A Single Man

Colin Andrew Firth is an English actor and producer. He was identified in the mid-1980s with the "Brit Pack" of rising young British actors, undertaking a challenging series of roles, including leading roles in A Month in the Country (1987), Tumbledown (1988) and Valmont (1989). His portrayal of Mr. Darcy in the 1995 television adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice led to widespread attention, and to roles in more prominent films such as The English Patient (1996), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), The Importance of Being Earnest (2002), Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003), Richard Curtis's romantic comedy ensemble film Love Actually (2003), and the musical comedy Mamma Mia! (2008) and its sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again! (2018).

Julie Anne Smith, known professionally as Julianne Moore, is an American actress. Prolific in film since the early 1990s, she is particularly known for her portrayals of emotionally troubled women in independent films, as well as for her roles in blockbusters. She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and two Emmy Awards.

Nicholas Caradoc Hoult is an English actor. His filmography includes supporting work in big-budget mainstream productions and starring roles in independent projects in the American and the British film industries. He has received several accolades, including nominations for a British Academy Film Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and a Primetime Emmy Award. He was included in the 2012 edition of Forbes 30 Under 30.

Matthew William Goode is a British actor. Goode made his screen debut in 2002 with ABC's TV film feature Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. His breakthrough role was in the romantic comedy Chasing Liberty (2004), for which he received a nomination at Teen Choice Awards for Choice Breakout Movie Star – Male. He then appeared in a string of supporting roles in films like Woody Allen's Match Point (2005), the German-British romantic comedy Imagine Me and You (2006), and the period drama Copying Beethoven (2006). He won praise for his performance as Charles Ryder in Julian Jarrold's adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (2008), and as Ozymandias in the American neo-noir superhero film Watchmen (2009), based on the comics by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. He then starred in romantic comedy Leap Year (2010) and Australian drama Burning Man (2011), the latter earning him a nomination for Best Actor at the Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards.

Jon Kortajarena Redruello is a Spanish fashion model and actor. He has landed advertising campaigns for Just Cavalli, Versace, Giorgio Armani, Bally, Etro, Trussardi, Diesel, Mangano, Lagerfeld, Pepe Jeans but notably H&M, Zara, Guess and Tom Ford for his consecutive seasons with the brands. On 26 June 2009, Forbes ranked Kortajarena eighth in The World's 10 Most Successful Male Models.

Jennifer Michelle "Ginnifer" Goodwin is an American actress. She is known for her starring role as Margene Heffman in the HBO drama series Big Love (2006–2011) and Snow White / Mary Margaret Blanchard in the ABC fantasy series Once Upon a Time (2011–2018).

Edward M. Sears is an American actor, known for his roles as Richard Patrick Woolsley on the TNT legal drama series Raising the Bar, Patrick on the first season of FX anthology horror drama American Horror Story, Dr. Austin Langham on the Showtime period drama series Masters of Sex, and DC Comics supervillain Hunter Zolomon / Zoom on The Flash.

Lee Grinner Pace is an American actor. He is known for starring as Thranduil the Elvenking in The Hobbit trilogy and as Joe MacMillan in the AMC period drama television series Halt and Catch Fire. He has also appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Ronan the Accuser, a role he first played in Guardians of the Galaxy and reprised in Captain Marvel. Pace earned a 2008 Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Ned in the ABC comedy-drama Pushing Daisies. Since 2021, he stars as the galactic emperor Brother Day in the television series Foundation, based on the stories of Isaac Asimov.

Aline Cleusa Weber is a Brazilian model.

Jonathan Daniel Hamm is an American actor. He is best known for his role as Don Draper in the period drama television series Mad Men (2007–2015), for which he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Series – Drama in 2008 and 2016, two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Ensemble in a Drama Series, and the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 2015. He received 16 Primetime Emmy Award nominations for acting in and producing Mad Men and for his guest appearances on 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

Thomas Carlyle Ford is an American fashion designer and filmmaker. He launched his eponymous luxury brand in 2005, having previously served as the creative director at Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. Ford wrote and directed the films A Single Man (2009) and Nocturnal Animals (2016). He currently serves as the chairman of the Board of the Council of Fashion Designers of America.

Mad Men is an American period drama television series created by Matthew Weiner and produced by Lionsgate Television. It ran on the cable network AMC from July 19, 2007, to May 17, 2015, lasting for seven seasons and 92 episodes. The show is set from March 1960 to November 1970.

Jonathan Daniel Hamm is an American actor. He is best known for his role as Don Draper in the period drama television series Mad Men (2007–2015), for which he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Series – Drama in 2008 and 2016, two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Ensemble in a Drama Series, and the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 2015. He received 16 Primetime Emmy Award nominations for acting in and producing Mad Men and for his guest appearances on 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

John Edward Lautner was an American architect. Following an apprenticeship in the mid-1930s with the Taliesin Fellowship led by Frank Lloyd Wright, Lautner opened his own practice in 1938, where he worked for the remainder of his career. Lautner practiced primarily in California, and the majority of his works were residential. Lautner is perhaps best remembered for his contribution to the development of the Googie style, as well as for several Atomic Age houses he designed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which include the Leonard Malin House, Paul Sheats House, and Russ Garcia House.

Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator.

The DVD is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind of digital data and has been widely used for video programs or formerly for storing software and other computer files as well. DVDs offer significantly higher storage capacity than compact discs (CD) while having the same dimensions. A standard DVD can store up to 4.7 GB of storage, while variants can store up to a maximum of 17.08 GB.

Harvey Weinstein is an American former film producer and convicted sex offender. He and his brother, Bob Weinstein, co-founded the entertainment company Miramax, which produced several successful independent films including Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989); The Crying Game (1992); Pulp Fiction (1994); Heavenly Creatures (1994); Flirting with Disaster (1996); and Shakespeare in Love (1998). Weinstein won an Academy Award for producing Shakespeare in Love and also won seven Tony Awards for plays and musicals including The Producers, Billy Elliot the Musical, and August: Osage County. After leaving Miramax, Weinstein and his brother Bob founded The Weinstein Company (TWC), a mini-major film studio. He was co-chairman, alongside Bob, from 2005 to 2017.

Brokeback Mountain is a 2005 American neo-Western romantic drama film directed by Ang Lee and produced by Diana Ossana and James Schamus. Adapted from the 1997 short story of the same name by Annie Proulx, the screenplay was written by Ossana and Larry McMurtry. The film stars Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, and Michelle Williams and depicts the complex romantic relationship between two American cowboys, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, in the American West from 1963 to 1983.

Midnight Cowboy is a 1969 American drama film, based on the 1965 novel of the same name by James Leo Herlihy. The film was written by Waldo Salt, directed by John Schlesinger, and stars Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, with notable smaller roles being filled by Sylvia Miles, John McGiver, Brenda Vaccaro, Bob Balaban, Jennifer Salt, and Barnard Hughes. Set in New York City, Midnight Cowboy depicts the unlikely friendship between two hustlers: naïve sex worker Joe Buck (Voight), and ailing con man Rico Rizzo (Hoffman), referred to as "Ratso".

Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang. Although the name "Rotten Tomatoes" connects to the practice of audiences throwing rotten tomatoes in disapproval of a poor stage performance, the original inspiration comes from a scene featuring tomatoes in the Canadian film Léolo (1992).

The Chicago Tribune is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, and formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper", it remains the most-read daily newspaper in the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region. In 2017, it had the sixth-highest circulation of any American newspaper.

National Public Radio is an American nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It serves as a national syndicator to a network of over 1,000 public radio stations in the United States. It differs from other non-profit membership media organizations such as the Associated Press, in that it was established by an act of Congress.

The Austin Chronicle is an alternative weekly newspaper published every Thursday in Austin, Texas, United States. The paper is distributed through free news-stands, often at local eateries or coffee houses frequented by its targeted demographic. The newspaper reported a weekly readership of 545,500. It is part of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and it emulates the typical publications of the 1960s counterculture movement.

The A.V. Club is an American online newspaper and entertainment website featuring reviews, interviews, and other articles that examine films, music, television, books, games, and other elements of pop-culture media. The A.V. Club was created in 1993 as a supplement to its satirical parent publication, The Onion. While it was a part of The Onion's 1996 website launch, The A.V. Club had minimal presence on the website at that point.

Roger Joseph Ebert was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times said Ebert "was without question the nation's most prominent and influential film critic," and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called him "the best-known film critic in America."

The Chicago Sun-Times is a daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Since 2022, it is the flagship paper of Chicago Public Media, and has the second largest circulation among Chicago newspapers, after the Chicago Tribune. The modern paper grew out of the 1948 merger of the Chicago Sun and the Chicago Daily Times. Journalists at the paper have received eight Pulitzer prizes, mostly in the 1970s; one recipient was film critic Roger Ebert (1975), who worked at the paper from 1967 until his death in 2013. Long owned by the Marshall Field family, since the 1980s ownership of the paper has changed hands numerous times, including twice in the late 2010s.

The Times is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register, adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers, since 1981 a subsidiary of News UK, in turn wholly owned by News Corp. The Times and The Sunday Times, which do not share editorial staff, were founded independently and have only had common ownership since 1966. In general, the political position of The Times is considered to be centre-right.

Variety is an American media company owned by Penske Media Corporation. The company was founded by Sime Silverman in New York City in 1905 as a weekly newspaper reporting on theater and vaudeville. In 1933 it added Daily Variety, based in Los Angeles, to cover the motion-picture industry. Variety.com features entertainment news, reviews, box office results, cover stories, videos, photo galleries and features, plus a credits database, production charts and calendar, with archive content dating back to 1905.

The Golden Lion is the highest prize given to a film at the Venice Film Festival. The prize was introduced in 1949 by the organizing committee and is now regarded as one of the film industry's most prestigious and distinguished prizes. In 1970, a second Golden Lion was introduced; this is an honorary award for people who have made an important contribution to cinema.

The 66th annual Venice International Film Festival, held in Venice, Italy, was held from 2 to 12 September 2009, with Maria Grazia Cucinotta serving as the festival's hostess. The opening film of the festival was Baarìa by Giuseppe Tornatore and the closing film was Chengdu, I Love You by Fruit Chan and Cui Jian. The international competition jury, chaired by Ang Lee, awarded the Golden Lion to Lebanon by Samuel Maoz.

Best Actor in a Leading Role is a British Academy Film Award presented annually by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) to recognize an actor who has delivered an outstanding leading performance in a film.

The Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama is a Golden Globe Award that was first awarded by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as a separate category in 1951. Previously, there was a single award for "Best Actor in a Motion Picture" but the splitting allowed for recognition of it and the Best Actor – Musical or Comedy.

The Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role in a Motion Picture is an award given by the Screen Actors Guild to honor the finest acting achievements in film.

The Academy Award for Best Actor is an award presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). It is given to an actor who has delivered an outstanding performance in a leading role in a film released that year. The award is traditionally presented by the previous year's Best Actress winner.

The Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture is a Golden Globe Award that was first awarded by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in 1944 for a performance in a motion picture released in the previous year.

The Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score is a Golden Globe Award presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), an organization of journalists who cover the United States film industry, but are affiliated with publications outside North America, since its institution in 1947.

Abel Korzeniowski is a Polish composer of film and theatre scores.

Shigeru Umebayashi is a Japanese composer.

Bernard Herrmann was an American composer and conductor best known for his work in composing for films. As a conductor, he championed the music of lesser-known composers. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest film composers. Alex Ross writes that "Over four decades, he revolutionized movie scoring by abandoning the illustrative musical techniques that dominated Hollywood in the 1930's and imposing his own peculiar harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary."

La Wally is an opera in four acts by composer Alfredo Catalani, to a libretto by Luigi Illica, first performed at La Scala, Milan, on 20 January 1892. It was Catalani's last opera.

Jamesetta Hawkins, known professionally as Etta James, was an American singer who performed in various genres, including gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, rock and roll, and soul. Starting her career in 1954, she gained fame with hits such as "The Wallflower", "At Last", "Tell Mama", "Something's Got a Hold on Me", and "I'd Rather Go Blind". She faced a number of personal problems, including heroin addiction, severe physical abuse, and incarceration, before making a musical comeback in the late 1980s with the album Seven Year Itch.

"Green Onions" is an instrumental composition recorded in 1962 by Booker T. & the M.G.'s. Described as "one of the most popular instrumental rock and soul songs ever" and as one of "the most popular R&B instrumentals of its era", the tune is a twelve-bar blues with a rippling Hammond M3 organ line by Booker T. Jones that he wrote when he was 17, although the actual recording was largely improvised in the studio.

Booker T. & the M.G.'s were an American instrumental R&B/funk band that was influential in shaping the sound of Southern soul and Memphis soul. The original members of the group were Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper (guitar), Lewie Steinberg (bass), and Al Jackson Jr. (drums). In the 1960s, as members of the Mar-Keys, the rotating slate of musicians that served as the house band of Stax Records, they played on hundreds of recordings by artists including Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Bill Withers, Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas, Johnnie Taylor and Albert King. They also released instrumental records under their own name, including the 1962 hit single "Green Onions". As originators of the unique Stax sound, the group was one of the most prolific, respected, and imitated of its era. By the mid-1960s, bands on both sides of the Atlantic were trying to sound like Booker T. & the M.G.'s.

Jo Elizabeth Stafford was an American traditional pop music singer, whose career spanned five decades from the late 1930s to the early 1980s. Admired for the purity of her voice, she originally underwent classical training to become an opera singer before following a career in popular music, and by 1955 had achieved more worldwide record sales than any other female artist. Her 1952 song "You Belong to Me" topped the charts in the United States and United Kingdom, becoming the second single to top the UK Singles Chart, and the first by a female artist to do so.