- published: 14 Jun 2007
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- author: ozmusicshop
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Berkeley, California
Berkeley (
/ˈbɜrkliː/ BURK-lee) is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington. The eastern city limits coincide with the county line (bordering Contra Costa County), which generally follows the ridge line of the Berkeley Hills. Berkeley is located in northern Alameda County. The population was 112,580 at the 2010 census. The city is named after Bishop George Berkeley.
Berkeley is the site of the University of California, Berkeley, the oldest of the University of California system, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It is also home to the Graduate Theological Union. The city is noted as one of the most politically liberal in the nation, with one study placing it as the third most liberal city in the United States.
The site of today's City of Berkeley was the territory of the Chochenyo/Huchiun band of the Ohlone people when the first Europeans arrived. Evidence of their existence in the area include pits in rock formations, which they used to grind acorns, and a shellmound, now mostly leveled and covered up, along the shoreline of San Francisco Bay at the mouth of Strawberry Creek. Other artifacts were discovered in the 1950s in the downtown area during remodeling of a commercial building, near the upper course of the creek.
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Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes International Film Festival (French: Le Festival International du Film de Cannes or just Festival de Cannes), is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is the world's most prestigious and publicized film festival. The invitation-only festival is held annually (usually in May) at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès.
The 2012 Cannes Film Festival took place from May 16 to May 27, 2012. The President of the Jury was the Italian film director Nanni Moretti.
The Cannes Film Festival has its origins in the late 1930s when Jean Zay, the French Minister of National Education, on the proposal of Philippe Erlanger and with the support of the British and Americans,[clarification needed] set up an international cinematographic festival. In 1947, the festival was held as the "Festival du film de Cannes", where films from sixteen countries were presented. Moreover, the principle of equality was introduced, so that the jury was to be made up only of one representative per country. Also, this year the festival was held at the made-for-the-occasion Palais des Festivals, although the roof was unfinished and blew off during a storm. The festival was not held in 1948 and 1950 on account of budgetary problems. In 1951, owing to better relations between France and Italy, the Cannes Festival was moved to Spring, while the Mostra remained in Autumn.
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Carson, California
Carson is a city in Los Angeles County, California. As of the 2010 census, Carson had a total population of 91,714. Located 13 miles (21 km) south of downtown Los Angeles and approximately 14 miles away from the Los Angeles International Airport, it is known as a suburb of the city. Incorporated on February 20, 1968, Carson is the youngest municipality in the South Bay region of Greater Los Angeles.
According to the United States Census Bureau, Carson has a total area of 19.0 square miles (49 km2). 18.7 square miles (48 km2) of it is land and 0.2 square miles (0.52 km2) of it (1.29%) is water.
Carson is bordered by West Compton on the north, Compton on the northeast, Long Beach on the east, Wilmington on the south, and West Carson and Harbor Gateway on the west.
Carson experiences a warm-summer Mediterranean Climate (Köppen climate classification Csb), similar to that of the Los Angeles Basin with noticeably cooler temperatures during the summer due to the close proximity of the Pacific Ocean (~6-8 miles). Rainfall is very scarce during the summer in Carson but receives just enough rainfall throughout the year to avoid Köppen's BSh (semi-arid climate). Carson, like much of the Southern California coastal areas, is subject to a late spring/early summer weather phenomenon called "June Gloom." This involves overcast or foggy skies in the morning which yield to sun by early afternoon.
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Drama Studio London
Drama Studio London (DSL) is a drama school based in Ealing, London, England, United Kingdom. It is accredited by the National Council for Drama Training, London and is a Member of the Conference of Drama Schools. DSL is considered to be among the most prestigious drama schools in the UK. It is the only member of the CDS to specialise in Post Graduate training, offering both a one and two year acting course. It is one of only twenty-one specialist performing arts schools approved to offer Government funded Dance and Drama Awards, a scheme established to subsidise the cost of professional dance and drama training for the most talented students, at leading institutions.
The school was founded in 1966, out of the need for a new, more realistic approach to actor training that took account of the professional requirements and demands of the theatre for which the students were being prepared.
The school is renowned for its flexibility of approach, its sensitivity to the needs of the students on an individual level, and its non-doctrinaire attitude to acting, allowing for wide scope in the ultimate employment prospects for the actors under our charge. The school theatre is called The Grange Court Theatre. In 1995, Friends of DSL, under the Presidency of Dame Judi Dench, was established in order to help provide scholarships for future students.
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Imo State
Imo State is one of the 36 states of Nigeria and lies to the south of Nigeria with Owerri as its capital and largest city.
Imo State came into existence in 1976 along with other new states created under the leadership of the late military ruler of Nigeria, Murtala Muhammad, having been previously part of East-Central State. The state is named after the Imo River. Part of it was split off in 1991 as Abia State, and another part became Ebonyi State. The main cities in Imo State are Owerri, Orlu and Okigwe. The Orashi River has its source in this state. The local language is Igbo and Christianity is the predominant religion. Imo state was created at Ngwoma.
Imo State lies within latitudes 4°45'N and 7°15'N, and longitude 6°50'E and 7°25'E with an area of around 5,100 sq km. It is bordered by Abia State on the East, by the River Niger and Delta State on the west, by Anambra State to the north and Rivers State to the south. Besides Owerri, Imo State's major towns are Isu, Okigwe, Oguta, Orlu, Mbaise, Mbano, Mbieri, Orodo and Orsu.
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Longview, Texas
Longview is a city in Gregg and Harrison Counties in the U.S. state of Texas. As of the 2010 Census, the population was 80,455. Most of the city is located in Gregg County, of which it is the county seat; only a small part extends into the western part of neighboring Harrison County. It is situated in East Texas, on the grid of Interstate 20 and U.S. Highways 80 and 259, just north of the Sabine River. Longview is a commercial hub for the Longview Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Longview is the principal city of the Longview Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is part of the larger MSA made up of Gregg, Upshur, and Rusk counties (population 271,669). Longview is considered a major hub city in the region, as is the nearby city of Tyler.
Longview is located at 32°30′33″N 94°45′14″W / 32.50917°N 94.75389°W / 32.50917; -94.75389 (32.509147, -94.753909). Longview is surrounded by many smaller cities and towns including: Kilgore, Gladewater, Gilmer, Ore City, Hallsville, Harleton, Diana, White Oak, and Lakeport. It is approximately 40 miles (64 km) east of the similarly sized city of Tyler.
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New York University
Coordinates: 40°43′48″N 73°59′42″W / 40.73°N 73.995°W / 40.73; -73.995
New York University (NYU) is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City, USA. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. Founded in 1831, NYU is one of the largest private nonprofit institutions of American higher education.
NYU was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1950. The university counts 34 Nobel Prize winners, 3 Abel Prize winners, 10 National Medal of Science recipients, 16 Pulitzer Prize winners, 21 Academy Award winners, and Emmy,Grammy, and Tony Award winners among its faculty and alumni. NYU also has MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowship holders as well as National Academy of Sciences members among its past and present graduates and faculty.
NYU is organized into 18 schools, colleges, and institutes, located in six centers throughout Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, as well as more than a dozen other sites across the world, with plans for further expansion.
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Nigeria
Nigeria
i/naɪˈdʒɪəriə/, officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in the north. Its coast in the south lies on the Gulf of Guinea on the Atlantic Ocean. The three largest and most influential ethnic groups in Nigeria are the Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba.
In terms of religion Nigeria is roughly split half and half between Muslims in the North and Christians in the South; a very small minority practice traditional religion. Since 2002 there have been a spate of clashes, particularly in the North of the country, between government forces and the Islamists Boko Haram, militant jihadists who seek to establish sharia law.
The people of Nigeria have an extensive history. Archaeological evidence shows that human habitation of the area dates back to at least 9000 BCE. The area around the Benue and Cross River is thought to be the original homeland of the Bantu migrants who spread across most of central and southern Africa in waves between the 1st millennium BC and the 2nd millennium.
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Nkwerre
Nkwerre is a Local Government Area of Imo State, Nigeria. Its headquarters are in the town of Eziama-Obaire Agu.
It has an area of 38 km² and a population of 80,152 at the 2006 census.
The postal code of the area is 471.
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Uganda
Coordinates: 1°17′N 32°23′E / 1.28°N 32.39°E / 1.28; 32.39
Uganda (
/juːˈɡændə/ yew-GAN-də or /juːˈɡɑːndə/ yew-GAHN-də), officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. Uganda is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by South Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the south by Tanzania. The southern part of the country includes a substantial portion of Lake Victoria, which is also shared by Kenya and Tanzania.
Uganda takes its name from the Buganda kingdom, which encompasses a large portion of the south of the country including the capital Kampala.
The people of Uganda were hunter-gatherers until 1,700 to 2,300 years ago, when Bantu-speaking populations migrated to the southern parts of the country. Uganda gained independence from Britain on 9 October 1962.
The official languages are English and Swahili, although multiple other languages are spoken in the country.
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United States
The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km2) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.
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Adrien Brody
Adrien Brody (born April 14, 1973) is an American actor and film producer. He received widespread recognition and acclaim after starring in Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002), for which he became the youngest actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor at age 29. Brody is also the only American actor to receive the French César Award.
Brody was born in Woodhaven, Queens, New York, the son of Sylvia Plachy, a photojournalist, and Elliot Brody, a retired history professor and painter. Brody's father is of Polish Jewish descent; Brody's mother – who was raised Catholic – was born in Budapest, Hungary, the daughter of a Catholic Hungarian aristocrat father and a Czech Jewish mother. Brody was raised "without a strong connection to" Judaism or Catholicism. As a child, he performed magic shows at children's birthday parties as "The Amazing Adrien". He attended the I.S. 145 Joseph Pulitzer middle school and New York's Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts (famous as the inspiration for television's Fame). His parents enrolled him in acting classes to distance him from the dangerous children with whom he associated[citation needed]. He attended summer camp at Long Lake Camp for the Arts in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. Brody attended the State University of New York at Stony Brook before transferring to Queens College for a semester.
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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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Albert Finney
Albert Finney (born 9 May 1936) is an English actor. He achieved prominence in films in the early 1960s, and has maintained a successful career in theatre, film and television.
A recipient of BAFTA, Golden Globe, Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Awards, Finney has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor four times, for Tom Jones (1963), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Dresser (1983), and Under the Volcano (1984); and was nominated for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Erin Brockovich (2000).
Finney is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His career began in the theatre; he made his first appearance on the London stage in 1958 in Jane Arden's The Party, directed by Charles Laughton, who starred in the production along with his wife, Elsa Lanchester. Then in 1959 he appeared at Stratford in Coriolanus opposite Laurence Olivier (as Coriolanus), Edith Evans and Vanessa Redgrave.
His first film appearance was a role in Tony Richardson's The Entertainer (1960), with Laurence Olivier, but he made his breakthrough with his portrayal of a disillusioned factory worker in Karel Reisz's film version of Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. This led to a series of "Angry Young Man" roles in kitchen sink dramas, before he starred in the Academy Award-winning 1963 film Tom Jones. Prior to this, Finney had been chosen to play T. E. Lawrence in David Lean's production of Lawrence of Arabia, but the actor quit after four days of shooting.
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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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Alfredo Landa
Alfredo Landa Areitio (born March 3, 1933) is a Spanish actor.
He was born in Pamplona, Navarra, Spain. He finished his pre-university studies in San Sebastián. He then began university studies on Law, where he began to work with university school groups. He left university to work in the theater.
After working as a dubbing actor for a short time in the 1950s, he debuted with his first considerable role in film in José María Forqué's Atraco a las tres in 1962.
When Francisco Franco died in 1975, censorship began to disappear. This led to a growth of erotic comedies on Spanish cinema. Landa became the "sexually repressed" role of that trend, especially under directors Mariano Ozores and Pedro Lazaga. He even created his own trend, that some people called landismo.
Afterwards, Landa changed his image, taking much deeper roles, like his bandit in El Bosque Animado.
Landa, together with Francisco Rabal, won Best Actor award at 1984 Cannes Film Festival by his memorable performance in Los santos inocentes.
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Anthony Edwards
Anthony Charles Edwards (born July 19, 1962) is an American actor and director. He has appeared in various movies and television shows, including Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Top Gun, Zodiac, Revenge of the Nerds, Northern Exposure and ER.
Edwards was born in Santa Barbara, California, the son of Erika Planck (née Weber), an artist/landscape painter, and Peter Edwards, an architect. He has two older sisters, Heidi and Ann-Marie, and two older brothers, Peter and Jeffrey. Edwards was encouraged by his parents to attend college before pursuing his interest in acting. He received a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in England and studied theatre at University of Southern California but by the age of nineteen was being offered enough acting work to enable him to leave college.
Edwards' early work includes a co-starring role in the TV series It Takes Two with Richard Crenna and Patty Duke Astin as his parents and Helen Hunt as his sister. His first starring role was in the 1984 comedy Revenge of the Nerds as Gilbert Lowe, though he had a tiny part in the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, credited as "stoner Bud". It was his role as LTJG Nick "Goose" Bradshaw alongside Tom Cruise in the 1986 film Top Gun that brought his first widespread public acknowledgement. His character, who died in an aviation accident, was among the most prominent and popular in the film. He also appeared as a terminally ill patient in Hawks (1988) alongside Timothy Dalton, another role which brought him worldwide fame. He also starred in the 1990 movie Downtown with Penelope Ann Miller and Forest Whitaker. In 1992 and 1993 he played Mike Monroe in ten episodes of Northern Exposure.
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Anthony Hopkins
Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins, CBE (born 31 December 1937), best known as Anthony Hopkins, is a Welsh actor of film, stage and television, and a composer. Considered to be one of the greatest living actors, Hopkins is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Other prominent film credits include The Lion in Winter, Magic, The Elephant Man, 84 Charing Cross Road, Dracula, Legends of the Fall, The Remains of the Day, Amistad, Nixon, The World's Fastest Indian, and Fracture. Hopkins was born and brought up in Wales. Retaining his British citizenship, he became a U.S. citizen on 12 April 2000. Hopkins' films have spanned a wide variety of genres, from family films to horror. As well as his Academy Award, Hopkins has also won three BAFTA Awards, two Emmys and the Cecil B. DeMille Golden Globe Award. Hopkins was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1993 for services to the arts. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003, and was made a Fellow of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2008.
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Anthony Quinn
Antonio Rodolfo Quinn-Oaxaca (April 21, 1915 – June 3, 2001), more commonly known as Anthony Quinn, was a Mexican and American actor, as well as a painter and writer. He starred in numerous critically acclaimed and commercially successful films, including Zorba the Greek, Lawrence of Arabia, The Guns of Navarone, The Message, Guns for San Sebastian, Lion of the Desert and Federico Fellini's La Strada. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor twice; for Viva Zapata! in 1952 and Lust for Life in 1956.
Quinn was born Antonio Reyes in Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution. His mother, Manuela "Nellie" Oaxaca, was of Aztec Indian ancestry. His father, Francisco Quinn, was also born in Mexico, to an Irish immigrant father from County Cork and a Mexican mother. Frank Quinn rode with Pancho Villa, then later moved to Los Angeles and became an assistant cameraman at a movie studio. In Quinn's autobiography The Original Sin: A Self-Portrait by Anthony Quinn he denied being the son of an "Irish adventurer" and attributed that tale to Hollywood publicists.
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Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II (i/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.
Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.
Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.
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Barry Pepper
Barry Robert Pepper (born April 4, 1970) is a Canadian actor. He is best known for playing roles like Sergeant Michael Strank in the Clint Eastwood film, Flags of Our Fathers, Private Daniel Jackson in Saving Private Ryan, Roger Maris in 61*, and Ned Pepper in True Grit. He has been nominated for three Screen Actors Guild Awards, a Golden Globe Award and in 2011 won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for his role as Robert F. Kennedy in the Canadian/American miniseries, The Kennedys.
Pepper, youngest of three sons, was born in Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada, the son of a retired lumberjack. When Pepper was five years old, his family set sail in a homemade ship, navigating through the South Pacific islands for five years. His education was completed in both public schools and correspondence courses. Due to the lack of television as entertainment, the family used sketch acting as a means of fun. When the family had finished their travels, they returned to Canada and set up a shop on Denman Island off Vancouver Island.
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Bill Murray
William James "Bill" Murray (born September 21, 1950) is an American actor, comedian and golfer. He first gained national exposure on Saturday Night Live in which he earned an Emmy Award and later went on to star in a number of critically and commercially successful comedic films, including Caddyshack (1980), Ghostbusters (1984), and Groundhog Day (1993). Murray gained additional critical acclaim later in his career, starring in Lost in Translation (2003), that earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor nomination, and a series of films directed by Wes Anderson, including Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Moonrise Kingdom (2012).
Murray was born and raised in Wilmette, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago, the son of Lucille (née Collins), a mail room clerk, and Edward Joseph Murray II, a lumber salesman. Murray's father died in 1967 from complications of diabetes when Bill was 17 years old. Murray, along with his eight siblings, was raised in an Irish American family. Three of his siblings are actors: John Murray, Joel Murray and Brian Doyle-Murray. A sister, Nancy, is an Adrian Dominican nun in Michigan, who has traveled the United States in a one-woman programme, portraying St. Catherine of Siena.
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Billy Bob Thornton
Billy Bob Thornton (born August 4, 1955) is an American actor, screenwriter, director and musician. Thornton gained early recognition as a cast member on the CBS sitcom Hearts Afire and in several early 1990s films including On Deadly Ground and Tombstone. In the mid-1990s, after writing, directing, and starring in the independent film Sling Blade, he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He appeared in several major film roles following Sling Blade 's success, including 1998's Armageddon and A Simple Plan. During the late 1990s, Thornton began a career as a singer-songwriter. He has released three albums and was the singer in a blues rock band.
Thornton was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the son of Virginia Roberta (née Faulkner), a psychic, and William Raymond "Billy Ray" Thornton (November 1929–August 1974), a high school history teacher and basketball coach who died when Thornton was 18. He has two younger brothers, Jimmy Don (April 1958–October 1988), who died of a heart attack at 30, and John David (born 1969), who resides in California. Jimmy Don Thornton wrote a number of songs, two of which—"Island Avenue" and "Emily"—Thornton has recorded on his solo albums. During his childhood, Thornton lived in both Alpine, Arkansas, and Malvern, Arkansas. He was raised a Methodist, in an extended family in a shack that had neither electricity nor plumbing. Thornton graduated from high school in 1973. A good high school baseball player, he tried out for the Kansas City Royals, but was let go after an injury. After a short period laying asphalt for the Arkansas State Transportation Department, he attended Henderson State University to pursue studies in psychology, but he dropped out after two semesters.
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Bing Crosby
Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby (May 3, 1903 – October 14, 1977) was an American singer and actor. Crosby's trademark bass-baritone voice made him one of the best-selling recording artistes of the 20th century, with over half a billion records in circulation.
A multimedia star, from 1934 to 1954 Bing Crosby was a leader in record sales, radio ratings and motion picture grosses. His early career coincided with technical recording innovations; this allowed him to develop a laid-back, intimate singing style that influenced many of the popular male singers who followed him, including Perry Como,Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin. Yank magazine recognized Crosby as the person who had done the most for American G.I. morale during World War II and, during his peak years, around 1948, polls declared him the "most admired man alive," ahead of Jackie Robinson and Pope Pius XII. Also in 1948, the Music Digest estimated that Crosby recordings filled more than half of the 80,000 weekly hours allocated to recorded radio music.
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Cameron Crowe
Cameron Buttboy Crowe (born July 13, 1957) is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Before moving into the film industry, Crowe was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, for which he still frequently writes.
Crowe has made his mark with character-driven, personal films that have been generally hailed as refreshingly original and devoid of cynicism. Michael Walker in The New York Times called Crowe "something of a cinematic spokesman for the post-baby boom generation" because his first few films focused on that specific age group, first as high schoolers and then as young adults making their way in the world.
Crowe's debut screenwriting effort, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, grew out of a book he wrote while posing for one year undercover as a student at Clairemont High School in San Diego, California, where he met Geraldine Edwards, who was a student there while he was visiting mutual friends in 1975. He later based part of his Penny Lane character on her in Almost Famous after discovering that she had been going backstage to Rock and Roll concerts. Later, he wrote and directed one more high school saga, Say Anything, and then Singles, a story of Seattle twentysomethings that was woven together by a soundtrack centering on that city's burgeoning grunge music scene. Crowe landed his biggest hit, though, with Jerry Maguire. After this, he was given a green light to go ahead with a pet project, the autobiographical effort Almost Famous. Centering on a teenage music journalist on tour with an up-and-coming band, it gave insight to his life as a 15-year-old writer for Rolling Stone. Part of the dialogue was inspired by comments that were made by Bebe Buell in certain interviews. Also in late 1999, Crowe released his second book, Conversations with Billy Wilder, a question and answer session with the legendary director.
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Campbell Scott
Campbell Scott (born July 19, 1961) is an American actor, director, producer, and voice artist.
Scott was born in New York City, the son of George C. Scott, an actor, director, and producer, and Colleen Dewhurst, a Canadian-born actress. He graduated from Lawrence University in 1983. His brother is Alexander Scott. He has a son, Malcolm, born in 1998.
In 1990, Scott played a lead role in the ground-breaking film Longtime Companion, which chronicles the early years of the AIDS/HIV epidemic and its impact upon a group of American friends. In the following year, Scott co-starred in the movie Dying Young (in which his mother also appeared) alongside Julia Roberts. He also appears in the 1992 movie Singles, and in 1996, he teamed up with Stanley Tucci to direct the film Big Night. The film met with critical acclaim and was nominated for the "Grand Jury Prize" at the Sundance Film Festival. For their work, Scott and Tucci won both the New York Film Critics Circle Award and the Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best New Director.
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Charlie Parker
Charles Parker, Jr. (August 29, 1920 – March 12, 1955), also known as Yardbird and Bird, was an American jazz saxophonist and composer.
Parker acquired the nickname "Yardbird" early in his career and the shortened form, "Bird", which continued to be used for the rest of his life, inspiring the titles of a number of Parker compositions, such as "Yardbird Suite", "Ornithology", "Bird Gets the Worm", and "Bird of Paradise."
Parker was a highly influential jazz soloist and a leading figure in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and improvisation. Parker introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas, including rapidly passing chords, new variants of altered chords, and chord substitutions. His tone ranged from clean and penetrating to sweet and somber. Many Parker recordings demonstrate virtuosic technique and complex melodic lines, combining jazz with other musical genres, including blues, Latin, and classical.
Parker was an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat Generation, personifying the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual, rather than an entertainer.
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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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Colin Farrell
Colin James Farrell (born 31 May 1976) is an Irish actor, who has appeared in such films as Tigerland, Miami Vice, Minority Report, Phone Booth, The Recruit, Alexander and S.W.A.T.. In 2008 he received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for his role in In Bruges.
Farrell was born in Dublin, the son of Rita (née Monaghan), a housewife, and Eamon Farrell, a footballer who played for Shamrock Rovers F.C. and owned a company importing and exporting canned goods in Dublin City. He was raised as a Roman Catholic. His uncle Tommy Farrell also played for Rovers. Farrell has two sisters, Claudine (who is his personal assistant) and Catherine, and a brother, Eamon Jr. When he was ten, the Farrells moved to Castleknock, a Dublin suburb. Farrell was educated at St. Brigid's National School Castleknock followed by Castleknock College and Gormanston College. Farrell unsuccessfully auditioned for the Irish group Boyzone when he was still unknown. Farrell attended The Gaiety School of Acting, but dropped out and was cast in the part of Danny Byrne on Ballykissangel, a BBC television drama. Farrell appeared on the show seven times from 1998 to 1999. He was inspired to try acting after being brought to tears while watching E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
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Dan Inosanto
Daniel Arca Inosanto (born July 24, 1936) is a Filipino-American martial arts instructor from California who is best known as a student of the late Bruce Lee and renowned authority on Jeet Kune Do, Filipino Martial Arts, and Silat.
Dan Inosanto teaches The Art and Philosophy of Jeet Kune Do, Filipino Martial Arts, Shoot Wrestling, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Muay Thai, Silat, mixed martial arts and other arts at his Marina del Rey, California school, the Inosanto Academy of Martial Arts. He received a shodan from and was an instructor for Ed Parker in American Kenpo Karate before becoming a student of Bruce Lee. Inosanto is one of three people allowed by Bruce Lee to teach his Martial Arts system (Taky Kimura and James Yimm Lee being the other two), and the only one to be given Instructorship in Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do of the third level. Inosanto also studied with dozens of martial arts masters elsewhere in the United States, Southeast Asia, and Europe, including Johny Lacoste (Kali, or Kamot Lihok, lit. "Hand Movement"), and Chai Sirisute (Muay Thai). After Bruce Lee's death, he has become the principal spokesperson and historian for Jeet Kune Do. He has had minor roles in a number of movies, including Bruce Lee's uncompleted last film Game of Death (1972). During this time period (1967–75), he also taught physical education at Malaga Cove Intermediate School in Palos Verdes Estates, California.
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Daniel Auteuil
Daniel Auteuil (French pronunciation: [danjɛl otøj]; born 24 January 1950) is a French film, television and theatre actor.
He was born in Algiers, French Algeria.
His starring role in the historical drama film Jean de Florette (1986) and its sequel Manon des Sources (1986) brought him international recognition. Auteuil has since become one of the best-known, best-paid and most popular actors in France. Through his appearances in films including the swashbuckler Le bossu (1997), the comedy The Closet (2001), the romantic comedy After You... (2003), the thriller Caché (2005) and the comedy My Best Friend (2006), he has since gained greater international recognition.
Auteuil has two daughters; Aurore Auteuil with his former partner, Anne Jousset, and Nelly from a ten-year relationship with actress Emmanuelle Béart, his co-star in the films A Heart in Winter and Manon des Sources (1986). He married Aude Ambroggi, a Corsican sculptor, on 22 July 2006 in Porto-Vecchio, Corsica.
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David Thewlis
David Thewlis (born David Wheeler; 20 March 1963) is an English actor of stage and screen. His most commercially successful role to date has been that of Remus Lupin, in the Harry Potter film series. Other notable performances include his work in the films Timeline (2003), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), The Omen (2006), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008), London Boulevard (2010) and War Horse (2011). He made his name known in 1993 with his performance of Johnny in Naked – for which he won multiple awards – became known publicly for his performance of main antagonist King Einon in the 1996 film Dragonheart. He has also done voice work in the films James and the Giant Peach (1996) and The Miracle Maker (2000).
Thewlis, second of three children, was born David Wheeler in Blackpool, Lancashire, the son of Maureen (née Thewlis) and Alec Raymond Wheeler. Both of his parents worked at his father's shop, which sold toys in the summer and wallpaper and paint in the winter. As a teenager, he played in a rock band called QED, in which he, Cliff Ashcroft, Mark Fawl and Chris Swift wrote much of their own music and lyrics. QED played at some of the Blackpool hotels to earn money for equipment and their first recording session at Storm Studios in Blackpool. Later, Thewlis played lead guitar with a punk rock band called Door 66. As a musician he was "doing nicely, doing good" and did not want to be an actor. Thewlis was educated at Highfield High School (since renamed Highfield Humanities College), a state secondary school in Marton, Blackpool in North West England where his nickname, at least to his friends, was 'Sqwee'.
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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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Door to Door (film)
Door to Door was a 2002 TV movie about Bill Porter (played by William H. Macy), a door-to-door salesman with cerebral palsy. The film was produced for the TNT cable network and was nominated for twelve Emmy Awards, winning six. Other actors in the film included Helen Mirren, Kyra Sedgwick, Michael Shanks, and Kathy Baker.
Porter had been told for many years that he was not employable, but he threw all of his effort into working as a salesman for Watkins. Despite the pain of his medical condition, he would walk eight to ten miles a day to meet his customers. Porter has been able to support himself, and continued to work as a salesman at the age of 69 at the time of the film's showing.
Door to Door was also the name of a Japanese 2009 TV movie retelling of the Bill Porter story set in Japan.
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Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself. His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim; his sonorous voice with a subtle Welsh lilt became almost as famous as his works. His best-known works include the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood and the celebrated villanelle for his dying father, "Do not go gentle into that good night". Appreciative critics have also noted the craftsmanship and compression of poems such as "In my Craft or Sullen Art", and the rhapsodic lyricism in "And death shall have no dominion" and "Fern Hill".
Dylan Thomas was born in the Uplands area of Swansea, Glamorgan, Wales, on 27 October 1914 just a few months after the Thomas family had bought the house. Uplands was, and still is, one of the more affluent areas of the city.
His father, David John Thomas (1876–1952), had attained a first-class honours degree in English at University College, Aberystwyth, and was dissatisfied with his position at the local grammar school as an English master who taught English literature. His mother, Florence Hannah Thomas (née Williams) (1882–1958), was a seamstress born in Swansea. Nancy, Thomas's sister, (Nancy Marles 1906–1953) was nine years older than he. Their father brought up both children to speak only English, even though he and his wife were both bilingual in English and Welsh. David was even known to give Welsh lessons at home.
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Francisco Rabal
Francisco Rabal (8 March 1926 – 29 August 2001), perhaps better known as Paco Rabal, was a Spanish actor born in Águilas, a small town in the province of Murcia, Spain.
In 1936, after the Spanish Civil War broke out. Rabal and his family left Murcia and moved to Madrid. Young Francisco had to work as a street salesboy and in a chocolate factory. When he was 13 years old, he left school to work as an electrician at Estudios Chamartín.
Rabal got some sporadic jobs as an extra. Dámaso Alonso and other people advised him to try his luck with a career in theater.
During the following years, he got some roles in theater companies such as Lope de Vega or María Guerrero. It was there that he met actress Asunción Balaguer; they married and remained together for the rest of Rabal's life. Their daughter, Teresa Rabal, is also an actor.
In 1947, Rabal got some regular jobs in theater. He used his full name, Francisco Rabal, as stage name. However, the people who knew him always called him Paco Rabal. (Paco is the familiar form for Francisco.) "Paco Rabal" became his unofficial stage name.
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Ge You
Ge You (born April 19, 1957) is an acclaimed Mainland Chinese actor. A native of Beijing, he is considered by many to be one of the most recognizable acting personalities in the Mainland. His success with major comedy roles made him a well known name throughout Mainland China.
Ge You won the Best Actor Award at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival for his role in the Zhang Yimou movie To Live.
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Gene Hackman
Eugene Allen "Gene" Hackman (born January 30, 1930) is a retired American actor and novelist.
Nominated for five Academy Awards, winning two, Hackman has also won three Golden Globes and two BAFTAs in a career that spanned five decades. He first came to fame in 1967 with his performance as Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde. His major subsequent films include The French Connection (1971), in which he played Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle; The Poseidon Adventure (1972); The Conversation (1974); Superman (1978), in which he played arch-villain Lex Luthor; Hoosiers (1986); Mississippi Burning (1987); Unforgiven (1992); The Firm (1993); Crimson Tide (1995); Get Shorty (1995); The Birdcage (1996); Enemy of the State (1998); and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).
Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, the son of Lyda (née Gray) and Eugene Ezra Hackman. He has a brother, Richard. His family moved frequently, finally settling in Danville, Illinois, where they lived in the house of his English-born maternal grandmother, Beatrice. Hackman's father operated the printing press for the Commercial-News, a local paper. Hackman's parents divorced in 1943 and his father subsequently left the family.
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George C. Scott
George Campbell Scott (October 18, 1927 – September 22, 1999) was an American stage and film actor, director and producer. He was best known for his stage work, as well as his portrayal of General George S. Patton in the film Patton, and as General Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.
George Campbell Scott was born in Wise, Virginia, the son of Helena Agnes (née Slemp; 1904–1935) and George Dewey Scott (1902–1988). His mother died just before his eighth birthday, and he was raised by his father, an executive with Buick. Scott's original ambition was to be a writer like his favorite author, F. Scott Fitzgerald; while attending Redford High School in Detroit, he wrote many short stories, none of which were ever published. As an adult, he tried on many occasions to write a novel, but was never able to complete one to his satisfaction.[citation needed]
Scott joined the US Marines, serving from 1945-49. He was assigned to 8th and I Barracks in Washington, D.C., in which capacity he taught English literature and radio speaking/writing at the Marine Corps Institute. He later claimed his duties at Arlington led to his drinking. After his military service, Scott enrolled in the University of Missouri, where he majored in journalism and then became interested in drama; he left college after a year to pursue acting.
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Gian Maria Volonté
Gian Maria Volonté (9 April 1933 – 6 December 1994) was an Italian actor. He is perhaps most famous outside of Italy for his roles as the main villain in Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (credited in the USA as "Johnny Wels") and For a Few Dollars More. In Italy, he was more notable for his roles in high-profile social dramas depicting the poilitical and social stirrings of Italian and European society in the 1960s and 1970s.
Volonté was born in Milan, and graduated in Rome in 1957. He had a brief career as a television and theatre (Shakespeare, Goldoni) actor, before concentrating on his film career.
He made his debut in 1960 in Sotto dieci bandiere, directed by Duilio Coletti. Just four years later, Volonté played "Ramón Rojo" in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), and "El Indio" in For a Few Dollars More (1965), both for cash reasons as he did not consider either role seriously. Both films were directed by the then-unknown Sergio Leone, and Volonté's roles in them would bring him his greatest recognition from American audiences. He also played the memorable role of the Bandito-turned-guerrilla, El Chucho, in A Bullet for the General (1966).
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Green Dragon (film)
Green Dragon is a 2001 American film directed by Timothy Linh Bui and starring Patrick Swayze, Forest Whitaker and Duong Don.
The film follows the experience of Vietnamese refugees in the United States immediately following the Fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. Tai Tran (Duong) has been appointed the camp translator by Gunnery Sgt. Jim Lance (Swayze). He has arrived with his sister's two young children. Their mother is believed to have been lost in the rush to leave Vietnam.
Despite the despair of leaving Vietnam and having to live in an unfamiliar United States, many of the occupants make adjustments. Minh (Nguyen) is silent and solitary until he meets Addie (Whitaker), the camp's cook. They embark on a friendship to the point where Minh is drawn out of his shell. Meanwhile, Tai and his friend Duc (Tran) find themselves enamored with two female refugees. Tai falls for Thuy Hoa, the daughter of a discredited Vietnamese general. Duc falls back in love with a former girlfriend from Vietnam who is an unhappily married second wife.
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Gérard Depardieu
Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu (French pronunciation: [ʒeʁaʁ dəpaʁdjø] (
listen); born 27 December 1948) is a French actor and filmmaker. He is a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, Chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite and has twice won the César Award for Best Actor. He also won the Golden Globe award for Best Actor in Green Card and was nominated for an Academy Award for the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac.
Gérard Depardieu was born in Châteauroux, Indre, France. He is one of five children of Anne Jeanne Josèphe "la Liette" (née Marillier) and René Maxime Lionel "le Dédé" Depardieu, a metal worker and volunteer fireman. His mother did not want more children and told Depardieu that she had tried to abort him with knitting needles. He has stated that as a child he would inspect his hands for scars from the needles.
Depardieu spent more time on the street than in the classroom and left school at 15.[citation needed]
At the age of 16, Depardieu left Châteauroux for Paris. There he began acting in the new comedy theatre Café de la Gare, along with Patrick Dewaere, Romain Bouteille, Sotha, Coluche, and Miou-Miou. His breakout film role came in 1974 playing Jean-Claude in Bertrand Blier's comedy Going Places. He studied dancing under Jean-Laurent Cochet, and went on to become one of France's most renowned actors. In 1986, his international fame grew as a result of his performance as a doomed, hunchbacked farmer in the film Jean de Florette. Five years later he won a César for his starring role in Cyrano de Bergerac.
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Harry Connick, Jr.
Joseph Harry Fowler Connick, Jr. (born September 11, 1967) is an American singer, big-band leader/conductor, pianist, actor, and composer. He has sold over 25 million albums worldwide. Connick is ranked among the top 60 best-selling male artists in the United States by the Recording Industry Association of America, with 16 million in certified sales. He has seven top-20 US albums, and ten number-one US jazz albums, earning more number-one albums than any other artist in the US jazz chart history.
Connick's best selling album in the United States is his 1993 Christmas album When My Heart Finds Christmas, which also is one of the best selling Christmas albums in the United States. His highest charting album, is his 2004 release Only You which reached #5 in the U.S. and #6 in Britain. He has won three Grammy awards and two Emmy Awards. He played Grace's husband, Dr. Leo Markus, on the TV sitcom Will & Grace from 2002 to 2006.
Connick began his acting career as a tail gunner in the World War II film, Memphis Belle, in 1990. He played a serial killer in Copycat in 1995, before being cast as jet fighter pilot in the 1996 blockbuster Independence Day. Connick's first role as a leading man was in 1998's Hope Floats with Sandra Bullock. His first thriller film since Copycat came in 2007, when he played the violent ex-husband in Bug, before two romantic comedies, 2007's P.S. I Love You, and the leading man in New in Town with Renée Zellweger in 2009.
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Ian McKellen
Sir Ian Murray McKellen, CH CBE (born 25 May 1939) is an English actor. He has won multiple Laurence Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, two Academy Award nominations, and five Emmy Award nominations. His work has spanned genres from Shakespearean and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction. He is known for film roles such as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Magneto in the X-Men films, and as Sir Leigh Teabing in The Da Vinci Code.
McKellen was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979, was knighted in 1991 for services to the performing arts, and was made a Companion of Honour for services to drama and to equality, in the 2008 New Year Honours.
McKellen was born in Burnley, Lancashire, England, though he spent most of his early life in Wigan. Born shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the experience had some lasting impact on him. In response to an interview question when an interviewer remarked that he seemed quite calm in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, he said: "Well, darling, you forget — I slept under a steel plate until I was four years old."
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Idi Amin
Idi Amin Dada (c. 1924 – 16 August 2003) was the military dictator and third President of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. Amin joined the British colonial regiment, the King's African Rifles in 1946. Eventually he held the rank of Major General in the post-colonial Ugandan Army and became its Commander before seizing power in the military coup of January 1971, deposing Milton Obote. He later promoted himself to Field Marshal while he was the head of state. While serving in the British Regiment he toured Kenya.
Amin's rule was characterised by gross human rights abuse, political repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, nepotism, corruption, and gross economic mismanagement. The number of people killed as a result of his regime is estimated by international observers and human rights groups to range from 100,000 to 500,000. During his years in power, Amin shifted in allegiance from being a pro-Western ruler enjoying considerable Israeli support to being backed by Libya's Muammar al-Gaddafi, the Soviet Union and East Germany.
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Jack Lemmon
John Uhler "Jack" Lemmon III (February 8, 1925 – June 27, 2001) was an American actor and musician. He starred in more than 60 films including Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Mister Roberts (for which he won the 1955 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award), Days of Wine and Roses, The Great Race, Irma la Douce, The Odd Couple, Save the Tiger (for which he won the 1973 Best Actor Academy Award), The Out-of-Towners, The China Syndrome, Missing (for which he won 'Best Actor' at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival), Glengarry Glen Ross, Grumpy Old Men and Grumpier Old Men.
Lemmon was born in an elevator[citation needed] at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He was the only child of Mildred Burgess LaRue (née Noel) and John Uhler Lemmon, Jr., who was the president of a doughnut company. Lemmon attended John Ward Elementary School in Newton and The Rivers School in Weston, Massachusetts. He had stated that he knew he wanted to be an actor from the age of eight. Lemmon attended Phillips Academy (Class of 1943) and Harvard University (Class of 1947), where he lived in Adams House and was an active member of several Drama Clubs - becoming president of the Hasty Pudding Club - as well as a member of the Delphic Club for Gentleman, a final club at Harvard. After Harvard, Lemmon joined the Navy, receiving V-12 training and serving as an ensign. On being discharged, he took up acting professionally, working on radio, television and Broadway. He studied acting under coach Uta Hagen. He also became enamored of the piano and learned to play it on his own. He could also play the harmonica, organ, and the double bass.
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Jack Nicholson
Not to be confused with Nicholas Jackson
John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson (born April 22, 1937) is an American actor, film director, producer and writer. He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. His twelve Oscar nominations make him the second most nominated actor of all time, behind only Meryl Streep, and tied with Katharine Hepburn.
Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and for As Good as It Gets. He also won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the 1983 film Terms of Endearment. He is tied with Walter Brennan for most acting wins by a male actor (three). Nicholson is well known for playing villainous roles such as Jack Torrance in The Shining, Frank Costello in The Departed, and the Joker in 1989's Batman, among many other roles.
Nicholson is one of only two actors who have been nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade from the 1960s to 2000s; the other is Michael Caine. He has won seven Golden Globe Awards, and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2001. In 1994, he became one of the youngest actors to be awarded the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. Notable films in which he has starred include Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Passenger, The Shining, Reds, Terms of Endearment, Batman, A Few Good Men, As Good as It Gets, About Schmidt, The Departed and Anger Management .
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James L. Farmer, Sr.
James Leonard Farmer, Sr. (June 12, 1886 – May 14, 1961) was an American author, theologian, educator, and the first African-American Texan to earn a doctorate. Farmer served as a deacon in the Methodist Episcopal Church and as a professor at several historically black colleges and universities in the U.S. South, most notably Wiley College and Rust College. Aspects of his life are chronicled in the film The Great Debaters, in which he is played by Forest Whitaker.
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James Mason
James Neville Mason (15 May 1909 - 27 July 1984) was an English actor who attained stardom in both British and American films. Mason remained a powerful figure in the industry throughout his career and was nominated for three Academy Awards as well as three Golden Globes (winning once).
Mason was born in Huddersfield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, to John and Mabel Mason; his father was a wealthy merchant. He was educated at Marlborough College, and earned a first in architecture at Peterhouse, Cambridge where he became involved in stock theatre companies in his spare time. Mason had no formal training as an actor and initially embarked upon it for fun. After Cambridge he joined the Old Vic theatre in London under the guidance of Tyrone Guthrie and Alexander Korda. In 1933 Korda gave Mason a small role in The Private Life of Don Juan but fired him three days into shooting.
From 1935 to 1948 he starred in many British quota quickies. A conscientious objector during World War II (causing his family to break with him for many years), he became immensely popular for his brooding anti-heroes in the Gainsborough series of melodramas of the 1940s, including The Man in Grey (1943) and The Wicked Lady (1945). He also starred with Deborah Kerr and Robert Newton in Hatter's Castle (1942). He then took the lead role in the critically acclaimed and immensely popular The Seventh Veil (1945) that set box office records in postwar Britain and raised him to international stardom. He followed it with a role as a mortally wounded Irish bank robber in Odd Man Out (1947) and his first Hollywood film, Caught (1949). Exhibitors voted him the most popular star in Britain in 1944 and 1945.
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James Spader
James Todd Spader (born February 7, 1960) is an American actor best known for his eccentric roles in films such as Pretty in Pink; Less Than Zero; Sex, Lies, and Videotape; Crash; Stargate; and Secretary. His most famous television roles are those of the colorful attorney Alan Shore in The Practice and its spin-off Boston Legal, for which he won three Emmy Awards, and Robert California in The Office.
Spader was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of teachers Jean (née Fraser) and Stoddard Greenwood "Todd" Spader. During his early education, he attended The Pike School (where his mother taught art) and enrolled in the Brooks School (where his father taught) for one year in North Andover, Massachusetts. Spader later transferred to Phillips Academy, but dropped out of school in the eleventh grade to pursue acting at the Michael Chekhov School in New York City. Before becoming a full-time actor, Spader held a variety of jobs including being a yoga instructor, busboy, truck driver, stable boy, and railroad-car loader.
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Jamie Bell
Andrew James Matfin "Jamie" Bell (born 14 March 1986) is an English actor. He is best known for his roles in the films Billy Elliot (2000), King Kong (2005), Jumper (2008), and The Adventures of Tintin (2011).
Bell was born in Billingham, County Durham, England, where he grew up with his mother, Eileen (née Matfin), and older sister, Kathryn. His father, John Bell, a toolmaker, left before Bell was born. Bell began his involvement with dance after he accompanied his sister to her ballet lessons. He was a pupil at Northfield School and took performing arts classes at the local franchise of Stagecoach Theatre Arts. He was a member of the National Youth Music Theatre. In 1999, he was chosen from a field of over 2,000 boys for the role of Billy Elliot, an 11-year-old boy who dismays his working class widowed father and older brother by taking up ballet.
Bell served as Honorary Jury President of the 2001 Giffoni Film Festival. Since his film debut in Billy Elliot, he has appeared as the disabled servant Smike in an adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, a young soldier in Deathwatch, a teenager on the run in Undertow, a gun-toting pacifist in Dear Wendy, a disaffected Southern California teenager in The Chumscrubber, and the young Jimmy in the 2005 film version of King Kong. He also appeared in Close and True, an ITV legal drama shown in 2000, which starred Robson Green, James Bolam and Susan Jameson. In 2007, he played the title character in Hallam Foe – for which he was nominated for the best actor award at the British Independent Film Awards – and appeared as himself in lonelygirl15 spin-off KateModern.
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Jamie Foxx
Eric Marlon Bishop (born December 13, 1967), professionally known as Jamie Foxx, is an American actor, singer-songwriter, rapper, stand-up comedian, and talk radio host who began playing the piano when he was five years old. As an actor, his work in the film Ray earned him the Academy Award and BAFTA Award for Best Actor as well as the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a musical/comedy. He is also a Grammy Award winning musician, producing three albums which have charted highly on the Billboard 200: Unpredictable, which topped the chart, Best Night of My Life and Intuition.
Born in Terrell, Texas, Foxx was raised by his mother's adoptive parents. He performed in high school and was awarded with a scholarship to United States International University. In his twenties, Foxx began performing stand-up at comedy clubs, and eventually joined the cast of In Living Color in 1991; this exposure helped him land film roles and star in his own sitcom, The Jamie Foxx Show. He released his debut album, Peep This, in 1994, but he did not gain significant musical success until 2004 when he was featured in Twista's song "Slow Jamz". Also in 2004, Foxx played critically acclaimed roles in the films Collateral and Ray. He released his second album, Unpredictable, in 2005, which was helped by his collaboration on Kanye West's number-one single "Gold Digger". His third album Intuition was released in 2008 and was anchored by the single "Blame It". Foxx released his fourth studio album, Best Night of My Life, in 2010.
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Jason Robards
Jason Nelson Robards, Jr. (July 26, 1922 – December 26, 2000) was an American actor on stage, and in film and television. He is a winner of the Tony Award, two Academy Awards and the Emmy Award. He was also a United States Navy combat veteran of World War II.
He became famous playing works of Eugene O'Neill, an American playwright, and regularly performed in O'Neill's works throughout his career. Robards was cast in both common-man roles and as well-known historical figures.
Robards was born in Chicago, the son of Hope Maxine (née Glanville) Robards and Jason Robards, Sr., an actor who regularly appeared on the stage and in such early films as The Gamblers (1929). Robards was of English, Welsh, Irish, and Swedish descent.
The family moved to New York City, New York, when Jason Jr. was still a toddler, and then moved to Los Angeles, California, when he was six years old. Later interviews with Robards suggested that the trauma of his parents' divorce, which occurred during his grade-school years, greatly affected his personality and worldview.
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Jay Schroeder
Jay Brian Schroeder (born June 28, 1961 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is a former professional American football quarterback in the National Football League who played for the Washington Redskins (1985–1987), Los Angeles Raiders (1988–1992), Cincinnati Bengals (1993) and Arizona Cardinals (1994).
He attended Palisades High School and was a high school football teammate of actor Forest Whitaker.
A third round draft pick in the 1984 NFL Draft by Washington after a moderate college career at UCLA, where he only started one game as the backup to Tom Ramsey, memorable however for throwing a miracle winning touchdown pass on a deflection to future NFL star Freeman McNeil to beat arch-rival USC with college football's version of the "immaculate reception." Schroeder was pressed into service during his second year after starting quarterback Joe Theismann suffered a career ending leg injury. His first pass play after Theismann was taken off the field was a 43-yard completion to Art Monk, the first of a four-play drive that led to a touchdown to put the Redskins into the lead and ultimately to win the game. Schroeder gained the starting spot on the Redskins in his second NFL season, and led them to a 12-4 record while throwing for a franchise record 4,109 passing yards and making the Pro Bowl. He managed to lead Washington all the way to the NFC title game, where his team was shut out 17-0 by the New York Giants.
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Jean Dujardin
Jean Edmond Dujardin (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ dy.ʒaʁ.dɛ̃]; born 19 June 1972) is a French actor and comedian. He has worked notably with director Michel Hazanavicius, starring in his OSS 117 spy parodies. His starring role in Hazanavicius' silent movie The Artist, playing actor George Valentin, received widespread acclaim. The role won him the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, the Cannes Film Festival Best Actor Award, and the Academy Award for Best Actor. He is the first French actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Dujardin was born and raised in Rueil-Malmaison (Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France), a commune in the western suburbs of Paris, France. After attending high school, he went to work for his parents' construction company. Dujardin began contemplating a career in acting while serving his mandatory military service a few years later.
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Jeff Bridges
Jeffrey Leon Bridges (born December 4, 1949) is an American actor, musician, producer, photographer, cartoonist, storyteller, and occasional vintner. He comes from a well-known acting family and began his first televised acting in 1958 as child with his father, Lloyd Bridges, and brother Beau on television's Sea Hunt. Some of his best-known major motion films include: Tron (and its sequel) , Fearless, Iron Man, Contender, TheThe Contender, Starman, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Jagged Edge, Against All Odds, Fisher King, TheThe Fisher King, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Seabiscuit, and The Big Lebowski. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as Otis "Bad" Blake in the 2009 film Crazy Heart and earned his sixth Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn in 2010's True Grit.
Jeffrey Leon Bridges was born in Los Angeles, California on December 4, 1949. He is son of showbiz parents, actor Lloyd Bridges. and actress and writer Dorothy Bridges (née Simpson). His older brother, Beau Bridges, is also an actor. He has a younger sister, Lucinda, and had another brother, Garrett, who died of sudden infant death syndrome in 1948. Growing up, Bridges shared a close relationship with his brother Beau, who acted as a surrogate father when their father was working. Bridges and his siblings were raised in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles. He graduated from University High School (Los Angeles, California) in 1967. At age fourteen, Jeff toured with his father in a stage production of Anniversary Waltz.
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Jesse Eisenberg
Jesse Adam Eisenberg (born October 5, 1983) is an American actor. He made his screen debut with the comedy-drama television series Get Real from 1999 to 2000. After his first leading role in the film Roger Dodger (2002), he appeared in such films as The Squid and the Whale (2005) and The Education of Charlie Banks (2007).
In 2004, Eisenberg was honored with the Vail Film Festival Rising Star Award. In 2009, he starred in the comedy drama Adventureland and the horror comedy Zombieland, for which he won critical acclaim. He then played Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (2010), for which he received a Golden Globe and Academy Award nomination in the Best Actor category. He also starred in Holy Rollers (2010), which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Since then, he has voiced the main character in the animated film Rio (2011), and starred in the comedy 30 Minutes or Less (2011). He will once again voice Blu in Rio 2, which is scheduled for a 2014 release.
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Jim Jarmusch
James R. "Jim" Jarmusch ( /ˈdʒɑrməʃ/; born January 22, 1953) is an American independent film director, screenwriter, actor, producer, editor and composer. Jarmusch has been a major proponent of independent cinema, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s.
The key, I think, to Jim, is that he went gray when he was 15 ... As a result, he always felt like an immigrant in the teenage world. He's been an immigrant – a benign, fascinated foreigner – ever since. And all his films are about that.
Jarmusch was born to a family of middle-class suburbanites in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio in 1953. His mother, of Irish and German descent, had been a reviewer of film and theatre for the Akron Beacon Journal before marrying his father, a businessman of Czech and German descent who worked for the B.F. Goodrich Company. She introduced the future director, the middle of three children, to the world of cinema by leaving him at a local cinema to watch matinee double features such as Attack of the Crab Monsters and Creature From the Black Lagoon while she ran errands. The first adult film he recalls having seen was the 1958 cult classic Thunder Road (starring Robert Mitchum) the violence and darkness of which left an impression on the seven-year-old Jarmusch. Another B-movie influence from his childhood was Ghoulardi, an eccentric Cleveland television show which featured horror films.
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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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Joel Schumacher
Joel T. Schumacher (born August 29, 1939) is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer.
Schumacher was born in New York City, the son of Marian (née Kantor) and Francis Schumacher. His mother was a Swedish Jew, and his father was a Baptist from Knoxville, Tennessee, who died when Joel was four years old. Schumacher studied at Parsons The New School for Design and The Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. After first working in the fashion industry, he realized his true love was in filmmaking. He moved out to Los Angeles, where he began his media work as a costume designer in films such as Sleeper and developed his skills with television work while earning an MFA from UCLA. He wrote the screenplay for the 1976 low-budget hit movie Car Wash and a number of other minor successes. He also wrote 1978's The Wiz, an adaptation of the stage play of the same name. His film directorial debut was The Incredible Shrinking Woman in 1981, which starred Lily Tomlin, and he quickly made more successful films, including two "brat pack" works.
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John Travolta
John Joseph Travolta (born February 18, 1954) is an American actor, dancer, and singer. Travolta first became known in the 1970s, after appearing on the television series Welcome Back, Kotter and starring in the box office successes Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Travolta's acting career declined in the early 1980s and continued to deteriorate for the rest of the decade. His career enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s with his role in Pulp Fiction, and he has since continued starring in Hollywood films, including Face/Off, Ladder 49, and Wild Hogs. Travolta was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction. He won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for his performance in Get Shorty.
Travolta, the youngest of six children, was born and raised in Englewood, New Jersey, an inner-ring suburb of New York City. His father, Salvatore Travolta (November 1912 – May 1995), was a semi-professional American football player turned tire salesman and partner in a tire company. His mother, Helen Cecilia (née Burke, January 1912 – December 1978), was an actress and singer who had appeared in The Sunshine Sisters, a radio vocal group, and acted and directed before becoming a high school drama and English teacher. His siblings, Joey, Ellen, Ann, Margaret, and Sam Travolta, have all acted. His father was a second-generation Italian American and his mother was Irish American; he grew up in an Irish-American neighborhood and has said that his household was predominantly Irish in culture. He was raised Roman Catholic, but converted to Scientology in 1975.
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John Turturro
John Michael Turturro (born February 28, 1957) is an American actor, writer and director known for his roles in the films Do the Right Thing (1989), Miller's Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), Quiz Show (1994), The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and the Transformers film series. He has appeared in over sixty films, and has worked frequently with the Coen brothers, Adam Sandler and Spike Lee.
Turturro was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Katherine, an amateur jazz singer who worked in a Navy yard during World War II, and Nicholas Turturro, a carpenter and construction worker who fought as a Navy sailor in D-Day. Turturro's mother was Sicilian (from Aragona near Agrigento) and his father emigrated from Giovinazzo, Bari, Italy at the age of six. Turturro was raised a Roman Catholic and moved to the Rosedale section of Queens, New York with his family when he was six. He majored in drama at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and completed his MFA at the Yale School of Drama. He first appeared on film working as an extra in Martin Scorsese's critically acclaimed Raging Bull (1980).
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Johnny Depp
John Christopher "Johnny" Depp II (born June 9, 1963) is an American actor, producer and musician. He has won the Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild award for Best Actor. Depp rose to prominence on the 1980s television series 21 Jump Street, becoming a teen idol. Dissatisfied with that status, Depp turned to film for more challenging roles; he played the title character of Edward Scissorhands (1990) and later found box office success in films such as Sleepy Hollow (1999), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Rango (2011) and the Pirates of the Caribbean film series (2003–present). He has collaborated with director and friend Tim Burton in eight films, most recently with Dark Shadows (2012).
Depp has gained acclaim for his portrayals of people such as Ed Wood, in Ed Wood, Joseph D. Pistone in Donnie Brasco, Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, George Jung in Blow, and the bank robber John Dillinger in Michael Mann's Public Enemies. Films featuring Depp have grossed over $3.1 billion at the United States box office and over $7.6 billion worldwide. He has been nominated for top awards many times, winning the Best Actor Awards from the Golden Globes for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and from the Screen Actors Guild for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. He also has garnered a sex symbol status in American cinema, being twice named as the "Sexiest Man Alive" by People magazine in 2003 and 2009. He has been listed in the 2012 Guinness Book of World Records as the highest paid actor, with $75 million.
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Jon Kavanaugh
Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh is a fictional Lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department on the FX television show The Shield. He was portrayed by method actor Forest Whitaker.
Kavanaugh was an internal affairs officer determined to take down Detective Vic Mackey and his Strike Team using any means at his disposal. He has been described as the toughest adversary the Team ever faced, and his investigation led to their ultimate downfall. Before he was promoted to Lieutenant, Kavanaugh took a spot in IAD after breaking the blue code of silence on his former partner. He has degrees in both criminology and psychology, and frequently played mind games with people under surveillance to find out whether "they'll crack under pressure." It is implied that his reasons for taking the case revolved around Chief Phillips's belief that it was an expedient time to prosecute police corruption and spin the news to his advantage. Egotistical and ambitious, Kavanaugh hoped to advance his own career by building a case against Mackey and his men.
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Jon Voight
Jonathan Vincent "Jon" Voight (/vɔɪt/) (born December 29, 1938) is an American actor. He has won one Academy Award, out of four nominations, and three Golden Globe Awards, out of nine nominations. Voight is the father of actress Angelina Jolie.
Voight came to prominence in the late 1960s with his performance as a would-be gigolo in Midnight Cowboy (1969). During the 1970s, he became a Hollywood star with his portrayals of a businessman mixed up with murder in Deliverance (1972), a paraplegic Vietnam veteran in Coming Home (1978), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor, and a penniless ex-boxing champion in The Champ (1979).
Although his output slowed during the 1980s, Voight received critical acclaim for his performance as a ruthless bank robber in Runaway Train (1985). During the 1990s, he most notably starred as an unscrupulous showman attorney in The Rainmaker (1997). Voight gave critically acclaimed biographical performances during the 2000s, appearing as sportscaster Howard Cosell in Ali (2001), as Nazi officer Jürgen Stroop in Uprising (2001), and as Pope John Paul II in the television miniseries of the same name (2005).
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Jonathan Pryce
Jonathan Pryce, CBE (born 1 June 1947) is a Welsh stage and film actor and singer. After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and meeting his longtime partner English actress Kate Fahy in 1974, he began his career as a stage actor in the 1970s. His work in theatre, including an award-winning performance in the title role of the Royal Court Theatre's Hamlet, led to several supporting roles in film and television. He made his breakthrough screen performance in Terry Gilliam's 1985 cult film Brazil.
Critically lauded for his versatility, Pryce has participated in big-budget films such as Evita, Tomorrow Never Dies, Pirates of the Caribbean and The New World, as well as independent films such as Glengarry Glen Ross and Carrington. His career in theatre has also been prolific, and he has won two Tony Awards—the first in 1977 for his Broadway debut in Comedians, the second for his 1991 role as "The Engineer" in the musical Miss Saigon.
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Judge Reinhold
Judge Reinhold (born May 21, 1957) is an American actor, perhaps best known for co-starring in movies such as Beverly Hills Cop, Ruthless People, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and The Santa Clause trilogy.
Reinhold was born Edward Ernest Reinhold, Jr. in Wilmington, Delaware, the son of Regina Celeste (née Fleming) and Edward Ernest Reinhold, Sr., a trial lawyer. He was raised in Fredericksburg, Virginia, until his family moved to Martin County, Florida, prior to his junior year in high school.[citation needed]
Judge graduated from Martin County High School and went on to attend Mary Washington College and North Carolina School of the Arts,[citation needed] after which he performed at various regional theatres, including Burt Reynolds' Dinner Theater in Jupiter, Florida.[citation needed]
Reinhold has appeared in more than 60 films. His first appearance on screen was in the Wonder Woman episode "Amazon Hot Wax" (1979), in which he played Jeff Gordon, a singer who gets caught up in an extortion ring in the music business.[citation needed] Reinhold's first major film role was as high school senior Brad Hamilton in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) along with then-unknown actors Sean Penn, Forest Whitaker, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Nicolas Cage. He appeared in an uncredited role in Pat Benatar's music video for "Shadows of the Night." He later played Detective Billy Rosewood, the junior police detective sent to trail Eddie Murphy, in Beverly Hills Cop (1984), and in 1986, starred in Ruthless People.
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Katie Holmes
Kate Noelle "Katie" Holmes (born December 18, 1978) is an American actress who first achieved fame for her role as Joey Potter on The WB television teen drama Dawson's Creek from 1998 to 2003. Her movie roles have included the blockbuster Batman Begins along with art house films such as The Ice Storm and thrillers including Abandon. She has also played on Broadway in a production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons. She achieved worldwide celebrity for her marriage to Tom Cruise, with whom she has a daughter, Suri.
Holmes was born in Toledo, Ohio. She is the fourth daughter and youngest child of five children born to Kathleen (née Stothers), a homemaker and philanthropist, and Martin Joseph Holmes, Sr., an attorney specializing in divorces, She has three older sisters and one older brother: Tamera, Holly Ann, Martin Joseph, Jr., and Nancy Kay.
Holmes is of Russian, German, English and Irish ancestry and was baptized a Roman Catholic. She attended Christ the King Church and parochial schools in Toledo. She graduated from the all-female Notre Dame Academy (also her mother's alma mater), where Katie was a 4.0 student. At St. John's Jesuit, a nearby all-male high school, Holmes appeared in school musicals, playing a waitress in Hello, Dolly! and Lola in Damn Yankees. She scored 1310 out of 1600 on her SAT and was accepted to Columbia University (and attended for a summer session); her father wanted her to be a doctor.
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Kevin Bacon
Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958) is an American film and theater actor whose notable roles include Animal House, Diner, Footloose, Flatliners, Wild Things, A Few Good Men, JFK, Apollo 13, Hollow Man, Mystic River, The Woodsman, Friday the 13th, Tremors, Death Sentence, Frost/Nixon, and X-Men: First Class.
Bacon has won Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards, was nominated for an Emmy Award, and was named by The Guardian as one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.
In 2003, Bacon received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Bacon, one of six children, was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His mother, Ruth Hilda (née Holmes; 1916–1991), taught at an elementary school and was a liberal activist, while his father, Edmund Norwood Bacon (May 2, 1910 – October 14, 2005), was a well-respected architect and a prominent Philadelphian who had been Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission for many years. At 16, in 1975, Bacon won a full scholarship to and attended the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts at Bucknell University, a state-funded five-week arts program where he studied Theatre under Dr. Glory Van Scott, which helped solidify Bacon's passion for the arts.
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Kiefer Sutherland
Kiefer William Frederick Dempsey George Rufus Sutherland (born 21 December 1966) is a British-Canadian actor, producer and director. He is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Jack Bauer on the Fox series 24 for which he won an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and two Satellite Awards. He currently stars as Martin Bohm in the Fox drama Touch.
Sutherland was born in London, the son of Donald Sutherland and Shirley Douglas, both of whom are successful Canadian actors. He has Scottish ancestry from both parents, and is the grandson of Canadian politician Tommy Douglas, widely credited for bringing universal health care to Canada.
He received his first given name from Warren Kiefer, the Italian director who gave his father his first movie role.
His family moved to Corona, California and in 1970, his parents divorced. In 1975, Sutherland moved with his mother to Toronto. He attended elementary school at Crescent Town Elementary School, St. Clair Junior High East York, and John G. Althouse Middle School in Toronto. He attended five different high schools including St. Andrew's College, Martingrove Collegiate Institute, Harbord Collegiate Institute, Silverthorn Collegiate Institute, Malvern Collegiate Institute and Annex Village Campus. He also spent a semester at Regina Mundi Catholic College in London (Ontario) and attended weekend acting lessons at Sir Frederick Banting Secondary School.
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L. Ron Hubbard
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (March 13, 1911 – January 24, 1986), better known as L. Ron Hubbard (and often referred to by his initials, LRH or as Elron), was an American pulp fiction author and the founder of the Church of Scientology. After establishing a career as a writer, becoming best known for his science fiction and fantasy stories, he developed a self-help system called Dianetics which was first published in May 1950. He subsequently developed his ideas into a wide-ranging set of doctrines and rituals as part of a new religious movement that he called Scientology. His writings became the guiding texts for the Church of Scientology and a number of affiliated organizations that address such diverse topics as business administration, literacy and drug rehabilitation.
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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 Marvin
Lee Marvin (February 19, 1924 – August 29, 1987) was an American film actor. Known for his gravelly voice, white hair and 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m) stature, Marvin at first did supporting roles, mostly villains, soldiers and other hardboiled characters, but after winning an Academy Award for Best Actor for his dual roles in Cat Ballou (1965), he landed more heroic and sympathetic leading roles.
Marvin was born in New York City. He was the son of Lamont Waltman Marvin, an advertising executive and the head of the New York and New England Apple Institute, and his wife Courtenay Washington (née Davidge), a fashion writer and beauty consultant. He was named in honor of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who was his first cousin, four times removed. His father was a direct descendant of Matthew Marvin, Sr., who emigrated from Great Bentley, Essex, England in 1635 and helped found Hartford, Connecticut.
Marvin studied violin when he was young. As a teenager, Marvin "spent weekends and spare time hunting deer, puma, wild turkey, and bobwhite in the wilds of the then-uncharted Everglades." He attended St. Leo College Preparatory School in St. Leo, Florida after being expelled from several other schools for bad behavior.
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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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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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Michael Douglas
Michael Kirk Douglas (born September 25, 1944) is an American actor and producer, primarily in movies and television. He has won three Golden Globes and two Academy Awards; as producer of 1975's Best Picture, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and as Best Actor in 1987 for his role in Wall Street. Douglas received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2009. He is the eldest of actor Kirk Douglas's four sons.
Douglas was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the first child of actor Kirk Douglas and Bermudian-born actress Diana Dill. His paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Gomel in Belarus (at that time a part of the Russian Empire). His mother was from Devonshire Parish, Bermuda; Douglas's maternal grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Melville Dill, served as Attorney General of Bermuda and was commanding officer of the Bermuda Militia Artillery. Douglas has a younger brother, Joel Douglas (born 1947), and two paternal half-brothers, Peter Douglas (born 1955) and Eric Douglas (1958–2004), from stepmother Anne Buydens.
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Michael Redgrave
Sir Michael Scudamore Redgrave, CBE (20 March 1908 – 21 March 1985) was an English stage and film actor, director, manager and author.
Redgrave was born in Bristol, Gloucestershire, England, the son of the silent film actor Roy Redgrave and the actress Margaret Scudamore. He never knew his father, who left when Michael was only six months old to pursue a career in Australia. His mother subsequently married Captain James Anderson, a tea planter, but Redgrave greatly disliked his stepfather.
He studied at Clifton College and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was a schoolmaster at Cranleigh School in Surrey before becoming an actor in 1934. There he directed the boys in Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest, but managed to play all the leading roles himself. The 'Redgrave Room' at the school was later named after him. In the new Guildford School of Acting building which opened in January 2010, there is the Sir Michael Redgrave studio.
Redgrave made his first professional appearance at the Liverpool Playhouse on 30 August 1934 as Roy Darwin in Counsellor-at-Law (by Elmer Rice), then spent two years with its Liverpool Repertory Company where he met his future wife Rachel Kempson. They married on 18 July 1935.
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Michel Blanc
Michel Blanc (born 16 April 1952 in Courbevoie, France) is a actor and director who is noted for his roles of losers and hypochondriacs. He is frequently associated with the Splendid group, which he co-founded, along with Thierry Lhermitte, Josiane Balasko, Christian Clavier and Gérard Jugnot.
Michel Blanc has also shown his versatility by appearing in more serious roles, such as the title role in the Patrice Leconte film Monsieur Hire.
As actor unless otherwise specified
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Michel Piccoli
Michel Piccoli (born 27 December 1925) is a French actor.
He was born in Paris to a musical family; his mother was a pianist and his father a violinist.
He has appeared in many different roles, from seducer to cop to gangster, in more than 170 movies. Piccoli has worked with Jean Renoir, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Lelouch, Jacques Demy, Claude Sautet, Louis Malle, Agnès Varda, Leos Carax, Luis Buñuel, Costa-Gavras, Alfred Hitchcock, Marco Ferreri, Jacques Rivette, Otar Iosseliani, Nanni Moretti, Jacques Doillon, Mario Bava, Manoel de Oliviera, Raul Ruiz, Theodoros Angelopoulos and Alain Resnais.
He has been married three times, first to Éléonore Hirt, then for eleven years to the singer Juliette Gréco and finally to Ludivine Clerc. He has one daughter from his first marriage, Anne-Cordélia.
Piccoli is politically active on the left, and is vocally opposed to the Front National.
He won the Best Actor Award at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival for A Leap in the Dark. In 1982, he won the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the 32nd Berlin International Film Festival for his role in Strange Affair.
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Mickey Rourke
Philip Andre "Mickey" Rourke, Jr. (born September 16, 1952) is an American actor, screenwriter and retired boxer, who has appeared primarily as a leading man in action, drama, and thriller films.
During the 1980s, Rourke starred in Diner, Rumble Fish, and the erotic drama 9½ Weeks, and received critical praise for his work in Barfly and Angel Heart. In 1991, Rourke, who had trained as a boxer in his early years, left acting and became a professional boxer for a period. He had supporting roles in several later films, including The Rainmaker, Buffalo '66, The Pledge, Get Carter, Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Man on Fire.
In 2005, Rourke made his comeback in mainstream Hollywood circles with a lead role in Sin City, for which he won awards from the Chicago Film Critics Association, the Irish Film and Television Awards and the Online Film Critics Society. In the 2008 film The Wrestler, Rourke portrayed a past-his-prime wrestler, and received a 2009 Golden Globe award, a BAFTA award, and a nomination for an Academy Award.
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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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Neil Jordan
Neil Patrick Jordan (born 25 February 1950) is an Irish filmmaker and novelist. He won an Academy Award (Best Original Screenplay) for The Crying Game. He also won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival for The Butcher Boy.
Jordan was born in County Sligo, the son of Angela (née O'Brien), a painter, and Michael Jordan, a professor. He was educated at St. Paul's College, Raheny. Of his religious background, Jordan said in a 1999 Salon interview: "I was brought up a Catholic and was quite religious at one stage in my life, when I was young. But it left me with no scars whatever; it just sort of vanished." He said about his current beliefs that "God is the greatest imaginary being of all time. Along with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, the invention of God is probably the greatest creation of human thought." Later, Jordan attended University College Dublin, where he studied Irish history and English literature.
When John Boorman was filming Excalibur in Ireland, he recruited Jordan as a script consultant, which led to his doing second unit work. His first feature Angel, a tale of a musician caught up in the Troubles, starred Stephen Rea who has subsequently appeared in almost all of Jordan's films to date.
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Nicolas Cage
Nicolas Cage (born Nicolas Kim Coppola; January 7, 1964) is an Academy Award–winning American actor, producer and director, having appeared in over 60 films including Raising Arizona (1987), The Rock (1996), Face/Off (1997), Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), Adaptation (2002), National Treasure (2004), Lord of War (2005), Ghost Rider (2007), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), Kick-Ass (2010), and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2012).
Cage was born Nicolas Kim Coppola on January 7, 1964 in Long Beach, California. His father, August Coppola, a professor of literature, and his mother, Joy Vogelsang, a dancer and choreographer, divorced in 1976. He was raised in a Catholic family. Cage's mother is of German descent and his father was of Italian descent. His paternal grandparents were composer Carmine Coppola and actress Italia Pennino, and his paternal great-grandparents were immigrants from Bernalda, Basilicata. Through his father, Cage is the nephew of director Francis Ford Coppola and actress Talia Shire, and the cousin of directors Roman Coppola and Sofia Coppola, film producer Gian-Carlo Coppola, and actors Robert Carmine and Jason Schwartzman. Cage's two brothers are New York radio personality Marc "The Cope" Coppola and director Christopher Coppola. He attended Beverly Hills High School, which is known for its many alumni who became entertainers. He aspired to act from an early age and also attended UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television. His first non-cinematic acting experience was in a school production of Golden Boy.
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Pascal Duquenne
Pascal Duquenne (b. 8 August 1970 in Vilvoorde, Belgium) is a Belgian actor. He shared the prize for a male role in 1996 Cannes Film Festival for his performance as Georges in the movie The Eighth Day, with Daniel Auteuil, who played Harry. He currently lives in Brussels. He has Down syndrome. In 2004 he received the very high civil distinction of Commander in the Order of the Crown (Belgium).
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Paul Auster
Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction, and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), and The Brooklyn Follies (2005).
Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish middle class parents of Polish descent, Queenie and Samuel Auster. He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey and was graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris, France where he earned a living translating French literature. Since returning to the U.S. in 1974, he has published poems, essays, novels of his own, as well as translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.
He and his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, were married in 1981, and they live in Brooklyn. Together they have one daughter, Sophie Auster. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer, Lydia Davis. They have one son together, Daniel Auster.
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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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Paul Scofield
David Paul Scofield, CH, CBE (21 January 1922 – 19 March 2008), better known as Paul Scofield, was an English actor of stage and screen. Noted for his distinctive voice and delivery, Scofield received an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for his performance as Sir Thomas More in the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, a reprise of the role he played in the stage version at the West End and on Broadway for which he received a Tony Award.
Scofield was born in Birmingham, England, the son of Mary and Edward Harry Scofield. When Scofield was a few weeks old, his family moved to Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, where his father served as the headmaster at the Hurstpierpoint Church of England School. At the age of 12 he began attending the Varndean Secondary School in Brighton, where he took various roles in school plays.
Scofield began his stage career in 1940 with a debut performance in Desire Under the Elms at the Westminster Theatre, and was soon being compared to Laurence Olivier. He played at the Old Rep in Birmingham. From there he went to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, where he starred in Walter Nugent Monck's 1947 revival of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
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Peter Mullan
Peter Mullan (born 2 November 1959) is a Scottish actor and filmmaker.
Mullan was born in Peterhead, Scotland, the son of Patricia (a nurse) and Charles Mullan (a lab technician at Glasgow University). The second youngest of eight children, Mullan was brought up in a working class Roman Catholic family. They later moved to Mosspark.[citation needed] An alcoholic and sufferer from lung cancer, Mullan's father became increasingly tyrannical and abusive. For a brief period, Mullan was a member of a street gang while at secondary school, and worked as a bouncer in a number of south-side pubs. His father died on the day Mullan began studying economic history and drama at the University of Glasgow.
Mullan began acting at university and continued stage acting after graduation. He had roles in several films such as Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, Braveheart, and Riff-Raff. His first full-length film, Orphans, won an award at the Venice Film Festival. In 2002, he returned to directing and screenwriting with the controversial film The Magdalene Sisters, based on life in an Irish Magdalene asylum. Mullan won a Golden Lion award from the Venice Film Festival.
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Peter O'Toole
Peter Seamus Lorcan O'Toole (born 2 August 1932) is an Irish actor of stage and screen. O'Toole achieved stardom in 1962 playing T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, and then went on to become a highly-honoured film and stage actor. He has been nominated for eight Academy Awards, and holds the record for most competitive Academy Award acting nominations without a win. He has won four Golden Globes, a BAFTA, and an Emmy, and was the recipient of an Honorary Academy Award in 2003 for his body of work.
Peter Seamus Lorcan O'Toole was born in 1932. Some sources give his birthplace as Connemara, County Galway, Ireland, and others as Leeds, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, where he grew up. O'Toole himself is not certain of his birthplace or date, noting in his autobiography that, while he accepts 2 August as his birthdate, he has a birth certificate from each country, with the Irish one giving a June 1932 birthdate. O'Toole is the son of Constance Jane (née Ferguson), a Scottishnurse, and Patrick Joseph O'Toole, an Irish metal plater, football player and racecourse bookmaker. When O'Toole was one year old, his family began a five-year tour of major racecourse towns in Northern England. He was brought up Roman Catholic. O'Toole was evacuated from Leeds early in World War II and went to a Catholic school for seven or eight years, where he was "implored" to become right-handed. “I used to be scared stiff of the nuns: their whole denial of womanhood – the black dresses and the shaving of the hair – was so horrible, so terrifying,” he later commented. “Of course, that's all been stopped. They're sipping gin and tonic in the Dublin pubs now, and a couple of them flashed their pretty ankles at me just the other day.”
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Peter Sellers
Richard Henry Sellers, CBE (8 September 1925 – 24 July 1980), known as Peter Sellers, was a British comedian and actor. Perhaps best known as Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther film series, he is also notable for playing three different characters in Dr. Strangelove, as Clare Quilty in Lolita, and as the TV-addicted man-child Chance the gardener in his penultimate film, Being There. Actress Bette Davis once remarked of him, "He isn't an actor—he's a chameleon."
Sellers rose to fame on the BBC Radio comedy series The Goon Show. His ability to speak in different accents (e.g., French, Indian, Italian, American, German, as well as British regional accents), along with his talent to portray a range of characters to comic effect, contributed to his success as a radio personality and screen actor and earned him national and international nominations and awards. Many of his characters became ingrained in public perception of his work. Sellers' private life was characterised by turmoil and crises, and included emotional problems and substance abuse. Sellers was married four times, and had three children from the first two marriages.
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Ray Milland
Ray Milland (3 January 1907 – 10 March 1986) was a Welsh actor and director. His screen career ran from 1929 to 1985, and he is best remembered for his Academy Award–winning portrayal of an alcoholic writer in The Lost Weekend (1945), a sophisticated leading man opposite a corrupt John Wayne in Reap the Wild Wind (1942), the murder-plotting husband in Dial M for Murder (1954), and as Oliver Barrett III in Love Story (1970).
Milland was born Alfred Reginald Jones (not Reginald Alfred John Truscott-Jones as has often been stated). His birth was registered in the March Quarter of 1907 in Neath, Wales, and he was the son of Elizabeth Annie (née Truscott) and Alfred Jones. In the 1911 census the family were living at 66 Coronation Road, Mount Pleasant, Neath, Wales. Of his parents, Milland wrote in his 1974 autobiography Wide-Eyed in Babylon, "My father was not a cruel or harsh man. Just a very quiet one. I think he was an incurable romantic and consequently a little afraid of his emotions and perhaps ashamed of them... he had been a young hussar in the Boer War and had been present at the relief of Mafeking. He never held long conversations with anyone, except perhaps with me, possibly because I was the only other male in our family. The household consisted of my mother, a rather flighty and coquettish woman much concerned with propriety and what the neighbours thought.."
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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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Rex Harrison
Sir Reginald Carey "Rex" Harrison (5 March 1908 – 2 June 1990) was an English actor of stage and screen. One of Harrison's best remembered film roles was that of Professor Henry Higgins in the stage and film versions of My Fair Lady. The role earned him a Tony Award, a Golden Globe Award and Best Actor Oscar.
Harrison was born in Huyton, Lancashire, and educated at Liverpool College. After a bout of childhood measles, Harrison lost most of the sight in his left eye, which on one occasion caused some on-stage difficulty. He first appeared on the stage in 1924 in Liverpool. Harrison's acting career was interrupted during World War II while serving in the Royal Air Force, reaching the rank of Flight Lieutenant. He acted in various stage productions until 11 May 1990. He acted in the West End of London when he was young, appearing in the Terence Rattigan play French Without Tears, which proved to be his breakthrough role.
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Richard Basehart
John Richard Basehart (August 31, 1914 – September 17, 1984) was an American actor. He starred in the 1960s television science fiction drama Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, in the role of Admiral Harriman Nelson.
One of his most notable film roles was the acrobat known as "the Fool" in the acclaimed Italian film La Strada, directed by Federico Fellini. He also appeared as the killer in the film noir classic He Walked by Night (1948), as a psychotic member of the Hatfield clan in Roseanna McCoy (1949), as Ishmael in Moby Dick (1956), and in the drama Decision Before Dawn (1951). He was married to Italian Academy Award-nominated actress Valentina Cortese, with whom he had one son, the actor Jackie Basehart, before their divorce in 1960. Cortese and Basehart also costarred in Robert Wise's The House on Telegraph Hill (1951).
From 1964-68, Basehart played the lead role, Admiral Harriman Nelson, on Irwin Allen's first foray into science-fiction television, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Allen would go on to produce a number of sci-fi series in the 1960s and the highly successful feature films The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), earning him the moniker "The Master of Disaster." Although Basehart started his career as a film actor, he became best known for his role on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
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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 Mitchum
Robert Charles Durman Mitchum (August 6, 1917 – July 1, 1997) was an American film actor, author, composer and singer and is #23 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male American screen legends of all time. Mitchum rose to prominence for his starring roles in several major works of the film noir style, and is considered a forerunner of the anti-heroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and 1960s.
Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, into a Methodist family. His mother, Ann Harriet (née Gunderson), was a Norwegian immigrant and sea captain's daughter, and his father, James Thomas Mitchum, was a shipyard and railroad worker. A sister, Annette, (known as Julie Mitchum during her acting career) was born in 1914. James Mitchum was crushed to death in a railyard accident in Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1919, when his son was less than 2 years old. After his death, Ann Mitchum was awarded a government pension, and soon realized she was pregnant. She returned to her family in Connecticut, and married a former British Army major who helped her care for the children. In September 1919 a second son, John, was born. When all of the children were old enough to attend school, Ann found employment as a linotype operator for the Bridgeport Post.
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Robert Ryan
Robert Bushnell Ryan (November 11, 1909 – July 11, 1973) was an American actor who often played hardened cops and ruthless villains.
Ryan was born in Chicago, Illinois, the first child of Timothy Ryan and his wife Mabel Bushnell Ryan. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1932, having held the school's heavyweight boxing title all four years of his attendance. After graduation, the 6′ 4" Ryan found employment as a stoker on a ship, a WPA worker, and a ranch hand in Montana.
Ryan attempted to make a career in show business as a playwright, but had to turn to acting to support himself. He studied acting in Hollywood and appeared on stage and in small film parts during the early 1940s.
In January 1944, after securing a contract guarantee from RKO Radio Pictures, Ryan enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and served as a drill instructor at Camp Pendleton, in San Diego, California. At Camp Pendleton, he befriended writer and future director Richard Brooks, whose novel, The Brick Foxhole, he greatly admired. He also took up painting.
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Robin Williams
Robin McLaurin Williams (born July 21, 1951) is an American actor and comedian. Rising to fame with his role as the alien Mork in the TV series Mork & Mindy, and later stand-up comedy work, Williams has performed in many feature films since 1980. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. He has also won two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globes, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and five Grammy Awards.
Williams was born in Chicago, Illinois. His mother, Laura McLaurin (née Smith, 1922–2001), was a former model from New Orleans, Louisiana. His father, Robert Fitzgerald Williams (September 10, 1906 – October 18, 1987), was a senior executive at Ford Motor Company in charge of the Midwest region. His maternal great-great-grandfather was senator and Mississippi governor Anselm J. McLaurin. Williams is of English, Welsh, Irish, and French ancestry. He was raised in the Episcopal Church (his mother practiced Christian Science). He grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he was a student at the Detroit Country Day School, and later moved to Woodacre, Marin County, California, where he attended the public Redwood High School. Williams studied at Claremont McKenna College (then called Claremont Men's College) for four years. He has two half-brothers: Todd (who died August 14, 2007) and McLaurin.
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Rod Serling
Rodman Edward "Rod" Serling (December 25, 1924 – June 28, 1975) was an American screenwriter, novelist, television producer, and narrator best known for his live television dramas of the 1950s and his science fiction anthology TV series, The Twilight Zone. Serling was active in politics, both on and off the screen and helped form television industry standards. He was known as the "angry young man" of Hollywood, clashing with television executives and sponsors over a wide range of issues including censorship, racism, and anti-war politics.
Serling was born December 25, 1924, into a Jewish family in Syracuse, New York, the second of two sons born to Esther (née Cooper) and Samuel Lawrence Serling. Serling's father had worked as a secretary and amateur inventor before having children, but took on his father-in-law's profession as a grocer in order to earn a steady income. Sam Serling later took up the trade of butcher after the Great Depression forced the store to close. Serling's mother was a homemaker.
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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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Russell Crowe
Russell Ira Crowe (born 7 April 1964) is a New Zealand born Australian actor, film producer and musician. He came to international attention for his role as Roman General Maximus Decimus Meridius in the 2000 historical epic film Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor, a Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Actor, an Empire Award for Best Actor and a London Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and ten further nominations for Best Actor. Crowe appeared as the tobacco firm whistle blower Jeffrey Wigand in the 1999 film The Insider, for which he received five awards as Best Actor and seven nominations in the same category. In 2001, Crowe's portrayal of mathematician and Nobel Prize winner John F. Nash in the biopic A Beautiful Mind brought him numerous awards, including an BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor category Motion Picture Drama and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role.
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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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Sean Penn
Sean Justin Penn (born August 17, 1960) is an American actor, screenwriter and film director, also known for his left-wing political and social activism (including humanitarian work). He is a two-time Academy Award winner for his roles in Mystic River (2003) and Milk (2008), as well as the recipient of a Golden Globe Award for the former and a Screen Actors Guild Award for the latter.
Penn began his acting career in television with a brief appearance in a 1974 episode of Little House on the Prairie, directed by his father Leo Penn. Following his film debut in 1981's Taps and a diverse range of film roles in the 1980s, Penn emerged as a prominent leading actor with the 1995 drama film Dead Man Walking, for which he earned his first Academy Award nomination and the Best Actor Award at the Berlin Film Festival. Penn received another two Oscar nominations for Sweet and Lowdown (1999) and I Am Sam (2001), before winning his first Academy Award for Best Actor in 2003 for Mystic River and a second one in 2008 for Milk. He has also won a Best Actor Award of the Cannes Film Festival for She's So Lovely (1997), and two Best Actor Awards at the Venice Film Festival for Hurlyburly (1998) and 21 Grams (2003).
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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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Spencer Tracy
Spencer Bonaventure Tracy (April 5, 1900 – June 10, 1967) was an American actor. Respected for his natural style and versatility, Tracy was one of the major stars of Hollywood's Golden Age. In a screen career that spanned 37 years, he was nominated for nine Academy Awards for Best Actor—a record he holds with Laurence Olivier—of which he won two.
Tracy discovered his talent for acting while a student at Ripon College, and subsequently gained a scholarship for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He spent seven years in the theatre, working in a succession of stock companies and intermittently on Broadway. Tracy's breakthrough came in 1930, when his lead performance in The Last Mile caught the attention of Hollywood. After a successful film debut in Up the River, Tracy was signed to a contract with Fox Film Corporation. His five years with Fox were unremarkable, and he remained largely unknown to audiences after 25 films. In 1935, Tracy joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Hollywood's most prestigious studio. His career flourished with a series of hit films, and in 1937 and 1938 he won consecutive Oscars for Captains Courageous and Boys Town. By the 1940s, Tracy was one of the studio's top stars. In 1942 he appeared with Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year, beginning a popular partnership that produced nine movies over 25 years.
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T.I.
Clifford Joseph Harris, Jr. (born September 25, 1980), better known by his stage name T.I., is an American rap artist, film and music producer, actor and author. He is also the founder and co-chief executive officer (CEO) of Grand Hustle Records.
T.I. has released seven studio albums (I'm Serious, Trap Muzik, Urban Legend, King, T.I. vs. T.I.P., Paper Trail, and No Mercy) with the most recent five being highly successful on the commercial market. He has released such successful singles as "Bring Em Out", "What You Know", "Big Shit Poppin' (Do It)", "Swagga Like Us" (featuring Kanye West, Jay-Z and Lil Wayne), "Whatever You Like", "Live Your Life" (featuring Rihanna), "Dead and Gone" (featuring Justin Timberlake), "Got Your Back" (featuring Keri Hilson) and "That's All She Wrote" (featuring Eminem). He has served two stints in county jail, twice for probation violations and a federal prison bid for a U.S. federal weapons charge. While serving 11 months in prison he released his seventh studio album, No Mercy. T.I. has also had successful acting career, starring in the films Takers and ATL.
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Terry McMillan
Terry McMillan (born October 18, 1951, in Port Huron, Michigan) is an American author. Her interest in books comes from working at a library when she was sixteen. She received her BA in journalism in 1986 at University of California, Berkeley. Her work is characterized by strong female protagonists.
Her first book, Mama, was published in 1987.[citation needed] She achieved national attention in 1992 with her third novel, Waiting to Exhale, which remained on The New York Times bestseller list for many months. In 1995, Forest Whitaker turned it into a film starring Whitney Houston. In 1998, another of McMillan's novels, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, was made into a movie. McMillan's novel Disappearing Acts was subsequently produced as a direct-to-cable feature, starring Wesley Snipes and Sanaa Lathan. She also wrote the best seller A Day Late and a Dollar Short. The Interruption of Everything was published on July 19, 2005. Getting to Happy, the long-awaited sequel to Waiting to Exhale, was published on September 7, 2010.
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Tim Robbins
Timothy Francis "Tim" Robbins (born October 16, 1958) is an American actor, screenwriter, director, producer, activist and musician. He is the former longtime partner of actress Susan Sarandon. He is known for his roles as Nuke in Bull Durham, Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, and as Dave Boyle in Mystic River, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Robbins was born in West Covina, California, and raised in New York City, the son of Mary Robbins (née Bledsoe), an actress, and Gilbert Lee Robbins (1931–2011), a musician, folk singer, actor and former manager of The Gaslight Cafe. Robbins has two sisters, Adele and Gabrielle, and a brother, David. Robbins was raised Catholic. He moved to Greenwich Village with his family at a young age, while his father pursued a career as a member of the folk music group The Highwaymen. Robbins started doing theater at age twelve and joined the drama club at Stuyvesant High School. He spent two years at SUNY Plattsburgh and then returned to California to study at the UCLA Film School.
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Tom Cruise
Thomas Cruise Mapother IV ( /ˈtɒməs ˈkruːz ˈmeɪpɒθər/; born July 3, 1962), widely known as Tom Cruise, is an American film actor and producer. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards and has won three Golden Globe Awards for the same movies: Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Jerry Maguire (1996), Magnolia (1999). He started his career with the movie Endless Love. Cruise's first appearance in a major film was in 1981's Taps. His first leading role was in the film Risky Business, released in August 1983. Cruise played the role of a heroic naval pilot in the popular and successful 1986 film Top Gun, and also secret agent Ethan Hunt in the series of Mission: Impossible action films.
He has starred in a variety of other successful films, including: Rain Man (1988), Days of Thunder (1990), A Few Good Men (1992), Vanilla Sky (2001), Minority Report (2002), The Last Samurai (2003), Collateral (2004), and War of the Worlds (2005).
Since 2005, Cruise and Paula Wagner have been in charge of the United Artists film studio, with Cruise as producer and star and Wagner as the chief executive. Cruise is also known for his support of and adherence to the Church of Scientology.
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Tom Hanks
Thomas Jeffrey "Tom" Hanks (born July 9, 1956) is an American actor, producer, writer, and director. Hanks is known for his roles in Philadelphia and as the title character in Forrest Gump, roles which won him two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor. Hanks is also known for his Oscar nominated roles in Big, Saving Private Ryan and Cast Away.
Hanks' other acting roles include Apollo 13 as Jim Lovell, The Green Mile as Paul Edgecomb, Toy Story as Woody and Charlie Wilson's War as Charlie Wilson.
Hanks was born in Concord, California. His father, Amos Mefford Hanks (born in Glenn County, California, on March 9, 1924 – died in Alameda, California, on January 31, 1992), was an itinerant cook. His mother, Janet Marylyn (née Frager; born in Alameda County, California, on January 18, 1932), was a hospital worker. Hanks' mother is of Portuguese ancestry, while two of his paternal great-grandparents immigrated from Britain. Hanks's parents divorced in 1960. The family's three oldest children, Sandra (now Sandra Hanks Benoiton, a writer)[citation needed], Larry (now Lawrence M. Hanks, PhD, an entomology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Tom, went with their father, while the youngest, Jim, now an actor and film maker, remained with his mother in Red Bluff, California.[citation needed]
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Ugo Tognazzi
Ugo Tognazzi (Italian pronunciation: [ˈuɡo toɲˈɲattsi]; 23 March 1922 - 27 October 1990) was an Italian film, TV, and theatre actor, director, and screenwriter.
Tognazzi was born in Cremona, in northern Italy but spent his youth in various localities as his father was a traveller clerk for an insurance company.
After his return in the native city in 1936, he worked in a salami production plant. In World War II, he was called to the Army, returning home after the Armistice of September 1943. His passion for spectacles and acting dates from his early years, and also during the conflict he had organized spectacles for his fellow soldiers. In 1945 he moved to Milan, where he was enrolled in the theatrical company led by Wanda Osiris. A few years later he formed his own successful musical revue company.
In 1950 Tognazzi made his debut for cinema, in I cadetti di Guascogna directed by Mario Mattoli. In the following year he met Raimondo Vianello, with whom he formed a successful comical duo for the new-born RAI TV (1954–1960). Their shows, sometimes containing satirical aspects, were also among the first ones to be censored in Italian television.
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Vic Mackey
Detective Victor Samuel "Vic" Mackey, played by Michael Chiklis, is a fictional character and the protagonist of the 7-year FX crime drama series The Shield. Mackey was a corrupt and brutal detective in the Los Angeles Police Department; he stole from drug dealers, routinely beat suspects and committed murder on at least three occasions. While two of the victims were violent gangsters, one was a fellow cop who was secretly working to expose Vic and his unit. Mackey saw his tactics as a means to an end. He is a devoted father and also saw himself as a family man.
Little is known about Mackey's early life, although his surname is probably of Irish origin (he occasionally wears a shamrock t-shirt). He also once mentioned that his father was a bricklayer (possibly only because he was making a joke). In season five, he told Lt. Jon Kavanaugh that he had been a police officer for at least 14 years. In one of the DVD commentaries for season four, Michael Chiklis mentions that the main characters on the show are from the same areas as the actors who play them, which would imply that Mackey is a native of the Boston, Massachusetts area. In support of this theory, during the season one episode "Cherrypoppers", Vic approaches a suspect outside of an underage sex show and, as a ruse, asks if the man remembers him from Boston.
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Victor Banerjee
Victor Banerjee (Bengali: ভিক্টর ব্যানার্জী, Hindi: विक्टर बनर्जी) (born 15 October 1946) is an Indian actor who appears in Hindi, Bengali and English language films. He has also appeared on a number of TV series on Indian television. He has worked for prominent directors like Jerry London, Shyam Benegal, Satyajit Ray, Ram Gopal Varma, Roman Polanski, James Ivory, Mrinal Sen and David Lean.
Banerjee was born to a of Bengali Hindu family and is a descendant of Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee, a leading intellectual, a prominent man of his time and the first president of the Indian National Congress (1885).
He had his schooling in St. Edmund's, Shillong, and graduated in English Literature from St. Xavier's College, Calcutta.
In 1984, he acted as Dr. Aziz Ahmed in David Lean's film of A Passage to India, bringing him to the attention of Western audiences. Victor was nominated for BAFTA award for this role in 1986. He won two other awards for this role: Evening Standard British Film Award and NBR Award (National Board Review, USA).
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Victor Sjöström
Victor Sjöström (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈvɪktɔɾ ˈɧœˈstɾœm] ( listen); in the United States sometimes known as Victor Seastrom) (20 September 1879 – 3 January 1960) was a Swedish actor, screenwriter, and film director.
Born in Silbodal, in the Värmland region of Sweden, he was only a year old when his father, Olof Adolf Sjöström, moved the family to Brooklyn, New York. His mother died when he was seven years old in 1886. Sjöström returned to Sweden where he lived with relatives in Stockholm, beginning his acting career at 17 as a member of a touring theater company.
Drawn from the stage to the fledgling motion picture industry, he made his first film in 1912 under the direction of Mauritz Stiller. Between then and 1923, he directed another forty-one films in Sweden, some of which are now lost. Those surviving include The Sons of Ingmar (1919), Karin, Daughter of Ingmar (1920) and The Phantom Carriage (1921), all based on stories by the Nobel-prize winning novelist Selma Lagerlöf. They confirm him as one the very greatest of silent film directors, who helped to create a unique idiom with qualities quite different from those of sound cinema. Many of his films from the period are marked by subtle character portrayal, fine storytelling and evocative settings in which the Swedish landscape often plays a key psychological role. The naturalistic quality of his films was enhanced by his (then revolutionary) preference for on-location filming, especially in rural and village settings.
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Walter Huston
Walter Thomas Huston ( /ˈwɔːltər ˈhjuːstən/; April 5, 1883 – April 7, 1950) was a Canadian-born American actor. He was the father of actor and director John Huston and the grandfather of actress Anjelica Huston and actor Danny Huston.
Huston was born in York County, Ontario, the son of Elizabeth (née McGibbon) and Robert Moore Huston, a provincial farmer who founded a construction company. He was of Scottish and Irish descent.
Huston began his Broadway career in 1924. Once talkies began in Hollywood, he achieved fame in character roles. His first major role was in 1929's The Virginian with Gary Cooper. He appeared in the Broadway theatrical adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's novel Dodsworth in 1934 and the play's film version two years later.
Huston remained busy throughout the 1930s and 1940s, both on stage and screen (becoming one of America's most distinguished actors); he performed "September Song" in the original Broadway production of Knickerbocker Holiday in 1938 (his grandaughter Anjelica Huston sang it on the May 7, 2012 episode of the NBC TV series "Smash"). Among his films are Abraham Lincoln (1930), Rain (1932), Gabriel Over the White House (1933), The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and Mission to Moscow (1943), a pro-Soviet World War II propaganda film as Ambassador Joseph E. Davies. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1948 for his role in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was directed by his son, John Huston. His last film was The Furies in 1950 with Barbara Stanwyck.
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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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Whitney Houston
Whitney Elizabeth Houston (August 9, 1963 – February 11, 2012) was an American recording artist, actress, producer, and model. In 2009, the Guinness World Records cited her as the most-awarded female act of all-time. Houston was one of the world's best-selling music artists, having sold over 170 million albums, singles and videos worldwide. She released seven studio albums and three movie soundtrack albums, all of which have diamond, multi-platinum, platinum or gold certification. Houston's crossover appeal on the popular music charts, as well as her prominence on MTV, starting with her video for "How Will I Know", influenced several African American female artists to follow in her footsteps.
Houston is the only artist to chart seven consecutive No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hits. She is the second artist behind Elton John and the only female artist to have two number-one Billboard 200 Album awards (formerly "Top Pop Album") on the Billboard magazine year-end charts. Houston's 1985 debut album Whitney Houston became the best-selling debut album by a female act at the time of its release. The album was named Rolling Stone's best album of 1986, and was ranked at number 254 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Her second studio album Whitney (1987) became the first album by a female artist to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 albums chart.
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William H. Macy
William Hall Macy, Jr. (born March 13, 1950) is an American actor and writer.
He was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo. He is also a teacher and director in theater, film and television. His film career has been built mostly on his appearances in small, independent films, though he has appeared in summer action films as well. Macy has described himself as "sort of a Middle American, WASPy, Lutheran kind of guy... Everyman". He has won two Emmy Awards and a Screen Actors Guild Award, being nominated for nine Emmy Awards and seven Screen Actors Guild Awards in total. He is also a three-time Golden Globe Award nominee.
Macy was born in Miami, Florida, and grew up in Georgia and Maryland. His father, William Hall Macy, Sr., was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal for flying a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber in World War II; he later ran a construction company in Atlanta and worked for Dun & Bradstreet, before taking over a Cumberland, Maryland-based insurance agency, when Macy was nine years old. His mother, Lois (née Overstreet), was a war widow who met Macy's father after her first husband died in 1943; Macy has described her as a "Southern belle".
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Wong Kar-wai
Wong Kar-wai BBS (born 17 July 1958) is a Hong Kong Second Wave filmmaker, internationally renowned as an auteur for his visually unique, highly stylised, emotionally resonant work, including Days of Being Wild (1990), Ashes of Time (1994), Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), Happy Together (1997) and 2046 (2004). His film In the Mood for Love (2000), starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, garnered widespread critical acclaim. Wong's films frequently feature protagonists who yearn for romance in the midst of a knowingly brief life and scenes that can often be described as sketchy, digressive, exhilarating, and containing vivid imagery.
Wong was listed at number three on the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound Top Ten Directors list of modern times.
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Yul Brynner
Yul Brynner (Russian: Юлий Борисович Бринер, Yuliy Borisovich Bryner; July 11, 1920 – October 10, 1985) was a Russian-born stage and film actor. He was best known for his portrayal of Mongkut, king of Siam, in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor for the film version; he also played the role more than 4,500 times onstage. He is also remembered as Rameses II in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille blockbuster The Ten Commandments, General Bounine in Anastasia and Chris Adams in The Magnificent Seven. Brynner was noted for his distinctive voice and for his shaven head, which he maintained as a personal trademark long after adopting it for his initial role in The King and I. He was also a photographer and the author of two books.
Yul Brynner was born Yuliy Borisovich Bryner in 1920. He exaggerated his background and early life for the press, claiming that he was born Taidje Khan of part-Mongol-Tatar parentage, on the Russian island of Sakhalin. In reality, he was born at home in a four-storey residence at 15 Aleutskaya Street, Vladivostok, in the Far Eastern Republic (present-day Primorsky Krai, Russia). He also occasionally referred to himself as Julius Briner,Jules Bryner, or Youl Bryner. A biography written by his son, Rock Brynner, in 1989 clarified these issues.
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Bird, A Filmography
Bird Filmography
Birds, The Filmography
karaoke
There are, there are some scars
That would make you cross eyed
Where we're going, I don’t care
If we'll ever get there.
You are, you are too kind
To be heading this far
Where we're going, I don’t care
If we'll ever get there.
If I can't make things right
I can't make things right
Were we're going, no one cares
If we'll ever get there.
I am, I am dreaming
Of a sudden crashing
When we hit ground, boy I swear
It looks just like back there.
If I can't make things right
I can't make things right
Were we're going, no one cares
If we'll ever get there.
When we hit ground, boy I swear
If I was a bird
I would fly high over the world
Come home at night to your garden
Build a nest among the branches
And I'll comb your hair with my beak
If I was a bird
I would count my time in pearls
Under my wings you'll find shelter
You'll breed bugs and keep me well fed
And I proclaim the reason why I'll have to fly
But you wanted me to be a girl
Without feathers without urge
Then my wings quick disappeared
And left was only fear
And I proclaim the reason why I'll have to fly
Proclaim the reason why I'll have to fly
Bird
A friendly push
Off the cliff - is all I need
A sudden change
Or a smile
Could make me feel alive,
Anything to take the ignorance away
There is a hole in my chest
where my heart used to be
If you're looking for emptiness,
I'm what you need
Colder and darker and worse
Sometimes life's just a curse
My ashen face
My snow-white skin
Perfect Isolation
Time - slips
My asylum years
Will end in silence
Without tears
All illusions lost
All colours faded
A senseless pain
Transparent
Imperfection
Falling
Like a sparrow to the ground
Leave no trace of life
Music as my ship set sails
Through the window
From the street
Divine
Goodbye
Leave no marks
upon my skin
Dreamless sleep
The convent walls on fire
Goodbye
Dreams and betrayal - hand in hand
Falling apart in a drug wonderland
Unable to move and talk
Unable to care at all...
Somebody is knocking at my door
Somebody - I think I have seen before
I'm trembled and shaken and stirred
RELEASE
ALBUMS
- Intro
- Flowers
- Up And At It
- Mirror
- Bitter Sweet Friday
- Sometimes Rain
- こんなにもblue
- それを愛と
- Happy Bithday
- DA DA DA DA
- TFR
- Perfect Circle
- Outro
- 海を見つめて
- YOU CAN’T HURRY LOVE
- BEATS (reggae Version)
- BATUCADA -バトゥカーダ-
- ジェットコースター・ロマンス
- Helllo, my friend
- 夢先案内人
- サマーヌード
- 世界はそれを愛と呼ぶんだぜ
- 夏の終りのハーモニー
- 童神
- SOULS (Acoustic Live @ oden studio)
- BATUCADA (DJ FUMIYA REMIX)
- BATUCADA (Rasmus Faber Remix)
- 青い珊瑚礁
- ジェットコースター・ロマンス
- ダンシング･シスター
- セロリ
- Hello, My Friend
- Point of No Return
- 青い車
- サマーヌード
- 恋とマシンガン
- 夏の終わりのハーモニー
- BEATS (Reggae version)
- BATUCADA (GOLD MIX) with 川島可能
- YOU CAN'T HURRY LOVE with 田島貴男
- ROXANNE with マボロシ
- 世界はそれを愛と呼ぶんだぜ with □□□（クチロロ）
- 月の裏で会いましょう (Let's go to the darkside of the moon) with FreeTEMPO
- CLUB TROPICANA with YOUR SONG IS GOOD
- BATUCADA ～バトゥカーダ～
- SOULS (Acoustic Live @ oden studio)
- おなかの中で
- ファーストブレス(Original Ver.)
- Dear My Friend
- ツツジの蜜をめしあがれ
- 記憶の水槽
- SPARKLES
- マイ ペン ライ
- やわらかな旋律
- よろこびの種
- laboratory
- パレード
- SOULS (main)
- BEATS (original)
- 童神 （ORIGINAL MIX）
- 髪をほどいて
- フラッシュ
- 空の瞳
- GAME (album version)
- flow
- 散歩しよう
- チャンス
- マインドトラベル
- ハイビスカス
- 桜
- Intro ~bird's nest~
- Souls
- 空の瞳
- 君の音が聴こえる場所へ
- Deep Breath
- REALIZE (feat.Suiken + Dev Large)
- パズル
- Rainterlude
- 雨の優しさを
- Beats
- 満ちてゆく唇 (album swing mix)
- 約束
- Outro ~greetings from murphy~
- マインドトラベル
- マーメイド3000
- daydream
- オアシス(アルバム・ヴァージョン)
- 4 PM
- これが私の優しさです
- CLAY
- 二人の夜明け
- GAME(アルバム・ヴァージョン)
- late summer breeze
- 9月の想い
- 桜
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Clint Eastwood "Bird" Charlie Parker Story
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:48
- Updated: 26 Nov 2012
worldmusicstore.com.au is where you can purchase this DVD or contact me at ozmusicshop "at" gmail.com. Movie based on the life of Charlie Parker with original solos worked into the film with a new rhythm section. Won an Oscar for sound.
http://wn.com/Clint_Eastwood_Bird_Charlie_Parker_Story
worldmusicstore.com.au is where you can purchase this DVD or contact me at ozmusicshop "at" gmail.com. Movie based on the life of Charlie Parker with original solos worked into the film with a new rhythm section. Won an Oscar for sound.
Lover Man (from "Bird" - 1988)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:22
- Updated: 28 Nov 2012
Bird is a 1988 American biographical film, produced and directed by Clint Eastwood with the screenplay written by Joel Oliansky. The film is a tribute to the life and music of jazz saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker. It is constructed as a collage of scenes from Parker's life, from his childhood in Kansas City, through his marriage to Chan Richardson, to his early death at the age of thirty-four. Forest Whitaker's performance as Parker earned him the Best Actor award at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Globe nomination. In addition, the film also won an Academy Award for Best Sound. Bird and Lover Man "A recording for the Dial label from July 29, 1946, provides evidence of his condition. Prior to this session, Parker drank about a quart of whiskey. According to the liner notes of Charlie Parker on Dial Volume 1, Parker missed most of the first two bars of his first chorus on the track, "Max Making Wax." When he finally did come in, he swayed wildly and once spun all the way around, going badly off mic. On the next tune, "Lover Man", producer Ross Russell physically supported Parker in front of the microphone. On "Bebop" (the final track Parker recorded that evening) he begins a solo with a solid first eight bars. On his second eight bars, however, Parker begins to struggle, and a desperate Howard McGhee, the trumpeter on this session, shouts, "Blow!" at Parker. McGhee's bellow is audible on the recording. Charles Mingus considered this version of "Lover Man" to ...
http://wn.com/Lover_Man_from_Bird_1988
Bird is a 1988 American biographical film, produced and directed by Clint Eastwood with the screenplay written by Joel Oliansky. The film is a tribute to the life and music of jazz saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker. It is constructed as a collage of scenes from Parker's life, from his childhood in Kansas City, through his marriage to Chan Richardson, to his early death at the age of thirty-four. Forest Whitaker's performance as Parker earned him the Best Actor award at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Globe nomination. In addition, the film also won an Academy Award for Best Sound. Bird and Lover Man "A recording for the Dial label from July 29, 1946, provides evidence of his condition. Prior to this session, Parker drank about a quart of whiskey. According to the liner notes of Charlie Parker on Dial Volume 1, Parker missed most of the first two bars of his first chorus on the track, "Max Making Wax." When he finally did come in, he swayed wildly and once spun all the way around, going badly off mic. On the next tune, "Lover Man", producer Ross Russell physically supported Parker in front of the microphone. On "Bebop" (the final track Parker recorded that evening) he begins a solo with a solid first eight bars. On his second eight bars, however, Parker begins to struggle, and a desperate Howard McGhee, the trumpeter on this session, shouts, "Blow!" at Parker. McGhee's bellow is audible on the recording. Charles Mingus considered this version of "Lover Man" to ...
- published: 04 Mar 2010
- views: 34358
- author: FirePhoenix70
bird 1988
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:51
- Updated: 27 Nov 2012
jazz on film, charlie parker, bird
http://wn.com/bird_1988
jazz on film, charlie parker, bird
- published: 13 Oct 2009
- views: 8533
- author: schumacher1956
Bird
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:48
- Updated: 14 Nov 2012
Bird is a 1988 American biographical film, produced and directed by Clint Eastwood with the screenplay written by Joel Oliansky. The film is a tribute to the life and music of jazz saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker. It is constructed as a collage of scenes from Parker's life, from his childhood in Kansas City, through his marriage to Chan Richardson, to his early death at the age of thirty-four. Forest Whitaker's performance as Parker earned him the Best Actor award at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Globe nomination. In addition, the film also won an Academy Award for Best Sound. Directed by Clint Eastwood Produced by Clint Eastwood Written by Joel Oliansky Starring Forest Whitaker, Diane Venora Music by Lennie Niehaus Cinematography Jack N. Green Editing by Joel Cox from www.wikipedia.com
http://wn.com/Bird
Bird is a 1988 American biographical film, produced and directed by Clint Eastwood with the screenplay written by Joel Oliansky. The film is a tribute to the life and music of jazz saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker. It is constructed as a collage of scenes from Parker's life, from his childhood in Kansas City, through his marriage to Chan Richardson, to his early death at the age of thirty-four. Forest Whitaker's performance as Parker earned him the Best Actor award at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Globe nomination. In addition, the film also won an Academy Award for Best Sound. Directed by Clint Eastwood Produced by Clint Eastwood Written by Joel Oliansky Starring Forest Whitaker, Diane Venora Music by Lennie Niehaus Cinematography Jack N. Green Editing by Joel Cox from www.wikipedia.com
- published: 04 Mar 2010
- views: 13452
- author: FirePhoenix70
Michael Jordan v Larry Bird 1988
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:27
- Updated: 15 Nov 2012
1988 was an incredible year for Michael Jordan. He won his first MVP, Defensive Player of the year, All Star MVP, the Slam Dunk Contest, his second straight scoring title and led the Bulls to 50 wins. But at that time the best team in the East was still Larry Bird's Boston Celtics. The Celtics won this game. Bird had 44 points to Jordan's 39. Jordan got his revenge 3 days later though in a Bulls victory over the Celtics. Jordan had 46 points and the Bulls won 50 games for the first time in a season. I've done something a little different this time. Instead of just showing Jordan's highlights, I've shown Birds as well because this was a classic shoot out. Enjoy
http://wn.com/Michael_Jordan_v_Larry_Bird_1988
1988 was an incredible year for Michael Jordan. He won his first MVP, Defensive Player of the year, All Star MVP, the Slam Dunk Contest, his second straight scoring title and led the Bulls to 50 wins. But at that time the best team in the East was still Larry Bird's Boston Celtics. The Celtics won this game. Bird had 44 points to Jordan's 39. Jordan got his revenge 3 days later though in a Bulls victory over the Celtics. Jordan had 46 points and the Bulls won 50 games for the first time in a season. I've done something a little different this time. Instead of just showing Jordan's highlights, I've shown Birds as well because this was a classic shoot out. Enjoy
- published: 19 Jun 2007
- views: 381269
- author: jxn23
Zombie 5 - Killing Birds (1988) Trailer
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:34
- Updated: 17 Nov 2012
In Louisiana, a soldier returning from Vietnam finds his wife in bed with her lover and he kills them both as well as a couple of friends, but he is attacked by a bird and he loses his eyes. Years later, the bodies have not been found and the former soldier is now a bird specialist (Dr. Fred Brown) living in a house nearby the swamp. When a group of college students go to the swamp on an assignment to research a species of woodpecker that is almost extinct, they head to Dr. Brown's house to get some tips of how to find the rare bird. They drive through the swamp where they find the house where the murders happened and they decide to stay there. During the night, weird things happen. Directed by: Claudio Lattanzi
http://wn.com/Zombie_5_Killing_Birds_1988_Trailer
In Louisiana, a soldier returning from Vietnam finds his wife in bed with her lover and he kills them both as well as a couple of friends, but he is attacked by a bird and he loses his eyes. Years later, the bodies have not been found and the former soldier is now a bird specialist (Dr. Fred Brown) living in a house nearby the swamp. When a group of college students go to the swamp on an assignment to research a species of woodpecker that is almost extinct, they head to Dr. Brown's house to get some tips of how to find the rare bird. They drive through the swamp where they find the house where the murders happened and they decide to stay there. During the night, weird things happen. Directed by: Claudio Lattanzi
- published: 23 Apr 2011
- views: 17058
- author: KxKWarriorV
Fred Penner's Place Word Bird 1988
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 0:59
- Updated: 21 Nov 2012
WORD BIRD!
http://wn.com/Fred_Penner's_Place_Word_Bird_1988
WORD BIRD!
- published: 02 Oct 2010
- views: 16009
- author: Retrontario
RUF Ctr "Yellow Bird" (1988) Racing Demonstration
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 19:19
- Updated: 29 Nov 2012
Legendary RUF Yellow Bird getting rid of all its Porsche GT opponents @ Magny-Cours, France. Against latest GT3, GT3 RS, Cup and GT2 RS, the 1988 biturbo prepared by the Nello Racing Team lead easily the exhibition...
http://wn.com/RUF_Ctr_Yellow_Bird_1988_Racing_Demonstration
Legendary RUF Yellow Bird getting rid of all its Porsche GT opponents @ Magny-Cours, France. Against latest GT3, GT3 RS, Cup and GT2 RS, the 1988 biturbo prepared by the Nello Racing Team lead easily the exhibition...
- published: 29 Aug 2012
- views: 1259
- author: NelloRacing
- published: 06 Feb 2012
- views: 45
- author: TCMBrasil
1988 Three - Point Shootout Larry Bird vs Dale Ellis
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:25
- Updated: 02 Dec 2012
http://wn.com/1988_Three_Point_Shootout_Larry_Bird_vs_Dale_Ellis
- published: 26 Apr 2012
- views: 17337
- author: Mark Anthony Cash Garrett
1988 NBA Playoffs: Larry Bird vs Dominique Wilkins
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:52
- Updated: 30 Nov 2012
1988 nba playoffs atlanta hawks vs boston celtics
http://wn.com/1988_NBA_Playoffs_Larry_Bird_vs_Dominique_Wilkins
1988 nba playoffs atlanta hawks vs boston celtics
- published: 08 Apr 2008
- views: 20564
- author: ginoongkamote
Ruf Ctr "Yellow Bird" (1988) - Magny-Cours Août 2012
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:24
- Updated: 02 Dec 2012
Face aux modèles GT les plus récents du constructeur allemand Porsche (GT3, GT3 RS, Cup, GT2 RS), la "Yellow bird" du préparateur Ruf (1988) se défait de ses concurrents avec une facilité déconcertante. Embarquez en backseat view (GoPro HD) dans ce biturbo mythique préparé par la Nello Racing Team... Other videos: www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Ruf_Ctr_Yellow_Bird_1988_Magny-Cours_Août_2012
Face aux modèles GT les plus récents du constructeur allemand Porsche (GT3, GT3 RS, Cup, GT2 RS), la "Yellow bird" du préparateur Ruf (1988) se défait de ses concurrents avec une facilité déconcertante. Embarquez en backseat view (GoPro HD) dans ce biturbo mythique préparé par la Nello Racing Team... Other videos: www.youtube.com
- published: 27 Aug 2012
- views: 3477
- author: NelloRacing
Larry Bird 49 pts vs. Suns (1988)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:05
- Updated: 29 Nov 2012
Larry Bird 49 pts, 12 rbs, 7 asts and hits clutch shots.
http://wn.com/Larry_Bird_49_pts_vs_Suns_1988
Larry Bird 49 pts, 12 rbs, 7 asts and hits clutch shots.
- published: 03 Aug 2009
- views: 17961
- author: fatal9ish
Larry Bird and Dominique Wilkins Shootout 1988 Game 7
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:42
- Updated: 20 Sep 2012
1988 Game 7 of the ECSFs, The greatest NBA Duel ever between Larry Bird and Dominique Wilkins.
http://wn.com/Larry_Bird_and_Dominique_Wilkins_Shootout_1988_Game_7
1988 Game 7 of the ECSFs, The greatest NBA Duel ever between Larry Bird and Dominique Wilkins.
- published: 13 Mar 2009
- views: 14668
- author: MerkinMuffly
Larry Bird - 39/17/10 vs. Spurs (1988)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:46
- Updated: 27 Oct 2012
Bird catches fire in the third quarter and even throws down a facial dunk at the end. There was a stretch where he scored 11 straight and I thought it was best to leave it unedited.
http://wn.com/Larry_Bird_39_17_10_vs_Spurs_1988
Bird catches fire in the third quarter and even throws down a facial dunk at the end. There was a stretch where he scored 11 straight and I thought it was best to leave it unedited.
- published: 26 Sep 2009
- views: 11161
- author: fatal9ish
L. Bird & K. McHale vs Z. Paspalj & V. Divac (Celtics vs Yugoslavia, 1988 McDonald's Open)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:09
- Updated: 25 Oct 2012
Awesome matchup during the semifinal match between Celtics and Yugoslavia played at McDonald's Open in 1988.
http://wn.com/L_Bird_K_McHale_vs_Z_Paspalj_V_Divac_Celtics_vs_Yugoslavia,_1988_McDonald's_Open
Awesome matchup during the semifinal match between Celtics and Yugoslavia played at McDonald's Open in 1988.
- published: 02 Aug 2010
- views: 11066
- author: TeamDarko
Larry Bird 34 pts vs D.Wilkins 47 pts, playoffs 1988 celtics vs hawks game 7
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:24
- Updated: 01 Dec 2012
man,what a game.........larry and dominique had a great shootout in the 4th quarter, larry with 20 points and wilkins with 17 points,,thats in game 7 ,incredible.....boston won that game 118-116......fun game........
http://wn.com/Larry_Bird_34_pts_vs_DWilkins_47_pts,_playoffs_1988_celtics_vs_hawks_game_7
man,what a game.........larry and dominique had a great shootout in the 4th quarter, larry with 20 points and wilkins with 17 points,,thats in game 7 ,incredible.....boston won that game 118-116......fun game........
- published: 12 May 2012
- views: 5246
- author: smoki2323
Bird (44pts/11rebs/8asts) vs. Drexler (36pts/8rebs/8asts) (1988)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 14:59
- Updated: 25 Nov 2012
Larry and Clyde put up a great show at The Boston Garden, both coming close to triple doubles. Although Portland has the lead for most of the game and Drexler has one heck of a 3rd quarter, Larry Bird wins the game for Boston with some clutch 4th quarter baskets. All points, rebounds and assists from both Bird and Drexler are included. February 24, 1988.
http://wn.com/Bird_44pts_11rebs_8asts_vs_Drexler_36pts_8rebs_8asts_1988
Larry and Clyde put up a great show at The Boston Garden, both coming close to triple doubles. Although Portland has the lead for most of the game and Drexler has one heck of a 3rd quarter, Larry Bird wins the game for Boston with some clutch 4th quarter baskets. All points, rebounds and assists from both Bird and Drexler are included. February 24, 1988.
- published: 04 May 2011
- views: 10243
- author: LamarMatic
Larry Bird - 33/7/8 vs. Jordan's Bulls (1988)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:24
- Updated: 06 Nov 2012
Bird put on a shooting clinic in the first half and then a passing one in the second half. You see a nice variety of Bird's passing repertoire in this game as he made several blind, no look, touch and left handed passes. Like with most of the Celtic-Bull games in the '86-'88 stretch, Bird outplayed Jordan easily and extended both his individual and team dominance in heads up matches.
http://wn.com/Larry_Bird_33_7_8_vs_Jordan's_Bulls_1988
Bird put on a shooting clinic in the first half and then a passing one in the second half. You see a nice variety of Bird's passing repertoire in this game as he made several blind, no look, touch and left handed passes. Like with most of the Celtic-Bull games in the '86-'88 stretch, Bird outplayed Jordan easily and extended both his individual and team dominance in heads up matches.
- published: 22 Jan 2010
- views: 9088
- author: fatal9ish
Larry Bird, Kevin McHale & Drazen Petrovic (Celtics vs Real Madrid, 1988 McDonald's open)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:55
- Updated: 26 Nov 2012
Boston Celtics defeated Real Madrid in the final of 1988 McDonald's Open 111-96
http://wn.com/Larry_Bird,_Kevin_McHale_Drazen_Petrovic_Celtics_vs_Real_Madrid,_1988_McDonald's_open
Boston Celtics defeated Real Madrid in the final of 1988 McDonald's Open 111-96
- published: 03 Aug 2010
- views: 14993
- author: TeamDarko
Michael Jordan 1988/89: 52 and 46 pts. Vs. Bird & Celtics
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:18
- Updated: 27 Nov 2012
What can you say? MJ always came up big against the greatest teams and players. In just the 4th game of 1989, MJ would get his usual 52 on Larry's squad. In their last meeting, he got his usual 46. Both games are here. MJ attacked with balance - shooting athletic jumpers, driving, dunking, stealing and so forth. There are a couple of rare, spectacular moves in each game.
http://wn.com/Michael_Jordan_1988_89_52_and_46_pts_Vs_Bird_Celtics
What can you say? MJ always came up big against the greatest teams and players. In just the 4th game of 1989, MJ would get his usual 52 on Larry's squad. In their last meeting, he got his usual 46. Both games are here. MJ attacked with balance - shooting athletic jumpers, driving, dunking, stealing and so forth. There are a couple of rare, spectacular moves in each game.
- published: 02 Aug 2006
- views: 172577
- author: hoopsencyclopedia
Jackie McLean Bird Lives 1988
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:08
- Updated: 14 Nov 2011
Jackie McLean (as) Rene McLean (ts, fl) Hotep Idris Galeta (p) Nat Reeves (b) Cal Allen (d)
http://wn.com/Jackie_McLean_Bird_Lives_1988
Jackie McLean (as) Rene McLean (ts, fl) Hotep Idris Galeta (p) Nat Reeves (b) Cal Allen (d)
- published: 18 Mar 2011
- views: 1628
- author: José Soares
1988 Thunderbird High School car
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:29
- Updated: 20 Nov 2012
This is my 1988 T-bird. For more info on the HO swap go here: www.coolcats.net also for great info on these cars go to: www.foxtbirdcougarforums.com So far it has had: -CHE adjustable upper and lower rear control arms -steeda springs -8.8 3.73 traction lok rearend from '87 Turbo coupe with disk brakes -Mustang 5.0 11" front brakes/spindles -17x9 Cobra R's -turbo coupe hood & steering wheel -subframe connectors -5.0 HO motor -new paint
http://wn.com/1988_Thunderbird_High_School_car
This is my 1988 T-bird. For more info on the HO swap go here: www.coolcats.net also for great info on these cars go to: www.foxtbirdcougarforums.com So far it has had: -CHE adjustable upper and lower rear control arms -steeda springs -8.8 3.73 traction lok rearend from '87 Turbo coupe with disk brakes -Mustang 5.0 11" front brakes/spindles -17x9 Cobra R's -turbo coupe hood & steering wheel -subframe connectors -5.0 HO motor -new paint
- published: 21 Feb 2009
- views: 16125
- author: 50tbrd88
photo: AP / Lefteris Pitarakis
30 Nov 2012
- For historians, it represents a treasure trove of boundless rewards and an opportunity to revisit some of the most enduring myths about Britain's colonial past. But for some of those still living with the physical and psychological scars, the release of thousands of previously secret government-held documents offers fresh hope of finally gaining a measure of justice for their suffering under British rule ... 1096 Source.. Al Jazeera ... ;">....(size: 22.4Kb)
photo: USAF / Senior Airman Patrice Clarke
02 Dec 2012
There have been "multiple explosions" near an airfield at a US base in eastern Afghanistan, Nato has said. Afghan intelligence officials told the BBC seven suicide attackers targeted the base in Jalalabad, and witnesses said that gunfire was heard ... Counter claims ... There were no Nato casualties in the attack, officials said ... ....(size: 1.7Kb)
photo: AP / Patrick Semansky
02 Dec 2012
Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. Much like the United States, the Vikings were a paradoxical and duplicitous civilization. Not only were they highly skilled shipbuilders and tremendous explorers, not to mention their expertise in the fishing, farming and trading industries, but they helped establish and contribute to the nation-states of France, England, Ireland, Germany, Russia, and Iceland ... This came to mind when Pfc....(size: 5.5Kb)
photo: UN / Shareef Sarhan
02 Dec 2012
Article by WN.com Guest Writer Gilad Atzmon. Israel suffered a humiliating defeat at The UN recently. The nations of the world stood up and said NO to the Jewish state - NO to Israeli occupation, NO to Israeli human rights abuse, NO to Jewish racism. In effect, they stood up and confessed to serious Zio-fatigue ... This is a very good news indeed. But interestingly, this united opposition to Israel is not in response to Israeli strength ... ....(size: 2.6Kb)
photo: US NARA
30 Nov 2012
Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. Staring at the quote on the small granite monument which read. "They said to one another, behold here comes the dreamer...Let us slay him...And we shall see what will become of his dreams," I tried to understand that fateful moment when a shot shattered heaven and earth ... Martin Luther King, Jr. Straining my ears, I tried to hear Rev. Abernathy cry out, "Oh my God, Martin's been shot!" ... Dr....(size: 6.5Kb)
The Inquisitr
03 Dec 2012
The Federal government has also banned controlled burns in the region, which has led to a marked increase in serious forest fires ... The bird has fallen prey to another, more powerful owl, the Barred Owl ... The Barred Owl is known to slam into the weaker birds at high speed and rip them to shreds with their talons or decapitate the Spotted Owl in their nests....(size: 6.0Kb)
The Times of India
03 Dec 2012
What are the chances that a chicken infected with bird flu will land on your plate? Zero. What are the chances that a bird flu infection will increase the price you pay for chicken and eggs? 100%. A virulent and deadly infection called avian influenza or bird flu is present in our country ... Bird flu attacks can wipe out entire flocks ... For an average-sized farm of 10,000 birds, this means losing minimum Rs 1 lakh and 20,000 kg meat....(size: 3.4Kb)
noodls
03 Dec 2012
Subaru's fourth generation Forester debuts in February with a bold new look and multiple technical innovations including X-Mode for autos, providing excellent control on poor surfaces and hills. ... New Forester offers smart practicality and added value, with pricing to be announced in January, 2013 ... Normally aspirated automatic Forester 2.5i, 2.5i-L and 2.5i-S feature the new generation 2.5-litre engine....(size: 6.2Kb)
Chicago Tribune
03 Dec 2012
The Salt Lake Tribune
03 Dec 2012
The bins of peanuts outside were uncovered, food safety inspectors reported, allowing birds to do on them what birds do. Employees failed to wash their hands regularly or to practice other basic hygiene. Salmonella was found in dozens of locations throughout the plant, which had shipped jars of peanut butter even though its own tests showed they were tainted with the potentially deadly bacteria ... And yet Sunland Inc ... Join the Discussion ... ....(size: 4.6Kb)
Sporting News
03 Dec 2012
NASHVILLE, Tenn ... Vanderbilt coach James Franklin received a long-term contract to remain with the Commodores. (AP Photo) ... Franklin said this new contract helps as he tried to focus first on Wake Forest, which Vandy beat 55-21 in the regular season finale, and now recruiting ... Williams has said he and Franklin will be looking at Stanford and California, which built new stadiums, and at Wake Forest, which is renovating its stadium ... ....(size: 5.4Kb)
photo: WN / Emico Silalahi
03 Dec 2012
In one of numerous reported attacks on the endangered big cats, villagers near the Bangladesh-India border bludgeoned a tiger to death earlier this month after it strayed from the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest ... networks and the loss of habitat which encourages the animals to leave the forest in search of food....(size: 4.7Kb)
San Francisco Chronicle
03 Dec 2012
JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) â Wildlife officials say area closures and travel restrictions are in effect in the Bridger-Teton National Forest and National Elk Refuge to protect wildlife wintering grounds ... ___. Information from....(size: 1.0Kb)
Knox News
03 Dec 2012
... Cumberland Forest manager Martin Schubert discuss a fracking research project Monday in Morgan County....(size: 0.6Kb)
Sporting News
03 Dec 2012
Otago Daily Times
03 Dec 2012
But participants said it was all a bit of fun, despite a few last-minute doubts ... Andre Pointon's conviction for offensive behaviour was overturned last week in the High Court in Tauranga after he was seen running naked along a forest track. He hoped the decision will change attitudes in New Zealand ... ....(size: 1.8Kb)
Kansas City Star
03 Dec 2012
He is charged with tracking down diseases and preventing them from coming to the United States, a job that has been glamorized in Richard Preston's true-story "Hot Zone," which tracks the Ebola virus from the African rain forest to the U.S., and the movie "Contagion," where epidemiologists chase a lethal pandemic ... "It was hot and humid and we worked in a densely forested area surrounded by curious people," Montgomery said ... ....(size: 6.6Kb)
noodls
03 Dec 2012
Sydney Swans Media 12.03 PM Mon 03 Dec, 2012. Mike Pyke marks in the Swans' forward 50 in the second quarter against St Kilda Related content. Today's headlines. The Road to Greatness - R17. Mon, Dec 03, 12 Premiership Cup hits the road. Mon, Dec 03, 12 Swans maintain Tippett commitment. Fri, Nov 30, 12 ... Round 17 v St Kilda ... Goodes 2, Jack 2, Reid 2, Bird, O'Keefe, Jetta, Roberts-Thomson, Grundy, Kennedy, McGlynn, McVeigh ... First....(size: 3.5Kb)
| Forest Whitaker | |
|---|---|
 Forest Whitaker, February 2009 |
|
| Born | Forest Steven Whitaker (1961-07-15) July 15, 1961 (age 50) Longview, Texas, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Cal Poly Pomona, University of Southern California, Drama Studio London, New York University |
| Occupation | Actor, producer, director |
| Years active | 1982–present |
| Spouse | Keisha Nash (1996–present) 2 children |
Forest Steven Whitaker (born July 15, 1961) is an American actor, producer, and director. He has earned a reputation for intensive character study work for films such as Bird and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,[1][2] and for his recurring role as ex-LAPD Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh on the gritty, award-winning television series, The Shield.[3] Whitaker won an Academy Award for his performance as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the 2006 film The Last King of Scotland. Whitaker has also won a Golden Globe and a BAFTA.
Contents |
Early life[link]
Whitaker was born in Longview, Texas, and his family moved to South Central Los Angeles when he was four.[4] His father, Forest Whitaker, Jr., was an insurance salesman and the son of novelist Forest Whitaker, Sr. His mother, Laura Francis (née Smith), was a special education teacher who put herself through college and earned two Masters degrees while raising her children.[5][6] Whitaker has two younger brothers, Kenn and Damon, and an older sister, Deborah.
As a teenager, Whitaker commuted from Carson to wealthy Palisades High School on LA's West Side.[4] There, he was all-league defensive tackle on the football team quarterbacked by Jay Schroeder, a future NFL player.[6] While in high school, he also took voice lessons, performed in musicals, and caught the "acting bug"; his first role as an actor was the lead in Dylan Thomas' play, Under Milk Wood.[4] Whitaker graduated from "Pali High" in 1979.[7]
Whitaker then attended California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona)[8] on a football scholarship, but due to a debilitating back injury, he changed his major to music (voice). He toured England with the Cal Poly Chamber Singers in 1980. While still at Cal Poly, he briefly changed his major to drama. He was accepted to the Music Conservatory at the University of Southern California to study opera as a tenor, and subsequently was accepted into the University's Drama Conservatory.[6] He graduated from USC in 1982. He also earned a scholarship to the Berkeley, California branch of the Drama Studio London.[9] Whitaker has also pursued a bachelor's degree at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.[10]
Career[link]
Film work[link]
Whitaker has a long history of working with well-regarded film directors and fellow actors. In his first onscreen performance of note, he had a small role playing a high school football player in the 1982 film version of Cameron Crowe's coming-of-age teen-retrospective, Fast Times at Ridgemont High.[6] He co-starred alongside Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, and Sean Penn. In 1986, he appeared in Martin Scorsese's film, The Color of Money (with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise), and in Oliver Stone's Platoon. The following year, he co-starred with Robin Williams in the comedy Good Morning, Vietnam.
In 1988, Whitaker played in the film Bloodsport alongside Jean-Claude Van Damme and he had his first lead role starring as musician Charlie Parker in the Clint Eastwood-directed film, Bird. To prepare himself for the part, he sequestered himself in a loft with only a bed, couch, and saxophone,[1] having also conducted extensive research and taken alto sax lessons.[11] His performance, which has been called "transcendent,"[3] earned him the Best Actor award at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival[12] and a Golden Globe nomination. Whitaker continued to work with a number of well-known directors throughout the 1990s. He starred in the 1990 film Downtown with Anthony Edwards and Penelope Ann Miller. Neil Jordan cast him in the pivotal role of "Jody", a captive British soldier in his 1992 film, The Crying Game where Whitaker used an English accent. Todd McCarthy, of Variety, described Whitaker's performance as "big-hearted," "hugely emotional," and "simply terrific."[13] In 1994, he was a member of the cast that won the first ever National Board of Review Award for Best Acting by an Ensemble for Robert Altman's film, Prêt-à-Porter. He gave a "characteristically emotional performance"[14] in Wayne Wang and Paul Auster's 1995 film, Smoke.
File:Ghostdog4.jpg
Whitaker as the samurai, Ghost Dog
Whitaker played a serene, pigeon-raising, bushido-following, mob hit man in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, a 1999 film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. Many consider this to have been a "definitive role" for Whitaker.[3] In a manner similar to his preparation for Bird, he again immersed himself in his character's world—he studied Eastern philosophy and meditated for long hours "to hone his inner spiritual hitman."[1] Jarmusch has told interviewers that he developed the title character with Whitaker in mind; the New York Times review of the film observed that "[I]t's hard to think of another actor who could play a cold-blooded killer with such warmth and humanity."[15]
File:Battlefield earth screencap.jpg
Scene from Battlefield Earth, showing (left to right) Barry Pepper, John Travolta, and Whitaker in costume.
Whitaker next appeared in what has been called one of the "worst films ever made,"[16] the 2000 production of Battlefield Earth, based on the novel of the same name by L. Ron Hubbard. The film was widely criticized as a notorious commercial and critical disaster.[16][17] However, Whitaker's performance was lauded by the film's director, Roger Christian, who commented that, "Everybody's going to be very surprised" by Whitaker, who "found this huge voice and laugh."[18] Battlefield Earth "won" seven Razzie Awards; Whitaker was nominated for Worst Supporting Actor, but lost to his co-star, Barry Pepper.[19] He has since publicly apologized for his appearance in the film.[citation needed]
In 2001, Whitaker had a small, uncredited role in the Wong Kar-wai-directed The Follow, one of five short films produced by BMW that year to promote its cars.[20] He co-starred in Joel Schumacher's 2002 thriller, Phone Booth, with Kiefer Sutherland and Colin Farrell. That year, he also co-starred with Jodie Foster in Panic Room. His performance as the film's "bad guy" was described as "a subtle chemistry of aggression and empathy."[4]
File:Lastking2.jpg
Whitaker as General Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland'
Whitaker's 2006 portrayal of Idi Amin in the film, The Last King of Scotland earned him positive reviews by critics as well as multiple awards and honors.[21][22] To portray the dictator, Whitaker gained 50 pounds, learned to play the accordion, and immersed himself in research.[2] He read books about Amin, watched news and documentary footage, and spent time in Uganda meeting with Amin's friends, relatives, generals, and victims; he also learned Swahili and mastered Amin's East African accent.[1] His performance earned him the 2007 Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, making him the fourth African-American actor in history to do so, joining the ranks of Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, and Jamie Foxx.[23] For that same role, he was also recognized with a Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild Award, BAFTA Award, and accolades from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the National Board of Review, and the Broadcast Film Critics Association among others.[24]
In 2007, Whitaker played Dr. James Farmer Sr. in The Great Debaters, for which he received an Image Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor.[25] In 2008, Whitaker appeared in three films, first as a business man known only as Happiness, who likes butterflies, in the film The Air I Breathe. He also portrayed a rogue police captain in Street Kings, and a heroic tourist in Vantage Point.
Television work[link]
After completing several films in the early 1980s, Whitaker gained additional roles in multiple television shows. On the series, Diff'rent Strokes, he played a bully in the 1985 episode "Bully for Arnold".[26] That same year, Whitaker also played the part of a comic book salesman in the Amazing Stories episode "Gather Ye Acorns".[27] He appeared in the first and second parts of North and South in 1985 and 1986. Throughout the 1990s, Whitaker mainly had roles in television films, including Criminal Justice, The Enemy Within, and Witness Protection.
From 2002 to 2003, Whitaker was the host and narrator of 44 new episodes of the Rod Serling classic, The Twilight Zone, which lasted one season on UPN.[28] After working in several film roles, he returned to television in 2006 when he joined the cast of FX's police serial The Shield, as Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh, who was determined to prove that the lead character, Vic Mackey, is a dirty cop. As opposed to with his previous character work, Whitaker states that he merely had to draw on his childhood years growing up in South Central Los Angeles for the role.[3] He received rave reviews for his performance—Variety called it a "crackling-good guest stint"[29]—and he reprised the role in the show's 2007 season.
In the fall of 2006, Whitaker started a multi-episode story arc on ER as Curtis Ames, a man who comes into the ER with a cough, but quickly faces the long-term consequences of a paralyzing stroke; he then takes out his anger on Doctors Luka Kovač and Abby Lockhart. Whitaker received a 2007 Emmy Award nomination for his performance on the series.[30] Also in 2006, Whitaker appeared in T.I.'s music video "Live in the Sky" alongside Jamie Foxx.[31]
Whitaker has recently been cast in the Criminal Minds spin-off, Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior.[32]
Producing and directing[link]
Whitaker branched out into producing and directing in the 1990s. He co-produced and co-starred in A Rage in Harlem in 1991. He made his directorial debut with a grim film about inner-city gun violence, Strapped, for HBO in 1993. In 1995, he directed his first feature, Waiting to Exhale, which was based on the Terry McMillan novel of the same name. Roger Ebert observed that the tone of the film resembled Whitaker's own acting style: "measured, serene, confident."[33] Whitaker also directed co-star Whitney Houston's music video of the movie's theme song, "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)".
Whitaker continued his directing career with the 1998 romantic comedy, Hope Floats, starring Sandra Bullock and Harry Connick, Jr. He directed Katie Holmes in the romantic comedy, First Daughter in 2004; he had co-starred with Holmes in Phone Booth in 2002. Whitaker served as an executive producer on First Daughter. He had previously gained experience as the executive producer of several made-for-television movies, most notably the 2002 Emmy-award winning Door to Door, starring William H. Macy. He produced these projects through his production company, Spirit Dance Entertainment, which he shut down in 2005 to concentrate on his acting career.[3][11]
Honors[link]
In addition to the numerous awards Whitaker won for his performance in The Last King of Scotland, he has also received several other honors. In September 2006, the 10th Annual Hollywood Film Festival presented him with its "Hollywood Actor of the Year Award," calling him "one of Hollywood's most accomplished actors."[34] He was honored at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2007, where he received the American Riviera Award.[35]
Previously, in 2005, the Deauville (France) Festival of American Film paid tribute to him.[36] Whitaker was the recipient of the 2,335th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on April 16, 2007.[37][38] He received an Honorary Degree from Xavier University of Louisiana in 2009 at the 82nd Commencement Ceremony.[39] He has also produced Monte Carlo.
Personal life[link]
Family[link]
In 1996, Whitaker married actress Keisha Nash, whom he met on the set of Blown Away.[2] The Whitakers have four children: two daughters together (Sonnet and True), his son (Ocean) from a previous relationship, and her daughter (Autumn) from a previous relationship. On Inside the Actors Studio, Whitaker said that a genetic test indicated he was of Igbo descent on his father's side, and Akan descent on his mother's side.[40]
Martial arts[link]
Whitaker studies yoga and has a black belt in kenpō.[2] He also trains in the Filipino martial art of Kali, under Dan Inosanto.
Ptosis[link]
Whitaker's left eye ptosis has been called "intriguing" by some critics[41] and "gives him a contemplative look."[42] Whitaker has explained that the condition is hereditary and that he has considered having surgery to correct it, not for cosmetic reasons but because it affects his vision.[43]
Activism[link]
Charity work[link]
Whitaker, who is a vegetarian,[2] recorded a public service announcement with his daughter, True, promoting vegetarianism on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).[44] He is also a supporter and public advocate for Hope North, a boarding school and vocational training center in northern Uganda for escaped child soldiers, orphans, and other young victims of the country's civil war.[45]
Politics[link]
In politics, Whitaker supported and spoke on behalf of Senator Barack Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign.[46] On April 6, 2009, Whitaker was given a chieftancy title in Imo State, Nigeria. Whitaker, who was named a chief among the Igbo community of Nkwerre, was given the title Nwannedinamba of Nkwerre, which means A Brother in a Foreign Land.
Whitaker was inducted as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Peace and Reconciliation, in a ceremony at UNESCO headquarters on June 21, 2011. As Goodwill Ambassador, Whitaker works with UNESCO to support and develop initiatives that empower youths and keep them from entering or remaining in cycles of violence. At the induction ceremony, U.S. Ambassador to UNESCO David Killion described Whitaker as a "perfect choice as a Goodwill Ambassador...He has exemplified compassion in every area of his life, with humility and grace. He does this because it's the right thing to do."
In May 2011, Whitaker co-founded with Dr. Aldo Civico the International Institute for Peace (IIP) at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Launched during the international Newark Peace Education Summit, IIP’s mission is to develop programs and strategic partnerships to address cutting-edge issues such as increasing citizen security through community-building; the role of women and spiritual and religious leaders in peace-building; the impact of climate change; and the reduction of poverty. Whitaker serves as chairman of IIP while Civico, who teaches sociology and anthropology at Rutgers-Newark, is the director. IIP operates under the auspices of UNESCO as a Category 2 Center.
Filmography[link]
| Year | Title |
|---|---|
| 1993 | Strapped |
| 1995 | Waiting to Exhale |
| 1998 | Hope Floats |
| 2004 | First Daughter |
| Year | Title | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1982 | Making The Grade | Episode "Marriage David Style" | |
| 1983 | Cagney & Lacey | Night Manager | Episode "The Grandest Jewel Thief of Them All" |
| 1984 | Trapper John, M.D. | Lewis Jordan | Episode "School Nurse" |
| 1984 | Hill Street Blues | Floyd Green | Episode "Blues for Mr. Green" |
| 1985 | Diff'rent Strokes | Herman | Episode "Bully for Arnold" |
| 1985 | Grand Baby, TheThe Grand Baby | Television movie | |
| 1985 | Fall Guy, TheThe Fall Guy | Friend | Episode "Spring Break" |
| 1986 | Amazing Stories | Jerry | Episode "Gather Ye Acorns" |
| 1987 | Hands of a Stranger | Sergeant Delaney | Television movie |
| 1990 | Criminal Justice | Jessie Williams | Television movie |
| 1993 | Lush Life | Buddy Chester | Television movie |
| 1993 | Last Light | Fred Whitmore | Television movie |
| 1994 | Enemy Within, TheThe Enemy Within | Colonel MacKenzie 'Mac' Casey | Television movie |
| 1996 | Rebound: The Legend of Earl "The Goat" Manigault | Mr. Rucker | Television movie |
| 1999 | Witness Protection | Steven Beck | Television movie |
| 2001 | Feast of All Saints | Daguerreotypist Picard | Television movie |
| 2003 | Deacons for Defense | Marcus Clay | Television movie |
| 2002– 2003 |
Twilight Zone, TheThe Twilight Zone | Host / Narrator | 44 episodes |
| 2006– 2007 |
ER | Curtis Ames | 6 episodes |
| 2006– 2007 |
The Shield | Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh | (Seasons 5 and 6) |
| 2007– 2009 |
American Dad! | Turlington | 3 episodes |
| 2010 | Criminal Minds | Sam Cooper | Episode "The Fight" |
| 2011 | Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior | Sam Cooper | Spin-off |
References[link]
- ^ a b c d "In general, he rules." The Boston Globe. October 1, 2006.
- ^ a b c d e "Forest Whitaker: The King Of The Oscars?" CBS News. February 4, 2007.
- ^ a b c d e Sternbergh, Adam. "Out of the Woods: How Forest Whitaker escaped his career slump." New York. January 9, 2006.
- ^ a b c d Patterson, John. "The bigger picture." The Guardian. dildo 20, 2002.
- ^ "Forest Whitaker Biography (1961–)." FilmReference.com.
- ^ a b c d "Forest Whitaker". Inside the Actors Studio. episode 1. season 13. December 11, 2006. http://www.bravotv.com/Inside_the_Actors_Studio/guest/Forest_Whitaker.
- ^ "Bringing Home the Oscars." Palisadian-Post. February 28, 2007.
- ^ "Cal Poly Pomona". CSU Mentor. http://www.csumentor.edu/campustour/undergraduate/1/Cal_Poly_Pomona/Cal_Poly_Pomona5.html. Retrieved September 12, 2008.
- ^ Joshua Rich. "Spotlight: Forest Whitaker." EW.com.
- ^ Laura Randall "BLACKBOARD: Independent Study; A Twin Peek: What The Stars Do at N.Y.U." "NY Times".
- ^ a b Longino, Bob. "The power of Forest Whitaker." The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. October 12, 2006.
- ^ "Festival de Cannes: Bird". festival-cannes.com. http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/archives/ficheFilm/id/316/year/1988.html. Retrieved July 25, 2009.
- ^ McCarthy, Todd. "The Crying Game (Review)." Variety. September 11, 1992.
- ^ Stratton, David. "Smoke (Review)." Variety. February 20, 1995.
- ^ Scott, A.O. "'Ghost Dog': Passions of Emptiness in an Essay on Brutality." New York Times. March 3, 2000.
- ^ a b Campbell, Duncan. "Cult Classic." Guardian Unlimited. May 31, 2005.
- ^ Ebert, Roger. "Battlefield Earth." Chicago Sun-Times. May 12, 2000.
- ^ Graham, Bob. "What on Earth Are These Guys Doing?" San Francisco Chronicle. April 30, 2000.
- ^ "Hollywood honours its worst". BBC News. March 25, 2001. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/1240930.stm. Retrieved January 14, 2010.
- ^ The Follow. MSN Movies.
- ^ Hirshon, Nicholas (September 17, 2006). "Reel Study of a Tyrant". New York Daily News. http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/ny_local/2006/09/17/2006-09-17_reel_study__of_a_tyrant__ami.html. Retrieved January 14, 2010.
- ^ Hall, Sandra (February 2, 2007). "The Last King of Scotland". The Sydney Morning Herald. http://www.smh.com.au/news/film-reviews/the-last-king-of-scotland/2007/02/02/1169919520376.html. Retrieved January 14, 2010.
- ^ Cocks, Tim (February 26, 2007). "Ugandans laud Whitaker for Oscar". Independent Online. http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=136&art_id=nw20070226125714268C265243. Retrieved January 14, 2010.
- ^ Foley, Doug (February 24, 2007). "Here's a list of what honours the top movies and Oscar nominees have won" (Registration required). The Spectator. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/thestar/access/1222085061.html?dids=1222085061:1222085061&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Feb+24%2C+2007&author=Doug+Foley&pub=The+Spectator&desc=Here%27s+a+list+of+what+honours+the+top+movies+and+Oscar+nominees+have+won%3A&pqatl=google. Retrieved January 14, 2010.
- ^ "'Great Debaters' scores 8 Image Award nods". Associated Press. MSNBC. January 8, 2008. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22562299/wid/11915773/. Retrieved January 14, 2010.
- ^ Grover, Ronald (February 15, 2007). "The Academy Should Reward Whitaker". BusinessWeek. http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/feb2007/db20070215_662383.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily. Retrieved January 14, 2010.
- ^ Schultz, Paul (August 28, 2006). "VD Review: Amazing Stories — The Complete First Season". The Trades. http://www.the-trades.com/article.php?id=4594. Retrieved January 14, 2010.
- ^ The Twilight Zone (2002). epguides.com.
- ^ Lowry, Brian. "The Shield (Review)." Variety. March 27, 2007.
- ^ Kings, Susan (July 19, 2007). "Emmy nominations unveiled". Los Angeles Times. http://theenvelope.latimes.com/awards/emmys/env-emmynews19jul19,0,5451140.story. Retrieved January 14, 2010.
- ^ Reid, Shaheem; Yasmine Richard (August 14, 2006). "T.I. Gets Vulnerable, Jamie Foxx Provides Comic Relief On 'Live In The Sky' Video Set". MTV. http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1538463/20060811/t_i_.jhtml. Retrieved January 14, 2010.
- ^ Michael Ausiello (January 25, 2010). "Scoop: Forest Whitaker to headline 'Criminal Minds' spin-off!". Entertainment Weekly. http://ausiellofiles.ew.com/2010/01/25/forest-whitaker-criminal-minds-spin-off/. Retrieved April 7, 2010.
- ^ Ebert, Roger. "Waiting to Exhale (review)." Chicago Sun-Times. December 22, 1995.
- ^ "Press release." Hollywood Film Festival News. September 28, 2006.
- ^ "Festival 2007 Tributes." Santa Barbara International Film Festival. sbiff.org.
- ^ Nesselson, Lisa. "Deauville tips hat." Variety. August 18, 2005.
- ^ "Forest Whitaker Gets Star On Walk Of Fame." The Insider. April 17, 2007. Accessed January 9, 2009.
- ^ "Forest Whitaker Gets Walk of Fame Star". Associated Press. Fox News. April 16, 2007. http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_wires/2007Apr16/0,4675,PeopleWhitaker,00.html. Retrieved January 14, 2010.
- ^ "Commencement 2009". Xavier University of Louisiana. Accessed January 9, 2009.
- ^ James Lipton (Himself — Host), Forest Whitaker (Himself) (December 11, 2006). "Inside the Actors Studio: Forest Whitaker (2006)". Inside the Actors Studio. season 13. New York City, New York, USA. Bravomedia. Bravotv. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1013110/.
- ^ Wloszczyna, Susan. "'Last King' demanded obedience to their craft." USA Today. October 2, 2006.
- ^ Zackarek, Stephanie. "Jim Jarmusch adds lyrical violence to a Zen meditation on warriors hip-hop and ancient." Salon.com. March 9, 2000.
- ^ Sager, Mike. "What I've Learned: Forest Whitaker." Esquire. February 26, 2007.
- ^ PSA for PETA PETA TV.
- ^ "Hope North". Hope North. http://www.hopenorth.org. Retrieved September 17, 2010.
- ^ "Actor Forest Whitaker campaigns for Barack Obama at Grand Rapids Community College". The Grand Rapids Press. October 9, 2008. http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2008/10/actor_forest_whitaker_campaign.html. Retrieved January 14, 2010.
- ^ "'Phone' release delayed". Amarillo.com. Associated Press. October 18, 2002. http://www.amarillo.com/stories/101802/ent_phone.shtml. Retrieved August 21, 2010.
External links[link]
|
||||||||
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Whitaker, Forest |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | American actor and film director. |
| Date of birth | July 15, 1961 |
| Place of birth | Longview, Texas, U.S. |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
