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• 
  

• 
  Aspen, Colorado
  The City of Aspen is a Home Rule Municipality that is the county seat and the most populous city of Pitkin County, Colorado, United States. The United States Census Bureau placed the city's population at 6,658 in 2010. Founded as a mining camp in the Colorado Silver Boom and named because of the abundance of aspen trees in the area, the city is now a ski resort and an upscale tourist center. Aspen is home to three renowned institutions that have international importance: the Aspen Music Festival and School, the Aspen Institute, and the Aspen Center for Physics. The Maroon-Snowmass Wilderness, the Hunter-Frying Pan Wilderness, and the Collegiate Peaks Wilderness are nearby.
  In the late 20th century, the city developed as a popular destination for celebrities, attracting people like Charlie Sheen, Hunter S. Thompson, and John Denver, the latter having written several songs about the town, including "Aspenglow" and "Starwood in Aspen". Aspen boasts the most expensive real estate prices in the United States.
  
  wn.com/Aspen,_Colorado
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  Broadway theatre
  Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City. Along with London's West End theatre, Broadway theatre is widely considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world.
  The Broadway theatre district is a popular tourist attraction in New York. According to The Broadway League, Broadway shows sold approximately $1.081 billion worth of tickets in calendar year 2011, compared with $1.037 billion for 2010. Attendance in 2011 was 12.13 million.
  New York did not have a significant theatre presence until about 1750, when actor-managers Walter Murray and Thomas Kean established a resident theatre company at the Theatre on Nassau Street, which held about 280 people. They presented Shakespeare plays and ballad operas such as The Beggar's Opera. In 1752, William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors from Britain to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager. They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice and The Anatomist. The company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad operas and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. The Revolutionary War suspended theatre in New York, but thereafter theatre resumed in 1798, the year the 2,000-seat Park Theatre was built on Chatham Street (now called Park Row). The Bowery Theatre opened in 1826, followed by others. Blackface minstrel shows, a distinctly American form of entertainment, became popular in the 1830s, and especially so with the arrival of the Virginia Minstrels in the 1840s.
  
  wn.com/Broadway_theatre
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  Brooklyn, New York
  Coordinates: 40°41′34″N 73°59′25″W / 40.69278°N 73.99028°W / 40.69278; -73.99028
  Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with approximately 2.5 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, after New York County (Manhattan). It is also the westernmost county on Long Island.
  Brooklyn was an independent city until it was annexed by New York City in 1898. It continues to maintain a distinct culture. Many Brooklyn neighborhoods are ethnic enclaves where particular ethnic groups and cultures predominate.
  Brooklyn's official motto is Eendraght Maeckt Maght. Written in the (early modern spelling of the) Dutch language, it is inspired by the motto of the United Dutch Provinces and translated "Unity makes strength". The motto is displayed on the borough seal and flag, which also feature a young robed woman bearing fasces, a traditional emblem of republicanism. Brooklyn's official colors are blue and gold.
  
  wn.com/Brooklyn,_New_York
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  California
  California (pronounced ⁱ/kælɨˈfɔrnjə/) is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third most extensive (after Alaska and Texas). It is home to the nation's second- and sixth-largest census statistical areas (Los Angeles Metropolitan Area and San Francisco Bay Area), and eight of the nation's fifty most populated cities (Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Fresno, Sacramento, Long Beach and Oakland). The capital city is Sacramento.
  California's diverse geography ranges from the Pacific Coast in the west, to the Sierra Nevada mountains in the east – from the Redwood–Douglas-fir forests of the northwest, to the Mojave Desert areas in the southeast. The center of the state is dominated by Central Valley, a major agricultural area. California contains both the highest and lowest points in the contiguous United States (Mount Whitney and Death Valley), and has the third-longest coastline of all states (after Alaska and Florida). Earthquakes are a common occurrence due to the state's location along the Pacific Ring of Fire: about 37,000 are recorded annually.
  
  wn.com/California
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  Charles Grapewin
  Charley Ellsworth Grapewin (December 20, 1869 – February 2, 1956) was an American vaudeville performer and a stage and film actor, who portrayed Uncle Henry in MGM's The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Grandpa Joad in the film The Grapes of Wrath (1940).
  Born in Xenia, Ohio, Charley Ellsworth Grapewin ran away from home to be a circus acrobat which led him to work as an aerialist and trapeze artist in a traveling circus before turning to acting. He traveled all over the world with the famous P. T. Barnum circus.
  After this he went on and off of stage for the next thirty years starting with various stock companies and wrote stage plays as a vehicle for himself. His sole Broadway theatre credit was the short-lived play It's Up To You John Henry in 1905.
  Grapewin began in silent films at the turn of the century. His very first films were two "moving image shorts" made by Frederick S. Armitage and released in November 1900; Chimmie Hicks at the Races (also known as Above the Limit) and Chimmie Hicks and the Rum Omelet, both shot in September and October 1900 and released in November of that year. During his long career, Grapewin appeared in more than one hundred films, including The Good Earth, The Grapes of Wrath, Tobacco Road and also for what is probably his most well-remembered role as Uncle Henry in the MGM Technicolor extravaganza The Wizard of Oz, after which he had garnered a recurring role as Inspector Queen in the Ellery Queen film series of the early 1940s,.
  
  wn.com/Charles_Grapewin
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  Colorado
  Colorado (ⁱ/kɒləˈrædoʊ/ or /kɒləˈrɒdoʊ/) is the US state that encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the Great Plains. Colorado is part of the Western United States, the Southwestern United States, and the Mountain States. Colorado is the 8th most extensive and the 22nd most populous of the 50 United States. The United States Census Bureau estimates that the population of Colorado was 5,116,796 on July 1, 2011, an increase of +1.74% since the 2010 United States Census.
  The state was named for the Colorado River, which early Spanish explorers named the Río Colorado for the red colored (Spanish: colorado) silt the river carried from the mountains. On August 1, 1876, U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant signed a proclamation admitting Colorado as the 38th state. Colorado is nicknamed the "Centennial State" because it was admitted to the Union in 1876, the centennial year of the United States Declaration of Independence.
  
  wn.com/Colorado
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  Connecticut
  Connecticut (ⁱ/kəˈnɛtɨkət/) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south (with which it shares a water boundary in Long Island Sound).
  Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately bisects the state. Its capital city is Hartford. Much of southern and western Connecticut (along with the majority of the state's population) is part of the New York metropolitan area; three of Connecticut's eight counties are statistically included in the New York City combined statistical area, the same area is widely referred to as the Tri-State area. Connecticut's center of population is in Cheshire, New Haven County, which is also located within the Tri-State area.
  Connecticut is the 3rd least extensive, the 29th most populous, and 4th most densely populated of the 50 United States. Called the Constitution State, Nutmeg State, and "The Land of Steady Habits", Connecticut was influential in the development of the federal government of the United States.
  
  wn.com/Connecticut
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  Houston, Texas
  Houston ( /ˈhjuːstən/) (Alibamu: Yosti ) is the largest city in the state of Texas, and the fourth-largest city in the United States. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the city had a population of 2.1 million people within an area of 656.3 square miles (1,700 km²). Houston is the seat of Harris County and the economic center of Houston–Sugar Land–Baytown, which is the fifth-largest metropolitan area in the United States, with 6.08 million people as of July 1st, 2011.
  Houston was founded in 1836 on land near the banks of Buffalo Bayou. It was incorporated as a city on June 5, 1837, and named after then-President of the Republic of Texas—former General Sam Houston—who had commanded at the Battle of San Jacinto, which took place 25 miles (40 km) east of where the city was established. The burgeoning port and railroad industry, combined with oil discovery in 1901, has induced continual surges in the city's population. In the mid-twentieth century, Houston became the home of the Texas Medical Center—the world's largest concentration of healthcare and research institutions—and NASA's Johnson Space Center, where the Mission Control Center is located.
  
  wn.com/Houston,_Texas
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  Miss Porter's School
  Miss Porter's School, sometimes simply referred to as Porter's or Farmington, is a private college preparatory school for girls located in Farmington, Connecticut.
  Porter's alumnae call themselves "Ancients," and faculty and staff often refer to the school as "Porter's" or MPS.
  Miss Porter's School was established in 1843 by education reformer Sarah Porter, who recognized the importance of women's education. She was insistent that the school's curriculum include chemistry, physiology, botany, geology, and astronomy in addition to the more traditional Latin, French, German, spelling, reading, arithmetic, trigonometry, history, and geography. Also encouraged were such athletic opportunities as tennis, horseback riding, and—in 1867—the school formed its very own baseball team, called the Tunxises. Management passed on to her nephew, Robert Porter Keep, after her death in 1900. From then until the school was incorporated as a non-profit institution in 1943, he, his wife, Elizabeth Hale Keep, and their son Robert Porter Keep Jr. ran the school. To this day, "Porter's remains a place where girls are supported by a close-knit community of students and faculty."
  
  wn.com/Miss_Porter's_School
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  New York
  New York (/njuː ˈjɔrk/; locally IPA: [nɪu ˈjɔək] or [nuː ˈjɔɹk] ( listen)) is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. New York is the 27th most extensive, the 3rd most populous, and the 7th most densely populated of the 50 United States. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east. The state has a maritime border with Rhode Island east of Long Island, as well as an international border with the Canadian provinces of Ontario to the west and north, and Quebec to the north. The state of New York is often referred to as New York State to distinguish it from New York City.
  New York City, with a population of over 8.1 million, is the most populous city in the United States. Alone, it makes up over 40 percent of the population of New York state. It is known for its status as a center for finance and culture and for its status as the largest gateway for immigration to the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, New York City is also a destination of choice for many foreign visitors. Both the state and city were named for the 17th century Duke of York, James Stuart, future James II and VII of England and Scotland.
  
  wn.com/New_York
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  Stork Club
  Coordinates: 40°45′37″N 73°58′31″W / 40.76028°N 73.97528°W / 40.76028; -73.97528
  The Stork Club was a nightclub in New York City from 1929 to 1965. From 1934 onwards, it was located at 3 East 53rd Street, just east of Fifth Avenue. The building was demolished in 1966 and the site is now the location of Paley Park, a small vest-pocket park.
  The Stork Club was owned and operated by Sherman Billingsley (1896–1966) an ex-bootlegger who came to New York from Enid, Oklahoma. (In later years, Billingsley claimed to have been born in 1900, but this is refuted by both the 1930 census and the Social Security Death Index.) From the end of Prohibition in 1933 until the early 1960s, the club was the symbol of café society. Movie stars, celebrities, the wealthy, showgirls, and aristocrats all mixed here. Other New York City clubs had the sophistication (El Morocco) and drew the sporting crowd (Toots Shor's Restaurant), but the Stork Club mixed power, money and glamour. Unlike its competitors, the Stork stayed open on Sunday nights and during the summer months.
  
  wn.com/Stork_Club
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  Switzerland
  Switzerland (German: die Schweiz[ˈʃvaɪts]; French: Suisse [sɥis(ə)]; Italian: Svizzera [ˈzvit͡sːɛra]; Romansh: Svizra [ˈʒviːtsrɐ] or [ˈʒviːtsʁːɐ]), in its full name the Swiss Confederation (Latin: Confoederatio Helvetica, hence its abbreviation CH), is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in western Europe, where it is bordered by Germany to the north, France to the west, Italy to the south, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east.
  Switzerland is a landlocked country geographically divided between the Alps, the Swiss Plateau and the Jura, spanning an area of 41,285 km² (15,940 sq mi). While the Alps occupy the greater part of the territory, the Swiss population of approximately 8 million people is concentrated mostly on the Plateau, where the largest cities are to be found. Among them are the two global cities and economic centres of Zurich and Geneva.
  The Swiss Confederation has a long history of armed neutrality—it has not been in a state of war internationally since 1815—and did not join the United Nations until 2002. It pursues, however, an active foreign policy and is frequently involved in peace-building processes around the world. Switzerland is also the birthplace of the Red Cross and home to a large number of international organizations, including the second largest UN office. On the European level, it is a founding member of the European Free Trade Association and is part of the Schengen Area – although it is notably not a member of the European Union, nor the European Economic Area.
  
  wn.com/Switzerland
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  Texas
  Texas (ⁱ/ˈtɛksəs/) (Alibamu: Teksi ) is the second most populous and the second most extensive of the 50 United States, and the most extensive state of the 48 contiguous United States. The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in East Texas. Located in the South Central United States, Texas shares an international border with the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas to the south, and borders the US states of New Mexico to the west, Oklahoma to the north, Arkansas to the northeast, and Louisiana to the east. Texas has an area of 268,820 square miles (696,200 km²), and a growing population of 25.7 million residents.
  During the Spanish colonial rule, the area was officially known as the Nuevo Reino de Filipinas: La Provincia de Texas. Antonio Margil de Jesús was known to be the first person to use the name in a letter to the Viceroy of Mexico in July 20, 1716. The name was not popularly used in daily speech but often appeared in legal documents until the end of the 1800s.
  
  wn.com/Texas
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  Topeka, Kansas
  Topeka (/tɵˈpiːkə/; Kansa: Tó Pee Kuh) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Kansas and the county seat of Shawnee County. It is situated along the Kansas River in the central part of Shawnee County, located in northeast Kansas, in the Central United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 127,473. The Topeka Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Shawnee, Jackson, Jefferson, Osage, and Wabaunsee counties, had an estimated population of 230,824 in the year 2009. The city is well known for the landmark United States Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson and declared segregation in public schools on account of race to be unconstitutional. Three ships of the US Navy have been named USS Topeka in honor of the city.
  Topeka means "to dig good potatoes" in the languages of the Kansa and the Ioway. The potato referred to is the prairie potato (Psoralea esculenta), a perennial herb which is an important food for many Native Americans. As a placename, Topeka was first recorded in 1826 as the Kansa name for what is now called the Kansas River. Topeka's founders chose the name in 1855 because it "was novel, of Indian origin and euphonious of sound." The mixed-blood Kansa Indian, Joseph James, called Jojim, is credited with suggesting the name of Topeka. The city, laid out in 1854, was one of the Free-State towns founded by Eastern antislavery men immediately after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. In 1857, Topeka was chartered as a city.
  
  wn.com/Topeka,_Kansas
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  Washington, D.C.
  Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a federal district to become the national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution. The District is therefore not a part of any U.S. state. It was formed from land along the Potomac River donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia; however, the Virginia portion was returned by Congress in 1846.
  A new capital city named after George Washington was founded in 1791 to the east of the preexisting port of Georgetown. Congress consolidated the City of Washington, Georgetown, and the remaining unincorporated area within the District under a single municipal government in 1871. The city shares its name with the U.S. state of Washington, located on the country's Pacific coast.
  Washington, D.C., had an estimated population of 617,996 in 2011. The city was the 24th most populous place in the United States as of 2010. Commuters from the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs raise the city's population to over one million during the workweek. The Washington Metropolitan Area, of which the District is a part, has a population of nearly 5.6 million, the seventh-largest metropolitan area in the country.
  
  wn.com/Washington,_D.C.
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  Wesleyan University
  Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college in Middletown, Connecticut, United States founded in 1831. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and sciences, also provides graduate research in many academic disciplines, and grants PhD degrees primarily in the sciences and mathematics. Wesleyan is the second most productive liberal arts college in the United States with respect to the number of undergraduates who go on to earn PhDs in all fields of study.
  Founded under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church and with the support of prominent residents of Middletown, the now secular university was the first institution of higher education to be named after John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. About 20 unrelated colleges and universities were subsequently named after Wesley. Wesleyan, along with Amherst College and Williams College, is a member of the historic Little Three colleges and has long been known as one of the Little Ivies.
  
  wn.com/Wesleyan_University

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  Agatha Christie
  Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie DBE (née Miller; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and more than 15 short story collections (especially those featuring Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple), and her successful West End plays.
  According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. Her novels have sold roughly four billion copies, and her estate claims that her works rank third, after those of William Shakespeare and the Bible, as the most widely published books. According to Index Translationum, Christie is the most translated individual author, with only the collective corporate works of Walt Disney Productions surpassing her. Her books have been translated into at least 103 languages.
  Agatha Christie published two autobiographies: a posthumous one covering childhood to old age; and another chronicling several seasons of archaeological excavation in Syria and Iraq with her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan. The latter was published in 1946 with the title, Come, Tell Me How You Live.
  
  wn.com/Agatha_Christie
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  Anatole Litvak
  Anatole Litvak (Анатоль Литвак) (May 10, 1902 – December 15, 1974) was a Ukrainian-born filmmaker who wrote, directed, and produced films in various countries and languages. He was best known as the Academy Award nominated director of the 1948 film The Snake Pit.
  Born Mikhail Anatol Litvak in Kiev, Ukraine, Litvak grew up in a Jewish family and lived in what was then known as the Russian Empire. As a teenager, he worked at a theater in St. Petersburg and took acting lessons at the state drama school. Litvak worked with Leningrad's Nordkino Studios where he was assistant director for nine silent films. For political and ideological reasons, he fled Russia for Berlin, Germany in 1925.
  In Germany, Litvak made his first few films at the beginning of the 1930s before the rise of the Nazis. He later fled to France prior to the Nazi invasions of World War II.
  According to film historian Ronald Bowers, Litvak became skilled in using location shooting and realistic documentary effects as early as the 1930s. He also became known in the industry for emphasizing sound effects over dialogue in sound films as well as using camera tracking shots and pans. As a result of having made Paris his home after fleeing Germany, the city would later become his favored locale for shooting films; thirteen of his thirty-seven films were set in Paris, including 1936's Mayerling. Of all the assistants who worked under Litvak in France, Max Ophuls would later become a recognized director.
  
  wn.com/Anatole_Litvak
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  Ann-Margret
  Ann-Margret Olsson (born April 28, 1941) is a Swedish-American actress, singer and dancer whose professional name is Ann-Margret. She is best known for her roles in Bye Bye Birdie (1963), Viva Las Vegas (1964), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Carnal Knowledge (1971), and Tommy (1975). She has won five Golden Globe Awards and been nominated for two Academy Awards, two Grammy Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and six Emmy Awards. On August 21, 2010, she won her first Emmy Award for her guest appearance on Law & Order: SVU.
  Ann-Margret was born in Stockholm, the daughter of Anna (née Aronsson) and Gustav Olsson, a native of Örnsköldsvik. While young she moved with her parents to Valsjöbyn, Jämtlands län, which she later described as a small town "of lumberjacks and farmers high up near the Arctic Circle". Her father worked in the United States during his youth and moved there again in 1942, working with the Johnson Electrical Company, while his wife and daughter stayed behind.
  Ann-Margret and her mother moved to the United States in November 1946, and her father took her to Radio City Music Hall on the day they arrived. They settled just outside of Chicago in Wilmette, Illinois. She became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1949 and took her first dance lessons at the Marjorie Young School of Dance, showing natural ability from the start, easily mimicking all the steps. Her parents were supportive and her mother handmade all her costumes. Ann-Margret's mother became a funeral parlor receptionist after her husband suffered a severe injury on his job. While a teenager, Ann-Margret appeared on the Morris B. Sachs Amateur Hour, Don McNeill's Breakfast Club and Ted Mack's Amateur Hour.
  
  wn.com/Ann-Margret
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  Anne Baxter
  Anne Baxter (May 7, 1923 – December 12, 1985) was an American actress known for her performances in films such as The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Razor's Edge (1946), All About Eve (1950) and The Ten Commandments (1956).
  Baxter was born in Michigan City, Indiana to Kenneth Stuart Baxter and Catherine Wright; her maternal grandfather was the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Baxter's father was a prominent executive with the Seagrams Distillery Co. and she was raised in New York City in a well-to-do home, and attended the prestigious Brearley School. At age 10, Baxter attended a Broadway play starring Helen Hayes, and was so impressed that she declared to her family that she wanted to become an actress. By the age of 13, she had appeared on Broadway. During this period, Baxter learned her acting craft as a student of the famed teacher Maria Ouspenskaya.
  At 16 Baxter screen-tested for the role of Mrs. DeWinter in Rebecca, losing to Joan Fontaine because director Alfred Hitchcock considered her too young for the role, but she soon secured a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox. Her first movie role was in 20 Mule Team in 1940. She was chosen by director Orson Welles to appear in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Baxter co-starred with Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney in 1946's The Razor's Edge, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Baxter later recounted that The Razor's Edge contained her only great performance which was a hospital scene where the character, Sophie, "loses her husband, child and everything else". She said she relived the death of her brother, who had died at age three. She played Mike in the 1948 Western film Yellow Sky with Gregory Peck and Richard Widmark.
  
  wn.com/Anne_Baxter
• Anthony Pelissier
  Harry Anthony Compton Pelissier (1912 – 2 April 1988) was an English actor, screenwriter, producer and director.
  Pelissier was born in Barnet and came from a theatrical family. His parents were the theatre producer H. G. Pelissier (who presented Pelissier's Follies) and the distinguished actress Fay Compton. His uncle was Compton MacKenzie, who wrote Whisky Galore.
  Pelissier began acting in the 1930s. In 1935 and 1936, he was featured in Noël Coward's play cycle, Tonight at 8.30, both in Britain and on Broadway. He also played in Coward's Set to Music (1939) He began writing in 1937 and directing in 1949. He was the screenwriter and director of three popular films, The History of Mr Polly (1949), based on a novel by H. G. Wells, The Rocking Horse Winner (1950), based on a short story by D. H. Lawrence and Personal Affair starring Gene Tierney written by Lesley Storm. He also directed Encore (1951). He also directed Ealing's satire on television Meet Mr Lucifer (1953). He later headed the experimental production unit at the BBC.
  
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  Belle Starr
  Myra Maybelle Shirley Reed Starr (February 5, 1848 – February 3, 1889), better known as Belle Starr, was a notorious American outlaw.
  She was born Myra Maybelle Shirley (known as May to her family) on her father's farm near Carthage, Missouri. Her father was John Shirley. Her mother was Eliza Hatfield. In the 1860s her father sold the farm and moved the family to Carthage where he bought an inn and livery stable on the town square.
  May Shirley received a classical education and learned piano, while graduating from Missouri's Carthage Female Academy, a private institution her father had helped to found.
  After a Union attack on Carthage in 1864, the Shirleys moved to Scyene, Texas. According to legend, it was at Scyene that the Shirleys became associated with a number of Missouri-born criminals, including Jesse James and the Youngers. In fact, she knew the Younger brothers and the James boys because she had grown up with them in Missouri. Her brother John A. Shirley was called Captain Shirley by local Confederate sympathizers. He does not appear on any list of Quantrill's Raiders, but rode with a group who were called partisans by some and bushwackers by Union sympathizers. Bud Shirley was killed in 1864 in Sarcoxie, Missouri, while he and another scout were being fed at the home of a Confederate sympathizer. Union troops surrounded the house and when Bud attempted to escape, he was shot and killed.
  
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  Ben Ames Williams
  Ben Ames Williams (7 March 1889 – 4 February 1953) was an accomplished American novelist and short story writer; he wrote hundreds of short stories and over thirty novels during the course of his life. Among his novels are Come Spring (1940), Leave Her to Heaven (1944) House Divided (1947), and The Unconquered (1953). He was published in many magazines, but the majority of his stories appeared in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post. He is arguably most famous for creating the fictional town of Fraternity.
  Williamswas born in Macon, Mississippi to Daniel Webster Williams and Sarah Marshall Ames on March 7, 1889. Just after his birth, he and his parents moved to Jackson, Ohio. Because his father was owner and editor of the Jackson Standard Journal in Ohio, Ben Williams grew up around writing, printing, and editing. In high school he worked for the Journal, doing grunt work in the beginning and eventually writing and editing. He attended Dartmouth College and upon graduation in 1910 was offered a job teaching English at a boy’s school in Connecticut. He telegraphed his father seeking career advice, but his handwriting was terrible and his father mistook “teaching” for “traveling” and, not wanting his son to become a travelling businessman, advised him not to take the job. Richard Cary says it later saved Williams from “a purgatory of grading endless, immature English ‘themes’” and propelled him “toward a career as one of the most popular storytellers of his time ”. Right after graduation he took a job reporting for the Boston American.
  
  wn.com/Ben_Ames_Williams
• Brooks Atkinson
  Justin Brooks Atkinson (November 28, 1894 – January 14, 1984) was an American theatre critic. He worked for The New York Times from 1925 to 1960. In his obituary, the Times called him "the most important reviewer of his time."
  Atkinson was born in Melrose, Massachusetts, where, as a boy, he printed his own newspaper (using movable type), and planned a career in journalism. He graduated from Harvard University in 1917, and worked at The Springfield Daily News and the Boston Evening Transcript, where he was assistant to the drama critic. In 1922, he became the editor of the New York Times Book Review, and in 1925 the drama critic.
  Atkinson quickly became known for his commitment to new kinds of theatre—he was one of the first critical admirers of Eugene O'Neill—for his interest in all kinds of drama, including off-Broadway productions, and for his wit. In 1928, he said of the new play The Front Page, "No one who has ground his heels in the grime of a police headquarters press room will complain that this argot misrepresents the gentlemen of the press." Atkinson had covered the police beat for the Evening Transcript.
  
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  Bruce Cabot
  Bruce Cabot (April 20, 1904 – May 3, 1972) was an American film actor, best remembered as Jack Driscoll in King Kong (1933). He is also known for his roles in films such as the sixth version of Last of the Mohicans, Fritz Lang's Fury and the western Dodge City. He was also known as one of "Wayne's Regulars", appearing in a number of John Wayne films beginning with Angel and the Badman.
  Cabot was born Etienne Pelissier Jacques de Bujac in Carlsbad, New Mexico, to French Army Colonel Etienne de Bujac and his wife Julia Armandine Graves, who died shortly after giving birth to him. Leaving the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee without graduating, Cabot worked at a many jobs, including as a sailor, an insurance salesman, oil worker, surveyor, prize fighter, sold cars, handled real estate and also worked a slaughterhouse. A meeting with a film magnate^[who?] started his screen career.
  Cabot appeared in nearly one hundred feature films. He made his debut in 1931 in Heroes of the Flames. He tested for the lead role of The Ringo Kid in John Ford's western Stagecoach (1939), but John Wayne got the part.
  
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  Carole Lombard
  Carole Lombard (October 6, 1908 – January 16, 1942) was an American actress. She is particularly noted for her comedic roles in the screwball comedies of the 1930s. She is listed as one of the American Film Institute's greatest stars of all time and was the highest-paid star in Hollywood in the late 1930s, earning around US$500,000 per year^{[citation needed]} (more than five times the salary of the US President). Lombard's career was cut short when she died at the age of 33 in a plane crash while returning from a World War II Bond tour.
  Queen of the 1930s screwball comedies, she personified the anxiety of a nervous age. Graham Greene praised the "heartbreaking and nostalgic melodies" of her faster-than-thought delivery. "Platinum blonde, with a heart-shaped face, delicate, impish features and a figure made to be swathed in silver lamé, she wriggled expressively through such classics of hysteria as Twentieth Century and My Man Godfrey."
  
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  Charles Grapewin
  Charley Ellsworth Grapewin (December 20, 1869 – February 2, 1956) was an American vaudeville performer and a stage and film actor, who portrayed Uncle Henry in MGM's The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Grandpa Joad in the film The Grapes of Wrath (1940).
  Born in Xenia, Ohio, Charley Ellsworth Grapewin ran away from home to be a circus acrobat which led him to work as an aerialist and trapeze artist in a traveling circus before turning to acting. He traveled all over the world with the famous P. T. Barnum circus.
  After this he went on and off of stage for the next thirty years starting with various stock companies and wrote stage plays as a vehicle for himself. His sole Broadway theatre credit was the short-lived play It's Up To You John Henry in 1905.
  Grapewin began in silent films at the turn of the century. His very first films were two "moving image shorts" made by Frederick S. Armitage and released in November 1900; Chimmie Hicks at the Races (also known as Above the Limit) and Chimmie Hicks and the Rum Omelet, both shot in September and October 1900 and released in November of that year. During his long career, Grapewin appeared in more than one hundred films, including The Good Earth, The Grapes of Wrath, Tobacco Road and also for what is probably his most well-remembered role as Uncle Henry in the MGM Technicolor extravaganza The Wizard of Oz, after which he had garnered a recurring role as Inspector Queen in the Ellery Queen film series of the early 1940s,.
  
  wn.com/Charles_Grapewin
• Clarence Brown
  Clarence Brown (May 10, 1890 – August 17, 1987) was an American film director.
  Born in Clinton, Massachusetts, to a cotton manufacturer, Brown moved to the South when he was 11. He attended Knoxville High School and the University of Tennessee, both in Knoxville, Tennessee, graduating from the university at the age of 19 with two degrees in engineering. An early fascination in automobiles led Brown to a job with the Stevens-Duryea Company, then to his own Brown Motor Car Company in Alabama. He later abandoned the car dealership after developing an interest in motion pictures around 1913. He was hired by the Peerless Studio at Fort Lee, New Jersey, and became an assistant to the French-born director Maurice Tourneur.
  After serving in World War I, Brown was given his first co-directing credit (with Tourneur) for The Great Redeemer (1920). Later that year, he directed a major portion of The Last of the Mohicans after Tourneur was injured in a fall.
  Brown moved to Universal in 1924, and then to MGM, where he stayed until the mid-1950s. At MGM he was one of the main directors of their female stars–he directed both Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo six times. Garbo called Brown her favorite director.
  
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  Clark Gable
  William Clark Gable (February 1, 1901 – November 16, 1960), known as Clark Gable, was an American film actor most famous for his role as Rhett Butler in the 1939 Civil War epic film Gone with the Wind, in which he starred with Vivien Leigh. His performance earned him his third nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor; he won for It Happened One Night (1934) and was also nominated for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). Later movies included Run Silent, Run Deep, a submarine war film, and his final film, The Misfits (1961), which paired Gable with Marilyn Monroe, also in her last screen appearance. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Gable seventh among the greatest male stars of all time. He was nicknamed 'The King of Hollywood.'
  Gable appeared opposite some of the most popular actresses of the time. Joan Crawford, who was his favorite actress to work with, was partnered with Gable in eight films, Myrna Loy worked with him seven times, and he was paired with Jean Harlow in six productions. He also starred with Lana Turner in four features, and with Norma Shearer and Ava Gardner in three each. In the mid-1930s, Gable was often named the top male movie star, and second only to the top box-office draw of all, Shirley Temple.
  
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  Clifton Webb
  Clifton Webb (November 19, 1889 – October 13, 1966) was an American actor, dancer, and singer known for his Oscar-nominated roles in such films as Laura, The Razor's Edge, and Sitting Pretty. In the theatrical world he was known for his appearances in the plays of Noël Coward, notably Blithe Spirit, as well as career on Broadway in a number of very successful musical revues.
  Originally called Webb Parmelee Hollenbeck, Webb was born in a rural part of Marion County, Indiana, which would, in 1906, become Beech Grove, a self-governing city entirely surrounded by Indianapolis. As a result, virtually all printed sources give the larger city as his place of birth. He was the only child of Jacob Grant Hollenbeck (1867 – May 2, 1939), the ticket-clerk son of a grocer from an Indiana farming family, and his wife, the former Mabel A. Parmelee (aka "Parmalee" or "Parmallee"; March 24, 1869 – October 17, 1960), the daughter of David Parmelee, a railroad conductor. The couple married in Kankakee, Illinois on January 18, 1888, and separated in 1891, shortly after their son's birth.
  
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  Cole Porter
  Cole Albert Porter (June 9, 1891 – October 15, 1964) was an American composer and songwriter. Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, he defied the wishes of his domineering grandfather and took up music as a profession. Classically trained, he was drawn towards musical theatre. After a slow start, he began to achieve success in the 1920s, and by the 1930s he was one of the major songwriters for the Broadway musical stage. Unlike most successful Broadway composers, Porter wrote both the lyrics and the music for his songs.
  After a serious horseback riding accident in 1937, Porter was left disabled and in constant pain, but he continued to work. His shows of the early 1940s did not contain the lasting hits of his best work of the 1920s and 30s, but in 1948 he made a triumphant comeback with his most successful musical, Kiss Me, Kate.
  Porter's other musicals include Fifty Million Frenchmen, DuBarry Was a Lady, Anything Goes and Can-Can, and his numerous hit songs include "Night and Day", "I Get a Kick out of You", "Well, Did You Evah!" and "I've Got You Under My Skin". He also composed scores for films from the 1930s to the 1950s. He was noted for his sophisticated, suggestive lyrics, clever rhymes and complex forms.
  
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  Cornel Wilde
  Cornel Wilde (October 13, 1912 – October 16, 1989) was an American actor and film director.
  Kornél Lajos Weisz was born in 1912 in Prievidza, Hungary (now Slovakia), although his year and place of birth are usually and inaccurately given as 1915 in New York City. His Hungarian Jewish parents were Vojtech Weisz (Americanized to Louis Bela Wilde) and Renée Mary Vid. He was named for his paternal grandfather, and upon arrival in the U.S. at age 7 in 1920, his name was Americanized to Cornelius Louis Wilde.
  A talented linguist and an astute mimic, he had an ear for languages which became apparent later in his acting career. Wilde attended the City College of New York as a pre-med student, completing the four-year course in three years and winning a scholarship to the Physicians and Surgeons College at Columbia University.
  He qualified for the United States fencing team prior to the 1936 Summer Olympic Games, but quit the team just prior to the games in order to take a role in the theater. In preparation for an acting career, he and his new wife Marjory Heinzen (later to be known as Patricia Knight) shaved years off their ages, three for him and five for her. As a result, most publicity records and subsequent sources wrongly indicate a 1915 birth for Wilde.
  
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  Dan Dailey
  Daniel James Dailey Jr. (December 14, 1915 – October 16, 1978) was an American dancer and actor.
  Born in New York City on December 14, 1915, to James J. and Helen Dailey, both born in New York City. He appeared in a minstrel show when very young, and appeared in vaudeville before his Broadway debut in 1937 in Babes in Arms. In 1940, he was signed by MGM to make movies and, although his past career had been in musicals, he was initially cast as a Nazi in The Mortal Storm and a mobster in The Get Away. However, the people at MGM realized their mistake quickly and cast him in a series of musical films.
  He served in the United States Army during World War II, was commissioned as an Army officer after graduation from Signal Corps Officer Candidate School at Fort Monmouth, NJ. He then returned Hollywood to more musicals. Beginning with Mother Wore Tights (1947) Dailey became the frequent and favorite co-star of movie legend Betty Grable. His performance in their film When My Baby Smiles at Me in 1948 garnered him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
  
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  Danny Kaye
  Danny Kaye (born David Daniel Kaminski; January 18, 1913 – March 3, 1987) was a celebrated American actor, singer, dancer, and comedian. His best known performances featured physical comedy, idiosyncratic pantomimes, and rapid-fire nonsense songs.
  Kaye starred in 17 movies, notably The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), The Inspector General (1949), Hans Christian Andersen (1952), and — perhaps his most accomplished performance — The Court Jester (1956). His films were extremely popular, especially his bravura performances of patter songs and children's favorites such as The Inch Worm and The Ugly Duckling. He was the first ambassador-at-large of UNICEF in 1954 and received the French Legion of Honor in 1986 for his many years of work with the organization.
  David Daniel Kaminski was born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn. Jacob and Clara Nemerovsky Kaminski and their two sons, Larry and Mac, left Ekaterinoslav two years before his birth; he was the only one of their sons born in the United States. He spent his early youth attending Public School 149 in East New York, Brooklyn, where he began entertaining his young classmates with songs and jokes, before moving to Thomas Jefferson High School, but he never graduated. His mother died when he was in his early teens. Clara enjoyed the impressions and humor of her youngest son and always had words of encouragement for them; her death was a great loss for young Danny.
  
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  Darryl F. Zanuck
  Darryl Francis Zanuck (September 5, 1902 – December 22, 1979) was an American producer, writer, actor, director and studio executive who played a major part in the Hollywood studio system as one of its longest survivors (the length of his career being rivalled only by that of Adolph Zukor). He earned three Academy Awards during his tenure.
  Zanuck was born in Wahoo, Nebraska, the son of Louise (Torpin) and Frank Zanuck, who owned and operated a hotel in Wahoo. Zanuck was of part Swiss descent and was raised a Protestant. At six, Zanuck and his mother moved to Los Angeles, where the better climate could improve her poor health. At eight, he found his first movie job as an extra, but his disapproving father recalled him to Nebraska.
  In 1918, despite being sixteen, he deceived a recruiter and joined the United States Army and served in France with the Nebraska National Guard. Returning to the U.S., he worked in many part-time jobs while he tried to find work as a writer. He managed to find work producing movie plots, selling his first story in 1922 to William Russell and his second to Irving Thalberg. Screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas, then story editor at Universal Pictures' New York office, stated that one of the stories Zanuck sent out to movie studios around this time was completely plagiarized from another author's work. Zanuck then worked for Mack Sennett and took that experience to Warner Bros. where he wrote stories for Rin Tin Tin and under a number of pseudonyms wrote over forty scripts from 1924–1929, including Old San Francisco (1927). He moved into management in 1929 and became head of production in 1931.
  
  wn.com/Darryl_F._Zanuck
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  Dean Martin
  Dean Martin (born Dino Paul Crocetti; June 7, 1917 – December 25, 1995) was an American singer, film actor, television star and comedian. Martin's hit singles included "Memories Are Made of This", "That's Amore", "Everybody Loves Somebody", "You're Nobody till Somebody Loves You", "Sway", "Volare" and "Ain't That a Kick in the Head?". Nicknamed the "King of Cool", he was one of the members of the "Rat Pack" and a major star in four areas of show business: concert stage/night clubs, recordings, motion pictures, and television.
  Martin was born in Steubenville, Ohio, to Italian parents, Gaetano and Angela Crocetti (née Barra). His father was from Montesilvano, Pescara, Abruzzo, Italy, and his mother was an Italian of part Neapolitan and part Sicilian ancestry. Martin was the younger of two sons. His brother was named Bill. Martin spoke only Italian until he started school. He attended Grant Elementary School in Steubenville, and took up the drums as a hobby as a teenager. He was the target of much ridicule for his broken English and ultimately dropped out of Steubenville High School in the 10th grade because he thought that he was smarter than his teachers. He delivered bootleg liquor, served as a speakeasy croupier, was a blackjack dealer, worked in a steel mill and boxed as welterweight. He grew up a neighbor to Jimmy the Greek.
  
  wn.com/Dean_Martin
• Delmer Daves
  Delmer Daves (July 24, 1904 – August 17, 1977) was an American screenwriter, director, and producer.
  Born in San Francisco, Delmer Daves first pursued a career as a lawyer. While attending Stanford University he became interested in the burgeoning film industry, first working as a prop boy on the Western The Covered Wagon (1923) and serving as a technical advisor on a number of films. After finishing his education in law, he continued his career in Hollywood.
  After moving to Hollywood in 1928, he began his career as a screenwriter, his first credit being the "talkie" comedy So This Is College released by MGM. Through the 1930s he made a name as a successful screenplay and story writer, while moonlighting as an actor in bit parts and uncredited roles. He penned the successful Dick Powell musicals Dames, Flirtation Walk, and Paging Miss Glory between 1934 and 1935. Daves' largest successes of the period, however, came with 1936's The Petrified Forest and Love Affair (1939). Almost twenty years later Leo McCarey, director of Love Affair, would helm the nearly identical An Affair to Remember (1957) using Daves' script.
  
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  Dinah Shore
  Dinah Shore (born Frances Rose Shore; February 29, 1916 – February 24, 1994) was an American singer, actress, and television personality. She reached the height of her popularity as a recording artist during the Big Band era of the 1940s and 1950s, but achieved even greater success a decade later, in television, mainly as hostess of a series of variety programs for Chevrolet.
  After failing singing auditions for the bands of Benny Goodman and both Jimmy Dorsey and his brother Tommy Dorsey, Shore struck out on her own to become the first singer of her era to achieve huge solo success. She had a string of 80 charted popular hits, lasting from 1940 into the late '50s, and after appearing in a handful of films went on to a four-decade career in American television, starring in her own music and variety shows in the '50s and '60s and hosting two talk shows in the '70s. TV Guide magazine ranked her at #16 on their list of the top fifty television stars of all time. Stylistically, Dinah Shore was compared to two singers who followed her in the mid-to-late '40s and early '50s, Doris Day and Patti Page.
  
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  Don Ameche
  Don Ameche (May 31, 1908 – December 6, 1993) was an Academy Award winning American actor with a career spanning almost sixty years.
  After touring in vaudeville, he starred in many film-biographies, including The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), causing the name Ameche to be used as the slang word for a telephone.
  He continued to appear on Broadway, as well as on radio and TV, where he was host and commentator for International Showtime, covering circus and ice-shows all over Europe. Ameche remained married to his wife Honore for fifty-four years, and they had six children.
  Ameche was born Dominic Felix Amici in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His mother, Barbara Etta (née Hertle), was of Scottish, Irish, and German descent, and his father, Felice Ameche, was an immigrant bartender from Italy, born in Montemonaco, Ascoli Piceno, Marche, Italy whose original surname was "Amici." He had three brothers, Umberto (Bert), James (Jim Ameche), and Louis and three sisters, Jane, Elizabeth and Catherine. Ameche attended Marquette University, Loras College and the University of Wisconsin, where his cousin Alan Ameche played football and won the Heisman Trophy in 1954. Ameche had gone to university to study law but found theatricals far more interesting and so decided on a stage career.
  
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  Don Murray (actor)
  Donald Patrick "Don" Murray (born July 31, 1929) is an American actor.
  Murray was born in Hollywood, California on July 31, 1929, the only child of Dennis Aloisius, a Broadway dance director and stage manager and Ethel Murray, a former Ziegfeld performer. He attended East Rockaway High School (class of 1947) in East Rockaway, New York where he played football and was on the track team. Murray was a member of the student government, glee club, and also joined the Alpha Phi Chapter of the Omega Gamma Delta Fraternity. Upon graduation from high school, he went on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. After graduating, he soon made his Broadway debut in the 1951 play The Rose Tattoo, as Jake Hunter. After taking a three-year break from acting, in order to assist orphans and war casualties during the Korean War, he returned from Europe to America in 1954 and to acting, by appearing alongside Mary Martin in the 1955 stage version of The Skin of Our Teeth. Upon seeing his performance in the play, director Joshua Logan decided to cast him in 20th Century Fox's film version of Bus Stop.
  
  wn.com/Don_Murray_(actor)
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  Donald O'Connor
  Donald David Dixon Ronald O’Connor (August 28, 1925 - September 27, 2003) was an American dancer, singer, and actor who came to fame in a series of movies in which he co-starred alternately with Gloria Jean, Peggy Ryan, and Francis the Talking Mule. He is best known today for his role as Gene Kelly's friend and colleague Cosmo Brown in Singin' in the Rain (1952).
  Though he considered Danville, Illinois to be his home town, O’Connor was born in St. Elizabeth Hospital in Chicago. His parents, Effie Irene (née Crane) and John Edward "Chuck" O'Connor, were vaudeville entertainers. His father's family was from County Cork, Ireland. When O'Connor was only a few years old, he and his sister Arlene were in a car crash outside a theater in Hartford, Connecticut; O'Connor survived, but his sister was killed. Several weeks later, his father died of a heart attack while dancing on stage in Brockton, Massachusetts. O'Connor at the time was being held in the arms of the theater manager Mr. Maurice Sims.
  
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  Ed Sullivan
  Edward Vincent "Ed" Sullivan (September 28, 1901 – October 13, 1974) was an American entertainment writer and television host, best known as the presenter of the TV variety show The Ed Sullivan Show. The show was broadcast from 1948 to 1971 (a total of 23 years), which made it one of the longest-running variety shows in U.S. broadcast history.
  In 1996, Ed Sullivan was ranked #50 on TV Guide's "50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time".
  Sullivan was born in New York City, New York, the son of Elizabeth F. (née Smith) and Peter Arthur Sullivan, a customs house employee. He was of Irish descent. A former boxer, Sullivan began his media work as a newspaper sportswriter for The New York Evening Graphic. When Walter Winchell, one of the original gossip columnists and the most powerful entertainment reporter of his day, left the newspaper for the Hearst syndicate, Sullivan took over as theatre columnist. His theatre column was later carried in The New York Daily News. His column, 'Little Old New York', concentrated on Broadway shows and gossip, as Winchell's had and, like Winchell, he also did show business news broadcasts on radio. Again echoing Winchell, Sullivan took on yet another medium in 1933 by writing and starring in the film Mr. Broadway, which has him guiding the audience around New York nightspots to meet entertainers and celebrities. Sullivan soon became a powerful starmaker in the entertainment world himself, becoming one of Winchell's main rivals, setting the El Morocco nightclub in New York as his unofficial headquarters against Winchell's seat of power at the nearby Stork Club. Sullivan continued writing for The News throughout his broadcasting career and his popularity long outlived that of Winchell.
  
  wn.com/Ed_Sullivan
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  Edmund Goulding
  Edmund Goulding (20 March 1891 – 24 December 1959) was a British film writer and director. As an actor early in his career he was one of the 'Ghosts' in the 1922 British made Paramount silent Three Live Ghosts alongside Norman Kerry and Cyril Chadwick. Also in the early 20s he wrote several screenplays for star Mae Murray and directed by her then husband Robert Z. Leonard. Goulding is best remembered for directing cultured dramas and such as Love (1927), Grand Hotel (1932) with Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford, Dark Victory (1939) with Bette Davis, and The Razor's Edge (1946) with Gene Tierney and Tyrone Power. He also directed the classic film noir Nightmare Alley (1947) with Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell, and the action drama The Dawn Patrol. He was also a successful songwriter, composer, and producer.
  Before moving to films, Goulding was an actor, playwright and director on the London stage.
  Interviewed about his Goulding biography Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory (2009), film historian Matthew Kennedy stated:
  
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  Edmund Purdom
  Edmund Anthony Cutlar Purdom (19 December 1926 – 1 January 2009) was a British actor.
  Purdom was born in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, England and educated at St. Augustine's Abbey School, Ramsgate, then by the Jesuits at St. Ignatius Grammar School and Welwyn Garden City Grammar School. He began his acting career in 1946 by joining the Northampton Repertory Company, appearing in productions which included Romeo and Juliet and Molière's The Imaginary Invalid. Followed by two years of military service where he joined the Army Pool of Artists. He then joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon.
  In 1951-52, Purdom appeared in small roles with the Laurence Olivier/Vivien Leigh company on Broadway in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra when his good looks brought him to the attention of Hollywood. His appearance in small roles in Titanic and Julius Caesar led to his being cast in the leading role opposite Ann Blyth in the MGM musical The Student Prince in 1954, a part originally intended for Mario Lanza, whose disagreement with director Curtis Bernhardt over the way a certain song was to be sung had led to his dismissal by MGM. (The film was subsequently directed by Richard Thorpe.) Purdom lip-synched to Lanza's singing voice.
  
  wn.com/Edmund_Purdom
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  Edna Best
  Edna Best (3 March 1900 – 18 September 1974) was a British actress. Born in Hove, Sussex, England, she was educated in Brighton and later studied dramatic acting under Miss Kate Rorke.^[who?] Best was known on the London stage before she entered films in 1921, having made her debut at the Grand Theatre, Southampton in Charley's Aunt in 1917. She also won a silver swimming cup as the lady swimming champion of Sussex.
  She is best remembered for her role as the mother in the original 1934 film version of Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. Among her other film credits are Intermezzo: A Love Story (1939), Swiss Family Robinson (1940), The Late George Apley and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (both 1947) and The Iron Curtain (1948).
  She received a nomination for an Emmy Award in 1957 for her role in This Happy Breed. Best had appeared on television as early as 1938, in a production of the play Love from a Stranger, adapted from the Agatha Christie short story Philomel Cottage by Frank Vosper. The Wednesday afternoon broadcast was aired live, not recorded, and could be seen only in London due to the limitations of the nascent technology.
  
  wn.com/Edna_Best
• Edward Dmytryk
  Edward Dmytryk (September 4, 1908 – July 1, 1999) was an American film director who was amongst the Hollywood Ten, a group of blacklisted film industry professionals who served time in prison for being in contempt of Congress during the McCarthy-era 'red scare'.
  Dmytryk was born in Grand Forks, British Columbia, Canada, the son of Ukrainian parents. He grew up in San Francisco when his family moved to the United States. After his mother died, his father, Michael Dmytryk, remarried. At the age of 31, Dmytryk became a naturalized citizen.
  Dmytryk made his directorial debut with The Hawk in 1935. His best known films from the pre-McCarthy period of his career were film noirs Crossfire, for which he received a Best Director Oscar nomination, and Murder, My Sweet, the latter an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely. In addition, he made two World War II films: Hitler's Children, the story of the Hitler youth and Back to Bataan starring John Wayne.
  
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  Ernst Lubitsch
  Ernst Lubitsch (January 28, 1892 – November 30, 1947) was a German Americanfilm director. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch."
  In 1947 he received an Honorary Academy Award for his distinguished contributions to the art of the motion picture, and he was nominated three times for Best Director.
  Lubitsch was born in Berlin, the son of Anna (née Lindenstaedt) and Simon Lubitsch (Russian: Любич), a tailor. His family was Ashkenazi Jewish, his father born in Grodno and his mother from Wriezen-on-the-Oder, outside Berlin. He turned his back on his father's tailoring business to enter the theater, and by 1911, he was a member of Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater. He made his film debut the following year as an actor, but he gradually abandoned acting to concentrate on directing.
  In 1918, he made his mark as a serious director with Die Augen der Mumie Ma (The Eyes of the Mummy), starring Pola Negri. Lubitsch alternated between escapist comedies and large-scale historical dramas, enjoying great international success with both. His reputation as a grand master of world cinema reached a new peak after the release of his spectacles Madame Du Barry (retitled Passion, 1919) and Anna Boleyn (Deception, 1920). Both of these films found American distributorship by early 1921. They, along with Lubitsch's Carmen (released as Gypsy Blood in the U.S. in 1921) were selected by The New York Times on its list of the 15 most important movies of 1921.
  
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  Franchot Tone
  Franchot Tone (February 27, 1905 – September 18, 1968) was an American stage, film, and television actor, star of Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and many other films through the 1960s. In the early 1960s Tone appeared in character roles on TV dramas like Bonanza, Wagon Train, The Twilight Zone, and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
  He was born as Stanislaus Pascal Franchot Tone in Niagara Falls, New York, the youngest son of Dr. Frank Jerome Tone, the wealthy president of the Carborundum Company, and his socially-prominent wife, Gertrude Van Vrancken Franchot. Tone was a distant relative of Wolfe Tone: his great-great-great-great-grandfather John was a first cousin of Peter Tone, whose eldest son was Theobald Wolfe Tone. Tone was of French Canadian, Irish, English and Basque ancestry.
  Tone attended The Hill School in Pottstown, PA and Cornell University, where he was President of the drama club and was elected to the Sphinx Head Society. He also joined Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. He gave up the family business to pursue an acting career in the theatre. After graduating, he moved to Greenwich Village, New York, and got his first major Broadway role in the 1929 Katharine Cornell production of The Age of Innocence.
  
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  Fredric March
  Fredric March (born Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel; August 31, 1897 – April 14, 1975) was an American stage and film actor. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1932 for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and in 1946 for The Best Years of Our Lives.
  March was born in Racine, Wisconsin, the son of Cora Brown (née Marcher), a schoolteacher, and John F. Bickel, a devout Presbyterian Church elder who worked in the wholesale hardware business. March attended the Winslow Elementary School (established in 1855), Racine High School, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi. He began a career as a banker, but an emergency appendectomy caused him to reevaluate his life, and in 1920 he began working as an extra in movies made in New York City, using a shortened form of his mother's maiden name, Marcher. He appeared on Broadway in 1926, and by the end of the decade signed a film contract with Paramount Pictures.
  March received an Oscar nomination in 1930 for The Royal Family of Broadway, in which he played a role based upon John Barrymore (which he had first played on stage in Los Angeles). He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1932 for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (tied with Wallace Beery for The Champ although March accrued one more vote than Beery), leading to a series of classic films based on stage hits and classic novels like Design for Living (1933) with Gary Cooper, Death Takes a Holiday (1934), Les Misérables (1935) with Charles Laughton, Anthony Adverse (1936) with Olivia de Havilland, and as the original Norman Maine in A Star is Born (1937) with Janet Gaynor, for which he received his third Oscar nomination.
  
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  Fritz Lang
  Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976) was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute. His most famous films are the groundbreaking Metropolis (the world's most expensive silent film at the time of its release) and M, made before he moved to the United States, his iconic precursor to the film noir genre.
  Lang was born in Vienna as the second son of Anton Lang (1860–1940), an architect and construction company manager, and his wife Pauline "Paula" Lang née Schlesinger (1864–1920). Fritz Lang himself was baptized on 28 December 1890 at the Schottenkirche in Vienna.
  Lang's parents were of Moravian^{[citation needed]} descent and practicing Roman Catholics. His mother was born Jewish, but had converted to Catholicism when Fritz was ten. His mother took this conversion seriously and was dedicated to raising Fritz as a Catholic. Lang never had an interest in his Jewish heritage and identified himself as Catholic. Although he was not a particularly devout Catholic, he "regularly used Catholic images and themes [in] his films".
  
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  Gene Tunney
  James Joseph "Gene" Tunney (May 25, 1897 – November 7, 1978) was an American professional boxer and the World Heavyweight Champion from 1926-1928 who defeated Jack Dempsey twice, first in 1926 and then in 1927. Tunney's successful title defense against Dempsey is one of the most famous bouts in boxing history and is known as The Long Count Fight. Tunney retired as an undefeated heavyweight after his victory over Tom Heeney in 1928.
  Mary Lydon from Culleen House, Gorthgarve, Kiltimagh, Ireland, emigrated to the United States after the Great Famine. She settled in New York City where she met John Tunney, also from Cill Aodain, Kiltimagh, County Mayo, Ireland. They married after a short courtship. The Tunneys had seven children; one son was killed in a homicide around 1920, another was a NYPD Detective from 1924 to 1951, dying in 1971, while Gene would become famous as a World Heavyweight Boxing Champion. Tunney fought some 68 official professional fights, losing only one, to Harry Greb, while fighting as a light heavyweight. He reported that he lost a second fight during World War I, a 10 round decision, to Tommy Loughran, as a Marine before he began his professional boxing career. Tunney was regarded as an extremely skillful boxer who excelled in defense. In addition to beating Dempsey, the most famous fighter of his era, Tunney defeated Tommy Gibbons, Georges Carpentier and many other fine boxers.
  
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• George Abbott
  George Francis Abbott (June 25, 1887 – January 31, 1995) was an American theater producer and director, playwright, screenwriter, and film director and producer whose career spanned more than nine decades.
  Abbott was born in Forestville, New York, and later moved to the town of Salamanca, which twice elected his father mayor. In 1898, his family moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he attended Kearney Military Academy. Within a few years, his family returned to New York, and he graduated from Hamburg High School in 1907. Four years later, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Rochester, where he wrote his first play, Perfectly Harmless, for the University Dramatic Club.
  Abbott then went to Harvard University, where he studied playwriting under George Pierce Baker. Under his tutelage, he wrote The Head of the Family, which was performed at the Harvard Dramatic Club in 1912. He then worked for a year as assistant stage manager at the Bijou Theatre in Boston, where his play The Man in the Manhole won a contest.
  
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  George Sanders
  George Henry Sanders (3 July 1906 – 25 April 1972) was a Russian-born English film and television actor, singer-songwriter, music composer, and author. His prominent English accent and baritone voice often led him to be cast as sophisticated but villainous characters. He is perhaps best known as Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Jack Favell in Rebecca (1940), and the malevolent tiger Shere Khan in The Jungle Book (1967). His career spanned more than 40 years.
  Sanders was born in Saint Petersburg, Imperial Russia, at number 6 Petrovski Ostrov. His English parents were Henry Sanders (1873–1961) and Margaret Sanders (1875–1967). Actor Tom Conway (1904–1967) was his elder brother. His younger sister, Margaret Sanders, was born in 1912. George was 11 when, in 1917, at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, the family went back to England. Like his brother, he attended Brighton College, a boys' independent school in Brighton, Sussex, then went on to Manchester Technical College. After graduation he worked at an advertising agency, where the company secretary, aspiring actress Greer Garson, suggested he take up a career in acting.
  
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  Ginger Rogers
  Ginger Rogers (July 16, 1911 – April 25, 1995) was an American actress, dancer, and singer who appeared in film, and on stage, radio, and television throughout much of the 20th century.
  During her long career, she made a total of 73 films, and was best known as Fred Astaire's romantic interest and dancing partner in a series of ten Hollywood musical films that revolutionized the genre. She achieved great success on her own in a variety of film roles and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Kitty Foyle (1940). She ranks #14 on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars list of actress screen legends.
  Rogers was born Virginia Katherine McMath in Independence, Missouri, the only child of William Eddins McMath, an electrical engineer, and his wife, Lela Emogene (née Owens; 1891–1977). Ginger's parents separated soon after her birth, and she and her mother went to live with her grandparents, Walter and Saphrona (née Ball) Owens, in nearby Kansas City. Rogers' parents fought over her custody. After her mother denied him visitation, her father reportedly absconded with his daughter twice. After her parents divorced, Rogers stayed with her grandparents while her mother wrote scripts for two years in Hollywood. Rogers was to remain close to her grandfather (much later, when she was a star in 1939, she bought him a home at 5115 Greenbush Avenue in Sherman Oaks, California so that he could be close to her while she was filming at the studios).^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Ginger_Rogers
• Glynis Johns
  Glynis Johns (born 5 October 1923) is a South African-born Welsh stage and film actress, dancer, pianist and singer (notably of "Send in the Clowns", which she originated in Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music and "Sister Suffragette" which was written for her for Walt Disney's musical motion picture, Mary Poppins written by the Sherman Brothers).
  Johns was born in Pretoria, South Africa, the daughter of Alys Maude (née Steele-Payne), a pianist, and Mervyn Johns (1899–1992), the British stage and film actor. Her roots are in West Wales, and she was born in Pretoria while her parents were performing on tour there. She attended Clifton High School in Bristol for a short time.
  Johns made her first stage appearance in Buckie's Bears as a child ballerina at the Garrick Theatre in 1935. She made her 1938 film debut in the movie version of Winifred Holtby's novel, South Riding. In 1944, she appeared with her father in Halfway House, and in 1948 starred as a mermaid in Miranda (Johns later reprised the role in a 1954 sequel, Mad About Men). In 1952, she co-starred in the movie version of Arnold Bennett's novel The Card.
  
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  Grace Kelly
  Grace Patricia Kelly (November 12, 1929 – September 14, 1982) was an American actress who, in April 1956, married Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, to become Princess consort of Monaco, styled as Her Serene Highness The Princess of Monaco, and commonly referred to as Princess Grace.
  After embarking on an acting career in 1950, at the age of 20, Grace Kelly appeared in New York City theatrical productions as well as in more than forty episodes of live drama productions broadcast during the early 1950s Golden Age of Television. In October 1953, with the release of Mogambo, she became a movie star, a status confirmed in 1954 with a Golden Globe Award and Academy Award nomination as well as leading roles in five films, including The Country Girl, in which she gave a deglamorized, Academy Award-winning performance. She retired from acting at 26 to enter upon her duties in Monaco. She and Prince Rainier had three children: Caroline, Albert, and Stéphanie. She also retained her American roots, maintaining dual US and Monégasque citizenships.
  
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  Gregory Peck
  Eldred Gregory Peck (April 5, 1916 – June 12, 2003) was an American actor.
  One of the world's most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s, Peck continued to play important roles well into the 1980s. His notable performances include that of Atticus Finch in the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird, for which he won an Academy Award. President Lyndon Johnson honored Peck with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 for his lifetime humanitarian efforts. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Peck among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking at #12. He was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1983.
  Eldred Gregory Peck was born in La Jolla, California, the son of Missouri-born Bernice Mae "Bunny" (née Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, who was a chemist and pharmacist. Peck's father was of Irish (maternal) heritage and English (paternal) heritage, and his mother was of Scots (paternal) and English (maternal) ancestry. Peck's father was a Catholic and his mother converted upon marrying his father. Peck's Irish-born paternal grandmother, Catherine Ashe, was related to Thomas Ashe, who took part in the Easter Rising fewer than three weeks after Peck's birth and died while on hunger strike in 1917. Peck's parents divorced by the time he was six years old and he spent the next few years being raised by his maternal grandmother.
  
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  Henry Fonda
  Henry Jaynes Fonda (May 16, 1905 – August 12, 1982) was an American film and stage actor.
  Fonda made his mark early as a Broadway actor. He also appeared in 1938 in plays performed in White Plains, New York, with Joan Tompkins. He made his Hollywood debut in 1935, and his career gained momentum after his Academy Award-nominated performance as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, a 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about an Oklahoma family who moved west during the Dust Bowl. Throughout six decades in Hollywood, Fonda cultivated a strong, appealing screen image in such classics as The Ox-Bow Incident, Mister Roberts and 12 Angry Men. Later, Fonda moved both toward darker epics as Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and lighter roles in family comedies like Yours, Mine and Ours with Lucille Ball.
  Fonda was the patriarch of a family of famous actors, including daughter Jane Fonda, son Peter Fonda, granddaughter Bridget Fonda, and grandson Troy Garity. His family and close friends called him "Hank". In 1999, he was named the sixth-Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute.
  
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• Henry Hathaway
  Henry Hathaway (March 13, 1898 – February 11, 1985) was an American film director and producer. He is best known as a director of Westerns, especially starring Randolph Scott and John Wayne.
  Born Henri Leonard de Fiennes in Sacramento, California, he was the son of an American actor and stage manager, Rhody Hathaway (1868–1944), and a Hungarian-born Belgian aristocrat, Marquise Lillie de Fiennes (1876–1938), who acted under the name Jean Hathaway. This branch of the de Fiennes family came to America in the 19th century on behalf of King Leopold I of Belgium and was part of the negotiations with the Belgian Prime Minister, Charles Rogier (1800–1885), to secure the 1862 treaty between Belgium and what was then known as the Sandwich Islands and is now called Hawaii.
  In 1925, Hathaway began working in silent films as an assistant to notable directors such as Victor Fleming and Josef von Sternberg and made the transition to sound with them. He was the assistant director to Fred Niblo in the 1925 version of Ben-Hur starring Francis X. Bushman and Ramon Novarro. During the remainder of the 1920s, Hathaway learned his craft as an assistant, helping direct future stars such as Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Adolphe Menjou, Fay Wray, Walter Huston, Clara Bow, and Noah Beery.
  
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• Herman Shumlin
  Herman Shumlin (December 6, 1898, Atwood, Colorado – June 4, 1979, New York) was a prolific Broadway theatrical director and theatrical producer beginning in 1927 with the play Celebrity and continuing through 1974 with a short run of As You Like It, notably with an all male cast. He was also the director of two movies, most famously Watch on the Rhine, which he first directed and produced on Broadway 1941/1943, and then directed for the screen and released in 1943.
  During a Broadway career which lasted 47 years, he produced and/or directed 45 different productions, including three separate productions of The Corn is Green (1940, 1943, and 1950). Other well-known productions include The Little Foxes (1939), Watch on the Rhine (1941), and Inherit the Wind (1955), which ran for 806 performances, and was famously first made into a movie in 1960, starring Spencer Tracy, Frederic March, and Gene Kelly, and remade three more times since.
  
  
  
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  Howard Hughes
  Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. (December 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976) was an American business magnate, investor, aviator, engineer, film producer, director, and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest people in the world. He gained prominence from the late 1920s as a maverick film producer, making big-budget and often controversial films like The Racket (1928), Hell's Angels (1930), Scarface (1932), and The Outlaw (1943). Hughes was one of the most influential aviators in history; he set multiple world air-speed records, built the Hughes H-1 Racer and H-4 "Hercules" (better known to history as the "Spruce Goose" aircraft), and acquired and expanded Trans World Airlines which would later on merge with American Airlines. Hughes is also remembered for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle in later life, caused in part by a worsening obsessive–compulsive disorder and chronic pain. His legacy is maintained through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
  Hughes' birthplace is recorded as either Humble or Houston, Texas. The date is also uncertain, though Hughes claimed his birthday was Christmas Eve. A 1941 affidavit birth certificate of Hughes signed by his aunt Annette Gano Lummis and Estelle Boughton Sharp states he was born on December 24, 1905, in Harris County, Texas. However, his baptismal record of October 7, 1906, in the parish register of St. John's Episcopal Church, in Keokuk, Iowa, has his birth listed as September 24, 1905, without reference to the place of birth.
  
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  Humphrey Bogart
  Humphrey DeForest Bogart (December 25, 1899 – January 14, 1957) was an American actor. He is widely regarded as a cultural icon. The American Film Institute ranked Bogart as the greatest male star in the history of American cinema.
  After trying various jobs, Bogart began acting in 1921 and became a regular in Broadway productions in the 1920s and 1930s. When the stock market crash of 1929 reduced the demand for plays, Bogart turned to film. His first great success was as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936), and this led to a period of typecasting as a gangster with films such as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and B-movies like The Return of Doctor X (1939).
  Bogart's breakthrough as a leading man came in 1941, with High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon. The next year, his performance in Casablanca raised him to the peak of his profession and, at the same time, cemented his trademark film persona, that of the hard-boiled cynic who ultimately shows his noble side. Other successes followed, including To Have and Have Not (1944); The Big Sleep (1946); Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948), with his wife Lauren Bacall; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948); In a Lonely Place (1950); The African Queen (1951), for which he won his only Academy Award; Sabrina (1954); and The Caine Mutiny (1954). His last movie was The Harder They Fall (1956). During a film career of almost thirty years, he appeared in 75 feature films.
  
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  Irish people
  The Irish people (Irish: Muintir na hÉireann or na hÉireannaigh; Ulster-Scots: Airisch or Airish fowk) are an ethnic group who originate in Ireland, an island in northwestern Europe. Ireland has been populated for around 9,000 years (according to archaeological studies, see Prehistoric Ireland). The Irish people's earliest ancestors are recorded in legends – they are claimed to be descended from groups such as the Nemedians, Fomorians, Fir Bolg, Tuatha Dé Danann and the Milesians.Lebor Gabála Érenn, a book of Irish mythology tells that Tuatha Dé Dananns were Scythian descendants.
  The main groups that interacted with the Irish in the Middle Ages include the Picts, Scots, and the Vikings. Due to this contact, Icelanders are noted for having some Irish descent. The Anglo-Norman invasion of the High Middle Ages, the English plantations and the subsequent English rule of the country introduced the Normans and Flemish into Ireland. Welsh, Picts, Bretons, and small parties of Gauls and even Anglo-Saxons are known in Ireland from much earlier times.
  
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• Irving Cummings
  Irving Camisky (October 9, 1888 – April 18, 1959) was an American movie actor, director, producer and writer.
  Cummings was born in New York City, New York. His father of screenwriter, Irving Cummings, Jr.
  Cummings started his acting career in his late teens on Broadway stage in his late teens, and appeared with the legendary Lillian Russell. He entered into movies in 1909 and quickly became a popular leading man. Few of the films he made as an actor are easily available, except for Buster Keaton's first feature film, The Saphead (1920), in which Cummings plays a crooked stockbroker and Fred Niblo's film Sex (1920), one of the first films to depict a new phenomenon in 1920s America, the Flapper. Both films are readily available on home video, as well as The Round-Up (1920), a Western drama starring Roscoe Arbuckle (with the famous tagline "Nobody loves a fat man") and featuring Wallace Beery. Around that time, he started to direct action movies and occasional comedies.
  In 1934, Cummings directed Grand Canary, and in 1929, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his direction of In Old Arizona.
  
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  Irving Pichel
  Irving Pichel (June 24, 1891 – July 13, 1954) was an American actor and film director. He married Violette Wilson, daughter of Jackson Stitt Wilson, a Methodist minister and Socialist mayor of Berkeley, California. Her sister was actress Viola Barry. The Pichels had three sons, Pichel Wilson, Julian Irving, and Marlowe Agnew.
  Pichel's first work in musical theatre was as a technical director for the Bohemian Club's summer pageants at the Bohemian Grove. He was soon loaned out to Wallace Rice as the main narrator in Rice's Primavera, the Masque of Santa Barbara in 1920. Pichel achieved significant notoriety as the title character in the landmark Pasadena Playhouse production of Eugene O'Neill's play Lazarus Laughed in 1927.
  Among his most notable screen roles were the servant Sandor in Dracula's Daughter, and Fagin in the 1933 adaptation of Oliver Twist. He directed several films, including The Miracle of the Bells, Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, and Destination Moon. His voice was heard as narrator in How Green Was My Valley, and as the voice of Jesus in the film The Great Commandment.
  
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• Jacques Tourneur
  Jacques Tourneur (November 12, 1904–December 19, 1977) was a French-American film director.
  Born in Paris, France, he was the son of film director Maurice Tourneur. At age 10, Jacques moved to the United States with his father. He started a career in cinema while still attending high school as an extra and later as a script clerk in various silent films. Both Maurice and Jacques returned to France after his father worked on the film The Mysterious Island in 1925. Tourneur died in 1977 in Bergerac, Dordogne, France.
  Jacques began work as an editor and assistant director. He made his debut as a director on French short film Tout ca ne vaut pas l'amour in 1931.
  Jacques Tourneur went back to Hollywood in 1934 where he had a contract with MGM Studios. While working as the second unit director on the film A Tale of Two Cities he met film producer Val Lewton. Tourneur made his feature debut as director in the 1939 film They All Come Out in 1939. After Tourneur was dropped by MGM in 1941, he was picked up by Lewton to film several acclaimed low-budget horror films for RKO Studios including Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie. Cat People was considered to be a B movie and didn’t have a very big budget, yet the style of lighting and cinematography gave it an edge that has been imitated countless times.Tourneur was promoted to the A-list at RKO, directing films including Out of the Past and Berlin Express. In the 1950s, Tourneur became a freelance director, filming various genre films including The Flame and the Arrow, Stars In My Crown and Night of the Demon. His last films both starred Vincent Price, with The Comedy of Terrors (1963) and War-Gods of the Deep (1965) for American International Pictures.
  
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  Jean Negulesco
  Jean Negulesco (born Jean Negulescu; 26 February 1900 – 18 July 1993) was a Romanian-born American film director and screenwriter.
  Born in Craiova, he attended Carol I High School. In 1915 he moved to Vienna, in 1919 to Bucharest, where he worked as a painter, before becoming a stage decorator in Paris. In 1927 he went to New York City for an exhibition of his paintings, and settled there.
  In 1934 he entered the film industry, first as a sketch artist, then as an assistant producer, second unit director and in the late 1930s he became a director and screenwriter. He made a reputation at Warner Brothers by directing short subjects, particularly a series of band shorts featuring unusual camera angles and dramatic use of shadows and silhouettes.
  Negulesco's first feature film as director was Singapore Woman (1941). In 1948 he was nominated for an Academy Award for Directing for Johnny Belinda. In 1955, he won the BAFTA Award for Best Film for How to Marry a Millionaire. His 1959 movie, The Best of Everything, was on Entertainment Weekly's Top 50 Cult Films of All-Time list.
  
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  Jean Simmons
  Jean Merilyn Simmons, OBE (January 31, 1929 – January 22, 2010) was an English actress. She appeared predominantly in films, beginning with those films made in Great Britain during and after World War II – she was one of J. Arthur Rank's 'well-spoken young starlets' – followed mainly by Hollywood films from 1950.
  Simmons was born in Lower Holloway, London, England, to Charles Simmons and his wife, Winifred (Loveland) Simmons. Jean was the youngest of four children with siblings Edna, Harold and Lorna. She began acting at the age of 14. During the war, the Simmons family was evacuated to Winscombe in Somerset. Her father, a physical education teacher (who had represented Great Britain in the 1912 Summer Olympics), taught briefly at Sidcot School, and sometime during this period Simmons followed her elder sister on to the village stage and sang songs such as "Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow Wow". Returning to London and just enrolled at the Aida Foster School of Dance, she was spotted by the director Val Guest, who cast her in the Margaret Lockwood vehicle Give Us the Moon. Small roles in several other films followed including the high profile Caesar and Cleopatra, produced by Gabriel Pascal. Pascal saw potential in Simmons and in 1945 he signed her to a seven year contract. Prior to moving to Hollywood, she played the young Estella in David Lean's version of Great Expectations (1946) and Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948), for which she received her first Oscar nomination. It was the experience of working on Great Expectations that caused her to pursue an acting career more seriously:
  
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  Jerry Lewis
  Jerry Lewis (born March 16, 1926) is an American comedian, actor, singer, film producer, screenwriter and film director. He is best known for his slapstick humor in film, television, stage and radio. He was originally paired up with Dean Martin in 1946, forming the famed comedy team of Martin and Lewis.
  In addition to the duo's popular nightclub work, they starred in a successful series of comedy films for Paramount Pictures. Lewis is also known for his charity fund-raising telethons and position as national chairman for the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA).
  Lewis has won several awards for lifetime achievements from The American Comedy Awards, The Golden Camera, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and The Venice Film Festival, and he has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
  In 2005, he received the Governors Award of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Board of Governors, which is the highest Emmy Award presented. On February 22, 2009, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Lewis the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
  
  wn.com/Jerry_Lewis
• Joe Schenck
  Joseph Michael Schenck ( /ˈskɛŋk/; December 25, 1878 – October 22, 1961) was a pioneer executive who played a key role in the development of the United States film industry.
  Born in Rybinsk, Yaroslavl Oblast, Russia to a Jewish household, he and his family-including younger brother Nicholas- emigrated to New York City in 1893, he and Nicholas eventually got into the entertainment business operating concessions at New York's Fort George Amusement Park. Recognizing the potential, in 1909 the Schenck brothers purchased Palisades Amusement Park and after that became participants in the fledgling motion picture industry as partners with Marcus Loew, operating a chain of movie theaters. Through his involvement in the film business, in 1916 Joseph Schenck met and married Norma Talmadge, one of the top young stars with Vitagraph Studios.
  After parting ways with his brother, Joseph Schenck moved to the West Coast where the future of the film industry seemed to lie. Within a few years the brilliant and ambitious Schenck was made the first president of the new United Artists. In 1933 he partnered with Darryl F. Zanuck to create 20th Century Pictures that merged with Fox Film Corporation in 1935. As chairman of the new 20th Century Fox he was one of the most powerful and influential people in the film business. During his tenure as chairman, he sought to establish equal pay rates for animals used in filming and more representative speaking roles for women and African Americans.
  
  wn.com/Joe_Schenck
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  John F. Kennedy
  John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy  pronunciation (help·info) (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963.
  After military service as commander of the Motor Torpedo Boats PT-109 and PT-59 during World War II in the South Pacific, Kennedy represented Massachusetts's 11th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953 as a Democrat. Thereafter, he served in the U.S. Senate from 1953 until 1960. Kennedy defeated then Vice President and Republican candidate Richard Nixon in the 1960 U.S. presidential election. He was the youngest elected to the office, at the age of 43, the second-youngest President (after Theodore Roosevelt), and the first person born in the 20th century to serve as president. Kennedy is the only Catholic president, and is the only president to have won a Pulitzer Prize. Events during his presidency included the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the building of the Berlin Wall, the Space Race, the African American Civil Rights Movement, and early stages of the Vietnam War.
  
  wn.com/John_F._Kennedy
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  John Ford
  John Ford (February 1, 1894 – August 31, 1973) was an American film director. He was famous for both his Westerns such as Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and adaptations of such classic 20th-century American novels as The Grapes of Wrath. His four Academy Awards for Best Director (1935, 1940, 1941, 1952) is a record, and one of those films, How Green Was My Valley, also won Best Picture.
  In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Ford directed more than 140 films (although nearly all of his silent films are now lost) and he is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers of his generation. Ford's films and personality were held in high regard by his colleagues, with Ingmar Bergman and Orson Welles among those who have named him as one of the greatest directors of all time.
  In particular, Ford was a pioneer of location shooting and the long shot which frames his characters against a vast, harsh and rugged natural terrain.
  Ford was born John Martin "Jack" Feeney (though he later often gave his given names as Sean Aloysius, sometimes with surname O'Feeny or O'Fearna; an Irish language equivalent of Feeney) in Cape Elizabeth, Maine to John Augustine Feeney and Barbara "Abbey" Curran, on February 1, 1894 (though he occasionally said 1895 and that date is erroneously inscribed on his tombstone). His father, John Augustine, was born in Spiddal,County Galway, Ireland in 1854. Barbara Curran had been born in the Aran Islands, in the town of Kilronan on the island of Inishmore (Inis Mór). John A. Feeney's grandmother, Barbara Morris, was said to be a member of a local (impoverished) gentry family, the Morrises of Spiddal, headed at present by Lord Killanin.
  
  wn.com/John_Ford
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  John Hodiak
  John Hodiak (April 16, 1914 – October 19, 1955) was an American actor who worked in radio and film.
  He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Walter Hodiak (October 25, 1888 – August 21, 1962) and Anna Pogorzelec (February 28, 1888 – October 17, 1971). He was of Ukrainian and Polish descent. He grew up in Hamtramck, Michigan.
  Hodiak had his first theatrical experience at age eleven, acting in Ukrainian and Russian plays at the Ukrainian Catholic Church. From the moment he first appeared on the stage, he resolved to become an actor. He was not even swayed when as a third baseman on his local high school baseball team, he was offered a contract with a St. Louis Cardinals farm club. He turned the offer down.
  When Hodiak first tried out for a radio acting job, he was turned down because of his accent. He became a caddy at a Detroit golf course, then worked at a Chevrolet automobile factory – and practiced his diction. When he conquered the diction hurdle, he became a radio actor and moved to Chicago. There he created the role of the comic strip character Li'l Abner on radio.
  
  wn.com/John_Hodiak
• John Lund
  John Lund (6 February 1911 - 10 May 1992) was an American film actor who is probably best remembered for his role in the film A Foreign Affair (1948), directed by Billy Wilder.
  John Lund's father was a Norwegian immigrant and glassblower in Rochester, NY. Lund did not finish high school, and he tried several businesses before settling on advertising in the 1930s. While working for an advertising agency, he was asked by a friend to appear in an industrial show for the 1939 World's Fair. Before moving to New York City he had appeared in several amateur productions in Rochester. He began acting professionally by appearing on Broadway in William Shakespeare's As You Like It. He wrote the book and lyrics for Broadway's New Faces of 1943. It was his appearance in the play The Hasty Heart (1945) that got him recognized by Hollywood and led to a long-term film contract with Paramount Pictures.
  His first film was To Each His Own (1946) with Olivia de Havilland for Paramount, in which he played dual roles. A Foreign Affair (1948), in which Lund played romantic lead to both Marlene Dietrich and Jean Arthur, was highly acclaimed but failed to make him a major star. In 1949, in My Friend Irma, Lund is Al, boyfriend of Irma (Marie Wilson). My Friend Irma, was the film debut of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
  
  wn.com/John_Lund
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  Johnny Carson
  John William "Johnny" Carson (October 23, 1925 – January 23, 2005) was an American television host and comedian, known for thirty years as host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962–1992). Carson received six Emmy Awards, the Governor Award, and a 1985 Peabody Award. He was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1987. Johnny Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992 and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1993.
  Although his show was already successful by the end of the 1960s, during the 1970s Carson became an American icon and remained so until his retirement in 1992. He adopted a casual, conversational approach with extensive interaction with guests, an approach pioneered by Arthur Godfrey and previous Tonight Show hosts Steve Allen and Jack Paar. Late night hosts David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Craig Ferguson, and Jimmy Fallon have all cited Carson's influence on their late-night talk shows, which resemble his in format and tone.
  Carson was born in Corning, Iowa, in the year 1925, to Homer Lloyd "Kit" Carson, a power company manager, and Ruth Hook Carson, who was of Irish descent. He grew up in the nearby towns of Avoca, Clarinda, and Red Oak in southwest Iowa before moving to Norfolk, Nebraska, at the age of eight. At the age of twelve, Carson found a book on magic at a friend's house and immediately purchased a mail-order magician's kit. He debuted as "The Great Carsoni" at fourteen and was paid $3; many other performances at local picnics and country fairs followed.
  
  wn.com/Johnny_Carson
• Josef von Sternberg
  Josef von Sternberg (29 May 1894 – 22 December 1969) — born Jonas Sternberg — was an Austrian-American film director. He is particularly noted for his distinctive mise en scène, use of lighting and soft lens, and seven-film collaboration with actress Marlene Dietrich.
  Von Sternberg was born Jonas Sternberg to a Jewish family in Vienna. When he was two years old the family moved to America, and he spent most of his childhood in New York City and Lynbrook, New York. His father, Moses (Morris) Sternberg, a former soldier in the army of Austria-Hungary, twice tried to make a home for the family in the US before finding employment as a lace worker. (The false aristocratic title 'von' was added in 1925 by actor/co-producer Elliott Dexter during the production of By Divine Right, supposedly to "even up" the credits as they appeared on screen. Sternberg did not protest, since it invited comparison with his hero, Erich von Stroheim.^{[citation needed]}).
  Von Sternberg dropped out of Jamaica High School and worked as an errand boy in a lace warehouse. He later obtained a job cleaning and repairing movie prints, and by about 1915 found himself working for William A. Brady at the World Film Company at Fort Lee, New Jersey, mentored by Emile Chautard and other French-speaking directors and cinematographers at World. Chautard hired him as assistant director in 1919 for a version of The Mystery of the Yellow Room, and Sternberg made his directorial debut in 1925 with The Salvation Hunters, called by some the first American independent film.^[who?]
  
  wn.com/Josef_von_Sternberg
• Joseph L. Mankiewicz
  Joseph Leo Mankiewicz (February 11, 1909 – February 5, 1993) was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. Mankiewicz had a long Hollywood career and is best known as the writer-director of All About Eve (1950), which was nominated for 14 Academy Awards and won six. He was brother to screenwriter and drama critic Herman J. Mankiewicz who also won an Oscar for co-writing Citizen Kane (1941).
  Joseph Mankiewicz was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania to Franz Mankiewicz (died 1941) and Johanna Blumenau, Jewish immigrants from Germany. He had a sister, Erna Mankiewicz (1901–1979), and a brother, Herman J. Mankiewicz, who became a screenwriter.
  At age four, Mankiewicz moved with his family to New York City where he graduated in 1924 from Stuyvesant High School. In 1928, he obtained a bachelor's degree from Columbia University. For a time he worked in Berlin, Germany, as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune newspaper before entering the motion picture business.
  Comfortable in a variety of genres and able to elicit career performances from actors and actresses alike, Joseph L. Mankiewicz combined ironic, sophisticated scripts with a precise, sometimes stylised mise en scène. Mankiewicz worked for seventeen years as a screenwriter for Paramount and as a producer for MGM before getting a chance to direct at Twentieth Century-Fox. Over six years he made 11 films for Fox, reaching a peak in 1950 and 1951 when he won consecutive Academy Awards for Screenplay and Direction for both A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve.
  
  wn.com/Joseph_L._Mankiewicz
• Joseph Schenck
  Joseph Michael Schenck ( /ˈskɛŋk/; December 25, 1878 – October 22, 1961) was a pioneer executive who played a key role in the development of the United States film industry.
  Born in Rybinsk, Yaroslavl Oblast, Russia to a Jewish household, he and his family-including younger brother Nicholas- emigrated to New York City in 1893, he and Nicholas eventually got into the entertainment business operating concessions at New York's Fort George Amusement Park. Recognizing the potential, in 1909 the Schenck brothers purchased Palisades Amusement Park and after that became participants in the fledgling motion picture industry as partners with Marcus Loew, operating a chain of movie theaters. Through his involvement in the film business, in 1916 Joseph Schenck met and married Norma Talmadge, one of the top young stars with Vitagraph Studios.
  After parting ways with his brother, Joseph Schenck moved to the West Coast where the future of the film industry seemed to lie. Within a few years the brilliant and ambitious Schenck was made the first president of the new United Artists. In 1933 he partnered with Darryl F. Zanuck to create 20th Century Pictures that merged with Fox Film Corporation in 1935. As chairman of the new 20th Century Fox he was one of the most powerful and influential people in the film business. During his tenure as chairman, he sought to establish equal pay rates for animals used in filming and more representative speaking roles for women and African Americans.
  
  wn.com/Joseph_Schenck
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  José Ferrer
  José Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cintrón (January 8, 1912 – January 26, 1992), best known as José Ferrer, was a Puerto Rican actor, as well as a theater and film director. He was the first Puerto Rican, as well as the first Hispanic actor to win an Academy Award. Jose Ferrer donated his Academy Award to the University of Puerto Rico as a tribute to his roots. The prolific and distinguished thespian also won numerous Tony Awards: In 1947 he won a Tony Award for his theatrical performance of Cyrano de Bergerac, and in 1952 Ferrer won the Distinguished Dramatic Actor Award for The Shrike, plus the Outstanding Director Award for The Shrike, The Fourposter, and Stalag 17. Jose Ferrer's contributions to American theatre were recognized in 1981 when he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Further honors came in 1985 when he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
  Ferrer was born in the Santurce, Puerto Rico, the son of Maria Providencia Cintron and Rafael Ferrer, an attorney and writer. He studied in the Swiss boarding school Institut Le Rosey. In 1933, he graduated from Princeton University, where he wrote a senior thesis "French Naturalism and Pardo Bazán"; he was also a member of the Princeton Triangle Club.
  
  wn.com/José_Ferrer
• Jules Dassin
  Julius "Jules" Dassin (18 December 1911 – 31 March 2008) was an American film director, with Jewish-Russian origins. He was a subject of the Hollywood blacklist in the McCarthy era, and subsequently moved to France, where he revived his career.
  One of eight children of Berthe Vogel and Samuel Dassin, a Russian-Jewish barber in Middletown, Connecticut, Dassin grew up in Harlem and went to Morris High School in the Bronx. He joined the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and left it after the Hitler–Stalin Pact in 1939. He started as a Yiddish actor with the ARTEF (Yiddish Proletarian Theater) company in New York. He collaborated on a film with Jack Skurnick that was incomplete because of Skurnick's early death.
  In 1937 he married Beatrice Launer, with whom he had three children. In May 1955 he met Melina Mercouri at the Cannes Film Festival. At about the same time, he discovered the literary works of Nikos Kazantzakis. These two elements created a bond with Greece. He divorced Launer in 1962 and married Mercouri in 1966. The couple had to leave Greece after the colonels' coup in 1967. In 1970, they were accused of having financed an attempt to overthrow the dictatorship, but the charges were quickly dropped.^{[citation needed]} Dassin and Mercouri lived in New York City during the 1970s; then, when the general's dictatorship in Greece fell in 1974, they returned to Greece and lived out their lives there. While Mercouri became involved with politics and won a parliamentary seat, Dassin stayed with movie-making in Europe but found time in the U.S. to make another movie, the racial drama Up Tight!, which would be his last American film.^{[citation needed]}
  
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  Leo Genn
  Leo John Genn (9 August 1905 – 26 January 1978) was a British stage and film actor.
  He was born at 144 Kyverdale Road, Stamford Hill, Hackney, London, England to a Jewish family. His father, Woolfe (William) Genn, was a jewellery salesman and the maiden name of his mother, Rachel, was Asserson.
  Genn attended the City of London School and studied law at Cambridge, qualifying as a barrister in 1928. He ceased practising as a lawyer soon after the Second World War. On 14 May 1933, Genn married Marguerite van Praag, a casting director at Ealing Studios. They had no children.
  Genn's theatrical debut was in 1930 in A Marriage has been Disarranged at the Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne and then at the Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, London. Actor/manager Leon M. Lion had engaged him simultaneously as an actor and attorney. In 1933 he appeared in Ballerina by Rodney Ackland. Between September 1934 and March 1936, Leo Genn was a member of the Old Vic Company where he appeared in many productions of Shakespeare. In 1937 he was Horatio in Tyrone Guthrie's production of Hamlet, with Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, in Elsinore Denmark. In 1938, Genn appeared in the theatrical hit, The Flashing Stream by Charles Langbridge Morgan and went with the show to America and Broadway. His many other stage performances included Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest, 12 Angry Men, The Devil's Advocate, Maugham's The Sacred Flame. In 1959 Genn gave a reading in Chichester Cathedral.
  
  wn.com/Leo_Genn
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  Lindsay Wagner
  Lindsay Jean Wagner (born June 22, 1949) is an American actress. She is probably best known for her portrayal of Jaime Sommers in the 1970s television series The Bionic Woman (for which she won an Emmy award), though she has maintained a lengthy career in a variety of other film and television productions since.
  Wagner was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Marilyn Louise (née Thrasher) and William Nowels Wagner. When she was seven years old, her parents divorced and her mother moved with her to the northeast Los Angeles neighborhood of Eagle Rock, near Pasadena. Another move with her mother and stepfather (Ted Ball) brought her to Portland, Oregon, where she attended David Douglas High School and appeared in a number of school plays. She studied at the University of Oregon.
  Wagner worked as a model in Los Angeles, and gained some television experience by appearing as a hostess in Playboy After Dark. In 1971, she signed a contract with Universal Studios and worked as a contract player in various Universal productions. Her prime-time network television debut was in the series Adam-12, and she went on to appear in a dozen other Universal shows including Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law, The F.B.I., Sarge, and Night Gallery. Between 1971-75, she appeared in five episodes of Universal's Marcus Welby, M.D., and two episodes of The Rockford Files. In 1973, Wagner branched into film roles when Universal cast her in Two People (Wagner's first feature film and first lead role). She also starred in the film The Paper Chase (for Twentieth Century Fox) the same year.
  
  wn.com/Lindsay_Wagner
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  Martin Scorsese
  Martin Charles Scorsese ( /skɔrˈsɛsɛ/; born November 17, 1942) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation. He is a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema, and has won Academy Award, Palme d'Or, Emmys, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and DGA Awards.
  Scorsese's body of work addresses such themes as Italian American identity, Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption,machismo, modern crime, and violence. Scorsese is hailed as one of the most significant and influential filmmakers of all time, directing landmark films such as Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Goodfellas (1990) – all of which he collaborated on with actor and close friend Robert De Niro. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed (2006), having been nominated a previous five times.
  
  wn.com/Martin_Scorsese
• Michael Curtiz
  Michael Curtiz (December 24, 1886 – April 10, 1962) was an Academy award winning Hungarian-American film director. He had early credits as Mihály Kertész and Michael Kertész. He directed more than fifty films in Europe and more than one hundred in the United States, many of them cinema classics, including The Adventures of Robin Hood, Captain Blood, Dodge City, The Sea Hawk, Angels with Dirty Faces, Casablanca, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and White Christmas. He thrived in the heyday of the Warner Bros. studio in the 1930s and '40s.
  He was less successful from the late 1940s onwards, when he attempted to move from studio direction into production and freelance work, but he continued working until shortly before his death.
  Curtiz was born Kertész Kaminer Manó to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary (then Austria-Hungary). He claimed to have been born December 24, 1886. Both the date and the year are open to doubt: he was fond of telling tall stories about his early years, including that he had run away from home to join the circus and that he had been a member of the Hungarian fencing team at the 1912 Olympic Games, but he seems to have had a conventional middle-class upbringing. He studied at Markoszy University and the Royal Academy of Theater and Art, Budapest, before beginning his career as an actor and director as Mihály Kertész at the National Hungarian Theater in 1912.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Curtiz
• Michelle Vogel
  Michelle Vogel is an Australian-born film historian and author. Vogel has written biographies on Gene Tierney, Marjorie Main and Olive Thomas. She has also written two books on Joan Crawford.
  
  
  
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  Mike Douglas
  Mike Douglas (August 11, 1925 – August 11, 2006) was an American "Big Band" era singer, entertainer, and television talk show host.
  Douglas was born Michael Delaney Dowd, Jr., in Chicago, Illinois, and began singing as a choirboy. By his teens he was working as a singer on a Lake Michigan dinner cruise ship. After serving briefly in the United States Navy near the end of World War II and as a "staff singer" for WMAQ-TV in Chicago, he moved to Los Angeles. He was on the Ginny Simms radio show. Then, he became a vocalist in the big band of Kay Kyser, with whom he was featured on two notable hits, "Ole [or Old] Buttermilk Sky" in 1946 and "The Old Lamplighter" the following year. Kyser was responsible for giving him his show business name, and he remained part of Kyser's band until Kyser retired from show business in 1951. In 1950, he provided the singing voice of Prince Charming in Walt Disney's Cinderella. In 1950s Douglas, living in Burbank, California, tried to keep his singing career going, working as house singer for a nightclub and going on the road to stay busy. He preferred not to switch to rock and roll, which limited his opportunities as big band music was declining in popularity. In the leanest years, he and his wife survived by successfully "flipping" their Los Angeles homes.
  
  wn.com/Mike_Douglas
• Mitchell Leisen
  Mitchell Leisen (b. October 6, 1898, Menominee, Michigan–d. October 28, 1972, Los Angeles) was an American director, art director, and costume designer.
  He entered the film industry in the 1920s, beginning in the art and costume departments. He directed his first film in 1933 with Cradle Song and became known for his keen sense of aesthetics in the glossy Hollywood melodramas and screwball comedies he turned out.
  His best known films include the Alberto Casella adaptation Death Takes a Holiday and Murder at the Vanities, a musical mystery story (both 1934), as well as Midnight (1939) and Hold Back the Dawn (1941), both scripted by Billy Wilder. Easy Living (1937), written by Preston Sturges and starring Jean Arthur, was another hit for the director, who also directed Remember the Night (1940), the last film written by Sturges before he started directing his scripts as well. The films Lady in the Dark (1944), To Each His Own (1946), and No Man of Her Own (1950) were later successes. Also Charles Brackett's comedy The Mating Season (1951) starring Gene Tierney, Miriam Hopkins and Thelma Ritter was an updated version of Leisen's earlier screwball comedies of the 1930s, and was also his last big movie success.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Mitchell_Leisen
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  Noël Coward
  Sir Noël Peirce Coward (16 December 1899 – 26 March 1973) was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".
  Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy in London as a child, making his professional stage début at the age of eleven. As a teenager he was introduced into the high society in which most of his plays would be set. Coward achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit, have remained in the regular theatre repertoire. He composed hundreds of songs, in addition to well over a dozen musical theatre works (including the operetta Bitter Sweet and comic revues), poetry, several volumes of short stories, the novel Pomp and Circumstance, and a three-volume autobiography. Coward's stage and film acting and directing career spanned six decades, during which he starred in many of his own works.
  
  wn.com/Noël_Coward
• Nunnally Johnson
  Nunnally Hunter Johnson (December 5, 1897—March 25, 1977) was an American filmmaker who wrote, produced, and directed motion pictures.
  He began his career as a journalist, writing for the Columbus Enquirer Sun, the Savannah Press, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and the New York Herald Tribune. He also wrote short stories and a collection of these, There Ought To Be a Law, was published in 1930.
  Johnson's first connection with film work was the sale of screen rights to one of his stories in 1927. Johnson asked his editor if he could write film criticism articles in 1932. When this request was denied, he decided to relocate to Hollywood and work directly in the film industry.
  Quickly finding work as a scriptwriter, Johnson was hired fulltime as a writer by 20th Century-Fox in 1935. He soon began producing films as well and co-founded International Pictures in 1943 with William Goetz. Johnson also directed several films in the 1950s, including two starring Gregory Peck.
  Johnson was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Screenplay in 1940 for The Grapes of Wrath and the Directors Guild of America Best Directors Award in 1956 for The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
  
  wn.com/Nunnally_Johnson
• Oleg Cassini
  Oleg Cassini (11 April 1913 – 17 March 2006) was born a Count and is a French-born American fashion designer. Cassini dressed numerous stars creating some of the most memorable moments in international fashion and film. With his designs for Jacqueline Kennedy he garnered admiration and even awe, for American fashion design.
  Oleg Cassini’s designs for the First Lady, ‘The Jackie Look’ are recognized as being the "single biggest fashion influence in history" by film costume designer, Edith Head. Cassini's contemporary designs such as the A-line, Sheath and the Empire Strapless continue to remain influential and predominant today.
  His passions including sports and Native American culture fueled his work with freshness and imagination, creating innovative looks fueled by his very personal feeling that: "To be well dressed is a little like being in love."
  He was born in Paris as Oleg Cassini Loiewski, the elder son of Countess Marguerite Cassini and her husband, Count Alexander Loiewski. His father was a Russian diplomat, and his maternal grandfather, Arthur Paul Nicholas Cassini, Marquis de Capuzzuchi di Bologna, Count Cassini, was the Russian ambassador to the United States during the administrations of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. In 1918, the violence of the Russian Revolution caused the family to flee for their lives, leaving behind their wealth, lands, homes, nationality and a long lineage which traced back to astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini. Cassini recounts seeing his cousin shot in front of him during this time. The family arrived in Denmark, under the Ambassadorial station of Cassini's father, then, to Switzerland. The Greek Royal family invited the Cassini family to Greece. Cassini recounts that on the way to Greece, the train stops in Italy, where newspapers headline the revolution in Greece. The family remained in Italy, settling in Florence.
  
  wn.com/Oleg_Cassini
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  Otto Preminger
  Otto Ludwig Preminger (5 December 1905 – 23 April 1986) was an Austro–Hungarian-American theatre and film director.
  After moving from the theatre to Hollywood, he directed over 35 feature films in a five-decade career. He rose to prominence for stylish film noir mysteries such as Laura (1944) and Fallen Angel (1945). In the 1950s and 1960s, he directed a number of high-profile adaptations of popular novels and stage works. Several of these pushed the boundaries of censorship by dealing with topics which were then taboo in Hollywood, such as drug addiction (The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955), rape (Anatomy of a Murder, 1959) and homosexuality (Advise & Consent, 1962). He was twice nominated for the Best Director Academy Award. He also had a few acting roles.
  Preminger was born in 1905 in Wiznitz (Vyzhnytsia), a town west of Czernowitz, northern Bukovyna, in today's Ukraine, then part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire, into the Jewish family of Markus and Josefa Preminger. Preminger's father was born in 1877 in Galicia, at a time when it was part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire. As an Attorney General of Austria–Hungary, Markus was a proud public prosecutor on the cusp of an extraordinary career defending the interests of the Emperor Franz Josef. The couple provided a stable home life for Preminger and his brother Ingo.
  
  wn.com/Otto_Preminger
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  Paul Muni
  Paul Muni (born Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund; 22 September 1895 – 25 August 1967) was an Austrian-born American stage and film actor. During the 1930s, he was considered one of the most prestigious actors at Warner Brothers studios, and one of the rare actors who was given the privilege of choosing which parts he wanted.
  His acting quality, usually playing a powerful character, such as Scarface, was partly a result of his intense preparation for his parts, often immersing himself in study of the real character's traits and mannerisms. He was also highly skilled in using makeup techniques, a talent he learned from his parents, who were also actors, and from his early years on stage with the Yiddish Theater, in New York. At the age of 12, he played the stage role of an 80-year-old man; in one of his films, Seven Faces, he played seven different characters.
  He was nominated six times for an Oscar, winning once as Best Actor in The Story of Louis Pasteur.
  Muni was born to a Jewish family in Lemberg, Galicia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Lviv, Ukraine (formerly Lwów, Poland). His family emigrated to the United States in 1902.
  
  wn.com/Paul_Muni
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  Preston Foster
  Preston Foster (August 24, 1900 – July 14, 1970) was an American stage and film actor, and singer. Foster entered films in 1929 after appearing as a Broadway stage actor. He was appearing in Broadway plays as late as October 1931 when he acted in a play titled Two Seconds starring Edward J. Pawley. Some of his notable films include: Doctor X (1932), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Annie Oakley (1935), The Last Days of Pompeii (also 1935), The Informer (1935) (as the head of the organization), and My Friend Flicka (1943).
  He starred on the television drama, Waterfront (1954–1955), playing the role of Captain John Herrick. Foster has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He was sometimes credited in movies as Preston S. Foster. His first wife was stage actress Gertrude Warren (1926–1945; divorced). He had one daughter, Stephanie. He was married to his second wife, actress Sheila Darcy, from 1946 until his death.
  During World War II while serving with the United States Coast Guard, he rose to the rank of Captain, Temporary Reserve. He eventually held the honorary rank of Commodore in the U.S. Coast Guard.
  
  wn.com/Preston_Foster
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  Prince Aly Khan
  Prince Ali Salman Aga Khan (June 13, 1911 – May 12, 1960), known as Aly Khan was a son of Aga Khan III, the head of the Ismaili Muslims, and the father of Aga Khan IV. A socialite, racehorse owner and jockey, he was the third husband of actress Rita Hayworth. After being passed over for succession as Aga Khan, he served as Pakistan's representative to the United Nations, where he became a vice president of the General Assembly.
  His first name was typically spelled Aly in the press. The titles of prince and princess, which are claimed by children of the Aga Khan by virtue of their descent from Shah Fath Ali Shah of the Persian Qajar dynasty, were recognized as courtesy titles by the British government in 1938.
  Born in Turin, Italy to a father of an Iranian origin (Aga Khan III), who was born in Karachi (then under British colonial rule), and Italian mother. He was the younger son and only surviving child of the Aga Khan III and Cleope Teresa "Ginetta" Magliano, a dancer with the Ballet Opera of Monte Carlo. He had two brothers: Prince Giuseppe Mahdi Aga Khan (who died in 1911) and, by his father's third marriage, Sadruddin Aga Khan.
  
  wn.com/Prince_Aly_Khan
• 
  Ray Milland
  Ray Milland (3 January 1907 – 10 March 1986) was a Welsh actor and director. His screen career ran from 1929 to 1985, and he is best remembered for his Academy Award–winning portrayal of an alcoholic writer in The Lost Weekend (1945), a sophisticated leading man opposite a corrupt John Wayne in Reap the Wild Wind (1942), the murder-plotting husband in Dial M for Murder (1954), and as Oliver Barrett III in Love Story (1970).
  Milland was born Alfred Reginald Jones (not Reginald Alfred John Truscott-Jones as has often been stated). His birth was registered in the March Quarter of 1907 in Neath, Wales, and he was the son of Elizabeth Annie (née Truscott) and Alfred Jones. In the 1911 census the family were living at 66 Coronation Road, Mount Pleasant, Neath, Wales. Of his parents, Milland wrote in his 1974 autobiography Wide-Eyed in Babylon, "My father was not a cruel or harsh man. Just a very quiet one. I think he was an incurable romantic and consequently a little afraid of his emotions and perhaps ashamed of them... he had been a young hussar in the Boer War and had been present at the relief of Mafeking. He never held long conversations with anyone, except perhaps with me, possibly because I was the only other male in our family. The household consisted of my mother, a rather flighty and coquettish woman much concerned with propriety and what the neighbours thought.."
  
  wn.com/Ray_Milland
• 
  Rex Harrison
  Sir Reginald Carey "Rex" Harrison (5 March 1908 – 2 June 1990) was an English actor of stage and screen. One of Harrison's best remembered film roles was that of Professor Henry Higgins in the stage and film versions of My Fair Lady. The role earned him a Tony Award, a Golden Globe Award and Best Actor Oscar.
  Harrison was born in Huyton, Lancashire, and educated at Liverpool College. After a bout of childhood measles, Harrison lost most of the sight in his left eye, which on one occasion caused some on-stage difficulty. He first appeared on the stage in 1924 in Liverpool. Harrison's acting career was interrupted during World War II while serving in the Royal Air Force, reaching the rank of Flight Lieutenant. He acted in various stage productions until 11 May 1990. He acted in the West End of London when he was young, appearing in the Terence Rattigan play French Without Tears, which proved to be his breakthrough role.
  
  wn.com/Rex_Harrison
• Richard Conte
  Richard Conte (born Nicholas Peter Conte; March 24, 1910 – April 15, 1975) was an American actor. He appeared in numerous films from the 1940s through 1970s, including I'll Cry Tomorrow and The Godfather.
  Richard Conte was born Nicholas Peter Conte on March 24, 1910, in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of Italian-Americans Julia (Fina), a seamstress, and Pasquale Conte, a barber.
  Conte held a variety of jobs before becoming a professional actor, including truck driver, Wall Street clerk and singing waiter at a Connecticut resort. In 1935, he was discovered by actors Elia Kazan and John Garfield during his job at the Connecticut resort, which led to Conte finding stage work. He eventually earned a scholarship to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, where he became a standout actor.
  He made his Broadway debut late in Moon Over Mulberry Street in 1939, and went on to be featured in other plays, including Night Music and Walk Into My Parlor. That led to his first film performance in 1939, Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence, in which he was billed as Nicholas Conte. His career started to thrive during the Second World War, when many Hollywood actors were away in the military. In 1942 Conte signed a long-term contract with 20th Century Fox. He then changed his name to Richard Conte. His first Fox film was Guadalcanal Diary (1943). During the World War II years, Conte played mostly soldiers in war dramas, including A Walk in the Sun (1945).
  
  wn.com/Richard_Conte
• 
  Richard Nixon
  Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913 – April 22, 1994) was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961.
  Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California. After completing his undergraduate work at Whittier College, he graduated from Duke University School of Law in 1937, and returned to California to practice law. He and his wife, Pat Nixon, moved to Washington to work for the federal government in 1942. He subsequently served in the United States Navy during World War II. Nixon was elected to the House of Representatives in 1946 and to the Senate in 1950. His pursuit of the Hiss Case established his reputation as a leading anti-communist, and elevated him to national prominence. He was the running mate of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican Party presidential nominee in the 1952 election. Nixon served for eight years as vice president. He waged an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1960, narrowly losing to John F. Kennedy, and lost a race for Governor of California in 1962. In 1968, he ran again for the presidency and was elected.
  
  wn.com/Richard_Nixon
• Richard Watts, Jr.
  Richard Watts, Jr. (1898–1981) was an American theatre critic.
  Born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, Watts was educated at Columbia University. He began his writing career as the film critic for the New York Herald Tribune before assuming the post of the newspaper's drama critic in 1936.
  After spending World War II in China as a war correspondent, Watts became the theatre critic for the New York Post, a position he held until a few years prior to his death from cardiac arrest. For the Post he also wrote a regular column entitled "Random Notes on This and That."
  
  wn.com/Richard_Watts,_Jr.
• 
  Ronald Reagan
  Ronald Wilson Reagan ( /ˈrɒnəld ˈwɪlsən ˈreɪɡən/; February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was the 40th President of the United States, serving from 1981 to 1989. Prior to that, he was the 33rd Governor of California from 1967 to 1975 and a radio, film and television actor.
  Born in Tampico, Illinois and raised in Dixon, Reagan was educated at Eureka College, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and sociology. After his graduation, Reagan moved first to Iowa to work as a radio broadcaster and then in to Los Angeles in 1937 where he began a career as an actor, first in films and later television. Some of his most notable films include Knute Rockne, All American, Kings Row, and Bedtime for Bonzo. Reagan served as president of the Screen Actors Guild, and later as a spokesman for General Electric (GE); his start in politics occurred during his work for GE. Originally a member of the Democratic Party, his positions began shifting rightward in the late 1950s, and he switched to the Republican Party in 1962. After delivering a rousing speech in support of Barry Goldwater's presidential candidacy in 1964, he was persuaded to seek the California governorship, winning two years later and again in 1970. He was defeated in his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 as well as 1976, but won both the nomination and general election in 1980, defeating incumbent Jimmy Carter.
  
  wn.com/Ronald_Reagan
• 
  Rory Calhoun
  Rory Calhoun (August 8, 1922 – April 28, 1999) was an American television and film actor, screenwriter and producer, best known for his roles in Westerns, in which he was always standing and walking.
  Born Francis Timothy McCown in Los Angeles, California, Calhoun spent his early years in Santa Cruz, California. The son of a professional gambler, he was of Irish and English ancestry. He was only nine months old when his father died; Calhoun's mother remarried, and he occasionally went by Frank Durgin, using the last name of his stepfather. At age thirteen, he stole a revolver, for which he was sent to the California Youth Authority's Preston School of Industry reformatory at Ione, California. He escaped while in the adjustment center (jail within the jail). After robbing several jewelry stores, he stole a car and drove it across state lines. This made it a federal offense, and when he was recaptured, he was sentenced to three years in the penitentiary at Springfield, Missouri. After finishing his sentence, he was transferred to San Quentin prison on other charges. He remained there until he was paroled shortly before his twenty-first birthday.
  
  wn.com/Rory_Calhoun
• 
  Rouben Mamoulian
  Rouben Zachary Mamoulian (pronounced: roo-BEN ma-mool-YAN; October 8, 1897 – December 4, 1987) was an Armenian-American film and theatre director.
  Mamoulian was born in Tbilisi, Georgia (ruled at that time by imperial Russia) to an Armenian family. His mother, Virginia (née Kalantarian), was a director of the Armenian theater, and his father, Zachary Mamoulian, was a bank president. Mamoulian relocated to England and started directing plays in London in 1922. He was brought to America the next year by Vladimir Rosing to teach at the Eastman School of Music and was involved in directing opera and theatre.
  In 1925, Mamoulian was head of the School of Drama, where Martha Graham was also working at the time. Among other performances, together they produced a short two-color film called The Flute of Krishna, featuring Eastman students. Mamoulian left Eastman shortly thereafter and Graham chose to leave also, even though she was asked to stay on. In 1930, Mamoulian became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
  
  wn.com/Rouben_Mamoulian
• Sobey Martin
  Sobey Martin (27 June 1909 – 27 July 1978) was an American director of television and short films, mainly in the 1950s and 1960s. Martin directed the film Four Nights of the Full Moon (Spanish: Las cuatro noches de la luna llena) (1963), starring an international ensemble cast led by Gene Tierney. However, he is probably best remembered for his prolific work on the Irwin Allen TV series Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Land of the Giants.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Sobey_Martin
• 
  Spencer Tracy
  Spencer Bonaventure Tracy (April 5, 1900 – June 10, 1967) was an American actor. Respected for his natural style and versatility, Tracy was one of the major stars of Hollywood's Golden Age. In a screen career that spanned 37 years, he was nominated for nine Academy Awards for Best Actor—a record he holds with Laurence Olivier—of which he won two.
  Tracy discovered his talent for acting while a student at Ripon College, and subsequently gained a scholarship for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He spent seven years in the theatre, working in a succession of stock companies and intermittently on Broadway. Tracy's breakthrough came in 1930, when his lead performance in The Last Mile caught the attention of Hollywood. After a successful film debut in Up the River, Tracy was signed to a contract with Fox Film Corporation. His five years with Fox were unremarkable, and he remained largely unknown to audiences after 25 films. In 1935, Tracy joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Hollywood's most prestigious studio. His career flourished with a series of hit films, and in 1937 and 1938 he won consecutive Oscars for Captains Courageous and Boys Town. By the 1940s, Tracy was one of the studio's top stars. In 1942 he appeared with Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year, beginning a popular partnership that produced nine movies over 25 years.
  
  wn.com/Spencer_Tracy
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  Thelma Ritter
  Thelma Ritter (February 14, 1902 — February 5, 1969) was an American actress. She typically played working class characters and was noted for her distinctive voice, with a strong Brooklyn accent. Ritter received six Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress.
  Ritter was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1902. After appearing in high school plays and stock companies, she trained as an actress at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She established a stage career but took a hiatus to raise her two children by her husband, Joseph Moran, an actor turned advertising executive.
  Ritter did stock theater and radio shows early in her career, without much impact. Ritter's first movie role was in Miracle on 34th Street (1947). She made a memorable impression in a brief uncredited part, as a frustrated mother unable to find the toy that Kris Kringle has promised to her son. Her second role, in writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's A Letter to Three Wives (1949), also left a mark, although Ritter was again uncredited.
  
  wn.com/Thelma_Ritter
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  Van Heflin
  Emmett Evan "Van" Heflin, Jr. (December 13, 1910 – July 23, 1971) was an American film and theater actor. He played mostly character parts over the course of his film career, but during the 1940s had a string of roles as a leading man. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Johnny Eager (1942).
  Heflin was born in Walters, Oklahoma, the son of Fanny Bleecker (née Shippey) and Dr. Emmett Evan Heflin, a dentist. He was of Irish and French ancestry. Heflin's sister was Daytime Emmy-nominated actress Frances Heflin. Heflin attended Classen High School in Oklahoma City and the University of Oklahoma, where he was a member of Phi Delta Theta fraternity.
  Heflin began his acting career on Broadway in the early 1930s before being signed to a contract by RKO Radio Pictures. He made his film debut in A Woman Rebels (1936), opposite Katharine Hepburn. He was signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and was initially cast in supporting roles in films such as Santa Fe Trail (1940), and Johnny Eager (1942), winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the latter performance.
  
  wn.com/Van_Heflin
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  Van Johnson
  Van Johnson (August 25, 1916 – December 12, 2008) was an American film and television actor and dancer who was a major star at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios during and after World War II.
  Johnson was the embodiment of the "boy-next-door wholesomeness (that) made him a popular Hollywood star in the '40s and '50s," playing "the red-haired, freckle-faced soldier, sailor or bomber pilot who used to live down the street" in MGM movies during the war years with such films as 30 Seconds over Tokyo, A Guy Named Joe and The Caine Mutiny. Johnson made occasional World War II movies through the end of the 1960s, and he played a military officer in one of his final feature films, in 1992. At the time of his death in December 2008, he was one of the last surviving matinee idols of Hollywood's "golden age."
  Johnson was born Charles Van Dell Johnson in Newport, Rhode Island; the only child of Loretta (née Snyder), a homemaker, and Charles E. Johnson, a plumber and later real-estate salesman. His father was born in Sweden and came to the United States as a young child), and his mother had German-American Pennsylvania Dutch ethnicity. His mother, an alcoholic, left the family when her son was a child; Johnson's relationship with his father was chilly.
  
  wn.com/Van_Johnson
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  Victor Mature
  Victor John Mature (January 29, 1913 – August 4, 1999) was an American stage, film and television actor.
  Mature was born in Louisville, Kentucky. His father, Marcello Gelindo Maturi, later Marcellus George Mature, was an Italian-speaking immigrant from the town Pinzolo, in the Italian part of the former County of Tyrol (now Trentino in Italy, at that time Austrian-Hungarian Empire); he was a cutler. His mother, Clara P. (Ackley), was Kentucky-born and of Swiss heritage. An older brother, Marcellus Paul Mature, died at 11 in 1918 from osteomyelitis. Victor Mature was educated at parochial schools, the Kentucky Military Institute and the Spencerian Business School. He briefly sold candy and operated a restaurant before moving to California.
  Discovered while on stage at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, his first leading role was as a fur-clad caveman in One Million B.C. (1940), after which he joined 20th Century Fox to star opposite actresses such as Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth.
  In July 1942 Mature attempted to enlist in the U.S. Navy but was rejected for color blindness. He enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard after taking a different eye test the same day. He was assigned to the USCGC Storis, which was doing Greenland patrol work. After 14 months aboard the Storis, Mature was promoted to the rate of Chief Boatswain's Mate. In 1944 he did a series of War Bond tours and acted in morale shows. He assisted Coast Guard recruiting efforts by being a featured player in the musical revue "Tars and Spars" which opened in Miami, Florida in April 1944 and toured the United States for the next year. In May 1945 Mature was reassigned to the Coast Guard manned troop transport USS Admiral H. T. Mayo which was involved in transferring troops to the Pacific Theater. Mature was honorably discharged from the Coast Guard in November 1945 and he resumed his acting career.
  
  wn.com/Victor_Mature
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  Vincent Price
  Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. (May 27, 1911 – October 25, 1993) was an American actor, well known for his distinctive voice and serio-comic performances in a series of horror films made in the latter part of his career.
  Price was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Marguerite Cobb (née Wilcox) and Vincent Leonard Price, Sr., who was the president of the National Candy Company. His grandfather, Vincent Clarence Price, invented "Dr. Price's Baking Powder," the first cream of tartar baking powder, and secured the family's fortune.
  Price attended St. Louis Country Day School. He was further educated at Yale in art history and fine art. He was a member of the Courtauld Institute, London. He became interested in the theatre during the 1930s, appearing professionally on stage for the first time in 1935.
  He made his film debut in 1938 with Service de Luxe and established himself in the film Laura (1944), opposite Gene Tierney, directed by Otto Preminger. He also played Joseph Smith, Jr. in the movie Brigham Young (1940) and William Gibbs McAdoo in Wilson (1944) as well as a pretentious priest in The Keys of the Kingdom (1944).
  
  wn.com/Vincent_Price
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  W. Somerset Maugham
  William Somerset Maugham (/ˈmɔːm/ MAWM), CH (25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was an English playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s.
  Maugham's father Robert Ormond Maugham was an English lawyer who handled the legal affairs of the British embassy in Paris, France. Since French law declared that all children born on French soil could be conscripted for military service, his father arranged for Maugham to be born at the embassy, technically on British soil. His grandfather, another Robert, had also been a prominent lawyer and co-founder of the English Law Society. It was taken for granted that Maugham and his brothers would follow in their footsteps. His elder brother Viscount Maugham enjoyed a distinguished legal career and served as Lord Chancellor from 1938 to 1939.
  Maugham's mother Edith Mary (née Snell) had tuberculosis, a condition for which her doctor prescribed childbirth. She had Maugham several years after the last of his three older brothers; they were already enrolled in boarding school by the time he was three. The youngest, he was effectively raised as an only child.
  
  wn.com/W._Somerset_Maugham
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  Walter Huston
  Walter Thomas Huston ( /ˈwɔːltər ˈhjuːstən/; April 5, 1883 – April 7, 1950) was a Canadian-born American actor. He was the father of actor and director John Huston and the grandfather of actress Anjelica Huston and actor Danny Huston.
  Huston was born in York County, Ontario, the son of Elizabeth (née McGibbon) and Robert Moore Huston, a provincial farmer who founded a construction company. He was of Scottish and Irish descent.
  Huston began his Broadway career in 1924. Once talkies began in Hollywood, he achieved fame in character roles. His first major role was in 1929's The Virginian with Gary Cooper. He appeared in the Broadway theatrical adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's novel Dodsworth in 1934 and the play's film version two years later.
  Huston remained busy throughout the 1930s and 1940s, both on stage and screen (becoming one of America's most distinguished actors); he performed "September Song" in the original Broadway production of Knickerbocker Holiday in 1938 (his grandaughter Anjelica Huston sang it on the May 7, 2012 episode of the NBC TV series "Smash"). Among his films are Abraham Lincoln (1930), Rain (1932), Gabriel Over the White House (1933), The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and Mission to Moscow (1943), a pro-Soviet World War II propaganda film as Ambassador Joseph E. Davies. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1948 for his role in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was directed by his son, John Huston. His last film was The Furies in 1950 with Barbara Stanwyck.
  
  wn.com/Walter_Huston
• Walter Lang
  Walter Lang (August 10, 1896 – February 7, 1972) was an American film director.
  Walter Lang was born in Memphis, Tennessee. As a young man he went to New York City where he found clerical work at a film production company. The business piqued his artistic instincts and he began learning the various facets of filmmaking and eventually worked as an assistant director. However, Lang also had ambitions to be a painter and left the United States for a time to join the great gathering of artists and writers in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, France. Things did not work out as Lang hoped and he eventually returned home and to the film business.
  In 1926, Walter Lang directed his first silent film, The Red Kimona. In the mid 1930s, he was hired by 20th Century Fox where, as a director, he "painted" a number of the spectacular colorful musicals for which Fox Studios became famous for producing during the 1940s. One of Lang's most recognized films is his 1956 epic The King and I for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Directing.
  
  wn.com/Walter_Lang
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  Walter Pidgeon
  Walter Davis Pidgeon (September 23, 1897 – September 25, 1984) was a Canadian actor, who starred in many motion pictures, including Mrs. Miniver, The Bad and the Beautiful, Forbidden Planet, Advise & Consent, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Funny Girl and Harry in Your Pocket.
  Born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Pidgeon was the son of Hannah (née Sanborn), a homemaker, and Caleb Burpee Pidgeon, a merchant who owned a men's clothing store. Pidgeon attended local schools, followed by the University of New Brunswick, where he studied law and drama. His university education was interrupted by World War I, and he enlisted in the 65th Battery, Royal Canadian Field Artillery. Pidgeon never saw combat, however, as he was severely injured in an accident. He was crushed between two gun carriages and spent 17 months in a military hospital. Following the war, he moved to Boston, where he worked as a bank runner, at the same time studying voice at the New England Conservatory of Music. He was a classically trained baritone.
  
  wn.com/Walter_Pidgeon
• William Keighley
  William Jackson Keighley (August 4, 1889, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - June 24, 1984, New York, New York) was an American stage actor and Hollywood film director.
  After graduating from the Ludlum School of Dramatic Art, Keighley began acting at the age of 23. By the 1910s and 1920s, he was acting and directing on Broadway. With the advent of talking pictures, he relocated to Hollywood. He eventually signed with Warner Bros., where he proved adept at directing in a wide variety of genres. He was the initial director of The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn, but was replaced by Michael Curtiz. During World War II, he supervised the U.S. Army Signal Corp's motion picture unit. He retired in 1953 and moved to Paris with his actress wife Genevieve Tobin.
  
  
  
  wn.com/William_Keighley

Laura Smiles (2006)

"Laura Smiles (2006)" Actors

• Kip Pardue
• Ted Hartley
• Petra Wright
• Mark Derwin
• Jonathan Silverman
• Scott Chernoff
• Stephen Sowan
• Jack Fitz

"Laura Smiles (2006)" Director

• Jason Ruscio

• 2020
• Moonwalk
• Sunflowers
• Muusa
• 581 C
• Lihtsad asjad
• Destiny
• Pühakud
• Ultra
• Südasuve rohtunud teed
• Võid kindel olla
• Kustuta kuuvalgus
• Sädemeid taevast

• Visitor
• This Grey Earth
• Gravity Hill
• Mark the Day
• Glint
• x1200
• Stone Seed
• Fugue State
• The Slow
• Safe Confinement
• New Safe Confinement

• Sprei
• Ultra
• Valgusliblikad
• Pühakud
• Ekvalaiser
• Udune pühapäev
• Südasuve rohtunud teed
• Destiny
• Joystick
• Miami
• Kustuta kuuvalgus
• Maailm räägib
• Kivilinn
• Sädemeid taevast

• Bobik Is in America
• Z.I.B. 1
• Cardboard Cutout Robot Victim Hero Children
• Z.I.B. 2
• Z.I.B. 3
• Another One for the Humans

• Muusa
• Lunatic
• Sunflowers
• Sinu enda stoori
• Moonwalk
• 581C
• Vihm
• Lihtsad asjad
• Repriis
• One & One
• Predaator

• Intro
• It's Kind of Like the Innocent Smiles You Get at the Start of a Relationship Before You Fuck Everything Up
• We Should Keep This Secret
• Radio Swan Is Down, Part 1
• Fugitive
• I Hope
• Is There No Help for the Widow's Son?

• Every Light
• Numbers Stations
• I Hope
• Radio Swan Is Down, Part 1
• Is There No Help for the Widow's Son?
• Lake Vostok Beachfront
• It's Kind of Like the Innocent Smiles You Get at the Start of a Relationship...
• Radio Swan Is Down, Part 2
• Patterns Not People
• Cambridge Bypass
• Another Near Miss
• We Should Keep This Secret

• Jericho 1
• Levodopa
• We Should Keep This Secret
• Fugitive
• Non Serviam
• We Are Mapping Your Dreams
• Hikikomori
• Raise Your Flags
• Ariadne
• Heliopause

• Immer wieder
• Herz aus Stein
• We Are Strong
• Hey Schwester
• Schrei nach Liebe
• Ich vermiss Dich
• Ein schöner Tag
• Ich brauche Dich
• Black or White
• Königin der Nacht
• Du bist allein
• Was auch passiert
• We Are Strong (reprise)