Meryl Streep

Agnes Moorehead
Agnes Robertson Moorehead (December 6, 1900 – April 30, 1974) was an American actress. Although she began with the Mercury Theatre, appeared in more than seventy films beginning with Citizen Kane and on dozens of television shows during a career that spanned more than thirty years, Moorehead is most widely known to modern audiences for her role as the witch Endora in the series Bewitched.
While rarely playing leads in films, Moorehead's skill at character development and range earned her one Emmy Award and two Golden Globe awards in addition to four Academy Award and six Emmy Award nominations. Moorehead's transition to television won acclaim for drama and comedy. She could play many different types, but often portrayed haughty, arrogant characters.
Moorehead was born in Clinton, Massachusetts, of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh ancestry, to a Presbyterian clergyman, John Henderson Moorehead, and his wife, the former Mildred McCauley, who had been a singer. Moorehead later shaved six years off her age by claiming to have been born in 1906. Moorehead recalled her first public performance was at the age of three, reciting "The Lord's Prayer" in her father's church. The family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and Moorehead's ambition to become an actress grew "very strong". Her mother indulged her active imagination often asking, "Who are you today, Agnes?", while Moorehead and her sister would often engage in mimicry, often coming to the dinner table and imitating parishioners. Moorehead noted and was encouraged by her father's amused reactions. She joined the chorus of the St. Louis Municipal Opera Company, known as "The Muny". In addition to her interest in acting, she developed a lifelong interest in religion; in later years actors such as Dick Sargent would recall Moorehead arriving on the set with "the Bible in one hand and the script in the other".

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Al Pacino
Alfredo James "Al" Pacino (/pəˈtʃiːnɵ/; born April 25, 1940) is an American film and stage actor and director. He is famous for playing mobsters, including Michael Corleone in The Godfather trilogy and Tony Montana in Scarface, though he has also appeared several times on the other side of the law — as a police officer, a detective and a lawyer. His role as Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman won him the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1993 after receiving seven previous Oscar nominations, one of them being in the same year.
He made his feature film debut in the 1969 film Me, Natalie in a minor supporting role, before playing the leading role in the 1971 drama The Panic in Needle Park. Pacino made his major breakthrough when he was given the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather in 1972, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Other Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor were for Dick Tracy and Glengarry Glen Ross. Oscar nominations for Best Actor include The Godfather Part II, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, ...And Justice for All and Scent of a Woman.

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Alan Alda
Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo (born January 28, 1936), better known as Alan Alda, is an American actor, director, screenwriter, and author. A six-time Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award winner, he is best known for his role as Hawkeye Pierce in the TV series M*A*S*H. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook School of Journalism and a member of the advisory board of The Center for Communicating Science.
In 1996, Alda was ranked #41 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time.
Alda was born Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo in The Bronx, New York City. His father, Robert Alda (born Alphonso Giuseppe Giovanni Roberto D'Abruzzo), was an actor and singer, and his mother, Joan Browne, was a former showgirl. His father was of Italian descent and his mother was of Irish ancestry. His adopted surname, "Alda," is a portmanteau of ALphonso and D'Abruzzo. When Alda was seven years old, he contracted Poliomyelitis. To combat the disease, his parents administered a painful treatment regimen developed by Sister Elizabeth Kenny that consisted of applying hot woolen blankets to his limbs and stretching his muscles. Alda attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, New York. In 1956, he received his Bachelor of Science degree in English from Fordham College of Fordham University in the Bronx, where he was a student staff member of its FM radio station, WFUV. Alda's half-brother, Antony Alda, was born the same year and would also become an actor.

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Alan J. Pakula
Alan Jay Pakula (April 7, 1928 – November 19, 1998) was an American film director, writer and producer noted for his contributions to the conspiracy thriller genre.
Pakula started his Hollywood career as an assistant in the cartoon department at Warner Brothers. In 1957, he undertook his first production role for Paramount Pictures. In 1962, he produced To Kill a Mockingbird, for which he was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award. In 1969, he directed his first feature, The Sterile Cuckoo, starring Liza Minnelli.
In 1971, Pakula released the first installment of what would informally come to be known as his "paranoia trilogy". Klute, the story of a relationship between a private eye (played by Donald Sutherland) and a call girl (played by Jane Fonda, who won an Oscar for her performance), was a commercial and critical success. This was followed in 1974 by The Parallax View starring Warren Beatty, a labyrinthine post-Watergate thriller involving political assassinations. The film has been noted for its experimental use of hypnotic imagery in a celebrated film-within-a-film sequence in which the protagonist is inducted into the Parallax Corporation, whose main, albeit non-ostensible, enterprise is domestic terrorism.

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Alec Guinness
Sir Alec Guinness, CH, CBE (2 April 1914 – 5 August 2000) was an English actor. After an early career on the stage he was featured in several of the Ealing Comedies, including Kind Hearts and Coronets in which he played eight different characters. However, he was probably best known for his six collaborations with David Lean: Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations (1946), Fagin in Oliver Twist (1948), Col. Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor), Prince Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Yevgraf in Doctor Zhivago (1965), and Professor Godbole in A Passage to India (1984). In later years, he achieved fame with younger audiences for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in George Lucas’s Star Wars films.
Guinness was born at 155 Lauderdale Mansions South, Lauderdale Road, Maida Vale, London as Alec Guinness de Cuffe. His mother's maiden name was Agnes Cuff. She was born 8 December 1890 to Edward Cuff and Mary Ann Benfield. On Guinness's birth certificate, the space for the mother's name shows Agnes de Cuffe. The space for the infant's name (where first names only are given) says Alec Guinness. The column for name and surname of father is blank.

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Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood. On 19 April 1955, he became an American citizen while remaining a British subject.
Over a career spanning more than half a century, Hitchcock fashioned for himself a distinctive and recognisable directorial style. He pioneered the use of a camera made to move in a way that mimics a person's gaze, forcing viewers to engage in a form of voyeurism. He framed shots to maximise anxiety, fear, or empathy, and used innovative film editing. His stories frequently feature fugitives on the run from the law alongside "icy blonde" female characters. Many of Hitchcock's films have twist endings and thrilling plots featuring depictions of violence, murder, and crime, although many of the mysteries function as decoys or "MacGuffins" meant only to serve thematic elements in the film and the extremely complex psychological examinations of the characters. Hitchcock's films also borrow many themes from psychoanalysis and feature strong sexual undertones. Through his cameo appearances in his own films, interviews, film trailers, and the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he became a cultural icon. Hitchocks reputation as a filmmaker is offset by claims that he engaged in obsessive and controlling behaviour towards many of his leading ladies, and that in some cases this extended to physical abuse and sexual harrassment.

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Amanda Seyfried
Amanda Michelle Seyfried (born December 3, 1985) is an American actress and singer-songwriter. She began her career as a child model when she was 11, and at 15 began her career as an actress, starting off with uncredited roles and moving on to recurring roles on As the World Turns and All My Children.
In 2004, Seyfried made her film debut in Mean Girls. Her subsequent supporting roles were in independent films, such as Nine Lives (2005) and Alpha Dog (2006). She also had a recurring role in the UPN TV show Veronica Mars (2004–2006). Between 2006 and 2011, she was on HBO's series Big Love. After that, Seyfried appeared in her breakthrough role in the 2008 musical feature film Mamma Mia!. Other appearances include leading roles in Jennifer's Body (2009), Chloe (2009), Dear John (2010), Letters to Juliet (2010), Red Riding Hood (2011), and In Time (2011). She is scheduled to play Linda Lovelace in the biopic Lovelace and Cosette in Les Misérables, both to be released in 2012.
Seyfried was born in Allentown, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania on December 3, 1985. Her mother, Ann (née Sander), is an occupational therapist, and her father, Jack, is a pharmacist. She has German ancestry. Seyfried graduated in 2003 from Allentown's William Allen High School. Seyfried has an older sister, Jennifer Seyfried, who is a musician in the Philadelphia organ-driven rock band, Love City.

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Amy Adams
Amy Lou Adams (born August 20, 1974) is an American actress and singer. Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy to American parents, and began her performing career on stage in dinner theaters, before making her screen debut in the 1999 black comedy film Drop Dead Gorgeous. After a series of television guest appearances and roles in B movies, she was cast in the role of Brenda Strong in 2002's Catch Me If You Can, but her breakthrough role was in the 2005 independent film Junebug, playing Ashley Johnsten, for which she received critical acclaim and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Adams subsequently starred in Disney's 2007 film Enchanted, a critical and commercial success, and received a Golden Globe Award nomination for her performance as Princess Giselle. She received her second Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations the following year for her role as a young nun, Sister James, in Doubt. Though she has appeared in a range of dramatic and comedic roles, Adams has gained a reputation for playing characters with cheerful and sunny dispositions. Adams starred in Sunshine Cleaning with Emily Blunt and Alan Arkin, and the following year appeared as Amelia Earhart in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. She appeared in Julie & Julia in 2009 portraying writer Julie Powell followed by Leap Year in 2010. Her recent role as Charlene Fleming in The Fighter earned Adams her third Academy Award nomination, her third Golden Globe Award, second BAFTA Award, and fifth Screen Actors Guild Award nominations. In 2011, Adams appeared in the critically acclaimed musical film The Muppets alongside Jason Segel. She is scheduled to play Lois Lane in the upcoming Superman reboot Man of Steel in 2013.

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Amy Ryan
Amy Ryan (born November 30, 1969) is an American actress. She has been nominated for an Academy Award and Golden Globe for her performance in Gone Baby Gone (2007) and is also known for her roles in HBO's The Wire, playing Port Authority Officer Beadie Russell; HBO's In Treatment, playing psychiatrist Adele Brousse; and NBC's The Office, playing human resources representative Holly Flax.
Ryan was born in Queens, New York City. Ryan is her mother's maiden name. She is of English, Irish, and Polish descent. Growing up in the 1970s, Ryan and her sister delivered the Daily News by bike. At a young age, Ryan attended the Stagedoor Manor Performing Arts Center in upstate New York. At 17, she graduated from New York's High School of Performing Arts. Hired for the national tour of Biloxi Blues right out of high school, Ryan worked steadily off-Broadway for the next decade.
Ryan made her off-Broadway debut in the Westside Theatre's 1987 production of A Shayna Maidel, playing the role of Hanna. The following year she was seen in the Second Stage Theatre Company's revival of The Rimers of Eldritch. Additional off-Broadway credits include As Bees In Honey Drown, Crimes of the Heart and Saved. She also worked in regional theater, where she originated roles in new plays by Neil LaBute, Arthur Miller and Neil Simon. On Broadway she has appeared as Tess in The Sisters Rosensweig, Natasha in the 1997 revival of The Three Sisters, and Peggy in the 2001–2002 revival of The Women.

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Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie (

/dʒoʊˈliː/ joh-LEE, born Angelina Jolie Voight; June 4, 1975) is an American actress and director. She has received an Academy Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards, and was named Hollywood's highest-paid actress by Forbes in 2009 and 2011. Jolie promotes humanitarian causes, and is noted for her work with refugees as a Special Envoy and former Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). She has been cited as the world's "most beautiful" woman, a title for which she has received substantial media attention.
Jolie made her screen debut as a child alongside her father Jon Voight in Lookin' to Get Out (1982), but her film career began in earnest a decade later with the low-budget production Cyborg 2 (1993). Her first leading role in a major film was in the cyber-thriller Hackers (1995). She starred in the critically acclaimed biographical television films George Wallace (1997) and Gia (1998), and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the drama Girl, Interrupted (1999).

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Anjelica Huston
Anjelica Huston /ˈhjuːstən/ (born July 8, 1951) is an American actress. Huston became the third generation of her family to win an Academy Award, for her performance in 1985's Prizzi's Honor, joining her father, director John Huston, and grandfather, actor Walter Huston. She later was nominated in 1989 and 1990 for her acting in Enemies, a Love Story and The Grifters respectively. Among her roles, she starred as Morticia Addams in The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993), receiving Golden Globe nominations for both. Huston also played the Grand High Witch in the children's movie Witches, TheThe Witches in 1990 and is, more recently, known for her frequent collaborations with director Wes Anderson. She currently stars on the NBC musical drama, Smash.
Anjelica Huston was born in Santa Monica, California, and is the daughter of director and actor John Huston and Italian–American prima ballerina Enrica 'Ricki' (née Soma), from New York. Huston spent most of her childhood in Ireland and England. She grew up in Saint Clerans House near Craughwell, County Galway. In 1969, she began taking a few small roles in her father's movies. In that same year, her mother, who was 39 years old, died in a car accident, and Huston relocated to the US, where she modeled for several years. While she modeled, she worked with photographers such as Richard Avedon and Bob Richardson.

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Ann-Margret
Ann-Margret Olsson (born April 28, 1941) is a Swedish-American actress, singer and dancer whose professional name is Ann-Margret. She is best known for her roles in Bye Bye Birdie (1963), Viva Las Vegas (1964), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Carnal Knowledge (1971), and Tommy (1975). She has won five Golden Globe Awards and been nominated for two Academy Awards, two Grammy Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and six Emmy Awards. On August 21, 2010, she won her first Emmy Award for her guest appearance on Law & Order: SVU.
Ann-Margret was born in Stockholm, the daughter of Anna (née Aronsson) and Gustav Olsson, a native of Örnsköldsvik. While young she moved with her parents to Valsjöbyn, Jämtlands län, which she later described as a small town "of lumberjacks and farmers high up near the Arctic Circle". Her father worked in the United States during his youth and moved there again in 1942, working with the Johnson Electrical Company, while his wife and daughter stayed behind.
Ann-Margret and her mother moved to the United States in November 1946, and her father took her to Radio City Music Hall on the day they arrived. They settled just outside of Chicago in Wilmette, Illinois. She became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1949 and took her first dance lessons at the Marjorie Young School of Dance, showing natural ability from the start, easily mimicking all the steps. Her parents were supportive and her mother handmade all her costumes. Ann-Margret's mother became a funeral parlor receptionist after her husband suffered a severe injury on his job. While a teenager, Ann-Margret appeared on the Morris B. Sachs Amateur Hour, Don McNeill's Breakfast Club and Ted Mack's Amateur Hour.

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Anna Kendrick
Anna Kendrick (born August 9, 1985) is an American actress. She rose to fame after her performance as Natalie Keener in Up in the Air, for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Her other work includes The Twilight Saga, Camp, Rocket Science, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, 50/50, and the Broadway musical High Society.
Kendrick "caught the [acting] bug" at the age of 10, when she caught a bus from Portland, Maine, to New York City so that she could attend auditions. Kendrick's first acting role was as Dinah in the Broadway musical High Society in August 1998 when she was 12 years old, a performance for which she earned Theatre World Award, Drama Desk Award, and Tony Award nominations, making her the third-youngest Tony Award nominee.
Kendrick went on to appear in a number of other theater productions, including the musical A Little Night Music, before making her film debut in the 2003 musical comedy Camp, for which she was nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category at the 2004 Chlotrudis Awards and Best Debut Performance Independent Spirit Award for her portrayal of Fritzi Wagner.

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Anna Magnani
Anna Magnani (Italian pronunciation: [ˈanna maɲˈɲani]; 7 March 1908 – 26 September 1973) was an Italian stage and film actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress, along with four other international awards, for her portrayal of a Sicilian widow in The Rose Tattoo.
Born in Rome, she worked her way through Rome's Academy of Dramatic Art by singing at night clubs. During her career, her only child was stricken by polio when he was 18 months old and remained crippled.
She was referred to as "La Lupa," the "perennial toast of Rome" and a "living she-wolf symbol" of the cinema. Time magazine described her personality as "fiery", and drama critic Harold Clurman said her acting was "volcanic". In the realm of Italian cinema, she was "passionate, fearless, and exciting," an actress that film historian Barry Monush calls "the volcanic earth mother of all Italian cinema." Director Roberto Rossellini called her "the greatest acting genius since Eleonora Duse". Playwright Tennessee Williams became an admirer of her acting and wrote The Rose Tattoo specifically for her to star in, a role for which she received her first Oscar in 1955.

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Anne Bancroft
Anne Bancroft (September 17, 1931 – June 6, 2005) was an American actress associated with the method acting school, which she had studied under Lee Strasberg. Respected for her acting prowess and versatility, Bancroft was often acknowledged for her work in film, theatre and television. She won one Academy Award, three BAFTA Awards, two Golden Globes, two Tony Awards and two Emmy Awards, and several other awards and nominations.
She made her film debut in Don't Bother to Knock (1952) and, following a string of supporting film roles during the 1950s, won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Miracle Worker (1962), receiving subsequent nominations for her roles in The Pumpkin Eater (1964), The Graduate (1967), The Turning Point (1977), and Agnes of God (1985). Bancroft's other acclaimed movies as a lead actress include Young Winston (1972), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975), To Be or Not to Be (1983), and 84 Charing Cross Road (1987).
Later in her career, she made the transition back to supporting roles in theatrical films such as Point of No Return (1993), Home for the Holidays (1995), Great Expectations (1998), Antz (1998), Keeping the Faith (2000), and Heartbreakers (2001). She also starred in seven television films, the last of which was The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (2003) for which she received Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations.

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Anne Heche
Anne Celeste Heche (

/ˈheɪʃ/ HAYSH; born May 25, 1969) is an American actress, director, and screenwriter. She started her career on the daytime soap opera Another World, for which she won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1991. Heche gradually landed supporting roles in feature films, and in 1997 appeared in I Know What You Did Last Summer, Wag the Dog, Donnie Brasco and Volcano. Her first leading role in a major Hollywood film was Six Days Seven Nights (1998)—which has remained her highest-profile film role to date. Following a supporting role in the film John Q. (2002), she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for her performance in the TV movie Gracie's Choice (2004), and starred in the 2006–2008 TV series Men in Trees. Her most recent film roles include Spread (2009), The Other Guys (2010), and Cedar Rapids (2011); she currently appears in the HBO cable TV series Hung.
Heche was beginning to establish herself in films during the late 1990s, when she began a highly publicized relationship with Ellen DeGeneres. In 2001, a year after her break-up with DeGeneres, Heche married cameraman Coleman Laffoon, with whom she had a son. Since their separation in 2007 (they divorced in 2009), she has lived with actor James Tupper, with whom she also has a son.

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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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Anouk Aimée
Anouk Aimée (born 27 April 1932) is a French film actress. Aimée has appeared in 70 films since 1947. She began her film career in 1947 at age 14. In 1958, she portrayed the tragic artist Jeanne Hébuterne in the film Les Amants de Montparnasse. She appeared in La Dolce Vita, 8½ and Jacques Demy's Lola.
She won the 1967 Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Drama and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the film that brought her international fame, A Man and a Woman. She was awarded the Award for Best Actress at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival for her performance in Marco Bellocchio's Salto nel vuoto (Leap Into The Void), her co-star Michel Piccoli winning the Best Actor Prize.
She was born Françoise Sorya Dreyfus in Paris, France, the daughter of Jewish actor Henri Murray (né Dreyfus) and Geneviève Sorya (née Durand).
At age fourteen, Françoise Dreyfus played the role of "Anouk" in La Maison sous la mer, and she kept the name afterwards. After secondary studies in England, she studied dramatic art and dance with Andrée Bauer-Thérond. After playing in a film by Marcel Carné which was never released, La Fleur de l'âge, Anouk met Jacques Prévert, screenwriter for that film, who suggested that she take the last name Aimée.

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Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Russian: Анто́н Па́влович Че́хов, pronounced [ɐnˈton ˈpavləvʲɪtɕ ˈtɕexəf]; 29 January 1860 – 15 July 1904) was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."
Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text."

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Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include plays such as All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (one-act, 1955; revised two-act, 1956).
Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, a period during which he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Prince of Asturias Award, and was married to Marilyn Monroe.
Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in Harlem, New York City, the second of three children of Isidore and Augusta Miller, Polish-Jewish immigrants. His father owned a women's clothing manufacturing business employing some 400 people. He became a wealthy and respected man in the community. (BBC TV Interview; Miller and Yentob; 'Finishing the Picture,' 2004) The family, including his younger sister Joan, lived on East 110th Street in Manhattan and owned a summer house in Far Rockaway, Queens. They employed a chauffeur. In the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the family lost almost everything and moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn. As a teenager, Miller delivered bread every morning before school to help the family. After graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School, he worked at several menial jobs to pay for his college tuition.

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Audrey Hepburn
Audrey Hepburn (born Audrey Kathleen Ruston; 4 May 1929 – 20 January 1993) was a British actress and humanitarian. Although modest about her acting ability, Hepburn remains one of the world's most famous actresses of all time who was ranked as the third greatest female screen legend in the history of American cinema. Remembered as both a film and fashion icon of the twentieth century, Hepburn redefined glamour with "elfin" features and a gamine waif-like figure that inspired designs by Givenchy and earned her place in the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame.
Born in Ixelles, a district of Brussels, Hepburn spent her childhood between Belgium, England and the Netherlands, including German-occupied Arnhem during the Second World War, where she studied ballet with Sonia Gaskell in Amsterdam before moving to London in 1948 to continue ballet training with Marie Rambert and perform as a chorus girl in West End musical theatre productions.
After appearing in several British films and starring in the 1951 Broadway play Gigi, Hepburn gained instant Hollywood stardom for playing the Academy Award-winning lead role in Roman Holiday (1953). Later performing in Sabrina (1954), The Nun's Story (1959), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Charade (1963), My Fair Lady (1964) and Wait Until Dark (1967), Hepburn became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age who received Academy Award, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations and accrued a Tony Award for her theatrical performance in the 1954 Broadway play Ondine. Hepburn remains one of few people who have won Academy, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Awards.

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Austin Pendleton
Austin Pendleton (born March 27, 1940) is an American film, television, and stage actor, a playwright, and a theatre director and instructor.
Pendleton was born in Warren, Ohio, the son of Frances Manchester Pendleton, a professional actress, and Thorn Pendleton, who ran a tool company. Pendleton is a graduate of Yale University, where he was a member of Scroll and Key Society. As a stage actor, he has appeared in The Last Sweet Days of Isaac (for which he won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance and an Obie Award ), The Diary of Anne Frank, Grand Hotel, Goodtime Charley, The Little Foxes, The Sunset Limited, Fiddler on the Roof, and Up from Paradise.
Pendleton penned the plays Uncle Bob, Booth, and Orson's Shadow, all of which were staged off-Broadway. His direction of Elizabeth Taylor and Maureen Stapleton in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes garnered him a Tony Award nomination. Additional directing credits include Spoils of War by Michael Weller, The Runner Stumbles by Milan Stitt, and The Size of the World by Charles Evered.

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Barbara Bel Geddes
Barbara Bel Geddes (October 31, 1922 - August 8, 2005) was an American actress, artist and children's author. She is best known for her role in the television drama series Dallas as matriarch Eleanor "Miss Ellie" Ewing. Bel Geddes also starred in the original Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the role of Maggie. Her notable films included Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) and I Remember Mama (1948). She was the recipient of several acting awards and nominations throughout her career.
Bel Geddes was born in New York City, the daughter of Helen Belle (née Schneider) and stage and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes. She married theatrical manager Carl Sawyer (aka Carl Schreuer) in 1944; they had one daughter, Susan. They divorced in 1951. Later that year, she married stage director Windsor Lewis with whom she had a daughter, Betsy. When Lewis became ill in 1967, Bel Geddes suspended her career to care for him until his death in 1972.
Bel Geddes came to prominence in the 1946 Broadway production of Deep Are The Roots. The performance garnered her the Clarence Derwent Award, and the Donaldson Award (forerunner of the Tony Awards) presented to her by Laurette Taylor, for "Outstanding Achievement in The Theatre". From 1951 to 1953, Bel Geddes played 924 performances of the Otto Preminger hit comedy The Moon Is Blue. In 1956, she created the role of Maggie "The Cat" in Elia Kazan's original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and in 1961 created the title role in the Jean Kerr comedy Mary, Mary which became Broadway's longest-running show with over 1,500 performances. Both roles earned her Tony Award nominations. Other highlights include John Steinbeck's Burning Bright, Edward Albee's Everything in the Garden and Silent Night, Lonely Night with Henry Fonda.

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Barbara Cook
Barbara Cook (born October 25, 1927) is an American singer and actress who first came to prominence in the 1950s after starring in the original Broadway musicals Candide (1956) and The Music Man (1957) among others, winning a Tony Award for the latter. She continued performing mostly in theatre until the mid 1970s, when she began a second career that continues to this day as a cabaret and concert singer. She has also made numerous recordings.
During her years as Broadway’s leading ingénue Cook was lauded for her excellent lyric soprano voice. She was particularly admired for her vocal agility, wide range, warm sound, and emotive interpretations. As she has aged her voice has taken on a darker quality, even in her head voice, that was less prominent in her youth. Today Cook is widely recognized as one of the "premier interpreters" of musical theatre songs and standards, in particular the songs of composer Stephen Sondheim. Her subtle and sensitive interpretations of American popular song continue to earn high praise even into her eighties. She was named an honoree at the 2011 Kennedy Center Honors.

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Barbara Hershey
Barbara Hershey (born Barbara Lynn Herzstein; February 5, 1948), also known as Barbara Seagull, is an American actress. In a career spanning nearly 50 years, she has played a variety of roles on television and in cinema, in several genres including westerns and comedies. She began acting at age 17 in 1965, but did not achieve much critical acclaim until the latter half of the 1980s. By that time, the Chicago Tribune referred to her as "one of America's finest actresses."
Hershey was awarded an Emmy and a Golden Globe for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries/TV Film for her role in A Killing in a Small Town (1990). She has been nominated for two more Golden Globes: in 1989 for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Mary Magdalene in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, and for her role in Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady (1996). For the latter film, she was also nominated for an Academy Award and she won a Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress. In addition, she has won two Best Actress awards at the Cannes Film Festival for her roles in Shy People (1987) and A World Apart (1988). She also featured in both Woody Allen's critically acclaimed Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Garry Marshall's melodrama Beaches (1988).

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Barbara Stanwyck
Barbara Stanwyck (July 16, 1907 – January 20, 1990) was an American actress. She was a film and television star, known during her 60-year career as a consummate and versatile professional with a strong screen presence, and a favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang and Frank Capra. After a short but notable career as a stage actress in the late 1920s, she made 85 films in 38 years in Hollywood, before turning to television.
Stanwyck was nominated for the Academy Award four times, and won three Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe. She was the recipient of honorary lifetime awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1981, the American Film Institute in 1987, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Golden Globes, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the Screen Actors Guild. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and is ranked as the eleventh greatest female star of all time by the American Film Institute.
Barbara Stanwyck was born Ruby Catherine Stevens in Brooklyn, New York on July 16, 1907. She was the fifth and youngest child of Catherine Ann (née McPhee) and Byron E. Stevens; the couple were working-class, her father a native of Massachusetts and her mother an immigrant from Nova Scotia, Canada. Stanwyck had English and Scottish ancestry. When she was four, her mother was killed when a drunken stranger pushed her off a moving streetcar. Two weeks after the funeral, Byron Stevens joined a work crew digging the Panama canal and was never seen again. Ruby and her brother Byron were raised by their elder sister Mildred, five years Ruby's senior. When Mildred got a job as a John Cort showgirl, Ruby and Byron were placed in a series of foster homes (as many as four in a year), from which Ruby often ran away.

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Barbara Sukowa
Barbara Sukowa (born 2 February 1950, Bremen, Germany) is a German theatre and film actress.
Sukowa's stage debut was in Berlin in 1971, in a production of Peter Handke's Der Ritt über den Bodensee. Günter Beelitz invited her to join the ensemble of the Darmstädter National Theatre in the same year. She also worked in Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg, in collaboration with directors such as Luc Bondy and Ivan Nagel. Her roles included Marion in Büchner's Danton's Death and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Other Shakespeare roles in Europe were Rosalind in As You Like It and Desdemona in Othello. Sukowa also performed in Ibsen's The Master Builder. In English, she has worked in a production of The Cherry Orchard (Princeton, New Jersey, 2000).
In addition to her stage work, Sukowa is well known for her performances in films from the New German Cinema. She portrayed Mieze in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), which earned her the German best young actress award. Her performance of the title role in Fassbinder’s Lola earned her a German Film Awards (Gold) award. Her performance in Margarethe von Trotta’s film Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane, 1981) earned her a best actress award at the Venice Film Festival. In 1985 she appeared in the mini-series Space based on James A Michener's novel. She received best actress honours at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival for her work in von Trotta's film Rosa Luxemburg.

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Barbra Streisand
Barbra Joan Streisand (/ˈstraɪsænd/; born April 24, 1942) is an American singer, actress, writer, film producer and director. She has won two Academy Awards, eight Grammy Awards, five Emmy Awards including one Daytime Emmy, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Peabody Award, and is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award.
She is one of the most commercially and critically successful entertainers in modern entertainment history, with more than 71.5 million albums shipped in the United States and 140 million albums sold worldwide. She is the best-selling female artist on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Top Selling Artists list, the only female recording artist in the top ten, and the only artist outside of the rock and roll genre. Along with Frank Sinatra, Cher, and Shirley Jones, she shares the distinction of being awarded an acting Oscar and also recording a number-one single on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.

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Beatrice Straight
Beatrice Whitney Straight (August 2, 1914 – April 7, 2001) was an American theatre, film, and television actress. Hers remains the shortest acting performance in a film to win an Oscar. In her winning role in the 1976 film Network, she was on screen for five minutes and forty seconds, the shortest time ever for the winner of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She also received an Emmy nomination for her role in The Dain Curse. Straight can also be recognized as Dr. Lesh in Poltergeist.
Born in Old Westbury, New York, Straight was the daughter of investment banker Willard Dickerman Straight and Dorothy Payne Whitney. She was four years old when her father died in France of influenza during the great epidemic while serving with the US Army during World War I.
Following her mother's remarriage to British agronomist Leonard K. Elmhirst in 1925, the family moved to England. It was there that Straight was educated and began acting in amateur theater productions.
Returning to the United States, she made her Broadway debut in 1939 in the play The Possessed. Most of her theatre work was in the classics, including Twelfth Night (1941), Macbeth, and The Crucible (1953), for which she won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play.

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Ben Brantley
Benjamin D. "Ben" Brantley (born October 26, 1954) is an American journalist and the chief theater critic of The New York Times.
Born in Durham, North Carolina, Brantley received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Brantley began his journalism career as a Summer Intern at the Winston-Salem Sentinel and, in 1975, became an Editorial Assistant at The Village Voice. At Women's Wear Daily, he was a reporter and then editor (1978-January 1983), and later became the European Editor, publisher, and Paris Bureau Chief until June 1985.
For the next eighteen months, Brantley freelanced, writing regularly for ELLE, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker before joining The Times as a Drama Critic (August 1993). He was elevated to Chief Theater Critic three years later.
Brantley is the editor of The New York Times Book of Broadway: On the Aisle for the Unforgettable Plays of the Last Century, a compilation of 125 reviews published by St. Martin's Press in 2001. He received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 1996-1997.

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Ben Younger
Ben Younger (born October 7, 1972) is an American screenwriter and film director.
Younger was born in Brooklyn, and raised in a Modern Orthodox Jewish household in Eltingville, Staten Island. He attended a yeshiva, before entering Queens College, part of the City University of New York, where he studied political science. While at university, he started performing stand-up comedy. After leaving university, he set his sights on a career in politics, taking on a role as a policy analyst for the New York City comptroller's office, where he served as a legislative aide to Alan Hevesi. After that, he successfully managed the State Assembly campaign for Queens Democrat Melinda Katz, becoming, at 21, the city's youngest ever campaign manager.
Despite his success, Younger became disenchanted with politics, and by 1995 started to seek a creative outlet that would rekindle the excitement he felt as a stand-up comedian. He wrote and directed two short films, Maestro and L & M, as well as working on a number of feature films as a grip, and directing music videos and commercials.

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Bernadette Peters
Bernadette Peters (born Bernadette Lazzara; February 28, 1948) is an American actress, singer and children's book author from Ozone Park, Queens, New York. Over the course of a career that has spanned five decades, she has starred in musical theatre, films and television, as well as performing in solo concerts and recordings. She is one of the most critically acclaimed Broadway performers, having received nominations for seven Tony Awards, winning two, and nine Drama Desk Awards, winning three. Four of the Broadway cast albums on which she has starred have won Grammy Awards.
Regarded by many as the foremost interpreter of the works of Stephen Sondheim, Peters is particularly noted for her roles on the Broadway stage, including Mack and Mabel, Sunday in the Park with George, Song and Dance, Into the Woods and Annie Get Your Gun.
Peters first performed on the stage as a child and then a teenage actor in the 1960s, and in film and television in the 1970s. She was praised for this early work and for appearances on The Muppet Show, The Carol Burnett Show and in other television work, and for her roles in films like Silent Movie, The Jerk, Pennies from Heaven and Annie. In the 1980s, she returned to the theatre, where she became one of the best-known Broadway stars over the next three decades. She also has recorded six solo albums and several singles, as well as many cast albums, and performs regularly in her own solo concert act. Peters also continues to act in films and on television, where she has been nominated for three Emmy Awards and three Golden Globe Awards, winning once.

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Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht (German: [ˈbɛɐ̯tɔlt ˈbʁɛçt] (

listen); born

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (help·info); 10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956) was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.
An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble – the post-war theatre company operated by Brecht and his wife, long-time collaborator and actress Helene Weigel.
Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, (about 50 miles (80 km) north-west of Munich) to a conventionally-devout Protestant mother and a Catholic father (who had been persuaded to have a Protestant wedding). His father worked for a paper mill, becoming its managing director in 1914. Thanks to his mother's influence, Brecht knew the Bible, a familiarity that would impact on his writing throughout his life. From her, too, came the "dangerous image of the self-denying woman" that recurs in his drama. Brecht's home life was comfortably middle class, despite what his occasional attempt to claim peasant origins implied. At school in Augsburg he met Caspar Neher, with whom he formed a lifelong creative partnership, Neher designing many of the sets for Brecht's dramas and helping to forge the distinctive visual iconography of their epic theatre.

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Bette Davis
Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis (April 5, 1908 – October 6, 1989) was an American actress of film, television and theater. Noted for her willingness to play unsympathetic characters, she was highly regarded for her performances in a range of film genres, from contemporary crime melodramas to historical and period films and occasional comedies, although her greatest successes were her roles in romantic dramas.
After appearing in Broadway plays, Davis moved to Hollywood in 1930, but her early films for Universal Studios were unsuccessful. She joined Warner Bros. in 1932 and established her career with several critically acclaimed performances. In 1937, she attempted to free herself from her contract and although she lost a well-publicized legal case, it marked the beginning of the most successful period of her career. Until the late 1940s, she was one of American cinema's most celebrated leading ladies, known for her forceful and intense style. Davis gained a reputation as a perfectionist who could be highly combative, and confrontations with studio executives, film directors and costars were often reported. Her forthright manner, clipped vocal style and ubiquitous cigarette contributed to a public persona which has often been imitated and satirized.

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Bette Midler
Bette Midler (born December 1, 1945) is an American singer, actress, and comedian, also known by her informal stage name, The Divine Miss M. She became famous as a cabaret and concert headliner, and went on to star in successful and acclaimed films such as The Rose, Ruthless People, Beaches, and For The Boys. During her more than forty-year career, Midler has been nominated for two Academy Awards, and won three Grammy Awards, four Golden Globes, three Emmy Awards, and a special Tony Award. She has sold over 30 million albums worldwide. Her voice type is categorized as deep mezzo soprano.
Midler was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her parents moved from Paterson, New Jersey to Honolulu before she was born, and hers was one of the few Jewish families in a mostly Asian neighborhood. Her mother, Ruth (née Schindel), was a seamstress and housewife, and her father, Fred Midler, worked at a Navy base in Hawaii as a painter. She was named after actress Bette Davis, though Davis pronounced her first name in two syllables, and Midler uses one, /ˈbɛt/. She was raised in Aiea and attended Radford High School, in Honolulu. She was voted "Most Talkative" in the 1961 school Hoss Election, and in her Senior Year (Class of 1963), "Most Dramatic". Midler majored in drama at the University of Hawaii, but left after three semesters. She earned money in the 1966 film Hawaii as an extra, playing an uncredited seasick passenger named Miss David Buff.

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Beverly Sills
Beverly Sills (May 25, 1929 – July 2, 2007) was an American operatic soprano whose peak career was between the 1950s and 1970s. In her prime she was the only real rival to Joan Sutherland as the leading bel canto stylist.
Although she sang a repertoire from Handel and Mozart to Puccini, Massenet and Verdi, she was known for her performances in coloratura soprano roles in live opera and recordings. Sills was largely associated with the operas of Donizetti, of which she performed and recorded many roles. Her signature roles include the title role in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, the title role in Massenet's Manon, Marie in Donizetti's La fille du régiment, the three heroines in Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann, Rosina in Rossini's The Barber of Seville, Violetta in Verdi's La traviata, and most notably Elisabetta in Roberto Devereux.
After retiring from singing in 1980, she became the general manager of the New York City Opera. In 1994, she became the Chairman of Lincoln Center and then, in 2002, of the Metropolitan Opera, stepping down in 2005. Sills lent her celebrity to further her charity work for the prevention and treatment of birth defects.

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Bill T. Jones
Bill T. Jones (born February 15, 1952) is an American artistic director, choreographer and dancer.
Jones was born in Bunnell, Florida and his family moved North as part of the Great Migration in the first half of the twentieth century. They settled in Wayland, New York, where Jones attended Wayland High School. He began his dance training at Binghamton University, where he studied classical ballet and modern dance.
Jones choreographed and performed worldwide as a soloist and duet company with his late partner, Arnie Zane before forming the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1982.
Creating more than 100 works for his own company, Jones has also choreographed for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, AXIS Dance Company, Boston Ballet, Lyon Opera Ballet, Berlin Opera Ballet and Diversions Dance Company, among others. In 1995, Jones directed and performed in a collaborative work with Toni Morrison and Max Roach, Degga, at Alice Tully Hall, commissioned by Lincoln Center’s "Serious Fun" Festival. His collaboration with Jessye Norman, How! Do! We! Do!, premiered at New York’s City Center in 1999.

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Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder (22 June 1906 – 27 March 2002) was an Austro-Hungarian born American filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, artist, and journalist, whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age. Wilder is one of only five people to have won Academy Awards as producer, director, and writer for the same film (The Apartment).
Wilder became a screenwriter in the late 1920s while living in Berlin. After the rise of Nazi Party, Wilder, who was Jewish, left for Paris, where he made his directorial debut. He relocated to Hollywood in 1933, and in 1939 he had a hit when he co-wrote the screenplay to the screwball comedy Ninotchka. Wilder established his directorial reputation after helming Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir he co-wrote with mystery novelist Raymond Chandler. Wilder earned the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the adaptation of a Charles R. Jackson story The Lost Weekend, about alcoholism. In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the critically acclaimed Sunset Boulevard.

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Brenda Blethyn
Brenda Anne Blethyn, OBE (born Brenda Anne Bottle; 20 February 1946) is an English actress who has worked in theatre, television and film. Blethyn has received two Academy Award nominations, two SAG Award nominations, two Emmy Award nominations and three Golden Globe Award nominations, winning one. In addition, she has won a BAFTA, an Empire Award and a Golden Lion, and has earned a Theatre World Award and both a Critics' Circle Theatre Award and a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for her theatrical work.
Born into a working class home, Blethyn pursued an administrative career until her early 30s before enrolling in the Guildford School of Acting after the dissolution of her marriage in 1973. She subsequently joined the Royal National Theatre and received credits for her performances in Troilus and Cressida (1976) and Mysteries (1979). In 1981, Blethyn earned her first critical acclaim for Steaming.
In 1980, Blethyn made her television debut in Mike Leigh's film Grown-Ups; then, after a modest number of guest spots in several productions, in the mid-1980s she garnered leading roles in the short-living sitcoms Chance in a Million and The Labours of Erica. Having followed her big screen debut with smaller supporting roles in films such as The Witches (1990) and A River Runs Through It (1992), she made her real cinema breakthrough with her role in the 1996 dramedy Secrets & Lies, for which she received rave reviews.

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Bruce Willis
Walter Bruce Willis (born March 19, 1955) is a German-born American actor, producer, and musician. His career began in television in the 1980s and has continued both in television and film since, including comedic, dramatic, and action roles. He is well known for the role of John McClane in the Die Hard series, which were mostly critical and uniformly financial successes. He has also appeared in over sixty films, including box office successes like Pulp Fiction (1994), 12 Monkeys (1995), The Fifth Element (1997), Armageddon (1998), The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), Sin City (2005), Over the Hedge (2006) and Red (2010).
Motion pictures featuring Willis have grossed US$2.64 billion to 3.05 billion at North American box offices, making him the ninth highest-grossing actor in a leading role and twelfth highest including supporting roles. He is a two-time Emmy Award–winning, Golden Globe Award–winning and four-time Saturn Award–nominated actor. Willis was married to actress Demi Moore and they had three daughters before their divorce in 2000, following thirteen years of marriage. He is currently married to model Emma Heming, with whom he has one daughter.

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Bryan Greenberg
Bryan E. Greenberg (born May 24, 1978) is an American actor and musician, known for his starring role as Ben Epstein in the HBO original series How to Make It in America as well as a recurring role as Jake Jagielski in the The WB TV series One Tree Hill and as Nick Garrett on the short-lived ABC drama October Road. His film work includes Friends with Benefits, The Good Guy, Bride Wars, Nobel Son and The Perfect Score.
Greenberg was born in Omaha, Nebraska to psychologists Denny and Carl Greenberg. He has a younger sister, Becca. Greenberg was raised in Conservative Judaism and attended Beth El Synagogue. He moved with his family to St. Louis, Missouri when he was twelve years old. He graduated from Parkway Central High School in Chesterfield, Missouri. Greenberg became interested in acting at an early age, and moved to New York City after high school. He attended and worked at a Jewish summer camp located in Webster, Wisconsin, called Herzl Camp. He starred as Joseph in a camp-wide production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in 1992. He was a 1995 Ozo.

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Candice Bergen
Candice Patricia Bergen (born May 9, 1946) is an American actress and former fashion model.
She is known for starring in two TV series, as the title character on the situation comedy Murphy Brown (1988–1998), for which she won five Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards; and as Shirley Schmidt on the comedy-drama Boston Legal (2004–2008), for which she was nominated for two Emmys, a Golden Globe, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Her first film was The Group (1965), which was based on Mary McCarthy's novel of the same name. She starred in several major films throughout the mid 1960s to early 1980s such as The Sand Pebbles, Carnal Knowledge, The Wind and the Lion, and Gandhi and received an Academy Award nomination for her role in Starting Over. Her later career includes character roles in Miss Congeniality and Sweet Home Alabama.
Bergen was born in Beverly Hills, California. Her mother, Frances Bergen (née Westerman), was a Powers model who was known professionally as Frances Westcott. Her father, Edgar Bergen, was a ventriloquist, comedian, and actor. Her paternal grandparents were Swedish-born immigrants who anglicized their surname, which was originally Berggren. As a child, Candice was irritated at being referred to as Charlie McCarthy's little sister, Charlie McCarthy being her father's star dummy.

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Carey Mulligan
Carey Hannah Mulligan (born 28 May 1985) is an English actress. She made her film debut as Kitty Bennet in Pride & Prejudice (2005). She had roles in numerous British programmes and, in 2007, made her Broadway debut in The Seagull to critical acclaim.
In 2009, she gained widespread recognition for playing the lead role of Jenny in An Education, winning a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role and also being nominated for a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award for her performance. She went on to star in dramatic films such as The Greatest, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Never Let Me Go, Drive and Shame.
Mulligan was born in Westminster, London, England. Her father, Stephen, was originally from Liverpool, and her mother, Nano (née Booth), a college lecturer, came from Llandeilo in West Wales. Her paternal great-grandfather emigrated from Ireland. Mulligan has one sibling, an elder brother. At the age of 3, she moved with her family from England to Germany after her father accepted the job of managing the European arm of Intercontinental Hotels. Due to her father's job, her family lived in expensive hotels for 8 years. She was "quite shy" during her childhood and a tomboy until the age of 15. She was also "quite straight-laced" and very academic until age 14, having then become more interested in acting. She was educated at Woldingham School, a girls' boarding school.

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Carol Burnett
Carol Creighton Burnett (born April 26, 1933) is an American actress, comedian, singer, dancer and writer. Burnett started her career in New York. After becoming a hit on Broadway, she made her television debut. After successful appearances on The Garry Moore Show, Burnett moved to Los Angeles and began an eleven-year run on The Carol Burnett Show which was aired on CBS television from 1967 to 1978. With roots in vaudeville, The Carol Burnett Show was a variety show which combined comedy sketches, song, and dance. The comedy sketches included film parodies and character pieces. Burnett created many characters during the show's television run.
Burnett was born in San Antonio, Texas, the daughter of Ina Louise (née Creighton), a publicity writer for movie studios, and Joseph Thomas Burnett, a movie theater manager. Both of her parents suffered from alcoholism, and at a young age she was left with her grandmother, Mabel Eudora White. Her parents divorced in the late 1930s, and Burnett and her grandmother moved to an apartment near her mother’s in an impoverished area of Hollywood. There, they stayed in a boarding house with her younger half-sister Chrissy.

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Carol Channing
Carol Elaine Channing (born January 31, 1921) is an American singer, actress, and comedienne. She is the recipient of three Tony Awards (including one for lifetime achievement), a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. Channing is best remembered for originating, on Broadway, the musical-comedy roles of bombshell Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and matchmaking widow Dolly Gallagher Levi in Hello, Dolly!
Channing was born in Seattle, Washington, the only child of George and Adelaide (née Glaser; 1886–1984) Channing. Her father was a city editor at the Seattle Star; his newspaper career took the family to San Francisco when Carol was only two weeks old. Her father later became a successful Christian Science practitioner, editor, and teacher. She attended Aptos Middle School and Lowell High School in San Francisco. At Lowell, Channing was a member of its famed Lowell Forensic Society, the nation's oldest high-school debate team.
According to Channing's memoirs, when she left home to attend Bennington College in Vermont, her mother informed her that her father, a journalist who Carol had believed was born in Rhode Island, had in fact been born in Augusta, Georgia, to a German-American father and an African-American mother. According to Channing's account, her mother reportedly did not want [Channing] to be surprised "if she had a black baby". Channing kept this a secret to avoid any problems on Broadway and in Hollywood, ultimately revealing it only in her autobiography, Just Lucky I Guess (published in 2002). Her autobiography contains a photograph of her mother but has no photos of her father or son. The book states her father's birth certificate was destroyed in a fire.

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Carol Lawrence
Carol Lawrence (born September 5, 1932) is an American actress, most often associated with musical theatre, but who has also appeared extensively on television.
Born as Carolina Maria Laraia in Melrose Park, Carol Lawrence made her Broadway debut in 1952. She achieved success in the role of Maria in the original Broadway production of West Side Story in 1957, and received a nomination for Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for this role. She played the role for two years, and after an appearance in the short-lived show Saratoga, she returned to West Side Story for its 1960 season. Among her other Broadway successes were I Do! I Do! (1967) and Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993–95).
She has played several roles at The Muny in St. Louis, the oldest and largest outdoor theater in the U.S., including Fanny Brice in Funny Girl (1975), Charity in Sweet Charity (1977), and Lucille Early in No, No, Nanette (1990). Among her other musical theatre parts are the title role in Mame, Guenevere in Camelot (opposite Goulet), Do I Hear a Waltz at the Pasadena Playhouse (2001) and Follies at the Wadsworth Theatre in Los Angeles in 2002.

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Carole Lombard
Carole Lombard (October 6, 1908 – January 16, 1942) was an American actress. She is particularly noted for her comedic roles in the screwball comedies of the 1930s. She is listed as one of the American Film Institute's greatest stars of all time and was the highest-paid star in Hollywood in the late 1930s, earning around US$500,000 per year^{[citation needed]} (more than five times the salary of the US President). Lombard's career was cut short when she died at the age of 33 in a plane crash while returning from a World War II Bond tour.
Queen of the 1930s screwball comedies, she personified the anxiety of a nervous age. Graham Greene praised the "heartbreaking and nostalgic melodies" of her faster-than-thought delivery. "Platinum blonde, with a heart-shaped face, delicate, impish features and a figure made to be swathed in silver lamé, she wriggled expressively through such classics of hysteria as Twentieth Century and My Man Godfrey."

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Carrie Fisher
Carrie Frances Fisher (born October 21, 1956) is an American actress, novelist, screenwriter, and performance artist. She is best known for her portrayal of Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy, her bestselling novel Postcards from the Edge and screenplay for a film of the same name, and her autobiographical one-woman play, Wishful Drinking.
Fisher was born in Beverly Hills, California, the daughter of singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds. Her father was Jewish, the son of immigrants from Russia, and her mother was Protestant. Her younger brother is producer and actor Todd Fisher, and her half-sisters are actresses Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher. Joely and Tricia's mother is the singer/actress Connie Stevens.
When Carrie Fisher was two, her parents divorced after her father left Debbie for her best friend, actress Elizabeth Taylor, the widow of Eddie's best friend Mike Todd. The following year, her mother married shoe store chain owner Harry Karl, who secretly spent her life savings. It was assumed from an early age that Carrie would go into the family show business, and she began appearing with her mother in Las Vegas, Nevada at the age of 12. She attended Beverly Hills High School, but she left to join her mother on the road. She appeared as a debutante and singer in the hit Broadway revival Irene (1973), starring her mother.

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Carroll Baker
Carroll Baker (born May 28, 1931) is an American actress who has enjoyed popularity as both a serious dramatic actress and, particularly in the 1960s, as a movie sex symbol. Despite being cast in a wide range of roles during her heyday, Baker's beautiful features, blonde hair, and distinctive drawl made her particularly memorable in roles as a brash, flamboyant woman.
Baker was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Virginia (née Duffy) and William Watson Baker, who was a traveling salesman. She spent a year at community college, and subsequently worked as a magician's assistant.
Baker began her film career in 1953, with a small part in Easy to Love. After appearing in television commercials and training at New York's Actors Studio, she took a role in the Broadway production of All Summer Long. That appearance brought her to the attention of director Elia Kazan, who cast Baker as the title character in his controversial 1956 Baby Doll. Her Tennessee Williams-scripted role as a Mississippi teenage bride to a failed middle-aged cotton gin owner brought Baker instant fame as well as a certain level of notoriety. Baby Doll would remain the film for which she is best remembered; she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role. Two months prior to Baby Doll's release, she appeared in the supporting role of Luz Benedict II in Giant, opposite Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean.

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Catharine Bond Hill
Catharine "Cappy" Bond Hill is the current president of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. She began in 2006, after former president Frances D. Fergusson retired. Before coming to Vassar, Hill was provost at Williams College.
A 1976 summa cum laude graduate of Williams College, Hill also earned B.A. and M.A. degrees at Brasenose College, Oxford, with First Class Honours in politics, philosophy and economics, and a Ph.D. in economics at Yale University.
In her early career Hill worked for The World Bank (1982–1987) and the Congressional Budget Office (1981–1982). In 1985, however, Hill returned to her alma mater to teach economics, and she began her role as Williams provost in July 1999, holding major financial and academic responsibilities. As chief financial officer of the college, she was responsible for the annual college budget and long-range financial planning, as well as the Controller's office. Hill was also responsible for the Williams College Museum of Art, the Williams College Libraries and the offices of Admissions, Financial Aid and Information Technology. In addition, she was a member of the Committee on Appointments and Promotions, which makes all reappointment and tenure decisions and allocates faculty positions. Hill chaired the Williams economics department from 1997 to 1999, as well as the college's Center for Development Economics from 1992 to 1994.

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Catherine Deneuve
Catherine Deneuve (French pronunciation: [katʁin dəˈnœv], born 22 October 1943) is a French actress. She gained recognition for her portrayal of aloof and mysterious beauties in films such as Repulsion (1965) and Belle de jour (1967). Deneuve was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1993 for her performance in Indochine; she also won César Awards for that film and The Last Metro (1980). One of France's most renowned actresses, she has also appeared in seven English-language films, most notably the 1983 cult classic The Hunger. In 2008, she appeared in her 100th film, Un conte de Noël.
Deneuve was born Catherine Fabienne Dorléac in occupied Paris to French stage and screen actor Maurice Dorléac and actress Renée Deneuve (born 1912). Deneuve is the second of their three daughters. Her older sister was Françoise Dorléac (1942-1967) and her younger sister is Sylvie Dorléac (born 1946). They have a maternal half-sister, Danielle (born 1937). Deneuve attended Catholic schools.
As Catherine Dorléac, she made her film debut at age eleven in Les Collégiennes (1957), filmed in 1955 but not released until two years later. Deneuve subsequently began using her mother's surname professionally so she wouldn't be confused with her elder sister, Françoise Dorléac, who was using their father's name.

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Catherine McClements
Catherine McClements (born 30 November 1965 in Melbourne, Australia) is an Australian actress.
Catherine is the third of four children, and after acting with the St Martin's Youth Arts Centre in Melbourne for a couple of years, she successfully auditioned for the prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art when she was 17. She graduated from NIDA in 1985, alongside Baz Luhrmann, Sonia Todd and Justin Monjo. In 1988, Catherine, along with a number of other people including Baz Luhrmann, set up an experimental theatre ensemble called 'Six Years Old', and they worked on expanding the play Strictly Ballroom, which was first produced in their second year of NIDA in 1984.
Catherine McClements is best known for her starring role as Rachel Goldstein on the Australian police drama Water Rats from 1996 to 1999. She had a recurring guest role on The Secret Life of Us in 2001, for which she won the AFI Award for Best Actress in a Guest Role in a Television Drama. She later starred as Rosie in the 2003 drama series CrashBurn and appeared in the Network Ten telemovie Mary Bryant in 2005. In 1993 she had a role in The Girl from Tomorrow Part II: Tomorrow's End.

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Catherine O'Hara
Catherine Anne O'Hara (born March 4, 1954) is a Canadian-American actress, writer and comedienne. She is well known for her comedy work on SCTV, and her roles in the films After Hours, Beetlejuice, Home Alone, and The Nightmare Before Christmas, and also in the mockumentary films written and directed by Christopher Guest including Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Consideration.
O'Hara was born in Toronto, Ontario, into a large Irish Catholic family, and was raised Roman Catholic. She attended Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute, where she first met Robin Duke, who went on to her own comedy career.
Catherine started her comedy career in 1974 as a cast member of The Second City in her native Toronto. She was an understudy for Gilda Radner until Radner left for Saturday Night Live. Two years later, this theatre troupe created the sketch comedy show SCTV, for which O'Hara became a regular performer. Her memorable characterizations on the show included Las Vegas scorcher Lola Heatherton, buzzer-happy game show contestant Margaret Meehan, raunchy nightclub comedian Dusty Towne, soap opera seductress Sue Ellen, and stage actress Sue Bopper Simpson.

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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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Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977) was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I. Chaplin used mime, slapstick and other visual comedy routines, and continued well into the era of the talkies, though his films decreased in frequency from the end of the 1920s. His most famous role was that of The Tramp, which he first played in the Keystone comedy Kid Auto Races at Venice in 1914. From the April 1914 one-reeler Twenty Minutes of Love onwards he was writing and directing most of his films, by 1916 he was also producing them, and from 1918 he was even composing the music for them. With Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith, he co-founded United Artists in 1919.
Chaplin was one of the most creative and influential personalities of the silent-film era. He was influenced by his predecessor, the French silent film comedian Max Linder, to whom he dedicated one of his films. His working life in entertainment spanned over 75 years, from the Victorian stage and the music hall in the United Kingdom as a child performer, until close to his death at the age of 88. His high-profile public and private life encompassed both adulation and controversy. Chaplin was identified with left-wing politics during the McCarthy era and he was ultimately forced to resettle in Europe from 1952.

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Charlize Theron
Charlize Theron (American English pronunciation:

/ʃɑrˈliːs ˈθɛrən/; Afrikaans pronunciation: [ʃɐrˈlis tron]; born 7 August 1975) is a South African actress and fashion model. She started her acting career in the United States and rose to fame in the late 1990s following roles in The Devil's Advocate (1997), Mighty Joe Young (1998), and The Cider House Rules (1999). Theron won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003), becoming the first African to win an Academy Award in a major acting category. She received another Academy Award nomination for her performance in North Country (2005). Theron became a US citizen in 2007, while retaining her South African citizenship.
Theron was born in Benoni, in the then Transvaal Province of South Africa, the only child of Gerda (née Maritz; who has also called herself Gerta) and Charles Theron (born 27 November 1947).Second Boer War figure Danie Theron was her great-great-uncle. Her ancestry includes French, German, and Dutch; her French forebears were early Huguenot settlers in South Africa. "Theron" is an Occitan surname (originally spelled Théron) pronounced in Afrikaans as [tron], although she has said that the way she pronounces it in South Africa is [θron]. She changed the pronunciation when she moved to the U.S. to give it a more "American" sound.

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Chen Shi-zheng
Chen Shi-Zheng 陳士爭 born in 1963 in Changsha, Hunan, China) is a New York-based theater director.
Having earned a BA from the Hunan Art School in Traditional Opera, he received his MA from the Tisch School of Art at New York University. In 2000, Chen was awarded the title Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.
Chen's directorial debut film, Dark Matter, was released in 2007, starring Liu Ye and Meryl Streep. This film won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. He also directed Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett's operatic stage adaptation of Monkey: Journey to the West at the Manchester International Festival in June–July 2007. In 2008 he directed the premiere production of Stewart Wallace's opera The Bonesetter's Daughter at the San Francisco Opera.

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Cher
Cher (

/ˈʃɛər/) (born Cherilyn Sarkisian; May 20, 1946) is an American recording artist, television personality, actress, director, record producer, and philanthropist. Referred to as the Goddess of Pop, she has won an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, an Emmy Award, three Golden Globes, and a Cannes Film Festival Award for her work in film, music, and television. She is the only person in history to receive all five awards. She began her career as a backup singer and came to prominence in 1965 as one-half of the pop rock duo Sonny & Cher with the success of their song "I Got You Babe". She subsequently established herself as a solo recording artist and became a television star in 1971 with The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, a variety show for which she won a Golden Globe. A well-received performance in the film Silkwood earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress of 1983. In the following years, she starred in a string of hit films including Mask, The Witches of Eastwick, and Moonstruck, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress of 1987.

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Christina Ricci
Christina Ricci (born February 12, 1980) is an American actress. Ricci received initial recognition and praise as a child star for her performance as Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993), and her role as Kat Harvey in Casper (1995). Ricci made a transition into more adult-oriented roles with The Ice Storm (1997), followed by an acclaimed performance in Buffalo 66 (1998) and then The Opposite of Sex (1998), for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress. She continued her success with well-received performances in Sleepy Hollow (1999), Monster (2003), Penelope (2006) and Black Snake Moan (2007). In 2006 Ricci was nominated for an Emmy award for her role as a paramedic in the ABC drama Grey's Anatomy. She currently stars as Maggie Ryan in the television show Pan Am.
Ricci was born in Santa Monica, California, the fourth and youngest child of Sarah (née Murdoch), a former Ford Model and real estate agent, and Ralph Ricci, a lawyer and psychiatrist. Regarding her ancestry, Ricci has stated that "the Italian blood has been bred out of me. There's an Italian four or five generations back who married an Irish woman and they all [sic] had sons. So they married more Irish women, there were more sons, and more Irish women. Now I'm basically Scots-Irish."

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Cicely Tyson
Cicely Tyson (born December 19, 1933) is an American actress. A successful stage actress, Tyson is also known for her Oscar-nominated role in the film Sounder and the television movies The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Roots.
Tyson was born and raised in Harlem, New York, the daughter of Theodosia, a domestic, and William Tyson, her father, who worked as a carpenter, a painter, or any other jobs he could find. Her parents were immigrants from the island of Nevis of the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis in the West Indies; Her father arrived in New York City at the age of 21 and was processed at Ellis Island on August 4, 1919. Tyson married legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis on November 26, 1981. The ceremony was conducted by Atlanta mayor Andrew Young at the home of actor Bill Cosby. Tyson and Davis divorced in 1988. She is a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. On May 17, 2009, Tyson received an honorary degree from Morehouse College, an all-male college.
Tyson was discovered or found by a photographer for Ebony magazine and became a popular fashion model. Her first credited film role was in Carib Gold in 1956, but she went on to do television such as the celebrated series East Side/West Side and the soap opera The Guiding Light. In 1961, Tyson appeared in the original cast of French playwright Jean Genet's The Blacks, the longest running off-Broadway non-musical of the decade, running for 1,408 performances. The original cast also featured James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Louis Gossett, Jr., Godfrey Cambridge, Maya Angelou and Charles Gordone. She appeared with Sammy Davis, Jr. in the film A Man Called Adam (film) (1966) and starred in the film version of Graham Greene's The Comedians (1967). Tyson had a featured role in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968) and was in a segment of the movie Roots.

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Claire Danes
Claire Catherine Danes (born April 12, 1979) is an American television, stage and film actress. She has appeared in roles as diverse as Angela Chase in My So-Called Life, as Juliet in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, as Kate Brewster in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, as Yvaine in Stardust and as Temple Grandin in the HBO TV film Temple Grandin. She portrays Carrie Mathison in the Showtime series Homeland.
Danes was born in Manhattan, New York City, New York. Her mother, Carla (née Hall), is a day-care provider, painter, and textile designer who later served as her daughter's manager, and her father, Christopher Danes (b. May 6, 1944 in Austin, Texas), is a computer consultant and former architectural photographer. Danes has described her background as being "as WASPy as you can get"; her paternal grandfather, Gibson Andrew Danes (1910–1992 in Litchfield, Connecticut), was the dean of the art and architecture school at Yale University. She has an older brother, Asa (b. 1973).
Danes attended the Dalton School in New York City, the New York City Lab School for Collaborative Studies, the Professional Performing Arts School, and the Lycée Français de Los Angeles in Los Angeles, California. In 1998, Danes went to Yale University, her father's alma mater. Director Oliver Stone wrote her letter of recommendation to Yale. After studying for two years as a psychology major, she dropped out of Yale to focus on her film career.

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Claudette Colbert
Claudette Colbert (/koʊlˈbɛər/; 13 September 1903 – 30 July 1996) was an American actress of stage and film.
Born in Paris, France, and raised in New York City, Colbert began her career in Broadway productions during the 1920s, progressing to film with the advent of talking pictures. She established a successful film career with Paramount Pictures, and was recognized as one of the leading female exponents of screwball comedy. Colbert was the highest paid actress in American cinema during late 1930s, and later became a freelance performer. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her comedic performance in It Happened One Night (1934), and also received Academy Award nominations for her dramatic roles in Private Worlds (1935) and Since You Went Away (1944).
Colbert's film career declined in the 1950s, and finished in 1961. Later in life, she returned to theater, except brief appearances in television. Her intermittent career lasted more than six decades. She moved in later life to Barbados, where she died at the age of 92, following a series of strokes.

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Clint Eastwood
Clinton "Clint" Eastwood, Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American film actor, director, producer, composer and politician. Eastwood first came to prominence as a supporting cast member in the TV series Rawhide (1959–1965). He rose to fame for playing the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy of spaghetti westerns (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) during the late 1960s, and as Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry films (Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, The Enforcer, Sudden Impact, and The Dead Pool) throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These roles, among others, have made him an enduring cultural icon of masculinity.
For his work in the films Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004), Eastwood won Academy Awards for Best Director and Producer of the Best Picture, as well as receiving nominations for Best Actor. These films in particular, as well as others including Play Misty for Me (1971), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Tightrope (1984), Pale Rider (1985), Heartbreak Ridge (1986), In the Line of Fire (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), and Gran Torino (2008), have all received commercial success and critical acclaim. Eastwood's only comedies have been Every Which Way but Loose (1978) and its sequel Any Which Way You Can (1980), which are his two most commercially successful films after adjustment for inflation.

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Cloris Leachman
Cloris Leachman (born April 30, 1926) is an American actress of stage, film and television. She has won eight Primetime Emmy Awards—more than any other performer—and one Daytime Emmy Award. She co-starred in the 1971 film The Last Picture Show. Leachman's longest running role was the nosy, self-centered and manipulative landlady Phyllis Lindstrom on the 1970s TV series Mary Tyler Moore, and later on the spinoff series, Phyllis. She also appeared in three Mel Brooks films, including Young Frankenstein. She had a regular role on the last two seasons of The Facts of Life portraying the character Beverly Ann Stickle. In recent years, she had a recurring role as Lois's mother Ida Gorski on Malcolm in the Middle. She also starred in the roast of Bob Saget in 2008. Leachman was a contestant on Season 7 (2008) of Dancing with the Stars, paired with Corky Ballas. At the age of 82, she was the oldest contestant to dance on the series.
Leachman was the grand marshal for the 2009 New Year's Day Tournament of Roses Parade and Rose Bowl Game in Pasadena, California. She presided over the 120th parade, the theme being "Hats Off to Entertainment", and the 95th Rose Bowl game. Leachman plays a supporting role in Raising Hope, a sitcom that premiered in the fall of 2010 on Fox. She will star with Tara Reid in The Fields, and with Colin Firth and Cameron Diaz in Gambit, a remake of a 1966 film.

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Davi Napoleon
Davi Napoleon, aka Davida Skurnick (born 1946) is an American theater historian and critic. She is a theater columnist for The Faster Times, an online newspaper, and a regular contributor to Live Design, a monthly magazine about entertainment design and designers. She is an expert on the not-for-profit theater in America and author of Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater. She has written on social and political issues occasionally as well.
She was born in New York City to Jack Skurnick and Fay Kleinman. She currently lives in Ann Arbor MI. She is married to Greg Napoleon, a software engineer. They have two sons, Brian and Randy Napoleon.
Napoleon was educated at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she earned a BA and an MA in psychology while studying playwriting with Kenneth Thorpe Rowe. She went on to New York University, and graduated with an MA in drama and a Ph.D. in performance studies.
She was a columnist for TheaterWeek magazine and has been a contributing editor for Theater Crafts, which became Theatre Crafts International, then Entertainment Design, then Live Design. She has also written for American Theatre, American Film, InTheatre, Playbill, ScriptWriter News, Stages and assorted general interest magazines. These include children's magazines, teen magazines Seventeen and others, and a range of general magazines, such as New York Magazine and Weight Watchers. She was a stringer for the Detroit Free Press and for the Ann Arbor News in the 1980s. She was the theater reviewer for the Ann Arbor News from 1987-1988.

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David Lean
Sir David Lean, CBE (25 March 1908 – 16 April 1991) was an English film director, producer, screenwriter and editor, best remembered for big-screen epics The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and A Passage to India (1984); for bringing Charles Dickens' novels to the silver screen with films such as Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948); and for the renowned romantic drama Brief Encounter (1945).
Acclaimed by directors including Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick,, Lean was voted 9th greatest film director of all time in the British Film Institute Sight & Sound Directors' Top Directors" poll 2002. Lean has four films in the top eleven of the British Film Institute's Top 100 British Films.
David Lean was born in Croydon, Surrey (now part of Greater London), to Francis William le Blount Lean and the former Helena Tangye (niece of Sir Richard Trevithick Tangye). His parents were Quakers and he was a pupil at the Quaker-founded Leighton Park School in Reading. His younger brother, Edward Tangye Lean (1911–1974), founded the original Inklings literary club when a student at Oxford University. Lean was a half-hearted schoolboy with a dreamy nature who was labeled a "dud" of a student; he left in his mid-teens and entered his father's chartered accountancy firm as an apprentice. At age 16, his father deserted the family when he ran off with another woman, and young David would later follow a similar path after his own first marriage and child.

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Debbie Reynolds
Debbie Reynolds (born April 1, 1932) is an American actress, singer, and dancer.
Initially signed at age sixteen by Warner Bros., Reynolds' career got off to a slow start. When her contract was not renewed, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) gave her a small but significant part in the film Three Little Words (1950), then signed her to a seven-year contract. In her next film, Two Weeks with Love (1950), she had a hit with the song "Aba Daba Honeymoon". However, it was her first leading role, in Singin' in the Rain (1952), that set her on the path to fame. By the mid 1950s, she was a major star.
Other notable successes include Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), in which her rendering of the song "Tammy" reached number one on the music charts; and The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She continues to perform successfully on stage, television and film to the present day.
Reynolds' first marriage, to popular singer Eddie Fisher, produced a son and a daughter, actress/author Carrie Fisher, but ended in divorce in 1959 when Fisher and her former (and later) friend Elizabeth Taylor fell in love. Her second and third marriages also ended in divorce, each time ruining her financially.

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Deborah Mailman
Deborah Mailman (born 14 July 1972 in Mount Isa, Queensland), is an Australian television and film actress. She was the first Aboriginal actress to win the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. She is well known for having played the character "Kelly" on successful Australian television series, The Secret Life of Us.
Mailman grew up in Mount Isa in north west Queensland and is the youngest of five children born to Wally, an accomplished rodeo rider, and Jane Mailman. She has both Indigenous Australian and Māori heritage. She graduated from Queensland University of Technology's Academy of the Arts in 1992. She played the role of Kate in a La Boite Theatre production of Shakespeare's 'The Taming of the Shrew' in 1994.
In 1998, Mailman won her first AFI win, was for playing the character "Nona", in the Australian independent film Radiance. From here she has since become one of Australia's most prominent local actors especially through her lead role on The Secret Life of Us, a role for which she was twice awarded Most Outstanding Actress In A Drama Series at the Logies (2002 and 2004). She stayed during the shows entire duration (2001–2006).

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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 Keaton
Diane Keaton (born Diane Hall; January 5, 1946) is an American film actress, director, producer, and screenwriter. Keaton began her career on stage, and made her screen debut in 1970. Her first major film role was as Kay Adams-Corleone in The Godfather (1972), but the films that shaped her early career were those with director and co-star Woody Allen beginning with Play It Again, Sam in 1972. Her next two films with Allen, Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975), established her as a comic actor. Her fourth, Annie Hall (1977), won her the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Keaton subsequently expanded her range to avoid becoming typecast as her Annie Hall persona. She became an accomplished dramatic performer, starring in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and received Academy Award nominations for Reds (1981) and Marvin's Room (1996). Some of her popular later films include Baby Boom (1987), Father of the Bride (1991), The First Wives Club (1996), Something's Gotta Give (2003) and The Family Stone (2005). Keaton's films have earned a cumulative gross of over US$1.1 billion in North America. In addition to acting, she is also a photographer, real estate developer, author, and occasional singer.

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Dino De Laurentiis
Agostino "Dino" De Laurentiis (8 August 1919 – 10 November 2010) was an Italian film producer.
He was born at Torre Annunziata in the province of Naples, and grew up selling spaghetti produced by his father. His studies at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome were interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War.
Following his first movie, L'ultimo Combattimento, (1940) he produced nearly 150 films during the next seven decades. In 1946 his company, the Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica, moved into production. In the early years, De Laurentiis produced neorealist films such as Bitter Rice (1946) and the Fellini classics La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1956), often in collaboration with producer Carlo Ponti. In the 1960s, Dino De Laurentiis built his own studio facilities, although these financially collapsed during the 1970s. During this period, though, De Laurentiis produced such films as Barabbas (1961) a Christian religious epic, Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die, an imitation James Bond film; Navajo Joe (1966), a spaghetti western; Anzio (1968), a World War II film; Barbarella (1968) and Danger: Diabolik (1968), both successful comic book adaptations; and The Valachi Papers made to coincide with the popularity of The Godfather.

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Drew Barrymore
Drew Blyth Barrymore (born February 22, 1975) is an American actress, film director, screenwriter, producer and model. She is a member of the Barrymore family of American actors and granddaughter of John Barrymore. She first appeared in an advertisement when she was 11 months old. Barrymore made her film debut in Altered States in 1980. Afterwards, she starred in her breakout role in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. She quickly became one of Hollywood's most recognized child actresses, going on to establish herself in mainly comic roles.
Following a turbulent childhood which was marked by drug and alcohol abuse and two stints in rehab, Barrymore wrote the 1990 autobiography, Little Girl Lost. She successfully made the transition from child star to adult actress with a number of films including Poison Ivy, Bad Girls, Boys on the Side, and Everyone Says I Love You. Subsequently, she established herself in romantic comedies such as The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates.
In 1995, she and business partner Nancy Juvonen formed the production company Flower Films, with its first production the 1999 Barrymore film Never Been Kissed. Flower Films has gone on to produce the Barrymore vehicle films Charlie's Angels, 50 First Dates, and Music and Lyrics, as well as the cult film Donnie Darko. Barrymore's more recent projects include He's Just Not That into You, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Everybody's Fine and Going the Distance. A recipient of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Barrymore appeared on the cover of the 2007 People magazine's 100 Most Beautiful issue.

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Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Lee Hoffman (born August 8, 1937) is an American actor with a career in film, television, and theatre since 1960. He has been known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and vulnerable characters.
He first drew critical praise for the play Eh?, for which he won a Theatre World Award and a Drama Desk Award. This was soon followed by his breakthrough movie role as the good-looking but troubled Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (1967). Since then Hoffman's career has largely been focused on cinema, with only sporadic returns to television and the stage. Some of his most notable films are Papillon, Marathon Man, Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man, Lenny, All the President's Men, Kramer vs. Kramer, Tootsie, Rain Man, Wag the Dog, and Meet the Fockers.
Hoffman has won two Academy Awards (for his performances in Kramer vs. Kramer and Rain Man), five Golden Globes, four BAFTAs, three Drama Desk Awards, a Genie Award, and an Emmy Award. Dustin Hoffman received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1999.

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Dyan Cannon
Dyan Cannon (born Samille Diane Friesen on January 4, 1937) is an American film and television actress, director, screenwriter, editor, and producer.
Cannon was born in Tacoma, Washington. Her mother Claire (née Portnoy) was a homemaker; Cannon's father Ben sold life insurance. Cannon was raised in the Jewish faith of her mother, who had emigrated from Russia; Dyan's father was Baptist. She attended West Seattle High School.
Cannon made her screen debut in 1960 in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond; however her small screen debut was in the late 1950s including a guest appearance on Bat Masterson in 1959, in the episode entitled "Lady Luck". She also made a 1959 guest appearance on Wanted: Dead or Alive starring Steve McQueen in episode 54 "Vanishing Act" as Nicole McCready. Another role was as Mona Elliott, with fellow guest star Franchot Tone, in the episode "The Man Behind the Man" of the 1964 CBS drama, The Reporter, with Harry Guardino in the title role. She also made appearances on 77 Sunset Strip, the perennial western series Gunsmoke, The Untouchables and the syndicated Two Faces West in the 1960 episode entitled "Sheriff of the Town".

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Edith Evans
Dame Edith Mary Evans, DBE (8 February 1888 – 14 October 1976) was a British actress. She was known for her work on the British stage. She also appeared in a number of films, for which she received three Academy Award nominations, plus a BAFTA and a Golden Globe award.
Evans was particularly well known at portraying haughty aristocratic ladies, as in two of her most famous roles: Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (both on stage and in the 1952 film), and Miss Western in the 1963 film of Tom Jones. By contrast, she played a poverty-stricken old woman in one of her most acclaimed film roles, in The Whisperers (1967).
Edith Evans was born in London, the daughter of Edward Evans, a civil servant, and his wife, Caroline Ellen Foster. She was educated at St Michael's Church of England School, Pimlico, before being apprenticed at the age of 15 in 1903 as a milliner.
Her first stage appearance was with Miss Massey's Shakespeare Players in the role of Viola in Twelfth Night in October 1910. In 1912 she was discovered by the noted producer William Poel and made her first professional appearance for Poel in August of that year, playing the role of Gautami in a 6th century Hindu classic, Sakuntala. She received much attention with her performance as Cressida in Troilus and Cressida in London and subsequently at Stratford-upon-Avon.

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Eileen Heckart
Eileen Heckart (March 29, 1919 – December 31, 2001) was an American actress of film, stage, and television.
Heckart was born Anna Eileen Herbert in Columbus, Ohio, the daughter of Esther Stark, who wed Leo Herbert at her own mother's insistence so her child would not be born with the stigma of illegitimacy. The child was soon after legally adopted by her grandfather, J.W. Heckart, whose surname she was known by her whole life. She had two stepsisters, Anne and Marilyn. She graduated from Ohio State University with a B.A. in drama.
Heckart began her Broadway career as the assistant stage manager and an understudy for The Voice of the Turtle in 1943. Her many credits include Picnic, The Bad Seed, A View from the Bridge, A Memory of Two Mondays, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, A Family Affair, Barefoot in the Park, Butterflies Are Free, You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running, Ladies at the Alamo and The Cemetery Club. In 2000, at the age of 81, she appeared Off Broadway in Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery and received more awards for a single performance in a single season than any actress in theatre history, including The Drama Desk Award, The Lucille Lortel Award, The Drama League Award and The Outer Critics Circle Award. That same year, she was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame and received an honorary Tony Award for lifetime achievement. Her other awards include the 1953 Theatre World Award for Picnic. Her nominations include a 1996 Drama Desk Award for Northeast Local and Tony nominations for Butterflies Are Free (play), Invitation to a March, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. She was granted three honorary doctorates by Sacred Heart University, Niagara University and Ohio State University.

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Elizabeth Taylor
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond "Liz" Taylor, DBE (February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011) was a British-American actress. From her early years as a child star with MGM, she became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age. As one of the world's most famous film stars, Taylor was recognized for her acting ability and for her glamorous lifestyle, beauty and distinctive violet eyes.
National Velvet (1944) was Taylor's first success, and she starred in Father of the Bride (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), Giant (1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for BUtterfield 8 (1960), played the title role in Cleopatra (1963), and married her co-star Richard Burton. They appeared together in 11 films, including Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), for which Taylor won a second Academy Award. From the mid-1970s, she appeared less frequently in film, and made occasional appearances in television and theatre.
Her much publicized personal life included eight marriages and several life-threatening illnesses. From the mid-1980s, Taylor championed HIV and AIDS programs; she co-founded the American Foundation for AIDS Research in 1985, and the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1993. She received the Presidential Citizens Medal, the Legion of Honour, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, who named her seventh on their list of the "Greatest American Screen Legends". Taylor died of congestive heart failure in March 2011 at the age of 79, having suffered many years of ill health.

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Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 – June 15, 1996), also known as the "First Lady of Song", "Queen of Jazz", and "Lady Ella", was an American jazz and song vocalist. With a vocal range spanning three octaves (D♭3 to D♭6), she was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.
Fitzgerald was a notable interpreter of the Great American Songbook. Over the course of her 59-year recording career, she was the winner of 13 Grammy Awards and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Ronald Reagan and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H. W. Bush.
Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Virginia, the child of a common-law marriage between William and Temperance "Tempie" Fitzgerald. The pair separated soon after her birth and she and her mother went to Yonkers, New York, where they eventually moved in with Tempie's longtime boyfriend, Joseph Da Silva. Fitzgerald's half-sister, Frances Da Silva, was born in 1923. She and her family were Methodists and were active in the Bethany African Methodist Episcopal Church and she regularly attended worship services, Bible study, and Sunday School.

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Estelle Parsons
Estelle Margaret Parsons (born November 20, 1927) is an American theatre, film and television actress and occasional theatrical director.
After studying law, Parsons became a singer before deciding to pursue a career in acting. She worked for the television program Today and made her stage debut in 1961. During the 1960s, Parsons established her career on Broadway before progressing to film. She received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Blanche Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and was also nominated for her work in Rachel, Rachel (1968).
Parsons worked extensively in film and theatre during the 1970s and later directed several Broadway productions. More recently her television work included a role in the sitcom Roseanne. Nominated on four occasions for a Tony Award, in 2004 Parsons was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
Parsons was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in the Lynn Hospital, the daughter of Elinor Ingebore (née Mattsson), who was a native of Sweden, and Eben Parsons. She attended the Oak Grove School for Girls in Maine. After graduating from Connecticut College in 1949, Parsons initially studied law at Boston University, and then worked as a singer with a band before settling on an acting career in the early 1950s.

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Ethel Merman
Ethel Merman (January 16, 1908 – February 15, 1984) was an American actress and singer. Known primarily for her powerful voice and roles in musical theatre, she has been called "the undisputed First Lady of the musical comedy stage." Among the many standards introduced by Merman in Broadway musicals are "I Got Rhythm", "Everything's Coming Up Roses", "Some People", "Rose's Turn", "I Get a Kick Out of You", "It's De-Lovely", "Friendship", "You're the Top", "Anything Goes", and "There's No Business Like Show Business", which later became her theme song.
Merman was born Ethel Agnes Zimmermann in her maternal grandmother's house located at 265 4th Street in Astoria, Queens, in New York City in 1908, though she would later emphatically declare that it was actually 1912. Her father, Edward Zimmermann (1879–1977), was an accountant with James H. Dunham & Company, a Manhattan wholesale dry-goods company, and her mother, Agnes (née Gardner; 1883–1974), was a school teacher. Zimmermann had been raised in the Dutch Reformed Church and his wife was Presbyterian, but shortly after they were wed they joined the Episcopalian congregation at Church of the Redeemer, where Merman was baptized. Her parents were strict about church attendance, and every Sunday she spent the day there, first at morning services, followed by Sunday school, an afternoon prayer meeting, and an evening study group for children.

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Eva Le Gallienne
Eva Le Gallienne (January 11, 1899 – June 3, 1991) was a theatrical actress, producer, and director during the first half of the 20th century.
Le Gallienne was born in London to an English poet of French descent, Richard Le Gallienne, and a Danish journalist, Julie Norregard. After Eva's parents separated when she was three years old, she spent her childhood shuttling back and forth between Paris and England. She made her stage debut at the age of 15 in a 1914 production of Maurice Maeterlinck's Monna Vanna.
The next year Le Gallienne sailed for New York, and then on to Arizona and California where she performed in several theatre productions. After travelling in Europe for a period of time, she returned to New York and became a Broadway star in several plays including Arthur Richman's Not So Long Ago (1920) and Ferenc Molnár's Liliom (1921).
Disillusioned by the state of commercial theatre in the 1920s, Le Gallienne founded the Civic Repertory Theatre in the former Fourteenth Street Theatre in Manhattan, New York. She was backed by the financial support of one of her lovers, Alice DeLamar, a wealthy Colorado gold mine heiress, whose support was instrumental in the success of the repertory theatre movement in the U.S. In 1928 she earned a great success with her performance in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. As head of the Civic Repertory Theatre, she is known to have rejected the admission of Bette Davis, whose attitude she described as "insincere" and "frivolous". The Civic Rep disbanded at the height of the Depression in 1934.

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Farrelly brothers
Peter John Farrelly (born December 17, 1956) and Robert Leo "Bobby" Farrelly, Jr. (born June 17, 1958), professionally known as the Farrelly brothers, are American screenwriters and directors of eleven comedy films, including There's Something About Mary; Dumb and Dumber; Kingpin; Hall Pass; Me, Myself & Irene; Shallow Hal; Stuck on You; Osmosis Jones; Fever Pitch (also known as The Perfect Catch outside of America), the 2007 remake of The Heartbreak Kid, and The Three Stooges.
The Farrelly brothers are from Cumberland, Rhode Island, and many of their movies partially take place in that state, or elsewhere in New England. Sports play a large part in their films and they have cast many popular sports stars for cameo appearances. The Farrelly brothers frequently cast Rob Moran, Steve Tyler and sports figures (e.g. Cam Neely; Roger Clemens; Brett Favre) in their films.The Farrely brothers are of Irish Decent.
They have been both praised and criticized for their humorous use of disability. On this use, Peter Farrelly has commented:

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Faye Dunaway
Dorothy Faye Dunaway (born January 14, 1941) is an American actress. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the 1976 film Network. She was previously nominated for Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Chinatown (1974). She has starred in a variety of other successful films, including The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Three Days of the Condor (1975), and Mommie Dearest (1981).
Dunaway was born in Bascom, Florida, the daughter of Grace April (née Smith), a housewife, and John MacDowell Dunaway, Jr., a career non-commissioned officer in the United States Army. She is of Scots-Irish, English, and German descent. She attended the University of Florida,Florida State University, and Boston University, but graduated from the University of Florida in theater. In 1962, Dunaway joined the American National Theater and Academy.
Dunaway appeared on Broadway in 1962 as the daughter of Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons. Her first screen role was in 1967 in The Happening. In 1967, she was in Hurry Sundown; that same year, she gained the leading female role in Bonnie and Clyde opposite Warren Beatty, which earned her an Oscar nomination. She also starred in 1968 with Steve McQueen in the caper film The Thomas Crown Affair (and had a small role in the 1999 remake with the same title with Pierce Brosnan).

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Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini (Italian pronunciation: [fedeˈriːko felˈliːni]; January 20, 1920 – October 31, 1993) was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century, and is widely revered. He won five Academy Awards and was nominated for 12 in a career that spanned over forty years.
Fellini was born on January 20, 1920 to middle-class parents in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea. His father, Urbano Fellini (1894–1956), born to a family of Romagnol peasants and small landholders from Gambettola, moved to Rome in 1915 as a baker apprenticed to the Pantanella pasta factory. His mother, Ida Barbiani (1896–1984), came from a bourgeois Catholic family of Roman merchants. Despite her family’s vehement disapproval, she eloped with Urbano in 1917 to live at his parents' home in Gambettola. A civil marriage followed in 1918 with the religious ceremony held at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome a year later. The couple settled in Rimini where Urbano became a traveling salesman and wholesale vendor. Fellini had two siblings: Riccardo (1921–1991), a documentary director for RAI Television, and Maria Maddalena (m. Fabbri; 1929–2002).

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Felicity Huffman
Felicity Kendall Huffman (born December 9, 1962) is an American film, stage, and television actress. She is known for her role as executive producer Dana Whitaker on the ABC television show Sports Night (1998–2000), which earned her a Golden Globe Award nomination, and as hectic supermom Lynette Scavo on the ABC show Desperate Housewives (2004–2012), which has earned her an Emmy Award.
In 2005, her critically acclaimed role as a trans woman in the independent film Transamerica earned her a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination. She has also starred in films such as Reversal of Fortune, The Spanish Prisoner, Magnolia, Path to War, Georgia Rule and Phoebe in Wonderland.
Huffman was born in Bedford, New York, the daughter of Grace Valle (née Ewing), an actress, and Moore Peters Huffman, a banker and partner at Morgan Stanley. Her parents divorced a year after her birth, and she was raised mostly by her mother. She has six sisters (Mariah, Betsy, Jane, Grace, Isabel, Jessie) and a brother (Moore Jr.).^{[citation needed]} She attended The Putney School, a private boarding high school in Putney, Vermont and graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan in 1980. After high school she went on to New York University where she graduated in 1984 from Circle In The Square, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drama.^{[citation needed]}

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Fernanda Montenegro
Fernanda Montenegro (born Arlete Pinheiro Esteves da Silva; October 16, 1929) is a Brazilian stage, television and film actress, mostly recognized for her leading role in Central Station, which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the first Brazilian actor to be nominated.
She is commonly revered as one of Brazil's finest actresses and referred to as "The First Lady of Brazilian Theater" and "The First Lady of Brazilian Television".
Montenegro was born Arlete Pinheiro Esteves da Silva in Rio de Janeiro, of Portuguese and Italian descent. Regarding the adoption of a stage name, the actress has stated that she chose Fernanda simply because of its sonority, whilst Montenegro was the surname of her family's doctor. Montenegro was married to Fernando Torres from 1954 until his death in 2008. They had two children: Fernanda Torres who is an actress and has been nominated for the Cannes Film Festival and film director Cláudio Torres.
In late 1940s, Montenegro was adapting famous theatre plays to radio. She began her artistic life in the theatre with the play Alegres Canções nas Montanhas (Happy Songs on the Mountain) in 1950. Among her mates was Fernando Torres, who would soon become her husband. In the next years she worked with other acclaimed actors like Sérgio Britto, Cacilda Becker, Nathalia Timberg, Cláudio Correa e Castro and Ítalo Rossi. In 1951 she become one of the TV's pioneers in Brazil, working in Rio de Janeiro's TV Tupi - the second TV station of South America. She played in several plays on TV between 1951 and 1970.

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Frances McDormand
Frances Louise McDormand (born June 23, 1957) is an American film and stage actress. She has starred in a number of films, including her Academy Award-winning performance as Marge Gunderson in Fargo, in 1996. She won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play in 2011 for her performance in Good People as Margie Walsh, having been nominated for the same category in 1988 for the revival of A Streetcar Named Desire.
McDormand is a three-time nominee of the Academy Award For Best Supporting Actress for her performances in Mississippi Burning, Almost Famous, and North Country, and has also been nominated for four Golden Globes, three BAFTA Awards, and an Emmy Award. She also starred in the Coen Brothers debut, Blood Simple.
McDormand was born in Chicago and was adopted by the McDormands, a Canadian couple – Noreen, a registered nurse and receptionist, and Vernon, a Disciples of Christ pastor. She has said that her biological mother may have been one of the parishioners at Vernon's church. She has a sister, Dorothy A. McDormand, who is an ordained Disciples of Christ minister and chaplain, as well as another sibling, both of whom were adopted by the McDormands, who had no biological children. As her father specialized in restoring congregations, he frequently moved their family, and they lived in several small towns in Illinois, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, before settling in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area town of Monessen, where she graduated from high school in 1976. She attended Bethany College, West Virginia, and earned a B.A. in Theater in 1979.

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Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola (

/ˈkoʊpələ/ KOH-pə-lə; born April 7, 1939) is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He is widely acclaimed as one of Hollywood's most innovative and influential film directors. He epitomized the group of filmmakers known as the New Hollywood, that includes Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, Robert Altman, Woody Allen, William Friedkin, Philip Kaufman, and George Lucas who emerged in the early 1970s with unconventional ideas that challenged contemporary film-making.
He co-wrote the script for Patton (1970), which won an Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay). His directorial fame escalated with the release of The Godfather (1972), a film which revolutionized movie-making in the gangster genre, earning praise from critics and public alike. It won three Academy Awards, including his second, for Academy Award for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay), and was instrumental in cementing his position as a prominent American film director.
Coppola followed it with a critically successful sequel, The Godfather Part II (1974), which became the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film was highly praised and won him three Academy Awards—for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture. The Conversation, which Coppola directed, produced and wrote, was released that same year, winning the Palme d'Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. He next directed Apocalypse Now (1979); notorious for its overlong and strenuous production, but critically acclaimed for its vivid and stark depiction of the Vietnam War, winning the Palme d'Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. To this day, Coppola is one of only seven filmmakers to win two Palme d'Or awards, and is the only filmmaker to win both in the same decade.

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Frank Capra
Frank Russell Capra (May 18, 1897 – September 3, 1991) was a Sicilian-born American film director. He emigrated to the U.S. when he was six, and eventually became a creative force behind major award-winning films during the 1930s and 1940s. His rags-to-riches story, having worked his way through college, has led film historians like Ian Freer to consider Capra the "American dream personified."
Capra became one of America's most powerful directors during the 1930s, winning three Oscars as Best Director. Among his leading films was It Happened One Night (1934), which became the first film to win all five top Oscars, including Best Picture. Other leading films included Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), You Can't Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and State of the Union (1948). Because of his early fame as a director, his name was listed "above the title" of his films when they were publicized. People "flocked to the theaters" during the 1930s and 1940s to see films directed by Frank Capra.

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Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire (born Frederick Austerlitz; May 10, 1899 – June 22, 1987) was an American film and Broadway stage dancer, choreographer, singer and actor. His stage and subsequent film career spanned a total of 76 years, during which he made 31 musical films. He was named the fifth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute. He is particularly associated with Ginger Rogers, with whom he made ten films.
Gene Kelly, another major innovator in filmed dance, said that "the history of dance on film begins with Astaire". Beyond film and television, many classical dancers and choreographers, Rudolf Nureyev, Sammy Davis, Jr., Michael Jackson, Gregory Hines, Mikhail Baryshnikov, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins among them, also acknowledged his importance and influence.
Astaire was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of Johanna "Ann" (née Geilus) and Frederic "Fritz" Austerlitz (born September 8, 1868, as Friedrich Emanuel Austerlitz). Astaire's mother was born in the United States to Lutheran German immigrants from East Prussia and Alsace, while Astaire's father was born in Linz, Austria, to Jewish parents who had converted to Catholicism.

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Gavin Hood
Gavin Hood (born 12 May 1963) is a South African filmmaker, screenwriter, producer and actor, best known for writing and directing the Academy Award-winning Foreign Language Film Tsotsi (2005). He is the director of the 20th Century Fox film X-Men Origins: Wolverine, released on 1 May 2009.
Hood was born in Johannesburg. He was educated at St. Stithians College (where he was elected Head Prefect in 1980) and the University of the Witwatersrand, where he studied law, and at the film school of the University of California, Los Angeles, in the United States.
He first came to the South African public's attention when he starred in the SABC TV production The Game, a drama series focusing on the game of rugby union.
Hood got his start at directing when he was commissioned to make several short educational dramas for the South African Department of Health. He directed his first commercial short film, The Storekeeper, in 1998.
His first feature film, A Reasonable Man, followed in 1999. The film portrays the accidental killing of a young child who is mistaken for a tokoloshe. He also starred in, co-produced and wrote the script for this movie. Hood then went on to direct the Polish language 2001 feature film In Desert and Wilderness (W pustyni i w puszczy) when the original director fell ill. This was followed by Tsotsi in 2005. Tsotsi won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006. Gavin Hood was also nominated for the 2005 Non-European Film - Prix Screen International at the European Film Awards for his work on the film.[3]

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Geena Davis
Virginia Elizabeth "Geena" Davis (born January 21, 1956) is an American actress, film producer, writer, former fashion model, and a women's Olympics archery team semi-finalist. She is known for her roles in Stuart Little,The Fly, Beetlejuice, Thelma & Louise, A League of Their Own, The Long Kiss Goodnight and The Accidental Tourist, for which she won the 1988 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. In 2005, she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Drama for her role in Commander in Chief.
Davis was born in Wareham, Massachusetts. Her mother, Lucille (née Cook), was a teacher's assistant, and her father, William F. Davis, was a civil engineer and church deacon; her parents had both been from small towns in Vermont. She has a brother named Danforth ("Dan"). At an early age, she became interested in music. She learned piano and flute and played organ well enough as a teenager to serve as an organist at her Congregationalist church in Wareham. Davis attended Wareham High School and was an exchange student in Sandviken, Sweden, becoming fluent in Swedish. Enrolling at New England College, she eventually graduated with a bachelor's degree in drama from Boston University in 1979. Davis is a member of Mensa, a social organization whose members are in the top 2% of intelligence as measured by an IQ test entrance exam.

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Gena Rowlands
Virginia Cathryn "Gena" Rowlands (born June 19, 1930) is an American actress of film, stage and television. The four-time Emmy and two-time Golden Globe winner is best known for her collaborations with her actor-director husband John Cassavetes in ten films, in two of which, Gloria and A Woman Under the Influence, she gave Academy Award-nominated performances.
Rowlands was born as Virginia Cathryn Rowlands in Madison, Wisconsin. Her mother, Mary Allen (née Neal), was a painter and housewife originally from Arkansas. Her father, Edwin Myrwyn Rowlands, was a banker and a state legislator who was of Welsh descent. Her family moved to Washington, D.C. in 1939 when Edwin was appointed to a position in the United States Department of Agriculture; moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1942 when he was appointed as branch manager of the Office of Price Administration; and later moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. From 1947-50, she attended the University of Wisconsin, where she was a popular student already renowned for her beauty. She left for New York City to study drama at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

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Gene Kelly
Eugene Curran "Gene" Kelly (August 23, 1912 - February 2, 1996) was an American dancer, actor, singer, film director and producer, and choreographer. Kelly was known for his energetic and athletic dancing style, his good looks and the likeable characters that he played on screen.
Although he is known today for his performances in Singin' in the Rain and An American in Paris, he was a dominant force in Hollywood musical films from the mid 1940s until this art form fell out of fashion in the late 1950s. His many innovations transformed the Hollywood musical film, and he is credited with almost single-handedly making the ballet form commercially acceptable to film audiences.
Kelly was the recipient of an Academy Honorary Award in 1952 for his career achievements. He later received lifetime achievement awards in the Kennedy Center Honors, and from the Screen Actors Guild and American Film Institute; in 1999, the American Film Institute also numbered him 15th in their Greatest Male Stars of All Time list.

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George C. Wolfe
George Costello Wolfe (born September 23, 1954) is an American playwright and director of theater and film. He won a Tony Award in 1993 for directing Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and another Tony Award in 1996 for his direction of the musical, Bring in 'da Noise/Bring in 'da Funk.
Wolfe was born in Frankfort, Kentucky, the son of Anna (née Lindsey), an educator, and Costello Wolfe, a government clerk. He attended an all-black private school where his mother taught. After a family move, he began attending the integrated Frankfort public school district.
He attended Frankfort High School where he began to pursue his interest in the theatre arts, and wrote poetry and prose for the school's literary journal. After high school, Wolfe enrolled at the historically black Kentucky State University, the alma mater of his parents. Following his first year, he transferred to Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he pursued a BA in theater. Wolfe taught for several years in Los Angeles at the Inner City Cultural Center and later in New York. He earned an MFA in dramatic writing and musical theater at New York University in 1983.

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George Cukor
George Dewey Cukor (

/ˈkjuːkər/; July 7, 1899 – January 24, 1983) was an American film director. He mainly concentrated on comedies and literary adaptations. His career flourished at RKO and later MGM, where he directed What Price Hollywood? (1932), A Bill of Divorcement (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), Little Women (1933), David Copperfield (1935), Romeo and Juliet (1936) and Camille (1936).
He was replaced as the director of Gone with the Wind (1939), but he went on to direct The Philadelphia Story (1940), Adam's Rib (1949), Born Yesterday (1950), A Star Is Born (1954) and My Fair Lady (1964). He continued to work into the 1980s.
Cukor was born on the Lower East Side of New York City, the younger child and only son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants Victor, an assistant district attorney, and Helen Ilona (née Gross) Cukor. His parents selected his middle name in honor of Spanish–American War hero George Dewey. Unlike the Jews of Poland and Russia whose first language was Yiddish, Hungarian Jews did not adopt Yiddish as their primary language. Therefore, the Cukor family, subscribing to the norm of their country of origin, was not a Yiddish speaking household. The family was not particularly religious, pork was a staple on the dinner table, and when he started attending temple as a boy, Cukor learned Hebrew phonetically, with no real understanding of the meaning of the words or what they represented. As a result, he was ambivalent about his faith and dismissive of old world traditions from childhood, and as an adult he embraced Anglophilia to remove himself even further from his roots.

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George Lucas
George Walton Lucas, Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an American film producer, screenwriter, director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones. Lucas is one of the American film industry's most financially successful directors/producers, with an estimated net worth of $3.2 billion as of 2011.
George Lucas was born in Modesto, California, the son of Dorothy Ellinore (née Bomberger) and George Walton Lucas, Sr. (1913–1991), who owned a stationery store.
Lucas grew up in the Central Valley town of Modesto and his early passion for cars and motor racing would eventually serve as inspiration for his USC student film 1:42.08, as well as his Oscar-nominated low-budget phenomenon, American Graffiti. Long before Lucas became obsessed with film making, he wanted to be a race-car driver, and he spent most of his high school years racing on the underground circuit at fairgrounds and hanging out at garages. However, a near-fatal accident in his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina on June 12, 1962, just days before his high school graduation, quickly changed his mind. Instead of racing, he attended Modesto Junior College and later got accepted into a junior college to study anthropology. While taking liberal arts courses, he developed a passion for cinematography and camera tricks. George Lucas graduated from USC in California.

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Geraldine Page
Geraldine Sue Page (November 22, 1924 – June 13, 1987) was an American actress. She starred in at least two dozen feature films, but she was primarily known for her performances in American theater. She was nominated for an Academy Award eight times, and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Carrie Watts in The Trip to Bountiful in March 1986, just over a year before she died.
Page was born in Kirksville, Missouri. She attended the Goodman School of Drama (later renamed The Theatre School at DePaul University) in Chicago and studied acting with Uta Hagen in New York. She began appearing in stock theatre at 17 years of age.
Page was a trained method actor and worked closely with Lee Strasberg.
Her appearance as Alma in the 1952 Off-Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke at the downtown Circle in the Square Theatre is as legendary as anything^{[peacock term]} that has ever happened in the American theater. Summer and Smoke had not been particularly well received in its Broadway incarnation. Page's performance (as the minister's daughter consumed with infinite longing) and that 1952 production, directed by José Quintero, gave the play a new life, and, according to common wisdom^[who?], it was that production (for its daring, for its fervor, for its being "downtown" rather than in the artistically "safe" realm of Broadway) which gave birth to the Off-Broadway movement in New York theatre. Her work continued, on Broadway, as the spinster in The Rainmaker and as the frustrated wife whose husband becomes romantically obsessed with a young Arab, played by James Dean, in The Immoralist.

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Glenn Close
Glenn Close (born March 19, 1947) is an American film, television and stage actress. She is best known for her roles as a femme fatale—the scheming Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and deranged stalker Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction (1987)—as well as Cruella de Vil in 101 Dalmatians (1996), and its sequel 102 Dalmatians (2000). She has been more recently known for her Emmy and Golden Globe winning role as Patty Hewes in the FX TV series Damages.
Consistently acclaimed for her versatility, she has been nominated six times for an Oscar (five times throughout the 1980's), three times for a Grammy Award and once for a BAFTA Film Award, and has won three Tonys, an Obie, three Emmys, two Golden Globes, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Close was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, the daughter of Bettine (née Moore) and William Taliaferro Close, a doctor who operated a clinic in the Belgian Congo and served as a personal physician to Congo/Zaire President Mobutu Sese Seko. Her parents came from prominent families. Her father was a descendant of the Taliaferros of Virginia; her paternal grandfather, Edward Bennett Close, a stockbroker and director of the American Hospital Association, was first married to Post Cereals' heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. Close is also a second cousin once-removed of actress Brooke Shields (Shields's great-grandmother Mary Elsie Moore was a sister of Close's maternal grandfather, Charles Arthur Moore, Jr.).

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Goldie Hawn
Goldie Jeanne Hawn (born November 21, 1945) is an American actress, film director, producer, and occasional singer. Hawn is known for her roles in Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, Private Benjamin, Foul Play, Shampoo, Overboard, Bird on a Wire, Death Becomes Her, The First Wives Club, and Cactus Flower, for which she won the 1969 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She is the mother of actors Oliver and Kate Hudson. Hawn has maintained a relationship with actor Kurt Russell since 1983.
Hawn was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Laura (née Steinhoff), a jewelry shop/dance school owner, and Edward Rutledge Hawn, a band musician who played at major events in Washington. She was named after her mother's aunt. She has a sister, Patricia; her brother, Edward, died before she was born. Through her father, Hawn is a direct descendant of Edward Rutledge, the youngest signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Hawn was raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she went to Montgomery Blair High School. Her father was Presbyterian and her mother was Jewish, the daughter of immigrants from Hungary; Hawn had a Jewish upbringing.

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Gong Li
Gong Li (born 31 December 1965) is a Chinese-born Singaporean film actress. Gong first came into international prominence through close collaboration with Chinese director Zhang Yimou and is credited with helping to bring Chinese cinema to Europe and the United States.
She has twice been awarded the Golden Rooster and the Hundred Flowers Awards as well as the Berlinale Camera, Cannes Festival Trophy, National Board of Review, New York Film Critics Circle Award, and Volpi Cup.
She married Singaporean businessman Ooi Hoe Soeng in 1996, and became a Singaporean citizen in 2008.
Gong Li was born in Shenyang, Liaoning, the youngest in a family of five children. Her father was a professor of economics and her mother, who was 40 when Gong was born, was a teacher. Gong grew up in Jinan, the capital of Shandong.
In 1985, Gong sought to study at China's top music school, but was denied entrance. Later that same year, she was accepted to the prestigious Central Academy of Drama in Beijing and graduated in 1989. While a student at the Central Academy of Drama, she was discovered by Zhang Yimou, who chose her for the lead role in Red Sorghum, his first film as a director.

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Grace Gummer
Grace Jane Gummer (born May 9, 1986) is an American actress.
The daughter of actress Meryl Streep and sculptor Don Gummer, Gummer grew up in Los Angeles and Connecticut with brother, Henry and sisters, Mamie Gummer and Louisa.
After graduating from Vassar College with a degree in Art History and Italian, Gummer made her stage debut in 2008 in Lukas Bärfuss's The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents. She starred as Anna Moore on the TeenNick show Gigantic, which premiered October 8, 2010.
Gummer made her feature film debut in the 2010 film Meskada, in which she played the role of Nat Collins, before playing Abby in Bashert with Paulo Costanzo. Grace Gummer also had a small role as a student in Julia Roberts' class in Larry Crowne, which was directed by Tom Hanks.
In the spring of 2011 she performed the role of Chloe Coverly in the revival of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York.
Gummer appeared as Katie Rand on the hit NBC television series Smash on March 26, 2012, in the episode entitled "The Coup". Katie Rand is a humanitarian attempting to bring peace to her divorcing parents. It is not known at this time if this will become a recurring role for Gummer.

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Grace Kelly
Grace Patricia Kelly (November 12, 1929 – September 14, 1982) was an American actress who, in April 1956, married Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, to become Princess consort of Monaco, styled as Her Serene Highness The Princess of Monaco, and commonly referred to as Princess Grace.
After embarking on an acting career in 1950, at the age of 20, Grace Kelly appeared in New York City theatrical productions as well as in more than forty episodes of live drama productions broadcast during the early 1950s Golden Age of Television. In October 1953, with the release of Mogambo, she became a movie star, a status confirmed in 1954 with a Golden Globe Award and Academy Award nomination as well as leading roles in five films, including The Country Girl, in which she gave a deglamorized, Academy Award-winning performance. She retired from acting at 26 to enter upon her duties in Monaco. She and Prince Rainier had three children: Caroline, Albert, and Stéphanie. She also retained her American roots, maintaining dual US and Monégasque citizenships.

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Greer Garson
Greer Garson, CBE (29 September 1904 – 6 April 1996) was a British actress who was very popular during World War II, being listed by the Motion Picture Herald as one of America's top ten box office draws in 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, and 1946. As one of MGM's major stars of the 1940s, Garson received seven Academy Award nominations, winning the Best Actress award for Mrs. Miniver (1942).
Greer Garson was born Eileen Evelyn Greer Garson in Manor Park, Essex (now Greater London), England in 1904, the only child of George Garson (1865–1906), a clerk born in London, but with Scottish lineage, and his wife, Nina (née Nancy Sophia Greer; died 1958). Her maternal grandfather was David Greer, a RIC sergeant in Castlewellan, County Down, Ireland in the 1880s and who later became a land steward to the Annesley family (wealthy landlords who built the town of Castlewellan). He lived in a large detached house built on the lower part of what was known as Pig Street or known locally as the Back Way near Shilliday's builder's yard. The house was called ‘Claremount’ and today the street is named Claremount Avenue. It was often reported that Garson was born in this house. She was, in fact, born in London, but spent much of her childhood in Castlewellan.

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Gregory Peck
Eldred Gregory Peck (April 5, 1916 – June 12, 2003) was an American actor.
One of the world's most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s, Peck continued to play important roles well into the 1980s. His notable performances include that of Atticus Finch in the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird, for which he won an Academy Award. President Lyndon Johnson honored Peck with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 for his lifetime humanitarian efforts. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Peck among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking at #12. He was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1983.
Eldred Gregory Peck was born in La Jolla, California, the son of Missouri-born Bernice Mae "Bunny" (née Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, who was a chemist and pharmacist. Peck's father was of Irish (maternal) heritage and English (paternal) heritage, and his mother was of Scots (paternal) and English (maternal) ancestry. Peck's father was a Catholic and his mother converted upon marrying his father. Peck's Irish-born paternal grandmother, Catherine Ashe, was related to Thomas Ashe, who took part in the Easter Rising fewer than three weeks after Peck's birth and died while on hunger strike in 1917. Peck's parents divorced by the time he was six years old and he spent the next few years being raised by his maternal grandmother.

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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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Haley Joel Osment
Haley Joel Osment (born April 10, 1988) is an American actor. After a series of roles in television and film during the 1990s, including a small part in Forrest Gump playing Tom Hanks' title character’s son, Osment rose to fame with his performance as Cole Sear in M. Night Shyamalan's thriller film, The Sixth Sense, which earned him a nomination for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He subsequently appeared in leading roles in several high-profile Hollywood films including Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Mimi Leder's Pay it Forward. He made his Broadway debut in 2008 in a short-lived revival of David Mamet's play, American Buffalo, starring John Leguizamo and Cedric the Entertainer.
Osment was born in Los Angeles, California; the son of Theresa Osment (née Seifert), a teacher, and Michael Eugene Osment, a theater and film actor, both natives of Alabama. Osment was raised Roman Catholic. He has one sibling, a sister, actress and singer-songwriter Emily Osment, who is almost four years his junior. Osment's parents described his childhood as a “good old-fashioned Southern upbringing”. His father said that when Osment was learning to speak, he deliberately avoided using baby talk when communicating with his son.

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Halle Berry
Halle Berry (

/ˈhæli ˈbɛri/; born August 14, 1966) is an American actress and a former fashion model. Berry received an Emmy, Golden Globe, SAG, and an NAACP Image Award for Introducing Dorothy Dandridge and won an Academy Award for Best Actress and was nominated for a BAFTA Award in 2001 for her performance in Monster's Ball, becoming the first and, as of 2012, only woman of African American descent to have won the award for Best Actress. She is one of the most highly paid actresses in Hollywood and also a Revlon spokesmodel. She has been involved in the production side of several of the films in which she performed.
Before becoming an actress, Berry entered several beauty contests, finishing as the 1st runner-up in the Miss USA Pageant (1986), and coming in 6th place in the Miss World Pageant in 1986. She made her film debut with a small role in 1991's Jungle Fever. This led to starring roles in The Flintstones (1994), Bulworth (1998), X-Men (2000) and its sequels, and as Bond Girl Jinx in Die Another Day (2002). She also won the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress in 2005 for Catwoman and accepted the award in person—one of the few performers to do so.

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Hanna Schygulla
Hanna Schygulla (born 25 December 1943) is a German actress and chanson singer. She is generally considered the most prominent German actress of the New German Cinema.
Schygulla was born in Königshütte, Upper Silesia, to German parents Antonie (née Mzyk) and Joseph Schygulla. Her father, a timber merchant by profession, was then drafted as an infantryman in the German Army and was captured by American forces in Italy, subsequently being held as a prisoner of war until 1948. In 1945, Hanna and her mother came as refugees to Munich, after the German majority population of Königshütte was expelled by Communist Poland. In the 1960s, Schygulla studied Romance languages and German studies, while taking acting lessons in Munich during her spare time.
Acting eventually became her focus, and she became particularly known for her film work with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. During the making of Effi Briest (1974), an adaptation of a classic German novel, Fassbinder and Schygulla fell out over divergent interpretations of the character. Also a problem for Schygulla was low pay, and she led a revolt against Fassbinder on this issue during the making of Effi Briest. Fassbinder's response was typically blunt: "I can't stand the sight of your face any more. You bust my balls". After this, they did not work together for several years until The Marriage of Maria Braun in 1978. The film was entered into the 29th Berlin International Film Festival, where Schygulla won the Silver Bear for Best Actress for her performance.

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Harrison Ford
Harrison Ford (born July 13, 1942) is an American film actor and producer. He is famous for his performances as Han Solo in the original Star Wars trilogy and as the title character of the Indiana Jones film series. Ford is also known for his roles as Rick Deckard in Blade Runner, John Book in Witness and Jack Ryan in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. His career has spanned six decades and includes roles in several Hollywood blockbusters, including Presumed Innocent, The Fugitive, Air Force One, and What Lies Beneath. At one point, four of the top six box-office hits of all time included one of his roles. Five of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry.
In 1997, Ford was ranked No. 1 in Empire's "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time" list. As of July 2008, the United States domestic box office grosses of Ford's films total over US$3.5 billion, with worldwide grosses surpassing $6 billion, making Ford the third highest grossing U.S. domestic box-office star. Ford is the husband of actress Calista Flockhart.

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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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Henry Fonda
Henry Jaynes Fonda (May 16, 1905 – August 12, 1982) was an American film and stage actor.
Fonda made his mark early as a Broadway actor. He also appeared in 1938 in plays performed in White Plains, New York, with Joan Tompkins. He made his Hollywood debut in 1935, and his career gained momentum after his Academy Award-nominated performance as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, a 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about an Oklahoma family who moved west during the Dust Bowl. Throughout six decades in Hollywood, Fonda cultivated a strong, appealing screen image in such classics as The Ox-Bow Incident, Mister Roberts and 12 Angry Men. Later, Fonda moved both toward darker epics as Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and lighter roles in family comedies like Yours, Mine and Ours with Lucille Ball.
Fonda was the patriarch of a family of famous actors, including daughter Jane Fonda, son Peter Fonda, granddaughter Bridget Fonda, and grandson Troy Garity. His family and close friends called him "Hank". In 1999, he was named the sixth-Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute.

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Hilary Swank
Hilary Ann Swank (born July 30, 1974) is an American film actress. She has won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, as Brandon Teena in Boys Don't Cry (1999) and as struggling waitress-turned-boxer Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby (2004). She also put in a notable performance in Insomnia, working alongside Al Pacino. Since 2003, Swank has also worked as an executive producer.
Swank was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. Her mother, Judy Kay (née Clough), was a secretary and dancer, and her father, Stephen Michael Swank, was an officer in the Air National Guard and later a traveling salesman. She has a brother, Daniel, who is eight years her senior. Her surname, originally Schwenk, is of German origin. Many of Swank's family members hail from Ringgold County, Iowa, and her maternal grandmother was of Spanish and Shoshone (Native American) ancestry. After having lived in Spokane, Washington, Swank's family moved to a trailer park near Lake Samish in Bellingham, Washington, when Swank was six.

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Holly Hunter
Holly Hunter (born March 20, 1958) is an American actress. Hunter starred in The Piano for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She has also been nominated for Oscars for her roles in Broadcast News, The Firm, and Thirteen. Hunter has also won two Emmy Awards with seven nominations and has won a Golden Globe Award with another six nominations.
Holly Hunter was born in Conyers, Georgia, the daughter of Opal Marguerite (née Catledge), a housewife, and Charles Edwin Hunter, a farmer and sporting-goods manufacturer's representative. Hunter earned a degree in drama from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and for a while performed in the theatre scene there, playing ingenue roles at City Theatre, then named the City Players. She eventually moved to New York City and roomed with fellow actress Frances McDormand. Hunter, in 2008, described living in The Bronx "at the end of the D [subway] train, just off 205th Street, on Bainbridge Avenue and Hull Avenue. It was very Irish, and then you could go just a few blocks away and hit major Italian". A chance encounter with playwright Beth Henley, when the two were trapped alone in an elevator, led to Hunter's being cast in Henley's plays Crimes of the Heart (succeeding Mary Beth Hurt on Broadway), and Off-Broadway's The Miss Firecracker Contest. "It was like the beginning of 1982. It was on 49th Street between Broadway and Eighth [Avenue] [...] on the south side of the street", Hunter recalled in an interview. "[We were trapped] 10 minutes; not long. We actually had a nice conversation. It was just the two of us".

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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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Ingrid Bergman
Ingrid Bergman (29 August 1915 – 29 August 1982) was a Swedish actress who starred in a variety of European and American films. She won three Academy Awards, two Emmy Awards, and the Tony Award for Best Actress. She is ranked as the fourth greatest female star of American cinema of all time by the American Film Institute. She is best remembered for her roles as Ilsa Lund in Casablanca (1942), a World War II drama co-starring Humphrey Bogart and as Alicia Huberman in Notorious (1946), an Alfred Hitchcock thriller co-starring Cary Grant.
Before becoming a star in American films, she had already been a leading actress in Swedish films. Her first introduction to American audiences came with her starring role in the English remake of Intermezzo in 1939. In America, she brought to the screen a "Nordic freshness and vitality", along with exceptional beauty and intelligence, and according to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, she quickly became "the ideal of American womanhood" and one of Hollywood's greatest leading actresses.

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Irene Papas
Irene Papas (Greek Ειρήνη Παππά; born 3 September 1926) is a Greek actress and occasional singer, who has starred in over seventy films in a career spanning more than fifty years.
Irene Papas was born as Irini Lelekou (Ειρήνη Λελέκου) in Chiliomodi outside Corinth, Greece.
She sits on the board of directors of the Anna-Marie Foundation.
Papas began her early career in Greece (she was discovered by Elia Kazan), achieving widespread fame there, before starring in internationally renowned films such as The Guns of Navarone and Zorba the Greek, and critically acclaimed films such as Z and Electra. She is a leading figure in cinematic transcriptions of ancient tragedy since she has portrayed Helen in The Trojan Women, Clytemnestra in Iphigenia, and the eponymous parts in Electra and Antigone. She appeared as Catherine of Aragon in the film Anne of the Thousand Days, opposite Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold in 1969. She co-starred in The Trojan Women with Katharine Hepburn, who once said that Papas was "one of the best actresses in the history of cinema".^{[citation needed]}

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Irène Jacob
Irène Marie Jacob (born 15 July 1966) is a French-born Swiss actress considered one of the preeminent French actresses of her generation. Jacob gained international recognition and acclaim through her work with Polish film director Krzysztof Kieślowski, who cast her in the lead role of The Double Life of Véronique and Three Colors: Red. She came to represent an image of European sophistication, through her "classic beauty and thoughtful, almost melancholic style of acting."
Irène Jacob was born in Suresnes, Hauts-de-Seine, a western suburb of Paris. The youngest child with three older brothers, she was raised in a highly educated and intellectual family and environment: her father Maurice Jacob was a physicist; her mother, a psychologist; one brother Francis Jacob, a musician; and two brothers, scientists. In 1969, at the age of three, Irène moved with her family to Geneva, Switzerland, where she became interested in the arts.
Jacob developed an interest in performing after seeing the films of Charlie Chaplin. "They took my heart", she has recalled. "They made me laugh and cry, and that was exactly what I was waiting for in a film: to awaken me to my feelings."

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Isabelle Adjani
Isabelle Yasmine Adjani (born 27 June 1955) is a French film actress and singer. Adjani has appeared in 30 films since 1970. She holds the record for most César Awards for Best Actress with five, for Possession (1981), One Deadly Summer (1983), Camille Claudel (1988), Queen Margot (1994) and Skirt Day (2009). She was also given a double Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Award in 1981 and a Berlin Film Festival Best Actress Award in 1989. She also received two Academy Award nominations for Best Actress. She performs in French, English and German.
Adjani was born in an immigrant neighborhood Gennevilliers, Hauts-de-Seine, a suburb of Paris to an Algerian father of Turkish origin from Constantine, Algeria, Mohammed Cherif Adjani. Her father was a soldier in the French Army in World War II. Her mother Augusta, called "Gusti", was German. She grew up bi-lingual, speaking German and French fluently. After winning a school recitation contest, she began acting in amateur theater by the age of twelve. At the age of 14, she starred in her first motion picture Le Petit bougnat (1970).

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Jack Lemmon
John Uhler "Jack" Lemmon III (February 8, 1925 – June 27, 2001) was an American actor and musician. He starred in more than 60 films including Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Mister Roberts (for which he won the 1955 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award), Days of Wine and Roses, The Great Race, Irma la Douce, The Odd Couple, Save the Tiger (for which he won the 1973 Best Actor Academy Award), The Out-of-Towners, The China Syndrome, Missing (for which he won 'Best Actor' at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival), Glengarry Glen Ross, Grumpy Old Men and Grumpier Old Men.
Lemmon was born in an elevator^{[citation needed]} at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He was the only child of Mildred Burgess LaRue (née Noel) and John Uhler Lemmon, Jr., who was the president of a doughnut company. Lemmon attended John Ward Elementary School in Newton and The Rivers School in Weston, Massachusetts. He had stated that he knew he wanted to be an actor from the age of eight. Lemmon attended Phillips Academy (Class of 1943) and Harvard University (Class of 1947), where he lived in Adams House and was an active member of several Drama Clubs - becoming president of the Hasty Pudding Club - as well as a member of the Delphic Club for Gentleman, a final club at Harvard. After Harvard, Lemmon joined the Navy, receiving V-12 training and serving as an ensign. On being discharged, he took up acting professionally, working on radio, television and Broadway. He studied acting under coach Uta Hagen. He also became enamored of the piano and learned to play it on his own. He could also play the harmonica, organ, and the double bass.

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Jack Nicholson
Not to be confused with Nicholas Jackson
John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson (born April 22, 1937) is an American actor, film director, producer and writer. He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. His twelve Oscar nominations make him the second most nominated actor of all time, behind only Meryl Streep, and tied with Katharine Hepburn.
Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and for As Good as It Gets. He also won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the 1983 film Terms of Endearment. He is tied with Walter Brennan for most acting wins by a male actor (three). Nicholson is well known for playing villainous roles such as Jack Torrance in The Shining, Frank Costello in The Departed, and the Joker in 1989's Batman, among many other roles.
Nicholson is one of only two actors who have been nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade from the 1960s to 2000s; the other is Michael Caine. He has won seven Golden Globe Awards, and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2001. In 1994, he became one of the youngest actors to be awarded the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. Notable films in which he has starred include Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Passenger, The Shining, Reds, Terms of Endearment, Batman, A Few Good Men, As Good as It Gets, About Schmidt, The Departed and Anger Management .

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Jacki Weaver
Jacqueline Ruth "Jacki" Weaver (born 25 May 1947) is an Australian theatre, film, and television actress. She is best known outside Australia for her performance in Animal Kingdom, for which she was nominated for the 2011 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Weaver was born in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Her father, Arthur, was a Sydney solicitor, and her mother, Edith (née Simpson), a migrant from northern England. She attended Hornsby Girls' High School.
She has had a number of relationships/marriages, including with director Richard Wherrett and media figure Derryn Hinch. She has a son, Dylan, and two grandchildren.
Weaver has been working in Australian film, stage and television since the 1960s.
In 1964 at the Palace Theatre in Sydney, Weaver and a number of other Australian singers such as The Delltones and her then-boyfriend Bryan Davies performed a satire on the Gidget movies, in which Weaver performed as "Gadget."
In the mid-1960s, she appeared on the Australian music show Bandstand. In one appearance, she sang a 1920s-style pastiche, the novelty song "I Love Onions."

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Jacqueline McKenzie
Jacqueline Susan McKenzie (born 24 October 1967) is an Australian actress.
McKenzie made her film debut in the 1987 film Wordplay and on stage in Child Dancing for Griffin Theatre Company. She made a strong impression in Romper Stomper (1992), and over the next couple of years came to be regarded as one of Australia's most promising young actresses. She received Australian Film Institute Award nominations for her roles in Stark, This Won't Hurt a Bit (both 1993), The Battlers and Traps (both 1994) before winning two awards in 1995 for "Best Actress in a Television Drama" for Halifax f.p: "Lies of the Mind", and Best Actress in a Leading Role" for Angel Baby. With this success she ventured to the United States and secured a Green Card, as a "Person of Extraordinary Ability". She subsequently had acting roles in films such as Deep Blue Sea (1999) and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002).
In 2004, she began playing the lead female role Diana Skouris in the science fiction television series The 4400, one of the year's biggest successes. The show ran for four seasons, ending in 2007. She also played a lead role in an episode of Two Twisted (2006), an Australian television program. McKenzie appeared on television again in 2006 playing Linda Landry in "Umney's Last Case", the third episode of Nightmares and Dreamscapes on TNT.

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James Cagney
James Francis Cagney, Jr. (July 17, 1899 – March 30, 1986) was an American actor, first on stage, then in film, where he had his greatest impact. Although he won acclaim and major awards for a wide variety of performances, he is best remembered for playing tough guys. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him eighth among its 50 Greatest American Screen Legends.
In his first professional acting performance, he danced dressed as a woman in the chorus line of the 1919 revue Every Sailor. He spent several years in vaudeville as a hoofer and comedian, until he got his first major acting part in 1925. He secured several other roles, receiving good notices, before landing the lead in the 1929 play Penny Arcade. After rave reviews, Warner Bros. signed him for an initial $500-a-week, three-week contract to reprise his role; this was quickly extended to a seven-year contract.

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James Stewart
James Maitland "Jimmy" Stewart (May 20, 1908 – July 2, 1997) was an American film and stage actor, known for his distinctive voice and persona. Over the course of his career, he starred in many films widely considered classics and was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning one in competition and receiving one Lifetime Achievement award. He was a major MGM contract star. He also had a noted military career and was a World War II and Vietnam War veteran, who rose to the rank of Brigadier General in the United States Air Force Reserve.
James Maitland Stewart was born on May 20, 1908, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the son of Elizabeth Ruth (née Jackson) and Alexander Maitland Stewart, who owned a hardware store. Stewart's parents were of Scottish descent and Presbyterians. His maternal ancestors served in the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the American Civil War. The eldest of three children (he had two younger sisters, Virginia and Mary), he was expected to continue his father's business, which had been in the family for three generations. His mother was an excellent pianist but his father discouraged Stewart's request for lessons. But when his father accepted a gift of an accordion from a guest, young Stewart quickly learned to play the instrument, which became a fixture off-stage during his acting career. As the family grew, music continued to be an important part of family life.

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Jamie Lee Curtis
Jamie Lee Curtis (born November 22, 1958) is an American actress and author. Although she was initially known as a "scream queen" because of her starring roles in several horror films early in her career, such as Halloween, The Fog, Prom Night, and Terror Train, Curtis has since compiled a body of work that spans many genres, and has won BAFTA and Golden Globe awards. Her 1998 book, Today I Feel Silly, and Other Moods That Make My Day, made the best-seller list in The New York Times. Curtis has appeared in advertisements, and is a blogger for The Huffington Post online newspaper. She is married to actor, screenwriter, and director Christopher Guest.
Curtis was born in Santa Monica, California, to actor Tony Curtis and actress Janet Leigh. Her paternal grandparents were Hungarian Jewish immigrants and two of her maternal great-grandparents were Danish. Curtis's parents divorced in 1962, after which her mother married Robert Brandt. Curtis has an older sister, Kelly Curtis, who is also an actress, and several half-siblings (all from her father's remarriages), Alexandra, Allegra, Ben, and Nicholas Curtis (who died in 1994 of a drug overdose). Curtis attended Westlake School in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills High School, and graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall. Returning to California in 1976, she attended the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. She considered majoring in social work, but quit after one semester to pursue an acting career.

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Jane Fonda
Jane Fonda (born Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda; December 21, 1937) is an American actress, writer, political activist, former fashion model, and fitness guru. She rose to fame in the 1960s with films such as Barbarella and Cat Ballou. She has won two Academy Awards and received several other movie awards and nominations during more than 50 years as an actress. After 15 years of retirement, she returned to film in 2005 with Monster in Law, followed by Georgia Rule two years later. She also produced and starred in over 20 exercise videos released between 1982 and 1995, and once again in 2010.
Fonda has been an activist for many political causes; her opposition to the Vietnam War and associated activities were controversial. She has also protested the Iraq War and violence against women. She describes herself as a liberal and a feminist. In 2005, Fonda worked alongside Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem to co-found the Women's Media Center, an organization that works to amplify the voices of women in the media through advocacy, media and leadership training, and the creation of original content. Fonda currently serves on the board of the organization. Since 2001, Fonda has been a Christian. She published an autobiography in 2005, and in 2011, she published a second memoir, Prime Time.

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Janet McTeer
Janet McTeer, OBE (born 5 August 1961)^{Dubious: Discuss} is an English actress.
McTeer was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, the daughter of Jean (née Morris) and Alan McTeer, and spent her childhood in York. She attended the now defunct Queen Anne Grammar School for Girls, and worked at the Old Starre Inn, at York Minster and at the Theatre Royal. She then trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, beginning a successful theatrical career with the Royal Exchange Theatre after graduating.
McTeer's television work includes the BBC production of Nigel Nicolson's book Portrait of a Marriage in which she played Vita Sackville-West and the popular ITV series The Governor written by Lynda La Plante. She made her screen debut in Half Moon Street, a 1986 film based on a novel by Paul Theroux. In 1991, she appeared in Catherine Cookson's The Black Velvet Gown, with Bob Peck and Geraldine Somerville; this won the International Emmy award for best drama. She appeared in the 1992 film version of Wuthering Heights (co-starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes) and the 1995 film Carrington (which starred Emma Thompson and Jonathan Pryce).

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Jean Simmons
Jean Merilyn Simmons, OBE (January 31, 1929 – January 22, 2010) was an English actress. She appeared predominantly in films, beginning with those films made in Great Britain during and after World War II – she was one of J. Arthur Rank's 'well-spoken young starlets' – followed mainly by Hollywood films from 1950.
Simmons was born in Lower Holloway, London, England, to Charles Simmons and his wife, Winifred (Loveland) Simmons. Jean was the youngest of four children with siblings Edna, Harold and Lorna. She began acting at the age of 14. During the war, the Simmons family was evacuated to Winscombe in Somerset. Her father, a physical education teacher (who had represented Great Britain in the 1912 Summer Olympics), taught briefly at Sidcot School, and sometime during this period Simmons followed her elder sister on to the village stage and sang songs such as "Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow Wow". Returning to London and just enrolled at the Aida Foster School of Dance, she was spotted by the director Val Guest, who cast her in the Margaret Lockwood vehicle Give Us the Moon. Small roles in several other films followed including the high profile Caesar and Cleopatra, produced by Gabriel Pascal. Pascal saw potential in Simmons and in 1945 he signed her to a seven year contract. Prior to moving to Hollywood, she played the young Estella in David Lean's version of Great Expectations (1946) and Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948), for which she received her first Oscar nomination. It was the experience of working on Great Expectations that caused her to pursue an acting career more seriously:

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Jeanine Tesori
Jeanine Tesori (born 1961, originally Jeanine Levenson) is an American musical arranger and composer who won the 1999 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play for Nicholas Hytner's production of Twelfth Night at Lincoln Center and the 2004 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music for Caroline, or Change.
Tesori made her Broadway debut when she arranged the dance music for the 1995 revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. In 1997 she composed the score for the off-Broadway musical Violet, which won her an Obie Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical, and the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical, and arranged the music for the Johnny Mercer revue Dream, a task she repeated with the 1998 revival of The Sound of Music and the 1999 revue Swing! She also served as associate conductor for the Broadway productions of The Secret Garden and The Who's Tommy.
In 2000, Tesori joined forces with lyricist Dick Scanlan to write eleven new songs for a stage adaptation of Thoroughly Modern Millie. A successful run at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego prompted a transfer to Broadway in 2002, and Tesori was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Original Score and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music.

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Jennifer Hudson
Jennifer Kate Hudson (born September 12, 1981) is an American recording artist, actress and spokesperson. She came to prominence in 2004 as one of the finalists on the third season of American Idol, coming in seventh place. She made her film debut in the 2006 film Dreamgirls, which won her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, a Golden Globe Award, a BAFTA Award, an NAACP Image Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
She won a Grammy Award for her eponymous debut album, Jennifer Hudson, which was released in 2008 on Arista Records and was certified gold by the RIAA for selling over 800,000 copies in the US; sales exceeded 1 million copies worldwide. Additionally, it spawned the hit single Spotlight. Her second album, I Remember Me, was released in March 2011, and reached number two on the Billboard 200, selling 165,000 copies in its first week of release. The album was certified gold by the RIAA, for shipping over 500,000 copies in the US.
In late 2008, after Hudson's mother, brother and nephew were killed in a shooting, Hudson stepped out of the limelight for three months. Hudson resumed her public appearances in 2009, and has since performed at the Super Bowl XLIII, the Grammy Awards, American Idol, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Hudson has been described as a friend of President Barack Obama, who invited her to appear with him at a fundraiser in Beverly Hills in May 2009. She also performed at the White House at the "Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement" event. Her vocal range is mezzo-soprano. Hudson has sold 1,280,000 albums and 2,237,000 tracks in the United States as of February 2012.

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Jeremy Irons
Jeremy John Irons (born 19 September 1948) is an English actor. After receiving classical training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Irons began his acting career on stage in 1969, and has since appeared in many London theatre productions including The Winter's Tale, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, Godspell and Richard II. In 1984, he made his Broadway debut in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing and received a Tony Award for Best Actor.
Irons's first major film role came in the 1981 romantic drama The French Lieutenant's Woman, for which he received a BAFTA nomination for Best Actor. After starring in such films as Moonlighting (1982), Betrayal (1983), and The Mission (1986), he gained critical acclaim for portraying twin gynaecologists in David Cronenberg's psychological thriller Dead Ringers (1988). In 1990, Irons played accused murderer Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune, and took home multiple awards including an Academy Award for Best Actor. Other notable films have included The House of the Spirits (1993), The Lion King (1994), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), Lolita (1997), The Merchant of Venice (2004), Being Julia (2004), Appaloosa (2008), and Margin Call (2011).

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Jerry Herman
Jerry Herman (born July 10, 1931) is an American composer and lyricist, known for his work in Broadway musical theater. He composed the scores for the hit Broadway musicals Hello, Dolly!, Mame, and La Cage aux Folles. He has been nominated for the Tony Award five times, and won twice, for Hello, Dolly! and La Cage aux Folles. In 2009, Herman received the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. He is a recipient of the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors.

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Jessica Lange
Jessica Phyllis Lange (born April 20, 1949) is an American actress who has worked in film, theatre and television. The recipient of multiple awards, including two Academy Awards, five Golden Globes, one Emmy and one Screen Actors Guild Award, Lange is regarded as one of the première actors of her generation.
Lange was discovered by producer Dino De Laurentiis and made her professional film debut in 1976's King Kong. In 1982, she became the first actor in forty years to receive two Oscar nominations within the same year; she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as a soap opera star in Tootsie and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of the troubled actress Frances Farmer in Frances. Lange received three more nominations for Country (1984), Sweet Dreams (1985), and Music Box (1989) before being nominated a sixth time and winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as a manic depressive in Blue Sky (1994).
In addition to acting, Lange is a photographer with two published works, and is a humanitarian, holding a position as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF, specializing in the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Congo and Russia.

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Jessica Tandy
Jessie Alice "Jessica" Tandy (June 7, 1909 - September 11, 1994) was an English-American stage and film actress.
She first appeared on the London stage in 1926 at the age of 16, playing, among other roles, Katherine opposite Laurence Olivier's Henry V, and Cordelia opposite John Gielgud's King Lear. She also worked in British films. Following the end of her marriage to the British actor Jack Hawkins, she moved to New York, where she met Canadian actor Hume Cronyn. He became her second husband and frequent partner on stage and screen.
She won the Tony Award for her performance as Blanche Dubois in the original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948, sharing the prize with Katherine Cornell (who won for the female lead in Antony and Cleopatra) and Judith Anderson (for the latter's portrayal of Medea). Over the following three decades, her career continued sporadically and included a supporting role in Alfred Hitchcock's horror film, The Birds (1963), and a Tony Award-winning performance in The Gin Game (1977, playing in the two-hander play opposite Hume Cronyn). Along with Cronyn, she was a member of the original acting company of the Guthrie Theater.

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Jew
The Jews (Hebrew: יְהוּדִים‎‎ ISO 259-3 Yhudim Israeli pronunciation [jehuˈdim]), also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and an ethnoreligious group, originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation.Converts to Judaism, whose status as Jews within the Jewish ethnos is equal to those born into it, have been absorbed into the Jewish people throughout the millennia.
In Jewish tradition, Jewish ancestry is traced to the Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the second millennium BCE. The modern State of Israel defines itself as a Jewish state in its Basic Laws, and Israel's Law of Return states: "Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh." Israel is the only country where Jews are a majority of the population. Jews achieved political autonomy twice before in ancient history. The first of these periods lasted from 1350 to 586 BCE, and encompassed the periods of the Judges, the United Monarchy, and the Divided Monarchy of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, ending with the destruction of the First Temple. The second was the period of the Hasmonean Kingdom spanning from 140 to 37 BCE. Since the destruction of the First Temple, most Jews have lived in diaspora. A minority in every country in which they live (except Israel), they have frequently experienced persecution throughout history, resulting in a population that has fluctuated both in numbers and distribution over the centuries.

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Jim Carrey
James Eugene "Jim" Carrey (born January 17, 1962) is a Canadian-American actor, comedian, and producer. Carrey has received four Golden Globe Award nominations, winning two. Known for his highly energetic, slapstick performances, he has been described as one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood.
Carrey first gained recognition in 1990 after landing a recurring role in the sketch comedy In Living Color. His first leading roles in major productions came with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), Dumb and Dumber (1994), The Mask (1994), and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1995). In 1997, he gave a critically acclaimed performance in Liar Liar, which earned him a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actor. He then starred in the critically acclaimed hits The Truman Show (1998) and Man on the Moon (1999), both garnering him two Golden Globe Awards for Best Actor.
In 2000, he gained further recognition for his portrayal of the The Grinch in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Three years later, Carrey starred in the major blockbuster film Bruce Almighty (2003). The following year he starred in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), for which he received another Golden Globe nomination in addition to a BAFTA Award nomination. He then starred in popular productions Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), Fun with Dick and Jane (2005), Yes Man (2008), A Christmas Carol (2009), and Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011).

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Joan Blondell
Rose Joan Blondell (August 30, 1906 – December 25, 1979) was an American actress who performed in movies and on television for five decades as Joan Blondell.
After winning a beauty pageant, Blondell embarked upon a film career. Establishing herself as a sexy wisecracking blonde, she was a pre-Code staple of Warner Brothers and appeared in more than 100 movies and television productions. She was most active in films during the 1930s, and during this time she co-starred with Glenda Farrell in nine films, in which the duo portrayed gold-diggers. Blondell continued acting for the rest of her life, often in small character roles or supporting television roles. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work in The Blue Veil (1951).
Blondell was seen in featured roles in two films released shortly before her death from leukemia, Grease (1978) and the remake of The Champ (1979).
Blondell was born to a vaudeville family in New York City. Her father, known as Eddie Joan Blondell, Jr., was born in Indiana in 1866 to French parents, and was a vaudeville comedian and one of the original Katzenjammer Kids. Blondell's mother was Kathryn ("Katie") Cain, born April 13, 1884, in Brooklyn of Irish American parents. Her younger sister, Gloria, also an actress, was briefly married to film producer Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli (the future producer of the James Bond film series) and bears a strong resemblance to her older sister, Joan. Blondell also had a brother, the namesake of her father and grandfather. Her cradle was a property trunk as her parents moved from place to place and she made her first appearance on stage at the age of four months when she was carried on in a cradle as the daughter of Peggy Astaire in The Greatest Love.

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Joan Crawford
Joan Crawford (March 23, 1905 – May 10, 1977), born Lucille Fay LeSueur, was an American actress in film, television and theatre.
Starting as a dancer in traveling theatrical companies before debuting on Broadway, Crawford was signed to a motion picture contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925. Initially frustrated by the size and quality of her parts, Crawford began a campaign of self-publicity and became nationally known as a flapper by the end of the 1920s. In the 1930s, Crawford's fame rivaled MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo. Crawford often played hardworking young women who find romance and financial success. These "rags-to-riches" stories were well received by Depression-era audiences and were popular with women. Crawford became one of Hollywood's most prominent movie stars and one of the highest paid women in the United States, but her films began losing money and by the end of the 1930s she was labeled "box office poison".
After an absence of nearly two years from the screen, Crawford staged a comeback by starring in Mildred Pierce (1945), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. In 1955, she became involved with the Pepsi-Cola Company through her marriage to company Chairman Alfred Steele. After his death in 1959, Crawford was elected to fill his vacancy on the board of directors but was forcibly retired in 1973. She continued acting in film and television regularly through the 1960s, when her performances became fewer; after the release of the British horror film Trog in 1970, Crawford retired from the screen. Following a public appearance in 1974, after which unflattering photographs were published, Crawford withdrew from public life and became more and more reclusive until her death in 1977.

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Joan Rivers
Joan Alexandra Molinsky (born June 8, 1933), better known by her stage name Joan Rivers, is an American television personality, comedian, and actress. She is known for her brash manner; her loud, raspy voice with a heavy New York accent; and her numerous cosmetic surgeries. Rivers' comic style relies heavily on her ability to poke fun at herself and other Hollywood celebrities.
Joan Rivers was born Joan Alexandra Molinsky in Brooklyn, a borough of New York City, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants Beatrice (née Grushman; January 6, 1906 – October 1975) and Meyer C. Molinsky (December 7, 1900 – January 1985). She was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and her family later moved to Larchmont, in Westchester County, New York. She attended Connecticut College between 1950 and 1952 and graduated from Barnard College in 1954 with a bachelor-of-arts degree in English literature and anthropology. Before entering show business, Rivers worked at various jobs such as a tour guide at Rockefeller Center, a writer/proofreader at an advertising agency and as a fashion consultant at Bond Clothing Stores. During this period, the agent Tony Rivers advised her to change her name, so she chose Joan Rivers as her stage name.

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Joanne Woodward
Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward (born February 27, 1930) is an American actress, television and theatrical producer, and widow of Paul Newman. She is perhaps best known for her Academy Award winning role in The Three Faces of Eve (1957).
Woodward was born in Thomasville, Georgia, daughter of Elinor Gignilliat (née Trimmier) and Wade Woodward, Jr., who at one point was vice president of publisher Charles Scribner's Sons. Her middle name, "Gignilliat", originates from distant Huguenot ancestry. She was influenced to become an actress by her mother's love of movies. Her mother named her after Joan Crawford, using the Southern pronunciation of the name "Joanne". Attending the premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, nine-year-old Woodward rushed out into the parade of stars and sat on the lap of Laurence Olivier, star Vivien Leigh's partner and future husband. She eventually worked with Olivier in 1977, in a television production of Come Back, Little Sheba. During rehearsals, she mentioned this incident to him and he told her he remembered her doing it.

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Jodhi May
Jodhi May (born 8 May 1975, some sources indicate 1 May 1975 and 30 November 1974) is an English stage, film and television actress. She is probably best known for her performances as Alice Munro in The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and as Florence Banner in the BBC drama Tipping the Velvet.
Born in Camden Town, London, May first acted at the age of 12 in 1988's A World Apart. The role earned her a Best Actress award at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, shared with her co-stars Barbara Hershey and Linda Mvusi. She remains the youngest recipient of the award.
Other than a brief lull while studying English at Wadham College, Oxford, she has had near constant work in the subsequent two decades, and can regularly be seen on film, television and the British stage.
Notable roles have included Alice Munro in Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans, Lea Papin in Sister My Sister, Florence Banner in Tipping the Velvet, Anne Boleyn in the first adaptation of The Other Boleyn Girl, and Sabina Spielrein in the play The Talking Cure.

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Jodie Foster
Jodie Foster (born Alicia Christian Foster; November 19, 1962) is an American actress, film director, and producer.
Foster began acting in commercials at three years of age, and her first significant role came at age 13 in the 1976 film Taxi Driver as the preteen prostitute Iris, for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Also that year, she starred in the cult film The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1989, for playing a rape victim in The Accused. In 1991, she starred in The Silence of the Lambs as Clarice Starling, a gifted FBI trainee, assisting in a hunt for a serial killer. This performance received international acclaim and her second Academy Award for Best Actress. She received her fourth Academy Award nomination for playing a hermit in Nell (1994). Other popular films include Bugsy Malone (1976); Freaky Friday (1976); Candleshoe (1977) Maverick (1994); Contact (1997); Panic Room (2002); Flightplan (2005); Inside Man (2006); The Brave One (2007); Nim's Island (2008) and Carnage (2011), for which she received a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy.

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Joe Morgenstern
Joe Morgenstern (born 3 October 1932) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for The Wall Street Journal.
Morgenstern graduated from Lehigh University in 1953. His first journalism experience was as news clerk at the New York Times. He then became foreign correspondent for the Times, based in Switzerland and France.
Morgenstern became an entertainment reporter for the New York Herald Tribune in 1959, later advancing to theater/music critic.
Beginning in 1965 until 1983 Morgenstern was film critic for Newsweek. During this time, his most famous review was when he initially panned Bonnie and Clyde and then reconsidered his opinion seriously enough to retract it in the next issue. That proved a golden marketing opportunity for Warner Brothers to attract interest in the film by noting it made a major film critic change his mind about its virtues. From 1983 to 1988 he wrote a column for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
Morgenstern, presently based in Santa Monica, California, has written movie reviews for the Wall Street Journal since May 1995. His movie reviews appear each Friday in the "Weekend & Leisure" section of the newspaper, and he covers the movie industry in a column which appears every other Saturday. He also writes movie reviews for CNBC.

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John Cazale
John Holland Cazale (/kəˈzeɪl/; Italian pronunciation: [kaˈdzaːle]; August 12, 1935 – March 12, 1978) was an American film and theater actor. During his six-year film career he appeared in five films, each of which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon and The Deer Hunter. He is the only actor to have this multi-film distinction.
From his start as an acclaimed theater actor he became one of Hollywood's premiere character actors, starting with Coppola's The Godfather in which he played Fredo Corleone, the weak link in the Corleone crime family. "Cazale broke hearts on screen with portrayals of volatile, vulnerable, vacillating men, including Pacino's tragic bank-robbing partner in Dog Day Afternoon," writes David Germain of the Associated Press. He is described as an actor "whose intense face is known to just about any serious cinema fan but whose name often escapes them." In his final film, The Deer Hunter, he chose to continue acting despite being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, and died in New York City on March 12, 1978, shortly after completing his role. He was 42 years old.

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John Ford
John Ford (February 1, 1894 – August 31, 1973) was an American film director. He was famous for both his Westerns such as Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and adaptations of such classic 20th-century American novels as The Grapes of Wrath. His four Academy Awards for Best Director (1935, 1940, 1941, 1952) is a record, and one of those films, How Green Was My Valley, also won Best Picture.
In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Ford directed more than 140 films (although nearly all of his silent films are now lost) and he is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers of his generation. Ford's films and personality were held in high regard by his colleagues, with Ingmar Bergman and Orson Welles among those who have named him as one of the greatest directors of all time.
In particular, Ford was a pioneer of location shooting and the long shot which frames his characters against a vast, harsh and rugged natural terrain.
Ford was born John Martin "Jack" Feeney (though he later often gave his given names as Sean Aloysius, sometimes with surname O'Feeny or O'Fearna; an Irish language equivalent of Feeney) in Cape Elizabeth, Maine to John Augustine Feeney and Barbara "Abbey" Curran, on February 1, 1894 (though he occasionally said 1895 and that date is erroneously inscribed on his tombstone). His father, John Augustine, was born in Spiddal,County Galway, Ireland in 1854. Barbara Curran had been born in the Aran Islands, in the town of Kilronan on the island of Inishmore (Inis Mór). John A. Feeney's grandmother, Barbara Morris, was said to be a member of a local (impoverished) gentry family, the Morrises of Spiddal, headed at present by Lord Killanin.

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John Huston
John Marcellus Huston (August 5, 1906 – August 28, 1987) was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote the screenplay for most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics: The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The African Queen (1951), Moulin Rouge (1952), The Misfits (1961), and The Man Who Would Be King (1975). During his 46-year career, Huston received 15 Oscar nominations, winning twice, and directed both his father, Walter Huston, and daughter, Anjelica Huston, to Oscar wins in different films.
Huston was known to direct with the vision of an artist, having studied and worked as a fine art painter in Paris in his early years. He continued to explore the visual aspects of his films throughout his career: sketching each scene on paper beforehand, then carefully framing his characters during the shooting. In addition, while most directors rely on post-production editing to shape their final work, Huston instead created his films while they were being shot, making his films both more economical and more cerebral, with little editing needed.

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Jonathan Demme
Robert Jonathan Demme (born February 22, 1944) is an American filmmaker, producer and screenwriter. Best known for directing The Silence of the Lambs, which won him the Academy Award for Best Director, he has also directed the acclaimed movies Philadelphia, Rachel Getting Married, the Talking Heads concert movie Stop Making Sense and a trilogy of Neil Young documentary/concert movies.
Demme broke into feature film working for exploitation film producer Roger Corman from 1971 to 1976, co-writing and producing Angels Hard as They Come and The Hot Box. He then moved on to directing, with three films (Caged Heat, Crazy Mama, Fighting Mad) for Corman's studio New World Pictures. After Fighting Mad, Demme directed the comedy film Handle with Care for Paramount Pictures in 1977. The film was well-reviewed by critics, but received little promotion, and performed poorly at the box office.
Demme's next film, 1980's Melvin and Howard, did not get a wide release, but received a groundswell of critical acclaim, and led to the signing of Demme to direct the Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell star vehicle Swing Shift. Intended as a prestige picture for Warner Bros. as well as a major commercial vehicle for Demme, it instead became a troubled production due to the conflicting visions of Demme and star Hawn. Demme ended up renouncing the finished product, and when the film was released in May 1984, it was generally panned by critics and neglected by moviegoers. After Swing Shift, Demme stepped back from Hollywood to make the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense; the eclectic screwball action-romantic comedy Something Wild; a film-version of the stage production Swimming to Cambodia, by monologist Spaulding Gray; and the New York Mafia-by-way-of Downtown comedy Married to the Mob.

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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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Judy Davis
Judy Davis (born 23 April 1955) is an Australian actress best known for her roles in Husbands and Wives, Barton Fink, A Passage to India and in the TV miniseries Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows.
Davis first came to attention for her role as the fiery Sybylla Melvyn in the 1979 film My Brilliant Career. She has won many acting awards, including two Golden Globe Awards, three Emmy Awards, one BAFTA and seven AFI Awards. She has also been nominated twice for an Academy Award.
Davis was born in Perth and had a strict Catholic upbringing. She was educated at Loreto Convent and the Western Australian Institute of Technology, and graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in 1977. She has been married to actor and fellow NIDA graduate Colin Friels since 1984. They have two children.
First coming to prominence for her role as Sybylla Melvyn in the coming-of-age saga My Brilliant Career (1979), for which she won BAFTA Awards for Best Actress and Best Newcomer, she also played the lead in such Australian New Wave classics as Winter of Our Dreams (1981) (as the waif-like heroin addict) and Heatwave (1982) (as the radical tenant organizer).

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Julia Child
Julia Child (née McWilliams; August 15, 1912 – August 13, 2004) was an American chef, author, and television personality. She is recognized for introducing French cuisine to the American public with her debut cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her subsequent television programs, the most notable of which was The French Chef, which premiered in 1963.
In 1996, Julia Child was ranked #46 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time.
Child was born Julia Carolyn McWilliams in Pasadena, California, the daughter of John McWilliams, Jr., a Princeton University graduate and prominent land manager, and his wife, the former Julia Carolyn ("Caro") Weston, a paper-company heiress whose father, Byron Curtis Weston, served as lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. The eldest of three children, she had a brother, John III (1914–2002), and a sister, Dorothy Dean (1917–2006).
Child attended Westridge School, Polytechnic School from fourth grade to ninth grade, then The Katherine Branson School in Ross, California, which was at the time a boarding school. At six feet, two inches (1.88 m) tall, Child played tennis, golf, and basketball as a child and continued to play sports while attending Smith College, from which she graduated in 1934 with a major in English. A press release issued by Smith in 2004 states that her major was history.

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Julia Roberts
Julia Fiona Roberts (born October 28, 1967) is an American actress. She became a Hollywood star after headlining the romantic comedy Pretty Woman (1990), which grossed $464 million worldwide. After receiving Golden Globe Awards and Academy Award nominations for Steel Magnolias (1989) and Pretty Woman, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Erin Brockovich (2000). Her films My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), Mystic Pizza (1988), Notting Hill (1999), Runaway Bride (1999), Valentine's Day (2010), The Pelican Brief (1993), Ocean's Eleven (2001), and Ocean's Twelve (2004) have collectively brought box office receipts of over $2.4 billion, making her one of the most successful actresses in terms of box office receipts.
Roberts had become one of the highest-paid actresses in the world, topping the Hollywood Reporter's annual "power list" of top-earning female stars from 2005 to 2006. Her fee for 1990's Pretty Woman was $300,000; in 2003, she was paid an unprecedented $25 million for her role in Mona Lisa Smile (2003). As of 2010, Roberts's net worth was estimated to be $140 million.

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Julianne Moore
Julianne Moore (born Julie Anne Smith on December 3, 1960) is a British-American actress and a children's book author. She has been nominated for four Oscars, six Golden Globes, three BAFTAs and nine Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Moore began her acting career in 1983 in minor roles, before joining the cast of the soap opera As the World Turns, for which she won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1988. She began to appear in supporting roles in films during the early 1990s, in films such as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The Fugitive. Her performance in Short Cuts (1993) won her and the rest of the cast a Golden Globe for their ensemble performance, and her performance in Boogie Nights (1997) brought her widespread attention and nominations for several major acting awards.
Her success continued with films such as The Big Lebowski (1998), The End of the Affair (1999) and Magnolia (1999). She received particular acclaim for her portrayal of a betrayed wife in Far from Heaven (2002), winning several critic awards as best actress of the year, in addition to several other nominations, including the Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild Award. The same year, she was also nominated for several awards as best supporting actress for her work in The Hours. In 2010, Moore starred in the comedy drama The Kids Are All Right, for which she received a Golden Globe and BAFTA nomination.

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Julie Andrews
Dame Julia Elizabeth Andrews, DBE (née Wells; born 1 October 1935) is an English film and stage actress, singer, and author. She is the recipient of Golden Globe, Emmy, Grammy, BAFTA, People's Choice Award, Theatre World Award, Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award honours.
Andrews is a former child actress and singer who made her Broadway debut in a 1954 production of The Boy Friend, and rose to prominence starring in musicals such as My Fair Lady and Camelot, both of which earned her Tony Award nominations. In 1957, she made her television debut with the title role in Cinderella, which was seen by over 100 million viewers.
Andrews made her feature film debut in Mary Poppins (1964), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She received her second Academy Award nomination for The Sound of Music (1965). Adjusted for inflation, these two films are the 25th and 3rd highest grossing films of all time, respectively. From 1964 to 1967, Andrews was the biggest film star in the world, with the additional box office successes of her films The Americanization of Emily, Hawaii, Torn Curtain, and Thoroughly Modern Millie.

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Juliette Binoche
Juliette Binoche (French pronunciation: [ʒyljɛt binɔʃ]; born 9 March 1964) is a French actress, artist and dancer. She has appeared in more than 40 feature films, been recipient of numerous international accolades, is a published author and has appeared on stage across the world. Coming from an artistic background, she began taking acting lessons during adolescence. After performing in several stage productions, she was propelled into the world of auteurs Jean-Luc Godard (Hail Mary, 1985), Jacques Doillon (Family Life, 1985) and André Téchiné, who made her a star in France with the leading role in his 1985 drama Rendez-vous. Her sensual performance in her English-language debut The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), directed by Philip Kaufman, launched her international career.
She sparked the interest of Steven Spielberg, who offered her several parts including a role in Jurassic Park which she declined, choosing instead to join Krzysztof Kieślowski on the set of Three Colors: Blue (1993), a performance for which she won the Venice Film Festival Award for Best Actress and a César. Three years later Binoche gained further acclaim in Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996), for which she was awarded an Academy Award and a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress in addition to the Best Actress Award at the 1997 Berlin Film Festival. For her performance in Lasse Hallström's romantic comedy Chocolat (2000) Binoche was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.

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Karen Black
Karen Black (born July 1, 1939) is an American actress, screenwriter, singer, and songwriter. She is noted for appearing in such films as Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Great Gatsby, Rhinoceros, The Day of the Locust, Nashville, Airport 1975, and Alfred Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot. Over the course of her career, she won two Golden Globe Awards (out of three nominations), and an Academy Award nomination in 1970 for Best Supporting Actress, among numerous other honors.
Black was born as Karen Blanche Ziegler in Park Ridge, Illinois, in suburban Chicago, the daughter of Elsie Mary (née Reif), a writer of several prize-winning children's novels, and Norman Arthur Ziegler. Her paternal grandfather was Arthur Charles Ziegler, a classical musician and the first violinist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Her sister is actress Gail Brown. Black is of German, Bohemian (Czech), and Norwegian descent. She attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, for two years, having commenced university studies in 1954, aged 15. She then moved to New York where she appeared in a number of Off-Broadway productions, as well as moonlighting on the female professional wrestling circuit.

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Karen Blixen
Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke (Danish pronunciation: [kʰɑːɑn ˈb̥leɡ̊sn̩]), (17 April 1885 – 7 September 1962), née Karen Christenze Dinesen, was a Danish author also known by her pen name Isak Dinesen. She also wrote under the pen names Osceola and Pierre Andrézel. Blixen wrote works in Danish, French, and English.
Blixen is best known for Out of Africa, her account of living in Kenya, and one of her stories, Babette's Feast, both of which have been adapted into highly acclaimed, Academy Award-winning motion pictures. Prior to the release of the first film, she was noted for her Seven Gothic Tales, for which she is also known in Denmark.
Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, described it as "a mistake" that Blixen was not awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature during the 1930s. She never did win, though she finished in third place behind Graham Greene in 1961, the year Ivo Andrić was awarded the prize.
Karen Dinesen was the daughter of writer and army officer Wilhelm Dinesen, and Ingeborg Westenholz, and was the sister of Thomas Dinesen. Her father's family, which she saw rarely, was of aristocratic background and held the lordship of Katholm.^{[citation needed]} Her mother came from a wealthy Unitarian bourgeois merchant family. She spent her early years in the bourgeois environment of her mother's estate of Mattrup Manor near Horsens. She was later schooled in art in Copenhagen, Paris, and Rome.

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Kate Winslet
Kate Elizabeth Winslet (born 5 October 1975) is an English actress. She was the youngest person to accrue six Academy Award nominations, and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Reader (2008). She has won awards from the Screen Actors Guild, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association among others, and has been nominated twice for an Emmy Award for television acting, winning once for her role as Mildred Pierce in the 2011 mini-series of the same name.
Brought up in Berkshire, Winslet studied drama from childhood, and began her career in British television in 1991. She made her film debut in Heavenly Creatures (1994), for which she received her first notable critical praise. She achieved recognition for her subsequent work in a supporting role in Sense and Sensibility (1995) and for her leading role in Titanic (1997), the highest grossing film at the time, and the highest grossing film of Winslet's career.
Since 2000, Winslet's performances have continued to draw positive comments from film critics, and she has been nominated for various awards for her work in such films as Quills (2000), Iris (2001), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Finding Neverland (2004), Little Children (2006), The Reader (2008) and Revolutionary Road (2008). Her performance in the last of these prompted New York magazine critic David Edelstein to describe her as "the best English-speaking film actress of her generation". The romantic comedy The Holiday and the animated film Flushed Away (both 2006) are among the biggest commercial successes of her career.

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Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Houghton Hepburn (May 12, 1907 – June 29, 2003) was an American actress of film, stage, and television. Known for her headstrong independence and spirited personality, Hepburn's career as a Hollywood leading lady spanned more than 60 years. Her work came in a range of genres, from screwball comedy to literary drama, and she received four Academy Awards for Best Actress—a record for any performer. Hepburn's characters were often strong, sophisticated women with a hidden vulnerability.
Raised in Connecticut by wealthy, progressive parents, Hepburn began to act while studying at Bryn Mawr College. After four years in the theatre, favorable reviews of her work on Broadway brought her to the attention of Hollywood. Her early years in the film industry were marked with success, including an Academy Award for her third picture, Morning Glory (1933), but this was followed by a series of commercial failures. In 1938 she was labeled "box office poison". Hepburn masterminded her own comeback, buying out her contract with RKO Radio Pictures and acquiring the film rights to The Philadelphia Story, which she sold on the condition that she be the star. In the 1940s she was contracted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where her career focused on an alliance with Spencer Tracy. The screen-partnership spanned 25 years, and produced nine movies.

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Kathy Bates
Kathleen Doyle "Kathy" Bates (born June 28, 1948) is an American actress and film director. After appearing in several minor roles in film and television during the 1970s and the 1980s, Bates rose to prominence with her performance in Misery (1990), for which she won both the Academy Award for Best Actress and a Golden Globe. She followed this with major roles in Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) and Dolores Claiborne (1995), before playing a featured role as Margaret "Molly" Brown in Titanic (1997). During this time, she began her directing career, primarily in television.
Bates received a Tony Award nomination for her 1983 performance in the Broadway play 'night, Mother. She won a Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance in Primary Colors (1998), for which she also received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for About Schmidt (2002). Her television work has resulted in nine Emmy Award nominations. Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2003, Bates has stated that she has made a full recovery.

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Kay Walsh
Kay Walsh (born Kathleen Walsh, 27 August 1911,Chelsea, London, England, UK – died 16 April 2005, Chelsea, London) was an English actress and dancer. She grew up in Pimlico, brought up by her grandmother.
She began her career as a dancer in West End music halls, making her film debut in How's Chances? (1934) in a small part, and had a larger role in another 1934 film, Get Your Man. She continued to act in "quota quickies" films for several years. Walsh first met David Lean, then a film editor, in 1936, during the filming of Secret Of Stamboul. They began a relationship and Walsh broke off her engagement to Pownell Pellew. Walsh and Lean married on 23 November 1940. She moved on to higher-prestige films with appearances in two Noël Coward-scripted films, In Which We Serve (1942) and This Happy Breed (1944), both directed by Lean. Walsh had campaigned for Lean to receive co-director credit on In Which We Serve.
Walsh contributed dialogue to the 1938 film of Pygmalion, and also devised the scenario for the closing sequence of Lean's film adaptation of Great Expectations (1946), for which she received a writing credit on the latter film. She devised the opening sequence of Lean's adaptation of Oliver Twist (1948), as well as performing the role of Nancy.

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Kevin Kline
Kevin Delaney Kline (born October 24, 1947) is an American stage and film actor. An Academy Award winner for his supporting role in the comedy hit Fish Called Wanda, AA Fish Called Wanda, he also won two Tony Awards and was nominated for five Golden Globe Awards, two BAFTA Awards and an Emmy Award.
Kline was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Peggy (née Kirk) and Robert Joseph Kline. His father was a classical music lover and an amateur opera singer who owned and operated The Record Bar, a record store in St. Louis that opened in the early '40s, and sold toys during the '60s and '70s; his father's family also owned Kline's Inc., a department store chain. Kline has described his mother as the "dramatic theatrical character in our family." Kline's father was Jewish, from a family that had emigrated from Germany; Kline's mother was of Irish descent, the daughter of an emigrant from County Louth. Kline was raised in his mother's Catholic religion (his father had become an agnostic). He has three siblings, Alex, Christopher, and Kate.

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Kim Stanley
Kim Stanley (February 11, 1925 – August 20, 2001) was an American actress, primarily in television and theatre, but with occasional film performances.
She began her acting career in theatre, and subsequently attended the Actors Studio in New York City, New York. She received the 1952 Theatre World Award for her role in The Chase (1952), and starred in the Broadway productions of Picnic (1953) and Bus Stop (1955). Stanley was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play for her roles in A Touch of the Poet (1959) and A Far Country (1962).
During the 1950s, Stanley was a prolific performer in television, and later progressed to film, with a well-received performance in The Goddess (1959). She was the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and starred in Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), for which she won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was less active during the remainder of her career; two of her later film successes were as the mother of Frances Farmer in Frances (1982), for which she received a second Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress, and as Pancho Barnes in The Right Stuff (1983). She received an Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress – Miniseries or a Movie for her performance as Big Mama in a television adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1985).

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Kirk Douglas
Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch, Russian: И́сер Даниело́вич; December 9, 1916) is an American stage and film actor, film producer and author. His popular films include Out of the Past (1947), Champion (1949), Ace in the Hole (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Lust for Life (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), Spartacus (1960), and Lonely Are the Brave (1962).
He is No.17 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male American screen legends of all time, making him the highest-ranked living person on the list. In 1996, he received the Academy Honorary Award "for 50 years as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community."
Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, New York, the son of Bryna "Bertha" (née Sanglel) and Herschel "Harry" Danielovitch, a businessman. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Gomel, Belarus. His father's brother, who emigrated earlier, used the surname Demsky, which Douglas's family adopted in the United States. In addition to their surname, his parents also changed their given names to Harry and Bertha. Douglas grew up as Izzy Demsky and legally changed his name to Kirk Douglas before entering the Navy during World War II.

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Kirstie Alley
Kirstie Louise Alley (born January 12, 1951) is an American actress known for her role in the TV show Cheers, in which she played Rebecca Howe from 1987–1993, winning an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award as the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 1991. She is also known for her role in the thriller Shoot to Kill and the Look Who's Talking film series as Mollie Ubriacco. More recently, Alley has appeared in reality shows revolving around her life.
Kirstie Alley was born in Wichita, Kansas, the daughter of Lillian Mickie (née Heaton), a homemaker, and Robert Deal Alley, who owned a lumber company. She has two siblings, Colette and Craig. Alley attended Wichita Southeast High School, graduating in 1969. She attended college at Kansas State University in 1969. In 1981, a car accident caused by a drunk driver killed her mother and left her father seriously injured. Her father eventually recovered. Kirstie came to Los Angeles to work as an interior designer and appeared as a contestant on the popular game show Match Game, where she won multiple games. She also appeared on the game show Password Plus in 1980.

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Kofi Annan
Kofi Atta Annan (

/ˈkoʊfi ˈænən/; born 8 April 1938) is a Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations, from 1 January 1997 to 31 December 2006. Annan and the United Nations were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize for his founding of the Global AIDS and Health Fund to support developing countries in their struggle to care for their people.
Since February 2012, Annan has been the UN-Arab League envoy to Syria, to help find a resolution to ongoing conflict there.
Kofi Annan was born in Kumasi, Ghana. His twin sister Efua Atta, who died in 1991, shares the middle name Atta, which in Fante and Akan means 'twin'. Annan and his sister were born into one of the country's aristocratic families; both their grandfathers and their uncle were tribal chiefs.
In the Akan names tradition, some children are named according to the day of the week on which they were born, and/or in relation to how many children precede them. Kofi in Akan is the name that corresponds with Friday.

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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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Kurt Weill
Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900 – April 3, 1950) was a German-Jewish composer, active from the 1920s, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed productions such as his most well known work The Threepenny Opera, a Marxist critique of capitalism, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill was a socialist^{[unreliable source?]} who held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose. He also wrote a number of works for the concert hall, as well as several Judaism-themed pieces.
Kurt Julian Weill was born on March 2, 1900, the third of four children to Albert Weill (1867–1950) and Emma Weill née Ackermann (1872–1955). He grew up in a religious Jewish family in the "Sandvorstadt", the Jewish quarter in Dessau, Germany, where his father was a cantor. At the age of twelve, Kurt Weill started taking piano lessons and made his first attempts at writing music; his earliest preserved composition was written in 1913 and is titled Mi Addir. Jewish Wedding Song.

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Lajos Koltai
Lajos Koltai, ASC, HSC, (born 2 April 1946 in Budapest, Hungary) is a Hungarian cinematographer and film director best known for his work with legendary Hungarian director Istvan Szabo, and Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Tornatore. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 2000 for his work on the film Malèna.
Born at the beginning of the Cold War, he became interested in film at a very young age, though in Hungary at the time, film containing subversive content was heavily censored. He shot his first short on a Super 8 film camera at the age of 14 and began to draft short scripts and turn them into movies starring friends and family. One year he won first and second prizes at a local amateur film festival, and coincidentally another young filmmaker, István Szabó, was the head of the jury. Koltai graduated from the School of Drama and Film in Budapest, a school known for nurturing such legends as Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács.
Still early in his career he gained international recognition during his collaborations with Szabó, namely his film Mephisto, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and the cult political classic "Angi Vera" by Pal Gabor. At this point the international film community was starting to take notice of these Eastern European films. While Hollywood was at the peak of creativity a decade before after several decades of turning out films that didn't face the same restrictions as in these parts of the world, the Hungarian artistic spirit was beginning to find its place in the world, and many Hungarian directors were confronting truths about their country's tainted Nazi-affiliated history . What followed was several artistic and political masterpieces, the teen-oriented Time Stands Still (1982), a film many considered to be well ahead of its time, Cannes Film Festival winner Colonel Redl (1985), which garnered yet another Oscar nomination, and Hanussen, another political drama loosely based on the rise of Hitler.

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Laura Linney
Laura Leggett Linney (born February 5, 1964) is an American actress of film, television, and theatre. Linney has won three Emmy Awards, two Golden Globes, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She has been nominated three times for an Academy Award and once for a BAFTA Award. She has garnered three nominations for the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play.
She received a Golden Globe award for her portrayal of a suburban woman diagnosed with terminal cancer in The Big C.
Linney was born in Manhattan. Her mother, Miriam Anderson "Ann" Perse (née Leggett), is a nurse who worked at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and her father, Romulus Linney, was a well-known playwright and professor (he died on January 15, 2011). Linney's paternal great-great-grandfather was Republican U.S. Congressman Romulus Zachariah Linney. Despite her pedigree, Linney grew up under modest circumstances, living with her mother in a small one-bedroom apartment after her parents' divorce. She has a half-sister, Susan, from her father's second marriage.

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Lauren Bacall
Lauren Bacall (

/ˌlɔrən bəˈkɔːl/; born Betty Joan Perske, September 16, 1924) is an American film and stage actress and model, known for her distinctive husky voice and sultry looks.
She first emerged as leading lady in the Humphrey Bogart film To Have And Have Not (1944) and continued on in the film noir genre, with appearances in Bogart movies The Big Sleep (1946) and Dark Passage (1947), as well as a comedienne in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) with Marilyn Monroe and Designing Woman (1957) with Gregory Peck. Bacall has also worked on Broadway in musicals, gaining Tony Awards for Applause in 1970 and Woman of the Year in 1981. Her performance in the movie The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) earned her a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination.
In 1999, Bacall was ranked #20 of the 25 actresses on the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars list by the American Film Institute. In 2009, she was selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to receive an Academy Honorary Award "in recognition of her central place in the Golden Age of motion pictures."

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Laurence Olivier
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM (

/ˈlɒrəns ɵˈlɪvi.eɪ/; 22 May 1907 – 11 July 1989) was an English actor, director, and producer. One of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century, he was the youngest actor to be knighted and the first to be elevated to the peerage. He married three times, to actresses Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Plowright. Actor Spencer Tracy said that Olivier was 'the greatest actor in the English-speaking world'.
Olivier played a wide variety of roles on stage and screen from Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and Restoration comedy to modern American and British drama. He was the first artistic director of the National Theatre of Great Britain and its main stage is named in his honour. He is regarded by some to be the greatest actor of the 20th century, in the same category as David Garrick, Richard Burbage, Edmund Kean and Henry Irving in their own centuries. Olivier's AMPAS acknowledgments are considerable: twelve Oscar nominations, with two awards (for Best Actor and Best Picture for the 1948 film Hamlet), plus two honorary awards including a statuette and certificate. He was also awarded five Emmy awards from the nine nominations he received. Additionally, he was a three-time Golden Globe and BAFTA winner.

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Lee Grant
Lee Grant (born October 31, 1928) is an American stage, film and television actress, and film director. She was blacklisted for 12 years from film work beginning in the mid-1950s, but worked in the theatre, and would eventually win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Felicia Karpf in the film Shampoo (1975).
Grant was born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal in New York City, the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants Witia (née Haskell), a teacher, and Abraham W. Rosenthal, a realtor and educator. The family resided at 706 Riverside Drive.
Grant studied acting at NYC's prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse under the guidance of famed acting coach Sanford Meisner before establishing herself as a dramatic actress on and off Broadway, earning praise for her role as a shoplifter in the play Detective Story which began its run on March 23, 1949.
Lee Grant made her film debut two years later in the film version of the same name (Detective Story), receiving her first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination, and winning the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival. Called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to testify against her husband, the playwright Arnold Manoff, father of her two children, Grant refused to testify and was blacklisted, but continued to work in theater and resumed her film career in the early 1960s, appearing in the television series Peyton Place as Stella Chernak. She won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Drama for that role. In 1968, Grant appeared in the TV series Mission Impossible, portraying the wife of a U.S. diplomat who goes undercover to discredit a rogue diplomat (Season 3, Episode 8 - "The Diplomat").

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Lemony Snicket
Lemony Snicket is the pen name of American novelist Daniel Handler (born February 28, 1970). Snicket is the author of several children's books, serving as the narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events (his best-known work) and appearing as a character within the series. Because of this, the name Lemony Snicket may refer to both a fictional character and a real person. This article deals primarily with the character.
As a character, Snicket is a harried, troubled writer and researcher falsely accused of felonies and continuously hunted by the police and his enemies, the fire-starting side of the secret organization Volunteer Fire Department (V.F.D.). As a child he was kidnapped and inducted as a "neophyte" into V.F.D., where he was trained in rhetoric and sent on seemingly pointless missions while all connections to his former life, apart from his siblings Jacques and Kit (who were also kidnapped and inducted), were severed. In the organization he met and fell in love with a peer named Beatrice, to whom he eventually became engaged. After a series of unfortunate events (after which the real-world series is in some ways named), he became falsely accused of murder and arson. Eventually the fallacies grew so much that The Daily Punctilio reported his death. Beatrice eventually moved on and married Bertrand Baudelaire, becoming the mother of Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, the protagonists of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Fourteen years thereafter Beatrice and Bertrand were murdered in a house fire, leaving the Baudelaires orphans. Feeling indebted to his former fiancée, Snicket embarks on a quest to chronicle the lives of the Baudelaire children until they become old enough to face the troubles of the world on their own.

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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 Manville
Lesley Manville (born 12 March 1956) is an English actress of film, theatre and television. She frequently collaborates with director Mike Leigh, twice being named British Actress of the Year at the London Film Critics Circle Awards for her performances in the Mike Leigh films, All or Nothing and Another Year. She is also a BAFTA and Olivier award nominee.
Born in Brighton, Manville was brought up in Hove, East Sussex, one of three daughters of a taxicab driver. Training as a soprano singer from age 8, she twice became under-18 champion of Sussex. She began acting as a teenager, appearing in television series such as King Cinder. As a result, at age 15, she gained a place at the Italia Conti Stage School.
After turning down teacher Arlene Phillips' invitation to join her new dance troupe Hot Gossip, she was taught improvisation by Italia Conti teacher Julia Carey.
Her first job was in West End theatre in the musical I and Albert directed by John Schlesinger, which was followed by television presentation on Westward Television's version of the BBC's Blue Peter. She paid for her first flat taking a part on Emmerdale Farm, which lasted for 80 episodes.

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Liam Neeson
Liam John Neeson,OBE (born 7 June 1952) is an Irish actor who has been nominated for an Oscar, a BAFTA and three Golden Globe Awards. He has starred in a number of notable roles including Oskar Schindler in Schindler's List, Michael Collins in Michael Collins, Peyton Westlake in Darkman, Bryan Mills in Taken, Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars (the film Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars), Alfred Kinsey in Kinsey, Ra's al Ghul in Batman Begins, and the voice of Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia film series.
He starred in other notable films such as Excalibur, The Dead Pool, Nell, Rob Roy, Les Misérables, The Haunting, Love Actually, Kingdom of Heaven, Taken, Clash of the Titans, The A-Team, Unknown and The Grey, as well as smaller arthouse films (e.g. Deception, Breakfast on Pluto, Chloe). He was ranked at number 69 on Empire magazine's 100 greatest movie stars of all time in 1997.
He was born in Ballymena, County Antrim and educated at St Patrick's College (now St Patrick's, Dundonald), Ballymena Technical College and Queen's University Belfast. He moved to Dublin after university to further his acting career, joining the renowned Abbey Theatre. In the early 1990s, he moved again to the United States, where the wide acclaim for his performance in Schindler's List led to more high-profile work. He is widowed and lives in New York with his two sons.

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Lillian Gish
Lillian Diana Gish (October 14, 1893 – February 27, 1993) was an American stage, screen and television actress whose film acting career spanned 75 years, from 1912 to 1987. She was called "The First Lady of American Cinema".
She was a prominent film star of the 1910s and 1920s, particularly associated with the films of director D.W. Griffith, including her leading role in Griffith's seminal Birth of a Nation (1915). Her sound-era film appearances were sporadic, but included memorable roles in the controversial western Duel in the Sun (1946) and the offbeat thriller Night of the Hunter (1955). She did considerable television work from the early 1950s into the 1980s, and closed her career playing, for the first time, opposite Bette Davis in the 1987 film The Whales of August.
The American Film Institute (AFI) named Gish 17th among the greatest female stars of all time. She was awarded an Honorary Academy Award in 1971, and in 1984 she received an AFI Life Achievement Award.

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Lily Tomlin
Mary Jean "Lily" Tomlin (born September 1, 1939) is an American actress, comedian, writer, and producer. Tomlin has been a major force in American comedy since the late 1960s when she began a career as a stand up comedian and became a featured performer on television's Laugh-in. Her career has spanned television, comedy recordings, Broadway, and motion pictures, enjoying acclaimed success in each medium. She has won many awards including Tony Awards, Emmy Awards, and a Grammy Award and has also been nominated for an Academy Award. Tomlin's humor is often sharp and insightful in the traditions of standup comedians, but also frequently endearing, slightly wacky, and generally quite "family friendly" in the tradition of television comediennes such as Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, and Eve Arden.
Tomlin was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Lillie Mae (née Ford), a housewife and nurse's aide, and Guy Tomlin, a factory worker. Tomlin's parents were Southern Baptists who moved to Detroit from Paducah, Kentucky, during the Great Depression. She is a 1957 graduate of Cass Technical High School. Tomlin attended Wayne State University, where her interest in the theater and performing arts began. After college, Tomlin began doing stand-up comedy in nightclubs in Detroit and later in New York City. Her first television appearance was on The Merv Griffin Show in 1965.

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Linda Blair
Linda Denise Blair (born January 22, 1959) is an American actress. Blair is best known for her role as the possessed child, Regan, in the film The Exorcist (1973), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award and two Golden Globes, winning one. She reprised her role in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977).
Blair was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and was raised in Westport, Connecticut. She began her career as a six-year-old child model and started acting with a regular role on the short-lived Hidden Faces (1968-69) day time soap. Her first theatrical film appearance was in The Way We Live Now (1970). Blair was selected from a field of 600 applicants for her most notable role as Regan in The Exorcist (1973). The role earned her a Golden Globe and People's Choice Award for Best Supporting Actress as well as an Academy Award nomination. She reprised her role in the sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), garnering a Saturn Award nomination for Best Actress of 1978. Between these two films, she appeared in the TV movies Born Innocent (1974), Sarah T. - Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (1975), and Sweet Hostage (1975) opposite Martin Sheen.

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Linda Hunt
Lydia Susanna Hunter (born April 2, 1945), better known by her stage name Linda Hunt, is an American film, stage and television actress. After making her film debut playing Mrs. Oxheart in Popeye (1980), Hunt portrayed Billy Kwan, her breakthrough performance, in The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). Her role as Billy Kwan earned her an Academy Award, an Australian Film Institute Award, a Golden Globe nomination and various other awards.
She continued success in films such as The Bostonians (1984), Dune (1984), Silverado (1985), Eleni (1985), Waiting for the Moon (1987), She-Devil (1989), Kindergarten Cop (1990), If Looks Could Kill (1991), Rain Without Thunder (1992), Twenty Bucks (1993), Younger and Younger (1993), Prêt-à-Porter (1994), Pocahontas (1995), The Relic (1997), Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World (1998), Dragonfly (2002), Yours Mine and Ours (2005) and Stranger Than Fiction (2006).
Hunt has also had a successful television career. She played Rose in the television movie Basements (1987) and narrated in the television movie The New Chimpanzees. She guest starred on Hallmark Hall of Fame in both 1978 and 1987, Space Rangers in 1993, Carnivale in both 2003 and 2005, Without a Trace in 2008, The Unit in 2008 and Nip Tuck in 2009. From 1997-2002 Hunt played the recurring role of Judge Zoey Hiller on The Practice. She currently plays Henrietta 'Hetty' Lange on the CBS television series NCIS Los Angeles, a role she has played since its debut in 2009. The role earned her a Teen Choice Award nomination in 2011. She is also the narrator in the God Of War video game franchise.

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Linda Mvusi
Linda Mvusi (c. 1955 in Bloemfontein- ) is an actress and architect. Mvusi took an award for best actress at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival for her role in the film A World Apart which was directed by Chris Menges. Mvusi was the first South African to get a best Actress award at Cannes. Mvusi also shared in an award for excellence for her architecture on the Apartheid Museum.
Linda Mvusi was born in the Free State in (about) 1955 and was brought up in Northern Rhodesia, Ghana and Kenya. She trained as an architect and was practicing her craft in Harare when she met Chris Menges who was trying to find locations for his film, A World Apart, near Bulawayo. Mvusi was initially wary of this film as she suspected it was a film made by outsiders with foreign money for a foreign audience. Mvusi felt that the millions of foreign money was preventing Africans from telling their own story. She said "white film makers [are] suppressing our own growth, our own view of history [and] our own reality". However Menges impressed her when he began to cast locals and ANC members into the cast.

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Lindy Chamberlain
Alice Lynne "Lindy" Chamberlain-Creighton (born 4 March 1948) was at the centre of one of Australia's most publicised murder trials in which she was accused and convicted of killing her 2-month old daughter, Azaria while camping at Uluru. In her defence, she always maintained that she saw a dingo leave the tent where Azaria slept on the night she disappeared. Eight years later her conviction was overturned in the discovery of new evidence and both she and Michael Chamberlain were acquitted of all charges. She was adjudged wrongly convicted only after having spent three years in prison for murdering her baby, and having given birth to her fourth child while a prisoner. In 1992 Lindy Chamberlain received $1.3 million compensation from the Australian government for wrongful imprisonment.
Alice Lynne Murchison was born in Whakatane, New Zealand where she was known as "Lindy" from a young age. She moved to Australia with her family in 1949. She and her family were members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and she married fellow Adventist and pastor Michael Chamberlain on 18 November 1969. In the 1970s the Chamberlains had two sons; Aidan, born in 1973, and Reagan, born in 1976. Chamberlain's first daughter, Azaria, was born 11 June 1980, her second daughter and fourth child, Kahlia, was born in November 1982. For the first five years after their marriage they lived in Tasmania, after which they moved to Mount Isa in northern Queensland. At the time their daughter Azaria went missing, Lindy's husband Michael served as minister of Mount Isa's Seventh Day Adventist Church.

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Lisa Harrow
Lisa Harrow (born 25 August 1943) is an actress, noted for her roles in British theatre, films and television.
Harrow was born in Auckland and attended Auckland University. She graduated from RADA in 1968, and joined the BBC Radio's Repertory Company.
Her stage career started at the Royal Shakespeare Company; roles there included Olivia in John Barton's production of Twelfth Night opposite Judi Dench, and Portia in The Merchant of Venice opposite Patrick Stewart. Other leading roles in the UK theatre include Juliet opposite John Hurt's Romeo at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, and Ann Whitfield in Man and Superman opposite Peter O'Toole at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.
Harrow has performed on stage all over America. She took over the central role of Vivian Bearing in the Pulitzer Prize winning play Wit in its long-running off-Broadway production in New York. She was named 2001 Performer of the Year in Pittsburgh for Medea. Other roles include: Raynevskya in The Cherry Orchard at Yale Rep and the Chautauqua Theatre Company, where she also played Kate Keller in All My Sons. She played Creusa in the Washington Shakespeare Theatre Company's 3/10/2009–4/12/2009 production of Euripides's Ion.

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Liv Ullmann
Liv Johanne Ullmann (born 16 December 1938) is a Norwegian actress and film director, as well as one of the "muses" of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Nominated five times for a Best Actress Golden Globe, winning once for The Emigrants, Ullmann has also been nominated for the Palme d'Or, two times for the Academy Award, and two times for a BAFTA Film Award.
Ullmann was born in Tokyo, Japan, the daughter of Janna (née Lund) and Viggo Ullmann, an aircraft engineer who was working in Tokyo at the time. At age two, the family moved to Toronto, Canada where her father worked at the Norwegian air force base on Toronto Island during World War II. Four years later, her father died of a brain tumor, an event that affected her deeply. After the war, the rest of the family moved to Trondheim, Norway, where Ullman spent the rest of her youth. She currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts.
Ullmann began her acting career on the Norwegian stage in the mid 1950s. She continued to act in the theatre for most of her career, and became noted for her portrayal of Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, but became wider known once she started to work with eminent Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. She went on to act to significant acclaim in 10 of his most admired films, including Persona in 1966, The Passion of Anna in 1969, Cries and Whispers in 1972 and Autumn Sonata, in which her co-star, Ingrid Bergman, made her return to Swedish cinema. She co-starred often with Swedish actor and fellow Bergman collaborator, Erland Josephson, with whom she made the 1973 Swedish television drama, Scenes from a Marriage, which was also edited to feature-film length and distributed theatrically. Ullmann appeared with Laurence Olivier in Richard Attenborough's A Bridge Too Far in 1977.

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Liza Minnelli
Liza May Minnelli (born March 12, 1946) is an American actress and singer. She is the daughter of singer and actress Judy Garland and film director Vincente Minnelli.
Already established as a nightclub singer and musical theatre actress, she first attracted critical acclaim for her dramatic performances in the movies The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970); Minnelli then rose to international stardom for her appearance as Sally Bowles in the 1972 film version of the Broadway musical Cabaret, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. She later made a great star turn in Arthur (1981), co-starring with Dudley Moore (in the title role) and Sir John Gielgud, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as Arthur's snobbish but loveable butler.
While film projects such as Lucky Lady, A Matter of Time and New York, New York were less favorably received than her stage roles, Minnelli became one of the most versatile, highly regarded and best-selling entertainers in television, beginning with Liza with a Z in 1972, and on stage in the Broadway productions of Flora the Red Menace, The Act and The Rink. Minnelli also toured internationally and did shows such as Liza Minnelli: At Carnegie Hall, Frank, Liza & Sammy: The Ultimate Event, and Liza Live from Radio City Music Hall.

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Lucille Ball
Lucille Désirée Ball (August 6, 1911 - April 26, 1989) was an American comedienne, film, television, stage and radio actress, model, film and television executive, and star of the sitcoms I Love Lucy, The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, Here's Lucy and Life With Lucy. One of the most popular and influential stars in the United States during her lifetime, with one of Hollywood's longest careers, especially on television, Ball began acting in the 1930s, becoming both a radio actress and B-movie star in the 1940s, and then a television star during the 1950s. She was still making films in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1962, Ball became the first woman to run a major television studio, Desilu, which produced many successful and popular television series.
Ball was nominated for an Emmy Award thirteen times, and won four times. In 1977 Ball was among the first recipients of the Women in Film Crystal Award. She was the recipient of the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1979, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kennedy Center Honors in 1986 and the Governors Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in 1989.

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Lupe Ontiveros
Lupe Ontiveros (born September 17, 1942) is an American film and television actress. Ontiveros has acted in numerous films and television shows, most often playing a maid or, more recently, an all-knowing grandmother; she estimates she has played a maid between 150 and 300 times on screen.
Ontiveros was born Guadalupe Moreno in El Paso, Texas, the daughter of Luz "Lucita" Castanon and Juan Moreno, middle-class Mexican immigrants who overcame a lack of formal education and were owners of a tortilla factory and two restaurants in El Paso. She graduated from El Paso High School and went on to study at Texas Woman's University in Denton, Texas, where she received a bachelor's degree in social work. Ontiveros was raised Roman Catholic. After her marriage, she and her husband moved to California to realize his dream of starting an automotive business. During a period of professional dissatisfaction with her social service career, Ontiveros was trying to decide whether to go back to school for a nursing degree when she saw an article about a need for local film "extras". With her husband's encouragement, she began with that simple job and parlayed it into a long stage and screen career.

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Lynn Whitfield
Lynn Whitfield (born May 6, 1953) is an American actress.
Whitfield began her acting career in television and theatre, before progressing to supporting roles in film. She won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Special and a NAACP Image Award for her performance as Josephine Baker in the HBO movie The Josephine Baker Story (1991). She also won NAACP Image awards for her work in Touched by an Angel (1998), The Planet of Junior Brown (2000) and Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story (2004).
Her film work includes performances in A Thin Line Between Love and Hate (1996), Eve's Bayou (1997), The Cheetah Girls (2003), Madea's Family Reunion (2006), and The Cheetah Girls 2 (2006).
Whitfield was born Lynn Butler-Smith in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the daughter of Jean (née Butler), an officer of a finance agency, and Valerian Smith, a dentist. Lynn Whitfield is an honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
Whitfield had a series of television appearances before her film career began, including playing Jill Thomas in the award-winning series Hill Street Blues. After gaining attention on stage in Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Whitfield appeared in supporting roles in such films as Doctor Detroit (1983) and Silverado (1985). She gained wider success by starring in the television films The George McKenna Story, Johnnie Mae Gibson: FBI, (both 1986), and the miniseries The Women of Brewster Place (1989).

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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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Mamie Eisenhower
Mamie Geneva Doud Eisenhower (November 14, 1896 – November 1, 1979) was the wife of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and First Lady of the United States from 1953 to 1961.
Mamie married Dwight Eisenhower in 1916, the young couple moved frequently between military quarters in many postings, from Panama to the Philippines. As First Lady, she entertained a wide range of foreign dignitaries, who reacted well to her confident style and splendid costumes. On leaving the White House, she made clear her disapproval of the incoming Kennedys.
Mamie Eisenhower spent her retirement and widowhood at the family farm at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The Hollywood star Mamie Van Doren was so named by Universal Studios in her honor.

Born in Boone, Iowa and named, in part, after the popular song Lovely Lake Geneva, Mamie Geneva Doud was the second child born to John Sheldon Doud, a meatpacking executive, and his wife, the former Elivera Mathilde Carlson. She grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Colorado Springs, Colorado, Denver, Colorado, and the Doud winter home in San Antonio, Texas. Her father, who retired at age 36, ran a meatpacking company founded by his father, Doud & Montgomery ("Buyers of Live Hogs"), and had investments in Illinois and Iowa stockyards. Her mother was a daughter of Swedish immigrants. She had three sisters: Eleanor Carlson Doud, Eda Mae Doud, and Mabel Frances "Mike" Doud.

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Mamie Gummer
Mary Willa "Mamie" Gummer (born August 3, 1983) is an American actress, and the daughter of actress Meryl Streep.
Mamie Gummer was born to actress Meryl Streep, and sculptor Don Gummer. She grew up in Los Angeles, California, and Salisbury, Connecticut, with her older brother, Henry and younger sisters, Grace Gummer (also an actress) and Louisa.
As a young child, she appeared with her mother in Heartburn (credited under the name Natalie Stern to avoid press scrutiny) and despite being only three at the time of filming, received a positive review in the New York Times. She attended Miss Porter's School and graduated from the Kent School in Kent CT before continuing her studies in theatre and communications at Northwestern University, graduating in 2005. Later that year, she made her off-Broadway debut alongside Michael C. Hall in the premiere of Noah Haidle's Mr. Marmalade, for which she won a Theatre World Award. In 2007, she received a Lucille Lortel Award nomination for her performance in Theresa Rebeck's The Water's Edge.

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Margaret Rutherford
Dame Margaret Taylor Rutherford, DBE (11 May 1892 – 22 May 1972) was an English character actress, who first came to prominence following World War II in the film adaptations of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. In 1963 she won the best supporting actress Oscar as The Duchess of Brighton in The VIPs.
She is probably best known for her 1960s performances as Miss Marple in several films based loosely on Agatha Christie's novels.
Margaret Rutherford's father, William Rutherford Benn, suffered from mental illness. During his honeymoon he had a nervous breakdown and was confined to an asylum. He was eventually released on holiday and on 4 March 1883, he murdered his father, the Reverend Julius Benn, a Congregational church minister, by bludgeoning him to death with a chamberpot (Worcester Spode). Shortly afterwards, William tried to kill himself as well, by slashing his throat with a pocketknife. After the murder, William Benn was confined to the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Several years later he was released, reportedly cured of his mental affliction. He changed his surname to Rutherford, and returned to his wife, Ann (née Taylor).

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Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS, née Roberts (born 13 October 1925) is a British politician and the longest-serving (1979–1990) British prime minister of the 20th century, and the only woman ever to have held the post. A Soviet journalist nicknamed her the "Iron Lady", which later became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style. As prime minister, she implemented conservative policies that have come to be known as Thatcherism.
Originally a research chemist before becoming a barrister, Thatcher was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Finchley in 1959. Edward Heath appointed her Secretary of State for Education and Science in his 1970 government. In 1975 Thatcher defeated Heath in the Conservative Party leadership election and became Leader of the Opposition, as well as the first woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom. She became prime minister after winning the 1979 general election.
After entering 10 Downing Street, Thatcher introduced a series of political and economic initiatives to reverse what she perceived as Britain's precipitous national decline. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation (particularly of the financial sector), flexible labour markets, the privatisation of state-owned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions. Thatcher's popularity during her first years in office waned amid recession and high unemployment, until economic recovery and the 1982 Falklands War brought a resurgence of support, resulting in her re-election in 1983. Thatcher was re-elected for a third term in 1987, but her Community Charge (popularly referred to as "poll tax") was widely unpopular and her views on the European Community were not shared by others in her Cabinet. She resigned as Prime Minister and party leader in November 1990, after Michael Heseltine launched a challenge to her leadership.

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Marion Cotillard
Marion Cotillard (French pronunciation: [maʁjɔ̃ kɔtijaʁ]; born 30 September 1975) is a French actress and singer. She garnered critical acclaim for her roles in films such as La Vie en Rose, My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument, Taxi, Furia and Jeux d'enfants. She has also appeared in such films as Big Fish, A Good Year, Public Enemies, Nine, Inception, Midnight in Paris, and Contagion.
In 2007, Cotillard starred as the French singer Édith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, for which she won the Academy Award, the BAFTA Award, the César Award and the Golden Globe Award for best actress. She made film history by becoming the first person to win an Academy Award for a French language performance. In 2010, she received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in the musical Nine.
Cotillard was born in Paris and grew up around Orléans, Loiret in an artistically inclined, "bustling, creative household". Her father, Jean-Claude Cotillard, is an actor, teacher, former mime, and 2006 Molière Award-winning director. Cotillard's mother, Monique (now known as Niseema) Theillaud, is also an actress and drama teacher. She has two younger twin brothers, Quentin and Guillaume. Guillaume is a screenwriter and director. She began acting during her childhood, appearing on stage in one of her father's plays.

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Marjorie Rambeau
Marjorie Rambeau (July 15, 1889 – July 6, 1970) was an American film and stage actress.
Rambeau was born in San Francisco, California to Marcel Rambeau and Lilian Garlinda Kindelberger. Her parents split up when she was a girl. She and her mother went to Nome, Alaska where young Marjorie dressed as a boy, sang and played the banjo in saloons and music halls. Her mother insisted she dress as a boy to thwart amorous attention from drunken grown men in such a wild and woolly outpost as Nome. She began performing on the stage at the age of 12. She attained theatrical experience in a rambling early life as a strolling player. Finally she made her Broadway debut on March 10, 1913 in a tryout of Willard Mack's play Kick In.
In her youth she was a Broadway leading lady. In 1921, Dorothy Parker memorialized her in verse:
If all the tears you shed so lavishly / Were gathered, as they left each brimming eye. / And were collected in a crystal sea, / The envious ocean would curl up and dry— / So awful in its mightiness, that lake, / So fathomless, that clear and salty deep. / For, oh, it seems your gentle heart must break, / To see you weep. ...

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Marjorie Rhodes
Marjorie Rhodes (9 April 1897 – 4 July 1979) was a British actress.
One of her best-known roles was as Lucy Fitton, the mother of Bill Naughton's northern comedy All in Good Time. She played the role on Broadway, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award in 1965. She reprised the role in the 1966 film version, The Family Way.
Rhodes was featured singing a track "The World Is For The Young" with Stanley Holloway in the Herman's Hermits 1968 film Mrs. Brown, You've Got A Lovely Daughter.
Her television appearances included Dixon of Dock Green (1961-2),For the Girl Who Has Everything episode of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969), Doctor at Large (1971) and Z-Cars (1974).

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Marlo Thomas
Margaret Julia “Marlo” Thomas (born November 21, 1937) is an American actress, producer, and social activist known for her starring role on the TV series That Girl (1966–1971). She also serves as National Outreach Director for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Thomas was born in Detroit, Michigan, the eldest child of comedian Danny Thomas (1912–1991) and his wife, the former Rose Marie Cassaniti (1914–2000). On her mother's side, she is also the granddaughter of drummer and percussionist, Marie "Mary" Cassaniti (1896–1972). Her brother, Tony Thomas, is a television and film producer, and her sister, Terre Thomas, is a former actress. Her father was Lebanese-American and her mother was Italian-American.
Marlo Thomas was raised in Beverly Hills, California. Her parents called her Margo as a child, though she soon became known as Marlo, she told The New York Times, because of her childhood mispronunciation of the nickname. She attended Marymount High School in Los Angeles. Thomas graduated from the University of Southern California with a teaching degree; "I wanted a piece of paper that said I was qualified to do something," she said. She was also a member of the sorority Kappa Alpha Theta.

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Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese (

/skɔrˈsɛsɛ/; born November 17, 1942) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation. He is a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema, and has won Academy Award, Palme d'Or, Emmys, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and DGA Awards.
Scorsese's body of work addresses such themes as Italian American identity, Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption,machismo, modern crime, and violence. Scorsese is hailed as one of the most significant and influential filmmakers of all time, directing landmark films such as Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Goodfellas (1990) – all of which he collaborated on with actor and close friend Robert De Niro. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed (2006), having been nominated a previous five times.

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Mary Steenburgen
Mary Nell Steenburgen (born February 8, 1953) is an American actress. She won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for playing the role of Lynda Dummar in Jonathan Demme's 1980 film Melvin and Howard.
Steenburgen was born in Newport, Arkansas, the daughter of Nellie Mae (née Wall), a school-board secretary, and Maurice Steenburgen, a freight-train conductor who worked at the Missouri Pacific Railroad. Steenburgen grew up in North Little Rock, Arkansas.
Steenburgen moved to New York City in 1972, working at Doubleday while studying acting at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse under Will Esper. Her break came when she was discovered by Jack Nicholson in the reception room of Paramount's New York office and was cast as the lead in his second directorial effort, the 1978 Western Goin' South. She had a leading role in the 1979 film Time After Time as a modern woman who falls in love with author H. G. Wells, played by her first husband-to-be Malcolm McDowell.
In only her third film, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the 1980 film Melvin and Howard, playing the wife of a man who claims to have befriended reclusive eccentric Howard Hughes. Another notable film appearances came in the well-received 1983 film Cross Creek.

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Mary Tyler Moore
Mary Tyler Moore (born December 29, 1936) is an American actress, primarily known for her roles in television sitcoms. Moore is best known for The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–77), in which she starred as Mary Richards, a 30-something single woman who worked as a local news producer in Minneapolis, and for her earlier role as Laura Petrie (Dick Van Dyke's wife) on The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–66). She also appeared in a number of films, most notably 1980's Ordinary People, in which she played a role that was the polar opposite of the television characters she had portrayed, and for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. Moore has also been active in charity work and various political causes, particularly around the issues of animal rights and Diabetes mellitus type 1. Mary Tyler Moore was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the beginning of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and also dealt with alcoholism, which was treated in the 1980s. In May 2011, Moore underwent elective brain surgery to remove a benign meningioma.

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Matthew Vassar
Matthew Vassar (April 29, 1792 – June 23, 1868) was an English-born American brewer and merchant. He founded the eponymous Vassar College in 1861. He was a cousin of John Ellison Vassar.
He was born in East Dereham, Norfolk, England. In 1796, he emigrated with his family to New York and settled on a farm near Poughkeepsie. When Vassar was 14 years old, his parents had him apprenticed to a tanner.
One day before he was to begin his apprenticeship, he ran away to Newburgh, New York, subsequently entering the brewing business. He took over his family's small brewery at the age of eighteen. Over the next several decades he developed his Poughkeepsie brewery into one of the country's largest, by the 1830s becoming perhaps the first to achieve nationwide distribution to every state and amassing a sizable personal fortune in the process.^{[citation needed]}
Lydia Booth, a niece of Matthew Vassar, encouraged him to establish a women's college in the United States, which would be located in Poughkeepsie. In January 1861, the New York Legislature passed an act to incorporate Vassar College, one of the first women's colleges in the U.S. On 26 February 1861, Matthew Vassar presented the college's Board of Trustees with a tin box containing half of his fortune, $408,000 (approximately $9,700,000 in 2008 dollars) and a deed of conveyance for 200 acres (0.81 km²) of land to establish the campus. On June 23, 1868, Vassar delivered his farewell address to the Vassar College Board of Trustees; he died in the middle of delivering the eleventh page of the speech. In a bill enacted on 15 July 1870, the U.S. Congress waived any tax claim(s) to the donation to the college.

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Maureen Stapleton
Maureen Stapleton (June 21, 1925 – March 13, 2006) was an American actress in film, theater and television.
Stapleton was born Lois Maureen Stapleton in Troy, New York, the daughter of Irene (née Walsh) and John P. Stapleton, and grew up in a strict Irish American Catholic family. Her father was an alcoholic and her parents separated during her childhood.
Stapleton moved to New York City at the age of eighteen, and did modeling to pay the bills. She once said that it was her infatuation with the handsome Hollywood actor Joel McCrea which led her into acting. She made her Broadway debut in the production featuring Burgess Meredith of The Playboy of the Western World in 1946. That same year, she played the role of Iras in Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" in a touring production by actress and producer Katharine Cornell. Stepping in because Anna Magnani refused the role due to her limited English, Stapleton won a Tony Award for her role in Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo in 1951. (Magnani's English improved, however, and she was able to play the role in the film version, winning an Oscar.) Stapleton played in other Williams' productions, including Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton and Orpheus Descending (and its film adaptation, The Fugitive Kind, co-starring her friend Marlon Brando), as well as Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic. She won a second Tony Award for Neil Simon's The Gingerbread Lady, which was written especially for her, in 1971. Later Broadway roles included "Birdie" in The Little Foxes opposite Elizabeth Taylor and as a replacement for Jessica Tandy in The Gin Game.

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Meg Ryan
Margaret Mary Emily Anne Hyra (born November 19, 1961), professionally known as Meg Ryan, is an American actress and producer. After minor roles in film and television, Ryan became a movie star in 1989 when she appeared in When Harry Met Sally.... Over the next 15 years she played leading roles in several romantic comedy films, including Sleepless in Seattle (1993), French Kiss (1995), Addicted to Love (1997), City of Angels (1998), You've Got Mail (1998), and Kate & Leopold (2001), grossing a total of over $870 million worldwide. At that time, TIME critic Richard Corliss called her "the current soul of romantic comedy".
Ryan (née Hyra) was born in Fairfield, Connecticut, the daughter of Susan Jordan (née Duggan) – a former actress and English teacher – and Harry Hyra, a math teacher. Both Susan and Harry were raised in Fairfield, Connecticut. Harry was an all state basketball player. Ryan's mother had appeared in one television commercial and later worked briefly as an assistant casting director in New York City. She supported and encouraged her young daughter's study of acting. Ryan has two sisters, Dana and Annie, and a brother, musician Andrew Hyra, of the band Billy Pilgrim. Her parents divorced in 1976, when she was 15 years old.

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Melissa Leo
Melissa Chessington Leo (born September 14, 1960) is an American actress. After appearing on several television shows and films in the late '80s, her breakthrough role came in 1993 as Det. Sgt. Kay Howard on the television series Homicide: Life on the Street for the show's first five seasons from 1993 – 1997. She was also previously been a regular on the television shows All My Children and The Young Riders. Her breakthrough film role was in the 2003 film, 21 Grams as Marianne Jordan.
Following several films, Leo received critical acclaim and national attention in the 2008 film, Frozen River earning several nominations and awards, including an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Leo earned several awards for her role as Alice Ward in the critically acclaimed 2010 film, The Fighter. For this role Leo won the Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild Award and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Leo currently appears on the HBO television series Treme as Antoinette "Toni" Bernette.
Leo was born in Manhattan, New York City. She is the daughter of Peggy (née Chessington), a California-born teacher, and Arnold Leo, an editor at Grove Press, fisherman, and spokesman for the East Hampton Baymen's Association. Leo was raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and spent summers at her father's house in Springs, a section of East Hampton, N.Y. She is a former resident of Putney, Vermont and now lives in Stone Ridge, New York. She has a son with actor and former boyfriend John Heard named John Matthew Heard (born 1987) and years later adopted Adam (born 1984).^{[citation needed]}

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Meryl Streep
Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep (born June 22, 1949) is an American actress who has worked in theatre, television, and film. She is widely regarded as one of the most talented actors of all time.
Streep made her professional stage debut in The Playboy of Seville (1971), before her screen debut in the television movie Deadliest Season (1977). In that same year, she made her film debut with Julia (1977). Both critical and commercial success came quickly with roles in The Deer Hunter (1978) and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), the former giving Streep her first Academy Award nomination and the latter her first win. She later won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performances in Sophie's Choice (1982) and The Iron Lady (2011).
Streep has received 17 Academy Award nominations, winning three, and 26 Golden Globe nominations, winning eight, more nominations than any other actor in the history of either award. Her work has also earned her two Emmy Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, a Cannes Film Festival award, five New York Film Critics Circle Awards, two BAFTA awards, an Australian Film Institute Award, five Grammy Award nominations, and a Tony Award nomination, amongst others. She was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2004 and the Kennedy Center Honor in 2009 for her contribution to American culture through performing arts, the youngest actress in each award's history.

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Mia Farrow
Mia Farrow (born February 9, 1945) is an American actress, singer, humanitarian, and fashion model.
Farrow first gained wide acclaim for her role as Allison MacKenzie in the soap opera Peyton Place, and for her subsequent short-lived marriage to Frank Sinatra. An early film role, as the woman pregnant with Satan's baby in 1968's Rosemary's Baby, saw her portrayal nominated for many awards.
Farrow has appeared in more than 45 films and won numerous awards, including a Golden Globe award (and seven additional Golden Globe nominations), three BAFTA Film Award nominations, and a win for best actress at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Farrow is also known for her extensive humanitarian work as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. She is involved in humanitarian activities in Darfur, Chad, and the Central African Republic. In 2008, Time magazine named her one of the most influential people in the world.
Farrow was born as Maria de Lourdes Villiers Farrow in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Australian film director John Farrow and Irish actress Maureen O'Sullivan. She was raised Roman Catholic. Her sisters are Prudence and actors Stephanie and Tisa. She has three brothers: Michael Damien (1939–1958), Patrick Joseph (1942–2009) and John Charles (born 1946).^{[citation needed]}

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Michael Caine
Sir Michael Caine, CBE (born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite; 14 March 1933) is an English actor.
Caine is one of two actors nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade from the 1960s to 2000s, the other one being Jack Nicholson. In 2000, Caine was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of his contribution to cinema.
Caine was born in St Olave's Hospital, Rotherhithe, Southwark in South East London, the son of Ellen Frances Marie (née Burchell; 1900-1989), a cook and charwoman, and Maurice Joseph Micklewhite, a fish market porter. His father was of English, Irish, and, reportedly, Irish Traveller ancestry. Caine was brought up in his mother's Protestant religion (his father was Catholic).
Caine grew up in Southwark, South London, and during the Second World War he was evacuated to North Runcton near King's Lynn in Norfolk. After the war, when his father was demobilised, the family was rehoused by the council in Marshall Gardens at the Elephant and Castle in a pre-fabricated house made in Canada, as much of London's housing stock had been damaged during the Blitz in 1940-41.

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Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham (born November 6, 1952) is an American writer, best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999.
Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and grew up in Pasadena, California. He studied English literature at Stanford University where he earned his degree. Later, at the University of Iowa, he received a Michener Fellowship and was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. While studying at Iowa, he had short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly and the Paris Review. His short story, "White Angel", was later used as a chapter in his novel A Home at the End of the World. It was included in "The Best American Short Stories, 1989," published by Houghton Mifflin.
In 1993, Cunningham received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1998 a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 1995 he was awarded the Whiting Writers' Award. Cunningham has taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and in the creative writing M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College. He is currently professor of creative writing at Yale University.

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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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Michelle Pfeiffer
Michelle Marie Pfeiffer (

/ˈfaɪfər/; born April 29, 1958) is an American actress. She made her film debut in 1980 in The Hollywood Knights, but first garnered mainstream attention with her performance in Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983). Pfeiffer has won numerous awards for her work. She received six consecutive Golden Globe Award nominations, winning the Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama award in 1990 for The Fabulous Baker Boys. She also won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Dangerous Liaisons, and the Silver Bear for Best Actress for Love Field, and has been nominated for three Academy Awards for the same films.
Pfeiffer rose to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s with critically acclaimed performances in the films Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Married to the Mob (1988), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), The Russia House (1990), Frankie and Johnny (1991), Love Field (1992), Batman Returns (1992), and The Age of Innocence (1993).
She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on August 6, 2007. The star is located at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard and is recognised as STAR 2,345.

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Mick LaSalle
Mick LaSalle (born May 7, 1959) is an American film critic and the author of two books on pre-Hays Code Hollywood. Up to March 2008, he had written inmore than 1550 reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle and he has been podcasting them since September 2005.
LaSalle is the author of Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood, a history/critical study of the actresses who worked in the film industry between 1929-1934. It was published by Thomas Dunne Books in 2000. In his review in The New York Times, Andy Webster called it "an overdue examination of a historic conflict between Hollywood and would-be monitors of morality" and added LaSalle "has an avuncular but informative style, and makes his points with a relaxed economy."
The book served as the basis for the documentary film Complicated Women, directed by Hugh Munro Neely and narrated by Jane Fonda, which originally was broadcast by Turner Classic Movies in May 2003. LaSalle provided commentary for and was associate producer of the project.

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Mike Nichols
Mike Nichols (born Michael Igor Peschkowsky; November 6, 1931) is a German-born American television, stage and film director, writer, producer and comedian. He began his career in the 1950s as one half of the comedy duo Nichols and May, along with Elaine May. In 1968 he won the Academy Award for Best Director for the film The Graduate. His other noteworthy films include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carnal Knowledge, Working Girl, Closer and the TV mini-series Angels in America. He also staged the original theatrical productions of Barefoot in the Park, Luv, The Odd Couple and Spamalot.
Nichols is one of a small group of people who have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award. His other honors include the Lincoln Center Gala Tribute in 1999, the National Medal of Arts in 2001, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2010.
Mike Nichols was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin, Germany, the son of Brigitte (née Landauer) and Paul Peschkowsky, a physician. His father was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Russian Jewish immigrant family that had been wealthy and lived in Siberia, leaving after the Russian Revolution and settling in Germany around 1920. His mother's family were German Jews. His maternal grandparents were anarchist Gustav Landauer and author Hedwig Lachmann. Nichols is a third cousin twice removed of scientist Albert Einstein, through Nichols' mother. He moved to the United States to flee the Nazis on April 28, 1939. His father, who had changed his name to Paul Nichols, had successfully set up a medical practice in Manhattan and the family lived near Central Park. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1944 and attended public elementary school in Manhattan (PS 87). After graduating from Walden High School, Nichols briefly attended New York University before dropping out. In 1950, he enrolled in the pre-med program at the University of Chicago.

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Mira Sorvino
Mira Katherine Sorvino (born September 28, 1967) is an American actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Mighty Aphrodite (1995) and is also known for her role as Romy White in Romy and Michele's High School Reunion.
Sorvino was born in Tenafly, New Jersey. Her mother, Lorraine Ruth Davis, is a drama therapist for Alzheimer's disease patients and a former actress, and her father, Paul Sorvino, is a character actor and director. She has two siblings, Michael and Amanda. Sorvino is of Italian descent on her father's side.
At a young age, Sorvino wrote and acted in backyard plays with her childhood friend Hope Davis, in theater productions at Dwight-Englewood School, and at Harvard University, where she graduated magna cum laude in East Asian Studies in 1989. She also helped found the Harvard-Radcliffe Veritones, one of Harvard's co-ed a cappella groups in 1985. Her solo piece was Yazoo's "Only You".^{[citation needed]}
Sorvino spent the next three years in New York City, trying to make a name for herself as an actress.^{[citation needed]} When the 1993 film Amongst Friends entered pre-production, she was hired as third assistant director, then was promoted to casting director, then to assistant producer, and was finally offered a lead role. Positive reviews opened doors for her.^{[citation needed]}

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Miranda Richardson
Miranda Jane Richardson (born 3 March 1958) is an English stage, film and television actor. She has been nominated for two Academy Awards, and has won two Golden Globes (with seven nominations) and a BAFTA (with seven nominations) during her career.
Richardson was born in Southport, Lancashire, to Marian Georgina (née Townsend), a housewife, and William Alan Richardson, a marketing executive. The second daughter of a middle class family, she revealed a talent for acting as a girl.
Richardson enrolled at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, where she studied alongside Daniel Day-Lewis, having started out with juvenile performances in Cinderella and Lord Arthur Savile's Crime at the Southport Dramatic Club. Richardson enjoyed a successful and extensive theatre career, making her stage debut in Moving at the Queen's Theatre in 1981. Soon afterwards, she appeared in repertory theatre, until she found recognition in the West End for a series of stage performances, ultimately receiving an Olivier Award nomination for her performance in A Lie of the Mind, and in 1996, she is cited as "the greatest actress of our time in any medium" by one critic after she appeared in Orlando at the Edinburgh Festival. She returned to the London stage in May 2009 to play the lead role in Wallace Shawn's new play, Grasses of a Thousand Colours at the Royal Court Theatre.

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Mo'Nique
Monique Angela Hicks (née Imes) (born December 11, 1967), known professionally as Mo'Nique, is an American comedienne and actress. Mo'Nique rose to fame in the UPN series The Parkers while making a name as a stand-up comedian hosting a variety of venues, including Showtime at the Apollo. Mo'Nique transitioned to film with roles in such films as Phat Girlz, and Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins.
In 2009, she received critical praise for her villainous role in the film Precious. For this performance, she has won numerous awards including an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a BAFTA Award. She won almost 30 awards for her performance. She is the sixteenth African American actress to receive a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and the fourth to win. Overall, Mo'Nique is the twelfth individual African-American to win an Oscar for acting; and the seventh winner during the decade of the 2000s. She hosted The Mo'Nique Show, a late-night talk show that premiered in 2009 on BET. On July 28, 2011, BET announced that The Mo'Nique Show would not be picked up for another season.

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Molly Haskell
Molly Haskell (born 29 September 1939, Charlotte, North Carolina) is an American feminist film critic and author. She contributed to The Village Voice, first as a theatre critic, then as a movie reviewer; and from there moved on to New York Magazine and Vogue. Her most influential book is From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (1974; revised and reissued in 1987). She co-hosted Turner Classic Movies's The Essentials with Robert Osborne in 2006 for one season.
Haskell was born in North Carolina and grew up in Richmond, Virginia. She attended Sweet Briar College, the University of London and the Collège de Sorbonne before settling in New York. While in Paris she wrote a newsletter about French films for the New York press. For the opening of new films in America, within the newsletter she interpreted the directors that came to America. To begin as a critic she then went to The Village Voice, and became a movie reviewer. Haskell finally found a steady career with New York Magazine and Vogue.

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Mona Washbourne
Mona Washbourne (born 27 November 1903, Birmingham, Warwickshire - died 15 November 1988, London) was an English actress of stage, film and television.
Mona Washbourne began her entertaining career training as a concert pianist. While performing on stage in the early 1920s, she found that she liked acting and became an actress.^{[citation needed]} In 1948, after numerous stage musical performances, Washbourne began appearing in films. Her film credits include Billy Liar (1963) and The Collector (1965). She played Mrs. Pearce in 1964's My Fair Lady, the stern and caustic Mrs. Bramson in the remake of Night Must Fall, and the Matron in the 1968 film, If.....
She appeared at both the Royal Court Theatre in London and on Broadway in 1970 in David Storey's Home. She was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play. She won the 1981 New York Film Critics' Circle Awards for Best Supporting Actress in Stevie.
In 1981, Mona Washbourne appeared in Granada Television's adaptation of Brideshead Revisited in the role of Nanny Hawkins.

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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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Nadine Garner
Nadine Lynette Garner (born 14 December 1970 in Knoxfield, Melbourne) is an Australian actress.
Garner first came to public attention in 1985, as Tamara Henderson in the Australian TV series, The Henderson Kids, and then in her debut film The Still Point. She made her stage debut in 1987, in the title role of the Melbourne Theatre Company production of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. Since then she has worked extensively in film, theatre and TV (both in Australia and the UK) and received awards and nominations for performances in each field. Also interested in writing, she wrote and performed in the stage work Birds Eye View in Sydney, 2002.
Garner has worked with most state theatre companies, in a wide variety of roles in works by Shakespeare, Molière, Sheridan, Ibsen, Chekhov, Orton, Shaffer, Lawler, and Elton. She also played the role of Desire in the highly controversial Australian musical Bad Boy Johnny and the Prophets of Doom.
Nadine Garner is married to Cameron Barnett and they have two young sons, Eden and Jem.

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Nancy Meyers
Nancy Jane Meyers (born December 8, 1949) is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. She is the writer, producer and director of several big-screen successes, including The Parent Trap (1998), Something's Gotta Give (2003), The Holiday (2006), and It's Complicated (2009). Her second film as director, What Women Want (2000), was at one point the most successful film ever directed by a woman, taking in $183 million in the United States.
Meyers was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The younger of two daughters, she was raised in a Jewish household in the Drexel Hill area, a largely Catholic neighborhood. Her father, Irving, worked as an executive at a voting machines manufacturer, while her mother, Patricia (née Lemisch), was a homemaker and volunteer, who was also engaged in the Head Start Program and the Home for the Blind. After reading the Moss Hart biography Act One at the age of twelve, Meyers became interested in theater and started to act in local stage productions. Her interest in screenwriting did not emerge until she saw Mike Nichols' film The Graduate in 1967.

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Natacha Régnier
Natacha Régnier (born 11 April 1974) is a Belgian actress.
Born in the Ixelles section of Brussels, she was attracted to theatre from early adolescence. Her first screen role was in The Motorcycle Girl (1993), a short film by Stéphan Carpiaux. After that, she played a number of roles for French television.
The confirmation of her talent came in 1998, when Régnier and Élodie Bouchez received the Prix d'interprétation féminine (Best Actress) at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival for their roles in La vie rêvée des anges by Erick Zonca.
She has stated that her idol is film actress Sandrine Bonnaire.
Régnier dated Jérémie Renier. Natacha Régnier was married to French musician Yann Tiersen, but they are now divorced. They have a daughter.
Régnier has just finished the film Une journée, which is now in post-production.

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Natalie Portman
Natalie Hershlag (Hebrew: נטלי הרשלג‎; born June 9, 1981), better known by her stage name Natalie Portman, is an actress with dual American and Israeli citizenship. Her first role was as an orphan taken in by a hitman in the 1994 French action film Léon, but mainstream success came when she was cast as Padmé Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy (released in 1999, 2002 and 2005). In 1999, she enrolled at Harvard University to study psychology while still working as an actress. She completed her bachelor's degree in 2003.
In 2001, Portman opened in New York City's Public Theater production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. In 2005, Portman received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as well as winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture for the drama Closer. She won a Constellation Award for Best Female Performance, and a Saturn Award for Best Actress for her starring role in V for Vendetta (2006). She played leading roles in the historical dramas Goya's Ghosts (2006) and The Other Boleyn Girl (2008). In May 2008, she served as the youngest member of the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival jury. Portman's directorial debut, Eve, opened the 65th Venice International Film Festival's shorts competition in 2008. Portman directed a segment of the collective film New York, I Love You.

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Nicole Kidman
Nicole Mary Kidman, AC (born 20 June 1967) is an Australian actress, singer, film producer, and humanitarian. Kidman began her career in 1983, starring in various Australian film and television productions until her breakthrough in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm. Following several films over the early 1990s, she came to worldwide recognition for her performances in Days of Thunder (1990), Far and Away (1992), and Batman Forever (1995). Kidman followed this with other successful films in the late 1990s. It was her performance in the musical, Moulin Rouge! (2001) which earned Kidman her second Golden Globe Award and first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Her performance as Virginia Woolf the following year in the drama film The Hours (2002) received critical acclaim and earned Kidman the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Kidman's other notable films include To Die For (1995), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Cold Mountain (2003), The Interpreter (2005), and Australia (2008). Her performance in 2010's Rabbit Hole (which she also produced) earned Kidman further accolades including a subsequent Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Kidman has been a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF since 1994 and for UNIFEM since 2006. Kidman's work has earned her a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, three Golden Globe Awards, one BAFTA, and an Academy Award. In 2006, Kidman was made a Companion of the Order of Australia, Australia's highest civilian honor, and was also the highest-paid actress in the motion picture industry. As a result of being born to Australian parents in Hawaii, Kidman has dual citizenship in Australia and the United States.

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Nina Foch
Nina Foch (April 20, 1924 – December 5, 2008) was a Dutch-born American actress and leading lady in many 1940s and 1950s films.
Nina Foch was born Nina Consuelo Maud Fock in Leiden, Holland. Her mother was the American actress and singer Consuelo Flowerton, who returned to the U.S. after her marriage to Foch's father, Dutch classical music conductor Dirk Fock ended. They divorced when Nina was a toddler. As Foch grew up in New York, her mother encouraged her artistic talents. She played the piano and enjoyed art but was more interested in acting.
Foch lived in Beverly Hills, California for 40 years. She married three times. Her first marriage was to James Lipton, the future host of Inside the Actors Studio. She later married Dennis de Brito in 1959. The couple had one child before divorcing in 1963. Her final marriage, to Michael Dewell, began in 1967 but ended in divorce in 1993.
Foch died December 5, 2008, of complications from the blood disorder myelodysplasia at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Her only son, Dr. Dirk de Brito, told the Los Angeles Times that "She had become ill while teaching at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts."

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Noni Hazlehurst
Leonie Elva "Noni" Hazlehurst (born 17 August 1953, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia) is an Australian actress. She won the Best Support Actress in a Single Series in the Logie Awards of 1985. After attending St Leonard's College in Brighton East, Victoria, Hazlehurst completed a Bachelor of Arts in 1973 at Flinders University in Adelaide. She has studied ballet, singing, piano, speech and drama. In the 1980s and 1990s, much of Noni's work had concentrated on children's television. She was married to actor John Jarratt until they divorced.
She lives in Victoria with her two teenage sons, Charlie and William, and her partner Ian Marden.
Hazlehurst began as an actress in television serials produced by Crawford Productions. She initially played the ongoing role of Sharon Lewis in The Box in 1975 before joining the original cast of The Sullivans as Lil Duggan in late 1976. She was a Play School presenter from 1978 to 2001, and has been an Ambassador for Children's Week since 1991. She has also worked extensively to provide fun and education for children. Noni has recorded several albums and spoken work cassettes and is a respected performer, presenter, writer and director whose work extends across all media, theatre, film, radio and television.

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Nora Ephron
Nora Ephron (born May 19, 1941) is an American female filmmaker, director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, playwright, journalist, author, and blogger.
She is best known for her romantic comedies and is a triple nominee for the Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay for three films: Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally... and Sleepless in Seattle. She sometimes writes with her sister Delia Ephron. Her most recent film is Julie & Julia. She has also co-authored the Drama Desk Award-winning theatrical production, Love, Loss, and What I Wore.
Ephron was born in New York City, eldest of four daughters in a Jewish family, and at age four moved to and grew up in Beverly Hills; her parents, Henry and Phoebe Ephron, were both East Coast-born and raised screenwriters. Her sisters Delia and Amy are also screenwriters. Her sister Hallie Ephron is a journalist, book reviewer, and novelist who writes crime fiction. Ephron's parents based Sandra Dee's character in the play and the Jimmy Stewart film Take Her, She's Mine on their 22-year-old daughter Nora and her letters to them from college. Both became alcoholics during their declining years. Ephron graduated from Beverly Hills High School in Beverly Hills, California, in 1958. It was during her junior year there, that she became interested in Journalism. She then majored in political science and wrote for the weekly newspaper at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, from which she graduated in 1962.

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Octavia Spencer
Octavia Lenora Spencer (born May 25, 1970) is an American actress. She is best known for her role as Minny, the outspoken maid in the 2011 film, The Help, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, among other accolades including the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress, BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress, and Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role.
Born in Montgomery, Alabama, she is the sixth of seven children. Her mother worked as a maid. Spencer graduated from Jefferson Davis High School in 1988, spent two years at Auburn Montgomery studying drama (1988–89), and received a bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts from Auburn University.
At 16, she worked as an intern on the set of The Long Walk Home, a film starring Whoopi Goldberg.
Spencer made her film debut as a nurse in Joel Schumacher's A Time to Kill based on the book by John Grisham. She was originally hired to work on casting, but asked Schumacher if she could audition for a small part. Other film credits include: Never Been Kissed, Big Momma's House, Bad Santa, Spider-Man, Coach Carter, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! and Pretty Ugly People. She has made a number of guest appearances on a myriad of hit series including: Raising the Bar, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, The Big Bang Theory, Wizards of Waverly Place, NYPD Blue, Grounded for Life, ER, Titus, Becker and Dharma & Greg. However, she is best known for her starring roles as Serenity Johnson on Comedy Central's Halfway Home, and Constance Grady, the amorous INS caseworker on Ugly Betty.

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Olivia de Havilland
Olivia Mary de Havilland (born 1 July 1916) is a British American film and stage actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1946 and 1949. She is the elder sister of actress Joan Fontaine. The sisters are among the last surviving leading ladies from Hollywood of the 1930s.
Olivia de Havilland was born in Tokyo, Japan, to parents from the United Kingdom. Her father, Walter Augustus de Havilland (31 August 1872 – 20 May 1968, aged 95), was a patent attorney with a practice in Japan, and her mother, Lilian Augusta (née Ruse; 11 June 1886 – 20 February 1975, aged 88) was a stage actress who had left her career after going to Tokyo with her husband – she would return to work after her daughters had already won fame in the 40s, with the stage name of Lillian Fontaine. Her parents married in 1914 and they separated in 1919, when Lilian decided to end the marriage after discovering that her husband used the sexual services of geisha girls, but divorce was not signed until February 1925.

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Olympia Dukakis
Olympia Dukakis (born June 20, 1931) is an American actress. In 1987, she won an Academy Award, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe for her performance in Moonstruck. She received another Golden Globe nomination for Sinatra, and Emmy nominations for Lucky Day, More Tales of the City and Joan of Arc.
Dukakis was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the daughter of Alexandra (née Christos) and Constantine S. Dukakis. Her parents were Greek immigrants to the United States, her father from Anatolia and her mother from the Peloponnese. She has a brother, Apollo, and is a cousin of Michael Dukakis, a former governor of Massachusetts and the Democratic nominee for president in 1988, for whom she was a delegate from New Jersey at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. She is an alumna of Arlington High School in Arlington, Massachusetts, and was educated at Boston University.
Dukakis has been married to actor Louis Zorich since 1962. They have three children.
Dukakis has held a lengthy career in a diverse range of films, including Steel Magnolias, Mr. Holland's Opus, Jane Austen's Mafia!, The Thing About My Folks, and Moonstruck, for which she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. She also played the role of Anna Madrigal in the Tales of the City television mini-series, which garnered her an Emmy Award nomination, and appeared on Search for Tomorrow as Dr. Barbara Moreno, who romanced Stu Bergman. She appears as Dolly Sinatra (Frank's mother) in the mini-series of Frank Sinatra's life (1992). Her Broadway theatre credits include Who's Who in Hell, Social Security, and the one-woman play Rose. Her theater, film, and television work has also won her an Obie Award, a Drama Desk Award, a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, and a Golden Globe.

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Orson Welles
George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, writer and producer who worked extensively in theater, radio and film. He is best remembered for his innovative work in all three media, most notably Caesar (1937), a groundbreaking Broadway adaption of Julius Caesar and the debut of the Mercury Theatre; The War of the Worlds (1938), the most famous broadcast in the history of radio; and Citizen Kane (1941), which many critics and scholars name as the best film of all time.
After directing a number of high-profile theatrical productions in his early twenties, including an innovative adaptation of Macbeth and The Cradle Will Rock, Welles found national and international fame as the director and narrator of a 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds performed for the radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was reported to have caused widespread panic when listeners thought that an invasion by extraterrestrial beings was occurring. Although these reports of panic were mostly false and overstated, they rocketed Welles to instant notoriety.

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Pamela Franklin
Pamela Franklin (born 3 February 1950) is a British actress who appeared in feature films from 1961 until 1976, and on American television throughout the 1970s.
Franklin, who had three brothers, was born in Yokohama, Japan, and grew up in the Far East, where her father was an importer/exporter. The family lived in Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, and Ceylon before returning to England. At the age of eight she was sent to the Elmhurst School of Ballet in England. She made her film debut at the age of 11 in The Innocents (1961), and her television debut in the Wonderful World of Disney's, The Horse Without a Head. In 1962 she played opposite William Holden, Trevor Howard and Capucine in the British film The Lion. She was only fourteen years old when she made The Third Secret in 1964, in which she played the doctor's daughter, Katherine. When she was interviewed about the film in 1979, she said that "she and Stephen Boyd had become friends and the warmth on screen was genuine." In 1966 she had a lead role in the BBC TV series Quick Before They Catch Us.

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Pamela Rabe
Pamela Rabe (born April 30, 1959) is a Canadian / Australian stage, television and film actor and theatre director. A graduate from the Playhouse Acting School, in Vancouver, Pamela Rabe is one of Australia’s most highly regarded and awarded actors. She is best known for her appearances in the films Cosi, Sirens and Paradise Road. She was born in Ontario, Canada, though she has long resided and worked in Australia.
Rabe is a prolific contributor to theatrical life in her adopted country. Some of her high-profile roles include Nora Boyle in Patrick White's The Season At Sarsaparilla, for which she won a Green Room Award for Best Actress, and Richard III in the Sydney Theatre Company production of The War Of The Roses, which also starred Cate Blanchett as Richard II.
Rabe also starred with Miranda Otto in the 1997 film adaptation of Elizabeth Jolley's novel The Well, for which she received an AFI Award for Best Actress.
In 2005 she performed a challenging, Croatian play called Woman-Bomb.
In 2010 she starred in the Melbourne stage production of David Mamet's play Boston Marriage.

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Patricia Clarkson
Patricia Davies Clarkson (born December 29, 1959) is an American actress. After studying drama on the East Coast, Clarkson launched her acting career in 1985 (a guest spot on Spenser: for Hire being one of her first acting jobs), and has worked steadily in both film and television. She twice won the Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress in Six Feet Under. Film roles included The Green Mile, Far From Heaven, Shutter Island and The Station Agent, and she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Pieces of April (2003).
Clarkson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of Jacquelyn (née Brechtel), a local New Orleans politician and councilwoman, and Arthur, a school administrator who worked at the Department of Medicine of Louisiana State University.
Clarkson studied drama at Fordham University, where she graduated summa cum laude, and earned her MFA at the Yale School of Drama before making her film debut in The Untouchables in 1987.
Clarkson's Broadway theatre credits include The House of Blue Leaves and Eastern Standard.

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Patricia Neal
Patricia Neal (January 20, 1926 – August 8, 2010) was an American actress of stage and screen. She was best known for her film roles as World War II widow Helen Benson in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), wealthy matron Emily Eustace Failenson in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), middle-aged housekeeper Alma Brown in Hud (1963), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She also played Olivia Walton in the 1971 made-for-television film The Homecoming, A Christmas Story, a role played in the regular series by actress Michael Learned.
Neal was born Patsy Louise Neal, in Packard, Whitley County, Kentucky, to William Burdette and Eura Petrey Neal. She grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she attended Knoxville High School, and studied drama at Northwestern University.
After moving to New York, she accepted her first job as understudy in the Broadway production of The Voice of the Turtle. Next she appeared in Another Part of the Forest (1946), winning the 1947 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play, in the first ever presentation of the Tony awards.

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Paul McCartney
Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE, Hon RAM, FRCM (born 18 June 1942) is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. Formerly of the Beatles (1960–1970) and Wings (1971–1981), he has been described by Guinness World Records as "The Most Successful Composer and Recording Artist of All Time", with 60 gold discs and sales of over 100 million albums and 100 million singles. With John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, he gained worldwide fame as a member of the Beatles, and with Lennon formed one of the most celebrated songwriting partnerships of the 20th century. After leaving the Beatles, he began a solo career and later formed the band Wings with his first wife, Linda Eastman, and singer-songwriter Denny Laine.
According to the BBC, his Beatles song "Yesterday" has been covered by over 2,200 artists—more than any other song. Wings' 1977 release, "Mull of Kintyre", became one of the best-selling singles ever in the UK, and he is "the most successful songwriter" in UK chart history, according to Guinness. As a songwriter or co-writer, he is included on thirty-one number one titles on the Billboard Hot 100, and as of 2012 he has sold over 15.5 million RIAA certified units in the United States.

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Paul Newman
Paul Leonard Newman (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008) was an American actor, film director, entrepreneur, humanitarian, professional racing driver, auto racing team owner, and auto racing enthusiast. He won numerous awards, including an Academy Award for best actor for his performance in the 1986 Martin Scorsese film The Color of Money and eight other nominations, three Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Cannes Film Festival Award, an Emmy award, and many honorary awards. He also won several national championships as a driver in Sports Car Club of America road racing, and his race teams won several championships in open wheel IndyCar racing.
Newman was a co-founder of Newman's Own, a food company from which Newman donated all post-tax profits and royalties to charity. As of July 2011, these donations exceeded $300 million.
Newman was born in Shaker Heights (a suburb of Cleveland). He was the son of Theresa (née Fetzer or Fetsko; Slovak: Terézia Fecková) and Arthur Sigmund Newman, who ran a profitable sporting goods store. His father was Jewish (Paul's paternal grandparents, Simon Newman and Hannah Cohn, were immigrants from Hungary and Poland). His mother, who practiced Christian Science, was born to a Slovak Roman Catholic family at Humenné, Ptičie (formerly Pticsie) in the former Kingdom of Hungary, Austria–Hungary (now Humenné in Slovakia). Newman had no religion as an adult, but described himself as a Jew, stating that "it's more of a challenge". Newman's mother worked in his father's store, while raising Paul and his brother, Arthur, who later became a producer and production manager.

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Peggy Ann Garner
Peggy Ann Garner (February 3, 1932 – October 16, 1984) was an American actress.
A successful child actor, Garner played her first film role in 1938 and won the Academy Juvenile Award for her work in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). Featured roles in such films as Black Widow (1954) did not further her attempts to establish herself in mature film roles, and although she progressed to theatrical work, she made relatively few acting appearances as an adult.
Born in Canton, Ohio, Garner's mother pushed her into the limelight and entered her in talent quests while Garner was still a child. By 1938 she had made her first film appearance, and over the next few years she appeared in several more films, including Jane Eyre (1943) and The Keys of the Kingdom (1944). She reached the height of her success at the age of 13 in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), winning an Academy Juvenile Award largely on the basis of this performance.
Like many child performers, Garner was unable to make a successful transition into adult film roles. She guest-starred steadily in television roles, beginning in the early 1950s and continuing through the 1960s. She was a regular panelist on the NBC series Who Said That?, along with H. V. Kaltenborn and Boris Karloff. After her film career ended, she ventured into stage acting and had some success but also worked as a real estate agent and fleet-car executive between acting jobs in order to support herself. In 1978, she surprised film audiences after a decade away from any feature film when she appeared as the pregnant aunt of the bride 'Candice Ruteledge' in the critically acclaimed ensemble Robert Altman film, "A Wedding", in 1978. Her final screen performance was a small part in a made-for-television feature, "This Year's Blonde", in 1980.

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Peggy Ashcroft
Dame Peggy Ashcroft, DBE (22 December 1907 – 14 June 1991) was an English actress.
Born as Edith Margaret Emily Ashcroft in Croydon, Surrey, Ashcroft attended the Woodford School, Croydon and the Central School of Speech and Drama. A prolific stage actress from a young age, she first gained notoriety playing Naemi in Jew Suss in 1929, and Desdemona opposite Paul Robeson's Othello two years later, during which time the two had a brief affair.
Stardom came in 1934 when she played Juliet in a legendary production of Romeo and Juliet, at the New Theatre, in which Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud alternated in the roles of Romeo and Mercutio. She and Gielgud would later be acclaimed as Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, which they played together a number of times, including a London engagement and European tour for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1955 (she also played Cordelia to his King Lear during that tour). When she first played Beatrice with him in 1950, Gielgud found her performance "a revelation - an impish, rather tactless girl with a curious resemblance to Bea Lillie," while a teenage Peter Hall observed in her "English containment and decency, contrasted with a wild passion." She stayed at the top of the British theatrical profession throughout her career, with some of the highlights Three Sisters (1937) in which she played Irina, The Heiress (1949), Antony and Cleopatra (1953), As You Like It and Cymbeline (as Imogen) (1957), The Taming of the Shrew (1960), and The War of the Roses, the Royal Shakespeare Company's massive landmark compendium of the three Henry VI plays and Richard III, directed by Peter Hall for the RSC in 1963. Her last appearances for the RSC were as the Countess of Rousillon in Trevor Nunn's 1981 All's Well That Ends Well, a "perfect…performance" according to Financial Times critic Bertram Young, and in a revival of The Hollow Crown for a gala performance at The Swan on 22 June 1986.

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Penélope Cruz
Penélope Cruz Sánchez (Spanish pronunciation: [peˈnelope kruθ ˈsantʃeθ]) (born April 28, 1974) is a Spanish actress. Signed by an agent at age 15, she made her acting debut at 16 on television and her feature film debut the following year in Jamón, jamón (1992), to critical acclaim. Her subsequent roles in the 1990s and 2000s included Open Your Eyes (1997), The Hi-Lo Country (1999), The Girl of Your Dreams (2000) and Woman on Top (2000). Cruz achieved recognition for her lead roles in Vanilla Sky and Blow. Both films were released in 2001 and were commercially successful worldwide.
In the 2000s she has appeared in films from a wide range of genres, including the comedy Waking Up in Reno (2002), the thriller Gothika (2003), the Christmas movie Noel (2004), the action adventure Sahara (2005), the animated G-Force and the musical drama Nine. Her most notable films to date are Volver (2006), for which she earned Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), for which she received an Academy Award. She was the first Spanish actress in history to receive an Academy Award and the first Spanish actress to receive a star at the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

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Pernilla August
Pernilla August (born Mia Pernilla Hertzman-Ericson;^{[citation needed]} 13 February 1958) is a Swedish actress, director and script-writer. Being one of Sweden's leading actresses and a long time collaborator with director Ingmar Bergman, she won the Best Actress Award at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival for her role in his The Best Intentions. Her international career includes the role of Shmi Skywalker in the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
August started acting during her childhood in theater and at school. Her professional acting career started in 1975 when acclaimed director Roy Andersson cast her in a minor role in the film Giliap the same year, followed from 1979 by films by other internationally renowned directors, Vilgot Sjöman (among them, the film about Alfred Nobel, 1983) and Lasse Hallström. She studied acting at Swedish National Academy of Mime and Acting in Stockholm 1979-82. Before finishing her studies, she even attracted the attention of Ingmar Bergman who cast her in his film Fanny and Alexander (1982), playing the nanny in the director's romanticised portrait of his childhood. That marked the beginning of two decades of collaboration, collecting several international awards, including TV series The Best Intentions (1991), where she portraited Bergman's mother and met her second husband to be, director Bille August, and TV-productions Private Confessions (1996), directed by Liv Ullmann and Bergman's own In the Presence of a Clown (1997).

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Phyllida Lloyd
Phyllida Lloyd, CBE (born 17 June 1957) is a British director, best known for her work in theatre and as the director of the United Kingdom's second highest-grossing film to date, Mamma Mia! and The Iron Lady.
Lloyd grew up in Bristol. After graduating from Birmingham University in 1979, she spent five years working in BBC Television Drama. In 1985 she was awarded an Arts Council of Great Britain bursary to be Trainee Director at the Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich. The following year she was appointed Associate Director at the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, then in 1989 Associate Director of the Bristol Old Vic, where her production of The Comedy of Errors was a success.
She moved on to the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester where she directed The Winter's Tale, The School for Scandal, Medea, and an acclaimed production of Death and the King's Horseman by Wole Soyinka. In 1991 she made her debut at the Royal Shakespeare Company with a well-received production of a little-known play by Thomas Shadwell, The Virtuoso. Although she followed this in 1992 with a successful production of the rarely-seen Artists and Admirers by Alexander Ostrovsky, she has, as of 2007, never returned to the RSC.

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Piper Laurie
Piper Laurie (born Rosetta Jacobs; January 22, 1932) is an American actress of stage and screen known for her roles in the television series Twin Peaks and the films The Hustler, Carrie, and Children of a Lesser God, all of which brought her Academy Award nominations. In 1991, she won a Golden Globe Award for her portrayal of Catherine Martell in Twin Peaks.
Laurie was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Charlotte Sadie (née Alperin) and Alfred Jacobs, a furniture dealer. Her grandparents were Jewish immigrants, from Poland on her father's side and Russia on her mother's. Her father moved the family to Los Angeles, California in 1938. The young Rosetta was red-haired and naturally attractive, but socially hesitant. She attended Hebrew school, and to combat her shyness her parents provided her with weekly elocution lessons; this activity eventually led her to minor roles at nearby Universal Studios.
In 1949, Rosetta Jacobs signed a contract with Universal Studios, in which her screen name was changed to Piper Laurie, by which she has been known professionally since then. Her breakout role was in Louisa, with Ronald Reagan (whom she dated a few times before his marriage to Nancy Davis). Several other roles followed: Francis Goes to the Races (1951, co-starring Donald O'Connor); Son of Ali Baba (1952, co-starring Tony Curtis); and Ain't Misbehavin' (1955, co-starring Rory Calhoun).

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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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Raúl Juliá
Raúl Rafael Juliá y Arcelay (March 9, 1940 – October 24, 1994) was a Puerto Rican actor.
Born in San Juan, he gained interest in acting while still in school. Upon completing his studies, Juliá decided to pursue a career in acting. After performing in the local scene for some time, he was convinced by entertainment personality Orson Bean to move and work in New York City. Juliá, who had been bilingual since his childhood, soon gained interest in Broadway and Off-Broadway plays. He performed in mobile projects, including the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre.
Juliá was eventually noticed by Joseph Papp, who offered him work in the New York Shakespeare Festival. After gaining notoriety, he received roles in two television series, Love of Life and Sesame Street. For his performance in Two Gentlemen of Verona, he received a nomination for the Tony Award and won a Drama Desk Award. Between 1974 and 1982, Juliá received Tony Award nominations for Where's Charley?, The Threepenny Opera and Nine. During the 1980s, he worked in several films, receiving nominations for the Golden Globe Awards, for his performance in Tempest, and Kiss of the Spider Woman, winning the National Board of Review Award for Best Actor for the latter.

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Reese Witherspoon
Laura Jeanne Reese Witherspoon (born March 22, 1976), better known as Reese Witherspoon, is an American actress and film producer. Witherspoon landed her first feature role as the female lead in the film The Man in the Moon in 1991; later that year she made her television acting debut, in the cable movie Wildflower. In 1996, Witherspoon appeared in Freeway and followed that appearance with roles in three major 1998 films: Overnight Delivery, Pleasantville and Twilight. The following year, Witherspoon appeared in the critically acclaimed Election, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination.
2001 marked her career's turning point with the breakout role as Elle Woods in the box office hit Legally Blonde, and in 2002 she starred in Sweet Home Alabama, which became her biggest commercial film success to date. 2003 saw her return as lead actress and executive producer of Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde. In 2005, Witherspoon received worldwide attention and praise for her portrayal of June Carter Cash in Walk the Line, which earned her an Academy Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role.

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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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Rita Moreno
Rita Moreno (born December 11, 1931) is a Puerto Rican singer, dancer and actress. She is the only Hispanic and one of the few performers who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony, and was the second Puerto Rican to win an Academy Award.
Moreno was born Rosa Dolores Alverío in Humacao, Puerto Rico, to Rosa María, a seamstress, and Paco Alverío, a farmer. She moved with her mother to New York City at the age of five, and took the surname of her stepfather, Edward Moreno.
She began her first dancing lessons soon after arriving in New York from a friend of her mother, a Spanish dancer called Paco Cansino, who was the uncle of Rita Hayworth. When she was 11 years old, she lent her voice to Spanish language versions of American films.
She had her first Broadway role — as "Angelina" in Skydrift — by the time she was 13, which caught the attention of Hollywood talent scouts. She appeared in small roles in The Toast of New Orleans and Singin' in the Rain, in which she played Zelda Zanners.

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Robert Altman
Robert Bernard Altman (February 20, 1925 – November 20, 2006) was an American film director and screenwriter known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award.
His films MASH (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), and Nashville (1975) have been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Altman was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of Helen (née Matthews), a Mayflower descendant from Nebraska, and Bernard Clement Altman, a wealthy insurance salesman and amateur gambler, who came from an upper-class family. Altman's ancestry was German, English and Irish; his paternal grandfather, Frank Altman, Sr., anglicized the spelling of the family name from "Altmann" to "Altman". Altman had a Catholic upbringing, but he did not continue to practice as a Catholic as an adult, although he has been referred to as "a sort of Catholic" and a Catholic director. He was educated at Jesuit schools, including Rockhurst High School, in Kansas City. He graduated from Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri in 1943.

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Robert Benton
Robert Douglas Benton (born September 29, 1932) is an American screenwriter and film director.
Benton was born in Waxahachie, Texas, the son of Dorothy (née Spaulding) and Ellery Douglass Benton, a telephone company employee. He attended the University of Texas and Columbia University. Benton has won numerous awards for both writing and directing in film. In 1959, he co-wrote the book "The IN and OUT Book" with Harvey Schmidt, published by The Viking Press. He was the art director at Esquire magazine in the early 1960s. In 2006 he appeared in the documentary Wanderlust.
Benton's family originally came from Northumberland in the United Kingdom, where the Bentons held a seat long before the Norman Conquest of 1066.^{[citation needed]} Many family members settled in America, including Abigail and Isabel Benton, who settled in Virginia in 1642; George Benton, who settled in Barbados in 1669; and Robert Benton, who settled in Virginia in 1635. Benton was once a noble family, but they were deprived of their title by the Normans after the Conquest. Robert Benton still has relatives living in England who trace their origins to the seventeenth century.

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Robert James Waller
Robert James Waller (b. August 1, 1939, Rockford, Iowa) is an American author, also known for his work as a photographer and musician.
Waller received his B.A. ('62) and M.A. ('64) from University of Northern Iowa (then known as Iowa State Teachers College). He received his Ph.D. in business from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University Bloomington in 1968.
Later that year he returned to UNI and began teaching management and economics, and in 1977 became a full professor. He became dean of the College of Business in 1980 and retired from that position in 1986. He made a "seven figure" donation to Indiana University.
Several of his books have been on the New York Times bestseller list including 1992's The Bridges of Madison County which was the top best-seller in 1993. Both that novel and his 1995 novel, Puerto Vallarta Squeeze, have been made into motion pictures. Waller currently resides in Texas.

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Robert Kalfin
Robert Zangwill Kalfin (born 1933) is an American stage director and producer who has worked on and off Broadway and at regional theaters throughout the country. He is a former artistic director of the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park and the founder/artistic director of The Chelsea Theater Center.
Robert Zangwill Kalfin was born in 1933 to a Jewish couple of Russian descent. Alfred Kalfin was a cabinetmaker in England until shortly after his 18th birthday, when he moved to the United States and went into real estate. Hilda Kalfin taught kindergarten. Robert has a sister, Eleanor Royte, three years younger.
The Kalfins shared a respect for the arts, particularly music, and they provided piano lessons and visits to concerts and opera. Kalfin's maternal grandmother wrote and recited poetry, worked with amateur theater groups, and loved to sing and folk dance.
Kalfin attended Alfred University, where he majored in psychology and became involved with the drama club. He received an MFA from the Yale School of Drama in 1957.

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Robert Redford
Charles Robert Redford, Jr. (born August 18, 1936), better known as Robert Redford, is an American actor, film director, producer, businessman, environmentalist, philanthropist, and founder of the Sundance Film Festival. He has received two Oscars: one in 1981 for directing Ordinary People, and one for Lifetime Achievement in 2002. In 2010 he was awarded French Knighthood in the Legion d'Honneur. At the height of his fame in the 1970s and 1980s, he was often described as one of the world's most attractive men and remains one of the most popular movie stars. His popular films include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Downhill Racer (1969), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Candidate (1972), The Sting (1973), The Way We Were (1973), The Great Gatsby (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), All the President's Men (1976), A Bridge Too Far (1977), The Natural (1984), Out of Africa (1985), Sneakers (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993),The Last Castle and Spy Game (2001). As a filmmaker, his notable films include Ordinary People (1980), The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), A River Runs Through It (1992), Quiz Show (1994), The Horse Whisperer (1998) and The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000).

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Robert Wise
Robert Earl Wise (September 10, 1914 – September 14, 2005) was an American film director, producer and editor. He twice won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture, for West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965). He was also nominated for Best Film Editing for Citizen Kane (1941) and Best Picture for The Sand Pebbles (1966).
Among his other films are The Body Snatcher; Born to Kill; The Set-Up; The Day the Earth Stood Still; Destination Gobi; Run Silent, Run Deep; I Want to Live!; The Haunting; The Andromeda Strain; The Hindenburg; and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Wise was the president of the Directors Guild of America from 1971 to 1975 and later became the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Often contrasted with 'auteur' directors such as Stanley Kubrick who tended to bring a distinctive directorial "look" to a particular genre, Wise is famously viewed to have allowed his (sometimes studio assigned) story to dictate style. Later critics such as Martin Scorsese expanded that characterization, insisting that despite Wise's notorious workaday concentration on stylistic perfection within the confines of genre and budget, his choice of subject matter and approach still functioned to identify Wise as an artist and not merely an artisan. Through whatever means, Wise's approach brought him critical success as a director in many different traditional film genres: horror, noir, western, war, science fiction, musical and drama, with many repeat successes within each genre. Wise's tendency towards professionalism led to a degree of preparedness which, though nominally motivated by studio budget constraints, nevertheless advanced the moviemaking art, with many Academy Award-winning films the result. Robert Wise received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1998.

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Roberta Guaspari
Roberta Guaspari (born September 15, 1947) is an American violinist and music teacher in Harlem, New York.
Roberta grew up in a working-class family in Rome, New York. She graduated with a music education degree from the State University of New York at Fredonia in 1969. She created a scholarship there in 2008.
She co-founded Opus 118, a school of music that provides music instruction and teacher development. A documentary film, Small Wonders (directed by Allan Miller), and a movie, Music of the Heart (starring Meryl Streep as Roberta) soon followed, depicting Guaspari’s struggle to keep music in the Harlem schools.

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Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert (

/ˈiːbərt/; born June 18, 1942) is an American journalist, film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Ebert is known for his film review column (appearing in the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967, and later online) and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The Movies, all of which he co-hosted for a combined 23 years with Gene Siskel. After Siskel's death in 1999, Ebert teamed with Richard Roeper for the television series Ebert & Roeper & the Movies, which began airing in 2000. Although his name remained in the title, Ebert did not appear on the show after mid-2006 after he suffered post-surgical complications related to thyroid cancer, leaving him unable to speak. Ebert ended his association with the show in July 2008, but in February 2009 he stated that he and Roeper would continue their work on a new show. Ebert's current show, Ebert Presents: At the Movies, premiered on January 21, 2011, with Ebert contributing a review voiced by someone else in a brief segment called "Roger's Office".

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Ronee Blakley
Ronee Blakley (born August 24, 1945) is an American entertainer. Although an accomplished singer, songwriter, composer, producer and director, she is perhaps best known as an actress. Her most famous role was as the fictional country superstar Barbara Jean in Robert Altman's 1975 film Nashville, for which she won a National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress and was nominated for an Academy Award. She also had a notable role in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
Blakley was born in Nampa, Idaho, daughter of civil engineer Ronald Blakley and his wife Carol. Blakley’s early years were spent in the Pacific Northwest where she was selected as Idaho's representative to Girl's Nation while in high school. She studied at Mills College, Stanford University, and went to New York to attend Juilliard for post-graduate work.
Blakley began in New York improvising vocally with Moog synthesizers in Carnegie Hall to music by Gershon Kingsley. Her first soundtrack was composed for the 20th Century Fox film Welcome Home Soldier Boys and earned her a spot in Who's Who in America.

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Roseanne Barr
Roseanne Cherrie Barr (born November 3, 1952) is an American actress, comedian, writer, television producer, director and candidate for President of the United States with the Green Party of the United States. Barr began her career in stand-up comedy at clubs before gaining fame for her role in the sitcom Roseanne. The show was a hit and lasted nine seasons, from 1988 to 1997. She won both an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her work on the show. Barr had crafted a "fierce working-class domestic goddess" persona in the eight years preceding her sitcom and wanted to do a realistic show about a strong mother who was not a victim of patriarchal consumerism.
The granddaughter of immigrants from Europe and Russia, Barr was the oldest of four children in a working-class Jewish Salt Lake City family; she was also active in the LDS Church. In 1974 she married Bill Pentland, with whom she had three children, before divorcing in 1990 and marrying comedian Tom Arnold for four years. Controversy arose when she sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" off-key at a 1990 nationally aired baseball game, followed by spitting and grabbing her crotch.

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Rosemary Harris
Rosemary Ann Harris (born 19 September 1927) is an English actress and a member of the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Throughout her career she has been nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award and has won a Golden Globe, an Emmy, a Tony Award, an Obie, and five Drama Desk Awards.
Harris was born in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, England, the daughter of Enid Maude Frances (née Campion) and Stafford Berkley Harris. Her grandmother was Romanian. Her father was in the Royal Air Force and as a result, Harris' family lived in India during her childhood. She attended convent schools, and later studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art from 1951 to 1952.^{[citation needed]}
Early in her acting career, she gained experience in English repertory theatre (in 1948, she acted in Kiss and Tell at Eastbourne with Tilsa Page and John Clark) before training at RADA.^{[citation needed]} She first appeared in New York in 1951 in Moss Hart's Climate of Eden, and then returned to England for her West End debut in The Seven Year Itch which ran for a year at the Aldwich. She then entered a classical acting period in productions with the Bristol Old Vic and then the Old Vic.^{[citation needed]}

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Ruby Dee
Ruby Dee (born October 27, 1924) is an American actress, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, and activist. She is perhaps best known for co-starring in the film A Raisin in the Sun (1961) and the film American Gangster (2007) for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She has won a Grammy, Emmy, Obie, Drama Desk, Screen Actors Guild Award, Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and is a recipient of the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors, among scores of others awards.
Dee was born Ruby Ann Wallace in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of Gladys Hightower and Marshall Edward Nathaniel Wallace, a cook, waiter, and porter. After her mother left the family, Dee's father married Emma Amelia Benson, a schoolteacher. Dee grew up in Harlem, New York. She attended Hunter College High School and went on to graduate from Hunter College with degrees in French and Spanish in 1944. Dee is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.
Dee made several appearances on Broadway before receiving national recognition for her role in the 1950 film The Jackie Robinson Story. Her career in acting has crossed all major forms of media over a span of eight decades, including the films A Raisin in the Sun, in which she recreated her stage role as a suffering housewife in the projects, and Edge of the City. She played both roles opposite Sidney Poitier. During the 1960s, Dee appeared in such politically charged films as Gone Are the Days and The Incident, which is recognized as helping pave the way for young African-American actors and filmmakers.

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Ruby Keeler
Ruby Keeler, born Ethel Hilda Keeler, (August 25, 1910 – February 28, 1993) was an actress, dancer and singer most famous for her on-screen coupling with Dick Powell in a string of successful early musicals at Warner Brothers, particularly 42nd Street (1933). From 1928 to 1940, she was married to singer Al Jolson. She retired from show business in the 1940s but made a widely-publicized comeback on Broadway in 1971.
Keeler was born in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, to an Irish Catholic family, one of six siblings. Two sisters, Helen and Gertrude, had brief performing careers. Her father was a truck driver, and when she was three years old, her family packed up and moved to New York City where he knew he could get better pay. But it was not enough: there were six children, and although Keeler was interested in taking dance lessons, the family could not afford to send her.

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Ruth Gordon
Ruth Gordon Jones (October 30, 1896 – August 28, 1985), better known as Ruth Gordon, was an American actress and writer. She was perhaps best known for her film roles such as Minnie Castevet, Rosemary's overly solicitous neighbor in Rosemary's Baby, as the eccentric Maude in Harold and Maude and as the mother of Orville Boggs in the Clint Eastwood film Every Which Way but Loose. In addition to her acting career, Gordon wrote numerous well-known plays, film scripts and books. Gordon won an Academy Award, an Emmy and two Golden Globe awards for her acting, as well as three Academy Award nominations for her writing.
Gordon was born at 31 Marion Street in Quincy, Massachusetts. She was the only child of Annie Tapley (née Ziegler) and Clinton Jones, a factory foreman who had been a ship's captain. She was baptized an Episcopalian. Prior to graduating from Quincy High School, she wrote to several of her favorite actresses for an autographed picture. A personal reply she received from Hazel Dawn (whom she had seen in a stage production of The Pink Lady) inspired her to go into acting. Although her father was skeptical of her chances of success in a difficult profession, he took his daughter to New York in 1914, where he enrolled her in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

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S. Epatha Merkerson
S. Epatha Merkerson (born Sharon Epatha Merkerson, November 28, 1952) is an American film, stage, and television actress. She has won a Golden Globe, Emmy Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards, Obie Award and four NAACP Image Awards. She has also received two Tony Award nominations. She is best known for her role as NYPD Lieutenant Anita Van Buren from 1993 to 2010 on the long-running NBC police procedural drama series, Law & Order. She appeared in 391 episodes of the series—more than any other cast member.
In 2012, Merkerson became the host of Find Our Missing, a reality-reenactment series on TV One which profiles missing people of color.
Merkerson, the youngest of five children, was born in Saginaw, Michigan, the daughter of Ann Merkerson, who at the time was the only female in the vehicles operation unit at the Detroit Post Office. Her father worked in a factory. Merkerson's parents separated in 1957.
Merkerson is often reticent about revealing what her first name really was (Sharon). On the June 11, 2005 episode of NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, she jokingly claimed that the initial "S," "stands for 'Sweet' [because] so many people have difficulty with Epatha, which is what I prefer to be called". She has legally changed her first name to S. During a segment on the January 31, 2012 episode of The Wendy Williams Show, when questioned about the origin of her name, Merkerson shared that "Epatha" was the name of "a grade-school teacher who was influential in keeping [her father] in school." She further went on to clarify that she prefers to be addressed as "Epatha" as opposed to "S. Epatha."

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Sabine Azéma
Sabine Azéma (born 20 September 1949) is a French stage and film actress and director. Born in Paris, she graduated from the Paris Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, and began her film career in 1975. Azéma appeared in A Sunday in the Country (1984), for which she won a César Award for Best Actress, and numerous films of Alain Resnais, including Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983), L'Amour à mort (1984), Mélo (which won her a second César Award for Best Actress), Smoking/No Smoking (1993), On connaît la chanson (1997), Pas sur la bouche (2003), and Cœurs (2006). She has been nominated a further five times.

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Sacha Horler
Sacha Horler (born 12 February 1970, Sydney) is an Australian actress. Her parents were lawyers, but co-founded Sydney's Nimrod Theatre Company in the early 1970s.
In 1993, Sacha Horler graduated from Sydney's prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Arts and made her film debut two years later with a role in the music-themed comedy Billy's Holiday. In 1997, Horler was featured in the Australian produced drama Blackrock, and even appeared in the international hit Babe: Pig in the City the following year. Among her notable Sydney stage credits were featured roles in the one-act play collection Playgrounds (1996) and Harold Pinter's theater classic The Birthday Party (1997).
Next up for the actress was her breakthrough role in the gritty drama Praise, which featured several sobering sex scenes and a great deal of unromanticized nudity.
Horler's follow-up supporting role in Soft Fruit was a more difficult role for the actress, as it required her to considerably gain weight for the role. That year, she also had a supporting turn in the drama My Mother Frank, starring as the married daughter of a widow (Sinéad Cusack) who returns to school after her children have grown. She also appeared in the TV series CrashBurn playing "Abby".

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Sally Field
Sally Margaret Field (born November 6, 1946) is an American actress, singer, producer, director, and screenwriter. In each decade of her career, she has been known for major roles in American TV/film culture, including: in the 1960s, for Gidget (1965–66) or Sister Bertrille on The Flying Nun (1967–70); in the 1970s, for Sybil (1976), Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Norma Rae (1979); in the 1980s, for Absence of Malice (1981), Places in the Heart (1984) and Steel Magnolias (1989); in the 1990s, for Not Without My Daughter (1991), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Forrest Gump (1994) and Eye for an Eye (1996); and in the 2000s, on the TV shows ER and Brothers & Sisters (2006–11). She has also performed in numerous other roles.
Field won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a leading role on two occasions, Norma Rae (1979) and Places in the Heart (1984). Field's professional achievements also include winning three Emmy Awards: for her role in the TV film Sybil (1976); her guest-starring role on ER in 2000; and for her starring role as Nora Holden Walker on ABC's series Brothers & Sisters in 2007. She has also won two Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress. She also won the Best Female Performance Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, for Norma Rae (1979).

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Sally Hawkins
Sally Cecilia Hawkins (born 27 April 1976) is an English actress. Her performance as Poppy in the 2008 film Happy-Go-Lucky won her several international awards, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. Other significant roles include Susan in Vera Drake (2004), Sue Trinder in the BBC serial Fingersmith (2005), Anne Elliot in Persuasion (2007), and Rita O'Grady in Made in Dagenham (2010).
The daughter of Jacqui and Colin Hawkins, authors and illustrators of children's books, Hawkins was brought up in Blackheath in southeast London, and attended James Allen's Girls' School in Dulwich. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1998.
Hawkins' theatre appearances include Much Ado About Nothing (2000), A Midsummer Night's Dream (2000), Misconceptions (2001), Country Music (2004), and David Hare's adaptation of Federico García Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba in 2005.
Hawkins made her first notable screen performance as Samantha in the 2002 Mike Leigh film All or Nothing. She also appeared as Slasher in the 2004 film Layer Cake. She played the role of Zena Blake in the BBC adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel, Tipping the Velvet in 2002. Her first major television role came in 2005, when she played Susan Trinder in the BAFTA-nominated BBC drama Fingersmith, an adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel of the same name, in which she co-starred with Imelda Staunton, as she had in Vera Drake. Since then she has gone on to star in another BBC adaptation, Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky.

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Sally Kirkland
Sally Kirkland (born October 31, 1941) is an American film and television actress.
Kirkland was named after her mother, fashion editor Sally Kirkland, who was a fashion editor at Vogue and LIFE magazines, and was raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her father, Frederic McMichael Kirkland, worked in the scrap metal business.
Kirkland began acting Off-Broadway in 1962.^{[citation needed]} Then in 1969, she gave a widely acclaimed performance in the classic underground film Coming Apart. In the 1970s, she had small roles in popular films such as The Sting, The Way We Were, A Star Is Born and Private Benjamin. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1987 for Anna, for which she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama. Kirkland currently (as of 2010) hosts a show on the syndicated HealthyLife Radio Network.^{[citation needed]}
Kirkland has had frequent television roles, including The Simple Life 5: Goes to Camp and the soap operas Valley of the Dolls and Days of Our Lives and Three's Company. Films in which she has appeared include: EDtv, JFK, Adam and Steve and Coffee Date.

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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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Sandy Dennis
Sandra Dale “Sandy” Dennis (April 27, 1937 – March 2, 1992) was an American theater and film actress. At the height of her career in the 1960s she won two Tony Awards, as well as an Oscar for her performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
Dennis was born in Hastings, Nebraska, the daughter of Yvonne, a secretary, and Jack Dennis, a postal clerk. She had a brother, Frank. A high school classmate of Dick Cavett, she attended the Nebraska Wesleyan University and University of Nebraska. Dennis grew up in Kenesaw and Lincoln, Nebraska, appearing in the Lincoln Community Theater Group and moving to New York City at the age of 19.
Dennis made her television debut in 1956 in The Guiding Light. In 1963, she appeared in the The Fugitive which starred David Janssen, in the episode "The Other Side of the Mountain." In 1964, she appeared in the television episode "Don't Mention My Name in Sheboygan" of Craig Stevens's CBS drama, Mr. Broadway. Her film debut was the role of Kay in Splendor in the Grass (1961). However, she was more committed to following a career in the theater. She won consecutive Tony Awards for her performances in A Thousand Clowns (1963) and Any Wednesday (1964). She won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Honey, the fragile, neurotic young wife of George Segal, in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). She followed this with well-received performances in Up the Down Staircase (1967), The Fox (1967), Sweet November (1968) and The Out-of-Towners (1970).

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Sean Connery
Sir Thomas Sean Connery (born 25 August 1930) is a Scottish actor and producer who has won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards (one of them being a BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award) and three Golden Globes (including the Cecil B. DeMille Award and a Henrietta Award).
Connery is best known for portraying the character James Bond, starring in seven Bond films between 1962 and 1983 (six Eon Productions films and the non-canonical Thunderball remake, Never Say Never Again). In 1988, Connery won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Untouchables. His film career also includes such films as Marnie, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Hunt for Red October, Highlander, Murder on the Orient Express, Dragonheart, and The Rock. He was knighted in July 2000. Connery has been polled as "The Greatest Living Scot" and "Scotland's Greatest Living National Treasure". In 1989, he was proclaimed "Sexiest Man Alive" by People magazine and in 1999, at age 69, he was voted "Sexiest Man of the Century".

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Shailene Woodley
Shailene Diann Woodley (born November 15, 1991) is an American actress. Woodley is known for portraying Amy Juergens in the ABC Family series The Secret Life of the American Teenager and for co-starring alongside George Clooney in the critically acclaimed 2011 film The Descendants. For her performance in The Descendants she won an Independent Spirit Award and was nominated for a Golden Globe.
Woodley was born in Simi Valley, California. Her mother, Lori (née Victor), is a middle school counselor, and her father, Lonnie Woodley, is a school principal. She has a younger brother, Tanner. When she was 15 and a freshman, her parents divorced and she was also diagnosed with scoliosis. She was put in a chest-to-hips plastic brace to straighten her spine.

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Sharon Stone
Sharon Vonne Stone (born March 10, 1958) is an American actress, film producer, and former fashion model. She achieved international recognition for her role in the erotic thriller Basic Instinct. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress and won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama for her performance in Casino.
Stone was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania. The second of four children, she is the daughter of Dorothy (née Lawson), an accountant and homemaker, and Joseph William Stone II, a tool and die manufacturer and factory worker. Stone graduated in 1975 from Saegertown High School in Saegertown, Pennsylvania.
Stone won the title of Miss Crawford County in Meadville, and was a candidate for Miss Pennsylvania. One of the pageant judges said she should quit school and move to New York City to become a fashion model. In 1977, Stone left Meadville, moving in with an aunt in New Jersey. Within four days of her arrival in New Jersey, she was signed by Ford Modeling Agency in New York.

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Sheila Florance
Sheila Florance (24 July 1916 – 12 October 1991) was an Australian film and television actress.
After working in theatre in London and appearing on Australian television, Florance played small roles in several Australian films of the 1970s, including Mad Max (1979). She won two Logie Awards for her portrayal the elderly, Lizzie Birdsworth, in the television series Prisoner.
She left the series in 1984, and continued to work sporadically in Australian films. Her final performance, as a woman dying of cancer in A Woman's Tale (1991), was filmed while she was suffering from cancer herself. She won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, a week before her death from cancer.
Born in St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia, her passion for theatre took her to London, where she worked for 16 years,; and eventually back to Melbourne. Florance was a frequent guest star in various television series during the 1960s and was a regular on the Bellbird series. In the 1970s, she began appearing in films, most notably Petersen (1974), End Play (1975), The Devil's Playground (1976 film) (1976), and Mad Max (1979). Division 4

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Shelley Winters
Shelley Winters (August 18, 1920 – January 14, 2006) was an American actress who appeared in dozens of films, as well as on stage and television; her career spanned over 50 years until her death in 2006. Winters won Academy Awards for her acting in The Diary of Anne Frank and A Patch of Blue, and is also remembered for her roles in A Place in the Sun, The Big Knife, Lolita, The Night of the Hunter, Alfie, and The Poseidon Adventure.
Winters was born Shirley Schrift in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Rose (née Winter), a singer with The Muny, and Jonas Schrift, a designer of men's clothing. Her parents were Jewish; her father immigrated from Austria, and her mother had been born in St. Louis to Austrian immigrants. Her parents had been third cousins. Her family moved to Brooklyn, New York when she was three years old. Her sister Blanche Schrift later married George Boroff, who ran The Circle Theatre (now named El Centro Theatre) in Los Angeles. Winters studied at The New School in New York City.

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Shirley Booth
Shirley Booth (August 30, 1898 – October 16, 1992) was an American actress.
Primarily a theatre actress, Booth's Broadway career began in 1925. Her most significant success was as Lola Delaney, in the drama Come Back, Little Sheba, for which she received a Tony Award in 1950. She made her film debut, reprising her role in the 1952 film version, and won both the Academy Award for Best Actress and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her performance. Despite her successful entry into films, she preferred stage acting, and made only four more films.
From 1961 until 1966, she played the title role in the sitcom Hazel, for which she won two Emmy Awards, and was acclaimed for her performance in the 1966 television production of The Glass Menagerie. She retired in 1974.
Booth was born as Marjory Ford, the daughter of Albert James Ford and Virginia Martha Wright. Her childhood was spent in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn where she attended P.S. 152. By the time of the 1910 census in April 1910, aged 11, she was known as Thelma by her family. She had only one sibling, a younger sister, Jean Valentine Ford, who died January 23, 2010.

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Shirley MacLaine
Shirley MacLean Beaty (born April 24, 1934), known professionally as Shirley MacLaine, is an American film and theater actress, singer, dancer, activist and author, well known for her beliefs in New Age spirituality and reincarnation. She has written a large number of autobiographical works, many dealing with her spiritual beliefs as well as her Hollywood career. She was nominated for an Academy Award five times before winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1983 for her role in Terms of Endearment. Her younger brother is Warren Beatty.
Named after Shirley Temple, MacLaine was born in Richmond, Virginia. Her father, Ira Owens Beaty, was a professor of psychology, public school administrator, and real estate agent, and her mother, Kathlyn Corinne (née MacLean), was a drama teacher originally from Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada; MacLaine's grandparents were also teachers.The family was devoutly Baptist. Her uncle (her mother's brother-in-law) was A.A. MacLeod, a Communist member of the Ontario legislature in the 1940s.

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Sidney Poitier
Sir Sidney Poitier, KBE (

/ˈpwɑːtjeɪ/ or /ˈpwɑːti.eɪ/; born February 20, 1927) is a Bahamian American actor, film director, author, and diplomat.
In 1963, Poitier became the first black person to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field. The significance of this achievement was later bolstered in 1967 when he starred in three well-received films To Sir, with Love; In the Heat of the Night; and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, making him the top box office star of that year. In all three films, issues revolve around the race of the characters Poitier portrays. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Poitier among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking 22nd on the list of 25.
Poitier has directed a number of popular movies such as A Piece of the Action; Uptown Saturday Night, and Let's Do It Again (with friend Bill Cosby), and Stir Crazy (starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder). In 2002, 38 years after receiving the Best Actor Award, Poitier was chosen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to receive an Honorary Award, designated "To Sidney Poitier in recognition of his remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being." Since 1997 he has been the Bahamian ambassador to Japan. On August 12, 2009, Sidney Poitier was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America's highest civilian honor, by President Barack Obama.

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Sigourney Weaver
Sigourney Weaver (born Susan Alexandra Weaver; October 8, 1949) is an American actress. She is known for her role of Ellen Ripley in the four Alien films: Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien Resurrection, for which she has received worldwide recognition.
Other notable roles include Dana Barrett in Ghostbusters and its sequel Ghostbusters II, Gorillas in the Mist: The Story of Dian Fossey, Working Girl, Death and the Maiden, The Ice Storm, Galaxy Quest, Snow Cake, Prayers for Bobby and Grace Augustine in Avatar.
Weaver has been nominated for three Academy Awards, three BAFTA Awards (one win), two Emmy Awards, six Saturn Awards (two wins) and six Golden Globe Awards, winning two in 1988 for Gorillas in the Mist and Working Girl, becoming the first person ever to have won two acting Golden Globe Awards in the same year. She was also nominated for a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award.
Her 1986 Academy Award nomination for Aliens is considered as a landmark in the recognition of science fiction, action, and horror genres, as well as a major step in challenging the gender role in cinema. Weaver progressively received notoriety for her numerous contributions to the science fiction film history (including minor roles in successful works such as Futurama, WALL-E and Paul) and gained the nickname of "The Sci-Fi Queen".

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Simone Signoret
Simone Signoret (French pronunciation: [simɔn siɲɔˈʁɛ]; 25 March 1921 – 30 September 1985) was a French cinema actress often hailed as one of France's greatest movie stars. She became the first French person to win an Academy Award, for her role in Room at the Top (1959). In her lifetime she also received a BAFTA, an Emmy, Golden Globe, Cannes Film Festival recognition and the Silver Bear for Best Actress.
Signoret was born Simone Henriette Charlotte Kaminker in Wiesbaden, Germany to André and Georgette (Signoret) Kaminker as the eldest of three children, with two younger brothers. Her father, a pioneering interpreter who worked in the League of Nations, was a French-born Jewish army officer of Polish descent, who brought the family to Neuilly-sur-Seine on the outskirts of Paris. Her mother Georgette, from whom she acquired her stage name, was a French Catholic. Signoret grew up in Paris in an intellectual atmosphere and studied the English language in school, earning a teaching certificate. She tutored English and Latin and worked part-time as a typist for a French collaborationist newspaper, Les nouveaux temps, run by Jean Luchaire.

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Sissy Spacek
Sissy Spacek (born Mary Elizabeth Spacek; December 25, 1949) is an American actress and singer. She came to international prominence for her role as Carrie White in Brian De Palma's 1976 horror film Carrie (based on the first novel by Stephen King) for which she earned her first Academy Award nomination. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as country star Loretta Lynn in the 1980 film Coal Miner's Daughter. She has been nominated for an Oscar a total of six times, and is also known for her role as Holly Sargis in Terrence Malick's 1973 film Badlands.
Spacek is mainly a dramatic actress, but also has made comedies. The films that Spacek has starred in have earned more than $1 billion worldwide.
Spacek was born on Christmas Day, 1949, in Quitman, Texas. She is the daughter of Virginia Frances (née Spilman) and Edwin Arnold Spacek, Sr., a county agricultural agent. Spacek's paternal grandparents, Mary Červenka and Arnold A. Špaček (who served as Mayor of Granger, Texas in Williamson County), were of Czech (Moravian) and German ancestry. Her mother, of English and Irish descent, was from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.

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Sonny Rollins
Theodore Walter "Sonny" Rollins (born September 7, 1930 in New York City) is an American jazz tenor saxophonist. Rollins is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential jazz musicians. A number of his compositions, including "St. Thomas", "Oleo", "Doxy", and "Airegin", have become jazz standards.
Although Rollins was born in New York City, his parents were born in the United States Virgin Islands. Rollins received his first saxophone at age 13. He attended Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem. He said that a concert by Frank Sinatra there, accompanied by a plea for racial harmony, changed his life.
Rollins started as a pianist, changed to alto saxophone, and finally switched to tenor in 1946. During his high-school years, he played in a band with other future jazz legends Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew and Art Taylor. He was first recorded in 1949 with Babs Gonzales ( J. J. Johnson was the arranger of the group). In his recordings through 1954, he played with performers such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.

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Spike Jonze
Spike Jonze (born Adam Spiegel; October 22, 1969) is an American director, producer and actor, whose work includes music videos, commercials, film and television. He is best known for his collaborations with writer Charlie Kaufman, which include the 1999 film Being John Malkovich (that gave him an Academy Award for Best Director nomination) and the 2002 film Adaptation, and as the co-writer/director of the 2009 film Where the Wild Things Are.
He is well known also for his music video collaborations with Weezer, Beastie Boys, and Björk. He was also a co-creator and executive producer of MTV's Jackass. He is currently the creative director of VBS.tv. He is also part owner of skateboard company Girl Skateboards with riders Rick Howard and Mike Carroll.
He also co-founded Directors Label with filmmakers Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry.
Spiegel was born in Rockville, Maryland, and raised in Bethesda, Maryland and in Gulph Mills, Pennsylvania. His father, Arthur Spiegel III, was a distant relation of the Spiegel catalog family and founded APM Management Consultants. His mother, Sandy Granzow, is a writer, communications consultant in developing countries, and artist. His brother Sam (aka Squeak E. Clean) is a producer and DJ. Jonze attended SFAI in San Francisco, California.

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Stanley Tucci
Stanley Tucci (born November 11, 1960) is an American actor, writer, film producer and film director. He has been nominated for several notable film awards, including an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, for his critically acclaimed performance in The Lovely Bones (2009). He also has won an Emmy for his performance in Winchell, and has been nominated for a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album for Children – "The One And Only Shrek".
Tucci, an Italian American, was born in Peekskill, New York, the son of Joan (née Tropiano), a secretary and writer, and Stanley Tucci, Sr., an art teacher at Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York. His sister is actress Christine Tucci, and his cousin is the screenwriter and retired history teacher Joseph Tropiano. He grew up in Katonah, New York, and attended John Jay High School. Tucci played on the John Jay soccer team and baseball teams; his main interest lay in the school's drama club, where he and fellow actor and high school buddy, Campbell Scott, son of actor George C. Scott, gave well-received performances at many of John Jay's drama club productions. Tucci attended SUNY Purchase, and completed his B.F.A. degree after four years in the school's Conservatory of Theatre Arts.

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Stellan Skarsgård
Stellan John Skarsgård (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈstɛlː.ˈan ˈskɒːʂɡoːɖ] (

listen); born 13 June 1951) is a Swedish actor, though he is best known internationally for his roles in English-language films.
Skarsgård was born in Gothenburg, Sweden; the son of Gudrun (née Larsson) and Jan Skarsgård. He moved often in his childhood and lived, amongst other places, in Helsingborg, Totebo, Kalmar, Marielund and Uppsala.
Skarsgård started his acting career early. At the age of 21 he already had a great deal of experience in film, TV and stage. Most of his early roles were in Swedish TV (such as Bombi Bitt) and movies. Of Skarsgård’s Swedish film work, he is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who worked to save Holocaust victims. The movie was filmed in Budapest, in the only Jewish ghetto to survive World War II.
Skarsgård is particularly associated with director Lars von Trier. He appeared in four of the Danish auteur's features – The Kingdom, Breaking the Waves, Dogville and Melancholia. His most personal working relationship, however, is with Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland. Relevant films here are Kjærlighetens kjøtere, Aberdeen and A Somewhat Gentle Man (2010). Skarsgård considers Moland a close friend. Before shooting their next project in 2009, he said of their relationship: "We're like an old married couple and I get separation anxiety." Aside from these, his best-known Scandinavian work is probably his leading role in another Norwegian film as the guilt-ridden policeman Jonas Engström in the original Insomnia.

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Stephen Daldry
Stephen David Daldry, CBE (born 2 May 1960) is an English theatre and film director and producer, as well as a three-time Academy Award nominated and Tony Award winning director. He is also notable for having all of his feature films that he has directed go on to be nominated for Best Director or Best Picture at the Academy Awards, the films of which are Billy Elliot (2000), The Hours (2002),The Reader (2008) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011).
Daldry was born in Dorset, England in 1961 (according to imdb), the son of bank manager Patrick Daldry and singer Cherry (née Thompson). The family moved to Taunton, Somerset, where when Daldry was aged 14, his father died of cancer.
After this, Daldry joined a youth theatre group in Taunton, and then aged 18 won a Royal Air Force scholarship to University of Sheffield to study English, where he became chairman of SuTCo (Sheffield University Theatre Company).
After graduation, he spent a year travelling through Italy, where he became a clown's apprentice. Returning to Sheffield, he became an apprentice at the Crucible Theatre from 1985-1988. He then trained as an actor at East 15 Acting School, London.

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Steve Martin
Stephen Glenn "Steve" Martin (born August 14, 1945) is an American actor, comedian, author, playwright, producer, musician and composer. Martin came to public notice as a writer for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and later became a frequent guest on The Tonight Show. In the 1970s, Martin performed his offbeat, absurdist comedy routines before packed houses on national tours. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Martin at sixth place in a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics.
Since the 1980s, having branched away from stand-up comedy, Martin has become a successful actor in both comedic and dramatic roles, as well as an author, playwright, pianist, and banjo player, eventually earning Emmy, Grammy, and American Comedy awards, among other honors.

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Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg (born December 18, 1946) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as archetypes of modern Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. In later years, his films began addressing such issues as the Holocaust, slavery, war and terrorism. He is considered one of the most popular and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. He is also one of the co-founders of DreamWorks movie studio.
Spielberg won the Academy Award for Best Director for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Three of Spielberg's films—Jaws (1975), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Jurassic Park (1993)—achieved box office records, each becoming the highest-grossing film made at the time. To date, the unadjusted gross of all Spielberg-directed films exceeds $8.5 billion worldwide. Forbes puts Spielberg's wealth at $3.0 billion.

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Stockard Channing
Stockard Channing (born Susan Antonia Williams Stockard; February 13, 1944) is an American stage, film and television actress. She is known for her portrayal of First Lady Abbey Bartlet in the NBC television series The West Wing; for playing Betty Rizzo in the film Grease; and for her role as Ouisa Kittredge in the play Six Degrees of Separation and its later film version.
Channing was born in New York City, the daughter of Mary Alice (née English), who came from a large Brooklyn-based Irish Catholic family, and Lester Napier Stockard (died 1960), who was in the shipping business. She grew up on the Upper East Side. She is an alumna of The Madeira School, a Virginia boarding school for girls, after starting out at The Chapin School in New York City. She studied history and literature at Radcliffe College, and graduated in 1965.
Channing started her acting career with the experimental Theatre Company of Boston and eventually performed in the group's Off-Broadway 1969 production of the Elaine May play Adaptation/Next. She performed in a revival of Arsenic and Old Lace directed by Theodore Mann as part of the Circle in the Square at Ford's Theatre program in 1970. In 1971, she made her Broadway debut in Two Gentlemen of Verona — The Musical, working with playwright John Guare. She also appeared on Broadway in 1973 in a supporting role in No Hard Feelings at the Martin Beck Theatre

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Susan Minot
Susan Minot /ˈmaɪnət/ (born 7 December 1956) is a prize-winning American novelist and short story writer.
Minot was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She graduated from Concord Academy and then attended Brown University, where she studied writing and painting; in 1983 she graduated from Columbia University School of the Arts with an M.F.A. in creative writing. Her first book, Monkeys, won the 1987 Prix Femina Étranger. She has also received an O. Henry Prize and a Pushcart Prize for her writing.
Sexuality and the difficulties of romantic relationships are a constant theme in Minot's work. Her second book, Lust and Other Stories, focuses on "the relations between men and women in their twenties and thirties having difficulty coming together and difficulty breaking apart". Reviewing her novella Rapture in The Atlantic Monthly, James Marcus notes that "Sex and the single girl have seldom been absent from Susan Minot's fiction", and Dave Welch at Powells.com identifies one of Minot's themes as "the emotional safeguards within family and romantic relations that hold people apart". About Lust, Jill Franks observes that Minot

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Susan Sarandon
Susan Sarandon (born Susan Abigail Tomalin; October 4, 1946) is an American actress. She has worked in movies and television since 1969, and won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the 1995 film Dead Man Walking. She had also been nominated for the award for four films before that and has received other recognition for her work. She is also noted for her social and political activism for a variety of liberal causes.
Sarandon was born Susan Abigail Tomalin in New York City to a Roman Catholic family. She is the eldest of nine children of Lenora Marie (née Criscione) and Phillip Leslie Tomalin, who worked as an advertising executive, television producer, and nightclub singer during the big band era. Her father was of English, Irish, and Welsh ancestry, his English ancestors being from Hackney in London. On her mother's side, she is of Italian descent, with ancestors from the regions of Tuscany and Sicily. Sarandon attended Roman Catholic schools.^{[citation needed]} She grew up in Edison, New Jersey, where she graduated from Edison High School in 1964. She then attended The Catholic University of America, from 1964 to 1968, where she began dating actor Chris Sarandon whom she married in 1967.

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Sybil Thorndike
Dame Agnes Sybil Thorndike CH DBE (24 October 1882 – 9 June 1976) was a British actress.
She was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire to Arthur Thorndike and Agnes Macdonald. Her father was a Canon of Rochester Cathedral. She was educated at Rochester Grammar School for Girls, and first trained as a classical pianist, making weekly visits to London for music lessons at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
She gave her first public performance as a pianist at the age of 11, but in 1899 was forced to give up playing owing to piano cramp. At the instigation of her brother, the author Russell Thorndike, she then trained as an actress.
At the age of 21 she was offered her first professional contract: a tour of the United States with the actor-manager Ben Greet's company. She made her first stage appearance in Greet's 1904 production of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. She went on to tour the U.S. in Shakespearean repertory for four years, playing some 112 roles.
In 1908 Sybil was spotted by the playwright George Bernard Shaw when she understudied the leading role of Candida in a tour directed by Shaw himself. There she also met her future husband, Lewis Casson. They were married in December 1908, and had four children - John (1909–1999), Christopher (1912–1996), Mary (1914–2009) and Ann (1915–1990).

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Sylvia Sidney
Sylvia Sidney, born Sophia Kosow, (August 8, 1910 – July 1, 1999) was an American character actress of stage, screen and film, who rose to prominence in the 1930s appearing in numerous crime dramas.
Sidney, born Sophia Kosow in The Bronx, was the daughter of Rebecca (née Saperstein), a Romanian Jew, and Victor Kosow, a Russian Jewish immigrant who worked as a clothing salesman. The area from which Victor Kosow came from is today in Belarus. Her parents divorced by 1915 and she was adopted by her stepfather, Sigmund Sidney, a dentist. Her mother became a dressmaker and renamed herself Beatrice Sidney. Now using the surname Sidney, she became an actress at the age of fifteen as a way of overcoming shyness. As a student of the Theater Guild's School for Acting, Sidney appeared in several of their productions during the 1920s and earned praise from theater critics. In 1926, she was seen by a Hollywood talent scout and made her first film appearance later that year.
During the Depression, Sidney appeared in a string of films, often playing the girlfriend or the sister of a gangster. She appeared opposite such heavyweight screen idols as Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda, Joel McCrea, Fredric March, George Raft (a frequent screen partner), and Cary Grant. Among her films from this period were: An American Tragedy, City Streets and Street Scene (all 1931), Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage and Fritz Lang's Fury (both 1936), You Only Live Once, Dead End (both 1937) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine an early three-strip Technicolor film.

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Séverine Caneele
Séverine Caneele (born 10 May 1974 in Nieuwkerke, West Flanders) is a Belgian film actress. She won the award for Best Actress at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival for the film L'humanité.

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Talia Shire
Talia Shire (born April 25, 1946) is an American actress most known for her roles as Connie Corleone in The Godfather films and Adrianna Balboa (née Pennino) in the Rocky series.
Shire was born Talia Rose Coppola in Lake Success, New York, the daughter of Italia (née Pennino) and arranger/composer Carmine Coppola. Talia is the sister of director and producer Francis Ford Coppola and academic August Coppola, the aunt of actor Nicolas Cage and director Sofia Coppola, and the niece of composer and conductor Anton Coppola. She was married to composer David Shire, with whom she had a son, Matthew Orlando Shire. She has two other sons, actors/musicians Robert Schwartzman and Jason Schwartzman, from her second marriage to the late producer Jack Schwartzman.
Shire first became famous for her role of Connie Corleone in The Godfather and its sequels. Later, she portrayed Adrianna Pennino Balboa, the girlfriend (and later wife) of Rocky Balboa in the Rocky movies. She also starred in such films as I ♥ Huckabees, Kiss the Bride and 2007's Homo Erectus.

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Tatum O'Neal
Tatum Beatrice O'Neal (born November 5, 1963) is an Irish American actress and author. Tatum is best known for her role as Sarah Brown in International Velvet. She is the youngest person ever to win a competitive Academy Award, at the age of 10, which she won for her performance as Addie Loggins in Paper Moon (1973) opposite her father Ryan O'Neal. She then starred in The Bad News Bears in 1976, followed by Nickelodeon, and Little Darlings.
In 1986, she married professional tennis player John McEnroe, with whom she had three children. The couple separated in 1992 and were divorced in 1994.
O'Neal was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of actors Ryan O'Neal and Joanna Moore, who had appeared in various motion pictures and television shows. Her brother, Griffin, was born in 1964. In 1967, her parents divorced and her father quickly remarried. Her father's marriage to actress Leigh Taylor-Young produced Tatum's half-brother, Patrick, but the union ended in divorce in 1973. Tatum has another half-brother, Redmond, from Ryan O'Neal's relationship with actress Farrah Fawcett. O'Neal's mother died in 1997 of lung cancer at age 63, after a career in which she had appeared in such movies as Walk on the Wild Side and Follow That Dream.

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Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983) was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs. His professional career lasted from the mid 1930s until his death in 1983, and saw the creation of many plays that are regarded as classics of the American stage. Williams adapted much of his best known work for the cinema.
Williams received virtually all of the top theatrical awards for his works of drama, including several New York Drama Critics' Circle awards, a Tony Award for best play for The Rose Tattoo (1951) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). In 1980 he was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter and is today acknowledged as one of the most accomplished playwrights in the history of English speaking theater.
Theater scholar Charlotte Canning, of the University of Texas at Austin where Williams' archives are located, has said, "There is no more influential 20th-century American playwright than Tennessee Williams... He inspired future generations of writers as diverse as Suzan-Lori Parks, Tony Kushner, David Mamet and John Waters, and his plays remain among the most produced in the world."

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The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register (it became The Times on 1 January 1788). The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times (founded in 1821) are published by Times Newspapers, since 1981 a subsidiary of News International, itself wholly owned by the News Corporation group headed by Rupert Murdoch. The Times and The Sunday Times do not share editorial staff, were founded independently and have only had common ownership since 1967.
The Times is the first newspaper to have borne that name, lending it to numerous other papers around the world, including The Times of India (1838), The Straits Times (1845), The New York Times (1851), The Irish Times (1859), the Los Angeles Times (1881), The Seattle Times (1891), The Daily Times (Malawi) (1900), The Canberra Times (1926), and The Times (Malta) (1935). For distinguishing purposes it is therefore sometimes referred to, particularly in North America, as the "London Times" or "The Times of London".

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Tilda Swinton
Katherine Mathilda "Tilda" Swinton (born 5 November 1960) is a British actress known for both arthouse and mainstream films. She has appeared in a number of films including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Burn After Reading, The Beach, The Chronicles of Narnia, and was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performances in The Deep End and We Need to Talk About Kevin. She won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Michael Clayton.
Swinton was born in London, England. Her father, Major-General Sir John Swinton, KCVO, OBE, DL, who was Lord Lieutenant of Berwickshire (1989–2000), is Scottish, and her mother, Judith Balfour, Lady Swinton (née Killen), was Australian. Her paternal great-grandfather was Scottish politician and officer-of-arms George Swinton, and her maternal great-great-grandfather was Scottish botanist John Hutton Balfour. The Swinton family is an ancient Anglo-Scots family that can trace its lineage to the High Middle Ages.
Swinton attended three independent schools, Queen's Gate School in London, the West Heath Girls' School, and also Fettes College for a brief period.^{[citation needed]} In 1983, she graduated from New Hall (now known as Murray Edwards College) at Cambridge University with a degree in Social and Political Sciences. While at Cambridge, she joined the Communist Party.

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Tina Fey
Elizabeth Stamatina "Tina" Fey (

/ˈfeɪ/; born May 18, 1970) is an American actress, comedian, writer and producer, known for her work on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live (SNL), the NBC comedy series 30 Rock, and films such as Mean Girls (2004) and Baby Mama (2008).
Fey first broke into comedy as a featured player in the Chicago-based improvisational comedy group The Second City. She then joined SNL as a writer, later becoming head writer and a performer, known for her position as co-anchor in the Weekend Update segment. In 2004 she adapted the screenplay Mean Girls in which she also co-starred. After leaving SNL in 2006, she created the television series 30 Rock, a situation comedy loosely based on her experiences at SNL. In the series, Fey portrays the head writer of a fictional sketch comedy series. In 2008, she starred in the comedy film Baby Mama, alongside former SNL co-star Amy Poehler. Fey next appeared in the 2010 comedy films Date Night and Megamind.
She has received seven Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, four Screen Actors Guild Awards, four Writers Guild of America Awards and has been nominated for a Grammy Award for her autobiographical book Bossypants, which topped the The New York Times Best Seller list for five weeks. She was singled out as the performer who had the greatest impact on culture and entertainment in 2008 by the Associated Press, which gave her its AP Entertainer of the Year award for her satirical portrayal of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in a guest appearance on SNL. In 2010, Fey was the recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, the youngest-ever winner of the award.

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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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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.

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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.

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Tony Kushner
Anthony Robert "Tony" Kushner (born July 16, 1956) is an American playwright and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes and co-authored with Eric Roth the screenplay for the 2005 film Munich.
Kushner was born in Manhattan, New York to Jewish clarinetist and conductor William Kushner and bassoonist Sylvia Deutscher. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, the seat of Calcasieu Parish where he spent his childhood. During high school Kushner had a reputation in policy debate, at one point going to a camp, and making it to the final rounds. Kushner moved to New York in 1974 to begin his undergraduate college education at Columbia University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Medieval Studies in 1978. He attended New York University's Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, graduating in 1984. During graduate school, he spent the summers of 1978-1981 directing both early original works (Masque of Owls and Incidents and Occurrences During the Travels of the Tailor Max) and plays by Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest) for the children attending the Governor's Program for Gifted Children (GPGC) in Lake Charles.

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Tracy Mann
Tracy Mann is an Australian actress. Her film credits include Hard Knocks, The Scarecrow, Fast Talking, and Any Questions for Ben? (2012).
Mann got her first big break playing Tina Harris in the 1970s television soap opera The Box. She is possibly best remembered to audiences for playing a character who ended up behind bars, deaf biker's moll Georgie Baxter in Prisoner. Mann played the lead role of guitarist / singer Carol Howard in the 1984 ABC-TV series Sweet and Sour, and also played the lead role in the police drama Skirts (1990).
Other TV appearances include Glenview High, The Sullivans, The Young Doctors, Arcade (she played Susie Blair, Syd Heylen and Aileen Britton's daughter), Holiday Island, A Country Practice, Cowra Breakout, Sword Of Honour, Cyclone Tracy, The Flying Doctors, How Wonderful!, Janus, Water Rats, All Saints and Blue Heelers.
Mann has related her conversion to Buddhism:

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Uma Thurman
Uma Karuna Thurman (born April 29, 1970) is an American actress and model. She has performed in leading roles in a variety of films, ranging from romantic comedies and dramas to science fiction and action movies. She received an Academy Award nomination for the Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction (1994) and she won a Golden Globe Award for her performance in Hysterical Blindness (2002).
Thurman was born in Boston to Nena von Schlebrügge and Robert Thurman, and grew up mostly in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she went to Amherst Regional Middle School, and then moved to Woodstock, New York. Her father gave his children a Buddhist upbringing, and she is named after an Dbuma Chenpo (in Tibetan, the "db" is silent; from Mahamadhyamaka in Sanskrit, meaning "Great Middle Way"). Regarding religion, she now calls herself agnostic. She has three brothers, Ganden (b. 1968), Dechen (b. 1973), and Mipam (b. 1978), and a half-sister named Taya (b. 1960), from her father's previous marriage. She and her siblings spent time in Almora, Uttarakhand, India, during childhood, and the Dalai Lama sometimes visited their home. She is described as having been an awkward and introverted girl who was teased for her tall frame, angular bone structure, enormous feet and unusual name (sometimes using the name “Uma Karen” instead of her birth name). When she was 10 years old, a friend's mother suggested a nose job. As a child, she suffered bouts of body dysmorphic disorder, which she discussed in an interview with Talk magazine in 2001. She attended Amherst Public Schools. In the 8th grade she discovered her love for acting. Talent scouts noticed her performance as Abigail in a production of The Crucible, and offered her the chance to act professionally. Thurman attended Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite preparatory school in Massachusetts, before dropping out to pursue a career in acting.

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Ursula Andress
Ursula Andress (born 19 March 1936) is a Swiss actress and sex symbol of the 1960s. She is known for her role as Bond girl Honey Ryder in the first James Bond movie, Dr. No (1962), for which she won a Golden Globe. She later starred as Vesper Lynd in the Bond-parody Casino Royale (1967).
Andress was born in Ostermundigen, Canton of Bern, Switzerland, the daughter of Anna, who was Swiss, and Rolf Andress, a German diplomat who was expelled from Switzerland for political reasons. He disappeared during World War II.
Andress became famous as Honey Ryder, a shell diver and James Bond's object of desire in Dr. No (1962), the first Bond movie. In a well-known scene, she rises out of the Caribbean Sea in a white bikini. The scene made Andress the "quintessential" Bond girl, and is now considered iconic. "My entrance in the film wearing the bikini on that beautiful beach made me world famous as 'the Bond girl'", she said, and the bikini from this "classic moment in cinema and Bond history" sold for £35,000 at auction in 2001. In 2003, in a UK Survey by Channel 4, her entrance in Dr. No was voted #1 in "the 100 Greatest Sexy Moments".

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Valerie Harper
Valerie Harper (born August 22, 1939) is an American actress, known for her role as Rhoda Morgenstern on the 1970s television show The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and for her starring roles on the sitcoms Rhoda (a spin-off of The Mary Tyler Moore Show) and Valerie.
Harper was born at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern, Rockland County, New York. Her Canadian-born mother, Iva (née McConnell), was a nurse, and her father, Howard Donald Harper, was a lighting salesman. Harper is of French and British ancestry, and was raised Roman Catholic, although at an early age she "quit" the church. The family moved every two years because of her father's promotions, living in South Orange, New Jersey. St. Andrews in Pasadena, California (where Harper attended the school St. Andrews); Monroe, Michigan, at age 10, where she attended St. Mary's Academy; then Ashland, Oregon "at [age] 11 to 13"; and then Jersey City, New Jersey from eighth grade through age 18. When her family returned to Oregon, Harper remained in the New York City area to study ballet. She has an older sister, Leah; a younger brother, Don (originally Merrill); and a half-sister, Virginia, from her father's second marriage. Harper based her future character Rhoda Morgenstern both on her Italian stepmother, Angela Basilico, and Penny Ann Green (née Joanna Greenberg from Brooklyn), with whom she danced in the Broadway musical Wildcat.

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Valerie Perrine
Valerie Ritchie Perrine (born September 3, 1943) is an American actress and model.
Perrine was born in Galveston, Texas, the daughter of Winifred (née McGinley), a dancer who appeared in Earl Carroll's Vanities, and Kenneth Perrine, a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army. Owing to her father's career, Perrine lived in many locations as the family moved to different posts.
Perrine began her career as a Las Vegas showgirl. Some believe she made her motion picture debut with an uncredited part in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) but this is not true. She played soft-core porn actress Montana Wildhack in the film of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1972).
Perrine was photographed as a model for a pictorial layout in the May 1972 issue of Playboy magazine, later appearing on the cover in August 1981. She then became the first actress to purposely display herself nude on American television by completely baring her breasts during the May 4, 1973, Public Broadcasting Service broadcast of Bruce Jay Friedman's Steambath on Hollywood Television Theater. (She was seen taking a shower from the side totally undressed.) Only a few PBS stations nationwide were adventurous enough to carry the program.

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Vanessa Redgrave
Vanessa Redgrave, CBE (born 30 January 1937) is an English actress of stage, screen and television, as well as a political activist.
She rose to prominence in 1961 playing Rosalind in As You Like It with the Royal Shakespeare Company and has since made more than 35 appearances on London's West End and Broadway, winning both the Tony and Olivier Awards. On screen, she has starred in more than 80 films; including Mary, Queen of Scots, Isadora, Julia, The Bostonians, Mission: Impossible and Atonement. Redgrave was proclaimed by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams as "the greatest living actress of our times," and she remains the only British actress ever to win the Oscar, Emmy, Tony, Cannes, Golden Globe, and the Screen Actors Guild awards. She was also the recipient of the 2010 BAFTA Fellowship "in recognition of an outstanding and exceptional contribution to film."
A member of the Redgrave family of actors, she is the daughter of the late Sir Michael Redgrave and Lady Redgrave (the actress Rachel Kempson), the sister of the late Lynn Redgrave and the late Corin Redgrave, the mother of Hollywood actresses Joely Richardson and the late Natasha Richardson, and the aunt of British actress Jemma Redgrave.

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Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby (July 27, 1924 – October 15, 2000) was an American film critic who became the chief film critic for The New York Times in 1969 and reviewed more than 1000 films during his tenure there.
Canby was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Katharine Anne (née Vincent) and Lloyd Canby. He attended a boarding school with the novelist William Styron, and the two became friends. He introduced Styron to the works of E.B. White and Ernest Hemingway, and the pair hitchhiked from their Christ Church, Virginia boarding school to Richmond, Virginia to buy Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. After war service in the Pacific he attended the Dartmouth College and then was employed as a film critic by Variety for six years.
Canby was an enthusiastic supporter of many filmmakers, notably Woody Allen, who credited Canby's rave review of Take The Money and Run as a crucial point in his career. He was also heavily critical of some otherwise acclaimed films, such as Rocky, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Jaws, Patton, Night of the Living Dead, Once Upon a Time in America, Chinatown, After Hours, Blazing Saddles, A Christmas Story, Witness, Mask, The Natural, Rain Man, The Exorcist, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,Deliverance, The Godfather Part II and Alien. In the early 1990s, Canby switched his attention from film to theatre; he was named the chief theatre critic in 1994.

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Viola Davis
Viola Davis (born August 11, 1965) is an American actress.
Beginning her career on the stage, Davis won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for her role in King Hedley II (2001). She won a second Drama Desk Award for Intimate Apparel (2004). She won a second Tony and a third Drama Desk Award for her role in Fences (2010).
Some of her notable films include Traffic (2000), Antwone Fisher (2002), Solaris (2002) and The Help (2011). Her eleven-minute-long performance in the film adaptation of John Patrick Shanley's Doubt (2008) earned several honors, including an Academy Award nomination. Her role in the film The Help has garnered two Screen Actors Guild Awards, a BAFTA Award nomination, another Academy Award nomination, and a Golden Globe nomination. In addition to her success, she was listed in Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World.
Davis was born on her grandmother's farm, at the former Singleton Plantation, in St. Matthews, South Carolina. She is the second youngest of six children. Her mother, Mary Alice, was a maid, factory worker, and homemaker, and her father, Dan Davis, was a horse trainer. Her family moved to Central Falls, Rhode Island a few months after she was born. Davis has described herself as having "lived in abject poverty and dysfunction" during her childhood.

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Virginia Maskell
Virginia Elizabeth Maskell (27 February 1936 in Shepherd's Bush – 25 January 1968 at Stoke Mandeville Hospital), was an English actress.
After the outbreak of World War II, Maskell's family were evacuated to South Africa. After the war she returned to London and entered a convent school where she developed an interest in acting.
After attending drama school, she starred in TV parts mainly playing demure young lasses in action series such as The Buccaneers and The Adventures of Robin Hood.
She made a minor film debut for director Roy Boulting with Happy is the Bride (1957), and then began hopscotching between the theatre and the screen in 1958, her next major film was Director Pat Jackson's comedy Virgin Island (1958). She resultantly won a British Lion contract and went on to appear in The Man Upstairs (1958) with Richard Attenborough, and as an air-hostess in Jet Storm (1959).
She also made an impact on the stage - in "The Catalyst" - and in live TV drama. She later starred in Doctor in Love (1960), and as Peter Sellers's wife in Only Two Can Play (1962); Sellers was unconvinced she could manage a credible Welsh accent and asked for her dismissal, though it was suspected that his ulterior motive was to replace Maskell with Welsh born actress Siân Phillips.

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Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf (/ˈwʊlf/; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882 to Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson).
Virginia's father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer. He was the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, a work that would influence Woolf's later experimental biographies.
Virginia's mother Julia Stephen (1846–1895) was a renowned beauty, born in India to Dr. John and Maria Pattle Jackson. She was also the niece of Julia Margaret Cameron née Pattle, the famous photographer. Julia moved to England with her mother, where she served as a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones.

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Virna Lisi
Virna Lisi (born 8 November 1936 in Ancona) is a Cannes and César award-winning Italian film actress. She was born in Ancona, Marche, as Virna Lisa Pieralisi.
Virna Lisi began her film career in her teens. She was discovered in Paris by two Neapolitan producers, Antonio Ferrigno and Ettore Pesce. Her debut was in La corda d'acciaio (The line of steel, 1953). Initially, she did musical films, like in E Napoli canta (Napoli sings, 1953) and the successful Questa è la vita (1954, with the popular Totò). Nonetheless, her beauty was more valued than her talent, as in Le diciottenni and Lo scapolo films of 1955. Yet she filled demanding roles, particularly in La Donna del Giorno (1956), Eva (1962), and the Italian-made spectacle Romolo e Remo (1961).
In the late 1950s, Lisi did theater at Piccolo Teatro di Milano in I giacobini by Federico Zardi under the direction of Giorgio Strehler. During the 1960s, Lisi did comedies and participated in television dramas that were widely viewed in Italy. Lisi also promoted a toothpaste brand on television with a slogan that would become a catchphrase among Italians: "con quella bocca può dire ciò che vuole" (with such a mouth, she can say whatever she wants).

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Vivien Merchant
Vivien Merchant (born Ada Thompson; 22 July 1929 – 3 October 1982) was a British actress.
Merchant performed in many stage productions and several films, including Alfie (1966) Accident (1967) Frenzy (1972) and The Offence (also 1972). Her performance in Alfie gained Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress, and the National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Merchant was the first wife of the playwright Harold Pinter, whom she met when working as a repertory actress and married in 1956. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1958.
Having performed the role of Rose in a production of his first play, The Room (1957) at the Hampstead Theatre in 1960, she appeared in many of Pinter's subsequent works, including as Ruth in The Homecoming (1964) on stage (1965) and screen (The Homecoming, 1973). The last of his plays in which she performed on stage was Old Times (1971) as Anna.
Their marriage began disintegrating in the mid-1960s. From 1962 to 1969, Harold Pinter had a clandestine affair with Joan Bakewell, which informs Pinter's play Betrayal. In 1975 Pinter began a serious affair with the historian Lady Antonia Fraser, the wife of Sir Hugh Fraser, which he confessed to his wife that March. At first, Merchant took it very well, saying positive things about Fraser, according to her friend artist Guy Vaesen (as cited by Michael Billington); but, Vaesen recalled, after "a female friend of Vivien's trotted round to her house and poisoned her mind against Antonia ... [L]ife in Hanover Terrace [where the Pinters then lived] gradually became impossible". Pinter left, and Vivien Merchant filed for divorce and gave interviews to the tabloid press, expressing her distress. The Frasers' divorce became final in 1977 and the Pinters' in 1980. In 1980 Pinter and Fraser married.

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Walter Brennan
Walter Brennan (July 25, 1894 – September 21, 1974) was an American actor. Brennan won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor on three separate occasions, which is currently the record for most Oscar wins by a male actor, tied with Jack Nicholson.
Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, less than two miles from his family's home in Swampscott, Walter Andrew Brennan was the second of three children born to Irish immigrants William John Brennan and Margaret Elizabeth Flanagan. The elder Brennan was an engineer and inventor, and young Walter studied engineering at Rindge Technical High School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
While in school, Brennan became interested in acting, and began to perform in vaudeville. While working as a bank clerk, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as a private with the 101st Field Artillery Regiment in France during World War I. Following the war, he moved to Guatemala and raised pineapples, before settling in Los Angeles. During the 1920s, he became involved in the real estate market, where he made a fortune. Unfortunately, he lost most of his money when the market took a sudden downturn due to the Great Depression.^{[citation needed]}

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Warren Beatty
Warren Beatty (

/ˈbeɪti/ BAY-tee; born March 30, 1937) is an American actor, producer, screenwriter and director. He has been nominated for 15 Academy Awards, including winning the Best Director Award and its highest honor, the Irving G. Thalberg Award. He has been nominated for 16 Golden Globe Awards and won six, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award, which he received in 2007. Only Beatty and Orson Welles have been nominated for producer, director, writer and actor in the same film. Welles did it once (for Citizen Kane), Beatty did it twice (for Heaven Can Wait and Reds).
Beatty was born Henry Warren Beaty in Richmond, Virginia. His mother, Kathlyn Corinne (née MacLean), was a Nova Scotia-born teacher, and his father, Ira Owens Beaty, was a Ph.D. of educational psychology, a public school administrator, and dealt in real estate. Beatty's grandparents were also educators. The family was Baptist. In 1945, the family moved from Richmond to Arlington, Virginia. Beatty's sister is the multi-award winning actress and writer Shirley MacLaine.

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Wendy Hughes
Wendy Hughes is an Australian actress.
Hughes began her career on television in the early 1970s with appearances in Homicide, Number 96, Matlock Police and in 1976, ABC Mini-Series, Power Without Glory. Her big screen debut was in 1974 in the film Petersen in which she appeared naked in several scenes.
She then spent the rest of the 1970s and 1980s as one of the leading actresses in Australian cinema, with roles in Newsfront, Kostas, My Brilliant Career, Lucinda Brayford, Touch and Go, Hoodwink, Lonely Hearts, Careful, He Might Hear You, My First Wife, I Can't Get Started, An Indecent Obsession, Echoes of Paradise, Boundaries of the Heart, Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train (1988), and Luigi's Ladies.
Hughes made her American debut in John G. Avildsen's film Happy New Year opposite Peter Falk and Charles Durning. In 1989 she starred opposite Pierce Brosnan in an HBO made for TV movie, "The Heist".
She also continued to make occasional appearances on television, such as playing Jilly Stewart in the mini-series Return to Eden.

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Wes Craven
Wesley Earl "Wes" Craven (born August 2, 1939) is an American film director, writer, producer, actor, perhaps best known as the director of many horror films, particularly slasher films, including the famed A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, and he also co-wrote A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors with Bruce Wagner, featuring the iconic Freddy Krueger character and has directed the entire Scream series, featuring Ghostface. Some of his other films include, The Hills Have Eyes, The Last House on the Left, The Serpent and the Rainbow, The People Under the Stairs, Vampire in Brooklyn, Red Eye, and My Soul to Take.
Craven was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Caroline (née Miller) and Paul Craven. He had a strict Baptist upbringing. Craven earned an undergraduate degree in English and Psychology from Wheaton College in Illinois, and a masters degree in Philosophy and Writing from Johns Hopkins University. Prior to landing his first job in the film industry as a sound editor for a post-production company in New York City, Craven briefly taught English at Westminster College and was a humanities professor at Clarkson College of Technology (now Clarkson University) in Potsdam, New York. He left the academic world for the more lucrative role of pornographic film director. In the documentary Inside Deep Throat, Craven says on camera he made "many X-rated films" under pseudonyms, learning his directing craft. While his role in Deep Throat is undisclosed, most of his early known work involved writing, film editing or both. In 1972 Wes Craven directed his first feature film The Last House on the Left.

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Wesley Morris
Wesley Morris is a film critic at The Boston Globe where he reviews films alongside Ty Burr. Morris and Burr also make regular appearances on NECN to discuss the latest films and do the weekly Take Two film review video series on Boston.com. He won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Before joining the Globe, he wrote films reviews and essays for the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is featured in the 2009 documentary film For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism discussing the impact of video store shopping on the importance of film criticism, and how critic Harry Knowles started a questionable revolution of amateurs writing film criticism.
Morris graduated from Yale University in 1997 and grew up in Philadelphia. He now lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

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Whoopi Goldberg
Whoopi Goldberg (

/ˈhwʊpi/, born Caryn Elaine Johnson; November 13, 1955) is an American comedienne, actress, singer-songwriter, political activist, author and talk show host.
Goldberg made her film debut in The Color Purple (1985) playing Celie, a mistreated black woman in the Deep South. She received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress and won her first Golden Globe Award for her role in the film. In 1990, she starred as Oda Mae Brown, a psychic helping a slain man (Patrick Swayze) find his killer in the blockbuster film Ghost. This performance won her a second Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Notable later films include Sister Act and Sister Act 2, The Lion King, Made in America, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Girl, Interrupted and Rat Race. She is also acclaimed for her roles as the bartender Guinan in Star Trek: The Next Generation and as Terry Doolittle in Jumpin' Jack Flash. More recently, she had performed the voice of Stretch in Toy Story 3 and made an appearance in Glee as Carmen Tibideaux.

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William Penn
William Penn (October 14, 1644 – July 30, 1718) was an English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania, the English North American colony and the future Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He was an early champion of democracy and religious freedom, notable for his good relations and successful treaties with the Lenape Indians. Under his direction, the city of Philadelphia was planned and developed.
In 1681, King Charles II handed over a large piece of his American land holdings to William Penn to satisfy a debt the king owed to Penn's father. This land included present-day Pennsylvania and Delaware. Penn immediately sailed to America and his first step on American soil took place in New Castle in 1682. On this occasion, the colonists pledged allegiance to Penn as their new Proprietor, and the first general assembly was held in the colony. Afterwards, Penn journeyed up river and founded Philadelphia. However, Penn's Quaker government was not viewed favorably by the Dutch, Swedish, and English settlers in what is now Delaware. They had no "historical" allegiance to Pennsylvania, so they almost immediately began petitioning for their own Assembly. In 1704 they achieved their goal when the three southernmost counties of Pennsylvania were permitted to split off and become the new semi-autonomous colony of Lower Delaware. As the most prominent, prosperous and influential "city" in the new colony, New Castle became the capital.

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William Styron
William Clark Styron, Jr. (June 11, 1925 – November 1, 2006) was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.
For much of his career, Styron was best known for his novels, including:
Styron's influence deepened and his readership expanded with the publication of Darkness Visible in 1990. This memoir, originally intended as a magazine article, chronicled the author's descent into depression and his near-fatal night of "despair beyond despair."
William Styron was born in the Hilton Village historic district of Newport News, Virginia. He grew up in the South and was steeped in its history. His birthplace was less than a hundred miles from the site of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, later the source for Styron's most famous and controversial novel.
Although Styron’s paternal grandparents had been slave owners, his Northern mother and liberal Southern father gave him a broad perspective on race relations. Styron’s childhood was a difficult one: his father, a shipyard engineer, suffered from clinical depression, which Styron himself would later experience. His mother died from breast cancer in 1939 when Styron was a boy, following a decade-long battle.

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William Wyler
William Wyler (July 1, 1902 – July 27, 1981) was a leading Alsatian-born American motion picture director, producer, and screenwriter who made his mark in Hollywood as one of film industry's icons.
Notable works included Ben-Hur (1959), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and Mrs. Miniver (1942), all of which won Wyler Academy Awards for Best Director, and also won Best Picture. He earned his first Oscar nomination for directing Dodsworth in 1936, starring Walter Huston and Mary Astor, "sparking a 20-year run of almost unbroken greatness."
Film historian Ian Freer calls Wyler a "bona fide perfectionist," whose penchant for retakes and an attempt to hone every last nuance, "became the stuff of legend." His ability to direct a string of classic literary adaptations into huge box-office and critical successes made him one of "Hollywood's most bankable moviemakers" during the 1930s and 1940s.
Other popular films include Funny Girl (1968), How to Steal a Million (1966), The Big Country (1958), Roman Holiday (1953), The Heiress (1949), The Letter (1940), The Westerner (1940), Wuthering Heights (1939), Jezebel (1938), Dodsworth (1936), A House Divided (1931), and Hell's Heroes (1930).

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Winona Ryder
Winona Ryder (born Winona Laura Horowitz; October 29, 1971) is an American actress. She made her film debut in the 1986 film Lucas. Ryder's first significant role came in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice (1988) as Lydia Deetz, a goth teenager, which won her critical and commercial recognition. After various appearances in film and television, Ryder continued her career with the cult film Heathers (1989), a controversial satire of teenage suicide and high school life, which drew Ryder further critical and commercial attention.
Having played diverse roles in many well-received films, Ryder won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and an Academy Award nomination in the same category for her role in The Age of Innocence in 1993, as well as another Academy Award nomination for Little Women the following year for Best Actress. In 2000, Ryder received a star on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood, California.
Ryder's personal life has been widely reported by the media. Her relationship with actor Johnny Depp in the early 1990s was highly publicized and received much scrutiny by the media and tabloid press. A much talked-about 2001 shoplifting incident led to a four-year hiatus from acting. She has also revealed her personal struggle with anxiety and depression, briefly checking into a clinic.

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Woody Allen
Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg, December 1, 1935) is an award-winning American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, and playwright, whose career spans over half a century.
He began as a comedy writer in the 1950s, penning jokes and scripts for television and also publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, Allen started performing as a stand-up comic, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. As a comic, he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he insists is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Allen in fourth place on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics, while a UK survey ranked Allen as the third greatest comedian.
By the mid-1960s Allen was writing and directing films, first specializing in slapstick comedies before moving into more dramatic material influenced by European art films during the 1970s. He is often identified as part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmakers of the mid-1960s to late '70s. Allen often stars in his own films, typically in the persona he developed as a standup. The best-known of his over 40 films include the Academy Award-winners Annie Hall (1977), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Midnight in Paris (2011); and the Golden Globe-winning The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Critic Roger Ebert has described Allen as "a treasure of the cinema."

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Yo-Yo Ma
Yo-Yo Ma (born October 7, 1955) is an American cellist, virtuoso, and orchestral composer. He has received multiple Grammy Awards, the National Medal of Arts in 2001 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. Ma is regarded by some as the most famous cellist of the modern age.
Yo-Yo Ma was born in Paris on October 7, 1955, to Chinese parents and had a musical upbringing. His mother, Marina Lu, was a singer, and his father, Hiao-Tsiun Ma, was a violinist and professor of music at Nanjing National Central University. His family moved to New York when he was five years old.
At a very young age, Ma began studying violin, and later viola, before settling on the cello in 1960 at age four. According to Ma, his first choice was the double bass due to its large size, but he compromised and took up cello instead. The child prodigy began performing before audiences at age five, and performed for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was seven. At age eight, he appeared on American television with his sister, Yeou-Cheng Ma, in a concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Ma attended Trinity School in New York but transferred to the Professional Children's School which he graduated at fifteen years of age. He appeared as a soloist with the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra in a performance of the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations.

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Yves Montand
Yves Montand (French pronunciation: [iv mɔ̃ˈtɑ̃]; 13 October 1921 – 9 November 1991) was an Italian-born French actor and singer.
Montand was born Ivo Livi in Monsummano Terme, Italy, the son of poor peasants Giuseppina (née Simoni) and Giovanni Livi, a broommaker. Montand's mother was a devout Catholic, while his father held strong Communist beliefs. Because of the Fascist regime in Italy, Montand's family left for France in 1923. He grew up in Marseilles, where, as a young man, he worked in his sister's barber shop, and later on the docks. He began a career in show business as a music-hall singer. In 1944, he was discovered by Édith Piaf in Paris and she made him part of her act, becoming his mentor and lover.
Montand went on to international recognition as a singer and actor, starring in numerous films. His recognizably crooner songs, especially those about Paris, became instant classics.
He was one of the most famous performers at Bruno Coquatrix's famous Paris Olympia music hall, and toured with musicians including Didi Duprat.

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Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep in Spain, 2008
Born	Mary Louise Streep (1949-06-22) June 22, 1949 (age 63) Summit, New Jersey, U.S.
Alma mater	Vassar College; Yale School of Drama
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1971–present
Spouse	Don Gummer (m. 1978–present; 4 children)
Partner	John Cazale (1975–1978, his death)
Children	4 (including Mamie Gummer and Grace Gummer)

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Persondata
Name	Streep, Meryl
Alternative names	Streep, Mary Louise
Short description	American actress
Date of birth	June 22, 1949
Place of birth	Summit, New Jersey, U.S.
Date of death
Place of death

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Contents

Early life and background [link]

Career [link]

Early career [link]

1980s [link]

1990s [link]

2000s [link]

2010s [link]

Accents and dialects [link]

Music [link]

Philanthropy [link]

Personal life [link]

Awards and nominations [link]

Selected filmography [link]

See also [link]

References [link]

Bibliography [link]

External links [link]

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Year	Title	Role	Notes
1978	The Deer Hunter	Linda	American Movie Award for Best Supporting Actress National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress Nominated - Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress Nominated - BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture
1979	Manhattan	Jill	Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress (also for The Seduction of Joe Tynan and Kramer vs. Kramer) National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress (also for The Seduction of Joe Tynan and Kramer vs. Kramer) National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress (also for The Seduction of Joe Tynan and Kramer vs. Kramer) Nominated - BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role
1979	Kramer vs. Kramer	Joanna Kramer	Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress (also for The Seduction of Joe Tynan and Manhattan) National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress (also for Manhattan and The Seduction of Joe Tynan) National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress (also for The Seduction of Joe Tynan and Manhattan) New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress (and also The Seduction of Joe Tynan) Nominated - BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role
1981	The French Lieutenant's Woman	Sarah/Anna	BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated - Academy Award for Best Actress
1982	Sophie's Choice	Sophie Zawistowski	Academy Award for Best Actress Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress National Board of Review Award for Best Actress National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress Nominated - BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role
1983	Silkwood	Karen Silkwood	Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress Nominated - Academy Award for Best Actress Nominated - BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama
1985	Out of Africa	Karen Blixen	David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actress (Migliore Attrice Straniero) Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated - Academy Award for Best Actress Nominated - BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama
1987	Ironweed	Helen Archer	Nominated - Academy Award for Best Actress
1988	A Cry in the Dark	Lindy Chamberlain	Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress Best Actress Award (Cannes Film Festival) Nominated - Academy Award for Best Actress Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama
1990	Postcards from the Edge	Suzanne Vale	American Comedy Award for Funniest Actress in a Motion Picture (Leading Role) Nominated - Academy Award for Best Actress Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
1992	Death Becomes Her	Madeline Ashton	Nominated - Saturn Award for Best Actress Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
1995	The Bridges of Madison County	Francesca Johnson	Nominated - Academy Award for Best Actress Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama Nominated - Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role
1998	One True Thing	Kate Gulden	Nominated - Academy Award for Best Actress Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama Nominated - Satellite Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture Nominated - Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role
1999	Music of the Heart	Roberta Guaspari	Nominated - Academy Award for Best Actress Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama Nominated - Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role
2002	Adaptation.	Susan Orlean	Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress Florida Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture Satellite Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture Silver Bear for Best Actress Southeastern Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress Nominated - Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress Nominated - BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role Nominated - Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress Nominated - London Film Critics Circle Award for Actress of the Year Nominated - Online Film Critics Society Award for Best Supporting Actress Nominated - Phoenix Film Critics Society Award for Best Supporting Actress Nominated - Phoenix Film Critics Society Award for Best Cast Nominated - Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture
2002	The Hours	Clarissa Vaughan	Silver Bear for Best Actress in Berlin International Film Festival (with Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman) Nominated - BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama Nominated - Las Vegas Film Critics Society Award for Best Supporting Actress Nominated - Phoenix Film Critics Society Award for Best Cast Nominated - Satellite Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture Nominated - Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture
2004	The Manchurian Candidate	Eleanor Shaw	Nominated - BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture Nominated - Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress
2006	The Devil Wears Prada	Miranda Priestly	Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy London Film Critics Circle Award for Actress of the Year National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress Online Film Critics Society Award for Best Actress Satellite Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy Nominated - Academy Award for Best Actress Nominated - BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role Nominated - Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated - Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated - MTV Movie Award for Best Villain Nominated - Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role
2008	Mamma Mia!	Donna	Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress Phoenix Film Critics Society Award for Best Actress Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated - Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy Nominated - London Film Critics Circle Award for Actress of the Year
2008	Doubt	Sister Aloysius Beauvier	Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress National Board of Review Award for Best Cast Phoenix Film Critics Society Award for Best Actress Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated - Academy Award for Best Actress Nominated - BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role Nominated - Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Cast Nominated - Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama Nominated - London Film Critics Circle Award for Actress of the Year Nominated - Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture
2009	Julie & Julia	Julia Child	Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress Phoenix Film Critics Society Award for Best Actress Satellite Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy Southeastern Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated - Academy Award for Best Actress Nominated - BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role Nominated - Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated - London Film Critics Circle Award for Actress of the Year Nominated - Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role
2009	It's Complicated	Jane Adler	Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
2011	The Iron Lady	Margaret Thatcher	Academy Award for Best Actress AACTA International Award for Best Actress BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role Denver Film Critics Society Award for Best Actress Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress New York Film Critics Online Award for Best Actress London Film Critics Circle Award for Actress of the Year Southeastern Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress UK's Annual Regional Film Awards for Best Actress Nominated - Alliance of Women Film Journalists Award for Best Actress Nominated - Alliance of Women Film Journalists Award for Actress Defying Age and Ageism Nominated - Alliance of Women Film Journalists Award for Female Icon Award Nominated - Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress (runner-up) Nominated - Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated - Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated - Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated - Detroit Film Critics Society Award for Best Actress Nominated - Houston Film Critics Society Award for Best Actres Nominated - Iowa Film Critics Awards for Best Actress Nominated - Irish Film & Television Award for Best International Actress Nominated - National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress Nominated - Online Film Critics Society Award for Best Actress Nominated - Toronto Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated - Satellite Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Nominated - St. Louis Gateway Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated - Vancouver Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress Nominated - Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated - Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role
2012	Hope Springs	Maeve Soames