Daniel Day-Lewis | Partying Stars | Bridget Jones | R.I.P.'s
U2's Bono Declares War for Daniel Day-Lewis
Yes, they're both Irish and live near each other for a good part of the year. But superstar rocker Bono doesn't really know Academy Award-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis.
Bono told me as the Golden Globe Awards show ended Sunday night that in reality he's just Day-Lewis' most ardent admirer and wants him to win another Oscar for Gangs of New York.
"This is nothing to knock Jack Nicholson, who did an amazing job and is a wonderful actor," Bono said, "but he's got a bunch of Oscars. Now he's got the Golden Globe. And Daniel deserves it for Gangs of New York. He's incredible. You can't deny it!"
Bono told me he was willing to do almost anything to get the word out about Day-Lewis. He did concede that Day-Lewis, unlike Nicholson, is not much of an awards campaigner.
"You see Jack up on stage and you know he loves the whole process," Bono said. "Daniel probably comes across as reticent. But believe me, he wants it too."
Bono — who wrote and sang the Golden Globe-winning theme song from Gangs — may have triggered something in Day-Lewis. At the Miramax afterparty at Trader Vic's I actually got to ask Day-Lewis if he even cared about winning the Oscar. (He last won in 1989 for My Left Foot.)
"I do," Day-Lewis responded, "but I care more about it for Marty."
He was referring of course to director Martin Scorsese, who won his first-ever award Sunday night. Believe it or not, he'd never won a Golden Globe or an Oscar, despite directing such classics as Raging Bull and GoodFellas.
Was Scorsese surprised that he finally won?
"The tip-off," the director confessed, "was when I saw the look on Harrison Ford's face when he opened the envelope. He's an old friend, and I had a feeling as soon as he saw the winner that he was going to say my name."
Day-Lewis, by the way, will take a little time off in Greece with his wife Rebecca Miller and their children before returning to the States and more Gangs promotion to help Scorsese get his first Oscar. But Bono will likely be right there at his side, pitching in to get Day-Lewis his second one.
If you're keeping count, by the way, Nicholson most recently won for As Good As It Gets in 1997. He also has Oscars for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Terms of Endearment, as well as a slew of nominations for Reds, Batman, Hoffa, and Chinatown.
Stars Party Into the Night Post-Golden Globes
And then there were the parties at the Beverly Hilton Hotel during the Globes show —viewing parties thrown by Miramax, HBO, and InStyle magazine which eventually gave way to post-show bacchanalias.
Focus Features and Paramount Pictures also celebrated on the hotel's rooftop party space, while New Line Cinema took Lord of the Rings and About Schmidt to an off-site restaurant.
Most revelers started the post-show celebrating with HBO downstairs at Griff's, with tables also set aside for My Big Fat Greek Wedding and producer Rita Wilson's very own big Greek family. The reason? Sopranos producer Brad Grey will also be producing the Greek Wedding TV show for CBS.
This made for the most ethnically interesting group of the night, what with the Italian Sopranos taking up a big chunk of the dining area and the Greeks occupying another.
Winner Larry David also commanded an area for his Curb Your Enthusiasm crew, but Joan Rivers — congratulating him — confused Jeff Garlin, who plays David's manager on Curb, for the Sopranos' Steven Schirripa, aka Bobby Bacala. Well, they're both dark and heavyset, so Joan is excused.
Meanwhile, at the HBO table, Kim Cattrall and hubby Mark Levinson (still happily married, never separated, as I reported a couple of weeks ago) showed off Kim's award trophy.
Truly, I have rarely seen the winner of any award clutch it so tightly. At one point, Cattrall burst into tears. They were very genuine.
At 46, she has worked in Hollywood for a quarter of a century, mostly in B-movies and TV shows, trying to get a break. Just when she thought she'd had it made, her career was nearly destroyed by the God-awful Brian DePalma movie Bonfire of the Vanities.
A decade older than her co-stars in Sex and the City, Cattrall deserves all the accolades she gets now. She earned them through hard work. (Remember Mannequin? She'd rather not, I'm sure.)
I also ran into slimmed-down and trim newly appointed AOL Time Warner chairman Dick Parsons, who is basking in his also-deserved success.
New Line Cinema honchos Michael Lynne and Bob Shaye also made the scene, but the main thing about the HBO party was the enormous number of stars who wanted to be part of the action. HBO is pretty much a full-fledged mini-studio now.
Later Sunday night, Creative Artists Agency took over the Chaya Brasserie on the other side of Beverly Hills. Talk about star-studded! Everywhere you turned in the square room there was A-list talent.
Are you ready? Brad Pitt, Courtney Cox, Kate Hudson and Chris Robinson, Geoffrey Rush, Hugh Grant, Heath Ledger, Heather Graham, Demi Moore (smoking away), Keanu Reeves, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Nicole Kidman, Joy Bryant, Maggie Gyllenhall, Carrie Fisher, Annabella Sciorra, Renée Zellweger, Chris and Paul Weitz, Greg Kinnear, Matthew Perry, Jim Sheridan, and Terry George all mingled about while CAA honchos Kevin Huvane and Bryan Lourd were the most popular talent agents in town.
But my favorite pairing was a rare and chance meeting between Michael Cunningham, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Hours, and Helen Fielding, best-selling author of Bridget Jones's Diary.
The American and the Brit had never met, but by accident they happened to be sitting across from each other at a little table. The discussion quickly turned to how they had each gotten such good treatment from the movie business.
"Were you involved in your film?" Fielding, who's just lovely, asked the very friendly Cunningham.
"Oh yes," he said, "I was on the set changing things and rearranging scenes."
William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter (you may remember them) were probably rolling in their graves, considering how Hollywood once treated them.
Fielding said she loved the movie version of The Hours, by the way, almost as much as the film of Bridget Jones. She's launched into her newest novel, she told me, which may require her to hang out backstage at the Academy Awards in March. Someone call Gil Cates and let him know this charming Englishwoman is on her way.
How good was the CAA party? Bono and The Edge from U2 took up residence there, and Miramax's Harvey Weinstein — who was supposed to have been hosting his own party at Ago on Melrose — huddled for a fair part of the night with Huvane.
CAA may have established a new tradition on Sunday night, eclipsing even Vanity Fair's Oscar party for sheer volume of megastars vs. hoi polloi.
R.I.P.: Dick Crenna, Al Hirschfeld
So sorry to hear about two well-known personalities who had different impacts on popular culture.
Al Hirschfeld will no doubt be eulogized extensively in the New York papers today, but I cannot express to you fully how exciting it was to see him at Broadway premieres. A caricaturist whose work came to symbolize New York theatre and sophistication, the 99-year-old Hirschfeld was still making it down the aisle until recently.
With his bushy white beard and hair, he looked particularly elegant in black tie and tails. A Hirschfeld drawing was sort of the mark of a star's ascent into rarified air. It's the end of a most impressive era.
I was a fan of Richard Crenna back when he was a kid on The Real McCoys and remained one through all his great TV movies and even his appearances in the "Rambo" movie series. He was the epitome of the egoless character actor and made all his work seem effortless. The Emmys should give him a posthumous award next fall. His kind of acting and attitude will be sorely missed.
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