The longtime companion of actor Robert Duvall, Luciana Pedraza, designed the interiors of Byrnley Farm, the couple’s three-story Georgian farmhouse, with gabled roofs and thick stone walls, located in the Virginia countryside. Set designer Jack Taylor transformed the barn into a dance area (above), with a pine floor and a beam ceiling. “This is where we practice the tango and have great parties for which Bobby flies in friends and dancers from France and Los Angeles and elsewhere,” Pedraza says. (October 2002)
Best Actor
Tender Mercies (1983)
Joan Crawford poses beside her ornate gilt grand piano at her Georgian-style house on Bristol Avenue in Brentwood. She had been living on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, but when stardom demanded a grander lifestyle, Louis B. Mayer—in a transaction not uncommon for studio chiefs eager to perpetuate the myth of stardom—loaned her $40,000 to buy the house. When she bought the house in 1929, she furnished it in “green and gold, silks and brocades,” hoping to achieve the sophistication she lacked, wrote one biographer, but she later called her efforts a “hodgepodge.” (April 1990)
Best Actress
Mildred Pierce (1945)
“Orange is the happiest color,” Frank Sinatra said of his favorite hue, which showed up in his clothes and his houses. Sinatra bought a modest house at the Tamarisk Country Club in Rancho Mirage in the mid-1950s and lived there until May 1995. A caboose, a gift from some of his employees in 1971, became the compound’s main hangout. Inside was a full-service salon, complete with barber’s chair, a professional hair dryer, a massage table, a scale and a sauna, at rear. (December 1998)
Special Award
The House I Live In (1945)
Best Supporting Actor
From Here to Eternity (1953)
“The living room was very dark and had a run-down charm—it couldn’t have been more appealing,” says actress and director Diane Keaton, who renovated a 1930s ranch house outside Tucson, Arizona. Keaton and designer Stephen Shadley reinforced the play of light and shadows with wood beams and furniture offset by the original stained-concrete floor. (April 1998)
Best Actress
Annie Hall (1977)
In his Beverly Hills house, formerly owned by Greta Garbo, Gary Cooper in 1933 enjoyed a bachelor existence, surrounded by the prizes he gathered on an African safari. (April 1990)
Best Actor
Sergeant York (1941)
High Noon (1952)
“I said to Catherine, ‘We’ll be on an island with lots of family and no place to go. Think about that.’ She did and immediately signed on,” says Michael Douglas of the Bermuda refuge he and his wife Catherine Zeta-Jones commissioned decorator Stephen Ryan to design. To maximize the height of the master bedroom, the designer created a canopy of laced panels that cascades from the beam ceiling. “It’s very pretty—it just works,” says Ryan. (July 2002)
Michael Douglas:
Best Picture
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) (as producer)
Best Actor
Wall Street (1987)
Catherine Zeta Jones:
Best Supporting Actress
Chicago (2002)
Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn’s costar in Roman Holiday, introduced her to his friend Mel Ferrer at a party. They married in 1954 and rented a beach house on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu from Anatole Litvak, who directed the pair in a 1957 television remake of Mayerling. (March 2006)
Best Actress
Roman Holiday (1953)
“The dining table and chairs were built in a workshop four miles from my home,” says Sir Ben Kingsley, who lives at Spelsbury House in Oxfordshire, England. “I like the fact that they’re linked with Oxfordshire and influenced, to some extent, by the history and mythology of the area.” The house, currently set on three acres, was built in the mid-19th-century and has undergone a series of renovations, including one in1998 by architect Michael Reardon. (January 2003)
Best Actor
Gandhi (1982)
“I saw the bones of a lovely house that needed everything, and I saw the beach,” said Claudette Colbert about Bellerive, her two-story Barbados residence. The actress, who restored the 19th-century plantation house in the 1960s, placed a Waterford chandelier and a Guanyin figure that came from her Los Angeles home in the entrance hall. (April 1998)
Best Actress
It Happened One Night (1934)
Original movie posters adorn nearly every wall of the home of director Martin Scorsese, who has been buying posters since 1968. The living room of the four-story residence, a circa 1860 town house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, features the poster for Renoir’s 1953 film Le Carrosse d’Or and a projector where the director can view his collection of 16mm films. On the mantel are 19th-century Japanese stirrups from actor Ken Takaura. “There’s a part of me that loves a kind of Japanese minimalism—I need an uncluttered room to think in,” he explains. “But in New York you can’t live with that rigor in every room.” (April 1994)
Best Director
The Departed (2006)
Stone chairs and ottoman, designed by the late Michael Taylor, complement the capitals used as tables in the master bedroom of Cher’s Malibu home. “The way we work is really strange,” she says of her long-standing relationship with designer Ron Wilson. “I’ll tell him that I want something that doesn’t exist—a style that isn’t a style—and then he’ll make it exist for me.” Wilson chose the bed fabric, by J. Robert Scott, because of its resemblance to tree bark. (April 1992)
Best Actress
Moonstruck (1987)
“New Orleans is our escape from Los Angeles and the film industry,” observed director Taylor Hackford, who lived in the French Quarter with his wife, actress Helen Mirren, in 1998. In 2007, Hackford wrote, “Since this article appeared, we sold our beautiful Creole cottage on Barracks street, but we continue to own commercial property in New Orleans. In spite of the destruction and hard times the city is still suffering due to Hurricane Katrina, we will never abandon the most beautiful city in America....New Orleans is a totally unique environment, and we encourage every American to make a long-term commitment to preserving this fabulous cultural asset.” (April 1998, April 2007)
Best Actress
The Queen (2006)
“I wanted every ceiling to be different,” says Barbra Streisand about the Art Déco guesthouse she created on her Malibu compound. “In the living room, the beams have that skyscraper, stepped look.” Her collection of Lalique objects includes Archers, a vase on the console table, and Jour et Nuit, a disque clock near the window. Roger de la Fresnaye’s bronze Sculpture of a Woman is by the bookshelves. (December 1993)
Best Actress
Funny Girl (1968)
Best Original Song (shared with Paul Williams)
“Evergreen (Love Theme from A Star is Born)”
A Star is Born (1976)
