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• 
  

• 
  Broadway theatre
  Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City. Along with London's West End theatre, Broadway theatre is widely considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world.
  The Broadway theatre district is a popular tourist attraction in New York. According to The Broadway League, Broadway shows sold approximately $1.081 billion worth of tickets in calendar year 2011, compared with $1.037 billion for 2010. Attendance in 2011 was 12.13 million.
  New York did not have a significant theatre presence until about 1750, when actor-managers Walter Murray and Thomas Kean established a resident theatre company at the Theatre on Nassau Street, which held about 280 people. They presented Shakespeare plays and ballad operas such as The Beggar's Opera. In 1752, William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors from Britain to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager. They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice and The Anatomist. The company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad operas and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. The Revolutionary War suspended theatre in New York, but thereafter theatre resumed in 1798, the year the 2,000-seat Park Theatre was built on Chatham Street (now called Park Row). The Bowery Theatre opened in 1826, followed by others. Blackface minstrel shows, a distinctly American form of entertainment, became popular in the 1830s, and especially so with the arrival of the Virginia Minstrels in the 1840s.
  
  wn.com/Broadway_theatre
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  Cheshire
  Cheshire ( /ˈtʃɛʃər/ or /ˈtʃɛʃɪər/; also known as the County Palatine of Chester, and archaically, as the County of Chester; abbreviated Ches.) is a ceremonial county in North West England. Cheshire's county town is the city of Chester, although the largest town since county boundary changes in 1974 is Warrington (moved from Lancashire for administrative purposes in 1974). Other major towns include Widnes (also moved from Lancashire in 1974), Congleton, Crewe, Ellesmere Port, Runcorn, Macclesfield, Winsford, Northwich, and Wilmslow. Historically the county contained the Wirral, Stockport, Altrincham and other towns. The county is bordered by Merseyside and Greater Manchester to the north, Derbyshire to the east, Staffordshire and Shropshire to the south, and Flintshire and Wrexham in Wales to the west. The county is a part of the Welsh Marches.
  Cheshire's area is 2,343 square kilometres (905 sq mi) and its population is around 700,000. Apart from the large towns along the River Mersey and the historic city of Chester, it is mostly rural, with a number of small towns and villages that support an agricultural industry. It is historically famous as a former principality and for the production of Cheshire cheese, salt, bulk chemicals, and woven silk.
  
  wn.com/Cheshire

• Abby Mann
  Abby Mann (December 1, 1927 – March 25, 2008) was an American film writer and producer.
  Born as Abraham Goodman in Philadelphia, he grew up in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was best known for his work on controversial subjects and social drama. His most famous work is the drama Judgment at Nuremberg, which was initially a television drama aired in 1959. Stanley Kramer directed the 1961 film adaptation, for which Mann received the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. In his acceptance speech, he said:
  "A writer worth his salt at all has an obligation not only to entertain but to comment on the world in which he lives."
  Mann later adapted the play for a 2001 production on Broadway, which featured Maximilian Schell from the 1961 film in a different role.
  Mann and Kramer also collaborated on the 1963 film A Child is Waiting.
  In the introduction to the printed script, Mann credited a conversation with Abraham Pomerantz, U.S. Chief Deputy Counsel, for giving him the initial interest in Nuremberg.
  
  wn.com/Abby_Mann
• Alan Hackney
  Alan Charles Langley Hackney (b. 10 September 1924, Manchester – d. 15 May 2009, Hertfordshire) was an English novelist and screenwriter.. He was educated at Thornleigh College, Bolton, and while at Manchester University was called up to the army. After demobilisation he proceeded to New College, Oxford where he read Politics, Philosophy and Economics under the tutelage of Isaiah Berlin.
  He was best known for his two novels Private's Progress and Private Life, which were both adapted into films, the former as Private's Progress (1956) and the latter as I'm All Right Jack (1959). Hackney also co-wrote the script of I'm All Right Jack, which was a satire of trade unions. He was also a frequent contributor to Punch.
  At around this time the British film industry collapsed and Hackney’s career was never to hit such heights again. A further two children meant that he had to travel to write and he had spells in Canada, Italy (with the RAI TV series K 2 +1, directed by Luciano Emmer, starring the German Kessler Sisters and the Italian-American crooner Johnny Dorelli) and Hollywood as well as working for British television and continuing to contribute to Punch.
  
  wn.com/Alan_Hackney
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  Albert Dekker
  Albert Dekker (December 20, 1905 – May 5, 1968) was an American character actor and politician best known for his roles in Dr. Cyclops, The Killers, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Wild Bunch. He is sometimes credited as Albert Van Dekker or Albert van Dekker.
  Born as Albert Van Ecke in Brooklyn, New York, he adopted his mother's maiden name of Dekker as his stage name. Dekker attended Bowdoin College and made his professional acting debut with a Cincinnati stock company in 1927. Within a few months, Dekker was featured in the Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's play Marco Millions.
  After a decade of theatrical appearances, Dekker transferred to Hollywood in 1937, and made his first film, 1937's The Great Garrick. He spent most of the rest of his acting career in the cinema, but also returned to the stage from time to time.
  He replaced Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman in the original production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and during a five-year stint back on Broadway in the early 1960s, he played the Duke of Norfolk in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons.
  
  wn.com/Albert_Dekker
• Alvin Sargent
  Alvin Sargent (born April 12, 1927) is an American screenwriter. He has won two Academy Awards for his screenplays (1978 and 1981) and has been involved in the writing of all movies to date in the Spider-Man film series.
  Sargent was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Upper Darby High School in 1945. As of 2006, he is one of 35 alumni to be on the school's Wall of Fame.
  Sargent began writing for television in 1953 and through the 1960s he scripted episodes for Route 66, Ben Casey and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. He collaborated on his first screenplay for a motion picture in 1966 and gained recognition for I Walk the Line and Paper Moon for which he won the WGA Award for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium and was nominated for an Academy Award. He won the Academy Award for Adapted Screenplay in 1978 for the film Julia and again in 1981 for Ordinary People. He collaborated on the 2004 screenplay for Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3 released in 2007.
  He was married to producer Laura Ziskin for 25 years, until her death in 2011. His brother was writer and producer Herb Sargent.
  
  wn.com/Alvin_Sargent
• Andrew Keir
  Andrew Keir (3 April 1926 – 5 October 1997) was a Scottish actor, who rose to prominence featuring in a number of films from Hammer Film Productions in the 1960s. He was also active in television, and particularly in the theatre, in a professional career that lasted from the 1940s to the 1990s. He is most remembered for starring as Professor Bernard Quatermass in Hammer's film version of Quatermass and the Pit (1967). He also originated the role of Thomas Cromwell in Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons in 1960.
  His obituary in The Times newspaper described him as possessing "considerable range and undeniable distinction."
  Keir was born Andrew Buggy in Shotts, North Lanarkshire, Scotland. He was the son of a coalminer, and had five brothers and one sister. When he was fourteen years old he left school and began working down the coal mine alongside his father. He began acting by chance, when he went to meet a friend at the Miners' Welfare Hall, and one member of the cast of an amateur dramatics production being performed at the Hall had failed to turn up. Keir was persuaded to take the minor role of a farmer in the play, and enjoyed the experience so much that he became a regular in the group's performances.
  
  wn.com/Andrew_Keir
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  Arthur Miller
  Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include plays such as All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (one-act, 1955; revised two-act, 1956).
  Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, a period during which he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Prince of Asturias Award, and was married to Marilyn Monroe.
  Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in Harlem, New York City, the second of three children of Isidore and Augusta Miller, Polish-Jewish immigrants. His father owned a women's clothing manufacturing business employing some 400 people. He became a wealthy and respected man in the community. (BBC TV Interview; Miller and Yentob; 'Finishing the Picture,' 2004) The family, including his younger sister Joan, lived on East 110th Street in Manhattan and owned a summer house in Far Rockaway, Queens. They employed a chauffeur. In the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the family lost almost everything and moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn. As a teenager, Miller delivered bread every morning before school to help the family. After graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School, he worked at several menial jobs to pay for his college tuition.
  
  wn.com/Arthur_Miller
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  Augustus John
  Augustus Edwin John OM, RA, (4 January 1878 – 31 October 1961) was a Welsh painter, draughtsman, and etcher. For a short time around 1910, he was an important exponent of Post-Impressionism in the United Kingdom.
  "Augustus was celebrated first for his brilliant figure drawings, and then for a new technique of oil sketching. His work was favourably compared in London with that of Gauguin and Matisse. He then developed a style of portraiture that was imaginative and often extravagant, catching an instantaneous attitude in his subjects."
  John was born at Tenby in Pembrokeshire, the younger son and third of four children in his family. His father was Edwin William John, a Welsh solicitor; his mother, Augusta Smith from a long line of Sussex plumbers, died young when he was six, but not before inculcating a love of drawing in both Augustus and his older sister Gwen. At the age of seventeen he briefly attended the Tenby School of Art, then left Wales for London, studying at the Slade School of Art UCL in London (his sister, Gwen, was with him at the Slade and became an important artist in her own right), where he became the star pupil of drawing teacher Henry Tonks, and even before his graduation was recognized as the most talented draughtsman of his generation.
  
  wn.com/Augustus_John
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  Ben Affleck
  Benjamin Géza Affleck-Boldt (born August 15, 1972), better known as Ben Affleck, is an American actor, film director, writer, and producer. He became known with his performances in Kevin Smith's films such as Mallrats (1995), Chasing Amy (1997), and Dogma (1999). Affleck won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for the screenplay for Good Will Hunting (1997), which he co-wrote with Matt Damon, and has appeared in lead roles in such popular hits as Armageddon (1998), Pearl Harbor (2001), Changing Lanes (2002), The Sum of All Fears (2002), Daredevil (2003), Hollywoodland (2007) and State of Play (2009).
  Affleck is a critically acclaimed filmmaker. He directed Gone Baby Gone (2007) and The Town (2010), playing the lead in the latter. He has worked with his younger brother, actor Casey Affleck, on several projects, including Good Will Hunting and Gone Baby Gone.
  Affleck has been married to Jennifer Garner since June 2005. They have two daughters, Violet and Seraphina, and a son, Samuel. He dated the actress Gwyneth Paltrow in 1998. His relationship with actress/singer Jennifer Lopez attracted worldwide media attention, in which Affleck and Lopez were dubbed "Bennifer". The two broke up in 2004.
  
  wn.com/Ben_Affleck
• Bernard Kay
  Bernard Kay (Born 23 February 1928, Bolton, England) is a British actor with an extensive theatre, television and film repertoire.
  Kay began his working life as a reporter on Bolton Evening News, and a stringer for The Manchester Guardian. He was conscripted in 1946 and started acting in the army. Kay gained a scholarship to study at the Old Vic Theatre School and became a professional in 1950, as a member of the company which reopened the Old Vic after WW2.
  He has appeared in hundreds of TV productions including Emmerdale Farm, The Champions, The Cellar and the Almond Tree, Clayhanger, A Very British Coup, Casualty, Casualty 1909, Doctors, Z-Cars, Coronation Street and Foyle's War. He portrayed Captain Stanley Lord of the SS Californian in the BBC dramatisation 'Trial by Inquiry: Titanic' in 1967; and he played the bandit leader Cordova in Zorro television episode "Alejandro Rides Again" in 1991 which was filmed in Madrid, Spain. Kay also gave a sympathetic performance as Korporal Hartwig in an early episode of "Colditz".
  
  wn.com/Bernard_Kay
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  Bernardo Bertolucci
  Bernardo Bertolucci (Italian pronunciation: [berˈnardo bertoˈluttʃi]; born 16 March 1941) is an Italian film director and screenwriter, whose films include The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, 1900, The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky and The Dreamers. In recognition of his work, he was presented with the inaugural Honorary Palme d'Or Award at the opening ceremony of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
  Bertolucci was born in the Italian city of Parma, in the region of Emilia Romagna. He is the elder son of Ninetta, a teacher, and Attilio Bertolucci, who was a poet, a reputed art historian, anthologist and film critic. Having been raised in such an environment, Bertolucci began writing at the age of fifteen, and soon after received several prestigious literary prizes including the Premio Viareggio for his first book. His father's background helped his career: the elder Bertolucci had helped the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini publish his first novel, and Pasolini reciprocated by hiring Bertolucci as first assistant in Rome on Accattone (1961), where he met his first wife, Adriana Asti.
  
  wn.com/Bernardo_Bertolucci
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  Bo Goldman
  Robert "Bo" Goldman (born September 10, 1932) is an American writer, Broadway playwright and screenwriter. To date, he has received two Academy Awards out of three nominations.
  Born in New York City, Goldman's father, Julian, owned a chain of well known eastern department stores called The Goldman Stores. An early pioneer of "time payments" his business thrived. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a close friend and also his attorney. Goldman Store ads typically featured men in business suits and fashionably dressed women in furs. While this was an old strategy for appealing to those with dreams of upper-class status, the ad copy explicitly addressed middle-income customers. "He Makes only $3,000 a year," blazoned one Goldman ad, "But is worth $112,290!" Julian loved the theatre, and was an "angel" or backer, to many Broadway Shows and reviews. His young son, Robert "Bo," accompanied Julian to an average of two shows a week. This had an impact on what the boy would choose to do later in life, convinced from an early age that he was meant to work in the theatre. In 1939 Julian was looking for a school where he could send his son. Eleanor Roosevelt admired the work of Helen Parkhurst and was in the midst of expanding the population and resources of the Dalton School by promoting a merger between the Todhunter School for girls (founded by Winifred Todhunter). Julian Goldman became an early backer, and it was this school where Bo would begin his education. He followed this by skipping his last year at Dalton in favor of fast tracking through Exeter, NH, an experience that informed a script he would write years later, Scent of a Woman.
  
  wn.com/Bo_Goldman
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  Boris Pasternak
  Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (Russian: Бори́с Леони́дович Пастерна́к; IPA: [bɐˈrʲis lʲeɐˈnʲidəvʲɪt͡ɕ pəstʲɪrˈnak]; 10 February [O.S. 29 January] 1890 – 30 May 1960) was a Russian language poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's anthology My Sister, Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Furthermore, Pasternak's theatrical translations of Goethe, Schiller, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and William Shakespeare remain deeply popular with Russian audiences.
  Outside Russia, Pasternak is best known as the author of Doctor Zhivago, a novel which spans the last years of Czarist Russia and the earliest days of the Soviet Union. Banned in the USSR, Doctor Zhivago was smuggled to Milan and published in 1957. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year, an event which both humiliated and enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the midst of a massive campaign against him by both the KGB^{[citation needed]} and the Union of Soviet Writers, Pasternak reluctantly agreed to decline the Prize. In his resignation letter to the Nobel Committee, Pasternak stated the reaction of the Soviet State was the only reason for his decision.
  
  wn.com/Boris_Pasternak
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  Brian Blessed
  Brian Blessed ( /ˈblɛsɪd/; born 9 October 1936) is an English actor, known for his sonorous voice and "hearty, king-sized portrayals".
  The son of William Blessed, a socialist miner, and Hilda Wall, Blessed was born at the Montague Hospital in the town of Mexborough, England. He attended Bolton on Dearne Secondary Modern School, but after his father suffered an industrial accident, he was forced to leave school early at 14 and spent several years working at a variety of jobs, ranging from undertaker to plasterer's assistant. At the age of eighteen, he suffered a nervous breakdown, from which he gradually recovered with the help of friends and family. He completed his National Service as a parachutist in the Royal Air Force. He began his acting training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, alongside Patrick Stewart. He has written about his early life in his autobiography, Dynamite Kid (1992).
  An early role was that of PC 'Fancy' Smith in the BBC police drama Z-Cars from 1962 to 1965. In 1966, Blessed appeared in "Incident at Vichy" at the Phoenix Theatre in London. Blessed had small roles in such cult shows as The Avengers (1967, 1969) and the original Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969). He portrayed Caesar Augustus in the BBC series I, Claudius. He portrayed the father of Robin Hood, Lord Locksley, in the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. He has appeared in a number of Shakespearean roles on both stage and screen, including four of the five Shakespeare films directed by Kenneth Branagh: as The Duke of Exeter in Henry V (1989), Antonio in Much Ado About Nothing (1993), The Ghost of Hamlet's Father in Hamlet (1996) and the dual role of Duke Frederick and Duke Senior in As You Like It (2006). He also provided the voices of Bob in the animated series Kika & Bob (2008) and Grampy Rabbit in Peppa Pig.
  
  wn.com/Brian_Blessed
• Bridget Boland
  Bridget Boland (13 March 1913 - 19 January 1988) was an Irish-British sceenwriter, playwright and novelist.
  Bridget Boland was the daughter of the Irish politician John Pius Boland. Born in London, Bridget Boland was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton and at Oxford University, where she studied philosophy, politics, and economics, graduating B.A. in 1935. In 1937 she became a film writer. From 1941 to 1946 she served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, producing plays for the troops to boost morale from 1943 to 1946.
  Boland reflected on her life and work in 1987:
  
  
  
  wn.com/Bridget_Boland
• Bryan Forbes
  Bryan Forbes, CBE is an English film director, actor and writer.
  Bryan Forbes was born John Theobald Clarke on 22 July 1926 in Queen Mary's Hospital, Stratford, West Ham, Essex (now Greater London), and grew up at 43 Cranmer Road, Forest Gate, West Ham, Essex (now Greater London).
  Forbes trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts but did not complete his studies. After military service from 1945 to 1948, he played numerous supporting roles in British films including in 1955 The Colditz Story, alongside John Mills, as well as appearing on the stage, but was obliged to change his name by British Equity to avoid confusion with the adolescent actor John Clark. He began also to write for the screen, receiving his first full credit for The Cockleshell Heroes in 1955. Another noted screenplay of his from this period was for The League of Gentlemen in 1959, in which he also acted.
  He formed a production company with his frequent collaborator Richard Attenborough in 1959 (Beaver Films), which went on to make The Angry Silence in 1960, a screenplay by Forbes in which Attenborough took the lead role, and both shared production responsibilities. In 1961 he made his directorial debut Whistle Down the Wind, again produced by Attenborough. In 1964, Forbes wrote and directed Séance on a Wet Afternoon, for which he won a 1965 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, for Best Foreign Film Screenplay. That same year he wrote the third screen adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novel Of Human Bondage. In 1965 he went to Hollywood to make King Rat. A 1968 caper film, Deadfall, starred Michael Caine.
  
  wn.com/Bryan_Forbes
• Callie Khouri
  Callie Khouri (born November 27, 1957, as Carolyn Ann Khouri) is an American screenwriter, producer and film director. In 1992 she won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen for the film, Thelma & Louise.
  Khouri was born in San Antonio, Texas. Her father was a physician who trained in Louisville, where he met her mother. He subsequently served in the U.S. Army at Fort Bliss in El Paso, then entered private practice in Paducah, Kentucky. Following her graduation from high school there, she first studied landscape architecture at Purdue University but became interested in drama. Post college, she studied at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute in Los Angeles. Khouri currently lives in Santa Monica, California.
  While working for a company that made commercials and music videos, she began writing Thelma & Louise, her first produced screenplay. For the script, she won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen in 1992. At the Oscar ceremony she said, "For everyone who wanted to see a happy ending for 'Thelma and Louise,' for me this is it."
  
  wn.com/Callie_Khouri
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  Catherine of Aragon
  Catharine of Aragon (Castilian: Catalina de Aragón; Aragonese: Catarina d'Aragón) (16 December 1485 – 7 January 1536) was Queen consort of England as the first wife of King Henry VIII of England and Princess of Wales as the wife to Arthur, Prince of Wales. In 1507, she also held the position of Ambassador for the Spanish Court in England when her father found himself without one, becoming the first female ambassador in European history. For six months, she served as regent of England while Henry VIII was in France. During that time the English won the Battle of Flodden, an event in which Catherine played an important part.
  At the age of three, Catherine was betrothed to Prince Arthur, heir to the English throne, and they married in 1501, but Arthur died five months later. Catherine subsequently married Arthur's younger brother, the recently-succeeded Henry VIII, in 1509. By 1525 Henry was infatuated with his mistress Anne Boleyn and dissatisfied that his marriage to Catherine had produced no surviving sons, leaving their daughter, the future Mary I of England, as heiress presumptive at a time when there was no established precedent for a woman on the throne. He sought to have their marriage annulled, setting in motion a chain of events that led to England's break with the Roman Catholic Church. When Pope Clement VII refused to annul the marriage, Henry defied him by assuming supremacy over religious matters. In 1533 their marriage was declared invalid and Henry married Anne on the judgement of clergy in England, without reference to the Pope. Catherine refused to accept Henry as Supreme Head of the Church of England and considered herself the King's rightful wife and Queen until her death. Now acknowledged by Henry only as Dowager Princess of Wales, she lived out the remainder of her life at Kimbolton Castle, and died there on 7 January 1536.
  
  wn.com/Catherine_of_Aragon
• Celia Johnson
  Dame Celia Elizabeth Johnson DBE (18 December 1908 – 25 April 1982) was an English actress.
  She began her stage acting career in 1928, and subsequently achieved success in West End and Broadway productions. She also appeared in several films, including the romantic drama Brief Encounter (1945), for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was nominated for BAFTA Awards on five occasions, and won twice, for her work in the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), and for the television production Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, a BBC Play for Today broadcast in 1973.
  Much of her later work was for television, and she continued performing in theatre for the rest of her life. She died suddenly from a stroke.
  Born in Richmond, Surrey, Johnson was the second daughter of Robert Johnson and Ethel Griffiths. During her childhood, her family called her "Betty". Johnson's first public performance was in 1916, when she played a role in a charity performance of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid to raise funds for returned World War I soldiers. She attended St Paul's Girls' School in London from 1919 until 1926, and played in the school's orchestra under Gustav Holst. She acted in school productions, but had no other acting experience, when she was accepted to study at R.A.D.A. in 1926, and later spent a term in Paris, studying under Pierre Fresnay at the Comédie Française. She later recalled her choice of an acting career with the comment, "I thought I'd rather like it. It was the only thing I was good at. And I thought it might be rather wicked.”
  
  wn.com/Celia_Johnson
• David Lean
  Sir David Lean, CBE (25 March 1908 – 16 April 1991) was an English film director, producer, screenwriter and editor, best remembered for big-screen epics The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and A Passage to India (1984); for bringing Charles Dickens' novels to the silver screen with films such as Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948); and for the renowned romantic drama Brief Encounter (1945).
  Acclaimed by directors including Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick,, Lean was voted 9th greatest film director of all time in the British Film Institute Sight & Sound Directors' Top Directors" poll 2002. Lean has four films in the top eleven of the British Film Institute's Top 100 British Films.
  David Lean was born in Croydon, Surrey (now part of Greater London), to Francis William le Blount Lean and the former Helena Tangye (niece of Sir Richard Trevithick Tangye). His parents were Quakers and he was a pupil at the Quaker-founded Leighton Park School in Reading. His younger brother, Edward Tangye Lean (1911–1974), founded the original Inklings literary club when a student at Oxford University. Lean was a half-hearted schoolboy with a dreamy nature who was labeled a "dud" of a student; he left in his mid-teens and entered his father's chartered accountancy firm as an apprentice. At age 16, his father deserted the family when he ran off with another woman, and young David would later follow a similar path after his own first marriage and child.
  
  wn.com/David_Lean
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  Edith Evans
  Dame Edith Mary Evans, DBE (8 February 1888 – 14 October 1976) was a British actress. She was known for her work on the British stage. She also appeared in a number of films, for which she received three Academy Award nominations, plus a BAFTA and a Golden Globe award.
  Evans was particularly well known at portraying haughty aristocratic ladies, as in two of her most famous roles: Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (both on stage and in the 1952 film), and Miss Western in the 1963 film of Tom Jones. By contrast, she played a poverty-stricken old woman in one of her most acclaimed film roles, in The Whisperers (1967).
  Edith Evans was born in London, the daughter of Edward Evans, a civil servant, and his wife, Caroline Ellen Foster. She was educated at St Michael's Church of England School, Pimlico, before being apprenticed at the age of 15 in 1903 as a milliner.
  Her first stage appearance was with Miss Massey's Shakespeare Players in the role of Viola in Twelfth Night in October 1910. In 1912 she was discovered by the noted producer William Poel and made her first professional appearance for Poel in August of that year, playing the role of Gautami in a 6th century Hindu classic, Sakuntala. She received much attention with her performance as Cressida in Troilus and Cressida in London and subsequently at Stratford-upon-Avon.
  
  wn.com/Edith_Evans
• Edward Anhalt
  Edward Anhalt (March 28, 1914, New York, New York - September 3, 2000, Pacific Palisades, California) was a noted screenwriter, producer, and documentary film-maker. After working as a journalist and documentary filmmaker for Pathé and CBS-TV he teamed with his wife Edna Anhalt, née Richards, during World War II to write pulp fiction. (Edna was one of his five wives.)
  During World War II, Anhalt served with the Army Air Force First Motion Picture Unit in Culver City, California as a scenarist for training films. After the war, the Anhalts graduated to writing screenplays for thrillers, initially using the joint pseudonym Andrew Holt. Put under contract by Columbia, the Anhalts scripted Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1947). After a stint at Twentieth Century Fox during which they earned an Oscar for the screen story to the urban thriller Panic in the Streets (1950), the husband and wife team returned to Columbia as writer-producers, scoring another Academy Award nomination for their story to the gritty thriller The Sniper in 1952.
  
  wn.com/Edward_Anhalt
• Eileen Atkins
  Dame Eileen June Atkins, DBE (born 16 June 1934) is an English actress and occasional screenwriter. Born in 1934 she has worked in the theatre, film, and television consistently since 1953. She has been nominated for and received many professional awards and was created a CBE in 1990 and later a DBE in 2001.
  Atkins was born in the Mothers' Hospital in Clapton, a Salvation Army women's hostel in East London. Her mother, Annie Ellen (née Elkins), was a barmaid who was 46 when Eileen was born, and her father, Arthur Thomas Atkins, was a gas meter reader who was previously under-chauffeur to the Portuguese Ambassador. She was the third child in the family and when she was born the family moved to a council home in Tottenham. Her father did not, in fact, know how to drive and was responsible, as under-chauffeur, mainly for cleaning the car. At the time Eileen was born, her mother worked in a factory the whole day and then as a barmaid in the Elephant & Castle at night. When Eileen was three, a Gypsy woman came to their door selling lucky heather and clothes pegs. She saw little Eileen and told her mother that her daughter would be a famous dancer. Her mother promptly enrolled her in a dance class. Although she hated it, she studied dancing from age 3 to 15 or 16. From age 7 to 15, which covered the last four years of the Second World War (1941–45), she danced in working men's club circuits for 15 shillings a pop as "Baby Eileen". During the war, she performed as well at London's Stage Door canteen for American troops and sang songs like "Yankee Doodle." At one time she was attending dance class four or five times a week.
  
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• 
  Emma Thompson
  Emma Thompson (born 15 April 1959) is a British actress, comedian and screenwriter. She first came to prominence in 1987 in two BBC TV series, Tutti Frutti and Fortunes of War. Her first major film role was in the 1989 romantic comedy The Tall Guy. In 1992, Thompson won multiple acting awards, including an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress, for her performance in the British drama Howards End. The following year Thompson garnered dual Academy Award nominations, as Best Actress for The Remains of the Day and as Best Supporting Actress for In the Name of the Father.
  In 1995, Thompson scripted and starred in Sense and Sensibility, a film adaptation of the Jane Austen novel of the same name, which earned her an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role among other awards. Other notable film and television credits have included the Harry Potter film series, Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Wit (2001), Love Actually (2003), Angels in America (2003), Nanny McPhee (2005), Stranger than Fiction (2006), Last Chance Harvey (2008), An Education (2009) and Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang (2010).
  
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• 
  English people
  The English (from Old English: Englisc) are a nation and ethnic group native to England, who speak English. The English identity is of early mediaeval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn. England is now a country of the United Kingdom, and the majority of English people in England are British Citizens. Their ethnonym is derived from the Angles, a Germanic people originally from Northern Germany who migrated to Britain.
  Historically, the English population is descended from several genetically similar peoples—the earlier Britons (or Brythons), the Germanic tribes that settled in the area, including Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, collectively known as the Anglo-Saxons, who founded what was to become England (from the Old English Englaland), and the later Danes, Normans and other groups. Following the Act of Union in 1707, in which the Kingdom of England became part of the Kingdom of Great Britain, English customs and identity became closely aligned with British customs and identity.
  
  wn.com/English_people
• Eric Portman
  Eric Portman (13 July 1901, Akroydon, Halifax, West Riding of Yorkshire - 7 December 1969, St Veep, Cornwall) was a distinguished English stage and film actor. He is probably best remembered for his roles in several films for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger during the 1940s.
  He started work in 1922 as a salesman in the menswear department at Marshall and Snelgrove's department store in Leeds and acted in the amateur Halifax Light Opera Society. He made his professional stage debut in 1924 with Henry Baynton's company, before he was engaged by Lilian Baylis for the Old Vic Company. In 1928, he starred as Romeo in the rebuilt Old Vic and forged a reputation as a noted Shakespearian actor.
  In the 1930s, he began appearing in films. In 1935, he appeared in four films, including Maria Marten or Murder in the Red Barn.
  In 1945, exhibitors voted him the tenth most popular star at the British box office. He maintained that ranking the following year.
  In 1967, he played Number Two in the TV series The Prisoner, appearing in the episode "Free For All".
  
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• 
  Erich Segal
  Erich Wolf Segal (June 16, 1937 – January 17, 2010) was an American author, screenwriter, and educator. He was best known for writing the novel Love Story (1970), a best-seller, and writing the motion picture of the same name, which was a major hit.
  The son of a rabbi, Segal attended Midwood High School in Brooklyn and traveled to Switzerland to take summer courses. He attended Harvard College, graduating as both the class poet and Latin salutatorian in 1958, after which he obtained his master's degree (in 1959) and a doctorate (in 1965) in comparative literature, from Harvard University.
  Segal was a professor of Greek and Latin literature at Harvard University, Yale University and Princeton University. He had been a Supernumerary Fellow and subsequently an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford.
  His first academic book, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus, revolutionized the great Roman comic playwright best known today as the inspiration for the Broadway hit, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.^{[citation needed]} In 2001 Harvard published his The Death of Comedy, the all-encompassing literary history.^{[citation needed]}
  
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• 
  Ernest Thompson
  Ernest Thompson (born Richard Ernest Thompson; November 6, 1949) is an American writer, actor, and director.
  Thompson was born as Richard Ernest Thompson in Bellows Falls, Vermont. He spent his early years in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, moving to Maryland as a junior high school student. He attended the University of Maryland and The Catholic University of America, graduating cum laude from American University in 1971.
  Thompson is known as the author of the play On Golden Pond, which he wrote at the age of twenty-eight. The play opened off-off-Broadway in 1978, starring Tom Aldredge and Frances Sternhagen. A great success at the Kennedy Center, it opened at the New Apollo Theater on Broadway February 28, 1979. Revived the following season at the Century Theatre, On Golden Pond ran for more than 400 performances. It went on to become a hit 1981 film starring Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda. Thompson won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1982, as well as awards from the Golden Globes and the Writers Guild of America.
  
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• 
  Ernest Tidyman
  Ernest Tidyman (January 1, 1928 - July 14, 1984) was a Cleveland-born American author and screenwriter, best known for his novels featuring the African-American detective John Shaft. He also co-wrote the screenplay for the film version of Shaft with John D.F. Black in 1971.
  His screenplay for The French Connection garnered him an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as a Golden Globe Award, a Writers Guild of America Award, and an Edgar Award.
  He also wrote the screenplay for the 1973 film High Plains Drifter, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. Tidyman also wrote the sequel to Shaft, Shaft's Big Score, which appeared in theaters in 1972.
  In 1974, he published Dummy, a non-fiction account of the story of Donald Lang, an accused deaf-mute murderer. It was nominated for an Edgar in the Fact Crime category.
  He co-wrote A Force of One in 1979, one of Chuck Norris's earlier films.
  In 1980, he wrote the teleplay for the TV movie Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones, which he also had a hand in producing), which got him an Emmy nomination. For creating the Shaft books, he became one of the few white individuals to win an NAACP Image Award.
  
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• 
  Francis Ford Coppola
  Francis Ford Coppola ( /ˈkoʊpələ/ KOH-pə-lə; born April 7, 1939) is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He is widely acclaimed as one of Hollywood's most innovative and influential film directors. He epitomized the group of filmmakers known as the New Hollywood, that includes Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, Robert Altman, Woody Allen, William Friedkin, Philip Kaufman, and George Lucas who emerged in the early 1970s with unconventional ideas that challenged contemporary film-making.
  He co-wrote the script for Patton (1970), which won an Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay). His directorial fame escalated with the release of The Godfather (1972), a film which revolutionized movie-making in the gangster genre, earning praise from critics and public alike. It won three Academy Awards, including his second, for Academy Award for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay), and was instrumental in cementing his position as a prominent American film director.
  Coppola followed it with a critically successful sequel, The Godfather Part II (1974), which became the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film was highly praised and won him three Academy Awards—for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture. The Conversation, which Coppola directed, produced and wrote, was released that same year, winning the Palme d'Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. He next directed Apocalypse Now (1979); notorious for its overlong and strenuous production, but critically acclaimed for its vivid and stark depiction of the Vietnam War, winning the Palme d'Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. To this day, Coppola is one of only seven filmmakers to win two Palme d'Or awards, and is the only filmmaker to win both in the same decade.
  
  wn.com/Francis_Ford_Coppola
• Frederic Raphael
  Frederic Michael Raphael (born August 14, 1931) is an American-born, British-educated screenwriter, and also a prolific novelist and journalist.
  Raphael was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Irene Rose (née Mauser) and Cedric Michael Raphael, an employee of the Shell Oil Co. With his parents, he emigrated to Putney, England, in 1938.
  Raphael was educated at two independent schools, Copthorne Preparatory School, near Crawley in West Sussex, and Charterhouse School (Lockites) in Godalming in Surrey, and then at St John's College at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge.
  Raphael won an Oscar for the screenplay for the 1965 movie Darling, and two years later received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Two for the Road. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1967 film adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd directed by John Schlesinger.
  His articles and book reviews appear in a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times and The Sunday Times. He has published more than twenty novels, the best-known being the semi-autobiographical The Glittering Prizes (1976), which traces the lives of a group of Cambridge University undergraduates in post-war Britain as they move through university and into the wider world. The original six-part BBC television series, from which the book was adapted, won him a Royal Television Society Writer of the Year Award.Fame and Fortune, which continues the story to 1979, was adapted in 2007 and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, television channels having refused to commission the sequel themselves. In 2010, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a further sequel in a series entitled Final Demands, with Tom Conti as Adam Morris, the central character, bringing the story to the late 1990s.
  
  wn.com/Frederic_Raphael
• George Tabori
  George Tabori (May 24, 1914 – July 23, 2007) was a Hungarian writer and theater director.
  Tabori was born in Budapest as György Tábori, a son of Kornél and Elsa Tábori. His father died in Auschwitz in 1944, but his mother and his brother Paul managed to escape the Nazis. His sons Peter and Kris Tabori attended Oxford. As a young man, Tabori went to Berlin but was forced to leave Hitler's Germany in 1935 due to his Jewish background. He first went to London, where he worked for the BBC and received British citizenship. In 1947 he immigrated to the United States, where he became a translator (mainly of works by Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch) and a screenwriter including Alfred Hitchcock's movie I Confess (1953).
  In the late 1960s, Tabori brought his own and the work of Brecht to many colleges and universities. At the University of Pennsylvania he taught classes in dramatic writing which resulted in Werner Liepolt's The Young Master Dante and Ron Cowen's Summertree. Two of Tabori's plays in English -- The Cannibals and Pinkville -- were produced by Wynn Handman at the American Place Theatre in New York City from 1968 through 1970.
  
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• 
  Gore Vidal
  Gore Vidal ( /ˌɡɔr vɨˈdɑːl/; born October 3, 1925) is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality. He also ran for political office twice and has been a longtime political critic.
  Vidal was born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal in West Point, New York, the only child of 1st Lieutenant Eugene Luther Vidal (1895–1969) and Nina Gore (1903–1978). He was born in the Cadet Hospital of the United States Military Academy, where his father was the first aeronautics instructor, and was christened by the headmaster of St. Albans preparatory school, his future alma mater. According to "West Point and the Third Loyalty", an article Vidal wrote for The New York Review of Books (October 18, 1973), he later decided to be called Gore in honor of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Gore, Democratic senator from Oklahoma.
  Vidal's father, a West Point football quarterback and captain, and an all-American basketball player, was director of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Air Commerce (1933–1937) in the Roosevelt administration, was one of the first Army Air Corps pilots and, according to biographer Susan Butler, was the great love of Amelia Earhart's life. In the 1920s and 1930s, he was a co-founder of three American airlines: the Ludington Line, which merged with others and became Eastern Airlines, Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT, which became TWA), and Northeast Airlines, which he founded with Earhart, as well as the Boston and Maine Railroad. The elder Vidal was also an athlete in the 1920 and 1924 Summer Olympics (seventh in the decathlon; U.S. pentathlon team coach).
  
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  Harold Pinter
  Harold Pinter, CH, CBE (10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a Nobel Prize-winning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted to film. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works.
  Pinter was born and raised in Hackney, east London, and educated at Hackney Downs School. He was a sprinter and a keen cricket player, acting in school plays and writing poetry. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but did not complete the course. He was fined for refusing National Service as a conscientious objector. Subsequently, he continued training at the Central School of Speech and Drama and worked in repertory theatre in Ireland and England. In 1956 he married actress Vivien Merchant and had a son, Daniel born in 1958. He left Merchant in 1975 and married author Antonia Fraser in 1980.
  
  wn.com/Harold_Pinter
• Horton Foote
  Albert Horton Foote, Jr. (March 14, 1916 – March 4, 2009) was an American playwright and screenwriter, perhaps best known for his screenplays for the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird and the 1983 film Tender Mercies, and his notable live television dramas during the Golden Age of Television. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1995 for his play The Young Man From Atlanta. In 1995, Foote was the inaugural recipient of the Austin Film Festival's Distinguished Screenwriter Award. In describing his 3-play work, "The Orphans' Home Cycle", the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal said this: "Foote, who died last March, left behind a masterpiece, one that will rank high among the signal achievements of American theater in the 20th century." In 2000, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
  Foote was born to Albert Horton Foote (1890-1973) and Harriet Gautier "Hallie" Brooks (1894-1974) in Wharton, Texas.His younger brothers were Thomas Brooks Foote (1921-1944) who died in aerial combat over Germany, and John Speed Foote (1923-1995).
  
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  James Brady
  James Scott "Jim" Brady (born August 29, 1940) is a former Assistant to the President and White House Press Secretary under U.S. President Ronald Reagan. After nearly being killed and becoming permanently disabled as a result of an assassination attempt on Reagan in 1981, Brady became an ardent supporter of gun control.
  Brady is an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America and attended St. Mary Catholic Grade School in Centralia, Illinois. In 1962, Brady graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a Bachelor of Science degree in political science, and was initiated into the Sigma Chi fraternity there. He began his career in public service as a staff member in the office of Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen. During the summer of 1962, he was an Honor Intern at the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division.
  After being on the faculty at Southern Illinois University (1964–1965), he held many positions in the private sector, including Assistant National Sales Manager and Executive Manager to the President of Lear-Seigler (1965–1966), Director of Legislation and Public Affairs for the Illinois State Medical Society (1966–1968), Whitaker and Baxter's Chicago Office Manager (1968–1969), and Executive and Vice President of James and Thomas Advertising and Public Relations (1969–1973).
  
  wn.com/James_Brady
• James Goldman
  James Goldman (June 30, 1927 – October 28, 1998) was an American screenwriter and playwright, and the brother of screenwriter and novelist William Goldman.
  He was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up primarily in Highland Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. He is most noted as the author of The Lion in Winter and author of the book for the Broadway musical Follies.
  Goldman died from a heart attack in New York City, where he had lived for many years.
  
  
  
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• John Briley
  John Richard Briley (b. 25 August 1925) is an American writer best known for screenplays of biopics. He won the Academy Award For Best Original Screenplay at the 1982 Oscars for Gandhi. As well as film scripts, he has written for television and theatre, and published several novels.
  Briley was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and served in the United States Air Force, 1943–46, reaching the rank of captain. At the University of Michigan, he gained a BA in 1950 and an MA in English 1951. He married Dorothy Louise Reichart in 1950, and they had four children. He worked in public relations for General Motors before rejoining the air force in 1955. He was posted to RAF Northolt airbase at South Ruislip near London, where he was director of orientation activities and started writing.
  In 1960, he earned a PhD in Elizabethan drama from the University of Birmingham, left the air force and became a staff writer with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood. He left MGM in 1964. He also had an uncredited part in the 1965 comedy Situation Hopeless... But Not Serious.
  
  wn.com/John_Briley
• John Normington
  John Normington (28 January 1937 – 26 July 2007) was an English actor who appeared widely on British television from the 1960s until the year of his death. Normington was also a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company performing in more than 20 RSC productions. He performed widely in the West End and at the National Theatre.
  John (Nora) Normington was born in Dukinfield, Cheshire, in 1937 and trained as an opera singer at the Northern School of Music. Following this, he did his national service and while stationed in Aldershot joined Farnham rep. Normington joined the Repertory Theatre in Oldham in 1950, and from 1959 to 1962 he worked at the Library Theatre in Manchester. After a short spell at the Oxford Playhouse, John Normington joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1963 and played many Shakespearean roles. He continued on stage for the rest of his life, with many memorable roles.
  In 1963, he made his first appearance on television and appeared regularly on the small screen until 2007, the year he died. In the 1960s and 1970s, he appeared in programmes such as Murder Most English; The Caesars; Softly, Softly; Nearest and Dearest; The Edwardians; Crown Court; Upstairs, Downstairs (in the episode "Such A Lovely Man"), and ITV Playhouse. Normington also appeared in the 1978 film The Thirty Nine Steps.
  
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  John Osborne
  John James Osborne (12 December 1929 – 24 December 1994) was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor and critic of the Establishment. The success of his 1956 play Look Back in Anger transformed English theatre.
  In a productive life of more than 40 years, Osborne explored many themes and genres, writing for stage, film and TV. His personal life was extravagant and iconoclastic. He was notorious for the ornate violence of his language, not only on behalf of the political causes he supported but also against his own family, including his wives and children.
  Osborne was one of the first writers to address Britain's purpose in the post-imperial age. He was the first to question the point of the monarchy on a prominent public stage. During his peak (1956–1966), he helped make contempt an acceptable and now even cliched onstage emotion, argued for the cleansing wisdom of bad behaviour and bad taste, and combined unsparing truthfulness with devastating wit.^{[citation needed]}
  Osborne was born in December 1929 in London, the son of Thomas Godfrey Osborne, a commercial artist and advertising copywriter of South Welsh extraction, and Nellie Beatrice, a Cockney barmaid. He adored his father and hated his mother, who he later wrote taught him "The fatality of hatred … She is my disease, an invitation to my sick room", and described her as "hypocritical, self-absorbed, calculating and indifferent". Thomas died in 1941, leaving the young boy an insurance settlement which he used to finance a private education at Belmont College, a minor public school in Devon. He entered the school in 1943 but was expelled in the summer term of 1945 after whacking the headmaster, who had struck him for listening to a forbidden broadcast by Frank Sinatra. School Certificate was the only formal qualification he acquired, but he possessed a native intelligence.
  
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  Joseph Stalin
  Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин; born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Джугашвили; 18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and later held the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. While the office of the General Secretary was officially elective and not initially regarded as the top position in the Soviet state, Stalin managed to use it to consolidate more and more power in his hands after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924 and gradually put down all opposition groups within the Communist Party. This included Leon Trotsky, a socialist theorist and the principal critic of Stalin among the early Soviet leaders, who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Whereas Trotsky was an exponent of permanent revolution, it was Stalin's concept of socialism in one country that became the primary focus of Soviet politics.
  
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  Kenneth Williams
  Kenneth Charles Williams (22 February 1926 – 15 April 1988) was an English comic actor and comedian. He was one of the main ensemble in 26 of the Carry On films, and appeared in numerous British television shows, and radio comedies with Tony Hancock and Kenneth Horne.
  Kenneth Charles Williams was born on 22 February 1926 in Bingfield Street, King's Cross, London, the son of Louisa ("Lou" or "Louie") and Charles Williams, a barber. Williams had a half-sister, Alice Patricia, born before Louie had met Charlie Williams. He was educated at Lyulph Stanley School, later becoming apprenticed as a draughtsman to a mapmaker. He joined the Army in 1944 at 18. As part of the Royal Engineers survey section in Bombay, he first performed on stage in the Combined Services Entertainment alongside Stanley Baxter and Peter Nichols. He was a voracious reader able to quote poems or literary extracts from memory. Excerpts from the diaries he kept as an adult show he adored his supportive, theatrical mother but despised his homophobic, morose and selfish father.
  
  wn.com/Kenneth_Williams
• Leo McKern
  Reginald "Leo" McKern, AO (16 March 1920 – 23 July 2002) was an Australian-born English actor who appeared in numerous British and Australian television programmes and movies, and more than 200 stage roles.
  McKern was born Reginald McKern in Sydney, New South Wales, the son of Vera (née Martin) and Norman Walton McKern and attended Sydney Technical High School. After an accident at age 15 he lost his left eye. He first worked as an engineering apprentice, then as an artist, followed by serving in the Australian Army during World War II. During the war, he made his first stage appearance in Sydney in 1944.
  Having fallen in love with actress Jane Holland, McKern moved to England to be with her and they married in 1946. He soon became a regular performer at London's Old Vic theatre and the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (now called the Royal Shakespeare Theatre) in Stratford-upon-Avon, despite the difficulties posed by his glass eye and Australian accent.
  In 1949, he played Forester in Love's Labour's Lost at the Old Vic. His most notable Shakespearean role was as Iago to Anthony Quayle's Othello in 1952. On the West End in London, McKern originated the role of the Common Man for Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons in 1960, but for the show's Broadway production, he was shifted to the role of Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex, the prosecutor of Sir Thomas More, which he would reprise in the film version. He also memorably played Subtle in Ben Jonson's The Alchemist in 1962.
  
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  Leon Trotsky
  Leon Trotsky (Russian: Лев Троцкий, pronounced [ˈlʲef ˈtrot͡skʲɪj] ( listen); 7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940), born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army.
  Trotsky was initially a supporter of the Menshevik Internationalists faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He joined the Bolsheviks immediately prior to the 1917 October Revolution, and eventually became a leader within the Party. During the early days of the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army as People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. He was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–20). He was also among the first members of the Politburo.
  After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was successively removed from power, expelled from the Communist Party, deported from the Soviet Union and assassinated on Stalin's orders. An early advocate of Red Army intervention against European fascism, Trotsky also opposed Stalin's non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s.
  
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  Malcolm McDowell
  Malcolm McDowell (born 13 June 1943) is an English actor, whose career spans more than four decades.
  McDowell is known for his early roles in the controversial films If...., O Lucky Man!, A Clockwork Orange, and Caligula. Since then, his versatility as an actor has led to varied roles in films and television series of different genres, including Tank Girl, Star Trek Generations, the TV serial Our Friends in the North, Entourage, Heroes, Metalocalypse, the animated movie Bolt, the 2007 remake of Halloween and its sequel, and Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness. He is also well known for his narration of the seminal 1982 documentary The Compleat Beatles.
  McDowell was born Malcolm John Taylor in Horsforth, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, now a part of the City of Leeds, the son of Edna (née McDowell), a hotelier, and Charles Taylor, a publican. His family later moved to Bridlington, since his father was in the Royal Air Force. McDowell trained as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA).
  
  wn.com/Malcolm_McDowell
• Marc Norman
  Marc Norman (born 1941, Los Angeles, California) is an American screenwriter.
  With Tom Stoppard, he won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in the 71st Academy Awards of 1998, for his script of Shakespeare in Love; he also shared in the Best Picture Oscar for the film as co-producer. Norman and Stoppard also won the Silver Bear for an outstanding single achievement at the 49th Berlin International Film Festival.
  Other screenwriting credits include the films Cutthroat Island (1995), The Aviator (1985), and an episode of the Mission: Impossible TV series.
  He is also the author of Bike Riding in Los Angeles. A Novel (New York: Dutton 1972) and What Happens Next?: A History of Hollywood Screenwriting (New York: Harmony Books 2007; UK: Aurum Press 2008).
  
  wn.com/Marc_Norman
• Mario Puzo
  Mario Gianluigi Puzo (October 15, 1920 – July 2, 1999) was an Italian American author and screenwriter, known for his novels about the Mafia, including The Godfather (1969), which he later co-adapted into a film by Francis Ford Coppola. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in both 1972 and 1974.
  Puzo was born into a poor family from Pietradefusi, Province of Avellino, Campania, Italy living in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York. Many of his books draw heavily on this heritage. After graduating from the City College of New York, he joined the United States Army Air Forces in World War II. Due to his poor eyesight, the military did not let him undertake combat duties but made him a public relations officer stationed in Germany. In 1950, his first short story, The Last Christmas, was published in American Vanguard. After the war, he wrote his first book, The Dark Arena, which was published in 1955.
  At periods in the 1950s and early 1960s, Puzo worked as a writer/editor for publisher Martin Goodman's Magazine Management Company. Puzo, along with other writers like Bruce Jay Friedman, worked for the company line of men's magazines, pulp titles like Male, True Action, and Swank. Under the pseudonym Mario Cleri, Puzo wrote World War II adventure features for True Action.
  
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  Matt Damon
  Matthew Paige "Matt" Damon (born October 8, 1970) is an American actor, screenwriter, and philanthropist whose career was launched following the success of the film Good Will Hunting (1997) from a screenplay he co-wrote with friend Ben Affleck. The pair won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and a Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay for their work. Damon alone received multiple Best Actor nominations, including an Academy Award for his lead performance in the film.
  Damon has since starred in commercially successful films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), the Ocean's trilogy, and the Bourne series, while also gaining critical acclaim for his performances in dramas such as Syriana (2005), The Good Shepherd (2006), and The Departed (2006). He garnered a Golden Globe nomination for portraying the title character in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in Invictus (2009). He is one of the top 40 highest grossing actors of all time. In 2007, Damon received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was named Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine. Damon has been actively involved in charitable work, including the ONE Campaign, H2O Africa Foundation, and Water.org.
  
  wn.com/Matt_Damon
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  Maxim Gorky
  Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (Russian: Алексе́й Макси́мович Пешко́в; 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868 – 18 June 1936), primarily known as Maxim Gorky (Russian: Макси́м Го́рький), was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.
  Gorky was born in Nizhny Novgorod and became an orphan at the age of nine. In 1880, at the age of twelve, he ran away from home in an effort to find his grandmother. Gorky was brought up by his grandmother. Her death deeply affected him, and after an attempt at suicide in December 1887, he travelled on foot across the Russian Empire for five years, changing jobs and accumulating impressions used later in his writing.
  As a journalist working for provincial newspapers, he wrote under the pseudonym Иегудиил Хламида (Jehudiel Khlamida). The name is suggestive of "cloak-and-dagger" by the similarity to the Greek chlamys, "cloak"). He began using the pseudonym Gorky (literally "bitter") in 1892, while working in Tiflis for the newspaper Кавказ (The Caucasus). The name reflected his simmering anger about life in Russia and a determination to speak the bitter truth. Gorky's first book Очерки и рассказы (Essays and Stories) in 1898 enjoyed a sensational success and his career as a writer began. Gorky wrote incessantly, viewing literature less as an aesthetic practice (though he worked hard on style and form) than as a moral and political act that could change the world. He described the lives of people in the lowest strata and on the margins of society, revealing their hardships, humiliations, and brutalization, but also their inward spark of humanity.
  
  wn.com/Maxim_Gorky
• Michael Jayston
  Michael Jayston (born Michael James on 29 October 1935) is a Nottingham-born English actor.
  He attended the Becket Grammar School in West Bridgford, then worked briefly as a trainee accountant at the offices of the National Coal Board before obtaining a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama to train as an actor. He made his professional debut, aged 27, in a production of The Amorous Prawn, going on to work on the stage at the Salisbury Repertory, Bristol Old Vic and with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
  He enjoyed success as a classical stage actor, then played roles on British television. Shakespearean roles on TV include Demetrius in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968), Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice (1973) and Edmund in King Lear (1975). An early recurring television role was as civil servant Dowling in the final series of boardroom drama The Power Game in 1969.
  In 1970 he played Henry Ireton in Cromwell. In 1971, he starred as Tsar Nicholas II of Russia in the film Nicholas and Alexandra, then in 1973 took the lead role of Mr Rochester in a BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre opposite Sorcha Cusack. He appeared as Gratiano opposite Laurence Olivier as Shylock in the National Theatre's film The Merchant of Venice (1974). He made two appearances in the anthology series Thriller in 1974 and in 1975 played Quiller, a spy who never used a gun, in the British TV series of the same name. He appeared as Dornford Yates' gentleman hero Jonathan Mansel in the 1977 BBC adaptation of She Fell Among Thieves. In 1979 he played Peter Guillam opposite Alec Guinness in the serial Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. He also played Mr Spooner in series Tracy Beaker Returns in 2010.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Jayston
• Michael Kitchen
  Michael Kitchen (born 31 October 1948) is an English actor and television producer, best known for his starring role as DCS Foyle in the British TV series Foyle's War.
  Kitchen was born in Leicester. As a young boy (circa 1960) he was head chorister in the Church of the Martyrs choir where he was a regular soloist. He worked with the National Youth Theatre and the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry before attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1969, while still at RADA, he won the "Emile Littler Award" for 'outstanding talent and aptitude for the professional theatre'.
  Michael Kitchen was discovered at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) by Top Talent Agent Peter Froggatt of Plant & Froggatt Ltd. Since the early 1970s, Kitchen has been a fixture of UK television. His early appearances include roles in Play for Today (Hell's Angels by David Agnew, 1971), Thriller and Beasts. He then played the role of Martin in the original production of Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle; Peter in Stephen Poliakoff's Caught on a Train; Edmund in the BBC Television Shakespeare production of King Lear; the Antipholi in the same series' production of The Comedy of Errors; Private Bamforth in the 1979 BBC television play of The Long and the Short and the Tall; Rochus Misch in The Bunker; In 1993 he appeared in an episode of the BBC Police TV-series Between the Lines; in Berkeley Cole in Out of Africa, the King of the United Kingdom in To Play the King (1996) (a character recognisably modeled on Prince Charles); and a recurring role as Bill Tanner in the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies GoldenEye and The World Is Not Enough. Other films include Enchanted April (1992), Fatherland (1994), The Hanging Gale (1995), Kidnapped (1995), Mrs. Dalloway (1997), The Railway Children (1999), Proof of Life (2000) as Ian Havery and My Week with Marilyn (2011).
  
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  Michael Redgrave
  Sir Michael Scudamore Redgrave, CBE (20 March 1908 – 21 March 1985) was an English stage and film actor, director, manager and author.
  Redgrave was born in Bristol, Gloucestershire, England, the son of the silent film actor Roy Redgrave and the actress Margaret Scudamore. He never knew his father, who left when Michael was only six months old to pursue a career in Australia. His mother subsequently married Captain James Anderson, a tea planter, but Redgrave greatly disliked his stepfather.
  He studied at Clifton College and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was a schoolmaster at Cranleigh School in Surrey before becoming an actor in 1934. There he directed the boys in Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest, but managed to play all the leading roles himself. The 'Redgrave Room' at the school was later named after him. In the new Guildford School of Acting building which opened in January 2010, there is the Sir Michael Redgrave studio.
  Redgrave made his first professional appearance at the Liverpool Playhouse on 30 August 1934 as Roy Darwin in Counsellor-at-Law (by Elmer Rice), then spent two years with its Liverpool Repertory Company where he met his future wife Rachel Kempson. They married on 18 July 1935.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Redgrave
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  Neil Simon
  Neil Simon (born July 4, 1927) is an American playwright and screenwriter. He has written numerous Broadway plays, including Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and The Odd Couple. He won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Lost In Yonkers. He has written the screenplays for several of his plays that were made into movies. He also has written the books for several musicals, including Sweet Charity.
  Neil Simon was born on July 4, 1927 in The Bronx, New York City to Irving Simon, a garment salesman, and his wife Mamie. He was their second son and grew up in Washington Heights, Manhattan during the Great Depression. His father often abandoned the family, causing financial and emotional difficulties. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School and graduated at the age of sixteen.
  He attended New York Universitybriefly from 1944 to 1945, where he was enlisted in the Army Air Force Reserve training program. He was assigned to Lowry Air Force Base during 1945 and attended the University of Denver from 1945 to 1946. He was a sports editor for the military magazine Rev-Meter.
  
  wn.com/Neil_Simon
• Nigel Balchin
  Nigel Balchin (3 December 1908 – 17 May 1970) was an English novelist and screenwriter particularly known for his novels written during and immediately after World War II: Darkness Falls From the Air, The Small Back Room (which popularised the terms "boffin" and "backroom boys")^{[citation needed]} and Mine Own Executioner.
  He was born Nigel Marlin Balchin in Potterne, Wiltshire to William and Ada Balchin. He was educated at Dauntsey's School and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he took a scholarship and became a Prizeman in Natural Sciences. He then worked for the National Institute of Industrial Psychology between 1930 and 1935, becoming a consultant to JS Rowntree & Sons, where he was intimately involved in the design and marketing of Black Magic chocolates. and, he claimed, responsible for the success of the Aero and Kit Kat brands.
  He wrote for Punch magazine, published as Mark Spade, and also wrote novels under his own name. During World War II he was a civil servant at the Ministry of Food, and then a successful scientific adviser, rising to the rank of Brigadier.
  
  wn.com/Nigel_Balchin
• Noel Willman
  Noel Willman (August 4, 1918 in Derry, Ireland - December 14, 1988 in New York) was a Irish actor and theatre director of English descent..
  His films included Androcles and the Lion (1952), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Across the Bridge (1957), Carve Her Name with Pride (1958), The Kiss of the Vampire (1963), Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Reptile (1966) and The Odessa File (1974).
  He was also a theatre director and actor, and won a Tony Award in 1962 for his direction of the original Broadway production of Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons. According to Bolt, he was instrumental in many aspects of the play's development, including the casting of Paul Scofield as Thomas More. He was also nominated in 1966 for the same category for James Goldman's The Lion in Winter, and he directed Katharine Hepburn and Christopher Reeve in A Matter of Gravity in 1976. He frequently collaborated with Bolt, also directing The Tiger and the Horse and Gentle Jack (and appearing in Zhivago, which Bolt scripted). One of his most famous theatrical roles was opposite Alec Guinness in the stage production of Bridget Boland's The Prisoner, later made into a film with Guinness and Jack Hawkins.
  
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  Oliver Stone
  William Oliver Stone (born September 15, 1946) is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Stone became well known in the late 1980s and the early 1990s for directing a series of films about the Vietnam War, in which he had previously participated as an infantry soldier. He won further attention - and controversy - with films JFK (1991) and Natural Born Killers (1994). Stone's movies frequently focus on contemporary political and cultural issues. He has received three Academy Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay for Midnight Express (1978), and Best Director for Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). British newspaper The Guardian described Stone as "one of the few committed men of the left working in mainstream American cinema." Stone's films often combine different cameras and film formats within a single scene (including VHS and 8 mm film) as evidenced in JFK and Natural Born Killers.
  
  wn.com/Oliver_Stone
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  Paddy Chayefsky
  Sidney Aaron "Paddy" Chayefsky (January 29, 1923 – August 1, 1981), was an American playwright, screenwriter and novelist. He is the one of only two people to have won three solo Academy Awards for Best Screenplay (the other being Woody Allen). The other three time winners, Francis Ford Coppola , Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder , have all shared their awards with co-writers.
  He was considered one of the most renowned dramatists of the so-called Golden Age of Television. His intimate, realistic scripts provided a naturalistic style of television drama for the 1950s, and he was regarded as the central figure in the "kitchen sink realism" movement of American television. Martin Gottfried wrote, "He was a successful writer, the most successful graduate of television's slice of life school of naturalism."
  Following his critically acclaimed teleplays, Chayefsky continued to succeed as a playwright and novelist. As a screenwriter, he received three Academy Awards for Marty (1955), The Hospital (1971) and Network (1976). The movie Marty was based on his own television drama about a relationship between two lonely people finding love. Network was his scathing satire of the television industry and The Hospital was considered satiric. Film historian David Thomson termed it "daring, uninhibited, and prophetic. No one else would have dreamed of doing it."
  
  wn.com/Paddy_Chayefsky
• Paul Dehn
  Paul Dehn (5 November 1912 – 30 September 1976) was a British screenwriter.
  Dehn was born in 1912 in Manchester, England. He was educated at Shrewsbury School, and attended Brasenose College, Oxford. While at Oxford, he contributed film reviews to weekly undergraduate papers.
  He began his career in 1936 as a film reviewer for several London newspapers.
  During World War II he was stationed at Camp X in Canada. This was one of several training facilities operated by Special Operations Executive to train spies and special forces teams. He was the Political Warfare officer from 1942–44 and held the rank of Major. Dehn took part in missions in France and Norway.
  He narrated the 1951 film Waters of Time and later wrote plays, operettas, and musicals for the stage. He wrote the lyrics for songs in two films, The Innocents (1961) and Moulin Rouge (1952).
  In 1949 or 1950, Dehn began a professional relationship with composer James Bernard, who later became his life partner. Dehn asked Bernard to collaborate with him on the original screen story for the Boulting Brothers film Seven Days to Noon (1950).
  
  wn.com/Paul_Dehn
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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.
  
  wn.com/Paul_Scofield
• Peter Shaffer
  Sir Peter Levin Shaffer (born 15 May 1926) is an English playwright and screenwriter of numerous award-winning plays, several of which have been filmed.
  Shaffer was born to a Jewish family in Blackpool, the son of Reka (née Fredman) and Jack Shaffer, an estate agent. He is the twin brother of fellow playwright, Anthony Shaffer.
  He was educated at St Paul's School (London) and subsequently he gained a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study history. Shaffer was a Bevin Boy coal miner during WW2 and took a number of jobs including bookstore clerk, and assistant at the New York Public Library, before discovering his dramatic talents.
  Shaffer's first play, The Salt Land (1954), was presented on the BBC. Encouraged by this success, Shaffer continued to write and established his reputation as a playwright in 1958 with the production of Five Finger Exercise which opened in London under the direction of John Gielgud and won the Evening Standard Drama Award. When Five Finger Exercise moved to New York in 1959, it was equally well received and landed Shaffer the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play.
  
  wn.com/Peter_Shaffer
• Pierre Boulle
  Pierre Boulle (20 February 1912 – 30 January 1994) was a French novelist best known for two works, The Bridge over the River Kwai (1952) and Planet of the Apes (1963) that were both made into award-winning films.
  Boulle was an engineer serving as a secret agent with the Free French in Singapore, when he was captured and subjected to two years' forced labour. He used these experiences in The Bridge over the River Kwai, about the notorious Death Railway, which became an international bestseller. The film by David Lean won many Oscars, and Boulle was credited with writing the screenplay, because its two genuine authors had been blacklisted.
  His science-fiction novel Planet of the Apes, where intelligent apes gain mastery over humans, was adapted into a series of five award-winning films that spawned magazine versions and popular themed toys.
  Born Pierre-François-Marie-Louis Boulle in Avignon, France, Boulle was baptised and raised as a Catholic, although later in life he was an agnostic^{[citation needed]}. He studied at the prestigious École supérieure d'électricité (Supélec) where he received an engineer's degree in 1933. From 1936 to 1939, he worked as a technician on British rubber plantations in Malaya. While there he met a Frenchwoman who was separated from her husband. She was to become the love of his life, to whom he would write tender love letters. She later chose to return to her husband, an official in French Indochina. During World War II she and her husband escaped into Malaya, but one of her children died in the process. Boulle would later meet her after the war, and they enjoyed a platonic friendship.
  
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  Quentin Tarantino
  Quentin Jerome Tarantino (pronunciation: /ˌtærənˈtiːnoʊ/; born March 27, 1963) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. He has received many industry awards, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a BAFTA and the Palme d'Or and had been nominated for an Emmy and Grammy.
  Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Tarantino was an avid film fan. His career began in the late 1980's, when he wrote and directed My Best Friend's Birthday. Its screenplay would form the basis for True Romance. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence. His films include Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill (2003, 2004), Death Proof (2007), and Inglourious Basterds (2009).
  His movies are generally characterized by stylistic influences from grindhouse, kung fu, and spaghetti western films. Tarantino also frequently collaborates with his friend and fellow filmmaker Robert Rodriguez.
  
  wn.com/Quentin_Tarantino
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  Ralph Richardson
  Sir Ralph David Richardson (19 December 1902 – 10 October 1983) was an English actor, one of a group of theatrical knights of the mid-20th century who, though more closely associated with the stage, also appeared in several classic films.
  Richardson first became known for his work on stage in the 1930s. In the 1940s, together with Laurence Olivier, he ran the Old Vic Company. He continued on stage and in films into the early 1980s and was especially praised for his comedic roles. In his later years he was celebrated for his theatre work with his old friend John Gielgud. Among his most famous roles were Peer Gynt, Falstaff, John Gabriel Borkman and Hirst in Pinter's No Man's Land.
  Richardson was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England, the third son and youngest child of Arthur Richardson, a master at the Ladies' College, and his wife Lydia (née Russell). When he was a baby, his mother left his father and took him with her to Gloucester, where he was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith of his mother (his father and brothers were Quakers). His father supported them with a small allowance. Lydia Richardson wished Ralph to become a priest. He was an altar boy in Brighton, and was sent to the Xavierian College, but he ran away from it.
  
  wn.com/Ralph_Richardson
• Robert Benton
  Robert Douglas Benton (born September 29, 1932) is an American screenwriter and film director.
  Benton was born in Waxahachie, Texas, the son of Dorothy (née Spaulding) and Ellery Douglass Benton, a telephone company employee. He attended the University of Texas and Columbia University. Benton has won numerous awards for both writing and directing in film. In 1959, he co-wrote the book "The IN and OUT Book" with Harvey Schmidt, published by The Viking Press. He was the art director at Esquire magazine in the early 1960s. In 2006 he appeared in the documentary Wanderlust.
  Benton's family originally came from Northumberland in the United Kingdom, where the Bentons held a seat long before the Norman Conquest of 1066.^{[citation needed]} Many family members settled in America, including Abigail and Isabel Benton, who settled in Virginia in 1642; George Benton, who settled in Barbados in 1669; and Robert Benton, who settled in Virginia in 1635. Benton was once a noble family, but they were deprived of their title by the Normans after the Conquest. Robert Benton still has relatives living in England who trace their origins to the seventeenth century.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Benton
• Robert Bolt
  Robert Oxton Bolt, CBE (15 August 1924 – 21 February 1995) was an English playwright and a two-time Oscar winning screenwriter.
  He was born in Sale, Cheshire. At Manchester Grammar School his affinity for Sir Thomas More first developed. He attended the University of Manchester, and, after war service, the University of Exeter. For many years he taught English and history at Millfield School and only became a full time writer at the age of 33 when his play The Flowering Cherry was staged in London in 1958, with Celia Johnson and Ralph Richardson.
  Although he was best known for his original play A Man for All Seasons - a depiction of Sir Thomas More's clash with King Henry VIII over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon - which won awards on the stage and in its film version, most of his writing was screenplays for films or television.
  Bolt was known for dramatic works that placed their protagonists in tension with the prevailing society. He won great renown for A Man for All Seasons, his first iteration of this theme, but he developed it in his existential script for Lawrence of Arabia (1962). In Lawrence, he succeeded where several before him had failed, at turning T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom into a cogent screenplay by turning the entire book on its head and making it a search for the identity of its author. Lawrence, by Bolt, is presented as a misfit both in English and Arab society.
  
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  Robert Towne
  Robert Towne (born Robert Bertram Schwartz; November 23, 1934) is an American screenwriter and director. His most notable work may be his Academy Award-winning original screenplay for Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974).
  Towne is the author of many notable film scripts, including Chinatown (1974), for which he received an Academy Award, plus its sequel, The Two Jakes (1990), and Oscar-nominated screenplays The Last Detail and Shampoo as well as the first two Mission Impossible films. Towne has also a "stellar reputation" in the motion-picture industry as an uncredited script doctor, who has worked in such a capacity for The Godfather, Bonnie and Clyde, The Parallax View, The Rock and dozens of other Hollywood films.
  After working for years on a script of Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) he grew dissatisfied with the production and credited his dog, P.H. Vazak, with the script. Vazak became the first dog nominated for an Oscar for screenwriting, but he did not fetch the award. Towne co-wrote the film 8 Million Ways to Die using the alias David Lee Henry.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Towne
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  Ron Kovic
  Ronald Lawrence Kovic (born July 4, 1946) is an anti-war activist, veteran and writer who was paralyzed in the Vietnam War. He is best known as the author of the memoir Born on the Fourth of July, which was made into an Academy Award–winning movie directed by Oliver Stone, with Tom Cruise playing Kovic. Kovic received the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay on January 20, 1990, exactly 22 years to the day that he was wounded in Vietnam. Ron Kovic was also nominated for an Academy Award for best screen play.Bruce Springsteen wrote the song "Shut Out The Light" after reading Kovic's memoir and then meeting him. Tom Paxton, the folk singer/political activist, wrote the song "Born on the Fourth of July", which is on his "New Songs from the Briarpatch" album. Academy Award winning actress Jane Fonda has stated that Ron Kovic's story was the inspiration for her film Coming Home.
  Kovic was born in Ladysmith, Wisconsin, and was raised in Massapequa, New York, in a Roman Catholic household. Inspired by President John F. Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country" speech, he joined the United States Marine Corps after high school in September 1964 and was assigned to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina, for twelve weeks of intensive recruit training. He was awarded the rank of Private First Class out of boot camp and became the push-up champion of his battalion. Kovic was then sent to the Infantry Training Regiment at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for advanced combat training. He returned home to Massapequa in December 1964, just in time for Christmas. After several weeks leave Kovic was assigned to the Marine Corps Barracks at Norfolk, Virginia, where he attended radio school and learned communication skills, including the International Morse Code. He was next assigned to the Second Field Artillery Battalion, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
  
  wn.com/Ron_Kovic
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  Ronald Reagan
  Ronald Wilson Reagan ( /ˈrɒnəld ˈwɪlsən ˈreɪɡən/; February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was the 40th President of the United States, serving from 1981 to 1989. Prior to that, he was the 33rd Governor of California from 1967 to 1975 and a radio, film and television actor.
  Born in Tampico, Illinois and raised in Dixon, Reagan was educated at Eureka College, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and sociology. After his graduation, Reagan moved first to Iowa to work as a radio broadcaster and then in to Los Angeles in 1937 where he began a career as an actor, first in films and later television. Some of his most notable films include Knute Rockne, All American, Kings Row, and Bedtime for Bonzo. Reagan served as president of the Screen Actors Guild, and later as a spokesman for General Electric (GE); his start in politics occurred during his work for GE. Originally a member of the Democratic Party, his positions began shifting rightward in the late 1950s, and he switched to the Republican Party in 1962. After delivering a rousing speech in support of Barry Goldwater's presidential candidacy in 1964, he was persuaded to seek the California governorship, winning two years later and again in 1970. He was defeated in his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 as well as 1976, but won both the nomination and general election in 1980, defeating incumbent Jimmy Carter.
  
  wn.com/Ronald_Reagan
• Roy Kinnear
  Roy Mitchell Kinnear (8 January 1934 – 20 September 1988) was a British character actor. He was familiar to UK audiences for his appearances in many British television comedy shows, and is also remembered for his film appearances as Veruca Salt's father, Mr. Salt, in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) and as Planchet to Michael York's D'Artagnan in The Return of the Musketeers (1989). It was during the filming of the latter that Kinnear died as a result of a riding accident.
  Kinnear was born in Wigan, Lancashire, England, the son of Annie Smith (née Durie) and Roy Muir Kinnear. His father was a dual international in rugby union and league - having played for Scotland and Great Britain national rugby league team international, making one Lions appearance and three for Other Nations, and scoring 81 tries in 184 games for Wigan; he collapsed and died while playing rugby union with the RAF in 1942, at age 38. Scotland Rugby League have named their Student Player of the Year Award after him.
  
  wn.com/Roy_Kinnear
• Sam Spiegel
  Sam Spiegel (November 11, 1901 – December 31, 1985) was an Austrian-born American independent film producer.
  Spiegel was born in Jarosław, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now in Poland) as Samuel P. Spiegel to a German-Jewish father and Polish mother^{[citation needed]} and educated at the University of Vienna. His brother was Shalom Spiegel, a professor of medieval Hebrew poetry. Spiegel worked briefly in Hollywood in 1927 following a stint serving with Hashomer Hatzair in Palestine. He then went to Berlin to produce German and French adaptations of Universal films until 1933 when he fled Germany. As an independent producer, Spiegel was behind a number of European films. In 1938, he immigrated to Mexico and subsequently the United States. Between 1935 and 1954, Spiegel billed himself as S.P. Eagle. After that he used his real name. "...Spiegel a decidedly flawed protagonist, as well as the wit, sophistication, and Old World charm that make him a titanic figure the likes of which the movie industry will not see again."
  
  wn.com/Sam_Spiegel
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  Sarah Miles
  Sarah Miles (born 31 December 1941) is an English theatre and film actress.
  Sarah Miles was born in the small town of Ingatestone, Essex, in South East England. She first attended Roedean, but at the age of 15 she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). Shortly after finishing at RADA, Miles debuted as Shirley Taylor in Term of Trial (1962), co-starring with Laurence Olivier. Soon afterwards, Miles became a well-reputed actress of the British New Wave with her roles in Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963) and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966).
  After acting in a variety of plays from 1966 to 1969, Miles was cast as Rosy in the title role of David Lean's 1970 film, Ryan's Daughter. Her performance gained a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
  Since 1973, Miles has gone through periods of semi-retirement.^{[citation needed]} She most recently appeared in Well at the Trafalgar Studios and the Apollo Theatre opposite Natalie Casey.^{[citation needed]}
  Miles is a practitioner of urine therapy. Citing Gandhi, who was an adherent of it, she has followed the tradition for thirty years, saying that it has kept her healthy and vigorous.
  
  wn.com/Sarah_Miles
• Shelagh Delaney
  Shelagh Delaney FRSL (pronounced /ˈʃiːlə dɛˈleɪniː/; 25 November 1938 – 20 November 2011) was an English dramatist and screenwriter, best known for her debut work, A Taste of Honey (1958).
  Born in Broughton, Salford, Lancashire, the daughter of a bus inspector, Of Irish descent, she failed the eleven plus exam four times, but transferred to a grammar school at the age of fifteen from a secondary modern school, gaining five O-levels.
  Thinking she could do better than Terence Rattigan's Variations on a Theme, a play she had seen at Manchester's Opera House during its pre–West End tour, Delaney wrote her first play, in ten days, partly because she felt the work showed "insensitivity in the way Rattigan portrayed homosexuals". Her play was accepted by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop. "Quite apart from its meaty content, we believe we have found a real dramatist", Gerry Raffles of Theatre Workshop said at the time.
  A Taste of Honey, first performed on 27 May 1958, is set in her native Salford."I had strong ideas about what I wanted to see in the theatre. We used to object to plays where the factory workers came cap in hand and call the boss 'sir'. Usually North Country people are shown as gormless, whereas in actual fact, they are very alive and cynical."
  
  wn.com/Shelagh_Delaney
• 
  Siân Phillips
  Siân Phillips, CBE, ( /ˈʃɑːn/; born Jane Elizabeth Ailwên Phillips; 14 May 1933) is a Welsh actress.
  Phillips was born in Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen, Neath Port Talbot, Wales, the daughter of Sally (née Thomas), a teacher, and David Phillips, a steelworker-turned-policeman. She is a Welsh-speaker: in the first volume of her autobiography (Private Faces) she notes that she spoke only Welsh for much of her childhood, learning English by listening to the radio.
  She attended Pontardawe Grammar School. Later she took up English and Philosophy at the University College of Wales in Cardiff. At RADA she won the Bancroft Gold Medal. She was originally known as and called Jane. But her Welsh teacher at school, Eric Davies, called her Siân (pronounced Shahn), the Welsh form of Jane.
  Phillips graduated from the University of Wales in 1955. She entered RADA, with a scholarship, in September 1955, the same year as Dame Diana Rigg and Glenda Jackson. She went on to win the prestigious Bancroft Gold Medal for Hedda Gabler and was offered a Hollywood contract when she left. She was offered three film contracts, entailing her to work for an extended period of time in the United States, while she was still at RADA. But she declined, preferring to work on stage instead.
  
  wn.com/Siân_Phillips
• State of Revolution
  State of Revolution is a play by Robert Bolt, written in 1977. It deals with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Civil War, the rise to power of Vladimir Lenin, and the struggles of his chief lieutenants - namely Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky - to gain power under Lenin in the chaos of the Revolution.
  The play was first staged in the Repertory Theatre in Birmingham, on May 3rd, 1977 and later moved to the Lyttelton Theatre in London.
  Despite the painstaking work put into the show by Bolt (he spent almost three years researching the Revolution and then editing the script), State of Revolution was at best a modest success. He was particularly criticized for having a play which, many felt, lacked Bolt's usual humor and a clear point (see Times review below). Others criticized the play for depicting the Russian characters in too much of an Anglicized manner. The play received its share of positive reviews as well, but was ultimately not a box-office success. It would prove to be Bolt's last stage production, though he would write several more film scripts.
  
  wn.com/State_of_Revolution
• Stephen Gaghan
  Stephen Gaghan (born May 6, 1965) is an American screenwriter and director. He is noted for writing the screenplay for Steven Soderbergh's film Traffic, based on a Channel 4 series, for which he won the Academy Award, as well as Syriana which he wrote and directed.
  Born in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of the former Elizabeth Jane Whorton and her first husband, Stephen Gaghan (d. 1980), and a stepson of Tom Haag, Gaghan attended Kentucky Country Day School, a college preparatory school in Louisville. He was an All-State soccer player where he held the assist record at the school for nearly three decades. He is a grandson of Jerry Gaghan, a newspaper columnist and drama critic for Variety and the Philadelphia Daily News, whose career inspired Gaghan's own professional pursuits. As he wrote in a 2001 article in Newsweek, "I also wanted to be a writer, like my grandfather, who carried a card in his wallet that read, "If you find me, call my son [my father] at this number..."
  
  wn.com/Stephen_Gaghan
• Steven Zaillian
  Steven Ernest Bernard Zaillian (born January 30, 1953) is an American screenwriter, director, editor, producer, and founder of Film Rites, a film production company. He won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Schindler's List and he has been nominated for Awakenings, Gangs of New York and Moneyball. The Times called him "the most artful and subtle screenwriter Hollywood has had since Robert Towne."^{[citation needed]}
  Zaillian was born in Fresno, California, the son of Jim Zaillian, a radio news reporter. He attended Sonoma State University, graduated from San Francisco State University and lives in Los Angeles. He is of Armenian descent.
  
  wn.com/Steven_Zaillian
• Stirling Silliphant
  Stirling Dale Silliphant (16 January 1918 – 26 April 1996) was an American screenwriter and producer. He was born in Detroit, Michigan, moved to Glendale, California as a child, graduated from Hoover High School, and was educated at the University of Southern California. He is probably best known for his screenplay for In the Heat of the Night and co-creating the television series Route 66. Other features as screenwriter include the Irwin Allen productions The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure, adapting both films from previously published novels. In the case of The Towering Inferno, Silliphant was tasked with blending two entirely unrelated novels into a single screenplay.
  Silliphant is also remembered for his now-infamous bet with Hal Warren on whether Warren could make a successful horror film on a limited budget, which was the inspiration for Manos: The Hands of Fate, and he is portrayed in the 2011 documentary / comedy feature film ""SUENO" The Dream of Hal Warren" from director Tony Trombo.
  
  wn.com/Stirling_Silliphant
• Terence Rigby
  Terence Christopher Rigby (2 January 1937 - 10 August 2008) was an English RADA trained actor with a number of film and television credits to his name. In the 1970s he was well-known as police dog-handler PC Snow in the long-running series Softly, Softly: Taskforce
  Film roles included: Get Carter (1971), Watership Down (1978), Testimony (1988), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), Elizabeth (1998), Mona Lisa Smile (2003) and Colour Me Kubrick (2006).
  TV credits included: Dixon of Dock Green, Softly, Softly: Taskforce; Z-Cars, The First Lady, Callan, The Saint, Public Eye, Edward & Mrs. Simpson, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Airline, Rumpole of the Bailey, Boon, Lovejoy, Our Friends in the North, Holby City, Midsomer Murders, Crossroads, Kings Oak (playing the part of motel boss, Tommy Lancaster), The Beiderbecke Affair and The Beiderbecke Connection.
  He was also Dr Watson to Tom Baker's Sherlock Holmes. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982) was known amongst the crew as the 'Tom and Terry show'.
  Among his stage credits was the première of No Man's Land by Harold Pinter, at the Royal National Theatre in 1975, in which he played a supporting role to the leads played by John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson.
  
  wn.com/Terence_Rigby
• 
  Thomas Cromwell
  Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex (c. 1485 – 28 July 1540) was an English statesman who served as chief minister of King Henry VIII of England from 1532 to 1540.
  Cromwell was one of the strongest advocates of the English Reformation, the English church's break with the papacy in Rome. Cromwell helped engineer an annulment of the King's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, so that Henry could marry his mistress Anne Boleyn. Supremacy over the Church of England was officially declared by Parliament in 1534, and Cromwell supervised the Church from the unique posts of vicegerent for spirituals and vicar general.
  Cromwell's rise to power made him many enemies, especially among the conservative faction at court. He fell from Henry's favour after arranging the King's marriage to a German princess, Anne of Cleves, which turned out to be a disaster. He was subjected to a bill of attainder and executed for treason and heresy on Tower Hill on 28 July 1540. The King later expressed regret at having lost his great minister.
  
  wn.com/Thomas_Cromwell
• Thomas Gomez
  Thomas Gomez (July 10, 1905 – June 18, 1971) was an American actor.
  Born Sabino Tomas Gomez in New York City, Gomez began his acting career in theater during the 1920s and was a student of the actor Walter Hampden. He made his first film Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror in 1942 and by the end of his career had appeared in sixty films.
  He received a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the film Ride the Pink Horse (1947). Directed by and starring Robert Montgomery, it was later used as the basis for an episode of the same name for the television series Robert Montgomery Presents in which Gomez reprised his role.
  His other film roles include Who Done It? (1942), Key Largo (1948), Force of Evil (1948), The Conqueror (1956) and his final film Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970). A frequent performer on television, Gomez also appeared in guest roles in such series as The Twilight Zone, Route 66, Dr. Kildare, Mr. Ed, Burke's Law, The Virginian, It Takes a Thief, Bewitched, The Rifleman, and Gunsmoke.
  
  wn.com/Thomas_Gomez
• 
  Timothy West
  Timothy Lancaster West,CBE (born 20 October 1934 in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire) is an English film, stage and television actor.
  West's craggy looks ensured a career as a character actor rather than a leading man. He began his career as an Assistant Stage Manager at the Wimbledon Theatre in 1956, and followed this with several seasons of repertory theatre. He acted at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1959 and was with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1965 at Stratford where he appeared in The Comedy of Errors, Timon of Athens, The Jew of Malta, Love's Labour's Lost, and Peter Hall's outstanding production of The Government Inspector at the Aldwych Theatre with Paul Scofield, Eric Porter, Donald Burton, Stanley Lebor, Bruce Condell, John Corvin and Tim Wylton among others. He was Artistic Director of the Forum Theatre, Billingham from 1980–81 and was appointed Director-in-Residence at the University of Western Australia in 1982.
  Having spent years as a familiar face who never quite became a household name, his big chance came with the major television series, Edward the Seventh (1975), in which he played the title role and his real-life sons, Samuel and Joseph, played the sons of King Edward VII as children. Other major roles have included parts in the films, Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), The Day of the Jackal (1973), The Thirty Nine Steps (1978), Masada (1981) and Cry Freedom (1987).
  
  wn.com/Timothy_West
• 
  Tom Stoppard
  Sir Tom Stoppard, OM, CBE, FRSL (born Tomáš Straüssler; 3 July 1937) is a British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil and Shakespeare in Love and has won one Academy Award and four Tony Awards. Themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom pervade his work along with exploration of linguistics and philosophy. Stoppard has been a key playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation.
  In 1939, Stoppard left Czechoslovakia as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright. He has been married twice, to Josie Ingle (1965–1972) and Miriam Stoppard (1972–1992), and has two sons from each marriage, one of whom is actor Ed Stoppard.
  
  wn.com/Tom_Stoppard
• Tony Richardson
  Cecil Antonio "Tony" Richardson (5 June 1928 – 14 November 1991) was an English theatre and film director and producer.
  Richardson was born in Shipley, Yorkshire in 1928, the son of Elsie Evans (Campion) and Clarence Albert Richardson, a chemist. He was Head Boy at Ashville College, Harrogate and attended Wadham College, Oxford, where his contemporaries included Kenneth Tynan, Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert. He had the unprecedented distinction of being elected President of both the Oxford University Dramatic Society and the Experimental Theatre Club (the ETC), in addition to being theatre critic for the university magazine Isis.
  In 1955, in his directing début, Richardson produced Jean Giraudoux's The Apollo of Bellac for Television with Denholm Elliott and Natasha Parry in the main roles.
  Representative of the British "New Wave" of directors, he developed the ideas that led to the formation of the English Stage Company, along with his close friend George Goetschius and George Devine. He directed John Osborne's seminal play Look Back in Anger at the Court, writing both the theatre and playwright into British theatrical history. In the same period he directed Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon. Then in 1957 he directed Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice in Osborne's The Entertainer, again at the Royal Court.
  
  wn.com/Tony_Richardson
• Val Guest
  Val Guest (11 December 1911 – 10 May 2006) was a British film director, best known for his science-fiction films for Hammer Film Productions in the 1950s, but who also enjoyed a long, varied and active career in the film industry from the early 1930s up until the early 1980s.
  He was born Valmond Maurice Grossmann in London, England, and educated at Seaford College. Guest's initial career was as an actor, appearing in various productions in London theatres. He also appeared in a few early sound film roles, before he gave up an acting career and moved into writing. For a time in the early 1930s he was the London correspondent for the Hollywood Reporter trade paper, before he began working on film screenplays for Gainsborough Pictures, his first being No Monkey Business in 1935.
  He wrote screenplays for the rest of the decade, including working on scripts for Will Hay, as well as some film scores, before in the early 1940s becoming a director, with his debut feature in this role being Miss London Ltd. in 1943. He went on to direct, produce and script a huge number of films over the following forty years, with perhaps his best known work being on the first two Hammer Films Quatermass science-fiction adaptations in the 1950s: The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass 2 (1957). He also directed the cult science-fiction films The Abominable Snowman (1957) and The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) (which won him a BAFTA Award with Wolf Mankowitz for Best Screenplay). He also directed and wrote the screenplay for When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970).
  
  wn.com/Val_Guest
• 
  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.
  
  wn.com/Vanessa_Redgrave
• Waldo Salt
  Waldo Miller Salt (October 18, 1914 – March 7, 1987) was an American screenwriter who was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses during the era of McCarthyism.
  Salt was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Winifred (née Porter) and William Haslem Salt, an artist and business executive. He graduated from Stanford University at age eighteen.^{[citation needed]} The first of his nineteen films he wrote or in which he participated in the writing, was released in 1937 with the title The Bride Wore Red. He joined the American Communist Party in 1938, and was a civilian consultant to the U.S. Office of War Information during World War II.^{[citation needed]}
  Salt's career in Hollywood was interrupted when he was blacklisted after refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951. Like many other blacklisted writers, while he was unable to work in Hollywood Salt wrote pseudonymously for the British television series The Adventures of Robin Hood. After the collapse of the blacklist, Salt won Academy Awards for Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home, and a nomination for his work on Serpico.
  
  wn.com/Waldo_Salt
• 
  Wendy Hiller
  Dame Wendy Margaret Hiller DBE (15 August 1912 – 14 May 2003) was an Academy Award-winning English film and stage actress, who enjoyed a varied acting career that spanned nearly sixty years. The writer Joel Hirschorn, in his 1984 compilation Rating the Movie Stars, described her as "a no-nonsense actress who literally took command of the screen whenever she appeared on film". Despite many notable film performances, she chose to remain primarily a stage actress.
  Born in Bramhall, Stockport, in Cheshire, the daughter of Frank Watkin Hiller, a Manchester cotton manufacturer, and Marie Stone, Hiller began her professional career as an actress in repertory at Manchester in the early 1930s. She first found success as slum dweller Sally Hardcastle in the stage version of Love on the Dole in 1934. The play was an enormous success and toured the regional stages of England. This play saw her West End debut in 1935 at the Garrick Theatre. She married the play's author Ronald Gow, fifteen years her senior, in 1937 (the same year as she made her film debut in Lancashire Luck, scripted by Gow).
  
  wn.com/Wendy_Hiller
• Wikipedia Persondata
  wn.com/Wikipedia_Persondata
• 
  William Goldman
  William Goldman (born August 12, 1931) is an American novelist, playwright, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.
  Goldman grew up in a Jewish family in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois, the son of Marion (née Weil) and Maurice Clarence Goldman, who worked in business. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Oberlin College in 1952 and a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University in 1956. Goldman lives in a penthouse apartment in New York City. His brother, James Goldman, who died in 1998, was a playwright and screenwriter.
  According to his memoir, Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983), Goldman began writing when he took a creative-writing course in college. His grades in the class were "horrible". An editor of Oberlin's literary magazine, he would submit short stories to the magazine anonymously; he recalls that the other editors, upon reading his submissions, remarked "We can't possibly publish this shit." He did not originally intend to become a screenwriter. His main interests were poetry, short stories, and novels. In 1956 he completed an MA thesis at Columbia University on the comedy of manners in America.
  
  wn.com/William_Goldman
• William Peter Blatty
  William Peter Blatty (born January 7, 1928) is an American writer and filmmaker. The novel The Exorcist, written in 1971, is his magnum opus; he also penned the subsequent screenplay version of the film, for which he won an Academy Award.
  His most recent works include the novels Elsewhere (2009), Dimiter (2010) and Crazy (2010). He is also featured in the upcoming 2012 Smoke And Mirrors anthology, featuring the teleplay "Hell Hospital" and the treatment "Faith".
  
  wn.com/William_Peter_Blatty
• Wolf Mankowitz
  Cyril Wolf Mankowitz (7 November 1924 – 20 May 1998) was an English writer, playwright and screenwriter of Russian Jewish descent.
  Mankowitz was born in Fashion Street in Spitalfields in the East End of London, the heart of London's Jewish community. He was educated at Downing College, Cambridge.
  His background provided Mankowitz with the material for his most successful book A Kid for Two Farthings (1953). This was adapted as a film by the director Carol Reed in 1955. Mankowitz himself wrote the screenplay. In 1958 he wrote the book for the West End musical Expresso Bongo which was made into a film starring Cliff Richard and Laurence Harvey the following year. Harvey arranged a couple of lunches with the unsuspecting Mankowitz to study the writer at close hand, so the character Johnny Jackson in the film version of Expresso Bongo sounds something like Mankowitz.
  Mankowitz's 1960 film, The Millionairess, starring Sophia Loren and Peter Sellers, was nominated for a BAFTA Award. Another of his screenplays at this time was a collaboration with director Val Guest on the science fiction film The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961).
  
  wn.com/Wolf_Mankowitz
• 
  Woody Allen
  Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg, December 1, 1935) is an award-winning American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, and playwright, whose career spans over half a century.
  He began as a comedy writer in the 1950s, penning jokes and scripts for television and also publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, Allen started performing as a stand-up comic, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. As a comic, he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he insists is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Allen in fourth place on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics, while a UK survey ranked Allen as the third greatest comedian.
  By the mid-1960s Allen was writing and directing films, first specializing in slapstick comedies before moving into more dramatic material influenced by European art films during the 1970s. He is often identified as part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmakers of the mid-1960s to late '70s. Allen often stars in his own films, typically in the persona he developed as a standup. The best-known of his over 40 films include the Academy Award-winners Annie Hall (1977), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Midnight in Paris (2011); and the Golden Globe-winning The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Critic Roger Ebert has described Allen as "a treasure of the cinema."
  
  wn.com/Woody_Allen

The Films of Robert Bolt (1972)

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• Documentary
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