Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

Gloria Grahame

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

August 10, 2018 by Robert J. Avrech 8 Comments

Not long before she died in 1981 at age 57, Gloria Grahame, who had acted in films signed by Frank Capra, Nicholas Ray, Josef von Sternberg, Vincente Minnelli, Elia Kazan, Fritz Lang, and Fred Zinnemann, demolished them all in one sweeping statement. “Those men never directed me,” she told an English stage director with whom she was currently working. “I’d go home and work on it with my mother, then come in and shoot it, and that would be that.”
—Donald Chase, “Gloria Grahame In Praise of the Naughty Mind,” Film Comment, 1997

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

August 3, 2018 by Robert J. Avrech 6 Comments

“I liked the strong characters. I don’t mean women who have masculine qualities about them, but something that has some intestinal fortitude, some guts to it.”
—Ida Lupino

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

January 5, 2018 by Robert J. Avrech 13 Comments

“It wasn’t the way I looked at a man, it was the thought behind it.”
—Gloria Grahame

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Gloria Grahame: Marriage Hollywood Style

June 22, 2017 by Robert J. Avrech 9 Comments

Gloria Grahame

Before Woody and Soon-Yi there was Gloria and Anthony.

In June 1948, the day after that she divorced her first husband, actress Gloria Grahame (1923 – 1981) wed director Nicholas Ray.

The marriage was troubled right from the start and ended when Ray walked in on Grahame while she was in bed with another man.

Actually, a boy.

He was 13-year-old Anthony Ray, Nick’s son from a previous marriage.

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

August 5, 2016 by Robert J. Avrech 12 Comments

“Learn your lines, find your mark, look ‘em in the eye and tell ‘em the truth.” —Acting advice from James Cagney, — “Learn your lines, find your mark, look ‘em in the eye and tell ‘em the truth.”
—Acting advice from James Cagney.

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I'm an Emmy Award winning screenwriter. I'm also an observant Jew, a religious Zionist, a conservative Republican, and a member of the NRA. I've been writing and producing in Hollywood for over twenty-five years. But the focus of my life is my family: my radiant wife, Karen—with whom I have been in love with since I was nine years-old—and my two daughters, who, thankfully, look like Karen. Not too long ago, we had three children. But our son, Ariel, died at the age of twenty-two from cancer. We miss him terribly. We think about him practically every minute of every day. People tell us that time heals, but Karen and I know this is not true. Time grinds away doing its terrible work. Ariel is gone. Yet absence becomes presence.

Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.

Annual Ariel Avrech
Memorial Lectures
Young Israel of Century City

NOTE: Click on video titles inside the thumbnail images, below, to open that video in YouTube

Fifteenth: June 10, 2018
Jackie Danicki: “Confessions of a Convert: A Humbling, Joyful Journey to Judaism.”

Blog Post | Audio: (94 MB)

Fourteenth: June 11, 2017
Daniel Greenfield: “Fighting Anti-Semitism and Defending Israel in the Age of BDS.”

Blog Post | Audio: (100 MB)

Thirteenth: May 22, 2016Ben Shapiro: “How You Can Save Israel”

Blog Post | Audio: (70 MB)

Twelfth: June 7, 2015
Larry Elder: “The New Black Anti-Semitism”

Blog Post | Audio: (100 MB)

Eleventh: June 8, 2014
Michael Medved: “Shifting Alliances: Why Liberals No Longer Reliably Support Israel — And Conservatives Do.”

Blog Post | Audio: (97MB)

Tenth: June 9, 2013
David Horowitz: “The War Against Judaism on the University Campus.”

Blog Post | Audio: (16MB)

Ninth: June 3, 2012
Joel B. Pollak: “The Mainstream Media’s Betrayal of Israel.”

Blog Post | Audio: (15MB)

Eighth: June 5, 2011
Yossi Klein Halevi: “What is Expected of a Survivor People: Lessons My Father Taught Me.”

Blog Post | Audio: (18MB)

Seventh: June 13, 2010
Dennis Prager: “Happiness is a Mitzvah, Not an Emotion.”

Blog Post | Audio: (80MB)

Sixth: June 21, 2009
Rabbi Steven Pruzansky: “Conformity in Jewish Life: Vice, Virtue or Affectation?”

Blog Post | Audio: (64MB)

Fifth: June 15, 2008
Rabbi Dr. Gil S. Perl: “What Was the Rosh Yeshiva Reading: Intellectual Openness in 19th Century Lithuania.”

Blog Post | Audio: (70MB)