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August 2, 1996

Dear Mr. Showbiz,
I went to see Kingpin because I'm a big Bill Murray fan. When I saw the name Vanessa Angel in the credits, I winced slightly because, frankly, it sounds like a stripper's stage name. So, as unfair and judgmental as it was, I didn't expect much from this newcomer. I was, however, pleasantly surprised! She was very funny, and I suspect we'll be seeing more of her in the future.

Could you tell me more about this young actress? Is this her first role in a movie? And please, tell me . . . is that her real name?

Ray Garton

Dear Ray,
You're not the only one to take note of Vanessa Angel's comic turn in the dim bowling farce Kingpin. Film critic Roger Ebert declared that Angel "proves herself a comic actress able to hold her own" in the company of co-stars Bill Murray and Woody Harrelson --two very funny guys. Despite what you may think, Kingpin isn't Angel's first film. No, she's been working hard in both the fashion and film industries for nearly twenty years.

Angel was discovered by top modelling agent Eileen Ford when she was just sixteen years old. In no time, she had left her hometown of London, England, for New York--and the covers of Vogue and Cosmopolitan. Angel, who is now thirty-three, made her feature-film debut as a kinky cosmonaut in the 1985 John Landis comedy Spies Like Us. She went on to small roles in such duds as Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992) with Sly Stallone , and the tepid 1994 comedy Sleep With Me. If you want to see Angel's one leading role, search the racks of your local video store for the 1991 erotic thriller, Killer Instinct (a.k.a. Homicidal Impulse). If you see that film, we think you'll agree that television has been much kinder to Vanessa Angel. She's logged guest appearances on Murder, She Wrote and Melrose Place, and for one season, she enjoyed the recurring role of Peggy Elliot on NBC's Reasonable Doubts. But, Ray, your favorite Angel is best-known as Lisa in Weird Science, the USA Network series based on John Hughes' strange 1985 film of the same name. Weird Science is now in its third season. Angel plays the computer-created "ultimate woman," who keeps those two teenage nerds out of trouble.

And yes, Ray, Vanessa Angel is her real name. She once considered changing it, so that people like you wouldn't think she was a porn star, but she decided to keep it in the end. She did, however, have an epiphany while she was filming Kingpin. The film, says Angel, "made me realize how much I want to do roles where the beauty factor is very much a sideline." Now there's a girl with a head on her shoulders.

Mr. Showbiz


July 31, 1996

Dear Mr. Showbiz,
During après-weekend catch-up, my co-workers and I were discussing A Time To Kill . One guy mentioned that Charles Dutton, who appears in the movie, spent time in jail for killing someone. Is this true?

Elaine

Dear Elaine,
Charles Dutton is a living testament to criminal rehabilitation; he did indeed serve time in the slammer. The forty-five-year-old Dutton grew up in Baltimore on the wrong side of the tracks. His childhood hooliganism got him two years in reform school (from age twelve to fourteen). Four years after his release, Dutton found trouble again, when one of his neighborhood's frequent street fights went too far. Dutton ended up stabbing one of his adversaries to death. "He nearly killed me; I killed him. It's as simple as that," Dutton recalled. The act landed the teenage Dutton in the notoriously tough Maryland State Penitentiary, where he served nearly eight years for manslaughter. Shortly after he was paroled, Dutton was arrested again, this time on an illegal weapons charge. He served another eighteen months.

But as you know, Elaine, the story has a happy ending. You see, halfway through Dutton's first prison stay, a friend sent him an anthology of black playwrights, and the stories awakened a latent interest in acting. Once the troubled youth had found something to believe in, his life began a rather dramatic turn-around. Dutton read more plays, and organized a prison theater troupe. After he left prison for good in 1976, Dutton got a degree in drama from Baltimore's Towson State University, then went on to earn a master's degree from Yale. Since then, he has put all that training to good use, delivering well-reviewed performances in Broadway's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom Blues (1985) and The Piano Lesson (1990), in the films Alien 3 (1992) and Menace II Society (1993), and on the Fox-TV series Roc (1991-94). In A Time To Kill, Dutton appears--on the right side of the law--as a small-town sheriff.

Mr. Showbiz


July 29, 1996

Dear Mr. Showbiz,
First, I want to say how much I love your site--especially the chic retro-fifties graphics and your refusal to take things too seriously. Second, I was wondering if you could answer the following: why did Joe DiMaggio have the delivery of a half-dozen red roses, three times a week, to Marilyn Monroe's grave halted in 1982?

Lisa

Dear Lisa,
This is a very good question. New York Yankee great Joe DiMaggio was married to Marilyn Monroe for only nine months, in 1954, but Joltin' Joe maintained a twenty-year floral commitment to his ex-wife after her death on August 5, 1962. Three times a week, Joe had six red roses placed in front of Marilyn's pink marble crypt at Westwood Memorial Park in Hollywood. The roses kept coming until the twentieth anniversary of Marilyn's death. That's when Joe, who resists speaking publicly about his late wife, decided it was time to end the deliveries. "He wanted to give the money to charity," speculates Bob Alhanati, co-owner of Parisian Florist, which filled DiMaggio's order from day one. "It had been twenty years and he thought the money could do good elsewhere." If you've priced long-stemmed roses lately, Lisa, you know Joe's floral bills weren't cheap.

There's one final twist to the story: producer-biographer Robert Slatzer, who claims he was briefly married to Marilyn Monroe in 1952, pledged to pick up where DiMaggio left off. Slatzer even vowed that he would amend his will to make sure that Marilyn's crypt had flowers in perpetuity. It didn't happen. When Slatzer failed to pay his bill, the florist finally cancelled the order. That was back in 1983. But with more than ten thousand visitors annually, many of them bearing gifts, Marilyn's crypt is never without floral decoration.

Mr. Showbiz

DiMaggio Photo: © 1996 Archive Photos


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