TV: Matt Rodrigues Inside The Actor's Fund's West Coast Tony Party Honoring Hal Holbrook!

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On Sunday, June 12, BroadwayWorld.com brought you special and exclusive coverage throughout the night of the 65th Annual Tony Awards, airing on CBS live from the Beacon Theatre in New York City, including backstage videos, photos, speech transcriptions, winners stories, blogs and all the latest from the after parties. The night's big winner was The Book of Mormon, which took home nine prizes, including Best Musical.  War Horse and Anything Goes were also evening standouts.

Not to leave the West Coast out of the loop, of course, Matt Roderiges was back at the annual The Actor's Fund's West Coast Tony celebration in Los Angeles, this year honoring HAl Holbrook with the Julie Harris Award for Lifetime Achievement.  On hand to pay tribute to the legend were the likes of Sean Penn, Martin Sheen, Brian Stokes Mitchell and more! Click below for highlights from the event, and to see how far Matt got in his appeal for a "Hosts Fund."  

CLICK HERE for a complete 2011 Tony Awards winners list on BroadwayWorld!

TONY Award winner and Academy Award-nominated actor HAl Holbrook's first solo performance as Mark Twain was in 1954 and Mark Twain Tonight! has since become one of the longest running show in theatre history. A role he would perform for President Eisenhower and eventually win him a Tony Award and a Drama Critics' Circle Award followed by a 90 minute CBS television special that was Emmy nominated and seen by 22 million. In New York he appeared in Marco Millions, After the Fall, Incident at Vichy and Tartuffe, as well as starring roles on Broadway in The Glass Menagerie, The Apple Tree, I Never Sang For My Father, Man of La Mancha, and Does A Tiger Wear A Necktie? (with a young Al Pacino). Mr. Holbrook has done some 50 television movies and mini-series, been nominated for 12 Emmys and won five for The Senator, Pueblo, Best Actor Of The Year (1974), Sandburg's Lincoln, and as host and narrator of Portrait Of America: Alaska.

He has had memorable roles on two sitcoms: Designing Women (along side wife, Dixie Carter) and Evening Shade, with guest appearances on The West Wing, Becker, Hope & Faith, Sons of Anarchy, The Event, ER, The Sopranos, and NCIS. His over 40 films include the just completed Savannah, Water for Elephants, Magnum Force, Midway, All The President's Men, Julia, Capricorn One, The Fog, Star Chamber, Creepshow, Wall Street, The Firm, The Bachelor, Waking The Dead, Men of Honor, The Majestic, Shade, Killshot and That Evening Sun. In 2008, he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for Into the Wild written and directed by Sean Penn. He has consistently returned to the stage in productions including Buried Inside Extra, The Country Girl, King Lear, An American Daughter and a National Tour of Death Of A Salesman. Holbrook has received numerous Honorary Doctors, Degrees, the Edwin Booth Award and the William Shakespeare Award. In 2000 he was inducted into the New York Theatre Hall of Fame and in 2003 received the Nat'l Humanities Medal from President Bush.

Previous recipients of the Julie Harris Award have included Julie Harris, Gwen Verdon, Charles Durning, Rita Moreno, James Earl Jones, Tyne Daly, Lauren Bacall, Stockard Channing, Carol Channing, Liza Minnelli, Jerry Herman, Tommy Tune, Chita Rivera and Brian Stokes Mitchell. This year's honorary celebrity committee includes Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, Carol Burnett, Phyllis Diller, Jerry Herman, Ken Howard, Judith Ivy, Angela Lansbury, Annie Potts, Brian Stokes-Mitchell, Holland Taylor, Harry Thomason and John Wells.

For more information on the event, visit www.actorsfund.org.