Synopsis

Gillian Holroyd is just your average, modern-day, witch, living in a New York apartment with her Siamese familiar, Pyewacket. But one day a handsome publisher, Shep Henderson walks into her building and Gillian decides she wants him--especially as it turns out he's marrying Merle Kittridge, an old poison penpal from Gillian's college days. So, Gillian casts a spell over Shep. But her powers are in danger of being exorcised by something stronger than the bell-book-and-candle routine: Love.

--- from IMDB.com

Cast

Gillian 'Gil' Holroyd - Kim Novak

Kim Novak was born in Chicago, Illinois on February 13, 1933 with the birth name of Marilyn Pauline Novak. She was the daughter of a former teacher turned transit clerk and his wife, also a former teacher. Throughout elementary and high school, Kim did not get along well with teachers. She even admitted that she didn't like being told what to do and when to do it. Her first job, after high school, was modeling teen fashions for a local department store. Kim, later, won a scholarship in a modeling school and continued to model part time. Kim later worked odd jobs as an elevator operator, sales clerk, and a dental assistant. The jobs never seemed to work out so she fell back on modeling, the one job she did well. After a stint on the road as a spokesperson for an appliance company, Kim decided to go to Los Angeles and try her luck at modeling there. Ultimately, her modeling landed her an uncredited role in the RKO production of The French Line (1954). The role encompassed nothing more than being seen on a set of stairs. Later a talent agent arranged for a screen test with Columbia Pictures and won a small six month contract. In truth, some of the studio hierarchy thought that Kim was Columbia's answer to Marilyn Monroe. Kim, who was still going by her own name of Marilyn, was originally going to be called "Kit Marlowe". She wanted to at least keep her family name of Novak, so the young actress and studio personnel settled on Kim Novak. After taking some acting lessons, which the studio declined to pay for, Kim appeared in her first film opposite Fred MacMurray in Pushover (1954). Though her role as "Lona McLane" wasn't exactly a great one, it was her classic beauty that seemed to capture the eyes of the critics. Later that year, Kim appeared in the film, Phffft (1954) with Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday. Now more and more fans were eager to see this bright new star. These two films set the tone for her career with a lot of fan mail coming her way. Her next film was as "Kay Greylek" in 5 Against the House (1955). The film was well-received, but it was her next one for that year that was her best to date. The film was Picnic (1955). Although Kim did a superb job of acting in the film as did her costars, the film did win two Oscars for editing and set decoration. Kim's next film was with United Artists on a loan out in the controversial Otto Preminger film The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). Her performance was flawless, but it was was Kim's beauty that carried the day. The film was a big hit. In 1957, Kim played "Linda English" in the hit movie Pal Joey (1957) with Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth. The film did very well at the box-office, but was condemned by the critics. Kim really didn't seem that interested in the role. She even said she couldn't stand people such as her character. That same year, Novak risked her career when she embarked upon an affair with singer/actor Sammy Davis Jr.. The interracial affair alarmed studio executives, most notably Harry Cohn, and they ended the relationship in January of the following year. In 1958, Kim appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's, now classic, Vertigo (1958) with Jimmy Stewart. This film's plot was one that thoroughly entertained the theater patrons wherever it played. The film was one in which Stewart's character, a detective, is hired to tail a friend's wife (Kim) and witnesses her suicide. In the end, Stewart finds that he has been duped in an elaborate scheme. Her next film was Bell Book and Candle (1958) which was only a modest success. By the early 1960s, Kim's star was beginning to fade, especially with the rise of new stars or stars that were remodeling their status within the film community. With a few more nondescript films between 1960 and 1964, she landed the role of "Mildred Rogers" in the remake of Of Human Bondage (1964). The film debuted to good reviews. While filming The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965), she had a romance with co-star Richard Johnson, whom she married, but the marriage failed the following year. Kim stepped away from the cameras for a while, returning in 1968 to star in The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968). It was a resounding flop, perhaps the worst of her career. However, after that, Kim, basically, was able to pick what projects she wanted. After The Great Bank Robbery (1969) in 1969, Kim was away for another four years until she was seen in a television movie called The Third Girl from the Left (1973) (TV), playing a veteran Las Vegas showgirl experiencing a midlife crisis. Subsequent films were not the type to get the critics to sit up and take notice. In 1981, Kim played, of all people, "Kit Marlowe" in the TV series "Falcon Crest" (1981). Her last film, on the silver screen, was Liebestraum (1991), in which she played a terminally ill woman with a past.

Shepherd 'Shep' Henderson - James Stewart

James Stewart was arguably the most loved actor ever to have appeared on screen. Certainly, he was the last of the great men who captured audience hearts in the throes of the Depression and became, in the words of Andrew Sarris, "the most complete actor-personality in the American cinema."

Stewart's origins read like cliches; he was born in 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the son of the local hardware store owner (his Oscar has permanently resided in the store, which has been in the family for generations). While studying architecture at Princeton (his father's alma mater), he met Joshua Logan, who convinced him to begin acting. Billy O'Grady, MGM's chief talent scout, saw his performance in a line of female impersonators and remembered him as "the only one who didn't ham it up." Bitten at last by the drama bug, Stewart moved with Logan to summer stock work with the University Players in Falmouth, MA, joining future co-stars Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan.

That summer a production had a pre-Broadway tryout at Falmouth and Stewart, as a chauffeur, had two lines: "Mrs. Mainwaring's car is waiting" and, after being delayed, "Mrs. Mainwaring's going to be sore as hell." It tore down the house and was noticed and written up by a visiting New York critic. Stewart and Fonda moved to New York, where Hedda Hopper recommended Jimmy for a screen test, resulting in a long-term MGM contract.

From the first, Stewart's performances stood out: raw, edgy, full of nervous, boyish energy. Tall, skinny and not conventionally handsome, he nonetheless possessed an engaging, approachable charisma and a naturalistic warmth. While his rivals played with masculine understatement, Stewart mirrored the vital excesses of those most American of rising actresses--Crawford, Davis, Rogers, Hepburn.

Audiences first took note of him as Eleanor Powell's leading man in 1936's "Born to Dance". Everyone at Metro at least had to "try" musicals; Stewart, singing--sort of--introduced Cole Porter's "Easy to Love". He was hopeless, but the public found him adorable.

Most of Stewart's big breaks came away from MGM: George Stevens's "Vivacious Lady", at RKO with Ginger Rogers, and Frank Capra's "You Can't Take it With You", at Columbia (both 1938); David O. Selznick's "Made For Each Other" (1939), opposite Carole Lombard; Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (his greatest pre-WWII performance), with Jean Arthur, at Columbia; and "Destry Rides Again", taming Marlene Dietrich and the west at Universal (both 1939). MGM rallied with two winners, both co-starring Sullavan: Ernst Lubitsch's entrancing "The Shop Around the Corner" and Frank Borzage's haunting "The Mortal Storm" (both 1940). George Cukor's "The Philadelphia Story" followed. Stewart surprised the industry and himself, winning a Best Actor Oscar, despite being second lead to Cary Grant.

At age 33, Stewart enlisted as private and rose to colonel in the Air Force, leading one thousand plane strikes against Germany; Stewart won the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross. In his later years he gradually rose in rank in the reserves until he retired a brigadier general.

After the war, Stewart contributed what is undoubtedly his best-known performance, in Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946), a film and a performance full of postwar angst and visions of youthful dreams dashed yet also showing the compensations bound up with overlooked achievements. He would later deliver a speech before Congress protesting the film's colorization.

Postwar audiences no longer wanted sentiment. Stewart vigorously changed his image, turning hard-bitten for "Call Northside 777" and working for Hitchcock in "Rope" (both 1948). He returned to Broadway to replace Frank Fay in the whimsical "Harvey" and, before filming the 1950 movie version, made the first two westerns of many that would follow, both of which were hugely popular. Stewart also turned in a heart-tugging performance as a clown in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Greatest Show on Earth" (1951).

In 1952, Stewart's agent Leland Hayward successfully negotiated an agreement with Universal for Stewart to work on a percentage basis--a first for the sound era. Every star in the business stampeded to do the same, something which Stewart felt signified the last hurrah for the studio system. He still looks back on his "factory years", though, with clear nostalgia and gratitude.

The next phase of Stewart's career saw some of his most complex roles, for directors such as Hitchcock, Otto Preminger (1959's "Anatomy of a Murder" earned him a best actor award from the New York Critics--his second--and the Venice Film Festival), John Ford, Robert Aldrich and, most prolifically, Anthony Mann. His famous gawky, stammering mannerisms took on an extra interest for being filtered through toughness, cynicism and world-weariness. Though there have been occasional flops, he has undoubtedly proved his ability to transcend bad material, and to add an intriguing tang of both homespun idealism and even nasty bitterness to seemingly routine genre situations.

Stewart married his wife Gloria in 1949 and had four children. In 1970, he revived "Harvey" on Broadway with Helen Hayes and did occasional TV work, notably "The Jimmy Stewart Show" (NBC, 1971-72) and 1983's powerful TV-movie "Right of Way" (HBO), with Bette Davis.

Nicky Holroyd - Jack Lemmon

One of the most consistently acclaimed actors in motion pictures, Jack Lemmon was the first man to win Academy Awards as both Best Supporting Actor ("Mister Roberts" 1955) and Best Actor ("Save the Tiger" 1973). After graduating from Harvard where he served as president of the prestigious Hasty Pudding Club, he moved to NYC and broke into show business in the late 1940s with running parts in several radio soap operas and some 500 performances in the great live television dramas of the medium's Golden Age. His Broadway debut in "Room Service" (1953) led to a contract with Columbia, and he launched his film career in a pair of Judy Holliday pictures, George Cukor's "It Should Happen to You" and Mark Robson's "Phfft!" (both 1954). Lemmon's fourth picture, "Mister Roberts" (1955), cast him as the opportunistic Ensign Pulver and brought him prominence and the first of his two Oscars.

A comic hit from the beginning when he showed he could more than hold his own with the flawless Holliday, Lemmon enhanced his reputation in three films with director Richard Quinine ("My Sister Eileen" 1955, "Operation Mad Ball" 1957 and "Bell, Book and Candle" 1958) before hooking up with the man who would have arguably the greatest influence on his career, director Billy Wilder. Wilder employed to perfection Lemmon's high level of nervous, indeed sometimes jittery, energy, in the part of a nightclub musician who, together with Tony Curtis, dresses in drag in order to escape the clutches of a Chicago mob in the delirious comic masterpiece "Some Like It Hot" (1959). His portrayal the following year in Wilder's "The Apartment" of a hapless insurance clerk who, in a bid for promotion, allows his superiors to conduct their extramarital affairs in his city flat was the prototype of the put-upon figure fighting a continual losing battle with life's daily frustrations and humiliations that became his trademark.

Although he became established in comedy, Lemmon has shown an equal facility at tackling serious roles. His first major dramatic part came in Blake Edwards' study of an alcoholic marriage, "Days of Wine and Roses" (1963), his dynamic and chilling performance representing some of his finest work. He earned a second Oscar for his pitiable businessman trapped in his own lifestyle and collapsing mentally in John Avildsen's "Save the Tiger". Two political thrillers--"The China Syndrome" (1979) and Costa-Gavras' "Missing" (1982)--each earned him the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. The former placed his anxious mannerisms in the novel setting of a compromised nuclear plant, which he takes over at gunpoint in an altruistic (and ultimately fatal) attempt to expose the cover-up of an accident. In the latter, Lemmon portrayed Ed Horman, a Christian Scientist father and staunch supporter of the American Way searching for his son during the first days of Pinochet's Chile, who finally cracks and takes his anger out on the emasculated American officials when he finds out they are conspiring with the crooked government.

Not only would Wilder reunite him with "Apartment" co-star Shirley MacLaine in "Irma la Douce" (1963), but he would also pair Lemmon for the first time with his good friend and frequent comedy mate Walter Matthau in "The Fortune Cookie" (1966) and subsequently in "The Front Page" (1974) and "Buddy Buddy" (1981). Their screen chemistry was immediately obvious, and they soon teamed for perhaps their definitive vehicle, Gene Saks' screen adaptation of Neil Simon's "The Odd Couple" (1968). In spite of Matthau originally coveting Lemmon's part as the finicky Felix, his Oscar Madison became somewhat of a signature role, and fans have came to expect a similar juxtaposition of opposites and resultant repartee from a Lemmon-Matthau picture. Although both actors worked singly with Simon afterwards (Lemmon in "The Out of Towners" 1969 and "Prisoner of Second Avenue" 1974; Matthau in "Plaza Suite" 1971, "The Sunshine Boys" 1975 and "California Suite" 1978), it would be nearly three decades before the trio would reunite for the unfortunately inferior "The Odd Couple II" (1998). The one feature Lemmon directed, "Kotch" (1971), however, managed to snare Matthau a Best Actor Oscar nomination.

Lemmon periodically returned to Broadway in "Face of a Hero!" (1960), "Tribute" (1978) and "Long Day's Journey Into Night" (1986), reprising his "Tribute" role in a 1980 film and the James Tyrone part from the O'Neill play for a 1987 Showtime TV production. He won an Emmy as the star of "Jack Lemmon in 'S Wonderful, 'S Marvelous 'S Gershwin" (NBC, 1972) and received nominations for his work in "The Entertainer" (NBC, 1975) and "The Murder of Mary Phagan" (NBC, 1988). Recently, his most acclaimed dramatic work has come for the small screen. He delivered a powerhouse turn as the dedicated, appraising Juror 8 in the Showtime remake of "12 Angry Men" (1997), directed by William Friedkin, and his squaring off against George C Scott's bitter, prejudiced Juror 3 was so electric that the cable channel, hoping to catch lightning in a bottle, paired the two to lesser effect in its 1999 remake of "Inherit the Wind". Lemmon was better in his other TV-movie role that year, inspiring both empathy and awe as the irrepressible Morrie Schwartz, stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease and confined to a wheelchair, in "Tuesdays with Morrie" (ABC), executive produced by Oprah Winfrey.

As for features, Lemmon continued to display his versatility and capabilities throughout the 90s, beginning with his excellent turn as private investigator Jack Martin in Oliver Stone's "JFK" (1991). "Glengarry Glen Ross" (1992), a fine adaptation of David Mamet's blistering play, proved he could still carry his dramatic weight as the loser in an office full of desperate real estate men. Then of course there was the highly commercial Lemmon-Matthau comedy "Grumpy Old Men" (1993) and its even more popular sequel "Grumpier Old Men" (1995), though the relative failure of their "Out to Sea" (1997) scuttled a proposed "Grumpiest Old Men". He also acted with Matthau in Matthau's son Charles' "The Grass Harp" (1996), adapted from the Truman Capote novel. Retirement is out of the question for Lemmon, who christened the new millennium with a cameo in Robert Redford's "The Legend of Bagger Vance" (2000). The public and critics alike continue to respond to his screen persona as his two 1999 Golden Globe nominations attest, and there will surely be an audience to see him opposite Matthau sometime in the near future.

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