• American Crow
• Andaman Treepie
• Animal
• Animalia
• Aphelocoma
• Australian Raven
• Aves
• Azure Jay
• Azure-hooded Jay
• Azure-naped Jay
• Azure-winged Magpie
• Banggai Crow
• Beautiful Jay
• Bird
• Bismarck Crow
• Black Magpie
• Black-billed Magpie
• Black-chested Jay
• Black-collared Jay
• Black-faced Treepie
• Black-throated Jay
• Blue Jay
• Bornean Treepie
• Bougainville Crow
• Brown Jay
• Brown-headed Crow
• Brown-necked Raven
• Bushy-crested Jay
• Cape Crow
• Carrion Crow
• Cayenne Jay
• Chatham Raven
• Chihuahuan Raven
• Chordata
• Chordate
• Chough
• Cissa (genus)
• Clark's Nutcracker
• Collared Crow
• Common Raven
• Corvidae
• Corvus (biology)
• Corvus (genus)
• Corvus albicollis
• Corvus antipodum
• Corvus corax
• Corvus coronoides
• Corvus crassirostris
• Corvus cryptoleucus
• Corvus mellori
• Corvus moriorum
• Corvus rhipidurus
• Corvus ruficollis
• Corvus tasmanicus
• Crow
• Crypsirina
• Cuban Crow
• Curl-crested Jay
• Cyanocitta
• Cyanocorax
• Cyanolyca
• Daurian Jackdaw
• Dendrocitta
• Dwarf Jay
• Eastern Carrion Crow
• Eurasian Jay
• Europe
• European Magpie
• Fan-tailed Raven
• Fish Crow
• Flores Crow
• Florida Scrub Jay
• Forest Raven
• Formosan Blue Magpie
• Garrulus
• Genus
• Gray Jay
• Green Jay
• Green Magpie
• Grey Crow
• Grey Treepie
• Ground jay
• Hawaiian Crow
• Hooded Crow
• Hooded Treepie
• House Crow
• Island Scrub Jay
• Jackdaw
• Jamaican Crow
• Jay
• Jungle Crow
• Korean Magpie
• Lanceolated Jay
• Lidth's Jay
• Little Crow (bird)
• Little Raven
• Long-billed Crow
• Magpie
• Magpie-jays
• Mariana Crow
• Mesopotamian Crow
• Mexican Jay
• Mongolian Ground-jay
• Neognathae
• Neornithes
• New Caledonian Crow
• New Zealand Raven
• North America
• Northwestern Crow
• Nutcracker (bird)
• Omnivorous
• Palm Crow
• Pander's Ground Jay
• Passeriformes
• Passerine
• Perisoreus
• Persian Ground-jay
• Piapiac
• Pica (genus)
• Pied Crow
• Pinyon Jay
• Piping Crow
• Plush-crested Jay
• Purplish Jay
• Purplish-backed Jay
• Raven
• Red-billed Chough
• Rook (bird)
• Rufous Treepie
• San Blas Jay
• Short-tailed Magpie
• Siberian Jay
• Sichuan Jay
• Silvery-throated Jay
• Sinaloa Crow
• Slender-billed Crow
• Somali Crow
• Spotted Nutcracker
• Steller's Jay
• Sunda Treepie
• Tamaulipas Crow
• Template Corvidae
• The Raven
• Thick-billed Raven
• Torresian Crow
• Tower of London
• Treepie
• True Crow
• Tufted Jay
• Turquoise Jay
• Unicolored Jay
• Urocissa
• Violaceous Jay
• Western Scrub Jay
• White-billed Crow
• White-collared Jay
• White-naped Jay
• White-necked Crow
• White-necked Raven
• White-tailed Jay
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• White-winged Magpie
• Wikipedia Stub
• Wikisource
• Xinjiang Ground-jay
• Yellow-billed Magpie
• Yucatan Jay
• 
  

• 
  Tower of London
  Coordinates: 51°30′29″N 0°4′34″W / 51.50806°N 0.07611°W / 51.50806; -0.07611
  Her Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress, more commonly known as the Tower of London, is a historic castle on the north bank of the River Thames in central London, England. It lies within the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, separated from the eastern edge of the City of London by the open space known as Tower Hill. It was founded towards the end of 1066 as part of the Norman Conquest of England. The White Tower, which gives the entire castle its name, was built by William the Conqueror in 1078, and was a resented symbol of oppression, inflicted upon London by the new ruling elite. The castle was used as a prison since at least 1100, although that was not its primary purpose. A grand palace early in its history, it served as a royal residence. As a whole, the Tower is a complex of several buildings set within two concentric rings of defensive walls and a moat. There were several phases of expansion, mainly under Kings Richard the Lionheart, Henry III, and Edward I in the 12th and 13th centuries. The general layout established by the late 13th century remains despite later activity on the site.
  
  wn.com/Tower_of_London

• 
  Adam Sandler
  Adam Richard Sandler (born September 9, 1966) is an American actor, comedian, screenwriter, musician and film producer. After becoming a Saturday Night Live cast member, Sandler went on to star in several Hollywood feature films that grossed over $100 million at the box office. He is best known for his comedic roles, such as in the films Billy Madison (1995), Happy Gilmore (1996), The Waterboy (1998), Big Daddy (1999), and Mr. Deeds (2002), though he has ventured into more dramatic territory. In 1999, Sandler founded Happy Madison, a film and television production company that has produced numerous films and developed the 2007 television series Rules of Engagement.
  Adam Sandler was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jewish parents, Stanley, an electrical engineer, and Judy Sandler, a nursery school teacher. When he was five, his family moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, where he attended Manchester Central High School. He found he was a natural comic, and nurtured his talent while at New York University by performing regularly in clubs and on campuses. Sandler graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 1988.
  
  wn.com/Adam_Sandler
• Adrian Lester
  Adrian Lester (born 14 August 1968) is a British actor, director, and writer.
  Lester was born in Birmingham, England, the son of Jamaican immigrants Monica, a medical secretary, and Reginald, a manager for a contract cleaning company. Lester sang as a boy treble in the choir of St. Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham. He began acting with the Birmingham Youth Theatre, attended Joseph Chamberlain VI Form College and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Lester is married to actress Lolita Chakrabarti. They live in South East London with their two daughters, both of whom were born in Lambeth, London: Lila Harvey Chakrabarti (born 2001) and Jasmine Harvey Chakrabarti (born 2004).
  In 1993, he played Anthony Hope in the Royal National Theatre's production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
  Lester is known for playing a big-time con artist named Michael "Mickey Bricks" Stone in the first three series BBC TV series Hustle between 2004 and 2012. The character was written out of the fourth series and replaced by Ashley Walters, although he returned from the fifth series onwards. In the United States, he played campaign manager Henry Burton in Mike Nichols's 1998 film Primary Colors, based on the novel by Anonymous (Joe Klein). His character is believed to represent George Stephanopoulos. This part earned him a Chicago Film Critics Association award nomination for "Most Promising Actor".
  
  wn.com/Adrian_Lester
• 
  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.
  
  wn.com/Al_Pacino
• 
  Alan Bates
  Sir Alain Arthur Bates CBE (17 February 1934 – 27 December 2003) was an English actor who came to prominence in the 1960s, a time of high creativity in British cinema, when he appeared in films ranging from the popular children's story Whistle Down the Wind to the "kitchen sink" drama A Kind of Loving. He is also known for his performance with Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek, as well as his roles in King of Hearts, Georgy Girl, Far From the Madding Crowd, and The Fixer, which gave him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. In 1969, he starred in the Ken Russell film Women in Love with Oliver Reed and Glenda Jackson.
  Bates went on to star in The Go-Between, An Unmarried Woman, Nijinsky, and The Rose with Bette Midler, as well as playing varied roles in television drama, including The Mayor of Casterbridge, Harold Pinter's The Collection, A Voyage Round My Father, An Englishman Abroad (as Guy Burgess), and Pack of Lies. He also continued to appear on the stage, notably in the plays of Simon Gray, such as Butley and Otherwise Engaged.
  
  wn.com/Alan_Bates
• 
  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.
  
  wn.com/Alec_Guinness
• 
  Alex Haley
  Alexander Murray Palmer Haley (August 11, 1921 – February 10, 1992) was an African-American writer. He is best known as the author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family and the co-author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
  Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, on August 11, 1921, and was the oldest of three brothers and a sister. Haley lived with his family in Henning, Tennessee, before he returned to Ithaca with his family when he was five years old. Haley's father was a professor of agriculture at Alabama A&M University. The younger Haley always spoke proudly of his father and the obstacles of racism he had overcome. Alex Haley was enrolled at Alcorn State University at age 15. Two years later he returned to his parents to inform them of his withdrawal from college. Simon Haley felt that Alex needed discipline and growth and convinced his son to enlist in the military when he turned 18. On May 24, 1939, Alex Haley began his twenty-year enlistment with the Coast Guard.
  He enlisted as a mess attendant and then became a Petty Officer Third Class in the rate of Steward, one of the few rates open to African Americans at that time. His Coast Guard service number was 212-548. It was during his service in the Pacific theater of operations that Haley taught himself the craft of writing stories. It is said that during his enlistment he was often paid by other sailors to write love letters to their girlfriends. He talked of how the greatest enemy he and his crew faced during their long sea voyages wasn't the Japanese but boredom.
  
  wn.com/Alex_Haley
• 
  Alfred Lunt
  Alfred Lunt (August 12, 1892 – August 3, 1977) was an American stage director and actor, often identified for a long-time professional partnership with his wife, actress Lynn Fontanne. Broadway's Lunt-Fontanne Theatre was named for them.
  Lunt received two Tony Awards, an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for 1931's The Guardsman and an Emmy Award for the Hallmark Hall of Fame's production of The Magnificent Yankee. He became a star in 1919 as the buffoonish lead in Booth Tarkington's Clarence, but soon distinguished himself in a variety of roles. The roles ranged from the Earl of Essex in Maxwell Anderson's Elizabeth the Queen, to a song-and-dance man touring the Balkans in Robert E. Sherwood's Idiot's Delight, a megalomaniacal tycoon in S. N. Behrman's Meteor and Jupiter himself in Jean Giraudoux's Amphitryon 38. His appearances in classical drama were infrequent, but he scored successes in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and Chekhov's The Seagull (in which Lunt played Trigorin, his wife played Arkadina, and Uta Hagen made her Broadway debut in the role of Nina). He was described by director and critic Harold Clurman as "universally acclaimed the finest American actor in the generation which followed John Barrymore; the Lunts are absolute angels."
  
  wn.com/Alfred_Lunt
• Andre Braugher
  Andre Braugher (born July 1, 1962) is an American actor. He is best known for his roles as Thomas Searles in the film Glory, as the fiery detective Frank Pembleton on Homicide: Life on the Street from 1993 to 1998 and again in the 2000 made-for-TV film, and as Owen Thoreau Jr. on the TNT show Men of a Certain Age.
  Braugher, the youngest of four children, was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Sally, a postal worker, and Floyd Braugher, a heavy-equipment operator. He attended St. Ignatius College Prep and later graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in theater in 1984. He then attended the Juilliard School's Drama Division (Group 17: 1984-1988), graduating with a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1988. He was acknowledged as the Most Outstanding Theater Student at graduation.^{[citation needed]}
  Braugher's first film role was in the 1989's Glory as Thomas Searles, a free, educated black from the North who joins the first black regiment in the Union Army.
  He subsequently moved on to a role on the television series Homicide: Life on the Street as Det. Frank Pembleton, a self-righteous, fiery, unyielding, Jesuit-educated police detective. Playing opposite Kyle Secor (who portrayed Det. Tim Bayliss), Braugher became the series' breakout star. He received Television Critics Association awards for individual achievement in drama in 1997 and 1998. He was nominated for an Emmy Award for best actor in a drama series in 1996 and 1998, winning in the latter year.
  
  wn.com/Andre_Braugher
• 
  Andrew Lloyd Webber
  Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber Kt. (born 22 March 1948) is an English composer and impresario of musical theatre.
  Lloyd Webber has achieved great popular success in musical theatre. Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End and on Broadway. He has composed 13 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass. He has also gained a number of honours, including a knighthood in 1992, followed by a peerage from the British Government for services to Music, seven Tony Awards, three Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, fourteen Ivor Novello Awards, seven Olivier Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2006.
  Several of his songs have been widely recorded and were hits outside of their parent musicals, notably "The Music of the Night" from The Phantom of the Opera, "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar, "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" and "You Must Love Me" from Evita, "Any Dream Will Do" from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and "Memory" from Cats.
  
  wn.com/Andrew_Lloyd_Webber
• 
  Angela Lansbury
  Angela Brigid Lansbury, CBE (born 16 October 1925) is an English-born US-naturalized actress and singer in theatre, television, and motion pictures. Her career has spanned eight decades and earned an unsurpassed number of performance Tony Awards (tied with Julie Harris), with five wins. Her first film appearance was in the film Gaslight (1944) as a conniving maid, for which she received an Academy Award nomination. Among her other films are The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Anastasia (1997).
  She expanded her repertoire to Broadway musicals and television in the 1950s and was particularly successful in Broadway productions of Gypsy, Mame and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Lansbury is perhaps best known to modern audiences for her twelve-year run starring as writer and sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the American television series Murder, She Wrote (1984–1996). Her recent roles include Lady Adelaide Stitch in the film Nanny McPhee (2005), Leona Mullen in the 2007 Broadway play Deuce, Madame Arcati in the 2009 Broadway revival of the play Blithe Spirit and Madame Armfeldt in the 2010 Broadway revival of the musical A Little Night Music.
  
  wn.com/Angela_Lansbury
• 
  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.
  
  wn.com/Anthony_Hopkins
• 
  Anthony LaPaglia
  Anthony M. LaPaglia ( /ləˈpɑːljə/; born 31 January 1959) is an Australian actor. He is best known for his role as FBI agent Jack Malone on the American TV series Without a Trace, for which he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Drama and for his portrayal of Simon Moon on the TV show Frasier for which he won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series. He is also known for his role as Barry "The Blade" Muldanno in The Client.
  LaPaglia was born in Adelaide, South Australia, the son of Maria Johannes (née Brendel), a secretary, and Gedio "Eddie" LaPaglia, an auto mechanic and car dealer. LaPaglia's mother was Dutch and his Italian father immigrated from Bovalino, Calabria at the age of eighteen. His younger brother, Jonathan LaPaglia, is also an actor, and his other brother, Michael, is a car wholesaler in Los Angeles.^{[citation needed]} LaPaglia attended Rostrevor College.
  LaPaglia first began his venture into dramatic art in his late teens, when he enrolled in an acting course at the South Australian Castings Agency (SA Castings) in Adelaide. The two and half year course was to be supplemented with a further three months, which would have included a "boot camp" and a trial listing with SA Castings. After completing one and half years of the course, LaPaglia left Adelaide for Los Angeles.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Anthony_LaPaglia
• 
  Art Carney
  Arthur William Matthew “Art” Carney (November 4, 1918 – November 9, 2003) was an American actor in film, stage, television and radio. He is best known for playing Ed Norton, opposite Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden in the situation comedy The Honeymooners.
  Carney, youngest of six sons (Fred, Jack, Ned, Phil, Robert), was born in Mount Vernon, New York, the son of Helen (née Farrell) and Edward Michael Carney, who was a newspaper man and publicist. His family was Irish American and Catholic. He attended A B Davis High School. Carney was drafted as an infantryman during World War II. During the Battle of Normandy, he was wounded in the leg by shrapnel and walked with a limp for the rest of his life.
  Carney was a comic singer with the Horace Heidt orchestra, which was heard often on radio during the 1930s, notably on the hugely successful Pot o' Gold, the first big-money giveaway show in 1939–41. Carney's film career began with an uncredited role in Pot o' Gold (1941), the radio program's spin-off feature film, playing a member of Heidt's band. Carney, a gifted mimic, worked steadily in radio during the 1940s, playing character roles and impersonating celebrities. In 1941 he was the house comic on the big band remote series, Matinee at Meadowbrook.
  
  wn.com/Art_Carney
• 
  Barbra Streisand
  Barbra Joan Streisand (/ˈstraɪsænd/; born April 24, 1942) is an American singer, actress, writer, film producer and director. She has won two Academy Awards, eight Grammy Awards, five Emmy Awards including one Daytime Emmy, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Peabody Award, and is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award.
  She is one of the most commercially and critically successful entertainers in modern entertainment history, with more than 71.5 million albums shipped in the United States and 140 million albums sold worldwide. She is the best-selling female artist on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Top Selling Artists list, the only female recording artist in the top ten, and the only artist outside of the rock and roll genre. Along with Frank Sinatra, Cher, and Shirley Jones, she shares the distinction of being awarded an acting Oscar and also recording a number-one single on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.
  
  wn.com/Barbra_Streisand
• 
  Barnard Hughes
  Bernard Aloysius Kiernan "Barnard" Hughes (July 16, 1915 – July 11, 2006) was an American actor of theater and film. Hughes became famous for a variety of roles; his most-notable roles came after middle age, and he was often cast as a dithering authority figure or grandfatherly elder.
  Hughes was born in Bedford Hills, New York, the son of Irish immigrants Madge (née Kiernan) and Owen Hughes. He attended La Salle Academy and Manhattan College in New York City. Hughes was married to actress Helen Stenborg. They married on April 19, 1950, and remained married until his death. Hughes was five days shy of his ninety-first birthday when he died. The Hugheses had two children, Tony Award-winning theatre director Doug and daughter Laura.
  Hughes changed the "e" in his first name to an "a" to help his acting career on the advice of a numerologist. Through high school and college, Hughes worked a series of odd jobs, including a stint as a dockworker and as a salesman at Macy's. He auditioned for the Shakespeare Fellowship Repertory company in New York City on the advice of a friend, and ended up joining the company for two years.
  
  wn.com/Barnard_Hughes
• 
  Basil Rathbone
  Sir Philip St. John Basil Rathbone, KBE, MC, Kt (13 June 1892 – 21 July 1967) was a South African-born British actor. He rose to prominence in England as a Shakespearean stage actor and went on to appear in over 70 films, primarily costume dramas, swashbucklers, and, occasionally, horror films. He frequently portrayed suave villains or morally ambiguous characters, such as Murdstone in David Copperfield (1935) and Sir Guy of Gisbourne in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). His most famous role, however, was heroic—that of Sherlock Holmes in fourteen Hollywood films made between 1939 and 1946 and in a radio series. His later career included Broadway and television work; he received a Tony Award in 1948 as Best Actor in a Play.
  He was born Philip St. John Basil Rathbone in Johannesburg, South African Republic, to English parents Edgar Philip Rathbone, a mining engineer and scion of the Liverpool Rathbone family, and Anna Barbara née George, a violinist. He had two older half brothers Harold and Horace as well as two younger siblings, Beatrice and John. The Rathbones fled to England when Basil was three years old after his father was accused by the Boers of being a British spy near the onset of the Second Boer War at the end of the 1890s.
  
  wn.com/Basil_Rathbone
• 
  Beau Bridges
  Lloyd Vernet "Beau" Bridges III (born December 9, 1941) is an American actor and director.
  Bridges was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of actors Lloyd and Dorothy Bridges (née Simpson). He was nicknamed Beau by his parents after Ashley Wilkes' son in Gone with the Wind. His younger brother is actor Jeff Bridges, and he has a younger sister Lucinda. Another brother, Garrett, died in 1948 of sudden infant death syndrome. Beau has shared a close relationship with Jeff, to whom he acted as a surrogate father during childhood, when their father was busy with work.^{[citation needed]} He and his siblings were raised in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles.
  Wanting to become a basketball star, he played in his freshman year at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and later transferred to the University of Hawaii. In 1959, he enlisted in the US Coast Guard and also served for eight years in the Coast Guard Reserve.
  In 1949, Bridges played a secondary juvenile role in the movie The Red Pony. In the 1962–63 television season, Bridges, along with his brother, Jeff, appeared on their father's CBS anthology series, The Lloyd Bridges Show. In 1965 he guest-starred as Corporal Corbett in "Then Came The Mighty Hunter", Season 2, Episode 3 of the TV series Twelve O'Clock High. Other TV roles followed in the mid-1960s on shows including The Fugitive, Bonanza, and The Loner. He found steady work in television and film throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Feature films of note during this time were The Other Side of the Mountain (1975), Greased Lightning (1977), Norma Rae (1979), Heart Like a Wheel (1983), and The Hotel New Hampshire (1984).
  
  wn.com/Beau_Bridges
• 
  Ben Kingsley
  Sir Ben Kingsley, CBE (born Krishna Pandit Bhanji;Gujarati:કૃષ્ણા પંડિત ભાનજી; 31 December 1943) is an English actor who has won an Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards in his career. He is known for starring as Mohandas Gandhi in the film Gandhi in 1982, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He is also known for his performances in the films Schindler's List (1993), Sexy Beast (2000), House of Sand and Fog (2003), and Hugo (2011).
  Kingsley was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji in Snainton, North Yorkshire, England, the son of Anna Lyna Mary (née Goodman), an actress and model, and Rahimtulla Harji Bhanji, a medical doctor.
  Kingsley's father, born in Kenya, is of Gujarati Indian descent; Kingsley's paternal grandfather was a spice trader who had moved from India to Zanzibar, where Kingsley's father lived until moving to England at the age of 14. Kingsley's mother, born out of wedlock, was "loath to speak of her background". Kingsley's maternal grandfather was believed by the family to have been a Russian or German Jew, while Kingsley's maternal grandmother was English and worked in the garment district of East London.
  
  wn.com/Ben_Kingsley
• 
  Betty White
  Betty Marion White Ludden (born January 17, 1922), better known as Betty White, is an American actress, comedienne, singer, author, and television personality. With a career spanning over seven decades, she is best known to contemporary audiences for her television roles as Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls. Since the death of co-star Rue McClanahan in 2010, she is now the only living Golden Girl. She currently stars as Elka Ostrovsky in the TV Land sitcom Hot in Cleveland and hosts the practical-joke show Betty White's Off Their Rockers.
  White has won seven Emmy Awards (six for acting) and has received 20 Emmy nominations over the course of her career, including being the first woman ever to receive an Emmy for game show hosting (for the short-lived Just Men!) and is the only person to have an Emmy in all female performing comedic categories. In May 2010, White became the oldest person to guest-host Saturday Night Live, for which she also received a Primetime Emmy Award. White also holds the record for longest span between Emmy nominations for performances – her first was in 1951 and her most recent was in 2011, a span of 60 years – and has become the oldest nominee as of 2012^[update], aged 90. She has made regular appearances on the game shows Password and Match Game and played recurring roles on Mama's Family, Boston Legal, The Bold and the Beautiful, and Community.
  
  wn.com/Betty_White
• Brian Bedford
  Brian Bedford (born 16 February 1935) is an English actor. He has appeared on the stage and in film, and is known for both acting in and directing Shakespeare.
  Bedford was born in Morley, West Riding of Yorkshire, the son of Ellen (née O'Donnell) and Arthur Bedford, a postman. Bedford attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London from 1952–1954 and was in the same class as Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Peter O'Toole.
  Primarily a stage actor, he is known for his English-speaking interpretations of the French playwright Molière, including Tony Award nominated performances in Tartuffe, The Molière Comedies (a double bill of the short plays The School for Husbands and The Imaginary Cuckold) and The School for Wives, for which he received the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play. He has done a great deal of Shakespearean work, notably as Ariel in The Tempest opposite John Gielgud's Prospero in 1958, Angelo in Measure for Measure at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 1975 and 1976, and The Public Theater's New York Shakespeare Festival Shakespeare in the Park productions of As You Like It (as Orlando), and Timon of Athens (as Timon), the latter based on a production he originated with the National Actors Theatre in 1993 and which he eventually played on Broadway.
  
  wn.com/Brian_Bedford
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  Brian Dennehy
  Brian Mannion Dennehy (born July 9, 1938) is an American actor of film, stage and screen.
  Dennehy was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of Hannah and Edward Dennehy, who was a wire service editor for the Associated Press; he has two brothers, Michael and Edward. Dennehy is of Irish ancestry and was raised Roman Catholic. The family relocated to Long Island, New York, where Dennehy attended Chaminade High School in the town of Mineola.
  Rather than immediately chase his dreams of stage and screen, Dennehy enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1959, actively serving until 1963. Although he said in numerous interviews that he had spent five years fighting in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, even telling harrowing tales of being hit by shrapnel, it was revealed in the 1998 book Stolen Valor by B.G. Burkett that Dennehy had never served overseas at all during his time in the military. Later that year, Dennehy admitted to the tabloid The Globe "I lied about serving in Vietnam and I'm sorry. That was very wrong of me. There is no real excuse for that. I was a peace-time Marine, and I got out in 1963 without ever serving in Vietnam. I started the story that I had been in 'Nam, and I got stuck with it. Then I didn't know how to set the record straight." Nonetheless, in 2007 Dennehy once again told a reporter that he had served in Vietnam, this time Joanne Kaufman of the Wall Street Journal.
  
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  Brian Wilson
  Brian Douglas Wilson (born June 20, 1942) is an American musician, best known as the leader and chief songwriter of the group The Beach Boys. On stage, Wilson provided many of the lead vocals, and often harmonized with the group in falsetto. Early during his on-stage career, Wilson primarily played bass on stage, but gradually transitioned to primarily playing piano/keyboards. Besides being the primary composer in The Beach Boys, he also functioned as the band's main producer and arranger. After signing with Capitol Records in mid-1962, Wilson wrote or co-wrote more than two dozen Top 40 hits including "Surfin' Safari", "Surfin' USA", "Shut Down", "Little Deuce Coupe", "Be True to Your School", "In My Room", "Fun, Fun, Fun", "I Get Around", "Dance Dance Dance", "Help Me Rhonda", "California Girls" and "Good Vibrations". These songs and their accompanying albums were internationally popular, making The Beach Boys one of the biggest acts of their time.
  In the mid-60s Wilson used his increasingly creative ambitions to compose and produce Pet Sounds, considered one of the greatest albums of all time. At this point his music was considered to rival that of Lennon–McCartney. The intended follow up to Pet Sounds, Smile, was cancelled for various reasons, including Wilson's deteriorating mental health. Wilson's contributions to The Beach Boys diminished as the years went by, and his erratic behavior led to tensions with the band. After years of treatment and recuperation, he began a solo career in 1988 with Brian Wilson, the same year that he and The Beach Boys were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Since then he has toured for the first time in decades with a new band and released acclaimed albums such as a reworked version of Smile in 2004, for which Wilson won a Grammy Award for "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow (Fire)" as Best Rock Instrumental, That Lucky Old Sun, and Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin.
  
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  Bruce Springsteen
  Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen (born September 23, 1949), nicknamed "The Boss," is an American singer-songwriter-performer who records and tours with the E Street Band. Springsteen is widely known for his brand of heartland rock, poetic lyrics, and Americana sentiments centered on his native New Jersey.
  Springsteen's recordings have included both commercially accessible rock albums and more somber folk-oriented works. His most successful studio albums, Born in the U.S.A. and Born to Run, showcase a talent for finding grandeur in the struggles of daily American life; he has sold more than 65 million albums in the United States and more than 120 million worldwide and he has earned numerous awards for his work, including 21 Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes and an Academy Award. He is widely regarded by many as one of the most influential songwriters of the 20th century, and in 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him as the 23rd Greatest Artist of all time.
  Springsteen was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and spent his childhood and high school years in Freehold Borough. He lived on South Street in Freehold Borough and attended Freehold Borough High School. His father, Douglas Frederick Springsteen, was of Dutch and Irish ancestry and worked, among other vocations, as a bus driver, although he was frequently unemployed; his surname is Dutch for jump stone. His mother, Adele Ann (née Zerilli), was a legal secretary and was of Italian ancestry. His maternal grandfather was born in Vico Equense, a city near Naples. He has two younger sisters, Virginia and Pamela. Pamela had a brief film career, but left acting to pursue still photography full time; she took photos for the Human Touch and Lucky Town albums.
  
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  Bruce Willis
  Walter Bruce Willis (born March 19, 1955) is a German-born American actor, producer, and musician. His career began in television in the 1980s and has continued both in television and film since, including comedic, dramatic, and action roles. He is well known for the role of John McClane in the Die Hard series, which were mostly critical and uniformly financial successes. He has also appeared in over sixty films, including box office successes like Pulp Fiction (1994), 12 Monkeys (1995), The Fifth Element (1997), Armageddon (1998), The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), Sin City (2005), Over the Hedge (2006) and Red (2010).
  Motion pictures featuring Willis have grossed US$2.64 billion to 3.05 billion at North American box offices, making him the ninth highest-grossing actor in a leading role and twelfth highest including supporting roles. He is a two-time Emmy Award–winning, Golden Globe Award–winning and four-time Saturn Award–nominated actor. Willis was married to actress Demi Moore and they had three daughters before their divorce in 2000, following thirteen years of marriage. He is currently married to model Emma Heming, with whom he has one daughter.
  
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  Carol Burnett
  Carol Creighton Burnett (born April 26, 1933) is an American actress, comedian, singer, dancer and writer. Burnett started her career in New York. After becoming a hit on Broadway, she made her television debut. After successful appearances on The Garry Moore Show, Burnett moved to Los Angeles and began an eleven-year run on The Carol Burnett Show which was aired on CBS television from 1967 to 1978. With roots in vaudeville, The Carol Burnett Show was a variety show which combined comedy sketches, song, and dance. The comedy sketches included film parodies and character pieces. Burnett created many characters during the show's television run.
  Burnett was born in San Antonio, Texas, the daughter of Ina Louise (née Creighton), a publicity writer for movie studios, and Joseph Thomas Burnett, a movie theater manager. Both of her parents suffered from alcoholism, and at a young age she was left with her grandmother, Mabel Eudora White. Her parents divorced in the late 1930s, and Burnett and her grandmother moved to an apartment near her mother’s in an impoverished area of Hollywood. There, they stayed in a boarding house with her younger half-sister Chrissy.
  
  wn.com/Carol_Burnett
• Cecilia Hart
  Cecilia Hart, born in Cheyenne, Wyoming February 19, 1948, is a television and stage actress married to actor James Earl Jones with whom she has one child, Flynn Earl Jones. Hart costarred with Jones in the short-lived 1979-80 CBS police drama Paris. She was formerly married to actor Bruce Weitz from 1971 to 1982.
  
  
  
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  Charles Durning
  Charles Durning (born February 28, 1923) is an American actor. With appearances in over 100 films, Durning's memorable roles include police officers in the Oscar-winning The Sting (1973) and crime drama Dog Day Afternoon (1975), along with the comedies Tootsie, To Be Or Not To Be and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, the last two of which earned him an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. He won a Tony award for his portrayal of Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1990.
  Durning was born in Highland Falls, New York, the second youngest of five children, James G. (1915–2000), Clifford John (1916–1994), Frances (born 1919) and Gerald J. Durning (born 1926). His mother, Louise M. (1894–1982), was a laundress at West Point, and his father was James Durning.
  Durning served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Drafted at age 21, he was first assigned as a rifleman with the 398th Infantry Regiment, and later served overseas with the 3rd Army Support troops and the 386th Anti-aircraft Artillery (AAA) Battalion. For his valor and the wounds he received during the war, Durning was awarded the Silver Star and three Purple Heart medals.
  
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  Chita Rivera
  Chita Rivera (born January 23, 1933) is an American actress, dancer, and singer best known for her roles in musical theater. She is the first Hispanic woman to receive a Kennedy Center Honors award (December 2002). She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.
  Rivera (birth name: Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero) was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Katherine, a government clerk, and Pedro Julio Figueroa del Rivero, a clarinetist and saxophonist for the United States Navy Band. Her father was Puerto Rican and her mother was of Scottish and Italian descent. Rivera was seven years old when her mother was widowed and went to work for The Pentagon.
  In 1944, Rivera's mother enrolled her in the Jones-Haywood School of Ballet (now the Jones Haywood School of Dance). Later, when she was 15, a teacher from George Balanchine's School of American Ballet visited their studio and Rivera was one of two students picked to audition in New York City; she was accompanied to the audition by Doris Jones, one of the people who ran the Jones-Haywood School. Rivera's audition was successful and she was accepted into the school and given a scholarship
  
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  Choctaw
  The Choctaw (alternatively spelled Chahta, Chactas, Chato, Tchakta, Chocktaw, and Chactaw) are a Native American people originally from the Southeastern United States (Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana). The Choctaw language belongs to the Muskogean linguistic group. The Choctaw are descendants of the Hopewellian people and Mississippian culture, who lived throughout the east of the Mississippi River valley and its tributaries. The former built Nanih Waiya, a great earthwork mound about 1,700 years ago that is considered sacred by the Choctaw. The early Spanish explorers of the mid-16th century encountered Mississippian-culture villages and chiefs. The anthropologist John Swanton suggested that the name was derived from a Choctaw leader. Henry Halbert, a historian, suggests that their name is derived from the Choctaw phrase Hacha hatak (river people).
  The Choctaw coalesced as a people in the 17th century, and developed three distinct political and geographical divisions: eastern, western and southern, which sometimes created differing alliances with nearby European powers, who included the French, English and Spanish during the colonial era. During the American Revolution, most Choctaw supported the Thirteen Colonies' bid for independence from the British Crown. They never went to war against the United States prior to Indian Removal.
  
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  Christopher Lloyd
  Christopher Allen Lloyd (born October 22, 1938) is an American actor. He is best known for playing Emmett Brown in the Back to the Future trilogy, Uncle Fester in The Addams Family and its sequel Addams Family Values, and Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He rose to prominence in the 1980s as Jim Ignatowski in the television series Taxi.
  Lloyd has used his vocal talents in animation, frequently voicing villains. He provided voice to the character The Hacker on the animated PBS series Cyberchase. Lloyd has won three Primetime Emmy Awards and an Independent Spirit Award, and has been nominated for two Saturn Awards and a Daytime Emmy Award.
  Lloyd was born in Stamford, Connecticut, the son of Samuel R. Lloyd, a lawyer, and his wife Ruth (née Lapham), a singer and sister of San Francisco mayor Roger Lapham. His maternal grandfather, Lewis Lapham, was one of the founders of the Texaco oil company, and Lloyd is also a descendant of Mayflower passenger John Howland. Lloyd attended the Fessenden School, a preparatory school in Newton, Massachusetts. Lloyd was raised in New Canaan, Connecticut, and Westport, Connecticut, where he graduated from Staples High School in 1958.
  
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  Christopher Plummer
  Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer, CC (born December 13, 1929) is a Canadian theatre, film and television actor. He made his film debut in 1958's Stage Struck, and notable early film performances include The Night of the Generals, The Return of the Pink Panther, and The Man Who Would Be King.
  In a career that spans seven decades and includes substantial roles in each of the dramatic arts, Plummer is probably best known to audiences as the autocratic widower Captain Georg Ludwig von Trapp in the hit 1965 musical film The Sound of Music alongside Julie Andrews. Plummer has also ventured into various television projects, including the legendary miniseries The Thorn Birds.
  His most recent film roles include the The Insider as Mike Wallace, the Disney-Pixar 2009 film Up as Charles Muntz, the Shane Acker production 9 as 1, The Last Station as Leo Tolstoy, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus as Doctor Parnassus, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as Henrik Vanger, and Beginners as Hal.
  Plummer has won numerous awards and accolades for his work, including an Academy Award, two Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a SAG Award, and a BAFTA Award. With his win at the age of 82 in 2012 for Beginners, Plummer is the oldest actor ever to win an Academy Award.
  
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  Chuck Berry
  Charles Edward Anderson "Chuck" Berry (born October 18, 1926) is an American guitarist, singer and songwriter, and one of the pioneers of rock and roll music. With songs such as "Maybellene" (1955), "Roll Over Beethoven" (1956), "Rock and Roll Music" (1957) and "Johnny B. Goode" (1958), Chuck Berry refined and developed rhythm and blues into the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive, with lyrics focusing on teen life and consumerism and utilizing guitar solos and showmanship that would be a major influence on subsequent rock music.
  Born into a middle class family in St. Louis, Missouri, Berry had an interest in music from an early age and gave his first public performance at Sumner High School. While still a high school student he served a prison sentence for armed robbery between 1944 and 1947. On his release, Berry settled into married life and worked at an automobile assembly plant. By early 1953, influenced by the guitar riffs and showmanship techniques of blues player T-Bone Walker, he was performing in the evenings with the Johnnie Johnson Trio. His break came when he traveled to Chicago in May 1955, and met Muddy Waters, who suggested he contact Leonard Chess of Chess Records. With Chess he recorded "Maybellene"—Berry's adaptation of the country song "Ida Red"—which sold over a million copies, reaching No. 1 on Billboard's Rhythm and Blues chart. By the end of the 1950s, Berry was an established star with several hit records and film appearances to his name as well as a lucrative touring career. He had also established his own St. Louis-based nightclub, called Berry's Club Bandstand. But in January 1962, Berry was sentenced to three years in prison for offenses under the Mann Act—he had transported a 14-year-old girl across state lines.
  
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  Claude Rains
  Claude Rains (10 November 1889 – 30 May 1967) was an English stage and film actor whose career spanned 46 years. He was known for many roles in Hollywood films, among them the title role in The Invisible Man (1933), a corrupt senator in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Mr. Dryden in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and, perhaps his most notable performance, as Captain Renault in Casablanca (1942).
  Rains was born William Claude Rains in Camberwell, London. He grew up, according to his daughter, with "a very serious cockney accent and a speech impediment". His parents were Emily Eliza (Cox) and English stage and film actor Frederick William Rains. The young Rains made his stage debut at 11 in Nell of Old Drury.
  His acting talents were recognised by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, founder of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Tree paid for the elocution lessons Rains needed in order to succeed as an actor. Later, Rains taught at the institution, teaching John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier, among others. Many years later, after he had gone to Hollywood and become a film star, Gielgud was to quip: "He was a great influence on me. I don`t know what happened to him. I think he failed and went to America."
  
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• Cliff Gorman
  Cliff Gorman (October 13, 1936 – September 5, 2002) was an American stage and screen actor. He won an Obie award in 1968 for the stage presentation of The Boys in the Band, and went on to reprise his role in the 1970 film version.
  Gorman was born in New York City, New York, the son of Ethel (née Kaplan) and Samuel Gorman. He was raised Jewish.
  Gorman won a Tony Award in 1972 for playing Lenny Bruce in the play Lenny. Although the film version, directed by Bob Fosse, featured Dustin Hoffman, Gorman was recruited to portray a Lenny-like character in a side-story in Fosse's film All That Jazz. In 1984 he co-starred as Lt. Andrews in the film Angel. Noteworthy are his roles in movies like An Unmarried Woman with Jill Clayburgh, Hoffa with Jack Nicholson and Danny De Vito and Night and the City with Robert De Niro. His TV work included performances in series like Law and Order, Murder, She Wrote and the 1970's drama Police Story, written by former LAPD Detective Sergeant Joseph Wambaugh.
  Gorman and his wife cared for his fellow Boys in the Band performer Robert La Tourneaux in the last few months of his battle against AIDS, until La Tourneaux's death on June 3, 1986.
  
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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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• Dabney Coleman
  Dabney Wharton Coleman (born January 3, 1932) is an American actor. He is best known for his roles in 9 to 5, WarGames, You've Got Mail, Sworn to Silence, The Beverly Hillbillies and as the voice of Principal Peter Prickly in Recess and Recess: School's Out.
  Coleman was born in Austin, Texas, the son of Mary Wharton (née Johns) and Melvin Randolph Coleman. He entered the Virginia Military Institute in 1949, then studied law at the University of Texas before turning to acting. He was drafted in 1953 to the US Army and served in Europe.
  Coleman is a character actor who has a wide range, with over 60 films to his credit. He is often typecast as a comic relief villain, the smarmy, devious foil to the main character. An early example of such features was his portrayal of an ethically absent Harrison Wilby in the Elvis Presley film The Trouble with Girls as well as a role in a 1962 AMC Rambler commercial.
  Coleman's fate in these types of roles was cemented with roles such as that of Franklin Hart, Jr. in 1980's 9 to 5, a sexist boss whose murder is fantasized about by his office employees (Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin). That role reunited him with actress Marian Mercer, with whom he also worked on the TV series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; he played Fernwood's mayor, Merle Jeeter and Marian played his second wife, Wanda Rittenhouse Jeeter. He broke from this type somewhat in his portrayal of military computer scientist John McKittrick in WarGames (1983).
  
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  Dave Brubeck
  David Warren "Dave" Brubeck (born December 6, 1920) is an American jazz pianist. He has written a number of jazz standards, including "In Your Own Sweet Way" and "The Duke". Brubeck's style ranges from refined to bombastic, reflecting his mother's attempts at classical training and his improvisational skills. His music is known for employing unusual time signatures, and superimposing contrasting rhythms, meters, and tonalities.
  His long-time musical partner, alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, wrote the Dave Brubeck Quartet's best remembered piece, "Take Five", which is in 5/4 time and has endured as a jazz classic on the top-selling jazz album, Time Out. Brubeck experimented with time signatures throughout his career, recording "Pick Up Sticks" in 6/4, "Unsquare Dance" in 7/4, and "Blue Rondo à la Turk" in 9/8. He is also a respected composer of orchestral and sacred music, and wrote soundtracks for television such as Mr. Broadway and the animated mini-series This Is America, Charlie Brown.
  Brubeck was born in Concord, California and grew up in Ione. He is of English (maternal), Swiss and possibly Native American Modoc Tribe multi-ethnic (paternal) ancestry His father, Howard "Pete" Brubeck, was a cattle rancher, and his mother, Elizabeth (née Ivey), who had studied piano in England under Myra Hess and intended to become a concert pianist, taught piano for extra money. Brubeck originally did not intend to become a musician (his two older brothers, Henry and Howard, were already on that track), but took lessons from his mother. He could not read sheet music during these early lessons, attributing this difficulty to poor eyesight, but "faked" his way through, well enough that this deficiency went mostly unnoticed.
  
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  David Prowse
  David Prowse, MBE (born 1 July 1935) is an English former bodybuilder,weightlifter and actor, most widely known for playing the role of Darth Vader in physical form. In Britain, he is also remembered as having played the Green Cross Code man. Prowse is a native of Bristol, where he attended Bristol Grammar School.
  Prowse is best known for playing the physical form of Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy.James Earl Jones, however, provided the voice for the character. Prowse spoke the dialogue during the making of the film, and didn't actually know Vader was Luke's father until he saw The Empire Strikes Back in the cinema. Though he was never going to be used as the voice of Darth Vader, he claims he was originally told that he would be seen and heard at the end of Return of the Jedi when Vader's mask was removed. This did not end up happening as actor Sebastian Shaw was brought in instead. However, Lucas claims he wanted a 'darker voice' (Lucas has stated that Darth Vader had to have a deep, reverberating voice) that Prowse could not provide and never intended to use Prowse's voice, which had a West Country accent. In the 2004 documentary, Empire of Dreams, actress Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia Organa in the original trilogy films, quipped that they nicknamed Prowse "Darth Farmer" because of his un-intimidating West Country accent. In the lightsaber battle scenes between Vader and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Prowse, who was not a skilled swordsman, was doubled by the scene's fight-choreographer, the stuntman and fencing coach Bob Anderson (who also taught the sword fighters in The Princess Bride and Lord Of The Rings).
  
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  David Wayne
  David Wayne (January 30, 1914 – February 9, 1995) was an American actor with a career spanning nearly 50 years.
  Wayne was born Wayne James McMeekan in Traverse City, Michigan, the son of Helen Matilda (née Mason) and John David McMeekan. He grew up in Bloomingdale, Michigan. Wayne's first major Broadway role was Og the leprechaun in Finian's Rainbow, for which he won the Theatre World Award and the first ever Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. While appearing in the play, he and co-star Albert Sharpe were recruited by producer David O. Selznick to play Irish characters in the film Portrait of Jennie (1948).
  He was awarded a second Tony for Best Actor in a Play for The Teahouse of the August Moon and was nominated as Best Actor in a Musical for The Happy Time. He originated the role of Ensign Pulver in the classic stage comedy Mister Roberts and also appeared in Say, Darling, After the Fall, and Incident at Vichy.
  In films, Wayne most often was cast as a supporting player, such as the charming cad opposite Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in Adam's Rib (1949). He portrayed the child killer, originally played by Peter Lorre, in the remake of M (1951), a chance to see him in a rare leading role, even rarer as an evil character. He costarred in The Tender Trap (1955) with Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds, and Celeste Holm.
  
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  Debbie Allen
  Deborrah Kaye “Debbie” Allen (born January 16, 1950) is an American actress, dancer, choreographer, television director, television producer, and a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. She is perhaps best known for her work on the 1982 musical-drama television series Fame, where she portrayed dance teacher Lydia Grant, and served as the series' principal choreographer. She is the younger sister of actress/singer Phylicia Rashād.
  Allen was born in Houston, Texas, the youngest of four children to orthodontist Andrew Arthur Allen Sr. and Vivian (née Ayers) Allen, she is a poet (Spice of Dawns and other books) and museum art director.
  She went on to earn a B.A. degree in classical Greek literature, speech, and theater from Howard University. She holds honoris causa Doctorates from Howard University and the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. She currently teaches young dancers. She also taught choreography to former Los Angeles Lakers dancer-turned-singer, Paula Abdul. Her daughter, Vivian Nixon, played Kalimba in the Broadway production of Hot Feet.
  
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  Dennis Franz
  Dennis Franz (born October 28, 1944) is an American actor best known for his role as Andy Sipowicz, a hard-boiled police detective, in the television series NYPD Blue. He previously appeared as Lt. Norman Buntz on Hill Street Blues, and earlier played Detective Benedetto on the same show.
  Franz was born Dennis Franz Schlachta in Maywood, Illinois, the son of German immigrants Eleanor, a postal worker, and Franz Schlachta, who was a baker and postal worker. Franz is a graduate of Proviso East High School (in Maywood) and Southern Illinois University Carbondale. After graduating from college, Franz was drafted into the United States Army. He served eleven months with the 82nd Airborne Division in Vietnam.
  Franz began his acting career at Chicago's Organic Theater Company. Although he has in the past performed Shakespeare, his "look" led to his being typecast early in his career as a police officer. (By Franz' own count, the character of Detective Andy Sipowicz was his 27th role as a police officer). He has also guest-starred in shows such as The A-Team. Other major roles were on the television series Hill Street Blues in which he played two characters over the run of that show. Franz first played the role of Officer Sal Benedetto, a corrupt cop in the 1983 season, who later kills himself. Due to his popularity with fans, he returned in 1985 as Lt. Norm Buntz, remaining until the show's end in 1987. He starred in the short-lived Beverly Hills Buntz as the morally questionable Norman Buntz.
  
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  Derek Jacobi
  Sir Derek George Jacobi, CBE ( /ˈdʒækəbi/; born 22 October 1938) is an English actor and film director.
  A "forceful, commanding stage presence", Jacobi has enjoyed a highly successful stage career, appearing in such stage productions as Hamlet,Uncle Vanya, and Oedipus the King. He received a Tony Award for his performance in Much Ado About Nothing. His stage work also included playing Edward II,Octavius Caesar,Richard III, and Cyrano de Bergerac.
  In addition to being a founder member of the Royal National Theatre and winning several prestigious theatre awards, Jacobi has also enjoyed a successful television career, starring in the critically praised adaptation of Roberts Graves' I, Claudius, for which he won a BAFTA; the titular role in the acclaimed medieval drama series Brother Cadfael, and Stanley Baldwin in The Gathering Storm. Though principally a stage actor, Jacobi has appeared in a number of films, such as Henry V (1989), Dead Again (1991), Gladiator (2000), Gosford Park (2001), The Golden Compass (2007), The King's Speech (2010), My Week with Marilyn (2011), and the forthcoming Hippie Hippie Shake. Like Laurence Olivier, he holds two knighthoods, Danish and British.
  
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  Diahann Carroll
  Diahann Carroll (/daɪˈæn ˈkær.əl/; born July 17, 1935, in New York, New York) is an American television and stage actress and singer. Diahann Carroll has had a long, successful career that has expanded throughout 5 decades.
  Having appeared in some of the earliest major studio films to feature black casts such as Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess, she starred in 1968's Julia, one of the first series on American television to star a black woman in a non-stereotypical role. Later she created the role of Dominique Deveraux on the popular prime time soap opera, Dynasty.
  She is the recipient of numerous stage and screen awards and nominations. Carroll has been married four times and became the mother of a daughter in 1960. She is a breast cancer survivor and activist.
  Carroll was born Carol Diahann Johnson in The Bronx, New York, to John Johnson of Aiken, South Carolina and Mabel Faulk of Bladenboro, North Carolina. When Carroll was an infant, the family moved to Harlem where she grew up. She attended Music & Art High School, along with schoolmate Billy Dee Williams. In many interviews about her childhood Diahann Carroll remembers her parents support of her and enrolled her in dance, singing and modeling classes. By the time Diahann Carroll was 15 she was modeling for Ebony Magazine she stood at 6 ft and had a lean build. After graduating high school, Diahann Carroll attended New York University to major in sociology.
  
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  Diana Ross
  Diana Ernestine Earle Ross (born March 26, 1944) is an American singer, record producer, and actress.
  Diana Ross was lead singer of the Motown group The Supremes during the 1960s. After leaving the group in 1970, Ross began a solo career that has included successful ventures into film and Broadway. She received a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her role as Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues (1972), for which she won a Golden Globe award. She has won seven American Music Awards, was honored with a 2012 Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award, and won a Tony Award for her one-woman show, An Evening with Diana Ross, in 1977.
  In 1976, Billboard magazine named her the "Female Entertainer of the Century." In 1993, the Guinness Book of World Records declared Diana Ross the most successful female music artist in history due to her success in the United States and United Kingdom for having more hits than any female artist in the charts with a career total of 18 number one records in the United States. Diana Ross has sold more than 100 million records worldwide.
  
  wn.com/Diana_Ross
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  Dolly Parton
  Dolly Rebecca Parton (born January 19, 1946) is an American singer-songwriter, author, multi-instrumentalist, actress and philanthropist, best known for her work in country music. As a songwriter, she has composed over 3,000 songs, the best known of which include "I Will Always Love You" (a two-time U.S. country chart-topper for Parton, as well an international pop hit for Whitney Houston), "Jolene", "Coat of Many Colors", "9 to 5" and "My Tennessee Mountain Home". As an actress, she starred in the movies 9 to 5, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Steel Magnolias, Straight Talk, Unlikely Angel and Joyful Noise. She is one of the most successful female country artists of all time; with an estimated 100 million in album sales, Dolly Parton is also one of the best selling artists of all time. She is known as "The Queen of Country Music".
  She was born in Sevierville, Tennessee, the fourth of twelve children of Avie Lee Parton (née Owens; October 5, 1923 – December 5, 2003) and Robert Lee Parton (March 22, 1921 – November 12, 2000), a tobacco farmer. Her siblings are: Willadeene Parton (born March 24, 1940), David Wilburn Parton (born March 30, 1942), Coy Denver "Denver" Parton (born August 16, 1943), Bobby Lee Parton (born February 18, 1948), Stella Mae Parton (born May 4, 1949), Cassie Nan Parton (February 12, 1951), Randel Huston "Randy" Parton (born December 15, 1953), Larry Gerald Parton (born and died July 6, 1955), Floyd and Frieda Estelle Parton (born June 1, 1957), and Rachel Ann Parton (born August 31, 1959). Her family was, as she has described them, "dirt poor". She outlined her family's lack of money in a number of her early songs, notably "Coat of Many Colors" and "In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)". They lived in a rustic, dilapidated one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, a hamlet just north of the Greenbrier Valley, in the Locust Ridge area of the Great Smoky Mountains in Sevier County, a predominantly Pentecostal area.
  
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  Donald Sutherland
  Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC (born 17 July 1935) is a Canadian actor whose film career spans nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in popular war movies such as The Dirty Dozen, MASH and Kelly's Heroes, as well as characters in other popular films such as Klute, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, JFK, Ordinary People and, more recently, The Hunger Games. He is the father of actor Kiefer Sutherland.
  Sutherland was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, the son of Dorothy Isobel (née McNichol; 1892–1956) and Frederick McLea Sutherland (1894–1983), who worked in sales and ran the local gas, electricity, and bus company. His ancestry includes Scottish, as well as German and English. His teenage years were spent in Nova Scotia. He got his first part time job at age 14 as a news correspondent for local radio station CKBW in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. He then studied at Victoria College, University of Toronto, where he met his first wife Lois Hardwick (not the child star of the same name), and graduated with a double major in engineering and drama. He had at one point been a member of the "UC Follies" comedy troupe in Toronto. He changed his mind about becoming an engineer, and subsequently left Canada for England to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
  
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  Dustin Hoffman
  Dustin Lee Hoffman (born August 8, 1937) is an American actor with a career in film, television, and theatre since 1960. He has been known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and vulnerable characters.
  He first drew critical praise for the play Eh?, for which he won a Theatre World Award and a Drama Desk Award. This was soon followed by his breakthrough movie role as the good-looking but troubled Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (1967). Since then Hoffman's career has largely been focused on cinema, with only sporadic returns to television and the stage. Some of his most notable films are Papillon, Marathon Man, Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man, Lenny, All the President's Men, Kramer vs. Kramer, Tootsie, Rain Man, Wag the Dog, and Meet the Fockers.
  Hoffman has won two Academy Awards (for his performances in Kramer vs. Kramer and Rain Man), five Golden Globes, four BAFTAs, three Drama Desk Awards, a Genie Award, and an Emmy Award. Dustin Hoffman received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1999.
  
  wn.com/Dustin_Hoffman
• Ed Flanders
  Edward Paul Flanders (December 29, 1934 - February 22, 1995) was an American actor best known for his role as Dr. Donald Westphall in the television series St. Elsewhere.
  Flanders was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of Bernice (née Brown) and Francis Michael Grey Flanders. Flanders began his acting career on Broadway before moving on to guest parts in television series. From 1967 through 1975, Flanders appeared in more than a dozen American TV shows, including six appearances on Hawaii Five-O (as six different characters). During this time, he was also prolific in TV movies. He also married actress Ellen Geer during this time; they later divorced.
  In the late 1970s, Flanders moved away from small TV roles to take major credits in both TV and feature films, while continuing his stage career. In 1974, Flanders won a Tony Award for Best Supporting or Featured Actor in a Dramatic Presentation for A Moon for the Misbegotten by Eugene O'Neill on Broadway, He also won an Emmy award in 1976 for the TV movie adaptation of A Moon for the Misbegotten.
  
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  Ed Harris
  Edward Allen "Ed" Harris (born November 28, 1950) is an American actor, writer, and director, known for his performances in Appaloosa, The Rock, The Abyss, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, A History of Violence, The Truman Show, and The Hours. Harris has also narrated commercials for The Home Depot and other companies. He is a three-time nominee of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, along with an Academy Award for Best Actor nomination for the title role in Pollock.
  Harris was born in Englewood Hospital, and raised in Tenafly, the son of Margaret, a travel agent, and Robert L. Harris, who sang with the Fred Waring chorus and worked at the bookstore of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has an older brother, Robert, and a younger brother, Spencer. His parents were originally from Oklahoma. Harris was raised in a middle-class Presbyterian family. He graduated from Tenafly High School in 1969, where he played on the football team, serving as the team's captain in his senior year. He was a star athlete in high school, and competed in athletics at Columbia University in 1969. Two years later his family moved to New Mexico, and he followed, after having discovered his interest in acting in various theater plays. He enrolled at the University of Oklahoma to study drama. After several successful roles in the local theater, he moved to Los Angeles, and enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts.
  
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  Edgar Allan Poe
  Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.
  He was born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts; he was orphaned young when his mother died shortly after his father abandoned the family. Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia, but they never formally adopted him. He attended the University of Virginia for one semester but left due to lack of money. After enlisting in the Army and later failing as an officer's cadet at West Point, Poe parted ways with the Allans. His publishing career began humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian".
  
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  Edward Asner
  Edward Asner (born November 15, 1929), commonly known as Ed Asner, is an American film, television, stage, and voice actor and former president of the Screen Actors Guild, primarily known for his Emmy Award-winning role as Lou Grant on both The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spin-off series, Lou Grant. In 2009, he starred as the voice of Carl Fredricksen in Pixar's award-winning animated film, Up. In early 2011, Asner returned to television as butcher Hank Greziak in Working Class, the first original sitcom on cable channel CMT. He is currently starring in a Canadian television series Michael, Tuesdays and Thursdays, on CBC Television.
  Asner was born Eddie Asner in Kansas City, Missouri, but was raised in nearby Kansas City, Kansas. His Russian-born parents, Lizzie (née Seliger), a housewife, and Morris David Asner, ran a second-hand shop. He was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family. Asner attended Wyandotte High School and the University of Chicago. He served with the U.S. Army Signal Corps and appeared in plays that toured Army camps in Europe.
  
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  Elizabeth Taylor
  Dame Elizabeth Rosemond "Liz" Taylor, DBE (February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011) was a British-American actress. From her early years as a child star with MGM, she became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age. As one of the world's most famous film stars, Taylor was recognized for her acting ability and for her glamorous lifestyle, beauty and distinctive violet eyes.
  National Velvet (1944) was Taylor's first success, and she starred in Father of the Bride (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), Giant (1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for BUtterfield 8 (1960), played the title role in Cleopatra (1963), and married her co-star Richard Burton. They appeared together in 11 films, including Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), for which Taylor won a second Academy Award. From the mid-1970s, she appeared less frequently in film, and made occasional appearances in television and theatre.
  Her much publicized personal life included eight marriages and several life-threatening illnesses. From the mid-1980s, Taylor championed HIV and AIDS programs; she co-founded the American Foundation for AIDS Research in 1985, and the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1993. She received the Presidential Citizens Medal, the Legion of Honour, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, who named her seventh on their list of the "Greatest American Screen Legends". Taylor died of congestive heart failure in March 2011 at the age of 79, having suffered many years of ill health.
  
  wn.com/Elizabeth_Taylor
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  Elton John
  Sir Elton Hercules John, CBE (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on 25 March 1947) is an English rock singer-songwriter, composer, pianist and occasional actor. He has worked with lyricist Bernie Taupin as his songwriter partner since 1967; they have collaborated on more than 30 albums to date.
  In his four-decade career John has sold more than 250 million records, making him one of the most successful artists of all time. His single "Candle in the Wind 1997" has sold over 33 million copies worldwide, and is the best selling single in Billboard history. He has more than 50 Top 40 hits, including seven consecutive No. 1 US albums, 56 Top 40 singles, 16 Top 10, four No. 2 hits, and nine No. 1 hits. He has won six Grammy Awards, four Brit Awards, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award and a Tony Award. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him Number 49 on its list of the 100 greatest artists of all time.
  John was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Having been named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1996, John received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for "services to music and charitable services" in 1998.
  
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  Ernest Borgnine
  Ernest Borgnine (born Ermes Effron Borgnino; January 24, 1917) is an American actor of television and film. His career has spanned more than six decades. He was an unconventional lead in many films of the 1950s, including his Academy Award-winning turn in the 1955 film Marty. On television, he played Quinton McHale in the 1962–66 series McHale's Navy and co-starred in the mid-1980s action series Airwolf, in addition to a wide variety of other roles. Borgnine is also known for his role as Mermaid Man in the animated television series SpongeBob SquarePants. Borgnine earned an Emmy Award nomination at age 92 for his work on the series ER.
  Borgnine was born in Hamden, Connecticut, the son of Anna (née Boselli), who immigrated to the United States from Carpi (Modena, Italy), and Camillo Borgnino, who immigrated to the U.S. from Ottiglio (Province of Alessandria, Italy).
  His parents separated when he was two years old, and he and his mother went to live in Italy. By 1923, his parents had reconciled, and the family name was changed from Borgnino to Borgnine. The family had settled in North Haven, Connecticut, where he attended public schools. His mother also had the passion to develop her own style of dance.^{[citation needed]} Anna gave her son a lot of moral support and he stood closely by her at all times.^{[citation needed]}
  
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  Frank Langella
  Frank A. Langella, Jr. (born January 1, 1938) is an American stage and film actor. He has won a Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Play for his performance as Richard Nixon in the play Frost/Nixon (2006), and later received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role for the same role in the film, Frost/Nixon (2008).
  Langella, an Italian American, was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of Angelina and Frank A. Langella Sr., a business executive who was the president of the Bayonne Barrel and Drum Company. Langella attended Washington Elementary School and Bayonne High School in Bayonne. After the family moved to South Orange, New Jersey he graduated from Columbia High School, in the South Orange-Maplewood School District, in 1955, and graduated from Syracuse University in 1959 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in drama. He remains a brother of the Alpha Chi Rho fraternity.
  
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  Fredric March
  Fredric March (born Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel; August 31, 1897 – April 14, 1975) was an American stage and film actor. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1932 for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and in 1946 for The Best Years of Our Lives.
  March was born in Racine, Wisconsin, the son of Cora Brown (née Marcher), a schoolteacher, and John F. Bickel, a devout Presbyterian Church elder who worked in the wholesale hardware business. March attended the Winslow Elementary School (established in 1855), Racine High School, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi. He began a career as a banker, but an emergency appendectomy caused him to reevaluate his life, and in 1920 he began working as an extra in movies made in New York City, using a shortened form of his mother's maiden name, Marcher. He appeared on Broadway in 1926, and by the end of the decade signed a film contract with Paramount Pictures.
  March received an Oscar nomination in 1930 for The Royal Family of Broadway, in which he played a role based upon John Barrymore (which he had first played on stage in Los Angeles). He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1932 for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (tied with Wallace Beery for The Champ although March accrued one more vote than Beery), leading to a series of classic films based on stage hits and classic novels like Design for Living (1933) with Gary Cooper, Death Takes a Holiday (1934), Les Misérables (1935) with Charles Laughton, Anthony Adverse (1936) with Olivia de Havilland, and as the original Norman Maine in A Star is Born (1937) with Janet Gaynor, for which he received his third Oscar nomination.
  
  wn.com/Fredric_March
• Fritz Weaver
  Fritz William Weaver (born January 19, 1926) is an American actor and voice actor.
  Weaver was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Elsa W. (née Stringaro) and John Carson Weaver. His mother was of Italian descent and his father was a social worker from Pittsburgh. Weaver attended Peabody High School. He served in Civilian Public Service as a conscientious objector during World War II, breaking into acting in the early 1950s. His first television role came in 1956 on an episode of The United States Steel Hour. He would continue to appear on television during the next four decades, appearing on such shows as The Twilight Zone (in episodes "Third from the Sun" and "The Obsolete Man"), Beyond This Place, Dr. Kildare, The Fugitive, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Rawhide, Mission: Impossible, Combat!, Gunsmoke, Mannix, Night Gallery, Kung Fu, Hawaii Five-O, Wonder Woman, Magnum, P.I., Murder, She Wrote, Matlock, Law & Order, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (in the episode "Tribunal"), 12 O'Clock High, The X-Files, and Frasier. Weaver also starred in the TV movies Holocaust (1978), and The Legend of Lizzie Borden.
  
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  Geoffrey Holder
  Geoffrey Richard Holder (born 1 August 1930) is a Trinidadian actor, choreographer, director, dancer, painter, costume designer, singer and voice-over artist.
  Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad of African descent, Holder is a Tony-award winning stage director and costume designer. He is known for his height (6'6"), heavily-accented deep basso voice and "hearty laugh."
  One of four children, Holder attended The Tranquillity School and secondary school at Queens Royal College in Port-of-Spain. At age seven, he began dancing in the company of his brother, Boscoe Holder.
  In 1952, the choreographer Agnes de Mille saw Holder dance on St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. She invited him to New York; he would teach at the Katherine Dunham School of Dance for two years. He was a principal dancer with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet in New York from 1955-1956.
  In 1955, Holder married dancer Carmen De Lavallade, whom he met when both were in the cast of House of Flowers, a musical by Harold Arlen (music and lyrics) and Truman Capote (lyrics and book). They were the subject of a 2004 film, Carmen & Geoffrey. They live in New York City and have one son, Leo Anthony Lamont. Holder's brother was the London-based artist Boscoe Holder.
  
  wn.com/Geoffrey_Holder
• George Grizzard
  George Cooper Grizzard, Jr. (April 1, 1928 – October 2, 2007) was an American actor of film and stage. He appeared in more than 40 films, dozens of television programs and a number of Broadway plays.
  Grizzard was born in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, the son of Mary Winifred (née Albritton) and George Cooper Grizzard, an accountant.
  Grizzard memorably appeared as an unscrupulous United States senator in the film Advise and Consent in 1962. His other theatrical films included the drama From the Terrace with Paul Newman (1960), the Western story Comes a Horseman with Jane Fonda (1978) and a Neil Simon comedy, Seems Like Old Times.
  In more recent years, he guest-starred several times on the NBC television drama Law & Order as defense attorney Arthur Gold. He also portrayed President John Adams in the Emmy Award-winning WNET-produced PBS mini-series The Adams Chronicles.
  Grizzard made his Broadway debut in The Desperate Hours in 1955. He was a frequent interpreter of the plays of Edward Albee, having appeared in the original 1962 production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as Nick, as well as the 1996 revival of A Delicate Balance and the 2005 revival of Seascape. He also starred in You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running.
  
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  George Jones
  George Glenn Jones (born September 12, 1931) is an American country music singer known for his long list of hit records, his distinctive voice and phrasing, and his marriage to Tammy Wynette.
  Over the past 20 years, Jones has frequently been referred to as the greatest living country singer. Country music scholar Bill C. Malone writes, "For the two or three minutes consumed by a song, Jones immerses himself so completely in its lyrics, and in the mood it conveys, that the listener can scarcely avoid becoming similarly involved."
  Throughout his long career, Jones made headlines often as much for tales of his drinking, stormy relationships with women, and violent rages as for his prolific career of making records and touring. His wild lifestyle led to Jones missing many performances, earning him the nickname "No Show Jones." With the help of his fourth wife, Nancy, he has been sober for over 10 years. Jones has had more than 150 hits during his career, both as a solo artist and in duets with other artists. The shape of his nose and facial features have given Jones the nickname "The Possum." Jones said in an interview that he has chosen to tour only about 60 dates a year.
  
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  George Lucas
  George Walton Lucas, Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an American film producer, screenwriter, director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones. Lucas is one of the American film industry's most financially successful directors/producers, with an estimated net worth of $3.2 billion as of 2011.
  George Lucas was born in Modesto, California, the son of Dorothy Ellinore (née Bomberger) and George Walton Lucas, Sr. (1913–1991), who owned a stationery store.
  Lucas grew up in the Central Valley town of Modesto and his early passion for cars and motor racing would eventually serve as inspiration for his USC student film 1:42.08, as well as his Oscar-nominated low-budget phenomenon, American Graffiti. Long before Lucas became obsessed with film making, he wanted to be a race-car driver, and he spent most of his high school years racing on the underground circuit at fairgrounds and hanging out at garages. However, a near-fatal accident in his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina on June 12, 1962, just days before his high school graduation, quickly changed his mind. Instead of racing, he attended Modesto Junior College and later got accepted into a junior college to study anthropology. While taking liberal arts courses, he developed a passion for cinematography and camera tricks. George Lucas graduated from USC in California.
  
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  Grace Bumbry
  Grace Bumbry (born January 4, 1937), an American opera singer, is considered one of the leading mezzo-sopranos of her generation, as well as a major soprano for many years. She was a member of a pioneering generation of singers who followed Marian Anderson (including Leontyne Price, Martina Arroyo, Shirley Verrett and Reri Grist) in the world of classical music and paved the way for future African American opera and classical singers. Bumbry's voice was rich and sizable, possessing a wide range, and was capable of producing a very distinctive plangent tone. In her prime, she also possessed good agility and bel canto technique (see for example her renditions of the 'Veil Song' from Verdi's Don Carlo in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as her Ernani from the Chicago Lyric Opera in 1984). She was particularly noted for her fiery temperament and dramatic intensity on stage. More recently, she has also become known as a recitalist and interpreter of lieder, and as a teacher. From the late 1980s on, she seemed to concentrate her career in Europe, rather than in the US. A long time resident of Switzerland, she now makes her home in Salzburg, Austria.
  
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  Hal Holbrook
  Harold Rowe "Hal" Holbrook, Jr. (born February 17, 1925) is an American actor. His television roles include Abraham Lincoln in the 1976 TV series Lincoln, Hays Stowe on The Bold Ones: The Senator and Capt. Lloyd Bucher on Pueblo. He is also known for his role in the 2007 film Into the Wild, for which he was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award and an Academy Award. He has also performed a one-man show as Mark Twain since 1954.
  Holbrook was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Aileen Davenport Holbrook, a vaudeville dancer, and Harold Rowe Holbrook, Sr. He was raised in South Weymouth, Massachusetts. He graduated from the Culver Academies and Denison University, where an honors project about Mark Twain led him to develop the one-man show for which he is best known, a series of performances called Mark Twain Tonight (for which he won both a Tony and a Drama Desk Award). Holbrook served in the U.S. Army in World War II and was stationed in Newfoundland, where he performed in theatre productions such as the play Madam Precious.
  
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  Hank Azaria
  Henry Albert "Hank" Azaria ( /əˈzɛəriə/ ə-ZAIR-ee-ə; born April 25, 1964) is an American film, television and stage actor, director, voice actor, and comedian. He is noted for being one of the principal voice actors on the animated television series The Simpsons (1989–present), on which he performs the voices of Moe Szyslak, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, Chief Wiggum, Comic Book Guy, Carl Carlson and numerous others. Azaria, who attended Tufts University, joined the show with little voice acting experience, but became a regular in its second season. Many of his performances on the show are based on famous actors and characters; Moe's voice, for example, is based on actor Al Pacino.
  Alongside his continued voice acting on The Simpsons, Azaria became more widely known through his live-action appearances in films such as The Birdcage (1996) and Godzilla (1998). He has continued to star in numerous films including Mystery Men (1999), America's Sweethearts (2001), Shattered Glass (2003), Along Came Polly (2004), Run Fatboy Run (2007), Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009) and The Smurfs (2011). He also had recurring roles on the television series Mad About You and Friends, and starred in the drama Huff (2004–2006), playing the titular character, as well as appearing in the popular stage musical Spamalot. Originally primarily a comic actor, in recent years Azaria has taken on more dramatic roles including the TV films Tuesdays With Morrie (1999) and Uprising (2001). He has won four Emmys and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Azaria was married to actress Helen Hunt from 1999 to 2000.
  
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  Harvey Fierstein
  Harvey Forbes Fierstein (born June 6, 1952) is an American actor and playwright, noted for the distinction of winning Tony Awards for both writing and originating the lead role in his long-running play Torch Song Trilogy, about a gay drag-performer and his quest for true love and family, as well as writing the award-winning book to the musical La Cage aux Folles. He has since become a champion for gay civil rights.
  Fierstein was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jacqueline Harriet (née Gilbert), a school librarian, and Irving Fierstein, a handkerchief manufacturer. Raised Jewish, Fierstein is now an atheist.
  Fierstein occasionally writes columns about gay issues. He was openly gay at a time when very few celebrities were. His careers as a stand-up comic and female impersonator are mostly behind him. Fierstein resides in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
  The gravel-voiced actor is perhaps best known for the play and film Torch Song Trilogy, which he wrote and starred in both Off-Broadway (with the young Matthew Broderick) and on Broadway (with Estelle Getty and Fisher Stevens). The 1982 Broadway production won him two Tony Awards, for Best Play and Best Actor in a Play, two Drama Desk Awards, for Outstanding New Play and Outstanding Actor in a Play, and the Theatre World Award, and the film adaptation earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination as Best Male Lead.
  
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  Henry Fonda
  Henry Jaynes Fonda (May 16, 1905 – August 12, 1982) was an American film and stage actor.
  Fonda made his mark early as a Broadway actor. He also appeared in 1938 in plays performed in White Plains, New York, with Joan Tompkins. He made his Hollywood debut in 1935, and his career gained momentum after his Academy Award-nominated performance as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, a 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about an Oklahoma family who moved west during the Dust Bowl. Throughout six decades in Hollywood, Fonda cultivated a strong, appealing screen image in such classics as The Ox-Bow Incident, Mister Roberts and 12 Angry Men. Later, Fonda moved both toward darker epics as Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and lighter roles in family comedies like Yours, Mine and Ours with Lucille Ball.
  Fonda was the patriarch of a family of famous actors, including daughter Jane Fonda, son Peter Fonda, granddaughter Bridget Fonda, and grandson Troy Garity. His family and close friends called him "Hank". In 1999, he was named the sixth-Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute.
  
  wn.com/Henry_Fonda
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  Hume Cronyn
  Hume Blake Cronyn, OC (July 18, 1911 – June 15, 2003) was a Canadian actor of stage and screen, who enjoyed a long career, often appearing professionally alongside his second wife, Jessica Tandy.
  Hume Cronyn, one of five children, was born in London, Ontario, Canada, the son of Hume Blake Cronyn, Sr., a businessman and a Member of Parliament for London (after whom the Hume Cronyn Memorial Observatory and asteroid (12050) Humecronyn are named) and Frances Amelia (née Labatt), an heiress of the brewing company of the same name. His paternal grandfather, Verschoyle Cronyn, was the son of the Right Reverend Benjamin Cronyn, an Anglican cleric of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy, who served as first bishop of the Anglican diocese of Huron, and founder of Huron College, from which grew the University of Western Ontario. His great-uncle, Benjamin, Jr., was both a prominent citizen and early mayor of London, Ontario, but was later indicted for fraud and fled to Vermont; during his tenure in London he built a mansion called Oakwood, which currently serves as the head office of the Info-Tech Research Group. Cronyn was also a cousin of Canadian-born theater producer, Robert Whitehead, and a first cousin of the Canadian-British artist Hugh Verschoyle Cronyn GM (1905–1996).
  
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  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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  Itzhak Perlman
  Itzhak Perlman (Hebrew: יצחק פרלמן‎; born August 31, 1945) is an Israeli-born violinist, conductor, and instructor of master classes. He is regarded as one of the preeminent violinists of the 20th and early-21st centuries.
  Perlman was born in Tel Aviv, British Mandate for Palestine. His parents, Chaim and Shoshana Perlman, were natives of Poland and had independently immigrated to Palestine in the mid-1930s before they met and got married. Perlman first became interested in the violin after hearing a classical music performance on the radio. At the age of three, he was denied entrance to the Shulamit Conservatory for being too small to hold a violin. He instead taught himself how to play the instrument using a toy fiddle until he was old enough to study with Rivka Goldgart at the Shulamit Conservatory and at the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv, where he gave his first recital at age 10, before moving to the United States to study at the Juilliard School with the violin pedagogue, Ivan Galamian, and his assistant Dorothy Delay.
  
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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 Brown
  James Joseph Brown (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006) was an American singer, songwriter, musician, and recording artist. He is the originator of funk music and is a major figure of 20th century popular music and dance.
  In a career that spanned decades, Brown profoundly influenced the development of many different musical genres. Brown moved on a continuum of blues and gospel-based forms and styles to a profoundly "Africanized" approach to music making. Brown performed in concerts, first making his rounds across the Chitlin' Circuit, and then across the country and later around the world, along with appearing in shows on television and in movies. Although he contributed much to the music world through his hitmaking, Brown holds the record as the artist who charted the most singles on the Billboard Hot 100 without ever hitting number one on that chart.
  For many years, Brown's touring show was one of the most extravagant productions in American popular music. At the time of Brown's death, his band included three guitarists, two bass guitar players, two drummers, three horns and a percussionist. The bands that he maintained during the late 1960s and 1970s were of comparable size, and the bands also included a three-piece amplified string section that played during ballads. Brown employed between 40 and 50 people for the James Brown Revue, and members of the revue traveled with him in a bus to cities and towns all over the country, performing upwards of 330 shows a year with almost all of the shows as one-nighters. In 1986, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 1990 into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
  
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  James Earl Jones
  James Earl Jones (born January 17, 1931) is an American actor. Since his Broadway debut in 1957, Jones has spent more than five decades as "one of America's most distinguished and versatile actors" and has been termed "one of the greatest actors in American history." On November 12, 2011, Jones received an Honorary Academy Award.
  He is well known for his distinctive bass voice and for his portrayal of characters of substance, gravitas and leadership.
  James Earl Jones was born in Arkabutla, Mississippi, son of Robert Earl Jones (1910–2006), an actor, boxer, butler, and chauffeur who left the family shortly after James Earl's birth, and his wife Ruth (Connolly) Jones, a teacher and maid. Jones and his father reconciled many years later. Jones was raised by his maternal grandparents, farmers John Henry and Maggie Connolly. He is multiracial, with African, Irish, and Native American ancestry.
  Jones describes his grandmother, Maggie, as "the most racist person I have ever known", thus forcing him to develop his own independent thinking. His grandmother was of Cherokee, Choctaw, and black ancestry.
  
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  James Gandolfini
  James J. Gandolfini, Jr. (born September 18, 1961) is an American actor. He is best known for his role as Tony Soprano in the HBO TV series The Sopranos, about a troubled crime boss struggling to balance his family life and career in the Mafia. For this role, Gandolfini garnered enormous praise, winning both the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series three times. Gandolfini's other roles include the woman-beating mob henchman Virgil in True Romance, enforcer/stuntman Bear in Get Shorty, Lt. General Miller in In the Loop, and the impulsive Wild Thing Carol in Where the Wild Things Are. In 2007, Gandolfini produced the HBO documentary "Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq" in which he interviewed 10 injured veterans from the Iraq War. In 2010, Gandolfini produced another HBO documentary "Wartorn: 1861-2010" in which Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and its impact on soldiers and families is analyzed throughout several wars in American history from 1861 to 2010.
  
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  James Garner
  James Garner (born James Scott Bumgarner; April 7, 1928) is an American film and television actor, one of the first Hollywood actors to excel in both media. He has starred in several television series spanning a career of more than five decades. These included his roles as Bret Maverick, in the popular 1950s western-comedy series, Maverick; Jim Rockford, in the popular 1970s detective drama, The Rockford Files; and the father of Katey Sagal's character on 8 Simple Rules following the death of John Ritter. He has starred in more than fifty movies, including The Great Escape (1963), Paddy Chayefsky's The Americanization of Emily (1964), Blake Edwards' Victor Victoria (1982), Murphy's Romance (1985), for which he received an Academy Award nomination, and The Notebook (2004).
  Garner, the youngest of three children, was born in Norman, Oklahoma, the son of Mildred Scott (née Meek) and Weldon Warren Bumgarner, a carpet layer. His two older brothers were actor Jack Garner (1926–2011) and Charles Bumgarner, a school administrator who died in 1984. His family was Methodist. His mother, who was said to be of part Cherokee descent, died when he was five years old. After their mother's death, Garner and his brothers were sent to live with relatives. Garner was reunited with his family in 1934, when Weldon remarried.
  
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• James Levine
  James Lawrence Levine ( /lɨˈvaɪn/; born June 23, 1943) is an American conductor and pianist. He is currently on hiatus from his work as Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera, a situation necessitated by health problems and not due to end before the fall of 2013; the hiatus began in May 2011.
  Levine's first performance conducting the Metropolitan Opera was on June 5, 1971, and, as of June 2011, he had conducted 2,442 Met performances, a record. The conductor has held music director positions with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic. In 1997, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
  Levine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a musical family: his maternal grandfather was a cantor in a synagogue, his father was a violinist who led a dance band, and his mother was an actress. He began to play the piano as a small child. At the age of 10, he made his concert debut as soloist in Felix Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 2 at a youth concert of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
  
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• Jason Evers
  Jason Evers (January 2, 1922 - March 13, 2005) was an American actor.
  Evers was born Herb Evers in New York City, New York. After quitting high school to join the United States Army, Evers was so inspired by stars like John Wayne (whom he would later appear with in The Green Berets) that he decided to try acting. A stint on Broadway led to Hollywood, where his first big break was the 1960 NBC series western Wrangler. On June 30, 1960, he appeared on NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford.
  In 1963-1964, Evers starred as 41-year-old Professor Howe in the 26-episode ABC drama Channing, based on life on a college campus, with co-star Henry Jones (1912–1999).
  Evers' most enduring role derived from the 1959 B-movie classic The Brain That Wouldn't Die, which was not released until 1962.
  In 1966, Evers appeared on the episode "The Insider" of NBC's The Road West starring Barry Sullivan as the patriarch of a family of pioneers relocated to Kansas. In 1968, Evers co-starred in the Star Trek episode entitled Wink of an Eye, about a race of aliens who exist in a hyperaccelerated time frame and take over the starship. From 1967-1969, he appeared sporadically as James Sonnett, the missing son sought by the Walter Brennan character, Will Sonnett, in ABC's The Guns of Will Sonnett. Dack Rambo co-starred as Evers' son and Brennan's grandson, Jeff Sonnett.
  
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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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  Jeremy Irons
  Jeremy John Irons (born 19 September 1948) is an English actor. After receiving classical training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Irons began his acting career on stage in 1969, and has since appeared in many London theatre productions including The Winter's Tale, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, Godspell and Richard II. In 1984, he made his Broadway debut in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing and received a Tony Award for Best Actor.
  Irons's first major film role came in the 1981 romantic drama The French Lieutenant's Woman, for which he received a BAFTA nomination for Best Actor. After starring in such films as Moonlighting (1982), Betrayal (1983), and The Mission (1986), he gained critical acclaim for portraying twin gynaecologists in David Cronenberg's psychological thriller Dead Ringers (1988). In 1990, Irons played accused murderer Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune, and took home multiple awards including an Academy Award for Best Actor. Other notable films have included The House of the Spirits (1993), The Lion King (1994), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), Lolita (1997), The Merchant of Venice (2004), Being Julia (2004), Appaloosa (2008), and Margin Call (2011).
  
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  Joan Sutherland
  Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, OM, AC, DBE (7 November 1926 – 10 October 2010) was an Australian dramatic coloratura soprano noted for her contribution to the renaissance of the bel canto repertoire from the late 1950s through to the 1980s.
  One of the most remarkable female opera singers of the 20th century, she was dubbed La Stupenda by a La Fenice audience in 1960 after a performance of the title role in Handel's Alcina. She possessed a voice of beauty and power, combining extraordinary agility, accurate intonation, "supremely" pinpoint staccatos, a splendid trill and a tremendous upper register, although music critics often complained about the imprecision of her diction. Her friend Luciano Pavarotti once called Sutherland the "Voice of the Century"; Montserrat Caballé described the Australian's voice as being like "heaven".
  Joan Sutherland was born to Scottish parents in Sydney, and attended St Catherine's School in the suburb of Waverley, New South Wales. As a child, she listened to and imitated her mother's singing exercises. Her mother, a mezzo-soprano, had taken voice lessons but never considered making a career as a professional singer. Sutherland was 18 years old when she began seriously studying voice with John and Aida Dickens. She made her concert debut in Sydney, as Dido in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, in 1947. In 1951, she made her stage debut in Eugene Goossens's Judith. In 1951, after winning Australia's most important competition, the Sun Aria, now known as the Sydney Eisteddfod McDonald's Operatic Aria in 1949. She then went to London to further her studies at the Opera School of the Royal College of Music with Clive Carey. She was engaged by the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as a utility soprano, and made her debut there on 28 October 1952, as the First Lady in The Magic Flute, followed in November by a few performances as Clotilde in Vincenzo Bellini's Norma, with Maria Callas as Norma.
  
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• John Kani
  Bonsile John Kani (born 1943) is a South African actor, director and playwright.
  He was born in New Brighton, South Africa.
  Kani joined The Serpent Players (a group of actors whose first performance was in the former snake pit of the zoo, hence the name) in Port Elizabeth in 1965 and helped to create many plays that went unpublished but were performed to a resounding reception.
  These were followed by the more famous Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island, co-written with Athol Fugard and Winston Ntshona, in the early 1970s. He also received an Olivier nomination for his role in My Children My Africa!
  Kani's work has been widely performed around the world, including New York, where he and Winston Ntshona won a Tony Award in 1975 for Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island. These two plays were presented in repertory at the Edison Theatre for a total of 52 performances.
  Nothing but the Truth (2002) was his debut as sole playwright and was first performed in the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. This play takes place in post-apartheid South Africa and does not concern the conflicts between whites and blacks, but the rift between blacks who stayed in South Africa to fight apartheid, and those who left only to return when the hated regime folded. It won the 2003 Fleur du Cap Awards for best actor and best new South African play. In the same year he was also awarded a special Obie award for his extraordinary contribution to theatre in the USA.
  
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  John Lithgow
  John Arthur Lithgow ( /ˈlɪθɡoʊ/ LITH-goh; born October 19, 1945) is an American actor, musician, and author. Presently, he is involved with a wide range of media projects, including stage, television, film, and radio. He also has written and published several books of poetry and children's literature.
  He appeared in the films The World According to Garp (1982) and Terms of Endearment (1983), receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for each. Lithgow is known for his roles as the Reverend Shaw Moore in Footloose, Dick Solomon on the NBC sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun, the voice of Lord Farquaad in Shrek, and Arthur Mitchell on Showtime's Dexter, for which he won Golden Globe and Emmy awards.
  On the stage, he appeared in the musical adaptation of Sweet Smell of Success, winning the Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical. He again appeared in a musical, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, again receiving a Tony nomination for Best Leading Actor in a Musical.
  He has also recorded music, such as the 1999 album of children's music, Singin' in the Bathtub, and has written poetry and short stories for children, such as Marsupial Sue.
  
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  John Malkovich
  John Gavin Malkovich (born December 9, 1953) is an American actor, producer, director and fashion designer with his label Technobohemian. Over the last 25 years of his career, Malkovich has appeared in more than 70 motion pictures. For his roles in Places in the Heart and In the Line of Fire, he received Academy Award nominations. He has also appeared in critically acclaimed films such as Empire of the Sun, The Killing Fields, Dangerous Liaisons, Of Mice and Men, Con Air, Being John Malkovich, and Red. He will produce the film version of the book The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
  Malkovich was born in Christopher, Illinois. His paternal grandparents were Croats, natives of Ozalj in Croatia. His mother was of Scottish and German ancestry. He grew up in Benton, Illinois, in a large house on South Main Street. His father, Daniel Leon Malkovich, was a state conservation director and publisher of Outdoor Illinois, a conservation magazine. His mother, Joe Anne (née Choisser), owned the Benton Evening News (a local newspaper in Benton, Il.), as well as Outdoor Illinois. Malkovich attended Logan Grade School,^{[citation needed]} Webster Junior High, and Benton Consolidated High School, in Benton, Illinois. During his high school years, he appeared in various plays and the musical, Carousel. He was also a member of a folk/rock musical trio, and was a member of a local summer theater/comedy project in Benton in 1972, where he co-starred in Jean-Claude van Itallie's America Hurrah. Upon graduation from high school, he entered Eastern Illinois University, and then transferred to Illinois State University, where he majored in theatre.
  
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  John Rubinstein
  John Arthur Rubinstein (born December 8, 1946) is an American film, Broadway, and television actor, a composer of film and theatre music, and a director in theatre and television.
  Rubinstein was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Aniela (née Młynarska), a dancer and writer, and Polish-born concert pianist Arthur Rubinstein. Rubinstein's maternal grandfather was the Polish conductor Emil Młynarski. Rubinstein's father was Jewish, and his mother, who was raised in Warsaw, was Catholic.
  He made his Broadway acting debut in 1972 and received a Theater World Award for creating the title role in the musical Pippin, directed by Bob Fosse. In 1980 he won the Tony, Drama Desk, Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle, and Drama-Logue Awards for his portrayal of James Leeds in Mark Medoff's Children of a Lesser God, directed by Gordon Davidson. Other Broadway appearances were in Neil Simon's Fools, directed by Mike Nichols, and Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which earned him a Drama Desk nomination; he replaced William Hurt as Eddie in David Rabe's Hurlyburly, replaced David Dukes in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, and starred in Getting Away with Murder, by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, directed by Jack O'Brien. In 1987, he made his off-Broadway debut at the Roundabout Theater as Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, with Stephen Lang and John Wood, and subsequently performed in Urban Blight and Cabaret Verboten. In 2005, he received the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Lead Actor in a Play, as well as nominations for both the Outer Critics’ and Drama League Awards, for his portrayal of George Simon in Elmer Rice's Counsellor-at-Law. In addition, he has made numerous appearances in regional theater productions.
  
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  John Sayles
  John Thomas Sayles (born September 28, 1950) is an American independent film director, screenwriter and author.
  Sayles was born in Schenectady, New York, the son of Mary (née Rausch), a teacher, and Donald John Sayles, a school administrator. He was raised Catholic and took to labeling himself "a Catholic atheist".^{[citation needed]} Both of Sayles's parents were of half-Irish descent.
  Like Martin Scorsese and James Cameron, among others, Sayles began his film career working with Roger Corman. Sayles went on to fund his first film, Return of the Secaucus 7, with $30,000 he had in the bank from writing scripts for Corman.^{[citation needed]} He set the film in a large house so that he did not have to travel to or get permits for different locations, set it over a three-day weekend to limit costume changes, and wrote about people his age so that he could have his friends act in it. In November 1997, the National Film Preservation Board announced that Return of the Secaucus 7 would be one of the 25 films selected that year for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.
  
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  John Shea
  John Victor Shea III (born April 14, 1949) is an American actor and director who has starred on stage, television and in film. He is best known for his role as Lex Luthor in the 1990s TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and also starred in the short-lived 1990s TV series WIOU as Hank Zaret. Later on in the 2000s he starred on the series Mutant X as Adam Kane.
  Shea was born in North Conway, New Hampshire, near where his father was teaching at Fryeburg Academy, Maine, and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts in a family of five. His parents were Elizabeth Mary (née Fuller) and Dr. John Victor Shea, Jr., who served in the U.S. Army in World War II, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and was a teacher, coach and later assistant Superintendent of Schools.
  Shea attended Catholic schools, graduating from Cathedral High School where he captained the varsity debate team and played varsity football and track. Shea received his early theatre training at Bates College under Lavinia Schaffer and Bill Beard. He also performed on the varsity debating and football teams and co-edited the college literary magazine, Puffed Wheat, before graduating with a BA in 1970. He studied acting and directing at the Yale School of Drama under Dean Robert Brustein, gaining an MFA in Directing in 1973. During his time at the School of Drama, he also performed at the Yale Repertory Theatre, in the Yale cabaret with schoolmates Joe Grifasi and Meryl Streep, and studied film with Arthur Penn and Sidney Lumet at the Film School.
  
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  John Williams
  John Towner Williams (born February 8, 1932) is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. In a career spanning almost six decades, he has composed some of the most recognizable film scores in the history of motion pictures, including the Star Wars saga, Jaws, Superman, the Indiana Jones films, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Hook, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, War Horse, Home Alone and the first three Harry Potter films. He has had a long association with director Steven Spielberg, composing the music for all but two (Duel and The Color Purple) of Spielberg's major feature films.
  Other notable works by Williams include theme music for four Olympic Games, NBC Sunday Night Football, the NBC Nightly News, the rededication of the Statue of Liberty, and the television series Lost in Space. Williams has also composed numerous classical concerti, and he served as the principal conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra from 1980 to 1993; he is now the orchestra's conductor laureate.
  Williams has won five Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, seven BAFTA Awards, and 21 Grammy Awards. With 47 Academy Award nominations, Williams is the second most nominated person, after Walt Disney. John Williams was honored with the prestigious Richard Kirk award at the 1999 BMI Film and TV Awards. The award is given annually to a composer who has made significant contributions to film and television music. Williams was inducted into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame in 2000, and was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004.
  
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  José Ferrer
  José Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cintrón (January 8, 1912 – January 26, 1992), best known as José Ferrer, was a Puerto Rican actor, as well as a theater and film director. He was the first Puerto Rican, as well as the first Hispanic actor to win an Academy Award. Jose Ferrer donated his Academy Award to the University of Puerto Rico as a tribute to his roots. The prolific and distinguished thespian also won numerous Tony Awards: In 1947 he won a Tony Award for his theatrical performance of Cyrano de Bergerac, and in 1952 Ferrer won the Distinguished Dramatic Actor Award for The Shrike, plus the Outstanding Director Award for The Shrike, The Fourposter, and Stalag 17. Jose Ferrer's contributions to American theatre were recognized in 1981 when he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Further honors came in 1985 when he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
  Ferrer was born in the Santurce, Puerto Rico, the son of Maria Providencia Cintron and Rafael Ferrer, an attorney and writer. He studied in the Swiss boarding school Institut Le Rosey. In 1933, he graduated from Princeton University, where he wrote a senior thesis "French Naturalism and Pardo Bazán"; he was also a member of the Princeton Triangle Club.
  
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• Judd Hirsch
  Judd Hirsch (born March 15, 1935) is an American actor most known for playing Alex Rieger on the television comedy series Taxi, John Lacey on the NBC series Dear John, and Alan Eppes on the CBS series Numb3rs.
  He was born in The Bronx borough of New York City, New York, the son of Sally (née Kitzis) and Joseph Sidney Hirsch, an electrician. His father was also born in New York where the family had lived since the mid-1800s. Sally (Sarah) Kitzis was born in Russia. Hirsch was raised Jewish.^{[citation needed]}
  He attended DeWitt Clinton High School, located in The Bronx, and later earned a college degree from the City College of New York in physics.^{[citation needed]}
  Hirsch's first major television appearance was in the mini-series The Law (1974).
  For his performance in Taxi, in 1981 and again in 1983, Judd Hirsch won the Emmy Award for Lead Actor In a Comedy Series. Hirsch went on to play the title character on the modestly successful sitcom Dear John and in 1989 won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Series in a Comedy or Musical for this role. He later teamed with Bob Newhart in the short-lived comedy George and Leo. He had also previously starred for one season in the series Delvecchio, playing a police detective (1976–1977).
  
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  Julie Andrews
  Dame Julia Elizabeth Andrews, DBE (née Wells; born 1 October 1935) is an English film and stage actress, singer, and author. She is the recipient of Golden Globe, Emmy, Grammy, BAFTA, People's Choice Award, Theatre World Award, Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award honours.
  Andrews is a former child actress and singer who made her Broadway debut in a 1954 production of The Boy Friend, and rose to prominence starring in musicals such as My Fair Lady and Camelot, both of which earned her Tony Award nominations. In 1957, she made her television debut with the title role in Cinderella, which was seen by over 100 million viewers.
  Andrews made her feature film debut in Mary Poppins (1964), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She received her second Academy Award nomination for The Sound of Music (1965). Adjusted for inflation, these two films are the 25th and 3rd highest grossing films of all time, respectively. From 1964 to 1967, Andrews was the biggest film star in the world, with the additional box office successes of her films The Americanization of Emily, Hawaii, Torn Curtain, and Thoroughly Modern Millie.
  
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  Julie Harris
  Julia Ann "Julie" Harris (born December 2, 1925) is an American stage, screen, and television actress. She has won five Tony Awards, three Emmy Awards and a Grammy Award, and was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1994, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts. She is a member of the American Theatre Hall of Fame. She also received the 2002 Special Lifetime Achievement Tony Award.
  Harris's screen debut was in 1952, repeating her Broadway success as the monumentally lonely teenage girl Frankie in Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding, for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. That film also preserves the original Broadway cast performances of Ethel Waters and Brandon DeWilde. That same year, she won her first Best Actress Tony for originating the role of insouciant Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera, the stage version of Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin (later musicalized as Cabaret on Broadway in 1966 and, in the 1972 film, with Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles.) Harris repeated her stage role in the 1955 film version of I Am a Camera. She also appeared in such films as East of Eden (1955), with James Dean (with whom she became close friends), Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), with Paul Newman in the private-detective film Harper in 1966, and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967).
  
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• Julienne Marie
  Julienne Marie (born March 21, 1937) is an American actress and singer known for her work on the Broadway stage.
  Julienne Marie Hendricks was born the only child of her father John Hendricks, who worked in the paint business as a chemist. Her mother was a stage mother who pushed her into performing at a young age. She was named after her father's mother, Julia. Her grandfather's name was George Gyurko. She dropped her last name and used Julienne Marie as her stage name because she thought 'Hendricks' sounded too Midwestern and not appropriate for the billboards. During her school years she took piano lessons and participated in local pageants. She moved from Toledo to New York City with her family where she started voice training at Juilliard at the age of 10.
  Julienne Marie made her Broadway debut in the original production of The King and I, in which she played the youngest child bride to Yul Brenner. Julienne auditioned for the role for Oscar Hammerstein II. She received her first Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical in 1959 for her portrayal of a young Indian maiden in Whoop-Up. Whoop-Up played 56 performances. She then turned down a role playing the sister of Lucille Ball in Wildcat to step into the original production of Gypsy as Louise in the role originated by Sandra Church. She has said that co-star Ethel Merman and herself got along quite well. Gypsy Rose Lee herself raved Julienne's performance after a show. Marie performed 585 shows as Louise opposite Merman.
  
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  Karl Malden
  Karl Malden (born Mladen George Sekulovich; Serbian Cyrillic Младен Ђорђе Секуловић; March 22, 1912 – July 1, 2009) was a Serbian American actor. In a career that spanned more than seven decades, he performed in such classic films as A Streetcar Named Desire, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor; On the Waterfront; and One-Eyed Jacks. Among other notable film roles were Archie Lee Meighan in Baby Doll, Zebulon Prescott in How the West Was Won, and General Omar Bradley in Patton. His best-known role, though, was on television as Lt. Mike Stone on the 1970s crime drama, The Streets of San Francisco. During the 1970s and 1980s, he was also the spokesman for American Express.
  
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  Korean War
  The Korean War (Korean: 한국전쟁 or 조선전쟁, Hanja: 韓國戰爭 or 朝鮮戰爭; 25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953) was a war between the Republic of Korea (supported primarily by the United States of America, with contributions from allied nations under the aegis of the United Nations) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (supported by the People's Republic of China, with military and material aid from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). The Korean War was primarily the result of the political division of Korea by an agreement of the victorious Allies at the conclusion of the Pacific War at the end of World War II. The Korean Peninsula was ruled by the Empire of Japan from 1910 until the end of World War II. Following the surrender of the Empire of Japan in September 1945, American administrators divided the peninsula along the 38th parallel, with U.S. military forces occupying the southern half and Soviet military forces occupying the northern half.
  
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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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  Leon Fleisher
  Leon Fleisher (born July 23, 1928) is an American pianist and conductor.
  Fleisher was born in San Francisco, where he started studying the piano at age four. He made his public debut at age eight and played with the New York Philharmonic under Pierre Monteux at 16; Monteux famously called him "the pianistic find of the century." He became one of the few child prodigies to be accepted for study with Artur Schnabel and also studied with Maria Curcio. Fleisher was linked via Schnabel to a tradition that descended directly from Beethoven himself, handed down through Carl Czerny and Theodor Leschetizky.
  In the 1950s, Fleisher signed an exclusive recording contract with Columbia Masterworks. He is particularly well known for his interpretations of the piano concerti of Brahms and Beethoven, which he recorded with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. They also recorded Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 25, the Grieg and Schumann piano concertos, Franck's Symphonic Variations, and Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.
  
  wn.com/Leon_Fleisher
• Leslie Uggams
  Leslie Uggams (born May 25, 1943, New York City) is an American actress and singer, perhaps best known for her work in Hallelujah, Baby! and the miniseries Roots. She is a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
  Uggams was born in New York City. Her father was a singer and her mother was a dancer.She attended the Professional Children's School of New York and Juilliard.
  Uggams started in show business as a child in 1950, playing the niece of Ethel Waters on Beulah. Uggams made her singing debut on the Lawrence Welk Show and was a regular on Sing Along with Mitch, starring record producer-conductor Mitch Miller.In 1960, she sang, off-screen, "Give Me That Old Time Religion" in the film Inherit the Wind. Uggams came to be recognized by TV audiences as an upcoming teen talent in 1954 on the NBC/CBS hit musical quiz show series "Name That Tune" (1953-9) along with child hitmaker Eddie Hodges.
  Her records "One More Sunrise"(an English-language cover of Ivo Robic's "Morgen", 1959) and "House Built On Sand" made Billboard Magazine's charts.
  
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  Linda Blair
  Linda Denise Blair (born January 22, 1959) is an American actress. Blair is best known for her role as the possessed child, Regan, in the film The Exorcist (1973), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award and two Golden Globes, winning one. She reprised her role in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977).
  Blair was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and was raised in Westport, Connecticut. She began her career as a six-year-old child model and started acting with a regular role on the short-lived Hidden Faces (1968-69) day time soap. Her first theatrical film appearance was in The Way We Live Now (1970). Blair was selected from a field of 600 applicants for her most notable role as Regan in The Exorcist (1973). The role earned her a Golden Globe and People's Choice Award for Best Supporting Actress as well as an Academy Award nomination. She reprised her role in the sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), garnering a Saturn Award nomination for Best Actress of 1978. Between these two films, she appeared in the TV movies Born Innocent (1974), Sarah T. - Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (1975), and Sweet Hostage (1975) opposite Martin Sheen.
  
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  Loretta Lynn
  Loretta Lynn (born Loretta Webb April 14, 1932), is an American country music singer-songwriter, author and philanthropist. Born in Butcher Hollow, near Paintsville, Kentucky in Johnson County to a coal miner father, Lynn married at 15 years old, was a mother soon after, and moved to Washington with her husband, Oliver Vanetta Lynn, Jr. (1926–1996), nicknamed "Doo". Their marriage was sometimes tumultuous; he had affairs and she was headstrong. Their experiences together became inspiration for her music.
  On her 21st birthday, Lynn's husband bought her a $17.00 Harmony guitar. She taught herself to play and when she was 24, on her wedding anniversary, Doo encouraged her to become a singer. She learned the guitar better, started singing at the Delta Grange Hall in Washington State with the Pen Brothers' band, The Westerners, then eventually cut her first record in February, 1960. She became a part of the country music scene in Nashville in the 1960s, and in 1967 charted her first of 16 number-one hits (out of 70 charted songs as a solo artist and a duet partner) that include "Don't Come Home A' Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)", "You Ain't Woman Enough", "Fist City", and "Coal Miner's Daughter". She focused on blue collar women's issues with themes of philandering husbands and persistent mistresses, and pushed boundaries in the conservative genre of country music by singing about birth control ("The Pill"), repeated childbirth ("One's on the Way"), double standards for men and women ("Rated "X""), and being widowed by the draft during the Vietnam War ("Dear Uncle Sam"). Country music radio stations often refused to play her songs. Nonetheless, she became known as "The First Lady of Country Music" and continues to be one of the most successful vocalists of all time.
  
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  Luciano Pavarotti
  Luciano Pavarotti, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (12 October 1935 – 6 September 2007) was an Italian operatic tenor, who also crossed over into popular music, eventually becoming one of the most commercially successful tenors of all time. He made numerous recordings of complete operas and individual arias, and established himself as one of the finest tenors of the 20th century. He was one of The Three Tenors and became well known for his televised concerts and media appearances. Pavarotti was also noted for his charity work on behalf of refugees and the Red Cross, amongst others.
  Pavarotti began his professional career as a tenor in 1961 in Italy. That same year, he made his first international appearance in La traviata in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He sang in opera houses in addition to Italy, in the Netherlands, Vienna, London, Ankara, Budapest and Barcelona. The young tenor earned valuable experience and recognition while touring Australia at the invitation of soprano Joan Sutherland in 1965. He made his United States debut in Miami soon afterwards, also on Sutherland's recommendation. His position as a leading lyric tenor was consolidated in the years between 1966 and 1972, during which time he first appeared at Milan's La Scala and other major European houses. In 1968, he debuted at New York City's Metropolitan Opera as Rodolfo in Puccini's La bohème. At the Met in 1972, in the role of Tonio in Donizetti's La fille du régiment he earned the title "King of the high Cs" when he sang the aria "Ah mes amis ... pour mon âme". He gained worldwide fame for the brilliance and beauty of his tone, especially into the upper register. He was at his best in bel canto operas, pre-Aida Verdi roles and Puccini works such as La bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly. The late 1970s and 1980s saw Pavarotti continue to make significant appearances in the world's foremost opera houses.
  
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  Mandy Patinkin
  Mandel Bruce "Mandy" Patinkin ( /pəˈtɪŋkɨn/; born November 30, 1952) is an award-winning American actor of stage and screen and a tenor vocalist. He is a noted interpreter of the musical works of Stephen Sondheim, and is best known for his work in musical theatre, originating iconic roles such as Georges Seurat in Sunday in the Park with George, Archibald Craven in The Secret Garden, Burrs in The Wild Party and Che in the original Broadway production of Evita.
  He has appeared in television series such as Chicago Hope, Dead Like Me and the first two seasons of Criminal Minds. He currently plays Saul Berenson in the Showtime series Homeland. His best-known film role was as Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride in 1987. Other film roles include Alien Nation (1988), Yentl (1983), Dick Tracy, and The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland (1999).
  Patinkin was born in Chicago, Illinois, of Russian and Polish Jewish descent, the son of Doris "Doralee" Sinton, a homemaker, and Lester Patinkin, who worked for the People's Iron & Metal Company and the Scrap Corporation of America. His mother wrote Grandma Doralee Patinkin's Jewish Family Cookbook. Patinkin's cousins include:
  
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  Marlon Brando
  Marlon Brando, Jr. (April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004) was an American movie star and political activist. "Unchallenged as the most important actor in modern American Cinema" according to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, Brando was one of only three professional actors, along with Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe, named by Time magazine as one of its 100 Persons of the Century in 1999.
  Brando had a significant impact on film acting, and was the foremost example of the "method" acting style. While he became notorious for his "mumbling" diction and exuding a raw animal magnetism, his mercurial performances were nonetheless highly regarded, and he is widely considered as one of the greatest and most influential actors of the 20th century. Director Martin Scorsese said of him, "He is the marker. There's 'before Brando' and 'after Brando'." Actor Jack Nicholson once said, "When Marlon dies, everybody moves up one." He was ranked by the American Film Institute as the fourth greatest screen legend among male movie stars.
  
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  Martin Balsam
  Martin Henry Balsam (November 4, 1919 – February 13, 1996) was an American actor. He is known for his Oscar-winning role as "Arnold Burns" in A Thousand Clowns and his role as "Detective Milton Arbogast" in Psycho.
  Martin Balsam was born in The Bronx, New York to Jewish parents Lillian (née Weinstein) and Albert Balsam, who was a manufacturer of ladies sportswear. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School, where he participated in the drama club. He studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York with the influential German director Erwin Piscator and then served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II.
  Martin Balsam made his professional debut in August 1941 in a production of The Play's the Thing in Locust Valley. In 1947, he was selected by Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg to be a player in the Actors Studio television program. He appeared in many other television drama series, including The Twilight Zone (episodes "The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine" and "The New Exhibit"), as a psychologist in the pilot episode, Five Fingers, Target: The Corruptors!, The Eleventh Hour, Breaking Point, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Fugitive, and Mr. Broadway, as a retired U.N.C.L.E. agent in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. episode, "The Odd Man Affair", and guest starred in the two-part Murder, She Wrote episode, "Death Stalks the Big Top".
  
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  Martin Scorsese
  Martin Charles Scorsese ( /skɔrˈsɛsɛ/; born November 17, 1942) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation. He is a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema, and has won Academy Award, Palme d'Or, Emmys, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and DGA Awards.
  Scorsese's body of work addresses such themes as Italian American identity, Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption,machismo, modern crime, and violence. Scorsese is hailed as one of the most significant and influential filmmakers of all time, directing landmark films such as Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Goodfellas (1990) – all of which he collaborated on with actor and close friend Robert De Niro. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed (2006), having been nominated a previous five times.
  
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  Mary Tyler Moore
  Mary Tyler Moore (born December 29, 1936) is an American actress, primarily known for her roles in television sitcoms. Moore is best known for The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–77), in which she starred as Mary Richards, a 30-something single woman who worked as a local news producer in Minneapolis, and for her earlier role as Laura Petrie (Dick Van Dyke's wife) on The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–66). She also appeared in a number of films, most notably 1980's Ordinary People, in which she played a role that was the polar opposite of the television characters she had portrayed, and for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. Moore has also been active in charity work and various political causes, particularly around the issues of animal rights and Diabetes mellitus type 1. Mary Tyler Moore was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the beginning of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and also dealt with alcoholism, which was treated in the 1980s. In May 2011, Moore underwent elective brain surgery to remove a benign meningioma.
  
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  Mel Brooks
  Mel Brooks (born Melvin Kaminsky; June 28, 1926) is an American film director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor and producer. He is best known as a creator of broad film farces and comic parodies. He began his career as a stand-up comic and as a writer for the early TV variety show Your Show of Shows. He became well known as part of the comedy duo with Carl Reiner, The 2000 Year Old Man. In middle age he became one of the most successful film directors of the 1970s, with many of his films being among the top ten money makers of the year that they were released. His most well known films include The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, History of the World, Part I and Spaceballs. More recently he has had a smash hit on Broadway with the musical adaptation of his first film, The Producers. He was married to the actress Anne Bancroft from 1964 until her death in 2005.
  Brooks is a member of the short list of entertainers with the distinction of having won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony award. Three of his films ranked in the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 comedy films of all-time: Blazing Saddles at number 6, The Producers at number 11, and Young Frankenstein at number 13.
  
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  Melvyn Douglas
  Melvyn Edouard Hesselberg (April 5, 1901 – August 4, 1981), better known as Melvyn Douglas, was an American actor.
  Coming to prominence in the 1930s as a suave leading man (perhaps best typified by his performance in the 1939 romantic comedy Ninotchka), Douglas later transitioned into more mature and fatherly roles as in his Academy Award-winning performances in Hud (1963) and Being There (1979).
  Douglas was born in Macon, Georgia, the son of Lena Priscilla (née Shackelford) and Edouard Gregory Hesselberg, a concert pianist and composer. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Riga, Latvia, then part of Russia. His mother, a native of Tennessee, was Protestant and a Mayflower descendant. His maternal grandfather, George Shackelford, was a General and Civil War veteran.
  Douglas, in his autobiography, See You at the Movies (1987), writes that he was unaware of his Jewish background until later in his youth: "I did not learn about the non-Christian part of my heritage until my early teens," as his parents preferred to hide his Jewish heritage. It was his aunts, on his father's side, who told him "the truth" when he was 14. He writes that he "admired them unstintingly and modeled" himself on them; they in turn treated him like a son.
  
  wn.com/Melvyn_Douglas
• Mercedes McCambridge
  Carlotta Mercedes McCambridge (March 16, 1916 – March 2, 2004) was an American actress. Orson Welles called her "the world's greatest living radio actress."
  McCambridge was born in Joliet, Illinois, the daughter of Irish American Catholic parents Marie (née Mahaffry) and John Patrick McCambridge. She graduated from Mundelein College in Chicago before embarking on a career.
  She began her career as a radio actor during the 1940s while also performing on Broadway. Her radio work in this period included her portrayal of Rosemary Levy on Abie's Irish Rose and various characters on the radio series I Love A Mystery in both its West Coast and East Coast incarnations (most notably as "Charity Martin" in The Thing That Cries in the Night, "Nasha" and "Laura" in Bury Your Dead, Arizona, "Sunny Richards" in both The Million Dollar Curse and The Temple of Vampires and "Jack 'Jacqueline' Dempsey Ross" in The Battle of the Century). She frequently did feature roles on the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, and was an original cast member on The Guiding Light, before the Bauers took over as the central characters. She also starred in her own show, The Defense Attorney as Martha Ellis Bryant.
  
  wn.com/Mercedes_McCambridge
• Michael Moriarty
  Michael Moriarty (born April 5, 1941) is an American-Canadian actor of stage and screen, and a jazz musician. He played Benjamin Stone for four seasons in the TV series Law & Order.
  Moriarty, an Irish American was born in Detroit, Michigan the son of Elinor (married and maiden names|née Paul) and George Moriarty, a police sergeant. His grandfather, George Moriarty, was a third baseman, umpire and manager in the major leagues for nearly 40 years.
  Moriarty attended middle school at Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills before transferring to the University of Detroit Jesuit High School for high school. He then matriculated at Dartmouth College in the class of 1963, where he was a theatre college major. After receiving his degree, he left for London, England, where he enrolled in the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, after receiving a Fulbright Scholarship.
  In 1973, Moriarty was cast as the egocentric Henry Wiggen in Bang the Drum Slowly, a film about the unlikely friendship between two baseball teammates – the second being Robert De Niro, a slow thinking catcher who becomes terminally ill. In the same year, Moriarty starred in a TV movie adaptation of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie with Katharine Hepburn. Coincidentally, the film also featured Sam Waterston, who later replaced Moriarty as the Executive Assistant District Attorney on Law & Order. Moriarty's role in Menagerie (as "Jim," the Gentleman Caller; Waterston played the son "Tom") won him an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor of the Year. In 1974, Moriarty starred as rookie detective Bo Lockley in the acclaimed gritty police drama Report to the Commissioner.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Moriarty
• Mike Nichols
  Mike Nichols (born Michael Igor Peschkowsky; November 6, 1931) is a German-born American television, stage and film director, writer, producer and comedian. He began his career in the 1950s as one half of the comedy duo Nichols and May, along with Elaine May. In 1968 he won the Academy Award for Best Director for the film The Graduate. His other noteworthy films include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carnal Knowledge, Working Girl, Closer and the TV mini-series Angels in America. He also staged the original theatrical productions of Barefoot in the Park, Luv, The Odd Couple and Spamalot.
  Nichols is one of a small group of people who have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award. His other honors include the Lincoln Center Gala Tribute in 1999, the National Medal of Arts in 2001, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2010.
  Mike Nichols was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin, Germany, the son of Brigitte (née Landauer) and Paul Peschkowsky, a physician. His father was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Russian Jewish immigrant family that had been wealthy and lived in Siberia, leaving after the Russian Revolution and settling in Germany around 1920. His mother's family were German Jews. His maternal grandparents were anarchist Gustav Landauer and author Hedwig Lachmann. Nichols is a third cousin twice removed of scientist Albert Einstein, through Nichols' mother. He moved to the United States to flee the Nazis on April 28, 1939. His father, who had changed his name to Paul Nichols, had successfully set up a medical practice in Manhattan and the family lived near Central Park. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1944 and attended public elementary school in Manhattan (PS 87). After graduating from Walden High School, Nichols briefly attended New York University before dropping out. In 1950, he enrolled in the pre-med program at the University of Chicago.
  
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  Mikhail Baryshnikov
  Mikhail Nikolaevich Baryshnikov (Russian: Михаи́л Никола́евич Бары́шников, Latvian: Mihails Barišņikovs) (born January 27, 1948), nicknamed "Misha", is a Russian American dancer, choreographer, and actor, often cited alongside Vaslav Nijinsky and Rudolf Nureyev as one of the greatest ballet dancers in history. After a promising start in the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad, he defected to Canada in 1974 for more opportunities in western dance. After freelancing with many companies, he joined the New York City Ballet as a principal dancer to learn George Balanchine's style of movement. He then danced with the American Ballet Theatre, where he later became artistic director.
  Baryshnikov has spearheaded many of his own artistic projects and has been associated in particular with promoting modern dance, premiering dozens of new works, including many of his own. His success as a dramatic actor on stage, cinema and television has helped him become probably the most widely recognized contemporary ballet dancer. In 1977, he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and a Golden Globe nomination for his work as "Yuri Kopeikine" in the film The Turning Point.
  
  wn.com/Mikhail_Baryshnikov
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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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  Nathan Lane
  Nathan Lane (born February 3, 1956) is an American actor of stage and screen. He is best known for his roles as Mendy in The Lisbon Traviata, Albert in The Birdcage, Max Bialystock in the musical The Producers, Ernie Smuntz in MouseHunt, Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and his voice work in The Lion King and Stuart Little. In 2006, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 2008, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
  Lane was born Joseph Lane in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of Irish American Catholic parents. He was named after his uncle, a Jesuit priest. His father, Daniel, was a truck driver and an aspiring tenor who died from alcoholism when Lane was eleven; his mother, Nora, was a housewife and secretary who suffered from manic-depression, and died in 2000. He has two brothers, Robert and Daniel. Lane attended Roman Catholic schools in Jersey City, including Jesuit-run St. Peter's Preparatory High School, where he was selected Best Actor in 1974.^{[citation needed]}
  
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  Nigel Hawthorne
  Sir Nigel Barnard Hawthorne, CBE (5 April 1929 – 26 December 2001) was an English actor, perhaps best remembered for his role as Sir Humphrey Appleby, the Permanent Secretary in the 1980s sitcom Yes Minister and the Cabinet Secretary in its sequel, Yes, Prime Minister. For this role he won four BAFTA Awards during the 1980s in the 'Best Light Entertainment Performance' Category. In the 1990s he won two more BAFTAs, one as Best TV Actor for The Fragile Heart, and one as Best Film Actor for The Madness of King George. His role in the latter also garnered him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
  Hawthorne was born in Coventry, England, the son of Agnes Rosemary (née Rice) and Charles Barnard Hawthorne, a physician. He grew up in South Africa, where he was educated at St George's Grammar School, Cape Town and Christian Brothers College. He enrolled at the University of Cape Town but withdrew and returned to the United Kingdom in the 1950s to pursue a career in acting.
  Hawthorne made his professional stage debut in 1950, playing Archie Fellows in a Cape Town production of The Shop at Sly Corner.
  
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  Ossie Davis
  Ossie Davis (born Raiford Chatman Davis, December 18, 1917 – February 4, 2005) was an Emmy Award winning and Grammy nominated, African- American film, television and Broadway actor, director, poet, playwright, author, and social activist.
  Davis was born Raiford Chatman Davis in Cogdell, Clinch County, Georgia, a son of Kince Charles Davis, a railway construction engineer, and his wife Laura (née Cooper). The name Ossie came from a county clerk who misheard his mother's pronunciation of his initials "R.C." when he was born. So he inadvertently became "Ossie" when his mother told the courthouse clerk in Clinch River, Ga., who was filing his birth certificate that his name was R.C. Davis. Davis experienced racism from an early age as the KKK threatened to shoot his father, whose job they felt was too advanced for a black man to have. Following the wishes of his parents, he attended Howard University but dropped out in 1939 to fulfill his acting career in New York; he later attended Columbia University School of General Studies. His acting career, which spanned seven decades, began in 1939 with the Rose McClendon Players in Harlem. He made his film debut in 1950 in the Sidney Poitier film No Way Out. He voiced Anansi the spider on the PBS children's television series Sesame Street in its animation segments.
  
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  Paul Muni
  Paul Muni (born Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund; 22 September 1895 – 25 August 1967) was an Austrian-born American stage and film actor. During the 1930s, he was considered one of the most prestigious actors at Warner Brothers studios, and one of the rare actors who was given the privilege of choosing which parts he wanted.
  His acting quality, usually playing a powerful character, such as Scarface, was partly a result of his intense preparation for his parts, often immersing himself in study of the real character's traits and mannerisms. He was also highly skilled in using makeup techniques, a talent he learned from his parents, who were also actors, and from his early years on stage with the Yiddish Theater, in New York. At the age of 12, he played the stage role of an 80-year-old man; in one of his films, Seven Faces, he played seven different characters.
  He was nominated six times for an Oscar, winning once as Best Actor in The Story of Louis Pasteur.
  Muni was born to a Jewish family in Lemberg, Galicia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Lviv, Ukraine (formerly Lwów, Poland). His family emigrated to the United States in 1902.
  
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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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  Paul Simon
  Paul Frederic Simon (born October 13, 1941) is a grammy award winning American singer-songwriter, poet and guitarist.
  Simon's international fame and success began as part of the duo Simon & Garfunkel, launched in 1964 with musical partner Art Garfunkel. Simon wrote most of the pair's songs, including three that reached No. 1 on the U.S. singles charts: "The Sound of Silence", "Mrs. Robinson", and "Bridge Over Troubled Water". The duo split up in 1970 at the height of their popularity, and Simon began a successful solo career, recording three highly acclaimed albums over the next five years. In 1986, he released Graceland, an album inspired by South African township music. Simon also wrote and starred in the film One-Trick Pony in 1980 and co-wrote the Broadway musical The Capeman in 1998.
  Simon has earned 12 Grammys for his solo and collaborative work, including the Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2001, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 2006 was selected as one of the "100 People Who Shaped the World" by Time magazine. Among many other honors, Simon was the first recipient of the Library of Congress' Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2007. In 1986 Simon was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Berklee College of Music where he currently serves on the Board of Trustees.
  
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  Pete Townshend
  Peter Dennis Blandford "Pete" Townshend (born 19 May 1945) is an English rock guitarist, vocalist, songwriter and author, known principally as the guitarist and songwriter for the rock group The Who, as well as for his own solo career. His career with The Who spans more than 40 years, during which time the band grew to be considered one of the most influential bands of the 1960s and 1970s, and, according to Eddie Vedder, "possibly the greatest live band ever."
  Townshend is the primary songwriter for The Who, having written well over 100 songs for the band's 11 studio albums, including concept albums and the rock operas Tommy and Quadrophenia, plus popular rock and roll radio staples like Who's Next, and dozens more that appeared as non-album singles, bonus tracks on reissues, and tracks on rarities compilations like Odds & Sods. He has also written over 100 songs that have appeared on his solo albums, as well as radio jingles and television theme songs. Although known primarily as a guitarist, he also plays other instruments such as keyboards, banjo, accordion, synthesiser, bass guitar and drums, on his own solo albums, several Who albums, and as a guest contributor to a wide array of other artists' recordings. Townshend has never had formal lessons in any of the instruments he plays.
  
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  Peter Falk
  Peter Michael Falk (September 16, 1927 – June 23, 2011) was an American actor, best known for his role as Lt. Frank Columbo in the television series Columbo. He appeared in numerous films such as The Princess Bride, The Great Race and Next, and television guest roles. He was nominated for an Academy Award twice (for 1960's Murder, Inc. and 1961's Pocketful of Miracles), and won the Emmy Award on five occasions (four for Columbo) and the Golden Globe award once. Director William Friedkin, when discussing Falk's role in his 1978 film The Brink's Job, said that "Peter has a great range from comedy to drama. He could break your heart or he could make you laugh."
  In 1968, he starred with Gene Barry in a ninety-minute television pilot about a highly-skilled, laid-back detective. Columbo eventually became part of an anthology series titled The NBC Mystery Movie, along with McCloud and McMillan & Wife. The detective series stayed on NBC from 1971 to 1978, took a respite, and returned occasionally on ABC from 1989 to 2003. Falk was "everyone's favorite rumpled television detective", wrote historian David Fantle.
  
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• Philip Anglim
  Philip Charles Anglim (born February 11, 1953) is an American actor best known for his performance as Joseph Merrick in the stage and television versions of The Elephant Man, a role for which he received a Best Actor nomination in the 1979 Tony Awards. Other notable roles include Macbeth on Broadway and Dane O'Neill, the ill-fated love child who grew up to follow in his unknown father's footsteps on the path to the priesthood, in the television mini-series The Thorn Birds. He also had a recurring guest role as the Bajoran priest Vedek Bareil on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
  Anglim was born in San Francisco, California. His father, a Catholic of Irish descent, worked as a patent attorney, while his mother was of French and Jewish descent and was an art dealer. He originally aspired to become a veterinarian, but after he was asked to appear in a play by one of his teachers, he switched to acting. Anglim graduated with a bachelor's degree in English literature from Yale University in 1973. Subsequently, Anglim spent a year in Connecticut at the Southbury Playhouse.
  
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• Philip Bosco
  Philip Michael Bosco (born September 26, 1930) is an American actor.
  Bosco was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of Margaret Raymond (née Thek), a policewoman, and Philip Lupo Bosco, a carnival worker. Bosco went to high school at St. Peter's Preparatory School in Jersey City. He attended the Catholic University of Washington, D.C. Bosco married Nancy Ann Dunkle on January 2, 1957. They have seven children, Jenny, Diane, Philip, Chris, John, Lisa, Celia and 15 grandchildren. A long-time resident of Teaneck, New Jersey, Bosco now lives in Haworth, New Jersey.
  Bosco began his career in Broadway theatre. He received a Tony Award nomination for his debut in The Rape of the Belt in 1960 and spent the next three decades supporting major stars in classic revivals like Cyrano de Bergerac, King Lear, and Twelfth Night. His speciality was George Bernard Shaw, winning raves for Broadway revivals of Man and Superman, Saint Joan, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Major Barbara, Heartbreak House (opposite Rex Harrison), and You Never Can Tell, winning Tony nominations for the last three. He also appeared with Shirley Knight in the Roundabout Theatre Company revival of Come Back, Little Sheba.
  
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  Plácido Domingo
  Plácido Domingo (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈplaθiðo ðoˈmiŋɡo]; born 21 January 1941), born José Plácido Domingo Embil, is a Spanish tenor and conductor known for his versatile and strong voice, possessing a ringing and dramatic tone throughout its range. In March 2008, he debuted in his 128th opera role, and as of July 2011, his 136 roles give Domingo more roles than any other tenor.
  One of The Three Tenors, he has also taken on conducting opera and concert performances, and he is the General Director of the Los Angeles Opera in California.
  Plácido Domingo was born on January 21, 1941, in the distrito de Retiro section of Madrid, Spain, and in 1949 moved to Mexico with his family, who ran a zarzuela company. He studied piano at first privately and later at the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City.
  In 1957, Domingo made his first professional appearance, performing with his mother in a concert at Mérida, Yucatán. He made his opera debut performing in Manuel Fernández Caballero's zarzuela, Gigantes y cabezudos, singing a baritone role. At that time, he was working with his parents' zarzuela company, taking baritone roles and as an accompanist for other singers. Among his first performances was a minor role in the first Mexican production of My Fair Lady where he was also the assistant conductor and assistant coach. The company gave 185 performances, which included a production of Lehár's The Merry Widow in which he performed alternately as either Camille or Danilo.
  
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  Quincy Jones
  Quincy Delight Jones, Jr. (born March 14, 1933) is an American record producer, conductor, arranger, film composer, television producer, and trumpeter. His career spans five decades in the entertainment industry and a record 79 Grammy Award nominations, 27 Grammys, including a Grammy Legend Award in 1991. He is particularly recognized as the producer of the album Thriller, by pop icon Michael Jackson, which has sold more than 110 million copies worldwide, and as the producer and conductor of the charity song “We Are the World”.
  In 1968, Jones and his songwriting partner Bob Russell became the first African Americans to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song "The Eyes of Love" from the Universal Pictures film Banning. That same year, he became the first African American to be nominated twice within the same year when he was nominated for Best Original Score for his work on the music of the 1967 film In Cold Blood. In 1971, Jones would receive the honor of becoming the first African American to be named musical director/conductor of the Academy Awards ceremony. He was the first African American to win the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, in 1995. He is tied with sound designer Willie D. Burton as the most Oscar-nominated African American, each of them having seven nominations. At the 2008 BET Awards, Quincy Jones was presented with the Humanitarian Award. He was played by Larenz Tate in the 2004 biopic about Ray Charles, Ray.
  
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  Ralph Bellamy
  Ralph Bellamy (June 17, 1904 – November 29, 1991) was an American actor whose career spanned sixty-two years.
  He was born Ralph Rexford Bellamy in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Lilla Louise (née Smith), a native of Canada, and Charles Rexford Bellamy. He ran away from home when he was fifteen and managed to get into a road show. He toured with road shows before finally landing in New York City, New York. He began acting on stage there and by 1927 owned his own theatre company. In 1931, he made his film debut and worked constantly throughout the decade first as a lead then as a capable supporting actor. Bellamy was cast in the lead role in the film Straight from the Shoulder (1936) and also in the film It Can't Last Forever (1937) with Edward J. Pawley.
  He received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Awful Truth (1937) with Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, and played a similar part, that of a naive boyfriend competing with the sophisticated Grant character, in His Girl Friday (1940). He portrayed detective Ellery Queen in a few films during the 1940s, but as his film career did not progress, he returned to the stage, where he continued to perform throughout the fifties. Highly regarded within the industry, he was a founder of the Screen Actors Guild and served as President of Actors' Equity from 1952-1964.
  
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  Ralph Fiennes
  Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton Wykeham Fiennes ( /ˈreɪf ˈfaɪnz/; born 22 December 1962) is an English theatre and film actor. A noted Shakespeare interpreter, he first achieved success onstage in the Royal National Theatre. Since then, he has portrayed characters such as Nazi war criminal Amon Goeth in Schindler's List, Count Almásy in The English Patient, and Charles Van Doren in Quiz Show. He also starred in The Constant Gardener, Strange Days, Red Dragon, Onegin, and The End of the Affair, among others. He is also well known for playing Lord Voldemort in five Harry Potter movies (of eight).
  In 2011, Fiennes made his directorial debut with his film adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy Coriolanus, in which he also played the titular character. Fiennes won a Tony Award for playing Hamlet on Broadway and has been nominated twice for the Academy Award.
  Ralph Twisleton Wykeham Fiennes was born in Ipswich on 22 December 1962, the eldest child of Mark Fiennes (1933–2004), a farmer and photographer whose father was industrialist Sir Maurice Fiennes (1907–1994), and Jennifer Lash (1938–1993), a writer of English and Irish descent. His surname is of Norman origin.
  
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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 Kiley
  Richard Paul Kiley (March 31, 1922 – March 5, 1999) was an American stage, television, and film actor. He is best known for his voice work, as narrator of various documentary series, and for having played Don Quixote in the original 1965 production of the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha. Kiley was the first to sing and record "The Impossible Dream", the hit song from the show. In the 1953 hit musical Kismet, he played the Caliph, and introduced the song "Stranger in Paradise". He won three Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards and two Tony Awards during his career.
  Kiley was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised Roman Catholic. He graduated from Mt. Carmel High School in 1940, and after a year at Loyola University Chicago he left to study acting at Chicago's Barnum Dramatic School. In the late 40s, he performed in Chicago-area summer stock theaters with actors such as Alan Furlan. Following a stint in the Navy, he returned to Chicago working as an actor and announcer on radio before moving to New York City. In New York he studied singing with Ray Smolover.
  
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  Robert De Niro
  Robert De Niro (pronounced /dəˈnɪəroʊ/; born August 17, 1943) is an American actor, director and producer. His first major film roles were in Bang the Drum Slowly and Mean Streets, both in 1973. In 1974, he played the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, a role that won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
  His critically acclaimed, longtime collaborations with Martin Scorsese began with 1973's Mean Streets, and earned De Niro an Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Jake LaMotta in the 1980 film Raging Bull. He was also nominated for an Academy Award for his roles in Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and Cape Fear (1991). In addition, he received nominations for his acting in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978) and Penny Marshall's Awakenings (1990). Also in 1990, his portrayal as Jimmy Conway in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas earned him a BAFTA nomination.
  He has earned four nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy: New York, New York (1977), Midnight Run (1988), Analyze This (1999) and Meet the Parents (2000). De Niro directed A Bronx Tale (1993) and The Good Shepherd (2006). He has received accolades for his esteemed career, including the AFI Life Achievement Award and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award.
  
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  Robert Earl Jones
  Robert Earl Jones (February 3, 1910 – September 7, 2006) was an American actor. He is best known for his roles in the films The Cotton Club and The Sting and as the father of actor James Earl Jones.
  Born in Mississippi, the specific location of his birth is unclear as some sources indicate Senatobia, while others suggest nearby Coldwater. Additionally, his date of birth has been variously reported by different sources as between 1900 and 1911. The most likely date is 1910 as reported by the United States Social Security Administration.
  Jones had to leave school to become a sharecropper, and later he became a prizefighter before making his way, via Chicago, to New York City and a career on stage and in film. Under the name "Battling Bill Stovall", he was a sparring partner of Joe Louis.
  Altogether Jones appeared in more than twenty films, including The Cotton Club (1984) and The Sting (1973). Jones was a living link with the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, having worked with Langston Hughes early in his career. In New York in the 1930s Jones worked with young people on the Works Progress Administration, the largest New Deal agency, through which he met Langston Hughes, who cast him in his 1938 play, Don't You Want to Be Free?
  
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  Robert Morse
  Robert Morse (born May 18, 1931) is an American actor and singer. Morse is best known for his appearances in musicals and plays on Broadway. He has also acted in movies and television shows. His best known role is that of J. Pierrepont Finch in the 1961 Broadway musical, and 1967 film How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He is currently known for his recurring role as Bertram Cooper on the show Mad Men.
  Morse was born on May 18, 1931 in Newton, Massachusetts. After serving in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War, Morse appeared on Broadway as an actor.
  He created the role of Barnaby in The Matchmaker on Broadway in 1955 opposite Ruth Gordon and reprised the role in the 1958 film adaptation, this time opposite Shirley Booth. That same year, he won the Theatre World Award and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play for Say, Darling. Morse had to lobby David Merrick for a role in Take Me Along, as there was a question if he could, at 28, play a convincing 16 year old. He could and did. What was considered the final step toward full stardom was his performance as J. Pierrepont Finch in the Pulitzer Prize-winning How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying it won him the Tony for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical in 1962. He also starred in the 1967 movie version
  
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  Robert Redford
  Charles Robert Redford, Jr. (born August 18, 1936), better known as Robert Redford, is an American actor, film director, producer, businessman, environmentalist, philanthropist, and founder of the Sundance Film Festival. He has received two Oscars: one in 1981 for directing Ordinary People, and one for Lifetime Achievement in 2002. In 2010 he was awarded French Knighthood in the Legion d'Honneur. At the height of his fame in the 1970s and 1980s, he was often described as one of the world's most attractive men and remains one of the most popular movie stars. His popular films include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Downhill Racer (1969), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Candidate (1972), The Sting (1973), The Way We Were (1973), The Great Gatsby (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), All the President's Men (1976), A Bridge Too Far (1977), The Natural (1984), Out of Africa (1985), Sneakers (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993),The Last Castle and Spy Game (2001). As a filmmaker, his notable films include Ordinary People (1980), The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), A River Runs Through It (1992), Quiz Show (1994), The Horse Whisperer (1998) and The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000).
  
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  Roger Daltrey
  Roger Harry Daltrey, CBE (born 1 March 1944), is an English singer, musician, songwriter and actor, best known as the founder and lead singer of English rock band The Who. He has maintained a musical career as a solo artist and has also worked in the film industry, acting in a large number of films, theatre and television roles and also producing films. In 2008 he was ranked number 61 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 100 greatest singers of all time.
  Roger Harry Daltrey was born in the Hammersmith area of London, but was brought up in Acton, the same working class suburban district that produced fellow Who members Pete Townshend and John Entwistle. He was one of three children born to parents Irene and Harry Daltrey, and grew up with two sisters, Gillian and Carol. Harry Daltrey worked for a water closet manufacturer, and Irene Daltrey was told she would be unable to have children because of losing a kidney in 1937. Nevertheless, she went into labour during a World War II air raid and gave birth to her son at the nearby Hammersmith Hospital, West London. At the age of three, the young Roger swallowed a rusty nail which had to be surgically removed, leaving a visible scar. At the age of five, the rust from the nail caused an ulcer in his stomach which required him to be hospitalised.
  
  wn.com/Roger_Daltrey
• Roger Rees
  Roger Rees (born 5 May 1944) is a Welsh actor. He is best known to American audiences for playing the characters Robin Colcord on the American television sitcom show Cheers and Lord John Marbury on the American television drama The West Wing. He won a Tony Award for his performance as the lead in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.
  Rees was born in Aberystwyth, Wales, the son of Doris Louise (née Smith), a shop clerk, and William John Rees, a police officer.
  Rees started his career with the Royal Shakespeare Company and attended the Slade School of Fine Arts. He played Malcolm in the acclaimed Trevor Nunn 1976 stage and 1978 television production of Macbeth. Rees created the title role in the original production of the play The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, winning both an Olivier Award and a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 1982. He also starred in the original production of The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard in London in 1984.
  Rees began to work in television during the 1970s, appearing opposite Laurence Olivier in The Ebony Tower (1984). From 1988 to 1991 he starred in the late 80s/early 90s British sitcom Singles, with actress and co-star Judy Loe. From 1989 to 1991 and in 1993, he also appeared intermittently on the long-running American TV series Cheers as the English tycoon Robin Colcord. Later television appearances include My So-Called Life as substitute teacher Mr Racine, British Ambassador Lord John Marbury on The West Wing and James MacPherson on Warehouse 13.
  
  wn.com/Roger_Rees
• Ron Leibman
  Ron Leibman (born October 11, 1937) is an American actor.
  Leibman was a member of the Compass Players in the late 1950s. He has appeared in many films such as Phar Lap; Where's Poppa?; The Hot Rock; Slaughterhouse-Five; The Super Cops; Up the Academy; Norma Rae; Romantic Comedy; Zorro, The Gay Blade; Garden State; and Rhinestone. He co-starred with second wife Jessica Walter in Neil Simon's play Rumors. They also appeared together as husband and wife in the film Dummy and in the TV Series Law & Order in the episode, "House Counsel."
  He won an Emmy Award for his convict-turned-lawyer character in Kaz (1978–79), a series which he also created and co-wrote. Leibman also received a Tony Award for his performance as Roy Cohn in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America. He is also widely known for his portrayal of Leonard Green, Rachel Green's overbearing father, on the sitcom Friends. Leibman had a recurring role on The Sopranos as Dr. Plepler.
  Leibman was born in New York City, New York, the son of Grace (née Marks) and Murray Leibman, who worked in the garment business. He graduated in 1958 from Ohio Wesleyan University. He has been married to actress Jessica Walter since 1983. He was previously married to actress Linda Lavin (1969–1981). He is currently the chair of the acting department at The New School in New York City.
  
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  Ron Rifkin
  Ron Rifkin (born October 31, 1939) is an American actor. He is best known for his roles as Arvin Sloane on the spy drama Alias and as Saul Holden on the American family drama Brothers & Sisters.
  Rifkin was born Saul M. Rifkin in New York City, New York to immigrants Miriam and Herman Rifkin. He is the oldest of three children. He was raised in Orthodox Judaism and remained Orthodox until the age of 32. Rifkin is married to Iva, who operates a fashion design business.
  In 2001, his association with Touchstone Television began when he played a ruthless intelligence agent Arvin Sloane in Alias, opposite Jennifer Garner. Currently, he plays second-in-command businessman Saul Holden on Brothers & Sisters, opposite Sally Field. He also played Bonnie Franklin's second boyfriend on One Day at a Time.
  Rifkin has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in film, on stage, and in television. His association with writer Jon Robin Baitz has been especially fruitful. In 1991, his performance in Baitz's play The Substance of Fire won him the Obie, Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, and Drama-Logue awards for Best Actor. The following year he performed in Baitz's Three Hotels, for which he received a second Lucille Lortel and Drama Desk nomination. In 1996, he starred in the film version of Substance; in 2002, he appeared in the Baitz play Ten Unknowns at Boston's Huntington Theatre; in 2004, he starred in his play, The Paris Letter at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles, a role he reprised the following year at the Laura Pels Theatre in New York City; and at present, he is appearing in the ABC drama series Brothers & Sisters, which Baitz created, as a character named Saul, Rifkin's real-life name.
  
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• Ron Silver
  Ronald Arthur "Ron" Silver (July 2, 1946 – March 15, 2009) was an American actor, director, producer, radio host and political activist.
  Silver was born in New York City, the son of May (née Zimelman), a substitute teacher, and Irving Roy Silver, a clothing sales executive. Silver was raised Jewish on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and attended The East Side Hebrew Institute ("ESHI") and then Stuyvesant High School.
  He went on to graduate from SUNY at Buffalo with a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and Chinese, and received a Master's Degree in Chinese History from St. John's University in New York and the College of Chinese Culture in Taiwan. He also attended Columbia University's Graduate School of International Affairs and studied acting at the Herbert Berghof Studio.^{[citation needed]}
  Silver made his stage debut starring in El Grande de Coca Cola in 1974. Producers Richard Flanzer and Roy Silver (no relation) opened it at the famed Whiskey A Go Go on the Sunset Strip in L.A. The production ran for more than a year. Silver and his co-star, actor Jeff Goldblum, were discovered by Hollywood Film Agents during this show's historic run.
  
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  Ruby Dee
  Ruby Dee (born October 27, 1924) is an American actress, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, and activist. She is perhaps best known for co-starring in the film A Raisin in the Sun (1961) and the film American Gangster (2007) for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She has won a Grammy, Emmy, Obie, Drama Desk, Screen Actors Guild Award, Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and is a recipient of the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors, among scores of others awards.
  Dee was born Ruby Ann Wallace in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of Gladys Hightower and Marshall Edward Nathaniel Wallace, a cook, waiter, and porter. After her mother left the family, Dee's father married Emma Amelia Benson, a schoolteacher. Dee grew up in Harlem, New York. She attended Hunter College High School and went on to graduate from Hunter College with degrees in French and Spanish in 1944. Dee is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.
  Dee made several appearances on Broadway before receiving national recognition for her role in the 1950 film The Jackie Robinson Story. Her career in acting has crossed all major forms of media over a span of eight decades, including the films A Raisin in the Sun, in which she recreated her stage role as a suffering housewife in the projects, and Edge of the City. She played both roles opposite Sidney Poitier. During the 1960s, Dee appeared in such politically charged films as Gone Are the Days and The Incident, which is recognized as helping pave the way for young African-American actors and filmmakers.
  
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  Sanaa Lathan
  Sanaa McCoy Lathan (born September 19, 1971) is an American actress and voice actress. She has starred in numerous movies, including the box-office hits Love & Basketball, Alien vs. Predator, Something New, and The Family That Preys. Lathan was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance on Broadway in A Raisin in the Sun. In 2010 she starred in the all-black performance of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Novello Theatre in London.
  Lathan was born in New York City and attended Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics. Her first name means "brilliance" in Arabic and "work of art" in Swahili. She is of African American descent. Her mother, Eleanor McCoy, was an actress and dancer who performed on Broadway with Eartha Kitt. Her father, Stan Lathan, worked behind the scenes in television for PBS, as well as a producer on shows such as Sanford & Son and Russell Simmons' Def Comedy Jam. Her brother is Tendaji Lathan (a DJ).
  She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in English. Lathan contemplated a career in law, but instead enrolled at the Yale School of Drama.
  
  wn.com/Sanaa_Lathan
• Scott Jacoby
  Scott Jacoby (born November 26, 1956) is an American actor. He won an Emmy Award for his role in the 1972 television film That Certain Summer. He is also famous for playing the lead role in the made for TV film Bad Ronald 1974.
  He was nominated for a Tony Award for his portrayal of Ally in the Broadway musical Golden Rainbow, which starred Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé. Jacoby was nominated in the category Best Featured Actor in a Musical at the 22nd Tony Awards, held on April 21, 1968.
  He began his television career playing the role of "Hubcap," who was a friend of Josh Hall (Laurence Fishburne) on the ABC daytime soap opera One Life to Live. He also had a recurring role as Michael Zbornak on The Golden Girls as Dorothy's musician son.
  He is the oldest of five acting siblings, including half-brothers Billy Jacoby (now Jayne, born in 1969), Bobby Jacoby (now Robert Jayne, born in 1973), and sisters Laura Jacoby and Susan Jacoby.
  
  
  
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  Shirley Temple
  Shirley Jane Temple (born April 23, 1928), later Shirley Temple Black, is an American film and television actress, singer, dancer, autobiographer, and former U.S. Ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia. She began her film career in 1932 at the age of three, and in 1934, found international fame in Bright Eyes, a feature film designed specifically for her talents. She received a special Juvenile Academy Award in February 1935, and film hits such as Curly Top and Heidi followed year after year during the mid-to-late 1930s. Licensed merchandise that capitalized on her wholesome image included dolls, dishes, and clothing. Her box office popularity waned as she reached adolescence, and she left the film industry at the age of 12 to attend high school^{[clarification needed]}. She appeared in a few films of varying quality in her mid-to-late teens, and retired completely from films in 1950 at the age of 22. She was the top box-office draw four years in a row (1935–38) in a Motion Picture Herald poll.
  
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  Sidney Blackmer
  Sidney Alderman Blackmer (July 13, 1895 – October 6, 1973) was an American actor.
  Blackmer was born and raised in Salisbury, North Carolina. He started off in an insurance and financial business but gave up on it. While working as a builder's laborer on a new building, he saw a Pearl White serial being filmed and immediately decided to go into acting. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Blackmer went to New York hoping to act on the stage. While in the city, he took jobs and extra work at various film studios at the then motion picture capital, Fort Lee, New Jersey, including a bit part in the highly popular serial, The Perils of Pauline (1914).
  He made his Broadway debut in 1917, but his career was interrupted by service in the U.S. military in World War I. After the war, he returned to the theatre and in 1929 returned to motion pictures and went on to be a major character actor in more than 120 films. He won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Actor (Drama) for his role in the Broadway play, Come Back, Little Sheba.
  
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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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  Smokey Robinson
  William "Smokey" Robinson, Jr. (born February 19, 1940) is an American R&B singer-songwriter, record producer, and former record executive. Robinson is most notable for being the founder and front man of the popular Motown vocal group, The Miracles, for which he also served as the group's chief songwriter and producer. Robinson led the group from its 1955 origins as The Five Chimes until 1972 when he announced a retirement from the stage to focus on his role as Motown's vice president.
  However, Robinson returned to the music industry as a solo artist the following year, later having solo hits such as "Baby That's Backatcha", "Quiet Storm", "The Agony and the Ecstasy", "Cruisin'", "Being With You" and "Just to See Her". Following the sale of Motown Records in 1988, Robinson left Motown in 1990. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.
  Robinson was born in Detroit and raised in the city's North End section. At one point, he and Diana Ross were next-door neighbors; he said he has known Ross since she was eight. Robinson later told reporters when he was a child, his uncle christened him "Smokey Joe", which Robinson assumed was a "cowboy name for me" until he was later told that smokey was a pejorative term for dark-skinned Blacks. Robinson, who is mainly of African American descent and is light-skinned, remembers his uncle saying to him, "I'm doing this so you won't ever forget that you're black." Robinson grew up as a fan of Western films.
  
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  Stephen Dillane
  Stephen J. Dillane (born 30 November 1956) is an English actor. He won a Tony Award for his lead performance in Tom Stoppard's play The Real Thing.
  Dillane was born in Kensington, London, to an English mother, Bridget (née Curwen), and an Australian surgeon father, John Dillane. He read history and political science at the University of Exeter and afterward became a journalist for the Croydon Advertiser. Unhappy in his career, he read how actor Trevor Eve gave up architecture for acting and was thus inspired to enter the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
  Dillane is a distinguished theatre actor and his notable roles include Archer in The Beaux' Stratagem (Royal National Theatre, 1989; spelled Stephen Dillon on the poster), Prior Walter in Angels in America (1993), Hamlet (1994), Clov in Samuel Beckett's Endgame (1996), Uncle Vanya (1998), Henry in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing (for which he won a Tony Award in 2000) and a one-man version of Macbeth (2005). He has also performed T.S. Eliot's 'Four Quartets' in London and New York City, and is soon to be seen in the 2010 Bridge Project's productions of 'The Tempest' and 'As You Like It'.
  
  wn.com/Stephen_Dillane
• Stephen Sackur
  Stephen John Sackur (born 9 January 1964) is an English journalist who presents HARDtalk, a current affairs interview programme on BBC World News and BBC News 24. He is also the main Friday presenter of GMT on BBC World News. For fifteen years he was a BBC foreign correspondent and he is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4 and a number of newspapers and magazines.
  Stephen Sackur was born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, England, and studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is married to an Iraqi, Zina Sabbagh and has three children.
  Sackur began working at the BBC as a trainee in 1986, and in 1990, he was appointed as one of its foreign affairs correspondents. As a BBC Radio correspondent, Stephen reported on the Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia in 1989 and the re-unification of Germany in 1990. During the Gulf War, he was part of a BBC team covering the conflict and spent eight weeks with the British Army. At the end of the war, he was the first correspondent to report the massacre of the retreating Iraqi army on the road leading out of Kuwait. Stephen was based in Cairo, Egypt, between 1992 and 1995 as the BBC's correspondent in the Middle East and he later moved to Jerusalem in 1995 until 1997. He covered both the death of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the growth of the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat. Between 1997 and 2002, he was appointed the BBC's correspondent in Washington and covered the Lewinsky scandal. He later covered the U.S. Presidential Election in 2000 and interviewed President George W. Bush. Stephen went back to Iraq in 2003 after the fall of Saddam Hussein and was the first to report Iraq's mass graves of victims of the regime. He was also the moderator of BBC's worldwide broadcast of a debate on climate change with a panel of five world leaders from South Africa, the Maldives, Sweden, Australia and Mexico.
  
  wn.com/Stephen_Sackur
• Stephen Spinella
  Stephen Nicholas Spinella (born 11 October 1956) is an American stage, television, and film actor.
  Spinella was born in Naples, Italy to a father who was an American naval airplane mechanic. He grew up in Glendale, Arizona and graduated from the University of Arizona drama department. He also attended New York University's Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, graduating in 1982. He won consecutive Tony-awards for Best Featured Actor and Best Actor for his performance as Prior Walter in Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Angels in America: Perestroika respectively. He was also nominated for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for James Joyce's The Dead.
  
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  Steve Martin
  Stephen Glenn "Steve" Martin (born August 14, 1945) is an American actor, comedian, author, playwright, producer, musician and composer. Martin came to public notice as a writer for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and later became a frequent guest on The Tonight Show. In the 1970s, Martin performed his offbeat, absurdist comedy routines before packed houses on national tours. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Martin at sixth place in a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics.
  Since the 1980s, having branched away from stand-up comedy, Martin has become a successful actor in both comedic and dramatic roles, as well as an author, playwright, pianist, and banjo player, eventually earning Emmy, Grammy, and American Comedy awards, among other honors.
  
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  Steven Bochco
  Steven Ronald Bochco (born December 16, 1943) is a US television producer and writer. He has developed a number of popular television hits including Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and NYPD Blue, as well as some notable flops such as Cop Rock.
  Bochco was born in New York City, the son of Mimi, a painter, and Rudolph Bozovic, a concert violinist. He is Serbian. He was educated in Manhattan at the High School of Music and Art. His elder sister is actress Joanna Frank. In 1961, he enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (after merging with the Mellon Institute in 1967 known as Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh to study playwriting and theater. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Theater in 1966, having also had an MCA Writing Fellowship.
  Bochco went to work for Universal Pictures as a writer and then story editor on Ironside, Columbo, McMillan & Wife and the short-lived Lorne Greene and Ben Murphy series, Griff, as well as Delvecchio and The Invisible Man. He wrote the screenplay for the 1968 TV movie The Counterfeit Killer and worked on Silent Running (1972) and Double Indemnity (1973). He left Universal in 1978 to go to MTM Enterprises where he had greater scope for producing. His first effort there was the short-lived CBS police drama Paris, notable as the first show on which James Earl Jones played a lead role.
  
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• Steven Reineke
  Steven Reineke (born September 14, 1970) is a conductor, composer, and arranger from Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the Music Director of The New York Pops. He currently resides in New York City.
  Reineke was born in 1970 in Tipp City, Ohio and developed an interest in his musical talents at an early age on the trumpet. At age fifteen, he taught himself how to play the piano. He continued his trumpet studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, receiving two bachelors of music degrees with honors in both trumpet performance and music composition.
  Steven Reineke started his tenure as Music Director of The New York Pops in the 2009-2010 season. Mr. Reineke conducts the orchestra’s annual concert series at Carnegie Hall as well as tours, recordings, and nationwide telecasts, including the Macy’s 4 July Fireworks Spectacular on NBC Television. New York’s only permanent and professional symphonic pops orchestra, The New York Pops is the largest independent pops orchestra in the United States.
  Reineke was appointed Principal Pops Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra and began his first season in 2011/12. He also serves as Principal Pops Conductor of the Long Beach and Modesto Symphony Orchestras. Previously, he was Associate Conductor of the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, where for fifteen years he served as a composer, arranger and conducting protégé of the late celebrated pops conductor Erich Kunzel.
  
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  Steven Spielberg
  Steven Allan Spielberg (born December 18, 1946) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as archetypes of modern Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. In later years, his films began addressing such issues as the Holocaust, slavery, war and terrorism. He is considered one of the most popular and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. He is also one of the co-founders of DreamWorks movie studio.
  Spielberg won the Academy Award for Best Director for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Three of Spielberg's films—Jaws (1975), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Jurassic Park (1993)—achieved box office records, each becoming the highest-grossing film made at the time. To date, the unadjusted gross of all Spielberg-directed films exceeds $8.5 billion worldwide. Forbes puts Spielberg's wealth at $3.0 billion.
  
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  Suzanne Farrell
  Suzanne Farrell (born August 16, 1945) is an eminent 20th century ballerina (often referred to as the greatest American lyric ballerina) and the founder of the Suzanne Farrell Ballet at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
  She was born as Roberta Sue Ficker in Cincinnati, and received her early training at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. In 1960 she was selected to study at George Balanchine's School of American Ballet with a Ford Foundation scholarship; she started there in 1960, and joined the New York City Ballet (NYCB) in 1961.
  Initially part of the corps de ballet at NYCB, Farrell soon moved on to dancing featured roles. The first ballet choreographed for her was Passage, now Arcade, by John Taras in 1963. Balanchine first paired her with Jacques d' Amboise to choreograph his Meditation, which debuted in Winter 1963. One of her most notable roles was Dulcinea in Balanchine's Don Quixote, which premiered in May 1965. Balanchine performed in the of Don Quixote on opening night. She re-scaled many ballets and expanded them to a new level of technique. In 1965 she was promoted to principal dancer. Her first role in her new title was Agon with Arthur Mitchell at the Paris Opera. George Balanchine quickly fell in love with his "alabaster princess", and created many roles for her. Farrell described learning choreography from Balanchine as a collaborative process, saying, "When Mr. B was working on a ballet, something would just spill out of his body; he could rarely duplicate it, so I tried to see precisely what he wanted the first time." In 1965 he created Don Quixote, thought to be a valentine to his newest "muse." In 1968 he cast her as the lead in the "Diamonds" section of his three-act plotless ballet "Jewels".
  
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  Tennessee Williams
  Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983) was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs. His professional career lasted from the mid 1930s until his death in 1983, and saw the creation of many plays that are regarded as classics of the American stage. Williams adapted much of his best known work for the cinema.
  Williams received virtually all of the top theatrical awards for his works of drama, including several New York Drama Critics' Circle awards, a Tony Award for best play for The Rose Tattoo (1951) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). In 1980 he was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter and is today acknowledged as one of the most accomplished playwrights in the history of English speaking theater.
  Theater scholar Charlotte Canning, of the University of Texas at Austin where Williams' archives are located, has said, "There is no more influential 20th-century American playwright than Tennessee Williams... He inspired future generations of writers as diverse as Suzan-Lori Parks, Tony Kushner, David Mamet and John Waters, and his plays remain among the most produced in the world."
  
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  Tina Turner
  Tina Turner (born Anna Mae Bullock; November 26, 1939) is an American singer and actress whose career has spanned more than 50 years. She has won numerous awards. Turner started out her music career with husband Ike Turner as a member of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. Success followed with a string of hits including "River Deep, Mountain High" and the 1971 hit "Proud Mary". With the publication of her autobiography I, Tina (1986), Turner revealed severe instances of spousal abuse against her by Ike Turner prior to their 1976 split and subsequent 1978 divorce. After virtually disappearing from the music scene for several years following her divorce from Ike Turner, she rebuilt her career, launching a string of hits beginning in 1983 with the single "Let's Stay Together" and the 1984 release of her fifth solo album Private Dancer.
  Her musical career led to film roles, beginning with a prominent role as The Acid Queen in the 1975 film Tommy, and an appearance in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. She starred opposite Mel Gibson as Aunty Entity in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome for which she received the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture, and her version of the film's theme, "We Don't Need Another Hero", was a hit single. She appeared in the 1993 film Last Action Hero.
  
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  Tom Conti
  Thomas "Tom" Conti (born 22 November 1941) is a Scottish actor, theatre director and novelist.
  Born Thomas Conti in Paisley, Renfrewshire, he was brought up Roman Catholic, but he considers himself anti-religious. Conti's father was Italian and his mother was Scottish.
  Conti was educated Hamilton Crescent School an independent fee-paying Catholic boys' (at that time) school in Glasgow, and at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow.
  Conti is an accomplished film and television actor. He began working with the Dundee Repertory in 1959. He appeared on Broadway in Whose Life Is It Anyway? in 1979, and in London he played the lead in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell at the Garrick Theatre.
  Besides taking the leading role in the TV versions of Frederic Raphael's The Glittering Prizes and Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests, Conti appeared in the Princess and the Pea episode of the family television series Faerie Tale Theatre, guested on Friends and Cosby, and played opposite Nigel Hawthorne in a long-running series of Vauxhall Astra car advertisements in the UK during the mid 1990s.
  
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  Tom Ewell
  Tom Ewell (April 29, 1909 – September 12, 1994) was an American actor.
  Born Samuel Yewell Tompkins in Owensboro, Kentucky, where his family expected him to follow in their footsteps as lawyers or whiskey and tobacco dealers.
  Ewell began acting in summer stock in 1928 with Don Ameche, before moving to New York in 1931. He enrolled in the Actors Studio alongside classmates Montgomery Clift and Karl Malden. He made his Broadway debut in 1934 and his film debut in 1940, and for several years played comic supporting roles. He attracted attention with a strong performance in the film Adam's Rib (1949) and he began to receive Hollywood roles more frequently. Ewell continued acting in summer stock through the 1940s: He starred opposite June Lockhart in Lawrence Riley's biographical play Kin Hubbard in 1951, the story of one of America's greatest humorists and cartoonists. With this play, Ewell also made his debut as a producer. In 1947 he won a Clarence Derwent Award for his portrayal of Fred Taylor in the original Broadway cast of John Loves Mary.
  
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  Tom Hulce
  Thomas Edward "Tom" Hulce ( /ˈhʊls/; born December 6, 1953) is an American actor and theater producer. As an actor, he is perhaps best known for his Oscar-nominated portrayal of Mozart in the movie Amadeus and his role as "Pinto" in National Lampoon's Animal House. Additional acting awards included a total of four Golden Globe nominations, an Emmy Award, and a Tony Award nomination. Hulce retired from acting in the mid-1990s in order to focus upon stage directing and producing. In 2007, he won a Tony Award as a lead producer of the Broadway musical Spring Awakening.
  Hulce was born in Detroit, Michigan (some sources incorrectly say Whitewater, Wisconsin). The youngest of four children, he was raised in Plymouth, Michigan. His mother, Joanna (née Winkleman), sang briefly with Phil Spitalny's All-Girl Orchestra, and his father, Raymond Albert Hulce, worked for the Ford Motor Company. Although he originally wanted to be a singer as a child, he switched to acting after his voice changed during his teenage years. He left home at the age of 15 and attended Interlochen Arts Academy and the North Carolina School of the Arts.
  
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  Tom Selleck
  Thomas William "Tom" Selleck (born January 29, 1945) is an American actor and film producer. He is best known for his starring role as the private investigator Thomas Magnum in the television series Magnum, P.I. (1980s), which was based in Hawaii. He also plays Police Chief Jesse Stone in a series of made-for-TV movies based on the Robert B. Parker novels. Since 2010 he has appeared as the NYPD Police Commissioner Frank Reagan in the drama Blue Bloods on CBS-TV.
  Selleck has acted in many TV roles, including Dr. Richard Burke on Friends and A.J. Cooper on Las Vegas. In addition to his series work, Selleck has appeared in more than fifty made for TV and general-release movies, including Mr. Baseball, Quigley Down Under, Lassiter and his most successful movie release Three Men and a Baby, which was the highest grossing movie in 1987.
  Selleck, born in Detroit, Michigan, is the son of Martha S. (née Jagger), a homemaker; and Robert Dean Selleck, an executive and real estate investor. The family moved to Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, California when Selleck was growing up. His siblings include brothers Robert (born 1944) and Daniel (born 1954) and sister Martha. Selleck graduated from Grant High School in 1962.
  
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  Tom Skerritt
  Thomas Roy "Tom" Skerritt (born August 25, 1933) is an American actor who has appeared in over 40 films and more than 200 television episodes since 1962. He is best known for his roles in MASH, Alien, Top Gun, A River Runs Through It, and the TV series Picket Fences.
  Skerritt was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Helen, a homemaker, and Roy Skerritt, a businessman. A 1951 graduate of Detroit's Mackenzie High School, Skerritt attended Wayne State University and the University of California at Los Angeles.
  Skerritt made his film debut in War Hunt, produced by Terry Sanders and released in 1962. Skerritt's notable film appearances include MASH (1970), Harold and Maude (credited as "M. Borman", 1971), Big Bad Mama, Cheech & Chong's Up In Smoke (1978), Ice Castles (1978), as Captain A. J. Dallas in Alien (1979), as a would-be astronaut in Contact (1997) and SpaceCamp (1986), and in Top Gun (1986) as Commander Mike "Viper" Metcalf. In 1988, he starred with Nancy Allen and Lara Flynn Boyle in Poltergeist III.
  
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  Tony Bennett
  Anthony Dominick Benedetto, better known as Tony Bennett (born August 3, 1926), is an American singer of popular music, standards, show tunes, and jazz. Bennett is also a serious and accomplished painter, having created works — under the name Benedetto — that are on permanent public display in several institutions. He is the founder of Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in New York City.
  Raised in New York City, Bennett began singing at an early age. He fought in the final stages of World War II as an infantryman with the U.S. Army in the European Theatre. Afterwards, he developed his singing technique, signed with Columbia Records, and had his first number one popular song with "Because of You" in 1951. Several top hits such as "Rags to Riches" followed in the early 1950s. Bennett then further refined his approach to encompass jazz singing. He reached an artistic peak in the late 1950s with albums such as The Beat of My Heart and Basie Swings, Bennett Sings. In 1962, Bennett recorded his signature song, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco". His career and his personal life then suffered an extended downturn during the height of the rock music era.
  
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  Twyla Tharp
  Twyla Tharp (born July 1, 1941) is an American dancer and choreographer, who lives and works in New York City.
  Tharp was born in 1941 on a farm in Portland, Indiana, and was named after Twila Thornburg, the "Pig Princess" of the 89th Annual Muncie Fair in Indiana.
  When Tharp was a young child she spent a few months each year living with her Quaker grandparents on their farm in Indiana. In 1950 Tharp's family—younger sister Twanette, twin brothers Stanley and Stanford, mother Lecile and father William—moved to Rialto, California. Her parents opened a drive-in movie theater, where Tharp worked from the time she was 8 years old. The drive-in was on the corner of Acacia and Foothill, the major east–west artery in Rialto and the path of Route 66. She attended Pacific High School in San Bernardino and studied at the Vera Lynn School of Dance. Tharp, a "devoted bookworm," admits that this schedule left little time for a social life. Tharp attended Pomona College in California but later transferred to Barnard College in New York City, where she graduated with a degree in Art History in 1963. It was in New York that she studied with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. In 1963 Tharp joined the Paul Taylor Dance Company.
  
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  Van Cliburn
  Harvey Lavan "Van" Cliburn, Jr. (born July 12, 1934), is an American pianist who achieved worldwide recognition in 1958 at the age of twenty-three, when he won the first quadrennial International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow, at the height of the Cold War.
  Van Cliburn was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and began taking piano lessons at the age of three from his mother, the former Rildia Bee O'Bryan, who herself had been instructed by Arthur Friedheim, a pupil of Franz Liszt. At six years old, Cliburn moved with his family to Kilgore, Texas, and at twelve he won a statewide piano competition which enabled him to debut with the Houston Symphony Orchestra. He entered the Juilliard School at the age of seventeen, and studied under Rosina Lhévinne, who trained him in the tradition of the great Russian romantics. At twenty, Cliburn won the Leventritt Award, and made his Carnegie Hall debut.
  It was his recognition in Moscow that propelled Cliburn to international fame. The first International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958 was an event designed to demonstrate Soviet cultural superiority during the Cold War, on the heels of their technological victory with the Sputnik launch in October 1957. Cliburn's performance at the competition finale of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 earned him a standing ovation lasting eight minutes. When it was time to announce a winner, the judges were obliged to ask permission of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to give first prize to an American. "Is he the best?" Khrushchev asked. "Then give him the prize!" Cliburn returned home to a ticker-tape parade in New York City, the only time the honor has been accorded a classical musician. His cover story in Time proclaimed him "The Texan Who Conquered Russia."
  
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  Vanessa Redgrave
  Vanessa Redgrave, CBE (born 30 January 1937) is an English actress of stage, screen and television, as well as a political activist.
  She rose to prominence in 1961 playing Rosalind in As You Like It with the Royal Shakespeare Company and has since made more than 35 appearances on London's West End and Broadway, winning both the Tony and Olivier Awards. On screen, she has starred in more than 80 films; including Mary, Queen of Scots, Isadora, Julia, The Bostonians, Mission: Impossible and Atonement. Redgrave was proclaimed by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams as "the greatest living actress of our times," and she remains the only British actress ever to win the Oscar, Emmy, Tony, Cannes, Golden Globe, and the Screen Actors Guild awards. She was also the recipient of the 2010 BAFTA Fellowship "in recognition of an outstanding and exceptional contribution to film."
  A member of the Redgrave family of actors, she is the daughter of the late Sir Michael Redgrave and Lady Redgrave (the actress Rachel Kempson), the sister of the late Lynn Redgrave and the late Corin Redgrave, the mother of Hollywood actresses Joely Richardson and the late Natasha Richardson, and the aunt of British actress Jemma Redgrave.
  
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  Vincent Gardenia
  Vincent Gardenia (born Vincenzo Scognamiglio, January 7, 1920 – December 9, 1992) was an Italian American stage, film, and television actor.
  Gardenia was born Vincenzo Scognamiglio in Naples, Italy, the son of Elisa and Gennaro Gardenia Scognamiglio. After emigrating to the United States at the age 2, he lived most of his life in Brooklyn, New York. As a child, he performed in a family acting troupe in Italian-American neighborhoods in and around New York City.
  When Vincent Gardenia was 2-years-old, the family immigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn, New York City, and his father established an Italian-language acting troupe that specialized in melodramas. "The titles changed, but they were usually about a son or daughter who gets in trouble, runs away, then begs forgiveness," Gardenia said. At age 5, he made his stage debut in his father's company as a shoeshine boy, and while still a teen-ager he was playing character roles. He continued acting in the company until 1960, five years after he took his first English-language stage role.
  
  wn.com/Vincent_Gardenia
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  Walter Matthau
  Walter Matthau (October 1, 1920 – July 1, 2000) was an American actor best known for his role as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple and his frequent collaborations with Odd Couple star Jack Lemmon, as well as his role as Coach Buttermaker in the 1976 comedy The Bad News Bears. He won an Academy Award for his performance in the 1966 Billy Wilder film The Fortune Cookie.
  Matthau was born Walter John Matthow in New York City's Lower East Side on October 1, 1920, the son of Rose (née Berolsky; from Lithuania), who worked in a sweatshop, and Milton Matthow, an electrician and peddler (from Russia), both Jewish immigrants. His surname has often incorrectly been listed as Matuschanskayasky (see below for a detailed discussion). As a young boy, Walter attended a Jewish non-profit sleepaway camp, Tranquillity Camp, where he first began acting in the shows the camp would stage on Saturday nights. He also attended Surprise Lake Camp. His high school was Seward Park High School.
  During World War II, Matthau served in the U.S. Army Air Forces with the Eighth Air Force in England as a B-24 Liberator radioman-gunner, in the same 453rd Bombardment Group as James Stewart. He reached the rank of staff sergeant and became interested in acting. He took classes in acting at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York with the influential German director Erwin Piscator. He often joked that his best early review came in a play where he posed as a derelict. One reviewer said, "The others just looked like actors in make-up, Walter Matthau really looks like a skid row bum!" Matthau was a respected stage actor for years in such fare as Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and A Shot in the Dark. He won the 1962 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a play.
  
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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.
  
  wn.com/Warren_Beatty
• Wikipedia Persondata
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  William Daniels
  William David Daniels (born March 31, 1927) is an American actor and former president of the Screen Actors Guild (1999 to 2001). He is known for his performance as Dustin Hoffman's father in The Graduate (1967), as Howard in Two for the Road, as John Adams in 1776, as Carter Nash in Captain Nice, as Mr. George Feeny in ABC's Boy Meets World, as the voice of KITT in Knight Rider, and as Dr. Mark Craig in St. Elsewhere, for which he won two Emmy Awards.
  William Daniels was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Irene and David Daniels, a builder. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1949, where he was a member of Sigma Nu fraternity. He has been married to actress and fellow Emmy Award-winner Bonnie Bartlett since June 30, 1951. They have two children.
  William Daniels began his career as a member of the singing Daniels family in Brooklyn, New York. He made his television debut as part of a variety act (along with other members of his family) in 1943, on NBC, then a single station in New York. He made his Broadway debut in 1945, in Life With Father, and remained a busy Broadway actor for decades afterwards. Broadway credits include starring or supporting roles in 1776, A Thousand Clowns, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever and A Little Night Music. He earned an Obie Award for The Zoo Story (1960).
  
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  William Shakespeare
  William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
  Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
  
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• Winston Ntshona
  Winston Ntshona (born 6 October 1941) is a South African playwright and actor.
  Born in Port Elizabeth, Ntshona worked alongside fellow South African Athol Fugard on several occasions and played a minor role in Richard Attenborough's acclaimed film Gandhi.
  Ntshona also played deposed President Julius Limbani, the subject of a rescue attempt in The Wild Geese (1978). Limbani is based on Moise Tshombe.
  With Fugard and John Kani, Ntshona wrote the 1973 play The Island, in which he and Kani starred in a number of major international productions over the next thirty years. He and Kani were co-winners of the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for their performance in both The Island and Sizwe Banzi is Dead, which he also co-wrote.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Winston_Ntshona
• Zero Mostel
  Samuel Joel “Zero” Mostel (February 28, 1915 – September 8, 1977) was an American actor of stage and screen, best known for his portrayal of comic characters such as Tevye on stage in Fiddler on the Roof, Pseudolus on stage and on screen in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and Max Bialystock in the original film version of The Producers. He was blacklisted during the 1950s, and his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities was well-publicized. He was a Tony Award and Obie Award winner.
  Mostel was born to Israel Mostel, an Eastern European Jew, and Cina "Celia" Druchs, also from a Jewish family, who was born in Poland and raised in Vienna. The two immigrated to the United States (separately: Israel in 1898 and Cina in 1908), where they met and married. Israel already had four children from his first wife; he had four more children with Cina. Samuel, later known as Zero, was Israel's seventh child.
  It is said that Samuel Mostel got his nickname "Zero" since his parents were not kind with words and always told him that he would only ever amount to "Gournisht," which is Yiddish for "zero" or "nothing." The rest is history.
  
  wn.com/Zero_Mostel
• 
  Zubin Mehta
  Zubin Mehta (ज़ुबिन मेहता); pronounced [ˈzuːbɪn ˈmeːɦt̪aː] (born 29 April 1936) is an Indian conductor of western classical music. He is the Music Director for Life of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.
  Zubin Mehta was born into a Parsi family in Bombay, British India, the son of Mehli and Tehmina Mehta. His father Mehli Mehta was a violinist and founding conductor of the Bombay Symphony Orchestra. Mehta is an alumnus of St. Mary's School, Mumbai, and St. Xavier's College, Mumbai. Mehta initially intended to study medicine, but eventually became a music student in Vienna at the age of 18, under Hans Swarowsky. Also at the same academy along with Mehta were conductor Claudio Abbado and conductor–pianist Daniel Barenboim.
  Mehta's first marriage was to Canadian soprano Carmen Lasky in 1958. They have a son, Mervon and a daughter, Zarina. In 1964, they divorced. Two years after the divorce, Carmen married Zubin's brother, Zarin Mehta, now the Executive Director of the New York Philharmonic. In July 1969, Mehta married Nancy Kovack, a former American film and television actress. Mehta is a permanent resident of the United States, but retains his Indian citizenship.
  
  wn.com/Zubin_Mehta

Raven, The (2012)

Actors

• Kevin Mcnally
• Brendan Gleeson
• Alice Eve
• Luke Evans
• John Cusack

Director

• James Mcteigue