Estevez discusses 'Bobby'

Estevez discusses 'Bobby'
VENICE, Italy -- Emilio Estevez said he wanted to bring ordinary people into the spotlight while making "Bobby," about Robert Kennedy's assassination.
"Bobby," starring Anthony Hopkins, Christian Slater, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone and Lindsay Lohan, is one of 21 movies vying for this year's Golden Lion, which will be awarded Saturday.
"What I wanted to discover were common people, those who found themselves at the epicenter of one of the most important events of the 20th century," Estevez told a news conference Tuesday.
The film revisits the night Kennedy was gunned down at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in 1968, telling the stories of those who were at the hotel that evening.
"I thought to choose characters that would be emblems, symbols, normal people," the 44-year-old actor/director said.
Notable death
BERLIN -- Astrid Varnay, the Swedish-American soprano who made her Metropolitan Opera debut in a nationally broadcast performance and went on to sing for half a century, has died. She was 88. Varnay died Monday in a Munich hospital of a pericardial infection.
Astrid Ibolyka Maria Varnay was born in Stockholm on April 25, 1918, to Hungarian parents involved in opera. The family moved to the United States in 1920, where her father, tenor Alexander Varnay, died at age 35 in 1924. Varnay got her break Dec. 6, 1941 -- a day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor -- when she filled in for an indisposed Lotte Lehmann as Sieglinde in Wagner's "Die Walkuere" in a performance conducted by Erich Leinsdorf that was broadcast nationally on radio.
Today's birthdays
Comedian JoAnne Worley is 69. Country singer David Allen Coe is 67. Rock singer-musician Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) is 63. Actress Swoosie Kurtz is 62. Comedian-actress Jane Curtin is 59. Country musician Joe Smyth (Sawyer Brown) is 49. Actor-comedian Jeff Foxworthy is 48. ABC News correspondent Elizabeth Vargas is 44. Country singer Mark Chesnutt is 43. Actress Rosie Perez is 42. Singer CeCe Peniston is 37. Rhythm-and-blues singer Macy Gray is 36. Rock singer Dolores O'Riordan (The Cranberries) is 35. Rapper Noreaga is 29. Rock singer Nina Persson (The Cardigans) is 32.