1 Betty White
Betty White is a huge animal lover who would have become a zookeeper had she not gone into acting. She rejected a role in “As Good As It Gets” because of an animal cruelty scene. She visits local zoos when traveling, and she’s been a long-term board member and generous donor to the L.A. Zoo.
2. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop sold “bio-frequency stickers” made of the “carbon material NASA uses to line space suits” and she claimed would “rebalance the energy frequency in our bodies.” When alerted to the product, NASA said their spacesuits weren’t even lined with carbon material.
3. In 1996, Mary Tyler Moore offered a restaurant $1,000 to sell her a 65-year-old lobster so she could return it to the wild. Rush Limbaugh then offered $2,000 to eat the lobster. The restaurant denied both offers and kept the lobster as a mascot.
4. When Joan Crawford died, her longtime rival Bette Davis said: “You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good . . . Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”
5. Julie Andrews initially refused the role of Mary Poppins because she was pregnant. Walt Disney, however, insisted that she played the nanny, saying, “We’ll wait for you.”
6 Debbie Reynolds
In 1970, when she was the highest paid woman on television with 42% of the viewing audience, Debbie Reynolds quit her show because NBC was running cigarette commercials during its airtime.
7. In 1906, Mary Astor planned the release of 10,000 imported Brazilian butterflies at her Debutante ball housed in nets lining the ceiling. They didn’t take into account the heat of the lights, and her party ended with 10,000 dead insects showering her party guests.
8. After Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American to win an Academy Award for her role in “Gone with the Wind” she was accused of being an Uncle Tom by the NAACP to which she responded that she would “rather make seven hundred dollars a week playing a maid than seven dollars being one.”
9. Maggie Smith continued acting as Professor McGonagall in the last Harry Potter movie in spite of battling cancer because she didn’t want to disappoint fans.
10. Audrey Hepburn was so slim because from ages 9 to 16 she was severely malnourished during World War 2 in Holland. Among other things, she sustained herself on tulip bulbs.
11 Bette Midler
When Bette Midler started her career in the early 1970s, she was the singer in a gay bathhouse in New York often accompanied by Barry Manilow on piano. Manilow produced her first album and patrons of the bath house were her first hardcore fans.
12. Halle Berry refused to shower for 10 days to accurately portray a drug-addicted prostitute in Spike Lee’s 1991 movie Jungle Fever. She felt sorry for co-star Samuel L. Jackson, “(I played) a foul-mouthed crack-smoking hoe. It’s true (I didn’t wash), ask Sam Jackson, he had to get a whiff of it!”
13. Doris Day believed she was born in 1924 until her 95th birthday when the Associated Press found a birth certificate with the year 1922 on it.
14. Rita Hayworth began showing signs of Alzheimer’s during her 40s. Even as it worsened, people blamed her behavior on her heavy drinking. She never got a proper diagnosis until 1979 and upon her death in 1987 at just 68, she would become a major public face for Alzheimer’s Awareness.
15. Grace Kelly became close friends with dancer Josephine Baker after Kelly stormed out of a nightclub in NYC that Baker was denied entry because she was black.
16 Liza Minnelli
Liza Minnelli only accepted the role of Lucille 2 on Arrested Development because she was asked in person by Ron Howard, who she had babysat when he was a child and she a teen.
17. Jennifer Lopez wearing a green Versace dress during the 42nd Annual Grammy Awards subsequently led to the creation of Google’s image search.
18. When Cher was in 5th grade, she directed a musical for her school. When the boys didn’t want to participate, she acted the male roles and sang their songs.
19. Emma Watson used to mouth Rupert Grint’s and Daniel Radcliffe’s lines during the filming of Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone.
20. After finishing a fundraiser for the army, actress Carole Lombard (highest paid actress of the 30s and Clark Gable’s wife) flipped a coin on whether to return home by plane or train. TWA Flight crashed 13 minutes after takeoff killing Lombard, her mother, and 21 others.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 Christina Ricci
Christina Ricci’s acting career started by stealing a role in her school play. At the audition, she taunted her acting rival to hit her, told on him and he lost the role to her as part of his punishment. That role got her discovered and on the career path, we know today.
22. Kristen Bell had to re-record some of her lines in Frozen to have a more ‘womanly’ tone when she gave birth during production because it deepened her voice.
23. Brie Larson had a short-lived singing career. Her album “Finally out of P.E.” released in 2005 and only sold 4,000 copies in the US.
24. When actress Renée Zellweger was preparing for the movie Bridget Jones’ Diary, she worked for a publishing company under the name Bridget Cavendish. She went largely unrecognized and had a framed photo of her then-boyfriend Jim Carrey on her desk. Most of her co-workers thought it was weird.
25. Actress Ellen Wong (Knives Chau in Scott Pilgrim vs The World) has a black belt in taekwondo. It was her martial arts background that helped her land the role.