seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Late Show with David Letterman


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Birth of Actor Colin Farrell

colin-farrell

Irish actor Colin James Farrell is born on May 31, 1976, in Castleknock, Dublin.

Farrell is educated at St. Brigid’s National School, followed by secondary school at Castleknock College, an exclusive all boys private school and then Gormanston College in County Meath. He unsuccessfully auditions for the Irish musical group Boyzone around this time.

Farrell is inspired to try acting when Henry Thomas‘ performance in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial moves him to tears. With his brother’s encouragement, he attends the Gaiety School of Acting, dropping out in 1998 when he is cast as Danny Byrne on Ballykissangel, a BBC drama about a young English priest who becomes part of an Irish rural community.

Farrell makes his film debut in the Tim Roth-directed drama The War Zone in 1999 and is discovered by Hollywood when Joel Schumacher casts him as the lead in the war drama Tigerland in 2000. He then stars in Schumacher’s psychological thriller Phone Booth (2003) where he plays a hostage in a New York City phone booth, and the American thrillers S.W.A.T. (2003) and The Recruit (2003), establishing his international box-office appeal. During this time, he also appears in Steven Spielberg‘s science fiction thriller Minority Report (2002) and as the villain Bullseye in the superhero film Daredevil (2003).

After starring in the independent films Intermission (2003) and A Home at the End of the World (2004), Farrell heads Oliver Stone‘s biopic Alexander (2004) and Terrence Malick‘s The New World (2005). Roles in Michael Mann‘s Miami Vice (2006), the adaptation of John Fante‘s Ask the Dust (2006), and Woody Allen‘s Cassandra’s Dream (2007) follow, underscoring his popularity among Hollywood writers and directors. However, it is his role in Martin McDonagh‘s In Bruges (2008) that earns him a Hollywood Foreign Press Association Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy.

Farrell stars in the black comedy film Horrible Bosses (2011), for which he receives critical praise, along with the comedy-horror film Fright Night (2011) and the science fiction action film Total Recall (2012), both remakes, and McDonagh’s second feature, the black comedy crime film Seven Psychopaths (2012). He also stars in the Niels Arden Oplev action film Dead Man Down (2013), and as Travers Goff in the period drama Saving Mr. Banks (2013). In 2014, he stars as Peter Lake in the supernatural fable Winter’s Tale, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Mark Helprin. In 2015, he stars as Detective Ray Velcoro in the second season of HBO‘s True Detective, and also stars in the film The Lobster, for which he is nominated for his second Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. In 2016, he plays Percival Graves in the Harry Potter spin-off film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

In December 2005, Farrell checks into a rehabilitation treatment centre for addictions to recreational drugs and painkillers. He speaks about it on the Late Show with David Letterman after coming out of rehab and continues to do so in the years following. “There was an energy that was created,” he says of the time when he was addicted, “a character that was created, that no doubt benefited me. And then there was a stage where it all began to crumble around me.”

In 2007, Farrell joins other celebrities as a spokesman for the Special Olympics World Games in Shanghai, China. He has also lent his support to the anti-bullying campaign Stand Up! organised by the Irish LGBT youth organisation BeLonG To in March 2012. He appears on The Ellen DeGeneres Show two years earlier to increase awareness of the subject. In 2015 he becomes an official Ambassador of the Homeless World Cup which uses street football to inspire homeless people to change their lives.


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Death of Ed Sullivan,Television Personality

ed-sullivan

Edward Vincent Sullivan, Irish American television personality, sports and entertainment reporter, and syndicated columnist for the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate, dies in Manhattan, New York on October 13, 1974. He is principally remembered as the creator and host of the television variety show The Toast of the Town, later popularly and officially renamed The Ed Sullivan Show. Broadcast for 23 years from 1948 to 1971, it sets a record as the longest-running variety show in United States broadcast history.

Sullivan is born on September 28, 1901, in Harlem, New York City, the son of Elizabeth F. (née Smith) and Peter Arthur Sullivan, a customs house employee, and grows up in Port Chester, New York. He is a gifted athlete in high school, earning 12 athletic letters at Port Chester High School.

Sullivan lands his first job at The Port Chester Daily Item, a local newspaper for which he had written sports news while in high school and then joins the paper full-time after graduation. In 1919, he joins The Hartford Post. The newspaper folds in his first week there but he lands another job on The New York Evening Mail as a sports reporter. After The Evening Mail closes in 1923, he bounced through a series of news jobs. In 1927, he joins The Evening Graphic as sportswriter and eventually sports editor. In 1929, when Walter Winchell moves to the New York Daily Mirror, he is made Broadway columnist.

Throughout his career as a columnist, Sullivan dabbles in entertainment, producing vaudeville shows with which he appears as master of ceremonies in the 1920s and 1930s, directing a radio program over the original WABC (now WCBS) and organizing benefit reviews for various causes. In 1941, he is host of the Summer Silver Theater, a variety program on CBS radio, with Will Bradley as bandleader and a guest star featured each week.

In 1948, producer Marlo Lewis gets the CBS network to hire Sullivan to do a weekly Sunday night TV variety show, Toast of the Town, which later becomes The Ed Sullivan Show. Debuting in June 1948, the show is originally broadcast from the Maxine Elliott’s Theatre on West 39th Street in New York City. In January 1953, it moves to CBS-TV Studio 50, at 1697 Broadway in New York City, which in 1967 is renamed the Ed Sullivan Theater. The theater is later the home of the Late Show with David Letterman and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Television critics initially give the new show and its host poor reviews.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Sullivan is a respected starmaker because of the number of performers who become household names after appearing on the show, including Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Dave Clark Five, B.J. Thomas and the Jackson Five. He has a knack for identifying and promoting top talent and pays a great deal of money to secure that talent for his show.

By 1971, the show’s ratings have plummeted. In an effort to refresh its lineup, CBS cancels the program along with some of its other longtime shows. Sullivan is angered and refuses to do a final show, although he remains with the network in various other capacities and hosts a 25th anniversary special in June 1973.

In early September 1974, X-rays reveal that Sullivan has an advanced growth of esophageal cancer. Doctors give him very little time to live, and the family chooses to keep the diagnosis secret from him. Sullivan, still believing his ailment to be yet another complication from a long-standing battle with gastric ulcers, dies five weeks later on October 13, 1974, at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital. His funeral is attended by 3,000 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, on a cold, rainy day. He is interred in a crypt at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.

Sullivan has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6101 Hollywood Blvd.