Names and faces
Ken Watanabe, one of a handful of Japanese actors who has made it on the international stage, has undergone surgery for stomach cancer. But he has beaten serious sickness before — leukemia more than 20 years ago. The early-stage cancer was found in a medical checkup, the Tony and Oscar-nominated actor said on his Japanese Twitter account. His publicist confirmed the sickness Tuesday, noting the 56-year-old actor will be forced to delay his return to Broadway’s
The King and I. But Watanabe said he’d be back. “I hate to worry you, but please wait,” he tweeted in Japanese. He had been scheduled to return to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical from March 1-April 17. He also said he was grateful to his wife, actress Kaho Minami, for recommending the checkup, and to his daughter, also an actress, for recommending a doctor. Watanabe, who has appeared in Christopher Nolan’s Batman
Begins and Inception, also starred in the reboot of Godzilla and Letters From Iwo Jima, directed by Clint Eastwood. He earned an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor in the Tom Cruise-led film The Last Samurai. The King and I was named best musical revival at last year’s Tonys and also is nominated for a Grammy for best musical theater album.
Some gun owners are pressuring the National Rifle Association to boot longtime board member Ted Nugent from the organization’s leadership ranks after the rock star’s social media outburst that depicted prominent American Jews as the men and women “really behind gun control.” Nugent, an outspoken Second Amendment advocate who has served on the NRA board since 1995, posted a photo on Facebook this week calling U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, among many others, “punks” who would “deny us the basic human right to self defense and to keep and bear arms while many of them have paid hired armed security.” He later posted a photo of Nazis rounding up Jews during the Holocaust and described gun-control advocates as “soulless sheep to slaughter.” Nugent’s Facebook posts triggered cries of anti-Semitism and prompted gun-control activists and Second Amendment advocates alike to call for his removal from the NRA board, as even several leading voices in the gun-rights movement wrote they can no longer justify his “half-baked rhetoric” and “simple-minded outbursts.” Bob Owens, editor for BearingArms.com, who wrote online Tuesday that Nugent should have realized that he “stepped in it” when “even-tempered pro-gun folks took issue” with his Facebook posts. An NRA spokesman told The Washington Post on Wednesday that “individual board members do not speak for the NRA.”