ENTERTAINMENT
January 9, 2013 | By Nicole Sperling, Los Angeles Times
It's lunchtime at Punch Productions, Dustin Hoffman's company, and the Brentwood office is a hive of activity. As young female assistants scurry around offering up salads and beverages, Hoffman - in a blue button-down shirt, gray cords, running shoes and a pedometer - putters around, explaining his company's logo (it's based on the large-nosed Italian commedia dell'arte character Punchinello) and joking with a photographer ("You know why I look so good: extraordinary plastic surgery and a penile reduction.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
December 12, 2012
Galina Vishnevskaya Russian opera singer, wife of Rostropovich Galina Vishnevskaya, 86, a world-renowned Russian opera diva who with her husband defied the Soviet regime to give shelter to writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn and suffered exile from her homeland, died Tuesday in Moscow. Moscow's Opera Center, which Vishnevskaya created, announced her death but did not state the cause. Vishnevskaya, celebrated internationally for her rich soprano voice, married cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in 1955.
NEWS
November 15, 2012 | By Hugh Hart
"Getting old is not for sissies. " That's a Bette Davis line, as quoted by a retired singer in Dustin Hoffman's directorial debut, "Quartet," but the world-weary wisecrack serves equally well as subtext for a bittersweet batch of new films that examine something that has been largely missing from the big screen: the aging process. At 82, Christopher Plummer's Oscar-winning turn in 2010's "Beginners" stood as something of an anomaly. This year, the "senior cinema" entries have grown to include two late-spring releases: Clint Eastwood's grumpy-old-man showcase "Trouble With the Curve" and the surprise hit "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," in which Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Bill Nighy appear as British pensioners in chaotic India.
ENTERTAINMENT
November 5, 2012 | By Deborah Vankin, Los Angeles Times
Mezzo-soprano Laurie Rubin dreams in vivid color - though she's been blind since birth. Yellow? That's the scent of ripe lemons and the warm sun glinting off her cheeks as a child in Encino. White is the crunch of snow and the feel of frothy shaving cream oozing between her fingers. Silver is the cool silkiness of chrome. And brown? That's the sound of B-flat. It reminds the singer of chocolate. "I always joke that part of me can sense color from maybe having had a past life," Rubin says.
ENTERTAINMENT
November 3, 2012 | By Nicole Sperling, Los Angeles Times
Billy Connolly may have been named the U.K.'s "most influential stand-up comedian of all time" this year, but at his core he's the same banjo-playing welder who infused his Humblebums gigs with joke-telling. So when he was asked to play a role recently abandoned by Albert Finney and opposite Maggie Smith in Dustin Hoffman's directorial debut "Quartet," it was only natural the 69-year-old Scot would feel some pangs of trepidation. "I thought, 'Oh, my God!' I got a bit scared," said Connolly of acting opposite such acclaimed talent.
ENTERTAINMENT
September 10, 2012 | By Nicole Sperling
TORONTO -- Actor Dustin Hoffman has been trying to direct a movie for years. At the age of 75, he has finally done so, and if the audience reaction inside the Elgin Theatre on Sunday evening was any indication, it was well worth the wait. From the two standing ovations awarded to Hoffman and his 77-year old star, Maggie Smith, before the film even began, to a third handed out at the conclusion of the screening, it was evident that this older crowd at the Toronto International Film Festival was thrilled with Hoffman's film "Quartet.