A CHANCE TO CELEBRATE

Lainie Kazan is the embodiment of the word entertainer—an artist who has reached the pinnacle in virtually every area of performance. 

Ms. Kazan began her career in the Broadway musical Funny Girl, where she played a Ziegfeld showgirl and understudied the leading lady, Barbra Streisand. She finally got her chance to go on in the title role a year and a half after its Broadway opening. Lainie performed the lead role twice in one day and received accolades that would start what would be an extraordinary career.

Lainie has also appeared on Broadway in The Government Inspector with Tony Randall, My Favorite Year with Tim Curry (Tony Award nomination), and produced and starred in the Ethel Merman tribute, Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly. Regional credits include: A Little Night Music, The Rink, Man of La Mancha, The Rose Tattoo, Gypsy, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, Orpheus Descending, Plaza Suite, and Bermuda Avenue Triangle with Joseph Bologna and Renee Taylor. She has also performed in The Vagina Monologues and The Exonerated.

Her film credits include: My Favorite Year (Golden Globe Nomination), Coppola’s One From The Heart, Spielberg’s Harry and the Hendersons, Paul Bartel’s Lust in the Dust, Delta Force, Beaches, The Cemetery Club, The Big Hit, The Associate, The Crew, What’s Cooking?, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Bratz, Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan and Pixels, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. More recently, Tango Shalom was the #1 Indie Film Release of the Summer in 2021. She has also starred in several movies for television.

Lainie’s television credits include: St. Elsewhere (Emmy Nomination), The Paper Chase (CableACE Award Nomination), The Nanny, Strong Medicine, Veronica’s Closet, Touched by an Angel, Will & Grace, My Big Fat Greek Life, Boston Legal, multiple episodes of ‘Til Death as Joely Fisher’s mother and Ugly Betty, a guest starring, multi-episodic arc on Desperate Housewives, Modern Family, Grey’s Anatomy on the Disney Channel series Jessie. Most recently, she guest starred on The Kominsky Method and Fuller House.

Lainie has performed in Nightclubs, Grand Hotels, and Concert Halls around the world. She partnered with Hugh Hefner and opened Lainie’s Room and Lainie’s Room East at the Los Angeles and New York Playboy Clubs. Lainie recorded five albums for MGM, and she produced her most recent CD’s with David Benoit for the Music Masters label entitled In The Groove and Body and Soul.

Recently she performed to sold-out houses at Feinstein’s at Vitello’s in Los Angeles, Feinstein’s/54 Below in New York, Vibrato in Bel Air, CA, and The Purple Room in Palm Springs.

Lainie serves on the board for the Young Musicians Foundation, AIDS Project LA, and B’nai B’rith. In June 2008, Lainie had the honor of being a Grand Marshall for the Salute to Israel Parade in New York, with guests such as Senators Clinton and Obama.

Lainie is a graduate of Hofstra University with a B.A. in Speech and Drama, with a minor in Education. She is an adjunct professor at Hofstra University teaching at the School of Communications, where she is on the advisory board. She is also on the board of the Screen Actors Guild and The Young Musicians’ Society.

Lainie studied with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse and studied voice with Joseph Scott for 20 years. She also studied with Lee Strasberg for 5 years and is a lifetime member of The Actor’s Studio.

Since 2012, Lainie has been an Adjunct Professor at the School of Theater, Film, and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her course at UCLA is titled “Acting for the Singer,” which uses the Great American Songbook and culminates with a Cabaret show at the end of the quarter. In the Spring of 2020, she joined the faculty of NYU, teaching an online class. She is currently working on her autobiography, which will be released next year.

Nancy Kwan was catapulted from her native Hong Kong at 19 to become an international star in such famed American Films as The World of Suzie Wong and Flower Drum Song. Kwan, the daughter of a prominent architect, was born in Hong Kong and educated in England, where she also studied dancing at the Royal Ballet School. By chance, while on vacation from school in Hong Kong, she was spotted by famed American producer Ray Stark, then on a hunt to find an Oriental beauty to star in the film version of The World of Suzie Wong. After a number of screen tests in-Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and London, Kwan finally got the part, starring opposite William Holden. For this role, she was nominated for Best Actress and International Star of Tomorrow by the Hollywood Foreign Press.

Kwan’s second starring role, which allowed her to display her dancing talents, was in Flower Drum Song, based on the acclaimed Rogers and Hammerstein Broadway Musical. It was nominated for five Academy Awards and two Golden Globes Awards, including Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. Flower Drum Song became the first major Hollywood feature film to have a majority Asian American cast in a contemporary Asian American story.

Following completion of that film, Kwan married. After her son, Bernie, was born, Kwan divided her time between Europe and the United States, starring in such films as The Main Attraction; Honeymoon Hotel, opposite Robert Goulet and Robert Morse; Tamahine; Fate is the Hunter, opposite Glenn Ford; Lt. Robinson Crusoe USA, with Dick Van Dyke; The Wrecking Crew, opposite Dean Martin; Arrivederci Baby, opposite Tony Curtis; Nobody’s Perfect, with Doug McClure; and The McMasters, with David Carradine, Brock Peters, and Jack Palance.

During the 1970s, Kwan moved back to Hong Kong, along with her son. There, she entered film production, as Managing Director of Nancy Kwan Films. Her company specialized in television commercials for the Southeast Asia market. In addition to running the business, which included a recording studio and motion picture equipment rental division, Kwan took time out to direct a number of commercials.

Also, during those years, Kwan continued her acting career, starring in numerous films made in Southeast Asia, among them Wonder Woman, The Pacific Connection, Fortress in the Sun, Project Kill, and Fear. She also starred in Spring Comes Not Again– a film made in Hong Kong, for which Kwan received rave reviews. During this time, she appeared on television in the pilot for Hawaii 5-0, with Jack Lord, and the two-part Cenotaph episode of Kung Fu, with David Carradine.

Since returning to the United States in 1980, Kwan has appeared in such series as Fantasy Island, Trapper John, Knots Landing, Partners In Crime, ER and in such movies as Chicago Story, The Last Ninja, Blade in Hong Kong, James Clavell’s Noble House, Miracle Landing for CBS and Babies for NBC. In addition, Ms. Kwan produced the feature film, The Biker Poet, and played the role of Kwan Yin in the television pilot The Zee Team.

Her other films include Walking the Edge, with Robert Forster; Night Children, with David Carradine; Cold Dog Soup, with Randy Quaid; Keys to Freedom, with Jane Seymour and Omar Sharif; Dragon, The Life of Bruce Lee, with Jason Scott Lee; Murder on the Yellow Brick Road and Ray of Sunshine. Kwan starred in For Life or Death and Mr. P’s Dancing Sushi Bar, a project that was developed at Sundance. Plus, Paint it Black, a feature film directed by Amber Tamblyn in 2015, and Window Horses, an animated feature film. She appeared in Hollywood Chinese, Arthur Dong’s documentary, which was selected for the Toronto International Film Festival, and To Whom It May Concern: Ka Shen’s Journey, a documentary film produced and directed by Brian Jamieson in 2010.

Her stage appearances include The Quartered Man at LATC; Love Letters at the English Theatre in Vienna, Austria. She originated the role of Leila in the award-winning Arthur and Leila at the Bayfront Theatre in San Francisco and the East-West Players in Los Angeles, and as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. She played Melissa in Love Letters at the Singapore Repertory Theatre in Singapore and reprised the role with James Shigeta at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco in 2006.

Kwan’s voice can be heard on Dove Books on Tape, Nancy Kwan Reads When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, Farewell to My Concubine, Katherine, and The Red Azalea. She was the narrator for the Anna May Wong- Frosted Yellow Willows: Her Life, Times, and Legend documentary film. Plus, McKnight’s Memory, an Audio Novel by Paul Kyriazi.

As a writer, Kwan has collaborated on a number of screenplays. These include Murder Within, Journey to the West Gate of Heaven, and Jade: Investigator. She developed the concept for T’ai Chi Ch’uan-Touching the Clouds, her instructional videotape on this ancient Chinese exercise. In 2025, her memoir, The World of Nancy Kwan, was released alongside her reading of the audiobook.

In 2002, Ms. Kwan was appointed Hong Kong’s Film Ambassador and appeared in, and narrated, My Hong Kong, a Television Special. The show won two Telly Awards. She has also taught “Acting in Film” classes at Cal State LA.

Nancy Kwan has been the recipient of many honors and awards over the course of her extraordinary career. Upon Chinatown’s 71st Anniversary, Ms. Kwan was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the City of Los Angeles. She received a Lifetime Tribute Award for her Contribution to the World of Cinema from the WIFTS Foundation. Most recently, she was inducted into the Asian Hall of Fame and honored with the Hollywood Cinema Icon Lifetime Achievement Award. The New York Historical Society invited her to be a guest speaker for a public program about her extraordinary life and career. The Joy Luck Club celebrated her contribution to the International Arts Community in 2016, and in 2021 the Asian Culture and Media Alliance presented her with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

She currently resides with her husband, Norbert, in the San Fernando Valley. Ms. Kwan will be signing copies of her memoir, The World of Nancy Kwan, in the lobby of the theatre after the screening.

The dark, delicate, and demure beauty of Anna Maria Alberghetti is what one envisions a princess to look like, and, indeed, she did have a chance to play a couple of princesses in her lifetime. She was born in a musical home in Pesaro, Italy, in 1936, the daughter of a concertmaster father and pianist mother. They greatly influenced her obvious talent, and by age six she was performing with symphony orchestras with her father as her vocal instructor. World War II forced their family from their homeland, and after performing on a European tour, Anna Maria’s pure operatic tones reached American ears via her Carnegie Hall debut at age 14. The family decided to settle permanently in the States. The teenager went on to perform with numerous symphony orchestras during this time.

In 1950, Hollywood saw a bright star in the making. Within a short time she was capturing hearts on film, making a magical debut in the eerie but hypnotic Gian Carlo Menotti’s chamber opera The Medium (1951). Opposite the magnificent Marie Powers in the title role as the fraudulent Madame Flora, Anna Maria was directed by Menotti himself in the independently produced film. While the movie was appreciated in art house form, Paramount Pictures wasted no time in placing the photogenic Anna into mainstream filming. She had an extended operatic solo in the breezy Capraesque Bing Crosby/Jane Wyman comedy Here Comes the Groom (1951), and played a Polish émigré befriended by a singer (played by Rosemary Clooney) who discovers the girl has musical talent of her own in The Stars Are Singing (1953). Anna’s songs included the touching “My Kind of Day” and “My Heart Is Home”. Thereafter, for some strange reason, her vocals were not regularly utilized. She acted instead in such rugged adventures as The Last Command (1955) and Duel at Apache Wells (1957), and in the fluffy comedy Ten Thousand Bedrooms (1957) opposite Dean Martin. And, in the end, she was lovely as the Prince Charming equivalent in the gender-bending Jerry Lewis farce Cinderfella (1960).

As she matured, she made a mark in other facets of entertainment. On television, Ed Sullivan first introduced Anna Maria to millions of households, and the public was thoroughly taken by this singing angel. She appeared with Sullivan a near-record 53 times. She also made a splash on such variety shows as Shower of Stars, Ford Star Jubilee and Startime. Other highlights include a guest-starring appearance on The Andy Williams Show in 1963 and a performance on The Hollywood Palace in 1964. She did game shows, too. Alberghetti was a guest contestant on the television series I’ve Got a Secret and was the mystery guest on What’s My Line in 1958 and 1961. She also appeared as herself in an episode of the comedy show Fractured Flickers, talking with the host Hans Conried.

Like many other personalities at that time, she made the rounds on a series of anthology shows, including The Ford Television Theatre, General Electric Theater, Matinee Theatre, The DuPont Show of the Month and Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse. Alberghetti’s versatility was further showcased through appearances on The Loretta Young Show, Climax!, Wagon Train, Checkmate and later on To Rome with Love. Her recording career has included associations with Capitol, Columbia, Mercury and MGM Records.

Anna Maria departed from films in the early 60s and instead sought out work on the Broadway stage. It was here that she found that elusive stardom. Following a role in the operetta Rose Marie in 1960, Anna Maria won the part of a lifetime as the waif-like Lili in the musical Carnival, based on Leslie Caron’s charming title film role. Anna Maria was utterly delightful and quite moving in the role and, for her efforts, was awarded the Tony Award—tying in her category with Diahann Carroll for “No Strings”. Anna Maria’s sister Carla replaced her when she left the show. Throughout the 60s she continued to impress in musical ingénue showcases—the title role in Fanny (1963), Maria in West Side Story (1964), Marsinah in Kismet (1967) (which was televised), and Luisa in The Fantasticks (1968), to name but a few.

In 1964, Anna married TV director/producer Claudio Guzmán, who was almost a decade older. The ten-year marriage produced two daughters, Alexandra and Pilar. She began to downplay her career after this in favor of parenting, particularly after her divorce in 1974.

Returning to the theater on occasion, Anna Maria later reintroduced herself back into TV households in the 1970s and 80s as the housewife/pitchwoman for “Good Seasons” salad dressing. Her one-woman stage show led to her interest in cabaret performing. More recent film appearances have included fun roles in the comedies Friends and Family (2001) and The Whole Shebang. Since then, she has chosen to focus on her family and friends, enjoying a quiet retirement here in Los Angeles.

Members of the Alberghetti Family will be presenting her with the Cinecon Legacy Award after the screening.