Dramas also took a turn with existentialist thrillers such as Fight Club ( 1999 ) and the tale of suburban angst American Beauty ( 1999 ).

He gained critical acclaim in the early 1990s, culminating in his first Academy Award for The Usual Suspects ( Best Supporting Actor ), followed by a Best Actor Academy Award win for American Beauty ( 1999 ).

Spacey won universal praise and a Best Actor Oscar for his role as a depressed suburban father who re-evaluates his life in 1999's American Beauty ; the same year, he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Dunst was offered the role of Angela in the 1999 drama film American Beauty, but turned it down because she did not want to appear in the film's suggestive sexual scenes or kiss co-star Kevin Spacey.

Further credits include Coming to America, Action Jackson, Jerry Maguire, The Running Man, American Beauty, Can't Buy Me Love, and Oliver Stone's The Doors.

Abdul served as the choreographer for several film and theater productions, including the 1998 musical Reefer Madness and the cheerleading scenes in the 1999 film American Beauty ( she had previously also choreographed the 1991 film The Doors ).

The Grateful Dead also had major successes with the more reflective and stripped back Workingman's Dead and American Beauty in 1970.

* Sam Mendes-Academy Award-winning film director ( for American Beauty ) and four-time Laurence Olivier Award winner

* American Beauty ( 1931 )

Judd is currently the magazine advertising " face " of American Beauty, an Estée Lauder cosmetic brand sold exclusively at Kohl's department stores, and H. Stern jewelers.

Next he teamed up with American Beauty director Sam Mendes for the adaptation of Max Allan Collins's and Richard Piers Rayner's graphic novel Road to Perdition, in which he played an anti-hero role as a hitman on the run with his son.

American Beauty is a 1999 American drama film directed by Sam Mendes and written by Alan Ball.

Ball began writing American Beauty as a play in the early 1990s, partly inspired by the media circus around the Amy Fisher trial in 1992.

Producers Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen took American Beauty to DreamWorks ; the fledgling film studio bought Ball's script for $ 250, 000, outbidding several other production bodies.

American Beauty marked acclaimed theater director Mendes ' film debut ; courted after his successful productions of the musicals Oliver!

Released in North America on September 15, 1999, American Beauty was positively received by critics and audiences alike ; it was the best-reviewed American film of the year and grossed over $ 350 million worldwide.

Academics have offered many possible readings of American Beauty ; film critics are similarly divided, not so much about the quality of the film as their interpretations of it.

" The literary critic and author Wayne C. Booth concludes that the film resists any one interpretation: " Beauty cannot be adequately summarized as ' here is a satire on what's wrong with American life '; that plays down the celebration of beauty.

With " innumerable voices intruding on the original author's ," Booth says, those who interpret American Beauty " have forgotten to probe for the elusive center ".

Mendes called American Beauty a rites of passage film about imprisonment and escape from imprisonment.

Like other American films of 1999 — such as Fight Club, Bringing Out the Dead and Magnolia — American Beauty instructs its audience to " more meaningful lives ".

The feminist academic and author Sally R. Munt argues that American Beauty uses its " art house " trappings to direct its message of non-conformity primarily to the middle classes, and that this approach is a " cliché of bourgeois preoccupation ... the underlying premise being that the luxury of finding an individual ' self ' through denial and renunciation is always open to those wealthy enough to choose, and sly enough to present themselves sympathetically as a rebel.

Of greater importance, however, is the content of those programs, which have had and are having enormous consequences for the American people.

I was having lunch not long ago ( apologies to N. V. Peale ) with three distinguished historians ( one specializing in the European Middle Ages, one in American history, and one in the Far East ), and I asked them if they could name instances where the general mores had been radically changed with `` deliberate speed, majestic instancy '' ( Francis Thompson's words for the Hound Of Heaven's Pursuit ) by judicial fiat.

In a book review of `` The Soviet Cultural Offensive '', he says, `` Long before the State Department organized its bureaucracy into an East-West Contacts Staff in order to wage a cultural counter-offensive within Soviet borders, the sharp cutting-edge of American culture had carved its mark across the Russian steppes, as when the enterprising promoters of ' Porgy And Bess ' overrode the State Department to carry the contemporary ' cultural warfare ' behind the enemy lines.

He gave us a simile to explain his admission that even at the worst period of his second illness it never occurred to him there was any renewed question about his running: as in the Battle of the Bulge, he had no fears about the outcome until he read the American newspapers.

He had taken out first papers for American citizenship ; ;

Such performance is a great tribute to American scientists and engineers, who in the past five years have had to telescope time and technology to develop these long-range ballistic missiles, where America had none before.

By this time she had learned that it was futile to argue with her young husband, yet the uncomfortable fact remained: the American Congregationalists were sending them as missionaries to the Far East and paying their salaries.

This was historic in its way, for it marked the first time an American Presidential aspirant had advertised his own virtues in his own string of newspapers spanning the land.

By this time word had got around that an American doctor was on the premises.

After all, Pike was an established poet and his work had been published in the respectable periodicals of that center of American culture, Boston.

His assignment was not a new one because Baker had sent him to the Mexican border in 1916 to investigate lurid newspaper stories about lack of discipline, drunkenness, and venereal disease in American military camps.

His metier was the American tropics, and he had lived all over Latin America and among the primitive tribes on the Amazon river.

Lewis's remarks about his marriage were suggestive enough to induce American reporters to invade the offices of Harcourt, Brace & Company for information, to pursue Mrs. Lewis to Cromwell Hall, and, after she had returned to New York, to ferret her out at the Stanhope on upper Fifth Avenue where she had taken an apartment.

There, to the Evening Post, she emphatically denied the divorce rumors and explained that she had stayed behind because of the schooling of their son, which henceforth would be strictly American.

One had it that a friend, protesting her snobbery, said, `` But, Gracie, you are an American, aren't you ''??

He is said to have reported that once, when she went to a hospital to call on a friend after a serious operation, and the friend protested that it had been `` nothing '', she replied, `` Well, it was your healthy American peasant blood that pulled you through ''.

In 1945, probably almost every American not only knew who Sam Spade was, but had some kind of emotional feeling about him.

My `` touchstones, had, been strictly '' literature and, humanly enough, American literature ( because that was what I wanted to write ).

Our companion was a huge, plain-spoken American sculptor who had been a sixteen-year-old rifleman all across France in 1944.

Gossip had it ( for gossip is the soul of Rome ) that a famous American dancer of the time had paid for both the planes.

Last year, after Trujillo had been cited for numerous aggressions in the Caribbean, the United States and many other members of the Organization of American States broke diplomatic relations with him.

Now, everyone knows -- or knew in the week of December 10 -- that something had gone shockingly wrong with American foreign policy.