Celebrity Jews

Bar mitzvah bits

The stars of TV's "Alias," Victor Garber and Jennifer Garner, just did a duet singing performance at a charity event in Los Angeles. Garner, who plays Garber's daughter, said that she's really not a singer, but she did sing a bit in musicals when she started out. On the other hand, Garber, who is a Broadway musical star, said that his first musical was his bar mitzvah, "and I was very good in it."

Forbes magazine recently noted that billionaire art collector and cosmetics fortune heir Ronald Lauder bought his first art piece, a drawing by a modern master, with money from his bar mitzvah. (And I foolishly spent my bar mitzvah gelt on trifles like college!)




About Jewish jokers

Woody Allen's new flick, "Melinda and Melinda," co-starring Amanda Peet, opened last week to better reviews than most of his recent films.

http://www.comingsoon.net asked Allen: "Do you think it's fair to say that the comedy in 'Melinda' is more for Jews and the drama is more for WASPs?" He replied: "That's very funny ... I'm forever being asked why all the comedians are Jewish, and I always feel that they're not. I was raised in a Jewish neighborhood in a Jewish household, so naturally my idiom is where I grew up. I've [discussed this] with Spike Lee ... I could never convincingly write about a black family and I doubt if he could write as convincingly as I could about a Jewish family, because I lived it every moment, so it gets into the nuances."

Also this month, Allen's only biological child, Seamus Farrow (formerly Satchel Allen), spoke to the press about Woody. Seamus, 17, said that he and Woody were once close, but they haven't talked in nine years. Their relationship was destroyed, he said, when Allen left Seamus' mother, Mia Farrow, for Mia's adopted daughter. Seamus, by the way, is called a "boy genius" because he's already finished college and will soon go to Yale Law School.




'Desperate Housewives' mom

The talented and pretty Lesley Ann Warren, 58, didn't become a major star as many predicted early in her career, but she's never stopped doing good TV and film work.

Warren, who got an Oscar nomination for "Victor/Victoria," will appear in the hit ABC series "Desperate Housewives" in an arc of shows starting Apr. 10. Warren plays the mother of Sophie (Teri Hatcher), one of the principal characters. The plotline has Hatcher trying to reconcile Warren with her ex-boyfriend,




Ryder's return

Reports say that a film production of "O! Jerusalem" will begin next month. It's based on a 1972 best-selling historical study about the struggle for the city during the Israeli War of Independence. Winona Ryder has been cast as a Jewish girl whose friendship with a Palestinian boy is shattered by war.

The film is directed by Elie Chouraqui, a French Jewish filmmaker who has been a leading public figure in protesting outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence in France. His most recent film was "Harrison's Flowers," starring Adrien Brody. He also wrote the French musical that was the basis for the recent Los Angeles stage musical "Moses," starring Val Kilmer as the prophet.




Bullock as bubbe

Beginning March 29 on Spike TV is William Shatner's reality series, "Invasion Iowa," which "stars" the people of the town where Capt. Kirk was supposedly born. Meanwhile, Shatner is now in theaters as the co-star of "Miss Congeniality II," which opened March 24. In the sequel, "Congeniality" star Sandra Bullock goes undercover as a Jewish grandma.




Columnist Nate Bloom is the Oakland-based editor of www.jewhoo.com.