Labor & Employment Law

Five SAG Lifetime Achievement Winners Featured in Film Marathon

By James Parks

Ruby Dee and Sidney Poitier starred in the 1961 movie “A Raisin in The Sun.”

One night before the Screen Actors (SAG) honor Hollywood’s finest performers, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will pay tribute to five actors who won SAG’ s highest honor: the Life Achievement Award. TCM’s four-film prime-time presentation airs Friday, Jan. 22, 2010, the night before a live broadcast of the 16th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards?the nation’s largest and only nationally televised all-union awards show.

TCM’s tribute will begin at 8 p.m. EST with the 1935 comedy short “Tit for Tat,” starring Stan Laurel, who received the Life Achievement Award in 1963. Next up, Jack Lemmon, who was honored by SAG in 1989, stars in the Neil Simon comedy “The Out-of-Towners” (1969). Sidney Poitier, honored in 1999, and Ruby Dee, honored in 2000, star in the dramatic adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun” (1961). And the night closes out with 1998 honoree Kirk Douglas in the suspenseful Western “Last Train from Gun Hill” (1959).

This year’s Life Achievement honoree is television and film actress Betty White. She will receive the award during the SAG Awards ceremony, which will be simulcast live on TNT and TBS Saturday, Jan. 23, 2010, at 8 p.m. EST/PST, 7 p.m. CST and 6 p.m. MST. SAG represents nearly 120,000 actors in film, television, industrials, commercials and music videos.

SAG’s Life Achievement Award is awarded not only for career achievement but also for humanitarian accomplishment. As a Lifetime Achievement Award winner, White joins such previous honorees as Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward (1985), Elizabeth Taylor (1997), Edward Asner (2001), Clint Eastwood (2002), Shirley Temple Black (2005), Julie Andrews (2006), Charles Durning (2007) and James Earl Jones (2008).

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on December 24, 2009 (boomark / email).