Tag: 16th

Christopher Walken is opening up about his past with some of Hollywood’s most legendary stars.

On Jan. 16, Walken and the rest of the Severance cast appeared on SiriusXM’s Town Hall hosted by Andy Cohen, and Cohen, 56, said to Walken, “I read you danced with a young Liza Minnelli. Do you remember that?”

The 81-year-old actor confirmed. “We did an Off-Broadway musical called Best Foot Forward. 1962. Well, she was 16 years old, I remember.”

Cohen asked, “Could you see it then that she had it?”

“Oh, absolutely,” the Dune: Part Two star said. Then Cohen asked if he interacted with Minnelli’s mom, Judy Garland, at all. 

“Her mom gave a sweet 16th birthday party for her,” Walken said, and the actor confirmed that he attended. “I remember I danced with Judy Garland,” he added. He confirmed that she was a good dancer and “very good-looking.”

Walken’s acting career began in the 1950s, when he first started working as a child actor under his birth name, Ronnie Walken. He adopted the stage name Christopher in the 1960s. His seven-decade career has taken him from Broadway to Hollywood, from musical movies like Hairspray to TV shows like Severance. He also won an Oscar in 2003 for Catch Me If You Can.

Minnelli, 78, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014 that she still saw Walken as a musical performer in his heart. “I can see the glint in his eye every time he has the opportunity to dance onscreen,” she said. He told the outlet, “I’m kind of an actor by way of musical comedy. That’s really my education, musicals.”

Way back in 1986, the Queens, New York, native told PEOPLE how he ended up with such a wide array of roles. “I just put one foot in front of the other and take what comes next,” he said. “What the heck, a part’s a part.”

Reflecting on his long career in 2022, he told The New York Times, “I don’t golf or play tennis. I have no kids. I’ve been married for 53 years,” referencing his wife, Georgianne. “I sometimes think about writing something, but I don’t have much talent for that. You know, all actors have a trunk full of scripts. A lot of people do. Even my dentist at one point, when he was doing my teeth, told me about a script he’d written. I’ve written things. They’re just not good enough. I start with two people sitting in a room talking and invariably it becomes incoherent. There’s nothing I can be other than an actor.”

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And his acting, he said, is always infused with a little fun. “Sometimes I do things just to amuse myself,” he told the outlet. “I’ve played scenes pretending that I was Elvis or Bugs Bunny or a U-boat commander. I just don’t tell anybody.”

“Acting is one of those things, you can keep doing it as long as they ask you to do it,” he told The Wrap in 2015. “They say you don’t retire from acting — they retire you. And I don’t want to be retired, because what would I do?”