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| Ringo Gets Back In The Saddle |
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As the ex-Beatles goes country (again), he explains how he's
keeping things fresh after nearly seven decades of fame.
By Rachel DeSantis in People
t 84 years old Ringo Starr still has some tricks up his sleeve. He's been one-quarter of the most famous rock band of all time, enjoyed a successful 55-year solo career and dabbled in acting. And in January Starr went back to move forward by putting out Look Up, his first country album since 1970. It went on to be his most successful record in years. Suffice it to say, this is not his first rodeo. "It sort of took its own way. We can make the right turns sometimes," Starr says of the album, his first Top 10 record on Billboard's album sales chart. "It's working out really well. I've been surprised a lot lately."
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The Beatles broke up in 1970, but they're still rocking on -- and even won the best rock performance Grammy in February for their swan song "Now and Then," which featured John Lennon's vocals with some help from artificial intelligence. "I didn't expect to win, but it was great," Starr says. "It just felt like John was with us." During a pair of star-studded performances at Nashville's revered Ryman Auditorium in January, now streaming as a concert special on Paramount+, Starr -- who made his Grand Ole Opry debut on Feb. 21 -- sang some Beatles tunes, including "Act Naturally," a Buck Owens country hit he recorded with the Fab Four in 1965. "We put in a lot of hard work and a lot of emotion, and the tracks are still holding up today," he says of the group's enduring classics.
As for the new songs on Look Up, "Thankful" stands out as an unusually personal song for Starr, who cowrote the sweet ode to actress Barbara Bach, 78, his wife of 43 years. "There's up-and-down days, and sometimes I'm really stupid, and then we get over it," he says of their secret to marital bliss.
Starr, who keeps in shape by working out up to five times a week, is currently gearing up for a tour in June with his All Starr Band before they headline a Las Vegas residency in September. "Sometimes when I finish a tour, I'm like, 'That's the end for me.' And all my children say, 'Oh, Dad, you've told us that for the last 10 years.' And they get fed up with me," says the father of three, who had sons Zak, 59, and Jason, 57, and daughter Lee, 54, with his late ex-wife Maureen. "I do feel, 'Oh, that's got to be enough,' and then I get a phone call: 'We've got a few gigs if you're interested.' Okay, we're off again!" 
| Gene Hackman, 1930-2025 |
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Farewell to an everyman leading man.
By Stephanie Zacharek in Time
ctors want nothing more than for us to believe in them. But to watch Gene Hackman, who died in February at age 95, almost always meant wrestling with the feeling that no one or nothing could be trusted. He gravitated toward characters whose core of lies came wrapped in the truth, or vice versa. Either way, you had to keep an eye on him every millisecond, to detect infinitesimal shifts of feeling, sleight-of-hand elisions, a sly but peppery sense of humor that could hit you like the kickback on a shot of cheap single malt. His greatness is the kind you measure in molecules, the building blocks of everything.
Though he'd had small roles in movies and on television through the early 1960s, Hackman was 36 before anyone really took notice. In Bonnie and Clyde (1967), he played Buck Barrow, older brother to Warren Beatty's Clyde; the performance was robust and quietly shattering. After that, Hackman worked so steadily through the 1970s, '80, and '90s that summarizing his credits is nearly impossible. He played a bracingly human man of the cloth in The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and provided a genius comic cameo, as a chaos-inducing blind hermit, in Young Frankenstein (1974). He made a great, dandyish Lex Luthor in several Superman movies and was equally at home in westerns, winning a Supporting Actor Academy Award for Unforgiven (1992). Though he retired from acting in 2008, younger audiences may know him for one of his later roles, as the hell-raising patriarch in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), a performance of cantankerous joy.
Here was an actor with a marvelous, pliable face, not necessarily movie-star handsome but made up of bits and pieces of star quality: the cleft chin, the ready smile, the slightly doughy nose that somehow made him look comically regal. He was great-looking; he was average. He won his first Academy Award for playing dogged New York narcotics detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle in The French Connection (1971). The movie features one of the most famous car-chase sequences in film history; Hackman, not just driving but also being driven by some ferocious, unnameable force, is the human element that makes it sing.
Yet Hackman's greatest performance is that of the guilt-ridden surveillance expert Harry Caul in The Conversation (1974). No other actor has ever made paranoia so poignant. Near the film's end, Harry tries to get on with the meager pleasures of his life: he unwinds by playing along with jazz records on his tenor sax. But the sounds he spins out can't dissolve the aural ghosts around him. Certain he's being surveilled, just as he has spied on others, he tears through his apartment in search of a bug he never finds. In the final shot, he's playing that horn again, amid the lonely wreckage of his apartment. Harry is a man who listens in because joining in isn't an option. He's the perennial outsider, and Hackman makes you feel it, like a cold, whooshing wind that reaches your bones.
That's just one example of the miracle of Gene Hackman. To watch him, in any one of his almost insanely varied roles, often meant sitting there with your jaw hanging in disbelief. What was he doing? How was he doing it? Why am I buying it? Great actors are also great salespeople, and Hackman was the kind of performer who'd have you metaphorically driving off the lot, happily, in a Cadillac you could hardly afford. Yes, you bought it. And you'd do it again.
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