Actor James Garner to Receive Lifetime Honor

LOS ANGELES - Veteran actor James Garner, whose career spans six decades and signature TV roles from "Maverick" to "The Rockford Files," was chosen on Wednesday to receive the Screen Actors Guild's highest honor.

Garner, 76, who built a career playing ruggedly charming, good-natured anti-heroes, will be presented with SAG's annual lifetime achievement award at its gala awards show on Feb. 5.

The show is carried live on the cable channel TNT. Garner, an Oklahoma native, entered show business in the 1950s after serving in the Korean War and gained fame on the TV western "Maverick." He played the wise-cracking Bret Maverick, a gambler and ladies man, who got by on his cunning rather than a six-gun and would just as soon duck a fight as face a showdown.

He left the show in 1960 in a contract dispute with producers, but brought his "Maverick"-like alter ego to a series of films, including "Thrill of It All," "Move Over, Darling," "The Great Escape" and "Support Your Local Sheriff!"

Garner said his screen persona as a guy smart enough to steer clear of a fight ran only so deep. "At times it's like me, but I used to have this temper. I used to get in a fight in a heartbeat. But that was many years ago," he told Reuters.

Garner had another prime-time hit as ex-con turned private detective Jim Rockford in "The Rockford Files," which ran from 1974 until he abruptly quit the show in 1980. He reprised Rockford for several TV movies in the late 1990s.

The role earned him an Emmy Award in 1977, his only victory in dozen TV acting nominations. He also received an Oscar nomination for his work opposite Sally Field in the 1985 feature comedy "Murphy's Romance."

Garner said his favorite role was as the cowardly American soldier who falls for Julie Andrews before being sent on a dangerous wartime mission in "The Americanization of Emily." He teamed up again with Andrews in the 1982 film "Victor/Victoria."

He returned to the big screen in 2000 in Clint Eastwood's astronaut adventure "Space Cowboys" and two years later in "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood."

Last year, Garner joined the cast of the ABC sitcom "8 Simple Rules," playing a grandfather after the untimely death of series star John Ritter.

Sophia Loren Turns 70 -- That's Right, 70!

ROME - Italians got a break from a steady stream of bad news about
terrorism and taxes Monday, to be reminded that screen siren Sophia
Loren had turned 70. That's right, 70!

The diva who started life as an illegitimate child in southern Italy
went on to win an Oscar and became a living legend and a symbol of
post-war Italy.

She is believed to be celebrating the birthday quietly with her family.

But Italians will get to see her acting talents Monday night with the
screening of a made-for-television film about an immigrant family set
in Umbria and Canada.

Corriere della Sera newspaper put the birthday on its front page, as
if to remind Italians that some of the Dolce Vita, or sweet life, was
left in a world dominated by bad news.

Italy's largest mainstream newspaper said it all: "Happy Birthday,
Sophia -- legend for a generation."

In fact, for Italians, Loren's birthday is not just an ordinary
anniversary or commemoration but a bittersweet reminder that the
post-war boom times she epitomized at the height of her fame no longer
exist.

The fact that Corriere used only her first name was not casual. She is
the only woman in Italy who is universally known by her first name.
When someone says Sophia on television, it can only mean "La Loren."

Loren has outlived many of her film contemporaries from the days when
Rome was known as the Hollywood on the Tiber because it was a major
production center and magnet for the jet set.

Directors Federico Fellini and Vittorio de Sica are dead, as is
Marcello Mastroianni, who was her leading man in many movies.

She shot to fame with an Oscar for best actress in De Sica's
neo-realistic classic Two Women in 1961, a film set in World War II in
which she proved that she was not just a pretty face.

It would be 38 years before another Italian would win an Oscar for a
starring role. Roberto Benigni clinched it in 1998 for his performance
in La Vita e' Bella (Life is Beautiful). Fittingly, it was Loren who
handed him the statue in Hollywood.

And, even though everyone agrees that Loren played many more serious
roles, news bulletins treated Italians to clips of perhaps her most
famous scene: a striptease for a howling Mastroianni in De Sica's
"Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" in 1963.