1.
Elvis Presley was a natural blonde. His familiar black hair was the product of dye, beginning in high school.
2.
Simon Cowell worked briefly as a runner on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. He polished Jack Nicholson’s axe. According to his half brother, Tony: “I well remember him saying he used to clean Jack Nicholson's axe in between takes for the most famous scenes. He took great pride in it, you could see your face in it, it was so shiny. It's a far cry from where he is now. I think the only thing he shines these days are his teeth."
3.
Mark Wahlberg served 45 days in jail for an unprovoked, racially motivated attack in 1988 that left one of two victims blind. He was initially charged with attempted murder.
According to Wikipedia:
Wahlberg had been in trouble 20–25 times with the Boston Police Department in his youth. By age 13, Wahlberg had developed an addiction to cocaine and other substances. At fifteen, civil action was filed against Wahlberg for his involvement in two separate incidents of harassing African-American children (the first some siblings and the second a group of black school children on a field trip), by throwing rocks and shouting racial epithets. At 16, Wahlberg approached a middle-aged Vietnamese man on the street and, using a large wooden stick, knocked him unconscious while yelling a racial epithet. That same day, he also attacked another Vietnamese man, leaving the victim permanently blind in one eye.
For these crimes, Wahlberg was charged with attempted murder, pleaded guilty to assault, and was sentenced to two years in state prison at Boston's Deer Island House of Correction. He served 45 days of his sentence. In another incident, the 21-year-old Wahlberg fractured the jaw of a neighbor in an unprovoked attack. Commenting in 2006 on his past crimes, Wahlberg has stated: "I did a lot of things that I regret, and I have certainly paid for my mistakes." He said the right thing to do would be to try to find the blinded man and make amends, and admitted he has not done so, but added that he was no longer burdened by guilt: "You have to go and ask for forgiveness and it wasn't until I really started doing good and doing right by other people, as well as myself, that I really started to feel that guilt go away. So I don't have a problem going to sleep at night. I feel good when I wake up in the morning."
4.
Star Trek’s engineer Scotty, real name James Doohan, served with the Canadian Army in World War 2. On D Day he killed two German snipers and was shot six times.
Doohan joined the Royal Canadian Artillery at the beginning of World War 2 and was commissioned a lieutenant. Sent to England in 1940 for training, his firs action was the invasion of Normandy on D-Day where he shot two snipers. He then led his men to higher ground, through a field of anti-tank mines, and set up defensive positions. Crossing between command posts at 11:30 that night, Doohan was hit by six rounds fired from a Bren gun by a nervous Canadian sentry: four in his leg, one in the chest, and one through his right middle finger. The bullet to his chest was stopped by a silver cigarette case. His right middle finger had to be amputated, something he would conceal during his career as an actor.
5.
At age 35 Harrison Ford was fitting a door for Francis Ford Coppola when a studio executive, testing actresses for a new film, asked him to help out by reading the lines written for the male lead. The film was Star Wars.
By the way:
- The trademark scar on his chin happened in 1964. He had a job near Laguna Beach, California and while driving to work he tried to put his seat belt on, lost control of his car and drove into a telephone pole, slamming his face into the steering wheel. Ford stood by the side of the road bleeding for hours, until somebody picked him up and drove him to the hospital.
- The famous and classic scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark in which Indy shoots an expert swordsman was not in the original script.
Harrison Ford on how the scene came to be filmed in its final format:
We were shooting in Tunisia, and the script had a scene in which I fight a swordsman, an expert swordsman, it was meant to be the ultimate duel between sword and whip. And I was suffering from dysentery, really, found it inconvenient to be out of my trailer for more than 10 minutes at a time. We’d done a brief rehearsal of the scene the night before we were meant to shoot it, and both Steve and I realised it would take 2 or 3 days to shoot this. And it was the last thing we were meant to shoot in Tunisia before we left to shoot in England. And the scene before this in the film included a whip fight against 5 bad guys that were trying to kidnap Marian, so I thought it was a bit redundant. I was puzzling how to get out of this 3 days of shooting, so when I got to set I proposed to Steven that we just shoot the son a bitch and Steve said “I was thinking that as well.” So he drew his sword, the poor guy was a wonderful British stuntman who had practiced his sword skills for months in order to do this job, and was quite surprised by the idea that we would dispatch him in 5 minutes. But he flourished his sword, I pulled out my gun and shot him, and then we went back to England.
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