In honor of the Tonys, airing Sunday, June 10, on CBS, Live with Regis and Kelly will showcase a slew of Broadway babies next week. Monday brings a Spring Awakening; Tuesday finds David Hyde Pierce hawking Curtains; on Wednesday, Raúl Esparza makes for great Company; Thursday Christine Ebersole brightens Grey Gardens; and on Friday Mary Poppins goes "Supercalifragilisticexpidalidocious".... Cheers star Rhea Perlman makes her West End debut in Boeing-Boeing this summer, as per Playbill.com.... Broadway.com reports that the American classic Gone with the Wind is being turned into a British musical, set to hit the stage in spring 2008.... An actor in the problem-plagued production of London's Lord of the Rings was injured by a piece of hydraulic stage machinery. He was treated with medicine, not magic. — Reporting by Raven Snook
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Question: I've heard that Oscar winners sometimes sell their statuettes and that there's supposedly something wrong with that. What's the story, and just for the record, what is an Oscar worth?
Answer: The only Oscar winner who actually sold his own statuette was Harold Russell, who traded his best-supporting-actor statuette from The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) for $50,000 in 1992. Russell, a nonactor, played a World War II veteran who comes home a double amputee, as Russell himself had done in real life. And he actually won two Oscars for the same performance, so even after selling his acting award, he had a special Oscar "bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans" for his mantle.
But generally when an Oscar is up for sale, it's by heirs of the person who actually won the award, and the problem
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Question: I was only a kid when The Day After was filmed in my town, but I remember it being a big deal with my brother and my dad. Was it a big hit?
Answer: Well, "hit" sort of implies that everyone had a ball taking in the depiction of nuclear annihilation as seen through the lens of your hometown, Maria, but I can tell you that a heck of a lot of people watched.
In fact, when ABC broadcast the groundbreaking (no pun intended), graphic movie in November 1983, it was the highest-rated made-for-TV movie shown to date, racking up a whopping 46 share, which means 46 percent of all TV sets in use at the time. (For all you detail lovers, it topped 1977's Little Ladies of the Night, which had a 36.9 share, and was the second-highest-rated movie of any kind to that point, beaten only by a 47.6 earned by Gone with the Wind in 1976. Trust me: Such number
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