Maria Bello is a talented actress best known for her roles in The Cooler, A History Of Violence, and The Mummy: Tomb of
the Dragon Emperor. Maria-Bello.org provides information and photos of Ms Bello's career, along with numerous other
features. Please don't hesitate to contact me with any feedback, questions or contributions. Enjoy the site!
Current Projects
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee As Suky Released On DVD now (UK & US) Info • Photos •
Web
Downloading Nancy As Nancy Released On DVD now (US) Info • Photos •
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Yellow Handkerchief As May Released In cinemas now (US) Info •
Photos •
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Grown Ups As Sally Lamonsoff Released June 25th 2010 Info • Photos •
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The Company Men As Sally Wilcox Released Early 2010 Info • Photos •
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Beautiful Boy As Kate Carroll Released 2010? Info • Photos •
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Emergency Sex (HBO TV Series)
Untitled HBO TV series
"As I’ve gotten older I’ve become more open. You stop judging yourself and you stop judging others. And it
doesn’t matter anymore if anybody likes you."
When United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was foreign minister of South Korea from 2004 through 2006, he experienced directly how entertainment can shape popular perceptions, when not one but two TV networks began airing miniseries about the lives of Korean diplomats.
Although the series romanticized diplomat life with requisite dashes of love and conflict, the net effect for the foreign ministry was a burnished public image. “Good storytelling is a very strong tool to change the attitudes and minds of people,” Ban recalled in an interview.
Ban said that’s what was on his mind this week as he led a veritable platoon of top U.N. officials, including the heads of UNICEF and the World Health Organization, on a mission to Hollywood to build relationships with the entertainment community and encourage film and television story lines about issues high on the U.N. agenda, such as climate change and violence against women.
Hollywood supports Artists for Peace and Justice for Haiti Watch our panel of amazing celebrity supporters including Daniel Craig, Paul Haggis, Olivia Wilde, Gerard Butler, Penelope Cruz, and Maria Bello voice their support for APJ, showing our work in Haiti!
Maria has been quite busy lately, it seems! Make sure you scroll down through this main page as lots of new articles have been posted today. Don’t miss the new Grown Ups stills and the news of Maria’s new HBO show!
Photos from two new events that Maria has attended have been added to the Gallery. I’ve also added a new still from The Yellow Handkerchief (the release date for which has changed to February 26th).
This is Part Three in a series of blog posts by Maria Bello, who is traveling with Artists For Peace And Justice in Haiti. Read Part One and Part Two of the series now.
Posted: January 26, 2010 04:23 PM
It’s almost impossible to explain what I have witnessed over the last week in Haiti. How to relay the depth of sorrow and devastation of the Haitian people and acknowledge the sheer beauty of a community coming together to help their fellow man?
Three days ago, at St. Damien’s hospital, I held the hand of a 16-year-old boy as his leg was amputated with nothing more than local anesthesia. His screams of despair, I believe, were not only from the physical pain but from the knowledge that his life as he has known it would never be the same. Haiti was a hard place to survive before the earthquake. Now, with one leg, perhaps impossible. And there are thousands of men, women and children just like him. Missing arms, legs, paralyzed from spinal cord injuries, brain injuries… and the list goes on.
How will these people survive?
That night, sleeping on the ground under the Haitian moon with hundreds of doctors, nurses, soldiers and volunteers at the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division camp, we were awakened by what sounded like the song of angels. It was quiet at first, like one mother’s mournful prayer in Creole for a lost child. And then her voice was joined by another and another and another, until the song they were singing turned into a choir of grieving voices.
Award-winning director and screenwriter Paul Haggis – straight off a flight from Haiti – hosted the Artists for Peace and Justice (APJ) Haiti relief brunch this morning (Sun 24th Jan). At his home, Haggis and friends raised four million dollars for Haiti through APJ, the charity he founded in 2009. The brunch had two purposes: first, to get emergency relief to the children of Haiti and second, to raise money for long-term relief so that Haiti will not once again be forgotten as soon is it is out of the news. One hundred friends and supporters of APJ pledged to support the disaster-stricken nation over the next five to ten years, committing funds to building and funding schools, in a country where most children don’t have access to basic education. Guests included APJ advisory board members, Josh Brolin, Maria Bello, Olivia Wilde, Charlize Theron, Jimmy-Jean Louis and Madeleine Stowe. Moby, Sheryl Crow, Macy Gray and Jackson Browne each gave live performances. Over the past year, APJ has been working with doctor and community organizer Father Rick Frechette who has been making real change in the lives of the people of the slums of Port-Au-Prince for over 22 years, long before this most recent disaster struck. Frechette and his team are working night and day in their beautiful paediatric hospital, St. Damiens, perhaps the only hospital that escaped major damage. They are providing medical supplies, tents, beds, food and water to earthquake survivors. Haggis and his wife personally pay all the expenses and overhead of APJ, so that every penny raised will go directly to the relief efforts and long-term reconstruction of the people of the slums of Haiti.
This is the second post in Maria Bello’s continuing series from Haiti. Read Part I of the series now.
Posted: January 22, 2010 03:44 PM
St. Damien’s is the calm in the midst of a storm. Arriving here yesterday with Sean and Diana’s team of incredible doctors, we were surprised at the lack of chaos and the efficiency of many volunteers and aid groups working together. The teams of doctors who have been embedded here for the last week were more than relieved to see a new set of faces so they could finally get some sleep. Many of the teams here were immediately deployed by Partners in Health the day the earthquake hit.
Partners in Health, founded by the brilliant Paul Farmer, has been working on the ground in Haiti for 20 years. They bring modern medical support to poor communities in the countryside and manage free community health clinics all over the country.
Lack of medication is still a huge problem here. In the childrens’ ward yesterday a six year old girl with a newly amputated arm was being treated for pain with nothing more than Tylenol. Dr. Delatre Lolo, a Haitian doctor now living in the States is a team member of JP Haiti relief organization. He told me this morning after working through the night, “we are seeing mostly amputations and it is very sad because most of them could have been avoided with quicker response and medication.”
The acrid smell of death is not the first thing that hits you landing in Port-au-Prince. It is the screams and wails of mourning that are overwhelming. The cries of mothers, fathers, neighbors and friends who have lost so much and so many in the last week. The Haitian people whom I have come to know over the last year are a strong, compassionate, resilient bunch who mourn with the same passion they live by.
Paul Haggis and I landed this morning with a team from the JP Haiti Relief Organization, a private foundation created by Sean Penn and Diana Jenkins to help in the rescue efforts. They have gathered 10 doctors, nurses and surgeons, a water specialist, logistics people and two cargo planes filled with medical supplies, food, tools, thousands of water filters and generators to help existing institutions and set up a clinic that will service those in need. They are generously supplying our group, Artists for Peace and Justice, with medicine we desperately need to get into the hands of our friends at St. Damien’s Hospital in Port-au-Prince. For the last 48 hours, operations have been performed without anesthesia, children are dying from dehydration and simple wounds have become so infected that many require amputation.
We have been called here by our dear friend, Father Rick Frechette. A doctor and priest in Haiti for the last 22 years, Rick defines the power of one man’s call to action. He and his Haitian colleagues have built and run the only free pediatric hospital in Haiti, the only hospital for disabled children, two orphanages, 20 street schools, free medical clinics in the poorest slums of the city, Cite de Soleil and most recently, New York City, a job training center that includes a bakery and shoe factory. He supplies the only free drinking water to the people of Cite de Soleil and feeds thousands of people a day in and around Port-au-Prince.
The Creative Coalition will be holding a Spotlight Awards Dinner on January 25th in Utah, honoring Elijah Wood, Adrian Grenier, Maria Bello, Treat Williams and Melissa Leo.
In the aftermath of the magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti, conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh said President Obama was using the tragedy to “boost his creditability with the black community” and said that we already “donate” to the impoverished nation with U.S taxpayer dollars.
But instead of getting mad, actress Maria Bello, who said she has been working for years to help Haiti, is sending out her “compassion” to Limbaugh.
“I feel really sad for that man, that he would really take the tragedy of these people and distill it into something so ugly,” Bello told us at the DIC and InStyle 9th Annual Awards Season Diamond Fashion Show Preview in Beverly Hills on Thursday.
Evangelist broadcaster and former Presidential candidate Pat Robertson also sparked outrage on Wednesday when he suggested that Haiti was “cursed” and that the Haitians made a “deal with the devil” in freeing themselves from the French.
Many of Hollywood’s most stylish beauties — including Rachel Bilson, Glee star Dianna Agron and Taraji P. Henson — hit the red carpet at The Diamond Information Center and InStyle luncheon in Beverly Hills yesterday prepared to focus on the gorgeous diamond preview to kick off the awards season. But with just days to go before the Golden Globes, thoughts of the devastating situation in Haiti seemed to be at the forefront of everyone’s minds. Talk quickly turned to the quake-damaged country that was already stripped to its core, with Haitians immersed in a daily reality of already tragic proportions.
Haitian-born actress Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon stoicly took to the press line only to excuse herself as she became too overwhelmed with discussion of her homeland.
For Maria Bello, speaking up for Haiti is something she was doing before the earthquake occurred. The actress is especially shaken by the stunning devastation and death toll because she was in Haiti just three weeks ago working with her organization, Artists for Peace and Justice. Bello is an active board member with the organization, founded by director Paul Haggis (Crash), alongside such fellow luminaries as Wilde, Josh Brolin, James Franco, Diane Lane, Oliver Stone, and Charlize Theron.
