The 74-year-old film icon lit up the small screen this year with a memorable stint on the polygamy soap Big Love. But it was her new memoir, Lessons in Becoming Myself, that landed Burstyn a seat on Oprah’s couch. In the book, she shares the story of her abusive childhood and her troubled former husband, who stalked her for years, and eventually killed himself. The Nyack resident also told the big O about her recent Buddhist “street retreat,� in which she slept on NYC sidewalks, ate in soup kitchens, and begged for money. So remember, next time you see a panhandler outside Vertigo, you could be looking at an Academy Award winner.

Prediction for 2008: More Oscar-caliber parts, including roles in Greta and The Loss of the Teardrop Diamond.

Adapted from “People of the Year,� Rockland Magazine, December 2007

(AP Photo/Rick Maiman)

The Sneden’s Landing smart alec may like to joke about retiring, but if 2007 proved anything, an out-of-work Murray is a restless Murray. While playing golf with Will Smith in March, he ripped off his shirt and began running up and down the fairway flapping his wings (he later explained that he’d been stung by a bee). Then in May—at the opening of good friend Peter Kelly’s X20 restaurant in Yonkers—he celebrated by hoisting the restaurateur onto his shoulders and doing a victory lap. And then picking up another Kelly, brother Ned, for a second lap. In July, he showed up for his graduation from Regis University 30 years late … and accepted his honorary diploma wearing shorts. And in August, the weirdest incident of all: Police in Stockholm, Sweden, pulled him over for a DUI. The vehicle? A golf cart.

Prediction for 2008: Fortunately, Murray is back making movies again! Keeping him out of trouble right now is City of Ember, a fantasy flick in which Murray plays the mayor of a brightly lit city with a failing generator. It’s set to arrive in theaters by October 2008.

Adapted from “People of the Year,� Rockland Magazine, December 2007

(Illustration by Ismael Roldon)

Let’s just say the year started badly for the Chappaqua resident. She’d just been fired without warning from CBS’s Early Show. Then, in January, she underwent a double mastectomy. And as if that weren’t enough stress, she then renovated her home. The 44-year-old rebounded quickly, though. After reconstructive surgery, her book Good Enough Mother came out in March. Before long she was talking to Oprah about the realities of imperfect parenting (serving pancakes for dinner, using a stapler to hem pants). Her so-called “imperfections� were, in reality, pretty harmless, but we were just glad to have her back on TV.

Prediction for 2008: Anthony LaPaglia’s production company has optioned her book as a sitcom. A casting suggestion: For the lead, try Wanda Sykes—an actress with enough brio to be Syler.

Adapted from “People of the Year,� InTown Westchester, December 2007

(Photo: Tom Nycz / The Journal News) 

Who’d have thought that radiating evil on screen would translate into good things off camera? But that’s exactly what happened after this Westchesterite (born in Tarrytown, raised in Millwood) signed on to play Ugly Betty’s villainous bad gal Wilhelmina Slater. The role landed her an Emmy nod, the covers of countless magazines (including InTown), and a $20-million endorsement deal for Proactiv. Even her beloved dog landed a fairy-tale ending this year. In June, when her Yorkie, Enzo, went missing from her Chappaqua home, he was found and traced back to Williams, thanks to a microchip implanted in his skin.

Prediction for 2008: Having now conquered the worlds of music, film, and TV, all that remains on Williams’ to-do list is finding a replacement for ex-husband Rick Fox.

Adapted from “People of the Year,� InTown Westchester, December 2007

(Illustration by Ismael Roldon)

Lock up the bunnies! The Fatal Attraction star and Bedford resident was back on TV this year as the star of the new FX series Damages, in arguably her most sinister role to date (she snuffs out a family pet here, too, only this time it’s a dog). In the show, she plays litigator Patty Hewes, a morally malevolent type who sinks her teeth into a season-long case against a Ken Lay-type billionaire (Ted Danson). Even though the series likely won’t be renewed, Close’s Emmy-worthy performance is reason enough to Netflix the DVDs or tune into the next season of the show.

Prediction for 2008: Close is set to star as Norma Desmond in the film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Sunset Boulevard (which is based on the 1950 film). Having won a Tony for the role on Broadway, she could finally get a shot at a long-overdue Oscar.

UPDATE: In preparing the initial version of this writeup, everyone through Damages wouldn’t see a second season. Everyone was wrong. Thanks to the wise, patient folks at FX, the show got reupped in November—for two seasons, no less. Read more on the deal in my Nov. 14 post.

Adapted from “People of the Year,� InTown Westchester, December 2007

(AP Photo / Chris Pizzello)

The “whoo-ha� man gave us something to “ooh and ah� about with his return to the big screen as casino kingpin Willie Bank in Ocean’s Thirteen. Pacino, who lives in Sneden’s Landing, also had the Internet buzzing about his next two projects: Dali & I: The Surreal Story and Righteous Kill. In the former he’ll play the famed artist during his final years—also known as his melting-clocks phase—while the latter, a crime thriller filming in Norwalk, also features Robert DeNiro. And Al wasn’t the only Pacino making news in 2007; daughter Julie, a recent Tappan Zee High grad, also earned her fair share of headlines as one of the school’s softball superstars.

Prediction for 2008: The Dali biopic may earn Pacino his second Academy Award. But it’s Righteous Kill—the first reuniting of the Pacino-DeNiro dramatic dream team since 1995’s Heat—that we’re dying to see.

Adapted from “People of the Year,� Rockland Magazine, December 2007

(AP Photo / Chris Pizzello)

Nobody felt the bursting of the local real-estate bubble quite like Bracco, a.k.a. the shrink from The Sopranos. While the mob series was wrapping up its final season, she tried unloading her two-acre Sneden’s Landing estate. Yet over the course of 2007, the asking price was hacked away like Richie Aprile’s corpse in the butcher shop—as of September, the initial asking price of $4.4 mil has been lowered to $2.9 (call Mason Sammett at 359-4940, if you’re interested). Bracco also lost the Best Supporting Actress race at the Emmys to New Caanan’s Katherine Heigl. But there is some good news: Late in the year she was cast in a pilot for Lifetime; she got a chance to appear on Oprah (albeit to talk about her infidelity to Harvey Keitel); and her brand of vino, Bracco Wines, is already selling tens of thousands of cases. Salud!

Prediction for 2008: Long Island Confidential, the new Lifetime show, doesn’t promise to be nearly as edgy as The Sopranos, but the wine business will continue to boom. Two-Buck Bracco, anyone?

Adapted from “People of the Year,� Rockland Magazine, December 2007

(Illustration by Ismael Roldon)

A year after departing The View for Today, the Irvington resident has proved she made a smart move. Among her exclusive “gets� in 2007: J.K. Rowling and Valerie Plame. And she would have had Paris Hilton’s first post-jail interview, if not for Larry King (the rat!). Of course, Vieira had her share of on-air gaffes this year, too. In February she shared one of her dreams, in which she’s naked in a bunker with Diane Sawyer. And in April, she cracked two teeth after an ice skating face-plant.

Prediction for 2008: While her salary of $10 mil a year ain’t bad, Matt Lauer still gets 30 percent more. Time for Vieira to start earning Katie Couric-caliber cash.

(AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Adapted from “People of the Year,� InTown Westchester, December 2007

Around the time Dateline NBC should have been firing the folks responsible for its “To Catch a Predator� segment (after a failed sting operation led a district attorney to shoot himself), the network was making a more Machiavellian move: dropping Phillips, the show’s co-anchor. The decision, last May, not to renew the Dobbs Ferry resident’s contract reportedly boiled down to cost-cutting. This after Phillips spent 15 years with the network, during which time he turned the newsmagazine into one of its prime-time staples. Talk about stone cold!

Prediction for 2008: Shortly after his June 2 departure from Dateline, Phillips told LoHud’s Suburbarazzi blog he would be taking time off, traveling, and “then taking on some independent projects.� One of those projects, we hope, will involve teaming up with fellow network refugee Ted Koppel over at the Discovery Channel—a better place for quality TV journalism these days, anyway.

(Stuart Ramson / AP Photo) 

Adapted from “People of the Year,� InTown Westchester, December 2007

Ever since first hearing this Monsey refugee’s tales of his Hasidic upbringing on This American Life and in the pages of The New Yorker (“I was raised like a veal�), we’ve had a hunch he might just be the second coming of Philip Roth. And with the 2007 release of Foreskin’s Lament, we’re happy to say: Called It!

Prediction for 2008: Luckily, Auslander isn’t a Rothian recluse, and he’ll continue touring with the book (he’s already booked the 92nd Street Y for January 24). Given his stage presence, a more fitting literary analogy might be: the David Sedaris of Orthodox Jews.

(Photo: Patrick Anderson, Courtesy Riverhead Books)

Adapted from “People of the Year,� Rockland Magazine, December 2007

Why do we love the quirky, genre-bending Icelandic songstress so much? For starters, she lives in Rockland. And in 2007 alone, she had almost too many bizarre moments to count. Still, we’ll try to recap a few. In March, there was her hilarious unplugged cover of “No Limitâ€? (“No, no, no, no, no, no …â€?) at the Paris club Baron. Later came “Earth Intruders,â€? the spacey electronica ditty off Volta, the album she released earlier this year. Oh, and we can’t forget her April performance on SNL, the single most mesmerizing (and weird) musical-guest gig the show has seen since—well, Björk last appeared on it in 1997.

Prediction for 2008: Another film role like 1999’s Dancer in the Dark? One-upping her 2004 Olympics performance (remember the 10,000-square-foot dress?) at the games in China? Your guess is as good as ours.

(AP Photo / Gary He)

Adapted from “People of the Year,� Rockland Magazine, December 2007

The rapper’s 2006 album, Year of the Dog … Again, may go down as one of the most prescient titles in music history. After a rough ride last year (in which he spent a night in the White Plains slammer), 2007 was worse—a nonstop string of dog days. It began on February 2, when DMX (who owns a home on the Mount Kisco/Bedford line) was arrested for blowing a red light in Yonkers. Then, in March and April, he missed court date after court date—for traffic violations in Yonkers and White Plains—and was rewarded with a pair of matching arrest warrants. Later this summer, his concert series fell apart, and, in civil court, a judge ordered him to pay $242,000 for a business deal gone bad. Finally, in August, another bombshell: Police raided DMX’s Arizona home and found a stash of weapons, cocaine, and abused pit bulls—including three dead ones buried in the back yard.

Prediction for 2008: He’s still on the lam, but if DMX does turn himself in, we’d love to see a revival of his BET reality series, Soul of a Man—only now set in Sing Sing with co-star Michael Vick.

(Illustration by Ismael Roldon)