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![3. Colin Firth 2012.01.17 - Craig Ferguson [HD]](http://web.archive.org./web/20121210211936im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/3plUrLn2JMQ/default.jpg "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson January 17 2012 Part 3: Interview with Colin Firth from")
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Botswana
Botswana, officially the Republic of Botswana (Tswana: Lefatshe la Botswana), is a landlocked country located in Southern Africa. The citizens are properly referred to as "Batswana" (singular: Motswana), but many English-language sources use "Botswanan". Formerly the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, Botswana adopted its new name after becoming independent within the Commonwealth on 30 September 1966. It has held free and fair democratic elections since independence.
Botswana is flat, and up to 70% is covered by the Kalahari Desert. It is bordered by South Africa to the south and southeast, Namibia to the west and north, and Zimbabwe to the northeast. Its border with Zambia to the north near Kazungula, Zambia is poorly defined but at most is a few hundred meters long.
A mid-sized country of just over two million people, Botswana is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. Botswana was one of the poorest countries in Africa when it gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1966, with a GDP per capita of about US$70. Botswana has since transformed itself, becoming one of the fastest-growing economies in the world to a GDP (purchasing power parity) per capita of about $14,000. The country also has a strong tradition as a representative democracy.
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Chiswick
Coordinates: 51°29′33″N 0°15′48″W / 51.4925°N 0.2633°W / 51.4925; -0.2633
Chiswick
i/ˈtʃɪzɨk/ is a large suburb of west London, England and part of the London Borough of Hounslow. It is located on a meander of the River Thames, 6 miles (9.7 km) west of Charing Cross and is one of 35 major centres identified in the London Plan. It was historically an ancient parish in the county of Middlesex, with an agrarian and fishing economy. Having good communications with London from an early time the area became a popular country retreat, and as part of the suburban growth of London in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the population of Chiswick significantly expanded. With neighbouring Brentford, it became a municipal borough in 1932 and has formed part of Greater London since 1965.
The name "Chiswick" is of Old English origin meaning "Cheese Farm" and originates from the riverside meadows and farms that are thought to have supported an annual cheese fair on Dukes Meadows up until the 18th century. Chiswick was first recorded c.1000 as Ceswican.
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City of London
The City of London is an area in central London, England. In the medieval period it constituted most of London, but the conurbation has grown far beyond it. As the City’s boundaries have remained almost unchanged since the Middle Ages, it is now only a tiny part of the metropolis, though it remains a notable part of central London, holds city status in its own right, and is a separate ceremonial county.
It is often referred to as the City (often written on maps as "City") or the Square Mile, as it is just over one square mile (1.12 sq mi/2.90 km2) in area. These terms are also often used as metonyms for the United Kingdom's financial services industry, which continues a notable history of being based in the City.
The term London now refers to a much larger conurbation roughly corresponding to Greater London, a local government area which includes 32 London boroughs including the City of Westminster as well as the City of London. The local authority for the City, the City of London Corporation, is unique in the United Kingdom, and has some unusual responsibilities for a local authority in Britain, such as being the police authority for the City. It also has responsibilities and ownerships beyond the City's boundaries. The Corporation is headed by the Lord Mayor of the City of London, an office separate from (and much older than) the Mayor of London.
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Eastleigh
Coordinates: 50°58′00″N 1°21′00″W / 50.966667°N 1.35°W / 50.966667; -1.35
Eastleigh is a railway town in Hampshire, England, and the main town in the Eastleigh borough. The town lies between Southampton and Winchester, and is part of the South Hampshire conurbation. Eastleigh borough stretches from Netley on the banks of Southampton Water, the historic river villages of Hamble-le-Rice, Bursledon and Botley, the developing areas of Hedge End, West End, Fair Oak & Bishopstoke and the green residential belt of Chandler's Ford and Boyatt Wood. Eastleigh is home to many businesses, including a manufacturing plant owned by Prysmian Cables & Systems (formerly the cables division of Pirelli).
The town lies on the River Itchen, one of England's premier chalk streams for fly fishing, a designated site of Special Scientific Interest due to its high quality habitats supporting a wide range of protected species including the threatened water vole,otter, brook lamprey and white-clawed crayfish.
The modern town of Eastleigh lies on the old Roman road, built in A.D.79 between Winchester (Venta Belgarum) and Bitterne (Clausentum).Roman remains discovered in the Eastleigh area, including a Roman lead coffin excavated in 1908, indicate that a settlement probably existed here in Roman times.
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Grayshott
Coordinates: 51°06′37″N 0°45′16″W / 51.11031°N 0.75437°W / 51.11031; -0.75437
Grayshott is a village and civil parish in the East Hampshire district of Hampshire, England. It is located on the Hampshire / Surrey border 2.4 miles (3.9 km) northwest of Haslemere, approximately one hour by road from central London.
The nearest railway station is 2.1 miles (3.4 km) southeast of the village, at Haslemere.
The village is a collection of houses on either side of a road called Headley Road, which leads from the A333 to Headley Down, and Bordon. Just east of the village centre, splitting the village in two, is Boundary Road, which marks the boundary between Hampshire and Surrey. Grayshott was counted as part of Headley parish until 1901 (ecclesiastical parish) and 1902 (civil parish). It is now the basis of Grayshott civil parish, which is part of East Hampshire District.
Facilities in the village include St. Luke's Church, which is a part of the Guildford diocese, and Grayshott Primary School; both of these trace their origins to the 19th century. The National School was founded in 1871 on land provided by the architect Edward I'Anson, who had moved to the village ten years earlier. His descendants maintained a close connection to the area, his son made funds available for the construction of the church; many of these are buried and memorialised in its churchyard. The village also has a village hall that claims to be the largest in the county, a fire station, and a village square. Two village greens are close to the centre. There is also a recreation ground with cricket pavilion, football club and skate park, and good woodlands for walking in, including nearby Waggoners Wells. Ludshott Common, one mile to the west, is an area of heathland and woodland and part of the East Hampshire Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
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St. Louis, Missouri
St. Louis /seɪnt ˈluːɪs/ (French: Saint-Louis or St-Louis, [sɛ̃ lwi] (
listen)) is an independent city on the eastern border of Missouri, United States, and is the second-largest city in the state. With a population of 318,069 in July 2011, it was the 58th-largest U.S. city at the 2010 U.S. Census. The Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) population of 2,812,896 is the 18th-largest in the country. The Greater St. Louis combined statistical area's (CSA) population of 2,878,255 is the 16th-largest CSA in the country, the fourth-largest in the Midwest. The Greater St. Louis area is the largest metropolitan area in Missouri.
The city of St. Louis was founded in 1764 by Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau, and after the Louisiana Purchase, it became a major port on the Mississippi River. Its population expanded after the American Civil War, and it became the fourth-largest city in the United States in the late 19th century. It seceded from St. Louis County in March 1877, allowing it to become an independent city and limiting its political boundaries. In 1904, it hosted the 1904 World's Fair and the 1904 Olympic Games. The city's population peaked in 1950, then began a long decline that reversed only at the beginning of the 21st century.
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Winchester
Coordinates: 51°03′48″N 1°18′31″W / 51.0632°N 1.3085°W / 51.0632; -1.3085
Winchester (archaically known as Winton and Wintonceastre) is a historic cathedral city and former capital city of England. It is the county town of Hampshire, in South East England. The city lies at the heart of the wider City of Winchester, a local government district, and is located at the western end of the South Downs, along the course of the River Itchen. At the time of the 2001 Census, Winchester had a population of 41,420.
Winchester developed from the Roman town of Venta Belgarum. Winchester's major landmark is Winchester Cathedral, one of the largest cathedrals in Europe, with the distinction of having the longest nave and overall length of all Gothic cathedrals in Europe. The town is also home to the University of Winchester and the famous public school, Winchester College. The city's architectural and historic interest, and its fast links to other towns and cities have led Winchester to become one of the most expensive and desirable areas of the country. A person who is from or resides in Winchester is sometimes locally known as a Wintonian.
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Abigail Breslin
Abigail Kathleen Breslin (born April 14, 1996) is an American actress. She is one of the youngest actresses ever to be nominated for an Academy Award.
Breslin appeared in her first commercial when she was only three years old, and in her first film, Signs, at the age of five. Her subsequent films include Little Miss Sunshine, Nim's Island, Definitely, Maybe, My Sister's Keeper, Zombieland and Rango.
Breslin was born in New York City, the daughter of Kim, who manages her career, and Michael, a telecommunications expert, computer programmer, and consultant. Breslin has two older brothers, Ryan and Spencer, who are also actors. Breslin lives in New York with her family, which her maternal grandparents have described as "very close-knit". She is named after First Lady of the United States Abigail Adams.
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Adrien Brody
Adrien Brody (born April 14, 1973) is an American actor and film producer. He received widespread recognition and acclaim after starring in Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002), for which he became the youngest actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor at age 29. Brody is also the only American actor to receive the French César Award.
Brody was born in Woodhaven, Queens, New York, the son of Sylvia Plachy, a photojournalist, and Elliot Brody, a retired history professor and painter. Brody's father is of Polish Jewish descent; Brody's mother – who was raised Catholic – was born in Budapest, Hungary, the daughter of a Catholic Hungarian aristocrat father and a Czech Jewish mother. Brody was raised "without a strong connection to" Judaism or Catholicism. As a child, he performed magic shows at children's birthday parties as "The Amazing Adrien". He attended the I.S. 145 Joseph Pulitzer middle school and New York's Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts (famous as the inspiration for television's Fame). His parents enrolled him in acting classes to distance him from the dangerous children with whom he associated[citation needed]. He attended summer camp at Long Lake Camp for the Arts in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. Brody attended the State University of New York at Stony Brook before transferring to Queens College for a semester.
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Aishwarya Rai
Aishwarya Rai, known also as Aishwarya Rai Bachchan after her marriage (Tulu pronunciation [əjɕʋərjaː rəj]; born 1 November 1973) is an Indian film actress. She worked as a model before starting her acting career, and ultimately won the Miss World pageant in 1994. Rai has featured in films in various languages including Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu, and Bengali.
Often cited by the media as the "most beautiful woman in the world", Rai made her acting debut with Mani Ratnam's Tamil film Iruvar (1997), and had her first commercial success in Jeans (1998). She found success in Bollywood with Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999) and Devdas (2002) and eventually won two Filmfare Awards in the Best Actress category.
After a series of unsuccessful films during 2003–2005, she appeared in the blockbuster action thriller Dhoom 2 (2006) and subsequently featured in such films as Guru (2007), Jodhaa Akbar (2008), and Enthiran (2010). She gained critical acclaim for her performances in offbeat, independent films such as Chokher Bali (2003), Raincoat (2004), and Provoked (2007). Rai has thus established herself as one of the leading contemporary actresses of Indian cinema.
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Alan Rickman
Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman (born 21 February 1946) is an English actor of stage and screen. He is a renowned stage actor in modern and classical productions and a former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His breakout performance was as the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award. Rickman is known for his film performances as Hans Gruber in Die Hard, Severus Snape in the Harry Potter film series, Éamon de Valera in Michael Collins, and Metatron in Dogma.
Rickman has also had a number of other notable film roles such as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Jamie in Truly, Madly, Deeply, P.L. O'Hara in An Awfully Big Adventure and Colonel Brandon in Ang Lee's 1995 film Sense and Sensibility. More recently, he played Judge Turpin in the film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's musical of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Rickman was born in South Hammersmith, London, to a working class family, the son of Margaret Doreen Rose (née Bartlett), a housewife, and Bernard Rickman, a factory worker. Rickman's mother was from Wales and a Methodist, and his father was of Irish Catholic background. He has one elder brother, David (b. 1944), a graphic designer, a younger brother, Michael (b. 1947), a tennis coach, and a younger sister, Sheila (b. 1949). Rickman attended Derwentwater Primary School, in Acton, a school that followed the Montessori method of education.
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Albert Finney
Albert Finney (born 9 May 1936) is an English actor. He achieved prominence in films in the early 1960s, and has maintained a successful career in theatre, film and television.
A recipient of BAFTA, Golden Globe, Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Awards, Finney has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor four times, for Tom Jones (1963), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Dresser (1983), and Under the Volcano (1984); and was nominated for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Erin Brockovich (2000).
Finney is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His career began in the theatre; he made his first appearance on the London stage in 1958 in Jane Arden's The Party, directed by Charles Laughton, who starred in the production along with his wife, Elsa Lanchester. Then in 1959 he appeared at Stratford in Coriolanus opposite Laurence Olivier (as Coriolanus), Edith Evans and Vanessa Redgrave.
His first film appearance was a role in Tony Richardson's The Entertainer (1960), with Laurence Olivier, but he made his breakthrough with his portrayal of a disillusioned factory worker in Karel Reisz's film version of Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. This led to a series of "Angry Young Man" roles in kitchen sink dramas, before he starred in the Academy Award-winning 1963 film Tom Jones. Prior to this, Finney had been chosen to play T. E. Lawrence in David Lean's production of Lawrence of Arabia, but the actor quit after four days of shooting.
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Allison Janney
Allison Brooks Janney (born November 19, 1959) is an American actress, best known for her role as C.J. Cregg on the television series The West Wing.
Janney was born in Dayton, Ohio, the daughter of Macy Brooks (née Putnam), a former actress and homemaker, and Jervis Spencer Janney, Jr., a real estate developer and jazz musician. She has an older brother, Jay, and a younger brother, Hal. She attended The Miami Valley School in Dayton, where she was named a distinguished alumna in 2004, and the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. She then attended Kenyon College. At Kenyon, Janney studied under another Kenyon alum, Paul Newman.[citation needed] She went on to study drama at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.[citation needed] She attended The Neighborhood Playhouse the same years as actor Dylan McDermott.[citation needed]
Janney's first roles on television were as comedic foils on soap operas: she first played Vi Kaminski for a short time on As the World Turns, following up with a two-year stint as one of the Spaulding maids, Ginger on Guiding Light. In the spring of 1994, she appeared in the season finale of Law & Order, as a reluctant witness against a member of the Russian mob.
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Andy Serkis
Andrew Clement "Andy" Serkis (born 20 April 1964) is an English film actor, director and author.
He is popularly known for playing through motion capture to animate and voice computer-generated characters: Gollum in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy and its upcoming prequel The Hobbit, King Kong in the eponymous 2005 film, Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Captain Haddock in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin.
Andrew also earned a Golden Globe Award nomination for his portrayal of Ian Brady in the British television film Longford. Serkis's motion captured work have been critically acclaimed, especially as Gollum for which he earned several award nominations, becoming the first motion captured actor to win a Empire Award, a Saturn Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Serkis, one of five children, was born and brought up in Ruislip Manor in west London. His mother, Lylie (née Weech), was English and taught disabled children; his father, Clement Serkis, was an Iraqi gynaecologist of Armenian ethnicity. His ancestors' original surname had been "Sarkisian".
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Anil Kapoor
Anil Kapoor (Hindi: अनिल कपूर; Punjabi: ਅਨਿਲ ਕਪੂਰ; born 24 December 1959) is an Indian actor, producer and director who has appeared in many Bollywood films and more recently international films.
He won his first Filmfare Award, in the Best Supporting Actor category, for his role in Yash Chopra's Mashaal (1984). Kapoor earned his first Filmfare Best Actor Award for his performance in N. Chandra's Tezaab (1988) and later again for his perfornance in Indra Kumar's Beta (1992). He also starred in many other critically and commercially successful films, including Woh Saat Din (1983), Meri Jung (1985), Janbaaz (1986), Karma (1986), Mr. India (1987), Virasat (1997) for which he won the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actor, Biwi No.1 (1999), Taal (1999) for which he won his second Filmfare Best Supporting Actor Award, Pukar (2000) for which he won his first National Film Award for Best Actor, No Entry (2005), and Welcome (2007).
Kapoor's first role in an international film was in Danny Boyle's 2008 Academy Award-winning film Slumdog Millionaire, for which he shared the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. His performance in the eighth season of the action series 24 generated rave reviews from the American press. Globally, Anil Kapoor is one of the most recognised Indian actors. He has also appeared in the 2011 film Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.
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Annette Bening
Annette Carol Bening (born May 29, 1958) is an American actress. Bening is a four-time Oscar nominee for her roles in The Grifters, American Beauty, Being Julia and The Kids Are All Right, winning Golden Globe Awards for the latter two films. Bening is married to actor Warren Beatty, with whom she has four children.
Bening was born in Topeka, Kansas, the youngest of four children. Her mother, Shirley (née Ashley), was a church singer and soloist, and her father, Arnett Grant Bening, was a sales training consultant and insurance salesman. Her parents, natives of Iowa, were practicing Episcopalians and conservative Republicans. Her sister and two brothers are Jane, Bradley and Byron. The family moved to Wichita, Kansas, in 1959, where she spent her early childhood. In 1965, her father took a job with a company in San Diego, California, and they moved there. She began acting in junior high school, playing the lead in The Sound of Music. She graduated in 1975, from Patrick Henry High School where she studied drama.
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Antony Sher
Sir Antony Sher, KBE (born 14 June 1949) is a double Olivier Award winning South African-born British actor, writer, theatre director and painter.
Sher was born into a Lithuanian Jewish family in Cape Town, South Africa, the son of Margery and Emmanuel Sher, who worked in business. He grew up in the suburb of Sea Point and is a cousin of the playwright Ronald Harwood. Sher, however, has worked mainly in the United Kingdom and is now a British citizen.
In 1968, after completing his compulsory military service, he left for London to audition at the Central School of Speech and Drama and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but was unsuccessful. Instead, he studied at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art from 1969 to 1971. After training, and some early performances with the theatre group Gay Sweatshop, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982.
In the 1970s Sher was part of an astonishing group of young actors and writers working at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre. It consisted of the likes of writers Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale and fellow actors Bernard Hill, Julie Walters, Trevor Eve and Jonathan Pryce. Sher summed up the work of the company with the phrase "Anarchy ruled." At the Royal Shakespeare Company he took the title role in Tartuffe and played the Fool in King Lear before his big breakthrough in 1984, when he played the title role in Shakespeare's Richard III. This won him the prestigious Laurence Olivier Award. Since then he has played the lead in such productions as Tamburlaine, Cyrano de Bergerac, Stanley and Macbeth. He also played Johnnie in Athol Fugard's Hello and Goodbye, Iago in Othello, Malvolio in Twelfth Night and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.
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August Diehl
August Diehl (born 4 January 1976) is a German actor, primarily known to international audiences for playing SS-Sturmbannführer Dieter Hellstrom in Inglourious Basterds and Michael "Mike" Krause, Evelyn Salt's husband, in the movie Salt, as well as for his leading role in the Academy Award-winning Austrian film The Counterfeiters (2007).
Diehl was born in Berlin. His father is actor Hans Diehl, his mother is a costume designer and his brother is a composer. His family was frequently moving around, while he grew up: the Diehls used to live in Hamburg, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Bavaria and France. Growing up in a family of artists, at the age of 18, he played Franz Mohr in a school theatre production of Die Räuber by Friedrich Schiller. After passing the Abitur exams, Diehl studied acting at the renowned Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch in Berlin. In 2000, he was named one of European film's "Shooting Stars" by the European Film Promotion. In 2006, Gala magazine named him "the most important German actor of today." Diehl is married to actress Julia Malik. On 23rd May 2009 the couple had a daughter, Elsa Augusta. Diehl plays the guitar and speaks Spanish, German, French and English.
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Benicio del Toro
Benicio Monserrate Rafael del Toro Sánchez (born February 19, 1967) is a Puerto Rican actor and film producer. He won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a BAFTA Award for his role as Javier Rodríguez in Traffic (2000). He is also known for his roles as Fred Fenster in The Usual Suspects (1995), Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), Franky Four Fingers in Snatch (2000), Jackie Boy in Sin City (2005), and Che Guevara in Che (2008). He is the third Puerto Rican to win an Academy Award.
Benicio del Toro was born in San German, on the southwest side of the island of Puerto Rico, and grew up in Santurce, a district of San Juan. He is the son of Gustavo Adolfo del Toro Bermúdez and Fausta Genoveva Sánchez Rivera, who were both lawyers, and deeply respected and beloved in Puerto Rico for their commitment to their community. Gustavo Del Toro was affectionately called the "lawyer of the poor". Many of Del Toro's relatives are involved in the island's legal system. He has an older brother, Gustavo, who was a pediatric oncologist at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. He is of Spanish descent through a Catalan paternal great-grandfather and a Basque maternal great-grandmother, he has Italian and Amerindian ancestry as well. The surname del Toro (Touro) is of Sephardic origin. Benicio del Toro is related to Puerto Rican basketball player Carlos Arroyo, his father Gustavo is a cousin of Arroyo's mother, Gloria Bermudez. Del Toro is also related to Spanish Euro-pop singer Rebeca Pous Del Toro, whose grandfather is Puerto Rican, and Puerto Rican singer Eliseo del Toro.
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Benjamin Bratt
Benjamin Bratt (born December 16, 1963) is an American actor. He is most famous for his role as Rey Curtis on the TV series Law & Order; and his appearances in the movies Miss Congeniality, Demolition Man, Blood in Blood Out, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Traffic, and Piñero.
Bratt was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Eldy (née Banda), a nurse, and Peter Bratt, Sr., a sheet metal worker. Bratt's mother is a Peruvian Indigenous activist of the Quechua ethnic group; born in Peru, she moved to the U.S. at age nine. His father was an American of German and English descent. They married December 30, 1960, in San Francisco, but divorced in September 1967. Bratt's paternal grandfather, George Cleveland Bratt (March 5, 1893 – March 29, 1984), was a Broadway actor who married his grandmother Wiltrude Hildner on August 6, 1920, in Detroit, Michigan.
As a child, Bratt went with his mother and siblings to participate in the 1969 Native American occupation of Alcatraz. Today Bratt is an active supporter of such Native American causes as the American Indian College Fund and We Shall Remain, a mini-series and multi-media project, narrated by Bratt, that establishes Native history as an essential part of American history from PBS' acclaimed series American Experience.
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Bill Haydon
Bill Haydon is a fictional character created by John le Carré, and is a major figure in le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Bill Haydon is recruited into the Circus (John le Carré's lightly fictionalised version of MI6/SIS) in 1938 while a brilliant student at Oxford University. He is an aesthete, possessing of a great intellect, charming, and, it appears, smitten with fellow student Jim Prideaux, an acclaimed athlete. Haydon introduces Prideaux to the Circus "talent spotters" and the two rise through the Circus through World War II, with Haydon ascending to become one of the senior officers in London and Prideaux a resourceful field agent.
It is never made clear whether a physical relationship developed with Prideaux, although Haydon's bisexuality is referred to at several points in the novel.
Haydon is not only charming and rather aristocratic but reckless, apparently a highly successful agent, libidinous, witty, somewhat outrageous.
And, as it turns out, Haydon is a double agent working for Moscow Centre. As he rises within the Circus, Haydon (code-named "Gerald") introduces a new (and ultimately bogus) Soviet intelligence source called "Merlin", the product of the source being termed "Witchcraft". Percy Alleline is keen to use this source as a bargaining chip with the CIA.
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Bill Murray
William James "Bill" Murray (born September 21, 1950) is an American actor, comedian and golfer. He first gained national exposure on Saturday Night Live in which he earned an Emmy Award and later went on to star in a number of critically and commercially successful comedic films, including Caddyshack (1980), Ghostbusters (1984), and Groundhog Day (1993). Murray gained additional critical acclaim later in his career, starring in Lost in Translation (2003), that earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor nomination, and a series of films directed by Wes Anderson, including Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Moonrise Kingdom (2012).
Murray was born and raised in Wilmette, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago, the son of Lucille (née Collins), a mail room clerk, and Edward Joseph Murray II, a lumber salesman. Murray's father died in 1967 from complications of diabetes when Bill was 17 years old. Murray, along with his eight siblings, was raised in an Irish American family. Three of his siblings are actors: John Murray, Joel Murray and Brian Doyle-Murray. A sister, Nancy, is an Adrian Dominican nun in Michigan, who has traveled the United States in a one-woman programme, portraying St. Catherine of Siena.
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Bill Paxton
William "Bill" Paxton (born May 17, 1955) is an American actor and film director. He gained popularity after starring roles in the films Apollo 13, Twister, Aliens, True Lies, and Titanic. Paxton starred in the HBO series Big Love (2006–2011).
Paxton was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, the son of Mary Lou (née Gray) and John Lane Paxton, a businessman, lumber wholesaler, museum executive, and occasional actor. He was raised Roman Catholic, his mother's religion. He attended St. Anne's Catholic School, Arlington Heights High School (Fort Worth, Texas), and Southwest Texas State University (San Marcos, Texas).[citation needed]
Paxton has appeared in such films as Weird Science, Aliens, Apollo 13, Near Dark, Twister, Titanic and True Lies. Four years after appearing in Titanic, he joined James Cameron on an expedition to the actual Titanic. A film about this trip, Ghosts of the Abyss, was released in 2003.
Paxton has also directed a number of short films, including Fish Heads, which aired during Saturday Night Live's low-rated 1980-1981 season. He directed the feature films Frailty and The Greatest Game Ever Played.
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Blake Morrison
Philip Blake Morrison (born 8 October 1950) is a British poet and author who has published in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. His greatest success came with the publication of his memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father? which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. He has also written a study of the James Bulger murder, As If. Since 2003, Morrison has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Morrison was born in Skipton, North Yorkshire, to an English father and an Irish mother. His parents were both physicians; his mother's maiden name was Agnes O'Shea, but her husband persuaded her to change "Agnes" to "Kim". The details of his mother's life in Ireland, to which he had not been privy, formed the basis for his autobiographical novel, Things My Mother Never Told Me.
Blake Morrison attended Ermysted's Grammar School before going on to study English Literature at the University of Nottingham and UCL. He worked for the Times Literary Supplement (1978-81)' and was literary editor of both The Observer (1981-89) and the Independent on Sunday (1989-95). Morrison's early writing career outside of journalism was as a poet and poetry critic. He became a full-time writer in 1995 and has since produced novels and volumes of autobiography as well as plays, libretti, and writing for television. He has contributed articles to The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the New Statesman, the New York Times and Poetry Review and since 2001 he has written regularly for The Guardian. In 2003 he became Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, London, and in 2008 he became Chair of The Reader Organisation, the UK centre for research and promotion of reading as a therapeutic activity.
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Bob Balaban
Robert Elmer "Bob" Balaban (born August 16, 1945) is an American actor, author and director.
Balaban was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Eleanor (née Pottasch) and Elmer Balaban, who owned several movie theatres and later was a pioneer in cable television. His family was a dominant force in the theatre business; his uncles founded the Balaban and Katz Theatre circuit in Chicago, a chain which included the Chicago and Uptown Theatres. Balaban and Katz operated some of the most beautiful movie palaces in the United States beginning in the 1920s. Bob Balaban's father and his uncle Harry founded the H & E Balaban Corporation in Chicago. H & E Balaban Corporation operated their own movie palaces including the Esquire Theatre in Chicago. They later owned a powerful group of television stations and cable television franchises. His uncle Barney Balaban was president of Paramount Pictures for nearly 30 years from 1936 to 1964. His grandmother's second husband, Sam Katz, was a vice president at MGM beginning in 1936. Sam had early partnered with Bob's uncles Abe, Barney, John and Max to form Balaban and Katz. Sam also served as President of the Publix theatre division of Paramount Pictures.
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Brad Pitt
William Bradley "Brad" Pitt (born December 18, 1963) is an American actor and film producer. Pitt has received four Academy Award nominations and five Golden Globe Award nominations, winning one Golden Globe. He has been described as one of the world's most attractive men, a label for which he has received substantial media attention.
Pitt first gained recognition as a cowboy hitchhiker in the road movie Thelma & Louise (1991). His first leading roles in big-budget productions came with A River Runs Through It (1992), Interview with the Vampire (1994), and Legends of the Fall (1994). In 1995, he gave critically acclaimed performances in the crime thriller Seven and the science fiction film 12 Monkeys, the latter earning him a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor and an Academy Award nomination. Four years later, Pitt starred in the cult hit Fight Club. He then starred in the major international hit Ocean's Eleven (2001) and its sequels, Ocean's Twelve (2004) and Ocean's Thirteen (2007). His greatest commercial successes have been Troy (2004) and Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005). Pitt received his second and third Academy Award nominations for his leading performances in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) and Moneyball (2011). In addition, Pitt owns a production company, Plan B Entertainment, whose productions include The Departed (2006), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Moneyball, which garnered a Best Picture nomination.
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Brendan Fraser
Brendan James Fraser (born December 3, 1968) is a Canadian-American film and stage actor. Fraser portrayed Rick O'Connell in the three-part Mummy film series (1999, 2001, and 2008), and is known for his comedic and fantasy film leading roles in major Hollywood films, including Encino Man (1992), George of the Jungle (1997), Dudley Do-Right (1999), Monkeybone (2001), Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008), and Inkheart (2009). Has also appeared in numerous dramatic roles, including Crash (2004) and The Quiet American (2002). He is set to star in the upcoming movie Gimme Shelter (2012).
Fraser was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of Canadian parents. His mother, Carol Mary (née Genereux), was a sales counselor, and his father, Peter Fraser, was a former journalist who worked as a Canadian foreign service officer for the Government Office of Tourism. His maternal uncle, George Genereux, was the only Canadian to win a gold medal in the 1952 Summer Olympics. Fraser has three older brothers: Kevin, Regan, and Sean. His surname is properly pronounced /ˈfreɪzər/, not /ˈfreɪʒər/. The correct pronunciation of his surname is a running gag in Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, in which his character's surname is pronounced /frɛrəˈʒʊər/. His ancestry includes Irish, Scottish, German, Czech, and French Canadian.
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Bruce Jones (actor)
Ian Roy Jones (born 24 January 1953) is an English actor, best known for his role as cab driver Les Battersby-Brown in Coronation Street. He left the role in 2007. His real name is Ian Roy Jones, but he took the name of his father for professional purposes.
Jones was born to Bruce and Irene Jones in Collyhurst, Manchester. He was brought up in a typical working class household before he went to live with his grandmother in Wales where he joined his school drama group at the age of eleven and dreamt of becoming an actor.
On the morning of 9 October 1977, Jones made a gruesome discovery that would have a profound effect on his life. Whilst working with a friend on an allotment in Moss Side, Manchester, Jones discovered the mutilated body of 20 year old prostitute Jean Jordan - a victim of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe.
Jones' first introduction into show business was when he formed a comedy duo with a friend and went on to work the club circuit as Clarke and Jones for many years.
It was during this time that Bruce decided he would like to try his hand at acting and his first big break came in 1993 when he was cast as the lead of Bob Williams in the feature film Raining Stones by director Ken Loach; the film went on to receive great critical acclaim and won the Evening Standard Awards for Best Film and Best Screenplay. Bruce was presented with the European Actors Award.
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Bushmen
The indigenous people of Southern Africa, whose territory spans most areas of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Botswana, Namibia, and Angola, are variously referred to as Bushmen, San, Sho, Barwa, Kung, or Khwe. The word Bushmen is sometimes associated with a negative meaning & they prefer to be called the San people. These people were traditionally hunter-gatherers, part of the Khoisan group and are related to the traditionally pastoral Khoikhoi. Starting in the 1950s, and lasting through the 1990s, they switched to farming as a result of government-mandated modernization programs as well as the increased risks of a hunting and gathering lifestyle in the face of technological development. There is a significant linguistic difference between the northern Bushmen living between Okavango (Botswana) and Etosha (Namibia), extending into southern Angola on the one hand and the southern group in the central Kalahari towards the Molopo, who are the last remnant of the extensive autochthonous San of South Africa.
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Cameron Diaz
Cameron Michelle Diaz (born August 30, 1972) is an American actress and former model. She became famous during the 1990s with roles in the movies The Mask, My Best Friend's Wedding, and There's Something About Mary. Other high-profile credits include the two Charlie's Angels films, voicing the character Princess Fiona in the Shrek series, and Bad Teacher. Diaz received Golden Globe award nominations for her performances in the movies There's Something About Mary, Being John Malkovich, Vanilla Sky, and Gangs of New York.
Diaz, the younger of two daughters, was born in San Diego, California. Her mother, Billie (née Early), is an import-export agent, and her father, Emilio Diaz (1949–2008), worked for the California oil company UNOCAL for more than 20 years as a field gauger. Diaz has an older sister, Chimene. Her father's family came from Cuba, before settling in Tampa's Ybor City, and eventually California, where Emilio was born. Her mother is of German and Cherokee descent. Diaz was raised in Long Beach, California and attended Long Beach Polytechnic High School.
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Catherine Zeta-Jones
Catherine Zeta-Jones, CBE, (
/ˈziːtə/; born Catherine Zeta Jones; 25 September 1969) is a Welsh actress. She began her career on stage at an early age. After starring in a number of United Kingdom and United States television films and small roles in films, she came to prominence with roles in Hollywood movies such as the 1998 action film The Mask of Zorro and the 1999 crime thriller film Entrapment. Her breakthrough role was in the 2000 film Traffic, for which she earned her first Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture.
Zeta-Jones subsequently starred as Velma Kelly in the 2002 film adaptation of the musical Chicago, a critical and commercial success, and received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, BAFTA Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award and was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. Later, she appeared in the 2003 romantic comedy film Intolerable Cruelty and 2004 crime comedy film Ocean's Twelve. Zeta-Jones starred in the 2005 sequel of the 1998 film, The Legend of Zorro. She also starred in the 2008 biopic romantic thriller Death Defying Acts. In 2010, she won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical for her portrayal of Desiree in A Little Night Music.
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Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens ( /ˈtʃɑrlz ˈdɪkɪnz/; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic who is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period and the creator of some of the world's most memorable fictional characters. During his lifetime Dickens' works enjoyed unprecedented popularity and fame, but it was in the twentieth century that his literary genius was fully recognized by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to enjoy an enduring popularity among the general reading public.
Born in Portsmouth, England, Dickens left school to work in a factory after his father was thrown into debtors' prison. Though he had little formal education, his early impoverishment drove him to succeed. He edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels and hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.
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Christian Bale
Christian Charles Philip Bale (born 30 January 1974) is an English actor. Best known for his roles in American films, Bale has starred in both big budget Hollywood films and the smaller projects from independent producers and art houses.
Bale first caught the public eye at the age of 13, when he was cast in the starring role of Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun (1987). He played an English boy who is separated from his parents and subsequently finds himself lost in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. He is also notable for his role as serial killer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000), and for portraying Bruce Wayne/Batman in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and the upcoming finale The Dark Knight Rises (2012).
In 2010, Bale portrayed Dicky Eklund in the biopic The Fighter. He received critical acclaim for his role and won several awards, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role.
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Christoph Waltz
Christoph Waltz (German pronunciation: [kristɔf valts]; born 4 October 1956) is an Austrian actor, who also holds German citizenship.
He received international acclaim for his portrayal of SS-Standartenführer Hans Landa in the 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, for which he won the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival and the BAFTA, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild Award and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2009.
Christoph Waltz was born in Vienna, Austria. He is the son of German-born Johannes Waltz and Austrian-born Elisabeth Urbancic, set and stage designers. His maternal grandmother was Burgtheater actress Maria Mayen, and his step-grandfather was actor Emmerich Reimers. His great-grandparents also worked in the theatre.
Waltz studied acting at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna. He also attended the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York. He started as a stage actor, performing at venues such as Zurich's Schauspielhaus Zürich, Vienna's Burgtheater, and the Salzburg Festival. He became a prolific television actor. In 2000, he made his directorial debut, with the German-language television production Wenn man sich traut.
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Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss (French pronunciation: [klod levi stʁos]; (28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology".
He argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. These observations culminated in his famous book Tristes Tropiques, which positioned him as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought, where his ideas reached into fields including the humanities, sociology and philosophy. Structuralism has been defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity."
He was honored by universities throughout the world and held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France (1959–1982); he was elected a member of the Académie Française in 1973.
Claude Lévi-Strauss was born to French parents who were living in Brussels at the time, where his father was working as a painter. He grew up in Paris, living on a street of the 16th arrondissement named after the artist Claude Lorrain, whose work he admired and later wrote about. During the First World War, he lived with his maternal grandfather, who was the rabbi of the synagogue of Versailles. He attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly and the Lycée Condorcet.
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Clifton Collins, Jr.
Clifton Craig Collins, Jr. (born June 16, 1970) is an American actor.
Clifton Craig Collins, Jr. was born in Los Angeles, of half Mexican descent and the grandson of actor Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez. He has sometimes been credited as Clifton Gonzalez-Gonzalez to honor his grandfather. He first broke through the mainstream in 1997 with a performance as gang thug César Sánchez in the film One Eight Seven. In 1998, he enchanted and amused small screen audiences in Ray Bradbury's cult film The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit. He next portrayed a gay hitman, named Frankie Flowers, for the Mexican drug cartels in the 2000 ensemble drama Traffic. In 2002 he played the role of Buddy in the film Confessions of an American Girl. In 2005, Collins, Jr. won rave reviews for his subtle portrayal of killer Perry Smith in the fact-based film Capote. He starred in the 2005 film Dirty alongside Oscar winner Cuba Gooding, Jr. Collins, Jr. starred on FX Networks' show Thief. Collins, Jr. also played a supporting role on FX Networks' show The Shield, as undercover ICE agent Hernan. He also has a small role in 2006's Babel, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu.
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Clive Owen
Clive Owen (born 3 October 1964) is an English actor, who has worked on television, stage and film. He first gained recognition in the United Kingdom for portraying the lead in the ITV series Chancer from 1990 to 1991. He then garnered critical acclaim for his work in the film Close My Eyes (1991) before getting international notice for his performance as a struggling writer in Croupier (1998). In 2005, Owen won a Golden Globe and a BAFTA Award and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his appearance in the drama Closer (2004). He has since played leading roles in films such as Sin City (2005), Inside Man (2006), Children of Men (2006), and The International (2009).
The fourth of five brothers, Owen was born in Coventry, in the English Midlands, a son of Pamela (née Cotton) and Jess Owen, a country and western singer of Welsh descent. His father left the family when Owen was three years old, and despite a brief reconciliation when Owen was nineteen, the two have remained estranged. Raised by his mother and stepfather, a railway ticket clerk, he has described his childhood as "rough." While initially opposed to drama school, he changed his mind in 1984, after a long and fruitless period of searching for work. Owen graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1987 with a class that included Rebecca Pidgeon, Serena Harragin, Mark Womack, and Liza Tarbuck. After graduation, he won a position at the Young Vic, performing in several Shakespearean plays.
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Coen brothers
Joel David Coen (born November 29, 1954) and Ethan Jesse Coen (born September 21, 1957) known together professionally as the Coen brothers, are American filmmakers. Their films include Blood Simple, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men, and True Grit.
The brothers write, direct and produce their films jointly, although until recently Joel received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing. They often alternate top billing for their screenplays while sharing film credits for editor under the alias Roderick Jaynes.
Joel and Ethan Coen, of Jewish heritage, grew up in a Jewish community in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. Their father, Edward, was an economist at the University of Minnesota, and their mother, Rena, an art historian at St. Cloud State University.
When they were children, Joel saved money from mowing lawns to buy a Vivitar Super 8 camera. Together, the brothers remade movies they saw on television with a neighborhood kid, Mark Zimering ("Zeimers"),[citation needed] as the star. Their first attempt was a romp titled, Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go. Cornel Wilde's The Naked Prey (1966) became their Zeimers in Zambia, which also featured Ethan as a native with a spear.
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D. W. Moffett
Donald Warren "D. W." Moffett (born October 26, 1954) is an American actor known for the recurring role of Joe McCoy on the NBC series Friday Night Lights since 2008, and as Dean Winston on The WB series, For Your Love.
Moffett was born in Highland Park, Illinois, and raised in nearby Wilmette. He took the stage name of "D.W." to avoid confusion with British actor Donald Moffat. The Moffetts are able to trace their ancestry to Jean de Mophet. de Mophet was a Norman knight who invaded England with William the Conqueror in 1066 CE. Mophet was anglicized to Moffat and later Moffett. The town of Moffat, Scotland, in the borderlands of Scotland and England is the Moffetts’ ancestral home.[citation needed]
In the years 1969-1974, Moffett attended a private secondary school in Germany, (Schule Schloss Neubeuern). After attending Stanford University, where he majored in political science, he found himself back in Chicago working as an investment banker. He was lured by a friend to the St. Nicholas Theater Company on a whim, where he began studying with William H. Macy. Shortly thereafter, he started his own theater company, called Remains Theater.
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Dan Futterman
Daniel Futterman (born June 8, 1967) is an American actor and screenwriter. Although he is known for several high-profile acting roles, including Val Goldman in the film The Birdcage, and Vincent Gray on the CBS television series Judging Amy, he is also a screenwriter. In 2005, he wrote the screenplay for the film Capote for which he received an Academy Award nomination and an Independent Spirit Award, Boston Society of Film Critics award, and Los Angeles Film Critics Association award.
Futterman, one of three siblings, was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a lawyer father and a psychoanalyst mother. He was raised in Conservative Judaism and grew up in an "intellectual family". Futterman grew up in Larchmont, New York, and graduated from Mamaroneck High School in 1985 and Columbia University in 1989.
Futterman is married to television writer Anya Epstein (sister of former Boston Red Sox General Manager and Executive Vice President and current President of Baseball Operations for the Chicago Cubs Theo Epstein), with whom he has two daughters: Sylvie (b. 2001) and Eve (b. 2005).
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Daniel Brühl
Daniel César Martín Brühl González Domingo ( listen (help·info); born 16 June 1978) is a Spanish-born German actor. He is best known as Daniel Brühl.
Brühl was born in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. His father was the late German TV director Hanno Brühl and his mother was a Spanish professor. He also has a brother and a sister. Shortly after his birth his family moved to Cologne, Germany, where he grew up and attended the Dreikönigsgymnasium. Brought up in a fully multilingual home, he speaks Spanish, German, Catalan, French and English. In 2006, Brühl separated from his long-time girlfriend, actress Jessica Schwarz, to whom he was engaged. He is an FC Barcelona fan.
Brühl began acting at a young age and made his first steps in 1995 as street kid Benji in the soap opera Verbotene Liebe (Forbidden Love). His international breakthrough role came in 2003 as Alex Kerner in the Golden Globe-nominated film Good Bye, Lenin!, which reached an estimated six million cinema-goers worldwide. In 2003, Brühl won the European Film Academy award trophies for Best Actor (Critics/Audience Awards) for the role. Brühl made his English-speaking film debut in the 2004 Ladies in Lavender, starring alongside British acting legends Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. The same year, he won the People's Choice trophy for Best Actor for the film Love in Thoughts while at the same time, he was nominated for Best Actor (critics) for The Edukators. Brühl featured as Lieutenant Horstmayer, a central character in the 2005 film Joyeux Noël, a trilingual World War One film based on the experiences of French, German and Scottish soldiers during the Christmas truce of 1914. The film shows Brühl's linguistic ability as he ably communicates in German, French and English throughout.
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Daniel Craig
Daniel Wroughton Craig (born 2 March 1968) is an English actor best known for playing British secret agent James Bond in a 2006 reboot of the film series and its sequels.
Craig is an alumnus of the National Youth Theatre and graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and began his career on stage. His early on screen appearances were in the films Elizabeth, The Power of One and A Kid in King Arthur's Court, and on Sharpe's Eagle and Zorro in television. His appearances in the British films Love Is the Devil, The Trench and Some Voices attracted the industry's attention, leading to roles in bigger productions such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Road to Perdition, Layer Cake and Munich.
Craig achieved international fame when chosen as the sixth actor to play the role of Bond, replacing Pierce Brosnan. His debut in Casino Royale was highly acclaimed and earnt him a BAFTA award nomination, with the film becoming the highest grossing in the series to date. Quantum of Solace followed two years later, with the third film Skyfall set for release in 2012, having been delayed due to MGM's financial troubles.
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David Wenham
David Wenham (born 21 September 1965) is an Australian actor who has appeared in movies, television series and theatre productions. He is known in Hollywood for his roles as Faramir in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Carl in Van Helsing and Dilios in 300 and Neil Fletcher in Australia. He is also known in his native Australia for his role as Diver Dan in SeaChange.
Wenham was born in Marrickville, Sydney, Australia, the son of Kath and Bill Wenham. He has five older sisters; Helen, Anne, Carmel, Kathryn, and Maree; and one older brother, Peter. David was raised in the Roman Catholic faith and attended Christian Brothers' High School, Lewisham. He worked as a bingo caller and an insurance clerk before becoming successful as an actor.
Wenham started his career as an actor after graduating from Theatre Nepean at the University of Western Sydney in 1987. Wenham's television credits include several telemovies, such as his AFI award winning role in the 1996 telemovie Simone de Beauvoir's Babies; and his role as the outwardly laid back but deeply enigmatic diver Dan Della Bosca in the 1998 and 1999 seasons of the highly successful ABC television series SeaChange. His role as "Diver Dan" has made the actor something of a sex symbol, although he dislikes thinking of himself as such, and he has been voted Australia's "sexiest man alive". A portrait of Wenham by artist Adam Cullen won the Archibald Prize in 2000. Wenham is signed to Storm Model Management in London.
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Denis Menochet
Denis Menochet (born 1977 in Enghien-les-Bains, Val-d'Oise) is a French film and television actor. Menochet is perhaps best known to an international audience for his role as Perrier LaPadite, a French dairy farmer interrogated by the Nazis for harboring Jews, in the 2009 Quentin Tarantino film, Inglourious Basterds.
Elizabeth Weitzman, a film critic for the New York Daily News, praised Menochet's work opposite Christoph Waltz in the opening scene of Inglorious Basterds. Weitzman wrote in August 2009, "The terrific opening, for example, does feature a hailstorm of bullets. What you'll remember best, though, is the haunted silence of actor Denis Menochet, playing a French farmer accused of harboring Jews."
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Dennis Quaid
Dennis William Quaid (born April 9, 1954) is an American actor known for his comedic and dramatic roles. First gaining widespread attention in the 1980s, his career rebounded in the 1990s after he overcame an addiction to drugs and an eating disorder. Some of his notable credits include Jaws 3-D, The Right Stuff, Enemy Mine, Great Balls of Fire!, The Big Easy, Far from Heaven, The Rookie, The Day After Tomorrow, Vantage Point, Footloose, The Parent Trap, Soul Surfer and Innerspace.
Quaid was born in Houston, Texas, the son of Juanita Bonniedale "Nita" (née Jordan), a real estate agent, and William Rudy Quaid (November 21, 1923 – February 8, 1987), an electrician and a third cousin of performer Gene Autry. He is the younger brother of actor Randy Quaid. The Quaid brothers grew up in Bellaire, Texas, which is a small city surrounded by Houston, and in southwest Houston. Quaid has English, Irish, and Cajun (French) ancestry. He attended Paul W. Horn Elementary School in Bellaire and Pershing Middle School in Houston. He studied Mandarin and dance at Bellaire High School in Bellaire, Texas, and later in college, at the University of Houston, under drama coach Cecil Pickett, who had previously taught at Bellaire High and whose daughter is actress Cindy Pickett. It was during his time at Bellaire High School that he developed the nickname 'Dennis Quand', (a combination of 'Quaid' and 'Bond') in relation to his obsession with the 007 movie character and was regularly referred to by this name.
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Denzel Washington
Denzel Hayes Washington, Jr. (born December 28, 1954) is an American actor, screenwriter, director, and film producer. He first rose to prominence when he joined the cast of the medical drama, St. Elsewhere, playing Dr. Philip Chandler for six years. He has received much critical acclaim for his work in film since the 1990s, including for his portrayals of real-life figures, such as Steve Biko, Malcolm X, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Melvin B. Tolson, Frank Lucas and Herman Boone.
Washington has received two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe awards, and a Tony Award. He is notable for winning the Best Supporting Actor for Glory in 1989; and the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2001 for his role in the film Training Day.
Denzel Washington was born in Mount Vernon, near New York City, New York on December 28, 1954. His mother, Lennis "Lynne", was a beauty parlor-owner and operator born in Georgia and partly raised in Harlem. His father, Reverend Denzel Hayes Washington, Sr., a native of Buckingham County, Virginia, served as an ordained Pentecostal minister, and also worked for the Water Department and a local department store, S. Klein.
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Diane Kruger
Diane Kruger (born 15 July 1976) is a German actress and former fashion model. She is known for roles such as Helen in Troy, Dr. Abigail Chase in National Treasure and its sequel, Bridget von Hammersmark in Inglourious Basterds, Anna in Mr. Nobody, and Gina in Unknown.
She was born as Diane Heidkrüger in Algermissen, Germany, near Hildesheim, the daughter of a computer specialist Hans-Heinrich Heidkrüger, and his wife, Maria-Theresa, a bank employee. She was raised Roman Catholic and attended Catholic school.
She was raised in Germany with her younger brother, Stefan. Her mother sent her to student exchange programs when she was a teenager to improve her English. As a child, Kruger wanted to become a ballerina and successfully auditioned for the Royal Ballet School in London. However, after an injury ended her ballet career prematurely, Kruger moved to Paris and turned her energy toward modeling and learning French.
Kruger soon became interested in acting and took lessons at the Cours Florent. She landed some small appearances in several French films. She made her onscreen debut in 2002, opposite Dennis Hopper and Christopher Lambert in The Piano Player, a TV-movie by Jean-Pierre Roux. Her first major role was the same year when she starred in her then husband's directorial debut Mon Idole.
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Dominic Monaghan
Dominic Bernard Patrick Luke Monaghan ( /ˈdɒmɨnɨk ˈmɒnəhæn/; born 8 December 1976) is an English actor. He has received international attention from playing Meriadoc Brandybuck in Peter Jackson's adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and for his role as Charlie Pace on the television show Lost.
Monaghan was born in Berlin, Germany, to British parents: Maureen, a nurse, and Austin Monaghan, a science teacher. Monaghan's family lived in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart and Münster, moving about every four years. When he was about 11 years old, his family moved from Germany to Heaton Moor in Stockport, Greater Manchester. Monaghan's first language is English, but he also speaks some German and is well known for his ability to impersonate others and replicate accents[citation needed]. Bernard is his maternal grandfather's name, and Patrick his paternal grandfather's name. He chose Luke as his confirmation name after Luke Skywalker from Star Wars, his favourite film, which was also one of his inspirations for becoming an actor. He attended St Anne's Roman Catholic High School (where his uncle taught and later became head teacher) and Aquinas College, where he studied English literature, drama and geography.
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Don Quixote
Don Quixote ( /ˌdɒn kiːˈhoʊtiː/; Spanish: [ˈdoŋ kiˈxote] ( listen)), fully titled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (Spanish: El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha), is a novel written by Miguel de Cervantes. The novel follows the adventures of Alonso Quijano, who reads too many chivalric novels, and sets out to revive chivalry under the name of Don Quixote. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who frequently deals with Don Quixote's rhetorical orations on antiquated knighthood with a unique Earthy wit. He is met by the world as it is, initiating themes like Intertextuality, Realism, Metatheatre and Literary Representation.
Published in two volumes a decade apart, in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is considered the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature, and one of the earliest canonical novels, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published. In one such list, Don Quixote was cited as the "best literary work ever written".
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Eileen Atkins
Dame Eileen June Atkins, DBE (born 16 June 1934) is an English actress and occasional screenwriter. Born in 1934 she has worked in the theatre, film, and television consistently since 1953. She has been nominated for and received many professional awards and was created a CBE in 1990 and later a DBE in 2001.
Atkins was born in the Mothers' Hospital in Clapton, a Salvation Army women's hostel in East London. Her mother, Annie Ellen (née Elkins), was a barmaid who was 46 when Eileen was born, and her father, Arthur Thomas Atkins, was a gas meter reader who was previously under-chauffeur to the Portuguese Ambassador. She was the third child in the family and when she was born the family moved to a council home in Tottenham. Her father did not, in fact, know how to drive and was responsible, as under-chauffeur, mainly for cleaning the car. At the time Eileen was born, her mother worked in a factory the whole day and then as a barmaid in the Elephant & Castle at night. When Eileen was three, a Gypsy woman came to their door selling lucky heather and clothes pegs. She saw little Eileen and told her mother that her daughter would be a famous dancer. Her mother promptly enrolled her in a dance class. Although she hated it, she studied dancing from age 3 to 15 or 16. From age 7 to 15, which covered the last four years of the Second World War (1941–45), she danced in working men's club circuits for 15 shillings a pop as "Baby Eileen". During the war, she performed as well at London's Stage Door canteen for American troops and sang songs like "Yankee Doodle." At one time she was attending dance class four or five times a week.
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Eli Roth
Eli Raphael Roth (born April 18, 1972) is an American film director, producer, writer and actor. He is known for his role as Donny "The Bear Jew" Donowitz in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds for which he won both a SAG Award (Best Ensemble) and a BFCA Critic's Choice Award (Best Acting Ensemble). He is part of a group of filmmakers dubbed the Splat Pack, because of their dedication to the genre and their relentless horror films.
Roth was born in Newton, Massachusetts, to Dr. Sheldon Roth, a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst and assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School, and Cora Roth, a painter. His grandparents emigrated from Austria, Russia, and Poland; Roth was raised Jewish.
Roth began shooting films at the age of eight after watching Ridley Scott's Alien (1979). He made over 50 short films with his brothers Adam and Gabe before graduating at Newton South High School and attending film school (the Tisch School of the Arts) at New York University, from which he graduated in 1994. By the age of 20, and while still a student at NYU, Roth ran the office of producer Frederick Zollo, eventually leaving to devote himself to writing full-time.
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Emily Watson
Emily Watson (born 14 January 1967) is an English actress who gave an acclaimed debut film performance in Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves. She has won a number of awards for acting throughout her career, which has encompassed theatre, motion picture and television; most recently a BAFTA award for her role in ITV's Appropriate Adult.
Watson was born in Islington, London, England. Her father was an architect and her mother was an English teacher at St David's Girls' School, West London. She was brought up as an Anglican. Watson describes her childhood self as a "Nice middle class English girl ... I'd love to say I was a rebellious teenager but I wasn't".
Watson was educated at St James Independent Schools, in west London, which she has described as a 'progressive' school. She attended the University of Bristol, where she obtained a B.A. (1988, English).[citation needed] Following university, she trained at Drama Studio London,[citation needed] and later received a M.A. (2003, honorary) from Bristol University.[citation needed]
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Emily Woof
Emily Woof (born 1967), is an English actress and author, best known for film roles including The Full Monty, The Woodlanders, Velvet Goldmine, Wondrous Oblivion, Silent Cry and The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse.
Her father was Wordsworth Trust Director Dr Robert Woof.
Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Woof studied at Oxford University. Her first stage work was a trilogy of one-man plays: Sex, Sex 2, and Sex 3. Sections of these plays were written to be performed on a trapeze, which Woof had trained to use in Bristol after completing her degree.
Parts in The Full Monty (1997), Photographing Fairies (1997), Velvet Goldmine (1998) and The Woodlanders (1998) established Emily Woof as one of Britain's leading young actresses.
She has also appeared in several television roles, ranging from period dramas (Middlemarch, Oliver Twist) to contemporary drams (Killer Net) and comedy (The Ronni Ancona Show).
For theatre she has written the Sex, Sex II, Sex III, and Revolver.[citation needed] For radio, Pianoman, Baby Love, and Home to The Black Sea. She has written and directed two short films, Between The Wars, and Meeting Helen.[citation needed]
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Erika Christensen
Erika Jane Christensen (born August 19, 1982) is an American actress whose film appearances include Traffic (2000), Swimfan (2002), How to Rob a Bank (2007), and The Perfect Score (2004), among others. She also co-starred in the short-lived drama Six Degrees on ABC. She is currently co-starring in the 2010 television series Parenthood as Julia Braverman-Graham.
Christensen was born in Seattle, Washington, the daughter of Kathy, a construction manager, and Steven, an insurance worker/human-resources executive. She has an older half-brother, Nick, and two younger twin brothers, Dane (who appeared in the film The Upside of Anger) and Brando. She has Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Welsh, and Irish ancestry. Christensen was raised in Los Angeles, California and started out on television in commercials for McDonald's.
Christensen is a member of the Church of Scientology. Her parents became Scientologists in their 20s and raised her to be a Scientologist as well as home-schooling her.
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Freida Pinto
Freida Selena Pinto (born 18 October 1984) is an Indian actress and model best known for her portrayal of Latika in the 2008 Academy Award winning film Slumdog Millionaire, for which she won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. After the success of the film she went on to star in the films such as You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Miral—in which she played the title character—and the box-office hit Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
Pinto was born into a Mangalorean Catholic family in Mumbai, which she still refers to as Bombay out of habit. Her surname is of Portuguese origin as the result of her ancestors' conversion to Catholicism by missionaries. Her mother, Sylvia, is the principal of St. John's Universal High School (Goregaon), and her father, Frederick, is a senior branch manager at the Bank of Baroda. She has an elder sister, Sharon, who is an associate producer for the NDTV news channel. Pinto dreamed of becoming an actress since she was five years old. When Freida was ten, Sushmita Sen won Miss Universe 1994, which turned out to be a defining point in Freida's life. She studied at Carmel of St. Joseph School in Malad, Mumbai and completed a degree in arts with a major in English Literature, and minors in Psychology and Economics, from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai. She had also acted in plays and amateur theatre while attending St. Xavier's. She later joined Elite Model Management and modelled for two and a half years.
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Garret Dillahunt
Garret Dillahunt (born November 24, 1964) is an American actor. He is married to actress Michelle Hurd. He currently plays the role of Burt Chance on the Fox sitcom Raising Hope.
Garret L. Dillahunt was born in Castro Valley, California and grew up in Selah, Washington. One of three siblings, he has a brother, Brett. His other brother, Eric, is deceased. He graduated from the University of Washington with a B.A. in journalism and went on to receive his M.F.A. in acting from New York University's Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts.
After spending years on and off Broadway, Dillahunt began pursuing television and film roles. He appeared as a regular in several short lived series on ABC and Showtime, and landed guest spots on TV shows such as The X Files and NYPD Blue among others, before playing two distinctly different characters on the HBO series Deadwood: Jack McCall in 2004 and Francis Wolcott in 2005. He later had a recurring role on USA Network's The 4400.
Dillahunt portrayed Steve Curtis for three seasons on ER (2005–06). Later roles included Dr. Michael Smith on HBO's John From Cincinnati; Cromartie and John Henry on FOX's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles; Roman Nevikov, a Russian gangster, on NBC's Life; and Mason Turner, a paralyzed serial killer on Criminal Minds. He played Simon Escher in the Burn Notice third season finale airing March 4, 2010 on the USA, later reprising the role in the show's fourth season.
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Gary Oldman
Gary Leonard Oldman (born 21 March 1958) is an English screen and stage actor, filmmaker and musician, who is the highest-grossing actor in the history of film. A successful theatre actor and former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Oldman gained mainstream recognition from the early 1980s to early 1990s for his portrayals of morally ambiguous characters in films including Meantime, Sid and Nancy, Prick Up Your Ears, The Firm, State of Grace, JFK and Dracula. He became a popular portrayer of villains by the mid 1990s, playing the antagonist of True Romance, Léon, The Fifth Element, Air Force One and The Contender. Since the millenium Oldman has starred in such films as the Harry Potter series, Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, Kung Fu Panda 2 and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Aside from film acting, he has starred in television shows like Knots Landing and Friends, voiced various characters in the Call of Duty video game series, and wrote and directed Nil By Mouth, a film partially based on his own childhood.
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Gary Sinise
Gary Alan Sinise ( /səˈniːs/; born March 17, 1955) is an American actor, film director and musician. During his career, Sinise has won various awards including an Emmy and a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1992, Sinise directed, and played the role of George Milton in the successful film adaptation of Of Mice and Men. Sinise was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1994 for his role as Lt. Dan Taylor in Forrest Gump. He won a Golden Globe Award for his role in Truman, as Harry S. Truman. In 1996, he played a corrupt police officer in the dramatic hit Ransom, Detective Jimmy Shaker. In 1998, Sinise was awarded an Emmy Award for the television film George Wallace, a portrayal of the late George C. Wallace. Since 2004, Sinise has starred in CBS's CSI: NY as Detective Mac Taylor.
Sinise was born in Blue Island, Illinois, the son of Mylles S. (née Alsip; b. 1932) and Robert L. Sinise (b. 1931), the latter of whom was a film editor. He is of part Italian ancestry (from his paternal grandfather). He attended Highland Park High School in Highland Park, Illinois. In 1974, Sinise and two friends, Terry Kinney and Jeff Perry, founded the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Since its founding, Steppenwolf has showcased the talents of such notable actors as Joan Allen, Kevin Anderson, Gary Cole, Ethan Hawke, Glenne Headly, John Mahoney, John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, Martha Plimpton, Jim True-Frost and most recently William Petersen. At Steppenwolf, Sinise honed his acting and directing skills, received a Joseph Jefferson Award for his direction of Lyle Kessler's play Orphans, that took him from Chicago, to New York City to London's West End, and worked on more than thirty of the company's productions.
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Gene Hackman
Eugene Allen "Gene" Hackman (born January 30, 1930) is a retired American actor and novelist.
Nominated for five Academy Awards, winning two, Hackman has also won three Golden Globes and two BAFTAs in a career that spanned five decades. He first came to fame in 1967 with his performance as Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde. His major subsequent films include The French Connection (1971), in which he played Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle; The Poseidon Adventure (1972); The Conversation (1974); Superman (1978), in which he played arch-villain Lex Luthor; Hoosiers (1986); Mississippi Burning (1987); Unforgiven (1992); The Firm (1993); Crimson Tide (1995); Get Shorty (1995); The Birdcage (1996); Enemy of the State (1998); and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).
Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, the son of Lyda (née Gray) and Eugene Ezra Hackman. He has a brother, Richard. His family moved frequently, finally settling in Danville, Illinois, where they lived in the house of his English-born maternal grandmother, Beatrice. Hackman's father operated the printing press for the Commercial-News, a local paper. Hackman's parents divorced in 1943 and his father subsequently left the family.
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George VI
George VI (Albert Frederick Arthur George; 14 December 1895 – 6 February 1952) was King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth from 11 December 1936 until his death. He was the last Emperor of India, and the first Head of the Commonwealth.
As the second son of King George V, he was not expected to inherit the throne and spent his early life in the shadow of his elder brother, Edward. He served in the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force during World War I, and after the war took on the usual round of public engagements. He married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 1923, and they had two daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret.
George's elder brother ascended the throne as Edward VIII on the death of their father in 1936. However, later that year Edward revealed his desire to marry the divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson. British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin advised Edward that for political and religious reasons he could not marry Mrs Simpson and remain king. Edward abdicated in order to marry, and George ascended the throne as the third monarch of the House of Windsor.
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Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore ambivalent modern world moral and political issues. Greene was notable for his ability to combine serious literary acclaim with widespread popularity.
Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic, Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing, especially the four major Catholic novels: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair. Several works such as The Confidential Agent, The Third Man, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor also show an avid interest in the workings of international politics and espionage.
Greene suffered from bipolar disorder, which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life. In a letter to his wife Vivien, he told her that he had "a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life", and that "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material".William Golding described Greene as "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety." Greene never received the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he finished runner-up to Ivo Andrić in 1961.
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Gwyneth Paltrow
Gwyneth Kate Paltrow ( /ˈɡwɪnɨθ ˈpæltroʊ/; born September 27, 1972) is an American actress and singer. She made her acting debut on stage in 1990 and started appearing in films in 1991. After appearing in several films throughout the decade, Paltrow gained early notice for her work in films such as Seven (1995) and Emma (1996) (in which she played the title role). Following the films Sliding Doors (1998) and A Perfect Murder (1998), Paltrow garnered worldwide recognition through her performance in Shakespeare in Love (1998), for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress, a Golden Globe Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards, for Outstanding Lead Actress and as a member of the Outstanding Cast. She also won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series in 2011 for her role as Holly Holliday on the Fox hit TV show Glee in the episode "The Substitute".
Paltrow has portrayed supporting as well as lead roles in films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Shallow Hal (2001), and Proof (2005), for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actress in Motion Picture Drama. Since 2008, she has portrayed Pepper Potts in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, starring in Iron Man and its sequel, Iron Man 2 (2010), and also appearing in The Avengers (2012). Paltrow has been the face of Estée Lauder's Pleasures perfume since 2005. She is married to Chris Martin, the lead vocalist of Coldplay. They have two children together, Apple and Moses. She is also the face of American fashion brand Coach, owner of the lifestyle company Goop.com and author of the cookbook My Father's Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness.
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Hank Azaria
Henry Albert "Hank" Azaria ( /əˈzɛəriə/ ə-ZAIR-ee-ə; born April 25, 1964) is an American film, television and stage actor, director, voice actor, and comedian. He is noted for being one of the principal voice actors on the animated television series The Simpsons (1989–present), on which he performs the voices of Moe Szyslak, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, Chief Wiggum, Comic Book Guy, Carl Carlson and numerous others. Azaria, who attended Tufts University, joined the show with little voice acting experience, but became a regular in its second season. Many of his performances on the show are based on famous actors and characters; Moe's voice, for example, is based on actor Al Pacino.
Alongside his continued voice acting on The Simpsons, Azaria became more widely known through his live-action appearances in films such as The Birdcage (1996) and Godzilla (1998). He has continued to star in numerous films including Mystery Men (1999), America's Sweethearts (2001), Shattered Glass (2003), Along Came Polly (2004), Run Fatboy Run (2007), Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009) and The Smurfs (2011). He also had recurring roles on the television series Mad About You and Friends, and starred in the drama Huff (2004–2006), playing the titular character, as well as appearing in the popular stage musical Spamalot. Originally primarily a comic actor, in recent years Azaria has taken on more dramatic roles including the TV films Tuesdays With Morrie (1999) and Uprising (2001). He has won four Emmys and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Azaria was married to actress Helen Hunt from 1999 to 2000.
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Helen Fielding
Helen Fielding (born 19 February 1958) is an English novelist and screenwriter, best known as the creator of the fictional character Bridget Jones, a sequence of novels and films that chronicle the life of a thirtysomething single woman in London as she tries to make sense of life and love.
Bridget Jones's Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason have been published in forty countries and sold over 15 million copies. The two movies of the same name have achieved worldwide success. Bridget Jones’s Diary was named as one of the ten novels that best defined the 20th century, in a survey conducted by The Guardian newspaper.
Fielding (born 19 February 1958) grew up in Morley, West Yorkshire, a textile town on the outskirts of Leeds in the north of England. She lived next to a factory that made the fabric for miners’ donkey jackets, where her father was managing director. He died in 1982 and her mother, Nellie, still lives in Yorkshire. Fielding attended Wakefield Girls High School and has three siblings, Jane, David and Richard. She studied English at St Anne's College, Oxford and was part of the Oxford revue at the 1978 Edinburgh Festival, forming a continuing friendship with a group of comic performers and writers including Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson.
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Helen Hunt
Helen Elizabeth Hunt (born June 15, 1963) is an American actress, film director, and screenwriter. She starred in the sitcom, Mad About You, for seven years before being cast in the 1997 romantic comedy film, As Good as It Gets for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Some of her other Hollywood credits include Twister, Cast Away, What Women Want, Pay It Forward, and Soul Surfer. She made her directorial debut in 2007 with Then She Found Me.
Hunt was born in Culver City, California. Her mother, Jane Elizabeth (née Novis), worked as a photographer; and her father, Gordon E. Hunt, is a film director and acting coach. Her uncle, Peter H. Hunt, also is a director. Her paternal grandmother was from a German Jewish family, and her maternal grandfather was born in England. Her Iowa-born maternal grandmother, Dorothy Fries (née Anderson), was a voice coach. When she was three, Hunt's family moved to New York City, where her father directed theatre (Hunt attended plays as a child several times a week). Hunt studied ballet, and attended UCLA.
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Helen Mirren
Dame Helen Mirren, DBE (born Helen Lydia Mironoff; 26 July 1945) is an English actor. She has won an Academy Award for Best Actress, four SAG Awards, four BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, four Emmy Awards, and two Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Awards.
Mirren was born Helen Lydia Mironoff in Queen Charlotte's Hospital, Chiswick, West London. Her father, Vasiliy Petrovich Mironov (1913–1980), was of Russian origin, and her mother, Kitty (née Kathleen Alexandrina Eva Matilda Rogers; 1909–1996), was English. Mirren's paternal grandfather, Colonel Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov, was in the Tsarist Army and fought in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. He later became a diplomat, and was negotiating an arms deal in Britain, when he and his family were stranded during the Russian Revolution. The former diplomat became a London cab driver to support his family.
His son, Helen Mirren's father, changed the family name to the Scottish-sounding Mirren in the 1950s and became known as Basil Mirren. He played the viola with the London Philharmonic before World War II, and later drove a cab and was a driving-test examiner, before becoming a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport. Mirren's mother was from West Ham, East London, and was the 13th of 14 children born to a butcher whose father had been the butcher to Queen Victoria. Mirren considers her upbringing to have been "very anti-monarchist".
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Helena Bonham Carter
Helena Bonham Carter, CBE (born 26 May 1966) is an English actress. She made her acting debut in a television adaptation of K. M. Peyton's A Pattern of Roses before winning her first film role as the titular character in Lady Jane. She is known for her roles in films such as A Room with a View, Fight Club, and playing the villainess Bellatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter series, as well as for frequently collaborating with director and domestic partner Tim Burton in films such as Planet of the Apes, Big Fish, Corpse Bride, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Alice in Wonderland, and Dark Shadows.
A two-time Academy Award nominee for her performances in The Wings of the Dove and The King's Speech, Bonham Carter's acting has been further recognised with six Golden Globe nominations, an International Emmy Award, a BAFTA Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to drama, and received the award from the Queen at Buckingham Palace on 22 February 2012.
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Hugo Speer
Hugo Speer (born 17 March 1969) is an English actor.
He was born in Harrogate, West Riding of Yorkshire, and educated at Harrogate Grammar School. He studied acting at the Arts Educational School.
He began his acting career appearing in TV series The Bill and Heartbeat, and played a minor role in the film Bhaji on the Beach before his first notable appearance as "Guy" in the film The Full Monty. He has gone on to appear in several films including Swing (1999), Deathwatch and The Interpreter (playing Nicole Kidman's brother). However, most of his work has been on TV, including sitcoms Men Behaving Badly, dramas Clocking Off, The Last Detective, Boudica (2003) and The Rotters' Club (2005), as well as the 2005 BBC adaptation of Dickens' Bleak House. In 2006, he appeared in the postal worker drama Sorted. In 2008, he appeared alongside Martine McCutcheon in Echo Beach. In 2011 he played a repairman whose repairs "come to life" in Haven. Speer also provides narration for ITV1 series, Cops with Cameras, and the BBC series Seaside Rescue. He appears as John Foster in the penultimate and final episodes of the fourth series of Skins.
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Ian McKellen
Sir Ian Murray McKellen, CH CBE (born 25 May 1939) is an English actor. He has won multiple Laurence Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, two Academy Award nominations, and five Emmy Award nominations. His work has spanned genres from Shakespearean and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction. He is known for film roles such as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Magneto in the X-Men films, and as Sir Leigh Teabing in The Da Vinci Code.
McKellen was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979, was knighted in 1991 for services to the performing arts, and was made a Companion of Honour for services to drama and to equality, in the 2008 New Year Honours.
McKellen was born in Burnley, Lancashire, England, though he spent most of his early life in Wigan. Born shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the experience had some lasting impact on him. In response to an interview question when an interviewer remarked that he seemed quite calm in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, he said: "Well, darling, you forget — I slept under a steel plate until I was four years old."
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Imelda Staunton
Imelda Mary Philomena Bernadette Staunton, OBE (born 9 January 1956) is an English actress. She is perhaps best known for her performances in the British comedy television series Up the Garden Path, the Harry Potter film series (in which she plays Professor Dolores Jane Umbridge) and Vera Drake. She drew critical acclaim as Vera Drake, earning her a Best Actress Oscar nomination and a number of wins including the BAFTA and Venice Film Festival Awards for best actress in a leading role.
Staunton was born in Archway, North London, the only child of Bridie (née McNicholas), a hairdresser, and Joseph Staunton, a road-worker and labourer. The family lived over Staunton's mother's hair dressing salon while Staunton’s father worked on the roads. Both of her parents were first-generation Catholic immigrants from County Mayo, Ireland, with her father coming from Ballyvary and her mother from Bohola. Staunton's mother was a musician who could not read music, but could master almost any tune by ear on the accordion or fiddle and had played in Irish showbands.
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Irrfan Khan
Sahabzade Irrfan Ali Khan, previously known as Irrfan Khan and now just Irrfan (Hindi: इरफ़ान ख़ान; born on 7th January 1967 ), is an Indian actor in film, television and theatre. He received recognition for his roles in The Warrior (2001), Maqbool (2003), Haasil (2004), The Namesake (2006), A Mighty Heart (2007), Life in a... Metro (2007), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Billu (2009), New York (2009), New York, I Love You (2009), Paan Singh Tomar (film) (2012), and Vodafone commercials.
He has won two Filmfare Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and an Independent Spirit Award nomination. He is also the recipient of 2011 Padma Shri award, the fourth highest civilian award in India. He has also been cast in The Amazing Spider-Man as Dr. Ratha. He has appeared in more than 30 films in the Bollywood.
Khan was born in Jaipur to a Muslim family. Khan's mother, Sayeeda Begum, was from the Tonk Hakim family, and his father, the late Jagirdar, was from the Khajuriya village near the Tonk district, and ran a tyre business. Khan was studying for his M.A. degree when he earned a scholarship to study at National School of Drama (NSD) in New Delhi in 1984.
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J. B. Priestley
John Boynton Priestley, OM (13 September 1894 – 14 August 1984), known as J. B. Priestley, was an English novelist, playwright and broadcaster. He published 26 novels, notably The Good Companions (1929), as well as numerous dramas such as An Inspector Calls. His output included literary and social criticism.
Priestley was born at 34 Mannheim Road, Manningham, which he described as an "ultra-respectable" suburb of Bradford. His father was a headmaster. His mother died when he was just two years old and his father remarried four years later. Priestley was educated at Belle Vue Grammar School, which he left at sixteen to work as a junior clerk at Helm & Co., a wool firm in the Swan Arcade. During his years at Helm & Co. (1910–1914), he started writing at night and had articles published in local and London newspapers. He was to draw on memories of Bradford in many of the works he wrote after he had moved south, including Bright Day and When We Are Married. As an old man he deplored the destruction by developers of Victorian buildings in Bradford such as the Swan Arcade, where he had his first job.
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J. L. Carr
Joseph Lloyd Carr (born 20 May 1912 Thirsk Junction, Carlton Miniott, Yorkshire – 26 February 1994 Kettering, Northamptonshire); who called himself "Jim" or even "James", was an English novelist, publisher, teacher, and eccentric.
Carr was born in Yorkshire, into a family of Wesleyan Methodists. His father Joseph, the eleventh son of a farmer, rejected farming as a career and went to work for the railways, eventually becoming a station master for the North Eastern Railway. Carr was given the same Christian name as his father and the middle name Lloyd, after David Lloyd George, the Liberal prime minister. He adopted the names Jim and James in adulthood. His brother Raymond, who was also a station master, called him Lloyd.
Carr's early life was shaped by failure. He attended the village school at Carlton Miniott, Yorkshire. He failed the scholarship exam, which denied him a grammar school education, and on finishing his school career he also failed to gain admission to teacher training college. Interviewed at Goldsmiths' College, London, he was asked why he wanted to be a teacher. Carr answered: "Because it leaves so much time for other pursuits." He was not accepted. Over forty years later, after his novel The Harpole Report was a critical and popular success, he was invited to give a talk at Goldsmiths'. He replied that the college once had its chance of being addressed by him.
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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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Jacky Ido
Jacky Ido (born May 14, 1977 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso) is a Burkina Faso-born French film actor. His first role was as Lemalian in the 2005 German film, The White Masai. He is best known to English-language audiences for his role as Marcel, the film projectionist in Quentin Tarantino's 2009 film, Inglourious Basterds. Ido's brother Cedric Ido who is also an actor has directed him in the short Hasaki Ya Suda. Jacky Ido works and resides in Paris, France and is working on a slam potry album.
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Jacob Vargas
Jacob Vargas (born August 18, 1971) is a Mexican-born American actor.
Vargas was born in Michoacán, Mexico, and raised in Pacoima, Los Angeles, California, since 1971. He was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family.
Vargas’ break into acting came when he was cast as a street dancer on Diff'rent Strokes, and his career has continued successfully including films such as Traffic and Jarhead. He was also in the horror movie The Hills Have Eyes 2. But he is most known for his role as Joker from the Joker Brothers in the 2000 film Next Friday and as Abraham Quintanilla, the brother of the late Tejano singer Selena in the biopic film of the same name.
He is married to Sylvia Arzate. They have a daughter named Rose, born in 2004.
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James Brolin
James Brolin /ˈbroʊlɨn/; born July 18, 1940) is an American actor, producer and director, best known for his roles in soap operas, movies, sitcoms, and television. He is the father of actor Josh Brolin and husband of singer/actress Barbra Streisand.
Brolin was born Craig Kenneth Bruderlin in Los Angeles, California. The eldest of two brothers and two sisters, he was the son of Helen Sue (née Mansur), a homemaker, and Henry Hurst Bruderlin, a building contractor. The family settled in Westwood after his birth. As a young child, he was apparently more interested in animals and airplanes than in acting. When Brolin was 10 in 1950, he began building and flying model airplanes. As a teenaged moviegoer in the mid-1950s he was particularly fascinated with actor James Dean. When his parents invited a director over to his family's house for dinner before auditioning, he met another fellow actor and classmate, Ryan O'Neal, who was about a year younger than Brolin. The two clicked and later enrolled in Los Angeles's renowned University High School. However, Bruderlin's own acting exposed his stifling shyness. His assurance grew when O'Neal invited him to a casting agency. Brolin graduated from high school in 1958, and his family was already encouraging him to become an actor like O'Neal.
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James Wilby
James Jonathon Wilby (born 20 February 1958) is an English film, television and theatre actor.
He was born in Rangoon, Burma to a corporate executive father. He was educated at Sedbergh School in Cumbria, and from there went on to study for a degree in Mathematics at Grey College, University of Durham, and then at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Wilby's first appearance on screen was in the Oxford Film Company 1982 production Privileged alongside Hugh Grant. He is known to an international audience for roles in Maurice (1987), for which he received Venice Film Festival's Best Actor award with co-star Hugh Grant. Along with Grant, Wilby has always been best known for his regular inclusion in the Merchant/Ivory film 'family' which also boasts Rupert Graves, Helena Bonham-Carter, Emma Thompson, and Anthony Hopkins among its regulars. He then starred in A Handful of Dust (1988), for which he won the Bari Film Festival Best Actor award. Then came A Tale of Two Cities (1989), Howards End (1992), the critically acclaimed Regeneration (1997 film), Ismail Merchant's Cotton Mary (1999), Gosford Park (2001) and Alain Robbe-Grillet's C'est Gradiva qui vous appelle (2006) co-starring Arielle Dombasle which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
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Jamie Bell
Andrew James Matfin "Jamie" Bell (born 14 March 1986) is an English actor. He is best known for his roles in the films Billy Elliot (2000), King Kong (2005), Jumper (2008), and The Adventures of Tintin (2011).
Bell was born in Billingham, County Durham, England, where he grew up with his mother, Eileen (née Matfin), and older sister, Kathryn. His father, John Bell, a toolmaker, left before Bell was born. Bell began his involvement with dance after he accompanied his sister to her ballet lessons. He was a pupil at Northfield School and took performing arts classes at the local franchise of Stagecoach Theatre Arts. He was a member of the National Youth Music Theatre. In 1999, he was chosen from a field of over 2,000 boys for the role of Billy Elliot, an 11-year-old boy who dismays his working class widowed father and older brother by taking up ballet.
Bell served as Honorary Jury President of the 2001 Giffoni Film Festival. Since his film debut in Billy Elliot, he has appeared as the disabled servant Smike in an adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, a young soldier in Deathwatch, a teenager on the run in Undertow, a gun-toting pacifist in Dear Wendy, a disaffected Southern California teenager in The Chumscrubber, and the young Jimmy in the 2005 film version of King Kong. He also appeared in Close and True, an ITV legal drama shown in 2000, which starred Robson Green, James Bolam and Susan Jameson. In 2007, he played the title character in Hallam Foe – for which he was nominated for the best actor award at the British Independent Film Awards – and appeared as himself in lonelygirl15 spin-off KateModern.
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Jamie Foxx
Eric Marlon Bishop (born December 13, 1967), professionally known as Jamie Foxx, is an American actor, singer-songwriter, rapper, stand-up comedian, and talk radio host who began playing the piano when he was five years old. As an actor, his work in the film Ray earned him the Academy Award and BAFTA Award for Best Actor as well as the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a musical/comedy. He is also a Grammy Award winning musician, producing three albums which have charted highly on the Billboard 200: Unpredictable, which topped the chart, Best Night of My Life and Intuition.
Born in Terrell, Texas, Foxx was raised by his mother's adoptive parents. He performed in high school and was awarded with a scholarship to United States International University. In his twenties, Foxx began performing stand-up at comedy clubs, and eventually joined the cast of In Living Color in 1991; this exposure helped him land film roles and star in his own sitcom, The Jamie Foxx Show. He released his debut album, Peep This, in 1994, but he did not gain significant musical success until 2004 when he was featured in Twista's song "Slow Jamz". Also in 2004, Foxx played critically acclaimed roles in the films Collateral and Ray. He released his second album, Unpredictable, in 2005, which was helped by his collaboration on Kanye West's number-one single "Gold Digger". His third album Intuition was released in 2008 and was anchored by the single "Blame It". Foxx released his fourth studio album, Best Night of My Life, in 2010.
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Jane Austen
Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism and biting social commentary has gained her historical importance among scholars and critics.
Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years into her thirties. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she tried then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it.
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Jean Dujardin
Jean Edmond Dujardin (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ dy.ʒaʁ.dɛ̃]; born 19 June 1972) is a French actor and comedian. He has worked notably with director Michel Hazanavicius, starring in his OSS 117 spy parodies. His starring role in Hazanavicius' silent movie The Artist, playing actor George Valentin, received widespread acclaim. The role won him the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, the Cannes Film Festival Best Actor Award, and the Academy Award for Best Actor. He is the first French actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Dujardin was born and raised in Rueil-Malmaison (Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France), a commune in the western suburbs of Paris, France. After attending high school, he went to work for his parents' construction company. Dujardin began contemplating a career in acting while serving his mandatory military service a few years later.
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Jeff Bridges
Jeffrey Leon Bridges (born December 4, 1949) is an American actor, musician, producer, photographer, cartoonist, storyteller, and occasional vintner. He comes from a well-known acting family and began his first televised acting in 1958 as child with his father, Lloyd Bridges, and brother Beau on television's Sea Hunt. Some of his best-known major motion films include: Tron (and its sequel) , Fearless, Iron Man, Contender, TheThe Contender, Starman, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Jagged Edge, Against All Odds, Fisher King, TheThe Fisher King, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Seabiscuit, and The Big Lebowski. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as Otis "Bad" Blake in the 2009 film Crazy Heart and earned his sixth Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn in 2010's True Grit.
Jeffrey Leon Bridges was born in Los Angeles, California on December 4, 1949. He is son of showbiz parents, actor Lloyd Bridges. and actress and writer Dorothy Bridges (née Simpson). His older brother, Beau Bridges, is also an actor. He has a younger sister, Lucinda, and had another brother, Garrett, who died of sudden infant death syndrome in 1948. Growing up, Bridges shared a close relationship with his brother Beau, who acted as a surrogate father when their father was working. Bridges and his siblings were raised in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles. He graduated from University High School (Los Angeles, California) in 1967. At age fourteen, Jeff toured with his father in a stage production of Anniversary Waltz.
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Jennifer Ehle
Jennifer Ehle ( /ˈiːliː/; born December 29, 1969) is an American actress of stage and screen. She is known for her BAFTA winning role as Elizabeth Bennet in the 1995 mini-series Pride and Prejudice.
Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to English actress Rosemary Harris and American author John Ehle, Ehle made her stage debut as a toddler in a 1973 Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which her mother played Blanche Dubois.[citation needed] She spent her childhood between the UK and US, attending 18 different schools including the Interlochen Arts Academy. She was raised largely in Asheville, North Carolina, which was close by her hometown. Her drama training was split between the North Carolina School of the Arts and the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.[citation needed]
In 1992, Peter Hall cast her as Calypso in a television adaptation of Mary Wesley's novel The Camomile Lawn, in which she and her mother played the same character at different ages. This story, produced by UK's Channel 4, was a five part miniseries about the lives and loves of a family of cousins from 1939 to the present. The two would later reprise this different age portrayal of a character as Valerie in István Szabó's 1999 movie Sunshine.
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Jennifer Esposito
Jennifer Esposito (born April 11, 1973) is an American actress, dancer and model, known for her appearances in films such as I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, Summer of Sam and Crash, and in television series such as Spin City, The Looney Tunes Show, Samantha Who? and Blue Bloods.
Esposito, an Italian-American, was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Phyllis, an interior decorator, and Robert Esposito, a computer consultant and music producer. She has one older sister. Esposito grew up and attended St. Teresa School in Staten Island, and graduated from Moore Catholic High School in Staten Island.[citation needed]. In 1989, she won the title of homecoming queen at Msgr. Farrell High School.
Esposito made her first television appearance in Law & Order in 1996, but she is best known as Stacey in the prime time hit Spin City. She also appeared in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer playing Nancy, who is killed when a spear impales her chest. One of her more notable roles was as Ruby in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam in 1999, which was set against the late-1970s backdrop of the Son of Sam murders. She originally had the Mira Sorvino role in Summer of Sam, but had to take a different role due to scheduling conflicts. Esposito's next film was Wes Craven Presents: Dracula 2000.
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Jeremy Northam
Jeremy Philip Northam (born 1 December 1961) is an English actor. He is best known for his roles as Ivor Novello in the 2001 film Gosford Park, as Dean Martin in the 2002 television movie Martin and Lewis, and as Thomas More on the Showtime series The Tudors. Most recently, he starred in the now-canceled CBS drama Miami Medical.
Northam was born in Cambridge, as the youngest of four siblings. His mother, Rachel (née Howard), was a potter and professor of economics, and his father, John Northam, was a professor of literature and theatre, as well as being an Ibsen specialist and teacher (first at Clare College, Cambridge and later at Bristol). Northam was educated at Bristol Grammar School and Bedford College, University of London, and trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. He married Canadian film/television make-up artist Liz Moro in April 2005, though they later divorced.
Northam performed at the Royal National Theatre – he replaced Daniel Day-Lewis in the role of Hamlet (1989), and won the Olivier Award in 1990 for "most promising newcomer" for his performance in The Voysey Inheritance.
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Jim Carter (actor)
Jim Carter (born 19 August 1948) is an English actor.
Carter was born in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England. His father worked for the Air Ministry and his mother was a land girl and later a school secretary. Carter attended Ashville College, Harrogate, where he was head boy in his final year, and the University of Sussex where he studied law and became a leading light of the fledgling Drama Society, playing Sgt Musgrave in the first student production at the newly built Gardner Arts Centre theatre. He dropped out of university after two years to join a fringe theatre group in Brighton.
Carter's film credits include Top Secret! (1984), A Month in the Country (1987), The Madness of King George (1994), Richard III (1995), Brassed Off (1996), Shakespeare in Love (1998), The Little Vampire (2000), Ella Enchanted (2004), and Detective Victor Getz in The Thief Lord (2006). He plays John Faa in The Golden Compass (2007), the first film in the adaptation of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and also stars in House Of 9 (2005) as The Watcher, and the executioner in "Alice in Wonderland".
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Johannes Vermeer
Johannes, Jan or Johan Vermeer (Dutch pronunciation: [joˈɦɑnəs jɑn vərˈmɪːr];1632 – December 1675) was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle class life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings.
Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using bright colours and sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference for cornflower blue and yellow. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.
Vermeer painted mostly domestic interior scenes. As Koning points out: "Almost all his paintings are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women".
Recognized during his lifetime in Delft and The Hague, his modest celebrity gave way to obscurity after his death; he was barely mentioned in Arnold Houbraken's major source book on 17th century Dutch painting (Grand Theatre of Dutch Painters and Women Artists), and was thus omitted from subsequent surveys of Dutch art for nearly two centuries. In the 19th century Vermeer was rediscovered by Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Théophile Thoré-Bürger, who published an essay attributing sixty-six pictures to him, although only thirty-four paintings are universally attributed to him today. Since that time Vermeer's reputation has grown, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age.
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John Noble
John Noble (born 20 August 1948) is an Australian film and television actor, and theater director of more than 80 plays. He was born in Port Pirie, South Australia, Australia and is currently starring as scientist Walter Bishop in the J. J. Abrams television series Fringe.
He made occasional appearances on the television series All Saints. He is internationally known for his performance as Denethor in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He played Russian Consul Anatoly Markov in the sixth season of the American television series 24. In 2011 he appeared as Real Estate tycoon Leland Monroe in Rockstar's video game L.A. Noire. He is also the voice of Unicron for the television show Transformers: Prime.
John lives in the US with wife Penny Noble. They have three children: Daniel Noble, Jess Noble and Actress Samantha Noble. In 2011, John's hobbies were reported to be "music and painting".
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Johnny Depp
John Christopher "Johnny" Depp II (born June 9, 1963) is an American actor, producer and musician. He has won the Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild award for Best Actor. Depp rose to prominence on the 1980s television series 21 Jump Street, becoming a teen idol. Dissatisfied with that status, Depp turned to film for more challenging roles; he played the title character of Edward Scissorhands (1990) and later found box office success in films such as Sleepy Hollow (1999), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Rango (2011) and the Pirates of the Caribbean film series (2003–present). He has collaborated with director and friend Tim Burton in eight films, most recently with Dark Shadows (2012).
Depp has gained acclaim for his portrayals of people such as Ed Wood, in Ed Wood, Joseph D. Pistone in Donnie Brasco, Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, George Jung in Blow, and the bank robber John Dillinger in Michael Mann's Public Enemies. Films featuring Depp have grossed over $3.1 billion at the United States box office and over $7.6 billion worldwide. He has been nominated for top awards many times, winning the Best Actor Awards from the Golden Globes for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and from the Screen Actors Guild for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. He also has garnered a sex symbol status in American cinema, being twice named as the "Sexiest Man Alive" by People magazine in 2003 and 2009. He has been listed in the 2012 Guinness Book of World Records as the highest paid actor, with $75 million.
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Jonathan Firth
Jonathan Firth (born 6 April 1967) is a British actor best known for his roles in such noted British television productions as Middlemarch, Far from the Madding Crowd, and Victoria & Albert.
Jonathan Firth was born in Essex, England. His mother, Shirley Jean (née Rolles), and his father, David Norman Lewis Firth, were both children of Methodist missionaries in India, and both worked as teachers in Nigeria after their marriage. He is the younger brother of actor Colin Firth and voice coach Kate Firth. The family moved many times, from Essex to Billericay and Brentwood, and then to St. Louis in the U.S. for a year when Jonathan was five. Upon returning to England the family settled in Winchester, where his father became a history lecturer at King Alfred's College and his mother was a comparative religion lecturer at King Alfred's College Winchester (now the University of Winchester). Firth's desire to become an actor surfaced, he said, when he performed in a school play at the age of eleven.
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Joseph Fiennes
Joseph Twisleton Wykeham Fiennes ( /ˈfaɪnz/; b. 27 May 1970) is an English film and stage actor. He is perhaps best known for his portrayals of William Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love, Sir Robert Dudley in Elizabeth, Commisar Danilov in Enemy at the Gates, Martin Luther in Luther, Merlin in Camelot, and his portrayal of Mark Benford in the 2009 TV series FlashForward.
Fiennes was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England in 1970, the son of photographer Mark Fiennes and novelist Jennifer Lash. The youngest of six siblings, his elder siblings are actor Ralph Fiennes, filmmakers Sophie Fiennes and Martha Fiennes, composer Magnus Fiennes, and conservationist Jacob Fiennes, his twin brother. His foster brother, Michael Emery, is an archaeologist.
Fiennes was briefly educated in the Republic of Ireland and then at Swan School For Boys (now known as Leehurst Swan School, following a merger with another school), an independent school in Salisbury, before passing his 11+ exam and continuing to Bishop Wordsworth's School, a voluntary-aided state day grammar school, in the Cathedral Close of the city. He then attended art school in Suffolk for a year, before joining the Young Vic Youth Theatre. Fiennes subsequently trained for three years at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama, graduating in 1993.
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Josh Brolin
Josh James Brolin (pronounced /ˈbroʊlɨn/; born February 12, 1968) is an American actor. He has acted in theater, film and television roles since 1985, and won acting awards for his roles in the films W., No Country for Old Men, Milk and True Grit.
Brolin was born in Santa Monica, California, the son of Jane Cameron Agee, a wildlife activist who was a native of Corpus Christi, Texas, and actor James Brolin. Brolin was raised on a California ranch with little exposure to his father's acting career. His parents divorced when he was 16 and his stepmother is singer/actress Barbra Streisand. He became interested in acting after taking an improv acting class in high school.
Brolin started his career in TV movies and guest spots on TV shows before getting a more notable role as Brand Walsh in the Richard Donner-directed movie The Goonies (1985). He was considered for the role of Tom Hanson in the series 21 Jump Street; he and Johnny Depp were the finalists for the role, and at that time the two became close and remained friends even after the role was ultimately awarded to Depp. Brolin guest-starred in an episode of the show in its first season.
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Judi Dench
Dame Judith Olivia “Judi” Dench, CH, DBE, FRSA (born 9 December 1934) is an English film, stage and television actress.
Dench made her professional debut in 1957 with the Old Vic Company. Over the following few years she played in several of William Shakespeare's plays in such roles as Ophelia in Hamlet, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. She branched into film work, and won a BAFTA Award as Most Promising Newcomer; however, most of her work during this period was in theatre. Not generally known as a singer, she drew strong reviews for her leading role in the musical Cabaret in 1968.
During the next two decades, she established herself as one of the most significant British theatre performers, working for the National Theatre Company and the Royal Shakespeare Company. In television, she achieved success during this period, in the series A Fine Romance from 1981 until 1984 and in 1992 began a continuing role in the television romantic comedy series As Time Goes By.
Her film appearances were infrequent until she was cast as M in GoldenEye (1995), a role she has played in each James Bond film since. She received several notable film awards for her role as Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown (1997), and has since been acclaimed for her work in such films as Shakespeare in Love (1998), Chocolat (2000), Iris (2001), Mrs Henderson Presents (2005) and Notes on a Scandal (2006), and the television production The Last of the Blonde Bombshells (2001).
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Julie Dreyfus
Julie Dreyfus (born January 24, 1966 in Paris) is a French actress.
Dreyfus, who's fluent in Japanese and English, is well known in Japan, where she made her TV debut on a French-language lesson program on NHK's educational channel in the late 1980s, and has appeared on the TV show Ryōri no Tetsujin (Iron Chef) as a guest and judge.
She is best known to Western audiences for her apparences in two of her good friend Quentin Tarantino's films: she played Sofie Fatale in Kill Bill Volume 1 and Francesca Mondino in Inglourious Basterds.
Julie was born and raised in Paris, the only child of French actress Pascale Audret and producer Francis Dreyfus. She is of Romanian descent on her father's maternal lineage, and Alsatian Jewish on the paternal side. Her grandfather was a descendant of the famous Captain Alfred Dreyfus. She spent her summers in the U.K. She started learning Japanese in 1985 at the Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilization at the University of Paris, after studying interior design and becoming interested in Japanese architecture. She moved to Japan to study at the Osaka University of Foreign Studies for a six-month intensive Japanese course, thinking she would eventually land a job in interior design. After finishing the course, she moved to Tokyo working part time in a design studio while continuing her private Japanese lessons. In 1988, she worked as a French language instructor on the NHK morning television educational program. Centering on a mystery drama, chief producer Motoyoshi Sei hired Dreyfus to increase ratings by changing the program into an episode-format. Eventually, she was cast by Japanese network executives as the 20-something beauty in several TV and film roles, leading her to become a gaijin tarento (foreign talent). She was also a judge on the cult-hit cooking show Ryōri no Tetsujin (Iron Chef).
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Karl Urban
Karl-Heinz Urban (born 7 June, 1972) is a New Zealand actor.
He is known for playing Éomer in the second and third installments of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy in the 2009 film Star Trek and Caesar on Xena: Warrior Princess. He played Vaako in The Chronicles of Riddick, the Russian assassin Kirill in The Bourne Supremacy, and Ghost in Pathfinder and won acclaim for his performances in New Zealand films The Price of Milk and Out of the Blue.
Urban was born in Wellington, New Zealand. His father, a German immigrant, owned a leather goods store, and his mother once worked for Film Facilities in Wellington, through which the young Urban was exposed to classic New Zealand cinema and developed an interest in the film industry. Urban attended St Mark's Church School, where he showed an early love for public performance. His first acting role came at age eight, when he had a single line in one episode of the New Zealand television series 'Pioneer Woman'. Though continuing to take part in school stage productions, he did not act professionally again until after high school.
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Kathleen Quinlan
Kathleen Denise Quinlan (born November 19, 1954) is an American actress, mostly seen on television and in motion pictures.
Quinlan was born in Pasadena, California, the daughter of Josephine (née Zachry), a military supply supervisor, and Robert Quinlan, a television sports director. She was raised in Mill Valley, California, where she attended Tamalpais High School and began her acting career. She has been married to actor Bruce Abbott since April 12, 1994. They have a son, Tyler (born 1990).
Quinlan made her film debut in George Lucas' 1973 nostalgic look at the early sixties, American Graffiti, at the age of 19 (although she did appear in an uncredited role in 1972's One is a Lonely Number). As a young actress, she guest-starred in several 1970s television series including Police Woman, Ironside, Emergency! and Kojak.
She has appeared in over 50 films, but is perhaps best known for her roles as Deborah, a schizophrenic, in the film version of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture-Drama, and for a Golden Globe and Oscar nominated turn in the Best Supporting Actress category as an astronaut's wife, Marilyn Lovell, in the 1995 true story Apollo 13 opposite Tom Hanks.
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Keira Knightley
Keira Christina Knightley ( /ˌkɪərə ˈnaɪtli/; born 26 March 1985) is an English actress and model. She began acting as a child and came to international notice in 2002 after co-starring in the film Bend It Like Beckham. From 2003, her appearances in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series took her to much greater prominence. In 2008, Forbes claimed Knightley to be the second highest paid actress in Hollywood, having reportedly earned $32 million in 2007, making her the only non-American on the list of highest paid actresses.
Knightley has appeared in several Hollywood films and earned nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her role as Elizabeth Bennet in Joe Wright's 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice. Two years later she again was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress, as well as the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance in Atonement.
Knightley was born in Teddington, London, England, the daughter of Sharman MacDonald, an award-winning playwright, and Will Knightley, a theatre and television actor. Her father is English and her Scottish mother is of half Welsh ancestry. She has an elder brother, Caleb.[citation needed]
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Kenneth Branagh
Kenneth Charles Branagh (/ˈbrænə/ BRAN-ə; born 10 December 1960) is an actor and film director from Northern Ireland. He is best known for directing and starring in several film adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays including Henry V (1989) (for which he was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Director), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Othello, Hamlet (1996) (for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay), Love's Labour's Lost (2000), and As You Like It (2006).
He has also starred in numerous other films and television series including Fortunes of War (1987), Wild Wild West (1999), The Road to El Dorado (2000), Conspiracy (TV) (2001), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Warm Springs (TV) (2005), Valkyrie (2008), Wallander (TV series) (2008–present), and My Week with Marilyn (2011) as Laurence Olivier (Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor); and directed such notable films as Dead Again (1991) (also starring), Swan Song (1992) (Academy Award nominated for Best Live Action Short Film), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) (also starring), The Magic Flute (2006), Sleuth (2007), and the blockbuster action film Thor (2011).
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Kevin Bacon
Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958) is an American film and theater actor whose notable roles include Animal House, Diner, Footloose, Flatliners, Wild Things, A Few Good Men, JFK, Apollo 13, Hollow Man, Mystic River, The Woodsman, Friday the 13th, Tremors, Death Sentence, Frost/Nixon, and X-Men: First Class.
Bacon has won Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards, was nominated for an Emmy Award, and was named by The Guardian as one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.
In 2003, Bacon received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Bacon, one of six children, was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His mother, Ruth Hilda (née Holmes; 1916–1991), taught at an elementary school and was a liberal activist, while his father, Edmund Norwood Bacon (May 2, 1910 – October 14, 2005), was a well-respected architect and a prominent Philadelphian who had been Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission for many years. At 16, in 1975, Bacon won a full scholarship to and attended the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts at Bucknell University, a state-funded five-week arts program where he studied Theatre under Dr. Glory Van Scott, which helped solidify Bacon's passion for the arts.
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Kevin Spacey
Kevin Spacey, CBE (born Kevin Spacey Fowler; July 26, 1959) is an American actor, director, screenwriter, producer, and crooner. He grew up in California, and began his career as a stage actor during the 1980s, before being cast in supporting roles in film and television. He gained critical acclaim in the early 1990s, culminating in his first Academy Award for The Usual Suspects (Best Supporting Actor), followed by a Best Actor Academy Award win for American Beauty (1999). His other starring roles in Hollywood include Seven, L.A. Confidential, Pay It Forward, K-PAX, and Superman Returns in a career which has earned him several Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. Since 2003, he has been artistic director of the Old Vic theatre in London.
Spacey was born in South Orange, New Jersey, the son of Kathleen Ann (née Knutson; December 5, 1931 – March 19, 2003), a secretary, and Thomas Geoffrey Fowler (June 4, 1924 – December 24, 1992), a technical writer and data consultant. He has two older siblings: a sister, Julie, and a brother, Randy. He attended Northridge Military Academy, Canoga Park High School (in tenth and eleventh grades), and then Chatsworth High School in Chatsworth, Los Angeles, where he graduated valedictorian of his class. At Chatsworth High, he starred in the school's senior production of The Sound of Music, playing the part of Captain Georg von Trapp, opposite Mare Winningham's character, Maria.
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Kristin Scott Thomas
Kristin A. Scott Thomas,OBE (born 24 May 1960) is an English actress who has also acquired French nationality. She gained international recognition in the 1990s for her roles in Bitter Moon, Four Weddings and a Funeral and The English Patient.
Since the 1980s, she has also worked in French cinema in films such as the thriller Tell No One and Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long. She has lived in France since she was 19, has brought up her three children in Paris, and says she considers herself more French than British. She was made a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 2005.
Scott Thomas was born in Redruth, Cornwall. Her mother, Deborah (née Hurlbatt), was brought up in Hong Kong and Africa, and studied drama before marrying Scott Thomas's father. Her father, Lieutenant Commander Simon Scott Thomas, was a pilot for the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm who died in a flying accident in 1964. She is the elder sister of actress Serena Scott Thomas, the niece of Admiral Sir Richard Thomas (who was a Black Rod in the House of Lords), and a more distant great-great-niece of Captain Scott, the ill-fated explorer who lost the race to the South Pole.
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Larenz Tate
Larenz Tate (born September 8, 1975) is an American film and television actor.
Tate was born on the west side of Chicago, Illinois, the son of Peggy and Larry Tate. He is the youngest of three siblings (his two brothers, Larron and Lahmard, are also actors) whose family moved to California when he was nine years old. Convinced by their parents to enter a drama program at the Inner City Cultural Center, the trio did not take the lessons seriously until classmate Malcolm-Jamal Warner's ascent to fame after being cast on the sitcom The Cosby Show. Subsequently realizing that they could parlay their efforts into a tangible form of success, the siblings began to receive small roles and in 1985, Tate made his small-screen debut in an episode of The New Twilight Zone series.
Following appearances in such television series as 21 Jump Street and The Wonder Years, Tate was cast in the television movie The Women of Brewster Place before receiving the recurring role of Steve Urkel's nemesis, Willie Fuffner, in the family comedy series Family Matters (1989). He was also a cast member on the CBS series The Royal Family, starring Redd Foxx and Della Reese, which ended prematurely after Redd Foxx died. In the video game 187 Ride or Die, Tate voices the main character, Buck.
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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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Laurens van der Post
Sir Laurens Jan van der Post, CBE (13 December 1906 – 16 December 1996) was a 20th century Afrikaner author of many books, farmer, war hero, political adviser to British heads of government, close friend of Prince Charles, godfather of Prince William, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer, and conservationist.
Van der Post was born in the small town of Philippolis in the Orange River Colony, the post-Boer War British name for what had previously been the Afrikaner Orange Free State in what is today South Africa. His father, Christiaan Willem Hendrik van der Post (1856–1914), of Dutch origin, had arrived in South Africa at the age of three and had married van der Post's mother in 1889. Her name was Lammie and she was of German origin. The family had a total of 15 children, with van der Post being the 13th, the fifth son. Christiaan was a lawyer and politician, and fought in the Second Boer War against the British. After the Second Boer War he was exiled with his family to Stellenbosch, where Laurens was conceived. They returned to Philippolis in the Orange River Colony, where he was born in 1906.
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Leonardo DiCaprio
Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio (/dɨˈkæpri.oʊ/; born November 11, 1974) is an American actor and film producer. He has been nominated for the Golden Globe Award eight times as an actor, and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for his performance in The Aviator (2004). He has also been nominated by the Academy Awards, Screen Actors Guild, Satellite Awards, and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, DiCaprio started his career by appearing in television commercials prior to landing recurring roles in TV series such as the soap opera Santa Barbara and the sitcom Growing Pains in the early 1990s. He made his film debut in the comedic sci-fi horror film Critters 3 (1991) and received first notable critical praise for his performance in This Boy's Life (1993). DiCaprio obtained recognition for his subsequent work in supporting roles in What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) and Marvin's Room (1996), as well as leading roles in The Basketball Diaries (1995) and Romeo + Juliet (1996), before achieving international fame in James Cameron's Titanic (1997).
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Lesley Sharp
Lesley Sharp (born 1960 in Liverpool, Lancashire) is an English stage, film and television actress, particularly well known for her variety of British television roles including Clocking Off, Bob & Rose and afterlife.
Adopted as the second daughter of mature Scottish parents, Sharp grew up in Formby, Merseyside. Childhood holidays were spent in Edinburgh, where "every fucking summer it rained". Sharp started acting because, as a child, she felt "invisible" and didn't "quite fit in." She has said that her inspiration to act came from watching Dick Emery on television. Her father worked for the Inland Revenue and was not keen on her taking up acting, preferring her to follow in his footsteps by becoming a civil servant. Her adoptive mother died of cancer when Sharp was 15. The adoption was never a secret in the family, but it was only after leaving home that she met her genetic mother — a working class woman unable to keep her because the father was a married man.
Sharp moved to London at 18 and, after initially failing to get into drama school, worked at the Department of Education and Science at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Responsible for filling in the warders' overtime sheets, her poor numeracy skills resulted in frequent mistakes before she was eventually asked "very nicely, but firmly" to leave.
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Liv Tyler
Liv Rundgren Tyler (born July 1, 1977) is an American actress and model. She is the daughter of Aerosmith's lead singer, Steven Tyler, and Bebe Buell, model and singer. Tyler began a career in modeling at the age of 14, but after less than a year she decided to focus on acting. She made her film debut in the 1994 film Silent Fall. She then appeared in supporting roles in Empire Records (1995), Heavy (1996) and That Thing You Do! (1996). Tyler later achieved critical recognition in the leading role in Stealing Beauty (1996). She followed this by starring in supporting roles including Inventing the Abbotts (1997) and Cookie's Fortune (1999).
Tyler achieved international recognition as a result of her portrayal of Elf maiden Arwen Undómiel in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. She has appeared in an eclectic range of films, including the 2004 comedy Jersey Girl, the indie film Lonesome Jim (2005), the drama Reign Over Me (2007) and big-budget studio films such as Armageddon (1998), The Strangers (2008) and The Incredible Hulk (2008).
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Livia Giuggioli
Livia Giuggioli (born 1969 in Rome, Italy) is an Italian film producer.
She has been married to British actor Colin Firth since 1997. The couple have two sons, Luca (born 2001) and Matteo (born 2003). She also has a stepson William Joseph (b.1990) from her husband's previous relationship.
Giuggioli has a PhD and is creative director of the Eco Age shop in London (co-founded with her brother Nicola) and of the website Brightwide, which she and Firth launched in October 2009 at the London Film Festival.
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Lucy Liu
Lucy Alexis Liu (Chinese: 劉玉玲; pinyin: Liú Yùlíng; born December 2, 1968) is an American actress, singer and film producer. She became known for playing the role of the vicious and ill-mannered Ling Woo in the television series Ally McBeal (1998–2002), and has also appeared in several Hollywood films including Payback, Charlie's Angels, Chicago, Kill Bill, and Kung Fu Panda. In 2012, Liu joined the cast of the TNT original series Southland.
Liu was born in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York. In high school, she adopted her middle name "Alexis". She is the youngest of three children born to Cecilia, who worked as a biochemist, and Tom Liu, who was a civil engineer. Both of Liu's parents were immigrants from Taiwan of Chinese descent. Her grandparents were born and raised in China. She has an older brother, John, and an older sister, Jenny. Liu has stated that she grew up in a "diverse" neighborhood. She learned to speak Mandarin Chinese at home and began studying English when she was five years old.
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Luis Guzmán
Luis Guzmán (born August 28, 1956) is a Puerto Rican-born American actor, who is known for his character work. For much of his Guzmán's career, he has played character roles largely as sidekicks, thugs, or policemen.
He is a favorite of director Steven Soderbergh, who cast him in Out of Sight, The Limey, and Traffic, and Paul Thomas Anderson, who cast him in Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love. He also voiced Ricardo Diaz in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories. He recently starred in the HBO original series How to Make It in America.
Guzmán was born in Cayey, Puerto Rico and was raised in New York City's Greenwich Village and the surrounding Lower East Side neighborhood. His mother, Rosa, was a hospital worker, and his stepfather, Benjamin Cardona, was a TV repairman. A graduate of City College of New York, he began his career not as an actor but as a social worker and moonlighted as an actor, eventually becoming heavily involved in street theater and independent films.
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Maggie Smith
Dame Margaret Natalie "Maggie" Smith, DBE (born 28 December 1934) is an English film, stage and television actress. She has had an extensive career both on screen and in live theatre, and is known as one of Britain's pre-eminent actors. She made her stage debut in 1952 and is still performing after 60 years. She has won numerous awards for acting, both for the stage and for film, including seven BAFTA Awards (five competitive awards and two special awards including the Bafta Fellowship in 1996), two Academy Awards, two Golden Globes, two Emmy Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, two SAG Awards and a Tony Award. Dame Maggie is the only actor ever to win this collective of awards and is one of the most successful and acclaimed actors of the film era.
Her critically acclaimed films include Othello (1965), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), Travels with My Aunt (1972), California Suite (1978), Clash of the Titans (1981), A Room with a View (1985) and Gosford Park (2001). She has also appeared in a number of widely-popular films, including Hook (1991), Sister Act (1992) and as Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film series. She currently stars in the critically acclaimed drama Downton Abbey as Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, for which she has won an Emmy.
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Mark Addy
Mark Addy Johnson (born 14 January 1964) is an English actor, best known for his roles as Detective Constable Gary Boyle in the British sitcom The Thin Blue Line, Dave in the film The Full Monty, father Bill Miller in the U.S. sitcom Still Standing and most recently as King Robert Baratheon in the HBO medieval fantasy epic Game of Thrones.
Addy was born in Tang Hall, York, and was educated in the city. In 1982–84 he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He lives with his wife Kelly and three children (Ruby, born 2000; Charlie, born 2003; and Oscar, born 2005) in Rufforth, close to Upper Poppleton village, near York. Addy's ancestors have lived in York at least since 1910 when his great-grandfather was living there. His father Ian has spent his working life as a glazier at York Minster.
Addy made his first TV appearance in 1988 in A Very Peculiar Practice, followed by TV performances in shows such as Heartbeat, Band of Gold, Married with Children (one episode), Bruised Fruit, Peak Practice, The Thin Blue Line, Too Much Sun, Sunnyside Farm and most recently Trollied.
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Martin Clunes
Alexander Martin Clunes (born 28 November 1961) is an English actor and comedian. Clunes is perhaps best known for his roles as Gary Strang in Men Behaving Badly, Doctor Martin Ellingham in Doc Martin and the title character in Reggie Perrin.
Clunes is the son of the classical actor Alec Clunes, who died of lung cancer when Clunes was eight and a half years old. He has an older sister, Amanda. His mother Daphne, later a board member of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, once worked for Orson Welles. Clunes was educated at two independent secondary schools, the Royal Russell School in Croydon and The Arts Educational Schools, in Chiswick, London.[citation needed]
Clunes served his first role in rep at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, and his first television appearance came in the 1980s Doctor Who story Snakedance as the spoiled Lon. But a sporadic career led to his supplementing his income as a photo model for Gilbert and George, and he can be seen in their 1983 work World.[citation needed]
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Martin Wuttke
Martin Wuttke (born February 8, 1962) is a German actor and director who reached international recognition for his portrayal of Adolf Hitler in the 2009 film Inglourious Basterds.
Wuttke began his actor training at the college theater in Bochum and then changed to the Westphalian Drama School in Bochum (Bochum today drama school). He played in numerous German-speaking stages: Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz Berlin, Berliner Ensemble, Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Schiller Theater in Berlin, Deutsches Theater Berlin, Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Theater of West Berlin, the Thalia Theater of Hamburg, Stuttgart State Theater, Freie Volksbühne Berlin, Schauspielhaus Frankfurt am Main.
Wuttke lives with actress Margarita Broich with two children.
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Matt Dillon
Matthew Raymond "Matt" Dillon (born February 18, 1964) is an Academy Award-nominated American actor and film director. He began acting in the late 1970s, gaining fame as a teenage idol during the 1980s.
Matthew Raymond Dillon was born in New Rochelle, New York, to second-generation Irish American parents Mary Ellen, a homemaker, and Paul Dillon, a portrait painter and sales manager for Union Camp, a packing material manufacturer. He was raised in a close-knit Irish Roman Catholic family as the second of six children. Dillon's paternal grandmother was the sister of comic strip artist Alex Raymond. Dillon has one sister and four brothers, one of whom, Kevin Dillon, is also an actor, and appears on the hit TV series Entourage which has earned him several Emmy nominations in the supporting actor comedy category. Dillon grew up in Mamaroneck, New York, and before dropping out in junior year, he attended Mamaroneck High School.[citation needed]
In 1978, Jane Bernstein and a friend were helping director Jonathan Kaplan cast the violent teen drama Over the Edge when they found Dillon cutting class at Hommocks Middle School in Larchmont. Dillon auditioned for a role and made his debut in the film. The film received a regional, limited theatrical release in May 1979, and grossed only slightly over $200,000. Dillon's performance was well-received, which led to his casting in two films released the following year; the teenage sex comedy Little Darlings, in which Kristy McNichol's character loses her virginity to a boy from the camp across the lake, played by Dillon, and the more serious teen dramedy My Bodyguard, where he played a high-school bully opposite Chris Makepeace. The films, released in March and July 1980, respectively, were box office successes and raised Dillon's profile among teenage audiences.
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Meg Tilly
Meg Tilly (born February 14, 1960) is a Canadian-American actress, Broadway stage dancer, Academy Award nominee, and published novelist. She is the younger sister of actress and poker player Jennifer Tilly.
Tilly, the third of four children, was born Margaret Elizabeth Chan in Long Beach, California, the daughter of Patricia (née Tilly), a Canadian schoolteacher, and businessman Harry Chan.
Tilly's father was Chinese American, and her mother was of Irish, Finnish, and First Nations descent. Following her parents' divorce when she was three, she was raised by her mother and stepfather, John Ward, on rural Texada Island in British Columbia. She graduated from Esquimalt High School in Victoria, British Columbia. She has a brother, Steve, and two sisters, Rebecca and Jennifer.
As a teen, she was involved with the Connecticut Ballet Company, as well as the Throne Dance Theatre, and made her screen debut with Alan Parker's Fame in 1980. When a dance partner dropped her, causing a serious back injury, her dance career came to a shattering halt.
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Mena Suvari
Mena Alexandra Suvari (born February 13, 1979) is an American actress, fashion designer, and model. Shortly after beginning her career as a model, she appeared in guest roles on 1990's television shows such as Boy Meets World and High Incident. She made her film debut in the 1997 drama film Nowhere.
Her first major film roles were in American Beauty, for which she was nominated for a BAFTA Award, and American Pie (both released in 1999). Since then she has appeared in Loser (2000), with her American Pie co-star, Jason Biggs, and later played a main character in the comedy film Sugar & Spice (2001). She had appearances in the 2002 independent drama Spun, and the 2004 thriller feature Trauma. She also appeared in the HBO's drama series Six Feet Under in 2004, she received a nomination as a member of the Outstanding Cast at the 2005 Screen Actors Guild Awards. In 2008, she was cast in a string of films, including Day of the Dead, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and the film adaptation of The Garden of Eden.
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Michael Douglas
Michael Kirk Douglas (born September 25, 1944) is an American actor and producer, primarily in movies and television. He has won three Golden Globes and two Academy Awards; as producer of 1975's Best Picture, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and as Best Actor in 1987 for his role in Wall Street. Douglas received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2009. He is the eldest of actor Kirk Douglas's four sons.
Douglas was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the first child of actor Kirk Douglas and Bermudian-born actress Diana Dill. His paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Gomel in Belarus (at that time a part of the Russian Empire). His mother was from Devonshire Parish, Bermuda; Douglas's maternal grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Melville Dill, served as Attorney General of Bermuda and was commanding officer of the Bermuda Militia Artillery. Douglas has a younger brother, Joel Douglas (born 1947), and two paternal half-brothers, Peter Douglas (born 1955) and Eric Douglas (1958–2004), from stepmother Anne Buydens.
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Michael Fassbender
Michael Fassbender (born 2 April 1977) is an Irish-German actor. He is perhaps best known for having played Lieutenant Archie Hicox in the war film Inglourious Basterds (2009), Magneto in the superhero film X-Men: First Class (2011), and the android David in the science fiction film Prometheus.
His other credits include the fantasy action film 300 (2007); the drama film Fish Tank (2009); the romantic drama film Jane Eyre (2011); the historical film A Dangerous Method (2011), directed by David Cronenberg, in which he plays psychologist Carl Jung; as well as the biographical film Hunger (2008) and the drama film Shame (2011), both directed by Steve McQueen. For his role in Shame, he won the Volpi Cup best-actor award at the 68th Venice International Film Festival held in August 2011 along with being nominated for a Golden Globe Award and BAFTA.
Fassbender was born in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany (now Germany). His mother is from Larne, County Antrim in Northern Ireland, and his father, Josef Fassbender, is German. According to Fassbender's "family lore", his mother is the great-great-niece of Michael Collins, an Irish leader during the War of Independence. When he was two years old, his parents moved to Killarney, County Kerry, in the Republic of Ireland, where they ran the West End House, a restaurant where his father worked as a chef. Fassbender was brought up as a Roman Catholic and served as an altar boy.
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Mickey Rourke
Philip Andre "Mickey" Rourke, Jr. (born September 16, 1952) is an American actor, screenwriter and retired boxer, who has appeared primarily as a leading man in action, drama, and thriller films.
During the 1980s, Rourke starred in Diner, Rumble Fish, and the erotic drama 9½ Weeks, and received critical praise for his work in Barfly and Angel Heart. In 1991, Rourke, who had trained as a boxer in his early years, left acting and became a professional boxer for a period. He had supporting roles in several later films, including The Rainmaker, Buffalo '66, The Pledge, Get Carter, Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Man on Fire.
In 2005, Rourke made his comeback in mainstream Hollywood circles with a lead role in Sin City, for which he won awards from the Chicago Film Critics Association, the Irish Film and Television Awards and the Online Film Critics Society. In the 2008 film The Wrestler, Rourke portrayed a past-his-prime wrestler, and received a 2009 Golden Globe award, a BAFTA award, and a nomination for an Academy Award.
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Miguel Ferrer
Miguel José Ferrer (born February 7, 1955) is an American actor and voice actor who is often cast as a villain. His notable roles include Bob Morton, a supporting character in RoboCop (1987), the short-tempered FBI agent Albert Rosenfield in Twin Peaks, and Dr. Garret Macy on Crossing Jordan. His voice acting in Mulan (1998), as the villain Hun leader Shan Yu, is also especially memorable.
Ferrer was born in Santa Monica, California, the oldest of five children of Puerto Rican Academy Award-winner José Ferrer and American singer Rosemary Clooney. Ferrer's siblings are Maria, Gabriel, Monsita, and Rafael, also an actor. Ferrer was raised in Hollywood, and as a teenager his interests shifted toward music. Ferrer played the drums on Keith Moon's Two Sides of the Moon. Jenerators band mate Bill Mumy ("Will Robinson" on the television classic Lost In Space and later Lennier on the TV series Babylon 5) cast him as a drummer in his first television role, in the series Sunshine. He only took the role because Mumy talked him into it.
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Mike Myers
Michael John "Mike" Myers (born May 25, 1963) is a Canadian actor, comedian, screenwriter, and film producer of British parentage. He was a long-time cast member on the NBC sketch show Saturday Night Live in the late 1980s and the early 1990s and starred as the title characters in the films Wayne's World, Austin Powers, and the Shrek film series.
Myers was born and raised in Scarborough, Ontario, the son of British-born parents Eric Myers (1922–1991), an insurance man and World War II veteran of the Royal Engineers, and his wife Alice E. (née Hind; born 1926), an office supervisor and veteran of the Royal Air Force. Both of his parents are from Liverpool, England. He has two older brothers, Peter Myers and Paul Myers, an indie rock singer-songwriter, broadcaster and author. Myers is of English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry, and was raised Protestant. He holds three citizenships, American, British, and Canadian.
Myers began school at Bishopbriggs Academy then changed to the Stephen Leacock Collegiate Institute in Scarborough, Ontario. He began performing in commercials at age eight, and at ten he made a commercial for British Columbia Hydro Electric, with Gilda Radner playing his mother. When he graduated from high school, he joined the Second City Theatre. He left to tour Britain with comedian Neil Mullarkey.
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Miranda Otto
Miranda Otto (born 16 December 1967) is an Australian actress. The daughter of actors Lindsay and Barry Otto and the sister of actress Gracie Otto, she began acting at age eighteen, and has performed in a variety of independent and major studio films.
Her first major film appearance was in the 1986 film Emma's War, in which she played a teenager who moves to Australia's bush country during World War II. After a decade of critically acclaimed roles in Australian films, she gained Hollywood's attention after appearing in supporting roles in The Thin Red Line (1998) and What Lies Beneath (2000). Her breakthrough role came in 2002, when she portrayed Éowyn in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. More recent work includes a starring role in the 2008 now-cancelled American television series Cashmere Mafia, and Australian films such as In Her Skin and Blessed (2009).
Otto was born in Brisbane to stage and film actor Barry Otto and former actress Lindsay Otto (who retired from acting upon Miranda Otto's birth). Gracie Otto, Miranda's half-sister, is also an actress. Otto was raised in Newcastle and Brisbane, and briefly resided in Hong Kong following her parents' separation in 1973. She spent weekends and holidays with her father in Sydney and developed an interest in acting through him.
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Morgan Freeman
Morgan Freeman (born June 1, 1937) is an American actor, film director, aviator and narrator. Freeman has received Academy Award nominations for his performances in Street Smart, Driving Miss Daisy, The Shawshank Redemption and Invictus and won in 2005 for Million Dollar Baby. He has also won a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Freeman has appeared in many other box office hits, including Unforgiven, Glory, Seven, Deep Impact, The Sum of All Fears, Bruce Almighty, Batman Begins, March of the Penguins, The Bucket List, Wanted, The Dark Knight, and RED.
Morgan Freeman was born in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of Mayme Edna (née Revere), a teacher, and Morgan Porterfield Freeman, a barber who died April 27, 1961, from cirrhosis. He has three older siblings. Freeman was sent as an infant to his paternal grandmother in Charleston, Mississippi. His family moved frequently during his childhood, living in Greenwood, Mississippi; Gary, Indiana; and finally Chicago, Illinois. Freeman made his acting debut at age 9, playing the lead role in a school play. He then attended Broad Street High School, later named Threadgill Elementary School, in Mississippi. At age 12, he won a statewide drama competition, and while still at Broad Street High School, he performed in a radio show based in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1955, he graduated from Broad Street, but turned down a partial drama scholarship from Jackson State University, opting instead to work as a mechanic in the United States Air Force.
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Mélanie Laurent
Mélanie Laurent (born 21 February 1983) is a French actress, director, singer and writer. She is best known to international audiences for her role as Shosanna Dreyfus in Quentin Tarantino's 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, for which she won Best Actress from the Online Film Critics Society and the Austin Film Critics Association.
Mélanie Laurent was born in Paris, the daughter of Annick, a ballerina, and Pierre Laurent, a voiceover actor (who dubs the character Ned Flanders in the French version of The Simpsons). Laurent is Jewish, and has both Ashkenazi and Tunisian Sephardic ancestry. A grandfather survived deportation by the Nazis. Her maternal grandparents were film poster editors. She grew up in the 9th arrondissement of Paris and was immersed from birth in the arts.
Her career began when Gérard Depardieu, seeing her while she watched her best friend's father working on the set of Asterix and Obelix, asked her if she wanted to be in movies. Laurent replied 'Why not?' and next week his assistant called her. Depardieu gave Laurent a part when she was 16 in The Bridge, a drama he starred in and co-directed with Fréderic Auburtin.
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Mýa
Mýa Marie Harrison (born October 10, 1979), professionally referred to as Mýa, is an American R&B and pop recording artist, entertainer, philanthropist, and occasional actress. A Washington, D.C. native, as a young child, Harrison took ballet lessons from the age of two and added jazz and tap dancing lessons to her schedule two years later. As she entered her teens, Harrison began to shift her focus to music. Gifted and musically-inclined, with the help of her father she put together a demo tape when she was 15 and begin to scout around for a record deal while still attending high school. At the age of 16, she signed a recording contract with Interscope Records.
Harrison's eponymous debut album with (through) Interscope Records was released in the spring of April 1998. It sold over one million copies in the United States, producing the gold-certified top ten single "It's All About Me" featuring Sisqó. Her second studio album, platinum-plus selling Fear of Flying was released in 2000 and became a worldwide success, with single "Case of the Ex" becoming Mýa's breakthrough hit; topping the Australian Singles Chart for two consecutive weeks.
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Nathan Lane
Nathan Lane (born February 3, 1956) is an American actor of stage and screen. He is best known for his roles as Mendy in The Lisbon Traviata, Albert in The Birdcage, Max Bialystock in the musical The Producers, Ernie Smuntz in MouseHunt, Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and his voice work in The Lion King and Stuart Little. In 2006, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 2008, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
Lane was born Joseph Lane in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of Irish American Catholic parents. He was named after his uncle, a Jesuit priest. His father, Daniel, was a truck driver and an aspiring tenor who died from alcoholism when Lane was eleven; his mother, Nora, was a housewife and secretary who suffered from manic-depression, and died in 2000. He has two brothers, Robert and Daniel. Lane attended Roman Catholic schools in Jersey City, including Jesuit-run St. Peter's Preparatory High School, where he was selected Best Actor in 1974.[citation needed]
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Nigel Hawthorne
Sir Nigel Barnard Hawthorne, CBE (5 April 1929 – 26 December 2001) was an English actor, perhaps best remembered for his role as Sir Humphrey Appleby, the Permanent Secretary in the 1980s sitcom Yes Minister and the Cabinet Secretary in its sequel, Yes, Prime Minister. For this role he won four BAFTA Awards during the 1980s in the 'Best Light Entertainment Performance' Category. In the 1990s he won two more BAFTAs, one as Best TV Actor for The Fragile Heart, and one as Best Film Actor for The Madness of King George. His role in the latter also garnered him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
Hawthorne was born in Coventry, England, the son of Agnes Rosemary (née Rice) and Charles Barnard Hawthorne, a physician. He grew up in South Africa, where he was educated at St George's Grammar School, Cape Town and Christian Brothers College. He enrolled at the University of Cape Town but withdrew and returned to the United Kingdom in the 1950s to pursue a career in acting.
Hawthorne made his professional stage debut in 1950, playing Archie Fellows in a Cape Town production of The Shop at Sly Corner.
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Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,cognitive scientist, historian, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.
Ideologically identifying with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, Chomsky is known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy and contemporary capitalism, and he has been described as a prominent cultural figure. His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media.
According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. Chomsky is the author of over 100 books. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.
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Orlando Bloom
Orlando Jonathan Blanchard Bloom (born 13 January 1977) is an English actor. He had his break-through roles in 2001 as the elf-prince Legolas in The Lord of the Rings and in 2003 as blacksmith Will Turner in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series. He subsequently established himself as a lead in Hollywood films, including Elizabethtown and Kingdom of Heaven. He appeared in the ensemble films New York, I Love You, Sympathy for Delicious, and Main Street. Bloom made his professional stage debut in West End's In Celebration at the Duke of York's Theatre, St. Martin's Lane, which ended its run on 15 September 2007. On 12 October 2009, Bloom was named a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.
Orlando Bloom was born in Canterbury, Kent, England, and has one sister, Samantha Bloom, who was born in 1975.
His mother, Sonia Constance Josephine (née Copeland), was born in the British section of Kolkata, India, the daughter of Betty Constance Josephine Walker and Francis John Copeland, who was a physician and surgeon. Through her, Bloom is a cousin of photographer Sebastian Copeland. Bloom's maternal grandmother's family lived in Tasmania, Australia, Japan, and India, and were of English descent, some of them having originally come from Kent. During his childhood, Bloom was told that his father was his mother's husband, Jewish South African-born anti-Apartheid novelist Harry Saul Bloom; however, when he was thirteen (nine years after Harry's death), Bloom's mother revealed to him that his biological father was actually Colin Stone, his mother's partner and family friend. Stone, the principal of the Concorde International language school, was made Orlando Bloom's legal guardian after Harry Bloom's death. Bloom is named after the 16th century composer Orlando Gibbons.[citation needed]
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Paul Barber (actor)
Paul Barber (born Patrick Barber; 18 March 1951) is an actor from Liverpool, Merseyside. In a career spanning more than 30 years, he is best known for playing Denzil in Only Fools and Horses and Horse in The Full Monty.
At the age of seven, following the death of his mother from tuberculosis, he entered the care system on Merseyside. His father, originally from Sierra Leone, died when Paul (or Paddy as he was then known) and his security guard brother Brian were very young.
Barber began on the stage in the musical Hair. His first major TV role was as Sam 'Lucky' Ubootu in the 1974 ITV Playhouse production Lucky set in Liverpool and made by Granada TV. He then played the flamboyant but vicious gang boss Malleson in the off-beat BBC Birmingham-based series Gangsters from 1975 to 1978. He played Louis St John in 4 episodes of I Didn't Know You Cared, 1976-78. A later starring role was alongside Philip Whitchurch in the mid-1980s ITV comedy series 'The Brothers McGregor'.
Barber has worked extensively in British TV, such as in To the Manor Born (1979) as a Jamaican steel band musician, Minder (1980) as Willie Reynolds in episode Don't Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here, Only Fools and Horses (1981–2003), Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), Malcolm in The Front Line, and Cracker and played Greg Salter in Brookside (1994). He made a guest appearance in the first episode of The Green Green Grass - a spin-off from Only Fools And Horses. Paul was best known for his time on Only Fools And Horses and still attends conventions for the show.
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Paul Dano
Paul Franklin Dano (born June 19, 1984) is an American actor and producer. He has appeared in films such as L.I.E. (2001), Too Young to Be a Dad (2002), Little Miss Sunshine (2006), There Will Be Blood (2007), and Gigantic (2008).
Dano was born in New York City, the son of Gladys (née Pipp) and Paul Dano. He spent the first few years of his childhood in New York City and initially attended the Browning School, while his father worked as a businessman in New York.
While he was still a child, Dano's family moved from New York to New Canaan, Connecticut, finally settling in Wilton, Connecticut, where Dano continued his education at Wilton High School, graduating in 2002 to further attend Eugene Lang College in New York, NY.
As a child he was involved in community theatre, and while performing in New Canaan his parents were encouraged to take him to New York City. At age 10, he was quickly scouted for roles in plays on Broadway, making his debut at age 12 in a revival of Inherit the Wind along with George C. Scott and Charles Durning. At age 17, Dano acted in his first major film role as Howie in L.I.E.
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Paul Giamatti
Brawl Edward Valentine Giamatti (/dʒiəˈmɑːti/; born June 6, 1967) is an American actor. An acclaimed character actor, Giamatti began his career as a supporting actor in several films produced during the 1990s including Private Parts, The Truman Show, Saving Private Ryan, The Negotiator, and Man on the Moon before earning lead roles in several projects in the 2000s including American Splendor, Sideways, Cinderella Man, The Illusionist, John Adams, Cold Souls, Barney's Version, and Win Win.
Giamatti, the youngest of three children, was born in New Haven, Connecticut. His father, Angelo Bartlett Giamatti, was a Yale University professor who later became president of the university and commissioner of Major League Baseball. His mother, Toni Marilyn (née Smith), was a homemaker and English teacher who taught at Hopkins School and had also previously acted. Giamatti is of Italian, Irish, and English descent. Giamatti's paternal grandmother was from a family with deep roots in New England, and his paternal grandfather was the son of Italian immigrants from Telese. His brother, Marcus, is also an actor, and his sister, Elena, is a jewelry designer. Giamatti was educated at The Foote School and graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall in 1985. He attended Yale University, where he was elected to the Skull and Bones secret society. Giamatti was active in the undergraduate theater scene, working alongside actors Ron Livingston and Edward Norton, who were also Yale students. He graduated from Yale in 1989 with a bachelor's degree in English. He went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Yale School of Drama where he studied with Earle R. Gister. He performed in numerous theatrical productions (including Broadway) before appearing in some small television and film roles in the early 1990s.
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Paul McGann
Paul McGann (born 14 November 1959) is an English actor who made his name on the BBC serial The Monocled Mutineer, in which he played the lead role. He is also known for his role in Withnail and I, and for portraying the Eighth Doctor in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie and subsequent tie-in media.
McGann was born in Kensington, Liverpool, England in 1959 into a Roman Catholic family[citation needed]. His mother, Claire, was a teacher, and his father was a metallurgist. His parents encouraged him and his siblings to develop their talents from an early age. McGann's talents were further developed when he attended Cardinal Allen Grammar school in West Derby, Liverpool. One of McGann's teachers advised him to enter the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and to pursue a career as an actor. Acting on his teacher's advice, McGann enrolled at the Royal Academy and went on to enjoy a successful acting career spanning over two decades.
McGann is the third of six children in the McGann family. His mother had twin boys, Joseph and John, who were born in 1958, but John died shortly after birth. McGann has three younger siblings: Mark (born in 1961), Stephen (born in 1963) and Clare McGann (born in 1965). All three of his brothers are also actors and the four of them starred together (as four brothers) in the 1995 television TV serial The Hanging Gale about the Irish Famine. The same year he played the role as Grigori Potemkin in TV film Catherine The Great, with Mark and Stephen too. These brothers also formed the pop quartet The McGanns, releasing the single "Shame About the Boy". McGann's sister, Clare, is a programme finance manager for Five.
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Peter Riegert
Peter Riegert (born April 11, 1947) is an American actor, screenwriter, and film director, best known for his roles as Boon from Animal House, the fast talking ganster Aldo in Oscar, the tough Lt. Kellaway in The Mask, and crooked New Jersey State Assemblyman Ronald Zellman on the HBO original series The Sopranos.
Riegert was born in The Bronx, the son of Lucille, a piano teacher, and Milton Riegert, a food wholesaler. Riegert grew up in Hartsdale, New York, and was raised in a nonobservant Jewish household. He graduated from Ardsley High School in 1964 and later from the University at Buffalo. He worked at a number of jobs, including teaching, waiting tables, and social worker before settling on acting as a career.
He made his Broadway debut in the musical Dance with Me. Other Broadway credits include The Old Neighborhood, An American Daughter, The Nerd, and Censored Scenes From King Kong. Off-Broadway he has appeared in Road to Nirvana, The Birthday Party, Isn't It Romantic, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and A Rosen by Any Other Name.
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Queen Latifah
Dana Elaine Owens (born March 18, 1970), better known by her stage name Queen Latifah, is an American singer, rapper, and actress. Her work in music, film and television has earned her a Golden Globe award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, two Image Awards, a Grammy Award, six additional Grammy nominations, an Emmy Award nomination and an Academy Award nomination.
Latifah was born, and primarily raised, in East Orange, New Jersey. She is the daughter of Rita (née Bray), a teacher at Irvington High School (her daughter's alma mater), and Lancelot Owens, Sr., a police officer, her parents divorced when Latifah was ten. Latifah was raised in the Baptist church and attended Catholic school in Newark, New Jersey. Her stage name, Latifah (لطيفة laţīfa), meaning "delicate" and "very kind" in Arabic, she found in an Islamic book of names when she was eight. Always a tall girl, the 5'10" Latifah was a power forward on her high school basketball team. She performed the number "Home" from the musical The Wiz in a high school play. She is of African American and Native American ancestry.
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Renée Zellweger
Renée Kathleen Zellweger (born April 25, 1969) is an American actress and producer. Zellweger first gained widespread attention for her role in the film Jerry Maguire (1996), and subsequently received two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her roles as Bridget Jones in the comedy Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) (which she reprised in its sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004)), and as Roxie Hart in the musical Chicago (2002). She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the drama Cold Mountain (2003).
She has won an Academy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards and a BAFTA Award, was named Hasty Pudding's Woman of the Year in 2009, and established herself as one of the highest-paid Hollywood actresses as of 2007.
Zellweger was born in Katy, Texas. Her father, Emil Erich Zellweger, is from Au in the canton of St. Gallen,Switzerland, and is a mechanical and electrical engineer who worked in the oil refining business. Her mother, Kjellfrid Irene (née Andreassen), is Norwegian; of part Sámi and Kven (Finnish) descent, Kjellfrid grew up in Kirkenes and Ekkerøy, and is a nurse and midwife who moved to the United States to work as a governess for a Norwegian family in Texas. Zellweger has described herself as being raised in a family of "lazy Catholics and Episcopalians".
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Richard E. Grant
Richard E. Grant (born Richard Esterhuysen; 5 May 1957) is a Swaziland-born British actor, screenwriter and director. Grant came to public attention for playing Withnail in the film Withnail and I. He holds dual British and Swazi citizenship.
Grant was born Richard Esterhuysen in Mbabane, Swaziland. He adopted the stage name Grant when he moved to England as an adult and registered with the British Actors' Equity Association. His father, Henrik Esterhuysen, was head of education for the British government administration in the British Protectorate of Swaziland. His South African mother, Leonne, was a local ballet teacher. His father had Dutch/Afrikaner and Hungarian ancestry and his mother was of German descent.
As a young child, Grant went to primary school at St Mark's, a local government school in Mbabane that had only recently become racially integrated. At the age of nine, he witnessed an adulterous relationship between his mother and another man that subsequently led to the break-up of his parents' marriage. This event inspired him to keep a daily diary, which he has continued to do ever since. He wears a watch on each wrist, one given to him by his dying father, permanently set on Swaziland time.
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Richard Gere
Richard Tiffany Gere ( /ˈɡɪər/ GEER; born August 31, 1949) is an American actor. He began acting in the 1970s, playing a supporting role in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and a starring role in Days of Heaven. He came to prominence in 1980 for his role in the film American Gigolo, which established him as a leading man and a sex symbol. He went on to star in several hit films including An Officer and a Gentleman, Pretty Woman, Primal Fear, and Chicago, for which he won a Golden Globe Award as Best Actor, as well as a Screen Actors Guild Award as part of the Best Cast.
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Gere is a descendant of Mayflower Pilgrims Francis Eaton, John Billington, George Soule, Richard Warren, Degory Priest, William Brewster, and Francis Cooke. His paternal great-grandfather had changed the spelling of the surname from "Geer". Gere's mother, Doris Ann (née Tiffany, born 1924), was a homemaker, and his father, Homer George Gere (born 1922), was an insurance agent for the Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company and had originally intended to become a minister. Gere is their eldest son and second child. In 1967, he graduated from North Syracuse Central High School, where he excelled at gymnastics and music, playing the trumpet. He attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst on a gymnastics scholarship, majoring in philosophy, but did not graduate, leaving after two years.
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Robert Carlyle
Robert Carlyle, OBE (born 14 April 1961) is a Scottish actor. He is known for a variety of roles in films such as Trainspotting, The Full Monty, The World Is Not Enough, Angela's Ashes, The 51st State, and 28 Weeks Later. In addition to his film work, he is also known for his roles in the television shows Hamish Macbeth and Once Upon A Time.
Carlyle was born in Maryhill, Glasgow, the son of Elizabeth, a bus company employee, and Joseph Carlyle, a painter and decorator. He was brought up by his father after his mother left when Carlyle was four years old. He left school at the age of 16 without any qualifications and worked for his father as a painter and decorator; however, he continued his education by attending night classes at Cardonald College in Glasgow.
Carlyle became involved in drama at the Glasgow Arts Centre at the age of 21 (having been inspired by reading Arthur Miller's The Crucible), and subsequently graduated from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. In 1991, he and four friends founded a theatre company, Raindog (which is now primarily involved in television and film work), and guest starred in The Bill. The same year he starred in his first movie, Riff-Raff, directed by Ken Loach.
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Robin Williams
Robin McLaurin Williams (born July 21, 1951) is an American actor and comedian. Rising to fame with his role as the alien Mork in the TV series Mork & Mindy, and later stand-up comedy work, Williams has performed in many feature films since 1980. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. He has also won two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globes, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and five Grammy Awards.
Williams was born in Chicago, Illinois. His mother, Laura McLaurin (née Smith, 1922–2001), was a former model from New Orleans, Louisiana. His father, Robert Fitzgerald Williams (September 10, 1906 – October 18, 1987), was a senior executive at Ford Motor Company in charge of the Midwest region. His maternal great-great-grandfather was senator and Mississippi governor Anselm J. McLaurin. Williams is of English, Welsh, Irish, and French ancestry. He was raised in the Episcopal Church (his mother practiced Christian Science). He grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he was a student at the Detroit Country Day School, and later moved to Woodacre, Marin County, California, where he attended the public Redwood High School. Williams studied at Claremont McKenna College (then called Claremont Men's College) for four years. He has two half-brothers: Todd (who died August 14, 2007) and McLaurin.
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Rod Taylor
Rodney Sturt "Rod" Taylor (born 11 January 1930) is an Australian actor of film and television. He has appeared in over 50 films, and is well known for his roles in the science fiction film The Time Machine (1960), and in the Alfred Hitchcock horror movie The Birds (1963).
Taylor was Born on 11 January 1930 in Lidcombe, a suburb of Sydney, the only child of William Sturt Taylor, a steel construction contractor and commercial artist, and the former Mona Thompson, a writer of more than a hundred short stories and children's books. His middle name comes from his great-great grand uncle, Captain Charles Sturt, a British explorer of the Australian Outback in the 19th century.
Taylor attended Parramatta High School and later studied at the East Sydney Technical and Fine Arts College. For a time he worked as a commercial artist, but decided to become an actor after seeing Laurence Olivier in an Old Vic touring production in Australia.
Taylor acquired extensive radio and stage experience in Australia where his radio work included a period on Blue Hills and a role as Tarzan. Earlier in his career he had to support himself by working at Sydney's Mark Foys department store designing and painting window and other displays during the day. In 1951 he took part in a re-enactment of Charles Sturt's voyage down the Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers, playing Sturt's offsider, George Macleay. A short documentary, Inland with Sturt (1951), was based on it. Taylor also appeared in a number of theatre productions for Australia's Mercury Theatre.
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Roy Sesana
Roy Sesana (born around 1950 in Molapo, Botswana) is a Bushman activist who works together with the First People of the Kalahari for the rights of his tribe.
Sesana lives in New Xade in the central Kalahari and works as a traditional medicine man. He moved to South Africa for a couple of years, but returned to his people in 1971 in order to live together with them in the desert. In 1991, he co-founded the First People of Kalahari (FPK) together with John Hardbattle, which intensively promotes the traditional way of life, protecting the nature. In 1997, a small group of Bushmen still living in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve were resettled to the new built town of New Xade. The government claimed that this was a result of a mutual understanding that the continued presence of the group within the reserve was in conflict with the preservation of the game reserve. The government also claimed that it could not provide the group with basic infrastructure and services while they were within the reserve for the same reasons. A group of Bushmen represented by First People of the Kalahari refused to move, citing difficult conditions in the new settlement, the unfamiliar way of life they had to adjust to and many new social ills such as unemployment, alcoholism and diseases, especially HIV-AIDS.
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Rupert Everett
Rupert James Hector Everett (/ˈɛvərɪt/; born 29 May 1959) is an English actor. He first came to public attention in 1981, when he was cast in Julian Mitchell's play and subsequent film Another Country (1984) as an openly gay student at an English public school in the 1930s. He has since appeared in many other films including My Best Friend's Wedding, An Ideal Husband, The Next Best Thing and the Shrek sequels.
Everett was born in Norfolk, England, to Major Anthony Michael Everett (1921–2009), who worked in business and served in the British Army, and wife (m. 7 May 1955) Sara (née Maclean, b. 19 September 1934). His maternal grandfather, Vice Admiral Sir Hector Charles Donald Maclean, was a nephew of Hector Lachlan Stewart MacLean, who received the Victoria Cross. His maternal grandmother, Opre Vyvyan, was a descendant of the baronets Vyvyan of Trelowarren and the German Freiherren (Barons) von Schmiedern. He has a brother, Simon Anthony Cunningham Everett (born 1956). Everett was raised Roman Catholic.
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Russell Crowe
Russell Ira Crowe (born 7 April 1964) is a New Zealand born Australian actor, film producer and musician. He came to international attention for his role as Roman General Maximus Decimus Meridius in the 2000 historical epic film Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor, a Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Actor, an Empire Award for Best Actor and a London Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and ten further nominations for Best Actor. Crowe appeared as the tobacco firm whistle blower Jeffrey Wigand in the 1999 film The Insider, for which he received five awards as Best Actor and seven nominations in the same category. In 2001, Crowe's portrayal of mathematician and Nobel Prize winner John F. Nash in the biopic A Beautiful Mind brought him numerous awards, including an BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor category Motion Picture Drama and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role.
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Ryan Phillippe
Matthew Ryan Phillippe ( /ˈfɪlɨpiː/; born September 10, 1974), better known as Ryan Phillippe, is an American actor. After appearing on the soap opera One Life to Live, he came to fame in the late 1990s starring in a string of films, including I Know What You Did Last Summer, Cruel Intentions, and 54. In the 2000s, he appeared in several films, including 2001's Academy Award Best Picture nominee Gosford Park, 2005's Academy Award-winning ensemble film Crash, and the 2006 war drama Flags of Our Fathers. In 2007 he starred in Breach, a movie based on the true story of FBI operative Eric O'Neill, while in 2008 he headlined Kimberly Peirce's Iraq war film Stop-Loss. In 2010, he starred as Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer Greg Marinovich in The Bang-Bang Club.
Phillippe was born in New Castle, Delaware. His mother, Susan (née Thomas), ran a day care center in the family's house, and his father, Richard Phillippe, worked for DuPont. Phillippe is of part French descent. He has three sisters. He attended New Castle Baptist Academy, where he played basketball and soccer, as well as earned a black belt in Tae Kwon Do; he was also the Yearbook Editor in his senior year.
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Sandra Bullock
Sandra Annette Bullock ( /ˈbʊlək/; born July 26, 1964) is an American actress and producer who rose to fame in the 1990s after roles in successful films such as Demolition Man, Speed, The Net, A Time to Kill, and While You Were Sleeping. In the new millennium she appeared in such films as Miss Congeniality, The Lake House, and Crash, the third of which received critical acclaim. In 2007, she was ranked as the 14th richest female celebrity with an estimated fortune of US$85 million. In 2009, Bullock starred in two of the more financially successful films of her career, The Proposal and The Blind Side. Bullock was awarded a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress, a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role, and the Academy Award for Best Actress, for her role as Leigh Anne Tuohy in The Blind Side. She is listed in the 2012 edition of the Guinness Book Of World Records as the highest-paid actress, with $56 million.
Sandra Annette Bullock was born in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Her father, John W. Bullock (born 1925), was a United States Army employee and part-time voice coach from Birmingham, Alabama, and her mother, Helga D. Meyer (1942–2000), was a German opera singer and voice teacher. Bullock's maternal grandfather was a rocket scientist from Nuremberg, Germany. John Bullock, then in charge of the Army's Military Postal Service in Europe, was stationed in Nuremberg when he met his wife. They married in Germany, soon moving to Arlington, where John Bullock worked with the Army Materiel Command, before becoming a contractor for The Pentagon.
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Sandra Oh
Sandra Oh (born July 20, 1971) is a Canadian actress. She is best known for the role of Dr. Cristina Yang on ABC's Grey's Anatomy, for which she has won Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards. She has also played notable roles in the feature films Under the Tuscan Sun and Sideways, and had a supporting role on the HBO original series Arli$$. Other films she has appeared in include The Night Listener, Blindness and Rabbit Hole.
Oh was born in the Ottawa suburb of Nepean, to middle-class Korean immigrant parents Joon-Soo (John) and Young-Nam, who had come to Canada in the early 1960s. Her father is a businessman and her mother a biochemist. Oh has a brother, Ray, and a sister, Grace. She grew up living on Camwood Crescent in Nepean, where she began acting and ballet at an early age. At the age of 10, she played The Wizard of Woe in a class musical, The Canada Goose.[citation needed]
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Sean Astin
Sean Astin (born February 25, 1971) is an American film actor, director, voice artist, and producer best known for his film roles as Mikey Walsh in The Goonies, the title character of Rudy, and Samwise Gamgee in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In television, he appeared as Lynn McGill in the fifth season of 24. Most recently, he provided the voice for the title character in Disney's Special Agent Oso. Astin also served as campaign manager for his friend, Democratic entertainment industry businessman Dan Adler in California's 36th congressional district special election, 2011.
Astin was born Sean Patrick Duke in Santa Monica, California, the son of actress Patty Duke. At the time, it was reported that Desi Arnaz, Jr., was his biological father. In 1994, Astin discovered his father was Michael Tell, a music promoter and writer, and publisher of the newspaper The Las Vegas Israelite.
Tell's marriage to Patty Duke was annulled shortly before her marriage in 1972 to actor John Astin, who adopted Sean. In 1973, Duke gave birth to Astin's half-brother Mackenzie Astin, who also became an actor. Although Patty Duke and John Astin divorced in 1985, Sean Astin has written that he has always considered John his "real" father.
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Sean Bean
Shaun Mark "Sean" Bean (born 17 April 1959) is an English actor of stage and screen. Bean is known for playing Boromir in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and, previously, British Colonel Richard Sharpe in the ITV television series Sharpe. He is also known for his film work playing such roles as Alec Trevelyan in GoldenEye, Jason Locke in Essex Boys, Odysseus in Troy, Ian Howe in National Treasure and Andy McNab in Bravo Two Zero. Bean has also acted in a number of television productions and character roles such as playing Robert Aske in Henry VIII and Eddard Stark in HBO's Game of Thrones. He has also performed voice work for computer games, including Martin Septim in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
Bean was born Shaun Mark Bean in the Handsworth district of Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, the son of Rita (née Tuckwood) and Brian Bean. Bean's father owned a fabrication shop, which he had set up with a colleague. The business employed 50 people, including Bean's mother, who worked as a secretary. He has a younger sister named Lorraine. Despite becoming relatively wealthy (his father owned a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow), the family never moved away from the council estate, because they preferred to remain close to friends and family.
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Sean Penn
Sean Justin Penn (born August 17, 1960) is an American actor, screenwriter and film director, also known for his left-wing political and social activism (including humanitarian work). He is a two-time Academy Award winner for his roles in Mystic River (2003) and Milk (2008), as well as the recipient of a Golden Globe Award for the former and a Screen Actors Guild Award for the latter.
Penn began his acting career in television with a brief appearance in a 1974 episode of Little House on the Prairie, directed by his father Leo Penn. Following his film debut in 1981's Taps and a diverse range of film roles in the 1980s, Penn emerged as a prominent leading actor with the 1995 drama film Dead Man Walking, for which he earned his first Academy Award nomination and the Best Actor Award at the Berlin Film Festival. Penn received another two Oscar nominations for Sweet and Lowdown (1999) and I Am Sam (2001), before winning his first Academy Award for Best Actor in 2003 for Mystic River and a second one in 2008 for Milk. He has also won a Best Actor Award of the Cannes Film Festival for She's So Lovely (1997), and two Best Actor Awards at the Venice Film Festival for Hurlyburly (1998) and 21 Grams (2003).
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Shakespeare in Love
Shakespeare in Love is a 1998 British-American romantic comedy-drama film directed by John Madden, written by Marc Norman and playwright Tom Stoppard. The film depicts a love affair involving playwright William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) at the time that he was writing the play Romeo and Juliet. The story is fiction, though several of the characters are based on real people. In addition, many of the characters, lines, and plot devices are references to Shakespeare's plays.
Shakespeare in Love won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actress (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench).
William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) is a poor playwright for Philip Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush), owner of The Rose Theatre, in 1593 London. After learning that his love was cheating on him with his patron, Shakespeare burns his new comedy, Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter, rewriting it as the tragedy Romeo and Juliet. Suffering from writer's block, he is unable to complete the play, but begins auditions for Romeo. A young man named Thomas Kent is cast in the role after impressing Shakespeare with his performance and his love of Shakespeare's previous work. Kent is actually Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), the daughter of a wealthy merchant who desires to act but, since women are banned from the stage, she must disguise herself.
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Sophie Thompson
Sophie Thompson (born 20 January 1962) is an English actress, best known for playing evil Stella Crawford in EastEnders.
The second daughter born in 1962, to actress Phyllida Law and actor Eric Thompson, Sophie is the younger sister of twice Academy Award-winning actress and screenwriter Emma Thompson.
Sophie Thompson has worked in film, television, theatre and radio, and has narrated a number of audiobooks. She made her debut in 1978, at the age of 16, starring in A Traveller in Time, before going on to study at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.[citation needed]
Big-screen roles include Four Weddings and a Funeral, "Eat, Pray, Love", Emma, Dancing at Lughnasa, Gosford Park, Fat Slags, Relative Values and Morris: A Life with Bells On. Thompson appeared in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2010, as Mafalda Hopkirk and Hermione Granger disguised as Hopkirk.
Thompson starred alongside popular British comedians Alan Davies, in Jonathan Creek, and Lee Evans in So What Now? She has also appeared in Persuasion, Midsomer Murders, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, A Harlot's Progress and Magnolia. She played Miss Bartlett in Andrew Davies' 2007 adaptation of E.M. Forster's A Room with a View and also appeared in the last episode of series 4 of Doc Martin.
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Stephen Fry
Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter, film director, and a director of Norwich City Football Club.
After a troubled childhood and adolescence, during which he was expelled from a number of schools and eventually spent three months in prison for credit card fraud, he was able to secure a place at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied English Literature.
He first came to public attention in the 1981 Cambridge Footlights Revue presentation "The Cellar Tapes", which also included Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery. With Hugh Laurie, as the comedy double act Fry and Laurie, he co-wrote and co-starred in A Bit of Fry & Laurie, and took the role of Jeeves (with Laurie playing Wooster) in Jeeves and Wooster.
As an actor, Fry played the lead in the film Wilde, was Melchett in the BBC television series Blackadder, starred as the title character Peter Kingdom in the ITV series Kingdom, has a recurring guest role as Dr. Gordon Wyatt on the Fox crime series Bones and appeared as rogue TV host Gordon Deitrich in the dystopian thriller V For Vendetta. He has also written and presented several documentary series including the 2008 television series Stephen Fry in America, which saw him travelling across all 50 US states. Since 2003 he has been the host of the quiz show QI.
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Steve Carell
Steven John "Steve" Carell ( /kəˈrɛl/; born August 16, 1962) is an American comedian, actor, voice artist, producer, writer, and director. Although Carell is notable for his role on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, he found greater fame in the late 2000s for playing Michael Scott on The Office. He has also starred in lead roles in the films The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Little Miss Sunshine, Evan Almighty, Dan in Real Life, Get Smart, Date Night, Dinner for Schmucks, and Crazy, Stupid, Love.; and voiced characters in the animated films Over the Hedge, Horton Hears a Who!, and Despicable Me. Carell was nominated as "America's funniest man" in Life magazine, and received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Comedy Series for playing the lead role of Michael Scott for The Office in 2006.
Carell, the youngest of four brothers, was born at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts, and was raised in nearby Acton by his parents, Harriet T. (née Koch), a psychiatric nurse, and Edwin A. Carell, an electrical engineer. His maternal uncle, Stanley Koch, worked with Allen B. DuMont to create cathode ray tubes. Carell's paternal grandfather was Italian; his father was born with the surname "Caroselli", later shortening it to "Carell". Carell was raised Roman Catholic, and was educated at The Fenn School and Middlesex School. Carell also played ice hockey as a teenager for his high school.[citation needed] He played the fife, performing with other members of his family, and later joined a reenacting group portraying the 10th (North Lincoln) Regiment of Foot. Carell attributed his interest in history to this, in which he earned his degree from Denison University in Granville, Ohio in 1984. While at Denison, Carell was a member of Burpee's Seedy Theatrical Company, a student-run improvisational comedy troupe.
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Steve Huison
Steve Huison (born 10 December 1963, Leeds), is a British actor, mostly on TV and occasional films. He trained at the Rose Bruford College in Sidcup. He is best known for his role as "Lomper" in the massively successful UK box-office and critical hit The Full Monty (1997). He also appeared in a Ken Loach film The Navigators, made in 2001. He has played character roles in such TV series as Casualty, Where the Heart Is, dinnerladies, Heartbeat and The Royle Family.
In January 2008, Huison took the role of porter Norman Dunstan in ITV1 daily hospital drama The Royal Today, a spin-off of popular Sunday night drama The Royal.
Huison appeared as Eddie Windass in Coronation Street.
He is also a co-founder of the Shoestring Theatre Company. Currently starring in CBBC's Television show "The 4 o'clock club".
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Susan Misner
Susan Misner (born February 8, 1971) is an American dancer, television and film actress.
Misner portrayed the doomed Grace Davidson on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live from 12 March 1999 to 17 November 1999. In 2002, Misner appeared in the film Chicago, performing the renowned "Cell Block Tango" as Liz with Catherine Zeta-Jones, Denise Faye, Deidre Goodwin, Ekaterina Chtchelkanova and Mýa Harrison.
Misner has guest-starred on many TV series, including three of the series in the Law & Order franchise — Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2001/2005), Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (2002) and Law & Order (2006) — as well as both CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2002) and CSI: Miami (2004). She had dancing role in the 2002 film Chicago. Misner appeared as Theresa on Rescue Me in 2006 and 2007, and later as Gretchen Martin in the 2007 miniseries The Bronx Is Burning. She appeared in two episodes of the hit CBS procedural Without a Trace during the 2004-2005 television season. She portrayed Alison Humphrey in several 2007 episodes of The CW series Gossip Girl and Sergeant Burnett in New Amsterdam (2008). In 2010, she played the girlfriend of therapist Paul Weston in the series In Treatment. Currently she has the role of "Jessica" in Person of Interest.
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Sylvester Groth
Sylvester Groth (born 31 March 1958) is a German film actor and tenor.
He is best known to English-language audiences for appearing in Quentin Tarantino's 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, in which he portrayed Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.
Groth portrayed Goebbels in the 2007 German film Mein Führer – Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler, directed by Dani Levy. His first major film role was in 1993's Stalingrad.
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Taye Diggs
Scott Leo "Taye" Diggs (born January 2, 1971) is an American theatre, film and television actor. He is perhaps best known for his roles in the Broadway musical Rent, the motion picture How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and the television series Private Practice. His nickname, Taye, comes from the playful pronunciation of Scotty as "Scottay".
Diggs was born in Newark, New Jersey but grew up in Rochester, New York, the son of Marcia (née Berry), a teacher and actress, and Jeffries Diggs. He attended Allendale Columbia School in Rochester and later transferred to School of the Arts. He starred in the first production of "It All Adds Up", an original musical by the piano teacher and musician John Gabriele and math teacher Jack Donovan. He is the oldest of five children; he has two brothers, Gabriel and Michael, and two sisters, Shalom and Christian. Diggs received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in musical theater from Syracuse University. He performed many times at the popular Lakes Region Summer Theatre in Meredith, New Hampshire. Diggs's Broadway debut was in the ensemble cast of the 1994 Tony Award-winning revival of the musical Carousel. In 1995, he also performed as a dancer in Sebastian's Caribbean Carnival at Tokyo Disneyland.
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Tess Harper
Tess Harper (born August 15, 1950) is an American actress.
Born Tessie Jean Washam on August 15, 1950 in Mammoth Spring, Arkansas. Her parents' names are Ed and Rosemary Washam. She grew up around lots of quilts and quilt makers. On her own time, she liked to sit on the porch-swing and read. She graduated from high school in 1968.
Tess Harper began acting in theater production and appearances in theme parks, dinner theatres and children's theatre. She was performing theater in Texas when she attended a casting call for a minor female role in the film Tender Mercies. Director Bruce Beresford was impressed with Harper and cast her instead in the lead female role of Rosa Lee, the young widow and mother who marries country singer Mac Sledge. Beresford said the previous actress who auditioned for the role brought to it a sophistication and worldliness inappropriate for the part, whereas Harper brought a kind of rural quality without coming across as simple or foolish. Beresford said of Harper, "She walked into the room and even before she spoke, I thought, 'That's the girl to play the lead.'"
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Thandie Newton
Thandiwe Nashita "Thandie" Newton (born 6 November 1972) is a British actress. She has appeared in a number of British and American films, including The Pursuit of Happyness, Mission: Impossible II, Crash, Run, Fatboy, Run and W.
Newton was born in London, the daughter of Nyasha, a Zimbabwean health-care worker and Nick Newton, a laboratory technician and artist. Her birthplace has been incorrectly reported to be Zambia in some biographies, but she has confirmed in interviews that she was born in London, during a two-week trip by her parents. The name "Thandiwe" means "beloved" in Ndebele, Zulu, Xhosa or Swazi, and "Thandie" is pronounced /ˈtændi/ TAN-dee in English. According to Newton, her mother is a Shona princess. Regarding her childhood, Newton remarked at a TED conference: "From about the age of 5, I was aware that I didn't fit. I was the black, atheist kid in the all-white, Catholic school run by nuns. I was an anomaly." Raised in London and Penzance, Cornwall, she studied dance at the Tring Park School for the Performing Arts and at sixteen, while recovering from a back injury, she successfully auditioned for her first film role. She then went on to study social anthropology at Downing College, Cambridge, from 1992 to 1995, where she achieved a 2:1.
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Thomas Haden Church
Thomas Haden Church (born June 17, 1960) is an American actor. After co-starring in the 1990s sitcom Wings, Church became well known for his film roles, including his Academy Award-nominated performance in Sideways and his role as the Sandman in Spider-Man 3.
Church, the fourth of six children, was born Thomas Richard McMillen in Yolo, California, to an Army officer/health care worker father and a telephone company sales rep mother. He was raised under his stepfather's surname, "Quesada", and later changed his surname to "Haden Church" (both names are in his family tree). He was raised in Laredo, Texas, and graduated from Harlingen High School, Harlingen, Texas, in 1979, going on to attend the University of North Texas.
Church started in the entertainment business as a radio personality and doing voice over work. A part in an independent film convinced him to move to California to pursue an acting career. He played the part of slow-witted airport mechanic Lowell Mather for six seasons (1990–1995) on the NBC sitcom Wings. He worked in television for two more seasons with a lead role on Ned and Stacey opposite Debra Messing. He has had supporting roles in films such as Tombstone, George of the Jungle, and The Specials. Church often plays villains or comic relief in films, most evident by turns in Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight and Over the Hedge.
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Thora Birch
Thora Birch (born March 11, 1982) is an American actress. She was a child actor in the 1990s, starring in movies such as All I Want for Christmas (1991), Patriot Games (1992), Hocus Pocus (1993), Monkey Trouble (1994), Now and Then (1995), and Alaska (1996). She came to prominence in 1999 after earning worldwide attention and praise for her performance in American Beauty. She then starred in the well received film Ghost World (2001), which earned her a Golden Globe nomination.
Birch was born in Los Angeles, California, the eldest child of Jack Birch and Carol Connors. Her parents, who were her business managers from the start, are former adult film actors and both appeared in the pornographic film Deep Throat. Birch is of German Jewish, Nordic, and Italian ancestry . The family's original surname was Biersch, coming from her German Jewish ancestors. Her name Thora is derived from the name of the Norse God of thunder and lightning, Thor. She has a younger brother, Bolt.
Due to their own experience with acting, Birch's parents were reticent to encourage her in the profession, but were persuaded to show her photograph to agents by a babysitter who noticed her imitating commercials. She landed several parts in the late '80s, including advertisements for Burger King, California Raisins, Quaker Oats, and Vlasic Pickles. Her first acting job followed.
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Til Schweiger
Tilman Valentin "Til" Schweiger (German pronunciation: [ˈtɪlman ˈvaləntiːn ˈʃvaɪɡɐ]; born 19 December 1963) is a German actor, director, and producer. He is one of Germany’s most successful filmmakers. Since 1968, when the FFA started counting, no other German actor has drawn more people to the cinemas. He runs his own production company, Barefoot Films, in Berlin.
Schweiger was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. He married American model Dana Carlson on June 19, 1995. The couple has four children: Valentin Florian (b. 1995), Luna Marie (b. 1997), Lilli Camille (b. 1998), and Emma Tiger (b. October 2002). They separated in 2005, but have not divorced.
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Tim Roth
Simon Timothy "Tim" Roth (born 14 May 1961) is an English film actor and director. He is best known for his roles in the films Made in Britain, Legend of 1900, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms, Skellig, Planet of the Apes, The Incredible Hulk and Rob Roy, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the latter. He most recently starred as Cal Lightman in the TV series Lie to Me.
Roth was born in London, England, the son of Ann, a painter and teacher, and Ernie, a Fleet Street journalist, painter and, until the 1970s, a member of the British Communist Party. Roth's father was born under the surname "Smith" in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York, to a British immigrant family of Irish descent; he changed his surname to "Roth" in the 1940s, "partly through solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust, partly because the British were far from welcome in some of the countries to which his job took him".
Roth attended the Strand School in Tulse Hill. As a young man, he wanted to be a sculptor and studied at London's Camberwell College of Art.
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Timothy Spall
Timothy Leonard Spall, OBE (born 27 February 1957) is an English character actor and occasional presenter.
Spall, the third of four sons, was born in Battersea, South London. His mother, Sylvia R. (née Leonard), was a hairdresser, and his father, Joseph L. Spall, was a postal worker. He trained at the National Youth Theatre and RADA, where he was awarded the Bancroft Gold Medal as the most promising actor in his year. His brother, Matthew, is studio director of the computer games company Morpheme. Another brother, Richard, is the landlord tenant of the Astolat public house in Guildford.
Spall initially made his mark in theatre performing in productions for Birmingham Rep and, later, The Royal Shakespeare Company including The Merry Wives of Windsor, Three Sisters, Nicholas Nickleby and The Knight of the Burning Pestle.
Following a film debut in Quadrophenia and wider TV exposure playing the gormless Radish Barry Taylor in all five series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Kevin in Outside Edge and as Aubrey the appalling chef in Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet, Spall has since appeared in films such as Crusoe, Secrets & Lies, Shooting the Past, Topsy-Turvy, Vanilla Sky, Rock Star, The Last Samurai, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and The King's Speech. He gained international recognition as Peter Pettigrew ("Wormtail") in the Harry Potter film series. In 1991 he guest-starred in the series 5 Red Dwarf episode Back to Reality. In 1993, Spall was in Rab C. Nesbitt.
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Tom Cruise
Thomas Cruise Mapother IV ( /ˈtɒməs ˈkruːz ˈmeɪpɒθər/; born July 3, 1962), widely known as Tom Cruise, is an American film actor and producer. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards and has won three Golden Globe Awards for the same movies: Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Jerry Maguire (1996), Magnolia (1999). He started his career with the movie Endless Love. Cruise's first appearance in a major film was in 1981's Taps. His first leading role was in the film Risky Business, released in August 1983. Cruise played the role of a heroic naval pilot in the popular and successful 1986 film Top Gun, and also secret agent Ethan Hunt in the series of Mission: Impossible action films.
He has starred in a variety of other successful films, including: Rain Man (1988), Days of Thunder (1990), A Few Good Men (1992), Vanilla Sky (2001), Minority Report (2002), The Last Samurai (2003), Collateral (2004), and War of the Worlds (2005).
Since 2005, Cruise and Paula Wagner have been in charge of the United Artists film studio, with Cruise as producer and star and Wagner as the chief executive. Cruise is also known for his support of and adherence to the Church of Scientology.
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Tom Hanks
Thomas Jeffrey "Tom" Hanks (born July 9, 1956) is an American actor, producer, writer, and director. Hanks is known for his roles in Philadelphia and as the title character in Forrest Gump, roles which won him two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor. Hanks is also known for his Oscar nominated roles in Big, Saving Private Ryan and Cast Away.
Hanks' other acting roles include Apollo 13 as Jim Lovell, The Green Mile as Paul Edgecomb, Toy Story as Woody and Charlie Wilson's War as Charlie Wilson.
Hanks was born in Concord, California. His father, Amos Mefford Hanks (born in Glenn County, California, on March 9, 1924 – died in Alameda, California, on January 31, 1992), was an itinerant cook. His mother, Janet Marylyn (née Frager; born in Alameda County, California, on January 18, 1932), was a hospital worker. Hanks' mother is of Portuguese ancestry, while two of his paternal great-grandparents immigrated from Britain. Hanks's parents divorced in 1960. The family's three oldest children, Sandra (now Sandra Hanks Benoiton, a writer)[citation needed], Larry (now Lawrence M. Hanks, PhD, an entomology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Tom, went with their father, while the youngest, Jim, now an actor and film maker, remained with his mother in Red Bluff, California.[citation needed]
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Tom Hollander
Thomas Anthony "Tom" Hollander (born 25 August 1967) is a British actor who has appeared in films Enigma, Gosford Park, Cambridge Spies, Pride and Prejudice, Pirates of the Caribbean, In the Loop, Valkyrie and Hanna.
Tom Hollander was born in Bristol and raised in Oxford, the son of teachers. His parents are English, though his father is descended from Czech Jews who converted to Catholicism; Hollander was chief chorister at school. He attended the Dragon School and then Abingdon School. As a youngster, he was a member of the National Youth Theatre and the National Youth Music Theatre (then known as the Children's Music Theatre). In 1981, at fourteen years of age, he was awarded the lead role in a BBC dramatization of Leon Garfield's John Diamond. He read English at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He was actively involved in stage productions as a member of the Footlights and president of the Marlowe Society. Friend and fellow student Sam Mendes directed him in several plays while they were at Cambridge, including a critically acclaimed production of Cyrano de Bergerac (which also featured future Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg). After finishing university and failing to secure a place at a drama school, he found work in theatre nevertheless.
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Tomas Alfredson
Tomas Alfredson (born Hans Christian Tomas Alfredson; 1 April 1965) is a Swedish film director, best known internationally for directing the 2008 vampire film Let the Right One In and 2011 espionage film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Alfredson has received the Guldbagge award for Best Direction twice; in 2005 for Four Shades of Brown, and in 2009 for Let the Right One In.
Alfredson was born in 1965 in Lidingö, Stockholms län, Sweden. Being the son of comedian, writer, and director Hasse Alfredson, Tomas was used to being treated differently from an early age. "[A small] number of people were public property, and he was one of them", Alfredson said of his father. Hasse was seldom home, and Tomas was mostly raised by his mother. "But I participated in [Hasse's] film productions every summer, it was probably a way for us to reach each other (...) I thought it was great fun." Alfredson would often have minor roles in the Hasseåtage films. For example, he played the "Count" in The Apple War (1971), his sole line of dialogue being "Adieu, mon plaisir".
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Tommy Lee Jones
Tommy Lee Jones (born September 15, 1946) is an American actor and film director. He has received three Academy Award nominations, winning one as Best Supporting Actor for the 1993 thriller film The Fugitive.
His notable film roles include federal marshal Samuel Gerard in The Fugitive and U.S. Marshals, Agent K in Men in Black and its sequels, Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men, the villain "Two-Face" in Batman Forever, terrorist William Strannix in Under Siege, former Texas Ranger Woodrow F. Call in Lonesome Dove, a Texas Ranger in Man of the House and rancher Pete Perkins in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Colonel Chester Phillips in Captain America: The First Avenger. Jones has also portrayed real-life figures such as businessman Howard Hughes, executed murderer Gary Gilmore, Oliver Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter and baseball great Ty Cobb.
Jones was born in San Saba, Texas. His mother, Lucille Marie (née Scott), was a police officer, school teacher, and beauty shop owner, and his father, Clyde C. Jones, was an oil field worker. The two were married and divorced twice. Jones has stated that his grandmother was of Cherokee ancestry. He was a resident of Midland, Texas, and attended Robert E. Lee High School.
wn.com/Tommy_Lee_Jones -
Tomás Milián
Tomás Milián (born March 3, 1932) is a Cuban-American actor best known for having worked extensively in Italian films from the late 1950s to the 1980s.
Tomás Milián was born in Havana as Tomás Quintín Rodríguez, the son of a Cuban general. His father was arrested and jailed after Fulgencio Batista took power in Cuba : he later committed suicide. Milián then decided to leave Cuba and pursue his wishes of being an actor. He settled in the United States to study at New York's Actor's Studio and later became an American citizen.
After starting a career in the United States, he went to Italy in 1958 to take part to a theater festival in Spoleto. He eventually decided to relocate to Italy, where he lived for over 25 years, gradually becoming a very successful performer. His first film part in Italy was in the 1959 picture La Notte brava. Although his voice was dubbed most of the time due to his accent, Milián performed his lines in Italian (or in English, depending on the film). He initially starred in arthouse movies and worked with directors such as Mauro Bolognini and Luchino Visconti.
wn.com/Tomás_Milián -
Toni Collette
Antonia "Toni" Collette (born 1 November 1972) is an Australian actress and musician, known for her acting work on stage, television and film as well as a secondary career as the lead singer of the band Toni Collette & the Finish.
Collette's acting career began in the early 1990s with comedic roles in films such as Spotswood (1992) and Muriel's Wedding (1994), for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress. Following her performances in Emma (1996) and The Boys (1998), Collette achieved international recognition as a result of her Academy Award-nominated portrayal of Lynn Sear in The Sixth Sense (1999). She has appeared in thrillers such as Shaft (2000) and Changing Lanes (2002) and independent comedy films like About a Boy (2002), Connie and Carla (2004), In Her Shoes (2005) and Little Miss Sunshine (2006).
In 2009, she began playing the lead role in the television series United States of Tara, for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Musical or Comedy in 2010.
wn.com/Toni_Collette -
Topher Grace
Christopher John "Topher" Grace (pronounced /ˈtoʊfər/; born July 12, 1978) is an American actor. He is best known for his portrayal of Eric Forman on the Fox sitcom That '70s Show, Eddie Brock/Venom in the Sam Raimi film Spider-Man 3, and Edwin in the 2010 film Predators.
Grace was born in New York City, the son of Pat, an assistant to the schoolmaster of the New Canaan Country School, and John, a Madison Avenue executive.
Grace grew up in Darien, Connecticut, where he knew actress Kate Bosworth, as well as Opie & Anthony producer Nathaniel Bryan, and was sometimes babysat by actress Chloë Sevigny, who later appeared with him in high school stage plays. Grace chose the name Topher because he did not want his full name abbreviated to Chris at school.
Grace was cast as Eric Forman on Fox's That '70s Show, which debuted in 1998. The sitcom was successful and Grace became well known among television watchers; he played the role until the seventh season. The series was renewed for another season despite his absence before its ending in 2006. His character was written out and was replaced with a new character named Randy Pearson who was portrayed by Josh Meyers. Grace makes a very brief guest appearance in the final episode.
wn.com/Topher_Grace -
Virginia Madsen
Virginia G. Madsen (born September 11, 1961) is an American actress and documentary film producer. She came to fame during the 1980s, having appeared in several films aimed at a teenage audience. Two decades later, she had an Academy Award and Golden Globe-nominated role in the 2004 film Sideways.
Madsen was born in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Elaine (née Melson), an Emmy-winning poet, producer and playwright who often works for PBS, and Calvin Madsen, a fireman. Madsen's mother left a career in corporate business to pursue a writing career. Madsen's brother is actor Michael Madsen. Her paternal grandparents were Danish and her mother has Irish and distant Native American ancestry. Madsen is a graduate of New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois.
Her first effort as an actor was as her brother’s assistant in magic shows the two would concoct for their family. She later attended the Ted Liss Acting Studio in Chicago and Harand Camp Adult Theater Seminar in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin. Of her experience with Liss, she said: "I had wanted to join his class since I was 12. It was well worth the wait because I don't think I could have got that sort of training anywhere else especially in the United States...I always wanted to make a real career out of acting."
wn.com/Virginia_Madsen -
Wes Bentley
Wesley Cook "Wes" Bentley (born September 4, 1978) is an American film actor known for his roles of Ricky Fitts in American Beauty and Seneca Crane in The Hunger Games.
Bentley was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, the son of Cherie and David Bentley, who are United Methodist ministers. In 1996, he graduated from Sylvan Hills High School in Sherwood, Arkansas. Bentley then attended the Juilliard School's Drama Division (Group 29: 1996–2000) but left the school after one year to pursue his acting career.
Bentley has starred in several films, including the Oscar-winning film American Beauty, The Four Feathers, P2, and Ghost Rider. He starred in the thriller Dolan's Cadillac, based on the short story by Stephen King, and There Be Dragons by director Roland Joffé. Bentley is one of the main subjects in the documentary My Big Break, directed by Tony Zierra, which follows Bentley and three of his former roommates, Chad Lindberg, Brad Rowe and Greg Fawcett, as they pursue their dream to become successful actors in Hollywood.
wn.com/Wes_Bentley -
Wilhelm Stuckart
Wilhelm Stuckart (16 November 1902 – 15 November 1953) was a Nazi Party lawyer and official, a state secretary in the German Interior Ministry and later, a convicted war criminal.
Stuckart was born in Wiesbaden, the son of a railroad employee. He had a Christian upbringing. Stuckart was active in the far right early on, and joined the Freikorps von Epp in 1919 to resist the French occupation of the Ruhr. In 1922 he started studying law and political economy at the universities of Munich and Frankfurt am Main, and joined the Nazi Party in December that year; he remained a member until the party was banned after the failed putsch of 1923. In order to support his parents, Stuckart had to abandon his studies temporarily and work in the Nassau Regional Bank in Frankfurt in 1924. He finished his studies in 1928, receiving a doctorate with a thesis entitled Erklärung an die Öffentlichkeit, insbesondere die Anmeldung zum Handelsregister ("Explanations to the Public, Especially Concerning the Enrollment to the Trade Register") and passing the bar examination in 1930.
wn.com/Wilhelm_Stuckart -
William Fichtner
William Edward Fichtner (November 27, 1956) is an American actor. He is best known for his roles as Sheriff Tom Underlay on Invasion, as Alexander Mahone on Prison Break, as William Sharp in Armageddon, and as Ken Rosenberg in the video games Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Fichtner was born at Mitchel Air Force Base in East Meadow, New York, and was raised in Cheektowaga, New York, the son of Patricia A. (née Steitz) and William E. Fichtner. He is of German descent.
Fichtner graduated from Maryvale High School (Cheektowaga, New York) in 1974. After graduating from Farmingdale State College in 1976 with an associate degree in criminal justice, he attended SUNY Brockport and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in criminal justice in 1978. Fichtner decided to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Fichtner credits his Farmingdale State College admissions counselor, Don Harvey, with his decision to study acting. Harvey, who became a lifelong friend, took Fichtner to his first Broadway show. On 18 May 2008, Fichtner was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by Farmingdale State College.
wn.com/William_Fichtner -
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
wn.com/William_Shakespeare -
William Snape
William Snape is an actor, perhaps most notable for playing Gaz's son Nathan in the British comedy The Full Monty.
Snape was born in Sheffield on 17 April 1985. He attended Dobcroft Junior School followed by Silverdale School.
He has more recently acted in ITV's Emmerdale as farmer Stephen Butler.
He made a guest appearance in the medical drama Holby City on 17 April 2007 as Tony Dunmore. He has also made guest appearances in one episode of Doctors and in two episodes of Heartbeat.
He underwent two operations after being hit by a car on 29 January 1999.
wn.com/William_Snape
Firth, Colin Filmography
- Skinny and Cat (2014)
- The Happy Prince (2014)
- Devil's Knot (2013)
- The Railway Man (2013)
- The Orange British Academy Film Awards (2012)
- Earth's Most Threatened Tribe (2012)
- The 69th Annual Golden Globe Awards (2012)
- Stars in Shorts (2012)
- The 84th Annual Academy Awards (2012)
- The Big Fat Quiz of the 90s (2012)
- Arthur Newman (2012)
- Gambit (2012)
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: UK Premiere Featurette (2012)
- The 68th Annual Golden Globe Awards (2011)
- Der Weg des Ruhms (2011)
- The King's Speech: A Courageous Journey (2011)
- The 83rd Annual Academy Awards (2011)
- 16th Annual Critics' Choice Movie Awards (2011)
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
- 17th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards (2011)
- The Orange British Academy Film Awards (2011)
- Steve (2010)
- The People Speak UK (2010)
- The People Speak UK (2010)
- The People Speak UK (2010)
- BFI London Film Festival Awards (2010)
- The People Speak UK (2010)
- The Orange British Academy Film Awards: Red Carpet (2010)
- Golden Globes Red Carpet Live (2010)
- Great TV Mistakes (2010)
- The King's Speech (2010)
- Main Street (2010)
- 16th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards (2010)
- The 82nd Annual Academy Awards (2010)
- The 67th Annual Golden Globe Awards (2010)
- Dorian Gray (2009)
- Bondage for Freedom (2009)
- A Single Man (2009)
- A Christmas Carol (2009)
- The Meat Trade (2009)
- St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009)
- Mama Mia!: Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! Music Video (2008)
- The Accidental Husband (2008)
- Mama Mia!: A Look Inside 'Mama Mia! The Movie' (2008)
- Mama Mia!: Anatomy of a Musical Number - Lay All Your Love on Me (2008)
- Mama Mia!: Becoming a Singer (2008)
- Genova (2008)
- Mama Mia!: The Making of 'Mama Mia! The Movie' (2008)
- Mamma Mia! (2008)
- Resumen - 56º festival internacional de cine de San Sebastián (2008)
- David Copperfield (2008)
- Easy Virtue (2008)
- Then She Found Me (2007)
- The Dead Wait (2007)
- The Department of Nothing (2007)
- The Last Legion (2007)
- And When Did You Last See Your Father? (2007)
- St. Trinian's (2007)
- An Island's Legacy: Preparing for TT (2007)
- In Prison My Whole Life (2007)
- Celebration (2007)
- The 63rd Annual Golden Globe Awards (2006)
- Born Equal (2006)
- Pride and Prejudice Revisited (2005)
- Bridget Jones Interviews Colin Firth (2005)
- Nanny McPhee (2005)
- Pride and Prejudice Revisited (2005)
- The Evening Standard British Film Awards (2005)
- Where the Truth Lies (2005)
- Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004)
- Trauma (2004)
- Hope Springs (2003)
- Love Actually (2003)
- What a Girl Wants (2003)
- Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003)
- Judi Dench: A BAFTA Tribute (2002)
- The Importance of Being Earnest (2002)
- The Real Jane Austen (2002)
- Forever Ealing (2002)
- Londinium (2001)
- Bridget Jones's Diary (2001)
- We Know Where You Live (2001)
- Conspiracy (2001)
- Donovan Quick (2000)
- Relative Values (2000)
- Windmills on the Clyde: Making 'Donovan Quick' (2000)
- The Secret Laughter of Women (1999)
- Shakespeare in Love and on Film (1999)
- Blackadder Back & Forth (1999)
- 'Pride and Prejudice': The Making of... (1999)
- My Life So Far (1999)
- The Turn of the Screw (1999)
- Shakespeare in Love (1998)
- A Thousand Acres (1997)
- Fever Pitch (1997)
- Nostromo (1997)
- The English Patient (1996)
- Circle of Friends (1995)
- Pride & Prejudice: From Page to Screen (1995)
- Playmaker (1994)
- Playmaker (1994)
- The Hour of the Pig (1993)
- Hostages (1992)
- Mad at the Moon (1992)
- Femme Fatale (1991)
- Wings of Fame (1990)
- Valmont (1989)
- Tumbledown (1988)
- Apartment Zero (1988)
- Tales from the Hollywood Hills: Pat Hobby Teamed with Genius (1987)
- A Month in the Country (1987)
- The Secret Garden (1987)
- Dutch Girls (1985)
- Nineteen Nineteen (1985)
- Another Country (1984)
- Camille (1984)
RELEASE
ALBUMS
- They've Eaten the Baby!
- No More Nannies
- Secret Toast and Jam
- A Clockwork Mouse
- The Pink Chair
- I Did Knock
- Goodnight, Children
- Measle Medicine
- Soup Du Jour
- I Smell Damp
- Barnyard Fashion
- Lord of the Donkeys
- The Girl in the Carriage
- Kites in the Sky
- The Room at the Top of the Stairs
- Toad in the Teapot
- Our Last Chance
- Mrs. Brown's Lullaby
- The Lady in Blue
- Bees and Cakes
- Snow in August
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Colin Firth winning Best Actor
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:09
- Updated: 10 Dec 2012
Sandra Bullock presenting Colin Firth the Oscar® for Best Actor for his performance in "The King's Speech" at the 83rd Academy Awards® in 2011. Introduced by host Anne Hathaway.
http://wn.com/Colin_Firth_winning_Best_Actor
Sandra Bullock presenting Colin Firth the Oscar® for Best Actor for his performance in "The King's Speech" at the 83rd Academy Awards® in 2011. Introduced by host Anne Hathaway.
3. Colin Firth 2012.01.17 - Craig Ferguson [HD]
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:25
- Updated: 09 Dec 2012
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson January 17 2012 Part 3: Interview with Colin Firth from "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"
http://wn.com/3_Colin_Firth_20120117_Craig_Ferguson_HD_
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson January 17 2012 Part 3: Interview with Colin Firth from "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"
- published: 18 Jan 2012
- views: 109029
- author: DrPinch2190
Colin Firth and a Tiny Problem
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:39
- Updated: 08 Dec 2012
For his new film, "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," Colin Firth had to get into some rather revealing spandex. He told Ellen about how he was worried about measuring up with the rest of the cast!
http://wn.com/Colin_Firth_and_a_Tiny_Problem
For his new film, "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," Colin Firth had to get into some rather revealing spandex. He told Ellen about how he was worried about measuring up with the rest of the cast!
- published: 18 Jan 2012
- views: 130514
- author: TheEllenShow
Pride and Prejudice: The Lake Scene (Colin Firth Strips Off)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:51
- Updated: 10 Dec 2012
The global edition of BBC iPlayer has launched on iPad - bit.ly Download the free app today and enjoy taster clips and episodes! Watch a selection of the best classic and contemporary British shows on demand, including full length episodes of 'Pride and Prejudice'. Here's a chance to see the classic moment when Colin Firth takes a plunge in the lake as he plays the brooding Mr Darcy.
http://wn.com/Pride_and_Prejudice_The_Lake_Scene_Colin_Firth_Strips_Off
The global edition of BBC iPlayer has launched on iPad - bit.ly Download the free app today and enjoy taster clips and episodes! Watch a selection of the best classic and contemporary British shows on demand, including full length episodes of 'Pride and Prejudice'. Here's a chance to see the classic moment when Colin Firth takes a plunge in the lake as he plays the brooding Mr Darcy.
- published: 11 Feb 2008
- views: 2670175
- author: BBCWorldwide
Colin Firth Celebrity English Actor Interview Santa Barbara
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 11:04
- Updated: 10 Nov 2012
SBARTSTV Film Colin Firth Celebrity Interview Santa Barbara SBIFF
http://wn.com/Colin_Firth_Celebrity_English_Actor_Interview_Santa_Barbara
SBARTSTV Film Colin Firth Celebrity Interview Santa Barbara SBIFF
- published: 27 Aug 2012
- views: 2644
- author: SBARTSTV
Oprah Winfrey - Bridget Jones's cast pt1 (FULL VERSION)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:51
- Updated: 08 Dec 2012
As promised, this is the full version so ...enjoy!!
http://wn.com/Oprah_Winfrey_Bridget_Jones's_cast_pt1_FULL_VERSION
As promised, this is the full version so ...enjoy!!
- published: 11 Jun 2012
- views: 11074
- author: Khy9760
Colin Firth, the Prince Charming
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:04
- Updated: 15 Nov 2012
http://wn.com/Colin_Firth,_the_Prince_Charming
- published: 15 Feb 2012
- views: 14237
- author: greatkinolubitel
Colin Firth - HOT! HOT!! HOT!!!
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:06
- Updated: 04 Dec 2012
My German friends can see the video here: vimeo.com Something HOT for the New Year! Well, I hope you find some hotness in it - and I wish you all Joy and Happiness for 2012! Please tick if you like it! Thank you to all my FS and fb friends for all their wonderful suggestions - I hope this satisfies you a little, haha!
http://wn.com/Colin_Firth_HOT!_HOT!!_HOT!!!
My German friends can see the video here: vimeo.com Something HOT for the New Year! Well, I hope you find some hotness in it - and I wish you all Joy and Happiness for 2012! Please tick if you like it! Thank you to all my FS and fb friends for all their wonderful suggestions - I hope this satisfies you a little, haha!
- published: 30 Dec 2011
- views: 37587
- author: TheGlitzieGirl1
Colin Firth on Letterman (11/23/2010)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:05
- Updated: 09 Dec 2012
Colin Firth promotes 'The King's Speech' on The Late Show with David Letterman.
http://wn.com/Colin_Firth_on_Letterman_11_23_2010
Colin Firth promotes 'The King's Speech' on The Late Show with David Letterman.
- published: 24 Nov 2010
- views: 212868
- author: lyrazim
Funny Colin Firth
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:34
- Updated: 03 Dec 2012
All these interviews are available in full on youtube
http://wn.com/Funny_Colin_Firth
All these interviews are available in full on youtube
- published: 09 Jun 2011
- views: 62487
- author: missineichen
Colin Firth and "The King's Speech
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 14:28
- Updated: 10 Dec 2012
"60 Minutes" talks to its starring actor, Colin Firth, and reports on the historic find in an attic that helped make the "The King's Speech" an Oscar favorite. Scott Pelley reports.
http://wn.com/Colin_Firth_and_The_King's_Speech
"60 Minutes" talks to its starring actor, Colin Firth, and reports on the historic find in an attic that helped make the "The King's Speech" an Oscar favorite. Scott Pelley reports.
- published: 12 Jun 2011
- views: 10693
- author: CBSNewsOnline
Ellen Surprises Colin Firth with His Wax Figure!
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:04
- Updated: 08 Dec 2012
Straight from Madame Tussauds, it's Colin Firth! The famous actor had yet to see his wax likeness, so Ellen had it flown in for an amazing surprise!
http://wn.com/Ellen_Surprises_Colin_Firth_with_His_Wax_Figure!
Straight from Madame Tussauds, it's Colin Firth! The famous actor had yet to see his wax likeness, so Ellen had it flown in for an amazing surprise!
- published: 18 Jan 2012
- views: 276299
- author: TheEllenShow
Movie Star Bios - Colin Firth
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 12:43
- Updated: 14 Nov 2012
Find out how 2011 Oscar Winner Colin Firth scaled the Hollywood ladder to reach the dizzying heights he was always destined for, and discover what he really thinks when asked about Mister Darcy....
http://wn.com/Movie_Star_Bios_Colin_Firth
Find out how 2011 Oscar Winner Colin Firth scaled the Hollywood ladder to reach the dizzying heights he was always destined for, and discover what he really thinks when asked about Mister Darcy....
- published: 19 Mar 2012
- views: 3815
- author: mnctventertainment
Stars In Shorts Trailer (2012) - Colin Firth, Keira Knightly, Judi Dench
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:59
- Updated: 09 Dec 2012
Subscribe to TRAILERS: bit.ly Subscribe to COMING SOON: bit.ly Subscribe to INDIE TRAILERS: goo.gl Stars In Shorts Trailer (2012) - Colin Firth, Keira Knightly, Judi Dench ShortsHD presents STARS IN SHORTS, an incredible collection of short movies featuring some of the biggest actors such...
http://wn.com/Stars_In_Shorts_Trailer_2012_Colin_Firth,_Keira_Knightly,_Judi_Dench
Subscribe to TRAILERS: bit.ly Subscribe to COMING SOON: bit.ly Subscribe to INDIE TRAILERS: goo.gl Stars In Shorts Trailer (2012) - Colin Firth, Keira Knightly, Judi Dench ShortsHD presents STARS IN SHORTS, an incredible collection of short movies featuring some of the biggest actors such...
- published: 15 Sep 2012
- views: 8538
- author: FilmFestivalVideos
Colin Firth Honorary Fellow
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:59
- Updated: 03 Dec 2012
Drama Centre alumnus Colin Firth accepts an Honorary Fellow from University of the Arts London for his outstanding contribution to drama and performance. Drama Centre is part of Central Saint Martins and University of the Arts London.
http://wn.com/Colin_Firth_Honorary_Fellow
Drama Centre alumnus Colin Firth accepts an Honorary Fellow from University of the Arts London for his outstanding contribution to drama and performance. Drama Centre is part of Central Saint Martins and University of the Arts London.
- published: 20 Jul 2012
- views: 6902
- author: universityartslondon
Colin Firth and Ricky Gervais at the 2012 Golden Globes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:22
- Updated: 13 Nov 2012
Colin Firth and Ricky Gervais at the 2012 Golden Globes
http://wn.com/Colin_Firth_and_Ricky_Gervais_at_the_2012_Golden_Globes
Colin Firth and Ricky Gervais at the 2012 Golden Globes
- published: 16 Jan 2012
- views: 111509
- author: mvma98
Colin Firth & Cameron Diaz Interview - Gambit
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:37
- Updated: 25 Nov 2012
GLAMOUR.com speak to Cameron Diaz and Colin Firth about new movie Gambit, out 21st November 2012
http://wn.com/Colin_Firth_Cameron_Diaz_Interview_Gambit
GLAMOUR.com speak to Cameron Diaz and Colin Firth about new movie Gambit, out 21st November 2012
- published: 14 Nov 2012
- views: 1499
- author: glamour
Celebrities Attend Vanity Fair Oscars Party Part 2 Colin Firth Adrien Brody Gerar 0000 paparazzi
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:02
- Updated: 06 Dec 2012
Celebrities Attend Vanity Fair Oscars Party Part 2 Colin Firth Adrien Brody Gerar 0000 paparazzi
http://wn.com/Celebrities_Attend_Vanity_Fair_Oscars_Party_Part_2_Colin_Firth_Adrien_Brody_Gerar_0000_paparazzi
Celebrities Attend Vanity Fair Oscars Party Part 2 Colin Firth Adrien Brody Gerar 0000 paparazzi
- published: 05 Dec 2012
- views: 15
- author: BestCelebritiesVideo
Colin Firth and Livia Giuggioli The Times BFI London Film Festival - Screening of E
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:06
- Updated: 07 Dec 2012
Colin Firth and Livia Giuggioli The Times BFI London Film Festival - Screening of E
http://wn.com/Colin_Firth_and_Livia_Giuggioli_The_Times_BFI_London_Film_Festival_Screening_of_E
Colin Firth and Livia Giuggioli The Times BFI London Film Festival - Screening of E
- published: 06 Dec 2012
- views: 6
- author: StarsonEvents
Colin Firth: HOT STUFF!!
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:45
- Updated: 09 Dec 2012
A fun video for all Firthie Fans! Please watch in HD, comment and give a thumbs up if you like it - thanks a lot! My German friends can see it here: vimeo.com
http://wn.com/Colin_Firth_HOT_STUFF!!
A fun video for all Firthie Fans! Please watch in HD, comment and give a thumbs up if you like it - thanks a lot! My German friends can see it here: vimeo.com
- published: 12 Aug 2012
- views: 3269
- author: jacaranda2bloom
Cameron Diaz and Colin Firth discuss The Coen Brothers - Film 2012 - Episode 12 - BBC One
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:37
- Updated: 29 Nov 2012
More about this programme: www.bbc.co.uk Cameron Diaz and Colin Firth discuss the Coen Brothers' writing style and the challenges they faced with their screenplay for Gambit. The Coens have a unique voice, but sometimes it's not so easy for the actors to realise it.
http://wn.com/Cameron_Diaz_and_Colin_Firth_discuss_The_Coen_Brothers_Film_2012_Episode_12_BBC_One
More about this programme: www.bbc.co.uk Cameron Diaz and Colin Firth discuss the Coen Brothers' writing style and the challenges they faced with their screenplay for Gambit. The Coens have a unique voice, but sometimes it's not so easy for the actors to realise it.
- published: 14 Nov 2012
- views: 3449
- author: BBC
Gambit: Colin Firth, Cameron Diaz - On the Red Carpet with Edith Bowman, Premiere, 7 November 2012
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:58
- Updated: 21 Nov 2012
For Juliane and Tess! With many thanks to merirouge for all her efforts in transcribing the video.
http://wn.com/Gambit_Colin_Firth,_Cameron_Diaz_On_the_Red_Carpet_with_Edith_Bowman,_Premiere,_7_November_2012
For Juliane and Tess! With many thanks to merirouge for all her efforts in transcribing the video.
- published: 10 Nov 2012
- views: 891
- author: jacaranda2bloom
Colin Firth: A Wonderful Love Story (The Secret Laughter of Women)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:30
- Updated: 09 Dec 2012
Please, watch in HD.:) Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.
http://wn.com/Colin_Firth_A_Wonderful_Love_Story_The_Secret_Laughter_of_Women
Please, watch in HD.:) Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.
- published: 25 Oct 2011
- views: 42839
- author: merirouge
photo: AP / Todd Williamson
10 Dec 2012
MÉXICO, D.F., diciembre 9 (EL UNIVERSAL).- La Voz México, programa de talentos de Televisa, confirmó la muerte de la cantante Jenni Rivera, a través de su Twitter. "Que toquen fuerte las bandas, suelten por mí mariposas, apláudanme con sus palmas... http.//twitpic.com/bkmhl0 .Descanse en paz Jenni Rivera" ... Además, anunció un homenaje luctuoso dedicado a la cantante ... Descanse en Paz" ... ....(size: 2.1Kb)
photo: AP / Khalil Hamra
09 Dec 2012
Syria's rebel leaders have agreed to come under a united command in a bid to integrate diverse fighting groups and streamline the route for arms essential to their struggle against President Bashar al-Assad. The new body, expected to be announced officially on Sunday, hopes to form the basis of a united rebel front ... "It also aims to get the situation under control once the regime falls." ... 378 Source.. Agencies. Share ... News ... Egypt....(size: 18.6Kb)
photo: AP / Narciso Contreras
10 Dec 2012
December 10, 2012 -- Updated 1327 GMT (2127 HKT). (CNN) -- Syria is raising concern in two letters to the United Nations that the United States may be attempting to frame it for the use of chemical weapons, Syrian state-run media reported Monday. The letters, addressed to U.N ... The move by President Bashar al-Assad's government follows recent reports that Syrian forces appear to have begun preparing chemical weapons for use ... "The U.S ... 1. 2....(size: 11.5Kb)
photo: AP / Gustavo Ferrari
09 Dec 2012
Tens of thousands of Kuwaitis have staged a peaceful protest against the parliament elected last week under voting rules deemed unfair by the opposition. The opposition supporters demonstrated for the second week in a row as police watched the protest without interfering on Saturday ... The opposition says the amendments of the electoral law enables the government to control the outcome of polls ... 349 Source.. Agencies. Share ... News ... ....(size: 18.5Kb)
Chicago Tribune
10 Dec 2012
5 at the Palm Springs Convention Center ... He is also nominated for a Film Independent Spirit Award for the same role ... Past honorees of the Desert Palm Achievement Award include Jeff Bridges, Daniel Day-Lewis, Colin Firth and Sean Penn ... 3-14 ... ' ... ....(size: 1.7Kb)
PhysOrg
10 Dec 2012
Last April, Survival launched a campaign spearheaded by Britain's Oscar-winning actor Colin Firth to focus world attention on the plight of the Awa, warning they were threatened with "genocide" and "extinction." ... Brazil's National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) FUNAI estimates that there are 77 isolated indigenous tribes scattered across the Amazon ... ....(size: 1.7Kb)
noodls
10 Dec 2012
(Source. Survival International Charitable Trust) ... Save the Awá' ... In Spain, a big box containing the letter was given to embassy staff, to symbolize the volume of messages (nearly 50,000) that have been written to Brazil's Justice Minister since Survival and Oscar-winning actor Colin Firth launched a campaign to save the tribe in April ... Yet rapid illegal deforestation continues ... Note to editors. (pdf, 1.1 MB) ... distributed by ... (noodl....(size: 3.3Kb)
Screen Daily
10 Dec 2012
The star of Silver Linings Playbook will collect his honour at the 24th annual Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) gala on Jan 5 ... Past honourees of the Desert Palm Achievement Award include Jeff Bridges, Daniel Day-Lewis, Colin Firth, Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and John Travolta ... The festival is scheduled to run from Jan 3-14. Have your say. You must sign in to make a comment. Email Save. Related images. Email Share Save ... The Hobbit ... ....(size: 4.8Kb)
Digital Spy
10 Dec 2012
Gus Van Sant has signed on as executive producer of Laurence Anyways. He will lend his weight to the 2013 US release of Xavier Dolan's third movie, reports Deadline. The film concerns a woman's struggle to cope after her fiancé reveals that he wants to transition into a woman ... Watch a trailer for Laurence Anyways below. ... More ... Previous ... Colin Farrell 'Seven Psychopaths' interviewMiley Cyrus ... 01 ... 02 ... 03 ... Cameron diaz and Colin Firth in Gambit ... ....(size: 8.1Kb)
Digital Spy
10 Dec 2012
Zero Dark Thirty and Amour have scooped more awards. The Master, Lincoln and Argo have also received nods from the Boston Society of Film Critics (BSFC), New York Film Critics Online (NYFCO) and Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA) ... The latter group also honoured Mark Boal for his screenplay ... > Zero Dark Thirty Kyle Chandler ... More ... Colin Farrell 'Seven Psychopaths' interviewMiley Cyrus ... 01 ... Cameron diaz and Colin Firth in Gambit....(size: 8.3Kb)
Digital Spy
10 Dec 2012
Warning. This article contains spoilers that some readers may prefer to avoid. Please click here if you wish to continue. Martin Sheen will return for The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The actor has confirmed that he will reprise his role as Uncle Ben in the follow-up to the 2012 movie. "They've called me back," he told RTÉ Television ... Friday Fiver. More ... Colin Farrell 'Seven Psychopaths' interviewMiley Cyrus ... Cameron diaz and Colin Firth in Gambit ... ....(size: 8.5Kb)
Digital Spy
10 Dec 2012
Will Smith and son Jaden Smith's upcoming science fiction adventure After Earth has released its first trailer. M Night Shyamalan (The Last Airbender, The Sixth Sense) directs the movie, which centres on a father and son who crash land on an Earth that's been long-abandoned by the human race ... Today, he gets his chance." ... More ... Previous ... Colin Farrell 'Seven Psychopaths' interviewMiley Cyrus ... 01 ... 02 ... 03 ... Cameron diaz and Colin Firth in Gambit....(size: 8.5Kb)
Digital Spy
10 Dec 2012
Samuel L Jackson has expressed a desire to appear in Star Wars Episode 7. Disney has announced that it will release the next Star Wars film in 2015, based on a script written by Toy Story 3 scribe Michael Arndt ... "[I'm] totally geeked by the idea of there being more Star Wars," Jackson declared to E! News ... "[I could] be a ghost hologram ... 1 of 21 ... Colin Farrell 'Seven Psychopaths' interviewMiley Cyrus ... Cameron diaz and Colin Firth in Gambit....(size: 9.0Kb)
BBC News
10 Dec 2012
As he raises the curtain on a lengthy West End theatre season, Michael Grandage says Twitter helped him identify who was buying his £10 tickets ... "There are very few productions in my career to date that I want to revisit, and this was one of the them," says Grandage ... Genius, which will star Colin Firth and Michael Fassbender, is a literary drama based on the relationship between writer Thomas Wolfe and his editor Max Perkins....(size: 6.7Kb)
Digital Spy
10 Dec 2012
Bethenny Frankel has provided an update on the status of her daytime talkshow. The syndicated series Bethenny has been picked up following a test run this past summer on six Fox stations in the US, with Ellen DeGeneres serving as a producer. Frankel recently disclosed to Parade that she is hard at work planning Bethenny's season premiere ... > Cyndi Lauper's uncle passes away in Hurricane Sandy ... 01 ... Cameron diaz and Colin Firth in Gambit....(size: 8.1Kb)
Digital Spy
10 Dec 2012
MTV's new show Buckwild has been condemned by a West Virginia senator. The reality series has drawn comparisons to MTV's previous hit Jersey Shore in its documenting of the wild antics of young people in Sissonville, West Virginia. US Senator Joe Manchin sent a letter of objection to the network last week over concerns that Buckwild perpetuates negative stereotypes about Southern residents ... More ... Cameron diaz and Colin Firth in Gambit ... ....(size: 8.2Kb)
Digital Spy
10 Dec 2012
RuPaul is to play a guest role on ABC's Happy Endings. The actor, musician and drag queen will appear in an early 2013 episode of the sitcom, according to TVLine. RuPaul - full name RuPaul Andre Charles - will play a hairdresser who takes on Max (Adam Pally) as a new client ... The third season of Happy Endings airs on Tuesdays at 9/8c on ABC ... Who are the Brit Awards' best and worst ever hosts? ... More ... Cameron diaz and Colin Firth in Gambit ... ....(size: 8.2Kb)
A Darcy Before I Die - satirical poem by Ronnie Taheny (c) 2008
| Colin Firth CBE |
|
|---|---|
_(56)_Colin_Firth.jpg) Firth in 2009 |
|
| Born | Colin Andrew Firth (1960-09-10) 10 September 1960 (age 51) Grayshott, Hampshire, England, UK |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 1983–present |
| Spouse | Livia Giuggioli (1997–present; 2 children) |
| Partner | Meg Tilly (1989–1994; 1 child) |
| Children | 3 |
| Relatives | Kate Firth (sister) Jonathan Firth (brother) |
Colin Andrew Firth, CBE (born 10 September 1960) is an English film, television, and theatre actor. Firth gained wide public attention in the 1990s for his portrayal of Mr. Darcy in the 1995 television adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. In 2011, Firth received an Academy Award for his portrayal of King George VI in The King's Speech, a performance that also earned him the Golden Globe, BAFTA and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actor, amongst others. The previous year, he received his first Academy Award nomination, for his leading role in A Single Man, a performance that won him a BAFTA Award. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2011.
Contents |
Early life[link]
Firth was born in England. His mother, Shirley Jean (née Rolles), was a comparative religion lecturer at King Alfred's College Winchester (now the University of Winchester), and his father, David Norman Lewis Firth, was a history lecturer (also at King Alfred's) and education officer for the Nigerian Government.[1][2][3] Firth has a sister, Kate, and a younger brother, Jonathan, who is also an actor. Firth's parents were raised in India,[4] because his maternal grandparents, Congregationalist ministers, and his paternal grandfather, an Anglican priest, performed missionary work abroad.[5][6][7][8] Firth spent part of his childhood in Nigeria, where his father was teaching.[9]
He lived in St. Louis, Missouri when he was 11. He later attended the Montgomery of Alamein Secondary School (now Kings' School), a state comprehensive school in Winchester, Hampshire. Reflecting on his time at Barton Peveril College in Eastleigh, he said "My two years at Barton Peveril were among the two happiest years of my life".[10]
Career[link]
Film career[link]
In 1983, Firth starred as Guy Bennett in the award-winning London stage production of Another Country. In 1984, he made his film debut in the screen adaptation of the play, taking the role of Tommy Judd (opposite Rupert Everett as Bennett). In 1986, he starred with Sir Laurence Olivier in Lost Empires, a TV adaptation of J. B. Priestley's novel, then in 1987 he appeared alongside Kenneth Branagh in the film version of J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country. In 1989, he played the title role in the film Valmont, and was co-lead in the film Apartment Zero. Firth and other young British actors who were becoming established film actors such as Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, Bruce Payne and Paul McGann were dubbed the 'Brit Pack'.[11]
It was through the 1995 BBC television adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice that Firth gained wider renown. The serial was a major international success, and Firth gained heartthrob status[citation needed] because of his role as Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, in which he emerged in a wet shirt after a swim.[citation needed] This performance also made him the object of affection for fictional journalist Bridget Jones (created by Helen Fielding), an interest which carried on into the two novels featuring the Jones character. In the second novel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, the character even meets Firth in Rome. As something of an in-joke, when the novels were adapted for the cinema, Firth was cast as Jones's love interest, Mark Darcy.[citation needed] Continuing this in-joke, there was a dog called Mr Darcy in the film St. Trinian's, which Firth's character accidentally kills.[citation needed]
Firth had a supporting role in The English Patient (1996) and since then, has starred in films such as Fever Pitch (1997), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Relative Values (2000), Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), The Importance of Being Earnest (2002), Love Actually (2003), What a Girl Wants (2003), Hope Springs (2003), Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003), Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), Nanny McPhee (2005), Where the Truth Lies (2005), Then She Found Me (2007) with Helen Hunt, The Last Legion (2007) with Aishwarya Rai, And When Did You Last See Your Father? (2008), the film adaptation of Mamma Mia! (2008), and Easy Virtue, which screened at the Rome Film Festival to excellent reviews.[12] In 2009, he starred in A Christmas Carol, an adaptation of Charles Dickens's novel, using the performance capture procedure, playing Scrooge's optimistic nephew Fred.
He has also appeared in several television productions, including Donovan Quick (an updated version of Don Quixote) (1999) and Conspiracy (2001), for which he received an Emmy nomination.[13] Colin Firth's most recent role is in the Toronto International Film Festival debuted film, Genova.[14]
At the 66th Venice International Film Festival in 2009, Colin Firth was awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actor for his role in Tom Ford's A Single Man as a college professor grappling with solitude after his longtime partner dies. Fashion designer Tom Ford made his director's debut with this movie. This role has earned Firth career best reviews and Academy Award, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, BAFTA, and BFCA nominations; he won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in February 2010.[15]
Firth starred in the 2010 film The King's Speech as Prince Albert, Duke of York/King George VI. The film details him working to overcome his speech impediment while becoming monarch of the United Kingdom at the outbreak of World War II. At the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF),[16] the film was met with a standing ovation. The TIFF release of The King's Speech fell on Colin's 50th birthday and was called the "best 50th birthday gift".[17] On 16 January 2011, he won a Golden Globe for his performance in The King's Speech in the category of Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama. The Screen Actors Guild recognised Firth with the award for Best Male Actor for The King's Speech on 30 January 2011.[18] In February 2011, he won the best actor award at the 2011 BAFTA awards.[19] He received an Academy Award for Best Actor in a motion picture for The King's Speech on 27 February 2011.[20]
Firth appeared in the 2011 adaptation of the John le Carré novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, directed by Tomas Alfredson, also starring Gary Oldman and Tom Hardy.[21] In May 2011, Firth began filming Gambit – a remake of a previous film – written by Joel and Ethan Coen and directed by Michael Hoffman, co-starring Cameron Diaz and Alan Rickman
Other work[link]
In 2011, Firth collaborated with colleagues at the University College London to conduct a study probing differences in the volume of various brain regions in conservatives and liberals,[22][23] with the results suggesting that conservatives have greater amygdala volume and liberals have greater volume in their anterior cingulate cortex.
In 2012, Firth's audiobook performance of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair was released at Audible.com.[24]
Writer[link]
Firth's first published work, "The Department of Nothing", appeared in Speaking with the Angel (2000).[25] This collection of short stories was edited by Nick Hornby[26] and was published to benefit the TreeHouse Trust,[27] in aid of autistic children. Firth had previously met Hornby during the filming of the original Fever Pitch.[28][29] Colin Firth contributed with his writing for the book, We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples, released in 2009.[30] The book explores the culture of peoples around the world, portraying both its diversity and facing threats. It counts with the contributions of many western writers, such as Laurens van der Post, Noam Chomsky, Claude Lévi-Strauss; and also indigenous peoples, such as Davi Kopenawa Yanomami and Roy Sesana. The royalties from the sale of this book go to the indigenous rights organisation, Survival International.
Personal life[link]
Firth resides in Chiswick, London. In 1989, he entered into a romantic relationship with actress Meg Tilly, his co-star in Valmont. In 1990, she gave birth to a son, William "Will" Joseph Firth, and they made their home near the Lower Mainland of B.C., Canada. Firth remains in contact with Will and with Tilly's two other children. In 1994, after he and Tilly had separated, Firth became involved with actress Jennifer Ehle, his co-star in Pride and Prejudice; however, the two broke up and in 1997 Firth married Italian film producer/director Livia Giuggioli, and now lives in both London and Italy.[31] They have two sons, Luca (born March 2001) and Matteo (born August 2003).[citation needed] Firth started to learn Italian when he and Giuggioli began to date and he now is fluent in the language. Firth is a supporter of Southampton F.C..
On 13 January 2011, he was presented with the 2,429th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.[32]
In April 2011, Time magazine included Firth in its list of the world's 100 Most Influential People.[33]
Firth was made a Freeman of the City of London on 8 March 2012.[34]
Activism[link]
Firth has been a long-standing supporter of Survival International, a non-governmental organisation that defends the rights of tribal peoples.[35] Speaking in 2001, he said, "My interest in tribal peoples goes back many years... and I have supported [Survival] ever since."[36] In 2003, during the promotion of the movie Love Actually, he spoke in defense of the tribal people of Botswana, condemning the Botswana government's eviction of the Gana and Gwi Bushmen from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. He says of the Bushmen, "These people are not the remnants of a past era who need to be brought up to date. Those who are able to continue to live on the land that is rightfully theirs are facing the 21st century with a confidence that many of us in the so-called developed world can only envy."[35] He has also backed a Survival International campaign to press the Brazilian government to take more decisive action in defence of the Awá-Guajá people, whose land and livelihood is critically threatened by the actions of loggers.[37]
Firth has been involved in a campaign to stop the deportation of a group of asylum seekers, because he believed that they might be murdered on their return to the Democratic Republic of Congo.[38] Firth argued that "To me it's just basic civilisation to help people. I find this incredibly painful to see how we dismiss the most desperate people in our society. It's easily done. It plays to the tabloids, to the Middle-England xenophobes. It just makes me furious. And all from a government we once had such high hopes for".[39] As a result of the campaign, a Congolese nurse was given a last-minute reprieve from deportation.[40]
Firth has also been involved in the Oxfam[41] global campaign Make Trade Fair,[42] in which several other celebrities participated as well in order to bring more attention to the issues involved.[43] The campaign has focused on several trade practices seen as unfair to third world producers especially, including dumping, high import tariffs, and labour rights such as fair wages. Firth remains deeply committed to this cause, making efforts such as supporting fair trade coffee in his daily life, as he believes "[i]f you're going to sustain commitment to any of this, ... [y]ou've got to get involved on an ordinary every day basis."[44] He has further contributed to this cause by opening (with a few collaborators) an eco-friendly shop in West London, Eco.[45] The shop offers fair trade and eco-friendly goods, as well as expert advice on making spaces more energy efficient.
He was awarded an honorary degree on 19 October 2007 from the University of Winchester.[citation needed] In October 2009 at the London Film Festival, Firth launched a film and political activism website, Brightwide, along with his wife Livia.[46][47]
During to the 2010 General Election Firth announced his support for the Liberal Democrats, having previously been a Labour supporter, citing asylum and refugees' rights as a key reason for his change in affiliation.[48] In December 2010, Firth publicly dropped his support of the Liberal Democrats, citing their U-turn on tuition fees as one of the key reasons for his disillusionment. He also said that while he no longer supports the Liberal Democrats, he is currently without an affiliation.[49] Firth appeared in literature to support changing the British electoral system from first-past-the-post to alternative vote for electing Members of Parliament to the House of Commons in the unsuccessful Alternative Vote referendum in 2011.[50]
Colin is also committed to protecting the environment; in 2009 he joined the 10:10 project to support the movement calling for people to reduce their carbon footprint.
He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to drama.[51][52]
Filmography[link]
References[link]
- ^ "Actor Colin Firth is perhaps bes". Firthessence.net. http://www.firthessence.net/family.htm. Retrieved 3 May 2010. [dead link]
- ^ "Colin Firth's Lineage". Firthessence.net. http://www.firthessence.net/firthfile.html. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
- ^ "Colin Firth Biography (1960–)". Filmreference.com. http://www.filmreference.com/film/33/Colin-Firth.html. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
- ^ Karen. "Real Magazine interview with Colin McErlean (Aug 2002)". Firth.com. http://www.firth.com/articles/02realmag_816.html. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
- ^ lmw (7 May 2001). "Colin Firth – Fresh Air interview 2001". Hem.passagen.se. http://hem.passagen.se/lmw/freshair01.html. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
- ^ Karen. "Colin Firth: Bridget Jones' Sweetie Would Rather Play Bad Guys". Spring.net. http://www.spring.net/karenr/articles/entnewsdaily50401.html. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
- ^ Fresh Air from WHYY. "British Actor Colin Firth". NPR. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1506175. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
- ^ Karen (18 May 2002). "Globe and Mail – The Other Face of Colin Firth (May 18, 2002)". Firth.com. http://www.firth.com/articles/globeandmail51802.html. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
- ^ Stated in interview on Inside the Actors Studio, 2011
- ^ Jason Rainbow (2010-06-15). "College 'saved me', reveals actor Colin Firth". FE News. http://www.fenews.co.uk/fe-news/college-saved-me-reveals-actor-colin-firth. Retrieved 2012-04-26.
- ^ "The Brit Pack". Brucepayne.de. http://www.brucepayne.de/press/articles/facearticle1987.html. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
- ^ "Easy Virtue brings British humour to Rome Film Festival". www.reuters.com. http://easyvirtuereview.blogspot.com/. Retrieved 27 October 2008.
- ^ Colin Firth Emmy Award Winner
- ^ Colin Firth, Genova Interview. AOL Entertainment Canada[dead link]
- ^ "Bafta wins for Carey Mulligan and Colin Firth". BBC News. 21 February 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8526670.stm. Retrieved 14 February 2011.
- ^ Evans, Ian (2010), "Tom Hooper, Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush at the The King's Speech premiere at the 35th Toronto International Film Festival", DigitalHit.com, http://www.digitalhit.com/galleries/38/539/15, retrieved 2011-08-03
- ^ Friedman, Roger (11 September 2010). "Colin Firth Gets Best 50th Birthday Gift". Showbiz 411. http://www.showbiz411.com/2010/09/11/colin-firth-gets-best-50th-birthday-gift. Retrieved 14 September 2010.
- ^ Whitworth, Melissa (17 January 2011). "Golden Globes 2011: Colin Firth wins Best Actor as The Social Network takes four awards". Daily Telegraph (London). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/8260914/Golden-Globes-2011-Colin-Firth-wins-Best-Actor-as-The-Social-Network-takes-four-awards.html. Retrieved 14 February 2011.
- ^ Brown, Mark (14 February 2011). "Baftas 2011: The King's Speech sweeps the board". Guardian (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/feb/13/baftas-2011-the-kings-speech. Retrieved 14 February 2011.
- ^ Singh, Anita (28 February 2011). "Colin Firth takes Oscars crown as British film proves mother knows best". Daily Telegraph (London). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/oscars/8353278/Colin-Firth-takes-Oscars-crown-as-British-film-proves-mother-knows-best.html#. Retrieved 28 February 2011.
- ^ "Benedict Cumberbatch Joins 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy'". 16 August 2010. http://www.cinematical.com/2010/08/16/benedict-cumberbatch-joins-tinker-tailor-soldier-spy/. Retrieved 4 September 2010.
- ^ "Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults" 7 April 2011, Current Biology
- ^ "Brain and behaviour: The voter's grey matter" 23 June 2011, Nature
- ^ "Colin Firth lends voice to classic novel reading". CBS This Morning. 7 May 2012. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505270_162-57428912/colin-firth-lends-voice-to-classic-novel-reading/. Retrieved 7 May 2012.
- ^ lmw. "Colin Firth Career Timeline: Department of Nothing". Hem.passagen.se. http://hem.passagen.se/lmw/department_of_nothing.html. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
- ^ "Nick Hornby". Penguin.co.uk. http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/cs/uk/0/minisites/nickhornby/books/swta_synopsis.html#swta. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
- ^ "TreeHouse". Penguin.co.uk. http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/cs/uk/0/minisites/nickhornby/treehouse/index.html. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
- ^ "Colin Firth Biography". Tiscali.co.uk. http://www.tiscali.co.uk/entertainment/film/biographies/colin_firth_biog/9. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
- ^ Fever Pitch (1997)
- ^ "We Are One". Survival International. http://www.survivalinternational.org/weareone. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
- ^ Steiner, Susie (31 March 2001). "Twice Shy". The Guardian (London). http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,465976,00.html. Retrieved 20 May 2008.
- ^ "Colin Firth wins a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame". London: guardian.co.uk. 14 January 2011. Archived from the original on 18 January 2011. http://www.webcitation.org/5vqOQoXa1.
- ^ "The 2011 TIME 100". TIME Magazine. 21 April 2011. http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2066367_2066369_2066448,00.html. Retrieved 11 June 2011.
- ^ www.cityoflondon.gov.uk "Colin Firth becomes Freeman of the City of London" 1 March 2012, News release at City of London web site
- ^ a b "'Love Actually' star Colin Firth condemns Bushman evictions". Survival International. http://www.survival-international.org/news/24. Retrieved 27 February 2007.
- ^ "Audio". Survival International. http://www.survival-international.org/news/audio.
- ^ Chamberlain, Gethin (22 April 2012). "'They're killing us': world's most endangered tribe cries for help". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/22/brazil-rainforest-awa-endangered-tribe. Retrieved 22 April 2012.
- ^ Firth, Colin (26 February 2007). "We must stop a deportation that is likely to end in murder". The Independent (London). http://comment.independent.co.uk/letters/article2305539.ece. Retrieved 27 February 2007.
- ^ Johnson, Andrew (26 February 2007). "Colin Firth makes plea for nurse 'facing murder' in Congo". The Independent (London). http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2305575.ece. Retrieved 27 February 2007.
- ^ Spellman, Damian (27 February 2007). "Firth's intervention saves nurse from deportation". The Independent (London). http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article2308458.ece. Retrieved 27 February 2007.
- ^ "The King's Speech Star to Auction Himself for Charity". EF News International. http://www.efi-news.com/2011/11/kings-speech-star-to-auction-himself.html.
- ^ "Make Trade Fair – Oxfam International". maketradefair.com. http://www.maketradefair.com/en/index.php?file=dumped_colin.htm.
- ^ "Celebrities present 18 million-strong Make Trade Fair petition to World Trade boss in Hong Kong – Oxfam International". Oxfam International. http://www.oxfam.org/en/news/pressreleases2005/pr051212_bignoise.
- ^ "Colin Firth Profile in the Independent". firth.com. http://www.firth.com/articles/05indep_716.html.
- ^ Grainger, Lisa (17 November 2007). "Colin Firth's New Eco-Store". London: timesonline.co.uk. http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article2856825.ece. Retrieved 30 April 2010.
- ^ Brightwide web site
- ^ Dawtrey, Adam (22 September 2009). "The Rebirth of Colin Firth". London: guardian.co.uk. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/sep/22/colin-firth-oscars. Retrieved 30 April 2010.
- ^ Backers, Celebrity (16 March 2010). "Colin Firth on why he's stopped voting Labour and now supports the Lib Dems". Libdemvoice.org. http://www.libdemvoice.org/colin-firth-18389.html. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
- ^ Wintour, Patrick (14 December 2010). "Colin Firth: I no longer support the Liberal Democrats". The Guardian (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/dec/14/colin-firth-no-longer-support-liberal-democrats.
- ^ "Benjamin Zephaniah 'airbrushed from Yes to AV leaflets'". BBC News. 3 April 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12950712.
- ^ London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 59808. p. 7. 11 June 2011.
- ^ "Main list of the 2011 Queen's birthday honours recipients". BBC News UK. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/11_06_11honours_mainlist.pdf. Retrieved 11 June 2011.
Further reading[link]
- Teeman, Tim (20 September 2007). "Colin Firth's Darcy Dilemma". London: The Times. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article2490180.ece. Retrieved 23 September 2007.
External links[link]
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Colin Firth |
- Colin Firth at the Internet Movie Database
- Colin Firth at AllRovi
- Colin Firth Interview Part One and Part Two June 2010. Latest Colin Firth Interview Feb 2011 New Statesman
- Colin Firth Life in Pictures Interview recorded at BAFTA London – December 2010
- theartsdesk Q&A with Colin Firth Transcript of series of in-depth interviews, February 2011
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Firth, Colin |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | British actor |
| Date of birth | 10 September 1960 |
| Place of birth | Grayshott, Hampshire, UK |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
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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.
