This POP SUPERHERO is HAPPY to extend BIRTHDAY WISHES to actor Edward Norton, born on 18 August 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, my personal stomping grounds... Happy Birthday! Add your own birthday wishes for Edward in the form of a comment below *AND* be sure to check out my YOUTUBE CHANNEL: "EDWARD NORTON TELEVISION!" It features behind the scenes movie clips, live incterviews, TV appearances, Red Carpet events and more. IT'S ALL EDWARD NORTON, ALL THE TIME!
THE MAGICAL MR. NORTON IN "THE ILLUSIONIST"
Why does 39 year old Mr. Norton deserve this musician's, and *YOUR*, respect & recognition? Many reasons... For starters, American History X and Fight Club. In the former film, Norton packed on 30 lbs in 3 months, au natural via protein drinks I'm told, to become a macho muscleman with a personality problem who could NOT be farther from the actor himself. Now *that* is a SUPER STRETCH of a performance worth more than just a quick fly by. (Personally, I muscle up by heading straight for the double burgers over dumb steroids any day! *wink*) In the latter movie, "Fight Club," he LOST an equal amount of mass... but NONE of his unquestionable charisma and seemingly inherent charm. (Even dieting can't melt Ed's magic.) So it's definately NOT purely physical attraction all his fans feel. Physics aside... I find myself drawn into chronicaling his career. (*Get it... drawn... lil' comic book humor there. SIDE NOTE: Mr. Norton was a COMIC BOOK GEEK in his youth. That said, perhaps this POP SUPERHERO may have a chance to turn his head my way someday...) Refusing interviews with MANY major magazines, Mr. Norton refuses to embrace or exploit his celebrity status. More importantly, he does NOT abuse it to rocket his already soaring career into the rag mags and promotional red carpet parade. (As if such a tremendous talent *needs* paparazzi, or Pop Superheroes, to validate him! OK... So "need" is out. Can I still "want" to be his very own personal Pop Superhero?) Unlike many of his celebrity peers, this "Super Man" is note worthy role model for young people to look up to. (...and this Pop Superhero to look down on, and watch over, from NY roof tops) Norton, correctly, in my humble opinion, assumes that the LESS his fans know of him, the MORE they will enjoy his movies, and the characters he creates through them.
EDWARD NORTON'S SPEECH at "EARTH DAY" 2008
This New York actor icon is a SUPERB EXAMPLE to all those who admire him and his work, not to mention other celebrities who could use a lesson in humility, appreciation and using their priviledges to 'give back' to society. (Personally, this Pop Superhero likes to admire him from atop tall buildings, catching fleeting glimpses of the artist with a soul beyond his years, as he catches subway cars... SIDE NOTE: Edward Norton attended YALE UNIVERSITY in New Haven,CT... My OLD stomping grounds!) He generously contributes to many charitable & environmental organizations, most notably THE HIGH LINE, THE ENTERPRISE FOUNDATION & PBS, not ONLY with money, but with something FAR more noble, precious, and available to us all: time. It's one thing for a celebrity to lend their NAME to a charity project. It's an entirely higher level to LEND THEMSELVES. POP SUPERHERO PROPS TO YOU, EDWARD NORTON! (Mom's everywhere must be SO GRATEFUL their kids have someone who is both COOL & KARMIC to look up to. Your Mother raised you right...)
In tribute, here's a look back on Edward Norton's career in film to date via Movie Posters & my very own EDWARD NORTON TV CHANNEL BELOW... BOOKMARK IT FOR YOUR FUTURE WATCHING PLEASTURE!
Today's lesson in how to "Be A Hero" by examply is the life of Christopher Reeve. You don't have to be a "Superman" to be a "Hero." Chris was a hero to his friends and family long before, and long after, he played the famous man of steel on the big screen. His courage, patience and love stand as a true example of real heroism. Read an excerpt from the book of his life: "Somewhere In Heaven." ###
"Real Love is a Very Rare and Precious Thing"
By Christopher Andersen. Excerpted from Somewhere in Heaven (Hyperion, 2008) That fate could have dealt such a cruel hand to this golden couple seemed unfathomable. That they could endure it all with grace, courage and humor defied belief. Read the story of their love-struck first meeting below.
June 30, 1987, Williamstown, Massachusetts
He simply could not take his eyes off her. Wearing a short black off-the-shoulder evening dress, her auburn hair tumbling over tanned shoulders, Dana Morosini confidently took the microphone off the stand and gazed through the blue haze of cigarette smo ke out over the heads of those sitting ringside. Then, in a sweet mezzo-soprano, she eased into Jule Styne's lyrical ballad "The Music That Makes Me Dance."
Williamstown was, in many ways, home to Christopher Reeve. It was here, at the annual theater festival held on the campus of Williams College, that Chris had come every summer since 1968 to sharpen his skills as a stage actor. As he had also done every year since 1968, Chris -- cast this season in Aphra Behn's costume drama The Rover -- after a hard day's rehearsal unwound with his fellow actors at the 1896 House, a quaint white-clapboard country inn nestled in the Berkshire hills.
Each night during the summer, festival-goers packed the inn's dimly lit, ground-floor cabaret—often in hopes of seeing one of the stars perform. Over the years Chris had gamely obliged, summoning enough courage to take the stage and belt out numbers by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the Gershwins. "A lot of us have no business singing," he allowed,"but the crowd seems to get a kick out of it.
"Tonight, however, Chris was content to sit back and listen to the Cabaret Corps, the tight little group of four professional singers who took up the slack each evening. Reeve's friends nudged one another as he kept staring at the slender young singer with the enormous eyes and blinding smile. Chris was oblivious to everything in the room—the clinking glasses, the hum of table conversation punctuated by clattering sounds from the kitchen , and the occasional spike of laughter -- everything but Dana.
POW! BIFF! "That was it," Chris later said. "Right then I went down hook, line, and sinker. She just knocked me out. A lot of people saw that happen." The inn's co-owner, Denise Richer, was one of them. "We kept looking at the stage, and then at him, and then back at her," Richer said, "and we thought, 'Something's happening here.' It was so obvious." According to fellow Rover cast member Charles Tuthill, who was standing against the back wall with Chris, "he was totally hit between the eyes. She took his breath away.
"When her number was over, Chris shook his head in wonder. "My God," he told his buddies, "who's that? She is incredible!" As intently as Chris had been staring at Dana, she had been doing her best to ignore his presence in the audience. It had been eight years since he shot to stardom as the Man of Steel, and with three sequels under his yellow belt, Reeve and the iconic comic book hero he portrayed on screen now seemed virtually inseparable. If anything, at thirty-five Reeve now seemed more physically striking than ever. Standing a full head taller than virtually everyone else in the room and decked out in his customary preppie uniform of pale blue polo shirt, khakis, and Docksiders without socks, Chris was impossible to miss. "I just pretended Superman wasn't there," she recalled wryly. "Not as easy as it sounds."
She had her reasons. That summer Reeve;s breakup with Gae Exton, his girlfri end of ten years and the mother of his two children, was grist for the rumor mill. While shooting Superman IV in London a few months earlier, he had been romantically linked with leading lady Mariel Hemingway. Now Williamstown was abuzz with gossip that Chris was on the prowl. Afterward, Chris went backstage to congratulate the woman who had, it would turn out, won his heart with a single song. "Hi, I'm Chris Reeve," he said with all the awkward charm of Clark Kent.
"Yes," she replied, stifling the urge to blurt out, "You must be kidding." Still suspicious of his motives -- her friends had warned her he was in the audience and on the make only moments before she stepped onstage -- she politely introduced herself in return, and then listened as he heaped praise on her performance. "I've always liked that song," said Chris, who sheepishly admitted to being a fan of Broadway musicals in general and Funny Girl in particular. "It's a great song," he told her. "You know," he went on, struggling to make small talk, "Streisand loved that song, but they cut it from the movie."
"I know." She nodded, trying not to appear surprised that one of the biggest action stars of the decade not only liked show tunes but was a Barbra Streisand fan. Maybe he wasn't going to make a move on her, she thought. Maybe her friends were completely wrong about Reeve and his intentions.
They were right, as it turned out. Chris and a few of his fellow actors from the cast of The Rover were=2 0headed to The Zoo, an after-hours Animal House–style hangout tucked away in a dormitory on the Williams College campus. The name of the establishment said it all.
"Would you like a ride?" he asked. "My truck is parked right outside.""Oh, no," Dana replied without missing a beat as several of her friends showed up to congratulate her. "That's OK. I've got my own car.""Oh," Chris mumbled as she disappeared in the crowd.
This was not the kind of response Superman was accustomed to. Dana, meantime, was being scolded by pals who had witnessed Chris's timid overtures. "You are crazy," one chided her. "Why don’t you go with him?" "But I have a car," she insisted. "I can get there on my own." "Give us your keys right now!" one demanded. "We'll drive your damn car. Christopher Reeve wants to give you a ride. Now go for it!"
"But why would I leave my perfectly good car in the parking lot," Dana persisted stubbornly, “and then be stuck at the party?" Her friends rolled their eyes, but by then it was too late; Chris had already spun out of the parking lot behind the wheel of his battered black pickup, hoping to meet up with Dana at The Zoo. When he got there, he ignored his friends and did not even bother to stop at the bar. Instead he stood where he could get a clear view of the front door, hands thrust in his pockets, waiting for the beautiful girl in the black off-the-shoulder dress to walk in.
Dana arrived a few minutes later, and scanned the crowd for Chris. Their eyes locked, and within moments they were standing together in the center of the crammed room. He had strolled up to her with a studied nonchalance that she found disarmingly clumsy. "Could I get you a drink?" he asked, and she said sure. But he never did. "We didn't get a drink, we didn't sit down, we didn't move," he later said. For the next hour, everything and everyone around them melted away as they stood talking -- just talking.
Don't rush this, Chris told himself. It's too important . . . "Well," he blurted as he looked at his watch. "It's getting late . . . It was very nice to meet you." She, in turn, shook his hand, and a half hour later both were back home in their own beds. They would eventually call June 30, 1987, simply "our day."
Saturday, October 9, 2004, Backstage at Southcoast Repertory Theater, Costa Mesa, California
She was one of the bravest women Mimi Lieber had ever known. But when Lieber poked her head into the cramped dressing room to ask if Dana Reeve would be joining her and the rest of the cast of Broadway-bound Brooklyn Boy that night for a postshow drink, the solitary figure she saw was plainly terrified.
Dana had been on the road performing in Brooklyn Boy for two months -- visiting home most weekends -- and was set to fly back to New York once and for all the next day. She had spoken to Chris on the phone only a few hours before about how excited she was to finally be returning to her family. Now, in an instant, that excitement had turned to dread.
"Something's wrong at home," Dana explained, using one trembling hand to steady the other as she clasped the phone to her ear. While Dana had been onstage, one of her husband's physicians had left an urgent message on her cell phone. Dana had received many emergency calls like this in the nine years since Chris's accident, as he faced one medical crisis after another. But this time the doctor's tone was unmistakably ominous.
It had all happened with such alarming speed. Although Chris could not feel it, the bedsore on his lower back was of growing concern -- this on top of the systemic infection he had been fighting for nearly three months. A powerful combination of what Reeve liked to call "industrial-strength" antibiotics had worked against these infections in the past, but he had built up a resistance to them over the years. Now the nurses who took care of Chris around the clock begged him to stay in bed so the drugs could take effect.
The patient had other ideas. With Dana twenty-six hundred miles away, Chris felt it was more important than ever that he attend their twelve-year-old son Will's peewee league hockey game that afternoon. Moreover, it was a key matchup: Will's team, the Westchester Express, was set to go head-to-head with their archrivals, the Mass Conn Braves from Springfield, Massachusetts. Nonetheless, the nurses continued to plead w ith Chris. "Please stay home this one time...This doesn't look good."
"No, I'm going," Chris shot back."But you go to all of Will's games. You can miss one. He'll understand.""No, no, no," Chris replied. "I want to watch Will play! So let's go!"
It took more than three hours for the aides to dress Reeve, load his wheel chair on to his specially outfitted van -- "Every time we leave the house, it's a production," Dana liked to joke -- and drive the twenty miles to the Brewster Ice Arena. But once the Westchester Express took to the ice at 3:20 P.M., Chris was at rink level behind the glass, cheering Will and his team on.
"Will, Will, Will," Chris chanted as his son scored two of the Express's eleven goals to defeat the Braves. Will's winning moves earned him the game puck for the day.
By 6 P.M., father and son were back at home on Great Hills Farm Road in suburban Bedford, New York. While Will showered and then chatted with friends online, Chris placed a call to then–Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. The Reeves had campaigned for Kerry, a strong supporter of stem cell research that might lead to a cure for spinal cord injuries, and Chris wanted to thank the Massachusetts senator for mentioning him by name during the most recent presidential debate.
"Chris was very excited about the future," Kerry recalled. "It was a long conversation about all the things we wanted to accomplish. I knew he hadn't been feeling well, but he gave no indication that he was in distress. He was... exuberant."
Both ardent Yankee fans, Will and his dad dined on turkey tetrazzini while glued to the Yankees–Minnesota Twins game on television. They both cheered when the Yankees won. It had been a great day, Will later said, "for father-son bonding."
At around 10:30 P.M., Chris was in bed and Will dropped in to say good night. He switched the set to CNN so his father could watch the latest campaign coverage, and then said good night the way he always did: Will kissed his father on the forehead, then, as he was leaving, took Chris's big toe between his thumb and forefinger and wiggled it. It was the last time he saw his father conscious.
Will was already fast asleep when, shortly before midnight, his father suffered a massive heart attack. Chris was resuscitated and rushed by ambulance to Northern Westchester Hospital in nearby Mt. Kisco. Now Dana was being told over the phone that her husband was alive, but comatose.
"Do I need to get a plane right now?” Dana asked the doctor, her steady voice masking a rising panic."Yes, I think you do," he replied."Could he die?" Dana inquired point-blank."Yes."
She hesitated for a moment before asking one more question -- the one that, in her mind, said more about the gravity of the situation than any other. It was a question that, even during the worst of the many crises that had gone before, none of Chris 's doctors had ever said yes to. "Do I...Dana asked. "Do I need to call the kids?""Yes."
Dana took a deep breath. She hung up the phone and immediately called the one person she knew who had the resources and the pull to get her a private jet on a moment's notice -- Marsha Williams, wife of Chris's close pal Robin Williams.
Next, Dana phoned Will, who was now being looked after by family friends. "I'm coming home right now," she told Will. She tried to reassure him. "Don't worry too much. Dad's a tough guy -- he's been through things like this before and bounced right back."
As she headed for Los Angeles Airport to board the private jet arranged by Marsha Williams, Dana worked her cell phone. She called London to discover that Matthew Reeve, one of two children from Chris's ten-year relationship with British modeling agent Gae Exton, was already on his way from England with his mother.
Meanwhile, Will's half-sister Alexandra, an undergraduate student at Yale, had driven down from New Haven. Within an hour of her father's arrival at the hospital, she was sitting at his bedside.
Alexandra had been warned that Chris had lapsed into a coma and was not responding to stimuli. But when she leaned in to speak to him, she noticed that his eyes "flickered. He knew I was there. He definitely heard me."
It was precisely the hopeful sign Dana needed. As she flew across the country, she checked in with Alexandra, who reassured her that Chris w as sleeping peacefully through the night. There had been emergencies like this in the past, Dana told herself -- times when he’d been rushed off to the hospital, and yet he'd always somehow managed to come through. "I thought," she later confessed, "There's a possibility..."
Hope faded in the early morning hours of October 10, however, when Chris suffered a series of cardiac arrests. Each time, intensive care doctors fought frantically to pull him back from the brink -- all in keeping with Dana's wishes. "Please, please," Dana told doctors from the plane. "Just keep him alive until I get there."
By the time Dana arrived at Westchester County Airport late that afternoon, most of the family was already at the hospital. Gae Exton and Matthew were there from London, as were Chris's father, Franklin Reeve, his brother Benjamin, and Dana's parents.
Chris's mother, Barbara, an angular, athletic woman who enjoyed rowing on Boston's Charles River well into her seventies, had received a call at 7:30 A.M. that Chris was in intensive care and driven two hours from her home in Princeton, New Jersey. When Chris suffered his famous horseback riding accident nine years earlier, it was Barbara who stood over his bed at the University of Virginia Medical Center and made the case for taking her son off life support."
All I could think of was how active he was -- sailing, scuba diving, flying a plane, skiing, tennis," she later recalled. "I didn't feel he would want to live if he was20paralyzed, trapped in his own body."
Although she risked angering Dana and the rest of the family back in June of 1995, Chris's mother had persisted. "I just don't understand," she told the others, "why we are doing all these measures just to keep him alive." It's not, she said, "the kind of life he would want to live."
At the time, Barbara's son by her second marriage, Chris's half-brother Jeffrey, took her aside. "Mom, Chris would want to be able to see Will grow up," Jeff said of the then-three-year-old boy, "even out of the corner of his eye." It was then, Barbara admitted, that she finally "came around" to the idea that life as a quadriplegic was still worth living.
The ventilators and monitors were still whooshing and beeping as they kept Chris alive, but this time things were different and everyone in the room knew it. As her son neared the end of his life, Barbara leaned over and whispered in his ear. "You're free, Chris," she said. "You fought a good fight and now you are finally free, Chris. You're free of all these tubes!"
When she got to the hospital, Dana didn't wait for the elevator. Instead, she dashed up the stairs to the second floor, threw her things down, and ran into Chris's room. "The good news," Mimi Lieber later observed, "is that Dana made it. I think he waited for her."
Now that she was finally on the scene and able to help her son through this terrible ordeal, Dana asked for Will to be driven to the hospital. Once he got there, Dana fought the urge to break down as she wrapped him up in her arms. "We're going to say good-bye to Dad now," she whispered into his ear. Then, taking his hand, Dana led Will into intensive care.
Chris had never emerged from his coma, but Will believed that somehow he knew the people who loved him were there. Will softly kissed his father on the forehead and gently wiggled Chris's toe. "Night, Dad," Will said.
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