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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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  Harvard University
  Harvard University is an American private Ivy League research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation (officially The President and Fellows of Harvard College) chartered in the country. Harvard's history, influence, and wealth have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
  Harvard was named after its first benefactor, John Harvard. Although never formally affiliated with a church, the college primarily trained Congregationalist and Unitarian clergy. Harvard's curriculum and students became secular throughout the 18th century and by the 19th century had emerged as the central cultural establishment among Boston elites. Following the American Civil War, President Charles W. Eliot's forty year tenure (1869–1909) transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a centralized research university, and Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.James Bryant Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II and began to reform the curriculum and liberalize admissions after the war. The undergraduate college became coeducational after its 1977 merger with Radcliffe College. Drew Gilpin Faust was elected the 28th president in 2007 and is the first woman to lead the university. Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world, standing at $32 billion as of September 2011.
  
  wn.com/Harvard_University
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  New York City
  New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. The city is referred to as New York City or The City of New York to distinguish it from the State of New York, of which it is a part. As a global power city, New York exerts a significant impact upon commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and entertainment. The home of the United Nations Headquarters, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has been described as the cultural capital of the world.
  Located on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, each of which comprises a state county. The five boroughs—The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island—were consolidated into a single city in 1898. With a Census-estimated 2011 population of 8,244,910 distributed over a land area of just 305 square miles (790 km²), New York is the most densely populated major city in the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. The New York City Metropolitan Area's population is the United States' largest, with 18.9 million people distributed over 6,720 square miles (17,400 km²), and is also part of the most populous combined statistical area in the United States, containing 22.1 million people as of the 2010 Census.
  
  wn.com/New_York_City

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  Alfred Hitchcock
  Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood. On 19 April 1955, he became an American citizen while remaining a British subject.
  Over a career spanning more than half a century, Hitchcock fashioned for himself a distinctive and recognisable directorial style. He pioneered the use of a camera made to move in a way that mimics a person's gaze, forcing viewers to engage in a form of voyeurism. He framed shots to maximise anxiety, fear, or empathy, and used innovative film editing. His stories frequently feature fugitives on the run from the law alongside "icy blonde" female characters. Many of Hitchcock's films have twist endings and thrilling plots featuring depictions of violence, murder, and crime, although many of the mysteries function as decoys or "MacGuffins" meant only to serve thematic elements in the film and the extremely complex psychological examinations of the characters. Hitchcock's films also borrow many themes from psychoanalysis and feature strong sexual undertones. Through his cameo appearances in his own films, interviews, film trailers, and the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he became a cultural icon. Hitchocks reputation as a filmmaker is offset by claims that he engaged in obsessive and controlling behaviour towards many of his leading ladies, and that in some cases this extended to physical abuse and sexual harrassment.
  
  wn.com/Alfred_Hitchcock
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  Angela Lansbury
  Angela Brigid Lansbury, CBE (born 16 October 1925) is an English-born US-naturalized actress and singer in theatre, television, and motion pictures. Her career has spanned eight decades and earned an unsurpassed number of performance Tony Awards (tied with Julie Harris), with five wins. Her first film appearance was in the film Gaslight (1944) as a conniving maid, for which she received an Academy Award nomination. Among her other films are The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Anastasia (1997).
  She expanded her repertoire to Broadway musicals and television in the 1950s and was particularly successful in Broadway productions of Gypsy, Mame and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Lansbury is perhaps best known to modern audiences for her twelve-year run starring as writer and sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the American television series Murder, She Wrote (1984–1996). Her recent roles include Lady Adelaide Stitch in the film Nanny McPhee (2005), Leona Mullen in the 2007 Broadway play Deuce, Madame Arcati in the 2009 Broadway revival of the play Blithe Spirit and Madame Armfeldt in the 2010 Broadway revival of the musical A Little Night Music.
  
  wn.com/Angela_Lansbury
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  Anjelica Huston
  Anjelica Huston /ˈhjuːstən/ (born July 8, 1951) is an American actress. Huston became the third generation of her family to win an Academy Award, for her performance in 1985's Prizzi's Honor, joining her father, director John Huston, and grandfather, actor Walter Huston. She later was nominated in 1989 and 1990 for her acting in Enemies, a Love Story and The Grifters respectively. Among her roles, she starred as Morticia Addams in The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993), receiving Golden Globe nominations for both. Huston also played the Grand High Witch in the children's movie Witches, TheThe Witches in 1990 and is, more recently, known for her frequent collaborations with director Wes Anderson. She currently stars on the NBC musical drama, Smash.
  Anjelica Huston was born in Santa Monica, California, and is the daughter of director and actor John Huston and Italian–American prima ballerina Enrica 'Ricki' (née Soma), from New York. Huston spent most of her childhood in Ireland and England. She grew up in Saint Clerans House near Craughwell, County Galway. In 1969, she began taking a few small roles in her father's movies. In that same year, her mother, who was 39 years old, died in a car accident, and Huston relocated to the US, where she modeled for several years. While she modeled, she worked with photographers such as Richard Avedon and Bob Richardson.
  
  wn.com/Anjelica_Huston
• Barbara Babcock
  Barbara Babcock (born February 27, 1937) is an American character actress. She is perhaps best known for her roles as Grace Gardner on Hill Street Blues for which she won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress—Drama Series in 1981 and her role as Dorothy Jennings on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1993.
  Although she was born in the United States, she spent a large part of her childhood in Tokyo, Japan, because her father Conrad Stanton Babcock, Jr. was a general in the United States Army. She learned to speak Japanese before English. She attended Miss Porter's School and later Wellesley College, where she was a classmate of Ali McGraw.
  Babcock has appeared in several episodes of television series between 1956 and 1967. She appeared in Star Trek in 1966. In 1968 she made her debut on the big screen in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer western movie Day of the Evil Gun. After followed by roles in films Heaven with a Gun co-starring Glenn Ford, Bang the Drum Slowly, Chosen Survivors, The Black Marble, Back Roads and The Lords of Discipline. From 1978 to 1981 she played the role as Liz Craig on the CBS soap opera Dallas.
  
  wn.com/Barbara_Babcock
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  Barbara Bel Geddes
  Barbara Bel Geddes (October 31, 1922 - August 8, 2005) was an American actress, artist and children's author. She is best known for her role in the television drama series Dallas as matriarch Eleanor "Miss Ellie" Ewing. Bel Geddes also starred in the original Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the role of Maggie. Her notable films included Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) and I Remember Mama (1948). She was the recipient of several acting awards and nominations throughout her career.
  Bel Geddes was born in New York City, the daughter of Helen Belle (née Schneider) and stage and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes. She married theatrical manager Carl Sawyer (aka Carl Schreuer) in 1944; they had one daughter, Susan. They divorced in 1951. Later that year, she married stage director Windsor Lewis with whom she had a daughter, Betsy. When Lewis became ill in 1967, Bel Geddes suspended her career to care for him until his death in 1972.
  Bel Geddes came to prominence in the 1946 Broadway production of Deep Are The Roots. The performance garnered her the Clarence Derwent Award, and the Donaldson Award (forerunner of the Tony Awards) presented to her by Laurette Taylor, for "Outstanding Achievement in The Theatre". From 1951 to 1953, Bel Geddes played 924 performances of the Otto Preminger hit comedy The Moon Is Blue. In 1956, she created the role of Maggie "The Cat" in Elia Kazan's original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and in 1961 created the title role in the Jean Kerr comedy Mary, Mary which became Broadway's longest-running show with over 1,500 performances. Both roles earned her Tony Award nominations. Other highlights include John Steinbeck's Burning Bright, Edward Albee's Everything in the Garden and Silent Night, Lonely Night with Henry Fonda.
  
  wn.com/Barbara_Bel_Geddes
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  Bernadette Peters
  Bernadette Peters (born Bernadette Lazzara; February 28, 1948) is an American actress, singer and children's book author from Ozone Park, Queens, New York. Over the course of a career that has spanned five decades, she has starred in musical theatre, films and television, as well as performing in solo concerts and recordings. She is one of the most critically acclaimed Broadway performers, having received nominations for seven Tony Awards, winning two, and nine Drama Desk Awards, winning three. Four of the Broadway cast albums on which she has starred have won Grammy Awards.
  Regarded by many as the foremost interpreter of the works of Stephen Sondheim, Peters is particularly noted for her roles on the Broadway stage, including Mack and Mabel, Sunday in the Park with George, Song and Dance, Into the Woods and Annie Get Your Gun.
  Peters first performed on the stage as a child and then a teenage actor in the 1960s, and in film and television in the 1970s. She was praised for this early work and for appearances on The Muppet Show, The Carol Burnett Show and in other television work, and for her roles in films like Silent Movie, The Jerk, Pennies from Heaven and Annie. In the 1980s, she returned to the theatre, where she became one of the best-known Broadway stars over the next three decades. She also has recorded six solo albums and several singles, as well as many cast albums, and performs regularly in her own solo concert act. Peters also continues to act in films and on television, where she has been nominated for three Emmy Awards and three Golden Globe Awards, winning once.
  
  wn.com/Bernadette_Peters
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  Bette Midler
  Bette Midler (born December 1, 1945) is an American singer, actress, and comedian, also known by her informal stage name, The Divine Miss M. She became famous as a cabaret and concert headliner, and went on to star in successful and acclaimed films such as The Rose, Ruthless People, Beaches, and For The Boys. During her more than forty-year career, Midler has been nominated for two Academy Awards, and won three Grammy Awards, four Golden Globes, three Emmy Awards, and a special Tony Award. She has sold over 30 million albums worldwide. Her voice type is categorized as deep mezzo soprano.
  Midler was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her parents moved from Paterson, New Jersey to Honolulu before she was born, and hers was one of the few Jewish families in a mostly Asian neighborhood. Her mother, Ruth (née Schindel), was a seamstress and housewife, and her father, Fred Midler, worked at a Navy base in Hawaii as a painter. She was named after actress Bette Davis, though Davis pronounced her first name in two syllables, and Midler uses one, /ˈbɛt/. She was raised in Aiea and attended Radford High School, in Honolulu. She was voted "Most Talkative" in the 1961 school Hoss Election, and in her Senior Year (Class of 1963), "Most Dramatic". Midler majored in drama at the University of Hawaii, but left after three semesters. She earned money in the 1966 film Hawaii as an extra, playing an uncredited seasick passenger named Miss David Buff.
  
  wn.com/Bette_Midler
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  Betty Ford
  Elizabeth Ann Bloomer Warren Ford (April 8, 1918 – July 8, 2011), better known as Betty Ford, was First Lady of the United States from 1974 to 1977 during the presidency of her husband Gerald Ford. As First Lady, she was active in social policy and created precedents as a politically active presidential wife.
  Throughout her husband's term in office, she maintained high approval ratings despite opposition from some conservative Republicans who objected to her more moderate and liberal positions on social issues. Ford was noted for raising breast cancer awareness following her 1974 mastectomy and was a passionate supporter of, and activist for, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Pro-choice on abortion and a leader in the Women's Movement, she gained fame as one of the most candid first ladies in history, commenting on every hot-button issue of the time, including feminism, equal pay, the ERA, sex, drugs, abortion, and gun control. She also raised awareness of addiction when she announced her long-running battle with alcoholism in the 1970s.
  
  wn.com/Betty_Ford
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  Beverly Sills
  Beverly Sills (May 25, 1929 – July 2, 2007) was an American operatic soprano whose peak career was between the 1950s and 1970s. In her prime she was the only real rival to Joan Sutherland as the leading bel canto stylist.
  Although she sang a repertoire from Handel and Mozart to Puccini, Massenet and Verdi, she was known for her performances in coloratura soprano roles in live opera and recordings. Sills was largely associated with the operas of Donizetti, of which she performed and recorded many roles. Her signature roles include the title role in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, the title role in Massenet's Manon, Marie in Donizetti's La fille du régiment, the three heroines in Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann, Rosina in Rossini's The Barber of Seville, Violetta in Verdi's La traviata, and most notably Elisabetta in Roberto Devereux.
  After retiring from singing in 1980, she became the general manager of the New York City Opera. In 1994, she became the Chairman of Lincoln Center and then, in 2002, of the Metropolitan Opera, stepping down in 2005. Sills lent her celebrity to further her charity work for the prevention and treatment of birth defects.
  
  wn.com/Beverly_Sills
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  Candice Bergen
  Candice Patricia Bergen (born May 9, 1946) is an American actress and former fashion model.
  She is known for starring in two TV series, as the title character on the situation comedy Murphy Brown (1988–1998), for which she won five Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards; and as Shirley Schmidt on the comedy-drama Boston Legal (2004–2008), for which she was nominated for two Emmys, a Golden Globe, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Her first film was The Group (1965), which was based on Mary McCarthy's novel of the same name. She starred in several major films throughout the mid 1960s to early 1980s such as The Sand Pebbles, Carnal Knowledge, The Wind and the Lion, and Gandhi and received an Academy Award nomination for her role in Starting Over. Her later career includes character roles in Miss Congeniality and Sweet Home Alabama.
  Bergen was born in Beverly Hills, California. Her mother, Frances Bergen (née Westerman), was a Powers model who was known professionally as Frances Westcott. Her father, Edgar Bergen, was a ventriloquist, comedian, and actor. Her paternal grandparents were Swedish-born immigrants who anglicized their surname, which was originally Berggren. As a child, Candice was irritated at being referred to as Charlie McCarthy's little sister, Charlie McCarthy being her father's star dummy.
  
  wn.com/Candice_Bergen
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  Carl Van Vechten
  Carl Van Vechten (June 17, 1880 – December 21, 1964) was an American writer and photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein.
  Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he graduated from Washington High School in 1898, and later the University of Chicago in 1903. In 1906, he moved to New York City. He was hired as the assistant music critic at the New York Times. His interest in opera had him take a leave of absence from the paper in 1907, to travel to Europe to explore opera. While in England he married his long time friend from Cedar Rapids, Anna Snyder. He returned to his job at the New York Times in 1909 and then became the first American critic of modern dance. At that time, Isadora Duncan, Anna Pavlova, and Loie Fuller were performing in New York City. The marriage to Anna Snyder ended in divorce in 1912 and he wed actress Fania Marinoff in 1914.
  Several books of Van Vechten's essays on various subjects such as music and literature were published between 1915 and 1920. Between 1922 and 1930 Knopf published seven novels by Van Vechten, starting with Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works and ending with Parties.
  
  wn.com/Carl_Van_Vechten
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  Carol Burnett
  Carol Creighton Burnett (born April 26, 1933) is an American actress, comedian, singer, dancer and writer. Burnett started her career in New York. After becoming a hit on Broadway, she made her television debut. After successful appearances on The Garry Moore Show, Burnett moved to Los Angeles and began an eleven-year run on The Carol Burnett Show which was aired on CBS television from 1967 to 1978. With roots in vaudeville, The Carol Burnett Show was a variety show which combined comedy sketches, song, and dance. The comedy sketches included film parodies and character pieces. Burnett created many characters during the show's television run.
  Burnett was born in San Antonio, Texas, the daughter of Ina Louise (née Creighton), a publicity writer for movie studios, and Joseph Thomas Burnett, a movie theater manager. Both of her parents suffered from alcoholism, and at a young age she was left with her grandmother, Mabel Eudora White. Her parents divorced in the late 1930s, and Burnett and her grandmother moved to an apartment near her mother’s in an impoverished area of Hollywood. There, they stayed in a boarding house with her younger half-sister Chrissy.
  
  wn.com/Carol_Burnett
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  Carol Channing
  Carol Elaine Channing (born January 31, 1921) is an American singer, actress, and comedienne. She is the recipient of three Tony Awards (including one for lifetime achievement), a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. Channing is best remembered for originating, on Broadway, the musical-comedy roles of bombshell Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and matchmaking widow Dolly Gallagher Levi in Hello, Dolly!
  Channing was born in Seattle, Washington, the only child of George and Adelaide (née Glaser; 1886–1984) Channing. Her father was a city editor at the Seattle Star; his newspaper career took the family to San Francisco when Carol was only two weeks old. Her father later became a successful Christian Science practitioner, editor, and teacher. She attended Aptos Middle School and Lowell High School in San Francisco. At Lowell, Channing was a member of its famed Lowell Forensic Society, the nation's oldest high-school debate team.
  According to Channing's memoirs, when she left home to attend Bennington College in Vermont, her mother informed her that her father, a journalist who Carol had believed was born in Rhode Island, had in fact been born in Augusta, Georgia, to a German-American father and an African-American mother. According to Channing's account, her mother reportedly did not want [Channing] to be surprised "if she had a black baby". Channing kept this a secret to avoid any problems on Broadway and in Hollywood, ultimately revealing it only in her autobiography, Just Lucky I Guess (published in 2002). Her autobiography contains a photograph of her mother but has no photos of her father or son. The book states her father's birth certificate was destroyed in a fire.
  
  wn.com/Carol_Channing
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  Carol Lawrence
  Carol Lawrence (born September 5, 1932) is an American actress, most often associated with musical theatre, but who has also appeared extensively on television.
  Born as Carolina Maria Laraia in Melrose Park, Carol Lawrence made her Broadway debut in 1952. She achieved success in the role of Maria in the original Broadway production of West Side Story in 1957, and received a nomination for Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for this role. She played the role for two years, and after an appearance in the short-lived show Saratoga, she returned to West Side Story for its 1960 season. Among her other Broadway successes were I Do! I Do! (1967) and Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993–95).
  She has played several roles at The Muny in St. Louis, the oldest and largest outdoor theater in the U.S., including Fanny Brice in Funny Girl (1975), Charity in Sweet Charity (1977), and Lucille Early in No, No, Nanette (1990). Among her other musical theatre parts are the title role in Mame, Guenevere in Camelot (opposite Goulet), Do I Hear a Waltz at the Pasadena Playhouse (2001) and Follies at the Wadsworth Theatre in Los Angeles in 2002.
  
  wn.com/Carol_Lawrence
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  Carroll Baker
  Carroll Baker (born May 28, 1931) is an American actress who has enjoyed popularity as both a serious dramatic actress and, particularly in the 1960s, as a movie sex symbol. Despite being cast in a wide range of roles during her heyday, Baker's beautiful features, blonde hair, and distinctive drawl made her particularly memorable in roles as a brash, flamboyant woman.
  Baker was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Virginia (née Duffy) and William Watson Baker, who was a traveling salesman. She spent a year at community college, and subsequently worked as a magician's assistant.
  Baker began her film career in 1953, with a small part in Easy to Love. After appearing in television commercials and training at New York's Actors Studio, she took a role in the Broadway production of All Summer Long. That appearance brought her to the attention of director Elia Kazan, who cast Baker as the title character in his controversial 1956 Baby Doll. Her Tennessee Williams-scripted role as a Mississippi teenage bride to a failed middle-aged cotton gin owner brought Baker instant fame as well as a certain level of notoriety. Baby Doll would remain the film for which she is best remembered; she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role. Two months prior to Baby Doll's release, she appeared in the supporting role of Luz Benedict II in Giant, opposite Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean.
  
  wn.com/Carroll_Baker
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  Charlize Theron
  Charlize Theron (American English pronunciation:  /ʃɑrˈliːs ˈθɛrən/; Afrikaans pronunciation: [ʃɐrˈlis tron]; born 7 August 1975) is a South African actress and fashion model. She started her acting career in the United States and rose to fame in the late 1990s following roles in The Devil's Advocate (1997), Mighty Joe Young (1998), and The Cider House Rules (1999). Theron won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003), becoming the first African to win an Academy Award in a major acting category. She received another Academy Award nomination for her performance in North Country (2005). Theron became a US citizen in 2007, while retaining her South African citizenship.
  Theron was born in Benoni, in the then Transvaal Province of South Africa, the only child of Gerda (née Maritz; who has also called herself Gerta) and Charles Theron (born 27 November 1947).Second Boer War figure Danie Theron was her great-great-uncle. Her ancestry includes French, German, and Dutch; her French forebears were early Huguenot settlers in South Africa. "Theron" is an Occitan surname (originally spelled Théron) pronounced in Afrikaans as [tron], although she has said that the way she pronounces it in South Africa is [θron]. She changed the pronunciation when she moved to the U.S. to give it a more "American" sound.
  
  wn.com/Charlize_Theron
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  Cher
  Cher ( /ˈʃɛər/) (born Cherilyn Sarkisian; May 20, 1946) is an American recording artist, television personality, actress, director, record producer, and philanthropist. Referred to as the Goddess of Pop, she has won an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, an Emmy Award, three Golden Globes, and a Cannes Film Festival Award for her work in film, music, and television. She is the only person in history to receive all five awards. She began her career as a backup singer and came to prominence in 1965 as one-half of the pop rock duo Sonny & Cher with the success of their song "I Got You Babe". She subsequently established herself as a solo recording artist and became a television star in 1971 with The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, a variety show for which she won a Golden Globe. A well-received performance in the film Silkwood earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress of 1983. In the following years, she starred in a string of hit films including Mask, The Witches of Eastwick, and Moonstruck, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress of 1987.
  
  wn.com/Cher
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  Christine Lahti
  Christine Ann Lahti (born April 4, 1950) is an American actress and film director. Throughout her career, she has garnered 2 Golden Globe Awards from 8 nominations, an Emmy Award from 6 nominations and 2 Academy Award nominations. Her first Academy Award nomination was for Best Supporting Actress for her work in the 1984 film Swing Shift. Her second nomination was for her work as a director when she won the Academy Award for Short Film, Live Action for her 1995 film Lieberman in Love.
  Lahti was born in Birmingham, Michigan, the daughter of Elizabeth Margaret (née Tabar), a painter, homemaker, and nurse, and Paul Theodore Lahti, a surgeon. Her paternal grandparents were Finnish immigrants and her maternal grandparents were from Austria-Hungary. Her surname means "a gulf", "a bay" or "a cove" in Finnish, and Lahti is also a city in Finland. Lahti was raised Lutheran.
  Lahti studied fine arts at Florida State University and received her bachelor's degree in drama from the University of Michigan, where she joined Delta Gamma sorority.
  
  wn.com/Christine_Lahti
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  Claire Danes
  Claire Catherine Danes (born April 12, 1979) is an American television, stage and film actress. She has appeared in roles as diverse as Angela Chase in My So-Called Life, as Juliet in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, as Kate Brewster in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, as Yvaine in Stardust and as Temple Grandin in the HBO TV film Temple Grandin. She portrays Carrie Mathison in the Showtime series Homeland.
  Danes was born in Manhattan, New York City, New York. Her mother, Carla (née Hall), is a day-care provider, painter, and textile designer who later served as her daughter's manager, and her father, Christopher Danes (b. May 6, 1944 in Austin, Texas), is a computer consultant and former architectural photographer. Danes has described her background as being "as WASPy as you can get"; her paternal grandfather, Gibson Andrew Danes (1910–1992 in Litchfield, Connecticut), was the dean of the art and architecture school at Yale University. She has an older brother, Asa (b. 1973).
  Danes attended the Dalton School in New York City, the New York City Lab School for Collaborative Studies, the Professional Performing Arts School, and the Lycée Français de Los Angeles in Los Angeles, California. In 1998, Danes went to Yale University, her father's alma mater. Director Oliver Stone wrote her letter of recommendation to Yale. After studying for two years as a psychology major, she dropped out of Yale to focus on her film career.
  
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  Dana Delany
  Dana Welles Delany (born March 13, 1956) is an American film, stage, and television actress, producer, presenter, and health activist.
  Delany has been active in show business since the late 1970s. Following small roles early in her career, Delany garnered her first leading role in 1987 in the short-lived NBC sitcom Sweet Surrender and achieved wider fame in 1988–1991 as Colleen McMurphy on the ABC television show China Beach, for which she won two Emmy Awards. She received further recognition for her performances in the films Light Sleeper (1992), Tombstone (1993), Exit to Eden (1994), The Margaret Sanger Story (1995), Fly Away Home (1996), True Women (1997) and Wide Awake (1998). Since the mid-1990s, Delany has served on the board of the Scleroderma Research Foundation.
  In 2000s she returned to television with a string of short-lived television series beginning with Pasadena (2001), Presidio Med (2002–2003), and Kidnapped (2006–2007). From 2007 to 2010 Delany played Katherine Mayfair on the ABC series Desperate Housewives. As of 2011^[update] she is in the lead role as Megan Hunt on the ABC drama series Body of Proof.
  
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  Danny Kaye
  Danny Kaye (born David Daniel Kaminski; January 18, 1913 – March 3, 1987) was a celebrated American actor, singer, dancer, and comedian. His best known performances featured physical comedy, idiosyncratic pantomimes, and rapid-fire nonsense songs.
  Kaye starred in 17 movies, notably The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), The Inspector General (1949), Hans Christian Andersen (1952), and — perhaps his most accomplished performance — The Court Jester (1956). His films were extremely popular, especially his bravura performances of patter songs and children's favorites such as The Inch Worm and The Ugly Duckling. He was the first ambassador-at-large of UNICEF in 1954 and received the French Legion of Honor in 1986 for his many years of work with the organization.
  David Daniel Kaminski was born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn. Jacob and Clara Nemerovsky Kaminski and their two sons, Larry and Mac, left Ekaterinoslav two years before his birth; he was the only one of their sons born in the United States. He spent his early youth attending Public School 149 in East New York, Brooklyn, where he began entertaining his young classmates with songs and jokes, before moving to Thomas Jefferson High School, but he never graduated. His mother died when he was in his early teens. Clara enjoyed the impressions and humor of her youngest son and always had words of encouragement for them; her death was a great loss for young Danny.
  
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  Debbie Reynolds
  Debbie Reynolds (born April 1, 1932) is an American actress, singer, and dancer.
  Initially signed at age sixteen by Warner Bros., Reynolds' career got off to a slow start. When her contract was not renewed, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) gave her a small but significant part in the film Three Little Words (1950), then signed her to a seven-year contract. In her next film, Two Weeks with Love (1950), she had a hit with the song "Aba Daba Honeymoon". However, it was her first leading role, in Singin' in the Rain (1952), that set her on the path to fame. By the mid 1950s, she was a major star.
  Other notable successes include Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), in which her rendering of the song "Tammy" reached number one on the music charts; and The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She continues to perform successfully on stage, television and film to the present day.
  Reynolds' first marriage, to popular singer Eddie Fisher, produced a son and a daughter, actress/author Carrie Fisher, but ended in divorce in 1959 when Fisher and her former (and later) friend Elizabeth Taylor fell in love. Her second and third marriages also ended in divorce, each time ruining her financially.
  
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  Diane Keaton
  Diane Keaton (born Diane Hall; January 5, 1946) is an American film actress, director, producer, and screenwriter. Keaton began her career on stage, and made her screen debut in 1970. Her first major film role was as Kay Adams-Corleone in The Godfather (1972), but the films that shaped her early career were those with director and co-star Woody Allen beginning with Play It Again, Sam in 1972. Her next two films with Allen, Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975), established her as a comic actor. Her fourth, Annie Hall (1977), won her the Academy Award for Best Actress.
  Keaton subsequently expanded her range to avoid becoming typecast as her Annie Hall persona. She became an accomplished dramatic performer, starring in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and received Academy Award nominations for Reds (1981) and Marvin's Room (1996). Some of her popular later films include Baby Boom (1987), Father of the Bride (1991), The First Wives Club (1996), Something's Gotta Give (2003) and The Family Stone (2005). Keaton's films have earned a cumulative gross of over US$1.1 billion in North America. In addition to acting, she is also a photographer, real estate developer, author, and occasional singer.
  
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  Dionne Warwick
  Dionne Warwick (born Marie Dionne Warrick; December 12, 1940) is an American singer, actress and TV show host, who became a United Nations Global Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization, and a United States Ambassador of Health.
  Having been in a partnership with Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Warwick ranks among the 40 biggest hit makers of the entire rock era (1955–1999), based on the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles Charts. Warwick ranks second only to Aretha Franklin as the most-charted female vocalist with 56 singles making the Billboard Hot 100 between 1962 and 1998. She is also a cousin of Whitney Houston.
  Warwick was born in East Orange, New Jersey, to Mancel Warwick (1911–1977), who began his career as a Pullman porter and subsequently became a chef, a gospel record promoter for Chess Records and later a Certified Public Accountant; and Lee Drinkard Warwick (1920–2005), manager of The Drinkard Singers (see below). Warwick had a sister Delia "Dee Dee" and a brother, Mancel Jr., who was killed in an accident in 1968 at the age of 21.^{[citation needed]}. She has African American, Native American, Brazilian and Dutch ancestry.
  
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  Donna Reed
  Donna Reed (January 27, 1921 – January 14, 1986) was an American film and television actress.
  With appearances in over 40 films, Reed received the 1953 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Lorene in the war drama From Here to Eternity. She is noted for her role in the perennial Christmas favorite It's a Wonderful Life (1946). She worked extensively in television, notably as Donna Stone, an American middle class mother in the sitcom The Donna Reed Show (1958–1966), in which she played a more prominent role than many other television mothers of the era and for which she received the 1963 Golden Globe Award for Best TV Star - Female. Later in Reed's career she replaced Barbara Bel Geddes as Miss Ellie in 1984 season of the television melodrama, Dallas, and sued the production company for breach of contract when she was abruptly fired upon Bel Geddes's decision to return to the show.
  Reed was born Donna Belle Mullenger on a farm near Denison, Iowa, the daughter of Hazel Jane (née Shives; 1899–1975) and William Richard Mullenger (1893–1981). The eldest of five children, she was raised as a Methodist. After graduating from Denison High School, Reed planned to become a teacher, but was unable to pay for college. She decided to move to California to attend Los Angeles City College on the advice of her aunt. While attending college, she performed in various stage productions but had no plans to become an actress. After receiving several offers to screen test for studios, Reed eventually signed with MGM, but insisted on finishing her education first.
  
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  Drew Barrymore
  Drew Blyth Barrymore (born February 22, 1975) is an American actress, film director, screenwriter, producer and model. She is a member of the Barrymore family of American actors and granddaughter of John Barrymore. She first appeared in an advertisement when she was 11 months old. Barrymore made her film debut in Altered States in 1980. Afterwards, she starred in her breakout role in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. She quickly became one of Hollywood's most recognized child actresses, going on to establish herself in mainly comic roles.
  Following a turbulent childhood which was marked by drug and alcohol abuse and two stints in rehab, Barrymore wrote the 1990 autobiography, Little Girl Lost. She successfully made the transition from child star to adult actress with a number of films including Poison Ivy, Bad Girls, Boys on the Side, and Everyone Says I Love You. Subsequently, she established herself in romantic comedies such as The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates.
  In 1995, she and business partner Nancy Juvonen formed the production company Flower Films, with its first production the 1999 Barrymore film Never Been Kissed. Flower Films has gone on to produce the Barrymore vehicle films Charlie's Angels, 50 First Dates, and Music and Lyrics, as well as the cult film Donnie Darko. Barrymore's more recent projects include He's Just Not That into You, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Everybody's Fine and Going the Distance. A recipient of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Barrymore appeared on the cover of the 2007 People magazine's 100 Most Beautiful issue.
  
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  Edie Falco
  Edith "Edie" Falco ( /ˈiːdi ˈfælkoʊ/; born July 5, 1963) is an American television, film and stage actress, known for her roles in Oz as Diane Whittlesey, as Carmela Soprano on the HBO series The Sopranos, and as the titular character on the Showtime series Nurse Jackie.
  Falco was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Judith Anderson, an actress, and Frank Falco, a jazz drummer. Her father was of Italian descent and her mother's ancestry was Swedish and English. Falco's siblings are Joseph, Paul and Ruth. Her uncle is novelist, playwright and poet Edward Falco, an English professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. She was raised in West Islip, on Long Island. Falco graduated from Northport High School in 1981, after playing Eliza Doolittle in a production of My Fair Lady. She attended the Acting Program at SUNY Purchase with fellow actors Stanley Tucci and Ving Rhames; she remains friends with both.
  Early in her career, Falco made appearances on television shows like Law & Order and Homicide: Life on the Street. Tom Fontana, executive director of Homicide, cast Falco as Eva Thormann, the wife of an injured police officer, after watching Falco's performance in Laws of Gravity, a 1992 film directed by Nick Gomez. Fontana said of her, "She's an actress who's unadorned by any embroidery. She does everything with such simplicity and honesty, it's breathtaking." A struggling actress at the time, Falco said her salary from these television episodes paid for one month's worth of rent. Fontana cast Falco as a regular character, prison officer Diane Whittlesey, in his HBO series Oz based on her work in the Homicide episodes "Son of a Gun" and "A Shot in the Dark".
  
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  Edward Albee
  Edward Franklin Albee III ( /ˈɔːlbiː/ AWL-bee; born March 12, 1928) is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and a rewrite of the book for the unsuccessful musical version of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1966). His works are considered well-crafted, often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue with helping to reinvent the post-war American theatre in the early 1960s. Albee continues to experiment in new works, such as The Goat: or, Who Is Sylvia? (2002).
  According to Magill's Survey of American Literature (2007), Edward Albee was born somewhere in Virginia (the popular belief is that he was born in Washington, D.C.). He was adopted two weeks later and taken to Larchmont, New York in Westchester County, where he grew up. Albee's adoptive father, Reed A. Albee, the wealthy son of vaudeville magnate Edward Franklin Albee II, owned several theaters. Here the young Edward first gained familiarity with the theatre as a child. His adoptive mother, Reed's third wife, Frances tried to raise Albee to fit into their social circles.
  
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  Elia Kazan
  Elia Kazan (IPA: [eˈlia kaˈzan]; September 7, 1909 – September 28, 2003) was an American director, producer, writer and actor, described by The New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history". He was born in Istanbul, Ottoman Empire, to Greek parents. After studying acting at Yale, he acted professionally for eight years, later joining the Group Theater in 1932, and co-founded the Actors Studio in 1947. With Lee Strasberg, he introduced Method acting to the American stage and cinema as a new form of self-expression and psychological "realism". Kazan acted in only a few films, including City for Conquest (1940).
  Kazan introduced a new generation of unknown young actors to the movie audiences, including Marlon Brando and James Dean. Noted for drawing out the best dramatic performances from his actors, he directed 21 actors to Oscar nominations, resulting in nine wins. He became "one of the consummate filmmakers of the 20th century" after directing a string of successful films, including, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), and East of Eden (1955). During his career, he won two Oscars as Best Director and received an Honorary Oscar, won three Tony Awards, and four Golden Globes. Among the other actors he introduced to movie audences were Warren Beatty, Carroll Baker, Julie Harris, Andy Griffith, Lee Remick, Rip Torn, Eli Wallach, Eva Marie Saint, Martin Balsam, Fred Gwynne, and Pat Hingle.
  
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  Elizabeth Taylor
  Dame Elizabeth Rosemond "Liz" Taylor, DBE (February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011) was a British-American actress. From her early years as a child star with MGM, she became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age. As one of the world's most famous film stars, Taylor was recognized for her acting ability and for her glamorous lifestyle, beauty and distinctive violet eyes.
  National Velvet (1944) was Taylor's first success, and she starred in Father of the Bride (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), Giant (1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for BUtterfield 8 (1960), played the title role in Cleopatra (1963), and married her co-star Richard Burton. They appeared together in 11 films, including Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), for which Taylor won a second Academy Award. From the mid-1970s, she appeared less frequently in film, and made occasional appearances in television and theatre.
  Her much publicized personal life included eight marriages and several life-threatening illnesses. From the mid-1980s, Taylor championed HIV and AIDS programs; she co-founded the American Foundation for AIDS Research in 1985, and the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1993. She received the Presidential Citizens Medal, the Legion of Honour, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, who named her seventh on their list of the "Greatest American Screen Legends". Taylor died of congestive heart failure in March 2011 at the age of 79, having suffered many years of ill health.
  
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  Ella Fitzgerald
  Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 – June 15, 1996), also known as the "First Lady of Song", "Queen of Jazz", and "Lady Ella", was an American jazz and song vocalist. With a vocal range spanning three octaves (D♭3 to D♭6), she was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.
  Fitzgerald was a notable interpreter of the Great American Songbook. Over the course of her 59-year recording career, she was the winner of 13 Grammy Awards and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Ronald Reagan and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H. W. Bush.
  Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Virginia, the child of a common-law marriage between William and Temperance "Tempie" Fitzgerald. The pair separated soon after her birth and she and her mother went to Yonkers, New York, where they eventually moved in with Tempie's longtime boyfriend, Joseph Da Silva. Fitzgerald's half-sister, Frances Da Silva, was born in 1923. She and her family were Methodists and were active in the Bethany African Methodist Episcopal Church and she regularly attended worship services, Bible study, and Sunday School.
  
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  Ethel Merman
  Ethel Merman (January 16, 1908 – February 15, 1984) was an American actress and singer. Known primarily for her powerful voice and roles in musical theatre, she has been called "the undisputed First Lady of the musical comedy stage." Among the many standards introduced by Merman in Broadway musicals are "I Got Rhythm", "Everything's Coming Up Roses", "Some People", "Rose's Turn", "I Get a Kick Out of You", "It's De-Lovely", "Friendship", "You're the Top", "Anything Goes", and "There's No Business Like Show Business", which later became her theme song.
  Merman was born Ethel Agnes Zimmermann in her maternal grandmother's house located at 265 4th Street in Astoria, Queens, in New York City in 1908, though she would later emphatically declare that it was actually 1912. Her father, Edward Zimmermann (1879–1977), was an accountant with James H. Dunham & Company, a Manhattan wholesale dry-goods company, and her mother, Agnes (née Gardner; 1883–1974), was a school teacher. Zimmermann had been raised in the Dutch Reformed Church and his wife was Presbyterian, but shortly after they were wed they joined the Episcopalian congregation at Church of the Redeemer, where Merman was baptized. Her parents were strict about church attendance, and every Sunday she spent the day there, first at morning services, followed by Sunday school, an afternoon prayer meeting, and an evening study group for children.
  
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  Faye Dunaway
  Dorothy Faye Dunaway (born January 14, 1941) is an American actress. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the 1976 film Network. She was previously nominated for Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Chinatown (1974). She has starred in a variety of other successful films, including The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Three Days of the Condor (1975), and Mommie Dearest (1981).
  Dunaway was born in Bascom, Florida, the daughter of Grace April (née Smith), a housewife, and John MacDowell Dunaway, Jr., a career non-commissioned officer in the United States Army. She is of Scots-Irish, English, and German descent. She attended the University of Florida,Florida State University, and Boston University, but graduated from the University of Florida in theater. In 1962, Dunaway joined the American National Theater and Academy.
  Dunaway appeared on Broadway in 1962 as the daughter of Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons. Her first screen role was in 1967 in The Happening. In 1967, she was in Hurry Sundown; that same year, she gained the leading female role in Bonnie and Clyde opposite Warren Beatty, which earned her an Oscar nomination. She also starred in 1968 with Steve McQueen in the caper film The Thomas Crown Affair (and had a small role in the 1999 remake with the same title with Pierce Brosnan).
  
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• George Stevens
  George Stevens (December 18, 1904 – March 8, 1975) was an American film director, producer, screenwriter and cinematographer.
  Among his most notable films were Diary of Anne Frank (1959), nominated for Best Director, Giant (1956), winner of Oscar for Best Director, Shane (1953), Oscar nominated, and A Place in the Sun (1951), winner of Oscar for Best Director.
  He was born in Oakland, California, and his family included his father Landers Stevens and his mother Georgie Cooper, both stage actors. His uncle was drama critic Ashton Stevens. He also had two brothers, Jack and writer Aston Stevens. He learned about the stage from his parents and worked and toured with them, on his way to filmmaking. He broke into the movie business as a cameraman, working on many Laurel and Hardy short films, such as Night Owls (1930). His first feature film was The Cohens and Kellys in Trouble in 1933.
  In 1934 he got his first directing job, the slapstick Kentucky Kernels. His big break came when he directed Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams in 1935. He went on in the late 1930s to direct several Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movies, not only with the two actors together, but on their own. In 1940, he directed Carole Lombard in Vigil in the Night, and the film has an alternate ending for European audiences in recognition of World War II, which the US had not yet entered.
  
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• Gertrude Lawrence
  Gertrude Lawrence (4 July 1898 – 6 September 1952) was an English actress, singer and musical comedy performer known for her stage appearances in the West End theatre district of London and on Broadway.
  Lawrence was born Gertrude Alice Dagmar Klasen, of English and Danish extraction, in the Newington area of London Borough of Southwark. Her father was a basso profundo who performed under the name Arthur Lawrence. His heavy drinking led her mother Alice to leave him soon after Gertrude's birth.
  In 1904, her stepfather took the family to Bognor for the August bank holiday. While there, they attended a concert where audience members were invited to entertain. At her mother's urging, young Gertrude sang a song and was rewarded with a gold sovereign for her effort. It was her first public performance.
  In 1908, in order to augment the family's meager income, Alice accepted a job in the chorus of the Christmas pantomime at Brixton Theatre. A child who could sing and dance was needed to round out the troupe, and Alice volunteered her daughter. While working in the production Alice heard of Italia Conti, who taught dance, elocution, and the rudiments of acting. Gertrud auditioned for Conti, who thought the child was talented enough to warrant free lessons.
  
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  Gillian Anderson
  Gillian Leigh Anderson (born August 9, 1968) is an American actress. After beginning her career in theatre, Anderson achieved international recognition for her role as Special Agent Dana Scully on the American television series The X-Files. Her film work includes The House of Mirth (2000), The Mighty Celt (2005), The Last King of Scotland (2006), and two X-Files films, The X-Files (1998) and The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008).
  Anderson is of English and Irish descent, and was born in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Rosemary Anderson (née Lane), a computer analyst, and Edward Anderson, who owned a film post-production company. Soon after her birth, her family moved to Puerto Rico for 15 months; she then lived for five years in Roseberry Gardens, London N4, and finally for 15 months in Albany Road, London N4, so that her father could attend the London Film School. When Anderson was 11 years old, her family moved again, this time to Grand Rapids, Michigan. She attended Fountain Elementary and then City High-Middle School, a program for gifted students with a strong emphasis on the humanities; she graduated in 1986.
  
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  Glenn Close
  Glenn Close (born March 19, 1947) is an American film, television and stage actress. She is best known for her roles as a femme fatale—the scheming Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and deranged stalker Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction (1987)—as well as Cruella de Vil in 101 Dalmatians (1996), and its sequel 102 Dalmatians (2000). She has been more recently known for her Emmy and Golden Globe winning role as Patty Hewes in the FX TV series Damages.
  Consistently acclaimed for her versatility, she has been nominated six times for an Oscar (five times throughout the 1980's), three times for a Grammy Award and once for a BAFTA Film Award, and has won three Tonys, an Obie, three Emmys, two Golden Globes, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
  Close was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, the daughter of Bettine (née Moore) and William Taliaferro Close, a doctor who operated a clinic in the Belgian Congo and served as a personal physician to Congo/Zaire President Mobutu Sese Seko. Her parents came from prominent families. Her father was a descendant of the Taliaferros of Virginia; her paternal grandfather, Edward Bennett Close, a stockbroker and director of the American Hospital Association, was first married to Post Cereals' heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. Close is also a second cousin once-removed of actress Brooke Shields (Shields's great-grandmother Mary Elsie Moore was a sister of Close's maternal grandfather, Charles Arthur Moore, Jr.).
  
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  Goldie Hawn
  Goldie Jeanne Hawn (born November 21, 1945) is an American actress, film director, producer, and occasional singer. Hawn is known for her roles in Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, Private Benjamin, Foul Play, Shampoo, Overboard, Bird on a Wire, Death Becomes Her, The First Wives Club, and Cactus Flower, for which she won the 1969 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She is the mother of actors Oliver and Kate Hudson. Hawn has maintained a relationship with actor Kurt Russell since 1983.
  Hawn was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Laura (née Steinhoff), a jewelry shop/dance school owner, and Edward Rutledge Hawn, a band musician who played at major events in Washington. She was named after her mother's aunt. She has a sister, Patricia; her brother, Edward, died before she was born. Through her father, Hawn is a direct descendant of Edward Rutledge, the youngest signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Hawn was raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she went to Montgomery Blair High School. Her father was Presbyterian and her mother was Jewish, the daughter of immigrants from Hungary; Hawn had a Jewish upbringing.
  
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  Hal Holbrook
  Harold Rowe "Hal" Holbrook, Jr. (born February 17, 1925) is an American actor. His television roles include Abraham Lincoln in the 1976 TV series Lincoln, Hays Stowe on The Bold Ones: The Senator and Capt. Lloyd Bucher on Pueblo. He is also known for his role in the 2007 film Into the Wild, for which he was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award and an Academy Award. He has also performed a one-man show as Mark Twain since 1954.
  Holbrook was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Aileen Davenport Holbrook, a vaudeville dancer, and Harold Rowe Holbrook, Sr. He was raised in South Weymouth, Massachusetts. He graduated from the Culver Academies and Denison University, where an honors project about Mark Twain led him to develop the one-man show for which he is best known, a series of performances called Mark Twain Tonight (for which he won both a Tony and a Drama Desk Award). Holbrook served in the U.S. Army in World War II and was stationed in Newfoundland, where he performed in theatre productions such as the play Madam Precious.
  
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  Halle Berry
  Halle Berry ( /ˈhæli ˈbɛri/; born August 14, 1966) is an American actress and a former fashion model. Berry received an Emmy, Golden Globe, SAG, and an NAACP Image Award for Introducing Dorothy Dandridge and won an Academy Award for Best Actress and was nominated for a BAFTA Award in 2001 for her performance in Monster's Ball, becoming the first and, as of 2012, only woman of African American descent to have won the award for Best Actress. She is one of the most highly paid actresses in Hollywood and also a Revlon spokesmodel. She has been involved in the production side of several of the films in which she performed.
  Before becoming an actress, Berry entered several beauty contests, finishing as the 1st runner-up in the Miss USA Pageant (1986), and coming in 6th place in the Miss World Pageant in 1986. She made her film debut with a small role in 1991's Jungle Fever. This led to starring roles in The Flintstones (1994), Bulworth (1998), X-Men (2000) and its sequels, and as Bond Girl Jinx in Die Another Day (2002). She also won the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress in 2005 for Catwoman and accepted the award in person—one of the few performers to do so.
  
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  Henry Fonda
  Henry Jaynes Fonda (May 16, 1905 – August 12, 1982) was an American film and stage actor.
  Fonda made his mark early as a Broadway actor. He also appeared in 1938 in plays performed in White Plains, New York, with Joan Tompkins. He made his Hollywood debut in 1935, and his career gained momentum after his Academy Award-nominated performance as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, a 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about an Oklahoma family who moved west during the Dust Bowl. Throughout six decades in Hollywood, Fonda cultivated a strong, appealing screen image in such classics as The Ox-Bow Incident, Mister Roberts and 12 Angry Men. Later, Fonda moved both toward darker epics as Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and lighter roles in family comedies like Yours, Mine and Ours with Lucille Ball.
  Fonda was the patriarch of a family of famous actors, including daughter Jane Fonda, son Peter Fonda, granddaughter Bridget Fonda, and grandson Troy Garity. His family and close friends called him "Hank". In 1999, he was named the sixth-Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute.
  
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  James Stewart
  James Maitland "Jimmy" Stewart (May 20, 1908 – July 2, 1997) was an American film and stage actor, known for his distinctive voice and persona. Over the course of his career, he starred in many films widely considered classics and was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning one in competition and receiving one Lifetime Achievement award. He was a major MGM contract star. He also had a noted military career and was a World War II and Vietnam War veteran, who rose to the rank of Brigadier General in the United States Air Force Reserve.
  James Maitland Stewart was born on May 20, 1908, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the son of Elizabeth Ruth (née Jackson) and Alexander Maitland Stewart, who owned a hardware store. Stewart's parents were of Scottish descent and Presbyterians. His maternal ancestors served in the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the American Civil War. The eldest of three children (he had two younger sisters, Virginia and Mary), he was expected to continue his father's business, which had been in the family for three generations. His mother was an excellent pianist but his father discouraged Stewart's request for lessons. But when his father accepted a gift of an accordion from a guest, young Stewart quickly learned to play the instrument, which became a fixture off-stage during his acting career. As the family grew, music continued to be an important part of family life.
  
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  Jamie Lee Curtis
  Jamie Lee Curtis (born November 22, 1958) is an American actress and author. Although she was initially known as a "scream queen" because of her starring roles in several horror films early in her career, such as Halloween, The Fog, Prom Night, and Terror Train, Curtis has since compiled a body of work that spans many genres, and has won BAFTA and Golden Globe awards. Her 1998 book, Today I Feel Silly, and Other Moods That Make My Day, made the best-seller list in The New York Times. Curtis has appeared in advertisements, and is a blogger for The Huffington Post online newspaper. She is married to actor, screenwriter, and director Christopher Guest.
  Curtis was born in Santa Monica, California, to actor Tony Curtis and actress Janet Leigh. Her paternal grandparents were Hungarian Jewish immigrants and two of her maternal great-grandparents were Danish. Curtis's parents divorced in 1962, after which her mother married Robert Brandt. Curtis has an older sister, Kelly Curtis, who is also an actress, and several half-siblings (all from her father's remarriages), Alexandra, Allegra, Ben, and Nicholas Curtis (who died in 1994 of a drug overdose). Curtis attended Westlake School in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills High School, and graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall. Returning to California in 1976, she attended the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. She considered majoring in social work, but quit after one semester to pursue an acting career.
  
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  Jane Fonda
  Jane Fonda (born Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda; December 21, 1937) is an American actress, writer, political activist, former fashion model, and fitness guru. She rose to fame in the 1960s with films such as Barbarella and Cat Ballou. She has won two Academy Awards and received several other movie awards and nominations during more than 50 years as an actress. After 15 years of retirement, she returned to film in 2005 with Monster in Law, followed by Georgia Rule two years later. She also produced and starred in over 20 exercise videos released between 1982 and 1995, and once again in 2010.
  Fonda has been an activist for many political causes; her opposition to the Vietnam War and associated activities were controversial. She has also protested the Iraq War and violence against women. She describes herself as a liberal and a feminist. In 2005, Fonda worked alongside Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem to co-found the Women's Media Center, an organization that works to amplify the voices of women in the media through advocacy, media and leadership training, and the creation of original content. Fonda currently serves on the board of the organization. Since 2001, Fonda has been a Christian. She published an autobiography in 2005, and in 2011, she published a second memoir, Prime Time.
  
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  Jane Wyman
  Jane Wyman, born Sarah Jane Mayfield, (January 5, 1917 - September 10, 2007) was an American singer, dancer, and character actress of film and television. She began her film career in the 1930s, and was a prolific performer for two decades. She received an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Johnny Belinda (1948), and later achieved success during the 1980s for her leading role in the television series Falcon Crest.
  Wyman was the first wife of Ronald Reagan. They married in 1940 and divorced in 1949, before Reagan ran for public office.
  Wyman was born Sarah Jane Mayfield in St. Joseph, Missouri. Although her birthdate has been widely reported for many years as January 4, 1914, research by biographers and genealogists indicates that she was born on January 5, 1917. The most likely reason for the 1914 date is that she added to her age when beginning her career as a minor, so that she could work. After Wyman's death, a release posted on her official website confirmed these details.
  
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• Jean Kerr
  Jean Kerr (July 10, 1922 – January 5, 2003) was an American author and playwright born in Scranton, Pennsylvania and best known for her humorous bestseller, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, and the plays King of Hearts and Mary, Mary. She was married to drama critic Walter Kerr and was the mother of six children.
  Born Bridget Jean Collins in Scranton, Pennsylvania to Tom and Kitty Collins, Kerr grew up on Electric Street in Scranton, and attended Marywood Seminary, the topic of her humorous short story "When I was Queen of the May." She received a Bachelor's Degree from Marywood College in Scranton and later attended The Catholic University of America, where she received her Masters' Degree and met then-professor Walter Kerr. She later married Kerr, who went on to become a well-known New York drama critic, and they had six children—Christopher, twins Colin and John, Gilbert, Gregory, and Kitty. The Kerrs bought a home in New Rochelle, New York, where Jean wrote 'King of Hearts', before settling in Larchmont. She died in White Plains, New York, of pneumonia, in 2003.
  
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  Jill Eikenberry
  Jill Eikenberry (born January 21, 1947) is an American film, stage, and television actress. She is best known for her role as lawyer Ann Kelsey in L.A. Law (1986–1994). She has won an Obie Award, been nominated five times for an Emmy Award and four Golden Globes, winning one, and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award in 2011.
  Eikenberry was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and was raised in Madison, Wisconsin and St. Joseph and Kansas City, Missouri. She began studies in anthropology at Barnard College but in her second year she auditioned for and was accepted into the Yale School of Drama.
  She met Michael Tucker at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., where they appeared together in The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail (1970) and Moonchildren (1971), the latter of which transferred to Broadway in 1972. She married Tucker in 1973 and they settled in New York City. She has a son, Max, and a stepdaughter, actress Allison Tucker (by Michael's first marriage).
  Her first role in film was a minor role in the television movie, They've Killed President Lincoln (1971). Among her early feature films was Between the Lines (1977), directed by Joan Micklin Silver. She and Michael Tucker had small roles in Lina Wertmuller's 1978 success A Night Full of Rain, and she also appeared in An Unmarried Woman starring Jill Clayburgh the same year.
  
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  Joan Collins
  Joan Henrietta Collins, OBE (born 23 May 1933), is an English actress, author and columnist. Born in Paddington and brought up in Maida Vale, Collins grew up during the Second World War. After making her stage debut in A Doll's House at the age of 9, she was trained as an actress at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London. After eighteen months at the drama school, she was signed to an exclusive contract by the Rank Organisation and appeared in various British films.
  At the age of 22, Collins headed to Hollywood and landed sultry roles in several popular films, including The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955) and Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! (1958). While she continued to make films in the US and the UK throughout the 1960s, her career languished in the 1970s, where she appeared in a number of horror flicks. Near the end of the decade, she starred in two films based on best-selling novels by her younger sister Jackie Collins: The Stud (1978) and its sequel The Bitch (1979). Returning to her theatrical roots, she played the title role in the 1980 British revival of The Last of Mrs. Cheyney and later had a lead role in the 1990 revival of Noël Coward's Private Lives. In 1981, Collins landed Alexis Colby, the role for which she is perhaps best known, in the long-running 1980s television soap opera Dynasty.
  
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  Joan Rivers
  Joan Alexandra Molinsky (born June 8, 1933), better known by her stage name Joan Rivers, is an American television personality, comedian, and actress. She is known for her brash manner; her loud, raspy voice with a heavy New York accent; and her numerous cosmetic surgeries. Rivers' comic style relies heavily on her ability to poke fun at herself and other Hollywood celebrities.
  Joan Rivers was born Joan Alexandra Molinsky in Brooklyn, a borough of New York City, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants Beatrice (née Grushman; January 6, 1906 – October 1975) and Meyer C. Molinsky (December 7, 1900 – January 1985). She was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and her family later moved to Larchmont, in Westchester County, New York. She attended Connecticut College between 1950 and 1952 and graduated from Barnard College in 1954 with a bachelor-of-arts degree in English literature and anthropology. Before entering show business, Rivers worked at various jobs such as a tour guide at Rockefeller Center, a writer/proofreader at an advertising agency and as a fashion consultant at Bond Clothing Stores. During this period, the agent Tony Rivers advised her to change her name, so she chose Joan Rivers as her stage name.
  
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  Joanne Woodward
  Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward (born February 27, 1930) is an American actress, television and theatrical producer, and widow of Paul Newman. She is perhaps best known for her Academy Award winning role in The Three Faces of Eve (1957).
  Woodward was born in Thomasville, Georgia, daughter of Elinor Gignilliat (née Trimmier) and Wade Woodward, Jr., who at one point was vice president of publisher Charles Scribner's Sons. Her middle name, "Gignilliat", originates from distant Huguenot ancestry. She was influenced to become an actress by her mother's love of movies. Her mother named her after Joan Crawford, using the Southern pronunciation of the name "Joanne". Attending the premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, nine-year-old Woodward rushed out into the parade of stars and sat on the lap of Laurence Olivier, star Vivien Leigh's partner and future husband. She eventually worked with Olivier in 1977, in a television production of Come Back, Little Sheba. During rehearsals, she mentioned this incident to him and he told her he remembered her doing it.
  
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  Jodie Foster
  Jodie Foster (born Alicia Christian Foster; November 19, 1962) is an American actress, film director, and producer.
  Foster began acting in commercials at three years of age, and her first significant role came at age 13 in the 1976 film Taxi Driver as the preteen prostitute Iris, for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Also that year, she starred in the cult film The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1989, for playing a rape victim in The Accused. In 1991, she starred in The Silence of the Lambs as Clarice Starling, a gifted FBI trainee, assisting in a hunt for a serial killer. This performance received international acclaim and her second Academy Award for Best Actress. She received her fourth Academy Award nomination for playing a hermit in Nell (1994). Other popular films include Bugsy Malone (1976); Freaky Friday (1976); Candleshoe (1977) Maverick (1994); Contact (1997); Panic Room (2002); Flightplan (2005); Inside Man (2006); The Brave One (2007); Nim's Island (2008) and Carnage (2011), for which she received a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy.
  
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  John Steinbeck
  John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952) and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). He was an author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books and five collections of short stories; Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
  John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He was of German and Irish descent. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck, Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, had shortened the family name to Steinbeck when he immigrated to the United States. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, is still today named "Großsteinbeck."
  His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, served as Monterey County treasurer. John's mother, Olive Hamilton, a former school teacher, shared Steinbeck's passion of reading and writing. The Steinbecks were members of the Episcopal Church. Steinbeck lived in a small rural town that was essentially a frontier settlement, set amid some of the world's most fertile land. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrant workers on Spreckels ranch. He became aware of the harsher aspects of migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in such works as Of Mice and Men. He also explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms.
  
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  Julia Roberts
  Julia Fiona Roberts (born October 28, 1967) is an American actress. She became a Hollywood star after headlining the romantic comedy Pretty Woman (1990), which grossed $464 million worldwide. After receiving Golden Globe Awards and Academy Award nominations for Steel Magnolias (1989) and Pretty Woman, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Erin Brockovich (2000). Her films My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), Mystic Pizza (1988), Notting Hill (1999), Runaway Bride (1999), Valentine's Day (2010), The Pelican Brief (1993), Ocean's Eleven (2001), and Ocean's Twelve (2004) have collectively brought box office receipts of over $2.4 billion, making her one of the most successful actresses in terms of box office receipts.
  Roberts had become one of the highest-paid actresses in the world, topping the Hollywood Reporter's annual "power list" of top-earning female stars from 2005 to 2006. Her fee for 1990's Pretty Woman was $300,000; in 2003, she was paid an unprecedented $25 million for her role in Mona Lisa Smile (2003). As of 2010, Roberts's net worth was estimated to be $140 million.
  
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  Julianne Moore
  Julianne Moore (born Julie Anne Smith on December 3, 1960) is a British-American actress and a children's book author. She has been nominated for four Oscars, six Golden Globes, three BAFTAs and nine Screen Actors Guild Awards.
  Moore began her acting career in 1983 in minor roles, before joining the cast of the soap opera As the World Turns, for which she won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1988. She began to appear in supporting roles in films during the early 1990s, in films such as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The Fugitive. Her performance in Short Cuts (1993) won her and the rest of the cast a Golden Globe for their ensemble performance, and her performance in Boogie Nights (1997) brought her widespread attention and nominations for several major acting awards.
  Her success continued with films such as The Big Lebowski (1998), The End of the Affair (1999) and Magnolia (1999). She received particular acclaim for her portrayal of a betrayed wife in Far from Heaven (2002), winning several critic awards as best actress of the year, in addition to several other nominations, including the Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild Award. The same year, she was also nominated for several awards as best supporting actress for her work in The Hours. In 2010, Moore starred in the comedy drama The Kids Are All Right, for which she received a Golden Globe and BAFTA nomination.
  
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  Julie Andrews
  Dame Julia Elizabeth Andrews, DBE (née Wells; born 1 October 1935) is an English film and stage actress, singer, and author. She is the recipient of Golden Globe, Emmy, Grammy, BAFTA, People's Choice Award, Theatre World Award, Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award honours.
  Andrews is a former child actress and singer who made her Broadway debut in a 1954 production of The Boy Friend, and rose to prominence starring in musicals such as My Fair Lady and Camelot, both of which earned her Tony Award nominations. In 1957, she made her television debut with the title role in Cinderella, which was seen by over 100 million viewers.
  Andrews made her feature film debut in Mary Poppins (1964), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She received her second Academy Award nomination for The Sound of Music (1965). Adjusted for inflation, these two films are the 25th and 3rd highest grossing films of all time, respectively. From 1964 to 1967, Andrews was the biggest film star in the world, with the additional box office successes of her films The Americanization of Emily, Hawaii, Torn Curtain, and Thoroughly Modern Millie.
  
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  Katharine Hepburn
  Katharine Houghton Hepburn (May 12, 1907 – June 29, 2003) was an American actress of film, stage, and television. Known for her headstrong independence and spirited personality, Hepburn's career as a Hollywood leading lady spanned more than 60 years. Her work came in a range of genres, from screwball comedy to literary drama, and she received four Academy Awards for Best Actress—a record for any performer. Hepburn's characters were often strong, sophisticated women with a hidden vulnerability.
  Raised in Connecticut by wealthy, progressive parents, Hepburn began to act while studying at Bryn Mawr College. After four years in the theatre, favorable reviews of her work on Broadway brought her to the attention of Hollywood. Her early years in the film industry were marked with success, including an Academy Award for her third picture, Morning Glory (1933), but this was followed by a series of commercial failures. In 1938 she was labeled "box office poison". Hepburn masterminded her own comeback, buying out her contract with RKO Radio Pictures and acquiring the film rights to The Philadelphia Story, which she sold on the condition that she be the star. In the 1940s she was contracted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where her career focused on an alliance with Spencer Tracy. The screen-partnership spanned 25 years, and produced nine movies.
  
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  Kathleen Turner
  Mary Kathleen Turner (born June 19, 1954) is an American actress. She came to fame during the 1980s, after roles in the Hollywood films Body Heat, Peggy Sue Got Married, Romancing the Stone, The War of the Roses, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Serial Mom and Prizzi's Honor. More recently, she guest starred on the third season of Showtime's Californication as Sue Collini, a jaded sex-crazed public relations company owner.
  Turner was born in Springfield, Missouri, the daughter of Patsy (née Magee) and Allen Richard Turner, a U.S. Foreign Service officer who grew up in China^{[citation needed]} (where Turner's great-grandfather had been a Methodist Christian missionary). Her father, a diplomat, had been imprisoned by the Japanese Empire for four years during the World War II.^{[citation needed]} As a girl, Turner lived in Canada, Venezuela, and England, and she was living in Cuba at the time that Fidel Castro took over the government. When the United States soon after broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba, it forced the staff members of the American embassy in Havana to leave the country. Turner has two brothers and one sister. While attending high school in England, she was a gymnast, and she also took classes at the Central School of Speech and Drama.
  
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  Kathy Baker
  Katherine Whitton "Kathy" Baker (born June 8, 1950) is an American stage, film and television actress.
  Baker began her career at San Francisco's Magic Theatre, performing in several of Sam Shepard's plays before getting her break in an off-Broadway production of Fool for Love opposite Ed Harris. Her recent projects include All the King's Men (2006) and The Jane Austen Book Club (2007).
  She has appeared in numerous films including Edward Scissorhands (Joyce Monroe), The Right Stuff, Street Smart, Jacknife and Cold Mountain. As a small-town doctor in the David E. Kelley television series Picket Fences she won Emmy awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series three times in the show's four-year run (1993, 1995 and 1996).
  Baker later re-teamed with Kelley, appearing in Boston Public as a teacher named Meredith Peters. Baker guest-starred in the premiere episode of the eighth season of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, playing the role of an ambitious mother of a city politician with a dark family secret. She also had a recurring role in Medium as Allison DuBois's mother-in-law, and another one in Tom Selleck's periodic Jesse Stone crime dramas as Rose, a small-town police officer.
  
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  Keri Russell
  Keri Lynn Russell (born March 23, 1976) is an American actress and dancer. After appearing in a number of made-for-television films and series during the mid-1990s, she came to fame for portraying the title role of Felicity Porter on the series Felicity, which ran from 1998 to 2002, and for which she won a Golden Globe Award. Russell has since appeared in several films, including Mad About Mambo (2000), We Were Soldiers (2002), The Upside of Anger (2005), Mission: Impossible III (2006), Waitress (2007), August Rush (2007), Bedtime Stories (2008) and Extraordinary Measures (2010).
  Russell was born in Fountain Valley, California, the daughter of Stephanie (née Stephens), a homemaker, and David Russell, a Nissan Motors executive. She has an older brother, Todd, and a younger sister, Julie. The family lived in Coppell, Texas; Mesa, Arizona; and Highlands Ranch, Colorado, moving frequently because of the father's employment. Although Russell is best known for her acting, she studied at Starstruck dance studio in a suburb of Denver. She earned a spot on the Mickey Mouse Club show by her dancing.^{[citation needed]}
  
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  Larry Hagman
  Larry Martin Hagman (born September 21, 1931) is an American film and television actor, producer and director most widely known for playing J.R. Ewing in the 1980s primetime television soap opera Dallas and Major Anthony "Tony" Nelson in the 1960s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. He is also the son of actress Mary Martin.
  Hagman was born in Fort Worth, Texas. His mother, Mary Martin, later became a Broadway actress and his father, Benjamin Jack Hagman, was a district attorney. His parents divorced in 1936 when he was five years old. He lived with his grandmother in Texas and California. His famous mother became a contract player with Paramount in 1938 and occasionally took him to her movies.
  In 1940 his mother met and married Richard Halliday and gave birth to a daughter, Heller, the following year.^{[citation needed]} Hagman attended the strict Black-Foxe Military Institute (now closed). When his mother moved to New York City to continue her Broadway career, Hagman again lived with his grandmother in California.^{[citation needed]} A couple of years later, his grandmother died and Hagman joined his mother in New York. At age 14 (in 1945) while attending boarding school, he began drinking heavily which led to serious health problems later in life.^{[citation needed]}
  
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  Lauren Bacall
  Lauren Bacall ( /ˌlɔrən bəˈkɔːl/; born Betty Joan Perske, September 16, 1924) is an American film and stage actress and model, known for her distinctive husky voice and sultry looks.
  She first emerged as leading lady in the Humphrey Bogart film To Have And Have Not (1944) and continued on in the film noir genre, with appearances in Bogart movies The Big Sleep (1946) and Dark Passage (1947), as well as a comedienne in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) with Marilyn Monroe and Designing Woman (1957) with Gregory Peck. Bacall has also worked on Broadway in musicals, gaining Tony Awards for Applause in 1970 and Woman of the Year in 1981. Her performance in the movie The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) earned her a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination.
  In 1999, Bacall was ranked #20 of the 25 actresses on the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars list by the American Film Institute. In 2009, she was selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to receive an Academy Honorary Award "in recognition of her central place in the Golden Age of motion pictures."
  
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  Laurette Taylor
  Laurette Taylor (born April 1, 1884 — died December 7, 1946) was an American stage and silent film actress.
  Laurette Taylor was born in New York City of Irish extraction as Loretta Helen Cooney.
  She married her first husband, Charles A. Taylor, around 1900, and they had two children, Dwight and Marguerite, but they divorced around 1910. In 1912 she married British-born playwright J. Hartley Manners, who wrote Peg o' My Heart, a major and enduring personal triumph for Taylor, who toured in it extensively throughout the country. Based upon the popular novel by Mary O'Hara, the play's success inspired a 1922 film version starring Taylor and directed by King Vidor. A six-reel print of the film survives in the Motion Picture Division of the Library of Congress. Taylor remained married to Manners until his death in 1928. She died from a coronary thrombosis in 1946. Her great-granddaughter, Chloe Taylor, is an actress in Los Angeles.
  Taylor wrote an essay on acting, titled "The Quality Most Needed", which was included in some of the early editions of the text "Actors on Acting". In it, Taylor muses on the importance of imagination over physical beauty for the actress wishing to truly create art. She sharply criticizes performances where you can "see the acting", and warns against paying too much attention to the traditions of acting, saying it "cramps creative instinct". To Taylor, the imaginative actress will leave you with a feeling that you can imagine the character's conduct "[i]n any position, aside from the situations involved in the actions of the play". Taylor applauded the imaginative actress who "builds a picture, using all her heart and soul and brain", not for the audience but for herself.
  
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  Lee Remick
  Lee Ann Remick (December 14, 1935 – July 2, 1991) was an American film and television actress. Among her best-known films are Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), and The Omen (1976).
  Remick was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, the daughter of Gertrude Margaret (née Waldo), an actress, and Francis Edwin "Frank" Remick, who owned a department store. Her maternal great-grandmother, Eliza Duffield, was an English-born preacher. Remick attended the Swaboda School of Dance, The Hewitt School and studied acting at Barnard College and the Actors Studio, making her Broadway theatre debut in 1953 with Be Your Age.
  Remick made her film debut in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957). While filming the movie in Arkansas, Remick lived with a local family and practiced baton twirling so that she would be believable as the teenager who wins the attention of Lonesome Rhodes (played by Andy Griffith).
  After appearing as Eula Varner, the hot-blooded daughter-in-law of Will Varner (Orson Welles) in 1958's The Long, Hot Summer, she appeared in These Thousand Hills as a dance hall girl. Remick came to prominence as a rape victim whose husband is tried for killing her attacker in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder. She made a second film with Elia Kazan called Wild River (1960), co-starring with Montgomery Clift and Jo Van Fleet.
  
  wn.com/Lee_Remick
• Lillian Hellman
  Lillian Florence "Lilly" Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an American author of plays, screenplays, and memoirs and throughout her life, was linked with many left-wing political causes.
  Lillian Hellman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, into a Jewish family. Her mother was Julia Newhouse of Demopolis, Alabama and her father was Max Hellman, a New Orleans shoe salesman. Julia Newhouse's parents were Sophie Marx, of a successful banking family, and Leonard Newhouse, a Demopolis liquor dealer. During most of her childhood she spent half of each year in New Orleans, in a boarding home run by her aunts, and the other half in New York City. She studied for two years at New York University and then took several courses at Columbia University.
  On December 31, 1925, Hellman married Arthur Kober, a playwright and press agent, although they often lived apart. In 1929, she traveled around Europe for a time and settled in Bonn to continue her education. She felt an initial attraction to a Nazi student group that advocated "a kind of socialism" until their questioning about her Jewish ties made their anti-Semitism clear, and she returned immediately to the United States. Years later she wrote, "Then for the first time in my life I thought about being a Jew."
  
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  Linda Evans
  Linda Evans (born on November 18, 1942) is an American actress. She is known primarily for her roles on television, and rose to fame playing Audra Barkley in the 1960s Western TV series, The Big Valley (1965–1969). Her most prominent role was that of Krystle Carrington in the 1980s ABC prime time television soap opera Dynasty, a role she played from 1981 to 1989.
  Born Linda Evenstad in Hartford, Connecticut, Evans was the second of three daughters to a couple who were professional dancers. "Evenstad" was the name of the small farm in Nes, Hedmark in Norway from where her paternal great-grandmother emigrated to the US in 1884 with her young son (Evans' grandfather) and a couple of relatives.
  When Evans was six months old, the family moved from Hartford to North Hollywood. To bring her out of her shyness her parents insisted that she take drama at school.^{[citation needed]} When she started her professional career, she changed her last name to "Evans".
  Evans has been married twice, first to actor and film producer John Derek from 1968 to 1974. Derek left Evans for Bo Derek who was 30 years his junior. Evans' second marriage was to Stan Herman, a property executive, from 1976 to 1981. In 1989, Evans began a relationship with new age musician Yanni, which lasted until 1998.
  
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  Lindsay Wagner
  Lindsay Jean Wagner (born June 22, 1949) is an American actress. She is probably best known for her portrayal of Jaime Sommers in the 1970s television series The Bionic Woman (for which she won an Emmy award), though she has maintained a lengthy career in a variety of other film and television productions since.
  Wagner was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Marilyn Louise (née Thrasher) and William Nowels Wagner. When she was seven years old, her parents divorced and her mother moved with her to the northeast Los Angeles neighborhood of Eagle Rock, near Pasadena. Another move with her mother and stepfather (Ted Ball) brought her to Portland, Oregon, where she attended David Douglas High School and appeared in a number of school plays. She studied at the University of Oregon.
  Wagner worked as a model in Los Angeles, and gained some television experience by appearing as a hostess in Playboy After Dark. In 1971, she signed a contract with Universal Studios and worked as a contract player in various Universal productions. Her prime-time network television debut was in the series Adam-12, and she went on to appear in a dozen other Universal shows including Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law, The F.B.I., Sarge, and Night Gallery. Between 1971-75, she appeared in five episodes of Universal's Marcus Welby, M.D., and two episodes of The Rockford Files. In 1973, Wagner branched into film roles when Universal cast her in Two People (Wagner's first feature film and first lead role). She also starred in the film The Paper Chase (for Twentieth Century Fox) the same year.
  
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  Liza Minnelli
  Liza May Minnelli (born March 12, 1946) is an American actress and singer. She is the daughter of singer and actress Judy Garland and film director Vincente Minnelli.
  Already established as a nightclub singer and musical theatre actress, she first attracted critical acclaim for her dramatic performances in the movies The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970); Minnelli then rose to international stardom for her appearance as Sally Bowles in the 1972 film version of the Broadway musical Cabaret, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. She later made a great star turn in Arthur (1981), co-starring with Dudley Moore (in the title role) and Sir John Gielgud, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as Arthur's snobbish but loveable butler.
  While film projects such as Lucky Lady, A Matter of Time and New York, New York were less favorably received than her stage roles, Minnelli became one of the most versatile, highly regarded and best-selling entertainers in television, beginning with Liza with a Z in 1972, and on stage in the Broadway productions of Flora the Red Menace, The Act and The Rink. Minnelli also toured internationally and did shows such as Liza Minnelli: At Carnegie Hall, Frank, Liza & Sammy: The Ultimate Event, and Liza Live from Radio City Music Hall.
  
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  Louis Armstrong
  Louis Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana.
  Coming to prominence in the 1920s as an "inventive" cornet and trumpet player, Armstrong was a foundational influence in jazz, shifting the music's focus from collective improvisation to solo performance. With his instantly recognizable deep and distinctive gravelly voice, Armstrong was also an influential singer, demonstrating great dexterity as an improviser, bending the lyrics and melody of a song for expressive purposes. He was also greatly skilled at scat singing (vocalizing using sounds and syllables instead of actual lyrics).
  Renowned for his charismatic stage presence and voice almost as much as for his trumpet-playing, Armstrong's influence extends well beyond jazz music, and by the end of his career in the 1960s, he was widely regarded as a profound influence on popular music in general. Armstrong was one of the first truly popular African-American entertainers to "cross over," whose skin-color was secondary to his music in an America that was severely racially divided. It allowed him socially acceptable access to the upper echelons of American society that were highly restricted for a black man. While he rarely publicly politicized his race, often to the dismay of fellow African-Americans, he was privately a strong supporter of the Civil Rights movement in America.^{[citation needed]}
  
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  Lucille Ball
  Lucille Désirée Ball (August 6, 1911 - April 26, 1989) was an American comedienne, film, television, stage and radio actress, model, film and television executive, and star of the sitcoms I Love Lucy, The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, Here's Lucy and Life With Lucy. One of the most popular and influential stars in the United States during her lifetime, with one of Hollywood's longest careers, especially on television, Ball began acting in the 1930s, becoming both a radio actress and B-movie star in the 1940s, and then a television star during the 1950s. She was still making films in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1962, Ball became the first woman to run a major television studio, Desilu, which produced many successful and popular television series.
  Ball was nominated for an Emmy Award thirteen times, and won four times. In 1977 Ball was among the first recipients of the Women in Film Crystal Award. She was the recipient of the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1979, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kennedy Center Honors in 1986 and the Governors Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in 1989.
  
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  Mamie Eisenhower
  Mamie Geneva Doud Eisenhower (November 14, 1896 – November 1, 1979) was the wife of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and First Lady of the United States from 1953 to 1961.
  Mamie married Dwight Eisenhower in 1916, the young couple moved frequently between military quarters in many postings, from Panama to the Philippines. As First Lady, she entertained a wide range of foreign dignitaries, who reacted well to her confident style and splendid costumes. On leaving the White House, she made clear her disapproval of the incoming Kennedys.
  Mamie Eisenhower spent her retirement and widowhood at the family farm at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The Hollywood star Mamie Van Doren was so named by Universal Studios in her honor.
  
  
  Born in Boone, Iowa and named, in part, after the popular song Lovely Lake Geneva, Mamie Geneva Doud was the second child born to John Sheldon Doud, a meatpacking executive, and his wife, the former Elivera Mathilde Carlson. She grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Colorado Springs, Colorado, Denver, Colorado, and the Doud winter home in San Antonio, Texas. Her father, who retired at age 36, ran a meatpacking company founded by his father, Doud & Montgomery ("Buyers of Live Hogs"), and had investments in Illinois and Iowa stockyards. Her mother was a daughter of Swedish immigrants. She had three sisters: Eleanor Carlson Doud, Eda Mae Doud, and Mabel Frances "Mike" Doud.
  
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  Mariette Hartley
  Mary Loretta "Mariette" Hartley (born June 21, 1940) is an American character actress.
  Hartley was born in Weston, Connecticut, the daughter of Mary Ickes “Polly” (née Watson), a manager and saleswoman, and Paul Hembree Hartley, an account executive. Her maternal grandfather was psychologist John B. Watson (through Watson’s daughter from his first marriage) and her maternal grandmother was the sister of politician Harold L. Ickes.
  In her 1990 autobiography Breaking the Silence, written with Anne Commire, Hartley talked about her struggles with psychological problems, pointing directly at Watson’s practical application of his theories as the source of the dysfunction in his family. She has also spoken in public about her experience of bipolar disorder, and was a founder of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. In 2009, Hartley spoke at a suicide and violence prevention forum about her father's suicide.
  Hartley began her career in her teens as a stage actress, coached and mentored by the noted Eva Le Gallienne. Her film career began with Ride the High Country (1962), a western with actors Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, and directed by Sam Peckinpah. In 1962, she appeared in an episode of Gunsmoke as a mountain girl. She also had a supporting role in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964).
  
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  Mary Tyler Moore
  Mary Tyler Moore (born December 29, 1936) is an American actress, primarily known for her roles in television sitcoms. Moore is best known for The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–77), in which she starred as Mary Richards, a 30-something single woman who worked as a local news producer in Minneapolis, and for her earlier role as Laura Petrie (Dick Van Dyke's wife) on The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–66). She also appeared in a number of films, most notably 1980's Ordinary People, in which she played a role that was the polar opposite of the television characters she had portrayed, and for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. Moore has also been active in charity work and various political causes, particularly around the issues of animal rights and Diabetes mellitus type 1. Mary Tyler Moore was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the beginning of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and also dealt with alcoholism, which was treated in the 1980s. In May 2011, Moore underwent elective brain surgery to remove a benign meningioma.
  
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  Meg Ryan
  Margaret Mary Emily Anne Hyra (born November 19, 1961), professionally known as Meg Ryan, is an American actress and producer. After minor roles in film and television, Ryan became a movie star in 1989 when she appeared in When Harry Met Sally.... Over the next 15 years she played leading roles in several romantic comedy films, including Sleepless in Seattle (1993), French Kiss (1995), Addicted to Love (1997), City of Angels (1998), You've Got Mail (1998), and Kate & Leopold (2001), grossing a total of over $870 million worldwide. At that time, TIME critic Richard Corliss called her "the current soul of romantic comedy".
  Ryan (née Hyra) was born in Fairfield, Connecticut, the daughter of Susan Jordan (née Duggan) – a former actress and English teacher – and Harry Hyra, a math teacher. Both Susan and Harry were raised in Fairfield, Connecticut. Harry was an all state basketball player. Ryan's mother had appeared in one television commercial and later worked briefly as an assistant casting director in New York City. She supported and encouraged her young daughter's study of acting. Ryan has two sisters, Dana and Annie, and a brother, musician Andrew Hyra, of the band Billy Pilgrim. Her parents divorced in 1976, when she was 15 years old.
  
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  Meryl Streep
  Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep (born June 22, 1949) is an American actress who has worked in theatre, television, and film. She is widely regarded as one of the most talented actors of all time.
  Streep made her professional stage debut in The Playboy of Seville (1971), before her screen debut in the television movie Deadliest Season (1977). In that same year, she made her film debut with Julia (1977). Both critical and commercial success came quickly with roles in The Deer Hunter (1978) and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), the former giving Streep her first Academy Award nomination and the latter her first win. She later won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performances in Sophie's Choice (1982) and The Iron Lady (2011).
  Streep has received 17 Academy Award nominations, winning three, and 26 Golden Globe nominations, winning eight, more nominations than any other actor in the history of either award. Her work has also earned her two Emmy Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, a Cannes Film Festival award, five New York Film Critics Circle Awards, two BAFTA awards, an Australian Film Institute Award, five Grammy Award nominations, and a Tony Award nomination, amongst others. She was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2004 and the Kennedy Center Honor in 2009 for her contribution to American culture through performing arts, the youngest actress in each award's history.
  
  wn.com/Meryl_Streep
• Michael Learned
  Michael Learned (born April 9, 1939) is an American actress known for her role as Olivia Walton on The Waltons.
  Learned was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Elizabeth Duane "Betti" (née Hooper) and Bruce Learned, a diplomat. Her maternal grandfather was an attaché for the United States Embassy in Rome. She lived on a Connecticut farm with her five sisters for the first ten years of her life. She was named Michael because her father, a diplomat, had wanted and expected to have a boy and had selected the name Michael in advance. When it was clear he had a daughter rather than a son, he decided to keep the name he had chosen.^{[citation needed]} When she was 11, Learned moved to Austria, where her father worked for the U.S. State Department. At this time, she attended Arts Educational School, Tring now Tring Park School for the Performing Arts in Tring, Hertfordshire, England. During this time, she discovered the theatre and decided to make acting her life's work. In a 2002 article she wrote for Daily Word, a publication of the Unity Church, Learned states that at the time she was cast in The Waltons, she had "hit rock bottom". It was then, at age 32, that Learned realized she was an alcoholic. Taking herself to ex-husband Peter Donat's cabin on the California coast, Learned states she decided to "get sober" and that her time there was the beginning of a spiritual journey. Learned further stated in the article that she has been sober since 1977.
  
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  Michelle Pfeiffer
  Michelle Marie Pfeiffer ( /ˈfaɪfər/; born April 29, 1958) is an American actress. She made her film debut in 1980 in The Hollywood Knights, but first garnered mainstream attention with her performance in Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983). Pfeiffer has won numerous awards for her work. She received six consecutive Golden Globe Award nominations, winning the Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama award in 1990 for The Fabulous Baker Boys. She also won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Dangerous Liaisons, and the Silver Bear for Best Actress for Love Field, and has been nominated for three Academy Awards for the same films.
  Pfeiffer rose to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s with critically acclaimed performances in the films Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Married to the Mob (1988), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), The Russia House (1990), Frankie and Johnny (1991), Love Field (1992), Batman Returns (1992), and The Age of Innocence (1993).
  She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on August 6, 2007. The star is located at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard and is recognised as STAR 2,345.
  
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  Norman Bel Geddes
  Norman Melancton Bel Geddes (April 27, 1893 – May 8, 1958) was an American theatrical and industrial designer who focused on aerodynamics.
  Bel Geddes was born Norman Melancton Geddes in Adrian, Michigan, and raised in New Philadelphia, Ohio, the son of Flora Luelle (née Yingling) and Clifton Terry Geddes, a stockbroker. When he married a woman named Helen Belle Schneider in 1916, they incorporated their names to Bel Geddes. Their daughter was actress Barbara Bel Geddes.
  He began his career with set designs for Aline Barnsdall's Los Angeles Little Theater in the 1916-1917 season, then in 1918 as the scene designer for the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He designed and directed various theatrical works, from Arabesque and The Five O'Clock Girl on Broadway to an ice show entitled It Happened on Ice produced by Sonja Henie. He created set designs for the film Feet of Clay (1924), directed by Cecil B. DeMille, designed costumes for Max Reinhardt, and created the sets for the Broadway production of Sidney Kingsley's Dead End (1935).
  
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  Otto Preminger
  Otto Ludwig Preminger (5 December 1905 – 23 April 1986) was an Austro–Hungarian-American theatre and film director.
  After moving from the theatre to Hollywood, he directed over 35 feature films in a five-decade career. He rose to prominence for stylish film noir mysteries such as Laura (1944) and Fallen Angel (1945). In the 1950s and 1960s, he directed a number of high-profile adaptations of popular novels and stage works. Several of these pushed the boundaries of censorship by dealing with topics which were then taboo in Hollywood, such as drug addiction (The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955), rape (Anatomy of a Murder, 1959) and homosexuality (Advise & Consent, 1962). He was twice nominated for the Best Director Academy Award. He also had a few acting roles.
  Preminger was born in 1905 in Wiznitz (Vyzhnytsia), a town west of Czernowitz, northern Bukovyna, in today's Ukraine, then part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire, into the Jewish family of Markus and Josefa Preminger. Preminger's father was born in 1877 in Galicia, at a time when it was part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire. As an Attorney General of Austria–Hungary, Markus was a proud public prosecutor on the cusp of an extraordinary career defending the interests of the Emperor Franz Josef. The couple provided a stable home life for Preminger and his brother Ingo.
  
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  Patricia Wettig
  Patricia Wettig (born December 4, 1951) is an American actress and playwright. She is best known for her roles in the television series Thirtysomething, Prison Break and Brothers & Sisters. In film, she is known for her role in City Slickers.
  Wettig, one of four sisters (Pam, Patricia, Phylis and Peggy), was born in Milford, Ohio, the daughter of Florence (née Morlock) and Clifford Neal Wettig, a high school basketball coach. She attended Ohio Wesleyan University and graduated from Temple University in 1975. She returned to her studies later in life and received an M.F.A. in playwriting from Smith College in 2001. Wettig is married to actor and producer Ken Olin; they have two children, Clifford (b. 1983) and Roxanne (b. 1985). Their daughter, Roxanne (better known as "Roxy"), was a principal cast member of the MTV series The City, and also had a recurring role on the ABC Drama Brothers and Sisters.
  Although Wettig has acted in a number of films (including City Slickers, Guilty by Suspicion, and The Langoliers), she is best known for her work on television. She received critical acclaim (and a number of awards) for her role as Nancy Weston on ABC's thirtysomething. Her portrayal of Nancy's cancer struggle attracted considerable acclaim and attention. She also portrayed Joanne McFadden on the television program St. Elsewhere. In addition, Wettig appeared in a number of popular television programs during the 1980s and 1990s including L.A. Law, Frasier, Hill Street Blues, and Remington Steele.
  
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  Peggy Ann Garner
  Peggy Ann Garner (February 3, 1932 – October 16, 1984) was an American actress.
  A successful child actor, Garner played her first film role in 1938 and won the Academy Juvenile Award for her work in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). Featured roles in such films as Black Widow (1954) did not further her attempts to establish herself in mature film roles, and although she progressed to theatrical work, she made relatively few acting appearances as an adult.
  Born in Canton, Ohio, Garner's mother pushed her into the limelight and entered her in talent quests while Garner was still a child. By 1938 she had made her first film appearance, and over the next few years she appeared in several more films, including Jane Eyre (1943) and The Keys of the Kingdom (1944). She reached the height of her success at the age of 13 in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), winning an Academy Juvenile Award largely on the basis of this performance.
  Like many child performers, Garner was unable to make a successful transition into adult film roles. She guest-starred steadily in television roles, beginning in the early 1950s and continuing through the 1960s. She was a regular panelist on the NBC series Who Said That?, along with H. V. Kaltenborn and Boris Karloff. After her film career ended, she ventured into stage acting and had some success but also worked as a real estate agent and fleet-car executive between acting jobs in order to support herself. In 1978, she surprised film audiences after a decade away from any feature film when she appeared as the pregnant aunt of the bride 'Candice Ruteledge' in the critically acclaimed ensemble Robert Altman film, "A Wedding", in 1978. Her final screen performance was a small part in a made-for-television feature, "This Year's Blonde", in 1980.
  
  wn.com/Peggy_Ann_Garner
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  Piper Laurie
  Piper Laurie (born Rosetta Jacobs; January 22, 1932) is an American actress of stage and screen known for her roles in the television series Twin Peaks and the films The Hustler, Carrie, and Children of a Lesser God, all of which brought her Academy Award nominations. In 1991, she won a Golden Globe Award for her portrayal of Catherine Martell in Twin Peaks.
  Laurie was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Charlotte Sadie (née Alperin) and Alfred Jacobs, a furniture dealer. Her grandparents were Jewish immigrants, from Poland on her father's side and Russia on her mother's. Her father moved the family to Los Angeles, California in 1938. The young Rosetta was red-haired and naturally attractive, but socially hesitant. She attended Hebrew school, and to combat her shyness her parents provided her with weekly elocution lessons; this activity eventually led her to minor roles at nearby Universal Studios.
  In 1949, Rosetta Jacobs signed a contract with Universal Studios, in which her screen name was changed to Piper Laurie, by which she has been known professionally since then. Her breakout role was in Louisa, with Ronald Reagan (whom she dated a few times before his marriage to Nancy Davis). Several other roles followed: Francis Goes to the Races (1951, co-starring Donald O'Connor); Son of Ali Baba (1952, co-starring Tony Curtis); and Ain't Misbehavin' (1955, co-starring Rory Calhoun).
  
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  Regina Taylor
  Regina Taylor (born August 22, 1960) is an American actress and playwright. She has won several awards throughout her career, including a Golden Globe Award and NAACP Image Award.
  Taylor was born in Dallas, Texas, but starting at age 12 she went to a newly integrated school in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where she was subjected to an incident of racism by another student. The family later returned to Dallas, where she graduated from L. G. Pinkston High School in 1977.
  Her earliest professional acting roles were two made-for-television films while she was studying at Southern Methodist University: 1980's Nurse and 1981's Crisis at Central High. In the latter movie, she was praised by critic John O'Connor of The New York Times for her portrayal of Minnijean Brown, a member of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American students who braved violence and armed guards to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Her first role to gain widespread attention was that of Mrs. Carter, the drug-addicted mother of a promising young female student, in the 1989 film Lean on Me. She became well-known to the television viewing public for her role as Lilly Harper on the early 1990s TV series I'll Fly Away. This role won her a Golden Globe award for Best Actress in a Television Drama and also an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series.
  
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  Renée Zellweger
  Renée Kathleen Zellweger (born April 25, 1969) is an American actress and producer. Zellweger first gained widespread attention for her role in the film Jerry Maguire (1996), and subsequently received two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her roles as Bridget Jones in the comedy Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) (which she reprised in its sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004)), and as Roxie Hart in the musical Chicago (2002). She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the drama Cold Mountain (2003).
  She has won an Academy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards and a BAFTA Award, was named Hasty Pudding's Woman of the Year in 2009, and established herself as one of the highest-paid Hollywood actresses as of 2007.
  Zellweger was born in Katy, Texas. Her father, Emil Erich Zellweger, is from Au in the canton of St. Gallen,Switzerland, and is a mechanical and electrical engineer who worked in the oil refining business. Her mother, Kjellfrid Irene (née Andreassen), is Norwegian; of part Sámi and Kven (Finnish) descent, Kjellfrid grew up in Kirkenes and Ekkerøy, and is a nurse and midwife who moved to the United States to work as a governess for a Norwegian family in Texas. Zellweger has described herself as being raised in a family of "lazy Catholics and Episcopalians".
  
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  Richard Widmark
  Richard Weedt Widmark (December 26, 1914 – March 24, 2008) was an American film, stage and television actor.
  He was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as the villainous Tommy Udo in his debut film, Kiss of Death, for which he also won the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer. Early in his career Widmark specialized in similar villainous or anti-hero roles in films noir, but he later branched out into more heroic leading and support roles in westerns, mainstream dramas and horror films, among others.
  For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Widmark has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6800 Hollywood Boulevard. In 2002, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
  Widmark was born in Sunrise Township, Minnesota, the son of Ethel Mae (née Barr) and Carl H. Widmark. His father was of Swedish descent and his mother of English and Scottish ancestry. Widmark grew up in Princeton, Illinois, and also lived in Henry, Illinois for a short time, moving frequently because of his father's work as a traveling salesman. He attended Lake Forest College, where he studied acting and also taught acting after he graduated.
  
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  Rosalind Russell
  Rosalind Russell (June 4, 1907 – November 28, 1976) was an American actress of stage and screen, perhaps best known for her role as a fast-talking newspaper reporter in the Howard Hawks screwball comedy His Girl Friday, as well as the role of Mame Dennis in the film Auntie Mame. She won all 5 Golden Globes for which she was nominated, and was tied with Meryl Streep for wins until 2007 when Streep was awarded a sixth. Russell won a Tony Award in 1953 for Best Performance by an Actress in a Musical for her portrayal of Ruth in the Broadway show Wonderful Town (a musical based on the film My Sister Eileen, in which she also starred).
  Russell was known for playing character roles, exceptionally wealthy, dignified ladylike women, as well as for being one of the few actresses of her time who regularly played professional women, such as judges, reporters, and psychiatrists. She had a wide career span from the 1930s to the 1970s and attributed her long career to the fact that, although usually playing classy and glamorous roles, she never became a sex symbol, not being famous for her looks.
  
  wn.com/Rosalind_Russell
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  Ruby Keeler
  Ruby Keeler, born Ethel Hilda Keeler, (August 25, 1910 – February 28, 1993) was an actress, dancer and singer most famous for her on-screen coupling with Dick Powell in a string of successful early musicals at Warner Brothers, particularly 42nd Street (1933). From 1928 to 1940, she was married to singer Al Jolson. She retired from show business in the 1940s but made a widely-publicized comeback on Broadway in 1971.
  Keeler was born in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, to an Irish Catholic family, one of six siblings. Two sisters, Helen and Gertrude, had brief performing careers. Her father was a truck driver, and when she was three years old, her family packed up and moved to New York City where he knew he could get better pay. But it was not enough: there were six children, and although Keeler was interested in taking dance lessons, the family could not afford to send her.
  
  wn.com/Ruby_Keeler
• Sada Thompson
  Sada Carolyn Thompson (September 27, 1927 – May 4, 2011) was an American stage, film, and television actress.
  Born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1927 to Hugh Woodruff Thompson and his wife Corlyss (née Gibson), and raised in New Jersey, Thompson earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, after which she worked steadily in regional theatre in such plays as The Seagull, Pygmalion, Our Town, Arms and the Man, and Blithe Spirit. She received training at Pittsburgh Playhouse, where she appeared in numerous productions.
  She made her Off-Broadway debut in a 1955 production of Under Milkwood, and the following year she appeared on television in a Goodyear Television Playhouse production. She made her Broadway debut in the 1959 musical Juno. Her additional New York City stage-credits include The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, Tartuffe, and Twigs. Her stage performances won her an Obie Award, a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play, three Drama Desk Awards and two Sarah Siddons Awards (the last presented for outstanding performances in Chicago theatre). She was elected to the American Theatre Hall of Fame.^[when?]
  
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  Sally Field
  Sally Margaret Field (born November 6, 1946) is an American actress, singer, producer, director, and screenwriter. In each decade of her career, she has been known for major roles in American TV/film culture, including: in the 1960s, for Gidget (1965–66) or Sister Bertrille on The Flying Nun (1967–70); in the 1970s, for Sybil (1976), Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Norma Rae (1979); in the 1980s, for Absence of Malice (1981), Places in the Heart (1984) and Steel Magnolias (1989); in the 1990s, for Not Without My Daughter (1991), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Forrest Gump (1994) and Eye for an Eye (1996); and in the 2000s, on the TV shows ER and Brothers & Sisters (2006–11). She has also performed in numerous other roles.
  Field won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a leading role on two occasions, Norma Rae (1979) and Places in the Heart (1984). Field's professional achievements also include winning three Emmy Awards: for her role in the TV film Sybil (1976); her guest-starring role on ER in 2000; and for her starring role as Nora Holden Walker on ABC's series Brothers & Sisters in 2007. She has also won two Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress. She also won the Best Female Performance Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, for Norma Rae (1979).
  
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  Sandra Bullock
  Sandra Annette Bullock ( /ˈbʊlək/; born July 26, 1964) is an American actress and producer who rose to fame in the 1990s after roles in successful films such as Demolition Man, Speed, The Net, A Time to Kill, and While You Were Sleeping. In the new millennium she appeared in such films as Miss Congeniality, The Lake House, and Crash, the third of which received critical acclaim. In 2007, she was ranked as the 14th richest female celebrity with an estimated fortune of US$85 million. In 2009, Bullock starred in two of the more financially successful films of her career, The Proposal and The Blind Side. Bullock was awarded a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress, a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role, and the Academy Award for Best Actress, for her role as Leigh Anne Tuohy in The Blind Side. She is listed in the 2012 edition of the Guinness Book Of World Records as the highest-paid actress, with $56 million.
  Sandra Annette Bullock was born in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Her father, John W. Bullock (born 1925), was a United States Army employee and part-time voice coach from Birmingham, Alabama, and her mother, Helga D. Meyer (1942–2000), was a German opera singer and voice teacher. Bullock's maternal grandfather was a rocket scientist from Nuremberg, Germany. John Bullock, then in charge of the Army's Military Postal Service in Europe, was stationed in Nuremberg when he met his wife. They married in Germany, soon moving to Arlington, where John Bullock worked with the Army Materiel Command, before becoming a contractor for The Pentagon.
  
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  Sarah Jessica Parker
  Sarah Jessica Parker (born March 25, 1965) is an American actress and producer.
  She is best known for her leading role as Carrie Bradshaw on the HBO television series Sex and the City (1998–2004), for which she won four Golden Globe Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and two Emmy Awards. She played the same role in the 2008 feature film based on the show, Sex and the City: The Movie, and in its sequel, Sex and the City 2, which opened on May 26, 2010. Parker has also appeared in many other films.
  Sarah Jessica Parker was born in Nelsonville, Ohio, the daughter of Barbara Parker (née Keck), a nursery school operator and teacher, and Stephen Parker, an entrepreneur and journalist. She was one of a total of eight children from her parents' marriage and her mother's second marriage (her full siblings include actors Timothy Britten Parker and Pippin Parker). After her parents' divorce, her mother married Paul Forste, a truck driver and account executive who was a part of Parker's life from an early age. Parker's father, a native of Brooklyn, was of Eastern European Jewish background; his family's original surname was "Bar-Kahn" ("son of Kohen"). Parker's mother was of English and German descent; through her mother, Parker is descended from Esther Elwell, one of the accused during the Salem witch trials. Parker has identified culturally and ethnically with her father's religion, Judaism, although she has had no religious training. She has said that even while her family lived in Cincinnati, her mother emulated a New York lifestyle.
  
  wn.com/Sarah_Jessica_Parker
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  Scarlett Johansson
  Scarlett Johansson (born November 22, 1984) is an American actress, model and singer.
  Johansson made her film debut in North (1994) and was later nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead for her performance in Manny & Lo (1996). She rose to further prominence with her roles in The Horse Whisperer (1998) and Ghost World (2001). She shifted to adult roles with her performances in Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003) and Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003), for which she won a BAFTA award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Both films earned her Golden Globe Award nominations.
  A role in A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004) earned Johansson a third Golden Globe for Best Actress nomination. Johansson garnered another Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress with her role in Woody Allen's Match Point (2005). She went on to star in two further Allen movies: Scoop (2006) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Johansson has appeared in other successful films, such as Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006). Johansson played popular Marvel comic book character Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff in the films Iron Man 2 (2010) and The Avengers (2012).
  
  wn.com/Scarlett_Johansson
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  Sela Ward
  Sela Ann Ward (born July 11, 1956) is an American movie and television actress, perhaps best known for her television roles as Teddy Reed on the American TV series Sisters (1991–96) and as Lily Manning on Once and Again (1999–2002). In 2010 she joined the CBS drama CSI: NY, as a series regular, playing Jo Danville.
  Ward was born in Meridian, Mississippi, the oldest of four children of Annie Kate (née Boswell), a housewife who died of ovarian cancer on February 12, 2002, and Granberry Holland "G.H." Ward, Jr., an electrical engineer who died on January 13, 2009. She has a younger sister, Jenna, and two brothers, Brock and Granberry (Berry) III.
  Ward attended the University of Alabama, where she performed as one of the Crimson Tide cheerleaders, was homecoming queen, joined Chi Omega sorority, and double-majored in art and advertising.
  While working in New York City as a storyboard artist for multimedia presentations, the 5'7" (170 cm) Ward began modeling to supplement her income. She was recruited by the Wilhelmina agency and was soon featured in television commercials promoting Maybelline cosmetics. Ward eventually moved to California to pursue acting and landed her first film role in the Burt Reynolds vehicle, The Man Who Loved Women, released in 1983. Her first regular role in a television drama series (as a beautiful socialite on Emerald Point N.A.S.) followed in the same year. Ward subsequently played variations on the same character in films and television guest spots throughout the 1980s, most notably opposite Tom Hanks in 1986's Nothing in Common. This pattern persisted until she aggressively pursued and won the role of the bohemian alcoholic Teddy Reed on Sisters, for which she received her first Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 1994.
  
  wn.com/Sela_Ward
• 
  Sharon Gless
  Sharon Marguerite Gless (born May 31, 1943) is an American character actress of stage, film and television, who is best known for her roles as Maggie Philbin on Switch (1975–1978), as Sgt. Christine Cagney in the police procedural drama series Cagney & Lacey (1982–1988) and as Debbie Novotny in the Showtime cable television series Queer as Folk (2000–2005). She is currently playing Madeline Westen on Burn Notice. Gless has won two Emmy Awards and has received 10 Emmy nominations, has been nominated 7 times for the Golden Globe (winning two in 1986 and 1991) and has received her own Star on the Walk of Fame in 1995.
  A fifth-generation Californian, Sharon Gless was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Marjorie McCarthy and sportswear manufacturing executive, Dennis J. Gless. Her maternal grandfather was Neil McCarthy, a prominent Los Angeles attorney for Howard Hughes who also had a large clientele of major film studio executives and actors. Wanting to become an actress, she sought her grandfather's advice and he told her: "It's a filthy business. You stay out of it" but a few years later when she spoke to him again about acting he encouraged her, and gave her money for acting class. She worked as a secretary for the advertising agencies Grey Advertising and Young & Rubicam, and then for the independent movie production companies Sassafras Films and General Film Corporation. After deciding to switch to acting, Gless took classes and in 1974 signed a 10-year contract with Universal Studios. Near the end of her contract, she was identified in the media as the last of the studio contract players — a salaried, Old Hollywood apprentice system which Universal was the last to employ.
  
  wn.com/Sharon_Gless
• 
  Shirley Booth
  Shirley Booth (August 30, 1898 – October 16, 1992) was an American actress.
  Primarily a theatre actress, Booth's Broadway career began in 1925. Her most significant success was as Lola Delaney, in the drama Come Back, Little Sheba, for which she received a Tony Award in 1950. She made her film debut, reprising her role in the 1952 film version, and won both the Academy Award for Best Actress and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her performance. Despite her successful entry into films, she preferred stage acting, and made only four more films.
  From 1961 until 1966, she played the title role in the sitcom Hazel, for which she won two Emmy Awards, and was acclaimed for her performance in the 1966 television production of The Glass Menagerie. She retired in 1974.
  Booth was born as Marjory Ford, the daughter of Albert James Ford and Virginia Martha Wright. Her childhood was spent in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn where she attended P.S. 152. By the time of the 1910 census in April 1910, aged 11, she was known as Thelma by her family. She had only one sibling, a younger sister, Jean Valentine Ford, who died January 23, 2010.
  
  wn.com/Shirley_Booth
• 
  Shirley MacLaine
  Shirley MacLean Beaty (born April 24, 1934), known professionally as Shirley MacLaine, is an American film and theater actress, singer, dancer, activist and author, well known for her beliefs in New Age spirituality and reincarnation. She has written a large number of autobiographical works, many dealing with her spiritual beliefs as well as her Hollywood career. She was nominated for an Academy Award five times before winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1983 for her role in Terms of Endearment. Her younger brother is Warren Beatty.
  Named after Shirley Temple, MacLaine was born in Richmond, Virginia. Her father, Ira Owens Beaty, was a professor of psychology, public school administrator, and real estate agent, and her mother, Kathlyn Corinne (née MacLean), was a drama teacher originally from Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada; MacLaine's grandparents were also teachers.The family was devoutly Baptist. Her uncle (her mother's brother-in-law) was A.A. MacLeod, a Communist member of the Ontario legislature in the 1940s.
  
  wn.com/Shirley_MacLaine
• 
  Sigourney Weaver
  Sigourney Weaver (born Susan Alexandra Weaver; October 8, 1949) is an American actress. She is known for her role of Ellen Ripley in the four Alien films: Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien Resurrection, for which she has received worldwide recognition.
  Other notable roles include Dana Barrett in Ghostbusters and its sequel Ghostbusters II, Gorillas in the Mist: The Story of Dian Fossey, Working Girl, Death and the Maiden, The Ice Storm, Galaxy Quest, Snow Cake, Prayers for Bobby and Grace Augustine in Avatar.
  Weaver has been nominated for three Academy Awards, three BAFTA Awards (one win), two Emmy Awards, six Saturn Awards (two wins) and six Golden Globe Awards, winning two in 1988 for Gorillas in the Mist and Working Girl, becoming the first person ever to have won two acting Golden Globe Awards in the same year. She was also nominated for a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award.
  Her 1986 Academy Award nomination for Aliens is considered as a landmark in the recognition of science fiction, action, and horror genres, as well as a major step in challenging the gender role in cinema. Weaver progressively received notoriety for her numerous contributions to the science fiction film history (including minor roles in successful works such as Futurama, WALL-E and Paul) and gained the nickname of "The Sci-Fi Queen".
  
  wn.com/Sigourney_Weaver
• 
  Susan Dey
  Susan Dey (born December 10, 1952) is an American actress, known primarily for her roles in film and television. Her more prominent parts came as elder daughter, Laurie Partridge, on the 1970s sitcom The Partridge Family, and as Grace Van Owen, a California assistant district attorney and judge on the dramatic series, L.A. Law, a role she played from 1986 to 1992.
  Dey was born Susan Hallock Smith in Pekin, Illinois, the daughter of Gail (née Dey), a nurse who died of pneumonia when Dey was eight years old, and Robert Smith, a newspaper editor. She adopted her mother's maiden name as her professional name. She graduated from Fox Lane High School in Bedford, New York.
  Dey was a model before starring as Laurie Partridge in the television series The Partridge Family from 1970–1974. She was 17 years old when she won the part and had no previous acting experience.
  In a 1977 made-for-television movie, Mary Jane Harper Cried Last Night, Dey portrayed a disturbed young mother with serious psychological problems, who begins to take them out on her toddler daughter. Also in 1977, Dey starred opposite William Katt in a romance film, First Love, directed by Joan Darling. The movie is based upon the story, Sentimental Education, by Harold Brodkey.
  
  wn.com/Susan_Dey
• 
  Susan Sarandon
  Susan Sarandon (born Susan Abigail Tomalin; October 4, 1946) is an American actress. She has worked in movies and television since 1969, and won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the 1995 film Dead Man Walking. She had also been nominated for the award for four films before that and has received other recognition for her work. She is also noted for her social and political activism for a variety of liberal causes.
  Sarandon was born Susan Abigail Tomalin in New York City to a Roman Catholic family. She is the eldest of nine children of Lenora Marie (née Criscione) and Phillip Leslie Tomalin, who worked as an advertising executive, television producer, and nightclub singer during the big band era. Her father was of English, Irish, and Welsh ancestry, his English ancestors being from Hackney in London. On her mother's side, she is of Italian descent, with ancestors from the regions of Tuscany and Sicily. Sarandon attended Roman Catholic schools.^{[citation needed]} She grew up in Edison, New Jersey, where she graduated from Edison High School in 1964. She then attended The Catholic University of America, from 1964 to 1968, where she began dating actor Chris Sarandon whom she married in 1967.
  
  wn.com/Susan_Sarandon
• 
  Tennessee Williams
  Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983) was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs. His professional career lasted from the mid 1930s until his death in 1983, and saw the creation of many plays that are regarded as classics of the American stage. Williams adapted much of his best known work for the cinema.
  Williams received virtually all of the top theatrical awards for his works of drama, including several New York Drama Critics' Circle awards, a Tony Award for best play for The Rose Tattoo (1951) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). In 1980 he was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter and is today acknowledged as one of the most accomplished playwrights in the history of English speaking theater.
  Theater scholar Charlotte Canning, of the University of Texas at Austin where Williams' archives are located, has said, "There is no more influential 20th-century American playwright than Tennessee Williams... He inspired future generations of writers as diverse as Suzan-Lori Parks, Tony Kushner, David Mamet and John Waters, and his plays remain among the most produced in the world."
  
  wn.com/Tennessee_Williams
• 
  Thornton Wilder
  Thornton Niven Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975) was an American playwright and novelist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes—for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the two plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth—and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day.
  Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Amos Parker Wilder, a US diplomat, and Isabella Niven Wilder. All of the Wilder children spent part of their childhood in China because of their father's work.
  Thornton Wilder's older brother, Amos Niven Wilder, was Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School, a noted poet, and foundational to the development of the field theopoetics. Amos was also a nationally ranked tennis player who competed at the Wimbledon tennis championships in 1922. His sister, Isabel Wilder, was an accomplished writer. Both of his other sisters, Charlotte Wilder, a poet, and Janet Wilder Dakin, a zoologist, attended Mount Holyoke College and were excellent students. Additionally, Wilder had a twin brother who died at birth.
  
  wn.com/Thornton_Wilder
• 
  Tyne Daly
  Tyne Daly (born February 21, 1946) is an American stage and screen actress, widely known for her work as Detective Mary Beth Lacey in the television series Cagney & Lacey and as Maxine Gray in the television series Judging Amy. She is also known for her role as Alice Henderson in television series Christy. She has won six Emmy Awards for her television work, and the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical in Gypsy: A Musical Fable in 1989.
  Daly was born Ellen Tyne Daly in Madison, Wisconsin, into a creative family; she is the daughter of actor James Daly. Her younger brother is actor Timothy Daly. Her sister-in-law, Amy Van Nostrand, is also an actress. She was raised in Westchester County, New York, where she started her career by performing in summer stock with her family; she earned her Equity Card at age 15. She studied at Brandeis University and The American Musical and Dramatic Academy.
  Daly was married to actor/director Georg Stanford Brown from 1966 to 1990.
  
  wn.com/Tyne_Daly
• 
  Valerie Harper
  Valerie Harper (born August 22, 1939) is an American actress, known for her role as Rhoda Morgenstern on the 1970s television show The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and for her starring roles on the sitcoms Rhoda (a spin-off of The Mary Tyler Moore Show) and Valerie.
  Harper was born at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern, Rockland County, New York. Her Canadian-born mother, Iva (née McConnell), was a nurse, and her father, Howard Donald Harper, was a lighting salesman. Harper is of French and British ancestry, and was raised Roman Catholic, although at an early age she "quit" the church. The family moved every two years because of her father's promotions, living in South Orange, New Jersey. St. Andrews in Pasadena, California (where Harper attended the school St. Andrews); Monroe, Michigan, at age 10, where she attended St. Mary's Academy; then Ashland, Oregon "at [age] 11 to 13"; and then Jersey City, New Jersey from eighth grade through age 18. When her family returned to Oregon, Harper remained in the New York City area to study ballet. She has an older sister, Leah; a younger brother, Don (originally Merrill); and a half-sister, Virginia, from her father's second marriage. Harper based her future character Rhoda Morgenstern both on her Italian stepmother, Angela Basilico, and Penny Ann Green (née Joanna Greenberg from Brooklyn), with whom she danced in the Broadway musical Wildcat.
  
  wn.com/Valerie_Harper
• 
  Whoopi Goldberg
  Whoopi Goldberg ( /ˈhwʊpi/, born Caryn Elaine Johnson; November 13, 1955) is an American comedienne, actress, singer-songwriter, political activist, author and talk show host.
  Goldberg made her film debut in The Color Purple (1985) playing Celie, a mistreated black woman in the Deep South. She received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress and won her first Golden Globe Award for her role in the film. In 1990, she starred as Oda Mae Brown, a psychic helping a slain man (Patrick Swayze) find his killer in the blockbuster film Ghost. This performance won her a second Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Notable later films include Sister Act and Sister Act 2, The Lion King, Made in America, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Girl, Interrupted and Rat Race. She is also acclaimed for her roles as the bartender Guinan in Star Trek: The Next Generation and as Terry Doolittle in Jumpin' Jack Flash. More recently, she had performed the voice of Stretch in Toy Story 3 and made an appearance in Glee as Carmen Tibideaux.
  
  wn.com/Whoopi_Goldberg
• Wikipedia Persondata
  wn.com/Wikipedia_Persondata
• Yoko Shimada
  Yoko Shimada (島田 陽子, Shimada Yōko^?, born May 17, 1953 in Kumamoto, Japan) is a Japanese actress. She is best known to Western audiences for her portrayal of Mariko in the 1980 miniseries Shōgun. She was the only female member of Shogun's massive cast of Japanese actors shown speaking English, for which she relied on a dialogue coach, as she was not fluent in the language at the time. Her English improved greatly during the production, however, allowing her to work in a few English language films during the 1980s and 1990s.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Yoko_Shimada

Dallas ()

Genres

• Comedy
• Drama

Taglines:

Quotes:

• Raj Kapoor
• Teenadelic
• G.N.A.
• She's ★
• Come on David
• Twinky
• Cosmic Baby
• G.N.A. (demo version)
• Your New Girlfriend
• Lorsque tu dors

• Seems Like Sun
• Brand New Rocket
• Timewaste
• If My Soul Turns Taxfree
• Set Alone
• March
• Raj Kapoor
• Justitia
• Kirjade kuningas
• Thunderstorm
• Lift
• Delay Lama / Tervenemine

• Let's Split
• Police
• Wendy's Outside
• Your New Girlfriend
• Lorsque Tu Dors
• Raj Kapoor
• Teenadelic
• Come on David
• Twinky
• Philosophy Will Die
• Beat the Psycho Boys
• She's a ★
• Sleeper's Entertainer
• Cosmic Baby
• Six for Fix
• Intro

• Raj Kapoor
• Teenadelic
• G.N.A.
• She's ★
• Come on David
• Twinky
• Cosmic Baby
• G.N.A. (demo version)

• Dubbing Good Morning
• Philosophy Will Die
• Can't Help
• Beat the Psycho Boys
• Do You Ever Graze
• Getting Better in Spring
• Silohead
• Me & Myself
• Ink
• Süsi
• She's 11