Mike Wallace Revisits Memorable Newsmakers

(CBS)  All three stories on Sunday's 60 Minutes will be Mike Wallace interviews of newsmakers, including a scheduled sit-down with Dr. Jack Kevorkian that will be his first post-prison interview. The broadcast also includes a new interview with actress Vanessa Redgrave and a rebroadcast of parts of Wallace's interview with the feisty Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

This special broadcast also features an Andy Rooney tribute to Wallace and will be broadcast this Sunday, June 3, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Kevorkian went to prison as a result of his first interview with Wallace, broadcast in 1998 on 60 Minutes. In it, he showed himself on videotape injecting lethal chemicals into Lou Gehrig's disease sufferer Thomas Youk, who wanted to die. The assisted suicide activist was convicted of second-degree murder and sent to a Michigan prison, from which he will be paroled on June 1, after serving more than eight years.

Wallace last interviewed Redgrave in 1979, when she was an activist who produced and appeared in a pro-Palestinian film that attracted protests and accusations of anti-Semitism. Today the 70-year-old actress is up for a Tony Award for starring in a one-woman play based on the Joan Didion best-selling book "The Year of Magical Thinking." She denies charges of anti-Semitism and says she pledged to fight it and fascism her entire life. She also acknowledges losing roles because of her political activism. "I think that it is always worth it to stand by some basic principles," she tells Wallace. "So if I've lost some roles because somebody, some distributor didn't like my politics, that's par for the course as they used to say."

Redgrave continues to work because she needs the money, she says — and not just to pay the mortgage. She has used her own money to make other films for causes, including a recent production about children for UNICEF, for which she serves as a goodwill ambassador. "I came to see that human rights and human rights law is the only basis for creating a world that my children, your children, our grandchildren can live in," Redgrave tells Wallace.

Less than a year ago, Wallace interviewed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad amid charges that Iranians were supplying insurgents in Iraq and were trying to build a nuclear bomb. Now that U.S.-Iranian diplomats have held their first formal talks in 27 years — and with the nuclear question still in the air — the spirited interview is just as timely.

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To Vanessa Redgrave:

Difficult in this day and age to find someone who stands up for what they truly believe. You go girl! Never give up. Never give up. Never, ever, ever, give up. Cheers to you.

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Mike Wallace:
I am so upset with your story on Jack Kevorkian tonight that I hope you retire tomorrow.

What the H--L were you doing, showing the world how to commit suicide? Dr. Death (Kevorkian) gave his word that he would NOT council or show or perform suicide on anyone. Now, you go and
do it for him!!

He is nothing but a Murderer. There are Many Other Methods of easing people's pain and suffering without murder. That is what Hospice's are for and modern medicine and treatments. Shame on you Mike Wallace.

Kathleen Sitzman
Lincoln, Michigan 48742