- published: 24 Oct 2009
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- author: JAldridge86
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- Aaron Spelling
- Academy Awards
- Agnes de Mille
- Alan Jay Lerner
- Alexander Hall
- Alexander Schneider
- Alexandra Danilova
- All Fall Down (film)
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- Alwin Nikolais
- Anaconda, Montana
- Angela Lansbury
- Anne Nichols
- Anthony Quinn
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Anaconda, Montana
Anaconda, county seat of Anaconda City/Deer Lodge County, is located in mountainous southwestern Montana. The Continental Divide passes within 8 miles (13 km) south of the community with the local Pintler Mountain range reaching 10,379 feet (3164 m). According to the 2010 census the population is 9,298, with a per capita personal income of $21,163 and a median household income of $26,305. It is the ninth biggest city in Montana. Central Anaconda is 5,335 feet (1626 m) above sea level, and is surrounded by the communities of Opportunity and West Valley.
The county area is 741 square miles (1,920 km2), characterized by densely timbered forestlands, lakes, mountains and recreation grounds. The county has common borders with Beaverhead, Butte-Silver Bow, Granite, Jefferson and Powell counties.
Anaconda was founded by Marcus Daly, one of the Copper Kings, who financed the construction of a smelter on nearby Warm Springs Creek to process copper ore from the Butte mines. In June 1883, Daly filed for a town plat for “Copperopolis,” but that name already graced a mining town in Meagher County. Instead, Daly accepted the name "Anaconda" from the postmaster of the time, Clinton Moore.
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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.
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Butte, Montana
Butte /ˈbjuːt/ is a city in Montana and the county seat of Silver Bow County, United States. In 1977, the city and county governments consolidated to form the sole entity of Butte-Silver Bow. As of the 2010 census, Butte's population was 34,200. Butte is currently Montana's fifth largest city.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, Butte experienced every stage of development of a mining town, from camp to boomtown to mature city to center for historic preservation and environmental cleanup. Unlike most such towns, Butte's urban landscape includes mining operations set within residential areas, making the environmental consequences of the extraction economy all the more apparent. Despite the dominance of the Anaconda Company, Butte was never a company town. It prided itself on architectural diversity and a civic ethos of rough-and-tumble individualism. In the 21st century, efforts at interpreting and preserving Butte's heritage are addressing both the town's historical significance and the continuing importance of mining to its economy and culture.
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Celoron, New York
Celoron is a village in Chautauqua County, New York, United States. It sits on the west boundary of the City of Jamestown, New York and is surrounded by the Town of Ellicott. The population was 1,112 at the 2010 census.
The village of Celoron was incorporated in 1896. Beginning in 1898, it was the home of the Acme Giants baseball team.
The name of the village comes from that of the French officer and explorer of Ohio – Pierre Joseph Céloron de Blainville.
Celoron is located at 42°6′24″N 79°16′53″W / 42.10667°N 79.28139°W / 42.10667; -79.28139 (42.106778, -79.281414).
According to the United States Census Bureau, the village has a total area of 0.7 square miles (1.8 km2), all of it land.
The village is on the south shore of Chautauqua Lake.
As of the census of 2000, there were 1,295 people, 526 households, and 357 families residing in the village. The population density was 1,741.0 people per square mile (675.7/km²). There were 567 housing units at an average density of 762.3 per square mile (295.8/km²). The racial makeup of the village was 94.90% White, 0.77% African American, 0.46% Native American, 1.54% Asian, 0.54% from other races, and 1.78% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 2.16% of the population.
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Communist Party USA
Coordinates: 40°44′40.8″N 73°59′48.5″W / 40.744667°N 73.996806°W / 40.744667; -73.996806
The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement.
For the first half of the 20th century, the CPUSA was the largest and most influential communist party in the United States. It played a very prominent role in the U.S. labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, having a major hand in founding most of the country's first industrial unions (which would later use the McCarran Internal Security Act to expel their Communist members) while also becoming known for opposing racism and fighting for integration in workplaces and communities during the height of the Jim Crow period of U.S. racial segregation. Historian Ellen Schrecker concludes that decades of recent scholarship offers a "nuanced portrayal of the party as both a Stalinist sect tied to a vicious regime and the most dynamic organization within the American Left during the 1930s and '40s". In regards to the former charge, the CPUSA, claiming proletarian internationalism (while the U.S. Government called it espionage), sponsored an elaborate intelligence network on behalf of the Soviet Union, involving over 500 members acting as agents. The most prominent example dealt with the Manhattan Project in which the network was accused in giving the blueprints of the atomic bomb to the Soviets; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were thereafter convicted and executed as the chief architects of this plan. Subsequent examination of the trial record shows the testimony directly tying the Rosenbergs to the atomic blueprints was conflicted and possibly false.
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Cuba
Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, (
i/ˈkjuːbə/; Spanish: República de Cuba, pronounced: [reˈpuβlika ðe ˈkuβa] (
listen)) is an island country in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city. To the north of Cuba lies the United States (140 km or 90 mi away) and the Bahamas, Mexico is to the west, the Cayman Islands and Jamaica are to the south, and Haiti and the Dominican Republic are to the southeast.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on and claimed the island now occupied by Cuba, for the Kingdom of Spain. Cuba remained a territory of Spain until the Spanish–American War ended in 1898, and gained formal independence from the U.S. in 1902. A fragile democracy, increasingly dominated by radical politics eventually evolved, solidified by the Cuban Constitution of 1940, but was definitely quashed in 1952 by former president Fulgencio Batista, and an authoritarian regime was set up, intensifying and catalyzing already rampant corruption, political repression and crippling economic regulations.Batista was ousted in January 1959 by the July 26 movement, and a new administration under Fidel Castro established, which had by 1965 evolved into a single-party state under the revived Communist Party of Cuba, which holds power to date.
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Hollywood
Hollywood is a district in Los Angeles, California, United States situated west-northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, the word Hollywood is often used as a metonym of American cinema. Today, much of the movie industry has dispersed into surrounding areas such as the Westside neighborhood, and the San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys, but significant auxiliary industries, such as editing, effects, props, post-production, and lighting companies remain in Hollywood, as does the backlot of Paramount Pictures.
On February 16, 2005, California Assembly Members Jackie Goldberg and Paul Koretz introduced a bill to require California to keep specific records on Hollywood as if it were independent, although it is not the typical practice of the City of Los Angeles to establish specific boundaries for districts or neighborhoods. For this to be done, the boundaries were defined. The bill was unanimously supported by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles City Council. Assembly Bill 588 was approved by the Governor of California on August 28, 2006, and now the district of Hollywood has official borders. The border can be loosely described as the area east of West Hollywood, south of Mulholland Drive, Laurel Canyon, Cahuenga Boulevard, and Barham Boulevard, and the cities of Burbank and Glendale, north of Melrose Avenue and west of the Golden State Freeway and Hyperion Avenue. This includes all of Griffith Park and Los Feliz[citation needed] – two areas that were hitherto considered separate from Hollywood by most Angelenos. The population of the district, including Los Feliz, as of the 2000 census was 123,436 and the median household income was $33,409 in 1999.
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Jamestown, New York
Jamestown is a city in southwestern Chautauqua County, New York in the United States. The population was 31,146 at the 2010 census. Situated between Lake Erie to the northwest and the Allegheny National Forest to the south, Jamestown is the largest population center in the county. Nearby Chautauqua Lake is a fresh water resource enjoyed by fishermen, boaters and naturalists alike. Internationally renowned Chautauqua Institution ciweb.org is approximately 17 miles away offering world class music, theater, educational classes and lectures for 8 weeks during the summer.
The area has contributed a number of notable people to the world including the most famous woman of comedy, Lucille Ball; Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson; naturalist Roger Tory Peterson; the 10,000 Maniacs and Natalie Merchant;and Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys. Innovative products developed in Jamestown include the Crescent Wrench and Automatic Voting Machines.
Jamestown was once called the "Furniture Capital of the World" where people visited from all over the country to attend furniture expositions at the Furniture Mart, a building that still stands in the city and currently houses offices for a variety of companies.
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Japan
Japan
i/dʒəˈpæn/ (Japanese: 日本 Nihon or Nippon; formally 日本国 
Nippon-koku or Nihon-koku, literally the State of Japan) is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south. The characters that make up Japan's name mean "sun-origin", which is why Japan is sometimes referred to as the "Land of the Rising Sun".
Japan is an archipelago of 6,852 islands. The four largest islands are Honshū, Hokkaidō, Kyūshū and Shikoku, together accounting for ninety-seven percent of Japan's land area. Japan has the world's tenth-largest population, with over 127 million people. The Greater Tokyo Area, which includes the de facto capital city of Tokyo and several surrounding prefectures, is the largest metropolitan area in the world, with over 30 million residents.
Archaeological research indicates that people lived in Japan as early as the Upper Paleolithic period. The first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other nations followed by long periods of isolation has characterized Japan's history. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, victory in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War and World War I allowed Japan to expand its empire during a period of increasing militarism. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since adopting its revised constitution in 1947, Japan has maintained a unitary constitutional monarchy with an emperor and an elected parliament called the Diet.
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Los Angeles
Los Angeles (i/lɒs ˈændʒələs/ loss-AN-jə-ləs; Spanish: [los ˈaŋxeles], which is written Los Ángeles; British pronounciation /lɒs ˈændʒəliːz/ loss-AN-jə-leez) with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in the state of California, and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of 468.67 square miles (1,213.8 km2), and is located in Southern California. Often known by its initials L.A., the city is the focal point of the larger Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana metropolitan statistical area and Greater Los Angeles Area region, which contain 12,828,837 and nearly 18 million people respectively as of 2010, making it one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world and the second largest in the United States. Los Angeles is also the seat of Los Angeles County, the most populated and one of the most ethnically diverse counties in the United States, while the entire Los Angeles area itself has been recognized as the most diverse of the nation's largest cities. The city's inhabitants are referred to as "Angelenos".
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Wyandotte, Michigan
Wyandotte is a city in Wayne County in the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 25,883 at the 2010 census, a decrease of 7.6% from 2000. Wyandotte is located in southeastern Michigan, approximately 11 miles (18 km) south of Detroit on the Detroit River, and is part of the collection of communities known as Downriver. Wyandotte is bounded by Southgate (west), Lincoln Park (northwest), Riverview (south) and Ecorse (north).
Wyandotte is a sister city to Komaki, Japan, and each year delegates from Komaki come to Wyandotte to tour the city.
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Aaron Spelling
Aaron Spelling (April 22, 1923 – June 23, 2006) was an American film and television producer. As of 2009, Spelling's eponymous production company Spelling Television holds the record as the most prolific television writer, with 218 producer and executive producer credits.Forbes ranked him the 11th top-earning dead celebrity in 2009.
Spelling was born in Dallas, to Pearl (née Wald) and David Spelling (originally Spurling), a tailor, who were Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland, respectively. Spelling had a brother, Daniel Spelling (died 2009), who lived in San Francisco, and who appeared on daughter Tori Spelling's television show Tori And Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood.[citation needed]
At the age of 8, Spelling lost the use of his legs psychosomatically, due to trauma caused by constant bullying from his schoolmates, and was confined to bed for a year. During this time, he read a vast number of books, which stimulated his imagination.[citation needed]
Spelling attended Forest Avenue High School, during WWII he served in the United States Armed Forces, and later attended Southern Methodist University, graduating in 1949, where he was a cheerleader. He married actress Carolyn Jones in 1953, and they moved to California. They divorced in 1964. With his second wife, Candy Gene (née Marer), whom he married in 1968, he had two children, Randy Spelling and Tori Spelling.
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Agnes de Mille
Agnes George de Mille (September 18, 1905 – October 7, 1993) was an American dancer and choreographer.
Agnes de Mille was born in New York City into a well-connected family of theater professionals. Her father William C. deMille and her uncle Cecil B. DeMille were both Hollywood directors. She was the granddaughter of economist Henry George.
She had a love for acting and originally wanted to be an actress, but was told that she was 'not pretty enough', so she turned her attention to dance. As a child, she had longed to dance, but dance at this time was considered more of an activity, rather than a viable career option, so her parents refused to allow her to dance. When de Mille's younger sister was prescribed ballet classes to cure her flat feet, de Mille joined her. De Mille lacked flexibility and technique, though, and did not have a dancer's body. Classical ballet was the most widely known dance form at this time, and de Mille's apparent lack of ability limited her opportunities. She taught herself from watching film stars on the set with her father in Hollywood; these were more interesting for her to watch than perfectly turned out legs, and she developed strong character work and compelling performances. One of de Mille’s earliest jobs, thanks to her father’s connections, was choreographing the film Cleopatra in 1934, though the dances were later cut from the film. She appeared in The Ragamuffin in 1916, which was her first job.
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Alan Jay Lerner
Alan Jay Lerner (August 31, 1918 – June 14, 1986) was an American lyricist and librettist. In collaboration with Frederick Loewe, he created some of the world's most popular and enduring works of musical theatre for both the stage and on film. He won three Tony Awards and three Academy Awards, among other honors.
Born in New York City, he was the son of Edith Adelson Lerner and Joseph Jay Lerner, whose brother, Samuel Alexander Lerner, was founder and owner of the Lerner Stores, a chain of dress shops. One of Lerner's cousins was the radio comedian/television game show panelist Henry Morgan. Alan Jay Lerner was educated at Bedales School in England, The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut, (where he wrote "The Choate Marching Song") and Harvard. He attended both Camp Androscoggin and Camp Greylock. At both Choate and Harvard, Lerner was a classmate of John F. Kennedy; at Choate they had worked together on the yearbook staff. Like Cole Porter at Yale and Richard Rodgers at Columbia, his career in musical theater began with his collegiate contributions, in Lerner's case to the annual Harvard Hasty Pudding musicals. During the summers of 1936 and 1937, Lerner studied at Juilliard. While attending Harvard, he lost his sight in his left eye due to an accident in the boxing ring. In 1957, Lerner and Leonard Bernstein, another of Lerner's college classmates, collaborated on "Lonely Men of Harvard," a tongue-in-cheek salute to their alma mater.
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Alexander Hall
Alexander Hall (January 11, 1894, Boston, Massachusetts – July 30, 1968, San Francisco, California) was an American film director and theatre actor.
Hall acted in the theatre from the age of four through 1914, when he began to work in silent movies. Following his military service in World War I, he returned to Hollywood and pursued a career in film production. He worked as a film editor and assistant director at Paramount Pictures until 1932, when he directed his first feature film, Sinners in the Sun. From 1937 to 1947, he was a contract director at Columbia Pictures, where he earned a reputation for sophisticated comedies. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941).
Hall was married to actress Lola Lane from 1934 to 1936. He was engaged briefly to Lucille Ball, who left him when she met Desi Arnaz. The couple later hired him to direct their 1956 film Forever, Darling.
Hall died of complications from a stroke in San Francisco.
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Alexander Schneider
Alexander Schneider (21 October 1908 – 2 February 1993) was a violinist, conductor, and educator. Born to a Lithuanian Jewish family in Vilnius, Lithuania, he later moved to the United States as a member of the Budapest String Quartet. He died in Manhattan, New York City, at the age of 84.
Alexander (Sasha) was born Abram Sznejder. At 13 he almost died of tetanus after cutting his knee in an accident. The tetanus distorted his joints and recovery was long and painful. Sasha left Vilnius in 1924 and joined his brother Mischa Schneider in Frankfurt, after securing a scholarship to study violin with Adolf Rebner, the principal violin tutor at the Hoch Conservatory.
In 1927, Alexander became leader (concertmaster) of an orchestra in Saarbrücken. It was at this point that he changed his name. The orchestra director wanted him as leader but wanted a German-sounding name. Abram took Schneider as a surname because his brother Mischa had already selected it. Alexander appealed to him as a first name. In 1929 he was appointed leader of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk Orchestra in Hamburg. In 1932, he lost this job as a result of the ongoing Nazi campaign against Jews - soon the time would come to leave Germany.
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Alexandra Danilova
Aleksandra Dionisyevna Danilova (Russian: Александра Дионисьевна Данилова) (November 20, 1903–July 13, 1997) was a Russian-born prima ballerina who became an American citizen.
Born in Peterhof, Russia, she trained at the Russian Imperial Ballet School in Leningrad (formerly and currently St. Petersburg). She was best known for being one of the few Russian-trained ballerinas to tour outside Russia. Her first professional post was as a member of the St. Petersburg's Imperial Ballet.
In 1924, she and George Balanchine left Russia. They were soon picked up by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; Danilova as a dancer, Balanchine as a choreographer. Danilova also toured for years with the Ballets Russes under Sergei Diaghilev, then with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo after Diaghilev's death. She was one of her generation's biggest stars, but Danilova was never good at handling her finances. Her last ballet performance was in 1957, but she made her Broadway musical comedy debut in 1958 in Oh, Captain!. She appeared in a single scene, a dance with the show's star, Tony Randall, which stole the show. Many have said it was the finest dance number in a post-war musical. Unfortunately, the show was a commercial failure and quickly closed. She was desperate when she again met Balanchine on the street in 1964. When he heard of her plight he instantly hired her to teach at the School of American Ballet. One of the most valued members of the faculty, she remained there until her retirement in 1989.
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Alvin Ailey
Alvin Ailey (January 5, 1931 - December 1, 1989) was an American choreographer and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York. Ailey is credited with popularizing modern dance and revolutionizing African-American participation in 20th century concert dance. His company gained the nickname "Cultural Ambassador to the World" because of its extensive international touring. Ailey's choreographic masterpiece Revelations is believed to be the best known and most often seen modern dance performance. Ailey received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1988, just one year before his death.
Ailey was born to his 17-year-old mother, Lula Elizabeth Ailey, in Rogers, Texas. His father abandoned the family when Alvin was only six months old. Like many African Americans living in Texas during the Great Depression, Ailey and his mother moved very often and she had a hard time finding work. Ailey grew up during a time of racial segregation, violence and lynchings against African-Americans. When Ailey was five, his 22-year-old mother was raped by a group of white men, leaving him afraid of whites. Early experiences in the Southern Baptist church and jook joints instilled in him a fierce sense of black pride that would later figure prominently in Ailey's signature works.'
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Alwin Nikolais
Alwin Nikolais (November 25, 1910 in Southington, Connecticut – May 8, 1993) was an American choreographer.
Nikolais studied piano at an early age and began his performing career as an organist accompanying silent films. As a young artist, he gained skills in scenic design, acting, puppetry and music composition. It was after attending a performance by the German dancer Mary Wigman that he was inspired to study dance. He received his early dance training at Bennington College from the great figures of the modern dance world: Hanya Holm, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Louis Horst, and others.
In 1940, in collaboration with Truda Kaschmann, his first modern dance teacher, Nikolais received a commission to create Eight Column Line, his first ballet. The work was presented at one of the events of Hartford social season that counted Salvador Dalí and Léonide Massine as honorary patrons and was well received.
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Anne Nichols
Anne Nichols (November 26, 1891 – September 15, 1966) was an American playwright.
Born in Dales Mill, Georgia, Nichols penned a number of Broadway plays, several of which were made into motion pictures. Her first and most famous production was Abie's Irish Rose, a farce depicting the tumult that arises with the marriage of a young Jewish man and an Irish girl.
In 1937 Nichols produced Hey Diddle Diddle, a comedy play written by Bartlett Cormack whose setting was a duplex apartment in Hollywood. The play premiered in Princeton, New Jersey on January 21 with Lucille Ball as Julie Tucker, "one of three roommates coping with neurotic directors, confused executives, and grasping stars who interfere with the girls' ability to get ahead." The play received good reviews, but there were problems, chiefly with its star, Conway Tearle, who was in poor health. Cormack wanted to replace him, but Nichols said the fault lay with the character and insisted that the part needed to be reshaped and rewritten. The two were unable to agree on a solution. The play was scheduled to open on Broadway at the Vanderbilt, but closed after one week in Washington, D.C. when Tearle suddenly became gravely ill.
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Anthony Quinn
Antonio Rodolfo Quinn-Oaxaca (April 21, 1915 – June 3, 2001), more commonly known as Anthony Quinn, was a Mexican and American actor, as well as a painter and writer. He starred in numerous critically acclaimed and commercially successful films, including Zorba the Greek, Lawrence of Arabia, The Guns of Navarone, The Message, Guns for San Sebastian, Lion of the Desert and Federico Fellini's La Strada. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor twice; for Viva Zapata! in 1952 and Lust for Life in 1956.
Quinn was born Antonio Reyes in Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution. His mother, Manuela "Nellie" Oaxaca, was of Aztec Indian ancestry. His father, Francisco Quinn, was also born in Mexico, to an Irish immigrant father from County Cork and a Mexican mother. Frank Quinn rode with Pancho Villa, then later moved to Los Angeles and became an assistant cameraman at a movie studio. In Quinn's autobiography The Original Sin: A Self-Portrait by Anthony Quinn he denied being the son of an "Irish adventurer" and attributed that tale to Hollywood publicists.
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Antony Tudor
Antony Tudor (4 April 1908 – 19 April 1987) was an English ballet choreographer, teacher and dancer.
Tudor, born William Cook, discovered dance accidentally. He began dancing professionally with Marie Rambert in 1928, becoming general assistant for her Ballet Club the next year. A precocious choreographer, at age twenty-three he created for her dancers Cross Garter'd, then Lysistrata, The Planets and other works at the little Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate, and his two most revolutionary, Jardin Aux Lilas (Lilac Garden) and Dark Elegies, before the age of thirty, himself dancing the main roles.
In 1938, he founded the London Ballet with Rambert members, including his future life partner, Hugh Laing, Andreé Howard, Agnes de Mille, Peggy van Praagh, Maude Lloyd and Walter Gore, but with the onset of World War II, in 1940 was invited with them to New York, joining Richard Pleasant's and Lucia Chase's reorganized Ballet Theater. Chase's company was later to become the American Ballet Theatre, with which Tudor was closely associated for the rest of his life.
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Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include plays such as All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (one-act, 1955; revised two-act, 1956).
Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, a period during which he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Prince of Asturias Award, and was married to Marilyn Monroe.
Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in Harlem, New York City, the second of three children of Isidore and Augusta Miller, Polish-Jewish immigrants. His father owned a women's clothing manufacturing business employing some 400 people. He became a wealthy and respected man in the community. (BBC TV Interview; Miller and Yentob; 'Finishing the Picture,' 2004) The family, including his younger sister Joan, lived on East 110th Street in Manhattan and owned a summer house in Far Rockaway, Queens. They employed a chauffeur. In the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the family lost almost everything and moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn. As a teenager, Miller delivered bread every morning before school to help the family. After graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School, he worked at several menial jobs to pay for his college tuition.
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Audrey Hepburn
Audrey Hepburn (born Audrey Kathleen Ruston; 4 May 1929 – 20 January 1993) was a British actress and humanitarian. Although modest about her acting ability, Hepburn remains one of the world's most famous actresses of all time who was ranked as the third greatest female screen legend in the history of American cinema. Remembered as both a film and fashion icon of the twentieth century, Hepburn redefined glamour with "elfin" features and a gamine waif-like figure that inspired designs by Givenchy and earned her place in the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame.
Born in Ixelles, a district of Brussels, Hepburn spent her childhood between Belgium, England and the Netherlands, including German-occupied Arnhem during the Second World War, where she studied ballet with Sonia Gaskell in Amsterdam before moving to London in 1948 to continue ballet training with Marie Rambert and perform as a chorus girl in West End musical theatre productions.
After appearing in several British films and starring in the 1951 Broadway play Gigi, Hepburn gained instant Hollywood stardom for playing the Academy Award-winning lead role in Roman Holiday (1953). Later performing in Sabrina (1954), The Nun's Story (1959), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Charade (1963), My Fair Lady (1964) and Wait Until Dark (1967), Hepburn became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age who received Academy Award, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations and accrued a Tony Award for her theatrical performance in the 1954 Broadway play Ondine. Hepburn remains one of few people who have won Academy, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Awards.
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Barbara Stanwyck
Barbara Stanwyck (July 16, 1907 – January 20, 1990) was an American actress. She was a film and television star, known during her 60-year career as a consummate and versatile professional with a strong screen presence, and a favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang and Frank Capra. After a short but notable career as a stage actress in the late 1920s, she made 85 films in 38 years in Hollywood, before turning to television.
Stanwyck was nominated for the Academy Award four times, and won three Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe. She was the recipient of honorary lifetime awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1981, the American Film Institute in 1987, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Golden Globes, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the Screen Actors Guild. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and is ranked as the eleventh greatest female star of all time by the American Film Institute.
Barbara Stanwyck was born Ruby Catherine Stevens in Brooklyn, New York on July 16, 1907. She was the fifth and youngest child of Catherine Ann (née McPhee) and Byron E. Stevens; the couple were working-class, her father a native of Massachusetts and her mother an immigrant from Nova Scotia, Canada. Stanwyck had English and Scottish ancestry. When she was four, her mother was killed when a drunken stranger pushed her off a moving streetcar. Two weeks after the funeral, Byron Stevens joined a work crew digging the Panama canal and was never seen again. Ruby and her brother Byron were raised by their elder sister Mildred, five years Ruby's senior. When Mildred got a job as a John Cort showgirl, Ruby and Byron were placed in a series of foster homes (as many as four in a year), from which Ruby often ran away.
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Barbra Streisand
Barbra Joan Streisand (/ˈstraɪsænd/; born April 24, 1942) is an American singer, actress, writer, film producer and director. She has won two Academy Awards, eight Grammy Awards, five Emmy Awards including one Daytime Emmy, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Peabody Award, and is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award.
She is one of the most commercially and critically successful entertainers in modern entertainment history, with more than 71.5 million albums shipped in the United States and 140 million albums sold worldwide. She is the best-selling female artist on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Top Selling Artists list, the only female recording artist in the top ten, and the only artist outside of the rock and roll genre. Along with Frank Sinatra, Cher, and Shirley Jones, she shares the distinction of being awarded an acting Oscar and also recording a number-one single on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.
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Bartlett Cormack
Edward Bartlett Cormack (March 19, 1898 - September 26, 1942) was an American actor, playwright, screenwriter, and producer best known for his 1927 Broadway play The Racket, and for working with Howard Hughes and Cecil B. DeMille on several films.
Cormack was the son of Scottish-born Edward K. Cormack and Alice E. Cormack. By 1900 his family had moved from Hammond, Indiana to Chicago, Illinois where his father worked in sales. He graduated from University High School, and was accepted at the University of Chicago. While a Sophomore, Cormack wrote the play Anybody's Girl, considered to be one of the best ever submitted for the Blackfriars (the student dramatic organization). Cormack became a member of Maurice Browne's Little Theatre Company in Chicago, but his duties as a general handyman were so demanding he was dismissed from the University as a result of poor class attendance.
To gain experience as a writer, he got a job at The Chicago Evening Journal and stayed there a year, covering "hangings, race riots, street car strikes and other diversions characteristic of Mayor Thompson's turbulent town". He left the Chicago Evening Journal for The American, working there five years before applying for reinstatement at the University of Chicago. He wrote two more college plays and became engaged, graduating two years later with honors and as a Phi Beta Kappa. He returned to The American, where he wrote features and dramatic criticism.
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Bela Lugosi
Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó (20 October 1882 – 16 August 1956), commonly known as Bela Lugosi, was a Hungarian actor of stage and screen. He was best known for having played Count Dracula in the Broadway play and subsequent film version, as well as having starred in several of Ed Wood's low budget films in the last years of his career.
Lugosi, the youngest of four children, was born as Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó in Lugos (at the time part of Austria–Hungary, now Lugoj in Romania), to Paula de Vojnich and István Blaskó, a banker. He later based his last name on his hometown. He and his sister Vilma were raised in a Roman Catholic family. At the age of 12, Lugosi dropped out of school. He began his acting career probably in 1901 or 1902. His earliest known performances are from provincial theaters in the 1903–1904 season, playing small roles in several plays and operettas. He went on to Shakespeare plays and other major roles. Moving to Budapest in 1911, he played dozens of roles with the National Theater of Hungary in the period 1913–1919. Although Lugosi would later claim that he "became the leading actor of Hungary's Royal National Theater", almost all his roles there were small or supporting parts.
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Benny Goodman
Benjamin David “Benny” Goodman (May 30, 1909 – June 13, 1986) was an American jazz and swing musician, clarinetist and bandleader; widely known as the "King of Swing".
In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman led one of the most popular musical groups in America. His January 16, 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City is described by critic Bruce Eder as "the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history: jazz's 'coming out' party to the world of 'respectable' music."
Goodman's bands launched the careers of many major names in jazz, and during an era of segregation, he also led one of the first well-known racially-integrated jazz groups. Goodman continued to perform to nearly the end of his life, including exploring his interest in classical music.
Goodman was born in Chicago, the ninth of twelve children of poor Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, who lived in the Maxwell Street neighborhood. His father was David Goodman, a tailor from Warsaw; his mother was Dora Grisinsky (from Kaunas, Lithuania). His parents met in Baltimore, Maryland, and moved to Chicago before Benny was born.
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Bette Davis
Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis (April 5, 1908 – October 6, 1989) was an American actress of film, television and theater. Noted for her willingness to play unsympathetic characters, she was highly regarded for her performances in a range of film genres, from contemporary crime melodramas to historical and period films and occasional comedies, although her greatest successes were her roles in romantic dramas.
After appearing in Broadway plays, Davis moved to Hollywood in 1930, but her early films for Universal Studios were unsuccessful. She joined Warner Bros. in 1932 and established her career with several critically acclaimed performances. In 1937, she attempted to free herself from her contract and although she lost a well-publicized legal case, it marked the beginning of the most successful period of her career. Until the late 1940s, she was one of American cinema's most celebrated leading ladies, known for her forceful and intense style. Davis gained a reputation as a perfectionist who could be highly combative, and confrontations with studio executives, film directors and costars were often reported. Her forthright manner, clipped vocal style and ubiquitous cigarette contributed to a public persona which has often been imitated and satirized.
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Betty White
Betty Marion White Ludden (born January 17, 1922), better known as Betty White, is an American actress, comedienne, singer, author, and television personality. With a career spanning over seven decades, she is best known to contemporary audiences for her television roles as Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls. Since the death of co-star Rue McClanahan in 2010, she is now the only living Golden Girl. She currently stars as Elka Ostrovsky in the TV Land sitcom Hot in Cleveland and hosts the practical-joke show Betty White's Off Their Rockers.
White has won seven Emmy Awards (six for acting) and has received 20 Emmy nominations over the course of her career, including being the first woman ever to receive an Emmy for game show hosting (for the short-lived Just Men!) and is the only person to have an Emmy in all female performing comedic categories. In May 2010, White became the oldest person to guest-host Saturday Night Live, for which she also received a Primetime Emmy Award. White also holds the record for longest span between Emmy nominations for performances – her first was in 1951 and her most recent was in 2011, a span of 60 years – and has become the oldest nominee as of 2012[update], aged 90. She has made regular appearances on the game shows Password and Match Game and played recurring roles on Mama's Family, Boston Legal, The Bold and the Beautiful, and Community.
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Beverly Sills
Beverly Sills (May 25, 1929 – July 2, 2007) was an American operatic soprano whose peak career was between the 1950s and 1970s. In her prime she was the only real rival to Joan Sutherland as the leading bel canto stylist.
Although she sang a repertoire from Handel and Mozart to Puccini, Massenet and Verdi, she was known for her performances in coloratura soprano roles in live opera and recordings. Sills was largely associated with the operas of Donizetti, of which she performed and recorded many roles. Her signature roles include the title role in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, the title role in Massenet's Manon, Marie in Donizetti's La fille du régiment, the three heroines in Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann, Rosina in Rossini's The Barber of Seville, Violetta in Verdi's La traviata, and most notably Elisabetta in Roberto Devereux.
After retiring from singing in 1980, she became the general manager of the New York City Opera. In 1994, she became the Chairman of Lincoln Center and then, in 2002, of the Metropolitan Opera, stepping down in 2005. Sills lent her celebrity to further her charity work for the prevention and treatment of birth defects.
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Bob Carroll Jr.
Bob Carroll Jr. (August 12, 1918 – January 27, 2007), was a television writer notable for his creative role in the series I Love Lucy, the first four seasons of which he wrote with his professional partner Madelyn Pugh, and collaborator Jess Oppenheimer. Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf later joined the series' writing staff in the fifth season.
Born Robert Gordon Carroll in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, his family moved to Florida when he was just 3 years old. His father made his living buying and selling real estate in Florida's 1920's land rush. The family also moved to California for a time in conjunction with Carroll Sr.'s work, but eventually settled back in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Bob Carroll Jr. attended St. Petersburg Junior College (now St. Petersburg College), where he studied French. He became a writer by happenstance. In 1940, he broke his hip in an accident. While he was recovering from his injury, he heard about a script writing contest being sponsored by local radio station WSUN. With plenty of time on his hands, the 21 year old decided to try writing a radio script, which ended up winning the station's $10 prize.[1]
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Boris Karloff
William Henry Pratt (23 November 1887 – 2 February 1969), better known by his stage name Boris Karloff, was an English actor.
Karloff is best remembered for his roles in horror films and his portrayal of Frankenstein's monster in Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and Son of Frankenstein (1939). His popularity following Frankenstein was such that for a brief time he was billed simply as "Karloff" or "Karloff the Uncanny." His best-known non-horror role is as the Grinch, as well as the narrator, in the animated television special of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966).
Karloff was born at 36 Forest Hill Road, Honor Oak, London, England, where a blue plaque can now be seen. His parents were Edward John Pratt, Jr. and Eliza Sarah Millard. His paternal grandparents were Edward John Pratt, an Anglo-Indian,[citation needed] and Eliza Julia (Edwards) Pratt, a sister of Anna Leonowens (whose tales about life in the royal court of Siam [now Thailand] were the basis of the musical The King and I). The two sisters were also of Anglo-Indian heritage.
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Carole Cook
Carole Cook (born 1928) is an American actress. She has appeared in many theatrical productions, in films and on television.
Born as Mildred Frances Cook, she was a protege of Lucille Ball. Ball gave her the stage name of "Carole", after her friend Carole Lombard because, Ball reportedly told Cook, "you have the same healthy disrespect for everything in general".[citation needed] Cook appeared regularly on two of her shows, The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy. Ball was matron of honor at Cook's wedding in 1964 to actor Tom Troupe.
Cook starred in the animated Disney film Home on the Range, as the voice of Pearl Gesner, the farmer of Patch of Heaven. She appeared in such feature films as The Incredible Mr. Limpet, Sixteen Candles, Grandview, U.S.A., American Gigolo and Summer Lovers. Her first film role was in Palm Springs Weekend.
She made guest appearances on such TV shows as The Lucy Show, Here's Lucy, Knight Rider, Magnum, P.I., Murder, She Wrote, Dynasty, Charlie's Angels, on a fourth season 1985 episode of The A-Team called "Members Only", and, more recently, on Grey's Anatomy. In 1974, Cook played Marta, the money-grubbing former wife of Walter Findlay (Bill Macy) on the series Maude. In 1976, she appeared as a bullying nurse in an episode of Emergency! in which Johnny Gage is injured by a hit-and-run driver. In 2006, she appeared as an elderly patient on the ABC drama Grey's Anatomy (episode 14 "Tell Me Sweet Little Lies", season two).
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Cary Grant
Archibald Alexander Leach (January 18, 1904 – November 29, 1986), better known by his stage name Cary Grant, was an English-American actor. Known for his transatlantic accent, debonair demeanor and "dashing good looks", Grant is considered one of classic Hollywood's definitive leading men.
Grant was named the second Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute. Noted particularly for his work in comedy but also for drama, Grant's best-known films include The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Gunga Din (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Notorious (1946), To Catch A Thief (1955), An Affair to Remember (1957), North by Northwest (1959) and Charade (1963).
Nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Actor, for Penny Serenade (1941) and None But the Lonely Heart (1944), and five times for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor, Grant was continually passed over, and in 1970 was given an Honorary Oscar at the 42nd Academy Awards. Frank Sinatra presented Grant with the award, "for his unique mastery of the art of screen acting with the respect and affection of his colleagues".
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Claudette Colbert
Claudette Colbert (/koʊlˈbɛər/; 13 September 1903 – 30 July 1996) was an American actress of stage and film.
Born in Paris, France, and raised in New York City, Colbert began her career in Broadway productions during the 1920s, progressing to film with the advent of talking pictures. She established a successful film career with Paramount Pictures, and was recognized as one of the leading female exponents of screwball comedy. Colbert was the highest paid actress in American cinema during late 1930s, and later became a freelance performer. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her comedic performance in It Happened One Night (1934), and also received Academy Award nominations for her dramatic roles in Private Worlds (1935) and Since You Went Away (1944).
Colbert's film career declined in the 1950s, and finished in 1961. Later in life, she returned to theater, except brief appearances in television. Her intermittent career lasted more than six decades. She moved in later life to Barbados, where she died at the age of 92, following a series of strokes.
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Clint Eastwood
Clinton "Clint" Eastwood, Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American film actor, director, producer, composer and politician. Eastwood first came to prominence as a supporting cast member in the TV series Rawhide (1959–1965). He rose to fame for playing the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy of spaghetti westerns (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) during the late 1960s, and as Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry films (Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, The Enforcer, Sudden Impact, and The Dead Pool) throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These roles, among others, have made him an enduring cultural icon of masculinity.
For his work in the films Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004), Eastwood won Academy Awards for Best Director and Producer of the Best Picture, as well as receiving nominations for Best Actor. These films in particular, as well as others including Play Misty for Me (1971), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Tightrope (1984), Pale Rider (1985), Heartbreak Ridge (1986), In the Line of Fire (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), and Gran Torino (2008), have all received commercial success and critical acclaim. Eastwood's only comedies have been Every Which Way but Loose (1978) and its sequel Any Which Way You Can (1980), which are his two most commercially successful films after adjustment for inflation.
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Conway Tearle
Conway Tearle (17 May 1878 – 1 October 1938) was an Anglo-American stage actor who went on to perform in silent and early sound films.
Frederick Conway Tearle was born in New York City the son of the well-known British-born cornetist Jules Levy and American actress, Mary “Minnie” Conway. Minnie Conway was a direct descendent of William Augustus Conway, a British Shakespearian actor who became popular in America during the 1820s. Her father, the proprietor of the Brooklyn Theatre, was said to have organized the first stock company in America. After Tearle’s parents divorced, his mother married Osmond Tearle, a British Shakespearian actor popular in “the provinces”. Conway Tearle was the step-brother of actor Malcolm Tearle and a half brother of actor Godfrey Tearle. and jazz musician Jules Levy Jr.
Conway Tearle was educated in England and America and took to the stage at an early age. By the age of ten he could recite twelve Shakespearean plays from memory. His big break came at the age of twenty-one when in Manchester, England, without any preparation, he was called upon to play Hamlet after the lead actor took ill just prior to the first act.
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Count Basie
William "Count" Basie (August 21, 1904 – April 26, 1984) was an American jazz pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer. His mother first taught him piano and he started performing in his teens. Dropping out of school, he learned to operate lights for vaudeville and improvised to accompany silent films at a local theater in his town of Red Bank, New Jersey. By 16, he increasingly played jazz piano at parties, resorts and other venues. In 1924, he went to Harlem, where his performing career expanded; he toured with groups to the major jazz cities of Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City. In 1929 he joined Bennie Moten's band in Kansas City, and played with them for years, until Moten's death in 1935.
That year Basie formed his own jazz orchestra, and in 1936 took them to Chicago for a long engagement and their first recording. He led the group for almost 50 years, creating innovations like the use of two "split" tenor saxophones, emphasizing the rhythm section, riffing with a big band, using arrangers to broaden their sound, and others. Many notable musicians came to prominence under his direction, including the tenor saxophonists Lester Young and Herschel Evans, the guitarist Freddie Green, trumpeters Buck Clayton and Harry "Sweets" Edison and singers Jimmy Rushing and Joe Williams. Basie's theme songs were "One O'Clock Jump," developed in 1935 in the early days of his band, and "April In Paris".
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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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Desi Arnaz
Desi Arnaz (March 2, 1917 – December 2, 1986) was a Cuban-born American musician, actor and television producer. While he gained international renown for leading a Latin music band, the Desi Arnaz Orchestra, he is best known for his role as Ricky Ricardo on the American TV series I Love Lucy, starring with Lucille Ball, to whom he was married at the time. He is generally credited as the inventor of the rerun.
Desi Arnaz was born Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III in Santiago de Cuba to Desiderio Alberto Arnaz II (March 8, 1894 - May 31, 1973) and his wife Dolores de Acha (April 2, 1896 - October 24, 1988). His father was Santiago's youngest mayor and also served in the Cuban House of Representatives. His maternal grandfather was Alberto de Acha, one of the three founders of Bacardi Rum. According to Arnaz himself, in his autobiography A Book (1976), the family owned three ranches, a palatial home, and a vacation mansion on a private island in Santiago Bay, Cuba. Following the 1933 Cuban Revolution, led by Fulgencio Batista, which overthrew President Gerardo Machado, Alberto Arnaz was jailed and all of his property was confiscated. He was released after six months when U.S. officials, who believed him to be neutral, intervened on his behalf. The family then fled to Miami, Florida, where Desi attended St. Patrick Catholic High School. In the summer of 1934 he attended Saint Leo Prep (near Tampa) to help improve his English.
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Dick Cavett
Richard Alva Cavett (English pronunciation: /ˈkævɨt/; born November 19, 1936) — known as Dick Cavett — is a former American television talk show host known for his conversational style and in-depth discussion of issues. Cavett appeared regularly on nationally broadcast television in the United States in five consecutive decades, the 1960s through the 2000s.
In recent years, Cavett has written a blog for the New York Times, promoted DVDs of his former shows, and hosted replays of his classic TV interviews with Groucho Marx, Katharine Hepburn, and others on Turner Classic Movies channel.
Cavett was born in Nebraska, but sources differ as to the specific town, locating his birthplace in either Gibbon, where his family lived, or nearby Kearney, the location of the nearest hospital. His mother Erabel "Era" (née Richards) and his father Alva B. Cavett both worked as educators. When asked by Lucille Ball on his own show about his heritage, he said he was "Scottish, Irish, English, and possibly partly French, and, and uh, a dose of German." He also mentioned that one grandfather "came over" from England, and the other from Wales. Cavett's grandparents all lived in Grand Island, Nebraska. His paternal grandparents were Alva A. Cavett and Gertrude Pinsch. His paternal grandfather was from Diller, Nebraska and his paternal grandmother was an immigrant from Aachen, Germany.[citation needed] His maternal grandparents were the Rev. R. R. and Etta Mae Richards. Rev. Richards was from Carmarthen, Wales and was a Baptist minister who served parishes across central Nebraska.[citation needed]
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Doris Day
Doris Day (born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff, April 3, 1924) is an American actress, singer, and animal rights activist. With an entertainment career that spanned through almost 50 years, Day started her career as a big band singer in 1939, but only began to be noticed after her first hit recording, "Sentimental Journey", in 1945. After leaving the Les Brown & His Band of Renown to try a solo career, she started her long-lasting partnership with Columbia Records, which would remain her only recording label. The contract lasted from 1947 to 1967, and included more than 650 recordings, making Day one of the most popular and acclaimed singers of the 20th century. In 1948, after being persuaded by Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne and her agent at the time, Al Levy, she auditioned for Michael Curtiz, which led to her being cast in the female lead role in Romance on the High Seas.
With a legendary Hollywood "girl next door" image, and capable of delivering comedy and romance as well as heavy drama, she appeared in 39 films, released 29 albums, spent 460 weeks in the Top 40 charts and eventually became one of America's most beloved entertainers. She received an Academy Award nomination for her performance in Pillow Talk, won three Henrietta Awards (World Film Favorite), a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, Presidential Medal of Freedom, Legend Award from the Society of Singers, Los Angeles Film Critics Association's Career Achievement Award and, in 1989, received the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion pictures.
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Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Lee Hoffman (born August 8, 1937) is an American actor with a career in film, television, and theatre since 1960. He has been known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and vulnerable characters.
He first drew critical praise for the play Eh?, for which he won a Theatre World Award and a Drama Desk Award. This was soon followed by his breakthrough movie role as the good-looking but troubled Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (1967). Since then Hoffman's career has largely been focused on cinema, with only sporadic returns to television and the stage. Some of his most notable films are Papillon, Marathon Man, Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man, Lenny, All the President's Men, Kramer vs. Kramer, Tootsie, Rain Man, Wag the Dog, and Meet the Fockers.
Hoffman has won two Academy Awards (for his performances in Kramer vs. Kramer and Rain Man), five Golden Globes, four BAFTAs, three Drama Desk Awards, a Genie Award, and an Emmy Award. Dustin Hoffman received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1999.
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Dwight Eisenhower
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (pronounced /ˈaɪzənhaʊər/, EYE-zən-how-ər; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was the 34th President of the United States from 1953 until 1961. He had previously been a five-star general in the United States Army during World War II, and served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe; he had responsibility for planning and supervising the invasion of North Africa in Operation Torch in 1942–43 and the successful invasion of France and Germany in 1944–45, from the Western Front. In 1951, he became the first supreme commander of NATO.
Eisenhower was of Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry, and was reared in a large family in Kansas, by parents with a robust work ethic and religious background. As one of five sons, he was conditioned by a competitive atmosphere which instilled self-reliance. He attended and graduated from West Point, and later was married with two sons. After World War II Eisenhower served as Chief of Staff under President Harry S. Truman, then assumed the post of President at Columbia University.
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Earl Carroll
Earl Carroll (September 16, 1893 – June 17, 1948) was an American theatrical producer, director, songwriter and composer born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Carroll produced and directed numerous Broadway musicals, including eleven editions of Earl Carroll's Vanities, Earl Carroll's Sketch Book, and Murder at the Vanities, which was also made into a film starring Jack Oakie. Known as "the troubadour of the nude", Carroll was famous for his productions featuring the most lightly clad showgirls on Broadway. In 1922, he built the first Earl Carroll Theatre in New York, which was demolished and rebuilt on a grander scale in 1931. He built a second theatre on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood, California in 1938.
In 1926, Carroll became involved in a scandal due to a party he threw in honor of Harry Kendall Thaw, the Pittsburgh-bred murderer of Stanford White 20 years earlier and a potential investor in Broadway shows. During the private party a bathtub was brought out in which there was a nude young woman bathing in illegal liquor. One of the guests at the party was Philip Payne, editor of the New York Mirror. Although Carroll expected his guests would be circumspect about what happened at the party, Payne published a report. This was noted by federal authorities, and they subpoenaed Carroll to appear (with others) before a grand jury. The authorities were apparently determined to learn the source of the illegal alcohol. Carroll denied the incident happened, but others at the party confirmed it. The federal government prosecuted Carroll for perjury, and he was convicted and sent to the Atlanta Penitentiary for six months.
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Edmund Rice (1638)
Edmund Rice (ca. 1594 – May 3, 1663), was an early immigrant to Massachusetts Bay Colony who was born in Suffolk, England, and lived in Stanstead, Suffolk and Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire before sailing with his kin to America. He landed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in summer or fall of 1638, thought to be first living in the town of Watertown, Massachusetts. Shortly thereafter he was a founder of Sudbury in 1638, and later in life, was one of the thirteen petitioners for the founding of Marlborough in 1656. He was a Deacon in the Puritan Church, and served in town politics as a selectman and judge, as well as serving five years as a member of the Great and General Court, the combined colonial legislature and judicial court of Massachusetts.
Edmund Rice's rough birth date of 1594 is reckoned from a 3 April 1656 court deposition in Massachusetts in which he stated that he was 62 years old. His likely birthplace, somewhere in Suffolk in East Anglia, is found through the town of his marriage and of his earliest children's birth. Many of the church records from 1594 in Suffolk are lost, so any record of his birth or the names of his parents or any of his forebears is unknown. Edmund Rice had a presumed brother, Henry, who married Elizabeth Frost (sister of Edmund's wife Thomasine) on 12 November 1605 at St. James Church,Stanstead, Suffolk 52°06′42″N 0°41′26″E / 52.111652°N 0.690641°E / 52.111652; 0.690641. Repeated attempts to find record of Edmund Rice's birth or the birth of his presumed brother Henry in church or civil records of the Stanstead, Sudbury, Haverhill, and Bury St. Edmunds region of Suffolk have not been successful.
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Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan (IPA: [eˈlia kaˈzan]; September 7, 1909 – September 28, 2003) was an American director, producer, writer and actor, described by The New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history". He was born in Istanbul, Ottoman Empire, to Greek parents. After studying acting at Yale, he acted professionally for eight years, later joining the Group Theater in 1932, and co-founded the Actors Studio in 1947. With Lee Strasberg, he introduced Method acting to the American stage and cinema as a new form of self-expression and psychological "realism". Kazan acted in only a few films, including City for Conquest (1940).
Kazan introduced a new generation of unknown young actors to the movie audiences, including Marlon Brando and James Dean. Noted for drawing out the best dramatic performances from his actors, he directed 21 actors to Oscar nominations, resulting in nine wins. He became "one of the consummate filmmakers of the 20th century" after directing a string of successful films, including, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), and East of Eden (1955). During his career, he won two Oscars as Best Director and received an Honorary Oscar, won three Tony Awards, and four Golden Globes. Among the other actors he introduced to movie audences were Warren Beatty, Carroll Baker, Julie Harris, Andy Griffith, Lee Remick, Rip Torn, Eli Wallach, Eva Marie Saint, Martin Balsam, Fred Gwynne, and Pat Hingle.
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Elizabeth Taylor
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond "Liz" Taylor, DBE (February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011) was a British-American actress. From her early years as a child star with MGM, she became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age. As one of the world's most famous film stars, Taylor was recognized for her acting ability and for her glamorous lifestyle, beauty and distinctive violet eyes.
National Velvet (1944) was Taylor's first success, and she starred in Father of the Bride (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), Giant (1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for BUtterfield 8 (1960), played the title role in Cleopatra (1963), and married her co-star Richard Burton. They appeared together in 11 films, including Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), for which Taylor won a second Academy Award. From the mid-1970s, she appeared less frequently in film, and made occasional appearances in television and theatre.
Her much publicized personal life included eight marriages and several life-threatening illnesses. From the mid-1980s, Taylor championed HIV and AIDS programs; she co-founded the American Foundation for AIDS Research in 1985, and the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1993. She received the Presidential Citizens Medal, the Legion of Honour, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, who named her seventh on their list of the "Greatest American Screen Legends". Taylor died of congestive heart failure in March 2011 at the age of 79, having suffered many years of ill health.
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Eugene Ormandy
Eugene Ormandy (November 18, 1899 – March 12, 1985) was a Hungarian-born conductor and violinist.
Born Jenő Blau in Budapest, Hungary, Ormandy began studying violin at the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music (now the Franz Liszt Academy of Music) at the age of five. He gave his first concerts as a violinist at age seven and, studying with Jenő Hubay, graduated at 14 with a master's degree. In 1920, he obtained a university degree in philosophy. In 1921, he moved to the United States of America. Around this time Blau changed his name to "Eugene Ormandy," "Eugene" being the equivalent of the Hungarian "Jenő." Accounts differ on the origin of "Ormandy"; it may have either been Blau's own middle name at birth, or his mother's. He was first engaged by conductor Erno Rapee, a former Budapest friend and fellow Academy graduate, as a violinist in the orchestra of the Capitol Theatre in New York City, a 77-player ensemble which accompanied silent movies. He became the concertmaster within five days of joining and soon became one of the conductors of this group. Ormandy also made 16 recordings as a violinist between 1923 and 1929, half of them using the acoustic process.
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Eve Arden
Eve Arden (April 30, 1908 – November 12, 1990) was an American actress. Her almost 60-year career crossed most media frontiers with supporting and leading roles, but she may be best-remembered for playing the sardonic but engaging title character, a high school teacher, on Our Miss Brooks, and as the Rydell High School principal in the films Grease and Grease 2.
Eve Arden was born Eunice M. Quedens (pronounced qwi-DENZ) in Mill Valley, California, to Lucille and Charles Peter Quedens. Her parents divorced when she was a child. Arden claimed to have been an insecure child, declaring later in life that she needed therapy because her mother was so much more beautiful than she.[citation needed]
Some sources indicate that Arden was Catholic based solely on the fact that she had, at one point, attended a Roman Catholic convent school. However, at age 16, she left Tamalpais High School, a public high school, and joined a stock theater company. She made her film debut, under her real name, in the backstage musical Song of Love (1929). She played a wisecracking showgirl who becomes a rival to the film's star, singer Belle Baker. The film was one of Columbia Pictures' earliest successes.
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F.W. Murnau
Friedrich Wilhelm "F. W." Murnau (born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe, December 28, 1888 – March 11, 1931) was one of the most influential German film directors of the silent era, and a prominent figure in the expressionist movement in German cinema during the 1920s. Although some of Murnau's films have been lost, most still survive.
He was born in Bielefeld, Province of Westphalia. He attended the University of Heidelberg and studied art history. He took the name "Murnau" from the town in Germany named Murnau am Staffelsee. Openly gay, the 6'11 (210 cm) director was said to have an icy, imperious disposition and an obsession with film. He was a combat pilot during World War I and directed his first film Der Knabe in Blau ('The Boy in Blue') in 1919.
Murnau's most famous film is Nosferatu, a 1922 adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula for which Stoker's widow sued for copyright infringement. Murnau lost the lawsuit and all prints of the film were ordered to be destroyed, but bootleg prints survived. The vampire, played by German stage actor Max Schreck, resembled a rat which was known to carry the plague. The origins of the word are from Stoker's novel, where it is used by the Romanian townsfolk to refer to Count Dracula and presumably, other undead.
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Fay Wray
Fay Wray (born Vina Fay Wray; September 15, 1907 – August 8, 2004) was a Canadian-American actress most noted for playing the female lead in King Kong. Through an acting career that spanned 57 years, Wray attained international stardom as an actress in horror film roles, leading to many considering her as the first "scream queen".
After appearing in minor film roles, Wray gained media attention being selected as one of the "WAMPAS Baby Stars". This led to Wray being signed to Paramount Pictures as a teenager, where she made more than a dozen films. After leaving Paramount, she signed deals with various film companies, being cast in her first horror film roles among many other types of roles, including in The Bowery (1933) and Viva Villa (1934), both huge productions starring Wallace Beery. For RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., she starred in the film with which she is most identified, King Kong (1933). After the success of King Kong, Wray appeared in many major film roles and on television, finishing her acting career in 1980.
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Florenz Ziegfeld
Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. (March 21, 1867 - July 22, 1932), (sometimes also called "Flo" Ziegfeld), was an American Broadway impresario, notable for his series of theatrical revues, the Ziegfeld Follies (1907–1931), inspired by the Folies Bergère of Paris. He also produced the musical Show Boat. He was known as the "glorifier of the American girl".
Ziegfeld was born in Chicago in 1867. (Some sources, including his obituary, give the year of birth as 1869.) His mother, Rosalie (née de Hez), who was born in Belgium, was the grand niece of General Count Étienne Maurice Gérard. His father, Florenz Ziegfeld, Sr., was a German immigrant whose father was the mayor of Jever in Friesland. Ziegfeld, Jr., was baptized in his mother's Catholic church (his father was Lutheran). Ziegfeld, Jr.'s father ran the Chicago Musical College and later opened a nightclub, the Trocadero, to obtain business from the 1893 World's Fair. To help his father's unsuccessful nightclub, Ziegfeld, Jr., hired and managed the strongman, Eugen Sandow.
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Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra,
/sɨˈnɑːtrə/, (December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was an American singer and film actor.
Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became an unprecedentedly successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, after being signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Being the idol of the "bobby soxers", he released his first album, The Voice of Frank Sinatra in 1946. His professional career had stalled by the 1950s, but it was reborn in 1953 after he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in From Here to Eternity.
He signed with Capitol Records in 1953 and released several critically lauded albums (such as In the Wee Small Hours, Songs for Swingin' Lovers, Come Fly with Me, Only the Lonely and Nice 'n' Easy). Sinatra left Capitol to found his own record label, Reprise Records in 1961 (finding success with albums such as Ring-a-Ding-Ding!, Sinatra at the Sands and Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim), toured internationally, was a founding member of the Rat Pack and fraternized with celebrities and statesmen, including John F. Kennedy. Sinatra turned 50 in 1965, recorded the retrospective September of My Years, starred in the Emmy-winning television special Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music, and scored hits with "Strangers in the Night" and "My Way".
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Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire (born Frederick Austerlitz; May 10, 1899 – June 22, 1987) was an American film and Broadway stage dancer, choreographer, singer and actor. His stage and subsequent film career spanned a total of 76 years, during which he made 31 musical films. He was named the fifth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute. He is particularly associated with Ginger Rogers, with whom he made ten films.
Gene Kelly, another major innovator in filmed dance, said that "the history of dance on film begins with Astaire". Beyond film and television, many classical dancers and choreographers, Rudolf Nureyev, Sammy Davis, Jr., Michael Jackson, Gregory Hines, Mikhail Baryshnikov, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins among them, also acknowledged his importance and influence.
Astaire was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of Johanna "Ann" (née Geilus) and Frederic "Fritz" Austerlitz (born September 8, 1868, as Friedrich Emanuel Austerlitz). Astaire's mother was born in the United States to Lutheran German immigrants from East Prussia and Alsace, while Astaire's father was born in Linz, Austria, to Jewish parents who had converted to Catholicism.
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Fred Ball
Frederick Henry Ball (July 17, 1915 – February 5, 2007) was an American movie studio executive, actor, brother of comedienne Lucille Ball.
Fred Ball was born on July 17, 1915, to Henry Durrell Ball (September 25, 1887 – February 28, 1915) and Desirée "DeDe" Evelyn Hunt (September 21, 1892 – July 20, 1977) in Jamestown, New York, U.S.A. He was named after his grandfather. He grew up in a Baptist family; his father was of Scottish descent and related to the first President of the United States, George Washington (whose mother was Mary Ball). His mother was of French, Irish and English descent. His genealogy can be traced back to the earliest settlers in the colonies. One direct ancestor, William Sprague, left England on the ship Lyon's Whelp for Plymouth/Salem, Massachusetts. He helped found the city of Charlestown, Massachusetts.
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Frederick Loewe
Frederick Loewe (/ˈloʊ/, originally German Friedrich (Fritz) Löwe [ˈløːvə]; June 10, 1901 – February 14, 1988), was an Austrian-American composer. He collaborated with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner on the long running Broadway musicals My Fair Lady and Camelot, with book and lyrics by Lerner, both of which were made into films.
Loewe was born in Berlin, Germany, to Viennese parents Edmond and Rosa Loewe. His father was a noted Jewish operetta star who performed throughout Europe and in North and South America; he starred as Count Danilo in the original production of The Merry Widow.
Frederick Loewe grew up in Berlin and attended a Prussian cadet school from the age of five until he was thirteen. At an early age Loewe learned to play piano by ear and helped his father rehearse, and he began composing songs at age seven. He eventually attended a music conservatory in Berlin, one year behind virtuoso Claudio Arrau, and studied with Ferruccio Busoni and Eugene d'Albert. He won the coveted Hollander Medal awarded by the school and gave performances as a concert pianist while still in Germany. At 13, he was the youngest piano soloist ever to appear with the Berlin Philharmonic.
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French American
French Americans or Franco-Americans are Americans of French or French Canadian descent. About 11.8 million U.S. residents are of this descent, and about 2.0 million speak French and French Creole at home. While Americans of French descent make up a substantial percentage of the American population, French Americans arguably are less visible than other similarly sized ethnic groups. This is due in part to the tendency of French American groups to identify more strongly with "New World" regional identities such as Acadian, Cajun, or Louisiana Creole. This has inhibited the development of a wider French American identity. The majority of Americans of French and French Canadian descent are descendants of those who first settled in Canada in the 17th century (known as New France at the time), which later became the Province of Quebec in 1763, Lower Canada in 1791, and a Canadian province of Quebec after Canadian Confederation in 1867. The majority of Americans of French descent, mostly resident in New England and the Midwest, are descendants of the Quebec Diaspora and the first Canadiens, while a few are of Acadian descent from the Canadian Maritime provinces. Immigration to the United States from France was much lower than from other parts of Europe, such as Ireland, Great Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, Italy, or Poland.
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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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Gale Gordon
Gale Gordon (February 20, 1906 – June 30, 1995) was an American character actor perhaps best remembered as Lucille Ball's longtime television foil—and particularly as cantankerously combustible, tightfisted bank executive Theodore J. Mooney, on Ball's second television situation comedy, The Lucy Show. Gordon also had starring roles in Ball's third series, Here's Lucy and her short-lived fourth series, Life with Lucy. Prior to his television career, Gordon was a respected American radio actor.
Born Charles T. Aldrich, Jr., in New York City, the son of British actress Gloria Gordon and her vaudevillian husband Charles Aldrich, Gale Gordon's first big radio break came via the recurring roles of "Mayor La Trivia" and "Foggy Williams" on Fibber McGee and Molly, before playing Rumson Bullard on the show's successful spinoff, The Great Gildersleeve. Gordon and his character of Mayor La Trivia briefly left the show in December 1942 when Gordon enlisted in World War II and the storyline followed.
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Gary Morton
Gary Morton (December 19, 1924 – March 30, 1999) was the second husband of Lucille Ball. He was a stand-up comedian, whose primary venues were the hotels and resorts of the Borscht Belt in upstate New York.
Morton was born Morton Goldaper in New York City of Jewish heritage.
Morton had been previously married to actress Susan Morrow.[citation needed]
In 1960, Morton met Lucille Ball in New York City a few months before she opened on Broadway in the musical Wildcat. Morton claimed he was always busy working nights, so had not seen the beloved series I Love Lucy. They were married on November 19, 1961 at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York. Morton signed a prenuptial agreement to stifle rumors that he was a gold digger. Morton was 13 years younger than Lucille Ball.
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Gene Kelly
Eugene Curran "Gene" Kelly (August 23, 1912 - February 2, 1996) was an American dancer, actor, singer, film director and producer, and choreographer. Kelly was known for his energetic and athletic dancing style, his good looks and the likeable characters that he played on screen.
Although he is known today for his performances in Singin' in the Rain and An American in Paris, he was a dominant force in Hollywood musical films from the mid 1940s until this art form fell out of fashion in the late 1950s. His many innovations transformed the Hollywood musical film, and he is credited with almost single-handedly making the ballet form commercially acceptable to film audiences.
Kelly was the recipient of an Academy Honorary Award in 1952 for his career achievements. He later received lifetime achievement awards in the Kennedy Center Honors, and from the Screen Actors Guild and American Film Institute; in 1999, the American Film Institute also numbered him 15th in their Greatest Male Stars of All Time list.
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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 Burns
George Burns (January 20, 1896 – March 9, 1996), born Naftaly Birnbaum, was an American comedian, actor, and writer.
He was one of the few entertainers whose career successfully spanned vaudeville, film, radio, and television. His arched eyebrow and cigar smoke punctuation became familiar trademarks for over three quarters of a century. Beginning at the age of 79, Burns' career was resurrected as an amiable, beloved and unusually active old comedian, continuing to work until shortly before his death, in 1996, at the age of 100.
Naftaly (late called Nathan) Birnbaum was the ninth of 12 children born to Louis and Dorah (nèe Bluth) Birnbaum, Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States from Romania. Burns was an active member of the First Roumanian-American congregation. His father was a substitute cantor at the local synagogue but usually worked as a coat presser. During the influenza epidemic of 1903, Lippe Birnbaum contracted the flu and died at the age of 47. Nattie (as he was then called) went to work to help support the family, shining shoes, running errands, and selling newspapers.
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George H. W. Bush
George Herbert Walker Bush (born June 12, 1924) is an American politician who served as the 41st President of the United States (1989–93). He had previously served as the 43rd Vice President of the United States (1981–89), a congressman, an ambassador, a Director of Central Intelligence, and is currently the oldest surviving president.
Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts, to Senator Prescott Bush and Dorothy Walker Bush. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Bush postponed going to college, enlisted in the US Navy on his 18th birthday, and became the youngest aviator in the Navy at the time. He served until the end of the war, then attended Yale University. Graduating in 1948, he moved his family to West Texas and entered the oil business, becoming a millionaire by the age of 40.
He became involved in politics soon after founding his own oil company, serving as a member of the House of Representatives, among other positions. He ran unsuccessfully for president of the United States in 1980, but was chosen by party nominee Ronald Reagan to be the vice presidential nominee, and the two were subsequently elected. During his tenure, Bush headed administration task forces on deregulation and fighting drug abuse.
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German people
The Germans (Deutsche) are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages. Legally, Germans are citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Of approximately 100 million native speakers of German in the world, about 66–75 million consider themselves Germans. There are an additional 80 million people of German ancestry mainly in the United States, Brazil, Canada, Argentina, France, Russia, Chile, Poland, Australia and Romania who most likely are not native speakers of German. Thus, the total number of Germans worldwide lies between 66 and 160 million, depending on the criteria applied (native speakers, single-ancestry ethnic Germans, partial German ancestry, etc.).
Today, peoples from countries with a German-speaking majority or significant German-speaking population groups other than Germany, such as Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg, have developed their own national identity and usually do not refer to themselves as "Germans" in a modern context.
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Gertrude Berg
Gertrude Berg (October 3, 1898 – September 14, 1966) was an American actress and screenwriter. A pioneer of classic radio, she was one of the first women to create, write, produce and star in a long-running hit when she premiered her serial comedy-drama The Rise of the Goldbergs (1929), later known as The Goldbergs.
Berg was born Tilly Edelstein in 1898 in Harlem, and attended public schools. She married Lewis Berg in 1918; they had two children, Cherney (1922–2003) and Harriet (1926–2003). She learned theater while producing skits at her father's Catskills Mountains resort in Fleischmanns, New York.
After the sugar factory her husband worked at burned down, she developed a semi-autobiographical skit, portraying a Jewish family in the New York tenements, into a radio show. Though the household had a typewriter, Berg wrote her script by hand, taking the pages this way to a long-awaited appointment at NBC. When the executive she was meeting with protested that he could not read what Berg had written, she read the script aloud to him. Her performance not only sold the idea for the radio program but also got Berg the job as the lead actress on the program she had written. Berg continued to write the show's scripts by hand in pencil for as long as the program was on the air. On November 20, 1929, a 15-minute episode of The Rise of the Goldbergs was first broadcast on the NBC radio network. She started at $75 a week. Less than two years later, in the heart of the Great Depression, she let the sponsor propose a salary and was told, "Mrs. Berg, we can't pay a cent over $2,000 a week." Berg's husband, Lewis, who became a successful consulting engineer after the loss of his job which prompted her to write the initial radio script, refused to be photographed with his wife for publicity purposes, as he felt this was infringing on her success.
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Gian Carlo Menotti
Gian Carlo Menotti (pronounced [dʒan ˈkarlo meˈnɔtːi]) (July 7, 1911 – February 1, 2007) was an Italian-American composer and librettist. Although he often referred to himself as an American composer, he kept his Italian citizenship. He wrote the classic Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, among about two dozen other operas intended to appeal to popular taste. He won the Pulitzer Prize for two of them: The Consul (1950) and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1955). He founded the noted Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of the Two Worlds) in 1958 and its American counterpart, Spoleto Festival USA, in 1977. In 1986 he commenced a Melbourne Spoleto Festival in Australia, but he withdrew after three years.
Born in Cadegliano-Viconago, Italy, near Lake Maggiore and the Swiss border, Menotti was the sixth of eight children of Alfonso and Ines Menotti, his father being a coffee merchant. Menotti began writing songs when he was seven years old, and at eleven wrote both the libretto and music for his first opera, The Death of Pierrot. He began his formal musical training at the Milan Conservatory in 1923.
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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]
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Goldwyn Girls
The Goldwyn Girls were a musical stock company of female dancers employed by Samuel Goldwyn. Famous actresses whose career included a stint in the Goldwyn Girls include Lucille Ball, Paulette Goddard, Betty Grable, Ann Sothern, Jane Wyman, Virginia Bruce, Virginia Grey, Barbara Pepper, Virginia Mayo, and Marjorie Reynolds.
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Harry Belafonte
Harold George "Harry" Belafonte, Jr. (born March 1, 1927) is an American singer, songwriter, actor and social activist. He was dubbed the "King of Calypso" for popularizing the Caribbean musical style with an international audience in the 1950s. Belafonte is perhaps best known for singing "The Banana Boat Song", with its signature lyric "Day-O". Throughout his career he has been an advocate for civil rights and humanitarian causes and was a vocal critic of the policies of the George W. Bush Administration.
Born Harold George Bellanfanti, Jr., at Lying-in Hospital, Harlem, New York, Belafonte was the son of Melvine (née Love) – a housekeeper of Jamaican descent – and Harold George Bellanfanti, Sr., a Martiniquan who worked as a chef in the National Guard. From 1932 to 1940, he lived with his grandmother in her native country of Jamaica. When he returned to New York City, he attended George Washington High School after which he joined the Navy and served during World War II. In the 1940s, he was working as a janitor's assistant in NYC when a tenant gave him, as a gratuity, two tickets to see the American Negro Theater. He fell in love with the art form and also met Sidney Poitier. The financially struggling pair regularly purchased a single seat to local plays, trading places in between acts, after informing the other about the progression of the play. At the end of the 1940s, he took classes in acting at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York with the influential German director Erwin Piscator alongside Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau, Bea Arthur and Sidney Poitier, while performing with the American Negro Theatre. He subsequently received a Tony Award for his participation in the Broadway revue John Murray Anderson's Almanac.
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Hattie Carnegie
Hattie Carnegie (15 March 1880 — 22 February 1956) was a fashion entrepreneur based in New York City from the 1920s to the 1960s. She was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary as Henrietta Kanengeiser.
The second oldest of seven children, Hattie Carnegie's father was an Austrian Jewish artist and tailor, thought to have introduced her to the world of fashion.[citation needed]
Carnegie, who emigrated with her family to the United States at the age of six years old in 1886, was known for her elegant couture collection and secondary ready-to-wear lines. Her company was revolutionary in the sense that it was one of the first to introduce ready-to-wear to the high-end market. She pioneered the 'head-to-hem' boutique concept that paved the way for the future success of Ralph Lauren in America. Her company discovered some of the most prominent American fashion designers of the twentieth century, such as Norman Norell, Pauline Trigère and James Galanos; for nearly a decade, the made-to-order department was headed by Pauline Fairfax Potter.[citation needed]
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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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Hope Lange
Hope Elise Ross Lange (November 28, 1933 – December 19, 2003) was an American film, stage and television actress.
Lange was born into a theatrical family in Redding, Connecticut. Her father, John George Lange (1885–1942), was a cellist and the music arranger for Florenz Ziegfeld and conductor for Henry Cohen; her mother, Minette (née Buddecke) (1898–1970), was an actress. They had three daughters, Minelda (1922–2004), Joy, (1927–2007), and Hope, and a son, David. John worked in New York City and the family moved to Greenwich Village when Hope was a young child.
Hope sang with other children in the play Life, Laughter and Tears, which opened at the Booth Theatre in March 1942. At age 9, Lange had a speaking part in the award-winning Broadway play The Patriots, which opened in January 1943.
John Lange died in September 1942 but the family stayed in New York City. Minette ran a restaurant on Macdougal Street near Washington Square Park from 1944 to 1956. The name was "Minette's of Washington Square", although some sources confuse it with "Minetta Tavern", an Italian restaurant on Macdougal Street founded in 1937. The entire family worked in the restaurant; the oldest daughter, Minelda, ran the cash register while Joy and Hope waited on tables.
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Hume Cronyn
Hume Blake Cronyn, OC (July 18, 1911 – June 15, 2003) was a Canadian actor of stage and screen, who enjoyed a long career, often appearing professionally alongside his second wife, Jessica Tandy.
Hume Cronyn, one of five children, was born in London, Ontario, Canada, the son of Hume Blake Cronyn, Sr., a businessman and a Member of Parliament for London (after whom the Hume Cronyn Memorial Observatory and asteroid (12050) Humecronyn are named) and Frances Amelia (née Labatt), an heiress of the brewing company of the same name. His paternal grandfather, Verschoyle Cronyn, was the son of the Right Reverend Benjamin Cronyn, an Anglican cleric of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy, who served as first bishop of the Anglican diocese of Huron, and founder of Huron College, from which grew the University of Western Ontario. His great-uncle, Benjamin, Jr., was both a prominent citizen and early mayor of London, Ontario, but was later indicted for fraud and fled to Vermont; during his tenure in London he built a mansion called Oakwood, which currently serves as the head office of the Info-Tech Research Group. Cronyn was also a cousin of Canadian-born theater producer, Robert Whitehead, and a first cousin of the Canadian-British artist Hugh Verschoyle Cronyn GM (1905–1996).
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I Love Lucy
I Love Lucy is an American television sitcom starring Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Vivian Vance, and William Frawley. The black-and-white series originally ran from October 15, 1951, to May 6, 1957, on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). After the series ended in 1957, however, a modified version continued for three more seasons with 13 one-hour specials, running from 1957 to 1960, known first as The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show and later in reruns as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour.
I Love Lucy was the most watched show in the United States in four of its six seasons, and was the first to end its run at the top of the Nielsen ratings (an accomplishment later matched by The Andy Griffith Show and Seinfeld). I Love Lucy is still syndicated in dozens of languages across the world.
The show was the first scripted television program to be shot on 35 mm film in front of a studio audience, and won five Emmy Awards and received numerous nominations. In 2002, it ranked second on TV Guide's list of television's greatest shows, behind Seinfeld and ahead of The Honeymooners. In 2007 it was listed as one of Time magazine's "100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME."I Love Lucy remains hugely popular today; more than 60 years after its debut, it is still seen by 40 million Americans each year.
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Irish Americans
Irish Americans are citizens of the United States who can trace their ancestry to Ireland. A total of 36,278,332 Americans—estimated at 11.9% of the total population—reported Irish ancestry in the 2008 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. Roughly another 3.5 million (or about another 1.2% of Americans) identified more specifically with Scotch-Irish ancestry. The Irish diaspora population in the United States is roughly 6 times the modern population of Ireland.
The only self-reported ancestral group larger than Irish Americans is German Americans. The Irish are widely dispersed in terms of geography, and demographics. Irish American political leaders have played a major role in local and national politics since before the American Revolutionary War: eight Irish Americans signed the United States Declaration of Independence, and 22 American Presidents, from Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama, have been at least partly of Irish ancestry. (See "American Presidents with Irish ancestry" below.)
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Isaac Stern
Isaac Stern (Ukrainian: Исаак Стерн, Russian: Айзек Стерн; July 21, 1920 – September 22, 2001) was a Ukrainian-born violinist and conductor. He was renowned for his recordings and for discovering new musical talent.
Isaac Stern was born into a Jewish family in Kremenets, Ukraine. He was fourteen months old when his family moved to San Francisco. He received his first music lessons from his mother, then in 1928 enrolled at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he studied until 1931 before going on to study privately with Louis Persinger. He returned to the San Francisco Conservatory to study for five years with Naoum Blinder, to whom he said he owed the most. At his public début on February 18, 1936, aged 15, he played Saint-Saëns' Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor with the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of Pierre Monteux. Reflecting on his background, Stern once memorably quipped that cultural exchanges between the US and Soviet Russia were simple affairs: "They send us their Jews from Odessa, and we send them our Jews from Odessa."
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J. Edgar Hoover
John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972 aged 77. Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency, and with instituting a number of modernizations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories.
Late in life and after his death Hoover became a controversial figure as evidence of his secretive actions became public. His critics have accused him of exceeding the jurisdiction of the FBI. He used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to amass secret files on political leaders, and to collect evidence using illegal methods. FBI directors are now limited to one 10-year term, subject to extension by the United States Senate, because of his long and controversial tenure.
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Jack Haley
John Joseph "Jack" Haley (August 10, 1898 – June 6, 1979) was an American stage, radio, and film actor best known for his portrayal of the Tin Man and Kansas farmworker Hickory in The Wizard of Oz.
Haley starred in vaudeville as a song-and-dance comedian. One of his closest friends was fellow vaudeville alumnus Fred Allen, who would frequently mention "Mr. Jacob Haley of Newton Highlands, Massachusetts" on the air. In the early 1930s Haley starred in comedy shorts for Vitaphone in Brooklyn, New York. His wide-eyed, good-natured expression landed him supporting roles in musical feature films like Poor Little Rich Girl with Shirley Temple, Higher and Higher with Frank Sinatra and the Irving Berlin musical Alexander's Ragtime Band. Both Poor Little Rich Girl and Alexander's Ragtime Band were released by Twentieth Century-Fox. Haley was under contract to them at the time, and also appeared in the Fox films Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Pigskin Parade, the latter marking his first appearance with Judy Garland.
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Jack Lemmon
John Uhler "Jack" Lemmon III (February 8, 1925 – June 27, 2001) was an American actor and musician. He starred in more than 60 films including Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Mister Roberts (for which he won the 1955 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award), Days of Wine and Roses, The Great Race, Irma la Douce, The Odd Couple, Save the Tiger (for which he won the 1973 Best Actor Academy Award), The Out-of-Towners, The China Syndrome, Missing (for which he won 'Best Actor' at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival), Glengarry Glen Ross, Grumpy Old Men and Grumpier Old Men.
Lemmon was born in an elevator[citation needed] at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He was the only child of Mildred Burgess LaRue (née Noel) and John Uhler Lemmon, Jr., who was the president of a doughnut company. Lemmon attended John Ward Elementary School in Newton and The Rivers School in Weston, Massachusetts. He had stated that he knew he wanted to be an actor from the age of eight. Lemmon attended Phillips Academy (Class of 1943) and Harvard University (Class of 1947), where he lived in Adams House and was an active member of several Drama Clubs - becoming president of the Hasty Pudding Club - as well as a member of the Delphic Club for Gentleman, a final club at Harvard. After Harvard, Lemmon joined the Navy, receiving V-12 training and serving as an ensign. On being discharged, he took up acting professionally, working on radio, television and Broadway. He studied acting under coach Uta Hagen. He also became enamored of the piano and learned to play it on his own. He could also play the harmonica, organ, and the double bass.
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Jack Nicholson
Not to be confused with Nicholas Jackson
John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson (born April 22, 1937) is an American actor, film director, producer and writer. He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. His twelve Oscar nominations make him the second most nominated actor of all time, behind only Meryl Streep, and tied with Katharine Hepburn.
Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and for As Good as It Gets. He also won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the 1983 film Terms of Endearment. He is tied with Walter Brennan for most acting wins by a male actor (three). Nicholson is well known for playing villainous roles such as Jack Torrance in The Shining, Frank Costello in The Departed, and the Joker in 1989's Batman, among many other roles.
Nicholson is one of only two actors who have been nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade from the 1960s to 2000s; the other is Michael Caine. He has won seven Golden Globe Awards, and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2001. In 1994, he became one of the youngest actors to be awarded the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. Notable films in which he has starred include Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Passenger, The Shining, Reds, Terms of Endearment, Batman, A Few Good Men, As Good as It Gets, About Schmidt, The Departed and Anger Management .
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James Cagney
James Francis Cagney, Jr. (July 17, 1899 – March 30, 1986) was an American actor, first on stage, then in film, where he had his greatest impact. Although he won acclaim and major awards for a wide variety of performances, he is best remembered for playing tough guys. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him eighth among its 50 Greatest American Screen Legends.
In his first professional acting performance, he danced dressed as a woman in the chorus line of the 1919 revue Every Sailor. He spent several years in vaudeville as a hoofer and comedian, until he got his first major acting part in 1925. He secured several other roles, receiving good notices, before landing the lead in the 1929 play Penny Arcade. After rave reviews, Warner Bros. signed him for an initial $500-a-week, three-week contract to reprise his role; this was quickly extended to a seven-year contract.
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James Stewart
James Maitland "Jimmy" Stewart (May 20, 1908 – July 2, 1997) was an American film and stage actor, known for his distinctive voice and persona. Over the course of his career, he starred in many films widely considered classics and was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning one in competition and receiving one Lifetime Achievement award. He was a major MGM contract star. He also had a noted military career and was a World War II and Vietnam War veteran, who rose to the rank of Brigadier General in the United States Air Force Reserve.
James Maitland Stewart was born on May 20, 1908, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the son of Elizabeth Ruth (née Jackson) and Alexander Maitland Stewart, who owned a hardware store. Stewart's parents were of Scottish descent and Presbyterians. His maternal ancestors served in the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the American Civil War. The eldest of three children (he had two younger sisters, Virginia and Mary), he was expected to continue his father's business, which had been in the family for three generations. His mother was an excellent pianist but his father discouraged Stewart's request for lessons. But when his father accepted a gift of an accordion from a guest, young Stewart quickly learned to play the instrument, which became a fixture off-stage during his acting career. As the family grew, music continued to be an important part of family life.
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Jean Stapleton
Jean Stapleton (born Jeanne Murray; January 19, 1923) is an American character actress of stage, television and film.
She is best known for her portrayal of Edith Bunker, the long-suffering, yet devoted wife of Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O'Connor) and mother of Gloria Stivic (played by Sally Struthers), on the 1970s situation comedy All in the Family. Stapleton was also seen occasionally on the All in the Family follow-up series, Archie Bunker's Place, but, tired of the role, asked to be written out after the first season.
Born in New York City, the daughter of Joseph E. Murray (a billboard advertising salesman) and Marie Stapleton Murray (a singer), she attended Hunter College. She began her career in 1941 in summer stock, aged 18, and made her New York debut in American Gothic, an Off-Broadway play.
She was featured on Broadway in several hit musicals, such as Damn Yankees, Funny Girl, Bells Are Ringing, and Juno. She guest starred in many television series, including the role of Rosa Criley in the 1963 episode "The Bride Wore Pink" on NBC's medical drama about psychiatry, The Eleventh Hour.
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Jessica Tandy
Jessie Alice "Jessica" Tandy (June 7, 1909 - September 11, 1994) was an English-American stage and film actress.
She first appeared on the London stage in 1926 at the age of 16, playing, among other roles, Katherine opposite Laurence Olivier's Henry V, and Cordelia opposite John Gielgud's King Lear. She also worked in British films. Following the end of her marriage to the British actor Jack Hawkins, she moved to New York, where she met Canadian actor Hume Cronyn. He became her second husband and frequent partner on stage and screen.
She won the Tony Award for her performance as Blanche Dubois in the original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948, sharing the prize with Katherine Cornell (who won for the female lead in Antony and Cleopatra) and Judith Anderson (for the latter's portrayal of Medea). Over the following three decades, her career continued sporadically and included a supporting role in Alfred Hitchcock's horror film, The Birds (1963), and a Tony Award-winning performance in The Gin Game (1977, playing in the two-hander play opposite Hume Cronyn). Along with Cronyn, she was a member of the original acting company of the Guthrie Theater.
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John Frankenheimer
John Michael Frankenheimer (February 19, 1930 – July 6, 2002) was an American film and television director known for social dramas and action/suspense films. Among his credits were Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Seven Days in May (1964), The Train, (1964), Grand Prix (1966), Black Sunday (1977) and Ronin (1998).
He won four consecutive Emmy Awards in the 1990s for the television movies Against the Wall, The Burning Season, Andersonville, and George Wallace, which also received a Golden Globe award. He was considered one of the last remaining directors who insisted on having complete control over all elements of production, making his style unique in Hollywood.
His 30 feature films and over 50 plays for television were notable for their influence on contemporary thought. He became a pioneer of the "modern-day political thriller," having begun his career at the peak of the Cold War. Many of his films were noted for creating "psychological dilemmas" for his male protagonists along with having a strong "sense of environment," similar in style to films by director Sidney Lumet, for whom he had earlier worked as assistant director. He developed a "tremendous propensity for exploring political situations" which would ensnare his characters.
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John Murray Anderson
John Murray Anderson (September 20, 1886 – January 30, 1954) was a theatre director and producer, songwriter, actor, screenwriter, and lighting designer. He worked almost every genre of show business, including vaudeville, Broadway, and film.
Born in St. John's, Newfoundland, the son of Hon. John Anderson and brother of Hugh Abercrombie Anderson, he received his early education at Bishop Feild College in St. John’s. He was then sent to Europe, where he was educated at Edinburgh Academy in Scotland and Lausanne University in Switzerland. He studied singing with Sir Charles Stanley and art with Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Before beginning his theatrical career, he was an antiques dealer in New York City, where he sold collections he had accumulated in Newfoundland. This lasted a year, as he said, because he had "everything but customers" in his store.
In New York, Anderson quickly became involved in theatre, first as a dance instructor, before becoming a writer and producer. He made his Broadway debut wearing three hats, as writer, director, and producer of The Greenwich Village Follies in 1919. He subsequently produced new editions of the revue in each of the five succeeding years. He also was responsible for productions of the Ziegfeld Follies in 1934, 1936, and 1943, the Harold Arlen-Ira Gershwin-E. Y. Harburg revue Life Begins at 8:40 (1934), Billy Rose's Jumbo (1935), One for the Money (1939), Two for the Show (1940), and Three to Make Ready (1946), and New Faces of 1952. In the West End he directed The League of Notions, Bow Bells, and Fanfare.
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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.
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Karl Freund
Karl W. Freund, A.S.C. (January 16, 1890-May 3, 1969(1969-05-03) (aged 79) was a cinematographer and film director most noted for photographing Metropolis (1927), Dracula (1931), and television's I Love Lucy (1951-1957).
Born in Dvůr Králové (Königinhof), Bohemia, his career began in 1905 when, at age 15, he got a job as an assistant projectionist for a film company in Berlin where his family moved in 1901.
He worked as a cinematographer on over 100 films, including the German Expressionist films The Golem (1920), The Last Laugh (1924) and Metropolis (1927). Freund co-wrote, and was cinematographer on, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927), directed by Walter Ruttmann.
Freund emigrated to the United States in 1929 where he continued to shoot well remembered films such as Dracula (1931) and Key Largo (1948). Notably, his work on Dracula came under a mostly disorganized shoot, with the usually meticulous director Tod Browning leaving cinematographer Freund to take over during much of filming, making Freund something of an uncredited director on the film. He won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography for The Good Earth (1937).
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Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Houghton Hepburn (May 12, 1907 – June 29, 2003) was an American actress of film, stage, and television. Known for her headstrong independence and spirited personality, Hepburn's career as a Hollywood leading lady spanned more than 60 years. Her work came in a range of genres, from screwball comedy to literary drama, and she received four Academy Awards for Best Actress—a record for any performer. Hepburn's characters were often strong, sophisticated women with a hidden vulnerability.
Raised in Connecticut by wealthy, progressive parents, Hepburn began to act while studying at Bryn Mawr College. After four years in the theatre, favorable reviews of her work on Broadway brought her to the attention of Hollywood. Her early years in the film industry were marked with success, including an Academy Award for her third picture, Morning Glory (1933), but this was followed by a series of commercial failures. In 1938 she was labeled "box office poison". Hepburn masterminded her own comeback, buying out her contract with RKO Radio Pictures and acquiring the film rights to The Philadelphia Story, which she sold on the condition that she be the star. In the 1940s she was contracted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where her career focused on an alliance with Spencer Tracy. The screen-partnership spanned 25 years, and produced nine movies.
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Katherine Dunham
Katherine Dunham (June 22, 1909 – May 21, 2006) was an American dancer, choreographer, and company director as well as an author, educator, and social activist. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers in American and European theater of the 20th century and has been called the "matriarch and queen mother of black dance."
During her heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, Dunham was renowned throughout Europe and Latin America and was widely popular in the United States, where the Washington Post called her "dance's Katherine the Great." For almost thirty years she maintained the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the only self-supported American black dance troupe at that time, and over her long career she choreographed more than ninety individual dances. Dunham was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of dance anthropology, or ethnochoreology.
Katherine Mary Dunham was born in June 1909 in a Chicago hospital and taken as an infant to her parents' home in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a village about fifteen miles west of Chicago. Her father, Albert Millard Dunham, was a descendant of slaves from West Africa and Madagascar. Her mother, Fanny June Dunham (née Taylor), who was of mixed French-Canadian and Native American heritage, died when Katherine was four years old. After her father's remarriage a few years later, the family moved to a predominately white neighborhood in Joliet, Illinois, where Mr. Dunham ran a dry cleaning business.
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Lauren Bacall
Lauren Bacall ( /ˌlɔrən bəˈkɔːl/; born Betty Joan Perske, September 16, 1924) is an American film and stage actress and model, known for her distinctive husky voice and sultry looks.
She first emerged as leading lady in the Humphrey Bogart film To Have And Have Not (1944) and continued on in the film noir genre, with appearances in Bogart movies The Big Sleep (1946) and Dark Passage (1947), as well as a comedienne in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) with Marilyn Monroe and Designing Woman (1957) with Gregory Peck. Bacall has also worked on Broadway in musicals, gaining Tony Awards for Applause in 1970 and Woman of the Year in 1981. Her performance in the movie The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) earned her a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination.
In 1999, Bacall was ranked #20 of the 25 actresses on the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars list by the American Film Institute. In 2009, she was selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to receive an Academy Honorary Award "in recognition of her central place in the Golden Age of motion pictures."
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Laurence Olivier
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM ( /ˈlɒrəns ɵˈlɪvi.eɪ/; 22 May 1907 – 11 July 1989) was an English actor, director, and producer. One of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century, he was the youngest actor to be knighted and the first to be elevated to the peerage. He married three times, to actresses Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Plowright. Actor Spencer Tracy said that Olivier was 'the greatest actor in the English-speaking world'.
Olivier played a wide variety of roles on stage and screen from Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and Restoration comedy to modern American and British drama. He was the first artistic director of the National Theatre of Great Britain and its main stage is named in his honour. He is regarded by some to be the greatest actor of the 20th century, in the same category as David Garrick, Richard Burbage, Edmund Kean and Henry Irving in their own centuries. Olivier's AMPAS acknowledgments are considerable: twelve Oscar nominations, with two awards (for Best Actor and Best Picture for the 1948 film Hamlet), plus two honorary awards including a statuette and certificate. He was also awarded five Emmy awards from the nine nominations he received. Additionally, he was a three-time Golden Globe and BAFTA winner.
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Lena Horne
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was an American singer, actress, civil rights activist and dancer.
Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of sixteen and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood, where she had small parts in numerous movies, and more substantial parts in the films Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. Due to the Red Scare and her left-leaning political views, Horne found herself blacklisted and unable to get work in Hollywood.
Returning to her roots as a nightclub performer, Horne took part in the March on Washington in August 1963, and continued to work as a performer, both in nightclubs and on television, while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which ran for more than three hundred performances on Broadway and earned her numerous awards and accolades. She continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, disappearing from the public eye in 2000.
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Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein ( /ˈbɜrnstaɪn/ US dict: bûrn′·stīn; August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim. According to The New York Times, he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."
His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world's leading orchestras, and from his music for West Side Story, as well as Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town and his own Mass.
Bernstein was also the first conductor to give numerous television lectures on classical music, starting in 1954 and continuing until his death. In addition, he was a skilled pianist, often conducting piano concertos from the keyboard.
As a composer he wrote in many styles encompassing symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre music, choral works, opera, chamber music and pieces for the piano. Many of his works are regularly performed around the world, although none has matched the tremendous popular and commercial success of West Side Story.
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Leontyne Price
Mary Violet Leontyne Price (born February 10, 1927) is an American soprano. Born and raised in the Deep South, she rose to international acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s, and was one of the first African Americans to become a leading artist at the Metropolitan Opera.
One critic characterized Price's voice as "vibrant", "soaring" and "a Price beyond pearls", as well as "genuinely buttery, carefully produced but firmly under control", with phrases that "took on a seductive sinuousness." Time magazine called her voice "Rich, supple and shining, it was in its prime capable of effortlessly soaring from a smoky mezzo to the pure soprano gold of a perfectly spun high C."
A lirico spinto (Italian for "pushed lyric") soprano, she was considered especially well suited to the roles of Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini, as well as several in operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Her voice ranged from A-flat below middle C to the E above high C. (She said she reached F "in the shower.")
After her retirement from the opera stage in 1985, she continued to appear in recitals and orchestral concerts for another 12 years.
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Lillian Gish
Lillian Diana Gish (October 14, 1893 – February 27, 1993) was an American stage, screen and television actress whose film acting career spanned 75 years, from 1912 to 1987. She was called "The First Lady of American Cinema".
She was a prominent film star of the 1910s and 1920s, particularly associated with the films of director D.W. Griffith, including her leading role in Griffith's seminal Birth of a Nation (1915). Her sound-era film appearances were sporadic, but included memorable roles in the controversial western Duel in the Sun (1946) and the offbeat thriller Night of the Hunter (1955). She did considerable television work from the early 1950s into the 1980s, and closed her career playing, for the first time, opposite Bette Davis in the 1987 film The Whales of August.
The American Film Institute (AFI) named Gish 17th among the greatest female stars of all time. She was awarded an Honorary Academy Award in 1971, and in 1984 she received an AFI Life Achievement Award.
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Liza Minnelli
Liza May Minnelli (born March 12, 1946) is an American actress and singer. She is the daughter of singer and actress Judy Garland and film director Vincente Minnelli.
Already established as a nightclub singer and musical theatre actress, she first attracted critical acclaim for her dramatic performances in the movies The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970); Minnelli then rose to international stardom for her appearance as Sally Bowles in the 1972 film version of the Broadway musical Cabaret, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. She later made a great star turn in Arthur (1981), co-starring with Dudley Moore (in the title role) and Sir John Gielgud, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as Arthur's snobbish but loveable butler.
While film projects such as Lucky Lady, A Matter of Time and New York, New York were less favorably received than her stage roles, Minnelli became one of the most versatile, highly regarded and best-selling entertainers in television, beginning with Liza with a Z in 1972, and on stage in the Broadway productions of Flora the Red Menace, The Act and The Rink. Minnelli also toured internationally and did shows such as Liza Minnelli: At Carnegie Hall, Frank, Liza & Sammy: The Ultimate Event, and Liza Live from Radio City Music Hall.
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Lucille Ball
Lucille Désirée Ball (August 6, 1911 - April 26, 1989) was an American comedienne, film, television, stage and radio actress, model, film and television executive, and star of the sitcoms I Love Lucy, The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, Here's Lucy and Life With Lucy. One of the most popular and influential stars in the United States during her lifetime, with one of Hollywood's longest careers, especially on television, Ball began acting in the 1930s, becoming both a radio actress and B-movie star in the 1940s, and then a television star during the 1950s. She was still making films in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1962, Ball became the first woman to run a major television studio, Desilu, which produced many successful and popular television series.
Ball was nominated for an Emmy Award thirteen times, and won four times. In 1977 Ball was among the first recipients of the Women in Film Crystal Award. She was the recipient of the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1979, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kennedy Center Honors in 1986 and the Governors Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in 1989.
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Madelyn Pugh Davis
Madelyn Pugh (March 15, 1921 – April 20, 2011), sometimes credited as Madelyn Pugh Davis, Madelyn Davis, or Madelyn Martin, was a television writer who became known in the 1950s for her work on the I Love Lucy television series.
A native of Indiana, Pugh became interested in writing while serving as editor of the Shortridge High School newspaper in Indianapolis, Indiana. She graduated from the Indiana University School of Journalism in 1942. Her first professional writing job was writing short radio spots for WIRE, an Indianapolis radio station.
When her family moved to California, she got work as a radio writer, first for NBC and then CBS, where she met Bob Carroll. Pugh credits some of her breakthrough as "the girl writer" to the war effort, which limited the pool of qualified male writers. Early in her career, she was frequently the only female writer on staff.[citation needed]
Early in her career, as a staff writer for CBS Radio in Hollywood, Pugh forged a partnership with Bob Carroll, Jr. which lasted more than 50 years. Together they wrote some 400 television programs and roughly 500 radio shows. While the team was writing for The Steve Allen Show, they became interested in writing for Lucille Ball's new radio show, My Favorite Husband. They paid Allen to write his own show one week so they could focus on creating a script submission for My Favorite Husband. Under the supervision of head writer Jess Oppenheimer, the pair wrote Ball's radio program for its 2½ years.
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Marx Brothers
The Marx Brothers were an American family comedy act, originally from New York City, that enjoyed success in Vaudeville, Broadway, and motion pictures from the early 1900s to around 1950. Five of the Marx Brothers’ thirteen feature films were selected by the American Film Institute as among the top 100 comedy films, with two of them (Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera) in the top twelve.
The core of the act was the three elder brothers, Chico, Harpo and Groucho; each developed a highly distinctive stage persona. The two younger brothers, Gummo and Zeppo, did not develop their stage characters to the same extent, and eventually left the act to pursue other careers. Gummo was not in any of the movies; Zeppo appeared in the first five.
Born in New York City, the Marx Brothers were the sons of Jewish immigrants from Germany and France. Their mother, Minnie Schönberg, was from Dornum in East Frisia; and their father, Simon Marx (whose name was changed to Samuel Marx, and who was nicknamed "Frenchy") was a native of Alsace and worked as a tailor. The family lived in the then-poor Yorkville section of New York City's Upper East Side, between the Irish, German and Italian quarters.
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Mary Martin
Mary Virginia Martin (December 1, 1913 – November 3, 1990) was an American actress and singer. She originated many roles over her career including Nellie Forbush in South Pacific and Maria in The Sound of Music. She was named a Kennedy Center Honoree in 1989. She was also the mother of actor Larry Hagman.
Mary Martin's life as a child, as she describes it in her autobiography My Heart Belongs, was secure and happy. She had close relationships with both her mother and father, as well as her siblings. Her autobiography details how the young actress had an instinctive ear for recreating musical sounds.
Martin's father, Preston Martin, was a lawyer and her mother, Juanita Presley, was a violin teacher. Although the doctors told Juanita that she would risk her life if she attempted to have another baby, she was determined to have a boy. Instead, she had Mary, who became quite a tomboy. Her birth was an event as all of the neighbors gathered around Juanita's bedroom window, waiting for the raising of a curtain to signal the baby’s arrival.
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Mary Tyler Moore
Mary Tyler Moore (born December 29, 1936) is an American actress, primarily known for her roles in television sitcoms. Moore is best known for The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–77), in which she starred as Mary Richards, a 30-something single woman who worked as a local news producer in Minneapolis, and for her earlier role as Laura Petrie (Dick Van Dyke's wife) on The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–66). She also appeared in a number of films, most notably 1980's Ordinary People, in which she played a role that was the polar opposite of the television characters she had portrayed, and for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. Moore has also been active in charity work and various political causes, particularly around the issues of animal rights and Diabetes mellitus type 1. Mary Tyler Moore was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the beginning of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and also dealt with alcoholism, which was treated in the 1980s. In May 2011, Moore underwent elective brain surgery to remove a benign meningioma.
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Mary Wickes
Mary Wickes (June 13, 1910 – October 22, 1995) was an American film and television actress.
Wickes was born as Mary Isabella Wickenhauser in St. Louis, Missouri, of German Irish Protestant extraction. She graduated at the age of eighteen with a degree in political science from Washington University in St. Louis, where she joined the Phi Mu women's fraternity and was initiated into Mortar Board in 1929. Wickes' first Broadway appearance was in Marc Connelly's The Farmer Takes a Wife in 1934 with Henry Fonda. She began acting in films in the late 1930s, and was also a member of the Orson Welles troupe on his radio drama Mercury Theatre of the Air. One of her earliest significant film appearances was in The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), reprising her stage role of "Nurse Preen".
A tall (5'10"), gangling woman with a distinctive voice, Wickes would ultimately prove herself adept as a comedienne, but she first attracted attention in the film Now, Voyager (1942), as the wisecracking nurse who helped Bette Davis' character during her mother's illness. (She had already appeared earlier that year with Davis in The Man Who Came To Dinner, and appeared with Davis again six years later in June Bride.) Also in 1942 she had a large part in the Abbott and Costello comedy Who Done It?. She continued playing supporting roles in films during the next decade, usually playing wisecracking characters. A prime example was her deadpan characterization of Stella, the harassed housekeeper, in the Doris Day vehicles By the Light of the Silvery Moon and On Moonlight Bay. She played similar roles in two later movies with Rosalind Russell: The Trouble with Angels and Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows in the mid 1960s.
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Merce Cunningham
Mercier "Merce" Philip Cunningham (April 16, 1919 – July 26, 2009) was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of the American avant-garde for more than 50 years. Throughout much of his life, Cunningham was considered one of the greatest creative forces in American dance. He is also notable for his frequent collaborations with artists of other disciplines, including musicians John Cage and David Tudor, artists Robert Rauschenberg and Bruce Nauman, designer Romeo Gigli, and architect Benedetta Tagliabue. Works that he produced with these artists had a profound impact on avant-garde art beyond the world of dance.
As a choreographer, teacher and leader of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Cunningham had a profound influence on modern dance. Many dancers who trained with Cunningham formed their own companies, and they include Paul Taylor, Remy Charlip, Viola Farber, Charles Moulton, Karole Armitage, Robert Kovich, Foofwa d’Imobilité, Kimberly Bartosik, Floanne Ankah and Jonah Bokaer.
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Myrna Loy
Myrna Loy (August 2, 1905 – December 14, 1993) was an American actress. Trained as a dancer, she devoted herself fully to an acting career following a few minor roles in silent films. She was originally typecast in exotic roles, often as a vamp or a woman of Asian descent, but her career prospects improved following her portrayal of Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934). Her successful pairing with William Powell resulted in 14 films together, including five subsequent Thin Man films. In 1937, she was crowned the "Queen of Hollywood" by a nationwide poll.
Loy was born Myrna Adele Williams in Helena, Montana, to Adelle Mae (née Johnson) and rancher David Franklin Williams, in nearby Radersburg. Her paternal grandparents were natives of Wales, and her maternal grandparents were Swedish and Scottish. Her first name came from a train station whose name her father liked. Her father was also a banker and real estate developer and the youngest man ever elected to the Montana state legislature. Her mother studied music at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago.
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Nanette Fabray
Nanette Fabray (born October 27, 1920) is an American actress, comedienne, singer, dancer, and activist. She began her career performing in vaudeville as a child and became a musical theatre actress during the 1940s and 1950s, winning a Tony Award in 1949 for her performance in Love Life. In the mid-1950s, she served as Sid Caesar's comedic partner on Caesar's Hour, for which she won three Emmy Awards. From 1979-1984, she appeared as Grandma Katherine Romano on One Day at a Time.
Fabray overcame a significant hearing impairment and has been a long-time advocate for the rights of the deaf and hard of hearing. Her honors representing the handicapped include the President's Distinguished Service Award and the Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award.
Fabray was born Ruby Bernadette Nanette Fabares in San Diego, California, to Raul Bernard Fabares, a train conductor, and Lily Agnes McGovern, a housewife. The family resided in Los Angeles and Fabray's mother was instrumental in getting her daughter involved in show business as a child. At a young age, she studied tap dancing with, among others, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. She made her professional stage debut as "Miss New Years Eve 1923" at the Million Dollar Theater at the age of three. The following year, she made her first film appearance as an extra in the Our Gang short Cradle Robbers. She spent much of her childhood appearing in vaudeville productions as a dancer and singer. She appeared with stars such as Ben Turpin.
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Nathan Milstein
Nathan Mironovich Milstein (January 13, 1904 [O.S. December 31, 1903] – December 21, 1992) was a Russian-born American virtuoso violinist.
Widely considered one of the finest violinists of the 20th century, Milstein was known for his interpretations of Bach's solo violin works and for works from the Romantic period. He was also known for his long career: he performed at a high level into his mid 80s, retiring only after suffering a broken hand.
He was born in Odessa, then part of the Russian Empire (now in Ukraine), the fourth child of seven, to a middle-class Jewish family with virtually no musical background. It was a concert by the 11-year-old Jascha Heifetz that inspired his parents to make a violinist out of Milstein. As a child of seven, he started violin studies (as suggested by his parents, to keep him out of mischief) with the eminent violin pedagogue Pyotr Stolyarsky, also the teacher of renowned violinist David Oistrakh.
When Milstein was 11, Leopold Auer invited him to become one of his students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Milstein reminisced:
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Paul Newman
Paul Leonard Newman (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008) was an American actor, film director, entrepreneur, humanitarian, professional racing driver, auto racing team owner, and auto racing enthusiast. He won numerous awards, including an Academy Award for best actor for his performance in the 1986 Martin Scorsese film The Color of Money and eight other nominations, three Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Cannes Film Festival Award, an Emmy award, and many honorary awards. He also won several national championships as a driver in Sports Car Club of America road racing, and his race teams won several championships in open wheel IndyCar racing.
Newman was a co-founder of Newman's Own, a food company from which Newman donated all post-tax profits and royalties to charity. As of July 2011, these donations exceeded $300 million.
Newman was born in Shaker Heights (a suburb of Cleveland). He was the son of Theresa (née Fetzer or Fetsko; Slovak: Terézia Fecková) and Arthur Sigmund Newman, who ran a profitable sporting goods store. His father was Jewish (Paul's paternal grandparents, Simon Newman and Hannah Cohn, were immigrants from Hungary and Poland). His mother, who practiced Christian Science, was born to a Slovak Roman Catholic family at Humenné, Ptičie (formerly Pticsie) in the former Kingdom of Hungary, Austria–Hungary (now Humenné in Slovakia). Newman had no religion as an adult, but described himself as a Jew, stating that "it's more of a challenge". Newman's mother worked in his father's store, while raising Paul and his brother, Arthur, who later became a producer and production manager.
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Paula Stewart
Paula Stewart (born April 9, 1929) is an American stage, film and television actress.
Born as Dorothy Paula Zürndorfer, her father was Dr. Walter Zürndorfer and her mother, Esther Morris, appeared in the films, Ziegfeld Follies and Lady Be Good.[citation needed] She attended Northwestern University before joining the national touring company of Brigadoon. She was next signed as understudy to Anne Crowley in a production of Seventeen on Broadway in June 1951.
She starred in the George White revue Nice to See You in 1953 at the Versailles Club, a dinner theatre. In September 1955, Stewart, a soprano, began a month-long engagement with Kismet at the Music circus in Lambertville, New Jersey. She has performed in over 35 musicals and plays on Broadway and in major Summer Stock productions around the country. She co-starred with Donald O'Connor in Little Me, Gordon MacRae and Howard Keel in Carousel, and Jack Carter in Operation Mad Ball, Born Yesterday and Critics Choice from 1956 to 1957. She succeeded Jo Sullivan in The Threepenny Opera, and was subsequently recruited by Frank Loesser to star in the revival of The Most Happy Fella in 1959.
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Perry Como
Pierino Ronald "Perry" Como (May 18, 1912 – May 12, 2001) was an American singer and television personality. During a career spanning more than half a century he recorded exclusively for the RCA Victor label after signing with them in 1943. "Mr. C.", as he was nicknamed, sold millions of records for Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and pioneered a weekly musical variety television show, which set the standards for the genre and proved to be one of the most successful in television history. Como was seen weekly on television from 1949 to 1963, then continued hosting the Kraft Music Hall variety program on a monthly basis until 1967. His television shows and seasonal specials were broadcast throughout the world. Also a popular recording artist, Perry Como produced numerous hit records with record sales so high the label literally stopped counting at Como's behest. His combined success on television and popular recordings was not matched by any other artist of the time. Como's appeal spanned generations and he was widely respected for both his professional standards and the conduct in his personal life. In the official RCA Records Billboard magazine memorial, his life was summed up in these few words: "50 years of music and a life well lived. An example to all." Composer Ervin Drake said of him, "... [o]ccasionally someone like Perry comes along and won't 'go with the flow' and still prevails in spite of all the bankrupt others who surround him and importune him to yield to their values. Only occasionally."
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Ray Charles
Ray Charles Robinson (September 23, 1930 – June 10, 2004), known by his shortened stage name Ray Charles, was an American musician. He was a pioneer in the genre of soul music during the 1950s by fusing rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues styles into his early recordings with Atlantic Records. He also helped racially integrate country and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records, most notably with his Modern Sounds albums. While with ABC, Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to be given artistic control by a mainstream record company.Frank Sinatra called Charles “the only true genius in show business.”
The influences upon his music were mainly jazz, blues, rhythm and blues and country artists of the day such as Art Tatum, Nat King Cole, Louis Jordan, Charles Brown, Louis Armstrong. His playing reflected influences from country blues and barrelhouse, and stride piano styles.
Rolling Stone ranked Charles number ten on their list of "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" in 2004, and number two on their November 2008 list of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time". In honoring Charles, Billy Joel noted: "This may sound like sacrilege, but I think Ray Charles was more important than Elvis Presley. I don't know if Ray was the architect of rock & roll, but he was certainly the first guy to do a lot of things . . . Who the hell ever put so many styles together and made it work?"
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Red Skelton
Richard Bernard "Red" Skelton (July 18, 1913 – September 17, 1997) was an American entertainer best known for being a national radio and television comedian between 1937 and 1971. Skelton, who has stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, began his show business career in his teens as a circus clown and continued on vaudeville and Broadway and in films, radio, TV, night clubs, and casinos, all while he pursued an entirely separate career as an artist.
Born in Vincennes, Indiana, Richard Skelton was the fourth son of Ida Mae (née Fields) and Joseph E. Skelton (1878–1913). Joseph, a grocer, died two months before his last child was born; he had once been a clown with the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. In Skelton's lifetime there was some dispute about the year of his birth. Author Wesley Hyatt suggests that since Skelton began working at such an early age, he may have had to say he was older than he actually was in order to work.
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Rena Vale
Rena Vale, or Rena M. Vale, (1898–1983) was a writer who from 1926 to 1930 was a scriptwriter for Universal Studios in Hollywood and in the 1930s was an investigator for a U.S. House of Representatives committee that later became the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Vale was born as Rena Marie Vale in Arizona on January 30, 1898, and graduated from Northern Arizona Normal School in Flagstaff in 1918. She taught school in Arizona for two years and was also a cowgirl in that state. She moved to California in 1920, where she was also a ballroom dancer in Long Beach, California. She worked at the Board of Education and then as a shop assistant, selling men's hosiery.
In 1916, at age 18, she sold a screenplay to the Lubin motion picture company, for which she received $25. Twelve years later, in March 1928, she was announced as the winner of a national contest sponsored by Photoplay magazine and Paramount Pictures for her scenario for a movie called Swag. She won from 40,000 entries and received a first prize of $5,000.
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Ricky Ricardo
Enrique Alberto Fernando Ricardo y de Acha, III, a.k.a. Ricky Ricardo is a main character in the television show I Love Lucy, played by Desi Arnaz. He is the husband of Lucy Ricardo (played by Lucille Ball) and the father of their son Little Ricky (played by Michael & Joseph Mayer, Keith Thibodeaux) He is a band leader and his trademark song is "Babalu." As he was born in Cuba, he often speaks Spanish, usually when he gets excited or angry. He is known for his accented English and his rapid-fire Spanish.
On the show, Ricky met Lucy on a blind date, although in the first episode of The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour it is retconned so that Lucy and Ricky met in Cuba while Lucy was there on vacation.
The character, and the actor who portrayed him (Desi Arnaz), are memorialized in the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center in Jamestown, New York.
Arnaz was the real-life husband of Lucille Ball.
In the first season episode The Young Fans, Ricky's age was revealed to be 35, making his birth-year 1917. (However, he was portrayed as only being 36 when they moved to Connecticut 5 years later).
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Robert Mitchum
Robert Charles Durman Mitchum (August 6, 1917 – July 1, 1997) was an American film actor, author, composer and singer and is #23 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male American screen legends of all time. Mitchum rose to prominence for his starring roles in several major works of the film noir style, and is considered a forerunner of the anti-heroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and 1960s.
Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, into a Methodist family. His mother, Ann Harriet (née Gunderson), was a Norwegian immigrant and sea captain's daughter, and his father, James Thomas Mitchum, was a shipyard and railroad worker. A sister, Annette, (known as Julie Mitchum during her acting career) was born in 1914. James Mitchum was crushed to death in a railyard accident in Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1919, when his son was less than 2 years old. After his death, Ann Mitchum was awarded a government pension, and soon realized she was pregnant. She returned to her family in Connecticut, and married a former British Army major who helped her care for the children. In September 1919 a second son, John, was born. When all of the children were old enough to attend school, Ann found employment as a linotype operator for the Bridgeport Post.
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Robert Redford
Charles Robert Redford, Jr. (born August 18, 1936), better known as Robert Redford, is an American actor, film director, producer, businessman, environmentalist, philanthropist, and founder of the Sundance Film Festival. He has received two Oscars: one in 1981 for directing Ordinary People, and one for Lifetime Achievement in 2002. In 2010 he was awarded French Knighthood in the Legion d'Honneur. At the height of his fame in the 1970s and 1980s, he was often described as one of the world's most attractive men and remains one of the most popular movie stars. His popular films include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Downhill Racer (1969), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Candidate (1972), The Sting (1973), The Way We Were (1973), The Great Gatsby (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), All the President's Men (1976), A Bridge Too Far (1977), The Natural (1984), Out of Africa (1985), Sneakers (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993),The Last Castle and Spy Game (2001). As a filmmaker, his notable films include Ordinary People (1980), The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), A River Runs Through It (1992), Quiz Show (1994), The Horse Whisperer (1998) and The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000).
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Roger L. Stevens
Roger Lacey Stevens (March 12, 1910 – February 2, 1998) was an American theatrical producer, arts administrator, and a real estate executive. He is the founding Chairman of both the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (1961), and National Endowment for the Arts (1965).
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Stevens was educated at The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut and at the University of Michigan. He produced more than 100 plays and musicals over his career, including West Side Story, Bus Stop, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In 1971, he received Special Tony Award for his body of work.
Stevens was the General Administrator of the Actors Studio as well as one of the producers of the Playwrights Company, a member of the board of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), and one of the members of a Broadway producing company he founded in 1953 with Robert Whitehead, and Robert Dowling. In 1961, he was asked by President John F. Kennedy to help establish a Natural Cultural Center, and became Chairman of Board of Trustees of what was eventually named the Kennedy Center from 1961 to 1988.
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Rudolf Serkin
Rudolf Serkin (March 28, 1903 – May 8, 1991), was a Bohemian-born pianist.
Serkin was born in Eger, Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Cheb, Czech Republic) to a Russian-Jewish family.
Hailed as a child prodigy, he was sent to Vienna at the age of 9, where he studied piano with Richard Robert and, later, composition with Joseph Marx, making his public debut with the Vienna Philharmonic at 12. From 1918 to 1920 he studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg and participated actively in Schoenberg's Society for the Private Performance of Music. He began a regular concert career in 1920, living in Berlin with the German violinist Adolf Busch and his family, which included a then 3-year-old daughter Irene, whom Serkin would marry 15 years later. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Serkin performed throughout Europe both as soloist and with Busch and the Busch Quartet. With the rise of Hitler in Germany in 1933, Serkin and the Busches (who were not Jewish but who vehemently opposed the Nazi regime) left Berlin for Basel, Switzerland.
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Sammy Davis, Jr.
Samuel George "Sammy" Davis Jr. (December 8, 1925 – May 16, 1990) was an American entertainer and was also known for his impersonations of actors and other celebrities.
Primarily a dancer and singer, Davis started as a child vaudevillian who became known for his performances on Broadway and Las Vegas. He went on to become a world famous recording artist, television and film star. Davis was also a member of Frank Sinatra's "Rat Pack".
At the age of three Davis began his career in vaudeville with his father and "uncle" as the Will Mastin Trio, toured nationally, and after military service, returned to the trio. Davis became an overnight sensation following a nightclub performance at Ciro's after the 1951 Academy Awards. With the trio, he became a recording artist. In 1954, he lost his left eye in an automobile accident.
His film career began as a child in 1933. In 1960 he appeared in the first Rat Pack film, Ocean's 11. After a starring role on Broadway in 1956's Mr Wonderful, Davis returned to the stage in 1964's Golden Boy, and in 1966 had his own TV variety show, The Sammy Davis Jr. Show. Davis' career slowed in the late sixties, but he had a hit record with "The Candy Man", in 1972, and became a star in Las Vegas earning him the nickname Mister Show Business.
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Scottish-Americans
Scottish Americans or Scots Americans (Scottish Gaelic: Ameireaganaich Albannach) are citizens of the United States whose ancestry originates wholly or partly in Scotland. Scottish Americans are closely related to Scots-Irish Americans, descendants of Ulster Scots, and communities emphasize and celebrate a common heritage. The majority of Scot-Irish originally came from the lowlands and border country of Scotland before migrating to the province of Ulster in Ireland (see Plantation of Ulster) and thence, beginning about five generations later, to North America in large numbers during the eighteenth century.
Recent studies state that there are between 30-40 million Americans who claim Scottish and Scot-Irish heritage in the United States. These figures include both Americans who claim Scottish heritage only as well as those who claim Scottish and other nationalities.
The first Scots in North America probably came with the Vikings. A Hebridean bard is said to have accompanied Bjarni Herjolfsson on his voyage around Greenland in 985 which sighted the mainland. On the evidence of the sagas, the first Scots to set foot in the New World were slaves, a man named Hake and a woman named Hekja, who scouted for Thorfinn Karlsefni's expedition in 1010, gathering wheat and the grapes for which Vinland was named. The controversial Zeno letters have been cited in support of a claim that Henry Sinclair, earl of Orkney, visited Nova Scotia in 1398. In the early years of Spanish colonization of the Americas, a Scot named Tam Blake spent 20 years in Mexico and Colombia and joined Coronado's 1540 expedition to the American Southwest.
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Sean Connery
Sir Thomas Sean Connery (born 25 August 1930) is a Scottish actor and producer who has won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards (one of them being a BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award) and three Golden Globes (including the Cecil B. DeMille Award and a Henrietta Award).
Connery is best known for portraying the character James Bond, starring in seven Bond films between 1962 and 1983 (six Eon Productions films and the non-canonical Thunderball remake, Never Say Never Again). In 1988, Connery won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Untouchables. His film career also includes such films as Marnie, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Hunt for Red October, Highlander, Murder on the Orient Express, Dragonheart, and The Rock. He was knighted in July 2000. Connery has been polled as "The Greatest Living Scot" and "Scotland's Greatest Living National Treasure". In 1989, he was proclaimed "Sexiest Man Alive" by People magazine and in 1999, at age 69, he was voted "Sexiest Man of the Century".
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Seinfeld
Seinfeld is an American television sitcom that originally aired on NBC from July 5, 1989, to May 14, 1998, lasting nine seasons, and is now in syndication. It was created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, the latter starring as a fictionalized version of himself. Set predominantly in an apartment block on Manhattan's Upper West Side (but shot in Los Angeles), the show features a host of Jerry's friends and acquaintances, in particular best friend George Costanza, former girlfriend Elaine Benes, and neighbor across the hall Cosmo Kramer.
Seinfeld was produced by Castle Rock Entertainment in association with Columbia Pictures Television in syndication the series was distributed by Columbia Pictures Television and Columbia TriStar Television; Sony Pictures Television has distributed the series since 2002. It was largely co-written by David and Seinfeld with input from numerous script writers, including Larry Charles, Peter Mehlman, Gregg Kavet, Andy Robin, Carol Leifer, David Mandel, Jeff Schaffer, Steve Koren, Jennifer Crittenden, Tom Gammill, Max Pross, Charlie Rubin, Marjorie Gross, Alec Berg, Elaine Pope, and Spike Feresten.
wn.com/Seinfeld -
Sheldon Leonard
Sheldon Leonard (born Sheldon Leonard Bershad; February 22, 1907 – January 10, 1997) was a pioneering American film and television producer, director, writer, and actor.
Leonard was born Sheldon Leonard Bershad in New York City, the son of middle class Jewish parents Anna and Frank Bershad. As an actor, Leonard specialized in playing supporting characters, especially gangsters or "heavies", in films such as It's a Wonderful Life (1946), To Have and Have Not (1944), and Open Secret (1948). His trademark was his especially thick New York accent, usually delivered from the side of his mouth. In the cult classic Decoy, Leonard uses his "heavy" persona to create the hard-boiled police detective Joe Portugal. In the 1950s, Leonard provided the voice of lazy cat Dodsworth in two Warner Bros. cartoons directed by Robert McKimson. Sheldon Leonard Bershad graduated from Syracuse University in 1929.
In radio, Leonard played an eccentric racetrack tout on The Jack Benny Program in the late 1940s and early '50s. His role was to salute Benny out of the blue in railroad stations, on street corners, or in department stores ("Hey Bud, come here a minute"), ask Benny what he was about to do, and then proceed to try to argue him out of his course of action by resorting to inane and irrelevant racing logic. Ironically, as "The Tout," he never gave out information on horse racing, unless Jack demanded it. One excuse the tout gave was "Who knows about horses?" Leonard was part of the ensemble cast of the Martin and Lewis radio show. He also appeared frequently on The Adventures of the Saint, often playing gangsters and heavies, but also sometimes in more positive roles.
wn.com/Sheldon_Leonard -
Shirley Booth
Shirley Booth (August 30, 1898 – October 16, 1992) was an American actress.
Primarily a theatre actress, Booth's Broadway career began in 1925. Her most significant success was as Lola Delaney, in the drama Come Back, Little Sheba, for which she received a Tony Award in 1950. She made her film debut, reprising her role in the 1952 film version, and won both the Academy Award for Best Actress and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her performance. Despite her successful entry into films, she preferred stage acting, and made only four more films.
From 1961 until 1966, she played the title role in the sitcom Hazel, for which she won two Emmy Awards, and was acclaimed for her performance in the 1966 television production of The Glass Menagerie. She retired in 1974.
Booth was born as Marjory Ford, the daughter of Albert James Ford and Virginia Martha Wright. Her childhood was spent in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn where she attended P.S. 152. By the time of the 1910 census in April 1910, aged 11, she was known as Thelma by her family. She had only one sibling, a younger sister, Jean Valentine Ford, who died January 23, 2010.
wn.com/Shirley_Booth -
Shirley MacLaine
Shirley MacLean Beaty (born April 24, 1934), known professionally as Shirley MacLaine, is an American film and theater actress, singer, dancer, activist and author, well known for her beliefs in New Age spirituality and reincarnation. She has written a large number of autobiographical works, many dealing with her spiritual beliefs as well as her Hollywood career. She was nominated for an Academy Award five times before winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1983 for her role in Terms of Endearment. Her younger brother is Warren Beatty.
Named after Shirley Temple, MacLaine was born in Richmond, Virginia. Her father, Ira Owens Beaty, was a professor of psychology, public school administrator, and real estate agent, and her mother, Kathlyn Corinne (née MacLean), was a drama teacher originally from Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada; MacLaine's grandparents were also teachers.The family was devoutly Baptist. Her uncle (her mother's brother-in-law) was A.A. MacLeod, a Communist member of the Ontario legislature in the 1940s.
wn.com/Shirley_MacLaine -
Sidney Poitier
Sir Sidney Poitier, KBE ( /ˈpwɑːtjeɪ/ or /ˈpwɑːti.eɪ/; born February 20, 1927) is a Bahamian American actor, film director, author, and diplomat.
In 1963, Poitier became the first black person to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field. The significance of this achievement was later bolstered in 1967 when he starred in three well-received films To Sir, with Love; In the Heat of the Night; and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, making him the top box office star of that year. In all three films, issues revolve around the race of the characters Poitier portrays. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Poitier among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking 22nd on the list of 25.
Poitier has directed a number of popular movies such as A Piece of the Action; Uptown Saturday Night, and Let's Do It Again (with friend Bill Cosby), and Stir Crazy (starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder). In 2002, 38 years after receiving the Best Actor Award, Poitier was chosen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to receive an Honorary Award, designated "To Sidney Poitier in recognition of his remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being." Since 1997 he has been the Bahamian ambassador to Japan. On August 12, 2009, Sidney Poitier was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America's highest civilian honor, by President Barack Obama.
wn.com/Sidney_Poitier -
Sophia Loren
Sophia Loren, OMRI (born Sofia Villani Scicolone; 20 September 1934) is an Italian actress.
In 1962, Loren, among 21 other awards, won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Two Women, becoming the first actress to win an Academy Award for a non-English-speaking performance. Loren has won several international awards, including one Golden Globe Award, a Grammy Award, a BAFTA Award and a Laurel Award. Her other films include: Houseboat (1958), El Cid (1961), Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963), Marriage Italian-Style (1964), and A Special Day (1977). She has received critical and commercial success in TV movies such as Courage (1986) and in American blockbusters such as Grumpier Old Men (1995), and Nine (2009). In 1994 she starred in Robert Altman's Ready to Wear, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination the same year. In 1995 she received the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievements. In 2011 she dubbed one of the characters of Pixar blockbuster Cars 2 for non-English speaking markets.
wn.com/Sophia_Loren -
Valerie Harper
Valerie Harper (born August 22, 1939) is an American actress, known for her role as Rhoda Morgenstern on the 1970s television show The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and for her starring roles on the sitcoms Rhoda (a spin-off of The Mary Tyler Moore Show) and Valerie.
Harper was born at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern, Rockland County, New York. Her Canadian-born mother, Iva (née McConnell), was a nurse, and her father, Howard Donald Harper, was a lighting salesman. Harper is of French and British ancestry, and was raised Roman Catholic, although at an early age she "quit" the church. The family moved every two years because of her father's promotions, living in South Orange, New Jersey. St. Andrews in Pasadena, California (where Harper attended the school St. Andrews); Monroe, Michigan, at age 10, where she attended St. Mary's Academy; then Ashland, Oregon "at [age] 11 to 13"; and then Jersey City, New Jersey from eighth grade through age 18. When her family returned to Oregon, Harper remained in the New York City area to study ballet. She has an older sister, Leah; a younger brother, Don (originally Merrill); and a half-sister, Virginia, from her father's second marriage. Harper based her future character Rhoda Morgenstern both on her Italian stepmother, Angela Basilico, and Penny Ann Green (née Joanna Greenberg from Brooklyn), with whom she danced in the Broadway musical Wildcat.
wn.com/Valerie_Harper -
Vincente Minnelli
Vincente Minnelli (February 28, 1903 – July 25, 1986) was an American stage director and film director, famous for directing such classic movie musicals as Meet Me in St. Louis, The Band Wagon, and An American in Paris. In addition to having directed some of the most famous and well-remembered musicals of his time, Minnelli made many comedies and melodramas. He was married to Judy Garland from 1945 until 1951; they were the parents of Liza Minnelli.
Born as Lester Anthony Minnelli in Chicago, he was the youngest of four known sons, only two of whom survived to adulthood, born to Marie Émilie Odile Lebeau (stage name: Mina Gennell) and Vincent Charles Minnelli. His father was musical conductor of Minnelli Brothers' Tent Theater. Minnelli's Chicago-born mother was of French Canadian descent with a strong probability of Native American (Anishinaabe) lineage included via her Mackinac Island, Michigan born mother. The family toured small towns primarily in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois before settling permanently in Delaware, Ohio.
wn.com/Vincente_Minnelli -
Virgil Thomson
Virgil Thomson (November 25, 1896 – September 30, 1989) was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music. He has been described as a modernist, a neoclassicist, a composer of "an Olympian blend of humanity and detachment" whose, "expressive voice was always carefully muted," until his late opera Lord Byron which, in contrast to all his previous work, exhibited an emotional content that rises to, "moments of real passion", and a neoromantic.
wn.com/Virgil_Thomson -
Vivian Vance
Vivian Vance (born Vivian Roberta Jones, July 26, 1909 – August 17, 1979) was an American television and theater actress and singer. Vance is best known for her role as Ethel Mertz, sidekick to Lucille Ball on the American television sitcom I Love Lucy, and as Vivian Bagley on The Lucy Show.
Born in Cherryvale, Kansas, Vance was the second of six children born to Robert and Euphemia Jones. When she was six years old her family moved to Independence, Kansas, where she eventually began her dramatic studies at Independence High School under the tutelage of Anna Ingleman, the drama instructor. Her love of acting clashed with her mother's strict religious beliefs, and it wasn't too long before Vance, nicknamed "Viv" by friends, became very rebellious, often sneaking out of her bedroom and staying out after curfew. She soon changed her surname to Vance (after folklorist Vance Randolph) and moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico to find work as an actress. Vance was a founding member of the Albuquerque Little Theatre, where she appeared in many plays including, This Thing Called Love and The Cradle Song. The local theatre community helped pay her way to New York to study under Eva Le Gallienne.
wn.com/Vivian_Vance -
Walter Mirisch
Walter Mortimer Mirisch (born 8 November 1921) is an American film producer. In his long and successful motion picture career, Walter Mirisch has produced some of the industry’s finest and most memorable films. He is President and Executive Head of Production of The Mirisch Corporation, an independent filmmaking organization, which he formed in 1957 with his brothers, Marvin and Harold.
A native of New York, Mirisch graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School and entered the movie business as a summer vacation usher in Jersey City’s State Theater, soon moving up to higher positions at other theaters. In 1942, he received a BA degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the following year graduated from Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration. In 1947, he produced his first film, Fall Guy, for Monogram Pictures Corporation.
At the age of 29, Mirisch became production head at Allied Artists Studio with some 30 films to oversee. During his tenure, he found time to personally produce Flat Top, Wichita, which received a Golden Globe from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as Best Outdoor Drama of 1955, The First Texan, and An Annapolis Story. He supervised the productions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Friendly Persuasion, and Love in the Afternoon, among many others.
wn.com/Walter_Mirisch -
William Frawley
William Clement Frawley (February 26, 1887 – March 3, 1966) was an American stage entertainer, screen and television actor. Although Frawley acted in over 100 films, he is best known for playing landlord Fred Mertz in the situation comedy I Love Lucy, and "Bub" in the TV series My Three Sons.
William was born to Michael A. Frawley and Mary E. Brady in Burlington, Iowa. As a young boy, Bill (as he was commonly called) attended Roman Catholic school and sang with the St. Paul's Church choir. As he got older, he loved playing bit roles in local theater productions, as well as performing in amateur shows. However, his mother, a religious woman, discouraged the idea.
William did two years of office work at Union Pacific Railroad in Omaha, Nebraska. He later relocated to Chicago and found a job as a court reporter. Soon thereafter, against his mother's wishes, Frawley obtained a singing part in the musical comedy The Flirting Princess. To appease his mother, Bill relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, to work for another railroad company.
wn.com/William_Frawley -
William Schuman
William Howard Schuman (August 4, 1910 – February 15, 1992) was an American composer and music administrator.
Born in Manhattan in New York City to Samuel and Rachel Schuman, Schuman was named after the twenty-seventh U.S. president, William Howard Taft, although his family preferred to call him Bill. Schuman played the violin and banjo as a child, but his overwhelming passion was baseball. While still in high school, he formed a dance band, "Billy Schuman and his Alamo Society Orchestra", that played local weddings and bar mitzvahs in which Schuman played string bass.
In 1928 he entered New York University's School of Commerce to pursue a business degree, at the same time working for an advertising agency. He also wrote popular songs with E. B. Marks, Jr., a friend he had met long before at summer camp. About then Schuman met lyricist Frank Loesser and wrote some forty songs with him. Loesser's first published song, "In Love with a Memory of You", credits the music to William H. Schuman.
wn.com/William_Schuman -
Yehudi Menuhin
Yehudi Menuhin, Baron Menuhin, OM, KBE (22 April 1916 – 12 March 1999) was an American violinist and conductor who spent most of his performing career in the United Kingdom. He was born to Russian Jewish parents in the United States, but became a citizen of Switzerland in 1970, and of the United Kingdom in 1985. He is often considered to be one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century.
Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York City, United States, to Bielorussian Jewish parents from what is now Belarus. His sisters were the concert pianist and human rights worker Hephzibah Menuhin and the pianist, painter, and poet Yaltah Menuhin. Through his father Moshe Menuhin, a former rabbinical student and anti-Zionist writer, Menuhin was descended from a distinguished rabbinical dynasty.
Menuhin began violin instruction at age four under violinist Sigmund Anker; his parents had wanted Louis Persinger to be his teacher, but Persinger refused. Menuhin displayed extraordinary talents at an early age. His first solo violin performance was at the age of seven with the San Francisco Symphony in 1923. Persinger then agreed to take Menuhin as a student. When the Menuhins went to Paris, Persinger suggested Yehudi go to his own teacher, Eugène Ysaÿe. He did have one lesson with Ysaÿe, but did not like his method or the fact that he was very old. Instead, he went to the Romanian composer and violinist George Enescu, after which he made several recordings with his sister Hephzibah. He was also a student of Adolf Busch. In 1929 he played in Berlin, under Bruno Walter's baton, three concerti by Bach, Brahms and Beethoven. In 1932 he recorded Edward Elgar's Violin Concerto in B minor for HMV in London, with the composer himself conducting, and between 1934 and 1936 he made the first integral recording of Johann Sebastian Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin.
wn.com/Yehudi_Menuhin
Famous quotes by Lucille Ball:
"I'm not funny. What I am is brave."
"The secret to staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age."
"Luck? I don't know anything about luck. I've never banked on it and I'm afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: Hard work - and realizing what is opportunity and what isn't."
"I think knowing what you cannot do is more important than knowing what you can."
"If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it."
"It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy."
"Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead."
"In life, all good things come hard, but wisdom is the hardest to come by."
"Love yourself first and everything falls into line"
"I would rather regret the things that I have done than the things that I have not"
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Lucille Ball on Joan Rivers (Part 1)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:44
- Updated: 02 Dec 2012
To promote "Life with Lucy" in 1986.
http://wn.com/Lucille_Ball_on_Joan_Rivers_Part_1
To promote "Life with Lucy" in 1986.
Lucy's Famous Chocolate Scene
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:02
- Updated: 02 Dec 2012
Here is the famous Chocolate scene from I Love Lucy, an illustrious tv series in the 1950's.
http://wn.com/Lucy's_Famous_Chocolate_Scene
Here is the famous Chocolate scene from I Love Lucy, an illustrious tv series in the 1950's.
- published: 19 May 2010
- views: 297378
- author: History104WWU
THE LAB presents Lucille Ball & Barbara Walters: An Interview of a LifeTime (FULL)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 22:02
- Updated: 29 Nov 2012
facebook.com/www.thelucyartblogtoo. / thelucyartblog.tumblr.com Along with having Dolly Pardon, Henry Winkler, and Stacy Weitzerman as guests for her 1977 Special, Barbara Walters also sits down with Lucy and Gary Morton. IMO:Barbara Walters asks the questions Lucy kinda steered away from up until this point of her career on television (post-I Love Lucy) Some say Lucy was uncomfortable with discussing her past life with her current husband, as she wanted to respect the present joys they had in a successful marriage, and giving it its own identity-It's definately interesting to see Lucy almost go ham on her first marriage and tell the TRUTH of how it was, and why it didnt work. Barbara is wonderful and friendly but asks those GOOD questions you've always wanted to know :) Id love to see an unedited version come out one day, as this is the only known full footage besides that shown on the original air date. At least that I know of.
http://wn.com/THE_LAB_presents_Lucille_Ball_Barbara_Walters_An_Interview_of_a_LifeTime_FULL
facebook.com/www.thelucyartblogtoo. / thelucyartblog.tumblr.com Along with having Dolly Pardon, Henry Winkler, and Stacy Weitzerman as guests for her 1977 Special, Barbara Walters also sits down with Lucy and Gary Morton. IMO:Barbara Walters asks the questions Lucy kinda steered away from up until this point of her career on television (post-I Love Lucy) Some say Lucy was uncomfortable with discussing her past life with her current husband, as she wanted to respect the present joys they had in a successful marriage, and giving it its own identity-It's definately interesting to see Lucy almost go ham on her first marriage and tell the TRUTH of how it was, and why it didnt work. Barbara is wonderful and friendly but asks those GOOD questions you've always wanted to know :) Id love to see an unedited version come out one day, as this is the only known full footage besides that shown on the original air date. At least that I know of.
- published: 12 Aug 2012
- views: 14382
- author: love4myclarks7
Lucy wears roller skates to a dance (Lucille Ball, Vivian Vance)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:28
- Updated: 29 Nov 2012
MY NEW ACCOUNT--www.youtube.com thelucyshowdvd.com From the Lucy Show episode, "Lucy the Good Skate," originally aired September 21st, 1964. Lucy must wear roller skates to a formal dance since her feet swelled up and she can't get them off! ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TO CBS I DO NOT OWN THE LUCY SHOW.
http://wn.com/Lucy_wears_roller_skates_to_a_dance_Lucille_Ball,_Vivian_Vance
MY NEW ACCOUNT--www.youtube.com thelucyshowdvd.com From the Lucy Show episode, "Lucy the Good Skate," originally aired September 21st, 1964. Lucy must wear roller skates to a formal dance since her feet swelled up and she can't get them off! ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TO CBS I DO NOT OWN THE LUCY SHOW.
- published: 10 Nov 2007
- views: 166465
- author: italianman1992
Lucille Ball - Jitterbug Bite
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:29
- Updated: 29 Nov 2012
Lucy is all crazy dancing to this boppin' tune - her best from "Dance, Girl, Dance!" (1940).
http://wn.com/Lucille_Ball_Jitterbug_Bite
Lucy is all crazy dancing to this boppin' tune - her best from "Dance, Girl, Dance!" (1940).
- published: 09 Apr 2009
- views: 64683
- author: SueSnell
Here's Lucy Bloopers w/ Lucille Ball & Lucie Arnaz
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:07
- Updated: 30 Nov 2012
Bloopers from Lucille Ball's 1968-1974 tv series called 'Here's Lucy.'
http://wn.com/Here's_Lucy_Bloopers_w_Lucille_Ball_Lucie_Arnaz
Bloopers from Lucille Ball's 1968-1974 tv series called 'Here's Lucy.'
- published: 28 Jan 2012
- views: 39177
- author: sbmsalz2
Vivian Vance roasts Lucille Ball
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:32
- Updated: 02 Dec 2012
Dean Martin Roast
http://wn.com/Vivian_Vance_roasts_Lucille_Ball
Dean Martin Roast
- published: 28 Sep 2009
- views: 555780
- author: LaffTherapy
Lucy is Drunk Again! Classic Lucille Ball Scene
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:49
- Updated: 21 Nov 2012
www.thelucyshowdvd.com Lucille Ball was the master of the "under the influence" comedy routine, whether it was alcohol, sleeping pills, or seasick pills. This clip is my second favorite such performance, the first being the classic Vitameatavegamin. Here she's been sent on an errand to get some papers signed, but gets a little too cozy and relaxed with the client. Please visit www.thelucyshowdvd.com
http://wn.com/Lucy_is_Drunk_Again!_Classic_Lucille_Ball_Scene
www.thelucyshowdvd.com Lucille Ball was the master of the "under the influence" comedy routine, whether it was alcohol, sleeping pills, or seasick pills. This clip is my second favorite such performance, the first being the classic Vitameatavegamin. Here she's been sent on an errand to get some papers signed, but gets a little too cozy and relaxed with the client. Please visit www.thelucyshowdvd.com
- published: 09 Jun 2007
- views: 233499
- author: ckri2
I Love Lucy - Chicken and Rice
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 0:58
- Updated: 02 Dec 2012
Lucy explains to her mother in law what she will be preparing for dinner.
http://wn.com/I_Love_Lucy_Chicken_and_Rice
Lucy explains to her mother in law what she will be preparing for dinner.
- published: 14 Mar 2008
- views: 370870
- author: Fizznizzlenuck
Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz original footage: Lucy Wins A Racehorse - 1958
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:43
- Updated: 01 Dec 2012
The Korny Krinkles breakfast cereal scene with "lost" footage from "Lucy Wins A Racehorse"(1958), the 4th episode of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show (later renamed The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour). With Vivian Vance, William Frawley and Keith Thibodeaux. Lucille & Desi introduce the new 1958 Ford Thunderbird before the end credits.
http://wn.com/Lucille_Ball_Desi_Arnaz_original_footage_Lucy_Wins_A_Racehorse_1958
The Korny Krinkles breakfast cereal scene with "lost" footage from "Lucy Wins A Racehorse"(1958), the 4th episode of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show (later renamed The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour). With Vivian Vance, William Frawley and Keith Thibodeaux. Lucille & Desi introduce the new 1958 Ford Thunderbird before the end credits.
- published: 19 Jul 2012
- views: 3094
- author: Rarevintagefinds
Ginger Rogers , Lucille Ball & Katharine Hepburn - The RKO Story
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:18
- Updated: 26 Nov 2012
Excerpt from "A Women's Lot" - Part 3 of The RKO Story - (1987) Available at: keep-it-gingery-ginger-rogers.blogspot.ca
http://wn.com/Ginger_Rogers_,_Lucille_Ball_Katharine_Hepburn_The_RKO_Story
Excerpt from "A Women's Lot" - Part 3 of The RKO Story - (1987) Available at: keep-it-gingery-ginger-rogers.blogspot.ca
- published: 03 May 2012
- views: 12535
- author: Ginger Peachy
Lucille Ball on Barbara Walters 1977
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:25
- Updated: 30 Nov 2012
This is from a later Special (The Best of Barbara Walters) but shows clips from her 1977 interview with Lucille Ball. The interview was actually done in Lucy's living room and back yard! Roseanne was hot at the time of this special and Barbara strives to compare the two comedic actresses. Lucy says some nasty stuff about her first husband Desi even though they are still friends and talk on the phone from time to time. One can only guess Lucy was upset with Desi Sr. for revealing too much is his 1976 tell-all autobiography titled "A Book." Why else would Lucy be so steamed with Desi 16 years after their marriage ended.
http://wn.com/Lucille_Ball_on_Barbara_Walters_1977
This is from a later Special (The Best of Barbara Walters) but shows clips from her 1977 interview with Lucille Ball. The interview was actually done in Lucy's living room and back yard! Roseanne was hot at the time of this special and Barbara strives to compare the two comedic actresses. Lucy says some nasty stuff about her first husband Desi even though they are still friends and talk on the phone from time to time. One can only guess Lucy was upset with Desi Sr. for revealing too much is his 1976 tell-all autobiography titled "A Book." Why else would Lucy be so steamed with Desi 16 years after their marriage ended.
- published: 10 Nov 2010
- views: 114543
- author: sbmsalz2
Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz original footage: Lucy Goes To Sun Valley - 1958
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:06
- Updated: 28 Nov 2012
The opening scene where Lucy helps Ricky look for his guitar strings from "Lucy Goes To Sun Valley", an episode of The Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Show (later renamed The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour) - 1958.
http://wn.com/Lucille_Ball_Desi_Arnaz_original_footage_Lucy_Goes_To_Sun_Valley_1958
The opening scene where Lucy helps Ricky look for his guitar strings from "Lucy Goes To Sun Valley", an episode of The Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Show (later renamed The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour) - 1958.
- published: 19 Jul 2012
- views: 3432
- author: Rarevintagefinds
I love Lucy Candy Factory Video wmv
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:46
- Updated: 01 Dec 2012
http://wn.com/I_love_Lucy_Candy_Factory_Video_wmv
- published: 17 Oct 2010
- views: 253126
- author: Greg Wells
Lucille Ball & Shirley MacLaine
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:54
- Updated: 18 Nov 2012
Enjoy it! =)
http://wn.com/Lucille_Ball_Shirley_MacLaine
Enjoy it! =)
- published: 07 Mar 2009
- views: 66602
- author: dudaidoj
Lucille Ball Interview (Merv Griffin Show 1980)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:55
- Updated: 02 Dec 2012
Lucy visits Merv in 1980 and talks about her life, her entertainment seminars and gives Merv a taste of the famous "cry." Merv Griffin had over 5000 guests appear on his show from 1963-1986. Footage from the Merv Griffin Show is available for licensing to all forms of media through Reelin' In The Years Productions. www.reelinintheyears.com.
http://wn.com/Lucille_Ball_Interview_Merv_Griffin_Show_1980
Lucy visits Merv in 1980 and talks about her life, her entertainment seminars and gives Merv a taste of the famous "cry." Merv Griffin had over 5000 guests appear on his show from 1963-1986. Footage from the Merv Griffin Show is available for licensing to all forms of media through Reelin' In The Years Productions. www.reelinintheyears.com.
- published: 03 Aug 2012
- views: 9682
- author: Merv GriffinShow
Lured - George Sanders, Lucille Ball
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 102:20
- Updated: 02 Dec 2012
IMDb 6.9 - A serial killer in London is murdering young women whom he meets through the personal columns of newpapers. He announces each of his murders to the police by sending them a cryptic poem. After a dancer disappears, the police enlist an American friend of hers, Sandra Carpenter(Lucille Ball), to answer adds in the personal columns to lure the killer. George Sanders, Lucille Ball, Charles Coburn, Boris Karloff, Cedric Hardwicke, George Zucco
http://wn.com/Lured_George_Sanders,_Lucille_Ball
IMDb 6.9 - A serial killer in London is murdering young women whom he meets through the personal columns of newpapers. He announces each of his murders to the police by sending them a cryptic poem. After a dancer disappears, the police enlist an American friend of hers, Sandra Carpenter(Lucille Ball), to answer adds in the personal columns to lure the killer. George Sanders, Lucille Ball, Charles Coburn, Boris Karloff, Cedric Hardwicke, George Zucco
- published: 06 Dec 2011
- views: 67649
- author: coachBswife
Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Fred MacMurray w/original footage - 1958
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 17:25
- Updated: 26 Nov 2012
The chase to the claims office with "lost" footage from "Lucy Hunts Uranium", the 3rd episode of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show (later renamed The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour). Guest star Fred MacMurray. Tennessee Ernie Ford is in the Ford commercial.
http://wn.com/Lucille_Ball_Desi_Arnaz_Fred_MacMurray_w_original_footage_1958
The chase to the claims office with "lost" footage from "Lucy Hunts Uranium", the 3rd episode of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show (later renamed The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour). Guest star Fred MacMurray. Tennessee Ernie Ford is in the Ford commercial.
- published: 17 Jul 2012
- views: 1982
- author: Rarevintagefinds
Password Plus (August 22, 1980): Lucille Ball & Dick Martin, and a Special Extra!
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 41:15
- Updated: 22 Oct 2012
Here is an August 1980 episode of Password Plus (preceded by a little extra of another show). Today, we start off at Alphabetics as Blase (who won his first game as time expired on the previous show with $400) goes for $5000. Can he get it? No copyright infringement is intended. Commercials are included.
http://wn.com/Password_Plus_August_22,_1980_Lucille_Ball_Dick_Martin,_and_a_Special_Extra!
Here is an August 1980 episode of Password Plus (preceded by a little extra of another show). Today, we start off at Alphabetics as Blase (who won his first game as time expired on the previous show with $400) goes for $5000. Can he get it? No copyright infringement is intended. Commercials are included.
- published: 17 Aug 2012
- views: 2297
- author: gamelover1949
1983 Kennedy Center Tribute Lucille Ball "Hey, Look Him Over!" 1983
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:23
- Updated: 30 Oct 2012
In 1983, Bob Hope was honored at a black-tie gala in Washington, DC to honor his 81st birthday. Guests who would perform on the stage of the Opera House of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts included Ronald Reagan, then president, Lucille Ball, Dudley Moore, Tom Selleck, Barbara Mandrell, Loretta Lynn, Phyllis Diller, Howard Cosell, George C. Scott, Kermit the Frog, Sheena Easton, Flip Wilson, Brooke Shields, Twiggy, Tommy Tune, and Dolores Hope.You can read all about the how Hope worked with his guests and his writers and what happened behind-the-scenes of these classic Bob Hope video clips by reading my book "THE LAUGH MAKERS: A Behind-the-Scenes Tribute to Bob Hope's Incredible Gag Writers." Says "laugh-In's" Gary Owens: "The Laugh Makers is the book we've all been waiting for. It's jam-packed with stories, anecdotes and un-retouched photos from a fondly remembered past, recalling often hilarious, sometimes heartwarming, and always touching tales of legendary stars, near-legendary stars and one or two complete failures — which happens in show business. You can look it up in your Funk & Wagnalls." To get your copy, just click on this Amazon link: www.amazon.com Or this Barnes & Noble link: search.barnesandnoble.com Or, if you'd prefer the KINDLE e-version for $2.99, click here: www.amazon.com
http://wn.com/1983_Kennedy_Center_Tribute_Lucille_Ball_Hey,_Look_Him_Over!_1983
In 1983, Bob Hope was honored at a black-tie gala in Washington, DC to honor his 81st birthday. Guests who would perform on the stage of the Opera House of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts included Ronald Reagan, then president, Lucille Ball, Dudley Moore, Tom Selleck, Barbara Mandrell, Loretta Lynn, Phyllis Diller, Howard Cosell, George C. Scott, Kermit the Frog, Sheena Easton, Flip Wilson, Brooke Shields, Twiggy, Tommy Tune, and Dolores Hope.You can read all about the how Hope worked with his guests and his writers and what happened behind-the-scenes of these classic Bob Hope video clips by reading my book "THE LAUGH MAKERS: A Behind-the-Scenes Tribute to Bob Hope's Incredible Gag Writers." Says "laugh-In's" Gary Owens: "The Laugh Makers is the book we've all been waiting for. It's jam-packed with stories, anecdotes and un-retouched photos from a fondly remembered past, recalling often hilarious, sometimes heartwarming, and always touching tales of legendary stars, near-legendary stars and one or two complete failures — which happens in show business. You can look it up in your Funk & Wagnalls." To get your copy, just click on this Amazon link: www.amazon.com Or this Barnes & Noble link: search.barnesandnoble.com Or, if you'd prefer the KINDLE e-version for $2.99, click here: www.amazon.com
- published: 26 Sep 2011
- views: 7869
- author: Bob Mills
"Lucy & Joan" Lucille Ball on The Tonight Show With Joan Rivers
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:53
- Updated: 30 Nov 2012
Here's a clip from 1984 I believe of Lucille Ball on The Tonight Show with Joan Rivers. it's such an easy and warm interview. You can tell both women have a mutual respect and admiration for each other. And, being a lucy nerd lol I listened carefully at the end of the video, while Lucy was leaving, and the heartfelt exchange between Lucy and Joan is just so nice to hear "Love ya Honey" "Have a merry a christmas, and happy anniversary! " "Thank you, God Bless as always" 2 Legends make on good clip! dedicated to Lucy-Joan and the punchy players lol
http://wn.com/Lucy_Joan_Lucille_Ball_on_The_Tonight_Show_With_Joan_Rivers
Here's a clip from 1984 I believe of Lucille Ball on The Tonight Show with Joan Rivers. it's such an easy and warm interview. You can tell both women have a mutual respect and admiration for each other. And, being a lucy nerd lol I listened carefully at the end of the video, while Lucy was leaving, and the heartfelt exchange between Lucy and Joan is just so nice to hear "Love ya Honey" "Have a merry a christmas, and happy anniversary! " "Thank you, God Bless as always" 2 Legends make on good clip! dedicated to Lucy-Joan and the punchy players lol
- published: 04 Jan 2011
- views: 58360
- author: love4myclarks7
FULL EPISODE "What's My Line" with Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz (1955)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 29:18
- Updated: 28 Nov 2012
Episode of the popular 50's TV game show "What's My Line" with guest stars Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz. Complete with original commercials for Remington Rand Shavers.
http://wn.com/FULL_EPISODE_What's_My_Line_with_Lucille_Ball_Desi_Arnaz_1955
Episode of the popular 50's TV game show "What's My Line" with guest stars Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz. Complete with original commercials for Remington Rand Shavers.
- published: 09 Aug 2012
- views: 2125
- author: LookAtMeTooTV
Yours, Mine and Ours Official Trailer #1 - Lucille Ball, Henry Fonda Movie (1968) HD
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:39
- Updated: 07 Nov 2012
Yours, Mine and Ours Trailer - Directed by Melville Shavelson and starring Henry Fonda, Van Johnson, Sidney Miller, Tom Bosley, Walter Brooke. When a widower with 10 children marries a widow with 8, can the 20 of them ever come together as one big happy family? MGM - 1968 MGM Yours "Mine and Ours" "Melville Shavelson" "Henry Fonda" "Van Johnson" "Walter Brooke" "Sidney Miller" "Tom Bosley" "lucille ball" "i love lucy" kids family "12 kids" comedy romance "big family" classic
http://wn.com/Yours,_Mine_and_Ours_Official_Trailer_1_Lucille_Ball,_Henry_Fonda_Movie_1968_HD
Yours, Mine and Ours Trailer - Directed by Melville Shavelson and starring Henry Fonda, Van Johnson, Sidney Miller, Tom Bosley, Walter Brooke. When a widower with 10 children marries a widow with 8, can the 20 of them ever come together as one big happy family? MGM - 1968 MGM Yours "Mine and Ours" "Melville Shavelson" "Henry Fonda" "Van Johnson" "Walter Brooke" "Sidney Miller" "Tom Bosley" "lucille ball" "i love lucy" kids family "12 kids" comedy romance "big family" classic
- published: 05 Oct 2012
- views: 663
- author: oldhollywoodtrailers
photo: AP / Lefteris Pitarakis
30 Nov 2012
- For historians, it represents a treasure trove of boundless rewards and an opportunity to revisit some of the most enduring myths about Britain's colonial past. But for some of those still living with the physical and psychological scars, the release of thousands of previously secret government-held documents offers fresh hope of finally gaining a measure of justice for their suffering under British rule ... 1096 Source.. Al Jazeera ... ;">....(size: 22.4Kb)
photo: USAF / Senior Airman Patrice Clarke
02 Dec 2012
There have been "multiple explosions" near an airfield at a US base in eastern Afghanistan, Nato has said. Afghan intelligence officials told the BBC seven suicide attackers targeted the base in Jalalabad, and witnesses said that gunfire was heard ... Counter claims ... There were no Nato casualties in the attack, officials said ... ....(size: 1.7Kb)
photo: UN / Shareef Sarhan
02 Dec 2012
Article by WN.com Guest Writer Gilad Atzmon. Israel suffered a humiliating defeat at The UN recently. The nations of the world stood up and said NO to the Jewish state - NO to Israeli occupation, NO to Israeli human rights abuse, NO to Jewish racism. In effect, they stood up and confessed to serious Zio-fatigue ... This is a very good news indeed. But interestingly, this united opposition to Israel is not in response to Israeli strength ... ....(size: 2.6Kb)
photo: AP / Patrick Semansky
02 Dec 2012
Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. Much like the United States, the Vikings were a paradoxical and duplicitous civilization. Not only were they highly skilled shipbuilders and tremendous explorers, not to mention their expertise in the fishing, farming and trading industries, but they helped establish and contribute to the nation-states of France, England, Ireland, Germany, Russia, and Iceland ... This came to mind when Pfc....(size: 5.5Kb)
photo: US NARA
30 Nov 2012
Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. Staring at the quote on the small granite monument which read. "They said to one another, behold here comes the dreamer...Let us slay him...And we shall see what will become of his dreams," I tried to understand that fateful moment when a shot shattered heaven and earth ... Martin Luther King, Jr. Straining my ears, I tried to hear Rev. Abernathy cry out, "Oh my God, Martin's been shot!" ... Dr....(size: 6.5Kb)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
30 Nov 2012
Confused about the work of the Betty Ford Clinic or the Susan G. Komen for the Cure because their namesakes are deceased?. Familiar with a Ferris wheel or Hershey's chocolate or a Ford vehicle or even Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania -- even though they're all named for people who are dead? ... "Gilda is very much an inspiration behind what we do here," Ms ... Hailed by critics as the next Lucille Ball, she won an Emmy in 1978 ... Ms ... Fuoco ... ....(size: 4.7Kb)
The Dallas Morning News
28 Nov 2012
A lieutenant in the Dallas Police Department who goes by the name âLucille Ballerâ when she promotes herself as a recording artist promises to shoot anyone who messes with her in a rap song that was posted on her website ... Lucille Baller.â ... The since-removed rap song played with a montage of photos that included photos of Smith in uniform, as well as others of her in skimpy attire and wearing a Lucille Ball-style wig....(size: 4.3Kb)
The Hollywood Reporter
28 Nov 2012
share. Kevin Winter/Getty Images. Jack Black. The annual event honored Betty White earlier this year. The Friars Club will put Jack Black in the hot seat for its next annual roast.our editor recommends ... STORY ... ... ... ... Other past recipients of the honor include Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Carson, Lucille Ball and Billy Crystal ... Its members have included such Hollywood legends as Sinatra, Dean Martin, Ball and Berle ... ....(size: 3.6Kb)
The Examiner
28 Nov 2012
The Jack Carson Show. Thanksgiving Dinner (CBS, 1946). In some ways, Jack Carson can’t catch a radio break no matter what ... Carson can’t put his clever comedy over Mr. and Mrs ... The good news ... The bad news ... Tonight ... Music ... Armed Forces Radio Service, 1947)—While the new neighbours moving into the building pique Liz’s (Lucille Ball) curiosity, George (Richard Denning) is the designated supervisor for an orphan’s group run by a major bank client....(size: 10.6Kb)
Huffington Post
28 Nov 2012
... Emmy winner this year for best actress</a> in a comedy series for HBO's "Veep" has won twice before -- for her work on "Seinfeld" and "The New Adventures of Old Christine." Indeed, she's been nominated 13 times -- which ties her with comedy legend Lucille Ball....(size: 33.7Kb)
LA Weekly
27 Nov 2012
A. Trachta. See also.. *5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A ... Lucille Ball's "Vitameatvegimin" sketch plays on a loop from an old-fashioned TV set next to a display case holding costumes from the set of I Love Lucy. Behind it, a sign explains how Ball and husband Desi Arnez's desire to film in Hollywood instead of New York indirectly birthed the concept of reruns (they agreed to a salary cut in exchange for keeping the rights for future airings) ... ....(size: 3.7Kb)
The Hollywood Reporter
26 Nov 2012
She had a stint on "General Hospital" in the 1970s and appeared in the Lucille Ball musical "Mame.". Actress Bobbi Jordan, who starred on General Hospital, in several primetime series and in the Lucille Ball musical Mame, died of a heart attack Nov ... the home of Mame Dennis (Ball) who winds up marrying Mame's nephew Patrick (Bruce Davison)....(size: 5.3Kb)
IMDb
26 Nov 2012
The Hollywood Reporter
25 Nov 2012
His father, Jess Oppenheimer, was the creator-producer behind the wildly successful comedy that starred Desi Arnaz as a bandleader and Lucille Ball as his wife ... Cahn’s contribution to I Love Lucy was “immeasurable and his generosity of energy and spirit to the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center and museum has been unmatched,” said Journey Gunderson, executive director of the center in Jamestown, N.Y....(size: 6.9Kb)
Sacramento Bee
25 Nov 2012
His father, Jess Oppenheimer, was the creator-producer behind the wildly successful comedy that starred Desi Arnaz as a bandleader and Lucille Ball as his wife ... Cahn's contribution to "I Love Lucy" was "immeasurable and his generosity of energy and spirit to the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center and museum has been unmatched," said Journey Gunderson, executive director of the center in Jamestown, N.Y....(size: 5.5Kb)
The Los Angeles Times
25 Nov 2012
His father, Jess Oppenheimer, was the creator-producer behind the wildly successful comedy that starred Desi Arnaz as a bandleader and Lucille Ball as his wife ... Cahn's contribution to "I Love Lucy" was "immeasurable and his generosity of energy and spirit to the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center and museum has been unmatched," said Journey Gunderson, executive director of the center in Jamestown, N.Y....(size: 33.7Kb)
Entertainment Weekly
23 Nov 2012
On Sunday, Lifetime premieres Liz & Dick, its Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton biopic starring Lindsay Lohan and Grant Bowler ... ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY ... LARRY THOMPSON ... It was ... there was ... Maybe if we hadn’t had all this attention paid to us, we could have kept it together, but there were too many balls we were trying to keep in the air ... You have to be accurate ... I’ve made the Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz movie [Lucy & Desi....(size: 5.8Kb)
CNN
23 Nov 2012
November 23, 2012 -- Updated 2132 GMT (0532 HKT). Lindsay Lohan and Grant Bowler star as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in "Liz & Dick." ... "If we couldn't have gotten insurance, there would have been no movie ... EW ... It was ... Maybe if we hadn't had all this attention paid to us, we could have kept it together, but there were too many balls we were trying to keep in the air ... I've made the Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz movie [Lucy & Desi ... ....(size: 7.8Kb)
| Lucille Ball | |
|---|---|
 Pin-up photo from Yank, the Army Weekly |
|
| Born | Lucille Désirée Ball (1911-08-06)August 6, 1911 Jamestown, New York |
| Died | April 26, 1989(1989-04-26) (aged 77)[1] Los Angeles, California |
| Cause of death | dissecting aortic aneurysm |
| Other names | Lucille Ball Morton[2] |
| Occupation | Actress, comedian, model, film executive |
| Years active | 1932-1986 |
| Spouse | Desi Arnaz (m.1940-1960; divorced) Gary Morton (m.1961-1989; her death) |
Lucille Désirée Ball (August 6, 1911 - April 26, 1989) was an American comedienne, film, television, stage and radio actress, model, film and television executive, and star of the sitcoms I Love Lucy, The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, Here's Lucy and Life With Lucy. One of the most popular and influential stars in the United States during her lifetime, with one of Hollywood's longest careers,[3] especially on television, Ball began acting in the 1930s, becoming both a radio actress and B-movie star in the 1940s, and then a television star during the 1950s. She was still making films in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1962, Ball became the first woman to run a major television studio, Desilu, which produced many successful and popular television series.[4]
Ball was nominated for an Emmy Award thirteen times, and won four times.[5] In 1977 Ball was among the first recipients of the Women in Film Crystal Award.[6] She was the recipient of the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1979,[7] the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kennedy Center Honors in 1986[8] and the Governors Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in 1989.[9]
In 1929, Ball landed work as a model and later began her performing career on Broadway using the stage name Diane Belmont. She appeared in many small movie roles in the 1930s as a contract player for RKO Radio Pictures. Ball was labeled as the "Queen of the Bs" (referring to her many roles in B-films). In 1951, Ball was pivotal in the creation of the television series I Love Lucy. The show co-starred her then-husband, Desi Arnaz as Ricky Ricardo, Vivian Vance as Ethel Mertz and William Frawley as Fred Mertz. The Mertzes were the Ricardos' landlords and friends. The show ended in 1957 after 180 episodes. Then, some minor adjustments were made to the program's format – the time of the show was lengthened from 30 minutes to 60 minutes (the first show lasted 75 mins), some new characters were added, the storyline was altered, and the show was renamed The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, which ran for three seasons (1957–1960) and 13 episodes. Ball went on to star in two more successful television series: The Lucy Show, which ran on CBS from 1962 to 1968 (156 Episodes), and Here's Lucy from 1968 to 1974 (144 episodes). Her last attempt at a television series was a 1986 show called Life with Lucy – which failed after 8 episodes aired, although 13 were produced.
Ball met and eloped with Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz in 1940. On July 17, 1951, at almost 40 years old, Ball gave birth to their first child, Lucie Désirée Arnaz.[10] A year and a half later, Ball gave birth to their second child, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV, known as Desi Arnaz, Jr.[11] Ball and Arnaz divorced on May 4, 1960.
On April 26, 1989, Ball died of a dissecting aortic aneurysm at age 77.[12] At the time of her death, she had been married to her second husband and business partner, standup comedian Gary Morton, for more than twenty-seven years.[13]
Early life[link]
Ball was born to Henry Durrell Ball (September 16, 1886 – February 19, 1915) and Desiree "DeDe" Evelyn Hunt (September 21, 1892 – July 20, 1977) in Jamestown, New York. Although Lucy was born in Jamestown, New York, she sometimes claimed that she was born in Butte, Montana.[14] At age 3, her family moved to Anaconda, Montana and then to Wyandotte, Michigan.[citation needed] Her family was Baptist; her father was of Scottish descent, and his mother was Mary Ball.[15] Her mother was of French, Irish and English descent.[16] Her genealogy can be traced back to the earliest settlers in the colonies, including Edmund Rice, an early immigrant to Massachusetts Bay Colony.[17][18]
Her father, a telephone lineman for Bell Telephone Company was frequently transferred because of his occupation, and within three years of her birth, Lucille had moved many times, from Jamestown to Anaconda, and then to Trenton.[19] While DeDe Ball was pregnant with her second child, Frederick, Henry Ball contracted typhoid fever and died in February 1915.[20] Ball recalled little from the day her father died, only fleeting memories of a picture falling and a bird getting trapped in the house. From that day forward, she suffered from Ornithophobia.[21][page needed]
After her father died, Ball and her brother Fred Henry Ball (July 17, 1915 – February 5, 2007) were raised by her mother and grandparents in Celoron, New York a summer resort village on Lake Chautauqua just west of Jamestown.[22] Her grandfather, Fred Hunt, was an eccentric who also enjoyed the theater. He frequently took the family to vaudeville shows and encouraged young Lucy to take part in both her own and school plays.[citation needed] Four years after the death of her father, Ball’s mother DeDe remarried. While her step-father, Edward Peterson, and mother went to look for work in another city, Ball was left in the care of her step-father’s parents. Ball’s new guardians were a puritanical Swedish couple who were so opposed to frivolity that they banished all mirrors from the house except for one over the bathroom sink. When the young Ball was caught admiring herself in it she was severely chastised for being vain.[23] This period of time affected Ball so deeply that in later life she claimed that it lasted seven or eight years, but in reality, it was probably less than one.[24] One good thing did come out of DeDe's new marriage. Edward was a Shriner. When his organization needed female entertainers for the chorus line of their next show, he encouraged his twelve-year-old stepdaughter to audition.[25] While Ball was onstage she began to realize that if one was seeking praise and recognition this was a brilliant way to receive it. Her appetite for recognition had thus been awakened at an early age.[26] In 1927 her family suffered misfortune when their house and furnishings were taken away in a legal judgement after a neighborhood boy was accidentally shot and paralyzed by someone target-shooting in their yard, under Ball's grandfather's supervision. The family then moved into a small apartment in Jamestown.[27]
Teenage years and early career[link]
In 1925 Ball, then only 14, started dating Johnny DeVita, a local hood who was 21. DeDe was unhappy with the relationship, but was unable to influence her daughter to end the relationship. She expected the romance to burn out in a few weeks but that didn't happen. After about a year, DeDe tried to separate them by using Lucille's desire to be in show business. Despite the family's meager finances, she arranged for Lucille to go to the John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts in New York City[28][29] where Bette Davis was a fellow student. Ball later said about that time in her life "All I learned in drama school was how to be frightened."[30]
Ball was determined to prove her teachers wrong, and returned to New York City in 1928, among her other jobs she landed work as a fashion model for Hattie Carnegie.[31] Her career was thriving when she became ill, either with rheumatic fever, rheumatoid arthritis or some other unknown illness and was unable to work for two years.[32] She moved back to New York City in 1932 to resume her pursuit of a career as an actress, and supported herself by again working for Carnegie[33] and as the Chesterfield cigarette girl. As Diane Belmont she started getting some chorus work on Broadway[34] but the work wasn't lasting. Ball was hired – but then quickly fired – by theatre impresario Earl Carroll from his Vanities, by Florenz Ziegfeld from a touring company of Rio Rita,[35] and was let go from the Shubert brothers production of Stepping Stones.[citation needed]
Hollywood[link]
After an uncredited stint as one of the Goldwyn Girls in Roman Scandals (1933) she permanently moved to Hollywood to appear in films. She appeared in many small movie roles in the 1930s as a contract player for RKO Radio Pictures, including a two-reel comedy short with the Three Stooges (Three Little Pigskins, 1934) and a movie with the Marx Brothers (Room Service, 1938). She can also be seen as one of the featured models in the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film Roberta (1935) and briefly as the flower girl in Top Hat (1935), as well as a brief supporting role at the beginning of Follow the Fleet (1936),[36] another Astaire-Rogers film. Ginger Rogers was a distant maternal cousin of Ball's. She and Rogers played aspiring actresses in the hit film Stage Door (1937) co-starring Katharine Hepburn. In 1936 she also landed the role she hoped would lead her to Broadway, in the Bartlett Cormack play Hey Diddle Diddle, a comedy set in a duplex apartment in Hollywood. The play premiered in Princeton, New Jersey on January 21, 1937 with Ball playing the part of Julie Tucker, "one of three roommates coping with neurotic directors, confused executives, and grasping stars who interfere with the girls' ability to get ahead." The play received good reviews, but there were problems, chiefly with its star, Conway Tearle, who was in poor health. Cormack wanted to replace him, but the producer, Anne Nichols, said the fault lay with the character and insisted that the part needed to be reshaped and rewritten. The two were unable to agree on a solution. The play was scheduled to open on Broadway at the Vanderbilt Theatre, but closed after one week in Washington, D.C. when Tearle suddenly became gravely ill.[37] Ball was signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the 1940s, but she never achieved major stardom from her appearance in those films.[38]
She was known in many Hollywood circles as "Queen of the B's" – a title previously held by Fay Wray – starring in a number of B-movies, such as 1939's Five Came Back. Like many budding starlets Ball picked up radio work to earn side income as well as gain exposure. In 1937 she appeared as a regular on The Phil Baker Show. When that completed its run in 1938, Ball joined the cast of The Wonder Show, starring future Wizard of Oz tin man Jack Haley. It was here that she began her fifty year professional relationship with Gale Gordon, who served as the show's announcer. The Wonder Show only lasted one season, with the final episode airing on April 7, 1939.[39]
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In 1940, Ball met Cuban-born bandleader Desi Arnaz while filming the Rodgers and Hart stage hit Too Many Girls. When they met again on the second day, the two connected immediately and eloped the same year. Arnaz was drafted to the United States Army in 1942. He ended up being classified for limited service due to a knee injury. As a result, Arnaz stayed in Los Angeles, organizing and performing USO shows for wounded GIs being brought back from the Pacific. That same year, Ball appeared opposite Henry Fonda in The Big Street, in which she plays a paralyzed nightclub singer and Fonda portrays a busboy who idolizes her. The following year Ball appeared in DuBarry Was a Lady, a film for which the natural brunette first had her hair dyed the flaming red that would be her screen trademark.
Ball filed for a divorce in 1944. Shortly after Ball obtained an interlocutory decree of divorce, however, she reconciled with Arnaz.[40] Ball and Arnaz were only six years apart in age but apparently believed that it was less socially acceptable for an older woman to marry a younger man, and hence split the difference in their ages, both claiming a 1914 birth date until this was disproved.[41]
In 1946, Ball starred in Lover Come Back.[42]
[edit] I Love Lucy and Desilu
Main articles: I Love Lucy and Desilu Productions
In 1948, Ball was cast as Liz Cugat (later "Cooper"), a wacky wife, in My Favorite Husband, a radio program for CBS Radio. The program was successful, and CBS asked her to develop it for television. She agreed, but insisted on working with Arnaz. CBS executives were reluctant, thinking the public would not accept an All-American redhead and a Cuban as a couple. CBS was initially not impressed with the pilot episode produced by the couple's Desilu Productions company, so the couple toured the road in a vaudeville act with Lucy as the zany housewife wanting to get in Arnaz's show. The tour was a smash, and CBS put I Love Lucy on their lineup.[43] The I Love Lucy show was not only a star vehicle for Lucille Ball, but a way for her to try to salvage her marriage to Desi Arnaz, which had become badly strained, in part by the fact that each had a hectic performing schedule which often kept them apart.
Along the way, she created a television dynasty and reached several "firsts." Ball was the first woman in television to be head of a production company: Desilu, the company that she and Arnaz formed. After their divorce, Ball bought out Arnaz's share of the studio, and she proceeded to function as a very active studio head.[44] Desilu and I Love Lucy pioneered a number of methods still in use in television production today such as filming before a live studio audience with a number of cameras, and distinct sets adjacent to each other.[45] During this time Ball taught a thirty-two week comedy workshop at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute. Ball was quoted as saying, "You cannot teach someone comedy; either they have it or they don't."[46]
When the show premiered, most shows were aired live from New York City studios to Eastern and Central Time Zone audiences, and captured by kinescope for broadcast later to the West Coast. The kinescope picture was inferior to film, and as a result the West Coast broadcasts were inferior to those seen elsewhere in the country. Ball and Arnaz wanted to remain in their Los Angeles home, but the time zone logistics made that broadcast norm impossible. Prime time in L.A. was too late at night on the East Coast to air a major network series, meaning the majority of the TV audience would be seeing not only the inferior picture of kinescopes but seeing them at least a day later.[47]
Sponsor Philip Morris did not want to show day-old kinescopes to the major markets on the East Coast, yet neither did they want to pay for the extra cost that filming, processing and editing would require, pressuring Ball and Arnaz to relocate to New York City. Ball and Arnaz offered to take a pay cut to finance filming, on the condition that their company, Desilu, would retain the rights to that film once it was aired. CBS relinquished the show rights back to Desilu after initial broadcast, not realizing they were giving away a valuable and durable asset. Desilu made many millions of dollars on I Love Lucy rebroadcasts through syndication and became a textbook example of how a show can be profitable in second-run syndication. In television's infancy, the concept of the rerun hadn't yet formed, and many in the industry wondered who would want to see a program a second time.[48] In fact, while other celebrated shows of the period exist only in incomplete sets of kinescopes mostly too degraded to show to subsequent generations of television viewers, I Love Lucy has virtually never gone out of syndication since it began, seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world over the past half century. The success of Ball and Arnaz's gamble was instrumental in drawing television production from New York to Hollywood for the next several decades.[49]
Desilu hired legendary German cameraman Karl Freund as their director of photography. Freund had worked for F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, shot part of Metropolis (1927) as well as the original Dracula (1931) with Bela Lugosi, and had directed a number of Hollywood films himself, including The Mummy (1932) with Boris Karloff. Freund used a three-camera setup, which became the standard way of filming situation comedies.[50] Shooting long shots, medium shots, and close-ups on a comedy in front of a live audience demanded discipline, technique, and close choreography. Among other non-standard techniques used in filming the show, cans of paint (in shades ranging from white to medium gray) were kept on set to "paint out" inappropriate shadows and disguise lighting flaws.[45][51] Freund also pioneered "flat lighting," in which everything is brightly lit to eliminate shadows and the need for endless relighting.
I Love Lucy dominated the weekly TV ratings in the United States for most of its run. (There was an attempt to adapt the show for radio; the cast and writers adapted the memorable "Breaking the Lease" episode—in which the Ricardos and Mertzes fall out over an argument, the Ricardos threaten to move, but they're stuck in a firm lease—for a radio audition disc that never aired but has survived.)[52] In the scene where Lucy and Ricky are practicing the tango in the episode "Lucy Does The Tango," the longest recorded studio audience laugh in the history of the show was produced. It was so long, in fact, that the sound editor had to cut that particular part of the soundtrack in half.[53] The strenuous rehearsals and demands of Desilu studio kept the Arnazes too busy to comprehend the show's success. During the show's production breaks they starred together in feature films: Vincente Minnelli's The Long, Long Trailer (1954) and Alexander Hall's Forever, Darling (1956).
Desilu produced several other popular shows, most notably Our Miss Brooks (starring Ball's 1937 Stage Door co-star Eve Arden), The Untouchables, Star Trek, and Mission: Impossible. Many other shows, particularly My Three Sons in its first seven of twelve seasons, Sheldon Leonard-produced series like Make Room for Daddy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, and I Spy, were filmed at Desilu Studios and bear its logo. Desilu was eventually sold and merged into Paramount Pictures in 1967.
Testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities[link]
When Ball registered to vote in 1936, she listed her party affiliation as Communist.[54] (She was registered as a Communist in 1938 as well.)[55] In order to sponsor the Communist Party's 1936 candidate for the California State Assembly's 57th District, Ball signed a certificate stating "I am registered as affiliated with the Communist Party."[56] The same year, she was appointed to the State Central Committee of the Communist Party of California, according to records of the California Secretary of State. In 1937, Hollywood writer Rena Vale, a self-identified former Communist, attended a Communist Party new members' class at Ball's home, according to Vale's testimony before the United States House of Representatives' Special Committee on Un-American Activities, on July 22, 1940.[57] Two years later, Vale reaffirmed this testimony in a sworn deposition:
...within a few days after my third application to join the Communist Party was made, I received a notice to attend a meeting on North Ogden Drive, Hollywood; although it was a typed, unsigned note, merely requesting my presence at the address at 8 o'clock in the evening on a given day, I knew it was the long-awaited notice to attend Communist Party new members classes... on arrival at this address I found several others present; an elderly man informed us that we were the guests of the screen actress, Lucille Ball, and showed us various pictures, books and other objects to establish that fact, and stated she was glad to loan her home for a Communist Party new members class...[58]
In a 1944 British Pathe newsreel, titled Fund Raising For Roosevelt, Ball was featured prominently among several stage and film stars at a fund-raising event in support of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt's campaign for re-election.[59] She also stated that in the 1952 US Presidential Election, she voted for Republican Dwight Eisenhower.[60]
On September 4, 1953, Ball met privately with HUAC investigator William A. Wheeler in Hollywood and gave him sealed testimony. She stated that she had registered to vote as a Communist "or intended to vote the Communist Party ticket" in 1936 at her socialist grandfather's insistence.[61] She stated she "at no time intended to vote as a Communist."
Ball stated she has never been a member of the Communist Party "to her knowledge";... did not know whether or not any meetings were ever held at her home at 1344 North Ogden Drive; stated... [that if she had been appointed] as a delegate to the State Central Committee of the Communist Party of California in 1936 it was done without her knowledge or consent; [and stated that she] did not recall signing the document sponsoring EMIL FREED for the Communist Party nomination to the office of member of the assembly for the 57th District...
A review of the subject's file reflects no activity that would warrant her inclusion on the Security Index.[62]
J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI, named "Lucy and Dezi" [sic] among his "favorites of the entertainment world."[63] Immediately before the filming of episode 68 ("The Girls Go Into Business") of I Love Lucy, Arnaz, instead of his usual audience warm-up, told the audience about Lucy and her grandfather. Arnaz quipped: "The only thing red about Lucy is her hair, and even that's not legitimate."[citation needed] Then, he presented his wife and she received a standing ovation from the audience.[64][not in citation given]
Children and divorce[link]
On July 17, 1951, one month before her fortieth birthday and after "several"[10] miscarriages, Ball gave birth to her first child, Lucie Désirée Arnaz.[10] A year and a half later, Ball gave birth to her second child, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV, known as Desi Arnaz, Jr.[11] When he was born, I Love Lucy was a solid ratings hit, and Ball and Arnaz wrote the pregnancy into the show. (Ball's necessary and planned cesarean section in real life was scheduled for the same date that her television character gave birth.)[11] There were several challenges from CBS, insisting that a pregnant woman could not be shown on television, nor could the word "pregnant" be spoken on-air. After approval from several religious figures[65] the network allowed the pregnancy storyline, but insisted that the word "expecting" be used instead of "pregnant." (Arnaz garnered laughs when he deliberately mispronounced it as "'spectin'").[66] The episode's official title was "Lucy Is Enceinte," borrowing the French word for pregnant;[19] however, episode titles never appeared on the show. The birth made the first cover of TV Guide in January 1953.[67]
Ball was outspoken against the relationship that Desi Jr. had with Liza Minnelli. Talking about Liza Minnelli dating her son, she was quoted as saying, "I miss Liza, but you cannot domesticate Liza."[68] Her close friends in the business included Ginger Rogers, Vivian Vance, Mary Wickes and Carole Cook.
In October 1956, Ball, Vivian Vance, Desi Arnaz, and William Frawley all appeared on a Bob Hope special on NBC, including a spoof of I Love Lucy, the only time all four stars were together on a color telecast.
By the end of the 1950s, Desilu had become a large company, causing a good deal of stress for both Ball and Arnaz; his increased drinking further compounded matters.[citation needed] On May 4, 1960, just two months after filming the final episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, the couple divorced. Until his death in 1986, however, Arnaz and Ball remained friends and often spoke very fondly of each other.[citation needed] Her real-life divorce indirectly found its way into her later television series, as she was always cast as an unmarried woman.[69][70]
The following year, Ball did a musical on Broadway, Wildcat, co-starring Paula Stewart. That marked the beginning of a thirty-year friendship between Lucy and Paula Stewart, who introduced her to second husband Gary Morton, a Borscht Belt stand-up comic who was thirteen years her junior.[13] According to Ball, Morton claimed he had never seen an episode of I Love Lucy due to his hectic work schedule.[71] Ball immediately installed Morton in her production company, teaching him the television business and eventually promoting him to producer. Morton also played occasional bit parts on Ball's various series.[72]
Later career[link]
The 1960 Broadway musical Wildcat ended its run early when Ball became too ill to continue in the show.[73] The show was the source of the song she made famous, "Hey, Look Me Over," which she performed with Paula Stewart on The Ed Sullivan Show. She made a few more movies including Yours, Mine, and Ours (1968), and the musical Mame (1974), and two more successful long-running sitcoms for CBS: The Lucy Show (1962–68), which costarred Vance and Gale Gordon, and Here's Lucy (1968–74), which also featured Gordon, as well Lucy's real life children, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz, Jr. Ball appeared on the Dick Cavett show in 1974 and spoke of her history and life with Arnaz. She revealed how she felt about other actors and actresses as well as her love for Arnaz. She continued by telling Cavett that the success to her life was, "getting rid of what was wrong and replacing it with what is right," talking about her divorce from Arnaz and marriage to Morton.
Ball also revealed in this interview that the strangest thing to ever happen to her was after she had some dental work completed and having lead fillings in her teeth, she started hearing radio stations in her head. She explained coming home one night from the studio and as she passed one area, she heard what she thought was morse code or a "tapping." She stated that "as I backed up it got stronger. The next morning, I reported it to the authorities and upon investigation, they found a Japanese radio transmitter that had been buried and was actively transmitting codes back to the Japanese."[74][75] The extraordinary theory that dental fillings could pick up radio signals would ultimately be tested and debunked on the TV show Mythbusters nearly thirty years later.
Ball was originally considered by Frank Sinatra for the role of Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate. Director/producer John Frankenheimer, however, had worked with Angela Lansbury in a mother role in All Fall Down and insisted on having her for the part.[76]
During the mid-1980s, she attempted to resurrect her television career. In 1982, Ball hosted a two-part Three's Company retrospective, showing clips from the show's first five seasons, summarizing memorable plotlines, and commenting on her love of the show.[77] A 1985 dramatic made-for-TV film about an elderly homeless woman, Stone Pillow, received mixed reviews. Her 1986 sitcom comeback Life With Lucy, costarring her longtime foil Gale Gordon and co-produced by Ball, Gary Morton, and prolific producer/former actor Aaron Spelling was canceled less than two months into its run by ABC.[78] The failure of this series was said to have sent Ball into a serious depression, and other than a few miscellaneous awards show appearances, she was absent from the public eye for the last several years of her life. Her last public appearance, just one month before her death, was at the 1989 Academy Awards telecast in which she and fellow presenter, Bob Hope, were given a standing ovation.
Death[link]
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This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2011) |
On April 18, 1989, Ball was at her home in Beverly Hills when she complained of chest pains. An ambulance was called and she was rushed to the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She was diagnosed with dissecting aortic aneurysm and underwent heart surgery for nearly eight hours, receiving an aorta from a 27 year old male donor. The surgery was successful, and Ball began recovering very quickly , even walking around her room with little assistance. On April 26, shortly after dawn, Ball awoke with severe back pains. Her aorta had ruptured in a second location and Ball quickly lost consciousness. All attempts to revive her proved unsuccessful, and she died at approximately 05:47 PST. She was 77 years old. Her ashes were initially interred in Forest Lawn – Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, but in 2002 her children moved her remains to the family plot at Lake View Cemetery in Jamestown, New York, where Ball's parents, brother, and grandparents are buried.[79]
Legacy and posthumous recognition[link]
Ball received many prestigious awards throughout her career including some received posthumously such as the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George H. W. Bush on July 6, 1989,[80] and The Women's International Center's Living Legacy Award.[81]
There is a Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center museum in Lucy's hometown of Jamestown, New York. The Little Theatre was renamed the Lucille Ball Little Theatre in her honor.[82] Ball was among Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the Century.[83]
On August 6, 2001, which would have been her ninetieth birthday, the United States Postal Service honored her with a commemorative postage stamp as part of its Legends of Hollywood series.[84] Ball appeared on the cover of TV Guide more than any other person; she appeared on thirty-nine covers, including the very first cover in 1953, with her baby son Desi Arnaz, Jr.[85] TV Guide voted Lucille Ball as the Greatest TV Star of All Time and later it commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of I Love Lucy with eight collector covers celebrating memorable scenes from the show and in another instance they named I Love Lucy the second best television program in American history, after Seinfeld.[86] Because of her liberated mindset and approval of the women's movement, Ball was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.[87]
She was awarded the Legacy of Laughter award at the fifth Annual TV Land Awards in 2007,[88] I Love Lucy was named the Greatest TV Series by Hall of Fame Magazine,[citation needed] and TV Guide voted her greatest TV star of all time[32] In November of that year, Lucille Ball was chosen as the second out of the 50 Greatest TV Icons, after Johnny Carson. In a poll done by the public, however, they chose her as the greatest icon.[89]
On August 6, 2011, which would have been her hundredth birthday, Google honored Ball with an interactive doodle on their homepage. This doodle displayed six classic moments from the I Love Lucy sitcom.[90] On the same day a total of 915 Ball look-alikes converged on Jamestown, New York to celebrate the birthday and set a new world record for such a gathering.[91]
On February 8, 1960, she was awarded two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: one at 6436 Hollywood Boulevard for contributions to motion pictures, and one at 6100 Hollywood Boulevard for television.[92]
Filmography and television work[link]
Main article: Lucille Ball filmography and television work
References[link]
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- ^ Lucille Ball Certificate of Death. Find a Grave. accessed August 7, 2011.
- ^ "Lucille Ball Bio". tv.com. http://www.tv.com/lucille-ball/person/10038/biography.html. Retrieved 2008-04-02. "Lucille Ball is one of the worlds favorite actresses"
- ^ "Arnaz Quits Presidency Of Desilu; Former Wife, Lucille Ball, Gets Post," Wall Street Journal, Nov. 9, 1962, p. 18.
- ^ "Lucille Ball – Biography". punoftheday.com. http://www.punoftheday.com/lucille-ball.html. Retrieved 2008-04-02. "Ball wins four Emmys and nominated for a total of 13"
- ^ "Past Recipients: Crystal Award". Women In Film. http://wif.org/past-recipients. Retrieved May 10, 2011.
- ^ "The Cecil B. DeMille Award". Hollywood Foreign Press Association. http://www.goldenglobes.org/cecil70/. Retrieved 2012-03-10.
- ^ "List of Kennedy Center Honorees". Kennedy-center.org. http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/specialevents/honors/history.cfm. Retrieved 2012-03-10.
- ^ "Hall of Fame Archives: Inductees". Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. http://www.emmys.tv/awards/hall-fame/hall-fame-archives-honorees. Retrieved 2012-03-10.
- ^ a b c "Lucie Arnaz Filmography". Fandango. http://www.fandango.com/luciearnaz/filmography/p2323. Retrieved 2008-04-05.
- ^ a b c "Lucille Ball Timeline and Biography". twoop.com. http://www.twoop.com/people/lucille_ball.html. Retrieved 2008-04-05. "Ball gives birth to her children"
- ^ "Lucille Ball". Morbid Curiosity. http://www.morbid-curiosity.com/id125.htm. Retrieved 2008-04-06. "Lucille Ball is recovering and dies"
- ^ a b Sanders & Gilbert 1993, p. 216.
- ^ "Time Life". Time. Archived from the original on 2008-04-06. http://web.archive.org/web/20080406060542/http://www.time.com/time/time100/artists/profile/lucy_related2.html. Retrieved 2008-04-02About Lucille Ball's relatives.
- ^ Kanfer 2003, p. 10.
- ^ Ball 1997, pp. 168–169.
- ^ "Ancestry of Lucille Ball". Genealogy.com. http://www.genealogy.com/famousfolks/lucilleb/index.html. Retrieved 2008-04-14.
- ^ "Isaac Ball (1747- ?)". Edmund Rice (1638) Association. http://www.edmund-rice.org/era5gens/p3.htm#i334023. Retrieved 13 May 2012.
- ^ a b Interview with Lucille Ball on the Dick Cavett Show.[Full citation needed]
- ^ Herringshaw 2011, pp. 17–19.
- ^ Kanfer 2003.
- ^ "Lucille Ball Biography". Encyclopedia of World Biography. http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ba-Be/Ball-Lucille.html. Retrieved 2008-04-05.
- ^ Harris 1991, p. 23.
- ^ Harris 1991, p. 24.
- ^ Kanfer 2003, p. 16.
- ^ Kanfer 2003, p. 20.
- ^ Ball 1996, p. 41.
- ^ Brady 2001, p. 20.
- ^ Kanfer 2003, p. 24.
- ^ Kanfer 2003, p. 205.
- ^ Kanfer 2003, p. 30.
- ^ a b "Lucille Ball Trivia". NetGlimse. http://www.netglimse.com/celebs/pages/lucille_ball/index.shtml. Retrieved 2012-03-14.
- ^ Brady 2001, p. 33.
- ^ Kanfer 2003, p. 28.
- ^ "Lucille Ball at Hollywood.com". Hollywood.com. http://www.hollywood.com/celebrity/Lucille_Ball/199957. Retrieved 2008-04-02. "Lucille Ball's stage name"
- ^ "Lucille Ball". Everything2.com. http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=103863. Retrieved 2008-04-05. "Ball and Rogers are lifelong friends"
- ^ Brady 2001, p. 73–74.
- ^ Crouse, Richard J. (2003). The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen. Toronto: ECW Press. p. 196. ISBN 1-55022-590-1. ""Stage Door" gives Ball her big break"
- ^ ""The Wonder Show" – 1938 Radio Series – Starring Jack Haley, with Lucille Ball & Gale Gordon". The Wonder Show. http://www.lucyfan.com/wondershow.html. Retrieved 2008-04-09. "Lucy and The Wonder Show"
- ^ "Lucille Ball biography". Essortment.com. http://www.essortment.com/all/lucilleballbi_rtkn.htm. Retrieved 2008-04-05. "Ball and Arnaz patch things up before divorce became final"
- ^ "Lucille Ball: Biography and Much More from Answers.com". US Census Bureau. http://www.answers.com/topic/lucille-ball?cat=entertainment. Retrieved 2008-04-02. "Discrepancy in birthdates"
- ^ "Lover Come Back". TCM. http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/82077/Lover-Come-Back/. Retrieved 7 March 2012.
- ^ Silver, Allison (2009-07-16). "Sotomayor: More 'Splainin' to Do". The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allison-silver/sotomayer-more-splainin-t_b_236347.html. Retrieved 2010-06-18. "CBS executives originally did not want Ball, a sassy redhead, married to a Latino on the program"
- ^ "American Masters "Lucille Ball: Finding Lucy"". PBS. http://www.pbs.org/previews/american_masters_lucy. Retrieved 2008-04-02. "Ball first woman to head a major studio"
- ^ a b "Desi Arnaz". Clown Ministry. http://www.clown-ministry.com/index_1.php?/site/articles/desi_arnaz_biography. Retrieved 2008-04-02. "Arnaz revolutionizes television"
- ^ Karol 2004, p. 201.
- ^ Gehring, Wes (2001). ""I Love Lucy" Turns 50 – Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, background info on influential, groundbreaking TV comedy". USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education). http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1272/is_2676_130/ai_78256901. Retrieved 2008-04-05. "Arnaz did not want kinescope"
- ^ "Sitcoms Online – I Love Lucy". sitcomsonline.com. http://www.sitcomsonline.com/ilovelucy.html. Retrieved 2008-04-05. "I Love Lucy was the first show to introduce reruns"
- ^ "Stars of the living room". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 2008-06-06. http://web.archive.org/web/20080606034611/http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/cl-ca-125tv21may21,0,5824081.htmlstory. Retrieved 2008-04-05. "Arnaz and Ball bring tv show to Los Angeles"
- ^ Adir, Karin (2001). The Great Clowns of American Television (McFarland Classics). Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Company. pp. 4–10. ISBN 0-7864-1303-4.
- ^ Sanders & Gilbert 2001, pp. 72–81.
- ^ [1](mp3) – archive.org
- ^ Hofstede, David (2006). 5000 Episodes and No Commercials: The Ultimate Guide to TV Shows on DVD 2007. New York: Back Stage Books. p. 149. ISBN 0-8230-8456-6. "Longest laugh in television history"
- ^ "Index to Register of Voters". Ancestry.com Blog. 1936. http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/bal-lucy-actress-cst-1936-la-co-highlight.jpg. Retrieved 2012-03-14. Copy of document from Los Angeles City Precinct No. 1598, Los Angeles County, CA
- ^ Ancestry.com (January 30, 2008). "New California Voter Registrations Reveal Celebrity Party Lines". Ancestry.com Blog. http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2008/01/30/new-california-voter-registrations-reveal-celebrity-party-lines/. Retrieved 2012-03-14.
- ^ Testimony of Lucille Désirée Ball Arnaz, September 4, 1953, Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 83d Cong., 1st sess., Investigation of Communist Activities in the Los Angeles Area – Part 7, September 4, 1953 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1953), p. 2567 (PDF p. 14)
- ^ FBI file, pp. 10–13: FBI memorandum: D.M. Ladd to Hoover, Subject: Lucille Ball, Dezi [sic] Arnaz, September 17, 1953.
- ^ Affidavit of Rena M. Vale, November 23, 1942. Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California, Report: Un-American Activities in California (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1943), pp. 127–128
- ^ Fundraising for Roosevelt (video newsreel film). Washington, DC: British Pathé. http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=55256. Retrieved 2011-06-14.
- ^ "Ball, Lucille". FunTrivia.com. http://www.funtrivia.com/en/Celebrities/Ball-Lucille-13852.html. Retrieved 2011-06-14.
- ^ Ball explained, "In those days that was not a big, terrible thing to do. It was almost as terrible to be a Republican in those days." Testimony of Lucille Désirée Ball Arnaz, September 4, 1953, Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 83d Cong., 1st sess., Investigation of Communist Activities in the Los Angeles Area – Part 7, September 4, 1953 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1953), p. 2571 (PDF p. 18)
- ^ FBI file, p. 24: FBI memorandum: SAC Los Angeles to Hoover, Subject: Lucille Ball, was., December 16, 1953. Cf. Sanders & Gilbert 2001, pp. 77–78.
- ^ FBI file, p. 32: copy of: Flaherty, Vincent X. (October 23, 1956). "Hoover Hits Crime Trends in Movies". Los Angeles Examiner.
- ^ Leibman, Nina. "Ball, Lucille". Museum of Broadcast Communications. http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/B/htmlB/balllucille/balllucille.htm. Retrieved 2007-05-10.
- ^ "Radio: Birth of a Memo". Time. 26 January 1953. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,817789,00.html. Retrieved 2011-06-14.
- ^ "Celebrity Commercials in TV's Golden Age". Teletronic. Archived from the original on 2010-08-19. http://web.archive.org/web/20100819094937/http://www.teletronic.co.uk/ustvads.htm. Retrieved 2008-04-05.
- ^ "Biography of Lucille Ball, famous TV clown". Clown Ministry. http://www.clown-ministry.com/index_1.php?/site/articles/biography_of_lucille_ball_famous_tv_clown. Retrieved 2008-04-05.
- ^ Kanfer 2003, pp. 35–37.
- ^ "Powell's Books – Review-a-Day – Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball by Stefan Kanfer". The New Republic Online. http://www.powells.com/review/2003_09_25.html. Retrieved 2008-04-05. "Ball's real life divorce makes it into her new shows as showing her as a single woman"
- ^ Kanfer 2003, pp. 72–84. "Ball and Arnaz remain friends".
- ^ Kanfer 2003, p. 94.
- ^ Kanfer 2003, p. 103.
- ^ Kanfer 2003, p. 220.
- ^ Karol 2004, p. 164.
- ^ "Brace Yourself". snopes.com. 5 August 2007. http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/fillings.asp. Retrieved 2011-06-14.
- ^ Frankenheimer's DVD audio commentary
- ^ "TV Land March 2007 --To Be Continued Free Fridays; Three's Company 30th Anniversary – Sitcoms Online Message Boards". TV Land. http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=192779. Retrieved 2008-04-06. "Ball hosts Three's Company reflective"
- ^ "Life With Lucy". TV Party. http://www.tvparty.com/movlucy4.html. Retrieved 2008-04-06. ""Life With Lucy" turns out to be a flop"
- ^ Ball, Lucille. "Lucille Ball's Gravesite". Lucille Ball's Gravesite. The Lucy-Desi Center. http://www.lucy-desi.com/blog/. Retrieved 18 October 2011. [dead link]
- ^ "NATION : Lucille Ball Gets Medal of Freedom". Los Angeles Times. 1989-07-06. http://articles.latimes.com/1989-07-06/news/mn-4245_1_lucille-ball. Retrieved 2011-05-22.
- ^ "Welcome to Women's International Center". Women's International Center. http://www.wic.org. Retrieved 2008-04-09. "Living Legacy Award"
- ^ "The Lucille Ball Little Theater of Jamestown, Inc.". Designsmiths. http://www.designsmiths.net/lucilleball/index.html. Retrieved 2008-04-09. "Renaming of the "Little Theater" in Jamestown, New York"
- ^ "TIME 100 – People of the Century". Time Magazine. http://www.time.com/time/time100/index_2000_time100.html. Retrieved 2008-04-09.
- ^ "USPS – Stamp Release No. 01-057 – Legendary Hollywood Star Lucille Ball Honored on U.S. Postage Stamp". US Post Office. Archived from the original on 2008-01-19. http://web.archive.org/web/20080119012634/http://www.usps.com/news/2001/philatelic/sr01_057.htm. Retrieved 2008-04-09. "Ball honored on a Postage Stamp"
- ^ "Lucille Ball — Photos, Bio and News for Lucille Ball". TV Guide. http://www.tvguide.com/celebrities/lucille-ball/163025#+http://www.tvguide.com/celebrities/lucille-ball/163025#. Retrieved 2008-04-09. "Lucy appears on thirty-nine covers of TV guide"
- ^ "TiVo Community Forums Archives – TV Guide's 50 Best Shows of All Time". TV Guide. http://archive.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/history/topic/56036-1.html+http://archive.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/history/topic/56036-1.html. Retrieved 2008-04-09. "TV Guide's second greatest or most influential show of all time"
- ^ "National Women's Hall of Fame". Great Women Organization. http://www.greatwomen.org. Retrieved 2008-04-09. "Ball inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame"
- ^ "TV Land loves Lucy". Los Angeles Times. April 15, 2007. http://theenvelope.latimes.com/tv/la-env-tvland15apr15,0,2045170.story?coll=env-tv. Retrieved 2007-05-10.
- ^ Associated Press (November 16, 2007). "Carson tops list of 50 greatest TV icons". MSNBC. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21772917. Retrieved 2008-03-19.
- ^ Nancy Blair (August 6, 2011). "Google Doodle pays charming tribute to Lucille Ball on her 100th". USA Today. http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2011/08/google-doodle-pays-charming-tribute-to-lucille-ball-on-her-100th/1. Retrieved 2011-08-06.
- ^ "915 Lucille Ball look-alikes set record" at upi.com
- ^ "Walk of Fame: Lucille Ball". http://www.walkoffame.com/lucille-ball.
- Citations – books
- Ball, Lucille (1996). Hoffman, Betty Hannah. ed. Love, Lucy. New York: Putnam. ISBN 978-0-399-14205-5. OCLC 231698725. This autobiography covers Ball's life up to 1964. It was discovered by her children in 1989 ("Love, Lucy". WorldCat. http://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=wikipedia&q=isbn%3A9780399142055. Retrieved 2011-11-19. )
- Ball, Lucille (1997). Hoffman, Betty Hannah. ed. Love, Lucy. New York: Berkly. ISBN 978-0-425-17731-0. OCLC 52255505.
- Brady, Kathleen (2001). Lucille: the life of Lucille Ball. New York: Billboard Books. p. 20. ISBN 0-8230-8913-4.
- Harris, Warren C (1991). Lucy and Desi: the legendary love story of television’s most famous couple. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-74709-1.
- Herringshaw, DeAnn (2011). Lucille Ball: Actress & Comedienne. Edina, MN: ABDO. ISBN 978-1-61787-664-6.
- Kanfer, Stefan (2003). Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-41315-4.
- Karol, Michael A. (2004). The Lucille Ball Quiz Book. United States: iUniverse. ISBN 978-0-595-31857-5.
- Sanders, Coyne Steven; Gilbert, Thomas W. (1993). Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-688-13514-0. http://books.google.com/?id=y1pXKrPW0DoC&pg=PA216&lpg=PA216&dq=Paula+Stewart+introduces+Lucille+BAll+to+Gary.
- Sanders, Coyne Steven; Gilbert, Thomas W. (2001). Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. New York: HarperEntertainment. ISBN 0-688-13514-5. OCLC 48543617.
- Web pages
- "FBI file: Lucille Ball, Part 1". FBI. October 18, 1994. Archived from the original on 2008-10-31. http://web.archive.org/web/20081031044236/http://foia.fbi.gov/ball/ball1.pdf. Retrieved 2011-11-19.
Further reading[link]
- Lucille Ball FAQ: Everything Left to Know About America's Favorite Redhead by James Sheridan and Barry Monush (2011) ISBN 978-1-61774-082-4
- The Comic DNA of Lucille Ball: Interpreting the Icon by Michael Karol (2005) ISBN 0-595-37951-6
- Lucy A to Z: The Lucille Ball Encyclopedia by Michael Karol (2004) ISBN 0-595-29761-7
- Lucy in Print by Michael Karol (2003) ISBN 0-595-29321-2
- Laughing With Lucy: My Life With America's Leading Lady of Comedy by Madelyn Pugh Davis with Bob Carroll Jr. (2005) ISBN 978-1-57860-247-6
- I Love Lucy: The Complete Picture History of the Most Popular TV Show Ever by Michael McClay (1995) ISBN 0-446-51750-X (hardcover)
- Young, Jordan R. (1999) The Laugh Crafters: Comedy Writing in Radio & TV's Golden Age. Beverly Hills: Past Times Publishing ISBN 0-940410-37-0 (interview with Bob Schiller)
External links[link]
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Lucille Ball |
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Lucille Ball |
- Official website
- Lucille Ball at the Internet Broadway Database
- Lucille Ball at the Internet Movie Database
- Lucille Ball at AllRovi
- Lucille Ball at TV Guide
- Lucille Ball at the Museum of Broadcast Communications
- Flint, Peter B. "Lucille Ball, Spirited Doyenne Of TV Comedies, Dies at 77." The New York Times. April 27, 1989.
- Lucille Ball & several other actors participate on Orson Welles Radio Almanac 1944; recordings
- Celebrating Lucille Ball at 100: Unpublished Photos – slideshow by LIFE.com
- Lucille Ball Google doodle
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Ball, Lucille Désirée |
| Alternative names | Lucy |
| Short description | American Actress |
| Date of birth | August 6, 1911 |
| Place of birth | Jamestown, New York, U.S. |
| Date of death | April 26, 1989 |
| Place of death | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
