Anna Magnani Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Tim Gray Senior Vice PresidentOscar voters take their duties seriously and seem to have a few key criteria in voting: Is this work emotionally honest, does it pop off the screen, and is it something that will be admired 50 years from now?Penelope Cruz in “Parallel Mothers” checks all those boxes. There are no guarantees with Oscars, but if there’s justice in the world, she will be nominated Feb. 8.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Prior to becoming an actor, Giancarlo Giannini, who on March 6 will be getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, studied electronic engineering, a skill he’s been known to put to good use even on movie sets. “I was meant to start working on the first artificial satellites, or on the first computers at IBM,” the Italian film and theater thesp recalls. But then Giannini enrolled in acting school and soon was given major roles, first by Franco Zeffirelli and then by Lina Wertmüller, with whom he went on to make nine movies that brought them both international fame. “I owe it to Lina that I will be getting the star. The only other Italian actor who has one is Rudolph Valentino,” he notes.

It immediately says something about the differences between Jean Cocteau’s brilliant 1928 dramatic monologue The Human Voice — as first put on screen in 1948 by Roberto Rossellini with the immortal Anna Magnani — and Pedro Almodovar’s new version of it starring Tilda Swinton, that the latter features six costume changes within the first six minutes, while the original was content with a single drab bit of wardrobe.