Category: Interesting Stories

Few comic actors are as fondly remembered by audiences of all ages as Robin Williams. And few of Williams’ family-friendly comedies are as well-loved as 1993’s Mrs. Doubtfire.   The story of a divorced father who disguises himself as a quaint Scottish nanny to spend time with his children, Mrs. Doubtfire was based on the […]

It’s often the case that producers of big-budget action and adventure movies look to cast at least one much-venerated actor (more often than not, a star of the British stage) to lend their project some much-needed gravitas. The Shakespearean actor Sir Derek Jacobi, for instance, appears as the head of a bloodline of vampires in […]

Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park did for dinosaurs what his 1975 movie Jaws did for sharks. Movie audiences the world over found the prospect of being chased by a gigantic Tyrannosaurus rex or stalked by a pair of bloodthirsty and super-intelligent Velociraptors, just as terrifying as being caught in the water by an equally […]

Legendary film critic Gene Siskel might have dismissed it as a “star-studded freak show”, but 1991’s Silence of the Lambs is now considered one of the greatest thrillers of all time. And, at the Oscars the following year, it became only the third film in movie history to win the “Big Five” awards for Best […]

Romantic drama Ghost was made for a relatively modest budget of $2 million, but went on to gross more than half a billion dollars worldwide, leaving it second only to Home Alone as the highest-grossing movie of 1990. It also won Whoopi Goldberg an Oscar; won its screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin an Oscar; and made […]

Nowadays, a new superhero movie every summer seems to come around every summer, but that hasn’t always been the case. Ultimately, when Warner Bros. announced that they were developing a big-screen adaption of Batman for release in 1989—and the hot new director Tim Burton had been signed on to direct it—comic book fans the world […]

One of the most curious movie facts of recent decades is that thanks to a longstanding clause in his movie contract, the role of John McClane—the all-action hero of the Die Hard movies, forever associated with Bruce Willis—originally had to be offered to Frank Sinatra. At the bottom of this peculiar arrangement is the fact […]

Among Hollywood’s strangest rumors is the claim that the set of 1987’s Three Men and a Baby—one of the decade’s most family-friendly comedies—was haunted by the ghost of a young boy. According to cinematic folklore, the boy was alleged to have killed himself in the building that served as the lead characters’ apartment in the […]

Telling the story of a group of US naval aviators at a specialist fighter pilot school in San Diego, 1986’s Top Gun kick-started director Tony Scott’s long career, established Tom Cruise as both an action hero and leading man, and all but launched the careers of his co-stars, Kelly McGillis and Val Kilmer. An unexpected […]

Robert Zemeckis’ 1985 sci-fi adventure Back to the Future told the story of a hapless teenager named Marty McFly (played by Michael J Fox—who was 24 years old at the time!), who is sent back in time by his eccentric scientist friend “Doc” Brown (played by Christopher Lloyd). The movie was one of the decade’s […]