American actor best known for his role as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman

The actor Lou Gossett Jr, who has died aged 87, is best known for his performance in An Officer and A Gentleman (1982) as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley, whose tough training transforms recruit Richard Gere into the man of the film’s title. He was the first black winner of an Academy Award for best supporting actor, and only the third black actor (after Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier ) to take home any Oscar.

The director, Taylor Hackford, said he cast Gossett in a role written for a white actor, following a familiar Hollywood trope played by John Wayne , Burt Lancaster , Victor McLaglen or R Lee Ermey , because while researching he realised the tension of “black enlisted men having make-or-break control over whether white college graduates would become officers”. Gossett had already won an Emmy award playing a different sort of mentor, the slave Fiddler who teaches Kunta Kinte the ropes in Roots (1977), but he was still a relatively unknown 46-year-old when he got his breakthrough role, despite a long history of success on stage and in music as well as on screen.

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Understated smart-casual clothes made Curb Your Enthusiasm creator and star ‘post-normcore’ pin-up

When Curb Your Enthusiasm emerged in 2000, the cult sitcom’s irascible star and creator, Larry David, wasn’t exactly a bastion of style. But over the critically acclaimed HBO comedy’s 12-season run, which draws to a close in the coming weeks, David has evolved into an unexpected fashion role model.

“Larry David is one of the bestdressed men on television,” New York magazine declared in 2020. On TikTok , videos from the likes of stylist Allison Bornstein examine the looks of an “accidental style icon”, celebrating the “classic, layered and practical” elements. Fashion publications have implored readers to channel his “laid-back dad style”. He has appeared on the front row at New York fashion week – admittedly with his fingers in his ears due to the loud music – and on the front of T-shirts, with one reading: “You’re allowed to be happy, but not in front of me.”

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Leaving Neverland director Dan Reed spent four years following the circus created by the rightwing TV host after he claimed the Sandy Hook school shooting never happened

There is a statistic dropped into the middle of the new HBO documentary about Alex Jones and his conspiracy-laden campaign to deny the Sandy Hook school massacre that is so startling it changes the complexion of the film.

It’s tempting to see the blustering alt-right InfoWars host as little more than a charlatan selling snake oil conspiracies to the fringes of American society. But then The Truth vs Alex Jones tells us that one in four Americans believes Jones’s claim that the 2012 murder of 20 small children and six staff at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, never happened.

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Timothy Snyder says former RNC chair ‘tried to disassemble our democracy’ and should not have been invited to take up position

The Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “tried to disassemble our democracy” by supporting Donald Trump’s electoral fraud lies and should not be given such a media role, a leading historian said amid uproar over the appointment.

“What NBC has done is they’ve invited into what should be a normal framework someone who doesn’t believe that framework should exist at all,” Timothy Snyder , a Yale professor and author of On Tyranny , told MSNBC, part of the network now employing McDaniel.

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A four-part docuseries details allegations tied to Dan Schneider’s time at the network when hit programs The Amanda Show, iCarly and Drake & Josh aired

Even in an unprecedented era of vigilance following the exposure of sexual predators Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, the #MeToo movement and revelations from the Adult Survivors Act , Hollywood retains its capacity to shock. The latest scandal swept through tinseltown like a tornado this week – and it was not a good look for Nickelodeon, the doyen of children’s television networks.

The whirlwind was a four-part documentary called Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV , streamed over two consecutive nights on the Investigation Discovery network.

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Ahead of a new documentary, You Can Call Me Bill, the Star Trek icon shares his eternal interest in learning more about the world

Cranked out to accommodate the recent boom in demand for fresh content to binge, too many celebrity-profile documentaries are defaulting to the formulaic sameness of assembly-line product: open with some candid talking-head soundbites, a walk down memory lane through their early years, deeper dives into the major bullet points of their career, and tie it up with a bit of summarizing introspection looking back on it all.

Conversely, Alexandre O Philippe’s new William Shatner portrait You Can Call Me Bill spends a goodly amount of time reflecting on its subject’s profound metaphysical bond with horses. The polymath showman also shares his musings on birds, dogs, space, Satan, classic westerns, the symbolic pregnancy of dreams, other people’s impressions of his distinctive voice, and occasionally, acting. He may have naturally wet eyes, but he appears to be on the verge of tears for the entirety of this feature-length philosophical inquisition into the Tao of Shatner.

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The whipsmart Tina Fey-produced sitcom was dropped by Peacock after two seasons yet it’s making a triumphant return and we should all be grateful

Very quietly, without much publicity or promotion, Girls5Eva appeared on Netflix last week. For those of us who haven’t kept their eye on the ball, this came as an immense surprise. Because as far as we were concerned, Girls5Eva was dead. At the end of its second season a year and a half ago, the show’s original platform Peacock announced that it would not renew the show.

And we made our peace with that. Written by Meredith Scardino, a storied writer with credits on SNL and The Colbert Report, Girls5Eva at times seemed almost too beautiful to live. A sitcom about four middle-aged women determined to reform their noughties girl group and recapture a flicker of their old fame, it was not only dense with every form of joke imaginable – never has a show revelled quite so much in the background sight gag – but at times weirdly touching. Produced by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, it shared an innate DNA with 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It was fast and precise, and boasted a murderer’s row of talent.

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The Traitors US star attempts to unravel 32 years of self-flagellation in one hour. The result: an intoxicating sense of validation

Parvati Shallow navigates social interactions the way Michael Phelps navigates a 50-meter swimming pool: smoothly, gracefully and with devastating efficiency. “I can connect with people and build trust and rapport very quickly,” she says.

It’s no idle claim. This skill set has made Shallow, 41, a reality television icon. Over the past 18 years, she has charmed, plotted, seduced, deceived and cajoled her way through four seasons of Survivor and the just-concluded US season of The Traitors , Peacock’s popular show where reality stars have to figure out who among them is trying to betray the group for prize money.

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The model and actor wrote on Instagram ‘My heart is broken’ after house in Studio City apparently collapsed after a fire broke out

A Los Angeles home that appears to belong to the model and actor Cara Delevingne was destroyed in a fire Friday.

One firefighter was taken to a hospital in fair condition with unspecified injuries, and a housesitter who was inside at the time was treated for minor injuries, a Los Angeles fire department spokesperson, Nicholas Prange, said.

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