Names and faces

Robert Downey Jr. thinks courtrooms are dull. That didn’t stop the leading man of The Avengers from landing on The Judge as the inaugural film from his production company, Team Downey, which he formed with his wife, Susan. The 2010 buddy comedy Due Date is Downey’s only other movie in the past five years in which he isn’t in the role of Iron Man or Sherlock Holmes. In the film, conceived of and directed by Wedding Crashers filmmaker David Dobkin, Downey plays a Chicago lawyer who returns to his small Indiana hometown to attend his mother’s funeral. While there, Downey’s character becomes enmeshed in a criminal case involving his father, the town’s judge, portrayed by Robert Duvall. “I’ve done lawyers before and it’s like, ‘Dude, really? Courtrooms? So boring,’” Downey said. “The idea David [Dobkin] had was that a lawyer would be able to get his father — when he’s sworn in — to tell the truth. How could you not take advantage of that, with his life on the line and all the stuff that’s happened between them?” After starring as Tony Stark in four Marvel films, Downey said he wasn’t necessarily looking for a project like The Judge, which opens Friday. Downey and his wife, a longtime producer he first met on the set of the 2003 thriller Gothika, were merely drawn to the story. “I think we’re a good partnership,” he said.

Actress and comedian Carol Burnett was honored by a Pennsylvania museum dedicated to actor Jimmy Stewart, a Hollywood star she was smitten with as a toddler who went to the movies with her grandmother in San Antonio. “I saw this long, tall drink of water up there in black and white and I said, ‘He’s my friend. I know him,’” Burnett said before receiving the award. “And it came to pass.” The 81-year-old actress received the museum’s Harvey Award at a Friday night fundraiser for the James M. Stewart Museum Foundation, based in the actor’s hometown of Indiana, Pa., about 45 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. The banquet was a few miles away in Blairsville. Past winners include actors Janet Leigh, Shirley Jones, Ernest Borgnine and Rich Little. Burnett has long said Stewart is her idol. “I have talked about him; I have worshipped him,” Burnett told the audience at the final episode of The Carol Burnett Show on March 29, 1978, on which Stewart made a surprise appearance. Burnett on Friday recalled her childhood trip to the movies but couldn’t remember the name of the film. “I just remember I fell in love with that man,” she said.

Burnett

Downey