Month: January 2021

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Cloris Leachman, an Oscar-winner for her portrayal of a lonely housewife in “The Last Picture Show” and a comedic delight as the fearsome Frau Blücher in “Young Frankenstein” and self-absorbed neighbor Phyllis on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” has died. She was 94. Leachman died in her sleep of natural causes at her home in Encinitas, California, publicist Monique Moss said Wednesday. Her daughter Dinah Englund was at her side, Moss said. A character actor of extraordinary range, Leachman defied typecasting. In her early television career, she appeared as Timmy’s mother on the “Lassie” series. She played a frontier prostitute in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” a crime spree family member in “Crazy Mama,” and Blücher in Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein,” in which the ...

For an industry that’s obsessed with dads — Kratos and Joel, for instance — there are so very few meaningful roles for moms in video games. Moms do exist, but they’re most often dead moms, bad moms, or missing moms; moms that are only there for a protagonist to play off of. The evolution of familial relationships in video games is changing, and at least one indie design team has decided to take on a meaningful maternal story. “There’s been a lot of sad dads,” Fullbright co-founder Steve Gaynor told Polygon. “They’ve been good games, many of them. But now it’s just mom hours.” Gaynor and a team of designers and writers at Fullbright are making a video game, Open Roads, about a teenage girl and her mom. The game, expected out in 2021, was revealed in December, and stars Keri Russel ...

<!-- -->It’s the beginning of the end for Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which released the trailer for its 20th and final season. The minute-long look at what’s ahead for reality TV’s first family doesn’t give us more than a whole lot of emotions around leaving the show behind. As Kris and Kim tearfully tell the crew that they won’t be continuing with the show, we also get our only indication that there’s a pandemic going on when the camera pans to a masked crew member. Kim, there’s people that are dying! Otherwise, the trailer includes a reference to Kourtney and Scott Disick’s relationship that hasn’t aged too well, nary a mention of Kanye West, and Harry Styles’s “Sign of the Times” t...

Written by Oscar Holland, CNN Contributors Jacqui PalumboLily Smith, CNN One of the last Sandro Botticelli portraits left in private hands sold at auction for more than $92 million USD (after fees) at Sotheby's New York on Thursday morning. The 15th-century painting "Young Man Holding a Roundel" became the most expensive work by the Renaissance artist ever to appear at auction, and the most valuable Old Masters work ever sold at Sotheby's, the auction house announced. It was also the second work to top the $80 million mark since Sotheby's began live streaming its auctions during the pandemic, according to a press statement, with the first being Francis Bacon's "Oresteia of Aeschylus," which sold for $84.5 million last June. Believed to have been produced in the late 1470s or early 14...

Patricia Rust is doing everything she can to stay safe during the pandemic. Her husband, however, is not. Rust, 68, a retired attorney in Clarksville, Tennessee, is militant about mask-wearing and social distancing. But she says her 71-year-old husband believes COVID is no worse than the flu, often refuses to wear a mask and frequently socializes in large groups. "We just had a fight the other night where I said, 'That's it, we're going to get divorced. I need to stay safe and you refuse to allow me to be safe or feel safe in my own home,'" Rust said. "I have pleaded. I have cried. I have begged. I have yelled. And he refuses to listen to anything I say." Rust's husband declined to be interviewed for this story. The coronavirus has taken a devastating toll, with more than 425,000 American...