18 movie stars who disappeared

They were on the path to stardom. The world was at their feet. Then they disappeared! We meet the movie stars that were, then weren't!

Hollywood is a fickle mistress. The road to superstardom is littered with her used-up conquests: child stars who never made it as adults, pin-ups who had the temerity to grow old or raise a family, boyish heroes who suddenly weren’t so boyish and side-splitting comics who found out the hard way just how fast comedy can date.

While Tinseltown is filled with performers who never made it to the big time, the strangest and saddest tales belong to those who hit the dizzy heights of  fame but could not, for whatever reason, hold on to it. What happened to them? Find out below.

Molly Ringwald

 A Breakfast Club star, Ringwald was the pin-up on every mid-80s bedroom wall. She almost seemed to decide against stardom when she turned down the Julia Roberts role in Pretty Woman (1990) and the Demi Moore role in Ghost (1990), escaping her US fame to live in Europe.

Mark Hamill

Despite starring in the Star Wars trilogy, arguably the three most famous films ever made, Mark Hamill’s movie career never really got off the ground. After a few dodgy sci-fi titles (slipstream anyone?) and cameo appearances in video games, Hamill has settled nicely into voice animation work. He does a mean Joker in the animated Batman.

Geena Davis

 With her kooky good looks and feisty screen presence, Davis was the quintessential 1980s poster girl, starring in such box office bonanzas as The Fly, Beetllejuice and the iconic Thelma and Louise.  Appearances in a series of duds for director and then husband Renny Harlin eclipsed her star somewhat, although she won a Golden Globe for her TV performance as the first female US president in Commander In Chief.

Michael Biehn

 What the hell happened?! This guy was THE star of The Terminator. He was all buddy buddy with James Cameron after that, bagging parts in Aliens ('86) and The Abyss ('89) that should have seen him hit the big time. Perhaps it all slipped away when Cameron cut his scenes from Terminator 2. Not cool, Jim. For our favourite Biehn performance check out 1991's underrated K2.

Thora Birch

Her breakout performance as Kevin Spacey’s sulky teen daughter in American beauty promised great things, and Birch followed it up with a pair of smart, sassy roles in Ghost World and The Hole. Still landing regular movie roles, but the movies themselves tend to disappear without trace. Anyone reading this seen Dark Corners, Tainted Love or Winter Of Frozen Dreams? Nope, neither have we.

 Daryl Hannah

 It can’t be easy to be remembered as “that girl who was the mermaid in that Tom Hanks movie” and "her from Blade Runner", but Daryl Hannah has borne her cross with goodwill, concentrating on indie movies, stage work and activism. An appearance in Kill Bill threatened to resurrect her A-list career and she'll be back when Tarantino does KB3 in 2014.

Macaulay Culkin

 One of the most successful child stars of all time, Macaulay Culkin struggled to convert the worldwide success of the Home Alone movies into an adult career. Decent performances in films like Party Monster failed to set the box office on fire, and Culkin was last seen (well, heard) doing voices for the animated TV show Robot Chicken.

Michael Keaton

 The former Batman and Beetlejuice star has been missing from our screens for a while, unless you count co-starring in Herbie: Fully Loaded with Lindsay Lohan (we don’t, frankly). We miss Keaton’s twitchy, lip-chewing performances. He was superb in Jackie Brown: perhaps Tarantino can resurrect his career again, John Travolta-style.

Rick Moranis

 The star of Ghostbusters and Honey I Shrunk The Kids has seen his movie career perform a similar disappearing act, with innumerable shrinking sequels delivering diminishing box office returns. He effectively gave up on movies to concentrate on family in the nineties. Last seen voicing children’s cartoons.

Kelly McGillis

 As a sultry flight instructor, Kelly McGillis took Tom Cruise’s breath away in Top Gun, and two years later she showed her serious acting chops in harrowing rape drama The Accused. Hasn’t had a proper hit since, and currently spends most of her time working on stage and running a restaurant in Florida.

Judd Nelson

 A brat-pack star in the The Breakfast Club and St Elmo's Fire, Judd Nelson went on to give a strong performance in New Jack City in '91. But it all fell off after that. Entangled in '93 (Ouch!) and Caroline At Midnight in '94 (Eugh!) did not go down well with critics.

Judge Reinhold

 There was a period in the 1980s when you simply couldn’t make a comedy without casting Judge Reinhold, though he is still best known as the softly spoken Detective Rosewood of Beverley Hills Cop. Reinhold more recently appeared in Kevin Costner’s political comedy Swing Vote. If the Beverly Hills Cop reboot comes about we could be seeing a whole lot more of him soon.

Phoebe Cates

 Man, we had such a crush on Gremlins star Phoebe Cates, with her heartbreakingly pretty face and relaxed attitude to nudity (check out Fast Times at Ridgemont High). What happened to her? Well, she married Kevin Kline and had a bunch of kids. Her last screen role was in 1994’s Princess Caraboo, although she’ll be back this year for ensemble drama The Anniversary Party.

Michael J Fox

 The youthful star of the Back To The Future trilogy never quite overcame his boyish looks, but his lesser known cinema performances showcase excellent comic timing – check out The Frighteners for Fox at his funniest. A successful TV and vocal star in the 90s (he was the voice of Stuart Little), his diagnosis with Parkinson’s Disease led to a semi-retirement in 2000.

Corey Feldman

 Gremlins, The Goonies, Stand By Me and The Lost Boys should have been enough to set Corey Feldman up for life (what a list!). Following a hiatus in the early 90s, he was unable to return to bigtime parts. Drugs have, famously, been an issue over the past 20 years or so for Feldman. He turns 40 this year.

Linda Fiorentino

 Fiorentino made a splash as one of modern cinema’s greatest femme fatales in the brilliant noir thriller The Last Seduction, and went on to star opposite Will Smith in Men In Black, a role she is rumoured to have won in a poker game with director Barry Sonnenfeld.  Since then her career has gradually waned, with rumours of a bust up with director Kevin Smith on the set of Dogma unlikely to have helped.

Chevy Chase

 File him under the "it-was-funny-back-then" category. He's not disappeared entirely, maintaining a stream of work in family movies and animations. But we all know him as the funny-boned slapstick man from National Lampoon's Vacation (1983), Three Amigos! (1986) and, unfortunately, Caddyshack 2 (1988).

Jeff Cohen

 Chunk! Perhaps our favourite character from The Goonies, Cohen didn't pursue acting as a grownup. He's now a successful lawyer. He's also thin!

Christine Bleakley movie awards

Christine Bleakley movie awards

Christine Bleakley has been confirmed as the presenter of the National Movie Awards next month.

The Daybreak host will present the live event at Wembley on Wednesday, May 11. It will be broadcast on ITV1 at the same time.
ITV's director of Entertainment and Comedy Elaine Bedell announced: "The results of the National Movie Awards are voted for by the public and we're delighted to be broadcasting them live on ITV1.

"Christine will add her own touch of style to what is already one of the most glamorous evenings of the awards calendar, making it a night not to be missed."

Among the nominations for the ceremony are Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, The Social Network and The King's Speech.

Source: Digital Spy

Source: Google

Our cousin's military funeral

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He signed up for the Marines when he graduated high school in 1973.

He served a few years. No one in the family knows what he did, he couldn't talk about it. He was a Marine on undisclosed missions in the Pacific.

Now, just before his 54th birthday, Don's cousin is gone, from congestive heart failure. What secrets were better left unsaid, that didn't take him to his grave, but he took them there?

Good night, David. Time to rest.

This was my first military funeral, though I've seen them on TV and in movies.

I was feeling sheepish about my camera until one of David's sisters met me going inside with "Thank you, none of us thought to bring one. I want the kids to have something to remember this by." From that point on, I felt complete freedom, with a purpose. If you know me, you know my protests against militarism. But it was time to set that aside and do something for the family.

Arriving at the cemetery we were greeted by a row of seven Marines holding rifles by their sides, poised in readiness for the 21-gun salute to come. I snapped several shots of their fixed faces before I went inside the mausoleum for the ceremony. Like the guards at Buckingham Palace, they were stoic and unmoving, barely breathing it seemed, in their stillness.

Inside, as the other three Marines fulfilled their ceremonial charge - one playing "Taps" on his horn outside the door, the other two marching up the aisle, then folding the flag in meditative precision - I felt calmed. When the rifles rang their 21 shots outside - each Marine firing three times in sync - and David's daughter burst into a sudden wail, I realized this is why we offer ceremony, why we turn to it in times of great sorrow and joy. In the silent, slow folding of the flag, how carefully they caressed it with their white gloves, how tightly they held it between them in their task of transformation. And I saw, as if for the first time, how beautiful our flag is. In those moments I didn't see borders, or patriotism, or war. I saw stunning, vivid colors in a bold design unlike any other flag in the world, and it had become a blanket covering a soldier at rest. A thing of comfort. And when the Marine handed David's widow the red white & blue fabric triangle I felt its power. Ah - the American flag, an instrument of healing!

I remember how I felt at age 7, perched on the floor in front of our black and white TV, watching Caroline Kennedy - one year younger than I - holding the hand of her mother dressed in black, in a veil. They walked up and touched her daddy's flag-covered casket in the vast Capitol rotunda - first her mother's black-gloved hand, followed quickly by her own small white-gloved hand - this girl with hair and white anklet socks like mine. Then her mother's kiss on the flag. They were us. We were being healed by ceremony.

If you're interested, you can view David's military honors in this YouTube slideshow.

a flick of a switch

While Don was recuperating from shoulder surgery, we got hooked watching "24," the TV show that started in 2001 about the CIA operative Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland) and the counter-terrorist unit in LA. Now that we can queue TV shows on Netflix, four episodes on a DVD, we could watch interruption-free, one episode after another. The writing is quite good, and the acting is excellent.


We finished the third of the six completed seasons last week (the seventh season premieres January 2009). In a strangely oxymoronic way, the show displays politically progressive viewpoints, while in the context of the very structures Progressives would like to see changed or eliminated. The politics in it are complex, not black and white.

Each season became more intense, the violence more graphic and more personal. Sure, Jack Bauer is a great guy who only tortures someone because he needs to save a million Americans. But this past season (3) when he had to shoot a colleague in the head and deliver his body to the terrorist enemy (a former British MI-6 agent gone sour) to keep him from releasing a biological weapon that would kill millions of Americans, we decided to stop watching.



Two out of the five Oscar nominees for Best Picture this year were violent films, including the winner, “No Country for Old Men.” The other is “There Will Be Blood.” Today we decided to take “No Country” off our queue because it’s rated R for strong graphic violence. Everyone says it’s a great movie.



It’s sort of strange that we cover our children’s eyes to protect their developing minds from violent acts, but it becomes okay as adults to entertain ourselves with it. I know it's out there in the real world, but as my mom used to say, "you get hungry for what you feed yourself."

I dunno, I’m getting sick from feeding myself violence through the TV.

Who am I: Deep Thoughts

I'm trying to think of a term for myself that sounds right. I inhabit a little non-working farm with my husband.


He is the farmer. He plants the seeds. He weeds and hoes. He sprays organic stuff to get rid of bugs.


He is the farmhand (remember Eb on "Green Acres"?). He lugs the heavy stuff, does the grunt work.


He is the farmer's wife. Forgive me, but he is. He not only picks the berries, he comes in the house sweaty and dirty from picking, and he gets out all the canning equipment and makes jams and jellies, while I sit and read. Well, I help sometimes. But he has all the knowledge, all the drive.


I, who am I?


Sticking with the Green Acres connection (please click on the link for the theme song and opening sequence), I am Lisa. Now she's not the typical farmer's wife, which is why I can say Don is the farmer's wife and I am Lisa.


Unlike Lisa, I can actually bake a real cake (not put a box in the oven and watch it come out a cake). Unlike Lisa, I am not a city girl, and I don't wear evening gowns around the house.


But she is the closest I can come, so far, to discovering who I am.



And oh, see all this pumpkin glory? Yes, my husband's first pumpkin harvest. And yes, it was HE (shall we call him "Ollivah"?) who cut one up (not easy), baked it 1 1/2 hours at 350F, pureed the flesh in the food processor, strained the juice, made homemade pie crust (Carolyn Roehm's recipe; if you look at this link, she looks a little like Lisa), and made pumpkin pie. It's the best darn pumpkin pie I've tasted, so fresh and REAL, unlike canned pumpkin. And he used the recipe for pie that our old friend gave us, who died a couple of weeks ago after a beautiful long life. She used molasses, and that, my friends, is the secret to extraordinary pumpkin pie. You can see it makes the pie dark too.