Frank Perry: Last News

Arriving, appropriately enough, in the wake of Mother’s Day, comes a new book toasting the mother of all Bad Mother movies, Mommie Dearest.Ashley Hoff’s With Love, Mommie Dearest: The Making of an Unintentional Camp Classic offers chapter after entertaining chapter digging into the making of the notorious 1981 drama starring Faye Dunaway, tearing down rose bushes, bearing walls, and some of the scenery as Hollywood film legend Joan Crawford.Based on the eponymous best-selling memoir by Christina Crawford, Joan’s adopted daughter, detailing years of emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her Oscar-winning mother, Mommie Dearest was supposed to be a serious exposé of child abuse. Somehow, that’s not the movie that director Frank Perry and producer Frank Yablans wound up making, as is vividly chronicled in Hoff’s book.“Nobody sets out to make a failure,” says the author and Hollywood historian, whose previous book Match Game 101: A Backstage History of Match Game took a behind-the-scenes look at a different camp phenomenon.

but actress Faye Dunaway could barely bring herself to film the scene.Dunaway, now 83, famously portrayed silver-screen icon Joan Crawford in the 1981 cult classic “Mommie Dearest.” Directed by Frank Perry, “Mommie Dearest” is based on the tell-all memoir of the same name written by Crawford’s adopted daughter Christina, played in the film by child actor Mara Hobel. The book exposed — and the movie brought to vivid life — the alleged childhood abuse Christina suffered at the hands of her controlling, alcoholic mother. A new book by Hollywood historian A.

Michaela Zee Janet Landgard, who starred in 1968’s “The Swimmer” alongside Burt Lancaster and played Paul Petersen’s love interest for three seasons on “The Donna Reed Show,” has died. She was 75.

Kathryn Hays, who in 1972 started playing As The World Turns‘ trouble-making home-wrecker Kim Sullivan and by the soap’s cancelation in 2010 had aged with her character to become the beloved matriarch Kim Hughes, died Friday, March 25 in Fairfield, Connecticut. She was 87.