born Alfonso Giuseppe Giovanni Roberto D’Abruzzo) was an actor and singer. His adopted surname, “Alda”, is a portmanteau of ALfonso and D’Abruzzo.
When Alda was seven years old, he contracted polio. To combat the disease, his parents administered a painful treatment regimen developed by Sister Elizabeth Kenny, consisting of applying hot woolen blankets to his limbs and stretching his muscles. In 1956, he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Fordham University in the Bronx, where he was a student staff member of its FM radio station, WFUV.
During Alda’s junior year, he studied in Paris, acted in a play in Rome, and performed with his father on television in Amsterdam. In college, he was a member of the ROTC, and after graduation, he served for a year at Fort Benning, and then six months in the United States Army Reserve on a tour of duty in Korea.
In 1966, he starred in the musical The Apple Tree on Broadway, also starring Barbara Harris; he was nominated for the Tony Award as Best Actor in a Musical for that role. In early 1972, Alda auditioned for and was selected to play the role of Hawkeye Pierce in the TV adaptation of the 1970 film MASH. He was nominated for 21 Emmy Awards, and won five. He took part in writing 19 episodes, including the 1983 2 1⁄2-hour series finale “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen”, which was also the 32nd episode he directed. It remains the single most-watched episode of any American broadcast network television series. Alda was the only series regular to appear in all 256 episodes.
Alda commuted from Los Angeles to his home in New Jersey every weekend for 11 years while starring in M*A*S*H. His wife and daughters lived in New Jersey and he did not want to move his family to Los Angeles, especially because he did not know how long the show would last. Alda’s father, Robert Alda, and half-brother Antony Alda appeared together in an episode of M*A*S*H, “Lend a Hand”, during season eight. In 1996, Alda was ranked 41st on TV Guide’s 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time.
During M*A*S*H’s run and continuing through the 1980s, Alda embarked on a successful career as a writer and director, with the ensemble dramedy, The Four Seasons being perhaps his most notable hit. Betsy’s Wedding is his last directing credit to date. After M*A*S*H, Alda took on a series of roles that either parodied or directly contradicted his “nice guy” image.
Beginning in 2004, Alda was a regular cast member on the NBC program The West Wing, portraying California U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Arnold Vinick, until the show’s conclusion in May 2006. In August 2006, Alda won an Emmy for his portrayal of Vinick in the final season of The West Wing. Alda appeared in a total of 28 episodes during the show’s sixth and seventh seasons.
In 2004, Alda portrayed Maine Senator Owen Brewster in Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award-winning film The Aviator, in which he co-starred with Leonardo DiCaprio. Alda received his first Academy Award nomination for this role in 2005.
In 2018, Alda began portraying psychiatrist Dr. Arthur Amiot in Season 6 of Showtime’s Ray Donovan.
Alda has three daughters: Eve, Elizabeth, and Beatrice. Two of his eight grandchildren are aspiring actors. In an intimate interview, Alda revealed that his wife sometimes will call him “Fonzi” in reference to his birth name “Alphonso”. The Aldas have been long-time residents of Leonia, New Jersey. On July 31, 2018, he appeared on CBS This Morning and announced he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease three years prior.
Source: Wiki
