“Grease” director Randal Kleiser will return to this year’s Sedona International Film Festival with his good friend, actress Diane Baker, for “An Afternoon with Diane Baker” on Thursday, Feb. 27, at 1 p.m. at the Sedona Performing Arts Center.
Baker will be honored with the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award for her distinguished career as an actress and her commitment to the art of filmmaking.
Kleiser and Baker will discuss her half-century career while accompanied by clips from such films as “Diary of Anne Frank,” “Marnie” and “Silence of the Lambs,” plus anecdotes about working with Joan Crawford, Sir Alfred Hitchcock, Maxmillian Schell, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Melvyn Douglas and more.
Baker’s distinguished career as an actress and producer of films and television programs spans over 50 years. First cast in director George Stevens Sr.’s film “The Diary of Anne Frank” [1959], her career quickly took off at Twentieth Century Fox, where her credits include “Journey to the Center of the Earth” [1959], “The Best of Everything” [1959], “Tess of the Storm Country” [1960], “Nine Hours to Rama” [1963] and “Stolen Hours” with Susan Hayward [1963].
In the subsequent years, Baker worked across the major studios and with Hollywood’s biggest names, starring in “The Prize” [1963] with Paul Newman, “Strait Jacket” [1964] with Crawford, “Marnie” [1964] with Sean Connery for Hitchcock and “Mirage” [1965] with Gregory Peck.
Baker returned to the screen in the 1990s with contemporary classics like “The Silence of the Lambs” [1991], “The Joy Luck Club” [1993], “The Net” with Sandra Bullock and “Murder at 1600” with Alan Alda.
Baker later expanded her career as producer, creating several award-winning documentaries, including “To Climb a Mountain,” the Emmy-nominated “Miracles in the Making” and TV films including “Portrait of Grandpa Doc” [1977], starring Douglas, Barbara Rush, Bruce Davison and Anne Seymour and directed by Kleiser.
She is the recipient of numerous lifetime honors and awards and several Emmy nominations, including one for “Inherit the Wind” starring Douglas and Ed Begley.
Baker is currently co-producing a six-part series with her partner, commercial and documentary filmmaker Dennis Powers, on the history of illustration for American television. Baker is creating a two-year postgraduate film and acting nonprofit program called Global Film Connect at the Robert Osborne Center for Film History to give auditioning students an opportunity to work with professionals in an industry setting to learn to produce small meaningful films and continue the legacy of TCM’s Robert Osborne [1932—2017], with whom she enjoyed a lifelong friendship.
“An Afternoon with Diane Baker,” hosted by Kleiser, will take the stage at the Sedona Performing Arts Center on Thursday, Feb. 27, at 1 p.m. Tickets are $18 for general admission or $15 for Sedona Film Festival members.
For tickets and more information, call (928) 282-1177. Both the theatre and film festival office are located at 2030 W. SR 89A in West Sedona. For more information, visit SedonaFilmFestival.org.
