Midler apologizes: called first lady ‘alien’
Pop singer Bette Midler said it was wrong to make fun of her accent.
Bette Midler has walked back controversial comments she tweeted about first lady Melania Trump during the 2020 Republican National Convention.
On Tuesday, the stage and screen icon drew sharp criticism for calling Trump — who immigrated to the United States from Slovenia — an “illegal alien” and mocking her accent during her RNC speech. Midler has since addressed the divisive remarks on Twitter.
“Well, all hell has broken loose because I said Melania ‘still can’t speak English’ last night,” Midler tweeted Wednesday afternoon. “I was wrong to make fun of her accent. America is made up of people who speak with all kinds of accents, and they are all welcomed always.”
In addition to inaccurately tweeting that Trump “still can’t speak English,” Midler knocked the first lady’s “Be Best” initiative and challenged her mastery of other languages as well. Trump is fluent in both English and her native Slovenian.
“#beBest is back! A UGE bore!” Midler tweeted Tuesday.
“She can speak several words in a few languages. Get that illegal alien off the stage!”
Among the many who shamed Midler for her outburst were former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer and the forthcoming star of Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” Rachel Zegler, who noted that “21% of people living in the United States speak a language other than English at home.”
“You don’t have to like Melania Trump — I don’t either,” Zegler wrote. “But the ability to ‘speak English’ does not measure one’s intelligence. At all.”
Amid mounting criticism, Midler followed up on her tweets Wednesday morning, claiming that her intent was to hold the Trump administration accountable for its attitude toward immigration. President Donald Trump’s stances and action on immigration have been widely condemned by many Americans as racist, xenophobic and cruel.
“Just giving them a taste of their own immigrant bashing medicine,” Midler wrote.
“I guess they’re not keen.”
Latest stunt: Cruise-ing to movies
One of Hollywood’s most notorious thrill seekers, none other than Tom Cruise, masked up to attend a public showing of Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” in London.
Production on the stilluntitled seventh film in the producer-star’s “Mission: Impossible” franchise was halted in February due to the pandemic, just days before shooting was to begin. However, while it was reported to be green-lighted to resume in September, production apparently restarted this month in Oxfordshire — until a motorcycle stunt gone wrong stalled it again (no reported fatalities or major injuries).
Meanwhile, in a video posted to Cruise’s Twitter on Aug. 25, the star and a masked companion who looks (from the cheeks up, anyway) very much like his frequent collaborator, Christopher McQuarrie (writer-director of “Mission: Impossible” installments 5, 6, 7 and, as announced, 8), ride a cab to a cinema and drop in on “Tenet.”
Above the video, Cruise included the message, “Big Movie. Big Screen. Loved It.”
In the video, which begins with a few shots of rain-soaked London landmarks through the cab window, Cruise waves back at some fans on the street, then asks the camera, “How does that happen? I’m wearing a mask.”
Getting out of the vehicle in front of a mural for Nolan’s film, he says, “Here we are ... back to the movies.”
After applauding both the beginning and end of the film, he rises and says to his fellow attendees in the apparently socially distanced crowd, “Great to be back in a movie theater, everybody.” Someone asks as he passes, “Did you enjoy the film?” and he responds, “I loved it. I loved it.”