Free Republic

Melinda Dillon, who received supporting Oscar nominations for her turns in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Absence of Malice and portrayed the doting mom in the holiday perennial A Christmas Story, died Jan. 9, her family announced. She was 83. In Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Dillon portrayed Jillian Guiler, the single mother who heads to Devils Tower with her next-door neighbor (Richard Dreyfuss) in search of her 3-year-old son, who’s been abducted by aliens through the kitchen doggy door. Sydney Pollack’s Absence of Malice (1981) had her back with Slap Shot co-star Paul...

It wouldn't be Christmas without 'A Christmas Story,' the 1983 movie that became an instant holiday classic thanks to its winning cast and quotable scenes. The film is as time-honored a tradition as getting your tongue stuck to a pole in freezing weather. Here's a then-and-now look at the gang from fictional Hohman, Indiana, who brought the 'original, traditional, one-hundred-percent, red-blooded, two-fisted, all-American Christmas' tale to life ...