Actor

Film & TV|
January 20, 2013

Bill Paxton

When my friend Tom Huckabee and I were seventeen, we pooled our money and bought a new Kodak Ektasound Super-8 system. One of the first films we made was a black and white pseudodocumentary called Victory at Auschwitz, which we shot in the old train yard off West Vickery in

Film & TV|
January 20, 2013

Bill, Due

After more than two decades in the movie business—including star turns in Apollo 13, Twister, and now his own Traveller—Fort Worth’s Bill Paxton is finally getting what’s coming to him.

Film & TV|
June 30, 2012

Meat, My Maker

When Dallas’s very own Marvin Lee Aday—that’s Meat Loaf to you—optioned one of my screenplays, he didn’t just offer me a glimpse of paradise by the dashboard lights. He also helped me write a novel.

The Horse's Mouth|
October 31, 2008

Doing Political Impressions

NAME: Jim Morris | AGE: 51 | HOMETOWN: Flower Mound | QUALIFICATIONS: Masterfully mimics the past seven presidents, from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush, as well as a range of presidential candidates, from John Edwards to Al Sharpton / Has provided voices for Saturday Night Live’s “The X-Presidents” cartoon

Arts & Entertainment|
June 30, 1998

Brad Maule

When I was five, my family got a television, and it was like a meteorite had landed on the farm. That’s when I knew I wanted to be in show business, but I had to keep it a secret because you couldn’t tell people that. My school had this talent

Film & TV|
June 30, 1998

Ernest Goes to Texas

Borgnine: The word itself is barrel-chested, glaring, grotesque. And has a name ever been so suggestive of a face? Known for cinematic classics like From Here to Eternity and Marty (for which he won an Academy award in 1955), Ernest Borgnine last worked in Texas in the mid-fifties, when he

Film & TV|
April 1, 1998

Greg Germann

My dad teaches theater at Southern University in Baton Rouge now, but we lived in Austin for a while when he worked on his master’s degree at the University of Texas. He directed plays on campus and also wrote children’s plays that were performed there and in Houston. When I

Film & TV|
March 1, 1998

Joan Crawford

All her life, Joan Crawford raised other people’s eyebrows as often as she reapplied her own. From the time she arrived in Hollywood, the temperamental Texan provoked hostility and gossip, and her wide-eyed flapper persona soon hardened into that of a sleek, steely sophisticate. But the arrogance accompanied a massive talent;

Film & TV|
March 1, 1998

Jensen Ackles

As a kid, Jensen Ackles used to poke fun at the “mushy” daytime dramas his mother regularly watched, but not anymore. Since last June, the Richardson native has starred on the hit NBC soap opera Days of Our Lives as Eric Brady, a mature-for-his-age teen who keeps his emotions bottled

Film & TV|
December 1, 1997

Ara Celi

“When I was little,” Ara Celi says, “I used to watch TV and ask, ‘How do you get on there?’” At 19 the El Paso native set out for Hollywood to answer that question; once there, she quickly learned the three most important words in show business: audition, audition, audition.

Film & TV|
November 1, 1997

Patricia Richardson

I thought that moving to Texas would be the worst thing that ever happened to me, but it saved my life. It happened during my junior year in high school, which was really traumatic. All my life I had never been at the same school for more than two years,

Film & TV|
September 30, 1997

Reneé O’Connor

Their mission is to save the world, not conquer it, but the stars of Xena: Warrior Princess are winning television-ratings battles from San Angelo to Slovakia. The two-year-old syndicated show airs in more than eighty countries, making Lucy Lawless, who plays Xena, the first leather-clad TV lead since the Fonz—and

Film & TV|
August 31, 1997

Barbara Barrie

I enrolled at the University of Texas in 1950 during a post-war period that produced many talented individuals. Harvey Schmidt, Tom Jones, Liz Smith, Robert Benton, Pat Hingle, Word Baker, Kathryn Grant (later Mrs. Bing Crosby), and I all graduated with degrees in drama. We did lots of dance concerts

Film & TV|
June 30, 1997

F. Murray Abraham

I arrived in El Paso as a small child and grew up within sight of the Rio Grande. Juárez was part of our lives, and it was comfortable and easy to cross the border. My friends and I were part of rat packs: We had jackets, and zip guns were

Film & TV|
June 30, 1997

Stick a Rourke in It—It’s Done.

Most nights it’s an ordinary shopping center, but during the months of May and June, Fort Worth’s Town Center Mall became a war zone. That was the principal location where Mickey Rourke, the brawl-prone star of 9 1/2 Weeks and Diner, knocked out the indie feature Recoil. Rourke plays a

Film & TV|
March 1, 1997

Jennifer Love Hewitt

She only turned eighteen on February 21, but Jennifer Love Hewitt’s résumé is beginning to read like that of a show biz veteran: At the moment, she has a starring role on a hit TV series, Fox’s Party of Five, and a self-titled pop album in record stores, and her

Music|
January 1, 1997

Saintly Bernard

Spring’s Crystal Bernard is already a top dog in the sitcom world. Will her new country CD separate her from the pack?

Arts & Entertainment|
December 1, 1996

Sandy Duncan

Every Christmas, from the time I was three until I was ten, my family would drive in a stream of cars to Kilgore, where, during the Depression and a very big oil boom, oil wells had been drilled downtown. Hundreds of derricks on street corners and next to office buildings

Film & TV|
September 30, 1996

Peri, Trouper

Waco, Houston, Dallas, Austin, London, New York, Hollywood: Peri Gilpin was all over the map before finding stardom on NBC�s hit sitcom Frasier.

Art|
August 31, 1996

Gilt Trip

Andrew Eccles has photographed plenty of 24-karat celebrities for Texas Monthly, but his session with Lou Diamond Phillips was a truly golden experience. “In an industry that’s marked by jaded people,” Eccles says, “Lou was a breath of fresh air. He’s down to earth, talkative, enthusiastic—an incredibly sweet guy.”In his

The Stand Up Desk|
July 31, 1996

Seeing Stars

In the summer of 1992, when Jason Cohen was a relatively unknown journalist and Matthew McConaughey was an extremely unknown actor, the two met on the Austin set of Dazed and Confused. “He looked so weird,” recalls 28-year-old Cohen, who was writing about the movie for Details. “He had

Film & TV|
June 30, 1996

Her Little Secret

Those whispers about Melissa Etheridge are true: She will play Port Arthur–born Janis Joplin in a forthcoming feature film. Director Mark Rocco (Murder in the First) has secured the rights to Myra Friedman’s 1973 Joplin bio, Buried Alive, and the rights to Joplin’s songs, and he’s talking to Etheridge’s label,

Film & TV|
May 31, 1996

Marcia Gay Harden

I REMEMBER ONE SUMMER when there were snakes galore on Lake LBJ near Kingsland. We have five kids in our family, and we’d all go swimming in the lake, but when we’d see something in the water—and couldn’t tell if it was a turtle or a water moccasin—we’d jump out.

Film & TV|
April 30, 1996

Mitch Pileggi

In 1980 I was doing defense contract work overseas for the government, but I was getting kind of tired of it, so I decided to move back to Austin and begin acting again. To pay the bills I did temp work and drove a cab for Roy’s Taxi, but then

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