 (363351929).jpg)
.jpg)
.svg)
![The Manchester Eye ITV franchisee Granada Television has its headquarters in Quay Street, in the Castle field area of the city.[149] Granada produces the world's oldest and most watched television soap opera, Coronation Street,[150] which is screened five times a week on ITV1.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110612063608im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/7b/54/0f324ee8db3afa532efc8d9406ce_grande.jpg "The Manchester Eye ITV franchisee Granada Television has its headquarters in Quay Street, in the Castle field area of the city.[149] Granada produces the world's oldest and most watched television soap opera, Coronation Street,[150] which is screened five times a week on ITV1.")
![Bilingual road sign near Wrexham Central station in 2009. The language has greatly increased its prominence since the creation of the television channel S4C in November 1982, which broadcasts 70% of Channel 4's programming along with a majority of Welsh language shows[22] during peak viewing hours.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110612063608im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/9d/94/134c211e5f363c95ac81a4574c2e_grande.jpg "Bilingual road sign near Wrexham Central station in 2009. The language has greatly increased its prominence since the creation of the television channel S4C in November 1982, which broadcasts 70% of Channel 4's programming along with a majority of Welsh language shows[22] during peak viewing hours.")
| Name | BBC News |
|---|---|
| Logo | |
| Caption | BBC News Logo |
| Type | Department of the BBC |
| Location city | BBC Television Centre, White City,London |
| Location country | United Kingdom |
| Area served | Specific services for United Kingdom and rest of world |
| Key people | Helen Boaden (Director) |
| Industry | Media |
| Services | Radio and television broadcasts |
| Owner | BBC |
| Num employees | 3,500 (2,000 are journalists) |
| Homepage | |
| Intl | yes |
BBC News is the department of the BBC responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online news coverage. The service maintains 44 foreign news bureaux and has correspondents in almost all the world's 240 countries. Since 2004 the Director of BBC News has been Helen Boaden.
The department's annual budget is £350 million; there are 3,500 members of staff, 2,000 of whom are journalists.
Criticism of the BBC in the United Kingdom has generally taken the form of accusations of political bias from across the political spectrum, although the BBC is a quasi-autonomous corporation authorised by Royal Charter, making it formally independent of government. Internationally the BBC has been banned from reporting from within some countries who accuse the corporation of working to destabilise their Governments.
In 2005 BBC News celebrated 50 years of news broadcasts. BBC News journalists, cameramen and programmes have won awards over the year for reporting, particularly from the Royal Television Society.
The BBC founded the BBC College of Journalism in 2005 as a part of the BBC Academy, following recommendations made after the Hutton Report.
The public's interest in television and live events was stimulated by Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953. It is estimated that up to 27 million people viewed the programme in the UK - overtaking radio's audience of 12 million for the first time - and those live pictures were fed from 21 cameras in central London to Alexandra Palace for transmission, and then on to other UK transmitters opened in time for the event. In coronation year there were around two million TV Licences held in the UK, rising to over three million the following year and four and a half million by 1955.
It was revealed that this had been due to producers fearing a newsreader with visible facial movements would distract the viewer from the story in question. On-screen newsreaders were finally introduced a year later, in 1955 - Kenneth Kendall (the first to appear in vision), Robert Dougall and Richard Baker - just three weeks before ITN's launch date of 21 September 1955.
Mainstream television production had started to move out of Alexandra Palace in 1950 to larger premises - mainly at Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd's Bush, west London - taking Current Affairs (then known as Talks Department) with it, and it was from here that the first Panorama, a new documentary programme, was transmitted on 11 November 1953, with Richard Dimbleby taking over as anchor in 1955. On 18 February 1957 the topical early-evening programme Tonight hosted by Cliff Michelmore and designed to fill the airtime provided by the abolition of the Toddlers' Truce, was broadcast from Marconi's Viking Studio in St Mary Abbott's Place, Kensington - with the programme moving into a Lime Grove studio in 1960 where it already maintained its production office.
Later in 1957, on 28 October in central London, radio launched its morning programme Today on the Home Service.
In 1958 Hugh Carleton Greene became head of News and Current Affairs, and set up a BBC study group whose findings, published in 1959, were critical of what the television news operation had become under Greene's predecessor Tahu Hole. The solution proposed was that the head of television news should take control (away from radio), and that the television service should have a proper newsroom of its own, with an editor-of-the-day.
A newsroom was created at Alexandra Palace, television reporters recruited, and given the opportunity to write and voice their own scripts - without the "impossible burden" of having to cover stories for radio too.
In 1987, almost thirty years later, John Birt resurrected the practice of correspondents working for both TV and radio with the introduction of bi-media journalism, and 2008 saw tri-media introduced across TV, radio and online.
Also in 1960, Nan Winton, the first female BBC network newsreader, appeared in vision on 20 June, and 19 September saw the start of the radio news and current affairs programme The Ten O'clock News.
Greene was a great innovator and (on a lighter note) asked Ned Sherrin, the then producer of Tonight to "prick the pomposity of public figures" with a weekly television show. So on 24 November 1962 That Was The Week That Was, a satirical programme hosted by David Frost, was born at Lime Grove Studios and is mentioned here because (of Greene's actions) it was a product of Current Affairs department rather than Light Entertainment.
BBC 2 started transmission on 20 April 1964, and with it came a new news programme for that channel - Newsroom.
The World at One (WATO), a lunchtime news programme, began on 4 October 1965 on the then Home Service, and the year before News Review had started on television. News Review was a roundup of the weeks news, first broadcast on Sunday 26 April 1964 on BBC 2 and harking back to the weekly Newsreel Review of the Week (produced from 1951) to open programming on Sunday evenings - the difference being that this incarnation had subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. As this was the decade before electronic caption generation, each "super" (superimposition) had to be produced on paper or card, synchronised manually to studio and news footage, committed to tape during the afternoon and broadcast early evening - thus Sundays were no longer a quiet day for news at Alexandra Palace. The programme ran until the 1980s - by then using electronic captions, known as Anchor - to be superseded by Ceefax subtitling (a similar format), and the signing of such programmes as See Hear (from 1981).
On Sunday 17 September 1967 The World This Weekend, a weekly news and current affairs programme, launched on what was then Home Service, but soon-to-be Radio 4.
Preparations for colour began in the autumn of 1967 and on Thursday 7 March 1968 Newsroom on BBC 2 moved to an early evening slot, becoming the first UK news programme to be transmitted in colour - from Studio A at Alexandra Palace. News Review and Westminster (the latter a weekly review of Parliamentary happenings) were "colourised" shortly after.
However, much of the insert material was still in black and white, as initially only a part of the film coverage shot in and around London was on colour reversal film stock, and all regional and many international contributions were still in black and white too. Colour facilities were also technically very limited for the next eighteen months at Alexandra Palace, as it had only one RCA colour videotape machine and, eventually two Pye plumbicon colour telecines - although the news colour service started with just one.
Black and white national bulletins on BBC 1 continued to originate from Studio B on weekdays, along with Town and Around, the London regional "opt out" programme broadcast throughout the 1960s (and the BBC's first regional news programme for the South East), until it started to be replaced by Nationwide on Tuesday to Thursday from Lime Grove Studios early in September 1969. Town and Around was never to make the move to Television Centre - instead it became London This Week which transmitted on Mondays and Fridays only from the new TVC studios.
This move to better technical facilities, but much smaller studios, allowed Newsroom and News Review to replace back projection with CSO.
And it also allowed all news output to be produced in PAL colour, in preparation for the "colourisation" of BBC 1 from 15 November 1969 - and, like Alexandra Palace Studio A, these studios too were capable of operating in NTSC for the US, Canada and Japan as the BBC occasionally provided facilities for overseas broadcasters. During the 1960s satellite communication had become not only possible, but popular, however colour field-store standards converters were still in their infancy in 1968 and we would have to wait until the 1970s for digital line-store conversion to do the job seamlessly.
The Nine made history again in 1975 with the appointment of Angela Rippon as the first female news presenter. Her work outside the news was controversial for the time, appearing on the Morecambe and Wise show singing and dancing. but this wasn't to last, or be the same programme as we know today - that would be launched in 1980 - and it soon reverted to being just a news summary with the early evening BBC 2 news expanded to become Newsday.
News on radio was to change in the 1970s, and on Radio 4 in particular, brought about by the arrival of new editor Peter Woon from television news and the implementation of the Broadcasting in the Seventies report. These included the introduction of correspondents into news bulletins where previously only a newsreader would present, as well as the inclusion of content gathered in the preparation process. New programmes were also added to the daily schedule, PM and The World Tonight as part of the plan for the station to become a "wholly speech network".
On 23 September 1974, a teletext system which was developed to bring news content on television screens using text only was launched. Engineers originally began developing such a system to bring news to deaf viewers, but the system was expanded. The Ceefax service is now much more diverse: it not only has subtitling for all channels, it also gives information such as weather, flight times and film reviews.
The decline in shooting film for news broadcasts became more prevalent, as ENG equipment became less cumbersome - the BBC's first attempts had been using a Philips colour camera with backpack base station and separate portable Sony U-matic recorder in the latter half of the decade.
Two years prior to this the Iranian Embassy Siege had been shot electronically by the BBC Television News OB team with Kate Adie reporting live from Prince's Gate, again nominated for BAFTA actuality coverage, but this time beaten by ITN for the 1980 award.
Newsnight, the news and current affairs programme still running to this day, was due to go on air on 23 January 1980, although trade union disagreements meant that its launch from Lime Grove was postponed by a week".
The Six O'Clock News first aired on 3 September 1984, eventually becoming the most watched news programme in the UK (however, since 2006 it has been overtaken by the BBC News at Ten).
Starting in 1981, the BBC gave a common theme to its main news bulletins with new electronic titles - a set of animated computerised "stripes" forming a circle on a red background with a "BBC News" typescript appearing below the circle graphics, and a theme tune consisting of brass and keyboards. The Nine used a similar (stripey) number 9. The red background was replaced by a blue from 1985 until 1987.
By 1987, the BBC had decided to re-brand its bulletins and established individual styles again for each one with differing titles and music, the weekend and holiday bulletins branded in a similar style to the Nine, although the "stripes" introduction continued to be used until 1989 on occasions where a news bulletin was screened out of the running order of the schedule.
In 1998 after 66 years at Broadcasting House, the BBC Radio News operation moved to BBC Television Centre.
New 'Silicon Graphics' technology came into use in 1993 for a relaunch of the main BBC One bulletins, creating a virtual set which appeared to be much larger than it was physically. The relaunch also brought all bulletins into the same style of set with only small changes in colouring, titles and music to differentiate each. A computer generated glass sculpture of the BBC coat of arms was the centrepiece of the programme titles until the largescale corporation rebranding of news services in 1999.
In 1999, the biggest relaunch occurred, with BBC One bulletins, BBC World, BBC News 24 and BBC News Online all adopting a common style. One of the most significant changes was the gradual adoption of the corporate image by the BBC regional news programmes, giving a common style across local, national and international BBC television news. This also included Newyddion, the main news programme of Welsh language channel S4C, produced by BBC News Wales. The introduction of regional headlines at the start of bulletins followed in 2000 though the English regions lost five minutes at the end of bulletins, due to a new headline round-up at 18:55.
It was also in 2000 that the Nine O'Clock News moved to the later time of 22:00. This was in response to ITN who had just moved their popular News at Ten programme to 23:00. ITN briefly returned News at Ten but following poor ratings when head to head against the BBC's Ten O'Clock News, the ITN bulletin was moved to 22.30, where it remained until 14 January 2008.
BBC News 24 and BBC World introduced a new style of presentation in December 2003, that was slightly altered on 5 July 2004 to mark 50 years of BBC Television News.
The individual positions of editor of the One and Six O'Clock News were replaced by a new daytime position in November 2005. Kevin Bakhurst became the first Controller of BBC News 24, replacing the position of editor. Amanda Farnsworth became daytime editor while Craig Oliver was later named editor of the Ten O'Clock News. The bulletins also began to be simulcast with News 24, as a way of pooling resources.
Bulletins received new titles and a new set design in May 2006, to allow for Breakfast to move into the main studio for the first time since 1997. The new set featured Barco videowall screens with a background of the London skyline used for main bulletins and originally an image of cirrus clouds against a blue sky for Breakfast. This was later replaced following viewer criticism. The studio bore similarities with the ITN-produced ITV News in 2004, though ITN uses a CSO Virtual studio rather than the actual screens at BBC News.
A new graphics and video playout system was introduced for production of television bulletins in January 2007. This coincided with a new structure to BBC World News bulletins, editors favouring a section devoted to analysing the news stories reported on.
The first new BBC News bulletin since the Six O'Clock News was announced in July 2007 following a successful trial in the Midlands. The summary, lasting 90 seconds, has been broadcast at 20:00 on weekdays since December 2007 and bears similarities with 60 Seconds on BBC Three, but also includes headlines from the various BBC regions and a weather summary.
As part of a long-term cost cutting programme, bulletins were renamed the BBC News at One, Six and Ten respectively in April 2008 while BBC News 24 was renamed BBC News and moved into the same studio as the bulletins at BBC Television Centre. BBC World was renamed BBC World News and regional news programmes were also updated with the new presentation style, designed by Lambie-Nairn.
The studio moves also meant that Studio N9, previously used for BBC World, was closed, and operations moved to the previous studio of BBC News 24. Studio N9 was later refitted to match the new branding, and was used for the BBC's UK Local Elections and European Elections coverage in early June 2009.
It was announced on 18 October 2007 as part of Mark Thompson's new six year plan, Delivering Creative Future, that there would no longer be a television Current Affairs department in its own right - it would become a unit within the new News Programmes department. The Director General's announcement, in response to a £2billion shortfall in funding, would deliver "a smaller, but fitter, BBC" in the digital age - along with imminent job cuts and the sale of Television Centre in 2013.
The various newsrooms of the BBC: television, radio and online, were merged together to create a multimedia newsroom - programme making within the newsrooms was brought together to form the multimedia programme making departments. Peter Horrocks, referring to the changes, stated that the move would bring about a greater efficiency - particularly at a time of cost-cutting at the BBC. He highlighted the dilemma faced with such a change in his blog: that by using the same resources across the various broadcasting mediums means fewer stories can be covered - or by following more stories, there would be fewer ways to broadcast them.
The entire News Operation is due to move from Television Centre to new facilities at Broadcasting House at Portland Place, Central London. Refurbishment and extension work was scheduled for completion in 2008 though delays have seen the deadline extended until 2010, with news expecting to move in during 2012. The new building will also become home to the BBC World Service once the lease on Bush House expires.
A strategy review of the BBC in March 2010 confirmed that having 'the best journalism in the world' would form one of five key editorial policies, as part of sweeping changes subject to public consultation and BBC Trust approval.
BBC News content is also output onto the BBC's digital interactive television services under the BBC Red Button brand, and the legacy analogue Ceefax teletext system.
The distinctive music on all BBC television news programmes was introduced in 1999 and composed by David Lowe. It was part of the extensive re-branding which commenced in 1999 and features the classic 'BBC Pips' The general theme was used not only on bulletins on BBC One but News 24, BBC World and local news programmes in the BBC's Nations and Regions. Lowe was also responsible for the music on Radio One's Newsbeat. The theme has had several changes since 1999.
The BBC Arabic Television news channel launched on 11 March 2008 - with a Persian language channel following on 14 January 2009, broadcasting from the Egton wing of Broadcasting House; both include news, analysis, interviews, sports and highly cultural programmes and are run by the BBC World Service and funded from a grant-in-aid from the British Foreign Office (and not the television licence).
BBC Radio News is a patron of The Radio Academy.
Many television and radio programmes are also available to view on the site, via the BBC iPlayer service. The BBC News channel is also available to view 24 hours a day, while video and radio clips are also available within online news articles.
The BBC's 'Editorial Guidelines' on Politics and Public Policy state that whilst 'the voices and opinions of opposition parties must be routinely aired and challenged', 'the government of the day will often be the primary source of news'.
The BBC is regularly accused by the government of the day of bias in favour of the opposition and, by the opposition, of bias in favour of the government. Similarly, during times of war, the BBC is often accused by the UK government, or by strong supporters of British military campaigns, of being overly sympathetic to the view of the enemy. An edition of Newsnight at the start of the Falklands War in 1982 was described as "almost treasonable" by Conservative MP John Page, who objected to the presenter Peter Snow talking of "if we believe the British".
During the first Gulf War, critics of the BBC took to using the satirical name "Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation". although Slobodan Milosevic later complained that the BBC's coverage had been biased against the Serbs.
Conversely, some of those who style themselves anti-establishment in the United Kingdom or who oppose foreign wars have accused the BBC of pro-establishment bias or of refusing to give an outlet to "anti-war" voices. Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq a study, by the Cardiff University School of Journalism, of the reporting of the war, found that nine out of 10 references to weapons of mass destruction during the war assumed that Iraq possessed them, and only one in 10 questioned this assumption. It also found that out of the main British broadcasters covering the war the BBC was the most likely to use the British government and military as its source. It was also the least likely to use independent sources, like the Red Cross, who were more critical of the war. When it came to reporting Iraqi casualties the study found fewer reports on the BBC than on the other three main channels. The report's author, Justin Lewis, wrote of his findings: "Far from revealing an anti-war BBC, our findings tend to give credence to those who criticised the BBC for being too sympathetic to the government in its war coverage. Either way, it is clear that the accusation of BBC anti-war bias fails to stand up to any serious or sustained analysis".
Prominent BBC appointments are constantly assessed by the British media and political establishment for signs of political bias. The appointment of Greg Dyke as Director-General was highlighted by press sources because Dyke was a Labour Party member and former activist, as well as a friend of Tony Blair. The BBC's current Political Editor, Nick Robinson, was some years ago a chairman of the Young Conservatives and did, as a result, attract informal criticism from the former Labour government, but his predecessor Andrew Marr faced similar claims from the right because he was editor of the liberal leaning Independent newspaper before his own appointment in 2000.
Director-General of the BBC Mark Thompson admitted the organisation has been biased "towards the left". He said, "In the BBC I joined 30 years ago, there was, in much of current affairs, in terms of people's personal politics, which were quite vocal, a massive bias to the left".
In protest against the claimed biased coverage of the BBC, renowned journalist Mobashar Jawed "M.J." Akbar has elected to boycott the BBC to speak about the Mumbai terror attacks. British parliamentarian Stephen Pound has supported these claims, referring to the BBC's whitewashing of the terror attacks as "the worst sort of mealy mouthed posturing. It is desperation to avoid causing offence which ultimately causes more offence to everyone."
Writing for The Hindu Business Line, reporter Premen Addy criticised the BBC's reportage on South Asia as consistently anti-India and pro-Islamist, and that they underreport India's economic and social achievements, as well as political and diplomatic efforts, and disproportionately highlight and exaggerate problems in the country. In addition, Addy alludes to discrimination against Indian anchors and reporters in favour of Pakistani and Bangladeshi ones who are hostile to India.
Writing for the 2008 edition of the peer-reviewed Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Alasdair Pinkerton analyses the coverage of India by the BBC since India's independence from British rule in 1947 until 2008. Pinkerton observes a tumultuous history involving allegations of anti-India bias in the BBC's reportage, particularly during the cold war, and concludes that the BBC's coverage of South Asian geopolitics and economics shows a pervasive and hostile anti-India bias due to the BBC's alleged imperialist and neo-colonialist stance.
Writing on western media bias regarding South Asia in the journal of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, media analyst Ajai K. Rai strongly criticised the BBC for anti-India bias. He writes that there is a total lack of depth or fairness in the BBC's reportage on conflict zones in South Asia, and that the BBC has, on one occasion, fabricated photographs while reporting on the Kashmir conflict in order to make India look bad. He also writes that the BBC made false allegations that the Indian Army stormed a sacred Muslim shrine, the tomb of Hazrat Sheikh Noor-u-din Noorani in Charari Sharief, and only retracted the claim after strong criticism from the media in India for several weeks.
In subsequent weeks the corporation stood by the report, saying that it had a reliable source. Following intense media speculation, David Kelly was named in the press as the source for Gilligan's story on 9 July 2003. Kelly was found dead, by suicide, in a field close to his home early on 18 July. An inquiry led by Lord Hutton was announced by the British government the following day to investigate the circumstances leading to Kelly's death, concluding that "Dr. Kelly took his own life."
In his report on 28 January 2004, Lord Hutton concluded that Gilligan's original accusation was "unfounded" and the BBC's editorial and management processes were "defective". In particular, it specifically criticised the chain of management that caused the BBC to defend its story. The BBC Director of News, Richard Sambrook, the report said, had accepted Gilligan's word that his story was accurate in spite of his notes being incomplete. Davies had then told the BBC Board of Governors that he was happy with the story and told the Prime Minister that a satisfactory internal inquiry had taken place. The Board of Governors, under BBC Chairman Gavyn Davies' guidance, accepted that further investigation of the Government's complaints were unnecessary.
Because of the criticism in the Hutton report, Davies resigned on the day of publication. BBC News faced an important test, reporting on itself with the publication of the report, but by common consent (of the Board of Governors) managed this "independently, impartially and honestly". Davies' resignation was followed by the resignation of Director General Greg Dyke the following day, and the resignation of Gilligan on 30 January. While doubtless a traumatic experience for the corporation, an ICM poll in April 2003 indicated that it had sustained its position as the best and most trusted provider of news.
The BBC has faced accusations of holding both anti-Arab and anti-Israel biases, and being anti-semitic.
For example, Douglas Davis, the London correspondent of The Jerusalem Post, has described the BBC's coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict as "a relentless, one-dimensional portrayal of Israel as a demonic, criminal state and Israelis as brutal oppressors [which] bears all the hallmarks of a concerted campaign of vilification that, wittingly or not, has the effect of delegitimising the Jewish state and pumping oxygen into a dark old European hatred that dared not speak its name for the past half-century.". However two large independent studies, one conducted by Loughborough University and the other by Glasgow University's Media Group concluded that Israeli perspectives are given greater coverage.
Critics of the BBC argue that the Balen Report proves systematic bias against Israel in headline news programming. Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph criticised BBC for spending hundreds of thousands of British tax payers pounds from preventing the report being released to the public.
Jeremy Bowen, the Middle East Editor for BBC world news, was singled out specifically for bias by the BBC Trust which concluded that he violated "BBC guidelines on accuracy and impartiality."
Noam Chomsky, and David Edwards of Medialens.org tend to criticise the BBC through differences in terminology sometimes used to describe Israeli and Palestinian actions. Israeli shootings are usually described as "security sweeps" or "incursions", while Palestinian shootings are described as "terrorist killings" committed by "gunmen".
An independent panel appointed by the BBC Trust was set up in 2006 to review the impartiality of the BBC's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The panel's assessment was that "apart from individual lapses, there was little to suggest deliberate or systematic bias." While noting a "commitment to be fair accurate and impartial" and praising much of the BBC's coverage the independent panel concluded "that BBC output does not consistently give a full and fair account of the conflict. In some ways the picture is incomplete and, in that sense, misleading." It notes that, "the failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, [reflects] the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation".
Writing in the FT, Philip Stephens, one of the panellists, later accused the BBC's director-general, Mark Thompson, of misrepresenting the panel's conclusions. He further opined "My sense is that BBC news reporting has also lost a once iron-clad commitment to objectivity and a necessary respect for the democratic process. If I am right, the BBC, too, is lost". Mark Thompson published a rebuttal in the FT the next day.
The description by one BBC correspondent reporting on the funeral of Yassir Arafat that she had been left with tears in her eyes led to other questions of impartiality, particularly from Martin Walker'" in a guest opinion piece in The Times, who picked out the apparent case of Fayad Abu Shamala, the BBC Arabic Service correspondent, who told a Hamas rally on 6 May 2001, that journalists in Gaza were "waging the campaign shoulder to shoulder together with the Palestinian people."
The BBC also faced criticism for not airing a Disasters Emergency Committee aid appeal for Palestinians who suffered in Gaza during 22-day war there in late 2008/early 2009. Most other major UK broadcasters did air this appeal, but rival Sky News did not.
British lawyer and journalist Julie Burchill has accused BBC of creating a "climate of fear" for British Jews over its "excessive coverage" of Israel compared to other nations.
In a 68 page study published by BBC watch examining BBC's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict between January–June 2005, it concluded that "journalists have a predilection to denigrate Israel and to evoke sympathy for Palestinians." The researchers claimed that BBC is "fascinated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" based on a pictorial analysis: 15.80% of all pictures published on BBC world news are on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, compared to 0.51% for the Darfur conflict.
News Category:BBC World News programmes BBC television news programmes Category:1922 establishments Category:Television news in the United Kingdom Category:Multilingual news services
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Honorific-prefix | The Right Honourable |
|---|---|
| Name | The Lord Foulkes of Cumnock |
| Honorific-suffix | MSP PC |
| Constituency mp | Lothians |
| Parliament | Scottish |
| Term start | 3 May 2007 |
| Constituency mp2 | Carrick, Cumnock and Doon ValleySouth Ayrshire (1979–1983) |
| Parliament2 | Parliament of the United KingdomUK |
| Term start2 | 3 May 1979 |
| Term end2 | 5 May 2005 |
| Predecessor2 | Jim Sillars |
| Successor2 | constituency abolished |
| Birth date | January 21, 1942 |
| Birth place | Oswestry, Shropshire |
| Party | Labour Co-operative |
| Alma mater | University of Edinburgh |
Foulkes is a strong supporter of ID cards, regularly speaking in favour of UK Government proposals. He is also a supporter of Scottish devolution and was involved in the drafting of "A Claim of Right for Scotland" in 1988.
Foulkes was chairman of Hearts football club from April 2004 until his resignation on 31 October 2005. Foulkes resigned in protest at the majority shareholder Vladimir Romanov deciding to dismiss the Hearts chief executive Phil Anderton.
As an MP, Foulkes introduced the first-ever proposals for a smoking ban in public places in 1982 and legislation against age discrimination in 1985, both through private member's bills.
After serving on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and the Council of Europe, he was appointed to the Opposition Front Bench as an opposition spokesperson on Foreign Affairs from 1983–92, then for Defence from 1992-93. He then served as Joan Lestor's deputy at International Development from 1994-1997.
When Labour won the election in 1997 he was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department for International Development, where he was Clare Short's deputy. From February 2001 he was Minister of State for Scotland until the May 2002 reshuffle. From June 2003 to May 2005 he was a UK delegate to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the Assembly of the Western European Union. Foulkes was made a member of the Privy Council in 2002, and stepped down from office at the 2005 general election.
He is a strong supporter of the Iraq war and has described Tony Blair's conduct of the war as clearly intentioned, carried through brilliantly and resulting in much improvement for the people of the country. Commenting on Sir Christopher Meyer's testimony to the Iraq Inquiry in 2009, he described the inquiry as "a procession of prima donnas and the usual suspects grandstanding for the TV".
He serves as a member of the Executive Committee of the Interparliamentary Union and Member of the Board of Governors of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. He is a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee in the Cabinet Office since 2007.
Lord Foulkes is very active on Caribbean matters. He serves as President of the Caribbean Britain Business Council, Chair of the Dominican Republic All-Party Parliamentary Group, Chair of the Belize All-Party Parliamentary Group, Vice Chair of the Trinidad and Tobago All-Party Parliamentary Group and Vice Chair of the British - Central America All-Party Parliamentary Group.
Foulkes returned to electoral politics in 2007 when he led the Scottish Labour Party's Lothian List in the 2007 Scottish Parliament election, and was vice-chairman of Labour's Holyrood election campaign. Lord Foulkes was elected as a Member of the Scottish Parliament on 3 May 2007.
Since his election to the Scottish Parliament, and as the most time-served politician currently serving in Holyrood, Foulkes has been responsible for Labour's opposition to the minority SNP Government. For that he has been a regular target of attacks by SNP bloggers, whom he branded “CyberNats”. He regularly tables Parliamentary Questions scrutinising the Scottish Government’s conduct, and exposed several irregularities, including the entertaining of wealthy SNP backers at Bute House at the expense of the taxpayer, and the preferential treatment given to Stagecoach, whose co-founder Brian Souter gave £500,000 to the SNP, in the Forth hovercraft project. He has led the fight against cuts to public services, including schools, made by Edinburgh's SNP/Liberal Democrat run City Council, and has been a staunch critic of the SNP's council tax freeze, which he constantly highlights is the cause of these cuts.
Foulkes has also been part of a campaign for presumed consent on organ donation.
He failed to be elected Rector of the University of Edinburgh on the 12 February 2009, securing 31% of the vote to the 69% taken by Iain Macwhirter.
During the 2009 expenses controversy, Foulkes attacked media presenters, saying they were all paid "to come on TV and sneer at democracy and undermine democracy. The vast majority of MPs are being undermined by you" in an exchange with BBC presenter Carrie Gracie.
In 2008, Foulkes had been criticised for his expenses claims, which included around £45,000 over a period of two years for overnight subsistence to stay in a flat he had inherited. Between April 2007 and March 2008, Foulkes claimed £54,527 in expenses from the House of Lords. In January 2009 Foulkes was shown to have one of the lowest expenses claims in the Scottish Parliament.
In 1993, he was forced to resign as Shadow Defence Minister after being convicted of being drunk and disorderly during in incident in which he struck a Police officer.
He has also made Freedom of Information requests about the expenses of General Sir Richard Dannatt, lately head of the British Army. These expenses have been revealed to be a fraction of Foulkes' own claims.
On 15 September 2010, Foulkes, along with 54 other public figures, signed an open letter published in The Guardian, stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the UK.
Category:1942 births Category:Living people Category:Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Category:Anglo-Scots Category:Heart of Midlothian F.C. non-playing staff Category:Labour Co-operative MPs Category:Labour Co-operative MSPs Foulkes of Cumnock Category:Members of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom Category:Members of the United Kingdom Parliament for Scottish constituencies Category:Old Haberdashers Category:People from Oswestry Category:People from Keith, Moray Category:Scottish football chairmen and investors Category:UK MPs 1979–1983 Category:UK MPs 1983–1987 Category:UK MPs 1987–1992 Category:UK MPs 1992–1997 Category:UK MPs 1997–2001 Category:UK MPs 2001–2005 Category:British republicans
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Victor De Leon III (Lil Poison) |
|---|---|
| Birth date | May 06, 1998 |
| Nickname | Lil Poison |
| Status | Active |
| Hometown | Long Island, New York |
| Country | United States |
| Team | Independent |
| Leagues | Major League Gaming |
| Years | 2001-present |
| Games | Halo 2Halo 3Call of DutyHalo Reach |
| Coach | Victor De Leon II |
| Website | http://www.lilpoison.com |
Victor De Leon III aka Lil Poison is the youngest professional video gamer. Born on May 6, 1998 in Long Island, New York, Lil Poison became the youngest pro gamer at the age of 6 years old when a gaming league signed him as a professional gamer. He is now signed with Gameology who is representing Lil Poison as his manager / agent.
Lil Poison is enrolled in the 2008, 2009, 2010 Guinness Book of World Records or and the Guinness Book or World Record Gamers edition.
Lil Poison's game of choice is Halo but has competed for the following games:
Lil Poison has participated in over 200 gaming events. Which include national leagues, local events, and challenges. Lil Poison has appeared in media appearances such as 60 minutes, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Latina, G4Tv, Nickelodeon, Mickey and many more.
The HBO Latino Film Festival premiered Lil Poison. A documentary film filmed and directed by Beth Earl (Massive Productions). The film is about the life of Victor De Leon III aka Lil Poison in how he started and continues video gaming around the country as well as his family and personal life.
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Diana |
|---|---|
| Title | Princess of Wales; Duchess of Rothesay |
| Imgw | 200 |
| Spouse | Charles, Prince of Wales (29 July 1981, div. 1996) |
| Issue | Prince William of WalesPrince Harry of Wales |
| Full name | Diana Frances Spencer |
| Titles | Diana, Princess of WalesHRH The Princess of WalesThe Lady Diana SpencerThe Hon Diana Spencer |
| Date of birth | July 01, 1961 |
| Place of birth | Park House, Sandringham, Norfolk |
| Father | John Spencer, 8th Earl Spencer |
| Mother | Frances Shand Kydd |
| Place of christening | St. Mary Magdalene Church, Sandringham, Norfolk |
| Date of death | August 31, 1997 |
| Place of death | Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, France |
| Place of burial | Althorp, Northamptonshire |
Diana, Princess of Wales (Diana Frances; née Spencer; 1 July 196131 August 1997) was a member of the British royal family and an international personality of the late 20th century as the first wife of Charles, Prince of Wales, whom she married on 29 July 1981. The wedding, which was held at St. Paul's Cathedral, was televised and watched by a global audience of over 750 million people. The marriage produced two sons: Princes William and Harry, currently second and third in line to the thrones of the 16 Commonwealth realms.
A public figure from the announcement of her engagement to Prince Charles, Diana was born into an old, aristocratic English family with royal ancestry, and remained the focus of worldwide media scrutiny before, during and after her marriage, which ended in divorce on 28 August 1996. This media attention continued following her death in a car crash in Paris along with her companion Dodi Fayed and driver Henri Paul (Fayed's bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was the sole survivor from the crash) on 31 August 1997, and in the subsequent display of public mourning a week later.
Diana also received recognition for her charity work and for her support of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. From 1989, she was the president of the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.
Diana was only eight years old when her parents were unexpectedly divorced, after much acrimony and as a result of her mother having an affair with a married man. Initially, Frances took Diana to live in an apartment in London's Knightsbridge, where Diana attended a local day school. However, Lord Spencer gained custody of Diana after a court battle in which Frances' mother, Baroness Fermoy, denounced her own daughter as being an unfit mother. Shortly afterwards, following the divorce of her companion Peter Shand Kydd from his wife, Frances married him and moved to the island of Seil on the west coast of Scotland. Henceforth, Diana was raised by her father, but did often visit her mother. On 14 July 1976, Lord Spencer followed in Frances' footsteps by having an affair with a married woman, Raine, Countess of Dartmouth, the only daughter of Alexander McCorquodale and Barbara Cartland. Neither of Diana's parents had any children from their second marriage. Diana also did not get along with either her stepmother or stepfather.
She was also a descendant of King James II of England through an illegitimate daughter, Henrietta FitzJames, by his mistress Arabella Churchill. On her mother's side, Diana was Irish and Scottish, as well as a descendant of American heiress Frances Work, her mother's grandmother and namesake, from whom the considerable Roche fortune was derived.
The Spencers had been close to the British Royal Family for centuries, rising in royal favour during the 17th century. Diana's maternal grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was a long-time friend and a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. Her father had served as an equerry to King George VI and to Queen Elizabeth II.
Diana moved to London before she turned seventeen, living in her mother's flat, as her mother then spent most of the year in Scotland. Soon afterwards, an apartment was purchased for £50,000 as an 18th birthday present, at Coleherne Court in Earls Court. She lived there until 1981 with three flatmates.
In London she took an advanced cooking course at her mother's suggestion, although she never became an adroit cook, and worked first as a dance instructor for youth, until a skiing accident caused her to miss three months of work. She then found employment as a playgroup (pre-preschool) assistant, did some cleaning work for her sister Sarah and several of her friends, and worked as a hostess at parties. Diana also spent time working as a childminder for an American family living in London.
Prince Charles had known Diana for several years, but he first took a serious interest in her as a potential bride during the summer of 1980, when they were guests at a country weekend, where she watched him play polo. The relationship developed as he invited her for a sailing weekend to Cowes aboard the royal yacht Britannia, followed by an invitation to Balmoral (the Royal Family's Scottish residence) to meet his family. There, Diana was well received by Queen Elizabeth II, by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and by the Queen Mother. The couple subsequently courted in London. The Prince proposed on 6 February 1981, and Diana accepted, but their engagement was kept secret for the next few weeks.
Twenty-year-old Diana became The Princess of Wales when she married Charles on 29 July 1981 at St Paul's Cathedral, which offered more seating than Westminster Abbey, generally used for royal nuptials. It was widely billed as a "fairytale wedding," watched by a global television audience of 750 million while 600,000 people lined the streets to catch a glimpse of Diana en route to the ceremony. At the altar Diana accidentally reversed the order of Charles's first two names, saying Philip Charles Arthur George instead. She did not say that she would "obey" him; that traditional vow was left out at the couple's request, which caused some comment at the time. Diana wore a dress valued at £9000 with a 25-foot (8-metre) train. The couple's wedding cake was created by Belgian pastry chef S. G. Sender, who was known as the "cakemaker to the kings."
A second son, Harry, was born about two years after William on 15 September 1984. Diana asserted that she and Prince Charles were closest during her pregnancy with "Harry", as the younger prince became known. She was aware their second child was a boy, but did not share the knowledge with anyone else, including Prince Charles.
She was regarded by a biographer as a devoted and demonstrative mother. She rarely deferred to Prince Charles or to the Royal Family, and was often intransigent when it came to the children. She chose their first given names, defied the royal custom of circumcision, dismissed a royal family nanny and engaged one of her own choosing, in addition to selecting their schools and clothing, planning their outings and taking them to school herself as often as her schedule permitted. She also negotiated her public duties around their timetables. from the mid-1980s, the Princess of Wales became increasingly associated with numerous charities. As Princess of Wales she was expected to visit hospitals, schools, etc., in the 20th-century model of royal patronage. Diana developed an intense interest in serious illnesses and health-related matters outside the purview of traditional royal involvement, including AIDS and leprosy. In addition, the Princess was the patroness of charities and organisations working with the homeless, youth, drug addicts and the elderly. From 1989, she was President of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.
During her final year, Diana lent highly visible support to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a campaign that went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 after her death.
The chronology of the break-up identifies reported difficulties between Charles and Diana as early as 1985. During 1986, Prince Charles turned again to his former girlfriend, Camilla Shand, who had become Camilla Parker-Bowles, wife of Andrew Parker-Bowles. This affair was exposed in May 1992 with the publication of Diana: Her True Story, by Andrew Morton. The book, which also laid bare Diana's allegedly suicidal unhappiness, caused a media storm. This publication was followed during 1992 and 1993 by leaked tapes of telephone conversations which negatively reflected on both the royal antagonists. Transcripts of taped intimate conversations between Diana and James Gilbey were published by the Sun newspaper in Britain in August 1992. The article's title, "Squidgygate", referenced Gilbey's affectionate nickname for Diana. Next to surface, in November 1992, were the leaked "Camillagate" tapes, intimate exchanges between Charles and Camilla, published in Today and the Mirror newspapers.
In the meantime, rumours had begun to surface about Diana's relationship with James Hewitt, her former riding instructor. These would be brought into the open by the publication in 1994 of Princess in Love.
In December 1992, Prime Minister John Major announced the Wales' "amicable separation" to the House of Commons,. and the full Camillagate transcript was published a month later in the newspapers, in January 1993. On 3 December 1993, Diana announced her withdrawal from public life. Charles sought public understanding via a televised interview with Jonathan Dimbleby on 29 June 1994. In this he confirmed his own extramarital affair with Camilla, saying that he had only rekindled their association in 1986, after his marriage to the Princess of Wales had "irretrievably broken down."
While she blamed Camilla Parker-Bowles for her marital troubles, Diana at some point began to believe Charles had other affairs. In October 1993 Diana wrote to a friend that she believed her husband was now in love with Tiggy Legge-Bourke and wanted to marry her. Legge-Bourke had been hired by Prince Charles as a young companion for his sons while they were in his care, and Diana was extremely resentful of Legge-Bourke and her relationship with the young princes.
In December 1995, the Queen asked Charles and Diana for "an early divorce," as a direct result of Diana's Panorama interview. This followed shortly after Diana's accusation that Tiggy Legge-Bourke had aborted Charles's child, after which Legge-Bourke instructed Peter Carter-Ruck to demand an apology.
On 20 December 1995, Buckingham Palace publicly announced the Queen had sent letters to Charles and Diana advising them to divorce. The Queen's move was backed by the Prime Minister and by senior Privy Councillors, and, according to the BBC, was decided after two weeks of talks. Prince Charles immediately agreed with the suggestion. In February Diana announced her agreement after negotiations with Prince Charles and representatives of the Queen, irritating Buckingham Palace by issuing her own announcement of a divorce agreement and its terms.
The divorce was finalised on 28 August 1996.
Days before the decree absolute of divorce, Letters Patent were issued with general rules to regulate royal titles after divorce. In accordance, as she was no longer married to the Prince of Wales, Diana lost the style Her Royal Highness and instead was styled Diana, Princess of Wales. Buckingham Palace issued a press release on the day of the decree absolute of divorce was issued, announcing Diana's change of title, but made it clear that Diana continued to be a British princess.
Buckingham Palace stated Diana was still a member of the Royal Family, as she was the mother of the second- and third-in-line to the throne. This was confirmed by the Deputy Coroner of the Queen's Household, Baroness Butler-Sloss, after a pre-hearing on 8 January 2007: "I am satisfied that at her death, Diana, Princess of Wales continued to be considered as a member of the Royal Household." This appears to have been confirmed in the High Court judicial review matter of Al Fayed & Ors v Butler-Sloss. In that case, three High Court judges accepted submissions that the "very name ‘Coroner to the Queen’s Household’ gave the appearance of partiality in the context of inquests into the deaths of two people, one of whom was a member of the Family and the other was not." for almost two years, before Khan ended the relationship. Khan was intensely private and the relationship was conducted in secrecy, with Diana lying to members of the press who questioned her about it. Khan was from a traditional Pakistani family who expected him to marry from a related Muslim clan, and their differences, not only religion, became too much for Khan. According to Khan's testimonial at the inquest for her death, it was Diana herself, not Khan, who ended their relationship in a late-night meeting in Hyde Park, which adjoins the grounds of Kensington Palace, in June 1997.
Within a month Diana had begun dating Dodi Al-Fayed, son of her host that summer, Mohamed Al-Fayed. Diana had considered taking her sons that summer on a holiday to the Hamptons on Long Island, New York, but security officials had prevented it. After deciding against a trip to Thailand, she accepted Fayed's invitation to join his family on the south of France, where his compound and large security detail would not cause concern to the Royal Protection squad. Mohamed Al-Fayed bought a multi-million pound yacht on which to entertain the princess and her sons.
She is believed to have influenced the signing, though only after her death, of the Ottawa Treaty, which created an international ban on the use of anti-personnel landmines. Introducing the Second Reading of the Landmines Bill 1998 to the British House of Commons, the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, paid tribute to Diana's work on landmines:
All Honourable Members will be aware from their postbags of the immense contribution made by Diana, Princess of Wales to bringing home to many of our constituents the human costs of landmines. The best way in which to record our appreciation of her work, and the work of NGOs that have campaigned against landmines, is to pass the Bill, and to pave the way towards a global ban on landmines.
The United Nations appealed to the nations which produced and stockpiled the largest numbers of landmines (United States, China, India, North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia) to sign the Ottawa Treaty forbidding their production and use, for which Diana had campaigned. Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), said that landmines remained "a deadly attraction for children, whose innate curiosity and need for play often lure them directly into harm's way". ''
Diana's funeral took place in Westminster Abbey on 6 September 1997. The previous day Queen Elizabeth II had paid tribute to her in a live television broadcast. Her sons, the Princes William and Harry, walked in the funeral procession behind her coffin, along with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh, and with Diana's brother, Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer.
In 1998, Azermarka issued the postage stamps with both Azeri and English captions, commemorating Diana. The English text reads "Diana, Princess of Wales. The Princess that captured people's hearts".
In 2003 the Franklin Mint counter-sued; the case was eventually settled in 2004, with the fund agreeing to an out-of-court settlement, which was donated to mutually agreed charitable causes.
Today, pursuant to this lawsuit, two California companies continue to sell Diana memorabilia without the need for any permission from Diana's estate: the Franklin Mint and Princess Ring LLC.
In July 1999, Tracey Emin created a number of monoprint drawings featuring textual references about Diana's public and private life, for Temple of Diana, a themed exhibition at The Blue Gallery, London. Works such as They Wanted You To Be Destroyed (1999) related to Diana's bulimia, while others included affectionate texts such as Love Was On Your Side and Diana's Dress with puffy sleeves. Another text praised her selflessness - The things you did to help other people, showing Diana in protective clothing walking through a minefield in Angola - while another referenced the conspiracy theories. Of her drawings, Emin maintained "They're quite sentimental . . . and there's nothing cynical about it whatsoever."
In 2005 Martin Sastre premiered during the Venice Biennial the film . This fictional work starts with the world discovering Diana alive and enjoying a happy undercover new life in a dangerous favela on the outskirts of Montevideo. Shot on a genuine Uruguayan slum and using a Diana impersonator from Sao Paulo, the film was selected among the Venice Biennial's best works by the Italian Art Critics Association.
In 2007, following an earlier series referencing the conspiracy theories, Stella Vine created a series of Diana paintings for her first major solo exhibition at Modern Art Oxford gallery. Vine intended to portray Diana's combined strength and vulnerability as well as her closeness to her two sons. Immodesty Blaize said she had been entranced by Diana crash, finding it "by turns horrifying, bemusing and funny". Vine asserted her own abiding attraction to "the beauty and the tragedy of Diana’s life".
Diana was revealed to be a major source behind Andrew Morton's Diana: Her True Story which had portrayed her as being wronged by the House of Windsor. Morton instanced Diana's claim that she attempted suicide while pregnant by falling down a series of stairs and that Charles had left her to go riding. Tina Brown opined that it was not a suicide attempt because she would not intentionally have tried to harm the unborn child. Brown cites an aide that says that Diana accidentally slipped and other sources claim it was an accident. In the televised audio tapes, Diana herself clearly admitted that she did indeed throw herself down the stairs, "bearing in mind I was carrying a child" and had "cut her wrists with razor blades" (evidence of further self-harm).
Royal biographer Sarah Bradford commented, "The only cure for her (Diana's) suffering would have been the love of the Prince of Wales, which she so passionately desired, something which would always be denied her. His was the final rejection; the way in which he consistently denigrated her reduced her to despair." Diana herself commented, "My husband made me feel inadequate in every possible way that each time I came up for air he pushed me down again ..."
In 2007, Tina Brown wrote a biography about Diana as a "restless and demanding shopaholic who was obsessed with her public image" as well as being a "spiteful, manipulative, media-savvy neurotic." Brown also claims that Diana married Charles for his power and had a romantic relationship with Dodi Fayed to anger the royal family, with no intention of marrying him.
Posthumously, as in life, she is most popularly referred to as "Princess Diana", a title she never held. Still, she is sometimes referred to (according to the tradition of using maiden names after death) in the media as "Lady Diana Spencer", or simply as "Lady Di". After Tony Blair's famous speech she was also often referred to as the People's Princess.
Diana's full title, while married, was Her Royal Highness The Princess Charles Philip Arthur George, Princess of Wales & Countess of Chester, Duchess of Cornwall, Duchess of Rothesay, Countess of Carrick, Baroness of Renfrew, Lady of the Isles, Princess of Scotland.
Foreign honours
| Notes | As the wife of the Prince of Wales, Diana used his arms impaled (side by side) with those of her father. |
|---|---|
| Crest | Coronet of the Prince of Wales |
| Escutcheon | Quarterly 1st and 4th gules three lions passant guardant in pale or armed and langed azure 2nd or a lion rampant gules armed and langued azure within a double tressure flory counterflory of the second 3rd azure a harp or stringed argent overall an escutcheon of Coat of Arms of the Principality of Wales, the whole differenced with a label of three points argent; impaled with a shield quarterly 1st and 4th argent 2nd and 3rd gules a fret or the whole defaced with a bend sable charged with three escallops argent. |
| Supporters | Dexter a lion rampant gardant Or crowned with the coronet of the Prince of Wales Proper, sinister a griffin winged and unguled Or, gorged with a coronet Or composed of crosses patée and fleurs de lis a chain affixed thereto passing between the forelegs and reflexed over the back also Or |
| Motto | DIEU DEFEND LE DROIT(God defends the right) |
| Previous versions | After her divorce and before her death, Diana used the arms of her father, undifferenced, crowned by a royal coronet. |
Category:Princesses of Wales Category:British humanitarians Category:Daughters of British earls Category:English Anglicans Category:Mine action Category:Mountbatten-Windsor family Category:People from King's Lynn and West Norfolk (district) Category:People from Northamptonshire Category:Recipients of the Order of the Crown (Netherlands) Category:Road accident deaths in France Category:Spencer-Churchill family Category:1961 births Category:1997 deaths
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Kimberley Walsh |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | Kimberley Jane Walsh |
| Born | November 20, 1981 model, television presenter and actress Walsh rose to fame after becoming a member of pop girl band Girls Aloud. on ITV's reality television programme Popstars The Rivals in late 2002. The girl group have marked their success by achieving twenty consecutive top ten singles (including four number ones) in the UK; five studio albums which have all been certified platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), two of which went to number one in the UK; and accumulating a total of five BRIT Award nominations from 2005 to 2010. |
| Name | Walsh, Kimberley |
| Date of birth | 1981-11-20 |
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | John Lennon |
|---|---|
| Img alt | A bearded, bespectacled man in his late twenties, with long black hair and wearing a loose-fitting pajama shirt, sings and plays an acoustic guitar. White flowers are visible behind and to the right of him. |
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | John Winston Lennon |
| Born | October 09, 1940Liverpool, England, UK |
| Died | December 08, 1980New York, New York, US |
| Instrument | Vocals, guitar, piano, banjo, harmonica, Mellotron, six-string bass, percussion |
| Genre | Rock, pop |
| Occupation | Musician, singer-songwriter, record producer, artist, writer |
| Years active | 1957–1975, 1980 |
| Label | Parlophone, Capitol, Apple, EMI, Geffen, Polydor |
| Associated acts | The Quarrymen, The Beatles, Plastic Ono Band, The Dirty Mac, John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band |
| Notable instruments | Rickenbacker 325Epiphone CasinoGibson J-160EGibson Les Paul Junior |
Born and raised in Liverpool, Lennon became involved as a teenager in the skiffle craze; his first band, The Quarrymen, evolved into The Beatles in 1960. As the group disintegrated towards the end of the decade, Lennon embarked on a solo career that produced the critically acclaimed albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, and iconic songs such as "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine". Lennon disengaged himself from the music business in 1975 to devote time to his family, but re-emerged in 1980 with a new album, Double Fantasy. He was murdered three weeks after its release.
Lennon revealed a rebellious nature and acerbic wit in his music, his writing, his drawings, on film, and in interviews, and he became controversial through his political activism. He moved to New York City in 1971, where his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a lengthy attempt by Richard Nixon's administration to deport him, while his songs were adopted as anthems by the anti-war movement.
As of 2010, Lennon's solo album sales in the United States exceed 14 million units, and as writer, co-writer or performer, he is responsible for 27 number-one singles on the US Hot 100 chart. In 2002, a BBC poll on the 100 Greatest Britons voted him eighth, and in 2008, Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth-greatest singer of all-time. He was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
Lennon was born in war-time England, on 9 October 1940 at Liverpool Maternity Hospital, to Julia and Alfred Lennon, a merchant seaman who was away at the time of his son's birth. He was named John Winston Lennon after his paternal grandfather, John "Jack" Lennon, and then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill. His father was often away from home but sent regular pay cheques to 9 Newcastle Road, Liverpool, where Lennon lived with his mother, but the cheques stopped when he went absent without leave in February 1944. When he eventually came home six months later, he offered to look after the family, but Julia—by then pregnant with another man's child—rejected the idea. After her sister, Mimi Smith, twice complained to Liverpool's Social Services, Julia handed the care of Lennon over to her. In July 1946, Lennon's father visited Smith and took his son to Blackpool, secretly intending to emigrate to New Zealand with him. Julia followed them—with her partner at the time, 'Bobby' Dykins—and after a heated argument his father forced the five-year-old to choose between them. Lennon twice chose his father, but as his mother walked away, he began to cry and followed her. It would be 20 years before he had contact with his father again.
Throughout the rest of his childhood and adolescence, he lived with his aunt and uncle, Mimi and George Smith, who had no children of their own, at Mendips, 251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton. His aunt bought him volumes of short stories, and his uncle, a dairyman at his family's farm, bought him a mouth organ and engaged him in solving crossword puzzles. Julia visited Mendips on a regular basis, and when he was 11 years old he often visited her at 1 Blomfield Road, Liverpool, where she played him Elvis Presley records, and taught him the banjo, playing "Ain't That a Shame" by Fats Domino.
In September 1980 he talked about his family and his rebellious nature: }}
He regularly visited his cousin, Stanley Parkes, who lived in Fleetwood. Seven years Lennon's senior, Parkes took him on trips, and to local cinemas. During the school holidays, Parkes often visited Lennon with Leila Harvey, another cousin, often travelling to Blackpool two or three times a week to watch shows. They would visit the Blackpool Tower Circus and see artists such as Dickie Valentine, Arthur Askey, Max Bygraves and Joe Loss, with Parkes recalling that Lennon particularly liked George Formby. After Parkes's family moved to Scotland, the three cousins often spent their school holidays together there. Parkes recalled, "John, cousin Leila and I were very close. From Edinburgh we would drive up to the family croft at Durness, which was from about the time John was nine years old until he was about 16." He was 14 years old when his uncle George died of a liver haemorrhage on 5 June 1955 (aged 52).
Lennon was raised as an Anglican and attended Dovedale Primary School. From September 1952 to 1957, after passing his Eleven-Plus exam, he attended Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool, and was described by Harvey at the time as, "A happy-go-lucky, good-humoured, easy going, lively lad." He often drew comical cartoons which appeared in his own self-made school magazine called The Daily Howl, but despite his artistic talent, his school reports were damning: "Certainly on the road to failure ... hopeless ... rather a clown in class ... wasting other pupils' time."
His mother bought him his first guitar in 1957, an inexpensive Gallotone Champion acoustic for which she "lent" her son five pounds and ten shillings on the condition that the guitar be delivered to her own house, and not Mimi's, knowing well that her sister was not supportive of her son's musical aspirations. As Mimi was sceptical of his claim that he would be famous one day, she hoped he would grow bored with music, often telling him, "The guitar's all very well, John, but you'll never make a living out of it". On 15 July 1958, when Lennon was 17 years old, his mother, walking home after visiting the Smiths' house, was struck by a car and killed.
Lennon failed all his GCE O-level examinations, and was accepted into the Liverpool College of Art only after his aunt and headmaster intervened. Once at the college, he started wearing Teddy Boy clothes and acquired a reputation for disrupting classes and ridiculing teachers. As a result, he was excluded from the painting class, then the graphic arts course, and was threatened with expulsion for his behaviour, which included sitting on a nude model's lap during a life drawing class. He failed an annual exam, despite help from fellow student and future wife Cynthia Powell, and was "thrown out of the college before his final year."
McCartney says that Aunt Mimi: "was very aware that John's friends were lower class", and would often patronise him when he arrived to visit Lennon. According to Paul's brother Mike, McCartney's father was also disapproving, declaring Lennon would get his son "into trouble"; although he later allowed the fledgling band to rehearse in the McCartneys' front room at 20 Forthlin Road. During this time, the 18-year-old Lennon wrote his first song, "Hello Little Girl", a UK top 10 hit for The Fourmost nearly five years later.
George Harrison joined the band as lead guitarist, even though Lennon thought Harrison (at 14 years old) was too young to join the band, so McCartney engineered a second audition on the upper deck of a Liverpool bus, where Harrison played Raunchy for Lennon. Stuart Sutcliffe, Lennon's friend from art school, later joined as bassist. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Sutcliffe became "The Beatles" in early 1960. In August that year The Beatles, engaged for a 48-night residency in Hamburg, Germany, and desperately in need of a drummer, asked Pete Best to join them. Lennon was now 19, and his aunt, horrified when he told her about the trip, pleaded with him to continue his art studies instead. After the first Hamburg residency, the band accepted another in April 1961, and a third in April 1962. Like the other band members, Lennon was introduced to Preludin while in Hamburg, and regularly took the drug, as well as amphetamines, as a stimulant during their long, overnight performances.
Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager from 1962, had no prior experience of artist management, but nevertheless had a strong influence on their early dress code and attitude on stage. Lennon initially resisted his attempts to encourage the band to present a professional appearance, but eventually complied, saying, "I'll wear a bloody balloon if somebody's going to pay me". McCartney took over on bass after Sutcliffe decided to stay in Hamburg, and drummer Ringo Starr replaced Best, completing the four-piece line-up that would endure until the group's break-up in 1970. The band's first single, "Love Me Do", was released in October 1962 and reached #17 on the British charts. They recorded their debut album, Please Please Me, in under 10 hours on 11 February 1963, a day when Lennon was suffering the effects of a cold, which is evident in the vocal on the last song to be recorded that day, Twist and Shout. The Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership yielded eight of its fourteen tracks. With few exceptions—one being the album title itself—Lennon had yet to bring his love of wordplay to bear on his song lyrics, saying: "We were just writing songs ... pop songs with no more thought of them than that–to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant". In a 1987 interview, McCartney said that the other Beatles idolised John: "He was like our own little Elvis ... We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest".
The Beatles achieved mainstream success in the UK around the start of 1963. Lennon was on tour when his first son, Julian, was born in April. During their Royal Variety Show performance, attended by the Queen Mother and other British royalty, Lennon poked fun at his audience: "For our next song, I'd like to ask for your help. For the people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands ... and the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewellery." After a year of Beatlemania in the UK, the group's historic February 1964 US debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show marked their breakthrough to international stardom. A two-year period of constant touring, moviemaking, and songwriting followed, during which Lennon wrote two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. The Beatles received recognition from the British Establishment when they were appointed Members of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen's Birthday Honours of 1965.
" with The Beatles in 1967 to 400 million viewers of "Our World".]] Deprived of the routine of live performances after their final commercial concert in 1966, Lennon felt lost and considered leaving the band. Since his involuntary introduction to LSD in January, he had made increasing use of the drug, and was almost constantly under its influence for much of the year." According to biographer Ian MacDonald, Lennon's continuous experience with LSD during the year brought him "close to erasing his identity". 1967 saw the release of "Strawberry Fields Forever", hailed by Time magazine for its "astonishing inventiveness", and the group's landmark album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which revealed Lennon's lyrics contrasting strongly with the simple love songs of the Lennon/McCartney's early years.
In August, after having been introduced to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the group attended a weekend of personal instruction at his Transcendental Meditation seminar in Bangor, Wales, and were informed of Epstein's death during the seminar. "I knew we were in trouble then", Lennon said later. "I didn't have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music, and I was scared". They later travelled to Maharishi's ashram in India for further guidance, where they composed most of the songs for The Beatles and Abbey Road.
The anti-war, black comedy How I Won the War, featuring Lennon's only appearance in a non–Beatles full-length film, was shown in cinemas in October 1967. McCartney organised the group's first post-Epstein project, the self-written, -produced and -directed television film Magical Mystery Tour, released in December that year. While the film itself proved to be their first critical flop, its soundtrack release, featuring Lennon's acclaimed, Carroll-inspired "I am the Walrus", was a success. With Epstein gone, the band members became increasingly involved in business activities, and in February 1968 they formed Apple Corps, a multimedia corporation comprising Apple Records and several other subsidiary companies. Lennon described the venture as an attempt to achieve, "artistic freedom within a business structure", but his increased drug experimentation and growing preoccupation with Yoko Ono, and McCartney's own marriage plans, left Apple in need of professional management. Lennon asked Lord Beeching to take on the role, but he declined, advising Lennon to go back to making records. Lennon approached Allen Klein, who had managed The Rolling Stones and other bands during the British Invasion. Klein was appointed as Apple’s chief executive by Lennon, Harrison and Starr, but McCartney never signed the management contract.
At the end of 1968, Lennon featured in the film The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (not released until 1996) in the role of a Dirty Mac band member. The supergroup, comprising Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell, also backed a vocal performance by Ono in the film. Lennon and Ono were married on 20 March 1969, and soon released a series of 14 lithographs called "Bag One" depicting scenes from their honeymoon, eight of which were deemed indecent and most of which were banned and confiscated. Lennon's creative focus continued to move beyond the Beatles and between 1968 and 1969 he and Ono recorded three albums of experimental music together: (known more for its cover than for its music), and Wedding Album. In 1969 they formed The Plastic Ono Band, releasing Live Peace in Toronto 1969. In protest at Britain's involvement in the Nigerian Civil War, Lennon returned his MBE medal to the Queen, though this had no effect on his MBE status, which could not be renounced. Between 1969 and 1970 Lennon released the singles "Give Peace a Chance" (widely adopted as an anti-Vietnam-War anthem in 1969), "Cold Turkey" (documenting his withdrawal symptoms after he became addicted to heroin) and "Instant Karma!".
Lennon left the Beatles in September 1969. He agreed not to inform the media while the band renegotiated their recording contract, and was outraged that McCartney publicised his own departure on releasing his debut solo album in April 1970. Lennon's reaction was, "Jesus Christ! He gets all the credit for it!" He later wrote, "I started the band. I disbanded it. It's as simple as that." In later interviews with Rolling Stone, he revealed his bitterness towards McCartney, saying, "I was a fool not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record." He spoke too of the hostility he perceived the other members had towards Ono, and of how he, Harrison, and Starr "got fed up with being sidemen for Paul ... After Brian Epstein died we collapsed. Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us when we went round in circles?"
With Lennon's next album, Imagine (1971), critical response was more guarded. Rolling Stone reported that "it contains a substantial portion of good music" but warned of the possibility that "his posturings will soon seem not merely dull but irrelevant". The album's title track would become an anthem for anti-war movements, while another, "How Do You Sleep?", was a musical attack on McCartney in response to lyrics from Ram that Lennon felt, and McCartney later confirmed, were directed at him and Ono. However, Lennon softened his stance in the mid-70s and said he had written "How Do You Sleep?" about himself. He said in 1980: "I used my resentment against Paul ... to create a song ... not a terrible vicious horrible vendetta ... I used my resentment and withdrawing from Paul and the Beatles, and the relationship with Paul, to write 'How Do You Sleep'. I don't really go 'round with those thoughts in my head all the time".
Lennon and Ono moved to New York in August 1971, and in December released "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)". To advertise the single, they paid for billboards in 12 cities around the world which declared, in the national language, "WAR IS OVER—IF YOU WANT IT". The new year saw the Nixon Administration take what it called a "strategic counter-measure" against Lennon's anti-war propaganda, embarking on what would be a four-year attempt to deport him: embroiled in a continuing legal battle, he was denied permanent residency in the US until 1976.
Recorded as a collaboration with Ono and with backing from the New York band Elephant's Memory, Some Time in New York City was released in 1972. Containing songs about women's rights, race relations, Britain's role in Northern Ireland, and Lennon's problems obtaining a green card, the album was poorly received—unlistenable, according to one critic. "Woman Is the Nigger of the World", released as a US single from the album the same year, was televised on 11 May, on The Dick Cavett Show. Many radio stations refused to broadcast the song because of the word "nigger". Lennon and Ono gave two benefit concerts with Elephant's Memory and guests in New York in aid of patients at the Willowbrook State School mental facility. Staged at Madison Square Garden on 30 August 1972, they were his last full-length concert appearances.
In 1974, Lennon was drinking heavily and his alcohol-fuelled antics with Harry Nilsson soon made the headlines. Two widely publicised incidents occurred at The Troubadour club in March, the first when Lennon placed a menstruation ‘towel’ on his forehead and scuffled with a waitress, and the second, two weeks later, when Lennon and Nilsson were ejected from the same club after heckling the Smothers Brothers. Lennon decided to produce Nilsson's album Pussy Cats and Pang rented an L.A. beach house for all the musicians but after a month of further debauchery, with the recording sessions in chaos, Lennon moved to New York with Pang to finish work on the album. In April, Lennon had produced the Mick Jagger song "Too Many Cooks (Spoil the Soup)" which was, for contractual reasons, to remain unreleased for more than thirty years. Pang supplied the recording for its eventual inclusion on The Very Best of Mick Jagger (2007).
Settled back in New York, Lennon recorded the album Walls and Bridges. Released in October 1974, it yielded his only number-one single in his lifetime, "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night", featuring Elton John on backing vocals and piano. A second single from the album, "#9 Dream", followed before the end of the year. Starr's Goodnight Vienna (1974) again saw assistance from Lennon, who wrote the title track and played piano. On 28 November, Lennon made a surprise guest appearance at Elton John's Thanksgiving concert at Madison Square Garden, in fulfilment of his promise to join the singer in a live show if "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night"—a song whose commercial potential Lennon had doubted—reached number one. Lennon performed the song along with "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "I Saw Her Standing There".
Lennon co-wrote "Fame", David Bowie's first US number one, and provided guitar and backing vocals for the January 1975 recording. He and Ono were reunited shortly afterwards. The same month, Elton John topped the charts with his own cover of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", featuring Lennon on guitar and back-up vocals. Lennon released Rock 'n' Roll (1975), an album of cover songs, in February. Soon afterwards, "Stand By Me", taken from the album and a US and UK hit, became his last single for five years. He made what would be his final stage appearance in the ATV special A Salute to Lew Grade, recorded on 18 April and televised in June. Playing acoustic guitar, and backed by his eight-piece band BOMF (introduced as "Etcetera"), Lennon performed two songs from Rock 'n' Roll ("Stand By Me", which was not broadcast, and "Slippin' and Slidin'") followed by "Imagine". The band wore masks on the backs of their heads, making them appear two-faced, a dig at Grade, with whom Lennon and McCartney had been in conflict because of his control of the Beatles' publishing company. (Dick James had sold his majority share to Grade in 1969.) During "Imagine", Lennon interjected the line "and no immigration too", a reference to his battle to remain in the United States.
He emerged from retirement in October 1980 with the single "(Just Like) Starting Over", followed the next month by the album Double Fantasy, which contained songs written during a journey to Bermuda on a 43-foot sailing boat the previous June, that reflected Lennon's fulfillment in his new-found stable family life. Sufficient additional material was recorded for a planned follow-up album Milk and Honey (released posthumously in 1984). Released jointly with Ono, Double Fantasy was not well received, drawing comments such as Melody Maker's "indulgent sterility ... a godawful yawn".
Ono issued a statement the next day, saying "There is no funeral for John," ending it with the words, "John loved and prayed for the human race. Please pray the same for him." His body was cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Ono scattered his ashes in New York's Central Park, where the Strawberry Fields memorial was later created. Chapman pleaded guilty to second degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life; as of 2010, he remains in prison, having been repeatedly denied parole.
Recalling his reaction in July 1962 on learning that Cynthia was pregnant, Lennon said, "There's only one thing for it Cyn. We'll have to get married." The couple were married on 23 August at the Mount Pleasant Register Office in Liverpool. His marriage began just as Beatlemania took hold across the UK. He performed on the evening of his wedding day, and would continue to do so almost daily from then on. Epstein, fearing that fans would be alienated by the idea of a married Beatle, asked the Lennons to keep their marriage secret. Julian was born on 8 April 1963; Lennon was on tour at the time and did not see his son until three days later.
Cynthia attributes the start of the marriage breakdown to LSD, and as a result, she felt that he slowly lost interest in her. When the group travelled by train to Bangor, Wales, in 1967, for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation seminar, a policeman did not recognise her and stopped her from boarding. She later recalled how the incident seemed to symbolize the ending of their marriage. After arriving home at Kenwood, and finding Lennon with Ono, Cynthia left the house to stay with friends. Alexis Mardas later claimed to have slept with her that night, and a few weeks later he informed her that Lennon was seeking a divorce and custody of Julian on grounds of her adultery with him. After negotiations, Lennon capitulated and agreed to her divorcing him on the same grounds. The case was settled out of court, with Lennon giving her £100,000, and custody of Julian.
Lennon delighted in mocking Epstein for his homosexuality and for the fact that he was Jewish. When Epstein invited suggestions for the title of his autobiography, Lennon offered Queer Jew; on learning of the eventual title, A Cellarful of Noise, he parodied, "More like A Cellarful of Boys". He demanded of a visitor to Epstein's flat, "Have you come to blackmail him? If not, you're the only bugger in London who hasn't." During the recording of "Baby, You're a Rich Man", he sang altered choruses of "Baby, you're a rich fag Jew".
Lennon's first son, Julian, was born as his commitments with the Beatles intensified at the height of Beatlemania during his marriage to Cynthia. Lennon was touring with the Beatles when Julian was born on 8 April 1963. Julian's birth, like his mother Cynthia's marriage to Lennon, was kept secret because Epstein was convinced public knowledge of such things would threaten the Beatles' commercial success. Julian recalls how some four years later, as a small child in Weybridge, "I was trundled home from school and came walking up with one of my watercolour paintings. It was just a bunch of stars and this blonde girl I knew at school. And Dad said, 'What's this?' I said, 'It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds.'" Lennon used it as the title of a Beatles' song, and though it was later reported to have been derived from the initials LSD, Lennon insisted, "It's not an acid song." McCartney corroborated Lennon's explanation that Julian innocently came up with the name. Lennon was distant from Julian, who felt closer to McCartney than to his father. During a car journey to visit Cynthia and Julian during Lennon's divorce, McCartney composed a song, "Hey Jules", to comfort him. It would evolve into the Beatles song "Hey Jude". Lennon later said, "That's his best song. It started off as a song about my son Julian ... he turned it into 'Hey Jude'. I always thought it was about me and Yoko but he said it wasn't."
Lennon's relationship with Julian was already strained, and after Lennon and Ono's 1971 move to New York, Julian would not see his father again until 1973. With Pang's encouragement, it was arranged for him (and his mother) to visit Lennon in Los Angeles, where they went to Disneyland. Julian started to see his father regularly, and Lennon gave him a drumming part on a Walls and Bridges track. He bought Julian a Gibson Les Paul guitar and other instruments, and encouraged his interest in music by demonstrating guitar chord techniques. Julian recalls that he and his father "got on a great deal better" during the time he spent in New York: "We had a lot of fun, laughed a lot and had a great time in general."
In a Playboy interview with David Sheff shortly before his death, Lennon said, "Sean was a planned child, and therein lies the difference. I don't love Julian any less as a child. He's still my son, whether he came from a bottle of whiskey or because they didn't have pills in those days. He's here, he belongs to me, and he always will." He said he was trying to re-establish a connection with the then 17-year-old, and confidently predicted, "Julian and I will have a relationship in the future." After his death it was revealed that he had left Julian very little in his will.
Two versions exist of how Lennon met Ono. According to the first, on 9 November 1966 Lennon went to the Indica gallery in London, where Ono was preparing her conceptual art exhibit, and they were introduced by gallery owner John Dunbar. Lennon was intrigued by Ono's "Hammer A Nail": patrons hammered a nail into a wooden board, creating the art piece. Although the exhibition had not yet begun, Lennon wanted to hammer a nail into the clean board, but Ono stopped him. Dunbar asked her, "Don't you know who this is? He's a millionaire! He might buy it." Ono had supposedly not heard of the Beatles, but relented on condition that Lennon pay her five shillings, to which Lennon replied, "I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in." The second version, told by McCartney, is that in late 1965, Ono was in London compiling original musical scores for a book John Cage was working on, Notations, but McCartney declined to give her any of his own manuscripts for the book, suggesting that Lennon might oblige. When asked, Lennon gave Ono the original handwritten lyrics to "The Word".
Ono began telephoning and calling at Lennon's home, and when his wife asked for an explanation, he explained that Ono was only trying to obtain money for her "avant-garde bullshit". In May 1968, while his wife was on holiday in Greece, Lennon invited Ono to visit. They spent the night recording what would become the Two Virgins album, after which, he said, they "made love at dawn." When Lennon's wife returned home she found Ono wearing her bathrobe and drinking tea with Lennon who simply said, "Oh, hi." Ono became pregnant in 1968 and miscarried a male child they named John Ono Lennon II on 21 November 1968, a few weeks after Lennon's divorce from Cynthia was granted.
During Lennon's last two years in the Beatles, he and Ono began public protests against the Vietnam War. They were married in Gibraltar on 20 March 1969, and spent their honeymoon in Amsterdam campaigning with a week-long Bed-In for peace. They planned another Bed-In in the United States, but were denied entry, so held one instead at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, where they recorded "Give Peace a Chance". They often combined advocacy with performance art, as in their "Bagism", first introduced during a Vienna press conference. Lennon detailed this period in the Beatles' song "The Ballad of John and Yoko". Lennon changed his name by deed poll on 22 April 1969, adding "Ono" as a middle name. The brief ceremony took place on the roof of the Apple Corps building, made famous three months earlier by the Beatles' Let It Be rooftop concert. Although he used the name John Ono Lennon thereafter, official documents referred to him as John Winston Ono Lennon, since he was not permitted to revoke a name given at birth. After Ono was injured in a car accident, Lennon arranged for a king-sized bed to be brought to the recording studio as he worked on the Beatles' last album, Abbey Road. To escape the acrimony of the band's break-up, Ono suggested they move permanently to New York, which they did on 31 August 1971. They first lived in the St. Regis Hotel on 5th Avenue, East 55th Street, then moved to a street-level flat at 105 Bank Street, Greenwich Village, on 16 October 1971. After a robbery, they relocated to the more secure Dakota at 1 West 72nd Street, in May 1973.
According to author Albert Goldman, Ono was regarded by Lennon as an "almost magical being" who could solve all his problems for him, but this was a "grand illusion", and she openly cheated on him with gigolos. Eventually, writes Goldman, "both he and Yoko were burnt out from years of hard drugs, overwork, emotional breakdowns, quack cures, and bizarre diets, to say nothing of the effects of living constantly in the glare of the mass media." After their separation, "no longer collaborating as a team, they remained in constant communication. ... No longer able to live together, they found that they couldn’t live apart either."
On moving to New York, they "prepared a spare room" in their newly rented apartment for Julian to visit. Lennon, hitherto inhibited by Ono in this regard, began to reestablish contact with other relatives and friends. By December he and Pang were considering a house purchase, and he was refusing to accept Ono's telephone calls. In January 1975, he agreed to meet Ono—who said she had found a cure for smoking—but after the meeting failed to return home or call Pang. When Pang telephoned the next day, Ono told her Lennon was unavailable, being exhausted after a hypnotherapy session. Two days later, Lennon reappeared at a joint dental appointment, stupefied and confused to such an extent that Pang believed he had been brainwashed. He told her his separation from Ono was now over, though Ono would allow him to continue seeing her as his mistress.
Lennon's most intense feelings were reserved for McCartney. In addition to attacking him through the lyrics of "How Do You Sleep?", Lennon argued with him through the press for three years after the group split. The two later began to reestablish something of the close friendship they had once known, and in 1974 even played music together again, before growing apart once more. Lennon said that during McCartney's final visit, in April 1976, they watched the episode of Saturday Night Live in which Lorne Michaels made a $3,000 cash offer to get the Beatles to reunite on the show. The pair considered going to the studio to make a joke appearance, attempting to claim their share of the money, but were too tired. Lennon summarised his feelings towards McCartney in an interview three days before his death: "Throughout my career, I've selected to work with...only two people: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono....That ain't bad picking."
Along with his estrangement from McCartney, Lennon always felt a musical competitiveness with him and kept an ear on his music. During his five-year career break he was content to sit back so long as McCartney was producing what Lennon saw as mediocre "product". When McCartney released "Coming Up" in 1980, the year Lennon returned to the studio and the last year of his life, he took notice. "It's driving me crackers!" he jokingly complained, because he couldn't get the tune out of his head. Asked the same year whether the group were dreaded enemies or the best of friends, he replied that they were neither, and that he had not seen any of them in a long time. But he also said, "I still love those guys. The Beatles are over, but John, Paul, George and Ringo go on."
Later that year, Lennon and Ono supported efforts by the family of James Hanratty, hanged for murder in 1962, to prove his innocence. Those who had condemned Hanratty were, according to Lennon, "the same people who are running guns to South Africa and killing blacks in the streets. ... The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything, it's the whole bullshit bourgeois scene." In London, Lennon and Ono staged a "Britain Murdered Hanratty" banner march and a "Silent Protest For James Hanratty", and produced a 40-minute documentary on the case. At an appeal hearing years later, Hanratty's conviction was upheld.
Lennon and Ono showed their solidarity with the Clydeside UCS workers' work-in of 1971 by sending a bouquet of red roses and a cheque for £5,000. On moving to New York City in August that year, they befriended two of the Chicago Seven, Yippie peace activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Another peace activist, John Sinclair, poet and co-founder of the White Panther Party, was serving ten years in prison for selling two joints of marijuana after previous convictions for possession of the drug. In December 1971 at Ann Arbor, Michigan, 20,000 people attended the "John Sinclair Freedom Rally", a protest and benefit concert with contributions from Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party, and others. Lennon and Ono, backed by David Peel and Rubin, performed an acoustic set of four songs from their forthcoming Some Time in New York City album including "John Sinclair", whose lyrics called for his release. The day before the rally, Michigan State had drastically reduced the penalties for Sinclair’s crimes and three days after the rally, he was released on bail. The performance was recorded and two of the tracks later appeared on John Lennon Anthology (1998).
Following the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972, in which 27 civil rights protesters were shot by the British Army during a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march, Lennon said that given the choice between the army and the IRA he would side with the latter. Lennon and Ono wrote two songs protesting England's actions in the Northern Irish political situation on their Some Time in New York City album: "Luck of the Irish" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday". In 2000, a former member of Britain's domestic security service MI5 suggested that Lennon had given money to the IRA. Biographer Bill Harry records that following Bloody Sunday, Lennon and Ono financially supported the production of the film The Irish Tapes, a political documentary with a pro-IRA slant.
According to FBI surveillance reports (and confirmed by Tariq Ali in 2006) Lennon was sympathetic to the International Marxist Group, a Trotskyist group formed in Britain in 1968. However, the FBI considered Lennon to have limited effectiveness as a revolutionary since he was "constantly under the influence of narcotics".
John and Yoko add a great voice and drive to the country’s so-called art institution. They inspire and transcend and stimulate and by doing so, only help others to see pure light and in doing that, put an end to this dull taste of petty commercialism which is being passed off as Artist Art by the overpowering mass media. Hurray for John and Yoko. Let them stay and live here and breathe. The country’s got plenty of room and space. Let John and Yoko stay!
On 23 March 1973, Lennon was ordered to leave the US within 60 days. Ono, meanwhile, was granted permanent residence. In response, Lennon and Ono held a press conference on 1 April 1973 at the New York chapter of the American Bar Association, where they announced the formation of the state of Nutopia; a place with "no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people". Waving the white flag of Nutopia (two handkerchiefs), they asked for political asylum in the US. The press conference was filmed, and would later appear in the 2006 documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon. Lennon's Mind Games (1973) included the track "Nutopian International Anthem", which comprised three seconds of silence. Soon after the press conference, Nixon's involvement in a political scandal came to light, and in June the Watergate hearings began in Washington, DC. They led to the president's resignation 14 months later. Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, showed little interest in continuing the battle against Lennon, and the deportation order was overturned in 1975. The following year, his US immigration status finally resolved, Lennon received his "green card" certifying his permanent residency, and when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president in January 1977, Lennon and Ono attended the Inaugural Ball.
Lennon's love of wordplay and nonsense with a twist found a wider audience when he was 24. Harry writes that In His Own Write (1964) was published after "Some journalist who was hanging around the Beatles came to me and I ended up showing him the stuff. They said, 'Write a book' and that's how the first one came about". Like the Daily Howl it contained a mix of formats including short stories, poetry, plays and drawings. One story, "Good Dog Nigel", tells the tale of "a happy dog, urinating on a lamp post, barking, wagging his tail—until he suddenly hears a message that he will be killed at three o'clock". The Times Literary Supplement considered the poems and stories "remarkable ... also very funny ... the nonsense runs on, words and images prompting one another in a chain of pure fantasy". Book Week reported, "This is nonsense writing, but one has only to review the literature of nonsense to see how well Lennon has brought it off. While some of his homonyms are gratuitous word play, many others have not only double meaning but a double edge." Lennon was not only surprised by the positive reception, but that the book was reviewed at all, and suggested that readers "took the book more seriously than I did myself. It just began as a laugh for me".
In combination with A Spaniard in the Works (1965), In His Own Write formed the basis of the stage play The John Lennon Play: In His Own Write, co-adapted by Victor Spinetti and Adrienne Kennedy. After negotiations between Lennon, Spinetti and the artistic director of the National Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier, the play opened at the Old Vic in 1968. Lennon and Ono attended the opening night performance, their second public appearance together to date. After Lennon's death, further works were published, including Skywriting by Word of Mouth (1986); Ai: Japan Through John Lennon's Eyes: A Personal Sketchbook (1992), with Lennon's illustrations of the definitions of Japanese words; and Real Love: The Drawings for Sean (1999). The Beatles Anthology (2000) also presented examples of his writings and drawings.
As his Beatles era segued into his solo career, his singing voice found a widening range of expression. Biographer Chris Gregory writes that Lennon was, "tentatively beginning to expose his insecurities in a number of acoustic-led 'confessional' ballads, so beginning the process of 'public therapy' that will eventually culminate in the primal screams of 'Cold Turkey' and the cathartic John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band." David Stuart Ryan notes Lennon's vocal delivery to range from, "extreme vulnerability, sensitivity and even naivety" to a hard "rasping" style. Wiener too describes contrasts, saying the singer's voice can be "at first subdued; soon it almost cracks with despair" Music historian Ben Urish recalls hearing the Beatles' Ed Sullivan Show performance of "This Boy" played on the radio a few days after Lennon's murder: "As Lennon's vocals reached their peak ... it hurt too much to hear him scream with such anguish and emotion. But it was my emotions I heard in his voice. Just like I always had."
In a 2006 Guardian article, Jon Wiener wrote: "For young people in 1972, it was thrilling to see Lennon's courage in standing up to [US President] Nixon. That willingness to take risks with his career, and his life, is one reason why people still admire him today." Whilst for music historians Urish and Bielen, Lennon's most significant effort was "the self-portraits ... in his songs [which] spoke to, for, and about, the human condition."
Lennon continues to be mourned throughout the world and has been the subject of numerous memorials and tributes. In 2010, on what would have been Lennon’s 70th birthday, the John Lennon Peace Monument was unveiled in Chavasse Park, Liverpool, by Cynthia and Julian Lennon. The sculpture entitled ‘Peace & Harmony’ exhibits peace symbols and carries the inscription “Peace on Earth for the Conservation of Life · In Honour of John Lennon 1940–1980”.
The Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership is regarded as one of the most influential and successful of the 20th century. As performer, writer or co-writer Lennon has had 27 number one singles on the US Hot 100 chart. His album sales in the US stand at 14 million units. Double Fantasy, released shortly before his death, and his best-selling, post-Beatles studio album at three million shipments in the US, won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. The following year, the BRIT Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music went to Lennon. Participants in a 2002 BBC poll voted him eighth of "100 Greatest Britons". Between 2003 and 2008, Rolling Stone recognised Lennon in several reviews of artists and music, ranking him fifth of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" and 38th of "The Immortals: The Fifty Greatest Artists of All Time", and his albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, 22nd and 76th respectively of "The RS 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". He was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) with the other Beatles in 1965. He was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
, Liverpool]]
Category:1940 births Category:1980 deaths Category:1960s singers Category:1970s singers Category:1980s singers Category:Apple Records artists Category:Alumni of Quarry Bank High School Category:Best Original Music Score Academy Award winners Category:BRIT Award winners Category:British anti-war activists Category:British people murdered abroad Category:Capitol Records artists Category:COINTELPRO targets Category:Critics of religions or philosophies Category:Deaths by firearm in New York Category:English expatriates in the United States Category:English experimental musicians Category:English film actors Category:English-language singers Category:English male singers Category:English murder victims Category:English pacifists Category:English people of Irish descent Category:English rock guitarists Category:English rock pianists Category:English rock singers Category:English singer-songwriters Category:Feminist artists Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Ivor Novello Award winners Category:Members of the Order of the British Empire Category:Murdered musicians Category:Musicians from Liverpool Category:Nonviolence advocates Category:People convicted of drug offenses Category:People murdered in New York Category:Plastic Ono Band members Category:Religious skeptics Category:Rhythm guitarists Category:Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Category:Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees Category:The Beatles members Category:The Dirty Mac Category:The Quarrymen members Category:Yoko Ono
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Caption | Eastwood in 2008 |
|---|---|
| Alt | An older man is at the center of the image smiling and looking off to the right of the image. He is wearing a white jacket, and a tan shirt and tie. The number 61 can be seen behind him on a background wall. |
| Nationality | American |
| Birth name | Clinton Eastwood |
| Birth date | May 31, 1930 |
| Birth place | San Francisco, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actor, director, producer, composer |
| Years active | 1953–present |
| Spouse | Maggie Johnson (1953-1984, divorced)Dina Ruiz (1996-present) |
| Partner | Sondra Locke (1975–89)Frances Fisher (1990–95) |
| Children | 7 |
Following his six-year run on the television series Rawhide (1959–65), Eastwood starred as the laconic Man With No Name in Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy of Spaghetti Westerns in the 1960s, and as Inspector Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry films of the 1970s and 1980s. These roles, and several others as tough-talking, no-nonsense police officers, have made him an enduring cultural icon of masculinity.Eastwood won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture and received nominations for Best Actor for his work in the films Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004). These films in particular, as well as others, including Play Misty for Me (1971) (his directorial debut), High Plains Drifter (1973), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Pale Rider (1985), In the Line of Fire (1993), and Gran Torino (2008), have all received critical acclaim and commercial success. He has directed most of his star vehicles, but has also directed films he did not act in, such as Mystic River (2003) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), for which he received Academy Award nominations.
After graduating from high school in 1949, Eastwood intended to enter Seattle University and major in music theory. However, in 1950 he was drafted into the United States Army during the Korean War. He was stationed at Fort Ord in California, where his certificate as a lifeguard got him appointed as a life-saving and swimming instructor.While on leave in 1951, Eastwood was a passenger in a Douglas AD bomber that ran out of fuel and crashed in the ocean near Point Reyes. After escaping from the sinking fuselage, he and the pilot safely swam to shore.
Eastwood later moved to Los Angeles and began a romance with Maggie Johnson, a college student. He managed an apartment house in Beverly Hills by day and worked at a Signal Oil gas station by night. He enrolled at Los Angeles City College and married Maggie shortly before Christmas 1953 in South Pasadena.
In May 1954, Eastwood made his first real audition for Six Bridges to Cross but was rejected by Joseph Pevney. After many unsuccessful auditions, he was eventually given a minor role by director Jack Arnold in Revenge of the Creature, a sequel to The Creature from the Black Lagoon. In September 1954, Eastwood worked for three weeks on Lubin's Lady Godiva of Coventry, won a role in February 1955 as a sailor in Francis in the Navy, and appeared uncredited in another Jack Arnold film, Tarantula, where he played a squadron pilot. In May 1955, Eastwood put four hours' work into the film Never Say Goodbye. Universal presented him with his first television role on July 2, 1955, on NBC's Allen in Movieland, which starred Tony Curtis and Benny Goodman. Although he continued to develop as an actor, Universal terminated his contract on October 23, 1955.
Eastwood joined the Marsh Agency, and although Lubin landed him his biggest role to date in The First Traveling Saleslady (1956) and later hired him for Escapade in Japan, without a formal contract Eastwood was struggling. Eastwood met financial advisor, Irving Leonard, who would arguably become the most responsible for launching his career in the late 1950s and 1960s and whom Eastwood described as being "like a second father to me". Upon Leonard's advice, he changed talent agencies to the Kumin-Olenick Agency in 1956 and Mitchell Gertz in 1957. He landed several small roles in 1956 as a temperamental army officer for a segment of ABC's Reader's Digest series, and as a motorcycle gang member on a Highway Patrol episode. The following year he played a Navy lieutenant in a segment of Navy Log and in early 1959 made a notable guest appearance on Maverick opposite James Garner as a cowardly villain intent on marrying a rich girl for money.
Some interior shots for the film were done at the Cinecittà studio on the outskirts of Rome and then production moved to a small village in Andalusia, Spain. A Fistful of Dollars became a benchmark in the development of spaghetti westerns, with Leone depicting a more lawless and desolate world than in traditional westerns and challenging the stereotypical American notions of a western hero with a morally ambiguous antihero. Eastwood became a major star in Italy.
Leone hired Eastwood to star in For a Few Dollars More (1965), the second film of the trilogy and thanks to screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni, the rights to the film and the final film of the trilogy (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) were sold to United Artists for roughly $900,000 (US$}} in dollars).
(1966)]] In January 1966, Eastwood met with producer Dino De Laurentiis in New York City and agreed to star in a non-Western five-part anthology production named Le streghe (The Witches) opposite De Laurentiis' wife, actress Silvana Mangano. Eastwood's nineteen-minute installment only took a few days to shoot. The performance was not met well by critics; one said "no other performance of his is quite so 'un-Clintlike'". Two months later, Eastwood began on the third Dollars film, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, in which he again played the mysterious Man With No Name. Lee Van Cleef returned to play a ruthless fortune seeker, while Eli Wallach was hired as the cunning Mexican bandit Tuco. The storyline involves a search for a cache of Confederate gold buried in a cemetery. One day, during the filming of the scene in which the bridge is blown up with dynamite, Eastwood, suspicious of explosives, urged his co-star Wallach to retreat up to the hilltop, saying, "I know about these things. Stay as far away from special effects and explosives as you can". Just minutes later, crew confusion over the word "Vaya!" consummated in a premature explosion which could have killed him, resulting in the bridge having to be rebuilt. All the films were successful in cinemas, particularly The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which eventually collected $8 million (US$}} in dollars) in rental earnings and turned Eastwood into a major film star. Judith Crist described A Fistful of Dollars as "cheapjack". Newsweek described For a Few Dollars More as "excruciatingly dopey" despite the fact that it is now widely considered to be one of the finest films in film history. While Time highlighted the wooden acting, especially Eastwood's, critics such as Vincent Canby and Bosley Crowther of The New York Times praised Eastwood's coolness playing the tall, lone stranger. Leone's unique style of cinematography was widely acclaimed, even by some critics who disliked the acting. A cross between Rawhide and Leone's westerns, the film brought him a salary of $400,000 (US$}} in dollars) and 25% of the net earnings. Using money earned from the Dollars trilogy, Leonard helped establish Eastwood's production company, Malpaso Productions, named after Malpaso Creek on Eastwood's property in Monterey County, California. Leonard arranged for Hang 'Em High to be a joint production with United Artists. Filming began in June 1967 in the Las Cruces area of New Mexico and became a major success after release in July 1968, becoming the biggest United Artists opening in history and exceeding all of the James Bond films at that time. It was widely praised by critics, including Arthur Winsten of the New York Post, who described Hang 'Em High as "a western of quality, courage, danger and excitement".
Meanwhile, before Hang 'Em High had been released, Eastwood had set to work on the film Coogan's Bluff opposite Don Stroud, about a lonely New York City Police Department deputy sheriff facing a psychopathic criminal (Stroud). The project reunited him with Universal Studios after he received an offer of $1 million (US$}} in dollars), more than double his previous salary. Coogan's Bluff also became the first of many collaborations with Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin, who would later compose the jazzy scores to Eastwood's films throughout the 1970s and 1980s, especially the Dirty Harry film series. Filming began in November 1967, before the full script had been finalized. The film was controversial for its portrayal of violence, and set the prototype for the macho cop that Eastwood would play in the Dirty Harry films.
Eastwood was paid $850,000 (US$}} in dollars) in 1968 for the war epic Where Eagles Dare. The film, about a World War II squad parachuting into a Gestapo stronghold in the mountains, had Richard Burton playing the squad's commander and Eastwood as his right-hand man. Eastwood was also cast as Two-Face in the Batman television series, but the series was canceled before filming could commence.
In 1969, Eastwood branched out by starring in his career's only musical, Paint Your Wagon. He and fellow non-singer Lee Marvin played gold miners who share the same wife (played by Jean Seberg). Production for the film was plagued with bad weather and delays and the budget—eventually exceeding $20 million (US$}} in dollars) —was extremely high for this period. The film was not a critical or commercial success, although it was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy.
The script for Dirty Harry (1971) was written by Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink. It is a story about a hard-edged New York City (later changed to San Francisco) police inspector named Harry Callahan who is determined to stop a psychotic killer by any means. Dirty Harry is arguably Eastwood's most memorable character and has been credited with inventing the "loose-cannon cop genre" that is imitated to this day. His lines (quoted) have been cited as amongst the most memorable in cinematic history and controversially has been attributed to increasing ownership in the United States of a .44 Magnum. After its release in December 1971, Dirty Harry proved a phenomenal success, earning some $22 million (US$}} in dollars) in the United States and Canada alone. It was Siegel's highest-grossing film and the start of a series of films featuring the character of Harry Callahan. Although a number of critics such as Jay Cocks of Time praised his performance as Dirty Harry, describing him as "giving his best performance so far, tense, tough, full of implicit identification with his character", the film was widely criticized and accused of fascism.
Eastwood was offered the role of James Bond following the departure of Sean Connery, but turned it down because he believed the character should be played by an English actor. Eastwood next starred in the loner Western Joe Kidd (1972), based on a character inspired by Reies Lopez Tijerina, who stormed a courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico in June 1967. Under John Sturges, filming began in Old Tucson in November 1971, but Eastwood suffered symptoms of a bronchial infection and several panic attacks during filming. Joe Kidd received a mixed reception. Roger Greenspun of The New York Times thought the film was unremarkable, with foolish symbolism and sloppy editing, but he praised Eastwood's performance.
In 1973, Eastwood directed his first western, High Plains Drifter, with a moral and supernatural theme which would be emulated later in Pale Rider. The plot follows a mysterious stranger (Eastwood) who arrives in a brooding Western town where the people hire the stranger to defend the town against three felons that are soon to be released. There remains confusion amongst viewers as to whether the stranger is the brother of the deputy whom the felons lynched and murdered or his ghost. Holes in the plot were filled in with black humor and allegory, influenced by Leone. The revisionist film received a mixed reception from critics, but was a major box office success. A number of critics thought Eastwood's directing was as derivative as it was expressive, with Arthur Knight of Saturday Review remarking that Clint had "absorbed the approaches of Siegel and Leone and fused them with his own paranoid vision of society". John Wayne, who had declined a role in the film, sent a letter of disapproval to Eastwood some weeks after the film was released, saying that "the townspeople did not represent the true spirit of the American pioneer, the spirit that made America great.
Eastwood turned his attention towards Breezy (1973), a film about love blossoming between a middle-aged man and a teenage girl. During casting for the film, Eastwood met Sondra Locke for the first time, an actress who would play a major role in many of his films for the next ten years and was an important figure in his life. Kay Lenz was awarded the part of Breezy, due to Locke being too old at 26. The film, shot very quickly and efficiently by Eastwood and Frank Stanley came in $1 million (US$}} in dollars) under budget and finished three days ahead of schedule. The film was not a major critical or commercial success; it barely reached the Top 50 before disappearing and was only made available on video in 1998.
After the filming of Breezy had finished, Warner Brothers announced that Eastwood had agreed to reprise his role as Detective Harry Callahan in a sequel to Dirty Harry, Magnum Force (1973), about a group of rogue young officers in the San Francisco Police Force who systematically exterminate the city's worst criminals. Although the film was a major success after release, grossing $58.1 million (US$}} in dollars) in the United States alone—a new record for Eastwood—it was not a critical success. The New York Times critics Nora Sayre criticized the often contradictory moral themes of the film and Frank Rich believed it "was the same old stuff". Eastwood's acting was noted by critics, but he was overshadowed by Bridges who was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Eastwood was reportedly fuming at his own lack of Academy Award recognition and swore that he would never work for United Artists again.
The Eiger Sanction (1975) was based on a critically acclaimed spy novel by Trevanian. Paul Newman was originally intended for the role of Jonathan Hemlock which was later adopted by Eastwood, an assassin turned college art professor who decides to return to his former profession for one last sanction in return for a rare Picasso painting; he must climb the north face of the Eiger in Switzerland and perform the deed under perilous conditions. Once again he starred alongside George Kennedy. Mike Hoover taught Eastwood how to climb during several weeks of preparation at Yosemite in the summer of 1974 before filming commenced in Grindelwald on August 12, 1974. Despite prior warnings of the perils of the Eiger, the filming crew suffered a number of accidents including one fatality. Eastwood insisted on doing all his own climbing and stunts, in spite of the danger. Upon its release in May 1975, The Eiger Sanction was a commercial failure, receiving only $23.8 million (US$}} in dollars) at the box office and was panned by most critics, with Joy Gould Boyum of the Wall Street Journal dismissing the film as "brutal fantasy". Eastwood blamed Universal Studios for the film's poor promotion and turned his back on them. He formed a long-lasting agreement with Warner Brothers through Frank Wells that would last for the next 35 years.
The western, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), was inspired by a 1972 novel by Asa Carter. The lead character, Josey Wales (Eastwood), is a rebel southerner who refuses to surrender his arms after the American Civil War and is chased across the old southwest by a group of enforcers. Eastwood cast his young son Kyle Eastwood, Chief Dan George and Sondra Locke for the first time, against director Philip Kaufman's wishes. Kaufman was notoriously fired under Eastwood's command by producer Bob Daley, resulting in a fine (reported to be around $60,000 (US$}} in dollars) from the Directors Guild of America, who subsequently passed new legislation reserving the right to impose a major fine on a producer for discharging a director and replacing him with himself. Upon release in August 1976, The Outlaw Josey Wales was widely acclaimed by critics with many critics and viewers seeing Eastwood's role as an iconic one that related to America's ancestral past and the destiny of the nation after the American Civil War.
Eastwood was offered the role of Benjamin L. Willard in Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now, but declined as he did not want to spend weeks in the Philippines shooting it. He refused the part of a platoon leader in Ted Post's Vietnam War film, Go Tell the Spartans. The film, at 95 minutes, was considerably shorter than the previous Dirty Harry movie but was a major commercial success, grossing $100 million (US$}} in dollars) worldwide, becoming Eastwood's highest-grossing film to date.
In 1977, Eastwood directed and starred in The Gauntlet. He portrays a down-and-out cop who falls in love with a prostitute he is assigned to escort from Las Vegas to Phoenix to testify against the mob. Although a moderate hit with the viewing public, critics were mixed about the film, with many believing it was overly violent. Eastwood's longtime nemesis , an uncharacteristic, offbeat comedy role. Eastwood played Philo Beddoe, a trucker and brawler who roams the American West searching for a lost love, accompanied by his brother and an orangutan. Upon its release, the film was a surprising success and became Eastwood's most commercially successful film at the time. Panned by the critics, it ranks high amongst those of his career to date, and was the second-highest grossing film of 1978.
In 1979, Eastwood starred in the atmospheric thriller Escape from Alcatraz, the last of his films to be directed by Don Siegel. It is based on the true story of Frank Lee Morris, who, along with John and Clarence Anglin, escaped from the notorious Alcatraz prison in 1962. The film was a major success and marked the beginning of a period of praise from critics for Eastwood, with Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic describing it as "crystalline cinema".
In 1984, Eastwood starred opposite his daughter Alison, Geneviève Bujold, and Jamie Rose in the provocative thriller Tightrope, inspired by newspaper articles about an elusive Bay Area rapist. Set in New Orleans (to avoid confusion with the Dirty Harry films), Eastwood starred as a single-parent cop, drawn into his target's tortured psychology and fascination for sadomasochism. Eastwood next starred in the period comedy City Heat (1984) with Burt Reynolds about a private eye and his partner who get mixed up with gangsters in the prohibition era of the 1930s. It grossed around $50 million (US$}} in dollars) domestically, but was overshadowed by Eddie Murphy's Beverly Hills Cop and failed to meet expectations. In 1985, Eastwood made his only foray into TV direction to date with the Amazing Stories episode "Vanessa In The Garden", which starred Harvey Keitel and Sondra Locke. This was his first collaboration with Steven Spielberg, who later produced Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Eastwood revisited the western genre, directing and starring in Pale Rider opposite Michael Moriarty and Carrie Snodgress. The film is based on the classic 1953 western Shane; a preacher descends from the mists of the Sierras and sides with miners during the California Gold Rush of 1850. The title is a reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as the rider of a pale horse is Death, and shows similarities to his 1973 western High Plains Drifter in its themes of morality and justice and its exploration of the supernatural. Pale Rider became one of Eastwood's most successful films to date and was hailed as one of the best films of 1985 and the best western in years, with Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune remarking, "This year (1985) will go down in film history as the moment Clint Eastwood finally earned respect as an artist".
In 1986, Eastwood co-starred with Marsha Mason in the military drama Heartbreak Ridge, about the 1983 United States invasion of Grenada. He portrays an aging United States Marine Gunnery Sergeant and Korean War veteran. The production and filming of Heartbreak Ridge was marred by internal disagreements between Eastwood and long-time friend and producer Fritz Manes, and between Eastwood and the United States Department of Defense, who expressed contempt for the film. A commercial rather than a critical success (only viewed more favorably in recent times), the film was released in 1,470 theaters, and grossed $70 million domestically.
Eastwood's fifth and final Dirty Harry film, The Dead Pool, was released in 1988. It co-starred Liam Neeson, Patricia Clarkson, and a young Jim Carrey. The Dead Pool grossed nearly $38 million, relatively low takings for a Dirty Harry film. Eastwood began working on smaller, more personal projects, and experienced a lull in his career between 1988 and 1992. Always interested in jazz, Eastwood directed Bird (1988), a biopic starring Forest Whitaker as jazz musician Charlie "Bird" Parker. Alto saxophonist Jackie McLean and Spike Lee, son of jazz bassist Bill Lee and a long term critic of Eastwood, criticized the characterization of Charlie Parker, remarking that it did not capture his true essence and sense of humor. Eastwood received two Golden Globes for the film: the Cecil B. DeMille Award for his lifelong contribution, and the Best Director award. However, Bird was a commercial disaster, earning just $11 million, which Eastwood attributed to a declining interest in jazz amongst black people.
Carrey would again appear with Eastwood in the poorly received comedy Pink Cadillac (1989) alongside Bernadette Peters. The film is about a bounty hunter and a group of white supremacists chasing an innocent woman, who tries to outrun everyone in her husband's prized pink Cadillac. The film was a disaster, both critically and commercially, earning barely more than Bird and marking the lowest point in Eastwood's career in years.
In 1993, Eastwood played Frank Horrigan, a guilt-ridden Secret Service agent in the CIA thriller In the Line of Fire, co-starring John Malkovich and Rene Russo and directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Eastwood's character, Horrigan, is haunted by his failure to react in time to save John F. Kennedy's life. As of 2011, it is the last time he acted in a film he did not direct himself. The film was among the top 10 box office performers in that year, earning a reported $200 million (US$}} in dollars) in the United States alone. Later in 1993, Eastwood directed and co-starred with Kevin Costner in the 1960s-set A Perfect World. Janet Maslin of The New York Times remarked that the film was the highest point of Eastwood's directing career, and it has since been cited as one of Eastwood's most underrated directorial achievements.
In May 1994, Eastwood attended the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and was presented with France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres medal. Eastwood continued to expand his repertoire by playing opposite Meryl Streep in the love story The Bridges of Madison County (1995). Based on a best-selling novel by Robert James Waller, it relates the story of Robert Kincaid (Eastwood), a photographer working for National Geographic, who has a love affair with a middle-aged Italian farm wife in Iowa named Francesca (Streep). The film was a hit at the box office and highly acclaimed by critics, much to their surprise; the novel was not viewed favorably and the subject matter was deemed a potentially disastrous one to produce on film. Roger Ebert remarked that "Streep and Eastwood weave a spell, and it is based on that particular knowledge of love and self that comes with middle age." The Bridges of Madison County was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Picture and Streep was also nominated for an Academy Award and Golden Globe.
In 1997, Eastwood then directed and again starred alongside Gene Hackman in the political thriller Absolute Power, in which he plays a veteran thief who witnesses the Secret Service cover up a murder. The film received a mixed reception from critics and was generally viewed as one of his weaker efforts. Maitland McDonagh of TV Guide remarked, "The plot turns are no more ludicrous than those of the average political thriller, but the slow pace makes their preposterousness all the more obvious. Eastwood's acting limitations are also sorely evident, since Luther is the kind of thoughtful thief who has to talk, rather than maintaining the enigmatic fortitude that is Eastwood's forte. Disappointing." Later in 1997, Eastwood directed Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, based on the novel by John Berendt and starring John Cusack, Kevin Spacey, and Jude Law. The film received a mixed response from critics.
In 1999, Eastwood directed and starred in True Crime, which also featured his young daughter, Francesca Fisher-Eastwood. Eastwood plays Steve Everett, a journalist recovering from alcoholism, given the task of covering the execution of murderer Frank Beechum (Isaiah Washington). The film received a mixed reception. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "True Crime is directed by Mr. Eastwood with righteous indignation and increasingly strong momentum. As in A Perfect World, his direction is galvanized by a sense of second chances and tragic misunderstandings, and by contrasting a larger sense of justice with the peculiar minutiae of crime. Perhaps he goes a shade too far in the latter direction, though."If some reviews for True Crime were positive, commercially it was a box office bomb, earning less than half its $55 million (US$}} in dollars) budget, and easily became his worst performing film of the 1990s (White Hunter Black Heart having only a limited release).
In 2003, Eastwood directed the crime drama Mystic River, a film about murder, vigilantism, and sexual abuse. Starring Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, and Tim Robbins, Mystic River was lauded by critics and viewers alike. The film won two Academy Awards, Best Actor for Penn and Best Supporting Actor for Robbins, with Eastwood garnering nominations for Best Director and Best Picture. The film grossed $90 million (US$}} in dollars) domestically on a budget of $30 million.
In 2004, Eastwood found further critical and commercial success when he directed, produced, scored, and starred in the boxing drama Million Dollar Baby. Eastwood played a cantankerous trainer who forms a bond with a female boxer (Hilary Swank) he is persuaded to train by his lifelong friend (Morgan Freeman). The film won four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Swank), and Best Supporting Actor (Freeman). Effectively at age 74, he became the oldest of eighteen directors to have directed two or more Best Picture winners. Eastwood also received a nomination for Best Actor and received a Grammy nomination for the score he composed. A. O. Scott of The New York Times lauded the film as a "masterpiece" and the best film of the year.
at Changelings premiere at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival]] In 2006, Eastwood directed two films about the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. The first, Flags of Our Fathers, focused on the men who raised the American flag on top of Mount Suribachi. The second one, Letters from Iwo Jima, dealt with the tactics of the Japanese soldiers on the island and the letters they wrote to family members. Letters from Iwo Jima was the first American film to show a war issue completely from the view of an American enemy. Both films were highly praised by critics and garnered several Oscar nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture for Letters from Iwo Jima.
On December 6, 2006, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Eastwood into the California Hall of Fame located at The California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts. In early 2007, Eastwood was presented with the highest civilian distinction in France, Légion d'honneur, at a ceremony in Paris. French President Jacques Chirac told Eastwood that he embodied "the best of Hollywood".
In 2008, Eastwood directed Changeling, which is based on a true story set in the late 1920s. It starred Angelina Jolie as a woman who is reunited with her missing son—only to realize he is an impostor. After releasing in several film festivals, the film grossed over $110 million (US$}} in dollars), the majority of which came from foreign markets. The film was highly acclaimed, with Damon Wise of Empire describing Changeling as "flawless". Todd McCarthy of Variety described it as "emotionally powerful and stylistically sure-handed" and stated that Changeling was a more complex and wide-ranging work than Eastwood's Mystic River, saying the characters and social commentary were brought into the story with an "almost breathtaking deliberation". Film critic Prairie Miller said that in its portrayal of female courage the film was "about as feminist as Hollywood can get", whilst David Denby argues that rather than "an expression of feminist awareness", the film—like Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby—is "a case of awed respect for a woman who was strong and enduring". , July 17, 2008]] After four years away from acting, Eastwood then ended his "self-imposed acting hiatus" with Gran Torino, which he also directed, produced, and partly scored with his son Kyle and Jamie Cullum. Biographer Marc Eliot called Eastwood's role "an amalgam of the Man with No Name, Dirty Harry, and William Munny, here aged and cynical but willing and able to fight on whenever the need arose." Eastwood has said that the role will most likely be the last time he acts in a film. It grossed close to $30 million during its wide release opening weekend in January 2009, the highest of his career as an actor or director. Gran Torino eventually grossed over $268 million (US$}} in dollars) worldwide in theaters, becoming the highest-grossing film of Eastwood's career so far without adjustment for inflation.
In 2009, Eastwood directed Invictus, based on the story of South Africa at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, with Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon as rugby team captain François Pienaar. John Carlin, author of the book on which the film is based, sold the film rights to Freeman.
In 2010, Eastwood directed Hereafter, a thriller starring Matt Damon as "a reluctant psychic", with co-stars Cécile de France and Lyndsey Marshal. The film had its world premiere on September 12, 2010 at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival and was given a limited release on October 15, 2010. Hereafter received mixed reviews from critics, with critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes being, "Despite a thought-provoking premise and Clint Eastwood's typical flair as director, Hereafter fails to generate much compelling drama, straddling the line between poignant sentimentality and hokey tedium." Also in 2010, Eastwood collaborated with Bruce Ricker as an executive producer for a Turner Classic Movies (TCM) documentary about legendary jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, , to commemorate Brubeck's 90th birthday in December.
Eastwood married swimsuit model Maggie Johnson on December 19, 1953, six months after they met on a blind date. During his marriage to Johnson, Eastwood had an affair with Roxanne Tunis, an extra on Rawhide which produced a daughter, Kimber, born on June 17, 1964, although it was not made public until 1989. Eastwood and Johnson had two children together: Kyle Eastwood (born May 19, 1968) and Alison Eastwood (born May 22, 1972). They separated around 1976, when Eastwood began living with actress Sondra Locke, but the $25 million (US$}} in dollars) divorce settlement was not finalized until May 1984.
Eastwood's relationship with Locke lasted 14 years, during which she had two abortions and then a tubal ligation. The couple separated acrimoniously in 1989. She filed a palimony suit against Eastwood for evicting her from the home which they shared and sued him for a second time for fraud. Locke and Eastwood resolved the dispute with a non-public settlement in 1999.
During his cohabitation with Locke, Eastwood had an affair with flight attendant Jacelyn Reeves. According to biographers, they met at the premiere of Pale Rider and conceived a son, Scott (born March 21, 1986), the same night. They also had a daughter, Kathryn (born February 2, 1988), although the identity of both was not publicly known until years later.
Actress Frances Fisher moved in with Eastwood after he broke up with Locke. They met while filming Pink Cadillac in 1988. They co-starred in Unforgiven and had a daughter, Francesca Fisher-Eastwood (born August 7, 1993). The couple ended their relationship in early 1995, but remain friends, and later appeared together in True Crime.
in 2007]] Eastwood met anchorwoman Dina Ruiz in an interview in 1993, and they married on March 31, 1996, when Eastwood surprised her with a private ceremony at a home on the Shadow Creek Golf Course in Las Vegas. She is 35 years his junior. The couple's daughter, Morgan Eastwood, was born on December 12, 1996.
A keen golfer, Eastwood owns the Tehàma Golf Club, is an investor of the world-famous Pebble Beach Golf Links, and donates his time every year to charitable causes at major tournaments. Eastwood was a licensed pilot and often flew his helicopter to the studios to avoid traffic.
|- ! colspan="3" style="background: #DAA520;"|National Board of Review |-
Category:1930 births Category:Actors from California Category:Akira Kurosawa Award winners Category:American actor-politicians Category:American actors of English descent Category:American actors of Scottish descent Category:American aviators Category:American composers Category:American film actors Category:American film directors Category:American film producers Category:American firefighters Category:American libertarians Category:American people of Dutch descent Category:American people of Irish descent Category:American restaurateurs Category:American television actors Category:Best Director Academy Award winners Category:Best Director Golden Globe winners Category:California Republicans Category:César Award winners Category:Commandeurs of the Légion d'honneur Category:Eastwood family Category:English-language film directors Category:Fellini Gold Medalists Category:Kennedy Center honorees Category:Restaurateurs Category:Living people Category:Mayors of places in California Category:Recipients of the Order of the Rising Sun Category:People from Oakland, California Category:People from Piedmont, California Category:People from San Francisco, California Category:Producers who won the Best Picture Academy Award Category:Spaghetti Western actors Category:Transcendental Meditation practitioners Category:United States Army soldiers Category:Western (genre) film actors Category:Western (genre) film directors
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Carrie Gracie |
|---|---|
| Birth place | Bahrain |
| Nationality | British |
| Ethnicity | White British |
| Education | University of EdinburghUniversity of OxfordMiddlesex University |
| Employer | BBC |
| Occupation | Television producer, Newsreader |
| Spouse | Jin (div) |
| Children | Daughter and son |
| Salary | £92,000 (2009) |
| Credits | BBC World ServiceBBC News 24 |
In 1985 she went to China to teach English and Economics at Yantai and Chongqing Universities. On her return to Britain a year later she managed a small film company. Since January 2008 she has been the main morning presenter on BBC News each Tuesday to Friday alongside Simon McCoy, previously her co-presenter on Fridays. She is also a presenter for the BBC World Service programme "The Interview".
Highlights of her career include covering the death of Deng Xiaoping and the handover of Hong Kong in 1997.
In an interview with George Foulkes, Baron Foulkes of Cumnock on the BBC News Channel (12 May 2009) about the MPs' expenses row, Gracie was asked how much she earned. When she stated that her salary is £92,000, Foulkes accused her of being paid "nearly twice as much" as Members of Parliament to "talk nonsense" and "undermine politicians" without mentioning the constituency work done by MPs.
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
At the UN, Ross served as the UK delegation's expert on the Middle East. Ross also worked on several important Security Council resolutions such as SCR 1284 which rewrote the Council's Iraq policy and established UNMOVIC, the weapons inspection body. He also negotiated for the UK the resolution establishing the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan and the Council's resolution of 12 September 2001 condemning the attacks of the day before.
Ross then served as Strategy Coordinator for the UN in Kosovo (UNMIK) where he devised and led a joint UN and government policy to implement a series of standards to improve governance, the rule of law and human rights protection, and advised the Secretary-General's Special Representative on diplomatic and political tactics.
He left the British civil service in 2004 after 15 years of service. He is now a supporter of a UN Parliamentary Assembly. In 2004, he founded the non-governmental organisation Independent Diplomat.
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Ayrton Senna |
|---|---|
| Caption | Senna at the 1989 San Marino Grand Prix |
| Nationality | ian |
| Date of birth | March 21, 1960 |
| Date of death | May 01, 1994 |
| Years | – |
| Team(s) | Toleman, Lotus, McLaren, Williams |
| Races | 162 (161 starts) |
| Championships | 3 (, , ) |
| Wins | 41 |
| Podiums | 80 |
| Points | 610 (614) In 2009, a poll of 217 current and former Formula One drivers chose Senna as their greatest Formula One driver, in a survey conducted by British magazine Autosport. He was recognised for his qualifying speed over one lap and from 1989 until 2006 held the record for most pole positions. He was especially quick in wet conditions, as shown by his performances in the 1984 Monaco Grand Prix, the 1985 Portuguese Grand Prix, and the 1993 European Grand Prix. He also holds the record for most victories at the prestigious Monaco Grand Prix (6) and is the third most successful driver of all time in terms of race wins. However, Senna courted controversy throughout his career, particularly during his turbulent rivalry with Alain Prost, which was marked by two championship-deciding collisions at the 1989 and 1990 Japanese Grands Prix. |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| BRARet |
| Style | "background:#dfffdf;"| RSA6 |
| Style | "background:#dfffdf;"| BEL6 |
| Style | "background:#ffcfcf;"| SMRDNQ |
| !rowspan | 2| 9th |
| | style | "background:#efcfff;"| FRARet |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| MON‡2 |
| Style | "background:#cfcfff;"| CAN7 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| DETRet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| DALRet |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| GBR3 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| GERRet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| AUTRet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| NEDRet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| EURRet |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| POR3 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| BRARet |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| POR1 |
| Style | "background:#cfcfff;"| SMR7 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| MONRet |
| Style | "background:#cfcfff;"| CAN16 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| DETRet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| FRARet |
| Style | "background:#cfcfff;"| GBR10 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| GERRet |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| AUT2 |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| NED3 |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| ITA3 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| BEL1 |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| EUR2 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| RSARet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| AUSRet |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| BRA2 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| ESP1 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| SMRRet |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| MON3 |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| BEL2 |
| Style | "background:#dfffdf;"| CAN5 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| DET1 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| FRARet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| GBRRet |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| GER2 |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| HUN2 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| AUTRet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| ITARet |
| Style | "background:#dfffdf;"| POR4 |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| MEX3 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| AUSRet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| BRARet |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| SMR2 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| BELRet |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| MON1 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| DET1 |
| Style | "background:#dfffdf;"| FRA4 |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| GBR3 |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| GER3 |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| HUN2 |
| Style | "background:#dfffdf;"| AUT5 |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| ITA2 |
| Style | "background:#cfcfff;"| POR7 |
| Style | "background:#dfffdf;"| ESP5 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| MEXRet |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| JPN2 |
| Style | "background:#000; color:white;"| AUSDSQ |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| 3rd |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| 57 |
| Style | "background:#000; color:white;"| BRADSQ |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| SMR1 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| MONRet |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| MEX2 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| CAN1 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| DET1 |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| FRA2 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| GBR1 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| GER1 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| HUN1 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| BEL1 |
| Style | "background:#cfcfff;"| ITA10 |
| Style | "background:#dfffdf;"| POR6 |
| Style | "background:#dfffdf;"| ESP4 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| JPN1 |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| AUS2 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| 1st |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| 90 (94) |
| Style | "background:#cfcfff;"| BRA11 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| SMR1 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| MON1 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| MEX1 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| USARet |
| Style | "background:#cfcfff;"| CAN7 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| FRARet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| GBRRet |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| GER1 |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| HUN2 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| BEL1 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| ITARet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| PORRet |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| ESP1 |
| Style | "background:#000; color:#fff;"| JPNDSQ |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| AUSRet |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| 2nd |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| 60 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| USA1 |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| BRA3 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| SMRRet |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| MON1 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| CAN1 |
| Style | "background:#cfcfff;"| MEX20 |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| FRA3 |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| GBR3 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| GER1 |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| HUN2 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| BEL1 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| ITA1 |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| POR2 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| ESPRet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| JPNRet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| AUSRet |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| 1st |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| 78 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| USA1 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| BRA1 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| SMR1 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| MON1 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| CANRet |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| MEX3 |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| FRA3 |
| Style | "background:#dfffdf;"| GBR4 |
| Style | "background:#cfcfff;"| GER7 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| HUN1 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| BEL1 |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| ITA2 |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| POR2 |
| Style | "background:#dfffdf;"| ESP5 |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| JPN2 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| AUS‡1 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| '''1st |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| 96 |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| RSA3 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| MEXRet |
| !rowspan | 2| 4th |
| | style | "background:#efcfff;"| BRARet |
| Style | "background:#cfcfff;"| ESP9 |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| SMR3 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| MON1 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| CANRet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| FRARet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| GBRRet |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| GER2 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| HUN1 |
| Style | "background:#dfffdf;"| BEL5 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| ITA1 |
| Style | "background:#ffdf9f;"| POR3 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| JPNRet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| AUSRet |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| RSA2 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| BRA1 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| EUR1 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| SMRRet |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| ESP2 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| MON1 |
| Style | "background:#cfcfff;"| CAN18 |
| Style | "background:#dfffdf;"| FRA4 |
| Style | "background:#dfffdf;"| GBR5 |
| Style | "background:#dfffdf;"| GER4 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| HUNRet |
| Style | "background:#dfffdf;"| BEL4 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| ITARet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| PORRet |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| JPN1 |
| Style | "background:#ffffbf;"| AUS1 |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| 2nd |
| Style | "background:#dfdfdf;"| 73 |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| BRARet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| PACRet |
| Style | "background:#efcfff;"| SMRRet |
Category:1960 births Category:1994 deaths Category:Brazilian Formula One drivers Category:Brazilian racecar drivers Category:Lotus Formula One drivers Category:McLaren Formula One drivers Category:Williams Formula One drivers Category:Formula One World Drivers' Champions Category:British Formula Three Championship drivers Category:Formula Ford drivers Category:International Motorsports Hall of Fame inductees Category:Monaco Grand Prix winners Category:CIK-FIA Karting World Championship drivers Category:People from São Paulo (city) Category:Racecar drivers killed while racing Category:Sport deaths in Italy
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Angelina Jolie |
|---|---|
| Caption | Jolie at the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con International in July 2010 |
| Birth name | Angelina Jolie Voight |
| Birth date | June 04, 1975 |
| Birth place | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actress, humanitarian |
| Years active | 1982; 1993–present |
| Spouse | Jonny Lee Miller (1996–1999) |
| Partner | Brad Pitt (2005–present) |
| Parents | Jon VoightMarcheline Bertrand (deceased) |
| Children | 3 sons, 3 daughters |
| Height | 5' 8" (1.73 m) |
Though she made her screen debut as a child alongside her father Jon Voight in the 1982 film Lookin' to Get Out, Jolie's acting career began in earnest a decade later with the low-budget production Cyborg 2 (1993). Her first leading role in a major film was in Hackers (1995). She starred in the critically acclaimed biographical films George Wallace (1997) and Gia (1998), and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the drama Girl, Interrupted (1999). Jolie achieved wider fame after her portrayal of video game heroine Lara Croft in (2001), and since then has established herself as one of the best-known and highest-paid actresses in Hollywood. She has had her biggest commercial successes with the action-comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) and the animated film Kung Fu Panda (2008).
Divorced from actors Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton, Jolie currently lives with actor Brad Pitt, in a relationship that has attracted worldwide media attention. Jolie and Pitt have three adopted children, Maddox, Pax, and Zahara, as well as three biological children, Shiloh, Knox, and Vivienne.
After her parents' separation in 1976, Jolie and her brother were raised by their mother, who abandoned her acting ambitions and moved with them to Palisades, New York. As a child, Jolie regularly saw movies with her mother and later explained that this had inspired her interest in acting; she had not been influenced by her father. When she was eleven years old, the family moved back to Los Angeles and Jolie decided she wanted to act and enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, where she trained for two years and appeared in several stage productions.
At the age of 14, she dropped out of her acting classes and dreamed of becoming a funeral director. During this period, she wore black clothing, dyed her hair purple and went out moshing with her live-in boyfriend.
She later recalled her time as a student at Beverly Hills High School (and later Moreno High School), and her feeling of isolation among the children of some of the area's more affluent families. Jolie's mother survived on a more modest income, and Jolie often wore second-hand clothes. She was teased by other students who also targeted her for her distinctive features, for being extremely thin, and for wearing glasses and braces.
Jolie was estranged from her father for many years. The two tried to reconcile and he appeared with her in (2001). In August of the same year, Voight claimed that his daughter had "serious mental problems" on Access Hollywood. Jolie later indicated that she no longer wished to pursue a relationship with her father, and said, "My father and I don't speak. I don't hold any anger toward him. I don't believe that somebody's family becomes their blood. Because my son's adopted, and families are earned." She stated that she did not want to publicize her reasons for her estrangement from her father, but because she had adopted her son, she did not think it was healthy for her to associate with Voight. In February 2010, Jolie publicly reunited with her father when he visited her while filming The Tourist in Venice.
She appeared as Gina Malacici in the 1996 comedy Love Is All There Is, a modern-day loose adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set among two rival Italian family restaurant owners in the Bronx, New York. In the road movie Mojave Moon (1996) she was a youngster, named Eleanor Rigby, who falls for Danny Aiello's character, while he takes a shine to her mother, played by Anne Archer. In 1996, Jolie also portrayed Margret "Legs" Sadovsky, one of five teenage girls who form an unlikely bond in the film Foxfire after they beat up a teacher who has sexually harassed them. The Los Angeles Times wrote about her performance, "It took a lot of hogwash to develop this character, but Jolie, Jon Voight's knockout daughter, has the presence to overcome the stereotype. Though the story is narrated by Maddy, Legs is the subject and the catalyst."
In 1997, Jolie starred with David Duchovny in the thriller Playing God, set in the Los Angeles underworld. The movie was not received well by critics and Roger Ebert noted that "Angelina Jolie finds a certain warmth in a kind of role that is usually hard and aggressive; she seems too nice to be [a criminal's] girlfriend, and maybe she is." She then appeared in the television movie True Women, a historical romantic drama set in the American West, and based on the book by Janice Woods Windle. That year she also appeared in the music video for "Anybody Seen My Baby?" by the Rolling Stones.
In 1998, Jolie starred in HBO's Gia, portraying supermodel Gia Carangi. The film depicted a world of sex, drugs and emotional drama, and chronicled the destruction of Carangi's life and career as a result of her drug addiction, and her decline and death from AIDS. Vanessa Vance from Reel.com noted, "Angelina Jolie gained wide recognition for her role as the titular Gia, and it's easy to see why. Jolie is fierce in her portrayal—filling the part with nerve, charm, and desperation—and her role in this film is quite possibly the most beautiful train wreck ever filmed." For the second consecutive year, Jolie won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for an Emmy Award. She also won her first Screen Actors Guild Award. In accordance with Lee Strasberg's method acting, Jolie reportedly preferred to stay in character in between scenes during many of her early films, and as a result had gained a reputation for being difficult to deal with. While shooting Gia, she told her then-husband Jonny Lee Miller that she would not be able to phone him: "I'd tell him: 'I'm alone; I'm dying; I'm gay; I'm not going to see you for weeks.'"
Following Gia, Jolie moved to New York and stopped acting for a short time, because she felt that she had "nothing else to give". She enrolled at New York University to study filmmaking and attended writing classes. She described it as "just good for me to collect myself" on Inside the Actors Studio.
Jolie returned to film as Gloria McNeary in the 1998 gangster movie Hell's Kitchen, and later that year appeared in Playing by Heart, part of an ensemble cast that included Sean Connery, Gillian Anderson, Ryan Phillippe and Jon Stewart. The film received predominantly positive reviews and Jolie was praised in particular. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "Jolie, working through an overwritten part, is a sensation as the desperate club crawler learning truths about what she's willing to gamble." Jolie won the Breakthrough Performance Award by the National Board of Review.
In 1999, she starred in Mike Newell's comedy-drama Pushing Tin, co-starring John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cate Blanchett. Jolie played Thornton's seductive wife. The film received a mixed reception from critics and Jolie's character was particularly criticized. The Washington Post wrote, "Mary (Angelina Jolie), a completely ludicrous writer's creation of a free-spirited woman who weeps over hibiscus plants that die, wears lots of turquoise rings and gets real lonely when Russell spends entire nights away from home." She then worked with Denzel Washington in The Bone Collector (1999), an adapted crime novel written by Jeffery Deaver. Jolie played Amelia Donaghy, a police officer haunted by her cop father's suicide, who reluctantly helps Washington track down a serial killer. The movie grossed $151 million worldwide,
Jolie next took the supporting role of the sociopathic Lisa Rowe in Girl, Interrupted (1999), a film that tells the story of mental patient Susanna Kaysen, and which was adapted from Kaysen's original memoir of the same name. While Winona Ryder played the main character in what was hoped to be a comeback for her, the film instead marked Jolie's final breakthrough in Hollywood. She won her third Golden Globe Award, her second Screen Actors Guild Award and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Variety noted, "Jolie is excellent as the flamboyant, irresponsible girl who turns out to be far more instrumental than the doctors in Susanna's rehabilitation".
In 2000, Jolie appeared in her first summer blockbuster, Gone In 60 Seconds, in which she played Sarah "Sway" Wayland, ex-girlfriend of car-thief Nicolas Cage. The role was small, and the Washington Post criticized that "all she does in this movie is stand around, cooling down, modeling those fleshy, pulsating muscle-tubes that nest so provocatively around her teeth." She later explained that the film was a welcome relief after the heavy role of Lisa Rowe, and it became her highest grossing movie up until then, earning $237 million internationally. The movie was an international success nonetheless, earning $275 million worldwide, In 2002, she played Lanie Kerrigan in Life or Something Like It, a film about an ambitious TV reporter who is told that she will die in a week. The film was poorly received by critics, though Jolie's performance received positive reviews. CNN's Paul Clinton wrote, "Jolie is excellent in her role. Despite some of the ludicrous plot points in the middle of the film, this Academy Award–winning actress is exceedingly believable in her journey towards self-discovery and the true meaning of fulfilling life."
Jolie reprised her role as Lara Croft in in 2003. The sequel, while not as lucrative as the original, earned $156 million at the international box-office.
at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007]]
In 2004, Jolie starred alongside Ethan Hawke in the thriller Taking Lives. She portrayed Illeana Scott, an FBI profiler summoned to help Montreal law enforcement hunt down a serial killer. The movie received mixed reviews and The Hollywood Reporter concluded, "Angelina Jolie plays a role that definitely feels like something she has already done, but she does add an unmistakable dash of excitement and glamour." She also provided the voice of Lola, an angelfish in the animated DreamWorks movie Shark Tale (2004) and she had a brief appearance in Kerry Conran's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), a science fiction adventure film shot with actors entirely in front of a bluescreen. Also in 2004, Jolie played Olympias in Alexander, Oliver Stone's biographical film about the life of Alexander the Great. The film failed domestically, with Stone attributing its poor reception to disapproval of the depiction of Alexander's bisexuality, but it succeeded internationally, with revenue of $139 million outside the United States. The movie earned $478 million worldwide, one of the biggest hits of 2005.
, November 2007]]
In 2007, Jolie made her directorial debut with the documentary A Place in Time, which captures the life in 27 locations around the globe during a single week. The film was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and is intended to be distributed through the National Education Association, mainly in high schools. Jolie starred as Mariane Pearl in Michael Winterbottom's documentary-style drama A Mighty Heart (2007), about the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. The film is based on Mariane Pearl's memoirs of the same name and had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The Hollywood Reporter described Jolie's performance as "well-measured and moving", played "with respect and a firm grasp on a difficult accent." The film earned her a fourth Golden Globe Award and a third Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. Jolie also played Grendel's mother in Robert Zemeckis' animated epic Beowulf (2007) which was created through the motion capture technique.
Jolie co-starred alongside James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman in the 2008 action movie Wanted, an adaptation of a graphic novel by Mark Millar. The film received predominately favorable reviews and proved to be an international success, earning $342 million worldwide. It is based on the true story of a woman in 1928 Los Angeles who is reunited with her kidnapped son — only to realize he is an impostor. The Chicago Tribune noted, "Jolie really shines in the calm before the storm, the scenes [...] when one patronizing male authority figure after another belittles her at their peril." Jolie received her second Academy Award nomination, and also was nominated for a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and the Screen Actors Guild Award.
It was confirmed that Jolie would star as Cleopatra in the remake of Queen of the Nile, Cleopatra: A Life, based on the book by Stacy Schiff.
Jolie has been on field missions around the world and met with refugees and internally displaced persons in more than 20 countries. Asked what she hoped to accomplish, she stated, "Awareness of the plight of these people. I think they should be commended for what they have survived, not looked down upon." In 2002, Jolie visited the Tham Hin refugee camp in Thailand and Colombian refugees in Ecuador. Jolie later went to various UNHCR facilities in Kosovo and paid a visit to Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya with refugees mainly from Sudan. She also met with Angolan refugees while filming Beyond Borders in Namibia.
In 2003, Jolie embarked on a six-day mission to Tanzania where she traveled to western border camps hosting Congolese refugees, and she paid a week-long visit to Sri Lanka, meeting Tamil refugee orphans in Jaffna. She later concluded a four-day mission to Russia as she traveled to North Caucasus. Concurrently with the release of her movie Beyond Borders she published Notes from My Travels, a collection of journal entries that chronicle her early field missions (2001–2002). During a private stay in Jordan in December 2003 she asked to visit Iraqi refugees in Jordan's eastern desert and later that month she went to Egypt to meet Sudanese refugees.
On her first U.N. trip within the United States, Jolie went to Arizona in 2004, visiting detained asylum seekers at three facilities and the Southwest Key Program, a facility for unaccompanied children in Phoenix. She flew to Chad in June 2004, paying a visit to border sites and camps for refugees who had fled fighting in western Sudan's Darfur region. Four months later she returned to the region, this time going directly into West Darfur. Also in 2004, Jolie met with Afghan refugees in Thailand and on a private stay to Lebanon during the Christmas holidays, she visited UNHCR's regional office in Beirut, as well as some young refugees and cancer patients in the Lebanese capital.
In 2005, Jolie visited Pakistani camps containing Afghani refugees, and she also met with Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz; she returned to Pakistan with Brad Pitt during the Thanksgiving weekend in November to see the impact of the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. In 2006, Jolie and Pitt flew to Haiti and visited a school supported by Yéle Haïti, a charity founded by Haitian-born hip hop musician Wyclef Jean. While filming A Mighty Heart in India, Jolie met with Afghan and Burmese refugees in New Delhi. She spent Christmas Day 2006 with Colombian refugees in San José, Costa Rica where she handed out presents. In 2007, Jolie returned to Chad for a two-day mission to assess the deteriorating security situation for refugees from Darfur; Jolie and Pitt subsequently donated $1 million to three relief organizations in Chad and Darfur. Jolie also made her first visit to Syria and twice went to Iraq, where she met with Iraqi refugees as well as multi-national forces and U.S. troops.
at World Refugee Day, June 2005]]
Over time, Jolie became more involved in promoting humanitarian causes on a political level. She has regularly attended World Refugee Day in Washington, D.C., and she was an invited speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2005 and 2006. Jolie also began lobbying humanitarian interests in the U.S. capital, where she met with members of Congress at least 20 times from 2003. Jolie also pushed for several bills to aid refugees and vulnerable children in the Third World. Jolie also co-chairs the Education Partnership for Children of Conflict, founded at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2006, which helps fund education programs for children affected by conflict.
Jolie has received wide recognition for her humanitarian work. In 2003, she was the first recipient of the newly created Citizen of the World Award by the United Nations Correspondents Association, and in 2005, she was awarded the Global Humanitarian Award by the UNA-USA. Cambodia's King Norodom Sihamoni awarded Jolie Cambodian citizenship for her conservation work in the country on August 12, 2005; she has pledged $5 million to set up a wildlife sanctuary in the north-western province of Battambang and owns property there. In 2007, Jolie became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and she received the Freedom Award by the International Rescue Committee.
After she and Pitt donated $1 million to relief efforts in Haiti following a devastating 2010 earthquake, Jolie visited Haiti and the Dominican Republic to discuss the future of relief efforts. She also donated $100,000 to the United Nations for the 2010 August flood relief operations in Pakistan.
On March 28, 1996, Jolie married British actor Jonny Lee Miller, her co-star in the film Hackers (1995). She attended her wedding in black rubber pants and a white shirt, upon which she had written the groom's name in her blood. Jolie and Miller separated the following year and subsequently divorced on February 3, 1999. They remained on good terms and Jolie later explained, "It comes down to timing. I think he's the greatest husband a girl could ask for. I'll always love him, we were simply too young." Jolie and Thornton divorced on May 27, 2003. Asked about the sudden dissolution of their marriage, Jolie stated, "It took me by surprise, too, because overnight, we totally changed. I think one day we had just nothing in common. And it's scary but... I think it can happen when you get involved and you don't know yourself yet."
at the Deauville American Film Festival in 2007]]
Jolie has said in interviews that she is bisexual and has long acknowledged that she had a sexual relationship with her Foxfire (1996) co-star Jenny Shimizu, "I would probably have married Jenny if I hadn't married my husband. I fell in love with her the first second I saw her." In 2003, asked if she was bisexual, Jolie responded, "Of course. If I fell in love with a woman tomorrow, would I feel that it's okay to want to kiss and touch her? If I fell in love with her? Absolutely! Yes!"
In early 2005, Jolie was involved in a well-publicized Hollywood scandal when she was accused of being the reason for the divorce of actors Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. The allegation was that she and Pitt had started an affair during filming of Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005). She denied this on several occasions, but admitted that they "fell in love" on the set. In an interview in 2005, she explained, "To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive. I could not look at myself in the morning if I did that. I wouldn't be attracted to a man who would cheat on his wife." In September 2010, Jolie said in an interview with Sanjay Gupta on CNN that Brad Pitt was the only one she could really talk to.
On March 10, 2002, Jolie adopted her first child, seven-month-old Maddox Chivan.
Jolie adopted a six-month-old girl from Ethiopia, Zahara Marley, on July 6, 2005. Zahara was born on January 8, 2005. She was originally named Yemsrach by her mother, and was later given the legal name Tena Adam at an orphanage. Jolie adopted her from Wide Horizons For Children orphanage in Addis Ababa. Shortly after they returned to the United States, Zahara was hospitalized for dehydration and malnutrition. In 2007, media outlets reported Zahara's biological mother, Mentewabe Dawit, was still alive and wanted her daughter back, but she later denied these reports, saying she thought Zahara was "very fortunate" to be adopted by Jolie. On January 19, 2006 a judge in California approved Pitt's request to legally adopt Jolie's two children. Their surnames were formally changed to "Jolie-Pitt".
Jolie gave birth to a daughter, Shiloh Nouvel, in Swakopmund, Namibia, by a scheduled caesarean section, on May 27, 2006. Pitt confirmed that their newly born daughter would have a Namibian passport, and Jolie decided to sell the first pictures of Shiloh through the distributor Getty Images herself, rather than allowing paparazzi to make these valuable photographs. People paid more than $4.1 million for the North American rights, while British magazine Hello! obtained the international rights for roughly $3.5 million. All profits were donated to an undisclosed charity by Jolie and Pitt. Madame Tussauds in New York unveiled a wax figure of two-month-old Shiloh; it was the first infant re-created in wax by Madame Tussauds.
On March 15, 2007, Jolie adopted a three-year-old boy from Vietnam, Pax Thien, who was born on November 29, 2003 and abandoned at birth at a local hospital, where he was initially named Pham Quang Sang. Jolie adopted the boy from the Tam Binh orphanage in Ho Chi Minh City. She revealed that his first name, Pax, was suggested by her mother before her death.
Following months of tabloid speculation, Jolie confirmed, at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, that she was expecting twins. She gave birth to a boy, Knox Léon, and a girl, Vivienne Marcheline, by caesarean section at the Lenval hospital in Nice, France, on July 12, 2008. The rights for the first images of Knox and Vivienne were jointly sold to People and Hello! for $14 million—the most expensive celebrity pictures ever taken. The money went to the Jolie/Pitt Foundation.
Jolie consciously furthers her children understanding not only what is going on in their home countries, but also the nature of the states their siblings come from. and plans to familiarize them with all faiths (in particular Christendom, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism) so that they would be able to decide themselves which religion they want to choose. She is also engaged on familiarizing all of her children with the French language.
Jolie appeared in the media from an early age due to her famous father Jon Voight. At seven she had a small part in Lookin' to Get Out, a movie co-written by and starring her father, and in 1986 and 1988 she attended the Academy Awards with him. However, when she started her acting career, Jolie decided not to use "Voight" as a stage name, because she wished to establish her own identity as an actress. She quickly became a tabloid's favorite, since she presented herself as very outspoken in interviews, discussing her love life and her interest in BDSM openly, it was also noted that her association with Brad Pitt had "accentuated" the frequency of requests for Jolie's looks. The media speculated that Jolie is a Buddhist, but she said that she teaches Buddhism to her son Maddox because she considers it part of his culture. When asked in 2000 if there was a God, she said, "For the people who believe in it, I hope so. There doesn't need to be a God for me."
in February 2009]]
Starting in 2005, her relationship with Brad Pitt became one of the most reported celebrity stories worldwide. After Jolie confirmed her pregnancy in early 2006, the unprecedented media hype surrounding them "reached the point of insanity" as Reuters described it in their story "The Brangelina fever". Trying to avoid the media attention, the couple went to Namibia for the birth of Shiloh, "the most anticipated baby since Jesus Christ", as it had been described. Two years later, Jolie's second pregnancy again fueled a media frenzy. For the two weeks she spent in a seaside hospital in Nice, reporters and photographers camped outside on the promenade to report on the birth.
Today, Jolie is one of the best known celebrities around the world. According to the Q Score, in 2000, subsequent to her Oscar win, 31% of respondents in the United States said Jolie was familiar to them, by 2006 she was familiar to 81% of Americans. Jolie was among the Time 100, a list of the 100 most influential people in the world, in 2006 and 2008. She was described as the world's most beautiful woman in the 2006 "100 Most Beautiful" issue of People, voted the greatest sex symbol of all time in the British Channel 4 television show The 100 Greatest Sex Symbols in 2007, She also topped Forbes' annual Celebrity 100 list in 2009; she had previously been ranked No. 14 in 2007, and No. 3 in 2008. Jolie was named one of the 50 People Who Matter 2010 by New Statesman Magazine.
Jolie's numerous tattoos have been the subject of much media attention and have often been addressed by interviewers. Jolie stated that, while she is not opposed to film nudity, the large number of tattoos on her body have forced filmmakers to become more creative when planning nude or love scenes. Make-up has been used to cover up the tattoos in many of her productions. Jolie has thirteen known tattoos, among them the Tennessee Williams quote "A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages", which she got together with her mother, the Arabic language phrase "العزيمة" (strength of will), the Latin proverb "quod me nutrit me destruit" (what nourishes me destroys me), and a Yantra prayer written in the ancient Khmer script for her son Maddox. She also has six sets of geographical coordinates on her upper left arm indicating the birthplaces of her children. Over time she covered or lasered several of her tattoos, including "Billy Bob", the name of her former husband Billy Bob Thornton, a Chinese character for death (死), and a window on her lower back; she explained that she removed the window, because, while she used to spend all of her time looking out through windows wishing to be outside, she now lives there all of the time.
Category:United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Goodwill Ambassadors Category:Best Supporting Actress Academy Award winners Category:Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe (film) winners Category:Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe (television) winners Category:Best Miniseries or Television Movie Actress Golden Globe winners Category:Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie Screen Actors Guild Award winners Category:Female aviators Category:American aviators Category:Bisexual actors Category:LGBT people from the United States Category:American film producers Category:American film actors Category:American television actors Category:American voice actors Category:American female models Category:American writers Category:Armenian philanthropists Category:American humanitarians Category:Actors from Los Angeles, California Category:American actors of German descent Category:American people of Slovak descent Category:American people of French-Canadian descent Category:People of Iroquois descent Category:Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute alumni Category:1975 births Category:Living people Category:American actors of French descent
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
![The Manchester Eye ITV franchisee Granada Television has its headquarters in Quay Street, in the Castle field area of the city.[149] Granada produces the world's oldest and most watched television soap opera, Coronation Street,[150] which is screened five times a week on ITV1.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110612063608im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/7b/54/0f324ee8db3afa532efc8d9406ce_thumb.jpg "The Manchester Eye ITV franchisee Granada Television has its headquarters in Quay Street, in the Castle field area of the city.[149] Granada produces the world's oldest and most watched television soap opera, Coronation Street,[150] which is screened five times a week on ITV1.")
![Bilingual road sign near Wrexham Central station in 2009. The language has greatly increased its prominence since the creation of the television channel S4C in November 1982, which broadcasts 70% of Channel 4's programming along with a majority of Welsh language shows[22] during peak viewing hours.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110612063608im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/9d/94/134c211e5f363c95ac81a4574c2e_thumb.jpg "Bilingual road sign near Wrexham Central station in 2009. The language has greatly increased its prominence since the creation of the television channel S4C in November 1982, which broadcasts 70% of Channel 4's programming along with a majority of Welsh language shows[22] during peak viewing hours.")
