• Academy Award
• Academy Awards
• Adam West
• Albert Bassermann
• Albert S. Ruddy
• Alfred A. Knopf
• Alice Faye
• Allan Warren
• Allen Drury
• Alzheimer's disease
• American burlesque
• Anatomy of a Murder
• Ann Sothern
• Arthur Laurents
• Attorney General
• Aussig
• Austria–Hungary
• Axel Wenner-Gren
• B movie
• Batman
• Batman (TV series)
• Becket (1964 film)
• Betty Grable
• Billy Wilder
• Blacklist
• Blacklisted
• Bob Hope
• Bronx
• Bukovyna
• Burt Ward
• Cancer
• Carl Foreman
• Carlo Goldoni
• Carlo Ponti
• Carmen
• Carmen Jones (film)
• Catherine the Great
• Censorship
• Centennial Summer
• Clifton Webb
• Constance Bennett
• Cornel Wilde
• Czernowitz
• Daisy Kenyon
• Dalton Trumbo
• Dana Andrews
• Darryl F. Zanuck
• Dorothy Dandridge
• Dorothy Gish
• Drug addiction
• Eli Wallach
• Emperor Franz Josef
• Erik Lee Preminger
• Ernst Lubitsch
• Eugene Pallette
• Exodus (1960 film)
• Faber and Faber
• Feature film
• Film director
• Film noir
• Find a Grave
• Firing Line
• Forbidden Paradise
• Forever Amber (film)
• Foster Hirsch
• Franz Kafka
• Fred Zinnemann
• Freddie Bartholomew
• Gary Cooper
• Gene Tierney
• George Gershwin
• George Sanders
• Gilbert Miller
• Gottfried von Einem
• Graham Greene
• Graz
• Gregory Ratoff
• Greta Garbo
• Groucho Marx
• Gypsy Rose Lee
• Hal B. Wallis
• Harry Horner
• HBO Pictures
• Henry Fonda
• Heroin
• Hollywood blacklist
• Homosexuality
• Howard G. Minsky
• Hurry Sundown (film)
• In Harm's Way
• Ingo Preminger
• Irving Thalberg
• Irwin Winkler
• Israel
• Jack the Ripper
• Jean Renoir
• Jeanne Crain
• Jerome Kern
• Jew
• Joan Bennett
• Joan Crawford
• John Barrymore
• John D. Voelker
• John M. Stahl
• Joseph Schenck
• Julius Caesar (play)
• Kathleen Winsor
• Kidnapped (film)
• Kramer vs. Kramer
• Laird Cregar
• Lana Turner
• Laura (1944 film)
• Laura (novel)
• Laurence Olivier
• Laurette Taylor
• Lawrence Tibbett
• Le Havre
• Legion of Decency
• Leon Uris
• Lilia Skala
• Linda Darnell
• Luise Rainer
• Lulu (opera)
• Lyle Wheeler
• Madeleine Carroll
• Mady Christians
• Margin for Error
• Marion Davies
• Mark Antony
• Marriage
• Martin Poll
• MASH (film)
• Meet Me in St. Louis
• Michael Caine
• Michael Douglas
• Milton Berle
• Mr. Freeze
• Nelson Algren
• New York
• New York City
• New York City Opera
• Nora Gregor
• Norma Shearer
• Normandie
• Noël Coward
• Nunnally Johnson
• Opera
• Ordinary People
• Oscar Wilde
• Otto Preminger
• Paris
• Pearl Harbor
• Peggy Cummins
• Philip D'Antoni
• Phyllis Curtin
• Pola Negri
• Porgy and Bess
• Portal Biography
• Portal Film
• Portal Theatre
• Production Code
• Rape
• River of No Return
• Robert Chartoff
• Rocky
• Ronald L. Schwary
• Rosebud (film)
• Rouben Mamoulian
• Ruth Warrick
• Saint Joan (film)
• Sam Spiegel
• Samuel Fuller
• Samuel Goldwyn
• Saul Bass
• Simone Simon
• Skidoo (film)
• Stalag 17
• Stanley R. Jaffe
• Stripper
• Styria
• Such Good Friends
• Taboo
• Tallulah Bankhead
• The 13th Letter
• The Cardinal
• The Champ
• The Exorcist (film)
• The Fan (1949 film)
• The Godfather
• The King and I
• The Moon Is Blue
• The New Yorker
• The Trial
• Trailer (promotion)
• Ukraine
• United States
• University of Vienna
• Variety (magazine)
• Vera Caspary
• Vienna
• Vincent Price
• Vyzhnytsia
• Wallace Beery
• Walter Brennan
• Walter Mirisch
• Whirlpool (film)
• Wikipedia Persondata
• William Dieterle
• William Goetz
• William Peter Blatty
• World War I
• WWOR-TV
• 
  

• 
  Israel
  Coordinates: 31°N 35°E / 31°N 35°E / 31; 35
  Israel, officially the State of Israel ( /ˈɪzriːəl/ or  /ˈɪzreɪəl/; Hebrew: מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל‎, Medīnat Yisrā'el, IPA: [me̞diˈnät jisʁäˈʔe̞l] ( listen); Arabic: دَوْلَة إِسْرَائِيل‎, Dawlat Isrāʼīl, IPA: [dawlat ʔisraːˈʔiːl]), is a parliamentary republic in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan and the West Bank in the east, Egypt and the Gaza Strip on the southwest, and the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea to the south, and it contains geographically diverse features within its relatively small area. Israel is defined as a Jewish and Democratic State in its Basic Laws and is the world's only Jewish-majority state.
  Following the adoption of a resolution by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 29 November 1947 recommending the adoption and implementation of the United Nations plan to partition Palestine, on 14 May 1948 David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization and president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel, a state independent from the British Mandate for Palestine. Neighboring Arab states invaded the next day in support of the Palestinian Arabs. Israel has since fought several wars with neighboring Arab states, in the course of which it has occupied the West Bank, Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. Portions of these territories, including east Jerusalem, have been annexed by Israel, but the border with the neighboring West Bank has not yet been permanently defined.^{[neutrality is disputed]} Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, but efforts to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have so far not resulted in peace.
  
  wn.com/Israel
• 
  Le Havre
  Coordinates: 49°29′24″N 0°06′00″E / 49.49000°N 0.100000°E / 49.49000; 0.100000
  Le Havre (French pronunciation: [lə avʁ]) is a city in the Seine-Maritime department of the Haute-Normandie region in France. It is situated in north-western France, on the right bank of the mouth of the river Seine on the English Channel. Le Havre is the most populous commune in the Haute-Normandie region, although the total population of the greater Le Havre conurbation is smaller than that of Rouen. It is also the second largest subprefecture in France (after Reims). Its port is the second busiest in France (after that of Marseille). Since 1974 it has been the see of the diocese of Le Havre.
  Le Havre was provisionally renamed Franciscopolis in the documents, after King Francis I, who developed the city in 1517. A chapel known as Notre-Dame-de-Grâce ("Our Lady of Grace") existed at the site before the city was established, and the denomination lent its name to the port, to be called Le Hable de Grâce (already in 1489, "the harbor of Grace"). The shortened name Le Havre, as used in modern times, simply translates as "the port" or "the harbour".
  
  wn.com/Le_Havre
• 
  New York
  New York (/njuː ˈjɔrk/; locally IPA: [nɪu ˈjɔək] or [nuː ˈjɔɹk] ( listen)) is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. New York is the 27th most extensive, the 3rd most populous, and the 7th most densely populated of the 50 United States. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east. The state has a maritime border with Rhode Island east of Long Island, as well as an international border with the Canadian provinces of Ontario to the west and north, and Quebec to the north. The state of New York is often referred to as New York State to distinguish it from New York City.
  New York City, with a population of over 8.1 million, is the most populous city in the United States. Alone, it makes up over 40 percent of the population of New York state. It is known for its status as a center for finance and culture and for its status as the largest gateway for immigration to the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, New York City is also a destination of choice for many foreign visitors. Both the state and city were named for the 17th century Duke of York, James Stuart, future James II and VII of England and Scotland.
  
  wn.com/New_York
• 
  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
• 
  Paris
  Coordinates: 48°51′24″N 2°21′03″E / 48.8567°N 2.3508°E / 48.8567; 2.3508
  Paris (ⁱ/ˈpærɨs/; French: [paʁi] ( listen)) is the capital and largest city of France. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region (or Paris Region, French: Région parisienne). As of January 2008 the city of Paris, within its administrative limits (the 20 arrondissements) largely unchanged since 1860, has an estimated population of 2,211,297 and a metropolitan population of 12,089,098, and is one of the most populated metropolitan areas in Europe. Paris was the largest city in the Western world for about 1,000 years, prior to the 19th century, and the largest in the entire world between the 16th and 19th centuries.
  Paris is today one of the world's leading business and cultural centres, and its influences in politics, education, entertainment, media, fashion, science, and the arts all contribute to its status as one of the world's major global cities. It hosts the headquarters of many international organizations such as UNESCO, the OECD, the International Chamber of Commerce or the European Space Agency. Paris is considered one of the greenest and most liveable cities in Europe. It is also one of the most expensive.
  
  wn.com/Paris
• 
  Styria
  Styria (/ˈstaɪəriə/; German: Steiermark, German pronunciation: [ˈʃtaɪ.ɐmaʁk] ( listen), Slovene: Štajerska, Hungarian: Stájerország) is a state or Bundesland, located in the southeast of Austria. In area it is the second largest of the nine Austrian federated states, covering 16,401 km². It borders Slovenia as well as the other Austrian states of Upper Austria, Lower Austria, Salzburg, Burgenland, and Carinthia. The population (as of 2011) was 1,210,700. The capital city is Graz (255,000 inhabitants).
  The term "Upper Styria" (German: Obersteiermark) used by an Austrian refers to the northern and northwestern parts of the federal-state (districts Liezen, Murau, Judenburg, Knittelfeld, Leoben, Bruck an der Mur, and Mürzzuschlag). The term "West Styria" (Weststeiermark) is used for the districts to the west of Graz (Voitsberg, Deutschlandsberg, western part of the district Leibnitz), the districts east of Graz (Weiz, Hartberg, Feldbach, Fürstenfeld, and Radkersburg) are referred to as "East Styria" (Oststeiermark). The western and eastern parts of the district Graz-Umgebung may or may not be considered parts of West and East Styria, respectively. The southern parts of the Duchy of Styria, which have formed part of Slovenia since 1918, were (and sometimes colloquially still are) referred to as "Lower Styria" (Untersteiermark; Slovene: Štajerska).
  
  wn.com/Styria
• 
  Ukraine
  Ukraine (ⁱ/juːˈkreɪn/ yew-KRAYN; Ukrainian: Україна, transliterated: Ukrayina, [ukrɑˈjinɑ]; Russian: Украина; Crimean Tatar: Ukraina) is a country in Central and Eastern Europe. Ukraine borders the Russian Federation to the east and northeast, Belarus to the northwest, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to the west, Romania and Moldova to the southwest, and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south and southeast, respectively. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after the Russian Federation.
  According to a popular and well established theory, the medieval state of Kievan Rus was established by the Varangians in the 9th century as the first historically recorded East Slavic state which emerged as a powerful nation in the Middle Ages until it disintegrated in the 12th century. By the middle of the 14th century, Ukrainian territories were under the rule of three external powers—the Golden Horde, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Kingdom of Poland. After the Great Northern War (1700–1721) Ukraine was divided between a number of regional powers and, by the 19th century, the largest part of Ukraine was integrated into the Russian Empire with the rest under Austro-Hungarian control. A chaotic period of incessant warfare ensued, with several internationally recognized attempts at independence from 1917 to 1921, following World War I and the Russian Civil War. Ukraine emerged from its own civil war, and on December 30, 1922 Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian SSR's territory was enlarged westward during the civil war shortly before, and after World War II, and further south in 1954 with the Crimea transfer. In 1945, the Ukrainian SSR became one of the founding members of the United Nations.
  
  wn.com/Ukraine
• 
  United States
  The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
  At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km²) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.
  
  wn.com/United_States
• 
  Vienna
  Vienna ( /viːˈɛnə/; German:  Wien (help·info) [viːn]) is the capital and largest city of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million (2.4 million within the metropolitan area, more than 25% of Austria's population), and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre. It is the 9th-largest city by population in the European Union. Until the beginning of the 20th century it was the largest German speaking city in the world, and before the first world war and the splitting of the Austro-Hungarian empire the city had 2 million inhabitants. Vienna is host to many major international organizations, including the United Nations and OPEC. The city lies in the east of Austria and is close to the borders of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. These regions work together in a European Centrope border region. Along with nearby Bratislava, Vienna forms a metropolitan region with 3 million inhabitants. In 2001, the city centre was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
  
  wn.com/Vienna
• 
  Vyzhnytsia
  Vyzhnytsia (Ukrainian: Вижниця, German: Wischnitza or Wiznitz, Romanian: Vijniţa, Russian: Вижница, translit. Vizhnitsia, Yiddish: וויזשניץ Vizhnitz) is a town located on the Cheremosh River in the Chernivtsi Oblast of western Ukraine. It is the administrative center of Vyzhnytsia Raion.
  Coordinates: 48°15′N 25°11.5′E / 48.25°N 25.1917°E / 48.25; 25.1917
  
  
  
  wn.com/Vyzhnytsia

• 
  Adam West
  William West Anderson (born September 19, 1928), better known by the stage name Adam West, is an American actor best known for his lead role in the Batman TV series on the ABC TV network and the 1966 eponymous feature film. He is currently known for portraying eccentric characters, as well as his voice work on animated series such as The Fairly OddParents and as the fictionalized character of the same name on Family Guy.
  West was born William West Anderson in Seattle, Washington to Otto West Anderson and Audrey V. Speer. The family moved to Walla Walla after his younger brother John was born. He attended Walla Walla High School during his freshman and sophomore years, and later enrolled in Lakeside School in Seattle. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literature and a minor in Psychology from Whitman College in Walla Walla where he was a member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity and participated on the speech and debate team.
  Later, while living in Hawaii, West landed a role as the sidekick on a children's show called El Kini Popo Show, which featured a chimp. West later took over as star of the show.
  
  wn.com/Adam_West
• 
  Albert Bassermann
  Albert Bassermann (7 September 1867 – 15 May 1952) was a German stage and screen actor.
  Bassermann began his acting career in 1887 in his birthplace, Mannheim. He then spent four years at the Hoftheater in Meiningen. He then moved to Berlin. From 1899, he worked for Otto Brahm. He began work at the Deutsches Theater from 1904, and in 1909 worked at the Lessing Theatre. From 1909 to 1915, Bassermann worked with Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater Berlin.
  Bassermann was among the first German theatre actors who worked in film. In 1913, he played the main role of the lawyer in Max Mack's Der Andere (The Other), after the play by Paul Lindau. He also worked with German silent film directors Richard Oswald, Ernst Lubitsch, Leopold Jessner and Lupu Pick.
  In 1933, Bassermann left Germany and lived in the United States from 1938.
  Annija Simsone who played opposite Bassermann in the Neue Wiener Beuhne Theater in the 1920s wrote the following in her autobiography:"During the Hitler era, Bassermann did not perform in Germany, though Adolf Hitler personally held him in high regard; Elsa was Jewish. Bassermann was told that if he wanted to continue to perform in Germany, he would have to get divorced. He did not get divorced, but Elsa and he went to Switzerland instead."
  
  wn.com/Albert_Bassermann
• 
  Alice Faye
  Alice Faye (May 5, 1915 – May 9, 1998) was an American actress and singer, called by The New York Times "one of the few movie stars to walk away from stardom at the peak of her career." She is remembered first for her stardom at 20th Century Fox and, later, as the radio comedy partner of her husband, bandleader and comedian Phil Harris. She is also often associated with the Academy Award–winning standard "You'll Never Know", which she introduced in the 1943 musical film Hello, Frisco, Hello.
  Born Alice Jeanne Leppert in New York City, she was the daughter of a New York police officer of German descent and his Irish-American wife, Charles and Alice Moffit Leppert. Faye's entertainment career began in vaudeville as a chorus girl (she failed an audition for the Ziegfeld Follies when it was revealed she was too young), before she moved to Broadway and a featured role in the 1931 edition of George White's Scandals. By this time, she had adopted her stage name and first reached a radio audience on Rudy Vallée's The Fleischmann Hour (1932–1934), where she may have met her future husband and comedy partner, Phil Harris.
  
  wn.com/Alice_Faye
• 
  Allan Warren
  Michael Allan Warren (born 26 October 1948 in Wimbledon, London) is an English society-photographer, writer and former actor. His work encompasses works of many celebrities during the late 1960s, 70s and into the 80s, such as members of the British Royal Family, influential politicians and artists in both music and literature as well as some of the most important people in Hollywood at their time.
  After growing up in post-war London, Warren attended Terry's Juveniles, a stage school based in the Drury Lane Theatre. It was during this time that he attended auditions through which he received several assignments. One such piece of work was as a child presenter in "The Five O'clock Club", which afforded him the opportunity to associate with a variety of people, including a young Marc Bolan (then performing as "Toby Tyler") who would later employ Warren as his first manager.
  Warren started his photographic career at the age of 17 when he was acting in Alan Bennett's play Forty Years On with John Gielgud in the West End at the Apollo Theatre. Around this time Warren bought his first second-hand camera and started to take photographs of his fellow actors. His first major assignment was when his friend Mickey Deans asked him to cover his wedding to Judy Garland, which marked the beginning of Warren's work as a professional photographer. Upon travelling to New York for personal reasons, he attended an audition for the Broadway production of Minnie's Boys. However, he later declined the role offered to him in favour of returning to London and pursuing photography as his vocation.
  
  wn.com/Allan_Warren
• Allen Drury
  Allen Stuart Drury (September 2, 1918 – September 2, 1998) was a U.S. novelist. He wrote the 1959 novel Advise and Consent, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1960.
  Born on 2 September 1918 in Houston, Texas, to Alden Monteith Drury (1895-1975), a real estate broker and insurance agent, and Flora Allen (1894-1973), a legislative representative for the California Parent-Teacher Association. Drury was a direct descendant of Hugh Drury (1616-1689) and Lydia Rice (1627-1675), daughter of Edmund Rice (1594-1663), all of whom were early immigrants to Massachusetts Bay Colony.
  Allen Stuart Drury grew up in Porterville, California and earned his B.A. at Stanford University in 1939. In the 1990s, he would write three novels inspired by his experiences at Stanford: Toward What Bright Glory?, Into What Far Harbor?, and Public Men. After graduating from Stanford, Drury went to work for the Tulare Bee in Porterville, where he won a Sigma Delta Chi Award for editorial writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. Drury enlisted in the U.S. Army on 25 Jul 1942 in Los Angeles and trained as an infantry soldier.
  
  wn.com/Allen_Drury
• 
  Ann Sothern
  Ann Sothern (born Harriet Arlene Lake, January 22, 1909 – March 15, 2001) was an American film and television actress whose career spanned six decades.
  Sothern was born in Valley City, North Dakota, but was raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she graduated from Minneapolis Central High School in 1926. Sothern left home and began her film career as an extra in the 1927 film Broadway Nights at the age of 18. During 1929 and 1930, she appeared as a chorus girl in such films as The Show of Shows and Whoopee! (as one of the "Goldwyn Girls"). She appeared on Broadway and had a trained voice, occasionally singing in films.
  On Broadway in 1931, she had leading roles in America's Sweetheart (135 performances in which she sang "I've Got Five Dollars" and "We'll Be The Same") and in Everybody's Welcome (139 performances).
  In 1934, Sothern signed a contract with Columbia Pictures, but after two years the studio released her. In 1936, she was signed by RKO Radio Pictures and after a string of films that failed to attract an audience, Sothern left RKO and was signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, making her first film for them in 1939.
  
  wn.com/Ann_Sothern
• Arthur Laurents
  Arthur Laurents (July 14, 1917 – May 5, 2011) was an American playwright, stage director and screenwriter.
  After writing scripts for radio shows after college and then training films for the U.S. Army during World War II, Laurents turned to writing for Broadway, producing a body of work that includes West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), Hallelujah, Baby! (1967) and La Cage Aux Folles (1983), and directing some of his own shows and other Broadway productions.
  His early film scripts include Rope (1948) for Alfred Hitchcock, followed by Anastasia (1956), Bonjour Tristesse (1958), The Way We Were (1973) and The Turning Point (1977).
  Born Arthur Levine, Laurents was the son of a lawyer and a schoolteacher who gave up her career when she married. He was born and raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, a borough of New York City, New York, the elder of two children, and attended Erasmus Hall High School. His sister Edith suffered from chorea as a child.
  His paternal grandparents were Orthodox Jews, and his mother's parents, although born Jewish, were atheists. His mother kept a kosher home for her husband's sake, but was lax about attending synagogue and observing the Jewish holidays. His Bar Mitzvah marked the end of Laurents's religious education and the beginning of his rejection of all fundamentalist religions, although he continued to identify himself as Jewish. However, late in life he admitted to having changed his last name from Levine to the less Jewish-sounding Laurents, "to get a job."
  
  wn.com/Arthur_Laurents
• 
  Batman
  Batman is a fictional character, a comic book superhero created by artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger. The character first appeared in Detective Comics #27 (May 1939), and since then has appeared primarily in publications by DC Comics. Originally referred to as "The Bat-Man" and still referred to at times as "The Batman", he is additionally known as "The Caped Crusader", "The Dark Knight", and "The World's Greatest Detective," among other titles.
  In the original version of the story and the vast majority of retellings, Batman's secret identity is Bruce Wayne, an American millionaire (later billionaire) playboy, industrialist, and philanthropist. Having witnessed the murder of his parents as a child, he swore revenge on criminals, an oath tempered with the greater ideal of justice. Wayne trains himself both physically and intellectually and dons a bat-themed costume in order to fight crime. Batman operates in the fictional American Gotham City, assisted by various supporting characters including his crime-fighting partner, Robin, his butler Alfred Pennyworth, the police commissioner Jim Gordon, and occasionally the heroine Batgirl. He fights an assortment of villains such as the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler, Two-Face, Poison Ivy and Catwoman. Unlike most superheroes, he does not possess any superpowers; he makes use of intellect, detective skills, science and technology, wealth, physical prowess, martial arts skills, an indomitable will, fear, and intimidation in his continuous war on crime.
  
  wn.com/Batman
• 
  Betty Grable
  Elizabeth Ruth "Betty" Grable (December 18, 1916 – July 2, 1973) was an American actress, dancer, and singer.
  Grable was celebrated for having the most beautiful legs in Hollywood and studio publicity widely dispersed photos featuring them. Her iconic bathing suit poster made her the number-one pin-up girl of the World War II era. It was later included in the Life magazine project "100 Photos that Changed the World". Hosiery specialists of the era often noted the ideal proportions of her legs as thigh (18.5"), calf (12"), and ankle (7.5"). Grable's legs were famously insured by her studio for $1,000,000 with Lloyds of London.
  Grable appeared in several smash-hit musical films in the 1940s, most notable: Mother Wore Tights in 1947, with frequent co-star Dan Dailey. She came to prominence in 1939 when she signed with Twentieth Century-Fox and signed on to appear opposite Ethel Merman in the Broadway musical Du Barry Was a Lady. But it was not until she was called back to Hollywood to replace Fox's musical queen, Alice Faye, in Down Argentine Way, that she became a household name. Throughout her career, Grable was typecast in her stereotype-musical film roles, and when her career faltered in the 1950s, she found it hard to reinvent herself as a serious-trained actress.
  
  wn.com/Betty_Grable
• 
  Billy Wilder
  Billy Wilder (22 June 1906 – 27 March 2002) was an Austro-Hungarian born American filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, artist, and journalist, whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age. Wilder is one of only five people to have won Academy Awards as producer, director, and writer for the same film (The Apartment).
  Wilder became a screenwriter in the late 1920s while living in Berlin. After the rise of Nazi Party, Wilder, who was Jewish, left for Paris, where he made his directorial debut. He relocated to Hollywood in 1933, and in 1939 he had a hit when he co-wrote the screenplay to the screwball comedy Ninotchka. Wilder established his directorial reputation after helming Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir he co-wrote with mystery novelist Raymond Chandler. Wilder earned the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the adaptation of a Charles R. Jackson story The Lost Weekend, about alcoholism. In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the critically acclaimed Sunset Boulevard.
  
  wn.com/Billy_Wilder
• 
  Bob Hope
  Bob Hope, KBE, KCSG, KSS (born Leslie Townes Hope; May 29, 1903 – July 27, 2003) was an English-born American comedian and actor who appeared in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in radio, television and movies. He was also noted for his work with the US Armed Forces and his numerous USO shows entertaining American military personnel. Throughout his long career, he was honored for his humanitarian work. In 1996, the U.S. Congress honored Bob Hope by declaring him the "first and only honorary veteran of the U.S. armed forces." Bob Hope appeared in or hosted 199 known USO shows.
  Hope was born in Eltham, London, England, the fifth of seven sons. His English father, William Henry Hope, was a stonemason from Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, and his Welsh mother, Avis Townes, was a light opera singer from Barry who later worked as a cleaning woman. She married William Hope in April 1891 and the couple set up home at 12 Greenwood Street in the town, then moved to Whitehall and St George in Bristol, before eventually moving to Cleveland, Ohio in 1908. The family emigrated to the United States aboard the SS Philadelphia, and passed inspection at Ellis Island on March 30, 1908. Hope became a U.S. citizen in 1920 at the age of 17. In a 1942 legal document, Hope's legal name is given as Lester Townes Hope. His name on the Social Security Index is also listed as Lester T. Hope. His name as registered at birth was Leslie Towns [sic] Hope.
  
  wn.com/Bob_Hope
• 
  Burt Ward
  Burt Ward (born Bert John Gervis, Jr.; July 6, 1945) is an American television actor and activist. He is best known for his portrayal of Robin in the television series Batman (1966–68) and its theatrical film spin-off.
  Ward was born Bert John Gervis, Jr., in Los Angeles, California. At the age of two, Ward was listed in the magazine Strange as It Seems as the world's youngest professional ice skater.^{[citation needed]} Growing up, he was an avid reader of comic books like Superman and Superboy, and enjoyed the action-adventure show Adventures of Superman.^{[citation needed]} He acquired the nickname "Sparky" in youth, possibly from the sparks his skates used to kick up during his routines or energetic nature. He excelled in high school sport activities such as football, track, and wrestling; he was also a member of the chess club and earned a black belt in Taekwondo.^{[citation needed]} After graduation, he enrolled in college, while working part-time for his father's real estate company.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Burt_Ward
• Carl Foreman
  Carl Foreman, CBE (July 23, 1914 – June 26, 1984) was an American screenwriter and film producer who wrote the notable film High Noon. He was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses in the 1950s.
  Born in Chicago, Illinois to a working-class Jewish family, he studied at the University of Illinois. As a student in the 1930s he became an advocate of revolutionary socialism and joined the American Communist Party.
  After graduating from university, Carl Foreman moved to Hollywood where he used his writing talents and training to work as a screenwriter. From 1941 to 1942 he was involved with writing three films but his career was interrupted by service in the United States military during World War II. Returning to writing commercial scripts, by the end of the 1940s, Foreman had become one of the top writers in Hollywood whose successes included the 1949 Kirk Douglas film Champion for which Foreman received an Academy Award nomination.
  In 1950, he adapted Brian Hooker's English translation of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac for the 1950 film version, which starred Jose Ferrer, and for which Ferrer won the Academy Award for Best Actor.
  
  wn.com/Carl_Foreman
• 
  Carlo Goldoni
  Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni (25 February 1707 – 6 February 1793) was an Italian playwright and librettist from the Republic of Venice. His works include some of Italy's most famous and best-loved plays. Audiences have admired the plays of Goldoni for their ingenious mix of wit and honesty. His plays offered his contemporaries images of themselves, often dramatizing the lives, values, and conflicts of the emerging middle classes. Though he wrote in French and Italian, his plays make rich use of the Venetian language, regional vernacular, and colloquialisms. Goldoni also wrote under the pen name and title "Polisseno Fegeio, Pastor Arcade," which he claimed in his memoirs the "Arcadians of Rome" bestowed on him.
  There is an abundance of autobiographical information on Goldoni, most of which comes from the introductions to his plays and from his Memoirs. However, these memoirs are known to contain many errors of fact, especially about his earlier years.
  In these memoirs, he paints himself as a born comedian, careless, light-hearted and with a happy temperament, proof against all strokes of fate, yet thoroughly respectable and honorable.
  
  wn.com/Carlo_Goldoni
• Carlo Ponti
  Carlo Ponti (11 December 1912 – 10 January 2007) was an Italian film producer with over 140 production credits, and the husband of Italian movie star Sophia Loren.
  Ponti was born in Magenta, Lombardy and studied law at the University of Milan. He joined his father's law firm in Milan and became involved in the film business through negotiating contracts. Ponti attempted to establish a film industry in Milan in 1940 and produced Mario Soldati's Piccolo Mondo Antico there, starring Alida Valli, in her first notable role. The film dealt with the Italian struggle against the Austrians for the inclusion of northeastern Italy into the Kingdom of Italy during the Risorgimento. The film was successful, because it was easy to see "the Austrians as Germans" during World War II. As a result, he was briefly jailed for undermining relations with Nazi Germany.
  Ponti accepted an offer from Lux Film in Rome in 1941, where he produced a series of commercially successful films featuring the comedian Totò. In 1954 he had his greatest artistic success with the production of Federico Fellini's La strada. However, Fellini denied Ponti's role in its success and said that "La Strada was made in spite of Ponti and De Laurentiis". He produced Visconti's Boccaccio '70 in 1962, Marriage Italian Style in 1964, and Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow in 1965. He produced his most popular and financially successful film, David Lean's Doctor Zhivago in 1965. He subsequently produced three notable films with Michelangelo Antonioni, Blowup in 1966, Zabriskie Point in 1970 and The Passenger in 1974.
  
  wn.com/Carlo_Ponti
• 
  Catherine the Great
  Catherine II, also known as Catherine the Great (Russian: Екатерина II Великая, Yekaterina II Velikaya; German: Katharina die Große), Empress of Russia (2 May [O.S. 21 April] 1729 – 17 November [O.S. 6 November] 1796), was the most renowned and the longest-ruling female leader of Russia, reigning from 9 July [O.S. 28 June] 1762 until her death at the age of 67. She was born in Stettin, Pomerania, Prussia as Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg, and came to power following a coup d'état and the assassination of her husband, Peter III, at the end of the Seven Years' War. Russia was revitalised under her reign, growing larger and stronger than ever and becoming recognised as one of the great powers of Europe.
  In both her accession to power and in rule of her empire, Catherine often relied on her noble favourites, most notably Grigory Orlov and Grigory Potemkin. Assisted by highly successful generals such as Pyotr Rumyantsev and Alexander Suvorov, and admirals such as Fyodor Ushakov, she governed at a time when the Russian Empire was expanding rapidly by conquest and diplomacy. In the south, the Crimean Khanate was crushed following victories over the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish wars, and Russia colonised the vast territories of Novorossiya along the coasts of the Black and Azov Seas. In the west, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, ruled by Catherine's former lover, king Stanisław August Poniatowski, was eventually partitioned, with the Russian Empire gaining the largest share. In the east, Russia started to colonise Alaska, establishing Russian America.
  
  wn.com/Catherine_the_Great
• 
  Clifton Webb
  Clifton Webb (November 19, 1889 – October 13, 1966) was an American actor, dancer, and singer known for his Oscar-nominated roles in such films as Laura, The Razor's Edge, and Sitting Pretty. In the theatrical world he was known for his appearances in the plays of Noël Coward, notably Blithe Spirit, as well as career on Broadway in a number of very successful musical revues.
  Originally called Webb Parmelee Hollenbeck, Webb was born in a rural part of Marion County, Indiana, which would, in 1906, become Beech Grove, a self-governing city entirely surrounded by Indianapolis. As a result, virtually all printed sources give the larger city as his place of birth. He was the only child of Jacob Grant Hollenbeck (1867 – May 2, 1939), the ticket-clerk son of a grocer from an Indiana farming family, and his wife, the former Mabel A. Parmelee (aka "Parmalee" or "Parmallee"; March 24, 1869 – October 17, 1960), the daughter of David Parmelee, a railroad conductor. The couple married in Kankakee, Illinois on January 18, 1888, and separated in 1891, shortly after their son's birth.
  
  wn.com/Clifton_Webb
• 
  Constance Bennett
  Constance Campbell Bennett (October 22, 1904 – July 24, 1965) was an American actress.
  She was born in New York City, the daughter of actor Richard Bennett and actress Adrienne Morrison, whose father was the stage actor Lewis Morrison (Morris W. Morris), a wealthy performer of English and Spanish ancestry. Constance's sister, actress Joan Bennett, spoke of her famous acting family and their background in her autobiography "The Bennett Playbill." Constance's other sister was actress/dancer Barbara Bennett.
  She started off with a spell in a convent but decided to go into the family business. Independent, cultured, ironic and outspoken, Constance, the first Bennett sister to enter motion pictures, appeared in New York-produced silent movies before a meeting with Samuel Goldwyn led to her Hollywood debut in Cytherea (1924).
  She abandoned a burgeoning career in silents for marriage to Philip Plant in 1925; She resumed her film career after divorce, with the advent of talking pictures (1929), and with her delicate blonde features and glamorous fashion style, quickly became a popular film star.
  
  wn.com/Constance_Bennett
• 
  Cornel Wilde
  Cornel Wilde (October 13, 1912 – October 16, 1989) was an American actor and film director.
  Kornél Lajos Weisz was born in 1912 in Prievidza, Hungary (now Slovakia), although his year and place of birth are usually and inaccurately given as 1915 in New York City. His Hungarian Jewish parents were Vojtech Weisz (Americanized to Louis Bela Wilde) and Renée Mary Vid. He was named for his paternal grandfather, and upon arrival in the U.S. at age 7 in 1920, his name was Americanized to Cornelius Louis Wilde.
  A talented linguist and an astute mimic, he had an ear for languages which became apparent later in his acting career. Wilde attended the City College of New York as a pre-med student, completing the four-year course in three years and winning a scholarship to the Physicians and Surgeons College at Columbia University.
  He qualified for the United States fencing team prior to the 1936 Summer Olympic Games, but quit the team just prior to the games in order to take a role in the theater. In preparation for an acting career, he and his new wife Marjory Heinzen (later to be known as Patricia Knight) shaved years off their ages, three for him and five for her. As a result, most publicity records and subsequent sources wrongly indicate a 1915 birth for Wilde.
  
  wn.com/Cornel_Wilde
• 
  Dalton Trumbo
  James Dalton Trumbo (December 9, 1905 – September 10, 1976) was an American screenwriter and novelist. As one of the Hollywood Ten, he refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947 during the committee's investigation of Communist influences in the motion picture industry. Trumbo won two Academy Awards while blacklisted; one was originally given to a front writer, and one was awarded to Robert Rich, Trumbo's pseudonym.
  Blacklisting effectively ended in 1960 when it lost credibility. Trumbo was publicly given credit for two blockbuster films: Otto Preminger made public that Trumbo wrote the screenplay for the smash hit, Exodus, and Kirk Douglas publicly announced that Trumbo was the screenwriter of Spartacus. Further, President-elect John F. Kennedy crossed picket lines to see the movie.
  His son Christopher Trumbo wrote a play based on his letters during the period of the blacklist, entitled Red, White and Blacklisted (2003), produced in New York in 2003. He adapted it as a film, adding material from documentary footage, Trumbo (2007).
  
  wn.com/Dalton_Trumbo
• 
  Dana Andrews
  Dana Andrews (January 1, 1909 – December 17, 1992) was an American film actor. He was one of Hollywood's major stars of the 1940s, and continued acting, though generally in less prestigious roles, into the 1980s.
  He was born Carver Dana Andrews on a farmstead outside Collins, Covington County, Mississippi, the third of nine children of Charles Forrest Andrews, a Baptist minister, and his wife Annis (née Speed). The family subsequently moved to Huntsville, Texas, where his younger siblings (including actor Steve Forrest) were born.
  Andrews attended college at Sam Houston State University and also studied business administration in Houston, Texas, working briefly as an accountant for Gulf & Western^{[citation needed]} . In 1931, he travelled to Los Angeles, California seeking opportunities as a singer. He worked at various jobs to earn a living, including pumping gas at a filling station in Van Nuys. One of his employers believed in him and paid for his studies in opera and also at the Pasadena Playhouse, a theater and acting school.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Dana_Andrews
• 
  Dorothy Dandridge
  Dorothy Jean Dandridge (November 9, 1922 – September 8, 1965) was an American actress and popular singer, and was the first African-American to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. She performed as a vocalist in venues such as the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater.
  After several minor bit parts in films, Dandridge landed her first noted film role in Tarzan's Peril (starring Lex Barker), in 1951. Dandridge won her first starring role in 1953, playing a teacher in a low-budget film with a nearly all-black cast, Bright Road, released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
  In 1954, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Carmen Jones, and in 1959 she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for Porgy and Bess. In 1999, she was the subject of the HBO biopic Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, starring Halle Berry as Dandridge. She has been recognized on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
  
  wn.com/Dorothy_Dandridge
• 
  Dorothy Gish
  Dorothy Elizabeth Gish (March 11, 1898 – June 4, 1968) was an American actress, and the younger sister of actress Lillian Gish.
  Gish was born in Dayton, Ohio. She had an older sister, Lillian. The Gish sisters' mother, Mary Robinson McConnell "Gish", supported the family after her husband, James Leigh Gish, abandoned the family. When they were old enough, Dorothy and Lillian were brought into their mother's act, and they also modeled. In 1912, their childhood friend, actress Mary Pickford, introduced them to director D.W. Griffith, and the sisters began acting at the Biograph Studios. Dorothy and Lillian Gish both debuted in Griffith's An Unseen Enemy. Dorothy would go on to star in over 100 short films and features, many of them with Lillian.
  Linda Arvidson, Griffith's wife recalled in her autobiography, When The Movies Were Young:
  
  wn.com/Dorothy_Gish
• 
  Eli Wallach
  Eli Herschel Wallach (born December 7, 1915) is an American film, television and stage actor who gained fame in the late 1950s. For his performance in Baby Doll he won a BAFTA Award for Best Newcomer and a Golden Globe nomination. Among his most famous roles are Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Calvera in The Magnificent Seven. Other portrayals include Don Altobello in The Godfather Part III, Cotton Weinberger in The Two Jakes, and Arthur Abbott in The Holiday. He has remained active well into his nineties, with roles in recent movies such as Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and The Ghost Writer.
  Wallach has received BAFTA Awards, Tony Awards and Emmy Awards for his work. He received an Honorary Academy Award at the 2nd Annual Governors Awards, presented on November 13, 2010.
  Wallach was born in Red Hook, Brooklyn at 166 Union St., the son of Polish Jewish immigrants Bertha (née Schorr) and Abraham Wallach. They were the only Jewish family in an otherwise predominantly Italian American neighborhood. His parents owned "Bertha's", a candy store. Wallach graduated in 1936 from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in history and in 1938 received a masters degree in education from the City College of New York. He gained his first Method experience at the Neighborhood Playhouse. While attending the University of Texas Wallach performed in a play with fellow students Ann Sheridan and Walter Cronkite.
  
  wn.com/Eli_Wallach
• Erik Lee Preminger
  Erik Lee Preminger (born December 11, 1944, New York City) is an American writer and actor. He has also been known as Erik Kirkland, Erik de Diego, Erik Lee, and Eric Preminger.
  His birth name was Eric Lee Kirkland or Erik Lee Kirkland, as his true paternity was not known to him until he was an adult, so he was named by his mother Gypsy Rose Lee and her then-husband, Alexander Kirkland. His father turned out to be film director Otto Preminger. He was the only nephew of actress June Havoc, Gypsy Rose Lee's younger sister.
  He wrote an autobiography about his relationship with his mother: Gypsy & Me: At Home and on the Road with Gypsy Rose Lee (Little, Brown - 1984, ISBN 0-89621-634-9) which was later re-issued as My G-String Mother: At Home and Backstage With Gypsy Rose Lee (ISBN 1-58394-096-0).
  As of 2005, Preminger was living in Orinda, California.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Erik_Lee_Preminger
• 
  Ernst Lubitsch
  Ernst Lubitsch (January 28, 1892 – November 30, 1947) was a German Americanfilm director. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch."
  In 1947 he received an Honorary Academy Award for his distinguished contributions to the art of the motion picture, and he was nominated three times for Best Director.
  Lubitsch was born in Berlin, the son of Anna (née Lindenstaedt) and Simon Lubitsch (Russian: Любич), a tailor. His family was Ashkenazi Jewish, his father born in Grodno and his mother from Wriezen-on-the-Oder, outside Berlin. He turned his back on his father's tailoring business to enter the theater, and by 1911, he was a member of Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater. He made his film debut the following year as an actor, but he gradually abandoned acting to concentrate on directing.
  In 1918, he made his mark as a serious director with Die Augen der Mumie Ma (The Eyes of the Mummy), starring Pola Negri. Lubitsch alternated between escapist comedies and large-scale historical dramas, enjoying great international success with both. His reputation as a grand master of world cinema reached a new peak after the release of his spectacles Madame Du Barry (retitled Passion, 1919) and Anna Boleyn (Deception, 1920). Both of these films found American distributorship by early 1921. They, along with Lubitsch's Carmen (released as Gypsy Blood in the U.S. in 1921) were selected by The New York Times on its list of the 15 most important movies of 1921.
  
  wn.com/Ernst_Lubitsch
• 
  Eugene Pallette
  Eugene William Pallette (July 8, 1889 – September 3, 1954) was an American actor. He appeared in over 240 silent era and sound era motion pictures between 1913 and 1946.
  An overweight man with large stomach and deep, gravelly voice, Pallette is probably best-remembered for comic character roles such as Alexander Bullock, Carole Lombard's father, in My Man Godfrey (1936), his role as Friar Tuck in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) starring Errol Flynn and his similar role as Fray Felipe in The Mark of Zorro (1940) starring Tyrone Power.
  He was born in Winfield, Kansas, the son of William Baird Pallette (1858–?) and Elnora "Ella" Jackson (1860–1906). His sister was Beulah L. Pallette (1880–1968).
  Pallette attended Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana. He then began his acting career on the stage in stock company roles, appearing for a period of six years.
  Pallette began his silent movie career as an extra in about 1911. His first credited appearance was in the one-reel short western/drama The Fugitive (1913), which was directed by Wallace Reid for Flying "A" Studios at Santa Barbara. The star was Edward Coxen.
  
  wn.com/Eugene_Pallette
• Foster Hirsch
  Foster Hirsch is the author of sixteen books on subjects related to theatre and movies. A native of California, Hirsch received his B.A. from Stanford University, and holds M.F.A, M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. Hirsch joined the English Department of Brooklyn College in 1967, and in 1973 became one of the first professors to join the school's newly established Film Department. He has also been associated with the Pine Bluff Film Festival since its inception in 1994.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Foster_Hirsch
• 
  Franz Kafka
  Franz Kafka (German pronunciation: [fʁants ˈkafka]; 3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was an influential German-language author of novels and short stories. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century. The term "Kafkaesque" has become part of the English language.
  Kafka was born to middle class, German-speaking, Jewish parents, in Prague, Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The house in which he was born, on the Old Town Square next to Prague's Church of St Nicholas, now contains a permanent exhibition devoted to the author.
  Most of Kafka's writing, including the large body of his unfinished work, was published posthumously.
  Franz Kafka was born into a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family in Prague (now the Czech Republic). His father, Hermann Kafka (1852–1931), was described as a "huge, selfish, overbearing businessman" and by Kafka himself as "a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, [and] knowledge of human nature". Hermann was the fourth child of Jacob Kafka, a shochet or ritual slaughterer, and came to Prague from Osek, a Czech-speaking Jewish village near Písek in southern Bohemia. After working as a traveling sales representative, he established himself as an independent retailer of men's and women's fancy goods and accessories, employing up to 15 people and using a jackdaw (kavka in Czech) as his business logo. Kafka's mother, Julie (1856–1934), was the daughter of Jakob Löwy, a prosperous brewer in Poděbrady, and was better educated than her husband.
  
  wn.com/Franz_Kafka
• Fred Zinnemann
  Fred Zinnemann (29 April 1907 – 14 March 1997) was an Austrian-American film director. He won two Academy Awards for directing films (From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons) in many genres, including thrillers, westerns, film noir, and play adaptations. Nineteen actors appearing in Zinnemann's films received Academy Award nominations for their performances: among that number are Frank Sinatra, Audrey Hepburn, Glynis Johns, Paul Scofield, Robert Shaw, Wendy Hiller, Jason Robards, Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda, Gary Cooper and Maximilian Schell.
  Zinnemann was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. While growing up in Austria, he wanted to become a musician, but went on to study law. While studying at the University of Vienna, he became drawn to films and eventually became a cameraman. He worked in Germany with several other beginners (Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak also worked with him on the 1929 feature People on Sunday) before going to America to study film.
  Zinnemann's penchant for realism and authenticity is evident in his first feature The Wave (1935), shot on location in Mexico with mostly non-professional actors recruited among the locals, which is one of the earliest examples of realism in narrative film. Earlier in the decade, in fact, Zinnemann had worked with documentarian Robert Flaherty, an association he considered "the most important event of my professional life".
  
  wn.com/Fred_Zinnemann
• Freddie Bartholomew
  Frederick Cecil Bartholomew (March 28, 1924 – January 23, 1992), known for his acting work as Freddie Bartholomew, was an English-American child actor. One of the most famous child actors of all time, he became very popular in 1930s Hollywood films. His most famous starring roles are in Captains Courageous (1937) and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936).
  Bartholomew was born in London, and for the title role of MGM's David Copperfield (1935), he immigrated to the United States at the age of 10 in 1934, living there the rest of his life. He became an American citizen in 1943 following World War II military service.
  Despite his great success and acclaim following David Copperfield, Bartholomew's childhood film stardom was marred by nearly constant legal battles and payouts which eventually took a huge toll on both his finances and his career. In adulthood, after World War II service, Bartholomew's film career dwindled rapidly, and he switched from performing to directing and producing in the medium of television.
  
  wn.com/Freddie_Bartholomew
• 
  Gary Cooper
  Frank James Cooper, known professionally as Gary Cooper, (May 7, 1901 – May 13, 1961) was an American film actor. He was renowned for his quiet, understated acting style and his stoic, but at times intense screen persona, which was particularly well suited to the many Westerns he made. He also excelled in sophisticated, screwball romantic comedies. His career spanned from 1925 until shortly before his death in 1961, and comprised more than one hundred films.
  Cooper received five Academy Award nominations for Best Actor, winning twice for Sergeant York and High Noon. He also received an Honorary Award in 1961 from the Academy.
  Decades later, the American Film Institute named Cooper among the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars, ranking 11th among males from the Classical Hollywood cinema period. In 2003, his performances as Will Kane in High Noon, Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees, and Alvin York in Sergeant York made the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains list, all of them as heroes.
  
  wn.com/Gary_Cooper
• 
  Gene Tierney
  Gene Eliza Tierney (November 19, 1920 – November 6, 1991) was an American film and stage actress. Acclaimed as one of the great beauties of her day, she is best remembered for her performance in the title role of Laura (1944) and her Academy Award-nominated performance for Best Actress in Leave Her to Heaven (1945).
  Other notable roles include Martha Strable Van Cleve in Heaven Can Wait (1943), Isabel Bradley Maturin in The Razor's Edge (1946), Lucy Muir in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), Ann Sutton in Whirlpool (1949), Maggie Carleton McNulty in The Mating Season (1951) and Anne Scott in The Left Hand of God (1955). Certain fragments of her film-related material and personal papers are contained in the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives, to which scholars and media experts from around the world may have full access.
  Tierney was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Howard Sherwood Tierney and Belle Lavina Taylor. She had an elder brother, Howard Sherwood “Butch” Tierney, Jr., and a younger sister, Patricia “Pat” Tierney. Her father was a prosperous insurance broker of Irish descent, her mother a former physical education instructor.
  
  wn.com/Gene_Tierney
• 
  George Gershwin
  George Gershwin (September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) was an American composer and pianist. Gershwin's compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are widely known. Among his best known works are the orchestral compositions Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris, as well as the opera Porgy and Bess.
  Born in Brooklyn to a Ukrainian father of Jewish descent and a Russian mother, Gershwin studied piano under Charles Hambitzer and composition with Rubin Goldmark and Henry Cowell. He began his career as a song plugger, but soon thereafter started composing Broadway theatre works with his brother Ira Gershwin and Buddy DeSylva. He moved to Paris in an attempt to study with Nadia Boulanger, where he began to compose An American in Paris. After returning to New York City, he wrote Porgy and Bess with Ira and author DuBose Heyward. Initially a commercial failure, Porgy and Bess is now considered one of the most important American operas of the Twentieth Century. Gershwin moved to Hollywood and composed numerous film scores until his death in 1937 from a brain tumor.
  
  wn.com/George_Gershwin
• 
  George Sanders
  George Henry Sanders (3 July 1906 – 25 April 1972) was a Russian-born English film and television actor, singer-songwriter, music composer, and author. His prominent English accent and baritone voice often led him to be cast as sophisticated but villainous characters. He is perhaps best known as Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Jack Favell in Rebecca (1940), and the malevolent tiger Shere Khan in The Jungle Book (1967). His career spanned more than 40 years.
  Sanders was born in Saint Petersburg, Imperial Russia, at number 6 Petrovski Ostrov. His English parents were Henry Sanders (1873–1961) and Margaret Sanders (1875–1967). Actor Tom Conway (1904–1967) was his elder brother. His younger sister, Margaret Sanders, was born in 1912. George was 11 when, in 1917, at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, the family went back to England. Like his brother, he attended Brighton College, a boys' independent school in Brighton, Sussex, then went on to Manchester Technical College. After graduation he worked at an advertising agency, where the company secretary, aspiring actress Greer Garson, suggested he take up a career in acting.
  
  wn.com/George_Sanders
• Gilbert Miller
  Gilbert Heron Miller (July 3, 1884 - January 2, 1969) was an American theatrical producer.
  Born in New York City, he was the son of English-born theatrical producer Henry Miller (1859–1926) and Bijou Heron, a former child actress. Raised and educated in Europe, he returned home to follow in his father's footsteps and became a highly successful Broadway producer. Miller served as director of the League of New York Theatres as well as an officer of the Actors Fund. He also managed the St James's Theatre in London.
  Nominated three times, Gilbert Miller won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1950 for his production of "The Cocktail Party." In 1965, he was given a Special Tony Award "for having produced 88 plays and musicals and for his perseverance which has helped to keep New York and theatre alive."
  Gilbert Miller died in 1969 and was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York.
  Miller's first wife was Jessie Beck, whom he divorced. They had one daughter, Dorothy.
  His second wife was Margaret Miller; they divorced.
  
  wn.com/Gilbert_Miller
• Gottfried von Einem
  Gottfried von Einem (24 January 1918 in Bern – 12 July 1996) was an Austrian composer. He is known chiefly for his operas influenced by the music of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, as well as by jazz. He also composed pieces for piano, violin and organ.
  Einem was born in Bern, Switzerland, into an Austrian diplomat family. According to Einem's publisher, his father was William von Einem, a part of the Austrian military attaché in Bern. According to another source, however, he was adopted by Einem, his natural father being the Hungarian aristocrat Count László von Hunyadi. After his school days he went to Berlin, where he studied with Boris Blacher and became a répétiteur for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Through Blacher, Einem met his first wife, Lianne von Bismarck, whom he married in 1946. They had a son, Caspar Einem (born 1948), who is now a former Austrian cabinet minister who still sits in the National Council on the Social Democratic bench. In 1953, the family moved back to Vienna.
  
  wn.com/Gottfried_von_Einem
• 
  Graham Greene
  Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore ambivalent modern world moral and political issues. Greene was notable for his ability to combine serious literary acclaim with widespread popularity.
  Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic, Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing, especially the four major Catholic novels: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair. Several works such as The Confidential Agent, The Third Man, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor also show an avid interest in the workings of international politics and espionage.
  Greene suffered from bipolar disorder, which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life. In a letter to his wife Vivien, he told her that he had "a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life", and that "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material".William Golding described Greene as "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety." Greene never received the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he finished runner-up to Ivo Andrić in 1961.
  
  wn.com/Graham_Greene
• Gregory Ratoff
  Gregory Ratoff (20 April 1897 — 14 December 1960) was a Russian-born American film director, actor and producer. His most famous role as an actor was as producer Max Fabian who feuds with star Margo Channing (Bette Davis) in All About Eve (1950).
  Ratoff was born in Samara, Russia to a Jewish family. The actor first came to the United States in 1922. He married the Russian actress Eugenie Leontovich in 1923 (they divorced in 1949). He returned to the United States, passing through Ellis Island in July 1925. On the steerage passenger list of the SS Mauretania he was listed as Gregoire Ratoff; for next of kin he listed his mother, Mme. Sophie Ratner of Paris.
  Ratoff is most noted for having directed the pro-Soviet propaganda film Song of Russia (1944) and for being one of the two producers to have purchased and developed the original rights to the James Bond franchise from Ian Fleming in 1955.
  Ratoff died on 14 December 1960 from leukemia in Solothurn, Switzerland, aged 63. His body was returned to the United States for burial at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, New York. Although divorced from Leontovich, Ratoff was buried under a gravestone marked Beloved Husband.
  
  wn.com/Gregory_Ratoff
• 
  Greta Garbo
  Greta Garbo (18 September 1905 – 15 April 1990), born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, was a Swedish film actress. Garbo was an international star and icon during Hollywood's silent and classic periods. Many of her films were sensational hits, and all but three of her twenty-four Hollywood films were profitable. Garbo was nominated four times for an Academy Award and received an honorary one in 1954 for her "luminous and unforgettable screen performances". She also won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress for both Anna Karenina (1935) and Camille (1936). In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Garbo fifth on their list of greatest female stars of all time, after Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, and Ingrid Bergman.
  Garbo launched her career with a leading role in the 1924 Swedish film The Saga of Gosta Berling. Her performance caught the attention of Louis B. Mayer, chief executive of Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), who brought her to Hollywood in 1925. She immediately stirred interest with her first silent film, Torrent, released in 1926; a year later, her performance in Flesh and the Devil, her third movie, made her an international star.
  
  wn.com/Greta_Garbo
• 
  Groucho Marx
  Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx (October 2, 1890 – August 19, 1977) was an American comedian and film and television star. He is known as a master of quick wit and widely considered one of the best comedians of the modern era. His rapid-fire, often impromptu delivery of innuendo-laden patter earned him many admirers and imitators. He made 13 feature films with his siblings the Marx Brothers, of whom he was the third-born. He also had a successful solo career, most notably as the host of the radio and television game show You Bet Your Life. His distinctive appearance, carried over from his days in vaudeville, included quirks such as an exaggerated stooped posture, glasses, cigar, and a thick greasepaint mustache and eyebrows. These exaggerated features resulted in the creation of one of the world's most ubiquitous and recognizable novelty disguises, known as "Groucho glasses", a one-piece mask consisting of horn-rimmed glasses, large plastic nose, bushy eyebrows and mustache.
  In a 1950 radio episode of You Bet Your Life, Groucho stated that he was born in a room above a butcher's shop on 78th Street in New York City.
  
  wn.com/Groucho_Marx
• 
  Gypsy Rose Lee
  Gypsy Rose Lee (January 9, 1911 – April 26, 1970) was an American burlesque entertainer famous for her striptease act. She was also an actress, author, and playwright whose 1957 memoir was made into the stage musical and film Gypsy.
  Gypsy Rose Lee was born Ellen June Hovick, (Her name was changed to Rose Louise when her sister was born and given her name, Ellen June) in Seattle, Washington, in 1911, although her mother later shaved three years off both of her daughters' ages. She was initially known by her middle name, Louise. Her mother, Rose Hovick (née Rose Evangeline Thompson), was a teenage bride fresh from a convent school when she married Norwegian-American John Olaf Hovick, who was a newspaper advertising salesman and a reporter at The Seattle Times. Louise's sister, Ellen June Hovick (better known as actress June Havoc), was born in 1913.
  After their parents divorced, the girls supported the family by appearing in Vaudeville^[when?], where June's talent shone while Louise remained in the background. At the age of 15 in December 1928, June eloped with Bobby Reed, a dancer in the act, much to her mother's displeasure, going on to a brief career in marathon dancing, which was more profitable than tap dancing at the time.
  
  wn.com/Gypsy_Rose_Lee
• Harry Horner
  Harry Horner (July 24, 1910 - December 5, 1994) was an Austrian art director who made a successful career in Hollywood. He was born in the town of Holitz, which now belongs to the Czech Republic, to German-speaking parents in Bohemia.
  He began his career working with Max Reinhardt in Vienna. When Reinhardt moved to the United States in the early 1930s, Horner went along with him. During World War II, he served as production designer and set designer for the U.S. Army Air Forces show Winged Victory.
  He won an Oscar in 1949 for his work on William Wyler's The Heiress and another in 1961 for Robert Rossen's drama The Hustler.
  One of his first notable successes was George Cukor's A Double Life (1947) and he soon found himself up on the Oscar podium in 1949 for his work on William Wyler's The Heiress. He worked with Cukor again in 1950 on Born Yesterday and then tried his hand at directing on several TV series, including Gunsmoke.
  He was nominated for a third time in 1969 for Sydney Pollack's 30s drama They Shoot Horses, Don't They?. Horner directed a few films beginning with Red Planet Mars and Beware, My Lovely both in 1952.
  
  wn.com/Harry_Horner
• 
  Henry Fonda
  Henry Jaynes Fonda (May 16, 1905 – August 12, 1982) was an American film and stage actor.
  Fonda made his mark early as a Broadway actor. He also appeared in 1938 in plays performed in White Plains, New York, with Joan Tompkins. He made his Hollywood debut in 1935, and his career gained momentum after his Academy Award-nominated performance as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, a 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about an Oklahoma family who moved west during the Dust Bowl. Throughout six decades in Hollywood, Fonda cultivated a strong, appealing screen image in such classics as The Ox-Bow Incident, Mister Roberts and 12 Angry Men. Later, Fonda moved both toward darker epics as Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and lighter roles in family comedies like Yours, Mine and Ours with Lucille Ball.
  Fonda was the patriarch of a family of famous actors, including daughter Jane Fonda, son Peter Fonda, granddaughter Bridget Fonda, and grandson Troy Garity. His family and close friends called him "Hank". In 1999, he was named the sixth-Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute.
  
  wn.com/Henry_Fonda
• Ingo Preminger
  Ingwald "Ingo" Preminger (25 February 1911, Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) – 6 June 2006, Pacific Palisades, California) was a film producer. He was also the literary agent for several writers, including Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr., both of whom were blacklisted in the McCarthy era. He was brother of actor-director-producer Otto Preminger.
  He was nominated for an Academy Award for the 1970 film M*A*S*H, the book of which had been sent to him by Lardner, and also produced The Salzburg Connection in 1972.
  Ingo Preminger studied law and worked as a lawyer in Vienna before emigrating to the United States due to the rise of Nazism.
  He was survived by his wife of 70 years, Kate, and three children, including former New York probate judge Eve Preminger.
  
  wn.com/Ingo_Preminger
• 
  Irving Thalberg
  Irving Grant Thalberg (May 30, 1899 – September 14, 1936) was an American film producer during the early years of motion pictures. He was called "The Boy Wonder" for his youth and his extraordinary ability to select the right scripts, choose the right actors, gather the best production staff and make hundreds of very profitable films, including Grand Hotel, China Seas, Camille, Mutiny on the Bounty and The Good Earth. His films carved out a major international market, "projecting a seductive image of American life brimming with vitality and rooted in democracy and personal freedom," states biographer Roland Flamini.
  He was born in Brooklyn, NY, and as a child was afflicted with a congenital heart disease that he was told would lead to his death before he reached the age of thirty. After graduating high school he took night classes in typing and worked as a store clerk during the day. He then took a job as a secretary at Universal Studios’ New York office, and was later made studio manager for their Los Angeles facility, where he oversaw production of a hundred films during his three years with the company. Among the films he produced were The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
  
  wn.com/Irving_Thalberg
• Irwin Winkler
  Irwin Winkler (born May 25, 1931) is an American film producer and director. He is the producer or director of 50 major motion pictures, dating back to 1967's Double Trouble, starring Elvis Presley. The fourth film he produced, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), starring Jane Fonda, was nominated for nine Academy Awards. In 1976, he won an Oscar for Best Picture for Rocky. As a producer, he has been nominated for Best Picture for three other films: Raging Bull, The Right Stuff, and Goodfellas.
  Winkler was born in New York, New York, to father Sol Winkler and mother Anna Winkler. He received a BA from New York University in 1955, after serving in the U.S. Army.
  In partnership with Robert Chartoff from the late 1960s, Irwin Winkler produced an impressive array of modern American gems, beginning with their first effort (along with Judd Bernard), John Boorman's taut thriller Point Blank (1967), largely ignored in its day but now regarded as a top film of the time. Adding Sydney Pollack to their production team for a one-shot-deal, they garnered critical acclaim for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969). Their next film, The Strawberry Statement (1970), won the Jury Prize at Cannes but Chartoff and Winkler roared to the top with Rocky (1976), which earned the Academy Award as Best Picture. Subsequently, the producing duo picked up Best Picture Oscar nominations for Raging Bull (1980) and The Right Stuff (1983), their last project together before Winkler launched his solo career with the disappointing Revolution (1985).
  
  wn.com/Irwin_Winkler
• 
  Jack the Ripper
  "Jack the Ripper" is the best-known name given to an unidentified serial killer who was active in the largely impoverished areas in and around the Whitechapel district of London in 1888. The name originated in a letter, written by someone claiming to be the murderer, that was disseminated in the media. The letter is widely believed to have been a hoax, and may have been written by a journalist in a deliberate attempt to heighten interest in the story. Other nicknames used for the killer at the time were "The Whitechapel Murderer" and "Leather Apron".
  Attacks ascribed to the Ripper typically involved female prostitutes from the slums whose throats were cut prior to abdominal mutilations. The removal of internal organs from at least three of the victims led to proposals that their killer possessed anatomical or surgical knowledge. Rumours that the murders were connected intensified in September and October 1888, and letters from a writer or writers purporting to be the murderer were received by media outlets and Scotland Yard. The "From Hell" letter, received by George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, included half of a preserved human kidney, supposedly from one of the victims. Mainly because of the extraordinarily brutal character of the murders, and because of media treatment of the events, the public came increasingly to believe in a single serial killer known as "Jack the Ripper".
  
  wn.com/Jack_the_Ripper
• 
  Jean Renoir
  Jean Renoir (French pronunciation: [ʁənwaʁ]; 15 September 1894 – 12 February 1979) was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. His pictures Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made. As an author, he wrote the definitive biography of his father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Renoir, My Father (1962). Jean Renoir was ranked by the BFI's Sight & Sound poll of critics as the fourth greatest director of all time.
  Renoir was born in the Montmartre district of Paris, France. He was the second son of Aline Charigot and the French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He was also the brother of Pierre Renoir, a noted French stage and film actor; the uncle of Claude Renoir, a cinematographer; and the father of Alain Renoir^(fr), professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley.
  
  wn.com/Jean_Renoir
• 
  Jeanne Crain
  Jeanne Elizabeth Crain (May 25, 1925 – December 14, 2003) was an American actress whose career spanned three decades from 1943 to 1975. She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in the 1949 film Pinky in which she played the leading role. She was also noted for her ability in ice skating.
  Crain was born in Barstow, California, to George A. Crain, a school teacher, and Loretta Carr; she was of Irish heritage on her mother's side, and of English and distant French descent on her father's.^{[citation needed]} She moved to Los Angeles, California, as a young child.
  An excellent ice skater, Crain first attracted attention when she was crowned Miss Pan Pacific at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles. Later, while still in high school, she was asked to make a screen test opposite Orson Welles. She did not get the part, but in 1943, at age 18, she appeared in a bit part in the film The Gang's All Here.
  In 1944 Crain starred in Home in Indiana and In the Meantime, Darling. Her acting was critically panned, but she gained nationwide attention. It resulted in landing the leading role in The Shocking Miss Pilgrim in October 1944, a musical film which was eventually shelved and made with Betty Grable.
  
  wn.com/Jeanne_Crain
• 
  Jerome Kern
  Jerome David Kern (January 27, 1885 – November 11, 1945) was an American composer of musical theatre and popular music. One of the most important American theatre composers of the early 20th century, he wrote more than 700 songs, used in over 100 stage works, including such classics as "Ol' Man River", "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", "A Fine Romance", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "All the Things You Are", "The Way You Look Tonight", "Long Ago (and Far Away)" and "Who?". He collaborated with many of the leading librettists and lyricists of his era, including George Grossmith Jr., Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, Dorothy Fields, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin and E. Y. Harburg.
  A native New Yorker, Kern created dozens of Broadway musicals and Hollywood films in a career that lasted for more than four decades. His musical innovations, such as 4/4 dance rhythms and the employment of syncopation and jazz progressions, built on, rather than rejected, earlier musical theatre tradition. He and his collaborators also employed his melodies to further the action or develop characterization to a greater extent than in the other musicals of his day, creating the model for later musicals. Although dozens of Kern's musicals and musical films were hits, only Show Boat is now regularly revived. Songs from his other shows, however, are still frequently performed and adapted. Although Kern detested jazz arrangements of his songs, many have been adopted by jazz musicians to become standard tunes.
  
  wn.com/Jerome_Kern
• 
  Joan Bennett
  Joan Geraldine Bennett (February 27, 1910 – December 7, 1990) was an American stage, film and television actress. Besides acting on the stage, Bennett appeared in more than 70 motion pictures from the era of silent movies well into the sound era. She is possibly best-remembered for her film noir femme fatale roles in director Fritz Lang's movies such as The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945).
  Bennett had three distinct phases to her long and successful career, first as a winsome blonde ingenue, then as a sensuous brunette femme fatale (with looks that movie magazines often compared to those of Hedy Lamarr), and finally as a warmhearted wife/mother figure.
  In 1951, Bennett's screen career was marred by scandal after her third husband, film producer Walter Wanger, shot and injured her agent Jennings Lang. Wanger suspected that Lang and Bennett were having an affair, a charge which she adamantly denied.
  In the 1960s, she achieved success for her portrayal of Elizabeth Collins Stoddard on TV's Dark Shadows, for which she received an Emmy nomination (1968). For her final movie role, as Madame Blanc in Suspiria (1977), she received a Saturn Award nomination.
  
  wn.com/Joan_Bennett
• 
  Joan Crawford
  Joan Crawford (March 23, 1905 – May 10, 1977), born Lucille Fay LeSueur, was an American actress in film, television and theatre.
  Starting as a dancer in traveling theatrical companies before debuting on Broadway, Crawford was signed to a motion picture contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925. Initially frustrated by the size and quality of her parts, Crawford began a campaign of self-publicity and became nationally known as a flapper by the end of the 1920s. In the 1930s, Crawford's fame rivaled MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo. Crawford often played hardworking young women who find romance and financial success. These "rags-to-riches" stories were well received by Depression-era audiences and were popular with women. Crawford became one of Hollywood's most prominent movie stars and one of the highest paid women in the United States, but her films began losing money and by the end of the 1930s she was labeled "box office poison".
  After an absence of nearly two years from the screen, Crawford staged a comeback by starring in Mildred Pierce (1945), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. In 1955, she became involved with the Pepsi-Cola Company through her marriage to company Chairman Alfred Steele. After his death in 1959, Crawford was elected to fill his vacancy on the board of directors but was forcibly retired in 1973. She continued acting in film and television regularly through the 1960s, when her performances became fewer; after the release of the British horror film Trog in 1970, Crawford retired from the screen. Following a public appearance in 1974, after which unflattering photographs were published, Crawford withdrew from public life and became more and more reclusive until her death in 1977.
  
  wn.com/Joan_Crawford
• 
  John Barrymore
  John Sidney Blyth (February 15, 1882 – May 29, 1942), better known as John Barrymore, was an American actor of stage and screen. He first gained fame as a handsome stage actor in light comedy, then high drama and culminating in groundbreaking portrayals in Shakespearean plays Hamlet and Richard III. His success continued with motion pictures in various genres in both the silent and sound eras. Barrymore's personal life has been the subject of much writing before and since his death in 1942. Today John Barrymore is known mostly for his portrayal of Hamlet and for his roles in movies like Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (1920), Grand Hotel (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), Twentieth Century (1934), and Don Juan (1926), the first ever movie to use a Vitaphone soundtrack.
  The most prominent member of a multi-generation theatrical dynasty, he was the brother of Lionel Barrymore and Ethel Barrymore, and was the paternal grandfather of Drew Barrymore.
  Barrymore was born in the Philadelphia home of his maternal grandmother. His parents were Maurice Barrymore and Georgie Drew Barrymore. His maternal grandmother was Louisa Lane Drew (aka Mrs Drew), a prominent and well-respected 19th-century actress and theater manager, who instilled in him and his siblings the ways of acting and theatre life. His uncles were John Drew, Jr. and Sidney Drew.
  
  wn.com/John_Barrymore
• Kathleen Winsor
  Kathleen Winsor (October 16, 1919 - May 26, 2003) was an American author, best known for the romance novel Forever Amber.
  Winsor was born October 16, 1919 in Olivia, Minnesota but raised in Berkeley, California. At the age of 18, Winsor made a list of her goals for life. Among those was her hope to write a best-selling novel. Winsor graduated in 1938 from the University of California, Berkeley. During her school years, she married a fellow student, All-American college football player Robert Herwig. In 1937, she began writing a thrice-weekly sports column for the Oakland Tribune. Although that job only lasted a year, Winsor later returned to the newspaper to work as a receptionist. She was fired in 1938 when the newspaper chose to trim their workforce.
  Winsor became interested in the Restoration period through her husband. Herwig was writing a paper for school on Charles II, and, out of boredom, Winsor read one of his research books.
  Her husband joined the military at the outbreak of World War II and spent five years with the US Marines fighting in the Pacific theatre. During that time, Winsor studied the Restoration period, claiming to have read 356 books on the subject. She began writing a novel based on her research. Her fifth draft of the novel was accepted for publication. The publishers promptly edited the book down to one-fifth of its original size. The resulting novel, Forever Amber, was 972 pages long. The novel frolicked through Restoration England and vivid images of fashion, politics, mild sex scenes, affairs and public disasters of the time, including the plague and the Great Fire of London.
  
  wn.com/Kathleen_Winsor
• 
  Laird Cregar
  Laird Cregar (July 28, 1913 – December 9, 1944) was an American film actor.
  Samuel Laird Cregar was the youngest of six sons of Edward Matthews Cregar, a cricketer and member of a team called the Gentlemen of Philadelphia. They toured internationally in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Laird's mother was the former Elizabeth Smith.
  Laird Cregar was educated at Winchester College in England, spending his summers as a page boy and bit player with the Stratford-upon-Avon theatrical troupe. Upon completing his schooling, Cregar won a scholarship at California's Pasadena Playhouse, supporting himself as a nightclub bouncer when funds ran out. So broke that at times he had to sleep in his car, Cregar forced Hollywood to pay attention to him by staging his own one-man show, in which he portrayed Oscar Wilde.
  After a few minor film roles, Cregar was signed to a 20th Century-Fox contract; among his first major roles was the middle-aged Francis Chesney (at the age of only 24) in Charley's Aunt (1941), the first of several showcases for the actor's delightful comic flair. With his sinister portrayal of the psychopathic detective in I Wake Up Screaming (1941), he followed that up with the successful screwball comedy Rings on Her Fingers (1942) playing a con artist opposite Gene Tierney. Cregar became one of filmdom's top "heavies" — both figuratively and literally. Seldom weighing less than 300 pounds (136 kg) throughout his adult life, Cregar became obsessed with his weight.
  
  wn.com/Laird_Cregar
• 
  Lana Turner
  Lana Turner (February 8, 1921 - June 29, 1995) was an American actress.
  Discovered and signed to a film contract by MGM at the age of sixteen, Turner first attracted attention in They Won't Forget (1937). She played featured roles, often as the ingenue, in such films as Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938). During the early 1940s she established herself as a leading actress in such films as Johnny Eager (1941), Ziegfeld Girl (1941) and Somewhere I'll Find You (1942). She is known as one of the first Hollywood scream queens thanks to her role in the 1941 horror film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and her reputation as a glamorous femme fatale was enhanced by her performance in the film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). Her popularity continued through the 1950s, in such films as The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Peyton Place (1957), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.
  In 1958, her daughter, Cheryl Crane, stabbed Turner's lover Johnny Stompanato to death. A coroner's inquest brought considerable media attention to Turner and concluded that Crane had acted in self defense. Turner's next film, Imitation of Life (1959), proved to be one of the greatest successes of her career, but from the early 1960s, her roles were fewer.
  
  wn.com/Lana_Turner
• 
  Laurence Olivier
  Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM ( /ˈlɒrəns ɵˈlɪvi.eɪ/; 22 May 1907 – 11 July 1989) was an English actor, director, and producer. One of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century, he was the youngest actor to be knighted and the first to be elevated to the peerage. He married three times, to actresses Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Plowright. Actor Spencer Tracy said that Olivier was 'the greatest actor in the English-speaking world'.
  Olivier played a wide variety of roles on stage and screen from Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and Restoration comedy to modern American and British drama. He was the first artistic director of the National Theatre of Great Britain and its main stage is named in his honour. He is regarded by some to be the greatest actor of the 20th century, in the same category as David Garrick, Richard Burbage, Edmund Kean and Henry Irving in their own centuries. Olivier's AMPAS acknowledgments are considerable: twelve Oscar nominations, with two awards (for Best Actor and Best Picture for the 1948 film Hamlet), plus two honorary awards including a statuette and certificate. He was also awarded five Emmy awards from the nine nominations he received. Additionally, he was a three-time Golden Globe and BAFTA winner.
  
  wn.com/Laurence_Olivier
• 
  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.
  
  wn.com/Laurette_Taylor
• 
  Lawrence Tibbett
  Lawrence Mervil Tibbett (November 16, 1896 – July 15, 1960) was a famous American opera singer and recording artist who also performed as a film actor and radio personality. A baritone, he sang with the New York Metropolitan Opera company more than 600 times from 1923 to 1950. He performed diverse musical theatre roles, ranging from Iago in Met productions of Othello to Captain Hook in Peter Pan in a touring show.
  Lawrence Tibbett was born Lawrence Mervil Tibbet, (with a single "t") on November 16, 1896 in Bakersfield, California. His father was a part-time deputy sheriff, killed in a shootout with desperado Jim McKinney in 1903. Tibbett grew up in Los Angeles, earning money by singing in church choirs and at funerals. He graduated from Manual Arts High School in 1915. A year later he met his future wife, Grace Mackay Smith, who rented a room in his mother's house. During World War I he served in the Merchant Marine, after which he found employment singing as prologue to silent movies at the Grauman "Million Dollar" Theater in downtown Los Angeles.
  
  wn.com/Lawrence_Tibbett
• 
  Leon Uris
  Leon Marcus Uris (August 3, 1924 – June 21, 2003) was an American novelist, known for his historical fiction and the deep research that went into his novels. His two bestselling books were Exodus (published in 1958) and Trinity (published in 1976).
  Leon Uris was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Jewish-American parents Wolf William and Anna (Blumberg) Uris. His father, a Polish-born immigrant, was a paperhanger, then a storekeeper. His mother was first-generation Russian American. William spent a year in Palestine after World War I before entering the United States. He derived his surname from Yerushalmi, meaning "man of Jerusalem". (His brother Aron, Leon's uncle, took the name Yerushalmi) "He was basically a failure", Uris later said of his father. "I think his personality was formed by the harsh realities of being a Jew in Czarist Russia. I think failure formed his character, made him bitter."
  At age six, Uris reportedly wrote an operetta inspired by the death of his dog. Uris attended schools in Norfolk, Virginia and Baltimore, but never graduated from high school, and failed English three times. When Uris was seventeen and in his senior year of high school, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Uris enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He served in the South Pacific, where he was stationed in New Zealand, and fought as a radioman in combat on Guadalcanal and Tarawa from 1942 through 1945. While recuperating from malaria in San Francisco, he met Betty Beck, a Marine sergeant; they married in 1945.
  
  wn.com/Leon_Uris
• Lilia Skala
  Lilia Skala (November 28, 1896 – December 18, 1994) was an Austrian-American actress.
  Skala was born Lilia Sofer in Vienna, Austria. Her mother, Katharina Skala, was Catholic, and her father, Julius Sofer, was Jewish and worked as a manufacturers representative for the Waldes Koh-i-noor Company. Skala was one of the first women to graduate in architecture and engineering from the University of Dresden, before practicing architecture professionally in Vienna.
  In the late 1930s, she was forced to flee her Nazi-occupied homeland with her husband, Louis Erich Skala, and their two young sons. (Lilia and Erich adopted the non-Jewish sounding surname of Lilia's mother.) Skala and her husband managed to escape (at different times) from Austria to England, and eventually settled in the United States.
  Skala was a Christian Scientist. She was introduced to the religion in Vienna in the 1920s.
  Lilia Skala appeared on countless television shows and serials from 1952 to 1985 (for example, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1965), and as Grand Duchess Sophie kept company on Broadway with Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam not too many years after toiling in a Queens zipper factory as a non-English-speaking refugee from Austria. The family later moved to Englewood, New Jersey.
  
  wn.com/Lilia_Skala
• 
  Linda Darnell
  Linda Darnell (October 16, 1923 – April 10, 1965) was an American film actress.
  Darnell was a model as a child, and progressed to theater and film acting as an adolescent. At the encouragement of her mother, she made her first film in 1939, and appeared in supporting roles in big budget films for 20th Century Fox throughout the 1940s. She rose to fame with co-starring roles opposite Tyrone Power in adventure films and established a main character career after her role in Forever Amber (1947). Furthermore, she won critical acclaim for her work in Unfaithfully Yours (1948) and A Letter to Three Wives (1949).
  Notorious for her unstable personal life, Darnell was incapable of dealing with Hollywood, and landed in a downward spiral of alcoholism, unsuccessful marriages and highly publicized or scandalous affairs. She failed to receive recognition from the industry and its critics, and disappeared from the screen in the 1950s. Darnell died from burns sustained in a house fire.
  Born Monetta Eloyse Darnell in Dallas, Texas, as one of four children (excluding her mother's two children from an earlier marriage), to postal clerk Calvin Roy Darnell and Pearl Brown. She was the younger sister of Undeen, born in March 1918, and the older sister of Monte Maloya (born 1929) and Calvin Roy, Jr. (born 1930). Her parents were not happily married, and she grew up as a shy and reserved girl in a house of domestic turmoil. Starting at an early age, her mother Pearl had big plans for Darnell in the entertainment industry. Her mother believed that Darnell was her only child with potential as an actress, and ignored the raising of her other children.
  
  wn.com/Linda_Darnell
• 
  Luise Rainer
  Luise Rainer (born 12 January 1910) is a former German film actress. Known as the "Viennese Teardrop", she was the first woman to win two Academy Awards, and the first person to win them consecutively. She was discovered by MGM talent scouts while acting on stage in Austria and Germany and after appearing in Austrian films. Aged 102, she is currently the oldest living Academy Award winner.
  Her training began in Germany from the age of 16 by leading Austrian stage director Max Reinhardt. After a few years, she became recognized as a "distinguished Berlin stage actress", acting with Reinhardt's Vienna theater ensemble. Critics "raved" about her stage and film acting quality, leading MGM to sign her to a three-year contract and bring her to Hollywood in 1935. A number of filmmakers anticipated she might become another Greta Garbo, MGM's leading female star.
  Her first American role was in the film Escapade (1935), which was soon followed with a relatively small part in the musical biopic The Great Ziegfeld (1936). Despite her limited appearances in the film, she "so impressed audiences" that she won the Oscar for Best Actress. For her dramatic telephone scene in the film, she was later dubbed "the Viennese teardrop". In her next role, producer Irving Thalberg was convinced, despite the studio's disagreement, that she could play the part of a poor uncomely Chinese farm wife in The Good Earth, based on Pearl Buck's novel about hardship in China. The subdued character she played was such a dramatic contrast to her previous, vivacious character, that she won another Academy Award.
  
  wn.com/Luise_Rainer
• Madeleine Carroll
  Edith Madeleine Carroll (26 February 1906 – 2 October 1987) was an English actress, popular in the 1930s and 1940s.
  Carroll was born at 32 Herbert Street (now number 44) in West Bromwich, Staffordshire. She graduated from the University of Birmingham, with a B.A. degree. She once taught in a girls' public school.
  Carroll made her stage debut with a touring company in The Lash. Widely recognised as one of the most beautiful women in films (she won a film beauty competition to start herself off in the business), Carroll's aristocratic blonde allure and sophisticated style were first glimpsed by film audiences in The Guns of Loos in 1928. Rapidly rising to stardom in Britain, she graced such popular films of the early 1930s as Young Woodley, Atlantic, The School for Scandal and I Was a Spy. She played the title role in the play Little Catherine. Abruptly, she announced plans to retire from films to devote herself to a private life with her husband, the first of four.
  Carroll attracted the attention of Alfred Hitchcock and, in 1935, starred as one of the director's earliest prototypical cool, glib, intelligent blondes in The 39 Steps based on the espionage novel by John Buchan. The film became a sensation and with it, so did Carroll. Cited by the New York Times for a performance that was "charming and skillful",^{[citation needed]} Carroll became very much in demand thanks, in part, to director Hitchcock, who later admitted that he worked very hard with her to bring out the vivacious and sexy qualities she possessed offscreen, but which sometimes vanished when cameras rolled.^{[citation needed]} Of Hitchcock's heroines, as exemplified by Carroll, film critic Roger Ebert once wrote that they "reflected the same qualities over and over again: They were blonde. They were icy and remote. They were imprisoned in costumes that subtly combined fashion with fetishism. They mesmerised the men, who often had physical or psychological handicaps."^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Madeleine_Carroll
• Mady Christians
  Marguerita Maria "Mady" Christians (January 19, 1892 – October 28, 1951) was an Austrian actress who achieved a successful acting career in theatre and film, in the United States until she was blacklisted during the McCarthy period.
  Her family went to Berlin when she was one year old, and to New York in 1912. Five years later she returned to Europe to study under Max Reinhardt. She appeared in a number of European films before getting into American films.
  On Broadway, she originated the title role in the 1944 play I Remember Mama. Her last movie roles were in All My Sons, based on the play by Arthur Miller, and Letter from an Unknown Woman, both released in 1948.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Mady_Christians
• 
  Marion Davies
  Marion Davies (January 3, 1897 – September 22, 1961) was an American film actress, best known for her relationship with newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst.
  Davies was already building a reputation as a popular film comedienne when Hearst took over her career, promoting her heavily through his newspapers, and pressuring the studios to cast her in historical dramas to which she was not suited.
  For this reason, she is better remembered as Hearst's mistress and hostess at many lavish events for the Hollywood elite. In particular, her name is linked with the 1924 scandal aboard Hearst's yacht when one of his guests, film producer Thomas Ince, is rumoured to have been shot dead by Hearst in a rage when he caught Davies embracing an unidentified male figure. This version assumes that Hearst's wealth put him above the law.
  In the film Citizen Kane, clearly based on Hearst, the character of his wife - an untalented singer whom he tries to promote - was widely assumed to be based on Davies. But many commentators, including Orson Welles himself, have defended Davies' record as a genuinely gifted actress, to whom Hearst's patronage did more harm than good.
  
  wn.com/Marion_Davies
• 
  Mark Antony
  Mark Antony (Latin: M·ANTONIVS·M·F·M·N) (January 14, 83 BC – August 1, 30 BC) was a Roman politician and general. As a military commander and administrator, he was an important supporter and loyal friend of his mother's cousin Julius Caesar. After Caesar's assassination, Antony formed an official political alliance with Octavian (the future Augustus) and Lepidus, known to historians today as the Second Triumvirate.
  The triumvirate broke up in 33 BC. Disagreement between Octavian and Antony erupted into civil war, the final war of the Roman Republic, in 31 BC. Antony was defeated by Octavian at the naval Battle of Actium, and in a brief land battle at Alexandria. He and his lover Cleopatra committed suicide shortly thereafter. His career and defeat are significant in Rome's transformation from Republic to Empire.
  A member of the Antonia clan (gens), Antony was born on January 14, 83 BC. He was the homonymous and thus presumably the eldest son of Marcus Antonius Creticus (praetor 74 BC, proconsul 73–71 BC) and grandson of the noted orator Marcus Antonius (consul 99 BC, censor 97–6 BC) who had been murdered during the Marian Terror of the winter of 87–6 BC.
  
  wn.com/Mark_Antony
• Martin Poll
  Martin Poll (November 24, 1922 – April 14, 2012) was an American film and television producer. Polls produced eleven feature films during his career, including The Lion in Winter, for which he received a 1968 Academy Award nomination for Academy Award for Best Picture.The Lion in Winter, which starred Katherine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole, received nine nominations and won three Academy Awards. It also won a Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama.
  Poll was born on November 24, 1922, in New York City. Poll launched his production career in 1954, when he produced thirty-nine episodes of the televisions series, Flash Gordon, for distribution in West Germany and France.
  Poll purchased and restored the Biograph Studios, a studio facility and film laboratory complex in the Bronx, during the 1950s. He reopened the studios in 1956 under a new name, Gold Medal Studios. The reopening made the Bronx-based facility the largest film studio in the United States located outside of Los Angeles at the time. Poll helped create numerous films at Gold Medal Studios, including A Face in the Crowd in 1957, The Goddess in 1958, The Fugitive Kind in 1959, Middle of the Night in 1959, and BUtterfield 8 in 1960. Poll was appointed the Commissioner of Motion Picture Arts of New York City in 1959 for his work with Gold Medal Studios. The New York City government soon established its own film commission shortly after Poll's appointment. Poll sold Gold Medal Studios during the early 1960s to focus on film production.
  
  wn.com/Martin_Poll
• 
  Michael Caine
  Sir Michael Caine, CBE (born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite; 14 March 1933) is an English actor.
  Caine is one of two actors nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade from the 1960s to 2000s, the other one being Jack Nicholson. In 2000, Caine was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of his contribution to cinema.
  Caine was born in St Olave's Hospital, Rotherhithe, Southwark in South East London, the son of Ellen Frances Marie (née Burchell; 1900-1989), a cook and charwoman, and Maurice Joseph Micklewhite, a fish market porter. His father was of English, Irish, and, reportedly, Irish Traveller ancestry. Caine was brought up in his mother's Protestant religion (his father was Catholic).
  Caine grew up in Southwark, South London, and during the Second World War he was evacuated to North Runcton near King's Lynn in Norfolk. After the war, when his father was demobilised, the family was rehoused by the council in Marshall Gardens at the Elephant and Castle in a pre-fabricated house made in Canada, as much of London's housing stock had been damaged during the Blitz in 1940-41.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Caine
• 
  Michael Douglas
  Michael Kirk Douglas (born September 25, 1944) is an American actor and producer, primarily in movies and television. He has won three Golden Globes and two Academy Awards; as producer of 1975's Best Picture, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and as Best Actor in 1987 for his role in Wall Street. Douglas received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2009. He is the eldest of actor Kirk Douglas's four sons.
  Douglas was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the first child of actor Kirk Douglas and Bermudian-born actress Diana Dill. His paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Gomel in Belarus (at that time a part of the Russian Empire). His mother was from Devonshire Parish, Bermuda; Douglas's maternal grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Melville Dill, served as Attorney General of Bermuda and was commanding officer of the Bermuda Militia Artillery. Douglas has a younger brother, Joel Douglas (born 1947), and two paternal half-brothers, Peter Douglas (born 1955) and Eric Douglas (1958–2004), from stepmother Anne Buydens.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Douglas
• 
  Milton Berle
  Milton Berle (born Milton Berlinger, July 12, 1908 – March 27, 2002) was an American comedian and actor. As the host of NBC's Texaco Star Theater (1948–55), he was the first major American television star and was known to millions of viewers as "Uncle Miltie" and "Mr. Television" during TV's golden age.
  Milton Berlinger was born into a Jewish family in a five-story walkup at 68 W. 118th Street in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan. He chose Milton Berle as his professional name when he was 16. His father, Moses Berlinger (1873–1938), was a paint and varnish salesman. His mother, Sarah (Sadie) Glantz Berlinger (1877–1954), eventually became stagestruck and changed her name to Sandra Berle when Milton became famous.
  Berle entered show business at the age of five when he won an amateur talent contest. He appeared as a child actor in silent films, beginning with The Perils of Pauline, filmed in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The director told Berle that he would portray a little boy who would be thrown from a moving train. In Milton Berle: An Autobiography, he explained, "I was scared shitless, even when he went on to tell me that Pauline would save my life. Which is exactly what happened, except that at the crucial moment they threw a bundle of rags instead of me from the train. I bet there are a lot of comedians around today who are sorry about that."
  
  wn.com/Milton_Berle
• 
  Nelson Algren
  Nelson Algren (March 28, 1909 – May 9, 1981) was an American writer. He may be best known for The Man with the Golden Arm, a 1949 novel that won the National Book Award and was adapted as a 1955 film of the same name.
  According to Harold Augenbraum, "in the late 1940s and early 1950s he was one of the best known literary writers in America, lover of Simone de Beauvoir, "hero" of her novel The Mandarins, and so on. He's still a sort of bard of the down-and-outer because of this book and the novel A Walk on the Wild Side (made even more famous by the Lou Reed song)."
  Algren was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Goldie (née Kalisher) and Gerson Abraham. At the age of three he moved with his parents to Chicago, Illinois where they lived in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood on the South Side. His father was the son of a Swedish convert to Judaism, and his mother (who owned a candy store) was of German Jewish descent. As a young child, Algren's family lived at 7139 S. South Park Avenue (now S. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) in the Greater Grand Crossing section of the South Side. At the age of eight, Algren's family moved from the far South Side to an apartment at 4834 N. Troy Street in the North Side neighborhood of Albany Park. His father worked as an auto mechanic nearby on North Kedzie Avenue.
  
  wn.com/Nelson_Algren
• Nora Gregor
  Nora Gregor (3 February 1901 – 20 January 1949) was a stage and film actress.
  She was born Eleonora Hermina Gregor in Gorizia, a town which then belonged to Austria-Hungary but is now part of Italy, to Austrian Jewish parents.
  Her first husband was Mitja Nikisch, a pianist. They divorced circa 1934.
  In the mid 1930s Gregor became the mistress of the married vice chancellor of Austria, fascist politician Prince Ernst Ruediger von Starhemberg, with whom she had a son, Heinrich (1934–1997). On 2 December 1937, five days after the prince's marriage to his first wife, the former Countess Marie-Elisabeth von Salm-Reifferscheidt-Raitz, was annulled, he and Gregor wed in Vienna.
  In 1938, the Starhembergs emigrated to France through Switzerland, and her husband joined the Free French forces; cut off from their money and eighty family estates, they were supported for a period by Starhemberg's close friend Friedrich Mandl, the Austrian armaments magnate. In 1942, the Starhembergs moved to Argentina.
  Reportedly depressed since the beginning of her South American exile, Gregor committed suicide in Viña del Mar, Chile.
  
  wn.com/Nora_Gregor
• 
  Norma Shearer
  Edith Norma Shearer (August 10, 1902 – June 12, 1983) was a Canadian actress. Shearer was one of the most popular actresses in North America from the mid-1920s through the 1930s. Her early films cast her as the girl-next-door but for most of the Pre-Code film era beginning with the 1930 film The Divorcee, for which she won an Oscar for Best Actress, she played sexually liberated women in sophisticated contemporary comedies. Later she appeared in historical and period films.
  Unlike many of her MGM contemporaries, Shearer's fame declined steeply after retirement. By the time of her death in 1983, she was largely remembered at best for her "noble" roles in The Women, Marie Antoinette, and Romeo and Juliet. Shearer's legacy began to be re-evaluated in the 1990s with the publication of two biographies and the TCM and VHS release of her films, many of them unseen since the implementation of the Production Code some sixty years before. Focus shifted to her pre-Code "divorcee" persona and Shearer was rediscovered as "the exemplar of sophisticated [1930's] woman-hood... exploring love and sex with an honesty that would be considered frank by modern standards".
  
  wn.com/Norma_Shearer
• 
  Noël Coward
  Sir Noël Peirce Coward (16 December 1899 – 26 March 1973) was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".
  Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy in London as a child, making his professional stage début at the age of eleven. As a teenager he was introduced into the high society in which most of his plays would be set. Coward achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit, have remained in the regular theatre repertoire. He composed hundreds of songs, in addition to well over a dozen musical theatre works (including the operetta Bitter Sweet and comic revues), poetry, several volumes of short stories, the novel Pomp and Circumstance, and a three-volume autobiography. Coward's stage and film acting and directing career spanned six decades, during which he starred in many of his own works.
  
  wn.com/Noël_Coward
• Nunnally Johnson
  Nunnally Hunter Johnson (December 5, 1897—March 25, 1977) was an American filmmaker who wrote, produced, and directed motion pictures.
  He began his career as a journalist, writing for the Columbus Enquirer Sun, the Savannah Press, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and the New York Herald Tribune. He also wrote short stories and a collection of these, There Ought To Be a Law, was published in 1930.
  Johnson's first connection with film work was the sale of screen rights to one of his stories in 1927. Johnson asked his editor if he could write film criticism articles in 1932. When this request was denied, he decided to relocate to Hollywood and work directly in the film industry.
  Quickly finding work as a scriptwriter, Johnson was hired fulltime as a writer by 20th Century-Fox in 1935. He soon began producing films as well and co-founded International Pictures in 1943 with William Goetz. Johnson also directed several films in the 1950s, including two starring Gregory Peck.
  Johnson was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Screenplay in 1940 for The Grapes of Wrath and the Directors Guild of America Best Directors Award in 1956 for The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
  
  wn.com/Nunnally_Johnson
• 
  Oscar Wilde
  Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the circumstances of his imprisonment, followed by his early death.
  Wilde's parents were successful Dublin intellectuals. Their son became fluent in French and German early in life. At university Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He became known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles. As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States of America and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art", and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde had become one of the most well-known personalities of his day.
  
  wn.com/Oscar_Wilde
• 
  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.
  
  wn.com/Otto_Preminger
• Peggy Cummins
  Peggy Cummins (born 18 December 1925) is a retired Irish actress. Cummins is best known for her performance in Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy (1949), playing a trigger happy femme fatale who robs banks with her lover (played by John Dall).
  She was born Augusta Margaret Diane Fuller in Prestatyn, Denbighshire, Wales. She was born in Wales—but that particular locale was but an accident. Her Irish parents happened to be there and a storm kept them from returning to their home in Dublin. Peggy lived most of her early life in Dublin where she was educated and later in London. Her mother was the actress Margaret Cummins (Margaret Mary Treacy Fuller Cummins, 1889–1973) who played a small but effective role of Anna the maid in the film Smart Woman (1948). She also played Emily in the Margaret Ferguson film The Sign of the Ram.
  In 1938 actor Peter Brock noticed Peggy Cummins at a Dublin tram stop and introduced her to Dublin's Gate Theatre Company. She then appeared on the London stage in the title role of Alice In Wonderland and in the title role of Junior Miss at age 12 at the Saville Theatre.
  
  wn.com/Peggy_Cummins
• Phyllis Curtin
  Phyllis Curtin (née Smith, on December 3, 1921) is an American classical soprano who had an active career in operas and concerts from the early 1950s through the 1980s. She was known for her creation of new roles such as the title role in the Carlisle Floyd opera Susannah, Catherine Earnshaw in Floyd's Wuthering Heights, and in other works by this composer. She was a dedicated song recitalist and retired from singing in 1984.
  Born Phyllis Smith in Clarksburg, West Virginia, Curtin studied singing with Olga Averino at Wellesley College where she earned a bachelors degree in international relations. She pursued graduate studies in vocal performance under Boris Goldovsky at the New England Conservatory. In 1946 she made her professional opera debut with Goldovsky's opera company, the New England Opera Theater, as Tatyana in Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. She sang several more roles with the company over the next seven years, including a much admired portrayal of Countess Almaviva in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro (1947). In 1950, Curtin performed in the inaugural year of the Peabody Mason Concerts in Boston.
  
  wn.com/Phyllis_Curtin
• 
  Pola Negri
  Pola Negri (3 January 1897 – 1 August 1987) was a Polish stage and film actress who achieved worldwide fame for her tragedienne and femme fatale roles from the 1910s through the 1940s during the Golden Era of Hollywood film. She was the first European film star to be invited to Hollywood, and became a great American star. She also started several important women's fashion trends. She is known for being one of the most popular stars of the silent film era, and her varied career included work as an actress in silent and talking films, theater, and vaudeville; as a singer and recording artist; as an author; and as a ballerina.
  Negri was born Apolonia Chalupec (or Chałupiec) according to her birth record and autobiography in Lipno, Vistula Land, Russian Empire (present-day Poland). She was the youngest of three children, but because the first two died young, she grew up as an only child. Her mother, whose maiden name was Eleonora Kiełczewska, was reportedly impoverished Polish royalty, and her father, Jerzy Chalupec, was a Slovak immigrant tinsmith. After Chalupec's father was arrested by the Russian authorities for revolutionary activities and sent to Siberia, she and her mother moved to Warsaw, where they lived in extreme poverty.
  
  wn.com/Pola_Negri
• Robert Chartoff
  Robert Chartoff (born August 26, 1933) is an American film producer. He and fellow producer Irwin Winkler won an Academy Award for Best Picture for the 1976 film Rocky.
  Chartoff graduated from Union College in 1955. He has three daughters (Jennifer, Julie, and Miranda) and two sons (William and Charley). Chartoff established the RC Charitable Foundation in 1990 to award grants to international schools and other child agencies. He continues to serve as its President. The RC Charitable Foundation gives less than $100,000 per year. Several grants awarded to the Buddha Educational Trust.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Chartoff
• 
  Rouben Mamoulian
  Rouben Zachary Mamoulian (pronounced: roo-BEN ma-mool-YAN; October 8, 1897 – December 4, 1987) was an Armenian-American film and theatre director.
  Mamoulian was born in Tbilisi, Georgia (ruled at that time by imperial Russia) to an Armenian family. His mother, Virginia (née Kalantarian), was a director of the Armenian theater, and his father, Zachary Mamoulian, was a bank president. Mamoulian relocated to England and started directing plays in London in 1922. He was brought to America the next year by Vladimir Rosing to teach at the Eastman School of Music and was involved in directing opera and theatre.
  In 1925, Mamoulian was head of the School of Drama, where Martha Graham was also working at the time. Among other performances, together they produced a short two-color film called The Flute of Krishna, featuring Eastman students. Mamoulian left Eastman shortly thereafter and Graham chose to leave also, even though she was asked to stay on. In 1930, Mamoulian became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
  
  wn.com/Rouben_Mamoulian
• 
  Ruth Warrick
  Ruth Elizabeth Warrick (June 29, 1916 – January 15, 2005), DM, was an American singer, actress and political activist, best known for her role as Phoebe Tyler on All My Children, which she played regularly from 1970 until her death in 2005.
  She celebrated her 80th birthday by attending a special screening of Citizen Kane to a packed, standing-room-only audience, to which she spoke afterward. (She made her film debut as Kane's first wife.) Over the years, she collected several books about Orson Welles and Citizen Kane, in which she would write "Property of Ruth Warrick, Mrs. Citizen Kane".
  She was born in Saint Joseph, Missouri. By writing an essay in high school called "Prevention and Cure of Tuberculosis", Warrick won a contest to be Miss Jubilesta, Missouri's paid ambassador to New York City. Popular legend says that she made her debut in New York City on the steps of city hall with an armful of turkeys for Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.
  Warrick began her career in the 1940s as a radio singer where she met her first husband Eric Rolf, but her first big break was being hired by a young Orson Welles for Citizen Kane, where she played Emily Monroe Norton. When she auditioned for the part, she read with Welles. She said that because she was so new to the acting business, she was not aware that it was very rare to actually read with the star. What she also didn't realize was that this was also Welles' first film role. Citizen Kane proved to be a major moment of her life and the long term success of the film would follow her for the rest of her life.
  
  wn.com/Ruth_Warrick
• Sam Spiegel
  Sam Spiegel (November 11, 1901 – December 31, 1985) was an Austrian-born American independent film producer.
  Spiegel was born in Jarosław, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now in Poland) as Samuel P. Spiegel to a German-Jewish father and Polish mother^{[citation needed]} and educated at the University of Vienna. His brother was Shalom Spiegel, a professor of medieval Hebrew poetry. Spiegel worked briefly in Hollywood in 1927 following a stint serving with Hashomer Hatzair in Palestine. He then went to Berlin to produce German and French adaptations of Universal films until 1933 when he fled Germany. As an independent producer, Spiegel was behind a number of European films. In 1938, he immigrated to Mexico and subsequently the United States. Between 1935 and 1954, Spiegel billed himself as S.P. Eagle. After that he used his real name. "...Spiegel a decidedly flawed protagonist, as well as the wit, sophistication, and Old World charm that make him a titanic figure the likes of which the movie industry will not see again."
  
  wn.com/Sam_Spiegel
• 
  Samuel Fuller
  Samuel Michael Fuller (August 12, 1912 – October 30, 1997) was an American screenwriter, novelist, and film director known for low-budget genre movies with controversial themes.
  He was born Samuel Michael Fuller in Worcester, Massachusetts, the son of Benjamin Rabinovitch, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, and Rebecca Baum, a Jewish immigrant from Poland. After immigrating to America, the family's surname was changed from Rabinovitch to "Fuller" possibly by inspiration of a Doctor who arrived in America on the Mayflower. At the age of 12, he began working in journalism as a newspaper copyboy. He became a crime reporter in New York City at age 17, working for the New York Evening Graphic. He broke the story of Jeanne Eagels' death. He wrote pulp novels, including The Dark Page (1944; reissued in 2007 with an introduction by Wim Wenders), and screenplays from the mid-1930s onwards. Fuller also became a screenplay ghostwriter but would never tell interviewers which screenplays he ghost-wrote explaining "that's what a ghost writer is for."^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Samuel_Fuller
• 
  Samuel Goldwyn
  Samuel Goldwyn (c. July 1879 – January 31, 1974) was an American film producer. He was most notably well known for being the founding contributor executive of several motion picture studios in Hollywood.
  Goldwyn was born Schmuel Gelbfisz in Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire to a Hasidic, Polish Jewish family. At an early age, he left Warsaw on foot and penniless. He made his way to Birmingham, England, where he remained with relatives for a few years using the name Samuel Goldfish. In 1898, he emigrated to the United States, but fearing refusal of entry, he got off the boat in Nova Scotia, Canada, before moving on to New York in January 1899. He found work in upstate Gloversville, New York, in the bustling garment business. Soon his innate marketing skills made him a very successful salesman at the Albano Glove Company. After four years, as vice-president for sales, he moved back to New York City.^{[citation needed]}
  In 1913, Goldfish along with his brother-in-law Jesse L. Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, and Arthur Friend formed a partnership, The Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, to produce feature length motion pictures. Film rights for the stage play The Squaw Man were purchased for $4000 and Dustin Farnum was hired for the leading role. Shooting for the first feature film made in Hollywood began on December 29, 1913.
  
  wn.com/Samuel_Goldwyn
• 
  Saul Bass
  Saul Bass (May 8, 1920 – April 25, 1996) was a graphic designer and filmmaker, perhaps best known for his design of film posters and motion picture title sequences.
  During his 40-year career Bass worked for some of Hollywood's greatest filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. Amongst his most famous title sequences are the animated paper cut-out of a heroin addict's arm for Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, the credits racing up and down what eventually becomes a high-angle shot of the United Nations building in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, and the disjointed text that races together and apart in Psycho.
  Bass designed some of the most iconic corporate logos in North America, including the AT&T "bell" logo in 1969, as well as AT&T's "globe" logo in 1983 after the breakup of the Bell System. He also designed Continental Airlines' 1968 "jetstream" logo and United Airlines' 1974 "tulip" logo which became some of the most recognized airline industry logos of the era.
  
  wn.com/Saul_Bass
• 
  Simone Simon
  Simone Thérèse Fernande Simon (23 April 1910 – 22 February 2005) was a French film actress who began her film career in 1931.
  Born in Béthune, Pas-de-Calais (some sources say Marseille) France, she was the daughter of Henri Louis Firmin Champmoynat, a French engineer, airplane pilot in World War II, who died in a concentration camp, and Erma Maria Domenica Giorcelli, an Italian housewife. Before settling and growing up in Marseille, Simon lived in Madagascar, Budapest, Turin and Berlin. She went to Paris in 1931 and worked briefly as a singer, model and fashion designer. She also at one point decided that she wanted to become a sculptress.
  Simon worked chiefly for the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens, and then managed to get more serious work with Sacha Guitry in Ô mon bel inconnu.
  After being spotted in a restaurant in June 1931, Simon was offered a film contract by director Victor Tourjansky, which ended her plans on becoming a fashion designer. She made her screen debut in Le chanteur inconnu (The Unknown Singer, 1931), and quickly established herself as one of the country's most successful film actresses. Simon later told a reporter that she had no acting experience when making her first screen test for The Unknown Singer. In 1932, she was given more important roles and she rose to fame after starring in Marc Allégret's Lac aux dames (Ladies Lake, 1934), which was in her own opinion her first serious role since The Unknown Singer. In later interviews, Simon expressed her gratitude towards Allégret, feeling that he was responsible for her glory.
  
  wn.com/Simone_Simon
• 
  Tallulah Bankhead
  Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 – December 12, 1968) was an American actress of the stage and screen, talk-show host, and bonne vivante. Bankhead was also known for her deep voice, flamboyant personality, romances with men and women, and support of liberal causes, which broke with the tendency of Southern Democrats at the time to support a more conservative agenda. She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1981.
  Bankhead was born in Huntsville, Alabama, to William Brockman Bankhead and Adelaide Eugenia "Ada" Bankhead (née Sledge). The event took place on the second floor of what is now known as the Isaac Schiffman Building; a marker has been erected to commemorate the site and, in 1980, the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. "Tallu" was named after her paternal grandmother. Her mother died as a result of blood poisoning on February 23, 1902, shortly after Tallulah's birth, and is buried in Huntsville's historic Maple Hill Cemetery. Tallulah has been described as "an extremely homely child", overweight and with a deep, husky voice resulting from chronic bronchitis. However, others described her as an exhibitionist, performer, personality, and star from the very beginning.
  
  wn.com/Tallulah_Bankhead
• Vera Caspary
  Vera Louise Caspary (November 13, 1899 – June 13, 1987) was an American writer of novels, plays, screenplays, and short stories. Her best-known novel Laura was made into a highly successful movie. Though she claimed she was not a "real" mystery writer, her novels effectively merged women's quest for identity and love with murder plots. Independence is the key to her protagonists, with her novels revolving around women who are menaced, but who turn out to be neither victimized nor rescued damsels.
  Following her father's death, the income from Caspary's writing was at times only just sufficient to support both herself and her mother, and during the Great Depression she became interested in Socialist causes. Caspary joined the Communist party under an alias, but not being totally committed and at odds with its code of secrecy, she claimed to have confined her activities to fund-raising and hosting meetings. Caspary visited Russia in an attempt to confirm her beliefs, but nonetheless became disillusioned and wished to resign from the Party, although she continued to contribute money and support similar causes. She eventually married her lover and writing collaborator of six years, Isidor "Igee" Goldsmith; but despite this being a successful partnership, her Communist connections would later lead to her being "graylisted", temporarily yet significantly affecting their offers of work and income. The couple split their time between Hollywood and Europe until Igee's death in 1964, after which Caspary remained in New York where she would write a further eight books.
  
  wn.com/Vera_Caspary
• 
  Vincent Price
  Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. (May 27, 1911 – October 25, 1993) was an American actor, well known for his distinctive voice and serio-comic performances in a series of horror films made in the latter part of his career.
  Price was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Marguerite Cobb (née Wilcox) and Vincent Leonard Price, Sr., who was the president of the National Candy Company. His grandfather, Vincent Clarence Price, invented "Dr. Price's Baking Powder," the first cream of tartar baking powder, and secured the family's fortune.
  Price attended St. Louis Country Day School. He was further educated at Yale in art history and fine art. He was a member of the Courtauld Institute, London. He became interested in the theatre during the 1930s, appearing professionally on stage for the first time in 1935.
  He made his film debut in 1938 with Service de Luxe and established himself in the film Laura (1944), opposite Gene Tierney, directed by Otto Preminger. He also played Joseph Smith, Jr. in the movie Brigham Young (1940) and William Gibbs McAdoo in Wilson (1944) as well as a pretentious priest in The Keys of the Kingdom (1944).
  
  wn.com/Vincent_Price
• 
  Wallace Beery
  Wallace Fitzgerald Beery (April 1, 1885 - April 15, 1949) was an American actor. He is best known for his portrayal of Bill in Min and Bill opposite Marie Dressler, as Long John Silver in Treasure Island, as Pancho Villa in Viva Villa!, and his titular role in The Champ, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Beery appeared in some 250 movies over a 36-year span.
  Beery was born in Kansas City, Missouri to Noah W. and Marguerite (Fitzgerald) Beery. He was a younger brother of actor/film executive William Beery and actor Noah Beery, who also had long careers in the motion picture industry, and was an uncle of actor Noah Beery, Jr., whose own screen career spanned seven decades. According to U.S. Census records, all three Beery brothers were born to the same parents, making them full brothers and not half-brothers as many biographies have claimed^{[citation needed]}.
  Wallace Beery ran away from home and joined the Ringling Brothers Circus at age sixteen as an assistant elephant trainer. He left two years later, after being clawed by a leopard. Beery found work in New York City in comic opera as a baritone and began to appear on Broadway. In 1913, he moved to Chicago to work for Essanay Studios, cast as Sweedie, The Swedish Maid, a masculine character in drag. Later, he worked for the Essanay Studios location in Niles, California.
  
  wn.com/Wallace_Beery
• 
  Walter Brennan
  Walter Brennan (July 25, 1894 – September 21, 1974) was an American actor. Brennan won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor on three separate occasions, which is currently the record for most Oscar wins by a male actor, tied with Jack Nicholson.
  Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, less than two miles from his family's home in Swampscott, Walter Andrew Brennan was the second of three children born to Irish immigrants William John Brennan and Margaret Elizabeth Flanagan. The elder Brennan was an engineer and inventor, and young Walter studied engineering at Rindge Technical High School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
  While in school, Brennan became interested in acting, and began to perform in vaudeville. While working as a bank clerk, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as a private with the 101st Field Artillery Regiment in France during World War I. Following the war, he moved to Guatemala and raised pineapples, before settling in Los Angeles. During the 1920s, he became involved in the real estate market, where he made a fortune. Unfortunately, he lost most of his money when the market took a sudden downturn due to the Great Depression.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Walter_Brennan
• Walter Mirisch
  Walter Mortimer Mirisch (born 8 November 1921) is an American film producer. In his long and successful motion picture career, Walter Mirisch has produced some of the industry’s finest and most memorable films. He is President and Executive Head of Production of The Mirisch Corporation, an independent filmmaking organization, which he formed in 1957 with his brothers, Marvin and Harold.
  A native of New York, Mirisch graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School and entered the movie business as a summer vacation usher in Jersey City’s State Theater, soon moving up to higher positions at other theaters. In 1942, he received a BA degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the following year graduated from Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration. In 1947, he produced his first film, Fall Guy, for Monogram Pictures Corporation.
  At the age of 29, Mirisch became production head at Allied Artists Studio with some 30 films to oversee. During his tenure, he found time to personally produce Flat Top, Wichita, which received a Golden Globe from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as Best Outdoor Drama of 1955, The First Texan, and An Annapolis Story. He supervised the productions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Friendly Persuasion, and Love in the Afternoon, among many others.
  
  wn.com/Walter_Mirisch
• Wikipedia Persondata
  wn.com/Wikipedia_Persondata
• 
  William Dieterle
  William Dieterle (July 15, 1893, Ludwigshafen, – December 9, 1972, Ottobrunn) was a German actor and film director, who worked in Hollywood for much of his career. His best known films include The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Story of Louis Pasteur and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. His 1937 film The Life of Emile Zola won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
  He was born Wilhelm Dieterle, the youngest child of nine, to Jacob and Berthe (Doerr) Dieterle. As a child, he lived in considerable poverty and earned money by various means including carpentry and as a scrap dealer. He became interested in theater early and would stage productions in the family barn for friends and family. At the age of sixteen he had joined a traveling theater company as a handy-man, scene shifter and apprentice actor. His striking good looks and ambition soon paved the way as a leading romantic actor in theater productions. In 1919, he attracted the attention of Max Reinhardt in Berlin who hired him as an actor for his productions until 1924. He started acting in German films in 1921 to make more money and quickly became a popular character actor. He usually portrayed "country yokels" or simpletons with great gusto and popularity, but he was ambitious to begin a career as a director. In 1921 Dieterle married Charolette Hagenbruch, an actress and later screenwriter with whom he would remain with until his death.
  
  wn.com/William_Dieterle
• William Goetz
  William Goetz (March 24, 1903 – August 15, 1969) was an American Hollywood film producer and studio executive. William Goetz died of cancer in 1969 at his home in Los Angeles and was buried in Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.
  Born to a Jewish working class family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Goetz was the youngest of eight children. His mother died when he was ten years old and shortly thereafter his father abandoned the family. Raised by older brothers, at the age of twenty-one he followed some of his brothers to Hollywood where he found work as a crew hand at one of the large studios. After a few years, he began doing production work and in 1930 was made an associate producer at Fox Films. That same year he married Edith Mayer (1905–1987), daughter of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer – who at first was less-than-enthusiastic at the idea. Nevertheless, the marriage worked and they remained together for life.
  In 1932, Goetz received the financial support necessary from his new father-in-law to become a minor partner with Joseph Schenck, the former president of United Artists, and Darryl F. Zanuck from Warner Brothers to create Twentieth Century Pictures. Zanuck was named president and Goetz served as vice-president. Successful from the very beginning, their 1934 film The House of Rothschild was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. In 1935, they bought out the financially strapped Fox Films to create 20th Century Fox.
  
  wn.com/William_Goetz
• William Peter Blatty
  William Peter Blatty (born January 7, 1928) is an American writer and filmmaker. The novel The Exorcist, written in 1971, is his magnum opus; he also penned the subsequent screenplay version of the film, for which he won an Academy Award.
  His most recent works include the novels Elsewhere (2009), Dimiter (2010) and Crazy (2010). He is also featured in the upcoming 2012 Smoke And Mirrors anthology, featuring the teleplay "Hell Hospital" and the treatment "Faith".
  
  wn.com/William_Peter_Blatty
• 
  World War I
  World War I (WWI), which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939 (World War II), and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. It involved all the world's great powers, which were assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies (based on the Triple Entente of the United Kingdom, France and Russia) and the Central Powers (originally centred around the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy; but, as Austria–Hungary had taken the offensive against the agreement, Italy did not enter into the war). These alliances both reorganised (Italy fought for the Allies), and expanded as more nations entered the war. Ultimately more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history. More than 9 million combatants were killed, largely because of enormous increases in lethality of weapons, thanks to new technology, without corresponding improvements in protection or mobility. It was the sixth-deadliest conflict in world history, subsequently paving the way for various political changes such as revolutions in the nations involved.
  
  wn.com/World_War_I

Otto Preminger (1999)

Genres

• Documentary

Taglines:

Quotes: