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Bude
Coordinates: 50°49′26″N 4°32′31″W / 50.824°N 4.542°W / 50.824; -4.542
Bude (Cornish: Bud) is a small seaside resort town in north Cornwall, England, UK, in the civil parish of Bude-Stratton and at the mouth of the River Neet (also known locally as the River Strat). It was formerly sometimes known as Bude Haven. It lies southwest of Stratton, south of Flexbury and Poughill, and north of Widemouth Bay and is located along the A3073 road off the A39. Bude is twinned with Ergué-Gabéric in Brittany, France.[citation needed] Bude's coast faces Bude Bay in the Celtic Sea, part of the Atlantic Ocean.
Its earlier importance was as a harbour, and then a source of sea sand useful for improving the moorland soil. The Victorians favoured it as a watering place, and it was a popular seaside destination in the 20th century.
It lies just south of Flexbury and north of Widemouth Bay and is located along the A3073 road off the A39 road.
Bude Coast SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest), located between Compass Cove to the south and Furzey Cove to the north, is noted for its geological and biological interest.Carboniferous sandstone cliffs surround Bude. During the Variscan Orogeny the strata were heavily faulted and folded. As the sands and cliffs around Bude contain calcium carbonate (a natural fertiliser), farmers used to take sand from the beach, for spreading on their fields. The cliffs around Bude are the only ones in Cornwall that are made of Carboniferous sandstone, as most of the Cornish coast is formed of Devonian slate, granite and Precambrian metamorphic rocks). The stratified cliffs of Bude give their name to a sequence of rocks called the Bude Formation. Many formations can be viewed from the South West Coast Path which passes through the town.
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Bush Tower
Bush Tower, also called the Bush Terminal International Exhibit Building is a historic thirty-story skyscraper located just east of Times Square at 130-132 West 42nd Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It was built in 1916-18 for Irving T. Bush's Bush Terminal Company, owners of Bush Terminal in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Bush Tower's unique original purpose as commercial display space and social space, its notable design that combined narrowness, height, and Neo-Gothic architecture, and its role in the evolution of Times Square and of New York skyscrapers after the 1916 Zoning Resolution all qualify it as an exceptional structure.
Under Irving T. Bush (who has no relation to the Bush political family) the Bush Terminal Co. created Bush Tower to bring buyers, manufacturers, and designers together. As such, the company promoted a "vast centralized marketplace under one roof where complete lines of goods can be examined without loss of time."
The tower's lowest three floors were planned for the comfort and convenience of buyers visiting New York. These floors were modeled after a traditional large metropolitan private club and housed the newly-created International Buyers Club, which contained "that mysterious element called 'atmosphere' and 'social standing,'" yet representatives of any "reputable" firm could join for free. The company wrote these floors were also designed to be "welcoming of women members."
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Cornwall
Cornwall (
/ˈkɔrnwɔːl/ or /ˈkɔrnwəl/;Cornish: Kernow [ˈkɛrnɔʊ]; Latin: Cornubia or Cornuvia) is a unitary authority and ceremonial county of England, within the United Kingdom. It is bordered to the north and west by the Celtic Sea, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by the county of Devon, over the River Tamar. Cornwall has a population of 537,400 and covers an area of 3,563 km2 (1,376 sq mi). The administrative centre and only city is Truro.
The area now known as Cornwall was first inhabited in the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods. It continued to be occupied by Neolithic and then Bronze Age peoples, and later (in the Iron Age) by Brythons with distinctive cultural relations to neighbouring Wales and Brittany. There is little evidence that Roman rule was effective west of Exeter and few Roman remains have been found. Cornwall was a division of the Dumnonii tribe—whose tribal centre was in the modern county of Devon—known as the Cornovii, separated from Wales after the Battle of Deorham, often coming into conflict with the expanding English kingdom of Wessex before King Athelstan in AD 936 set the boundary between English and Cornish at the Tamar. From the early Middle Ages, British language and culture was apparently shared by Brythons trading across both sides of the Channel, evidenced by the corresponding high medieval Breton kingdoms of Domnonee and Cornouaille and the Celtic Christianity common to both territories.
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Adam Sandler
Adam Richard Sandler (born September 9, 1966) is an American actor, comedian, screenwriter, musician and film producer. After becoming a Saturday Night Live cast member, Sandler went on to star in several Hollywood feature films that grossed over $100 million at the box office. He is best known for his comedic roles, such as in the films Billy Madison (1995), Happy Gilmore (1996), The Waterboy (1998), Big Daddy (1999), and Mr. Deeds (2002), though he has ventured into more dramatic territory. In 1999, Sandler founded Happy Madison, a film and television production company that has produced numerous films and developed the 2007 television series Rules of Engagement.
Adam Sandler was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jewish parents, Stanley, an electrical engineer, and Judy Sandler, a nursery school teacher. When he was five, his family moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, where he attended Manchester Central High School. He found he was a natural comic, and nurtured his talent while at New York University by performing regularly in clubs and on campuses. Sandler graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 1988.
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Adrian Cronauer
Adrian Cronauer (born September 8, 1938 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a former United States Air Force sergeant and radio personality whose experiences as an innovative deejay in Vietnam inspired the 1987 film Good Morning, Vietnam.
Cronauer began his broadcasting career at the age of 12, as a guest for a Pittsburgh-area children's amateur hour. He attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he helped found the forerunner of the university's college radio station WPTS.
Cronauer co-wrote the original story for the film Good Morning, Vietnam, which was based on his experiences as a Saigon-based deejay during the Vietnam War, where he served from 1965 to 1966. His program was known as the "Dawn Buster". A subsequent special program on National Public Radio about the role of the American Forces Vietnam Network — AFVN — (military radio and television) earned Cronauer a 1992 Ohio State Award and two 1991 Gold Medals from the New York Radio Festival.
Cronauer earned a master's degree in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research in New York City and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Cronauer's law practice concentrated in information and communications law. He was also the head of an advertising agency. Later he worked as a special assistant to the Director of the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office.
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Al Pacino
Alfredo James "Al" Pacino (/pəˈtʃiːnɵ/; born April 25, 1940) is an American film and stage actor and director. He is famous for playing mobsters, including Michael Corleone in The Godfather trilogy and Tony Montana in Scarface, though he has also appeared several times on the other side of the law — as a police officer, a detective and a lawyer. His role as Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman won him the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1993 after receiving seven previous Oscar nominations, one of them being in the same year.
He made his feature film debut in the 1969 film Me, Natalie in a minor supporting role, before playing the leading role in the 1971 drama The Panic in Needle Park. Pacino made his major breakthrough when he was given the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather in 1972, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Other Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor were for Dick Tracy and Glengarry Glen Ross. Oscar nominations for Best Actor include The Godfather Part II, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, ...And Justice for All and Scent of a Woman.
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Alan Alda
Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo (born January 28, 1936), better known as Alan Alda, is an American actor, director, screenwriter, and author. A six-time Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award winner, he is best known for his role as Hawkeye Pierce in the TV series M*A*S*H. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook School of Journalism and a member of the advisory board of The Center for Communicating Science.
In 1996, Alda was ranked #41 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time.
Alda was born Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo in The Bronx, New York City. His father, Robert Alda (born Alphonso Giuseppe Giovanni Roberto D'Abruzzo), was an actor and singer, and his mother, Joan Browne, was a former showgirl. His father was of Italian descent and his mother was of Irish ancestry. His adopted surname, "Alda," is a portmanteau of ALphonso and D'Abruzzo. When Alda was seven years old, he contracted Poliomyelitis. To combat the disease, his parents administered a painful treatment regimen developed by Sister Elizabeth Kenny that consisted of applying hot woolen blankets to his limbs and stretching his muscles. Alda attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, New York. In 1956, he received his Bachelor of Science degree in English from Fordham College of Fordham University in the Bronx, where he was a student staff member of its FM radio station, WFUV. Alda's half-brother, Antony Alda, was born the same year and would also become an actor.
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Albert Finney
Albert Finney (born 9 May 1936) is an English actor. He achieved prominence in films in the early 1960s, and has maintained a successful career in theatre, film and television.
A recipient of BAFTA, Golden Globe, Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Awards, Finney has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor four times, for Tom Jones (1963), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Dresser (1983), and Under the Volcano (1984); and was nominated for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Erin Brockovich (2000).
Finney is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His career began in the theatre; he made his first appearance on the London stage in 1958 in Jane Arden's The Party, directed by Charles Laughton, who starred in the production along with his wife, Elsa Lanchester. Then in 1959 he appeared at Stratford in Coriolanus opposite Laurence Olivier (as Coriolanus), Edith Evans and Vanessa Redgrave.
His first film appearance was a role in Tony Richardson's The Entertainer (1960), with Laurence Olivier, but he made his breakthrough with his portrayal of a disillusioned factory worker in Karel Reisz's film version of Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. This led to a series of "Angry Young Man" roles in kitchen sink dramas, before he starred in the Academy Award-winning 1963 film Tom Jones. Prior to this, Finney had been chosen to play T. E. Lawrence in David Lean's production of Lawrence of Arabia, but the actor quit after four days of shooting.
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Alec Guinness
Sir Alec Guinness, CH, CBE (2 April 1914 – 5 August 2000) was an English actor. After an early career on the stage he was featured in several of the Ealing Comedies, including Kind Hearts and Coronets in which he played eight different characters. However, he was probably best known for his six collaborations with David Lean: Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations (1946), Fagin in Oliver Twist (1948), Col. Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor), Prince Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Yevgraf in Doctor Zhivago (1965), and Professor Godbole in A Passage to India (1984). In later years, he achieved fame with younger audiences for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in George Lucas’s Star Wars films.
Guinness was born at 155 Lauderdale Mansions South, Lauderdale Road, Maida Vale, London as Alec Guinness de Cuffe. His mother's maiden name was Agnes Cuff. She was born 8 December 1890 to Edward Cuff and Mary Ann Benfield. On Guinness's birth certificate, the space for the mother's name shows Agnes de Cuffe. The space for the infant's name (where first names only are given) says Alec Guinness. The column for name and surname of father is blank.
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Allison Janney
Allison Brooks Janney (born November 19, 1959) is an American actress, best known for her role as C.J. Cregg on the television series The West Wing.
Janney was born in Dayton, Ohio, the daughter of Macy Brooks (née Putnam), a former actress and homemaker, and Jervis Spencer Janney, Jr., a real estate developer and jazz musician. She has an older brother, Jay, and a younger brother, Hal. She attended The Miami Valley School in Dayton, where she was named a distinguished alumna in 2004, and the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. She then attended Kenyon College. At Kenyon, Janney studied under another Kenyon alum, Paul Newman.[citation needed] She went on to study drama at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.[citation needed] She attended The Neighborhood Playhouse the same years as actor Dylan McDermott.[citation needed]
Janney's first roles on television were as comedic foils on soap operas: she first played Vi Kaminski for a short time on As the World Turns, following up with a two-year stint as one of the Spaulding maids, Ginger on Guiding Light. In the spring of 1994, she appeared in the season finale of Law & Order, as a reluctant witness against a member of the Russian mob.
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American Masters
American Masters is a PBS television show which produces biographies on the artists, actors and writers of the United States who have left a profound impact on the nation's popular culture. It is produced by WNET in New York City. The show debuted on PBS in 1986.
Groups or organizations featured include: Actor's Studio, Algonquin Round Table, Group Theatre, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Women of Tin Pan Alley, Negro Ensemble Company, Juilliard School, the Beat Generation, The Singer-songwriters of the 1970s, Sun Records, Vaudeville, and Warner Bros. Pictures.
American Masters, a series "devoted to America's 'greatest native-born and adopted' artists," was originally scheduled to premier in September 1985; for "logistical scheduling reasons" the premiere was delayed until summer 1986, though on October 16, 1985, an American Masters "special" called Aaron Copland: A Self-Portrait was aired.
The first of the 15 first-season episodes was Private Conversations, a "cinema-verite documentary by Christian Blackwood done in that trickiest of cinematic forms: a film about a film, in this instance the television version of Death of a Salesman, directed by Volker Schlöndorff". It aired on June 23, 1986, as one of two episodes not specifically commissioned for the show's first season.
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Amy Irving
Amy Davis Irving (born September 10, 1953) is an American actress, known for her roles in the films Crossing Delancey, The Fury, Carrie, and Yentl as well as roles on Broadway and Off-Broadway. She has been nominated for an Academy Award, two Golden Globes, and has won an Obie award. She is also known for marrying director Steven Spielberg; they divorced in 1989 after four years of marriage, with Irving receiving a settlement of 100 million dollars.
Irving was born in Palo Alto, California, the daughter of film and stage director Jules Irving (birth name: Jules Israel) and actress Priscilla Pointer. Irving's brother is writer/director David Irving (not the British author of the same name) and her sister is singer/teacher of deaf children Katie Irving. Her father was Jewish and her mother is of Cherokee and Welsh background. She was raised in the Christian Science faith.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Irving attended the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, where she appeared in several productions. She also trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and made her off-Broadway debut at age 17 in And Chocolate on Her Chin. She is a graduate of the Professional Children's School, in Manhattan, New York.
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Andrew Garfield
Andrew Russell Garfield (born 20 August 1983) is an American-English actor. His early roles include the films Lions for Lambs, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and Boy A, which garnered him the 2007 BAFTA Television Award for "Best Actor". Garfield achieved wider recognition and critical acclaim for his role as Eduardo Saverin in the 2010 film The Social Network, a role which earned him Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations. Garfield is a dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom. He will portray the title character in the 2012 superhero film The Amazing Spider-Man, a reboot of the Spider-Man film series.
Garfield was born in Los Angeles, the son of a British mother from Essex and an American father from California. His family moved to England when he was three years old. Garfield is Jewish and was raised in a "middle class home". His parents ran a small interior design business; his father, Richard, later became head coach of the Guildford City Swimming Club, and his mother is a teaching assistant at a nursery school. He also has an older brother who is a doctor. Garfield was raised in Surrey, England and was a gymnast during his early years. He attended Priory Preparatory School in Banstead and later City of London Freemen's School in nearby Ashtead, before training at the Central School of Speech and Drama, from which he graduated in 2004.
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Andy Serkis
Andrew Clement "Andy" Serkis (born 20 April 1964) is an English film actor, director and author.
He is popularly known for playing through motion capture to animate and voice computer-generated characters: Gollum in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy and its upcoming prequel The Hobbit, King Kong in the eponymous 2005 film, Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Captain Haddock in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin.
Andrew also earned a Golden Globe Award nomination for his portrayal of Ian Brady in the British television film Longford. Serkis's motion captured work have been critically acclaimed, especially as Gollum for which he earned several award nominations, becoming the first motion captured actor to win a Empire Award, a Saturn Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Serkis, one of five children, was born and brought up in Ruislip Manor in west London. His mother, Lylie (née Weech), was English and taught disabled children; his father, Clement Serkis, was an Iraqi gynaecologist of Armenian ethnicity. His ancestors' original surname had been "Sarkisian".
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Annette Bening
Annette Carol Bening (born May 29, 1958) is an American actress. Bening is a four-time Oscar nominee for her roles in The Grifters, American Beauty, Being Julia and The Kids Are All Right, winning Golden Globe Awards for the latter two films. Bening is married to actor Warren Beatty, with whom she has four children.
Bening was born in Topeka, Kansas, the youngest of four children. Her mother, Shirley (née Ashley), was a church singer and soloist, and her father, Arnett Grant Bening, was a sales training consultant and insurance salesman. Her parents, natives of Iowa, were practicing Episcopalians and conservative Republicans. Her sister and two brothers are Jane, Bradley and Byron. The family moved to Wichita, Kansas, in 1959, where she spent her early childhood. In 1965, her father took a job with a company in San Diego, California, and they moved there. She began acting in junior high school, playing the lead in The Sound of Music. She graduated in 1975, from Patrick Henry High School where she studied drama.
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Anthony Hopkins
Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins, CBE (born 31 December 1937), best known as Anthony Hopkins, is a Welsh actor of film, stage and television, and a composer. Considered to be one of the greatest living actors, Hopkins is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Other prominent film credits include The Lion in Winter, Magic, The Elephant Man, 84 Charing Cross Road, Dracula, Legends of the Fall, The Remains of the Day, Amistad, Nixon, The World's Fastest Indian, and Fracture. Hopkins was born and brought up in Wales. Retaining his British citizenship, he became a U.S. citizen on 12 April 2000. Hopkins' films have spanned a wide variety of genres, from family films to horror. As well as his Academy Award, Hopkins has also won three BAFTA Awards, two Emmys and the Cecil B. DeMille Golden Globe Award. Hopkins was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1993 for services to the arts. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003, and was made a Fellow of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2008.
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Anthony Quinn
Antonio Rodolfo Quinn-Oaxaca (April 21, 1915 – June 3, 2001), more commonly known as Anthony Quinn, was a Mexican and American actor, as well as a painter and writer. He starred in numerous critically acclaimed and commercially successful films, including Zorba the Greek, Lawrence of Arabia, The Guns of Navarone, The Message, Guns for San Sebastian, Lion of the Desert and Federico Fellini's La Strada. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor twice; for Viva Zapata! in 1952 and Lust for Life in 1956.
Quinn was born Antonio Reyes in Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution. His mother, Manuela "Nellie" Oaxaca, was of Aztec Indian ancestry. His father, Francisco Quinn, was also born in Mexico, to an Irish immigrant father from County Cork and a Mexican mother. Frank Quinn rode with Pancho Villa, then later moved to Los Angeles and became an assistant cameraman at a movie studio. In Quinn's autobiography The Original Sin: A Self-Portrait by Anthony Quinn he denied being the son of an "Irish adventurer" and attributed that tale to Hollywood publicists.
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Antony Sher
Sir Antony Sher, KBE (born 14 June 1949) is a double Olivier Award winning South African-born British actor, writer, theatre director and painter.
Sher was born into a Lithuanian Jewish family in Cape Town, South Africa, the son of Margery and Emmanuel Sher, who worked in business. He grew up in the suburb of Sea Point and is a cousin of the playwright Ronald Harwood. Sher, however, has worked mainly in the United Kingdom and is now a British citizen.
In 1968, after completing his compulsory military service, he left for London to audition at the Central School of Speech and Drama and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but was unsuccessful. Instead, he studied at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art from 1969 to 1971. After training, and some early performances with the theatre group Gay Sweatshop, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982.
In the 1970s Sher was part of an astonishing group of young actors and writers working at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre. It consisted of the likes of writers Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale and fellow actors Bernard Hill, Julie Walters, Trevor Eve and Jonathan Pryce. Sher summed up the work of the company with the phrase "Anarchy ruled." At the Royal Shakespeare Company he took the title role in Tartuffe and played the Fool in King Lear before his big breakthrough in 1984, when he played the title role in Shakespeare's Richard III. This won him the prestigious Laurence Olivier Award. Since then he has played the lead in such productions as Tamburlaine, Cyrano de Bergerac, Stanley and Macbeth. He also played Johnnie in Athol Fugard's Hello and Goodbye, Iago in Othello, Malvolio in Twelfth Night and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.
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Barbra Streisand
Barbra Joan Streisand (/ˈstraɪsænd/; born April 24, 1942) is an American singer, actress, writer, film producer and director. She has won two Academy Awards, eight Grammy Awards, five Emmy Awards including one Daytime Emmy, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Peabody Award, and is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award.
She is one of the most commercially and critically successful entertainers in modern entertainment history, with more than 71.5 million albums shipped in the United States and 140 million albums sold worldwide. She is the best-selling female artist on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Top Selling Artists list, the only female recording artist in the top ten, and the only artist outside of the rock and roll genre. Along with Frank Sinatra, Cher, and Shirley Jones, she shares the distinction of being awarded an acting Oscar and also recording a number-one single on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.
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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.
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Ben Affleck
Benjamin Géza Affleck-Boldt (born August 15, 1972), better known as Ben Affleck, is an American actor, film director, writer, and producer. He became known with his performances in Kevin Smith's films such as Mallrats (1995), Chasing Amy (1997), and Dogma (1999). Affleck won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for the screenplay for Good Will Hunting (1997), which he co-wrote with Matt Damon, and has appeared in lead roles in such popular hits as Armageddon (1998), Pearl Harbor (2001), Changing Lanes (2002), The Sum of All Fears (2002), Daredevil (2003), Hollywoodland (2007) and State of Play (2009).
Affleck is a critically acclaimed filmmaker. He directed Gone Baby Gone (2007) and The Town (2010), playing the lead in the latter. He has worked with his younger brother, actor Casey Affleck, on several projects, including Good Will Hunting and Gone Baby Gone.
Affleck has been married to Jennifer Garner since June 2005. They have two daughters, Violet and Seraphina, and a son, Samuel. He dated the actress Gwyneth Paltrow in 1998. His relationship with actress/singer Jennifer Lopez attracted worldwide media attention, in which Affleck and Lopez were dubbed "Bennifer". The two broke up in 2004.
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Ben Kingsley
Sir Ben Kingsley, CBE (born Krishna Pandit Bhanji;Gujarati:કૃષ્ણા પંડિત ભાનજી; 31 December 1943) is an English actor who has won an Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards in his career. He is known for starring as Mohandas Gandhi in the film Gandhi in 1982, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He is also known for his performances in the films Schindler's List (1993), Sexy Beast (2000), House of Sand and Fog (2003), and Hugo (2011).
Kingsley was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji in Snainton, North Yorkshire, England, the son of Anna Lyna Mary (née Goodman), an actress and model, and Rahimtulla Harji Bhanji, a medical doctor.
Kingsley's father, born in Kenya, is of Gujarati Indian descent; Kingsley's paternal grandfather was a spice trader who had moved from India to Zanzibar, where Kingsley's father lived until moving to England at the age of 14. Kingsley's mother, born out of wedlock, was "loath to speak of her background". Kingsley's maternal grandfather was believed by the family to have been a Russian or German Jew, while Kingsley's maternal grandmother was English and worked in the garment district of East London.
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Ben Stiller
Benjamin Edward "Ben" Stiller (born November 30, 1965) is an American comedian, actor, writer, film director, and producer. He is the son of veteran comedians and actors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara.
After beginning his acting career with a play, Stiller wrote several mockumentaries, and was offered two of his own shows, both entitled The Ben Stiller Show. He began acting in films, and made his directorial debut with Reality Bites. Throughout his career he has since written, starred in, directed, and/or produced over 50 films including Heavyweights, There's Something About Mary, Meet the Parents, Zoolander, Dodgeball, Tropic Thunder, Greenberg and Night at the Museum. In addition, he has had multiple cameos in music videos, television shows, and films.
Stiller is a member of the comedic acting brotherhood colloquially known as the Frat Pack. His films have grossed more than $2.1 billion in Canada and the United States, with an average of $73 million per film. Throughout his career, he has received several awards and honors including an Emmy Award, several MTV Movie Awards, and a Teen Choice Award.
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Benicio del Toro
Benicio Monserrate Rafael del Toro Sánchez (born February 19, 1967) is a Puerto Rican actor and film producer. He won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a BAFTA Award for his role as Javier Rodríguez in Traffic (2000). He is also known for his roles as Fred Fenster in The Usual Suspects (1995), Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), Franky Four Fingers in Snatch (2000), Jackie Boy in Sin City (2005), and Che Guevara in Che (2008). He is the third Puerto Rican to win an Academy Award.
Benicio del Toro was born in San German, on the southwest side of the island of Puerto Rico, and grew up in Santurce, a district of San Juan. He is the son of Gustavo Adolfo del Toro Bermúdez and Fausta Genoveva Sánchez Rivera, who were both lawyers, and deeply respected and beloved in Puerto Rico for their commitment to their community. Gustavo Del Toro was affectionately called the "lawyer of the poor". Many of Del Toro's relatives are involved in the island's legal system. He has an older brother, Gustavo, who was a pediatric oncologist at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. He is of Spanish descent through a Catalan paternal great-grandfather and a Basque maternal great-grandmother, he has Italian and Amerindian ancestry as well. The surname del Toro (Touro) is of Sephardic origin. Benicio del Toro is related to Puerto Rican basketball player Carlos Arroyo, his father Gustavo is a cousin of Arroyo's mother, Gloria Bermudez. Del Toro is also related to Spanish Euro-pop singer Rebeca Pous Del Toro, whose grandfather is Puerto Rican, and Puerto Rican singer Eliseo del Toro.
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Benjamin Bratt
Benjamin Bratt (born December 16, 1963) is an American actor. He is most famous for his role as Rey Curtis on the TV series Law & Order; and his appearances in the movies Miss Congeniality, Demolition Man, Blood in Blood Out, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Traffic, and Piñero.
Bratt was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Eldy (née Banda), a nurse, and Peter Bratt, Sr., a sheet metal worker. Bratt's mother is a Peruvian Indigenous activist of the Quechua ethnic group; born in Peru, she moved to the U.S. at age nine. His father was an American of German and English descent. They married December 30, 1960, in San Francisco, but divorced in September 1967. Bratt's paternal grandfather, George Cleveland Bratt (March 5, 1893 – March 29, 1984), was a Broadway actor who married his grandmother Wiltrude Hildner on August 6, 1920, in Detroit, Michigan.
As a child, Bratt went with his mother and siblings to participate in the 1969 Native American occupation of Alcatraz. Today Bratt is an active supporter of such Native American causes as the American Indian College Fund and We Shall Remain, a mini-series and multi-media project, narrated by Bratt, that establishes Native history as an essential part of American history from PBS' acclaimed series American Experience.
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Bette Midler
Bette Midler (born December 1, 1945) is an American singer, actress, and comedian, also known by her informal stage name, The Divine Miss M. She became famous as a cabaret and concert headliner, and went on to star in successful and acclaimed films such as The Rose, Ruthless People, Beaches, and For The Boys. During her more than forty-year career, Midler has been nominated for two Academy Awards, and won three Grammy Awards, four Golden Globes, three Emmy Awards, and a special Tony Award. She has sold over 30 million albums worldwide. Her voice type is categorized as deep mezzo soprano.
Midler was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her parents moved from Paterson, New Jersey to Honolulu before she was born, and hers was one of the few Jewish families in a mostly Asian neighborhood. Her mother, Ruth (née Schindel), was a seamstress and housewife, and her father, Fred Midler, worked at a Navy base in Hawaii as a painter. She was named after actress Bette Davis, though Davis pronounced her first name in two syllables, and Midler uses one, /ˈbɛt/. She was raised in Aiea and attended Radford High School, in Honolulu. She was voted "Most Talkative" in the 1961 school Hoss Election, and in her Senior Year (Class of 1963), "Most Dramatic". Midler majored in drama at the University of Hawaii, but left after three semesters. She earned money in the 1966 film Hawaii as an extra, playing an uncredited seasick passenger named Miss David Buff.
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Bill Cosby
William Henry "Bill" Cosby, Jr. (born July 12, 1937) is an American comedian, actor, author, television producer, educator, musician and activist. A veteran stand-up performer, he got his start at various clubs, then landed a starring role in the 1960s action show, I Spy. He later starred in his own series, the situation comedy The Bill Cosby Show. He was one of the major characters on the children's television series The Electric Company for its first two seasons, and created the educational cartoon comedy series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, about a group of young friends growing up in the city. Cosby has also acted in a number of films.
During the 1980s, Cosby produced and starred in what is considered to be one of the decade's defining sitcoms, The Cosby Show, which aired eight seasons from 1984 to 1992. The sitcom highlighted the experiences and growth of an affluent African-American family. He also produced the spin-off sitcom A Different World, which became second to The Cosby Show in ratings. He starred in the sitcom Cosby from 1996 to 2000 and hosted Kids Say the Darndest Things for two seasons.
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Bill Paxton
William "Bill" Paxton (born May 17, 1955) is an American actor and film director. He gained popularity after starring roles in the films Apollo 13, Twister, Aliens, True Lies, and Titanic. Paxton starred in the HBO series Big Love (2006–2011).
Paxton was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, the son of Mary Lou (née Gray) and John Lane Paxton, a businessman, lumber wholesaler, museum executive, and occasional actor. He was raised Roman Catholic, his mother's religion. He attended St. Anne's Catholic School, Arlington Heights High School (Fort Worth, Texas), and Southwest Texas State University (San Marcos, Texas).[citation needed]
Paxton has appeared in such films as Weird Science, Aliens, Apollo 13, Near Dark, Twister, Titanic and True Lies. Four years after appearing in Titanic, he joined James Cameron on an expedition to the actual Titanic. A film about this trip, Ghosts of the Abyss, was released in 2003.
Paxton has also directed a number of short films, including Fish Heads, which aired during Saturday Night Live's low-rated 1980-1981 season. He directed the feature films Frailty and The Greatest Game Ever Played.
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Billy Bob Thornton
Billy Bob Thornton (born August 4, 1955) is an American actor, screenwriter, director and musician. Thornton gained early recognition as a cast member on the CBS sitcom Hearts Afire and in several early 1990s films including On Deadly Ground and Tombstone. In the mid-1990s, after writing, directing, and starring in the independent film Sling Blade, he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He appeared in several major film roles following Sling Blade 's success, including 1998's Armageddon and A Simple Plan. During the late 1990s, Thornton began a career as a singer-songwriter. He has released three albums and was the singer in a blues rock band.
Thornton was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the son of Virginia Roberta (née Faulkner), a psychic, and William Raymond "Billy Ray" Thornton (November 1929–August 1974), a high school history teacher and basketball coach who died when Thornton was 18. He has two younger brothers, Jimmy Don (April 1958–October 1988), who died of a heart attack at 30, and John David (born 1969), who resides in California. Jimmy Don Thornton wrote a number of songs, two of which—"Island Avenue" and "Emily"—Thornton has recorded on his solo albums. During his childhood, Thornton lived in both Alpine, Arkansas, and Malvern, Arkansas. He was raised a Methodist, in an extended family in a shack that had neither electricity nor plumbing. Thornton graduated from high school in 1973. A good high school baseball player, he tried out for the Kansas City Royals, but was let go after an injury. After a short period laying asphalt for the Arkansas State Transportation Department, he attended Henderson State University to pursue studies in psychology, but he dropped out after two semesters.
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Billy Crystal
William Edward "Billy" Crystal (born March 14, 1948) is an American actor, writer, producer, comedian, and film director. He gained prominence in the 1970s for playing Jodie Dallas on the ABC sitcom Soap and became a Hollywood film star during the late 1980s and 1990s, appearing in the critical and box office successes When Harry Met Sally... and City Slickers. He has hosted the Academy Awards nine times, including the 84th Academy Awards in 2012.
Crystal was born in the Doctor's Hospital in Manhattan and raised on Long Island in Long Beach, the son of Helen (née Gabler), a housewife, and Jack Crystal, a record company executive and jazz producer who also owned and operated the Commodore Record store. His babysitter was occasionally Billie Holiday. His uncle was musician and songwriter Milt Gabler, and his brother, Richard "Rip" Crystal, is a television producer. Crystal grew up in a Jewish family that he has described as "large" and "loving".
After graduation from Long Beach High School, Crystal attended Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia on a baseball scholarship, having learned the game from his father, who pitched for St. John's University. Crystal never played a game at Marshall because the program was suspended during his freshman year, and because he was too busy being the Editor in Chief of The BG News from 1969–70. He did not return to Marshall as a sophomore, staying back in New York with his future wife. He instead attended Nassau Community College and later New York University, where he graduated in 1970 with a BFA from its Tisch School of the Arts.
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Bing Crosby
Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby (May 3, 1903 – October 14, 1977) was an American singer and actor. Crosby's trademark bass-baritone voice made him one of the best-selling recording artistes of the 20th century, with over half a billion records in circulation.
A multimedia star, from 1934 to 1954 Bing Crosby was a leader in record sales, radio ratings and motion picture grosses. His early career coincided with technical recording innovations; this allowed him to develop a laid-back, intimate singing style that influenced many of the popular male singers who followed him, including Perry Como,Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin. Yank magazine recognized Crosby as the person who had done the most for American G.I. morale during World War II and, during his peak years, around 1948, polls declared him the "most admired man alive," ahead of Jackie Robinson and Pope Pius XII. Also in 1948, the Music Digest estimated that Crosby recordings filled more than half of the 80,000 weekly hours allocated to recorded radio music.
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Brad Pitt
William Bradley "Brad" Pitt (born December 18, 1963) is an American actor and film producer. Pitt has received four Academy Award nominations and five Golden Globe Award nominations, winning one Golden Globe. He has been described as one of the world's most attractive men, a label for which he has received substantial media attention.
Pitt first gained recognition as a cowboy hitchhiker in the road movie Thelma & Louise (1991). His first leading roles in big-budget productions came with A River Runs Through It (1992), Interview with the Vampire (1994), and Legends of the Fall (1994). In 1995, he gave critically acclaimed performances in the crime thriller Seven and the science fiction film 12 Monkeys, the latter earning him a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor and an Academy Award nomination. Four years later, Pitt starred in the cult hit Fight Club. He then starred in the major international hit Ocean's Eleven (2001) and its sequels, Ocean's Twelve (2004) and Ocean's Thirteen (2007). His greatest commercial successes have been Troy (2004) and Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005). Pitt received his second and third Academy Award nominations for his leading performances in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) and Moneyball (2011). In addition, Pitt owns a production company, Plan B Entertainment, whose productions include The Departed (2006), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Moneyball, which garnered a Best Picture nomination.
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Brandon Routh
Brandon James Routh (born October 9, 1979) is an American actor and former fashion model. He grew up in Iowa before moving to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, and subsequently appeared on multiple television series throughout the early 2000s. In 2006, he gained greater recognition for his role as the titular hero of the 2006 film Superman Returns. He also had a recurring role in the TV series Chuck, as Daniel Shaw. Following this, he has had several supporting roles in television and film. In 2011, he portrayed the eponymous protagonist of another comic book film, Dylan Dog: Dead of Night.
Routh, the third of four children, was born in Norwalk, Iowa, on October 9, 1979, the son of Catherine (née Lear), a teacher, and Ronald Ray Routh, a carpenter. Routh's family, which is Methodist, has German, French, English, and Native American ancestry. Routh grew up in Norwalk, approximately 100 miles (160 km) south of Woolstock, the hometown of George Reeves, the first actor to play Superman on television. During his childhood, Routh thought a full-time acting career was unrealistic, citing his small-town background. In his spare time, he played the trumpet and the piano. Routh attended Norwalk High School, where he played sports and participated in music and theatre. He has described himself as a "momma's boy" and not "the most popular kid" during his school years. Routh has also noted that during his younger years, he was fond of the Superman films and comic books.
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Brenda Vaccaro
Brenda Buell Vaccaro (born November 18, 1939) is an American stage, television and film actress.
Vaccaro was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Italian American parents Christine M. (née Pavia) and Mario A. Vaccaro (originally a lawyer), both of whom were pioneers in Italian cuisine. She was raised in Texas, where her parents co-founded Mario's Restaurant (a nationally recognized restaurant) and where Vaccaro graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Dallas in 1958. She returned to New York City to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and made her Broadway debut in the short-lived 1961 comedy Everybody Loves Opal, for which she won the Theatre World Award.
Vaccaro's Broadway credits include The Affair (1962), Cactus Flower (1965), How Now, Dow Jones (1967), The Goodbye People (1968), the female version of The Odd Couple, (1985), and Jake's Women (1992). The husky-voiced actress is a three-time Tony Award nominee, for Best Featured Actress in a Play (Cactus Flower), Best Actress in a Musical (Dow Jones), and Best Actress in a Play (The Goodbye People).
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Brent Spiner
Brent Jay Spiner (born February 2, 1949) is an American actor, best known for his portrayal of the android Lieutenant Commander Data in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation and four subsequent films. His portrayal of Data in Star Trek: First Contact and of Dr. Brackish Okun in Independence Day, both in 1996, earned him a Saturn Award and Saturn Award nomination respectively. He has also enjoyed a career in the theatre and as a musician.
Spiner was born in Houston, Texas, to Sylvia and Jack Spiner, who owned a furniture store. After his father's death, Spiner was adopted by Sylvia's second husband, Sol Mintz, whose surname he used between 1955 and 1975. Spiner attended Bellaire High School, Bellaire, Texas, where he was influenced by drama teacher Cecil Pickett—the same man who coached his daughter Cindy Pickett, and future actors Randy Quaid, Dennis Quaid, Trey Wilson, Robert Wuhl, and director Thomas Schlamme. Spiner became active on the Bellaire Speech team, winning the national championship in dramatic interpretation. He attended the University of Houston where he performed in local theatre.
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Bruce Willis
Walter Bruce Willis (born March 19, 1955) is a German-born American actor, producer, and musician. His career began in television in the 1980s and has continued both in television and film since, including comedic, dramatic, and action roles. He is well known for the role of John McClane in the Die Hard series, which were mostly critical and uniformly financial successes. He has also appeared in over sixty films, including box office successes like Pulp Fiction (1994), 12 Monkeys (1995), The Fifth Element (1997), Armageddon (1998), The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), Sin City (2005), Over the Hedge (2006) and Red (2010).
Motion pictures featuring Willis have grossed US$2.64 billion to 3.05 billion at North American box offices, making him the ninth highest-grossing actor in a leading role and twelfth highest including supporting roles. He is a two-time Emmy Award–winning, Golden Globe Award–winning and four-time Saturn Award–nominated actor. Willis was married to actress Demi Moore and they had three daughters before their divorce in 2000, following thirteen years of marriage. He is currently married to model Emma Heming, with whom he has one daughter.
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Campbell Scott
Campbell Scott (born July 19, 1961) is an American actor, director, producer, and voice artist.
Scott was born in New York City, the son of George C. Scott, an actor, director, and producer, and Colleen Dewhurst, a Canadian-born actress. He graduated from Lawrence University in 1983. His brother is Alexander Scott. He has a son, Malcolm, born in 1998.
In 1990, Scott played a lead role in the ground-breaking film Longtime Companion, which chronicles the early years of the AIDS/HIV epidemic and its impact upon a group of American friends. In the following year, Scott co-starred in the movie Dying Young (in which his mother also appeared) alongside Julia Roberts. He also appears in the 1992 movie Singles, and in 1996, he teamed up with Stanley Tucci to direct the film Big Night. The film met with critical acclaim and was nominated for the "Grand Jury Prize" at the Sundance Film Festival. For their work, Scott and Tucci won both the New York Film Critics Circle Award and the Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best New Director.
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Chevy Chase
Cornelius Crane "Chevy" Chase (/ˈtʃɛvi/; born October 8, 1943) is an American comedian, writer, and television and film actor. Born into a prominent New York family, Chase worked a plethora of odd jobs before moving into comedy acting with National Lampoon. He quickly became a key cast member in the inaugural season of Saturday Night Live, where his Weekend Update skit soon became a staple of the show. Chase is also well known for his portrayal of the character Clark Griswold in four National Lampoon's Vacation films, and for his roles in other successful comedies such as Caddyshack (1980), Fletch (1985), and ¡Three Amigos! (1986). He has hosted the Academy Awards twice (1987 and 1988) and briefly had his own late-night talk show, The Chevy Chase Show. Since 2009, he has appeared as Pierce Hawthorne on the NBC comedy series Community.
Chase was born in Lower Manhattan, New York City. His father, Edward Tinsley "Ned" Chase, was a prominent Manhattan book editor and magazine writer. His mother, Cathalene Parker (née Browning), a concert pianist and librettist, was the daughter of Miles Browning, who served a critical role at the Battle of Midway in World War II; she was adopted as a child by her stepfather, Cornelius Vanderbilt Crane, heir to Crane Plumbing, and took the name Cathalene Crane. As a child, Chase vacationed at Castle Hill, the Cranes' summer estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts.[citation needed]
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Chris Diamantopoulos
Chris Diamantopoulos (born May 9, 1975) is a Canadian actor and comedian.
Chris Diamantopoulos was born in Toronto, Ontario. He grew up splitting time between Canada and Greece. He is of Greek descent and practices the Greek Orthodox religion. He met his wife, actress Becki Newton, in a subway station in New York. The couple married on May 12, 2005. Becki gave birth to their first child, a boy, in November 2010.
He began appearing in TV commercials and professional theatre productions at the age of 9, and by the time he turned 18, he had left home to partake in a series of U.S. national tours. A short time later, he landed on Broadway where he played the lead in The Full Monty (2002) and Les Misérables (2003). Diamantopoulos attended East York Collegiate Institute.
He portrayed Robin Williams in Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Mork & Mindy, a 2005 television film about the behind-the-scenes drama during the making of Mork & Mindy. He has guest-starred in several series, including Kevin Hill, Charmed, The Sopranos, Nip/Tuck, and Boston Legal. In 2007 he appeared opposite Debra Messing in the USA Network mini-series The Starter Wife, where he gave a memorable performance as the gay interior decorator character of Rodney.
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Christian Bale
Christian Charles Philip Bale (born 30 January 1974) is an English actor. Best known for his roles in American films, Bale has starred in both big budget Hollywood films and the smaller projects from independent producers and art houses.
Bale first caught the public eye at the age of 13, when he was cast in the starring role of Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun (1987). He played an English boy who is separated from his parents and subsequently finds himself lost in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. He is also notable for his role as serial killer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000), and for portraying Bruce Wayne/Batman in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and the upcoming finale The Dark Knight Rises (2012).
In 2010, Bale portrayed Dicky Eklund in the biopic The Fighter. He received critical acclaim for his role and won several awards, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role.
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Christine Baranski
Christine Jane Baranski (born May 2, 1952) is an American stage and screen actress, and is perhaps best known for her Emmy Award-winning portrayal as Maryanne Thorpe in the sitcom Cybill, and her Emmy-nominated portrayal of Diane Lockhart in The Good Wife. Prior to her appearances in film and television, Baranski rose to prominence as a Broadway actress, winning two Tony Awards.
Baranski was born in Buffalo, New York, the daughter of Virginia (née Mazurowski) and Lucien Baranski, who edited a Polish-language newspaper. She is of Polish descent and her grandparents were actors in the Polish theater. Baranski attended high school at the Villa Maria Academy in Cheektowaga, a suburb of Buffalo. She then studied at New York City's Juilliard School (Drama Division Group 3: 1970–1974) where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1974.
Baranski made her Off-Broadway debut in Coming Attractions at Playwrights Horizons in 1980, and has appeared in several Off Broadway productions at the Manhattan Theatre Club, starting with Sally and Marsha in 1982.
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Christopher Nolan
Christopher Jonathan James Nolan (/ˈnoʊlən/; born 30 July 1970), also known as Chris Nolan is a British/Americanfilm director, screenwriter and producer.
He received serious notice after his second feature Memento (2000), which he wrote and directed based on a story idea by his brother, Jonathan Nolan. Jonathan went to co-write later scripts with him, including the Batman series and The Prestige. He also first collaborated with Wally Pfister, who would photograph all his subsequent films. After directing Insomnia (2002), Nolan pitched an idea for a reboot of the Batman film franchise to Warner Bros., eventually making a successful trilogy consisting of Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012).
Inception (2010) was an original screenplay by Nolan, a heist film set in the world of "shared dreaming." Nolan co-founded Syncopy Films with his wife, Emma Thomas, and they have produced all his films since The Prestige (2006).
Nolan has also worked with screenwriter David S. Goyer, film editor Lee Smith, composers David Julyan and Hans Zimmer, special effects coordinator Chris Corbould, and actors Christian Bale, Cillian Murphy, Jeremy Theobald, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, and Michael Caine.
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Christopher Reeve
Christopher D'Olier Reeve (September 25, 1952 – October 10, 2004) was an American actor, film director, producer, screenwriter, author and activist. He achieved stardom for his acting achievements, including his notable motion picture portrayal of the fictional superhero Superman.
On May 27, 1995, Reeve became a quadriplegic after being thrown from a horse in an equestrian competition in Virginia. He required a wheelchair and breathing apparatus for the rest of his life. He lobbied on behalf of people with spinal cord injuries, and for human embryonic stem cell research afterward. He founded the Christopher Reeve Foundation and co-founded the Reeve-Irvine Research Center.
Reeve married Dana Morosini in April 1992. Christopher and Dana's son, William Elliot Reeve, was born on June 7, 1992. Reeve also had two children, Matthew Exton Reeve (born 1979) and Alexandra Exton Reeve (born 1983), from his previous relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Gae Exton.
Christopher Reeve was born in New York City on September 25, 1952, the son of Barbara Pitney (née Lamb), a journalist, and Franklin D'Olier Reeve, who was a teacher, novelist, poet and scholar. His paternal grandfather, Colonel Richard Henry Reeve, had been the CEO of Prudential Financial for over twenty-five years, and his great-grandfather, Franklin D'Olier, was a prominent businessman, veteran of World War I, and the first national commander of the American Legion. Reeve's father was also descended from a sister of statesman Elias Boudinot, as well as from Massachusetts governors Thomas Dudley and John Winthrop, Pennsylvania deputy governor Thomas Lloyd, and Henry Baldwin, a US Supreme Court Justice. Reeve's mother was the granddaughter of Mahlon Pitney, another U.S. Supreme Court Justice, and was also a descendant of William Bradford, a Mayflower passenger.
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Chuck Jones
Charles Martin "Chuck" Jones (September 21, 1912 – February 22, 2002) was an American animator, cartoon artist, screenwriter, producer, and director of animated films, most memorably of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts for the Warner Bros. Cartoons studio. He directed many of the classic short animated cartoons starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, Sylvester, Pepé Le Pew and a slew of other Warner characters. Three of these shorts (Duck Amuck, One Froggy Evening and What's Opera, Doc?) were later inducted into the National Film Registry. Chief among Jones' other works was the famous "Hunting Trilogy" of Rabbit Fire, Rabbit Seasoning, and Duck! Rabbit, Duck! (1951–1953).
After his extraordinary career at Warner Bros. ended in 1962, Jones started Sib Tower 12 Productions and began producing memorable cartoons for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, including a new series of Tom and Jerry shorts and the television adaptation of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. He later started his own studio, Chuck Jones Productions, which created several one-shot specials, and periodically worked on Looney Tunes related works.
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Cliff Robertson
Clifford Parker "Cliff" Robertson III (September 9, 1923 – September 10, 2011) was an American actor with a film and television career that spanned half a century. Robertson portrayed a young John F. Kennedy in the 1963 film PT 109, and won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the movie Charly. On television, he portrayed retired astronaut Buzz Aldrin in the 1976 adaptation of Aldrin's autobiographic Return to Earth, played a fictional character based on Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms in the 1977 adaptation of John Ehrlichman's Watergate novel The Company, and portrayed Henry Ford in the 1987 Ford: The Man and the Machine. His last well-known film appearances were in 2002 through 2007 as Uncle Ben in the Spider-Man film trilogy.
Robertson was born on September 9, 1923 in La Jolla, California, the son of Clifford Parker Robertson, Jr. (1902–1968), and his first wife, the former Audrey Olga Willingham (1903-1925). His Texas-born father was described as "the idle heir to a tidy sum of ranching money". Robertson recalled that his father "was a very romantic figure—tall, handsome. He married four or five times, and between marriages he'd pop in to see me. He was a great raconteur, and he was always surrounded by sycophants who let him pick up the tab. During the Depression, he tapped the trust for $500,000, and six months later he was back for more." The actor's parents divorced when he was one, and Robertson's mother died of peritonitis a year later in El Paso, Texas, at the age of 21. He was raised by his maternal grandmother, Mary Eleanor "Eleanora" Willingham (née Sawyer, 1875–1957), in California, and he and his father rarely saw one another. He graduated from La Jolla High School in 1941, where he was known as "The Walking Phoenix".[why?] He then served in the merchant marine in World War II before attending Antioch College in Ohio and dropping out to work as a journalist for a short time.
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Clint Eastwood
Clinton "Clint" Eastwood, Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American film actor, director, producer, composer and politician. Eastwood first came to prominence as a supporting cast member in the TV series Rawhide (1959–1965). He rose to fame for playing the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy of spaghetti westerns (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) during the late 1960s, and as Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry films (Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, The Enforcer, Sudden Impact, and The Dead Pool) throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These roles, among others, have made him an enduring cultural icon of masculinity.
For his work in the films Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004), Eastwood won Academy Awards for Best Director and Producer of the Best Picture, as well as receiving nominations for Best Actor. These films in particular, as well as others including Play Misty for Me (1971), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Tightrope (1984), Pale Rider (1985), Heartbreak Ridge (1986), In the Line of Fire (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), and Gran Torino (2008), have all received commercial success and critical acclaim. Eastwood's only comedies have been Every Which Way but Loose (1978) and its sequel Any Which Way You Can (1980), which are his two most commercially successful films after adjustment for inflation.
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Cloris Leachman
Cloris Leachman (born April 30, 1926) is an American actress of stage, film and television. She has won eight Primetime Emmy Awards—more than any other performer—and one Daytime Emmy Award. She co-starred in the 1971 film The Last Picture Show. Leachman's longest running role was the nosy, self-centered and manipulative landlady Phyllis Lindstrom on the 1970s TV series Mary Tyler Moore, and later on the spinoff series, Phyllis. She also appeared in three Mel Brooks films, including Young Frankenstein. She had a regular role on the last two seasons of The Facts of Life portraying the character Beverly Ann Stickle. In recent years, she had a recurring role as Lois's mother Ida Gorski on Malcolm in the Middle. She also starred in the roast of Bob Saget in 2008. Leachman was a contestant on Season 7 (2008) of Dancing with the Stars, paired with Corky Ballas. At the age of 82, she was the oldest contestant to dance on the series.
Leachman was the grand marshal for the 2009 New Year's Day Tournament of Roses Parade and Rose Bowl Game in Pasadena, California. She presided over the 120th parade, the theme being "Hats Off to Entertainment", and the 95th Rose Bowl game. Leachman plays a supporting role in Raising Hope, a sitcom that premiered in the fall of 2010 on Fox. She will star with Tara Reid in The Fields, and with Colin Firth and Cameron Diaz in Gambit, a remake of a 1966 film.
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Cobra Starship
Cobra Starship is an American synthpop band created by former Midtown bassist and lead vocalist Gabe Saporta in 2003 in New York City, New York. After writing and recording the band's debut album While the City Sleeps, We Rule the Streets as a solo project, Saporta enlisted guitarist Ryland Blackinton, bassist Alex Suarez, drummer Nate Novarro, and keytarist Victoria Asher, all of whom provide backing vocals.
The group released its debut album, While the City Sleeps, We Rule the Streets in 2006, which contained the single "Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)". In 2007, ¡Viva la Cobra! was released, which served as the band's first record featuring the complete lineup. Hot Mess followed in 2009, reaching commercial success due to the single "Good Girls Go Bad". The band's fourth studio album, Night Shades was released August 29, 2011 featuring the first single "You Make Me Feel...".
Cobra Starship was formed in 2005 after Midtown bassist Gabe Saporta took a trip to the deserts of Arizona. During this time, Saporta went on a "vision quest", spending time with Native American tribes and smoking peyote. He began to create his vision for a new band, a melodic style of music heavily influenced by synthpop and hip-hop. Upon returning home, Saporta rented a house in the Catskill Mountains and began writing what would become the band's debut album, While the City Sleeps, We Rule the Streets. He posted a parody response to Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl" titled "Hollaback Boy" on Myspace. The song gained Saporta notoriety on the internet and he eventually signed to Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz's label, Decaydance Records.
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Colin Firth
A Darcy Before I Die - satirical poem by Ronnie Taheny (c) 2008
Colin Andrew Firth, CBE (born 10 September 1960) is an English film, television, and theatre actor. Firth gained wide public attention in the 1990s for his portrayal of Mr. Darcy in the 1995 television adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. In 2011, Firth received an Academy Award for his portrayal of King George VI in The King's Speech, a performance that also earned him the Golden Globe, BAFTA and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actor, amongst others. The previous year, he received his first Academy Award nomination, for his leading role in A Single Man, a performance that won him a BAFTA Award. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2011.
Firth was born in England. His mother, Shirley Jean (née Rolles), was a comparative religion lecturer at King Alfred's College Winchester (now the University of Winchester), and his father, David Norman Lewis Firth, was a history lecturer (also at King Alfred's) and education officer for the Nigerian Government. Firth has a sister, Kate, and a younger brother, Jonathan, who is also an actor. Firth's parents were raised in India, because his maternal grandparents, Congregationalist ministers, and his paternal grandfather, an Anglican priest, performed missionary work abroad. Firth spent part of his childhood in Nigeria, where his father was teaching.
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Dabney Coleman
Dabney Wharton Coleman (born January 3, 1932) is an American actor. He is best known for his roles in 9 to 5, WarGames, You've Got Mail, Sworn to Silence, The Beverly Hillbillies and as the voice of Principal Peter Prickly in Recess and Recess: School's Out.
Coleman was born in Austin, Texas, the son of Mary Wharton (née Johns) and Melvin Randolph Coleman. He entered the Virginia Military Institute in 1949, then studied law at the University of Texas before turning to acting. He was drafted in 1953 to the US Army and served in Europe.
Coleman is a character actor who has a wide range, with over 60 films to his credit. He is often typecast as a comic relief villain, the smarmy, devious foil to the main character. An early example of such features was his portrayal of an ethically absent Harrison Wilby in the Elvis Presley film The Trouble with Girls as well as a role in a 1962 AMC Rambler commercial.
Coleman's fate in these types of roles was cemented with roles such as that of Franklin Hart, Jr. in 1980's 9 to 5, a sexist boss whose murder is fantasized about by his office employees (Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin). That role reunited him with actress Marian Mercer, with whom he also worked on the TV series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; he played Fernwood's mayor, Merle Jeeter and Marian played his second wife, Wanda Rittenhouse Jeeter. He broke from this type somewhat in his portrayal of military computer scientist John McKittrick in WarGames (1983).
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Dan Castellaneta
Daniel Louis "Dan" Castellaneta (born October 29, 1957) is an American actor, voice actor, comedian, singer and screenwriter. Noted for his long-running role as Homer Simpson on the animated television series The Simpsons, he voices many other characters on The Simpsons, including Abraham "Grampa" Simpson, Barney Gumble, Krusty the Clown, Groundskeeper Willie, Mayor Quimby and Hans Moleman.
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, Castellaneta started taking acting classes at a young age. He would listen to his father's comedy records and do impressions of the artists. After graduating from Northern Illinois University, Castellaneta joined Chicago's Second City in 1983, and performed with the troupe until 1987. He was cast in The Tracey Ullman Show, which debuted in 1987. The Tracey Ullman Show included a series of animated shorts about a dysfunctional family. Voices were needed for the shorts, so the producers decided to ask Castellaneta to voice Homer. His voice for the character started out as a loose impression of Walter Matthau, but later evolved into a more robust voice. The shorts would eventually be spun off into The Simpsons. Castellaneta has won four Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance for his work on the show as well as an Annie Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in the Field of Animation in 1993. Castellaneta has co-written four episodes of The Simpsons with his wife Deb Lacusta.
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Dan Futterman
Daniel Futterman (born June 8, 1967) is an American actor and screenwriter. Although he is known for several high-profile acting roles, including Val Goldman in the film The Birdcage, and Vincent Gray on the CBS television series Judging Amy, he is also a screenwriter. In 2005, he wrote the screenplay for the film Capote for which he received an Academy Award nomination and an Independent Spirit Award, Boston Society of Film Critics award, and Los Angeles Film Critics Association award.
Futterman, one of three siblings, was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a lawyer father and a psychoanalyst mother. He was raised in Conservative Judaism and grew up in an "intellectual family". Futterman grew up in Larchmont, New York, and graduated from Mamaroneck High School in 1985 and Columbia University in 1989.
Futterman is married to television writer Anya Epstein (sister of former Boston Red Sox General Manager and Executive Vice President and current President of Baseball Operations for the Chicago Cubs Theo Epstein), with whom he has two daughters: Sylvie (b. 2001) and Eve (b. 2005).
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Dana Carvey
Dana Thomas Carvey (born June 2, 1955) is an American actor and stand-up comedian, best known for his work as a cast member on Saturday Night Live and for playing the role of Garth in the Wayne's World movies.
Dana Carvey was born in Missoula, Montana, the son of Billie, a schoolteacher, and William Carvey, a high school business teacher. Carvey is the brother of Brad Carvey, the engineer/designer of the Video Toaster. The character Garth Algar (from the movie Wayne's World) is a loosely based portrayal of Brad. Carvey was raised Lutheran. When he was three years old, his family moved to San Carlos, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. He received his first drum kit at an early age. He attended Tierra Linda Junior High in San Carlos, Carlmont High School in Belmont, California (where he was a member of the Central Coast Section champion Cross Country team), College of San Mateo in San Mateo, California, and received his Bachelor's degree in communications from San Francisco State University.
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Dat Phan
Dat Phan (born January 25, 1975 in Saigon, South Vietnam), is a Vietnamese American stand-up comedian.
When he was a child, he, his mother, and nine of his siblings emigrated from South Vietnam to the United States. They suffered financial hardships throughout his childhood. He grew up in the City Heights neighborhood of San Diego, California, then spent his teenage years in Santee, California, a suburb of San Diego. Phan was voted most successful of his class at his West Hills High School ten year reunion, and was voted into Grossmont College's Walk of Fame.
In 2003, he entered the first season of NBC's stand-up comedy competition reality show, Last Comic Standing. He was picked on by the other contestants due to his relative youth in the comedy world. Nonetheless, Phan was the surprise winner of Last Comic Standing, and subsequently has made cameo appearances in Hollywood films such as Cellular and Love is the Drug. He currently resides in Los Angeles, California.
Dat Phan Productions released the DVD Dat Phan: Live and the CD You Touch, You Buy in stores January 2010 and began preproduction on a movie titled Yellow Fever. He has endorsed the Jade Ribbon Campaign established to fight against hepatitis B and liver cancer.
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David Brenner
David Brenner (born February 4, 1936) is an American standup comedian, actor, author, and filmmaker.
Brenner was born and raised in poor areas of Philadelphia. Unlike many of the other children in his neighborhood, he managed to stay away from too much trouble. His sense of humor led to his immense popularity during his school years, winning Brenner the title of "Class President" every year. After high school he largely hung out on the street corners for two years, followed by two years in the army, serving in the 101st Airborne and as a cryptographer of the 595th Signal Corp in Boblingen, Germany. After being discharged, he attended Temple University where he majored in mass communications, graduating with honors.
After making his national television debut on the The Tonight Show he became the show's most frequent guest with 158 appearances. Since the majority of his jokes deal with current events, mostly political, he has become somewhat of a political pundit, and has been a guest on several news-oriented shows in the recent past, and was also ranked #53 on Comedy Central Presents: 100 Greatest Stand-Ups of All Time." Brenner has appeared more often on major TV Talk Shows than any other entertainer.
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David Carradine
David Carradine (born John Arthur Carradine; December 8, 1936 – June 3, 2009) was an American actor and martial artist, best known for his role as a warrior monk, Kwai Chang Caine, in the 1970s television series Kung Fu. He was a member of a productive acting family dynasty that began with his father, John Carradine. His acting career, which included major and minor roles on stage, television and cinema, spanned over four decades. A prolific "B" movie actor, he appeared in more than 100 feature films and was nominated four times for a Golden Globe Award. The last nomination was for his title role in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill.
Films that featured Carradine continued to be released after his death. These posthumous credits were from a variety of genres including horror, action, western, martial arts, drama, science fiction and documentary. In addition to his acting career, Carradine was also a musician and pursued a directing career. Influenced by his most popular acting role, he studied martial arts. The child of a frequently married actor, "Jack", as Carradine was known in his youth, had an unstable childhood. This instability would continue throughout his life as he himself was married five times. He was also frequently arrested and prosecuted for a variety of offenses which often involved substance abuse. He died on June 3, 2009 of an apparently accidental asphyxiation.
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David Letterman
David Michael Letterman (born April 12, 1947) is an American television host and comedian. He hosts the late night television talk show, Late Show with David Letterman, broadcast on CBS. Letterman has been a fixture on late night television since the 1982 debut of Late Night with David Letterman on NBC. Letterman recently surpassed friend and mentor Johnny Carson for having the longest late-night hosting career in the United States of America.
Letterman is also a television and film producer. His company Worldwide Pants produces his show as well as its network follow-up The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Worldwide Pants has also produced several prime-time comedies, the most successful of which was Everybody Loves Raymond, currently in syndication.
In 1996, David Letterman was ranked #45 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time.
Letterman was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. His father, Harry Joseph Letterman (April 1915 – February 1973), was a florist of British descent; his mother Dorothy Letterman (née Hofert, now Dorothy Mengering), a Presbyterian church secretary of German descent, is an occasional figure on the show, usually at holidays and birthdays.
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Deirdre Costello
Deirdre Costello is a former camogie player, winner of an All Ireland senior medal when her county won its first senior success in 1996 and winner of the AIB Gaelic Star award for Camogie Junior Player of the year in 1985.
She won three All Ireland medals at different grades in 1985, scoring four goals in her county's victorious All Ireland Junior final against Armagh in September, scoring 3-5 for St Raphael’s Loughrea whom she captained to victory against Loreto, Letterkenny in the All Ireland colleges final in March, winning a National Junior League with Galway in May. She finished second in the Gradam Taillte skills competition and scored 2-1 in the All Ireland minor final against Cork, in which Galway were defeated. She played for Connacht in both the junior and senior finals of the Gael Linn Cup that year, scoring a goal in the senior final.
She scored 3-3 for St Raphael’s Loughrea in the All Ireland colleges final of 1986.
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Dennis Quaid
Dennis William Quaid (born April 9, 1954) is an American actor known for his comedic and dramatic roles. First gaining widespread attention in the 1980s, his career rebounded in the 1990s after he overcame an addiction to drugs and an eating disorder. Some of his notable credits include Jaws 3-D, The Right Stuff, Enemy Mine, Great Balls of Fire!, The Big Easy, Far from Heaven, The Rookie, The Day After Tomorrow, Vantage Point, Footloose, The Parent Trap, Soul Surfer and Innerspace.
Quaid was born in Houston, Texas, the son of Juanita Bonniedale "Nita" (née Jordan), a real estate agent, and William Rudy Quaid (November 21, 1923 – February 8, 1987), an electrician and a third cousin of performer Gene Autry. He is the younger brother of actor Randy Quaid. The Quaid brothers grew up in Bellaire, Texas, which is a small city surrounded by Houston, and in southwest Houston. Quaid has English, Irish, and Cajun (French) ancestry. He attended Paul W. Horn Elementary School in Bellaire and Pershing Middle School in Houston. He studied Mandarin and dance at Bellaire High School in Bellaire, Texas, and later in college, at the University of Houston, under drama coach Cecil Pickett, who had previously taught at Bellaire High and whose daughter is actress Cindy Pickett. It was during his time at Bellaire High School that he developed the nickname 'Dennis Quand', (a combination of 'Quaid' and 'Bond') in relation to his obsession with the 007 movie character and was regularly referred to by this name.
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Denzel Washington
Denzel Hayes Washington, Jr. (born December 28, 1954) is an American actor, screenwriter, director, and film producer. He first rose to prominence when he joined the cast of the medical drama, St. Elsewhere, playing Dr. Philip Chandler for six years. He has received much critical acclaim for his work in film since the 1990s, including for his portrayals of real-life figures, such as Steve Biko, Malcolm X, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Melvin B. Tolson, Frank Lucas and Herman Boone.
Washington has received two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe awards, and a Tony Award. He is notable for winning the Best Supporting Actor for Glory in 1989; and the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2001 for his role in the film Training Day.
Denzel Washington was born in Mount Vernon, near New York City, New York on December 28, 1954. His mother, Lennis "Lynne", was a beauty parlor-owner and operator born in Georgia and partly raised in Harlem. His father, Reverend Denzel Hayes Washington, Sr., a native of Buckingham County, Virginia, served as an ordained Pentecostal minister, and also worked for the Water Department and a local department store, S. Klein.
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Dianne Wiest
Dianne Wiest (born March 28, 1948) is an American actress on stage, television and film. She has won two Academy Awards, two Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe Award. Wiest has also been nominated for a BAFTA Award.
Wiest was born in Kansas City, Missouri. Her mother, Anne Stewart (née Keddie), was born in Auchtermuchty, Scotland, and worked as a nurse, and her father, Bernard John Wiest, was a college dean and former psychiatric social worker for the U.S. Army. The two met in Algiers. She has two brothers: Greg and Don Wiest. Wiest's original ambition was to be a ballerina, but in late high school she switched her goal to theatre.[citation needed]
Wiest graduated from the University of Maryland in 1969 with a degree in Arts and Sciences.
She made her film debut in It's My Turn (1980), but did not establish herself as a film actress until her work for Woody Allen in the 1980s.
Wiest studied theatre at the University of Maryland, leaving after her third term to tour with a Shakespearean troupe. Later, she had a supporting role in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of Ashes. She also acted at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, CT, playing the title role in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. She was an understudy both off-Broadway and on Broadway, in Kurt Vonnegut's Happy Birthday, Wanda June in 1970.
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Don Ameche
Don Ameche (May 31, 1908 – December 6, 1993) was an Academy Award winning American actor with a career spanning almost sixty years.
After touring in vaudeville, he starred in many film-biographies, including The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), causing the name Ameche to be used as the slang word for a telephone.
He continued to appear on Broadway, as well as on radio and TV, where he was host and commentator for International Showtime, covering circus and ice-shows all over Europe. Ameche remained married to his wife Honore for fifty-four years, and they had six children.
Ameche was born Dominic Felix Amici in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His mother, Barbara Etta (née Hertle), was of Scottish, Irish, and German descent, and his father, Felice Ameche, was an immigrant bartender from Italy, born in Montemonaco, Ascoli Piceno, Marche, Italy whose original surname was "Amici." He had three brothers, Umberto (Bert), James (Jim Ameche), and Louis and three sisters, Jane, Elizabeth and Catherine. Ameche attended Marquette University, Loras College and the University of Wisconsin, where his cousin Alan Ameche played football and won the Heisman Trophy in 1954. Ameche had gone to university to study law but found theatricals far more interesting and so decided on a stage career.
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Don Cheadle
Donald Frank "Don" Cheadle, Jr. (pronounced /ˈtʃiːdəl/; born November 29, 1964) is an American film actor and producer. Cheadle rose to prominence in the late 1990s and the early 2000s for his supporting roles in the Steven Soderbergh-directed films Out of Sight, Traffic, and Ocean's Eleven. In 2004, his lead role as Rwandan hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina in the genocide drama film Hotel Rwanda earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. He also campaigns for the end of genocide in Darfur, Sudan, and co-authored a book concerning the issue titled Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond. In 2010, Cheadle was named U.N. Environment Program Goodwill Ambassador. He currently stars on the Showtime sitcom House of Lies.
Cheadle was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of Bettye (née North), a teacher, and Donald Frank Cheadle, Sr., a clinical psychologist. He has a sister, Dawn, and a brother, Colin. His family moved from city to city throughout his childhood. Cheadle graduated in 1982 from East High School in Denver, Colorado, and went on to the California Institute of the Arts, graduating with a BFA in Acting.
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Dudley Moore
Dudley Stuart John Moore, CBE (19 April 1935 – 27 March 2002) was an English actor, comedian, composer and musician.
Moore first came to prominence as one of the four writer-performers in the ground-breaking comedy revue Beyond the Fringe in the early 1960s, and then became famous as half of the highly popular television double-act he formed with Peter Cook.
His fame as a comedy film actor was later heightened by success in hit Hollywood films such as 10 with Bo Derek and Arthur in the late 1970s and early 1980s, respectively. He received an Oscar nomination for the latter role. He was frequently referred to in the media as "Cuddly Dudley" or "The Sex Thimble", a reference to his short stature and reputation as a "ladies' man".
Moore was born in Charing Cross Hospital, London, the son of Ada Francis (née Hughes), a secretary, and John Moore, a railway electrician. He was brought up in Dagenham, Essex. He was notably short: 5 ft 2.5 in (1.588 m) and was born with club feet that required extensive hospital treatment and which, coupled with his diminutive stature, made him the butt of jokes from other children. His right foot responded well to corrective treatment and had straightened itself by the time he was six, but his left foot became permanently twisted and consequently his left leg below the knee was withered. Seeking refuge from his problems, he became a choirboy at the age of six and took up piano and violin. He rapidly developed into a highly talented pianist and organist and was playing the pipe organ at church weddings by the age of 14. He attended Dagenham County High School (now The Sydney Russell School) where he received musical tuition from a dedicated teacher, Peter Cork. Cork became a friend and confidant to Moore, corresponding with him until 1994.
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Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Lee Hoffman (born August 8, 1937) is an American actor with a career in film, television, and theatre since 1960. He has been known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and vulnerable characters.
He first drew critical praise for the play Eh?, for which he won a Theatre World Award and a Drama Desk Award. This was soon followed by his breakthrough movie role as the good-looking but troubled Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (1967). Since then Hoffman's career has largely been focused on cinema, with only sporadic returns to television and the stage. Some of his most notable films are Papillon, Marathon Man, Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man, Lenny, All the President's Men, Kramer vs. Kramer, Tootsie, Rain Man, Wag the Dog, and Meet the Fockers.
Hoffman has won two Academy Awards (for his performances in Kramer vs. Kramer and Rain Man), five Golden Globes, four BAFTAs, three Drama Desk Awards, a Genie Award, and an Emmy Award. Dustin Hoffman received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1999.
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Ed Harris
Edward Allen "Ed" Harris (born November 28, 1950) is an American actor, writer, and director, known for his performances in Appaloosa, The Rock, The Abyss, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, A History of Violence, The Truman Show, and The Hours. Harris has also narrated commercials for The Home Depot and other companies. He is a three-time nominee of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, along with an Academy Award for Best Actor nomination for the title role in Pollock.
Harris was born in Englewood Hospital, and raised in Tenafly, the son of Margaret, a travel agent, and Robert L. Harris, who sang with the Fred Waring chorus and worked at the bookstore of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has an older brother, Robert, and a younger brother, Spencer. His parents were originally from Oklahoma. Harris was raised in a middle-class Presbyterian family. He graduated from Tenafly High School in 1969, where he played on the football team, serving as the team's captain in his senior year. He was a star athlete in high school, and competed in athletics at Columbia University in 1969. Two years later his family moved to New Mexico, and he followed, after having discovered his interest in acting in various theater plays. He enrolled at the University of Oklahoma to study drama. After several successful roles in the local theater, he moved to Los Angeles, and enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts.
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Eddie Izzard
Edward John "Eddie" Izzard (born 7 February 1962) is an English stand-up comedian, actor, and writer. His comedy style takes the form of rambling, whimsical monologue and self-referential pantomime. He had a starring role in the television series The Riches as Wayne Malloy and has appeared in many motion pictures such as Ocean's Twelve, Ocean's Thirteen, Mystery Men, Shadow of the Vampire, The Cat's Meow, Across the Universe, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and Valkyrie. He is also the voice of Nigel in the 2006 animated film The Wild and Miles Axlerod in the 2011 Disney/Pixar animated film Cars 2.
He has cited his main comedy role model as Monty Python, and John Cleese once referred to him as the "Lost Python". In 2009, he completed 43 marathons in 51 days for Sport Relief in spite of having no prior history of long distance running. He is also known for his transvestism. He has won numerous awards including a Primetime Emmy Award for Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program for his comedy special Dress to Kill, in 2000. Izzard's web site won the Yahoo People's Choice Award and earned the Webby Award.
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Eddie Murphy
Edward Regan "Eddie" Murphy (born April 3, 1961) is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, singer, director, and musician.
Box office takes from Murphy's films make him the second-highest grossing actor in the United States. He was a regular cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1980 to 1984 and has worked as a stand-up comedian. He was ranked #10 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time.
He has received Golden Globe Award nominations for his performances in 48 Hrs, Beverly Hills Cop series, Trading Places, and The Nutty Professor. In 2007, he won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor and received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of soul singer James "Thunder" Early in Dreamgirls.
Eddie Murphy's work as a voice actor includes Thurgood Stubbs in The PJs, Donkey in the Shrek series and the dragon Mushu in Disney's Mulan. In some of his films, he plays multiple roles in addition to his main character, intended as a tribute to one of his idols Peter Sellers, who played multiple roles in Dr. Strangelove and elsewhere. Murphy has played multiple roles in Coming to America, Wes Craven's Vampire In Brooklyn, the Nutty Professor films (where he played the title role in two incarnations, plus his father, brother, mother, and grandmother), Bowfinger, Norbit, and Meet Dave.
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Elijah Wood
Elijah Jordan Wood ( /ɪˈlaɪdʒə ˈdʒɔrdən ˈwʊd/; born January 28, 1981) is an American actor. He made his film debut with a minor part in Back to the Future Part II (1989), then landed a succession of larger roles that made him a critically acclaimed child actor by age 9, being nominated for several Young Artist Awards. He is best known for his high-profile role as Frodo Baggins in Peter Jackson's critically acclaimed The Lord of the Rings trilogy and its upcoming prequels The Hobbit films. Since then, he has resisted typecasting by choosing varied roles in critically acclaimed films such as Bobby, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Sin City, Green Street and Everything Is Illuminated.
Wood starred in the film Day Zero (2007) and provided the voice of the main character in the award-winning animated musical films Happy Feet and Happy Feet Two. Wood also voiced the lead as 9 in the Tim Burton-produced action/science fiction film 9. He played an American tourist turned vampire in Paris, je t'aime. In 2005, he started his own record label, Simian Records. He currently appears as Ryan in FX's dark comedy Wilfred, which debuted on June 23, 2011.
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Emily Woof
Emily Woof (born 1967), is an English actress and author, best known for film roles including The Full Monty, The Woodlanders, Velvet Goldmine, Wondrous Oblivion, Silent Cry and The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse.
Her father was Wordsworth Trust Director Dr Robert Woof.
Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Woof studied at Oxford University. Her first stage work was a trilogy of one-man plays: Sex, Sex 2, and Sex 3. Sections of these plays were written to be performed on a trapeze, which Woof had trained to use in Bristol after completing her degree.
Parts in The Full Monty (1997), Photographing Fairies (1997), Velvet Goldmine (1998) and The Woodlanders (1998) established Emily Woof as one of Britain's leading young actresses.
She has also appeared in several television roles, ranging from period dramas (Middlemarch, Oliver Twist) to contemporary drams (Killer Net) and comedy (The Ronni Ancona Show).
For theatre she has written the Sex, Sex II, Sex III, and Revolver.[citation needed] For radio, Pianoman, Baby Love, and Home to The Black Sea. She has written and directed two short films, Between The Wars, and Meeting Helen.[citation needed]
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Emma Stone
Emily Jean "Emma" Stone (born November 6, 1988) is an American actress.
Stone was a cast member of the TV series Drive, and made her feature film debut in the comedy Superbad (2007). She appeared in The House Bunny (2008) and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009). She then starred in the horror-comedy Zombieland and the indie comedy Paper Man in 2009. In 2010, Stone voiced the character Mazie in Marmaduke, and starred in the high school comedy Easy A, which earned her a nomination for a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy. In 2011, she starred in the films Crazy, Stupid, Love. and The Help, both of which were well received by critics and commercial successes. Stone will play Gwen Stacy in the Amazing Spider-Man film, a reboot of the Spider-Man film franchise.
Stone was born in Scottsdale, Arizona, the daughter of Krista (née Yeager), a homemaker, and Jeff Stone, a contractor. She has a brother, who is two years her junior. Stone's paternal grandfather was of Swedish descent, and his family's surname was anglicized to "Stone" when immigrating to the U.S. through Ellis Island; some of her ancestors also lived in Pennsylvania Dutch Country.
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English American
English Americans (occasionally known as Anglo-Americans, although this may have a wider linguistic meaning) are citizens of the United States whose ancestry originates wholly or partly in England.
According to American Community Survey in 2010 data, Americans reporting English ancestry made up an estimated 9.0% of the total U.S. population, and form the third largest European ancestry group after German Americans and Irish Americans. However, demographers regard this as an undercount, as the index of inconsistency is high, and many, if not most, people from English stock have a tendency to identify simply as Americans or, if of mixed European ancestry, nominate a more recent and differentiated ethnic group. Throughout the nineteenth century, England was the largest investor in American land development, railroads, mining, cattle ranching, and heavy industry. Perhaps because English settlers gained easy acceptance, they founded few organizations dedicated to preserving the traditions of their homeland.
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Erika Christensen
Erika Jane Christensen (born August 19, 1982) is an American actress whose film appearances include Traffic (2000), Swimfan (2002), How to Rob a Bank (2007), and The Perfect Score (2004), among others. She also co-starred in the short-lived drama Six Degrees on ABC. She is currently co-starring in the 2010 television series Parenthood as Julia Braverman-Graham.
Christensen was born in Seattle, Washington, the daughter of Kathy, a construction manager, and Steven, an insurance worker/human-resources executive. She has an older half-brother, Nick, and two younger twin brothers, Dane (who appeared in the film The Upside of Anger) and Brando. She has Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Welsh, and Irish ancestry. Christensen was raised in Los Angeles, California and started out on television in commercials for McDonald's.
Christensen is a member of the Church of Scientology. Her parents became Scientologists in their 20s and raised her to be a Scientologist as well as home-schooling her.
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Ernest Borgnine
Ernest Borgnine (born Ermes Effron Borgnino; January 24, 1917) is an American actor of television and film. His career has spanned more than six decades. He was an unconventional lead in many films of the 1950s, including his Academy Award-winning turn in the 1955 film Marty. On television, he played Quinton McHale in the 1962–66 series McHale's Navy and co-starred in the mid-1980s action series Airwolf, in addition to a wide variety of other roles. Borgnine is also known for his role as Mermaid Man in the animated television series SpongeBob SquarePants. Borgnine earned an Emmy Award nomination at age 92 for his work on the series ER.
Borgnine was born in Hamden, Connecticut, the son of Anna (née Boselli), who immigrated to the United States from Carpi (Modena, Italy), and Camillo Borgnino, who immigrated to the U.S. from Ottiglio (Province of Alessandria, Italy).
His parents separated when he was two years old, and he and his mother went to live in Italy. By 1923, his parents had reconciled, and the family name was changed from Borgnino to Borgnine. The family had settled in North Haven, Connecticut, where he attended public schools. His mother also had the passion to develop her own style of dance.[citation needed] Anna gave her son a lot of moral support and he stood closely by her at all times.[citation needed]
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Flip Wilson
Clerow Wilson, Jr. (December 8, 1933 – November 25, 1998), known professionally as Flip Wilson, was an American comedian and actor. In the early 1970s, Wilson hosted his own weekly variety series, The Flip Wilson Show. The series earned Wilson a Golden Globe and two Emmy Awards.
In January 1972, Time magazine featured Wilson's image on their cover and named him "TV's first black superstar".
Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, he was one of 18 children in an impoverished household. After years of bouncing from foster homes to reform school, 16-year-old Wilson lied about his age and joined the United States Air Force. His outgoing personality and funny stories made him popular; he was even asked to tour military bases to cheer up other servicemen. Claiming that he was always "flipped out," Wilson's barracks mates gave him his famous nickname. Discharged in 1954, Wilson started working as a bellhop in San Francisco's Manor Plaza Hotel.
At the Plaza's nightclub, Wilson found extra work playing a drunken patron in between regularly scheduled acts. His inebriated character proved popular and Wilson began performing it in clubs throughout California. He managed to get jobs at various comedy clubs using his nickname, Flip. At first Wilson would simply ad-lib on-stage, but in time, he added written material and his act became more sophisticated.
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Forest Whitaker
Forest Steven Whitaker (born July 15, 1961) is an American actor, producer, and director. He has earned a reputation for intensive character study work for films such as Bird and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and for his recurring role as ex-LAPD Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh on the gritty, award-winning television series, The Shield. Whitaker won an Academy Award for his performance as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the 2006 film The Last King of Scotland. Whitaker has also won a Golden Globe and a BAFTA.
Whitaker was born in Longview, Texas, and his family moved to South Central Los Angeles when he was four. His father, Forest Whitaker, Jr., was an insurance salesman and the son of novelist Forest Whitaker, Sr. His mother, Laura Francis (née Smith), was a special education teacher who put herself through college and earned two Masters degrees while raising her children. Whitaker has two younger brothers, Kenn and Damon, and an older sister, Deborah.
As a teenager, Whitaker commuted from Carson to wealthy Palisades High School on LA's West Side. There, he was all-league defensive tackle on the football team quarterbacked by Jay Schroeder, a future NFL player. While in high school, he also took voice lessons, performed in musicals, and caught the "acting bug"; his first role as an actor was the lead in Dylan Thomas' play, Under Milk Wood. Whitaker graduated from "Pali High" in 1979.
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Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola ( /ˈkoʊpələ/ KOH-pə-lə; born April 7, 1939) is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He is widely acclaimed as one of Hollywood's most innovative and influential film directors. He epitomized the group of filmmakers known as the New Hollywood, that includes Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, Robert Altman, Woody Allen, William Friedkin, Philip Kaufman, and George Lucas who emerged in the early 1970s with unconventional ideas that challenged contemporary film-making.
He co-wrote the script for Patton (1970), which won an Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay). His directorial fame escalated with the release of The Godfather (1972), a film which revolutionized movie-making in the gangster genre, earning praise from critics and public alike. It won three Academy Awards, including his second, for Academy Award for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay), and was instrumental in cementing his position as a prominent American film director.
Coppola followed it with a critically successful sequel, The Godfather Part II (1974), which became the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film was highly praised and won him three Academy Awards—for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture. The Conversation, which Coppola directed, produced and wrote, was released that same year, winning the Palme d'Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. He next directed Apocalypse Now (1979); notorious for its overlong and strenuous production, but critically acclaimed for its vivid and stark depiction of the Vietnam War, winning the Palme d'Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. To this day, Coppola is one of only seven filmmakers to win two Palme d'Or awards, and is the only filmmaker to win both in the same decade.
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Frank Caliendo
Frank Caliendo (born January 19, 1974) is an American comedian and impressionist, best known for his work on the Fox Network television series MADtv, and as the in-house prognosticator for Fox NFL Sunday. In 2007 and 2008, he performed his impersonations on his own show, Frank TV, which aired on TBS. He is known for his impressions of Charles Barkley, NFL color commentator John Madden, sportscaster Jim Rome, comedian Robin Williams, actor William Shatner, and United States Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and for his frequent appearances on The Bob & Tom Show. He has released six solo CDs, and has performed as many as 120 impressions. From 2009 to 2011 he had a show at the Monte Carlo Resort and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. He now tours.
Caliendo was born in Chicago, Illinois, and was raised in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where he attended Waukesha South High School. He is of Italian ancestry. Before graduating from University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Caliendo began performing stand-up comedy at many different local night clubs and comedy clubs, eventually taking a job as a master of ceremonies at a local comedy club. Frank quickly became known for his spot on impressions of Colombo, the Seinfeld crew, Jonathan Winters, and many more which he mastered while bedridden after a painful back surgery. Within just a few short years, he was very active on the college circuit, putting thousands of miles on a beater of a car. During these years, he built a reputation as one of the circuit's top performers. Between 2000-2001, Caliendo made his television debut on sketch comedy series Hypeand later gaining significant national exposure on the comedy series MADtv.
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Frank Lovece
Frank Lovece is an American journalist, author, comedy performer and comic book writer. He was additionally one of the first professional Web journalists, becoming an editor of a Silicon Alley start-up in 1996.
For an Entertainment Weekly article on direct-to-video movies representing themselves as theatrical releases, he produced the first — and, after the article's publication, only — home video to obtain an MPAA rating.
Raised in Morgantown, West Virginia, Frank Lovece attended West Virginia University in that city, graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in communication. He was the arts/entertainment editor of the college newspaper, the Daily Athenaeum; held posts in student government; and interned with both the WWVU statewide radio news service, and, in Washington, D.C., the USDA Cooperative Extension Service.
He became a stringer for the New York City/Long Island newspaper Newsday in the late 1980s, becoming a weekly TV columnist there in 2003. Lovece's book Hailing Taxi: The Official Book of the Show, was published in 1988, the first of several books he would write on topics including the TV series The Brady Bunch and The X-Files, and on the Godzilla movie series.
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French American
French Americans or Franco-Americans are Americans of French or French Canadian descent. About 11.8 million U.S. residents are of this descent, and about 2.0 million speak French and French Creole at home. While Americans of French descent make up a substantial percentage of the American population, French Americans arguably are less visible than other similarly sized ethnic groups. This is due in part to the tendency of French American groups to identify more strongly with "New World" regional identities such as Acadian, Cajun, or Louisiana Creole. This has inhibited the development of a wider French American identity. The majority of Americans of French and French Canadian descent are descendants of those who first settled in Canada in the 17th century (known as New France at the time), which later became the Province of Quebec in 1763, Lower Canada in 1791, and a Canadian province of Quebec after Canadian Confederation in 1867. The majority of Americans of French descent, mostly resident in New England and the Midwest, are descendants of the Quebec Diaspora and the first Canadiens, while a few are of Acadian descent from the Canadian Maritime provinces. Immigration to the United States from France was much lower than from other parts of Europe, such as Ireland, Great Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, Italy, or Poland.
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Garry Marshall
Garry Kent Marshall (born November 13, 1934) is an American actor, director, writer, and producer. His notable credits include creating Happy Days and The Odd Couple and directing Nothing In Common, Pretty Woman, Runaway Bride, Valentine's Day, and The Princess Diaries.
Marshall was born in the New York City borough of the Bronx, the son of Marjorie Irene (née Ward), a tap dance teacher who ran a tap dance school, and the late Anthony Wallace Marshall (1906–99), a director of industrial films and later a producer. He is the brother of actress/director Penny Marshall and Ronny Marshall Hallin, a TV producer. His father was of Italian descent, his family having come from San Martino sulla Marrucina, Chieti, Abruzzo, and his mother was of English and Scottish ancestry; His father changed his last name from "Masciarelli" to "Marshall" before Garry was born. Marshall was baptized Presbyterian and also raised in the Lutheran religion for a time. He attended De Witt Clinton High School and Northwestern University, where he wrote a sports column for The Daily Northwestern, and is a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity.
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Gary Oldman
Gary Leonard Oldman (born 21 March 1958) is an English screen and stage actor, filmmaker and musician, who is the highest-grossing actor in the history of film. A successful theatre actor and former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Oldman gained mainstream recognition from the early 1980s to early 1990s for his portrayals of morally ambiguous characters in films including Meantime, Sid and Nancy, Prick Up Your Ears, The Firm, State of Grace, JFK and Dracula. He became a popular portrayer of villains by the mid 1990s, playing the antagonist of True Romance, Léon, The Fifth Element, Air Force One and The Contender. Since the millenium Oldman has starred in such films as the Harry Potter series, Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, Kung Fu Panda 2 and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Aside from film acting, he has starred in television shows like Knots Landing and Friends, voiced various characters in the Call of Duty video game series, and wrote and directed Nil By Mouth, a film partially based on his own childhood.
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Gary Sinise
Gary Alan Sinise ( /səˈniːs/; born March 17, 1955) is an American actor, film director and musician. During his career, Sinise has won various awards including an Emmy and a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1992, Sinise directed, and played the role of George Milton in the successful film adaptation of Of Mice and Men. Sinise was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1994 for his role as Lt. Dan Taylor in Forrest Gump. He won a Golden Globe Award for his role in Truman, as Harry S. Truman. In 1996, he played a corrupt police officer in the dramatic hit Ransom, Detective Jimmy Shaker. In 1998, Sinise was awarded an Emmy Award for the television film George Wallace, a portrayal of the late George C. Wallace. Since 2004, Sinise has starred in CBS's CSI: NY as Detective Mac Taylor.
Sinise was born in Blue Island, Illinois, the son of Mylles S. (née Alsip; b. 1932) and Robert L. Sinise (b. 1931), the latter of whom was a film editor. He is of part Italian ancestry (from his paternal grandfather). He attended Highland Park High School in Highland Park, Illinois. In 1974, Sinise and two friends, Terry Kinney and Jeff Perry, founded the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Since its founding, Steppenwolf has showcased the talents of such notable actors as Joan Allen, Kevin Anderson, Gary Cole, Ethan Hawke, Glenne Headly, John Mahoney, John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, Martha Plimpton, Jim True-Frost and most recently William Petersen. At Steppenwolf, Sinise honed his acting and directing skills, received a Joseph Jefferson Award for his direction of Lyle Kessler's play Orphans, that took him from Chicago, to New York City to London's West End, and worked on more than thirty of the company's productions.
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Gene Hackman
Eugene Allen "Gene" Hackman (born January 30, 1930) is a retired American actor and novelist.
Nominated for five Academy Awards, winning two, Hackman has also won three Golden Globes and two BAFTAs in a career that spanned five decades. He first came to fame in 1967 with his performance as Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde. His major subsequent films include The French Connection (1971), in which he played Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle; The Poseidon Adventure (1972); The Conversation (1974); Superman (1978), in which he played arch-villain Lex Luthor; Hoosiers (1986); Mississippi Burning (1987); Unforgiven (1992); The Firm (1993); Crimson Tide (1995); Get Shorty (1995); The Birdcage (1996); Enemy of the State (1998); and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).
Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, the son of Lyda (née Gray) and Eugene Ezra Hackman. He has a brother, Richard. His family moved frequently, finally settling in Danville, Illinois, where they lived in the house of his English-born maternal grandmother, Beatrice. Hackman's father operated the printing press for the Commercial-News, a local paper. Hackman's parents divorced in 1943 and his father subsequently left the family.
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Geoffrey Rush
Geoffrey Roy Rush (born 6 July 1951) is an Australian actor and film producer. He is one of the few people who has won the "Triple Crown of Acting": an Academy Award, a Tony Award and an Emmy Award. He has won one Academy Award for acting (from four nominations), three British Academy Film Awards (from five nominations), two Golden Globe Awards and four Screen Actors Guild Awards. He is the foundation President of the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts. He is the 2012 Australian of the Year.
Rush was born in Toowoomba, Queensland, to Merle (née Kiehne), a department store sales assistant, and Roy Baden Rush, an accountant for the Royal Australian Air Force. His parents divorced when he was five and his mother subsequently took him to live with her parents in suburban Brisbane. Before he began his acting career, Rush attended Everton Park State High School. He also has an arts degree from the University of Queensland. While at university, he was talent-spotted by Queensland Theatre Company (QTC) in Brisbane. Rush began his career with QTC in 1971, appearing in 17 productions.
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George Carlin
George Denis Patrick Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008) was an American stand-up comedian, social critic, satirist, actor and writer/author, who won five Grammy Awards for his comedy albums.
Carlin was noted for his black humor as well as his thoughts on politics, the English language, psychology, religion, and various taboo subjects. Carlin and his "Seven Dirty Words" comedy routine were central to the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, in which a narrow 5–4 decision by the justices affirmed the government's power to regulate indecent material on the public airwaves.
The first of his fourteen stand-up comedy specials for HBO was filmed in 1977. In 1988, the 1990s and 2000s, Carlin's routines focused on socio-cultural criticism of modern American society. He often commented on contemporary political issues in the United States and satirized the excesses of American culture. His final HBO special, It's Bad for Ya, was filmed less than four months before his death.
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George Clooney
George Timothy Clooney (born May 6, 1961) is an American actor, film director, producer, and screenwriter. For his work as an actor, he has received three Golden Globe Awards and an Academy Award. Clooney is also noted for his political activism, and has served as one of the United Nations Messengers of Peace since January 31, 2008.
Though he made his acting debut on television in 1978, Clooney gained fame and recognition by portraying Dr. Douglas "Doug" Ross on the long-running medical drama ER from 1994 to 1999. While working on ER, he started attracting a variety of leading roles in films including Batman & Robin (1997) and Out of Sight (1998), in which he first teamed with long-term collaborator Steven Soderbergh. 1999 saw the release of Three Kings, a well-received war satire set during the Gulf War featuring Clooney in another lead role. In 2001, Clooney's fame widened with the release of his biggest commercial success, Ocean's Eleven, the first of a profitable film trilogy, a remake of the film from 1960 with the members of The Rat Pack with Frank Sinatra as Danny Ocean. He made his directorial debut a year later with the 2002 biographical thriller Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and has since directed Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), Leatherheads (2008), and The Ides of March (2011). He won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work in the Middle East thriller Syriana (2005) and subsequently fetched Best Actor nominations for such films as Michael Clayton (2007), Up in the Air (2009) and The Descendants (2011).
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George Hearn
George Hearn (born June 18, 1934) is an American actor and singer, primarily in Broadway musical theatre.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Hearn studied philosophy at Southwestern at Memphis, now Rhodes College before he embarked on a career in the theater, training for the stage with actress turned acting coach Irene Dailey. Most of Hearn's early performances were in traditional productions at the New York Shakespeare Festival and theaters at Lincoln Center.
Hearn's career began in 1963 when he played Sir Dinidan in a national tour of Camelot with Biff McGuire and Jeannie Carson, standing by for McGuire, who played King Arthur. He first garnered a notice as John Dickinson in the acclaimed 1969 musical 1776 and as Liv Ullmann's leading man in the musical version of I Remember Mama (1979).
On March 4, 1980 he replaced Len Cariou in the title role of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd opposite Dorothy Loudon. Later in 1980 Hearn and the show's original star, Angela Lansbury, headed the show's touring company, then reprised their roles for a Showtime production of the musical, which won him an Emmy Award for his portrayal.
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George Martin
Sir George Henry Martin CBE (born 3 January 1926) is an English record producer, arranger, composer, conductor, audio engineer and musician. He is sometimes referred to as "the Fifth Beatle"—a title that he has described as "nonsense"—in reference to his extensive involvement on each of The Beatles' original albums. He is considered one of the greatest record producers of all time, with 30 number one hit singles in the UK and 23 number one hits in the USA.
Influenced by a range of musical styles, encompassing Cole Porter and Johnny Dankworth, he attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama from 1947 to 1950, studying piano and oboe. Following his graduation, he worked for the BBC's classical music department, then joined EMI in 1950. Martin produced comedy and novelty records in the early 1950s, working with the likes of Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan.
In a career spanning over six decades, Martin has worked in music, film, television and live performance. He has also held a number of senior executive roles at media companies and contributes to a wide range of charitable causes, including his work for the Prince's Trust and the Caribbean island of Montserrat.
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Gilda Radner
Gilda Susan Radner (June 28, 1946 – May 20, 1989) was an American comedienne and actress, best known as one of the original cast members of the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, for which she won an Emmy Award in 1978.
Radner was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Jewish parents Henrietta (née Dworkin), a legal secretary, and Herman Radner, a businessman. She grew up in Detroit with a nanny, Elizabeth Clementine Gillies, whom she called "Dibby" (and on whom she based her famous character Emily Litella), and an older brother named Michael. She attended the University Liggett School in Grosse Pointe. Radner wrote in her autobiography It's Always Something toward the end of her life, "I coped with stress by having every possible eating disorder from the time I was nine years old. I have weighed as much as 160 pounds and as little as 93. When I was a kid, I overate constantly. My weight distressed my mother and she took me to a doctor who put me on Dexedrine diet pills when I was ten years old."
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Goldie Hawn
Goldie Jeanne Hawn (born November 21, 1945) is an American actress, film director, producer, and occasional singer. Hawn is known for her roles in Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, Private Benjamin, Foul Play, Shampoo, Overboard, Bird on a Wire, Death Becomes Her, The First Wives Club, and Cactus Flower, for which she won the 1969 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She is the mother of actors Oliver and Kate Hudson. Hawn has maintained a relationship with actor Kurt Russell since 1983.
Hawn was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Laura (née Steinhoff), a jewelry shop/dance school owner, and Edward Rutledge Hawn, a band musician who played at major events in Washington. She was named after her mother's aunt. She has a sister, Patricia; her brother, Edward, died before she was born. Through her father, Hawn is a direct descendant of Edward Rutledge, the youngest signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Hawn was raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she went to Montgomery Blair High School. Her father was Presbyterian and her mother was Jewish, the daughter of immigrants from Hungary; Hawn had a Jewish upbringing.
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Gwyneth Paltrow
Gwyneth Kate Paltrow ( /ˈɡwɪnɨθ ˈpæltroʊ/; born September 27, 1972) is an American actress and singer. She made her acting debut on stage in 1990 and started appearing in films in 1991. After appearing in several films throughout the decade, Paltrow gained early notice for her work in films such as Seven (1995) and Emma (1996) (in which she played the title role). Following the films Sliding Doors (1998) and A Perfect Murder (1998), Paltrow garnered worldwide recognition through her performance in Shakespeare in Love (1998), for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress, a Golden Globe Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards, for Outstanding Lead Actress and as a member of the Outstanding Cast. She also won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series in 2011 for her role as Holly Holliday on the Fox hit TV show Glee in the episode "The Substitute".
Paltrow has portrayed supporting as well as lead roles in films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Shallow Hal (2001), and Proof (2005), for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actress in Motion Picture Drama. Since 2008, she has portrayed Pepper Potts in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, starring in Iron Man and its sequel, Iron Man 2 (2010), and also appearing in The Avengers (2012). Paltrow has been the face of Estée Lauder's Pleasures perfume since 2005. She is married to Chris Martin, the lead vocalist of Coldplay. They have two children together, Apple and Moses. She is also the face of American fashion brand Coach, owner of the lifestyle company Goop.com and author of the cookbook My Father's Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness.
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Gérard Depardieu
Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu (French pronunciation: [ʒeʁaʁ dəpaʁdjø] (
listen); born 27 December 1948) is a French actor and filmmaker. He is a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, Chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite and has twice won the César Award for Best Actor. He also won the Golden Globe award for Best Actor in Green Card and was nominated for an Academy Award for the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac.
Gérard Depardieu was born in Châteauroux, Indre, France. He is one of five children of Anne Jeanne Josèphe "la Liette" (née Marillier) and René Maxime Lionel "le Dédé" Depardieu, a metal worker and volunteer fireman. His mother did not want more children and told Depardieu that she had tried to abort him with knitting needles. He has stated that as a child he would inspect his hands for scars from the needles.
Depardieu spent more time on the street than in the classroom and left school at 15.[citation needed]
At the age of 16, Depardieu left Châteauroux for Paris. There he began acting in the new comedy theatre Café de la Gare, along with Patrick Dewaere, Romain Bouteille, Sotha, Coluche, and Miou-Miou. His breakout film role came in 1974 playing Jean-Claude in Bertrand Blier's comedy Going Places. He studied dancing under Jean-Laurent Cochet, and went on to become one of France's most renowned actors. In 1986, his international fame grew as a result of his performance as a doomed, hunchbacked farmer in the film Jean de Florette. Five years later he won a César for his starring role in Cyrano de Bergerac.
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Hank Azaria
Henry Albert "Hank" Azaria ( /əˈzɛəriə/ ə-ZAIR-ee-ə; born April 25, 1964) is an American film, television and stage actor, director, voice actor, and comedian. He is noted for being one of the principal voice actors on the animated television series The Simpsons (1989–present), on which he performs the voices of Moe Szyslak, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, Chief Wiggum, Comic Book Guy, Carl Carlson and numerous others. Azaria, who attended Tufts University, joined the show with little voice acting experience, but became a regular in its second season. Many of his performances on the show are based on famous actors and characters; Moe's voice, for example, is based on actor Al Pacino.
Alongside his continued voice acting on The Simpsons, Azaria became more widely known through his live-action appearances in films such as The Birdcage (1996) and Godzilla (1998). He has continued to star in numerous films including Mystery Men (1999), America's Sweethearts (2001), Shattered Glass (2003), Along Came Polly (2004), Run Fatboy Run (2007), Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009) and The Smurfs (2011). He also had recurring roles on the television series Mad About You and Friends, and starred in the drama Huff (2004–2006), playing the titular character, as well as appearing in the popular stage musical Spamalot. Originally primarily a comic actor, in recent years Azaria has taken on more dramatic roles including the TV films Tuesdays With Morrie (1999) and Uprising (2001). He has won four Emmys and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Azaria was married to actress Helen Hunt from 1999 to 2000.
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Harrison Ford
Harrison Ford (born July 13, 1942) is an American film actor and producer. He is famous for his performances as Han Solo in the original Star Wars trilogy and as the title character of the Indiana Jones film series. Ford is also known for his roles as Rick Deckard in Blade Runner, John Book in Witness and Jack Ryan in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. His career has spanned six decades and includes roles in several Hollywood blockbusters, including Presumed Innocent, The Fugitive, Air Force One, and What Lies Beneath. At one point, four of the top six box-office hits of all time included one of his roles. Five of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry.
In 1997, Ford was ranked No. 1 in Empire's "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time" list. As of July 2008[update], the United States domestic box office grosses of Ford's films total over US$3.5 billion, with worldwide grosses surpassing $6 billion, making Ford the third highest grossing U.S. domestic box-office star. Ford is the husband of actress Calista Flockhart.
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Harvey Korman
Harvey Herschel Korman (February 15, 1927 – May 29, 2008) was an American comedic actor who performed in television and movie productions beginning in 1960. His big break was being a featured performer on The Danny Kaye Show, but he is best remembered for his performances on the sketch comedy series The Carol Burnett Show and in several films by Mel Brooks, most notably as Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles.
Korman, who was of Russian Jewish descent, was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Ellen (née Blecher) and Cyril Raymond Korman, a salesman. He served in the United States Navy during World War II. After being discharged, he studied at the Goodman School of Drama. He was a member of the Peninsula Players summer theater program during the 1950, 1957, and 1958 seasons.
His early television work included voice-over work as the Great Gazoo on The Flintstones. He appeared on numerous television programs, including the role of Blake in the 1964 episode "Who Chopped Down the Cherry Tree?" on the NBC medical drama The Eleventh Hour. He frequently appeared as a supporting player on The Danny Kaye Show from 1963 through 1967. From 1964-1966, he appeared three times in consecutive years on the CBS's comedy The Munsters starring Fred Gwynne and Yvonne De Carlo. During the 1965-1966 season, Korman made regular appearances on The Flintstones as The Great Gazoo, in what would be its final season on network TV. He also starred in the short-lived Mel Brooks TV series The Nutt House.
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Heath Ledger
Heath Andrew Ledger (4 April 1979 – 22 January 2008) was an Australian television and film actor. After performing roles in Australian television and film during the 1990s, Ledger left his homeland for the United States in 1998 to develop his film career. His work comprised nineteen films, including 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), The Patriot (2000), A Knight's Tale (2001), Brokeback Mountain (2005), and The Dark Knight (2008). In addition to acting, he produced and directed music videos and aspired to be a film director.
For his portrayal of Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain, Ledger won the 2005 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and the 2006 "Best Actor" award from the Australian Film Institute and was nominated for the 2005 Academy Award for Best Actor as well as the 2006 BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. Posthumously he shared the 2007 Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award with the rest of the ensemble cast, the director, and the casting director for the film I'm Not There, which was inspired by the life and songs of American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. In the film, Ledger portrayed a fictional actor named Robbie Clark, one of six characters embodying aspects of Dylan's life and persona. Ledger received numerous accolades for his critically acclaimed portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, a Best Actor International Award at the 2008 Australian Film Institute Awards, for which he became the first actor to win an award posthumously, the 2008 Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actor, the 2009 Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor and the 2009 BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor.
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Henry Winkler
Henry Franklin Winkler (Hon.OBE, born October 30, 1945) is an American actor, director, producer, and author.
Winkler is best known for his role as Fonzie on the 1970s American sitcom Happy Days. "The Fonz," a leather-clad greaser and auto mechanic, started out as a minor character at the show's beginning but had achieved top billing by the time the show ended.
Henry Winkler was born in Manhattan, New York City, the son of Ilse Anna Maria (née Hadra) and Harry Irving Winkler, a lumber company executive. Winkler's Jewish parents emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1939, before the beginning of World War II.
Winkler attended the McBurney School, received his bachelor's degree from Emerson College in 1967, and earned his MFA from the Yale School of Drama in 1970. In 1978, Emerson gave Winkler an honorary doctorate of humane letters. Winkler has also received a Doctor of Humane Letters from Austin College.
Winkler started acting by appearing in a number of television commercials. He also appeared in an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In October 1973, he was cast for the role of Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, nicknamed "The Fonz" or "Fonzie", in the long-running 1970s television series Happy Days. The show was first aired in January 1974.
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Hugh Grant
Hugh John Mungo Grant (born 9 September 1960) is an English actor and film producer. He has received a Golden Globe Award, a BAFTA, and an Honorary César. His films have earned more than $2.4 billion from 25 theatrical releases worldwide. Grant achieved international stardom after appearing in Richard Curtis's sleeper hit Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). He used this breakthrough role as a frequent cinematic persona during the 1990s to deliver comic performances in mainstream films like Mickey Blue Eyes (1999) and Notting Hill (1999). By the turn of the 21st century, he had established himself as a leading man skilled with a satirical comic talent. Since the 2000s, Grant has expanded his oeuvre with critically acclaimed turns as a cad in Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), About A Boy (2002), Love Actually (2003), and American Dreamz (2006).
Within the film industry, Grant is cited as an anti-film star who approaches his roles like a character actor, with the ability to make acting look effortless. Hallmarks of his comic skills include a nonchalant touch of irony/sarcasm and studied physical mannerisms as well as his precisely-timed dialogue delivery and facial expressions. The entertainment media's coverage of Grant's life off the big screen has often overshadowed his work as a thespian. He has been vocal about his disrespect for the profession of acting, and in his disdain towards the culture of celebrity and hostility towards the media. In a career spanning 30 years, Grant has repeatedly claimed that acting is not a true calling but just a job he fell into.
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Hugh Jackman
Hugh Michael Jackman (born 12 October 1968) is an Australian actor and producer who is involved in film, musical theatre, and television.
Jackman has won international recognition for his roles in major films, notably as action/superhero, period and romance characters. He is known for his role as Wolverine in the X-Men film series, as well as for his leads in Kate & Leopold, Van Helsing, The Prestige, Australia, and Real Steel. Jackman is a singer, dancer, and actor in stage musicals, and won a Tony Award for his role in The Boy from Oz.
In November 2008, Open Salon named Jackman one of the sexiest men alive. Later that same month, People magazine named Jackman "Sexiest Man Alive."
A three-time host of the Tony Awards, winning an Emmy Award for one of these appearances, Jackman also hosted the 81st Academy Awards on 22 February 2009.
Jackman was born in Sydney, New South Wales, the youngest of five children of English parents Chris Jackman and Grace Watson, and the second child to be born in Australia (he also has a younger half-sister, from his mother's re-marriage). One of his paternal great-grandfathers was Greek. His parents divorced when he was eight, and he remained with his accountant father and siblings, while his mother moved back to England. As a child, Jackman liked the outdoors, spending a lot of time at the beach and on camping trips and vacations all over Australia. He wanted to see the world: "I used to spend nights looking at atlases. I decided I wanted to be a chef on a plane. Because I'd been on a plane and there was food on board, I presumed there was a chef. I thought that would be an ideal job."
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Hugo Speer
Hugo Speer (born 17 March 1969) is an English actor.
He was born in Harrogate, West Riding of Yorkshire, and educated at Harrogate Grammar School. He studied acting at the Arts Educational School.
He began his acting career appearing in TV series The Bill and Heartbeat, and played a minor role in the film Bhaji on the Beach before his first notable appearance as "Guy" in the film The Full Monty. He has gone on to appear in several films including Swing (1999), Deathwatch and The Interpreter (playing Nicole Kidman's brother). However, most of his work has been on TV, including sitcoms Men Behaving Badly, dramas Clocking Off, The Last Detective, Boudica (2003) and The Rotters' Club (2005), as well as the 2005 BBC adaptation of Dickens' Bleak House. In 2006, he appeared in the postal worker drama Sorted. In 2008, he appeared alongside Martine McCutcheon in Echo Beach. In 2011 he played a repairman whose repairs "come to life" in Haven. Speer also provides narration for ITV1 series, Cops with Cameras, and the BBC series Seaside Rescue. He appears as John Foster in the penultimate and final episodes of the fourth series of Skins.
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Ian McKellen
Sir Ian Murray McKellen, CH CBE (born 25 May 1939) is an English actor. He has won multiple Laurence Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, two Academy Award nominations, and five Emmy Award nominations. His work has spanned genres from Shakespearean and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction. He is known for film roles such as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Magneto in the X-Men films, and as Sir Leigh Teabing in The Da Vinci Code.
McKellen was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979, was knighted in 1991 for services to the performing arts, and was made a Companion of Honour for services to drama and to equality, in the 2008 New Year Honours.
McKellen was born in Burnley, Lancashire, England, though he spent most of his early life in Wigan. Born shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the experience had some lasting impact on him. In response to an interview question when an interviewer remarked that he seemed quite calm in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, he said: "Well, darling, you forget — I slept under a steel plate until I was four years old."
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Imelda Staunton
Imelda Mary Philomena Bernadette Staunton, OBE (born 9 January 1956) is an English actress. She is perhaps best known for her performances in the British comedy television series Up the Garden Path, the Harry Potter film series (in which she plays Professor Dolores Jane Umbridge) and Vera Drake. She drew critical acclaim as Vera Drake, earning her a Best Actress Oscar nomination and a number of wins including the BAFTA and Venice Film Festival Awards for best actress in a leading role.
Staunton was born in Archway, North London, the only child of Bridie (née McNicholas), a hairdresser, and Joseph Staunton, a road-worker and labourer. The family lived over Staunton's mother's hair dressing salon while Staunton’s father worked on the roads. Both of her parents were first-generation Catholic immigrants from County Mayo, Ireland, with her father coming from Ballyvary and her mother from Bohola. Staunton's mother was a musician who could not read music, but could master almost any tune by ear on the accordion or fiddle and had played in Irish showbands.
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Irish American
Irish Americans are citizens of the United States who can trace their ancestry to Ireland. A total of 36,278,332 Americans—estimated at 11.9% of the total population—reported Irish ancestry in the 2008 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. Roughly another 3.5 million (or about another 1.2% of Americans) identified more specifically with Scotch-Irish ancestry. The Irish diaspora population in the United States is roughly 6 times the modern population of Ireland.
The only self-reported ancestral group larger than Irish Americans is German Americans. The Irish are widely dispersed in terms of geography, and demographics. Irish American political leaders have played a major role in local and national politics since before the American Revolutionary War: eight Irish Americans signed the United States Declaration of Independence, and 22 American Presidents, from Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama, have been at least partly of Irish ancestry. (See "American Presidents with Irish ancestry" below.)
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Jack Albertson
Jack Albertson (June 16, 1907 – November 25, 1981) was an American character actor dating to vaudeville. A comedian, dancer, singer, and musician, Albertson is perhaps best known for his roles as Manny Rosen in The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Grandpa Joe in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), Amos Slade in the 1981 animated film The Fox and the Hound (1981), and as Ed Brown in the 1974–1978 television sitcom Chico and the Man. For his contributions to the television industry, Jack Albertson was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6253 Hollywood Boulevard.
Albertson was born in Malden, Massachusetts, the son of Russian-born Jewish immigrants Flora (née Craft) and Leopold Albertson. His sister was actress Mabel Albertson. Albertson's mother, a stock actress, supported the family by working in a shoe factory. Albertson dropped out of high school and traveled to New York City in an attempt to make it big in show business. He was too poor to get a room in a flophouse, so in the winter he would sleep on the IRT subway; he would catch the train for a nickel, and hide out when the transit workers would clear out the train at the end of the line. In the summer he would sleep in Central Park. Albertson's first real job in show business was with a vaudeville road troupe, the Dancing Verselle Sisters.
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Jack Black
Thomas Jacob "Jack" Black (born August 28, 1969) is an American comedian, actor and musician. He makes up one half of the comedy and satirical rock duo Tenacious D. The group has three albums as well as a television series and a film. His acting career is extensive, starring primarily as bumbling, cocky, but internally self-conscious outsiders in comedy films. He was a member of the Frat Pack, a group of comedians who have appeared together in several Hollywood films, and has been nominated for a Golden Globe award. He has also won an MTV Movie Award, and a Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award as well as hosting the 2006, 2008, and 2011 Kids Choice Awards.
Black was born in Santa Monica, California, the son of two satellite engineers, Judith (née Cohen), who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, and Thomas William Black. His mother is Jewish and his father converted to Judaism (Black attended Hebrew school). On The Tonight Show, he said his surname may have come from the occupational name Blacksmith. Black's parents divorced when he was 10; Black moved to Culver City with his father and frequently visited his mother’s home. As a child, Black appeared in a commercial for the Activision game Pitfall! in 1982, which was later shown during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live and again on The Tonight Show with Conan O' Brien. When Black entered high school, his parents enrolled him at the Poseidon School, a private secondary school engineered specifically for students struggling in the traditional school system. Black also attended the Crossroads School, where he excelled in drama. He later attended UCLA but dropped out during his sophomore year to pursue a career in entertainment, at which point his father discontinued his financial support.[citation needed] Fellow UCLA alumnus Tim Robbins later cast Black in Bob Roberts. He also had recurring roles on the HBO sketch comedy series Mr. Show.
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Jack Klugman
Jacob Joachim "Jack" Klugman (born April 27, 1922) is an American stage, film and television actor. He is best known as Felix Unger's sloppy roommate Oscar Madison in the American television series The Odd Couple (1970-1975), for his starring role in Quincy, M.E. (1976-1983), and as Juror #5 in 12 Angry Men.
Klugman was born in Philadelphia, the son of Rose, a hat maker, and Max Klugman, a house painter. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants. He attended Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University, where he graduated in 1948. He began acting after serving in the United States Army during World War II. As a struggling actor in New York City, he roomed with future star Charles Bronson.
In 1954, Klugman played Jim Hanson on the soap opera The Greatest Gift. Also in 1954 Klugman made multiple appearances on the NBC legal drama Justice, starring Gary Merrill and Dane Clark, that was based on cases of the Legal Aid Society of New York.
On September 4, 1955, Klugman and Tony Randall appeared together with Gena Rowlands in the episode entitled "The Pirate's House" of the CBS anthology series, Appointment with Adventure.
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Jack Lemmon
John Uhler "Jack" Lemmon III (February 8, 1925 – June 27, 2001) was an American actor and musician. He starred in more than 60 films including Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Mister Roberts (for which he won the 1955 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award), Days of Wine and Roses, The Great Race, Irma la Douce, The Odd Couple, Save the Tiger (for which he won the 1973 Best Actor Academy Award), The Out-of-Towners, The China Syndrome, Missing (for which he won 'Best Actor' at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival), Glengarry Glen Ross, Grumpy Old Men and Grumpier Old Men.
Lemmon was born in an elevator[citation needed] at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He was the only child of Mildred Burgess LaRue (née Noel) and John Uhler Lemmon, Jr., who was the president of a doughnut company. Lemmon attended John Ward Elementary School in Newton and The Rivers School in Weston, Massachusetts. He had stated that he knew he wanted to be an actor from the age of eight. Lemmon attended Phillips Academy (Class of 1943) and Harvard University (Class of 1947), where he lived in Adams House and was an active member of several Drama Clubs - becoming president of the Hasty Pudding Club - as well as a member of the Delphic Club for Gentleman, a final club at Harvard. After Harvard, Lemmon joined the Navy, receiving V-12 training and serving as an ensign. On being discharged, he took up acting professionally, working on radio, television and Broadway. He studied acting under coach Uta Hagen. He also became enamored of the piano and learned to play it on his own. He could also play the harmonica, organ, and the double bass.
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Jack Nicholson
Not to be confused with Nicholas Jackson
John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson (born April 22, 1937) is an American actor, film director, producer and writer. He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. His twelve Oscar nominations make him the second most nominated actor of all time, behind only Meryl Streep, and tied with Katharine Hepburn.
Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and for As Good as It Gets. He also won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the 1983 film Terms of Endearment. He is tied with Walter Brennan for most acting wins by a male actor (three). Nicholson is well known for playing villainous roles such as Jack Torrance in The Shining, Frank Costello in The Departed, and the Joker in 1989's Batman, among many other roles.
Nicholson is one of only two actors who have been nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade from the 1960s to 2000s; the other is Michael Caine. He has won seven Golden Globe Awards, and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2001. In 1994, he became one of the youngest actors to be awarded the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. Notable films in which he has starred include Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Passenger, The Shining, Reds, Terms of Endearment, Batman, A Few Good Men, As Good as It Gets, About Schmidt, The Departed and Anger Management .
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Jack Palance
Jack Palance (born Volodymyr Palahniuk, Ukrainian: Володимир Палагнюк; February 18, 1919 – November 10, 2006), was an American actor. During half a century of film and television appearances, Palance was nominated for three Academy Awards, all as Best Actor in a Supporting Role, winning in 1991 for his role in City Slickers.
Palance, one of 6 children, was born Volodymyr Palahniuk in the Lattimer Mines section of Hazle Township, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, the son of Anna (née Gramiak) and Ivan Palahniuk, who was an anthracite coal miner. Palance's parents were Ukrainian immigrants, his father a native of Ivane Zolote in Southwestern Ukraine (Ternopil Oblast) and his mother from the Lviv region. He worked in coal mines during his youth before becoming a boxer.
In the late 1930s, Palance started a professional boxing career. Fighting under the name Jack Brazzo, Palance reportedly compiled a record of 15 consecutive victories with 12 knockouts before fighting the future heavyweight contender Joe Baksi in a "Pier-6" brawl. Palance lost a close decision, and recounted: "Then, I thought, you must be nuts to get your head beat in for $200".
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Jacob Vargas
Jacob Vargas (born August 18, 1971) is a Mexican-born American actor.
Vargas was born in Michoacán, Mexico, and raised in Pacoima, Los Angeles, California, since 1971. He was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family.
Vargas’ break into acting came when he was cast as a street dancer on Diff'rent Strokes, and his career has continued successfully including films such as Traffic and Jarhead. He was also in the horror movie The Hills Have Eyes 2. But he is most known for his role as Joker from the Joker Brothers in the 2000 film Next Friday and as Abraham Quintanilla, the brother of the late Tejano singer Selena in the biopic film of the same name.
He is married to Sylvia Arzate. They have a daughter named Rose, born in 2004.
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James Brolin
James Brolin /ˈbroʊlɨn/; born July 18, 1940) is an American actor, producer and director, best known for his roles in soap operas, movies, sitcoms, and television. He is the father of actor Josh Brolin and husband of singer/actress Barbra Streisand.
Brolin was born Craig Kenneth Bruderlin in Los Angeles, California. The eldest of two brothers and two sisters, he was the son of Helen Sue (née Mansur), a homemaker, and Henry Hurst Bruderlin, a building contractor. The family settled in Westwood after his birth. As a young child, he was apparently more interested in animals and airplanes than in acting. When Brolin was 10 in 1950, he began building and flying model airplanes. As a teenaged moviegoer in the mid-1950s he was particularly fascinated with actor James Dean. When his parents invited a director over to his family's house for dinner before auditioning, he met another fellow actor and classmate, Ryan O'Neal, who was about a year younger than Brolin. The two clicked and later enrolled in Los Angeles's renowned University High School. However, Bruderlin's own acting exposed his stifling shyness. His assurance grew when O'Neal invited him to a casting agency. Brolin graduated from high school in 1958, and his family was already encouraging him to become an actor like O'Neal.
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James Coburn
James Harrison Coburn III (August 31, 1928 – November 18, 2002) was an American film and television actor. Coburn appeared in nearly 70 films and made over 100 television appearances during his 45-year career, and played a wide range of roles and won an Academy Award for his supporting role as Glen Whitehouse in Affliction.
A capable, rough-hewn leading man, his toothy grin and lanky body made him a perfect tough-guy in numerous leading and supporting roles in Westerns and action films, such as The Magnificent Seven, Hell Is for Heroes, The Great Escape, Major Dundee, Our Man Flint, Duck, You Sucker, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Cross of Iron.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s he would cultivate an image synonymous with "cool", and along with such contemporaries as Lee Marvin, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson, became one of the prominent "tough-guy" actors of his day.
Coburn was born in Laurel, Nebraska, the son of Mylet S. (née Johnson) and James Harrison Coburn, Jr., who had a garage business that was wiped out by the Great Depression. Coburn was of Scotch-Irish and Swedish descent. He was raised in Compton, California, attended Compton Junior College and enlisted in the United States Army in 1950, serving as a truck driver and an occasional disc jockey on an Army radio station in Texas. Coburn also narrated Army training films in Mainz, Germany. He attended Los Angeles City College, where he studied acting alongside Jeff Corey and Stella Adler, then made his stage debut at the La Jolla Playhouse in Billy Budd. Coburn was selected for a Remington Products razor commercial in which he was able to shave off 11 days of beard growth in less than 60 seconds, while joking that he had more teeth to show on camera than the other 12 candidates for the part.
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James Mason
James Neville Mason (15 May 1909 - 27 July 1984) was an English actor who attained stardom in both British and American films. Mason remained a powerful figure in the industry throughout his career and was nominated for three Academy Awards as well as three Golden Globes (winning once).
Mason was born in Huddersfield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, to John and Mabel Mason; his father was a wealthy merchant. He was educated at Marlborough College, and earned a first in architecture at Peterhouse, Cambridge where he became involved in stock theatre companies in his spare time. Mason had no formal training as an actor and initially embarked upon it for fun. After Cambridge he joined the Old Vic theatre in London under the guidance of Tyrone Guthrie and Alexander Korda. In 1933 Korda gave Mason a small role in The Private Life of Don Juan but fired him three days into shooting.
From 1935 to 1948 he starred in many British quota quickies. A conscientious objector during World War II (causing his family to break with him for many years), he became immensely popular for his brooding anti-heroes in the Gainsborough series of melodramas of the 1940s, including The Man in Grey (1943) and The Wicked Lady (1945). He also starred with Deborah Kerr and Robert Newton in Hatter's Castle (1942). He then took the lead role in the critically acclaimed and immensely popular The Seventh Veil (1945) that set box office records in postwar Britain and raised him to international stardom. He followed it with a role as a mortally wounded Irish bank robber in Odd Man Out (1947) and his first Hollywood film, Caught (1949). Exhibitors voted him the most popular star in Britain in 1944 and 1945.
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James Woods
James Howard Woods (born April 18, 1947) is an American film, stage and television actor. Woods is known for starring in critically acclaimed films such as Once Upon a Time in America, Salvador, Nixon, Ghosts of Mississippi, The Last Day of Summer, Casino, and in the television legal drama Shark. He has won three Emmy Awards, and has gained two Academy Award nominations. He is also well known for appearing several times in the comedy animated series Family Guy, as well as the voice of Hades in Disney's Hercules.
Woods was born in Vernal, Utah. His father, Gail Peyton Woods, was an army intelligence officer who died in 1960 following routine surgery. His mother, Martha A. (née Smith), operated a pre-school after her husband's death and later married Thomas E. Dixon. Woods grew up in Warwick, Rhode Island, where he attended Pilgrim High School.
Woods chose to pursue his undergraduate studies at MIT, where he majored in political science (though he originally planned on a career as an eye surgeon). While at MIT, Woods pledged to Theta Delta Chi Fraternity. He was also an active member of the student theatre group "Dramashop" where he both acted in and directed a number of plays. He dropped out of MIT 1969 before his graduation in order to pursue a career in acting. Woods has said that he became an actor because of the father of actor Ben Affleck, Tim Affleck, who was a stage manager at the Theatre Company of Boston while Woods was a student there.
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Jamie Foxx
Eric Marlon Bishop (born December 13, 1967), professionally known as Jamie Foxx, is an American actor, singer-songwriter, rapper, stand-up comedian, and talk radio host who began playing the piano when he was five years old. As an actor, his work in the film Ray earned him the Academy Award and BAFTA Award for Best Actor as well as the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a musical/comedy. He is also a Grammy Award winning musician, producing three albums which have charted highly on the Billboard 200: Unpredictable, which topped the chart, Best Night of My Life and Intuition.
Born in Terrell, Texas, Foxx was raised by his mother's adoptive parents. He performed in high school and was awarded with a scholarship to United States International University. In his twenties, Foxx began performing stand-up at comedy clubs, and eventually joined the cast of In Living Color in 1991; this exposure helped him land film roles and star in his own sitcom, The Jamie Foxx Show. He released his debut album, Peep This, in 1994, but he did not gain significant musical success until 2004 when he was featured in Twista's song "Slow Jamz". Also in 2004, Foxx played critically acclaimed roles in the films Collateral and Ray. He released his second album, Unpredictable, in 2005, which was helped by his collaboration on Kanye West's number-one single "Gold Digger". His third album Intuition was released in 2008 and was anchored by the single "Blame It". Foxx released his fourth studio album, Best Night of My Life, in 2010.
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Jane Fonda
Jane Fonda (born Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda; December 21, 1937) is an American actress, writer, political activist, former fashion model, and fitness guru. She rose to fame in the 1960s with films such as Barbarella and Cat Ballou. She has won two Academy Awards and received several other movie awards and nominations during more than 50 years as an actress. After 15 years of retirement, she returned to film in 2005 with Monster in Law, followed by Georgia Rule two years later. She also produced and starred in over 20 exercise videos released between 1982 and 1995, and once again in 2010.
Fonda has been an activist for many political causes; her opposition to the Vietnam War and associated activities were controversial. She has also protested the Iraq War and violence against women. She describes herself as a liberal and a feminist. In 2005, Fonda worked alongside Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem to co-found the Women's Media Center, an organization that works to amplify the voices of women in the media through advocacy, media and leadership training, and the creation of original content. Fonda currently serves on the board of the organization. Since 2001, Fonda has been a Christian. She published an autobiography in 2005, and in 2011, she published a second memoir, Prime Time.
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Jason Robards
Jason Nelson Robards, Jr. (July 26, 1922 – December 26, 2000) was an American actor on stage, and in film and television. He is a winner of the Tony Award, two Academy Awards and the Emmy Award. He was also a United States Navy combat veteran of World War II.
He became famous playing works of Eugene O'Neill, an American playwright, and regularly performed in O'Neill's works throughout his career. Robards was cast in both common-man roles and as well-known historical figures.
Robards was born in Chicago, the son of Hope Maxine (née Glanville) Robards and Jason Robards, Sr., an actor who regularly appeared on the stage and in such early films as The Gamblers (1929). Robards was of English, Welsh, Irish, and Swedish descent.
The family moved to New York City, New York, when Jason Jr. was still a toddler, and then moved to Los Angeles, California, when he was six years old. Later interviews with Robards suggested that the trauma of his parents' divorce, which occurred during his grade-school years, greatly affected his personality and worldview.
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Javier Bardem
Javier Ángel Encinas Bardem (Spanish pronunciation: [xaˈβjer βarˈðen]; born 1 March 1969) is a Spanish actor. In 2007 he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as sociopathic assassin Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, and has also garnered critical acclaim for roles in films such as Jamón, jamón, Carne trémula, Boca a boca, Los Lunes al sol and Mar adentro.
As well as the Academy Award, Bardem has been awarded a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a BAFTA, five Goya awards, two European Film Awards, a Prize for Best Actor at Cannes and two Coppa Volpis at Venice for his work. He is the first Spaniard to be nominated for an Oscar (Best Actor, 2000, for Before Night Falls, lost to Russell Crowe for Gladiator), as well as the first Spanish actor to win an Academy Award. He received his third Academy Award nomination, and second Best Actor nomination, for the film Biutiful.
Bardem was born in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands (Spain). His mother, Pilar Bardem, is an actress, and his father, José Carlos Encinas Doussinague, was a businessman who was involved in environmental work; the two separated shortly after his birth. His mother raised him alone. Bardem comes from a long line of filmmakers and actors who have been working since the earliest days of Spanish cinema; he is the grandson of actors Rafael Bardem and Matilde Muñoz Sampedro, and the nephew of screenwriter and director Juan Antonio Bardem. Both his older brother and sister, Carlos and Mónica, are actors. Bardem was raised Roman Catholic by his grandmother. He also comes from a very political background, his uncle Juan Antonio was imprisoned by Franco for his anti-fascist films.
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Jeff Bridges
Jeffrey Leon Bridges (born December 4, 1949) is an American actor, musician, producer, photographer, cartoonist, storyteller, and occasional vintner. He comes from a well-known acting family and began his first televised acting in 1958 as child with his father, Lloyd Bridges, and brother Beau on television's Sea Hunt. Some of his best-known major motion films include: Tron (and its sequel) , Fearless, Iron Man, Contender, TheThe Contender, Starman, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Jagged Edge, Against All Odds, Fisher King, TheThe Fisher King, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Seabiscuit, and The Big Lebowski. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as Otis "Bad" Blake in the 2009 film Crazy Heart and earned his sixth Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn in 2010's True Grit.
Jeffrey Leon Bridges was born in Los Angeles, California on December 4, 1949. He is son of showbiz parents, actor Lloyd Bridges. and actress and writer Dorothy Bridges (née Simpson). His older brother, Beau Bridges, is also an actor. He has a younger sister, Lucinda, and had another brother, Garrett, who died of sudden infant death syndrome in 1948. Growing up, Bridges shared a close relationship with his brother Beau, who acted as a surrogate father when their father was working. Bridges and his siblings were raised in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles. He graduated from University High School (Los Angeles, California) in 1967. At age fourteen, Jeff toured with his father in a stage production of Anniversary Waltz.
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Jeffrey Katzenberg
Jeffrey Katzenberg (born December 21, 1950) is an American film producer and CEO of DreamWorks Animation. He is perhaps most known for his period as chairman of The Walt Disney Studios when Disney produced some of its biggest hits, including Good Morning, Vietnam, Dead Poets Society, The Little Mermaid, Pretty Woman, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Sister Act and The Lion King. As a founder and CEO of DreamWorks Animation, he has overseen the production of such animated franchises as Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon.
Katzenberg was born in New York City, the son of Anne, an artist, and Walter, a stockbroker. He attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, graduating in 1969.
Katzenberg began his career as an assistant to producer David Picker, then in 1974 he became an assistant to Barry Diller, the Chairman of Paramount Pictures. Diller moved Katzenberg to the marketing department, followed by other assignments within the studio, until he was assigned to revive the Star Trek franchise, which resulted in the hit film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). He continued to work his way up and became President of Production under Paramount President Michael Eisner.
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Jesse Eisenberg
Jesse Adam Eisenberg (born October 5, 1983) is an American actor. He made his screen debut with the comedy-drama television series Get Real from 1999 to 2000. After his first leading role in the film Roger Dodger (2002), he appeared in such films as The Squid and the Whale (2005) and The Education of Charlie Banks (2007).
In 2004, Eisenberg was honored with the Vail Film Festival Rising Star Award. In 2009, he starred in the comedy drama Adventureland and the horror comedy Zombieland, for which he won critical acclaim. He then played Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (2010), for which he received a Golden Globe and Academy Award nomination in the Best Actor category. He also starred in Holy Rollers (2010), which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Since then, he has voiced the main character in the animated film Rio (2011), and starred in the comedy 30 Minutes or Less (2011). He will once again voice Blu in Rio 2, which is scheduled for a 2014 release.
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Jim Carrey
James Eugene "Jim" Carrey (born January 17, 1962) is a Canadian-American actor, comedian, and producer. Carrey has received four Golden Globe Award nominations, winning two. Known for his highly energetic, slapstick performances, he has been described as one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood.
Carrey first gained recognition in 1990 after landing a recurring role in the sketch comedy In Living Color. His first leading roles in major productions came with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), Dumb and Dumber (1994), The Mask (1994), and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1995). In 1997, he gave a critically acclaimed performance in Liar Liar, which earned him a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actor. He then starred in the critically acclaimed hits The Truman Show (1998) and Man on the Moon (1999), both garnering him two Golden Globe Awards for Best Actor.
In 2000, he gained further recognition for his portrayal of the The Grinch in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Three years later, Carrey starred in the major blockbuster film Bruce Almighty (2003). The following year he starred in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), for which he received another Golden Globe nomination in addition to a BAFTA Award nomination. He then starred in popular productions Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), Fun with Dick and Jane (2005), Yes Man (2008), A Christmas Carol (2009), and Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011).
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Jo Koy
Jo Koy (born Joseph Glenn Herbert; June 2, 1971) is an American stand-up comic. He is currently touring the college circuit as a featured comedian and performs in clubs across the country. He is often a panelist on E!'s late night show Chelsea Lately.
Koy is of Filipino and Caucasian heritage. His American father was in the Air Force when he married his Filipino mother. Koy's Filipino-American family moved from Tacoma, Washington to Las Vegas soon after he finished high school in Spanaway, Washington; a graduate from Spanaway Lake High School. He moved to Las Vegas to be near his ailing grandmother. Koy enrolled in UNLV, but dropped out to do stand-up comedy.
Koy's stage name comes from a nickname his family gave him growing up.Jokoy is a colloquial Filipino term for "joker".
Koy began in 1994 at a comedy club in Las Vegas. Soon he moved from open mic night to a regular spot on the show Catch a Rising Star at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino. After performing at the MGM Grand Las Vegas, Koy rented the Huntridge Theater and went door to door to sell tickets to his comedy shows.
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Joe Pesci
Joseph Frank "Joe" Pesci (/ˈpɛʃi/PESH-ee; born February 9, 1943) is an American actor, comedian, and musician. He is known for playing a variety of different roles, from violent mobsters to comedic leads to quirky sidekicks. Pesci has starred in a number of high profile films including Goodfellas, Casino, Raging Bull, Once Upon a Time in America, My Cousin Vinny, JFK, Home Alone, and the Lethal Weapon series. He took a six year hiatus from acting between 1999 and 2005 before returning for a cameo in The Good Shepherd (2006).
In 1990, Pesci won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as the psychotic mobster Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas, ten years after receiving a nomination in the same category for Raging Bull.
Pesci was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Mary, who worked part-time as a barber, and Angelo Pesci, a forklift driver for General Motors and bartender. Pesci was raised in Belleville, New Jersey and attended Belleville High School. By the time Pesci was five years old, he was appearing in plays in New York. A few years later, at age ten, he was a regular on a television variety show called Startime Kids, which also featured Connie Francis. He started out working as a barber in the 1960s, following in his mother's footsteps.
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Joe Roth
Joe Roth (born July 13, 1948) is an American film executive, producer and film director. He co-founded Morgan Creek Productions in 1987 and was chairman of 20th Century Fox (1989–1993), Caravan Pictures (1993–1994), and Walt Disney Studios (1994–2000) before founding Revolution Studios in 2000.
Roth was born in New York, New York, the son of Lawrence Roth, a foreman at a plastics plant. In 1959, Roth's father volunteered his son to be a plaintiff in the ACLU's effort to abolish mandatory prayer in public schools. The case, filed in New York, wound its way through the system, finally reaching the U.S. Supreme Court in 1962. The Court ruled that such prayer was unconstitutional under the First Amendment, in the landmark case of Engel v. Vitale.
Over the course of his career, he has produced over 40 films, and has directed six to date, including 1990's Coupe de Ville (in which a Cadillac Coupe de Ville plays a big part) and 2001's America's Sweethearts.
Roth, who was ranked 6th in Premiere Magazine's 2003 Hollywood Power List, produced the 76th annual Academy Awards. Roth announced that in October 2007, when Revolution's distribution deal with Sony Pictures ends, Revolution Studios will close and he will join Sony as a producer.
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John Belushi
John Adam Belushi ( /bəˈluːʃi/; January 24, 1949 – March 5, 1982) was an American comedian, actor, and musician, best known as one of the original cast members of the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live and starring alongside Dan Aykroyd in the comedy film The Blues Brothers. He was the older brother of James "Jim" Belushi.
John Belushi was born in Chicago. He was the son of Agnes (née Samaras), who was of Albanian descent, and Adam Belushi (1918–1996), an Albanian immigrant and restaurant operator who left his native village, Qytezë, in 1934 at the age of sixteen. John was raised in a Chicago suburb, along with his three siblings: younger brothers Billy and Jim and his sister, Marian. The family's name at the time of immigration was Bellios, or Belliors. Belushi was raised in the Albanian Orthodox church and grew up outside Chicago in Wheaton. He attended Wheaton Central High School, where he met his future wife, Judy Jacklin.
Belushi's first big break as a comedian occurred in 1971, when he joined The Second City comedy troupe in Chicago. He was cast in National Lampoon's Lemmings, a parody of Woodstock, which played Off-Broadway in 1972 and showcased future Saturday Night Live (SNL) performers Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest.
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John Gielgud
Sir Arthur John Gielgud, OM, CH (/ˈɡiːlɡʊd/; 14 April 1904 – 21 May 2000) was an English actor, director, and producer. A descendant of the renowned Terry acting family, he achieved early international acclaim for his youthful, emotionally expressive Hamlet which broke box office records on Broadway in 1937. He was known for his beautiful speaking of verse and particularly for his warm and expressive voice, which his colleague Sir Alec Guinness likened to "a silver trumpet muffled in silk". Gielgud is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award.
John Gielgud was born in South Kensington in London to Kate Terry and Frank Gielgud. He was of theatrical lineage on his mother's side, being the grandson of actress Kate Terry, whose actor-siblings included Ellen Terry, Marion Terry and Fred Terry.
Gielgud's Catholic father, Franciszek Giełgud, born in 1880, was a descendant of a Polish noble family residing at a manor in a town called Giełgudyszki (now Gelgaudiškis in Marijampolė County, Lithuania). In his autobiography, Gielgud states repeatedly and clearly that his father was Polish Catholic, and mentions Gelgaudiškis as being his ancestral home whence his family and their surname originated.
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John Houseman
John Houseman (born Jacques Haussmann; September 22, 1902 – October 31, 1988) was a Romanian-born British-American actor and film producer who became known for his highly publicized collaboration with director Orson Welles from their days in the Federal Theatre Project through to the production of Citizen Kane. He is perhaps best known for his role as Professor Charles Kingsfield in the 1973 film The Paper Chase, for which he won a best supporting actor Oscar. He reprised his role as Kingsfield in the subsequent TV series adaptation of The Paper Chase. Houseman was also known for his commercials for the brokerage firm Smith Barney. He had a distinctive Mid-Atlantic English accent, in common with many actors of his generation.
Houseman was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1902, the son of May (née Davies) and Georges Haussmann, who ran a grain business. His mother was British, from a Christian family of Welsh and Irish descent. His father was an Alsatian-born Jew. He was educated in England at Clifton College, became a British citizen and worked in the grain trade in London before emigrating to the United States in 1925, where he took the stage name of John Houseman. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943. Houseman died of spinal cancer in 1988 at his home in Malibu, California, at age 86.
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John Leguizamo
Jonathan Alberto "John" Leguizamo (born July 22, 1964) is a Colombian-American actor, producer, voice artist, and comedian.
John Leguizamo was born in Bogotá, Colombia, to Alberto and Luz Leguizamo, According to Leguizamo, his paternal grandfather was of Puerto Rican and Italian descent and his maternal grandfather was Lebanese. Leguizamo has also described himself as being of Amerindian and Mestizo heritage. Leguizamo's father was once an aspiring film director and studied at Cinecittà, but eventually dropped out due to lack of finances. When Leguizamo was four years old, his family emigrated to the United States and lived in various neighborhoods of Queens in New York City, including Jackson Heights. He later credited growing up as one of the first Latino children in his Jackson Heights neighborhood as formative in his acting ability: "It was tough. There were lots of fights. I would walk through a park and be attacked, and I had to defend myself all the time. But this helped me to become funny so that I wouldn’t get hit." Leguizamo attended the Joseph Pulitzer Middle School (I.S.145) and later the Murry Bergtraum High School. As a student at Murry Bergtraum, Leguizamo wrote comedy material and tested it out on his classmates. He was voted "Most Talkative" by his fellow classmates. After graduating from high school, he began his theater career as an undergraduate at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in which he eventually dropped out to seek a stand-up comedy career. Post NYU Leguizamo enrolled at Long Island University C.W. Post Campus where he took theater classes.
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John Ritter
Jonathan Southworth "John" Ritter (September 17, 1948 – September 11, 2003) was an American actor, voice over artist and comedian perhaps best known for having played Jack Tripper and Paul Hennessy in the ABC sitcoms Three's Company and 8 Simple Rules, respectively. He is also known for being the voice of the title character Clifford in the PBS television series Clifford the Big Red Dog. Don Knotts called him the "Greatest physical comedian on the planet".
Ritter's final films—the screwball dark comedy Bad Santa and the two children's animated films Clifford's Really Big Movie and Stanley's Dinosaur Round-Up—were all dedicated in his memory.
John Ritter was born in Burbank, California, the son of Dorothy Fay (née Southworth), an actress, and singing cowboy/matinee-star Tex Ritter. He attended Hollywood High School, where he was student body president. He went on to the University of Southern California, where he was a member of the Phi Gamma Delta (FIJI) fraternity, and majored in psychology and minored in architecture. In 1966 at the age of 18, Ritter was a contestant on The Dating Game.
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John Travolta
John Joseph Travolta (born February 18, 1954) is an American actor, dancer, and singer. Travolta first became known in the 1970s, after appearing on the television series Welcome Back, Kotter and starring in the box office successes Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Travolta's acting career declined in the early 1980s and continued to deteriorate for the rest of the decade. His career enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s with his role in Pulp Fiction, and he has since continued starring in Hollywood films, including Face/Off, Ladder 49, and Wild Hogs. Travolta was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction. He won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for his performance in Get Shorty.
Travolta, the youngest of six children, was born and raised in Englewood, New Jersey, an inner-ring suburb of New York City. His father, Salvatore Travolta (November 1912 – May 1995), was a semi-professional American football player turned tire salesman and partner in a tire company. His mother, Helen Cecilia (née Burke, January 1912 – December 1978), was an actress and singer who had appeared in The Sunshine Sisters, a radio vocal group, and acted and directed before becoming a high school drama and English teacher. His siblings, Joey, Ellen, Ann, Margaret, and Sam Travolta, have all acted. His father was a second-generation Italian American and his mother was Irish American; he grew up in an Irish-American neighborhood and has said that his household was predominantly Irish in culture. He was raised Roman Catholic, but converted to Scientology in 1975.
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Johnny Carson
John William "Johnny" Carson (October 23, 1925 – January 23, 2005) was an American television host and comedian, known for thirty years as host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962–1992). Carson received six Emmy Awards, the Governor Award, and a 1985 Peabody Award. He was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1987. Johnny Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992 and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1993.
Although his show was already successful by the end of the 1960s, during the 1970s Carson became an American icon and remained so until his retirement in 1992. He adopted a casual, conversational approach with extensive interaction with guests, an approach pioneered by Arthur Godfrey and previous Tonight Show hosts Steve Allen and Jack Paar. Late night hosts David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Craig Ferguson, and Jimmy Fallon have all cited Carson's influence on their late-night talk shows, which resemble his in format and tone.
Carson was born in Corning, Iowa, in the year 1925, to Homer Lloyd "Kit" Carson, a power company manager, and Ruth Hook Carson, who was of Irish descent. He grew up in the nearby towns of Avoca, Clarinda, and Red Oak in southwest Iowa before moving to Norfolk, Nebraska, at the age of eight. At the age of twelve, Carson found a book on magic at a friend's house and immediately purchased a mail-order magician's kit. He debuted as "The Great Carsoni" at fourteen and was paid $3; many other performances at local picnics and country fairs followed.
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Johnny Depp
John Christopher "Johnny" Depp II (born June 9, 1963) is an American actor, producer and musician. He has won the Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild award for Best Actor. Depp rose to prominence on the 1980s television series 21 Jump Street, becoming a teen idol. Dissatisfied with that status, Depp turned to film for more challenging roles; he played the title character of Edward Scissorhands (1990) and later found box office success in films such as Sleepy Hollow (1999), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Rango (2011) and the Pirates of the Caribbean film series (2003–present). He has collaborated with director and friend Tim Burton in eight films, most recently with Dark Shadows (2012).
Depp has gained acclaim for his portrayals of people such as Ed Wood, in Ed Wood, Joseph D. Pistone in Donnie Brasco, Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, George Jung in Blow, and the bank robber John Dillinger in Michael Mann's Public Enemies. Films featuring Depp have grossed over $3.1 billion at the United States box office and over $7.6 billion worldwide. He has been nominated for top awards many times, winning the Best Actor Awards from the Golden Globes for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and from the Screen Actors Guild for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. He also has garnered a sex symbol status in American cinema, being twice named as the "Sexiest Man Alive" by People magazine in 2003 and 2009. He has been listed in the 2012 Guinness Book of World Records as the highest paid actor, with $75 million.
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Jon Voight
Jonathan Vincent "Jon" Voight (/vɔɪt/) (born December 29, 1938) is an American actor. He has won one Academy Award, out of four nominations, and three Golden Globe Awards, out of nine nominations. Voight is the father of actress Angelina Jolie.
Voight came to prominence in the late 1960s with his performance as a would-be gigolo in Midnight Cowboy (1969). During the 1970s, he became a Hollywood star with his portrayals of a businessman mixed up with murder in Deliverance (1972), a paraplegic Vietnam veteran in Coming Home (1978), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor, and a penniless ex-boxing champion in The Champ (1979).
Although his output slowed during the 1980s, Voight received critical acclaim for his performance as a ruthless bank robber in Runaway Train (1985). During the 1990s, he most notably starred as an unscrupulous showman attorney in The Rainmaker (1997). Voight gave critically acclaimed biographical performances during the 2000s, appearing as sportscaster Howard Cosell in Ali (2001), as Nazi officer Jürgen Stroop in Uprising (2001), and as Pope John Paul II in the television miniseries of the same name (2005).
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Jonah Lomu
Jonah Tali Lomu, MNZM (born 12 May 1975) is a New Zealand rugby union player. He had sixty-three caps as an All Black after debuting in 1994. He is generally regarded as the first true global superstar of rugby union. He has had a huge impact on the game. He was inducted into the International Rugby Hall of Fame on 9 October 2007, and the IRB Hall of Fame on 24 October 2011.
Lomu burst onto the international rugby scene during the 1994 Hong Kong Sevens tournament and was widely acknowledged to be the top player at the 1995 World Cup in South Africa even though New Zealand lost the championship game to the host Springboks. At one time Lomu was considered 'rugby union's biggest drawcard', swelling attendances at any match where he appeared. He is officially the Rugby World Cup all-time top try scorer with 15 tries.
He has played for several provincial teams, in the Super Rugby and NPC competitions. These included the Blues, Chiefs and Hurricanes, and Counties Manukau, Wellington and later North Harbour. He made a comeback after undergoing a kidney transplant in 2004.
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Jonathan Winters
Jonathan Harshman Winters III (born November 11, 1925) is an American comedian, actor, and artist.
Winters was born in Bellbrook, Ohio, the son of Alice Kilgore (née Rodgers), a radio personality, and Jonathan Harshman Winters II, an investment broker. He is a descendant of Valentine Winters, founder of the Winters National Bank in Dayton, Ohio (now part of JPMorgan Chase). Of English and Scotch-Irish ancestry, Winters has described his father as an alcoholic who had trouble holding a job.[citation needed] When he was seven, his parents separated, and Winters' mother took him to Springfield, Ohio to live with his maternal grandmother.[citation needed]
At age 17, Winters quit high school and joined the United States Marine Corps and served two and a half years in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Upon his return he attended Kenyon College. He later studied cartooning at Dayton Art Institute, where he met Eileen Schauder, whom he married in 1948.
Winters is a brother of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Lambda chapter).
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Joseph Fiennes
Joseph Twisleton Wykeham Fiennes ( /ˈfaɪnz/; b. 27 May 1970) is an English film and stage actor. He is perhaps best known for his portrayals of William Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love, Sir Robert Dudley in Elizabeth, Commisar Danilov in Enemy at the Gates, Martin Luther in Luther, Merlin in Camelot, and his portrayal of Mark Benford in the 2009 TV series FlashForward.
Fiennes was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England in 1970, the son of photographer Mark Fiennes and novelist Jennifer Lash. The youngest of six siblings, his elder siblings are actor Ralph Fiennes, filmmakers Sophie Fiennes and Martha Fiennes, composer Magnus Fiennes, and conservationist Jacob Fiennes, his twin brother. His foster brother, Michael Emery, is an archaeologist.
Fiennes was briefly educated in the Republic of Ireland and then at Swan School For Boys (now known as Leehurst Swan School, following a merger with another school), an independent school in Salisbury, before passing his 11+ exam and continuing to Bishop Wordsworth's School, a voluntary-aided state day grammar school, in the Cathedral Close of the city. He then attended art school in Suffolk for a year, before joining the Young Vic Youth Theatre. Fiennes subsequently trained for three years at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama, graduating in 1993.
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Judd Hirsch
Judd Hirsch (born March 15, 1935) is an American actor most known for playing Alex Rieger on the television comedy series Taxi, John Lacey on the NBC series Dear John, and Alan Eppes on the CBS series Numb3rs.
He was born in The Bronx borough of New York City, New York, the son of Sally (née Kitzis) and Joseph Sidney Hirsch, an electrician. His father was also born in New York where the family had lived since the mid-1800s. Sally (Sarah) Kitzis was born in Russia. Hirsch was raised Jewish.[citation needed]
He attended DeWitt Clinton High School, located in The Bronx, and later earned a college degree from the City College of New York in physics.[citation needed]
Hirsch's first major television appearance was in the mini-series The Law (1974).
For his performance in Taxi, in 1981 and again in 1983, Judd Hirsch won the Emmy Award for Lead Actor In a Comedy Series. Hirsch went on to play the title character on the modestly successful sitcom Dear John and in 1989 won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Series in a Comedy or Musical for this role. He later teamed with Bob Newhart in the short-lived comedy George and Leo. He had also previously starred for one season in the series Delvecchio, playing a police detective (1976–1977).
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Judi Dench
Dame Judith Olivia “Judi” Dench, CH, DBE, FRSA (born 9 December 1934) is an English film, stage and television actress.
Dench made her professional debut in 1957 with the Old Vic Company. Over the following few years she played in several of William Shakespeare's plays in such roles as Ophelia in Hamlet, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. She branched into film work, and won a BAFTA Award as Most Promising Newcomer; however, most of her work during this period was in theatre. Not generally known as a singer, she drew strong reviews for her leading role in the musical Cabaret in 1968.
During the next two decades, she established herself as one of the most significant British theatre performers, working for the National Theatre Company and the Royal Shakespeare Company. In television, she achieved success during this period, in the series A Fine Romance from 1981 until 1984 and in 1992 began a continuing role in the television romantic comedy series As Time Goes By.
Her film appearances were infrequent until she was cast as M in GoldenEye (1995), a role she has played in each James Bond film since. She received several notable film awards for her role as Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown (1997), and has since been acclaimed for her work in such films as Shakespeare in Love (1998), Chocolat (2000), Iris (2001), Mrs Henderson Presents (2005) and Notes on a Scandal (2006), and the television production The Last of the Blonde Bombshells (2001).
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Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne (French pronunciation: [ʒyl vɛʁn]; February 8, 1828 – March 24, 1905) was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Verne wrote about space, air, and underwater travel before air travel and practical submarines were invented, and before practical means of space travel had been devised. He is the second most translated author in the world (after Agatha Christie). Some of his books have also been made into live-action and animated films and television shows. Verne is often referred to as the "Father of Science Fiction", a title sometimes shared with Hugo Gernsback and H. G. Wells.
Jules Verne was born in Nantes, in France, to Pierre Verne, an attorney, and his wife, Sophie Allote de la Fuÿe. Jules spent his early years at home with his parents in the bustling harbor city of Nantes. The family spent summers in a country house just outside the city, in Brains on the banks of the Loire River. Here Jules and his brother Paul would often rent a boat for one franc a day. The sight of the many ships navigating the river sparked Jules's imagination, as he describes in the autobiographical short story "Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse". At the age of nine, Jules and Paul, of whom he was very fond, were sent to boarding school at the Saint Donatien College (Petit séminaire de Saint-Donatien). As a child, he developed a great interest in travel and exploration, a passion he showed as a writer of adventure stories and science fiction. His interest in writing often cost him progress in other subjects.
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Kathleen Quinlan
Kathleen Denise Quinlan (born November 19, 1954) is an American actress, mostly seen on television and in motion pictures.
Quinlan was born in Pasadena, California, the daughter of Josephine (née Zachry), a military supply supervisor, and Robert Quinlan, a television sports director. She was raised in Mill Valley, California, where she attended Tamalpais High School and began her acting career. She has been married to actor Bruce Abbott since April 12, 1994. They have a son, Tyler (born 1990).
Quinlan made her film debut in George Lucas' 1973 nostalgic look at the early sixties, American Graffiti, at the age of 19 (although she did appear in an uncredited role in 1972's One is a Lonely Number). As a young actress, she guest-starred in several 1970s television series including Police Woman, Ironside, Emergency! and Kojak.
She has appeared in over 50 films, but is perhaps best known for her roles as Deborah, a schizophrenic, in the film version of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture-Drama, and for a Golden Globe and Oscar nominated turn in the Best Supporting Actress category as an astronaut's wife, Marilyn Lovell, in the 1995 true story Apollo 13 opposite Tom Hanks.
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Kevin Bacon
Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958) is an American film and theater actor whose notable roles include Animal House, Diner, Footloose, Flatliners, Wild Things, A Few Good Men, JFK, Apollo 13, Hollow Man, Mystic River, The Woodsman, Friday the 13th, Tremors, Death Sentence, Frost/Nixon, and X-Men: First Class.
Bacon has won Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards, was nominated for an Emmy Award, and was named by The Guardian as one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.
In 2003, Bacon received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Bacon, one of six children, was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His mother, Ruth Hilda (née Holmes; 1916–1991), taught at an elementary school and was a liberal activist, while his father, Edmund Norwood Bacon (May 2, 1910 – October 14, 2005), was a well-respected architect and a prominent Philadelphian who had been Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission for many years. At 16, in 1975, Bacon won a full scholarship to and attended the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts at Bucknell University, a state-funded five-week arts program where he studied Theatre under Dr. Glory Van Scott, which helped solidify Bacon's passion for the arts.
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Kevin Kline
Kevin Delaney Kline (born October 24, 1947) is an American stage and film actor. An Academy Award winner for his supporting role in the comedy hit Fish Called Wanda, AA Fish Called Wanda, he also won two Tony Awards and was nominated for five Golden Globe Awards, two BAFTA Awards and an Emmy Award.
Kline was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Peggy (née Kirk) and Robert Joseph Kline. His father was a classical music lover and an amateur opera singer who owned and operated The Record Bar, a record store in St. Louis that opened in the early '40s, and sold toys during the '60s and '70s; his father's family also owned Kline's Inc., a department store chain. Kline has described his mother as the "dramatic theatrical character in our family." Kline's father was Jewish, from a family that had emigrated from Germany; Kline's mother was of Irish descent, the daughter of an emigrant from County Louth. Kline was raised in his mother's Catholic religion (his father had become an agnostic). He has three siblings, Alex, Christopher, and Kate.
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Kevin Spacey
Kevin Spacey, CBE (born Kevin Spacey Fowler; July 26, 1959) is an American actor, director, screenwriter, producer, and crooner. He grew up in California, and began his career as a stage actor during the 1980s, before being cast in supporting roles in film and television. He gained critical acclaim in the early 1990s, culminating in his first Academy Award for The Usual Suspects (Best Supporting Actor), followed by a Best Actor Academy Award win for American Beauty (1999). His other starring roles in Hollywood include Seven, L.A. Confidential, Pay It Forward, K-PAX, and Superman Returns in a career which has earned him several Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. Since 2003, he has been artistic director of the Old Vic theatre in London.
Spacey was born in South Orange, New Jersey, the son of Kathleen Ann (née Knutson; December 5, 1931 – March 19, 2003), a secretary, and Thomas Geoffrey Fowler (June 4, 1924 – December 24, 1992), a technical writer and data consultant. He has two older siblings: a sister, Julie, and a brother, Randy. He attended Northridge Military Academy, Canoga Park High School (in tenth and eleventh grades), and then Chatsworth High School in Chatsworth, Los Angeles, where he graduated valedictorian of his class. At Chatsworth High, he starred in the school's senior production of The Sound of Music, playing the part of Captain Georg von Trapp, opposite Mare Winningham's character, Maria.
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Lance Armstrong
Lance Edward Armstrong (born Lance Edward Gunderson on September 18, 1971) is an American former professional road racing cyclist who won the Tour de France a record seven consecutive times after having survived testicular cancer. He is also the founder and chairman of the Lance Armstrong Foundation for cancer research and support. He last rode for UCI ProTeam Team RadioShack, a team he helped found.
In October 1996 he was diagnosed as having testicular cancer with a tumor that had metastasized to his brain and lungs. His cancer treatments included brain and testicular surgery and extensive chemotherapy, and his prognosis was originally poor. He went on to win the Tour de France each year from 1999 to 2005, and is the only person to win seven times having broken the previous record of five wins shared by Miguel Indurain, Bernard Hinault, Eddy Merckx, and Jacques Anquetil.
In 1999, he was named the ABC Wide World of Sports Athlete of the Year. In 2000 he won the Prince of Asturias Award in Sports. In 2002, Sports Illustrated magazine named him Sportsman of the Year. He was also named Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year for the years 2002–2005. He received ESPN's ESPY Award for Best Male Athlete in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006, and won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Overseas Personality Award in 2003. Armstrong announced his retirement from racing on July 24, 2005, at the end of the 2005 Tour de France but returned to competitive cycling in January 2009 and finished third in the 2009 Tour de France. He confirmed he had retired from competitive cycling for good on February 16, 2011.
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Lance Henriksen
Lance James Henriksen (born May 5, 1940) is an American actor and artist best known to film and television audiences for his roles in science fiction, action, and horror films such as the Alien film franchise, and on television shows such as Millennium. Henriksen is also a voice actor; he is noted for his deep, commanding voice.
Henriksen was born in New York City. His father, James Henriksen (born as Jim Marino Henriksen in Tønsberg 1910), was a Norwegian merchant sailor and boxer nicknamed "Icewater" who spent most of his life at sea. His mother, Margueritte, struggled to find work as a dance instructor, waitress, and model. His parents divorced when he was two years old and he was raised by his mother. As he grew up, Henriksen found himself in trouble at various schools and even saw the inside of a children's home. Henriksen left home[not in citation given] and dropped out of school at the age of twelve;[not in citation given] he would not learn to read until he was 30, when he taught himself by studying film scripts. Henriksen's grandmother from Norway was of Sami origin.[citation needed]
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Laurence Olivier
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM ( /ˈlɒrəns ɵˈlɪvi.eɪ/; 22 May 1907 – 11 July 1989) was an English actor, director, and producer. One of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century, he was the youngest actor to be knighted and the first to be elevated to the peerage. He married three times, to actresses Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Plowright. Actor Spencer Tracy said that Olivier was 'the greatest actor in the English-speaking world'.
Olivier played a wide variety of roles on stage and screen from Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and Restoration comedy to modern American and British drama. He was the first artistic director of the National Theatre of Great Britain and its main stage is named in his honour. He is regarded by some to be the greatest actor of the 20th century, in the same category as David Garrick, Richard Burbage, Edmund Kean and Henry Irving in their own centuries. Olivier's AMPAS acknowledgments are considerable: twelve Oscar nominations, with two awards (for Best Actor and Best Picture for the 1948 film Hamlet), plus two honorary awards including a statuette and certificate. He was also awarded five Emmy awards from the nine nominations he received. Additionally, he was a three-time Golden Globe and BAFTA winner.
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Lee Marvin
Lee Marvin (February 19, 1924 – August 29, 1987) was an American film actor. Known for his gravelly voice, white hair and 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m) stature, Marvin at first did supporting roles, mostly villains, soldiers and other hardboiled characters, but after winning an Academy Award for Best Actor for his dual roles in Cat Ballou (1965), he landed more heroic and sympathetic leading roles.
Marvin was born in New York City. He was the son of Lamont Waltman Marvin, an advertising executive and the head of the New York and New England Apple Institute, and his wife Courtenay Washington (née Davidge), a fashion writer and beauty consultant. He was named in honor of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who was his first cousin, four times removed. His father was a direct descendant of Matthew Marvin, Sr., who emigrated from Great Bentley, Essex, England in 1635 and helped found Hartford, Connecticut.
Marvin studied violin when he was young. As a teenager, Marvin "spent weekends and spare time hunting deer, puma, wild turkey, and bobwhite in the wilds of the then-uncharted Everglades." He attended St. Leo College Preparatory School in St. Leo, Florida after being expelled from several other schools for bad behavior.
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Lesley Sharp
Lesley Sharp (born 1960 in Liverpool, Lancashire) is an English stage, film and television actress, particularly well known for her variety of British television roles including Clocking Off, Bob & Rose and afterlife.
Adopted as the second daughter of mature Scottish parents, Sharp grew up in Formby, Merseyside. Childhood holidays were spent in Edinburgh, where "every fucking summer it rained". Sharp started acting because, as a child, she felt "invisible" and didn't "quite fit in." She has said that her inspiration to act came from watching Dick Emery on television. Her father worked for the Inland Revenue and was not keen on her taking up acting, preferring her to follow in his footsteps by becoming a civil servant. Her adoptive mother died of cancer when Sharp was 15. The adoption was never a secret in the family, but it was only after leaving home that she met her genetic mother — a working class woman unable to keep her because the father was a married man.
Sharp moved to London at 18 and, after initially failing to get into drama school, worked at the Department of Education and Science at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Responsible for filling in the warders' overtime sheets, her poor numeracy skills resulted in frequent mistakes before she was eventually asked "very nicely, but firmly" to leave.
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Linda Ronstadt
Linda Maria Ronstadt (born July 15, 1946) is an American popular music recording artist. She has earned eleven Grammy Awards, two Academy of Country Music awards, an Emmy Award, an ALMA Award, numerous United States and internationally certified gold, platinum and multiplatinum albums, in addition to Tony Award and Golden Globe nominations.
A singer, songwriter, and record producer, she is recognized as a definitive interpreter of songs. Being one of music's most versatile and commercially successful female singers in U.S. history, she is recognized for her many public stages of self-reinvention and incarnations.
With a one-time standing as the Queen of Rock, where she was bestowed the title of "highest paid woman in rock", and known as the First Lady of Rock, she has more recently emerged as music matriarch, international arts advocate and human rights advocate.
Ronstadt has collaborated with artists from a diverse spectrum of genres—including Billy Eckstine,Frank Zappa, Rosemary Clooney, Flaco Jiménez, Philip Glass, Carla Bley, The Chieftains, Gram Parsons, Dolly Parton, Kate and Anna McGarrigle and has lent her voice to over 120 albums around the world. Christopher Loudon of Jazz Times noted in 2004, Ronstadt is "Blessed with arguably the most sterling set of pipes of her generation ... rarest of rarities—a chameleon who can blend into any background yet remain boldly distinctive ... It's an exceptional gift; one shared by few others."
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Liza Minnelli
Liza May Minnelli (born March 12, 1946) is an American actress and singer. She is the daughter of singer and actress Judy Garland and film director Vincente Minnelli.
Already established as a nightclub singer and musical theatre actress, she first attracted critical acclaim for her dramatic performances in the movies The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970); Minnelli then rose to international stardom for her appearance as Sally Bowles in the 1972 film version of the Broadway musical Cabaret, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. She later made a great star turn in Arthur (1981), co-starring with Dudley Moore (in the title role) and Sir John Gielgud, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as Arthur's snobbish but loveable butler.
While film projects such as Lucky Lady, A Matter of Time and New York, New York were less favorably received than her stage roles, Minnelli became one of the most versatile, highly regarded and best-selling entertainers in television, beginning with Liza with a Z in 1972, and on stage in the Broadway productions of Flora the Red Menace, The Act and The Rink. Minnelli also toured internationally and did shows such as Liza Minnelli: At Carnegie Hall, Frank, Liza & Sammy: The Ultimate Event, and Liza Live from Radio City Music Hall.
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Luis Guzmán
Luis Guzmán (born August 28, 1956) is a Puerto Rican-born American actor, who is known for his character work. For much of his Guzmán's career, he has played character roles largely as sidekicks, thugs, or policemen.
He is a favorite of director Steven Soderbergh, who cast him in Out of Sight, The Limey, and Traffic, and Paul Thomas Anderson, who cast him in Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love. He also voiced Ricardo Diaz in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories. He recently starred in the HBO original series How to Make It in America.
Guzmán was born in Cayey, Puerto Rico and was raised in New York City's Greenwich Village and the surrounding Lower East Side neighborhood. His mother, Rosa, was a hospital worker, and his stepfather, Benjamin Cardona, was a TV repairman. A graduate of City College of New York, he began his career not as an actor but as a social worker and moonlighted as an actor, eventually becoming heavily involved in street theater and independent films.
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Mark Addy
Mark Addy Johnson (born 14 January 1964) is an English actor, best known for his roles as Detective Constable Gary Boyle in the British sitcom The Thin Blue Line, Dave in the film The Full Monty, father Bill Miller in the U.S. sitcom Still Standing and most recently as King Robert Baratheon in the HBO medieval fantasy epic Game of Thrones.
Addy was born in Tang Hall, York, and was educated in the city. In 1982–84 he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He lives with his wife Kelly and three children (Ruby, born 2000; Charlie, born 2003; and Oscar, born 2005) in Rufforth, close to Upper Poppleton village, near York. Addy's ancestors have lived in York at least since 1910 when his great-grandfather was living there. His father Ian has spent his working life as a glazier at York Minster.
Addy made his first TV appearance in 1988 in A Very Peculiar Practice, followed by TV performances in shows such as Heartbeat, Band of Gold, Married with Children (one episode), Bruised Fruit, Peak Practice, The Thin Blue Line, Too Much Sun, Sunnyside Farm and most recently Trollied.
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Martin Clunes
Alexander Martin Clunes (born 28 November 1961) is an English actor and comedian. Clunes is perhaps best known for his roles as Gary Strang in Men Behaving Badly, Doctor Martin Ellingham in Doc Martin and the title character in Reggie Perrin.
Clunes is the son of the classical actor Alec Clunes, who died of lung cancer when Clunes was eight and a half years old. He has an older sister, Amanda. His mother Daphne, later a board member of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, once worked for Orson Welles. Clunes was educated at two independent secondary schools, the Royal Russell School in Croydon and The Arts Educational Schools, in Chiswick, London.[citation needed]
Clunes served his first role in rep at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, and his first television appearance came in the 1980s Doctor Who story Snakedance as the spoiled Lon. But a sporadic career led to his supplementing his income as a photo model for Gilbert and George, and he can be seen in their 1983 work World.[citation needed]
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Martin Landau
Martin Landau (born June 20, 1928) is an American film and television actor. Landau began his career in the 1950s. His early films include a supporting role in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). He played continuing roles in the television series Mission: Impossible (for which he received several Emmy Award nominations) and Space:1999. He received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture and his first nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Tucker: The Man and His Dream, and was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). His performance in the supporting role of Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994) earned him the Academy Award, Screen Actors Guild Award and a Golden Globe. He continues to perform in film and television and heads the Hollywood branch of the Actors Studio.
Landau was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Selma and Morris Landau. His family was Jewish, and his father, an Austrian-born machinist, scrambled to rescue relatives from the Nazis. He attended James Madison High School and The Pratt Institute before finding full-time work as a cartoonist.
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Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese ( /skɔrˈsɛsɛ/; born November 17, 1942) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation. He is a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema, and has won Academy Award, Palme d'Or, Emmys, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and DGA Awards.
Scorsese's body of work addresses such themes as Italian American identity, Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption,machismo, modern crime, and violence. Scorsese is hailed as one of the most significant and influential filmmakers of all time, directing landmark films such as Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Goodfellas (1990) – all of which he collaborated on with actor and close friend Robert De Niro. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed (2006), having been nominated a previous five times.
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Matt Frewer
Matthew "Matt" Frewer (born January 4, 1958) is a Canadian American stage, TV and film actor. Acting since 1983, he is known for portraying the 1980s icon Max Headroom and the retired villain Moloch in the film adaptation of Watchmen.
Frewer was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Gillian Anne (née German) and Frederick Charlesley Frewer, a Royal Canadian Navy officer. He was raised in Peterborough, Ontario, and trained at the famous Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, graduating from its three-year acting course in 1980.
He is most popularly known for portraying the artificial intelligence character of Max Headroom in the 1980s, starring in a science fiction television series of the same name (1985) followed by The Original Max Talking Headroom Show (1987) and the more popular Max Headroom (1987–88).
Frewer is also well known for his starring role as Dr. Mike Stratford in the CBS situation comedy series Doctor Doctor (1989–91).
Frewer is also recognized for his roles in such films as The Fourth Protocol (1987, with Joanna Cassidy), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989, with Rick Moranis, Amy O'Neill, Carl Steven and Mark L. Taylor), National Lampoon's Senior Trip (1995, with Nicole de Boer), and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead.
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Mena Suvari
Mena Alexandra Suvari (born February 13, 1979) is an American actress, fashion designer, and model. Shortly after beginning her career as a model, she appeared in guest roles on 1990's television shows such as Boy Meets World and High Incident. She made her film debut in the 1997 drama film Nowhere.
Her first major film roles were in American Beauty, for which she was nominated for a BAFTA Award, and American Pie (both released in 1999). Since then she has appeared in Loser (2000), with her American Pie co-star, Jason Biggs, and later played a main character in the comedy film Sugar & Spice (2001). She had appearances in the 2002 independent drama Spun, and the 2004 thriller feature Trauma. She also appeared in the HBO's drama series Six Feet Under in 2004, she received a nomination as a member of the Outstanding Cast at the 2005 Screen Actors Guild Awards. In 2008, she was cast in a string of films, including Day of the Dead, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and the film adaptation of The Garden of Eden.
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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.
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Michael Douglas
Michael Kirk Douglas (born September 25, 1944) is an American actor and producer, primarily in movies and television. He has won three Golden Globes and two Academy Awards; as producer of 1975's Best Picture, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and as Best Actor in 1987 for his role in Wall Street. Douglas received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2009. He is the eldest of actor Kirk Douglas's four sons.
Douglas was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the first child of actor Kirk Douglas and Bermudian-born actress Diana Dill. His paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Gomel in Belarus (at that time a part of the Russian Empire). His mother was from Devonshire Parish, Bermuda; Douglas's maternal grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Melville Dill, served as Attorney General of Bermuda and was commanding officer of the Bermuda Militia Artillery. Douglas has a younger brother, Joel Douglas (born 1947), and two paternal half-brothers, Peter Douglas (born 1955) and Eric Douglas (1958–2004), from stepmother Anne Buydens.
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Michael Redgrave
Sir Michael Scudamore Redgrave, CBE (20 March 1908 – 21 March 1985) was an English stage and film actor, director, manager and author.
Redgrave was born in Bristol, Gloucestershire, England, the son of the silent film actor Roy Redgrave and the actress Margaret Scudamore. He never knew his father, who left when Michael was only six months old to pursue a career in Australia. His mother subsequently married Captain James Anderson, a tea planter, but Redgrave greatly disliked his stepfather.
He studied at Clifton College and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was a schoolmaster at Cranleigh School in Surrey before becoming an actor in 1934. There he directed the boys in Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest, but managed to play all the leading roles himself. The 'Redgrave Room' at the school was later named after him. In the new Guildford School of Acting building which opened in January 2010, there is the Sir Michael Redgrave studio.
Redgrave made his first professional appearance at the Liverpool Playhouse on 30 August 1934 as Roy Darwin in Counsellor-at-Law (by Elmer Rice), then spent two years with its Liverpool Repertory Company where he met his future wife Rachel Kempson. They married on 18 July 1935.
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Mickey Rourke
Philip Andre "Mickey" Rourke, Jr. (born September 16, 1952) is an American actor, screenwriter and retired boxer, who has appeared primarily as a leading man in action, drama, and thriller films.
During the 1980s, Rourke starred in Diner, Rumble Fish, and the erotic drama 9½ Weeks, and received critical praise for his work in Barfly and Angel Heart. In 1991, Rourke, who had trained as a boxer in his early years, left acting and became a professional boxer for a period. He had supporting roles in several later films, including The Rainmaker, Buffalo '66, The Pledge, Get Carter, Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Man on Fire.
In 2005, Rourke made his comeback in mainstream Hollywood circles with a lead role in Sin City, for which he won awards from the Chicago Film Critics Association, the Irish Film and Television Awards and the Online Film Critics Society. In the 2008 film The Wrestler, Rourke portrayed a past-his-prime wrestler, and received a 2009 Golden Globe award, a BAFTA award, and a nomination for an Academy Award.
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Miguel Ferrer
Miguel José Ferrer (born February 7, 1955) is an American actor and voice actor who is often cast as a villain. His notable roles include Bob Morton, a supporting character in RoboCop (1987), the short-tempered FBI agent Albert Rosenfield in Twin Peaks, and Dr. Garret Macy on Crossing Jordan. His voice acting in Mulan (1998), as the villain Hun leader Shan Yu, is also especially memorable.
Ferrer was born in Santa Monica, California, the oldest of five children of Puerto Rican Academy Award-winner José Ferrer and American singer Rosemary Clooney. Ferrer's siblings are Maria, Gabriel, Monsita, and Rafael, also an actor. Ferrer was raised in Hollywood, and as a teenager his interests shifted toward music. Ferrer played the drums on Keith Moon's Two Sides of the Moon. Jenerators band mate Bill Mumy ("Will Robinson" on the television classic Lost In Space and later Lennier on the TV series Babylon 5) cast him as a drummer in his first television role, in the series Sunshine. He only took the role because Mumy talked him into it.
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Mike Myers
Michael John "Mike" Myers (born May 25, 1963) is a Canadian actor, comedian, screenwriter, and film producer of British parentage. He was a long-time cast member on the NBC sketch show Saturday Night Live in the late 1980s and the early 1990s and starred as the title characters in the films Wayne's World, Austin Powers, and the Shrek film series.
Myers was born and raised in Scarborough, Ontario, the son of British-born parents Eric Myers (1922–1991), an insurance man and World War II veteran of the Royal Engineers, and his wife Alice E. (née Hind; born 1926), an office supervisor and veteran of the Royal Air Force. Both of his parents are from Liverpool, England. He has two older brothers, Peter Myers and Paul Myers, an indie rock singer-songwriter, broadcaster and author. Myers is of English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry, and was raised Protestant. He holds three citizenships, American, British, and Canadian.
Myers began school at Bishopbriggs Academy then changed to the Stephen Leacock Collegiate Institute in Scarborough, Ontario. He began performing in commercials at age eight, and at ten he made a commercial for British Columbia Hydro Electric, with Gilda Radner playing his mother. When he graduated from high school, he joined the Second City Theatre. He left to tour Britain with comedian Neil Mullarkey.
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Morgan Freeman
Morgan Freeman (born June 1, 1937) is an American actor, film director, aviator and narrator. Freeman has received Academy Award nominations for his performances in Street Smart, Driving Miss Daisy, The Shawshank Redemption and Invictus and won in 2005 for Million Dollar Baby. He has also won a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Freeman has appeared in many other box office hits, including Unforgiven, Glory, Seven, Deep Impact, The Sum of All Fears, Bruce Almighty, Batman Begins, March of the Penguins, The Bucket List, Wanted, The Dark Knight, and RED.
Morgan Freeman was born in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of Mayme Edna (née Revere), a teacher, and Morgan Porterfield Freeman, a barber who died April 27, 1961, from cirrhosis. He has three older siblings. Freeman was sent as an infant to his paternal grandmother in Charleston, Mississippi. His family moved frequently during his childhood, living in Greenwood, Mississippi; Gary, Indiana; and finally Chicago, Illinois. Freeman made his acting debut at age 9, playing the lead role in a school play. He then attended Broad Street High School, later named Threadgill Elementary School, in Mississippi. At age 12, he won a statewide drama competition, and while still at Broad Street High School, he performed in a radio show based in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1955, he graduated from Broad Street, but turned down a partial drama scholarship from Jackson State University, opting instead to work as a mechanic in the United States Air Force.
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Nathan Lane
Nathan Lane (born February 3, 1956) is an American actor of stage and screen. He is best known for his roles as Mendy in The Lisbon Traviata, Albert in The Birdcage, Max Bialystock in the musical The Producers, Ernie Smuntz in MouseHunt, Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and his voice work in The Lion King and Stuart Little. In 2006, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 2008, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
Lane was born Joseph Lane in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of Irish American Catholic parents. He was named after his uncle, a Jesuit priest. His father, Daniel, was a truck driver and an aspiring tenor who died from alcoholism when Lane was eleven; his mother, Nora, was a housewife and secretary who suffered from manic-depression, and died in 2000. He has two brothers, Robert and Daniel. Lane attended Roman Catholic schools in Jersey City, including Jesuit-run St. Peter's Preparatory High School, where he was selected Best Actor in 1974.[citation needed]
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Nicolas Cage
Nicolas Cage (born Nicolas Kim Coppola; January 7, 1964) is an Academy Award–winning American actor, producer and director, having appeared in over 60 films including Raising Arizona (1987), The Rock (1996), Face/Off (1997), Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), Adaptation (2002), National Treasure (2004), Lord of War (2005), Ghost Rider (2007), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), Kick-Ass (2010), and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2012).
Cage was born Nicolas Kim Coppola on January 7, 1964 in Long Beach, California. His father, August Coppola, a professor of literature, and his mother, Joy Vogelsang, a dancer and choreographer, divorced in 1976. He was raised in a Catholic family. Cage's mother is of German descent and his father was of Italian descent. His paternal grandparents were composer Carmine Coppola and actress Italia Pennino, and his paternal great-grandparents were immigrants from Bernalda, Basilicata. Through his father, Cage is the nephew of director Francis Ford Coppola and actress Talia Shire, and the cousin of directors Roman Coppola and Sofia Coppola, film producer Gian-Carlo Coppola, and actors Robert Carmine and Jason Schwartzman. Cage's two brothers are New York radio personality Marc "The Cope" Coppola and director Christopher Coppola. He attended Beverly Hills High School, which is known for its many alumni who became entertainers. He aspired to act from an early age and also attended UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television. His first non-cinematic acting experience was in a school production of Golden Boy.
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Patch Adams
Hunter Doherty "Patch" Adams (born May 28, 1945, in Washington, D.C.) is an American physician, social activist, citizen diplomat and author. He founded the Gesundheit! Institute in 1971. Each year he organizes a group of volunteers from around the world to travel to various countries where they dress as clowns in an effort to bring humor to orphans, patients, and other people.
Adams is currently based in Urbana, Illinois. In collaboration with the institute, he promotes an alternative health care model, not funded by insurance policies.
Adams had a difficult childhood. His father, an officer in the United States Army, had fought in Korea, and died while stationed in Germany when Adams was still a teenager. After his father's death, Adams returned to the United States with his mother and brother. Upon his return, Adams has stated that he encountered institutional injustice which made him a target for bullies at school. As a result, Adams was unhappy and became actively suicidal. After being hospitalized three times in one year for wanting to end his life, he decided "you don't kill yourself; you make revolution."[citation needed]
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Paul Hogan
Paul Hogan, AM (born 8 October 1939) is an Australian actor best known for his role as Michael "Crocodile" Dundee from the Crocodile Dundee film series, for which he won a Golden Globe award.
Hogan was born in Lightning Ridge, New South Wales. He grew up in the Sydney suburb of Granville and attended Parramatta Marist High School. Hogan went on to become a rigger working on the Sydney Harbour Bridge before rising to fame in the early 1970s after an interview on A Current Affair. Hogan followed this with his own comedy sketch program The Paul Hogan Show, which he produced, wrote, and in which he played characters with John Cornell. The series, which ran for 60 episodes between 1973 and 1984, was popular both in his native country and in the UK, and showcased his trademark lighthearted but laddish ocker humour. The early series was on Channel Seven and by 1975, it was screened on Channel Nine where it remained until 1984.
In the 1970s, he advertised Winfield cigarettes in television, print and billboard advertisements in which he wore a formal dinner suit. These ads always ended with the catchphrase "Anyhow, have a Winfield". During the early 1980s, Hogan filmed a series of television ads promoting the Australian tourism industry, which aired in the United States. An advertisement featuring the phrase "shrimp on the barbie" which aired from 1984, was particularly successful.
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Paul Newman
Paul Leonard Newman (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008) was an American actor, film director, entrepreneur, humanitarian, professional racing driver, auto racing team owner, and auto racing enthusiast. He won numerous awards, including an Academy Award for best actor for his performance in the 1986 Martin Scorsese film The Color of Money and eight other nominations, three Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Cannes Film Festival Award, an Emmy award, and many honorary awards. He also won several national championships as a driver in Sports Car Club of America road racing, and his race teams won several championships in open wheel IndyCar racing.
Newman was a co-founder of Newman's Own, a food company from which Newman donated all post-tax profits and royalties to charity. As of July 2011, these donations exceeded $300 million.
Newman was born in Shaker Heights (a suburb of Cleveland). He was the son of Theresa (née Fetzer or Fetsko; Slovak: Terézia Fecková) and Arthur Sigmund Newman, who ran a profitable sporting goods store. His father was Jewish (Paul's paternal grandparents, Simon Newman and Hannah Cohn, were immigrants from Hungary and Poland). His mother, who practiced Christian Science, was born to a Slovak Roman Catholic family at Humenné, Ptičie (formerly Pticsie) in the former Kingdom of Hungary, Austria–Hungary (now Humenné in Slovakia). Newman had no religion as an adult, but described himself as a Jew, stating that "it's more of a challenge". Newman's mother worked in his father's store, while raising Paul and his brother, Arthur, who later became a producer and production manager.
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Paul Scofield
David Paul Scofield, CH, CBE (21 January 1922 – 19 March 2008), better known as Paul Scofield, was an English actor of stage and screen. Noted for his distinctive voice and delivery, Scofield received an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for his performance as Sir Thomas More in the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, a reprise of the role he played in the stage version at the West End and on Broadway for which he received a Tony Award.
Scofield was born in Birmingham, England, the son of Mary and Edward Harry Scofield. When Scofield was a few weeks old, his family moved to Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, where his father served as the headmaster at the Hurstpierpoint Church of England School. At the age of 12 he began attending the Varndean Secondary School in Brighton, where he took various roles in school plays.
Scofield began his stage career in 1940 with a debut performance in Desire Under the Elms at the Westminster Theatre, and was soon being compared to Laurence Olivier. He played at the Old Rep in Birmingham. From there he went to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, where he starred in Walter Nugent Monck's 1947 revival of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
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Peter Finch
Frederick George Peter Ingle Finch (28 September 1916 – 14 January 1977) was a British-born Australian actor. He is best remembered for his role as "crazed" television anchorman Howard Beale in the film Network, which earned him a posthumous Academy Award for Best Actor, his fifth Best Actor award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and a Best Actor award from the Golden Globes. He was the first of two people to win a posthumous Academy Award in an acting category; the other was fellow Australian Heath Ledger.
Finch was born as Frederick George Peter Ingle Finch in London to Alicia Gladys Fisher. At the time, Alicia was married to George Finch. George Finch was born in New South Wales, Australia, but was educated in Paris and Zurich. He was a research chemist when he moved to England in 1912 and later served during the first World War with the Royal Army Ordnance Depot and the Royal Field Artillery. In 1915, at Portsmouth, in Hampshire, George married Alicia Fisher, the daughter of a Kent barrister. However, George Finch was not Peter Finch's biological father. He learned only in his mid-40s that his biological father was Wentworth Edward Dallas "Jock" Campbell, an Indian Army officer, whose adultery with Finch's mother was the cause of George and Alice's divorce, when Peter was two years old. Alicia Finch married "Jock" Campbell in 1922.
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Peter Fonda
Peter Henry Fonda (born February 23, 1940) is an American actor. He is the son of Henry Fonda, brother of Jane Fonda, and father of Bridget and Justin Fonda (by first wife Susan Brewer, stepdaughter of Noah Dietrich). Fonda is an icon of the counterculture of the 1960s.
Fonda was born in New York City, the only son of actor Henry Fonda and his wife Frances Ford Seymour; he is the younger brother of actress Jane Fonda.
On his eleventh birthday, he accidentally shot himself in the stomach and nearly died. Years later, he would reference this incident to John Lennon and George Harrison while taking LSD with The Beatles, and claiming "I know what it's like to be dead", which ended up becoming a direct inspiration for The Beatles song "She Said, She Said".
Early on, Fonda studied acting in Omaha, Nebraska, his father's home town. While attending the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Fonda joined the Omaha Community Playhouse, where many actors (including his father and Marlon Brando) had begun their careers.
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Peter Gallagher
Peter Killian Gallagher (born August 19, 1955) is an American actor, musician, and writer. Since 1980, Gallagher has played roles in numerous Hollywood films. He starred as Sandy Cohen in the television drama series The O.C. from 2003 to 2007. He currently appears in a recurring role on the USA Network drama Covert Affairs, as CIA Clandestine Services Director Arthur Campbell.
Gallagher was born in New York City, New York. His mother, Mary Ann (née O'Shea), was a bacteriologist, and his father, Thomas Francis Gallagher II, was an advertising executive. He is of Irish Catholic background and was raised in Armonk, New York. Gallagher graduated from Tufts University, where he had been active in theater, appearing in such shows as Stephen Sondheim's Company and singing with the all-male a cappella group the Beelzebubs.
Gallagher's debut movie performance was as one of the co-stars in the 1980 movie, The Idolmaker.
Gallagher appeared on Broadway with Glenn Close in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, but first achieved fame for his role in Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989). He also starred as Sky Masterson in the 1992 Broadway Revival of Guys and Dolls.
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Peter Pan
Peter Pan is a character created by Scottish novelist and playwright J. M. Barrie. A mischievous boy who can fly and who never ages, Peter Pan spends his never-ending childhood adventuring on the small island of Neverland as the leader of his gang the Lost Boys, interacting with mermaids, Indians, fairies, pirates, and occasionally ordinary children from the world outside of Neverland. In addition to two distinct works by Barrie, the character has been featured in a variety of media and merchandise, both adapting and expanding on Barrie's works.
Peter Pan first appeared in a section of The Little White Bird, a 1902 novel written by Barrie for adults.
The character's best-known adventure debuted on 27 December 1904, in the stage play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. The play was adapted and expanded somewhat as a novel, published in 1911 as Peter and Wendy (later as Peter Pan and Wendy, and still later as Peter Pan).
Following the highly successful debut of the 1904 play, Barrie's publishers, Hodder and Stoughton, extracted chapters 13–18 of The Little White Bird and republished them in 1906 under the title Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, with the addition of illustrations by Arthur Rackham.
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Peter Riegert
Peter Riegert (born April 11, 1947) is an American actor, screenwriter, and film director, best known for his roles as Boon from Animal House, the fast talking ganster Aldo in Oscar, the tough Lt. Kellaway in The Mask, and crooked New Jersey State Assemblyman Ronald Zellman on the HBO original series The Sopranos.
Riegert was born in The Bronx, the son of Lucille, a piano teacher, and Milton Riegert, a food wholesaler. Riegert grew up in Hartsdale, New York, and was raised in a nonobservant Jewish household. He graduated from Ardsley High School in 1964 and later from the University at Buffalo. He worked at a number of jobs, including teaching, waiting tables, and social worker before settling on acting as a career.
He made his Broadway debut in the musical Dance with Me. Other Broadway credits include The Old Neighborhood, An American Daughter, The Nerd, and Censored Scenes From King Kong. Off-Broadway he has appeared in Road to Nirvana, The Birthday Party, Isn't It Romantic, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and A Rosen by Any Other Name.
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Peter Sellers
Richard Henry Sellers, CBE (8 September 1925 – 24 July 1980), known as Peter Sellers, was a British comedian and actor. Perhaps best known as Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther film series, he is also notable for playing three different characters in Dr. Strangelove, as Clare Quilty in Lolita, and as the TV-addicted man-child Chance the gardener in his penultimate film, Being There. Actress Bette Davis once remarked of him, "He isn't an actor—he's a chameleon."
Sellers rose to fame on the BBC Radio comedy series The Goon Show. His ability to speak in different accents (e.g., French, Indian, Italian, American, German, as well as British regional accents), along with his talent to portray a range of characters to comic effect, contributed to his success as a radio personality and screen actor and earned him national and international nominations and awards. Many of his characters became ingrained in public perception of his work. Sellers' private life was characterised by turmoil and crises, and included emotional problems and substance abuse. Sellers was married four times, and had three children from the first two marriages.
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Pierce Brosnan
Pierce Brendan Brosnan (born 16 May 1953) is an Irish actor, film producer and environmentalist. After leaving school at 16, Brosnan began training in commercial illustration, but trained at the Drama Centre in London for three years. Following a stage acting career he rose to popularity in the television series Remington Steele (1982–87).
After Remington Steele, Brosnan took the lead in many films such as Dante's Peak and The Thomas Crown Affair. In 1995, he became the fifth actor to portray secret agent James Bond in the official film series, starring in four films between 1995 and 2002. He also provided his voice and likeness to Bond in the 2004 video game James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing. Since playing Bond, he has starred in such successes as The Matador (nominated for a Golden Globe, 2005), Mamma Mia! (National Movie Award, 2008), and The Ghost Writer (2010).
In 1996, along with Beau St. Clair, Brosnan formed Irish DreamTime, a Los Angeles-based production company. In later years, he has become known for his charitable work and environmental activism.
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Rajiv Joseph
Rajiv Joseph (born June 16, 1974) is an American playwright and a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Joseph was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio; his mother is Euroamerican of French and German ancestry and his father immigrated to the States from India. He attended Cleveland Heights High School and graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 1996 with a B.A. in Creative Writing. While at Miami he was a member of the university's premier male a capella group, the Cheezies.
Following graduation Joseph joined the Peace Corps, serving three formative years in the West African Republic of Senegal, including two years in Koular and the third in Kaolack. Joseph has stated about his time there: "Being in Senegal, more than anything else in my life, made me into a writer." His time in Senegal helped him develop the discipline of daily writing and inspired his "fascination with the power of language"; as he has stated: "It felt a little like being a child again, because your language skills are on the level of a 4-year-old, so the adults kind of ignore you, but the children cluster around you telling you what everything is called".
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Ralph Richardson
Sir Ralph David Richardson (19 December 1902 – 10 October 1983) was an English actor, one of a group of theatrical knights of the mid-20th century who, though more closely associated with the stage, also appeared in several classic films.
Richardson first became known for his work on stage in the 1930s. In the 1940s, together with Laurence Olivier, he ran the Old Vic Company. He continued on stage and in films into the early 1980s and was especially praised for his comedic roles. In his later years he was celebrated for his theatre work with his old friend John Gielgud. Among his most famous roles were Peer Gynt, Falstaff, John Gabriel Borkman and Hirst in Pinter's No Man's Land.
Richardson was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England, the third son and youngest child of Arthur Richardson, a master at the Ladies' College, and his wife Lydia (née Russell). When he was a baby, his mother left his father and took him with her to Gloucester, where he was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith of his mother (his father and brothers were Quakers). His father supported them with a small allowance. Lydia Richardson wished Ralph to become a priest. He was an altar boy in Brighton, and was sent to the Xavierian College, but he ran away from it.
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Ray Milland
Ray Milland (3 January 1907 – 10 March 1986) was a Welsh actor and director. His screen career ran from 1929 to 1985, and he is best remembered for his Academy Award–winning portrayal of an alcoholic writer in The Lost Weekend (1945), a sophisticated leading man opposite a corrupt John Wayne in Reap the Wild Wind (1942), the murder-plotting husband in Dial M for Murder (1954), and as Oliver Barrett III in Love Story (1970).
Milland was born Alfred Reginald Jones (not Reginald Alfred John Truscott-Jones as has often been stated). His birth was registered in the March Quarter of 1907 in Neath, Wales, and he was the son of Elizabeth Annie (née Truscott) and Alfred Jones. In the 1911 census the family were living at 66 Coronation Road, Mount Pleasant, Neath, Wales. Of his parents, Milland wrote in his 1974 autobiography Wide-Eyed in Babylon, "My father was not a cruel or harsh man. Just a very quiet one. I think he was an incurable romantic and consequently a little afraid of his emotions and perhaps ashamed of them... he had been a young hussar in the Boer War and had been present at the relief of Mafeking. He never held long conversations with anyone, except perhaps with me, possibly because I was the only other male in our family. The household consisted of my mother, a rather flighty and coquettish woman much concerned with propriety and what the neighbours thought.."
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Raúl Juliá
Raúl Rafael Juliá y Arcelay (March 9, 1940 – October 24, 1994) was a Puerto Rican actor.
Born in San Juan, he gained interest in acting while still in school. Upon completing his studies, Juliá decided to pursue a career in acting. After performing in the local scene for some time, he was convinced by entertainment personality Orson Bean to move and work in New York City. Juliá, who had been bilingual since his childhood, soon gained interest in Broadway and Off-Broadway plays. He performed in mobile projects, including the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre.
Juliá was eventually noticed by Joseph Papp, who offered him work in the New York Shakespeare Festival. After gaining notoriety, he received roles in two television series, Love of Life and Sesame Street. For his performance in Two Gentlemen of Verona, he received a nomination for the Tony Award and won a Drama Desk Award. Between 1974 and 1982, Juliá received Tony Award nominations for Where's Charley?, The Threepenny Opera and Nine. During the 1980s, he worked in several films, receiving nominations for the Golden Globe Awards, for his performance in Tempest, and Kiss of the Spider Woman, winning the National Board of Review Award for Best Actor for the latter.
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Redd Foxx
John Elroy Sanford (December 9, 1922 – October 11, 1991), better known by his stage name Redd Foxx, was an American comedian and actor, best known for his starring role on the sitcom Sanford and Son.
Foxx was born in St. Louis, Missouri and raised there and on Chicago's South Side. His mother was half Seminole.[citation needed] His father, an electrician, left his family when Foxx was four years old. Foxx was raised by his mother, his minister, and his grandmother. He briefly attended DuSable High School with future Chicago mayor Harold Washington.
In the 1940s, he was an associate of Malcolm Little, later known as Malcolm X. In Malcolm's autobiography, Foxx is referred to as "Chicago Red, the funniest dishwasher on this earth." Foxx earned the nickname due to his reddish hair and complexion. His stage surname was taken from baseball star Jimmie Foxx. During World War II, Foxx dodged the draft by eating half a bar of soap before his physical, a trick that resulted in heart palpitations.
Foxx gained notoriety with his nightclub act (considered by the standards of the time to be raunchy). His big break came after singer Dinah Washington insisted that Foxx come to Los Angeles, where Dootsie Williams of Dootone records caught his act at the Brass Rail nightclub. He was signed to a long term contract and released a series of comedy albums that quickly became cult favorites.
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Reese Witherspoon
Laura Jeanne Reese Witherspoon (born March 22, 1976), better known as Reese Witherspoon, is an American actress and film producer. Witherspoon landed her first feature role as the female lead in the film The Man in the Moon in 1991; later that year she made her television acting debut, in the cable movie Wildflower. In 1996, Witherspoon appeared in Freeway and followed that appearance with roles in three major 1998 films: Overnight Delivery, Pleasantville and Twilight. The following year, Witherspoon appeared in the critically acclaimed Election, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination.
2001 marked her career's turning point with the breakout role as Elle Woods in the box office hit Legally Blonde, and in 2002 she starred in Sweet Home Alabama, which became her biggest commercial film success to date. 2003 saw her return as lead actress and executive producer of Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde. In 2005, Witherspoon received worldwide attention and praise for her portrayal of June Carter Cash in Walk the Line, which earned her an Academy Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role.
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Rex Harrison
Sir Reginald Carey "Rex" Harrison (5 March 1908 – 2 June 1990) was an English actor of stage and screen. One of Harrison's best remembered film roles was that of Professor Henry Higgins in the stage and film versions of My Fair Lady. The role earned him a Tony Award, a Golden Globe Award and Best Actor Oscar.
Harrison was born in Huyton, Lancashire, and educated at Liverpool College. After a bout of childhood measles, Harrison lost most of the sight in his left eye, which on one occasion caused some on-stage difficulty. He first appeared on the stage in 1924 in Liverpool. Harrison's acting career was interrupted during World War II while serving in the Royal Air Force, reaching the rank of Flight Lieutenant. He acted in various stage productions until 11 May 1990. He acted in the West End of London when he was young, appearing in the Terence Rattigan play French Without Tears, which proved to be his breakthrough role.
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Richard Basehart
John Richard Basehart (August 31, 1914 – September 17, 1984) was an American actor. He starred in the 1960s television science fiction drama Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, in the role of Admiral Harriman Nelson.
One of his most notable film roles was the acrobat known as "the Fool" in the acclaimed Italian film La Strada, directed by Federico Fellini. He also appeared as the killer in the film noir classic He Walked by Night (1948), as a psychotic member of the Hatfield clan in Roseanna McCoy (1949), as Ishmael in Moby Dick (1956), and in the drama Decision Before Dawn (1951). He was married to Italian Academy Award-nominated actress Valentina Cortese, with whom he had one son, the actor Jackie Basehart, before their divorce in 1960. Cortese and Basehart also costarred in Robert Wise's The House on Telegraph Hill (1951).
From 1964-68, Basehart played the lead role, Admiral Harriman Nelson, on Irwin Allen's first foray into science-fiction television, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Allen would go on to produce a number of sci-fi series in the 1960s and the highly successful feature films The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), earning him the moniker "The Master of Disaster." Although Basehart started his career as a film actor, he became best known for his role on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
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Richard Mulligan
Richard Mulligan (November 13, 1932 – September 26, 2000) was an American television and film actor best known for his role as Burt Campbell in the 1970s sitcom Soap and later as Dr. Harry Weston on The Golden Girls and its spin-off Empty Nest.
He was born in New York City, the younger brother of director Robert Mulligan. After attending Columbia University, Mulligan began working in theatre, making his debut as a stage manager and performer on Broadway in All the Way Home in 1960. Additional theatre credits included A Thousand Clowns, Never Too Late, Hogan's Goat, and Thieves.
Mulligan starred with Mariette Hartley in the 1966-67 season comedy series The Hero, in which he played TV star Sam Garret, who in turn starred on a fictional series as Jed Clayton, U.S. Marshal. The Hero lasted only 16 episodes. Another notable TV appearance was on the I Dream of Jeannie episode "Around the World in 80 Blinks", as a navy commander accompanying Maj. Nelson (Larry Hagman) on a mission.
Mulligan's most notable film role was as General Custer in Little Big Man, whom he portrayed as a borderline psychotic. He also appeared in the disaster movie spoof The Big Bus (1976), where he was reunited with Larry Hagman, with whom he starred in an episode of I Dream of Jeannie (see above). In the comedy-drama Teachers, he partially reprised his Custer role from Little Big Man, portraying a mental patient mistaken for a substitute teacher, who dresses up as various historical figures (including Abe Lincoln, Ben Franklin and Custer in his final scene) to teach his pupils, who learn more from him than from the actual teachers.
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Richard Pryor
Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor (December 1, 1940 – December 10, 2005) was an American stand-up comedian, actor, social critic, writer, and MC. Pryor was known for uncompromising examinations of racism and topical contemporary issues, which employed colorful vulgarities, and profanity, as well as racial epithets. He reached a broad audience with his trenchant observations and storytelling style. He is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential stand-up comedians of his era: Jerry Seinfeld called Pryor "The Picasso of our profession";Bob Newhart has called Pryor "the seminal comedian of the last 50 years.". This legacy can be attributed, in part, to the unusual degree of intimacy Pryor brought to bear on his comedy. As Bill Cosby reportedly once said, "Richard Pryor drew the line between comedy and tragedy as thin as one could possibly paint it."
His body of work includes the concert movies and recordings Richard Pryor: Live & Smokin' (1971), That Nigger's Crazy (1974), ...Is It Something I Said? (1975), Bicentennial Nigger (1976), Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979), Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip (1982), and Richard Pryor: Here and Now (1983). He also starred in numerous films as an actor, such as Superman III (1983) but was usually in comedies such as Silver Streak (1976), and occasionally in dramatic roles, such as Paul Schrader's film Blue Collar (1978). He collaborated on many projects with actor Gene Wilder. Another frequent collaborator was actor/comedian/writer Paul Mooney.
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Rita Moreno
Rita Moreno (born December 11, 1931) is a Puerto Rican singer, dancer and actress. She is the only Hispanic and one of the few performers who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony, and was the second Puerto Rican to win an Academy Award.
Moreno was born Rosa Dolores Alverío in Humacao, Puerto Rico, to Rosa María, a seamstress, and Paco Alverío, a farmer. She moved with her mother to New York City at the age of five, and took the surname of her stepfather, Edward Moreno.
She began her first dancing lessons soon after arriving in New York from a friend of her mother, a Spanish dancer called Paco Cansino, who was the uncle of Rita Hayworth. When she was 11 years old, she lent her voice to Spanish language versions of American films.
She had her first Broadway role — as "Angelina" in Skydrift — by the time she was 13, which caught the attention of Hollywood talent scouts. She appeared in small roles in The Toast of New Orleans and Singin' in the Rain, in which she played Zelda Zanners.
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Robbie Williams
Robert Peter "Robbie" Williams (born 13 February 1974) is an English singer-songwriter, vocal coach and occasional actor. He is a member of the pop group Take That.
Williams rose to fame in the band's first run in the early- to mid-1990s. After many disagreements with the management and certain group members, Williams left the group in 1995 to launch his solo career. On 15 July 2010, it was announced he had rejoined Take That and that the group intended to release a new album in November 2010 which became the second fastest-selling album of all-time in UK chart history and the fastest-selling record of the century.
Williams has sold over 70 million records worldwide, which ranks him among the best-selling music artists worldwide. He is the best-selling British solo artist in the United Kingdom and the best selling non-Latino artist in Latin America. Six of his albums are among the top 100 biggest-selling albums in the United Kingdom. He has also been honoured with seventeen BRIT Awards—more than any other artist—and seven ECHO Awards. In 2004, he was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame after being voted as the "Greatest Artist of the 1990s."
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Robert Carlyle
Robert Carlyle, OBE (born 14 April 1961) is a Scottish actor. He is known for a variety of roles in films such as Trainspotting, The Full Monty, The World Is Not Enough, Angela's Ashes, The 51st State, and 28 Weeks Later. In addition to his film work, he is also known for his roles in the television shows Hamish Macbeth and Once Upon A Time.
Carlyle was born in Maryhill, Glasgow, the son of Elizabeth, a bus company employee, and Joseph Carlyle, a painter and decorator. He was brought up by his father after his mother left when Carlyle was four years old. He left school at the age of 16 without any qualifications and worked for his father as a painter and decorator; however, he continued his education by attending night classes at Cardonald College in Glasgow.
Carlyle became involved in drama at the Glasgow Arts Centre at the age of 21 (having been inspired by reading Arthur Miller's The Crucible), and subsequently graduated from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. In 1991, he and four friends founded a theatre company, Raindog (which is now primarily involved in television and film work), and guest starred in The Bill. The same year he starred in his first movie, Riff-Raff, directed by Ken Loach.
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Robert De Niro
Robert De Niro (pronounced /dəˈnɪəroʊ/; born August 17, 1943) is an American actor, director and producer. His first major film roles were in Bang the Drum Slowly and Mean Streets, both in 1973. In 1974, he played the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, a role that won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
His critically acclaimed, longtime collaborations with Martin Scorsese began with 1973's Mean Streets, and earned De Niro an Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Jake LaMotta in the 1980 film Raging Bull. He was also nominated for an Academy Award for his roles in Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and Cape Fear (1991). In addition, he received nominations for his acting in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978) and Penny Marshall's Awakenings (1990). Also in 1990, his portrayal as Jimmy Conway in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas earned him a BAFTA nomination.
He has earned four nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy: New York, New York (1977), Midnight Run (1988), Analyze This (1999) and Meet the Parents (2000). De Niro directed A Bronx Tale (1993) and The Good Shepherd (2006). He has received accolades for his esteemed career, including the AFI Life Achievement Award and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award.
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Robert Duvall
Robert Selden Duvall (born January 5, 1931) is an American actor and director. He has won an Academy Award, two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards and a BAFTA over the course of his career.
A veteran character actor, Duvall has starred in some of the most acclaimed and popular films and TV shows of all time, among them The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, To Kill a Mockingbird, THX 1138, Joe Kidd, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, MASH, Network, True Grit, Bullitt, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, Tender Mercies, The Natural and Lonesome Dove.
He began appearing in theater during the late 1950s, moving into television and film roles during the early 1960s in such works as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) (as Boo Radley) and Captain Newman, M.D. (1963). He started to land much larger roles during the early 1970s with films like the blockbuster comedy MASH (1970) (as Major Frank Burns) and the lead in George Lucas' THX 1138 (1971). This was followed by a series of critically lauded performances in films which were also commercial successes: The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), Network (1976), The Great Santini (1979), Apocalypse Now (1979), and True Confessions (1981).
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Robert Mitchum
Robert Charles Durman Mitchum (August 6, 1917 – July 1, 1997) was an American film actor, author, composer and singer and is #23 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male American screen legends of all time. Mitchum rose to prominence for his starring roles in several major works of the film noir style, and is considered a forerunner of the anti-heroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and 1960s.
Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, into a Methodist family. His mother, Ann Harriet (née Gunderson), was a Norwegian immigrant and sea captain's daughter, and his father, James Thomas Mitchum, was a shipyard and railroad worker. A sister, Annette, (known as Julie Mitchum during her acting career) was born in 1914. James Mitchum was crushed to death in a railyard accident in Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1919, when his son was less than 2 years old. After his death, Ann Mitchum was awarded a government pension, and soon realized she was pregnant. She returned to her family in Connecticut, and married a former British Army major who helped her care for the children. In September 1919 a second son, John, was born. When all of the children were old enough to attend school, Ann found employment as a linotype operator for the Bridgeport Post.
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Robert Ryan
Robert Bushnell Ryan (November 11, 1909 – July 11, 1973) was an American actor who often played hardened cops and ruthless villains.
Ryan was born in Chicago, Illinois, the first child of Timothy Ryan and his wife Mabel Bushnell Ryan. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1932, having held the school's heavyweight boxing title all four years of his attendance. After graduation, the 6′ 4" Ryan found employment as a stoker on a ship, a WPA worker, and a ranch hand in Montana.
Ryan attempted to make a career in show business as a playwright, but had to turn to acting to support himself. He studied acting in Hollywood and appeared on stage and in small film parts during the early 1940s.
In January 1944, after securing a contract guarantee from RKO Radio Pictures, Ryan enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and served as a drill instructor at Camp Pendleton, in San Diego, California. At Camp Pendleton, he befriended writer and future director Richard Brooks, whose novel, The Brick Foxhole, he greatly admired. He also took up painting.
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Robin Williams
Robin McLaurin Williams (born July 21, 1951) is an American actor and comedian. Rising to fame with his role as the alien Mork in the TV series Mork & Mindy, and later stand-up comedy work, Williams has performed in many feature films since 1980. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. He has also won two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globes, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and five Grammy Awards.
Williams was born in Chicago, Illinois. His mother, Laura McLaurin (née Smith, 1922–2001), was a former model from New Orleans, Louisiana. His father, Robert Fitzgerald Williams (September 10, 1906 – October 18, 1987), was a senior executive at Ford Motor Company in charge of the Midwest region. His maternal great-great-grandfather was senator and Mississippi governor Anselm J. McLaurin. Williams is of English, Welsh, Irish, and French ancestry. He was raised in the Episcopal Church (his mother practiced Christian Science). He grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he was a student at the Detroit Country Day School, and later moved to Woodacre, Marin County, California, where he attended the public Redwood High School. Williams studied at Claremont McKenna College (then called Claremont Men's College) for four years. He has two half-brothers: Todd (who died August 14, 2007) and McLaurin.
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Russell Crowe
Russell Ira Crowe (born 7 April 1964) is a New Zealand born Australian actor, film producer and musician. He came to international attention for his role as Roman General Maximus Decimus Meridius in the 2000 historical epic film Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor, a Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Actor, an Empire Award for Best Actor and a London Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and ten further nominations for Best Actor. Crowe appeared as the tobacco firm whistle blower Jeffrey Wigand in the 1999 film The Insider, for which he received five awards as Best Actor and seven nominations in the same category. In 2001, Crowe's portrayal of mathematician and Nobel Prize winner John F. Nash in the biopic A Beautiful Mind brought him numerous awards, including an BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor category Motion Picture Drama and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role.
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Sacha Baron Cohen
Sacha Noam Baron Cohen (born 13 October 1971) is an English stand-up comedian, writer, actor, and voice actor. A graduate of Cambridge University, Baron Cohen is most widely known for writing and playing four unorthodox fictional characters: Ali G, Borat, Brüno, and Admiral General Aladeen. In his routines, Baron Cohen's characters interact with unsuspecting people who do not realise they are being set up for comic situations and self-revealing ridicule.
Baron Cohen was named Best Newcomer at the 1999 British Comedy Awards for The 11 O'Clock Show, and since then, his work has been further recognised with two BAFTA Awards for Da Ali G Show, several Emmy nominations, a nomination for an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay, and a Golden Globe for Best Actor for his work in the feature film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. After the release of Borat, Baron Cohen stated that because the public had become too familiar with the characters, he would retire Borat and Ali G. Similarly, after the release of Brüno, Baron Cohen has stated he would also retire the title character.
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Sam Worthington
Samuel Henry J. "Sam" Worthington (born 2 August 1976) is an Australian-English actor, best known for his starring roles in the feature films Avatar, Terminator Salvation, Clash of the Titans, and its sequel, Wrath of the Titans.
In 2004, Worthington received Australia's highest film award for his lead performance in Somersault. He performed predominantly in leading roles in a variety of low-budget films before transitioning to major studio films, ranging from romantic drama and comedy-drama to science fiction and action. Worthington is also noted for his voicework as Alex Mason in the 2010 video game Call of Duty: Black Ops.
Worthington was born to English parents in Godalming, Surrey, in southeastern England, and moved to Perth, Western Australia when he was six months old. He grew up in Warnbro, a suburb of Rockingham. His mother, Jeanne J. (née Martyn), a homemaker, raised him and his sister Lucinda, and his father, Ronald W. Worthington, was a power plant employee. He attended John Curtin College of the Arts, a school specialising in the dramatic arts, located in Fremantle, Western Australia, where he studied drama but failed to graduate and dropped out.[citation needed] His father gave him $400 and sent him on a one-way trip to Cairns in Queensland, and told him to "work his way home".[citation needed] He began working on construction and odd jobs, eventually settling in Sydney, New South Wales. At 19, he worked as a bricklayer, when he auditioned for the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and was accepted with scholarship.
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Sean Astin
Sean Astin (born February 25, 1971) is an American film actor, director, voice artist, and producer best known for his film roles as Mikey Walsh in The Goonies, the title character of Rudy, and Samwise Gamgee in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In television, he appeared as Lynn McGill in the fifth season of 24. Most recently, he provided the voice for the title character in Disney's Special Agent Oso. Astin also served as campaign manager for his friend, Democratic entertainment industry businessman Dan Adler in California's 36th congressional district special election, 2011.
Astin was born Sean Patrick Duke in Santa Monica, California, the son of actress Patty Duke. At the time, it was reported that Desi Arnaz, Jr., was his biological father. In 1994, Astin discovered his father was Michael Tell, a music promoter and writer, and publisher of the newspaper The Las Vegas Israelite.
Tell's marriage to Patty Duke was annulled shortly before her marriage in 1972 to actor John Astin, who adopted Sean. In 1973, Duke gave birth to Astin's half-brother Mackenzie Astin, who also became an actor. Although Patty Duke and John Astin divorced in 1985, Sean Astin has written that he has always considered John his "real" father.
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Sean Connery
Sir Thomas Sean Connery (born 25 August 1930) is a Scottish actor and producer who has won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards (one of them being a BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award) and three Golden Globes (including the Cecil B. DeMille Award and a Henrietta Award).
Connery is best known for portraying the character James Bond, starring in seven Bond films between 1962 and 1983 (six Eon Productions films and the non-canonical Thunderball remake, Never Say Never Again). In 1988, Connery won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Untouchables. His film career also includes such films as Marnie, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Hunt for Red October, Highlander, Murder on the Orient Express, Dragonheart, and The Rock. He was knighted in July 2000. Connery has been polled as "The Greatest Living Scot" and "Scotland's Greatest Living National Treasure". In 1989, he was proclaimed "Sexiest Man Alive" by People magazine and in 1999, at age 69, he was voted "Sexiest Man of the Century".
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Sean Penn
Sean Justin Penn (born August 17, 1960) is an American actor, screenwriter and film director, also known for his left-wing political and social activism (including humanitarian work). He is a two-time Academy Award winner for his roles in Mystic River (2003) and Milk (2008), as well as the recipient of a Golden Globe Award for the former and a Screen Actors Guild Award for the latter.
Penn began his acting career in television with a brief appearance in a 1974 episode of Little House on the Prairie, directed by his father Leo Penn. Following his film debut in 1981's Taps and a diverse range of film roles in the 1980s, Penn emerged as a prominent leading actor with the 1995 drama film Dead Man Walking, for which he earned his first Academy Award nomination and the Best Actor Award at the Berlin Film Festival. Penn received another two Oscar nominations for Sweet and Lowdown (1999) and I Am Sam (2001), before winning his first Academy Award for Best Actor in 2003 for Mystic River and a second one in 2008 for Milk. He has also won a Best Actor Award of the Cannes Film Festival for She's So Lovely (1997), and two Best Actor Awards at the Venice Film Festival for Hurlyburly (1998) and 21 Grams (2003).
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Shakespeare in Love
Shakespeare in Love is a 1998 British-American romantic comedy-drama film directed by John Madden, written by Marc Norman and playwright Tom Stoppard. The film depicts a love affair involving playwright William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) at the time that he was writing the play Romeo and Juliet. The story is fiction, though several of the characters are based on real people. In addition, many of the characters, lines, and plot devices are references to Shakespeare's plays.
Shakespeare in Love won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actress (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench).
William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) is a poor playwright for Philip Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush), owner of The Rose Theatre, in 1593 London. After learning that his love was cheating on him with his patron, Shakespeare burns his new comedy, Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter, rewriting it as the tragedy Romeo and Juliet. Suffering from writer's block, he is unable to complete the play, but begins auditions for Romeo. A young man named Thomas Kent is cast in the role after impressing Shakespeare with his performance and his love of Shakespeare's previous work. Kent is actually Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), the daughter of a wealthy merchant who desires to act but, since women are banned from the stage, she must disguise herself.
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Simon Callow
Simon Phillip Hugh Callow, CBE (born 15 June 1949) is an English actor, musician, writer and theatre director. He is also currently a judge on Popstar to Operastar.
Callow was born in Streatham, London, England, UK, the son of Yvonne Mary (née Guise), a secretary, and Neil Francis Callow, a businessman. His father was of English and French descent and his mother was of Danish and German ancestry. He was brought up Roman Catholic. Callow attended the London Oratory School and then went on to study at Queen's University Belfast ('Queen's') in Northern Ireland before giving up his degree course to go into acting at the Drama Centre London.[citation needed]
Callow's immersion in the theatre began after he wrote a fan letter to Sir Laurence Olivier, the Artistic Director of the National Theatre, and received a response suggesting he join their box office staff. It was while watching actors rehearse that he realised he wanted to act.
Callow made his stage debut in 1973, appearing in The Thrie Estates at the Assembly Rooms Theatre, Edinburgh. In the early 1970s he joined the Gay Sweatshop theatre company and performed in Martin Sherman's critically acclaimed Passing By. In 1977 he took various parts in the Joint Stock Theatre Company's production of Epsom Downs and in 1979 he starred in Snoo Wilson's The Soul of the White Ant at the Soho Poly.
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Spencer Tracy
Spencer Bonaventure Tracy (April 5, 1900 – June 10, 1967) was an American actor. Respected for his natural style and versatility, Tracy was one of the major stars of Hollywood's Golden Age. In a screen career that spanned 37 years, he was nominated for nine Academy Awards for Best Actor—a record he holds with Laurence Olivier—of which he won two.
Tracy discovered his talent for acting while a student at Ripon College, and subsequently gained a scholarship for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He spent seven years in the theatre, working in a succession of stock companies and intermittently on Broadway. Tracy's breakthrough came in 1930, when his lead performance in The Last Mile caught the attention of Hollywood. After a successful film debut in Up the River, Tracy was signed to a contract with Fox Film Corporation. His five years with Fox were unremarkable, and he remained largely unknown to audiences after 25 films. In 1935, Tracy joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Hollywood's most prestigious studio. His career flourished with a series of hit films, and in 1937 and 1938 he won consecutive Oscars for Captains Courageous and Boys Town. By the 1940s, Tracy was one of the studio's top stars. In 1942 he appeared with Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year, beginning a popular partnership that produced nine movies over 25 years.
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Steve Carell
Steven John "Steve" Carell ( /kəˈrɛl/; born August 16, 1962) is an American comedian, actor, voice artist, producer, writer, and director. Although Carell is notable for his role on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, he found greater fame in the late 2000s for playing Michael Scott on The Office. He has also starred in lead roles in the films The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Little Miss Sunshine, Evan Almighty, Dan in Real Life, Get Smart, Date Night, Dinner for Schmucks, and Crazy, Stupid, Love.; and voiced characters in the animated films Over the Hedge, Horton Hears a Who!, and Despicable Me. Carell was nominated as "America's funniest man" in Life magazine, and received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Comedy Series for playing the lead role of Michael Scott for The Office in 2006.
Carell, the youngest of four brothers, was born at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts, and was raised in nearby Acton by his parents, Harriet T. (née Koch), a psychiatric nurse, and Edwin A. Carell, an electrical engineer. His maternal uncle, Stanley Koch, worked with Allen B. DuMont to create cathode ray tubes. Carell's paternal grandfather was Italian; his father was born with the surname "Caroselli", later shortening it to "Carell". Carell was raised Roman Catholic, and was educated at The Fenn School and Middlesex School. Carell also played ice hockey as a teenager for his high school.[citation needed] He played the fife, performing with other members of his family, and later joined a reenacting group portraying the 10th (North Lincoln) Regiment of Foot. Carell attributed his interest in history to this, in which he earned his degree from Denison University in Granville, Ohio in 1984. While at Denison, Carell was a member of Burpee's Seedy Theatrical Company, a student-run improvisational comedy troupe.
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Steve Huison
Steve Huison (born 10 December 1963, Leeds), is a British actor, mostly on TV and occasional films. He trained at the Rose Bruford College in Sidcup. He is best known for his role as "Lomper" in the massively successful UK box-office and critical hit The Full Monty (1997). He also appeared in a Ken Loach film The Navigators, made in 2001. He has played character roles in such TV series as Casualty, Where the Heart Is, dinnerladies, Heartbeat and The Royle Family.
In January 2008, Huison took the role of porter Norman Dunstan in ITV1 daily hospital drama The Royal Today, a spin-off of popular Sunday night drama The Royal.
Huison appeared as Eddie Windass in Coronation Street.
He is also a co-founder of the Shoestring Theatre Company. Currently starring in CBBC's Television show "The 4 o'clock club".
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Steve Martin
Stephen Glenn "Steve" Martin (born August 14, 1945) is an American actor, comedian, author, playwright, producer, musician and composer. Martin came to public notice as a writer for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and later became a frequent guest on The Tonight Show. In the 1970s, Martin performed his offbeat, absurdist comedy routines before packed houses on national tours. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Martin at sixth place in a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics.
Since the 1980s, having branched away from stand-up comedy, Martin has become a successful actor in both comedic and dramatic roles, as well as an author, playwright, pianist, and banjo player, eventually earning Emmy, Grammy, and American Comedy awards, among other honors.
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Steven Bauer
Steven Bauer (born December 2, 1956) is a Cuban-American actor. He is known for his role as Manny Ribera in the 1983 film Scarface, and his role on the bilingual PBS show ¿Qué Pasa, USA?.
Bauer was born Esteban Ernesto Echevarría Samson in Havana, Cuba, the son of Lillian Samson Agostini, a schoolteacher, and Esteban Echevarria, a pilot who worked for Cubana Airlines. Bauer's maternal grandfather was a Jewish refugee from Germany, and Bauer's maternal grandmother was a Cuban of partial Italian ancestry. His stage surname comes from his maternal great-grandmother. Bauer's parents fled from Cuba to Miami, Florida, on July 4, 1960, following Fidel Castro's Revolution. He graduated from Miami Coral Park High School in 1974. Originally intending to become a musician, Bauer turned to acting while attending Miami-Dade Community College, but then transferred to the University of Miami, where he studied in its Department of Theater Arts and performed at its Jerry Herman Ring Theatre where he became friends with actor Ray Liotta.
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Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg (born December 18, 1946) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as archetypes of modern Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. In later years, his films began addressing such issues as the Holocaust, slavery, war and terrorism. He is considered one of the most popular and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. He is also one of the co-founders of DreamWorks movie studio.
Spielberg won the Academy Award for Best Director for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Three of Spielberg's films—Jaws (1975), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Jurassic Park (1993)—achieved box office records, each becoming the highest-grossing film made at the time. To date, the unadjusted gross of all Spielberg-directed films exceeds $8.5 billion worldwide. Forbes puts Spielberg's wealth at $3.0 billion.
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Ted Danson
Edward Bridge 'Ted' Danson III (born December 29, 1947) is an American actor, author and producer, well known for his role as lead character Sam Malone in the sitcom Cheers, and his role as Dr. John Becker on the series Becker. He is currently starring in the CBS drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. He also plays a recurring role on Larry David's HBO sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, starred alongside Glenn Close in legal drama Damages and was a regular on the HBO comedy series Bored to Death.
In his 30-year career, Danson has been nominated for 15 Primetime Emmy Awards, winning two; ten Golden Globe Awards nominations, winning three; one Screen Actors Guild Awards nomination; one American Comedy Award and a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. He was ranked second in TV Guide's list of the top 25 television stars. Danson has also been a longtime activist in ocean conservation. In March 2011, he published his first book, Oceana: Our Endangered Oceans And What We Can Do To Save Them, written with journalist Michael D'Orso.
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Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt (
/ˈroʊzəvɛlt/ ROH-zə-velt; October 27, 1858 – January 6, 1919) was the 26th President of the United States of America (1901–1909). He is noted for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his "cowboy" persona and robust masculinity. He was a leader of the Republican Party and founder of the short-lived Progressive ("Bull Moose") Party of 1912. Before becoming President, he held offices at the city, state, and federal levels. Roosevelt's achievements as a naturalist, explorer, hunter, author, and soldier are as much a part of his fame as any office he held as a politician. Roosevelt was 42 years old when sworn in as President of the United States in 1901, making him the youngest president ever; he beat out the youngest elected president, John F. Kennedy, by only one year. Roosevelt was also one of only three sitting presidents to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the other two being Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama.
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Thora Birch
Thora Birch (born March 11, 1982) is an American actress. She was a child actor in the 1990s, starring in movies such as All I Want for Christmas (1991), Patriot Games (1992), Hocus Pocus (1993), Monkey Trouble (1994), Now and Then (1995), and Alaska (1996). She came to prominence in 1999 after earning worldwide attention and praise for her performance in American Beauty. She then starred in the well received film Ghost World (2001), which earned her a Golden Globe nomination.
Birch was born in Los Angeles, California, the eldest child of Jack Birch and Carol Connors. Her parents, who were her business managers from the start, are former adult film actors and both appeared in the pornographic film Deep Throat. Birch is of German Jewish, Nordic, and Italian ancestry . The family's original surname was Biersch, coming from her German Jewish ancestors. Her name Thora is derived from the name of the Norse God of thunder and lightning, Thor. She has a younger brother, Bolt.
Due to their own experience with acting, Birch's parents were reticent to encourage her in the profession, but were persuaded to show her photograph to agents by a babysitter who noticed her imitating commercials. She landed several parts in the late '80s, including advertisements for Burger King, California Raisins, Quaker Oats, and Vlasic Pickles. Her first acting job followed.
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Tim Allen
Tim Allen (born Timothy Alan Dick; June 13, 1953) is an American comedian, actor, voice-over artist, and entertainer, known for his role in the sitcom Home Improvement. He is also known for his starring roles in several popular films, including the Toy Story film series, The Santa Clause film series, and Galaxy Quest. Allen currently stars in the ABC sitcom Last Man Standing.
Born in Denver, Colorado, Allen is the son of Martha Katherine (née Fox), a community-service worker, and Gerald M. Dick, a real estate agent. He is the third oldest of five brothers. His father died in a car accident, colliding with a drunk driver, when Allen was 11. Two years later, his mother married her high school sweetheart, a successful business executive, and moved with her six children to Birmingham, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, to be with her new husband and his three children. Allen attended Ernest W. Seaholm High School in Birmingham, where he was in theater and music classes (resulting in his love of classical piano). He then attended Central Michigan University and transferred to Western Michigan University in 1974. At Western Michigan, Allen worked at the student radio station WIDR and received a bachelor of science degree in communications specializing in radio and television production in 1976 with a split minor in philosophy and design. In 1998, Western Michigan awarded Allen an honorary fine arts degree and the Distinguished Alumni Award.
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Tim Burton
Timothy Walter "Tim" Burton (born August 25, 1958) is an American film director, film producer, writer and artist. He is famous for quirky-themed movies such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and Dark Shadows and for blockbusters such as Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Batman, Batman Returns, Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Alice in Wonderland, which was the second highest-grossing film of 2010, and the tenth highest-grossing film of all time.
Burton is known for using recurring collaborators on his works; among them are Johnny Depp, who has become a close friend of Burton since their first film together; musician Danny Elfman, who has composed for all but five of the films Burton has directed or produced; and domestic partner Helena Bonham Carter. He also wrote and illustrated the poetry book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories, published in 1997, and a compilation of his drawings, entitled The Art of Tim Burton, was released in 2009. Burton has directed 16 films and produced 12, as of 2012. His latest films are an adaptation of the soap opera Dark Shadows, released on May 10, 2012, and a remake of his 1984 short, Frankenweenie, scheduled to be released on October 5, 2012.
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Tim Conway
Thomas Daniel "Tim" Conway (born December 15, 1933) is an Emmy award-winning American comedian and actor, who has worked in sitcoms, sketch comedy, and film. Conway is best known for his role in the popular 1960s WWII sitcom McHale's Navy as the inept Ensign Charles Parker, second in command to Lt. Commander Quinton McHale (Ernest Borgnine), and for co-starring alongside Carol Burnett on The Carol Burnett Show.
Conway was born in Willoughby, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, to an Irish father and Romanian mother, and grew up in nearby Chagrin Falls. He attended Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, majoring in speech and radio, and was a member of the Phi Delta Theta Fraternity. After graduating, he joined the Army, and thereafter took a job at a Cleveland radio station, at first answering mail and later as a writer in the promotional department. Conway changed his first name to "Tim" to avoid confusion with actor Tom Conway.
Conway moved back to Cleveland to work with Ernie Anderson on KYW-TV, an NBC affiliate, in 1958 and 1959 and later, from 1960 to 1962, on WJW TV, (then the CBS affiliate) on the weekday morning film (under the Ernie's Place banner) where he also wrote material for the comedic skits shown in between film intermissions. Conway recorded a comedy album with Anderson.
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Tim Robbins
Timothy Francis "Tim" Robbins (born October 16, 1958) is an American actor, screenwriter, director, producer, activist and musician. He is the former longtime partner of actress Susan Sarandon. He is known for his roles as Nuke in Bull Durham, Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, and as Dave Boyle in Mystic River, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Robbins was born in West Covina, California, and raised in New York City, the son of Mary Robbins (née Bledsoe), an actress, and Gilbert Lee Robbins (1931–2011), a musician, folk singer, actor and former manager of The Gaslight Cafe. Robbins has two sisters, Adele and Gabrielle, and a brother, David. Robbins was raised Catholic. He moved to Greenwich Village with his family at a young age, while his father pursued a career as a member of the folk music group The Highwaymen. Robbins started doing theater at age twelve and joined the drama club at Stuyvesant High School. He spent two years at SUNY Plattsburgh and then returned to California to study at the UCLA Film School.
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Tobey Maguire
Tobias Vincent "Tobey" Maguire (born June 27, 1975) is an American actor and producer. He began his career in the late 1980s. While perhaps best known for his role as Peter Parker / Spider-Man in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man film trilogy (2002–2007), he has also appeared in films such as Pleasantville (1998), Ride with the Devil (1999), The Cider House Rules (1999), Wonder Boys (2000), Seabiscuit (2003), The Good German (2006), Tropic Thunder (2008), and Brothers (2009). He has been nominated for Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe Awards and received two Saturn Awards, including one for Best Actor.
Maguire was born in Santa Monica, California. He is the son of Wendy (née Brown), a secretary turned screenwriter and producer, and Vincent Maguire, a construction worker and cook. He has four half-brothers. His parents, 18 and 20 years old, were unmarried at the time of his birth; the two married and subsequently divorced when Maguire was two. Maguire spent much of his childhood moving from town to town, living with each parent and other family members. During his childhood, Maguire entertained the idea of becoming a chef and to that end wanted to enroll in a home economics class as a sixth grader. His mother offered him US$100 to take a drama class instead, and Tobey agreed.
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Tom Conti
Thomas "Tom" Conti (born 22 November 1941) is a Scottish actor, theatre director and novelist.
Born Thomas Conti in Paisley, Renfrewshire, he was brought up Roman Catholic, but he considers himself anti-religious. Conti's father was Italian and his mother was Scottish.
Conti was educated Hamilton Crescent School an independent fee-paying Catholic boys' (at that time) school in Glasgow, and at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow.
Conti is an accomplished film and television actor. He began working with the Dundee Repertory in 1959. He appeared on Broadway in Whose Life Is It Anyway? in 1979, and in London he played the lead in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell at the Garrick Theatre.
Besides taking the leading role in the TV versions of Frederic Raphael's The Glittering Prizes and Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests, Conti appeared in the Princess and the Pea episode of the family television series Faerie Tale Theatre, guested on Friends and Cosby, and played opposite Nigel Hawthorne in a long-running series of Vauxhall Astra car advertisements in the UK during the mid 1990s.
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Tom Cruise
Thomas Cruise Mapother IV ( /ˈtɒməs ˈkruːz ˈmeɪpɒθər/; born July 3, 1962), widely known as Tom Cruise, is an American film actor and producer. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards and has won three Golden Globe Awards for the same movies: Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Jerry Maguire (1996), Magnolia (1999). He started his career with the movie Endless Love. Cruise's first appearance in a major film was in 1981's Taps. His first leading role was in the film Risky Business, released in August 1983. Cruise played the role of a heroic naval pilot in the popular and successful 1986 film Top Gun, and also secret agent Ethan Hunt in the series of Mission: Impossible action films.
He has starred in a variety of other successful films, including: Rain Man (1988), Days of Thunder (1990), A Few Good Men (1992), Vanilla Sky (2001), Minority Report (2002), The Last Samurai (2003), Collateral (2004), and War of the Worlds (2005).
Since 2005, Cruise and Paula Wagner have been in charge of the United Artists film studio, with Cruise as producer and star and Wagner as the chief executive. Cruise is also known for his support of and adherence to the Church of Scientology.
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Tom Hanks
Thomas Jeffrey "Tom" Hanks (born July 9, 1956) is an American actor, producer, writer, and director. Hanks is known for his roles in Philadelphia and as the title character in Forrest Gump, roles which won him two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor. Hanks is also known for his Oscar nominated roles in Big, Saving Private Ryan and Cast Away.
Hanks' other acting roles include Apollo 13 as Jim Lovell, The Green Mile as Paul Edgecomb, Toy Story as Woody and Charlie Wilson's War as Charlie Wilson.
Hanks was born in Concord, California. His father, Amos Mefford Hanks (born in Glenn County, California, on March 9, 1924 – died in Alameda, California, on January 31, 1992), was an itinerant cook. His mother, Janet Marylyn (née Frager; born in Alameda County, California, on January 18, 1932), was a hospital worker. Hanks' mother is of Portuguese ancestry, while two of his paternal great-grandparents immigrated from Britain. Hanks's parents divorced in 1960. The family's three oldest children, Sandra (now Sandra Hanks Benoiton, a writer)[citation needed], Larry (now Lawrence M. Hanks, PhD, an entomology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Tom, went with their father, while the youngest, Jim, now an actor and film maker, remained with his mother in Red Bluff, California.[citation needed]
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Tom Wilkinson
Thomas Geoffrey "Tom" Wilkinson,OBE (born 5 February 1948) is a British actor. He has twice been nominated for an Academy Award, for his roles in In the Bedroom and Michael Clayton. In 2009, he won Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy Awards for Best Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Film for John Adams.
Wilkinson was born in Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, the son of Thomas Wilkinson, Sr., a farmer. At the age of four, he moved with his family to Canada, where they lived for several years before returning to England and running a pub in Cornwall. Wilkinson graduated from the University of Kent, where he was a member of T24 Drama Society (then named UKCD) and attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Wilkinson currently lives in North London with his wife, actress Diana Hardcastle, and their two children, Alice and Mollie.
In 2011, Wilkinson and Hardcastle portrayed real life husband and wife Joe and Rose Kennedy in the mini series The Kennedys.
Wilkinson made his television debut in the mid-1970s and worked on several British television series, most notably the mini-series First Among Equals (1986). He first gained critical acclaim with his appearance as Mr. Pecksniff, in the BBC’s 1994 adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit. He made only the occasional film (including a brief appearance in 1995’s Sense and Sensibility). After becoming part of the ensemble cast of the smash hit The Full Monty in 1997, a role which earned him a BAFTA, he began to take film roles more frequently, including supporting parts in Oscar and Lucinda, Wilde, Shakespeare in Love, and The Patriot.
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Tommy Lee Jones
Tommy Lee Jones (born September 15, 1946) is an American actor and film director. He has received three Academy Award nominations, winning one as Best Supporting Actor for the 1993 thriller film The Fugitive.
His notable film roles include federal marshal Samuel Gerard in The Fugitive and U.S. Marshals, Agent K in Men in Black and its sequels, Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men, the villain "Two-Face" in Batman Forever, terrorist William Strannix in Under Siege, former Texas Ranger Woodrow F. Call in Lonesome Dove, a Texas Ranger in Man of the House and rancher Pete Perkins in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Colonel Chester Phillips in Captain America: The First Avenger. Jones has also portrayed real-life figures such as businessman Howard Hughes, executed murderer Gary Gilmore, Oliver Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter and baseball great Ty Cobb.
Jones was born in San Saba, Texas. His mother, Lucille Marie (née Scott), was a police officer, school teacher, and beauty shop owner, and his father, Clyde C. Jones, was an oil field worker. The two were married and divorced twice. Jones has stated that his grandmother was of Cherokee ancestry. He was a resident of Midland, Texas, and attended Robert E. Lee High School.
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Tomás Milián
Tomás Milián (born March 3, 1932) is a Cuban-American actor best known for having worked extensively in Italian films from the late 1950s to the 1980s.
Tomás Milián was born in Havana as Tomás Quintín Rodríguez, the son of a Cuban general. His father was arrested and jailed after Fulgencio Batista took power in Cuba : he later committed suicide. Milián then decided to leave Cuba and pursue his wishes of being an actor. He settled in the United States to study at New York's Actor's Studio and later became an American citizen.
After starting a career in the United States, he went to Italy in 1958 to take part to a theater festival in Spoleto. He eventually decided to relocate to Italy, where he lived for over 25 years, gradually becoming a very successful performer. His first film part in Italy was in the 1959 picture La Notte brava. Although his voice was dubbed most of the time due to his accent, Milián performed his lines in Italian (or in English, depending on the film). He initially starred in arthouse movies and worked with directors such as Mauro Bolognini and Luchino Visconti.
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Tony Bennett
Anthony Dominick Benedetto, better known as Tony Bennett (born August 3, 1926), is an American singer of popular music, standards, show tunes, and jazz. Bennett is also a serious and accomplished painter, having created works — under the name Benedetto — that are on permanent public display in several institutions. He is the founder of Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in New York City.
Raised in New York City, Bennett began singing at an early age. He fought in the final stages of World War II as an infantryman with the U.S. Army in the European Theatre. Afterwards, he developed his singing technique, signed with Columbia Records, and had his first number one popular song with "Because of You" in 1951. Several top hits such as "Rags to Riches" followed in the early 1950s. Bennett then further refined his approach to encompass jazz singing. He reached an artistic peak in the late 1950s with albums such as The Beat of My Heart and Basie Swings, Bennett Sings. In 1962, Bennett recorded his signature song, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco". His career and his personal life then suffered an extended downturn during the height of the rock music era.
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Topher Grace
Christopher John "Topher" Grace (pronounced /ˈtoʊfər/; born July 12, 1978) is an American actor. He is best known for his portrayal of Eric Forman on the Fox sitcom That '70s Show, Eddie Brock/Venom in the Sam Raimi film Spider-Man 3, and Edwin in the 2010 film Predators.
Grace was born in New York City, the son of Pat, an assistant to the schoolmaster of the New Canaan Country School, and John, a Madison Avenue executive.
Grace grew up in Darien, Connecticut, where he knew actress Kate Bosworth, as well as Opie & Anthony producer Nathaniel Bryan, and was sometimes babysat by actress Chloë Sevigny, who later appeared with him in high school stage plays. Grace chose the name Topher because he did not want his full name abbreviated to Chris at school.
Grace was cast as Eric Forman on Fox's That '70s Show, which debuted in 1998. The sitcom was successful and Grace became well known among television watchers; he played the role until the seventh season. The series was renewed for another season despite his absence before its ending in 2006. His character was written out and was replaced with a new character named Randy Pearson who was portrayed by Josh Meyers. Grace makes a very brief guest appearance in the final episode.
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Tracey Ullman
Tracey Ullman (born 30 December 1959) is a British stage and television actress, comedienne, singer, dancer, director, screenwriter and author.
Her early appearances were on British TV sketch comedy shows A Kick Up the Eighties (with Rik Mayall and Miriam Margolyes) and Three of a Kind (with Lenny Henry and David Copperfield). After a brief but high-profile singing career, she appeared as Candice Valentine in Girls On Top with Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.
She emigrated from the UK to the US and created her own network television series, The Tracey Ullman Show, from 1987 until 1990, from which The Simpsons was spun off in 1989. She later produced programmes for HBO, including Tracey Takes On... (1996–1999), for which she has won numerous awards. She has also appeared in several feature films. Ullman's most recent sketch comedy series, Tracey Ullman's State of the Union, ran from 2008 to 2010 on Showtime.
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Vicki Lawrence
Vicki Lawrence (born Vicki Ann Axelrad, March 26, 1949, Inglewood, California) is an American actress, comedienne, and Billboard Hot 100 #1 singer, who was frequently a game show panelist in the 1970s and 1980s. She is best known for her co-starring role on The Carol Burnett Show, alongside Carol Burnett, from 1967 to 1978, and as the sharp-tongued matriarch, Thelma Harper (the main character on Mama's Family, airing from 1983 to 1990, which was spun off from The Carol Burnett Show's The Family sketches). As a singer she recorded The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia that made #1 on the US chart as well as in Canada. She is credited with co-authoring two books and has also used the name Vicki Lawrence Schultz.
Lawrence was born in Inglewood, California, the daughter of Anne Alene (née Loyd) and Howard Axelrad, a certified public accountant. She is a graduate of Morningside High School in Inglewood. She was valedictorian of her class of 1967.
As a comedienne and actress, Lawrence is known for her work on The Carol Burnett Show, of which she was a part from 1967 to 1978. She was the only cast member, except for Burnett herself, who stayed on the show for the entire eleven seasons. Lawrence was hired for the show on the basis of a letter she sent to Burnett and the producers, with a photograph of Lawrence that showed her resemblance to Burnett.
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Victor Banerjee
Victor Banerjee (Bengali: ভিক্টর ব্যানার্জী, Hindi: विक्टर बनर्जी) (born 15 October 1946) is an Indian actor who appears in Hindi, Bengali and English language films. He has also appeared on a number of TV series on Indian television. He has worked for prominent directors like Jerry London, Shyam Benegal, Satyajit Ray, Ram Gopal Varma, Roman Polanski, James Ivory, Mrinal Sen and David Lean.
Banerjee was born to a of Bengali Hindu family and is a descendant of Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee, a leading intellectual, a prominent man of his time and the first president of the Indian National Congress (1885).
He had his schooling in St. Edmund's, Shillong, and graduated in English Literature from St. Xavier's College, Calcutta.
In 1984, he acted as Dr. Aziz Ahmed in David Lean's film of A Passage to India, bringing him to the attention of Western audiences. Victor was nominated for BAFTA award for this role in 1986. He won two other awards for this role: Evening Standard British Film Award and NBR Award (National Board Review, USA).
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Victor Sjöström
Victor Sjöström (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈvɪktɔɾ ˈɧœˈstɾœm] ( listen); in the United States sometimes known as Victor Seastrom) (20 September 1879 – 3 January 1960) was a Swedish actor, screenwriter, and film director.
Born in Silbodal, in the Värmland region of Sweden, he was only a year old when his father, Olof Adolf Sjöström, moved the family to Brooklyn, New York. His mother died when he was seven years old in 1886. Sjöström returned to Sweden where he lived with relatives in Stockholm, beginning his acting career at 17 as a member of a touring theater company.
Drawn from the stage to the fledgling motion picture industry, he made his first film in 1912 under the direction of Mauritz Stiller. Between then and 1923, he directed another forty-one films in Sweden, some of which are now lost. Those surviving include The Sons of Ingmar (1919), Karin, Daughter of Ingmar (1920) and The Phantom Carriage (1921), all based on stories by the Nobel-prize winning novelist Selma Lagerlöf. They confirm him as one the very greatest of silent film directors, who helped to create a unique idiom with qualities quite different from those of sound cinema. Many of his films from the period are marked by subtle character portrayal, fine storytelling and evocative settings in which the Swedish landscape often plays a key psychological role. The naturalistic quality of his films was enhanced by his (then revolutionary) preference for on-location filming, especially in rural and village settings.
wn.com/Victor_Sjöström -
Walter Huston
Walter Thomas Huston ( /ˈwɔːltər ˈhjuːstən/; April 5, 1883 – April 7, 1950) was a Canadian-born American actor. He was the father of actor and director John Huston and the grandfather of actress Anjelica Huston and actor Danny Huston.
Huston was born in York County, Ontario, the son of Elizabeth (née McGibbon) and Robert Moore Huston, a provincial farmer who founded a construction company. He was of Scottish and Irish descent.
Huston began his Broadway career in 1924. Once talkies began in Hollywood, he achieved fame in character roles. His first major role was in 1929's The Virginian with Gary Cooper. He appeared in the Broadway theatrical adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's novel Dodsworth in 1934 and the play's film version two years later.
Huston remained busy throughout the 1930s and 1940s, both on stage and screen (becoming one of America's most distinguished actors); he performed "September Song" in the original Broadway production of Knickerbocker Holiday in 1938 (his grandaughter Anjelica Huston sang it on the May 7, 2012 episode of the NBC TV series "Smash"). Among his films are Abraham Lincoln (1930), Rain (1932), Gabriel Over the White House (1933), The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and Mission to Moscow (1943), a pro-Soviet World War II propaganda film as Ambassador Joseph E. Davies. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1948 for his role in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was directed by his son, John Huston. His last film was The Furies in 1950 with Barbara Stanwyck.
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Walter Matthau
Walter Matthau (October 1, 1920 – July 1, 2000) was an American actor best known for his role as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple and his frequent collaborations with Odd Couple star Jack Lemmon, as well as his role as Coach Buttermaker in the 1976 comedy The Bad News Bears. He won an Academy Award for his performance in the 1966 Billy Wilder film The Fortune Cookie.
Matthau was born Walter John Matthow in New York City's Lower East Side on October 1, 1920, the son of Rose (née Berolsky; from Lithuania), who worked in a sweatshop, and Milton Matthow, an electrician and peddler (from Russia), both Jewish immigrants. His surname has often incorrectly been listed as Matuschanskayasky (see below for a detailed discussion). As a young boy, Walter attended a Jewish non-profit sleepaway camp, Tranquillity Camp, where he first began acting in the shows the camp would stage on Saturday nights. He also attended Surprise Lake Camp. His high school was Seward Park High School.
During World War II, Matthau served in the U.S. Army Air Forces with the Eighth Air Force in England as a B-24 Liberator radioman-gunner, in the same 453rd Bombardment Group as James Stewart. He reached the rank of staff sergeant and became interested in acting. He took classes in acting at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York with the influential German director Erwin Piscator. He often joked that his best early review came in a play where he posed as a derelict. One reviewer said, "The others just looked like actors in make-up, Walter Matthau really looks like a skid row bum!" Matthau was a respected stage actor for years in such fare as Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and A Shot in the Dark. He won the 1962 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a play.
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Warren Beatty
Warren Beatty ( /ˈbeɪti/ BAY-tee; born March 30, 1937) is an American actor, producer, screenwriter and director. He has been nominated for 15 Academy Awards, including winning the Best Director Award and its highest honor, the Irving G. Thalberg Award. He has been nominated for 16 Golden Globe Awards and won six, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award, which he received in 2007. Only Beatty and Orson Welles have been nominated for producer, director, writer and actor in the same film. Welles did it once (for Citizen Kane), Beatty did it twice (for Heaven Can Wait and Reds).
Beatty was born Henry Warren Beaty in Richmond, Virginia. His mother, Kathlyn Corinne (née MacLean), was a Nova Scotia-born teacher, and his father, Ira Owens Beaty, was a Ph.D. of educational psychology, a public school administrator, and dealt in real estate. Beatty's grandparents were also educators. The family was Baptist. In 1945, the family moved from Richmond to Arlington, Virginia. Beatty's sister is the multi-award winning actress and writer Shirley MacLaine.
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Welsh American
Welsh Americans are citizens of the United States whose ancestry originates wholly or partly in Wales. In the 2008 U.S. Census community survey, an estimated 1.98 million Americans had Welsh ancestry, 0.6% of the total U.S. population. This compares with a population of 3 million in Wales. However, 3.8% of Americans bear a Welsh surname. Moreover, a particularly large proportion of the African American population have Welsh names. History shows that there is little evidence that the Welsh were among the slave-owning classes at this time, as most immigrants were poor.
There have been at least eight U.S. Presidents with Welsh ancestry including Thomas Jefferson,Abraham Lincoln, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, James Garfield, Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon and Barack Obama. Confederate President Jefferson Davis and U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey were also of Welsh heritage.
The proportion of the population with a name of Welsh origin ranges from 9.5% in South Carolina to 1.1% in North Dakota. Typically names of Welsh origin are concentrated in the mid Atlantic states, the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama and in Appalachia, West Virginia and Tennessee. By contrast there are relatively fewer Welsh names in New England, the northern mid West, and the South West.
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Wes Bentley
Wesley Cook "Wes" Bentley (born September 4, 1978) is an American film actor known for his roles of Ricky Fitts in American Beauty and Seneca Crane in The Hunger Games.
Bentley was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, the son of Cherie and David Bentley, who are United Methodist ministers. In 1996, he graduated from Sylvan Hills High School in Sherwood, Arkansas. Bentley then attended the Juilliard School's Drama Division (Group 29: 1996–2000) but left the school after one year to pursue his acting career.
Bentley has starred in several films, including the Oscar-winning film American Beauty, The Four Feathers, P2, and Ghost Rider. He starred in the thriller Dolan's Cadillac, based on the short story by Stephen King, and There Be Dragons by director Roland Joffé. Bentley is one of the main subjects in the documentary My Big Break, directed by Tony Zierra, which follows Bentley and three of his former roommates, Chad Lindberg, Brad Rowe and Greg Fawcett, as they pursue their dream to become successful actors in Hollywood.
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Whitney Houston
Whitney Elizabeth Houston (August 9, 1963 – February 11, 2012) was an American recording artist, actress, producer, and model. In 2009, the Guinness World Records cited her as the most-awarded female act of all-time. Houston was one of the world's best-selling music artists, having sold over 170 million albums, singles and videos worldwide. She released seven studio albums and three movie soundtrack albums, all of which have diamond, multi-platinum, platinum or gold certification. Houston's crossover appeal on the popular music charts, as well as her prominence on MTV, starting with her video for "How Will I Know", influenced several African American female artists to follow in her footsteps.
Houston is the only artist to chart seven consecutive No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hits. She is the second artist behind Elton John and the only female artist to have two number-one Billboard 200 Album awards (formerly "Top Pop Album") on the Billboard magazine year-end charts. Houston's 1985 debut album Whitney Houston became the best-selling debut album by a female act at the time of its release. The album was named Rolling Stone's best album of 1986, and was ranked at number 254 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Her second studio album Whitney (1987) became the first album by a female artist to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 albums chart.
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Whoopi Goldberg
Whoopi Goldberg ( /ˈhwʊpi/, born Caryn Elaine Johnson; November 13, 1955) is an American comedienne, actress, singer-songwriter, political activist, author and talk show host.
Goldberg made her film debut in The Color Purple (1985) playing Celie, a mistreated black woman in the Deep South. She received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress and won her first Golden Globe Award for her role in the film. In 1990, she starred as Oda Mae Brown, a psychic helping a slain man (Patrick Swayze) find his killer in the blockbuster film Ghost. This performance won her a second Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Notable later films include Sister Act and Sister Act 2, The Lion King, Made in America, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Girl, Interrupted and Rat Race. She is also acclaimed for her roles as the bartender Guinan in Star Trek: The Next Generation and as Terry Doolittle in Jumpin' Jack Flash. More recently, she had performed the voice of Stretch in Toy Story 3 and made an appearance in Glee as Carmen Tibideaux.
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Wikipedia Persondata
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Will Smith
Willard Christopher "Will" Smith, Jr. (born September 25, 1968), also known by his stage name The Fresh Prince, is an American actor, producer, and rapper. He has enjoyed success in television, film and music. In April 2007, Newsweek called him the most powerful actor in Hollywood. Smith has been nominated for four Golden Globe Awards, two Academy Awards, and has won multiple Grammy Awards.
In the late 1980s, Smith achieved modest fame as a rapper under the name The Fresh Prince. In 1990, his popularity increased dramatically when he starred in the popular television series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The show ran for nearly six years (1990–1996) on NBC and has been syndicated consistently on various networks since then. In the mid-1990s, Smith moved from television to film, and ultimately starred in numerous blockbuster films. He is the only actor to have eight consecutive films gross over $100 million in the domestic box office and the only one to have eight consecutive films in which he starred open at #1 spot in the domestic box office tally.
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Willem Dafoe
Willem Dafoe (born July 22, 1955) is an American film, stage, and voice actor, and a founding member of the experimental theatre company The Wooster Group. He has had roles in a wide range of films, including Platoon, Affliction, Off Limits, Streets of Fire, To Live and Die in L.A., Born on the Fourth of July, The English Patient, The Last Temptation of Christ, Mississippi Burning, "The Life Aquatic" The Boondock Saints, Spider-Man, and The Aviator, and voice roles in Fantastic Mr. Fox and Finding Nemo.
Dafoe has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor twice. The first was for his role in Platoon in 1986 and the second time for his performance in Shadow of the Vampire in 2000.
Dafoe was born William J. Dafoe in Appleton, Wisconsin. One of seven children of Muriel Isabel (née Sprissler) and Dr. William Alfred Dafoe, he recalled in 2009, "My five sisters raised me because my father was a surgeon, my mother was a nurse and they worked together, so I didn't see either of them much." In high school, he acquired the nickname Willem. His ancestry includes Irish, Scottish, German, and Canadian.
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William Hurt
William McChord Hurt (born March 20, 1950) is an American stage and film actor. He received his acting training at the Juilliard School, and began acting on stage in the 1970s. Hurt made his film debut as a troubled scientist in the science-fiction feature Altered States (1980), for which he received a Golden Globe nomination for New Star of the Year. He subsequently played a leading role, as a lawyer who succumbs to the temptations of Kathleen Turner, in the well-received neo noir Body Heat (1981).
In 1985, Hurt garnered substantial critical acclaim and multiple acting awards, including an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for Best Actor, for portraying an effeminate gay man in Kiss of the Spider Woman. He received another two Academy Award nominations for his lead performances in Children of a Lesser God (1986) and Broadcast News (1987). Hurt remained an active stage actor throughout the 1980s, appearing in Off-Broadway productions, including Henry V, Fifth of July, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Hurt received his first Tony Award nomination in 1985 for the Broadway production of Hurlyburly.
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William Snape
William Snape is an actor, perhaps most notable for playing Gaz's son Nathan in the British comedy The Full Monty.
Snape was born in Sheffield on 17 April 1985. He attended Dobcroft Junior School followed by Silverdale School.
He has more recently acted in ITV's Emmerdale as farmer Stephen Butler.
He made a guest appearance in the medical drama Holby City on 17 April 2007 as Tony Dunmore. He has also made guest appearances in one episode of Doctors and in two episodes of Heartbeat.
He underwent two operations after being hit by a car on 29 January 1999.
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Yul Brynner
Yul Brynner (Russian: Юлий Борисович Бринер, Yuliy Borisovich Bryner; July 11, 1920 – October 10, 1985) was a Russian-born stage and film actor. He was best known for his portrayal of Mongkut, king of Siam, in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor for the film version; he also played the role more than 4,500 times onstage. He is also remembered as Rameses II in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille blockbuster The Ten Commandments, General Bounine in Anastasia and Chris Adams in The Magnificent Seven. Brynner was noted for his distinctive voice and for his shaven head, which he maintained as a personal trademark long after adopting it for his initial role in The King and I. He was also a photographer and the author of two books.
Yul Brynner was born Yuliy Borisovich Bryner in 1920. He exaggerated his background and early life for the press, claiming that he was born Taidje Khan of part-Mongol-Tatar parentage, on the Russian island of Sakhalin. In reality, he was born at home in a four-storey residence at 15 Aleutskaya Street, Vladivostok, in the Far Eastern Republic (present-day Primorsky Krai, Russia). He also occasionally referred to himself as Julius Briner,Jules Bryner, or Youl Bryner. A biography written by his son, Rock Brynner, in 1989 clarified these issues.
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Zach Galifianakis
Zachary Knight "Zach" Galifianakis ( /ˌɡælɨfəˈnækɨs/ GAL-i-fə-NAK-iss; born October 1, 1969) is an American stand-up comedian and actor known for his numerous film and television appearances including his own Comedy Central Presents special. While initially more of an "underground" comedian, he garnered mainstream attention for his role as Alan Garner in the comedy film The Hangover and its sequel The Hangover Part II.
Zach Galifianakis was born in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. His mother, Mary Frances (née Cashion), ran a community center for the arts, and his father, Harry Galifianakis, was a heating oil vendor. Galifianakis' paternal grandparents emigrated from Crete, Greece, and Galifianakis was baptized in his father's Greek Orthodox faith. His mother is of Scots-Irish descent. He has two siblings, a younger sister, Merritt, and an older brother, Greg. His uncle, Nick Galifianakis, was a congressman from North Carolina between 1967 and 1973. He attended Wilkes Central High School, and subsequently attended but did not graduate from North Carolina State University, where he was a communications major.
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Zelda Williams
Zelda Rae Williams (born July 31, 1989) is an American actress and the daughter of actor and comedian Robin Williams and Marsha Garces. She was named after Princess Zelda of The Legend of Zelda series of video games. Her first big role was that of Melissa Loggia, the main character's teenage love interest in the 2004 film House of D. In 2007, she was chosen as one of People Magazine's 100 Most Beautiful People.
Williams was born in New York City to Marsha Garces Williams, the second wife of Robin Williams. The first of Marsha's two children, Zelda has an older half-brother from Robin's first marriage, Zachary Pym Williams (born April 11, 1983), as well as a younger brother, Cody Alan Williams (born November 25, 1991). Zelda moved to Los Angeles from her hometown of San Francisco.
Williams has been quoted as saying she's played "every single sport on the face of the planet." She regularly visits an indoor climbing gym in her hometown of San Francisco. Williams is also a dedicated video game player and Halo 3 fan. She has stated that Wikipedia and Notcot.org are websites she visits frequently. In June 2011, both Zelda and Robin feature in a television commercial for the Nintendo 3DS game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. Furthermore on October 25, 2011, she was the special guest host at the London Zelda Symphony Concert at the Hammersmith Apollo, marking the 25th anniversary of Zelda Series. On November 17, 2011, subscribers to Nintendo emails received an email of her and her father playing the new game The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword for the Nintendo Wii. She has stated that Majora's Mask is her favorite game of all time, and voices support of a release of it on the Nintendo 3DS by supporting Operation Moonfall. She appears in the Wynter Gordon music video for "Buy My Love" and she also has a cameo in the Cobra Starship music video "You Make Me Feel", along with father Robin.
wn.com/Zelda_Williams
karaoke
You stood beside a burning bush
And let the trumpetmen catch fire
You squeezed a flood out of a stone
And all the people drank it dry
So all the ships returned to land
The birds could swim
The fish could fly
The angels couldn't understand
How everyone could get it right
Circus composer, you let us get closer
You stood below a tangerine
And let the fruit roll melt away
And all the world was you
And we thought it were better anyway
Circus composer, could you write this all down?
You let us get closer,
You let us be found
Circus composer, could you make me a star?
Oh, young Rick James, tie it up front
..get up bitch brain
Baby boy, be the...
Lady Cocaine, waiting for the next train
Drop the ... you missed the balloon
Dropping that tag... waiting for the full moon, whoof
Don't give a fuck about a ... nigga
Just being me by myself, will make her come quicker
..like she's nine months from a fat nigga
Pussy clean, eat it up...
Pussy pop pill, a couple pills, we don't need liquor
Lean, a couple .. on that thing
From... on the scene, got... the team
Cush, I give a fuck less bush
Guillotine nigga, hit in the puss yummy
Chorus:
She know what I'll be,
That's why she asking about me
And they're still ain't fucking with me
That's why she fucking with me
Let go!
No, I give a fuck nigga
She's so, I give a fuck niggas
I'll give a fuck less
I couldn't give a fuck less
J talk to me!
And nobody gives less of a fuck than George Bush
You think you don't give a fuck?
Bush don't give a fuck!
Pussy clean, don't let it feed me
Hoes on my dick, cause I look like me
You're a nigga under wall, why you're looking like me
Talk a big sucker dick, why you're talking like me?
..let that bitch leave with so gold teeth, number one
Number one cocked up, yo bitch fucked up
looking like she ruffed up, while I'm getting cuffed up,
She playing the cops seat, super freak, that's me
Young Rick James, mother fucker till the nose bleeds.
She'll be in the back room, posing like a bad BONE
You're already cool, let's get her popping...
Chorus:
She know what I'll be,
That's why she asking about me
And they're still ain't fucking with me
That's why she fucking with me
Let go!
No, I give a fuck nigga
She's so, I give a fuck niggas
I'll give a fuck less
I couldn't give a fuck less
J talk to me!
I know what she wants, I know what she needs
Put your head on this car on the top of my key
I know what she wants, I know what she needs yeah, yeah
Uh yeah I get 'em up right, uh yeah, so get 'em up right
So get 'em up right, aha yeah
So get 'em up right, aha yeah
Chorus:
She know what I'll be,
That's why she asking about me
And they're still ain't fucking with me
That's why she fucking with me
Let go!
No, I give a fuck nigga
She's so, I give a fuck niggas
I'll give a fuck less
I couldn't give a fuck less
[David Banner]
Mama ain't got no cash, daddy aint got no doe
So daddy went to my mama and started pimpin that hoe
Man it's hard times, niggas ain't got shit
Nothin but billy clubs to they head and they ass kicked
Heroin in they vein, cocaine up in they brain
Man what you expect, America gave us pain
So fuck it, now we thugs, ??? mean drugs
And takin mean mugs, and fill 'em with those slugs
I gave up fake gods, and Jesus don't look like us
Why y'all think we gon' kill and just don't give a hot fuck
Devil that's how you made us, ??? us up in the pen
Man we came out blind, that's why we goin back in
But God, I'mma teach 'em, reach 'em up in these streets
Bush, I'm runnin' up in this shit like a track meet
You murdered, up in Texas where killin' is such a sin
The first month you in office you started killin' again
But shit, we just some niggas and that's how the game go
Y'all took us up out the state moved us straight out to Death Row
Y'all may of, made us slaves but never make us your hoe
God, you my pimp so let's start exposin' these hoes
Y'all judges some weak pussies, y'all preaches some rapin' fags
These people that made us slaves, these niggas wavin' they flags
America ain't shit but home of the hot lick
They hang us all by rope, then laugh and cut off our dick
[Chorus]
Have y'all niggas ever thought about
All the things we been talkin' bout
Down in Mississippi
Down in Mississippi
Have y'all niggas ever thought about
All the things we been talkin' bout
Down in Mississippi
Down in Mississippi
Have y'all niggas ever thought about
All the things we been talkin' bout
Down in Mississippi
Down in Mississippi
RELEASE
ALBUMS
- The Mirror of the Signs
- The Sound of Winter
- All My Life
- The Afterlife
- All Night Doctors
- Baby Come Home
- Red Light
- She's a Stallion
- I Believe in You
- Stand Up
- The Heart of the Matter
- Be Still My Love
- Comedown (acoustic)
- Glycerine (acoustic)
- Everything Zen (acoustic)
- Machinehead
- Comedown
- Bomb
- Glycerine
- Everything Zen
- Little Things
- Everything Zen
- Little Things
- Comedown
- Glycerine
- Machinehead
- Swallowed
- Greedy Fly
- Warm Machine
- The Chemicals Between Us
- Letting the Cables Sleep
- Everything Zen (The Lhasa Fever mix)
- Mouth (The Stingray mix)
- Swallowed (Goldie/Toasted Both Sides Please mix)
- Intro
- Machinehead
- Greedy Fly
- Warm Machine
- Everything Zen
- The Chemicals Between Us
- Glycerine
- [crowd noise]
- Swallowed
- The One I Love
- Little Things
- Outro
- Warm Machine
- Jesus Online
- The Chemicals Between Us
- English Fire
- Spacetravel
- 40 Miles From the Sun
- Prizefighter
- The Disease of the Dancing Cats
- Altered States
- Dead Meat
- Letting the Cables Sleep
- Mindchanger
- Solutions
- Headful of Ghosts
- The People That We Love
- Superman
- Fugitive
- Hurricane
- Inflatable
- Reasons
- Land of the Living
- My Engine Is With You
- Out of This World
- Float
- Everything Zen
- Swim
- Bomb
- Little Things
- Comedown
- Body
- Machinehead
- Testosterone
- Monkey
- Glycerine
- Alien
- X-Girlfriend
- Personal Holloway
- Greedy Fly
- Swallowed
- Insect Kin
- Cold Contagious
- A Tendency to Start Fires
- Mouth
- Straight No Chaser
- History
- Synapse
- Communicator
- Bonedriven
- Distant Voices / [unknown]
- Everything Zen (The Lhasa Fever mix)
- Mouth (The Stingray mix)
- Swallowed (Goldie/Toasted Both Sides Please mix)
- Synapse (Philip Steir/My Ghost in the Bush of Life mix)
- History (Dub Pistols mix)
- Personal Holloway (Fabio Paras/Soundclash Republic mix)
- Bonedriven (Mekon/Beat Me Clever mix)
- Insect Kin (Jack Dangers/Drum and Bees mix)
- Comedown (Lunatic Calm mix)
- Everything Zen (Derek DeLarge mix)
- In a Lonely Place (Tricky mix)
- Backstage Girl
- Yonge St. Patty
- Got to Leave the City
- I Miss You
- The Grand Commander
- Cross Country Man
- I Can Hear You Calling
- Messin' Around With Boxes
- Livin' Life
- Turn Down
- Drink Your Wine
- Try (live)
- Lookin' (live)
- Wicked Woman (live)
- Cross Country Man (live)
- Everything Zen (acoustic)
- Comedown (acoustic)
- Machinehead (acoustic live)
- Swallowed (acoustic)
- Glycerine (acoustic)
- This Cloud (acoustic)
- Wild Horses (acoustic)
- Swallowed (acoustic)
- Glycerine (acoustic)
- Little Things (live)
- This Cloud (acoustic)
- Wild Horses (acoustic)
- Monkey
- Body
- Janie Jones
- X-Girlfriend
- Little Things
- Glycerine
- Everything Zen
- Swim
- Everything Zen (acoustic)
- Comedown (acoustic)
- Wild Horses (acoustic)
- X-Girlfriend (Slow acoustic version)
- Glycerine (acoustic)
- Machinehead
- Bomb
- Little Things
- The Disease of the Dancing Cats (2000-01-19: Tilburg, Netherlands)
- Machinehead (2000-01-19: Tilburg, Netherlands)
- Greedy Fly (2000-01-19: Tilburg, Netherlands)
- English Fire (2000-01-19: Tilburg, Netherlands)
- Warm Machine (2000-01-19: Tilburg, Netherlands)
- Insect Kin (2000-01-19: Tilburg, Netherlands)
- Mouth (2000-01-19: Tilburg, Netherlands)
- Everything Zen (2000-01-19: Tilburg, Netherlands)
- Letting the Cables Sleep (2000-01-19: Tilburg, Netherlands)
- Dead Meat (2000-01-19: Tilburg, Netherlands)
- The Chemicals Between Us (2000-01-19: Tilburg, Netherlands)
- Prizefighter (2000-01-19: Tilburg, Netherlands)
- The One I Love (1999-07-23: Woodstock, USA)
- Fuckin' Up (1999-07-23: Woodstock, USA)
- A Tendency to Start Fires
- Personal Holloway
- Machinehead
- Greedy Fly
- Comedown
- Synapse
- Straight No Chaser
- Glycerine
- Distant Voices
- Everything Zen
- Swallowed
- Alien
- Little Things
- Solutions
- The Chemicals Between Us
- The People That We Love
- Fugitive
- Everything Zen
- Greedy Fly
- Machinehead
- Inflatable
- Comedown
- Swallowed
- Glycerine
- Little Things
- Body
- Monkey
- Broken TV
- Everything Zen
- X-Girlfriend
- Swim
- Comedown
- Janie Jones
- Bomb
- Little Things
- Alien
- Machinehead
- Monkey
- Old
- Testosterone
- Bomb
- Little Things
- Swim
- Comedown
- Machinehead
- Bubbles
- Everything Zen
- Glycerine
- Machinehead
- Warm Machine
- Everything Zen
- Jesus Online
- Spacetravel
- 40 Miles From the Sun
- Insectkin
- Deadmeat
- The Chemicals Between Us
- Little Things
- Disease of the Dancing Cats
- Swallowed
- Greedy Fly
- Prizefighter
- Comedown
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Bush - Glycerine
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:20
- Updated: 25 Dec 2012
www.youtube.com Lyrics Must be your skin that I'm sinkin in Must be for real cause now I can feel and I didn't mind it's not my kind not my time to wonder why everything's gone white and everything's grey now your here now you away I don't want this remember that I'll never forget where your at don't let the days go by glycerine I'm never alone I'm alone all the time are you at one or do you lie we live in a wheel where everyone steals but when we rise it's like strawberry fields If I treated you bad you bruise my face couldn't love you more you got a beautiful taste don't let the days go by could have been easier on you I coudn't change though I wanted to could have been easier by three our old friend fear and you and me glycerine (repeat) don't let the days go by glycerine I needed you more when we wanted us less I could not kiss just regress it might just be clear simple and plain that's just fine that's just one of my names don't let the days go by could've been easier on you glycerine
http://wn.com/Bush_Glycerine
www.youtube.com Lyrics Must be your skin that I'm sinkin in Must be for real cause now I can feel and I didn't mind it's not my kind not my time to wonder why everything's gone white and everything's grey now your here now you away I don't want this remember that I'll never forget where your at don't let the days go by glycerine I'm never alone I'm alone all the time are you at one or do you lie we live in a wheel where everyone steals but when we rise it's like strawberry fields If I treated you bad you bruise my face couldn't love you more you got a beautiful taste don't let the days go by could have been easier on you I coudn't change though I wanted to could have been easier by three our old friend fear and you and me glycerine (repeat) don't let the days go by glycerine I needed you more when we wanted us less I could not kiss just regress it might just be clear simple and plain that's just fine that's just one of my names don't let the days go by could've been easier on you glycerine
Must See Hilarious George Bush Bloopers! - VERY FUNNY
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:50
- Updated: 26 Dec 2012
Click here to watch another funny video: www.youtube.com Various George W. Bush clips. These are hilarious! He could be a comic. xD
http://wn.com/Must_See_Hilarious_George_Bush_Bloopers!_VERY_FUNNY
Click here to watch another funny video: www.youtube.com Various George W. Bush clips. These are hilarious! He could be a comic. xD
- published: 21 Mar 2008
- views: 7152885
- author: YouFaves
Bush - Swallowed [Widescreen]
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:25
- Updated: 25 Dec 2012
Bush - Swallowed Widescreen
http://wn.com/Bush_Swallowed_Widescreen_
BUSH "The Sound Of Winter" (HD Official Video 2011) from THE SEA OF MEMORIES
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:45
- Updated: 25 Dec 2012
The first video in Full HD from the new BUSH album. The Sound Of Winter is released in Europe by earMUSIC. You can find it on iTunes here: itunes.apple.com A limited edition with 8 unreleased song on a bonus CD will be made available on October 28th.
http://wn.com/BUSH_The_Sound_Of_Winter_HD_Official_Video_2011_from_THE_SEA_OF_MEMORIES
The first video in Full HD from the new BUSH album. The Sound Of Winter is released in Europe by earMUSIC. You can find it on iTunes here: itunes.apple.com A limited edition with 8 unreleased song on a bonus CD will be made available on October 28th.
- published: 09 Sep 2011
- views: 2724916
- author: earMUSICofficial
Bush - Chemicals Between Us
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:38
- Updated: 26 Dec 2012
Led by guitarist/vocalist Gavin Rossdale, Bush became the first post-Nirvana British band to hit it big in America. Of course, they became a hit by playing by the grunge rules — they had loud guitars, guttural vocals, stop-start rhythms, and extreme dynamics. Formed in late 1992 by Rossdale, Bush landed an American record deal before they had a British label. Sixteen Stone, their debut album produced by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley (producers of early-'80s hits by Madness and Elvis Costello, among others), was released in late 1994 by Interscope Records. By the end of December, Bush's "Everything Zen" video had landed in MTV's Buzz Bin and the album began to take off; by spring of 1995, the record had gone gold, despite a stack of bad reviews. By that time, the band was successful enough in the US to land a British record deal, although they weren't able to match their American success in the UK Over the course of 1995, Sixteen Stone became a major hit in the US, with "Little Things" reaching number four on the modern rock charts in the spring; later that year "Comedown" and "Glycerine" both reached number one on the modern rock charts, as well as crossing over into the pop Top 40. Despite their success, Bush received scathing reviews from the press and many alternative rock insiders who believed the group was manufactured. To counter such charges, the band asked Steve Albini — notorious for his abrasive productions for not only Pixies, Nirvana, and PJ Harvey, but ...
http://wn.com/Bush_Chemicals_Between_Us
Led by guitarist/vocalist Gavin Rossdale, Bush became the first post-Nirvana British band to hit it big in America. Of course, they became a hit by playing by the grunge rules — they had loud guitars, guttural vocals, stop-start rhythms, and extreme dynamics. Formed in late 1992 by Rossdale, Bush landed an American record deal before they had a British label. Sixteen Stone, their debut album produced by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley (producers of early-'80s hits by Madness and Elvis Costello, among others), was released in late 1994 by Interscope Records. By the end of December, Bush's "Everything Zen" video had landed in MTV's Buzz Bin and the album began to take off; by spring of 1995, the record had gone gold, despite a stack of bad reviews. By that time, the band was successful enough in the US to land a British record deal, although they weren't able to match their American success in the UK Over the course of 1995, Sixteen Stone became a major hit in the US, with "Little Things" reaching number four on the modern rock charts in the spring; later that year "Comedown" and "Glycerine" both reached number one on the modern rock charts, as well as crossing over into the pop Top 40. Despite their success, Bush received scathing reviews from the press and many alternative rock insiders who believed the group was manufactured. To counter such charges, the band asked Steve Albini — notorious for his abrasive productions for not only Pixies, Nirvana, and PJ Harvey, but ...
- published: 10 Feb 2010
- views: 1112526
- author: setzerlock
george bush is funny video BLOOPERS!
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:54
- Updated: 24 Dec 2012
FREE Twitter Covers! www.covermytwitter.com
http://wn.com/george_bush_is_funny_video_BLOOPERS!
FREE Twitter Covers! www.covermytwitter.com
- published: 06 May 2006
- views: 11147714
- author: bigrich0861
Uncommon Knowledge: George W. Bush
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 63:21
- Updated: 25 Dec 2012
This week on Uncommon Knowledge President George W. Bush discusses postpresidential life and his work at the Bush Institute. To listen to an mp3 of the interview go to: itunes.apple.com feeds.feedburner.com
http://wn.com/Uncommon_Knowledge_George_W_Bush
This week on Uncommon Knowledge President George W. Bush discusses postpresidential life and his work at the Bush Institute. To listen to an mp3 of the interview go to: itunes.apple.com feeds.feedburner.com
- published: 18 Jul 2012
- views: 294510
- author: HooverInstitution
Kate Bush - Wuthering Heights - Official Music Video - Version 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:46
- Updated: 25 Dec 2012
Official music video for the single "Wuthering Heights" -- Version 1 by Kate Bush. Wuthering Heights was released as Kate's debut single in January 1978. It became a No.1 hit in the UK singles chart and remains Kate's biggest-selling single. Two music videos were created to accompany the single. In Version 1, Kate can be seen performing the song in a dark room filled with white mist while wearing a white dress -- this was the UK release. In Version 2 Kate dances in an outdoor environment while wearing a red dress -- this video was produced for the American release. The song appears on Kate's 1978 debut album, The Kick Inside, and was also re-recorded in 1986 for the greatest-hits album The Whole Story. "Wuthering Heights" came 32nd in Q magazine's Top 100 Singles of All Time, voted by readers.
http://wn.com/Kate_Bush_Wuthering_Heights_Official_Music_Video_Version_1
Official music video for the single "Wuthering Heights" -- Version 1 by Kate Bush. Wuthering Heights was released as Kate's debut single in January 1978. It became a No.1 hit in the UK singles chart and remains Kate's biggest-selling single. Two music videos were created to accompany the single. In Version 1, Kate can be seen performing the song in a dark room filled with white mist while wearing a white dress -- this was the UK release. In Version 2 Kate dances in an outdoor environment while wearing a red dress -- this video was produced for the American release. The song appears on Kate's 1978 debut album, The Kick Inside, and was also re-recorded in 1986 for the greatest-hits album The Whole Story. "Wuthering Heights" came 32nd in Q magazine's Top 100 Singles of All Time, voted by readers.
- published: 30 Dec 2010
- views: 2977306
- author: KateBushMusic
Bush - The Afterlife
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:46
- Updated: 24 Dec 2012
BUSH performing "The Afterlife" from the album The Sea of Memories. ©2012 Zuma Rock Records.
http://wn.com/Bush_The_Afterlife
BUSH performing "The Afterlife" from the album The Sea of Memories. ©2012 Zuma Rock Records.
- published: 02 Oct 2012
- views: 265512
- author: BushVEVO
Bush - Glycerine - Woodstock 99
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:19
- Updated: 26 Dec 2012
Bush Glycerine Woodstock 99
http://wn.com/Bush_Glycerine_Woodstock_99
BUSH - Landslide (Rooftop Live)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:56
- Updated: 24 Dec 2012
Music video by BUSH performing Landslide (Rooftop Live). © 2011 Zuma Rock Records. "Landslide" available on The Sea of Memories (Deluxe Version) at iTunes www.itunes.com/bush Video directed by Todd Stefani
http://wn.com/BUSH_Landslide_Rooftop_Live
Music video by BUSH performing Landslide (Rooftop Live). © 2011 Zuma Rock Records. "Landslide" available on The Sea of Memories (Deluxe Version) at iTunes www.itunes.com/bush Video directed by Todd Stefani
- published: 14 Dec 2011
- views: 136975
- author: BushOfficial
Robin Williams! Destroys President Bush
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:21
- Updated: 25 Dec 2012
boredom-browsing.blogspot.com VERY Funny stand up by Robin Williams when he dishes on former President Bush -Luke Miconi
http://wn.com/Robin_Williams!_Destroys_President_Bush
boredom-browsing.blogspot.com VERY Funny stand up by Robin Williams when he dishes on former President Bush -Luke Miconi
- published: 20 Dec 2008
- views: 2045182
- author: exoticfruittrain
Kate Bush - Babooshka - Official Music Video
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:31
- Updated: 25 Dec 2012
Official music video for the single "Babooshka" by British singer Kate Bush, taken from her album Never for Ever. Released as a single in June 1980, it spent 10 weeks in the UK chart, peaking at number five. It was an even bigger hit in Australia, where it was the 20th best-selling single of the year. The track features John Giblin on bass. "Babooshka" became Bush's second top five hit in the UK and was certified silver for sales of over 250000 by the BPI.
http://wn.com/Kate_Bush_Babooshka_Official_Music_Video
Official music video for the single "Babooshka" by British singer Kate Bush, taken from her album Never for Ever. Released as a single in June 1980, it spent 10 weeks in the UK chart, peaking at number five. It was an even bigger hit in Australia, where it was the 20th best-selling single of the year. The track features John Giblin on bass. "Babooshka" became Bush's second top five hit in the UK and was certified silver for sales of over 250000 by the BPI.
- published: 23 Dec 2010
- views: 1940905
- author: KateBushMusic
Bush Doesn't Care About Black People
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:51
- Updated: 26 Dec 2012
Bush Doesn't Care About Black People HIPHOP IS FAR FROM DEAD BE SURE TO CHECK OUT ERA HARDAWAY - erayoucrazy.bandcamp.com
http://wn.com/Bush_Doesn't_Care_About_Black_People
Bush Doesn't Care About Black People HIPHOP IS FAR FROM DEAD BE SURE TO CHECK OUT ERA HARDAWAY - erayoucrazy.bandcamp.com
- published: 17 Apr 2006
- views: 5720581
- author: Shockroc1
When Will Ferrell Met George W. Bush - CONAN on TBS
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:15
- Updated: 26 Dec 2012
Will recalls back in 2000, when then-Governor Dubya visited SNL.
http://wn.com/When_Will_Ferrell_Met_George_W_Bush_CONAN_on_TBS
Will recalls back in 2000, when then-Governor Dubya visited SNL.
- published: 03 Aug 2012
- views: 456789
- author: teamcoco
Kate Bush - Running Up That Hill - Official Music Video
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:57
- Updated: 26 Dec 2012
Official music video for the single "Running Up That Hill" written and produced by British singer Kate Bush. The song was the first single from Kate's 1985 album Hounds of Love and released in the UK on 5 August 1985. "Running Up That Hill" entered the UK chart at number 9 and eventually peaked at number 3. The single also reached the top 30 in the United States. "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) 2012 REMIX" - is out now. Full story here: is.gd
http://wn.com/Kate_Bush_Running_Up_That_Hill_Official_Music_Video
Official music video for the single "Running Up That Hill" written and produced by British singer Kate Bush. The song was the first single from Kate's 1985 album Hounds of Love and released in the UK on 5 August 1985. "Running Up That Hill" entered the UK chart at number 9 and eventually peaked at number 3. The single also reached the top 30 in the United States. "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) 2012 REMIX" - is out now. Full story here: is.gd
- published: 15 Jan 2011
- views: 5244519
- author: KateBushMusic
Fox News Blasts Obama For Exclusion, Forgets Bush Did Same
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:12
- Updated: 25 Dec 2012
"A newsletter for conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham attacked President Obama for meeting with MSNBC pundits after the election, but left out the fact that George W. Bush met with conservative analysts — including Ingraham herself — in 2006. "If Fox News hosts and conservative personalities had stopped by the Bush White House to discuss policy" the media "would have been rightly outraged," Ingraham's Dec. 5 newsletter said. "Given MSNBC's history of blatantly promoting the DNC's talking points and spewing left-wing talking points, maybe it's time they just became Obama's official mouthpiece." As MediaMatters points out, in October 2006, the New York Times reported on a meeting between President Bush and several conservative radio hosts, including Sean Hannity, Mike Gallagher, Neal Boortz and Ingraham."* Whoops! When criticizing Obama for inviting "influential progressives" to a White House meeting and excluding Fox News anchors, she said they would have been outraged if President Bush had only invited Fox News to a policy meeting. Well...he did. And Ingraham was there. Cenk Uygur breaks it down. Support The Young Turks by Subscribing bit.ly Support The Young Turks by Shopping bit.ly Like Us on Facebook: www.fb.com Follow Us on Twitter: bit.ly Buy TYT Merch: theyoungturks.spreadshirt.com Find out how to watch The Young Turks on Current by clicking here: www.current.com
http://wn.com/Fox_News_Blasts_Obama_For_Exclusion,_Forgets_Bush_Did_Same
"A newsletter for conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham attacked President Obama for meeting with MSNBC pundits after the election, but left out the fact that George W. Bush met with conservative analysts — including Ingraham herself — in 2006. "If Fox News hosts and conservative personalities had stopped by the Bush White House to discuss policy" the media "would have been rightly outraged," Ingraham's Dec. 5 newsletter said. "Given MSNBC's history of blatantly promoting the DNC's talking points and spewing left-wing talking points, maybe it's time they just became Obama's official mouthpiece." As MediaMatters points out, in October 2006, the New York Times reported on a meeting between President Bush and several conservative radio hosts, including Sean Hannity, Mike Gallagher, Neal Boortz and Ingraham."* Whoops! When criticizing Obama for inviting "influential progressives" to a White House meeting and excluding Fox News anchors, she said they would have been outraged if President Bush had only invited Fox News to a policy meeting. Well...he did. And Ingraham was there. Cenk Uygur breaks it down. Support The Young Turks by Subscribing bit.ly Support The Young Turks by Shopping bit.ly Like Us on Facebook: www.fb.com Follow Us on Twitter: bit.ly Buy TYT Merch: theyoungturks.spreadshirt.com Find out how to watch The Young Turks on Current by clicking here: www.current.com
- published: 07 Dec 2012
- views: 40562
- author: TheYoungTurks
Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush -Don't Give Up
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:13
- Updated: 26 Dec 2012
Don't give up In this proud land we grew up strong We were wanted all along I was taught to fight, taught to win I never thought I could fail No fight left or so it seems I am a man whose dreams have all deserted Ive changed my face, Ive changed my name But no one wants you when you lose Dont give up cos you have friends Dont give up Youre not beaten yet Dont give up I know you can make it good Though I saw it all around Never thought I could be affected Thought that wed be the last to go It is so strange the way things turn Drove the night toward my home The place that I was born, on the lakeside As daylight broke, I saw the earth The trees had burned down to the ground Dont give up You still have us Dont give up We dont need much of anything Dont give up cause somewhere theres a place Where we belong Rest your head You worry too much Its going to be alright When times get rough You can fall back on us Dont give up Please dont give up got to walk out of here I cant take anymore Going to stand on that bridge Keep my eyes down below Whatever may come And whatever may go That rivers flowing That rivers flowing Moved on to another town Tried hard to settle down For every job, so many men So many men no-one needs Dont give up cause you have friends Dont give up Youre not the only one Dont give up No reason to be ashamed Dont give up You still have us Dont give up now Were proud of who you are Dont give up You know its never been easy Dont give up cause I believe theres the a ...
http://wn.com/Peter_Gabriel_Kate_Bush_-Don't_Give_Up
Don't give up In this proud land we grew up strong We were wanted all along I was taught to fight, taught to win I never thought I could fail No fight left or so it seems I am a man whose dreams have all deserted Ive changed my face, Ive changed my name But no one wants you when you lose Dont give up cos you have friends Dont give up Youre not beaten yet Dont give up I know you can make it good Though I saw it all around Never thought I could be affected Thought that wed be the last to go It is so strange the way things turn Drove the night toward my home The place that I was born, on the lakeside As daylight broke, I saw the earth The trees had burned down to the ground Dont give up You still have us Dont give up We dont need much of anything Dont give up cause somewhere theres a place Where we belong Rest your head You worry too much Its going to be alright When times get rough You can fall back on us Dont give up Please dont give up got to walk out of here I cant take anymore Going to stand on that bridge Keep my eyes down below Whatever may come And whatever may go That rivers flowing That rivers flowing Moved on to another town Tried hard to settle down For every job, so many men So many men no-one needs Dont give up cause you have friends Dont give up Youre not the only one Dont give up No reason to be ashamed Dont give up You still have us Dont give up now Were proud of who you are Dont give up You know its never been easy Dont give up cause I believe theres the a ...
- published: 12 Nov 2008
- views: 7379805
- author: ibs11
Bush - Glycerine (Official Music)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:12
- Updated: 25 Dec 2012
Must be you skin im sinking in must be for real because now i can feel i didn;t mind its not my kind its not my time to wonder why everything gone white everything grey now your here now your away dont let the days go by glycerine....... bad moon wine again.
http://wn.com/Bush_Glycerine_Official_Music
Must be you skin im sinking in must be for real because now i can feel i didn;t mind its not my kind its not my time to wonder why everything gone white everything grey now your here now your away dont let the days go by glycerine....... bad moon wine again.
- published: 28 Jun 2009
- views: 207127
- author: ArthurFabbro
Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Presidency
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:58
- Updated: 25 Dec 2012
President Bush will seek to comfort victims of his presidency as they try to make sense of the destruction he has caused.
http://wn.com/Bush_Tours_America_To_Survey_Damage_Caused_By_His_Presidency
President Bush will seek to comfort victims of his presidency as they try to make sense of the destruction he has caused.
- published: 03 Jul 2008
- views: 580699
- author: TheOnion
Halloween Scare Prank
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:15
- Updated: 26 Dec 2012
In spirit of Halloween I decided to go out dressed as a bush and try to scare people. This has been done a million times, but it's always a good time! I made the suit myself, here's how: Camo shirt from Dicks Sporting Goods...$15 Camo Pants from Wal Mart...$8 Leaf Vines from Michael's Arts & Crafts...Approx $40 Camo Head Veil from Wal Mart...$4 Vines were safety pinned to the camo.
http://wn.com/Halloween_Scare_Prank
In spirit of Halloween I decided to go out dressed as a bush and try to scare people. This has been done a million times, but it's always a good time! I made the suit myself, here's how: Camo shirt from Dicks Sporting Goods...$15 Camo Pants from Wal Mart...$8 Leaf Vines from Michael's Arts & Crafts...Approx $40 Camo Head Veil from Wal Mart...$4 Vines were safety pinned to the camo.
- published: 28 Oct 2011
- views: 2179078
- author: edbassmaster
Steve Bridges - As George W. Bush with George W. Bush!
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 11:06
- Updated: 19 Dec 2012
March 4, 2012: It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Steve Bridges. His passing comes as a shock to all of us. The cause of death is not known at this time. Steve brought joy and laughter to millions and was a great inspiration to all who knew him. He will be sadly missed. Our prayers go to his family at this time. K&M; Productions (Toronto) www.kmprod.com
http://wn.com/Steve_Bridges_As_George_W_Bush_with_George_W_Bush!
March 4, 2012: It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Steve Bridges. His passing comes as a shock to all of us. The cause of death is not known at this time. Steve brought joy and laughter to millions and was a great inspiration to all who knew him. He will be sadly missed. Our prayers go to his family at this time. K&M; Productions (Toronto) www.kmprod.com
- published: 21 Aug 2011
- views: 747281
- author: kmprod1
Bush - machinehead
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:17
- Updated: 26 Dec 2012
bush
http://wn.com/Bush_machinehead
photo: AP / Virginie Nguyen Huang
23 Dec 2012
Tweet. Moscow, Dec 23 (IANS/RIA Novosti) Chemical weapons in Syria are under the control of the government, which has consolidated them in one or two locations, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. "As of right now, the (Syrian) government is doing all it can to safeguard those weapons," he said. "We are following all leads concerning chemical weapons," Lavrov said ... "My answer is very simple. Why use us as a postman ... pm/ ... ) .. ). ... . ....(size: 3.2Kb)
photo: Creative Commons / Giorgione
24 Dec 2012
Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. A deadly silence immediately followed after a bullet penetrated the calf's skull. Against my wishes, Vic had decided against either amputating its leg or contacting a veterinarian-something he reasoned would have been too expensive. The unfortunate calf had slid down into a ravine where its hind leg, which was mangled and torn, became wrapped in barbed wire ... But it was more than a bellow ... 9....(size: 6.3Kb)
photo: AP / Altaf Qadri
23 Dec 2012
A commission will be set up to probe the gang-rape and torture of a 23-year-old woman in Delhi and measures to ensure such crimes do not recur while laws will be amended to enhance punishment for rape, Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde said . He also appealed the thousands of protesters on the capital’s streets, demanding justice for the victim, to withdraw ... “The government is serious on the issue. ... . . ....(size: 2.4Kb)
photo: Creative Commons / Axou
24 Dec 2012
Steve Jobs was controversial in life, and now his high-tech mega-yacht is associated with a controversy long after his death. The former Apple CEO's ship was impounded in Amsterdam in the middle of a financial battle over a disputed bill. Phillippe Starck, a French product designer and architect, has alleged that Jobs' heirs owe him 3 million euros for his work on Venus, the 256-foot yacht Jobs commissioned before his death ... ... ....(size: 2.6Kb)
photo: AP / Musadeq Sadeq
24 Dec 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — An Afghan policewoman shot and killed an American adviser outside the police headquarters in Kabul on Monday, the latest in a rising tide of insider attacks by Afghans against their foreign allies, senior Afghan officials said. The woman, identified as Afghan police Sgt ... The woman was taken into Afghan custody shortly after the attack ... As many Afghans, the policewoman uses only one name ... Air Force Lt. Col ... Gen ... ....(size: 4.6Kb)
The Inquisitr
26 Dec 2012
Bush spent a quiet Christmas with his wife and family, just like in other years ... A monthlong bout with a bronchitis-like cough kept ex-president Bush in the hospital through Christmas, The Associated Press reported ... Late last week, he had a few low-energy days followed by a low-grade fever,” Jim McGrath, Bush’s spokesman in Houston, told The Associated Press ... ex-president Bush, George Bush hospitalized, george h w bush, George H.W....(size: 7.0Kb)
Fox News
26 Dec 2012
Bush, and his wife, former first lady Barbara Bush, arrive for the premiere of HBO's documentary on his life in Kennebunkport, Maine ... Bush spent Christmas in a Houston hospital with his wife, Barbara, and other relatives who planned to treat him to a special holiday meal ... A hospital spokesman had said Bush was likely to be released to spend Christmas at home, but then McGrath said the former president developed a fever....(size: 2.5Kb)
Star Telegram
26 Dec 2012
Bush spent Christmas in a Houston hospital with his wife, Barbara, and other relatives who planned to treat him to a special holiday meal ... A hospital spokesman had said Bush was likely to be released to spend Christmas at home, but then McGrath said the former president developed a fever....(size: 1.5Kb)
Clarion Ledger
26 Dec 2012
Bush spent Christmas in a Houston hospital with his wife, Barbara, and other relatives who planned to treat him to a special holiday meal. Bush's son, Neil, and his wife also visited on Tuesday, and one of Bush's grandsons was planning to stop by as well, said Jim McGrath, Bush's spokesman in Houston....(size: 1.6Kb)
Clarion Ledger
26 Dec 2012
Bush spent Christmas in a Houston hospital with his wife, Barbara, and other relatives who planned to treat him to a special holiday meal. Bush's son, Neil, and his wife also visited on Tuesday, and one of Bush's grandsons was planning to stop by as well, said Jim McGrath, Bush's spokesman in Houston....(size: 1.6Kb)
New York Daily News
26 Dec 2012
Bush spent Christmas in a Houston hospital with his wife, Barbara, and other relatives who planned to treat him to a special holiday meal. Bush's son, Neil, and his wife also visited on Tuesday, and one of Bush's grandsons was planning to stop by as well, said Jim McGrath, Bush's spokesman in Houston ... On Christmas, the Bush ......(size: 1.7Kb)
Khaleej Times
26 Dec 2012
Bush spent Christmas in a Houston hospital with his wife, Barbara, and other relatives who planned to treat him to a special holiday meal. Bush’s son, Neil, and his wife also visited on Tuesday, and one of Bush’s grandsons was planning to stop by as well, said Jim McGrath, Bush’s spokesman in Houston....(size: 1.6Kb)
San Francisco Chronicle
26 Dec 2012
Bush will spend Christmas with his wife and other family members in a Houston hospital after developing a fever and weakness following a monthlong, bronchitis-like cough, his spokesman said Monday. A hospital spokesman had said the 88-year-old ex-president would be released in time to spend the holiday at home, but that changed after Bush developed a fever ... He said the cough that initially brought Bush to the hospital on Nov....(size: 2.3Kb)
Houston Chronicle
26 Dec 2012
Bush noshed on Chinese food with his wife and a few family members as he spent Christmas in a Houston hospital, where setbacks following a persistent cough have kept him from going home. Bush, 88, remains in stable condition at The Methodist Hospital in Houston, spokesman Jim McGrath said Tuesday, adding that it is unclear when the 41st president might be released. Doctors had expected Bush to be home in time for the holiday....(size: 13.8Kb)
Ohio
26 Dec 2012
Bush still in hospital ... Bush spent Christmas in a Houston hospital with his wife, Barbara, and other relatives who planned to treat him to a special holiday meal. Bush’s son, Neil, and his wife also visited on Tuesday, and one of Bush’s grandsons was planning to stop by as well, said Jim McGrath, Bush’s spokesman in Houston....(size: 2.2Kb)
The Washington Post
26 Dec 2012
Bush by permanently extending tax cuts enacted during his tenure ... The main dividing line between Republicans and Democrats now has come down to whether tax rates should increase for top earners at the end of the year, when the Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire ... Keeping the lower rates even for incomes under $250,000 “would enshrine the vast bulk of the Bush tax cuts,” he said....(size: 4.8Kb)
Times Union
26 Dec 2012
Full Moon Hike, Albany Pine Bush Discovery Center, 195 New Karner Road, Albany When ... Snowshoe Adventure, Albany Pine Bush Discovery Center, 195 New Karner Road, Albany When ... Cookie Burner Stroll, Albany Pine Bush Discovery Center, 195 New Karner Road, Albany When ... Snowshoe Adventure, Albany Pine Bush Discovery Center, 195 New Karner Road, Albany When ... Winter Wildlife, Albany Pine Bush Discovery Center, 195 New Karner Road, Albany When....(size: 6.2Kb)
Independent online (SA)
26 Dec 2012
Bush expire at the end of the year – should Democrats and Republicans fail to reach a deal to cut the deficit. The White House has offered a deal with $1.2 trillion in revenues – by fulfilling an Obama campaign promise to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for the wealthy – and nearly $1 trillion in spending cuts....(size: 2.9Kb)
For persons named Bush including the 41st and 43rd U.S. Presidents, see Bush (surname).
 |
Look up bush in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
Bush may refer to:
Contents |
Nouns[link]
- Shrub, a type of woody plant, smaller than normal trees. Usually grows in the soil. Most bushes are low to the ground and have branches which rise up from the bottom of the plant.
- The Bush, a term used in several countries for rural, undeveloped land or country areas
- Bushcraft, a popular term for wilderness survival skills
- Bush baby, or galago, a small nocturnal primate
- Slang for Pubic hair
- Bushing (disambiguation) (several meanings) is commonly called "bush"
Places[link]
- Canada
- New Zealand
- The easternmost part of the Manawatu-Wanganui Region, in the southern North Island
- United Kingdom
- Bush House, London, a building in London used by the BBC for its international broadcasting service, the World Service
- Shepherds Bush, a district of London
- Bush, Cornwall, a small town in North Cornwall, near Bude
- United States
- Bush, Illinois
- Bush, Louisiana
- Bush Tower, a building in Manhattan, New York
- Original name of the Ralph Waldo Emerson House in Concord, Massachusetts
Brand names and companies[link]
- Bush (brand), a British electronics manufacturer brand owned by Home Retail Group and sold exclusively at Argos
- Bush (1916 automobile), an early American car company
- Bush Brothers and Company, commonly known as Bush's
- Bush (Beer), a Belgian beer made by Dubuisson Brewery
Media and entertainment[link]
- Bush Mechanics, a 2001 television documentary featuring an Indigenous Australian take on motor mechanics
- Bush (band), a popular rock band, named after the Shepherd's Bush district in London
- Bush (Canadian band), a Canadian band active in the 1970s
Sport[link]
- Wairarapa Bush Rugby Football Union in New Zealand
- Bush Rugby Football Union, a former team which combined with Wairarapa to form the above side
Vessels[link]
- USS Bush, two destroyers in the United States Navy
See also[link]
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This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. |
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This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
| Kate Bush | |
|---|---|
 Kate Bush about to perform at Comic Relief 1986 |
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Catherine Bush |
| Born | (1958-07-30) 30 July 1958 (age 53) Bexleyheath, Southeast London, England |
| Genres | Art rock,[1] progressive rock,[2] alternative rock[1], baroque pop |
| Occupations | Musician, vocalist, songwriter, record producer |
| Instruments | Vocals, piano, keyboards, bass guitar, guitar, violin |
| Years active | 1975–present |
| Labels | EMI Records (1975–present) Columbia Records (U.S.) (1989–2009) Legacy Recordings (2010–present) Fish People (division of EMI) 2011– |
| Website | Official website |
| Notable instruments | |
| Fairlight CMI | |
Catherine "Kate" Bush (born 30 July 1958)[1] is an English singer-songwriter, musician and record producer. Her eclectic musical style and idiosyncratic vocal style have made her one of the United Kingdom's most successful solo female performers of the past 30 years.
In 1978, at the age of 19, Bush topped the UK Singles Chart for four weeks with her debut single "Wuthering Heights", becoming the first woman to have a UK number one with a self-written song.[3] She has since released ten albums, three of which topped the UK Albums Chart, and has had 25 UK Top 40 hit singles including the Top 10 hits "Wuthering Heights", "Running Up that Hill", "King of the Mountain", "Babooshka", "The Man with the Child in His Eyes", and "Don't Give Up".
In 1987, she won a Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist, and in 2002, her songwriting ability was recognised with an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. During the course of her career, she has also been nominated for three Grammy Awards. After her 1979 tour – the only concert tour of her career – Bush released the 1980 album Never for Ever, which made her the first British solo female artist to top the UK album charts and the first female artist ever to enter the album chart at Number 1.[4] She is also the first (and to date only) female artist to have Top 5 albums in the UK charts in 5 successive decades.
In May 2012, Bush's latest album, 50 Words for Snow, won the South Bank Arts Award [5]. The album was also nominated for an Ivor Novello Award and a Brit Award that same year.
Early life[link]
Bush was born in Bexleyheath, Southeast London, to English physician Robert Bush and his Irish wife, Hannah Daly.[6] She was raised in their farmhouse in East Wickham with her older brothers, John and Paddy.[7] Bush came from an artistic background: her mother was a former Irish folk dancer, her father was an accomplished pianist, Paddy worked as a musical instrument maker and John was a poet and photographer. Both brothers were involved in the local folk music scene.[8]
John was a karateka at Goldsmiths College karate club and Kate also trained there, becoming known as "Ee-ee" because of her squeaky kiai. One of the instructors, Dave Hazard, later noted in his autobiography that her dance moves seemed to owe something to karate.[9]
Her family's musical influence inspired the young Kate to teach herself to play the piano at the age of 11. She also played the organ in a barn behind her parents' house and studied the violin.[10] She soon began writing her own tunes and eventually added lyrics to them.[11]
Career[link]
Bush attended St Joseph's Convent Grammar School (later the St Joseph's campus of Bexley College) and a Catholic girls' school on Woolwich Road in Abbey Wood, London, in the mid-1970s. During this time her family produced a demo tape with over 50 of her compositions, which was turned down by record labels. David Gilmour of Pink Floyd received the demo from Ricky Hopper, a mutual friend of Gilmour and the Bush family. Impressed with what he heard, Gilmour helped the sixteen-year-old Bush get a more professional-sounding demo tape recorded that would be more saleable to the record companies.[12] Three tracks in total were recorded and paid for by Gilmour. [13]The tape was produced by Gilmour's friend Andrew Powell, who would go on to produce Bush's first two albums,[11] and sound engineer Geoff Emerick.[14] The tape was sent to EMI executive Terry Slater.[15] Slater was impressed by the tape and signed her.[16] The British record industry was reaching a point of stagnation.[15] Progressive rock was very popular and visually oriented rock performers were growing in popularity, thus record labels looking for the next big thing were considering experimental acts.[15]
Bush was put on retainer for two years by Bob Mercer, managing director of EMI group-repertoire division. According to Mercer he felt Bush's material was good enough to be released but felt that if the album failed it would be demoralising and if it was successful Bush was too young to handle it.[17] For the first two years of her contract, Bush spent more time on school work than making an album. She left school after doing her mock A-levels and having gained ten GCE O-Level qualifications.[18] In 2005, Bush stated in an interview with Mark Radcliffe on BBC Radio 2 that she believed EMI signed her before she was ready to make an album so that no other record company could offer her a contract. After the contract signing, EMI forwarded her a sizeable advance which she used to enrol in interpretive dance classes taught by Lindsay Kemp, a former teacher of David Bowie,[19] and mime training with Adam Darius.[20]
Bush also wrote and made demos of close to 200 songs, a few of which today can be found on bootleg recordings and are known as the Phoenix Recordings.[21] From March to August 1977, she fronted the KT Bush Band at public houses around London – specifically at the Rose of Lee public house (now Dirty South) in Lewisham. The other three band members were Del Palmer (bass), Brian Bath (guitar), and Vic King (drums). She began recording her first album in August 1977,[11] although two tracks had been recorded during the summer of 1975.
[edit] The Kick Inside and Lionheart
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As part of her preparation for entering the studio, Bush toured pubs with the KT Bush Band. However, for her debut album The Kick Inside (1978) she was persuaded to use established session musicians, some of whom she would retain even after she had brought her bandmates back on board.[22] Her brother Paddy played the harmonica and mandolin, unlike on later albums where he would play more exotic instruments such as the balalaika and didgeridoo. Stuart Elliott played some of the drums and would become her main percussionist on subsequent albums.[23]
Bush released The Kick Inside when she was 19 years old, but some of the songs had been written when she was as young as 13. EMI originally wanted the more rock-oriented track "James and the Cold Gun" to be her debut single, but Bush insisted that it should be "Wuthering Heights". Even at this early stage of her career, she had gained a reputation for her determination to have a say in decisions affecting her work.[11] "Wuthering Heights" topped the UK and Australian charts and became an international hit.[24] Bush became the first woman to reach number one in the UK charts with a self-penned song.[25] A second single, "The Man with the Child in His Eyes", reached number six in the UK charts.[26] It also made it onto the American Billboard Hot 100 where it reached number 85 in early 1979. Bob Mercer felt that Bush's relative lack of success in the United States compared to the rest of the world was due to her music being a poor fit for American radio formats and that there were no outlets for the visual presentation central to Bush's appeal.[17] "The Man with the Child in His Eyes" went on to win her an Ivor Novello Award in 1979 for Outstanding British Lyric.[27]
EMI capitalised on Bush's appearance by promoting the album with a poster of her in a tight pink top that emphasised her breasts. In an interview with NME magazine in 1982, Bush criticised the marketing technique, stating: "People weren't even generally aware that I wrote my own songs or played the piano. The media just promoted me as a female body. It's like I've had to prove that I'm an artist in a female body."[11] In late 1978, EMI persuaded Bush to quickly record a follow-up album, Lionheart, to take advantage of the success of The Kick Inside. Bush has often expressed dissatisfaction with Lionheart, feeling that she had needed more time to get it right. The album was produced by Andrew Powell, assisted by Bush. While it had spawned several hit singles, most notably "Wow", it did not garner the same reception as her first album, reaching number six in the UK album charts.[28]
Bush was displeased with being rushed into making the second album. She set up her own publishing company, Kate Bush Music, and her own management company, Novercia, to maintain complete control over her work. Bush herself, along with members of her family, comprised the company's board of directors.[11] Following the album's release, she was required by EMI to undertake heavy promotional work and an exhausting tour, the only one of her career.[29] The tour, named The Tour of Life, began in April 1979 and lasted six weeks. This live show was co-devised and performed on stage with magician Simon Drake.[30] Typical of her determination to have control, she was involved in every aspect of the show's production, choreography, set design, and staff recruitment.[11] The shows were noted for her dancing, complex lighting and her 17 costume changes per show. Because of her intention to dance as she sang, her sound engineers used a wire coat hanger and a radio microphone to fashion the first headset mic to be used by a rock performer since the Swedish group Spotnicks used a very primitive version in the early 1960s.[1][31]
[edit] Never for Ever and The Dreaming
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Released in September 1980, Never for Ever saw Bush's second foray into production, co-producing with Jon Kelly. Her first time as a producer was on her Live On Stage EP, released after her tour the previous year. The first two albums had resulted in a definitive sound evident in every track, with orchestral arrangements supporting the live band sound. The range of styles on Never for Ever is much more diverse, veering from the straightforward rocker "Violin" to the wistful waltz of hit single "Army Dreamers". Never for Ever was the first Kate Bush album to feature synthesisers and drum machines, in particular the Fairlight CMI, to which she was introduced when providing backing vocals on Peter Gabriel's eponymous third album in early 1980.[11] It was her first record to reach the top position in the UK album charts, also making her the first female British artist to achieve that status,[18] and the first female artist ever to enter the album chart at the top.[4] The top-selling single from the album was "Babooshka", which reached number five in the UK singles chart.[32] In November 1980, she released the Christmas single "December Will Be Magic Again", which reached number 29 in the UK charts.
September 1982 saw the release of The Dreaming, the first album Bush produced by herself.[33] It was also a major departure for Bush, being initially composed on the Fairlight CMI rather than piano, with songs extensively revised and rebuilt in the studio, rather than merely arranged there.[citation needed] With her new-found freedom, she experimented with production techniques, creating an album that features a diverse blend of musical styles and is known for its near-exhaustive use of the Fairlight CMI. The Dreaming received a mixed critical reception in the UK at first. Many were baffled by the dense soundscapes Bush had created, and some critics accused the album of being over-produced.[citation needed] In a 1993 interview with Q, Bush stated: "That was my 'She's gone mad' album."[11] However, the album was hailed as a "masterpiece" and a "musical tour-de-force" by critics in America, and the album became her first to enter the US charts, albeit only reaching number 157.[11] The album entered the UK album chart at number three, but is to date her lowest-selling album, garnering only a gold disc.
"Sat in Your Lap" was the first single from the album to be released. It pre-dated the album by over a year and peaked at number 11 in the UK.[34] The album's title track, featuring the talents of Rolf Harris and Percy Edwards, stalled at number 48, while the third single, "There Goes a Tenner", failed to chart, despite promotion from EMI and Bush. The track "Suspended in Gaffa" was released as a single in Europe, but not in the UK.
Continuing in her storytelling tradition, Bush looked far outside her own personal experience for sources of inspiration. She drew on old crime films for "There Goes a Tenner", a documentary about the war in Vietnam for "Pull Out the Pin", and the plight of Indigenous Australians for "The Dreaming". "Houdini" is about the magician's death, and "Get Out Of My House" was inspired by Stephen King's novel The Shining.[35]
[edit] Hounds of Love and The Whole Story
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Hounds of Love was released in 1985. Because of the high cost of hiring studio space for her previous album, she built a private studio near her home, where she could work at her own pace.[36] Hounds of Love ultimately topped the charts in the UK, knocking Madonna's Like a Virgin from the number one position.[37]
The album takes advantage of the vinyl format with two very different sides. The first side, Hounds of Love, contains five "accessible" pop songs, including the four singles "Running Up that Hill", "Cloudbusting", "Hounds of Love", and "The Big Sky". In August 1985, NME featured Bush in a "Where Are They Now" article. "Running Up that Hill" reached number 3 in the UK charts and also re-introduced Bush to American listeners, climbing to number 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1985. The second side of the album, The Ninth Wave, takes its name from Tennyson's poem, "Idylls of the King", about the legendary King Arthur's reign, and is one continuous piece of music.[38] The album earned Bush nominations for Best Female Solo Artist, Best Album, Best Single, and Best Producer at the 1986 BRIT Awards. In the same year, Bush and Peter Gabriel had a UK top ten hit with "Don't Give Up" (Dolly Parton, Gabriel's original choice, turned his offer down),[39] and EMI released her "greatest hits" album, The Whole Story. Bush provided a new lead vocal and refreshed backing track on "Wuthering Heights," and recorded a new single, "Experiment IV," for inclusion on the compilation. At the 1987 BRIT Awards, Bush won the award for Best Female Solo Artist.
[edit] The Sensual World and The Red Shoes
The increasingly personal tone of her writing continued on 1989's The Sensual World, with songs about unexpressed and unrequited love ("Love and Anger" and "Never Be Mine", respectively), and the pressures on modern relationships ("Between a Man and a Woman").[citation needed] One of the quirkiest tracks on the album, touched by Bush's black humour, is "Heads We're Dancing", about a woman who dances all night with a charming stranger only to discover in the morning that he is Adolf Hitler.[40] The title track drew its inspiration from James Joyce's novel Ulysses.[40]
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The Sensual World went on to become her biggest-selling album in the US, receiving an RIAA Gold certification four years after its release for 500,000 copies sold. In the United Kingdom album charts, it reached the number two position.[41]
In 1990, the boxed-set This Woman's Work was released and included all of her albums with their original cover art, as well as two discs of all single B sides recorded from 1978–1990. In 1991, Bush released a cover of Elton John's "Rocket Man", which reached number 12 in the UK singles chart[42], and went as high as number two in Australia, and in 2007, was voted the greatest cover ever by readers of The Observer newspaper.[43] She recorded "Candle in the Wind", as the single's b-side.[44]
The Red Shoes was released in November 1993. The Red Shoes features more high-profile cameo appearances than Bush's previous efforts, including contributions from composer and conductor Michael Kamen. Comedian Lenny Henry, Prince, Eric Clapton, Gary Brooker of Procol Harum, Trevor Whittaker, and Jeff Beck also contributed to the album. Both "The Sensual World" and "The Red Shoes" featured contributions from Trio Bulgarka, a trio of women who sang on several tracks, including "You're The One" and "Rocket's Tail." The album gave Bush her highest chart position in the US, reaching number 28, although the only song from the album to make the US singles chart was "Rubberband Girl", which peaked at number 88 in January 1994. In the UK, the album reached number two, and the singles "Rubberband Girl", "The Red Shoes", "Moments of Pleasure", and "And So Is Love" all reached the top 30.[34][45] That same year, the short film The Line, the Cross & the Curve, written and directed by Bush, and starring Bush and English actress Miranda Richardson,[46] used six of the songs on the album.
The initial plan had been to take the songs out on the road (though a new tour did not transpire), so Bush deliberately aimed for a live-band feel, with less of the studio trickery that had typified her last three albums and that would be difficult to recreate on stage.[47] The result alienated some of her fan base, who enjoyed the intricacy of her earlier compositions,[48] but others found a new complexity in the lyrics and the emotions they expressed.[49]
This was a troubled time for Bush. She had suffered a series of bereavements, including the loss of guitarist Alan Murphy, who had started working with her on The Tour Of Life in 1979, and her mother Hannah, to whom she was exceptionally close.[18] Many of the people she lost are honoured in the ballad "Moments of Pleasure". However, Bush's mother was still alive when "Moments of Pleasure" was written and recorded. Bush describes playing the song to her mother, who thought the line where she is quoted by Bush as saying "Every old sock meets an old shoe", was hilarious and "couldn't stop laughing".[50]
[edit] Aerial
After the release of The Red Shoes, Bush dropped out of the public eye for many years, although her name occasionally cropped up in the media with rumours of a new album release. Bush had originally intended to take one year off but despite working on material 12 years would pass before her next album release.[51] The press often viewed her as an eccentric recluse, sometimes drawing a comparison with Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.[52] In reality, she was trying to give her young son a normal childhood, and needed a quiet place for her creative process to function.[51] In 1998, Bush had given birth to Albert, known as "Bertie", fathered by her guitarist and now-husband Danny McIntosh.[18][53] After living for many years on Court Road, Eltham, southeast London, the couple and their son moved away from the city and currently have two homes: a £2.5 million house in East Portlemouth on the Devon coast[53] and a mansion on an islet on the Kennet and Avon canal at Sulhamstead in West Berkshire.[54]
Bush's eighth studio album, Aerial, was released on double CD and vinyl in November 2005.[18] The first single from the album was "King of the Mountain", which was played for the first time on BBC Radio 2 on 21 September 2005.[55]
As on Hounds of Love (1985), the album is divided into two sections, each with its own theme and mood.[56] The first disc, subtitled A Sea of Honey, features a set of unrelated themed songs, including "King of the Mountain"; "Bertie", a Renaissance-style ode to her son; and "Joanni", based on the story of Joan of Arc. In the song "π", Bush sings the number Pi to 115 decimal places.[56][57] The second disc, subtitled A Sky of Honey, features one continuous piece of music describing the experience of being outdoors after waking at dawn, moving through afternoon, dusk, to night, then back to the following dawn of single summer's day. All the pieces in this suite refer or allude to sky and sea in their lyrical content. Bush mixed her voice with cooing wood pigeons to repeat the phrases "A sea of honey, a sky of honey," and "You're full of beauty" throughout the piece, and uses recordings of actual birdsong throughout. A Sky of Honey features Rolf Harris playing the didgeridoo on one track, and providing vocals on "The Painter's Link".[56] Other artists making guest appearances on the album include Peter Erskine, Eberhard Weber, Lol Creme, and Gary Brooker. Two tracks feature string arrangements by Michael Kamen, performed by the London Metropolitan Orchestra. A CD release of the single "King of the Mountain" included a cover of "Sexual Healing" by Marvin Gaye.[58]
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"King of the Mountain" entered the UK Downloads Chart at number six on 17 October 2005,[59] and by 30 October it had become Bush's third-highest-charting single ever in the UK, peaking at number four on the full chart. Aerial entered the UK albums chart at number 3,[60] and the US chart at number 48.[61] Bush herself carried out relatively little publicity for the album, only conducting a handful of magazine and radio interviews. Aerial earned Bush two nominations at the 2006 BRIT Awards, for Best British Female Solo Artist and Best British Album.[62]
In late 2007, Bush composed and recorded a new song, "Lyra", for the soundtrack to the fantasy film The Golden Compass.[63]
[edit] Director's Cut and 50 Words for Snow
On 16 May 2011, Bush released the album Director's Cut. The album, which Bush has described as an entirely new project rather than a collection of mere remixes, contains 11 tracks of substantially reworked material from her earlier albums The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, all of which have been recorded using analogue, rather than digital, equipment to create "a warmer sound". All the tracks have new lead vocals, new drums, and radically reworked instrumentation. Some of them have been transposed to a lower key to accommodate her lowering voice. Three of the songs, including "This Woman's Work", have been completely re-recorded, with lyrics often changed in places.[64] The album has been met with a wide range of reviews with most reviewers a bit confused about the concept of the album itself, while responding with varying degrees of enthusiasm about its revamped tracks. Of particular note is the warmer, more intimate tone of the songs and the richer, more mature sound of her voice.[65][66] This is the first album on her new label, Fish People, a division of EMI Records, with whom she's had a relationship since she started recording. In addition to the album Director's Cut in both its single CD form and in a box-set with The Sensual World and the analogue re-mastered The Red Shoes, Fish People will be releasing re-mastered editions of The Hounds of Love and The Dreaming.[67] The album debuted at number 2 on the United Kingdom chart.[68]
The song "The Sensual World" has been renamed "Flower of the Mountain" and contains a passage of Molly Bloom's famous soliloquy from James Joyce's novel Ulysses. Bush said, "Originally when I wrote the song "The Sensual World", I had used text from the end of Ulysses. When I asked for permission to use the text I was refused, which was disappointing. I then wrote my own lyrics for the song, although I felt that the original idea had been more interesting. Well, I'm not James Joyce am I? When I came to work on this project I thought I would ask for permission again and this time they said yes."[69]
The first single released from the album was "Deeper Understanding" and contains a new chorus featuring computerised vocals from Bush's son, Albert. A video for the song, directed by Bush, has been released through her channel on YouTube. It features Robbie Coltrane as a man consumed by his relationship with his computer (voiced by Bush's son). Frances Barber plays the man's wife, and Noel Fielding also appears.
Bush's next studio album, 50 Words for Snow, was released on 21 November 2011. The album contains seven new songs "set against a backdrop of falling snow," with a total running time of 65 minutes.[70][71] A radio edit of the first single, "Wild Man," was played on BBC Radio 2's 'Ken Bruce' show on 10 October.[72] and was released as a digital download on 11 October.[73] The album will be distributed in the United States by Anti-Records.
On 14 November 2011, NPR played 50 Words for Snow in its entirety for the first time.[74] Australia's ABC Radio National declared 50 Words for Snow album of the week of 12 November 2011.[75]
The album's songs are built around Bush's quietly jazzy piano and Steve Gadd's drums, and utilise both sung and spoken word vocals in what Classic Rock's Stephen Dalton calls "a...supple and experimental affair, with a comtemporary chamber pop sound grounded in crisp piano, minimal percussion and light-touch electronics...billowing jazz-rock soundscapes, interwoven with fragmentary narratives delivered in a range of voices from shrill to Laurie Anderson-style cooing."[76] Bassist Danny Thompson appears on the album, which also features performances by Elton John and actor Stephen Fry.
On the first track, "Snowflake," in a song written specifically to use his still high choir-boy voice,[77] Bush's son Albert (Bertie) sings the role of a falling snowflake in a song expressing the hope of a noisy world soon being hushed by snowfall. "Snowflake" drifts into "Lake Tahoe", where choral singer Stefan Roberts and Bush sing about a rarely seen ghost: a woman who appears in a Victorian gown to call to her dog, Snowflake. Bush explained to fellow musician Jamie Cullum in an interview on Dutch Radio[78] that she wished to explore using high male voices in contrast to her own, deeper, voice. "Misty" is about a snowman lover who melts away after a night of passion, while "Wild Man" tells the story of a group of climbers in the Himalayas who, upon finding evidence of a nearby Yeti, erase all traces of it to protect it from discovery. Elton John and Bush as eternally divided lovers trade vocals on "Snowed In at Wheeler Street", while Stephen Fry recites the "50 Words for Snow". The quiet "Among Angels" finishes the album.[79]
50 Words For Snow received general acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 88, based on 26 reviews, which indicates "universal acclaim".[80] She was nominated for a Brit Award in the "Best Female Artist" category[81], and the album was nominated in 2012 in the Best Album category of both the South Bank Arts and Ivor Novello Awards.[82]
On 1 May 2012, Bush won the South Bank Arts Award.[5]
Musical style[link]
Bush's music is eclectic, using various styles of music even within the same album. Her songs have spanned genres as diverse as rock, pop, alternative and art rock.[1] Even in her earliest works where the piano was a primary instrument, she wove together many diverse influences, melding classical music, rock, and a wide range of ethnic and folk sources, and this has continued throughout her career.
In an interview with Melody Maker magazine in 1977, she revealed that male artists had more influence on her work than females, stating: "Every female you see at a piano is either Lynsey De Paul, or Carole King. And most male music—not all of it but the good stuff—really lays it on you. It really puts you against the wall and that's what I like to do. I'd like my music to intrude. Not many females succeed with that."[11]
The experimental nature of her music has led it to be described as a later, more technological, and more accessible manifestation of the British progressive rock movement.[2][15] Southern England was the home to the most influential and successful acts of the progressive rock movement and,[2] like other artists in this genre, Bush rejects the classic American style of making pop music, which was adopted by most UK pop artists. Bush's vocals contain elements of British, Anglo-Irish and most prominently (southern) English accents and, in its utilisation of musical instruments from many periods and cultures, her music has differed from American pop norms.[2] Elements of Bush's lyrics tend to be more unusual and less clichéd than American-style pop lyrics, often employing historical or literary references and avoiding autobiographical lyrics. She considers herself a storyteller who embodies the character singing the song and strenuously rejects efforts by others to insist that her songs are autobiographical.[2][83][84]
Reviewers have used the term "surreal" to describe her music.[85] Many of her songs have a melodramatic emotional and musical surrealism that defies easy categorisation.[86] It has been observed that even the more joyous pieces are often tinged with traces of melancholy, and even the most sorrowful pieces have elements of vitality struggling against all that would oppress them.[87]
Bush is not afraid to tackle sensitive and taboo subjects.[88] "The Kick Inside" is based on a traditional English folk song (The Ballad of Lucy Wan) about an incestuous pregnancy and a resulting suicide.[89] "Kashka from Baghdad" is a song about a homosexual male couple;[90] Out magazine listed two of her albums in their Top 100 Greatest Gayest albums list.[91][92] "The Infant Kiss" is a song about a haunted, unstable woman's almost paedophile infatuation with a young boy in her care (inspired by Jack Clayton's film The Innocents (1961), which had been based on Henry James's famous novella The Turn of the Screw);[93] and "Breathing" explores the results of nuclear fallout from the perspective of an unborn child in the womb.[94] Her lyrics have referenced a wide array of subject matter, often relatively obscure, as in "Cloudbusting", which was inspired by Peter Reich's autobiography, "Book of Dreams", about his relationship with his father, Wilhelm Reich, and G. I. Gurdjieff in "Them Heavy People", while "Deeper Understanding", from The Sensual World, portrays a person who stays indoors, obsessively talking to a computer and shunning human contact.
Comedy is also a big influence on her and is a significant component of her work. She has cited Woody Allen,[95] Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and The Young Ones[96] as particular favourites. Horror movies are another interest of Bush's and have influenced the gothic nature of several of her songs, such as "Hounds of Love", inspired by the 1957 horror movie Night of the Demon.[97] Her songs have occasionally combined comedy and horror to form dark humour, such as murder by poisoning in "Coffee Homeground", an alcoholic mother in "Ran Tan Waltz" and the upbeat "The Wedding List", a song inspired by François Truffaut's 1967 film of Cornell Woolrich's The Bride Wore Black about the death of a groom and the bride's subsequent revenge against the killer.[98]
Length of time between albums and perception of perfectionism[link]
The length of time in between album releases has led to rumours in the media concerning her health or appearance.[96] In the past, stories of weight gain or mental instability have been disproved by Bush's periodic reappearance.[99] In 2011 Bush told BBC Radio 4 that the amount of time between album releases is extremely stressful noting: "It's very frustrating the albums take as long as they do...I wish there weren't such big gaps between them." In the same interview Bush denied she was a perfectionist in the studio, saying: "I think it's important that things are flawed...That's what makes a piece of art interesting sometimes – the bit that's wrong or the mistake you've made that's led onto an idea you wouldn't have had otherwise," and reiterated her prioritisation of her family life.[83]
Live performances[link]
Further information: The Tour of Life
Bush's only tour took place 2 April – 13 May 1979, after which she gave only the occasional live performance. Several reasons have been suggested as to why she abandoned touring, among them her reputed need to be in total control of the final product, which is incompatible with live stage performance, a rumour of a crippling fear of flying,[100] and the suggestion that the death of 21-year-old Bill Duffield severely affected her. Duffield, her lighting director, was killed in an accident during her 2 April 1979 concert at Poole Arts Centre. Bush held a benefit concert on 12 May 1979, with Peter Gabriel and Steve Harley at London's Hammersmith Odeon for his family. Duffield would be honoured in two later songs: "Blow Away" on Never for Ever and "Moments of Pleasure" on The Red Shoes. Bush explained in a BBC Radio 2 interview with Mark Radcliffe that she actually enjoyed the tour but was consumed with producing her subsequent records. A BBC film crew followed the preparation for the tour which was shown on the BBC Nationwide program as a 30 minute special.
During the same period as her tour, she made numerous television appearances around the world, including Top of the Pops in the United Kingdom, Bios Bahnhof in Germany, and Saturday Night Live in the United States (with Paul Shaffer on piano).[101] On 28 December 1979, BBC TV aired the Kate Bush Christmas Special. It was recorded in October 1979 at the BBC Studios in Birmingham, England; choreography by Anthony Van Laast.[102] As well as playing songs from her first two albums, she played "December Will Be Magic Again", and "Violin" from her forthcoming album, Never for Ever. Peter Gabriel made a guest appearance to play "Here Comes the Flood", and a duet of Roy Harper's "Another Day" with Bush.[103]
After the Tour of Life Bush desired to make two more albums before touring again. At that point she got involved with production techniques and sound experimentation that took up a lot of time and prevented her from touring. Later on there were a couple of instances where she came close to touring again.[104]
In 1982, Bush participated in the first benefit concert in aid of The Prince's Trust alongside artists such as Madness, Midge Ure, Phil Collins, Mick Karn and Pete Townshend. On 25 April 1986 Bush performed live for British charity event Comic Relief, singing "Do Bears... ?", a humorous duet with Rowan Atkinson, and a rendition of "Breathing". Later in the year on 28 June 1986, she made a guest appearance to duet with Peter Gabriel on "Don't Give Up" at Earl's Court, London as part of his "So" tour. In March 1987, Bush sang "Running Up that Hill" at The Secret Policeman's Third Ball.
On 17 January 2002, Bush appeared with her long-time champion, David Gilmour, singing the part of the doctor in "Comfortably Numb" at the Royal Festival Hall in London.
In 2011 Bush told Classic Rock Magazine "I do hope that some time I get a chance to do some shows. Maybe not a tour, but something"[104]
Video projects[link]
In 1979 Bush's one live show, The Tour of Life, was recorded for the BBC and for release on VHS as Kate Bush Live at Hammersmith Odeon.[105]
Bush has appeared in innovative music videos designed to accompany her singles releases. Among the best known are those for "Running Up that Hill", "Babooshka", "Breathing", "Wuthering Heights", and "The Man with the Child in His Eyes", and "Cloudbusting", featuring actor Donald Sutherland, who made time during the filming of another project to take part in the video.[106] EMI has released collections of her videos, including The Single File, Hair of the Hound, The Whole Story, a career video overview released in conjunction with the 1986 compilation album of the same title,[105] and The Sensual World.
In 1993, she directed and starred in the short film, The Line, the Cross & the Curve, a musical co-starring Miranda Richardson, featuring music from Bush's album The Red Shoes, which was inspired by the classic movie of the same name. It was released on VHS in the UK in 1994 and also received a small number of cinema screenings around the world. In recent interviews, Bush has said that she considers it a failure, and stated in 2001: "I'm very pleased with four minutes of it, but I'm very disappointed with the rest."[107] In a 2005 interview, she described the film as "A load of bollocks."[108]
In 1994, Bush provided the music used in a series of psychedelic-themed television commercials for the soft drink Fruitopia that appeared in the United States. The same company aired the ads in the United Kingdom, but the British version featured Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins instead of Bush.[109]
In late 2006, a DVD documentary titled Kate Bush Under Review was released by Sexy Intellectual, which included archival interviews with Bush, along with interviews with a selection of music historians and journalists (including Phil Sutcliffe, Nigel Williamson, and Morris Pert). The DVD also includes clips from several of Bush's music videos.[110]
On 2 December 2008, the DVD collection of the fourth season of Saturday Night Live, including her performances, was released.[111] A three DVD set of The Secret Policeman's Balls benefit concerts that includes Bush's performance was released on 27 January 2009.[112].
Bush has released four short videos for the album 50 Words for Snow. One is an advertisement for the album. Two stop-motion "Animation Segments" were posted on the Kate Bush Official website and YouTube, one to accompany a 2 minute 25 second section of "Misty", called "Mistraldespair", the other to accompany a 2 minute 33 second section of "Wild Man". "Mistraldespair" was directed by Bush and animated by Gary Pureton,[113] while the "Wild Man" segment was created by Finn and Patrick at Brandt Animation.[114] On 24 January 2012, a third piece called "Eider Falls at Lake Tahoe", was premiered on her website and on YouTube. Running at 5:01, the piece is a sepia tone shadow puppet animation. Directed by Bush and photographed by award-winning British cinematographer Roger Pratt, the shadow puppets were designed by Robert Allsopp.[115] Bush stated that "Eider Falls at Lake Tahoe" is intended to be a "self contained piece" separate from the song "Lake Tahoe".[116]
Movie projects[link]
In 1990, Bush starred in the black comedy film Les Dogs, produced by The Comic Strip for BBC television. Aired on 8 March 1990, Bush plays the bride Angela at a wedding set in a post-apocalyptic version of Britain. While Bush's is a silent presence in a wedding dress throughout most of the film, she does have several lines of dialogue with Peter Richardson in two dream sequences. In another Comic Strip Presents film, GLC, she produced the theme song "Ken", which includes a vocal performance by Bush. The song was written about Ken Livingstone, the leader of the Greater London Council, who would later be elected as mayor of London and at the time was working with musicians to help the Labour Party garner the youth vote.[117]
She also produced all the incidental music, which is synthesiser based. Bush wrote and performed the song "The Magician", in a fairground-like arrangement, for Menahem Golan's 1979 film The Magician of Lublin.[118] In 1985, Bush contributed a darkly melancholic version of the Ary Barroso song "Brazil" to the soundtrack of the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. The track was scored and arranged by Michael Kamen. In 1986, she wrote and recorded "Be Kind To My Mistakes" for the Nicolas Roeg film Castaway. An edited version of this track was used as the B side to her 1989 single "This Woman's Work". In 1988, the song "This Woman's Work" was featured in the John Hughes film She's Having a Baby, and a slightly remixed version appeared on Bush's album The Sensual World.[119] The song has since appeared on numerous television shows, and in 2005 reached number eight on the UK download chart after featuring in a British television advertisement for the charity NSPCC.[120]
In 1999, Bush wrote and recorded a song for the Disney film Dinosaur, but the track was ultimately not included on the soundtrack. According to the winter 1999 issue of HomeGround, a Bush fanzine, it was scrapped when Disney asked her to rewrite the song and she refused. Also in 1999, Bush's song "The Sensual World" was featured prominently in Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan's film "Felicia's Journey".[121] "The Man with the Child in His Eyes" is on the soundtrack for the 2007 British romantic comedy film Starter for 10.[122]
In 2007, Bush was asked to write a song for The Golden Compass soundtrack which made reference to the lead character, Lyra Belacqua. The song, "Lyra", was used in the closing credits of the film, reached number 187 in the UK Singles Chart[123] and was nominated for the International Press Academy's Satellite Award for original song in a motion picture.[124][125]
According to Del Palmer, Bush was asked to compose the song on very short notice and the whole project was completed in 10 days.[126] The song was produced and recorded by Bush in her own studio, and features the Magdalen College, Oxford choir.
Collaborations[link]
Bush provided vocals on two of Peter Gabriel's albums, including the hits "Games Without Frontiers" and "Don't Give Up", as well as "No Self-Control". Gabriel appeared on Bush's 1979 television special, where they sang a duet of Roy Harper's "Another Day". She has sung on two Roy Harper tracks, "You", on his 1979 album, "The Unknown Soldier", and "Once", the title track of his 1990 album. She has also sung on the title song of the 1986 Big Country album The Seer, the Midge Ure song "Sister and Brother" from his 1988 album Answers to Nothing, Go West's 1987 single "The King Is Dead" and two songs with Prince – "Why Should I Love You?", from her 1993 album The Red Shoes, and in 1996, the song "My Computer" from Prince's album Emancipation. In 1987, she sang a verse on the charity single "Let It Be" by Ferry Aid. She sang a line on the charity single "Spirit of the Forest" by Spirit of the Forest in 1989. 1990 saw Kate producing, for the only time in her career, one song for another artist, Alan Stivell's "Kimiad", on his album Again. Stivell had appeared on The Sensual World. In 1995, Bush covered George Gershwin's "The Man I Love" for the tribute album The Glory of Gershwin. In 1996, Bush contributed a version of "Mná na hÉireann" (Irish for Women of Ireland) for the Anglo-Irish folk-rock compilation project Common Ground: The Voices of Modern Irish Music. Bush had to sing the song in Irish, which she learned to do phonetically.[127] Artists who have contributed to Bush's own albums include Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, David Gilmour, Nigel Kennedy, Gary Brooker, and Prince. Bush provided backing vocals for a song that was recorded during the 1990s titled Wouldn't Change a Thing by Lionel Azulay, the drummer with the original band that was later to become the KT Bush Band. The song, which was engineered and produced by Del Palmer, is available for download and will be on Azulay’s upcoming CD.[128][129]
Bush declined a request by Erasure to produce one of their albums because "she didn’t feel that that was her area".[130]
In 2010, Bush provided vocals for Rolf Harris's cover of the traditional Irish song "She Moves Through the Fair". Harris, who described the collaboration the "best thing I’ve done," is unsure of how to release the track.[131]
Bush's most recent collaborations, including duets with Elton John and Stephen Fry, took place on her 2012 album, 50 Words for Snow.
Reluctance to tour[link]
Kate has always been reluctant to tour and has always cited the reason is she finds it exhausting. She has said by the time she's completed the album, videos and promotional work "there's nothing left of me". [13] She said it would be impossible for her to tour the way she works.
She did do some shows in 1979 and the one at the Hammersmith Odeon was released on video. She said she "really enjoyed it" and that it was a "tremendous, fabulous experience". However, she also found it "incredibly exhausting and a total commitment. I don't think people understand the level of involvement I get into when I do a project."[13]
The Hammersmith video shows an elaborate set complete with mime, magicians and theatrics.
Upon the release of The Director's Cut, she said she wouldn't rule out the possibility of shows in the future: "Maybe I will do some shows some day. I'd like to think so, before I get too ancient - turn up with my Zimmer frame."[132]
Influence[link]
From the 1980s onward, it has become almost standard for individualistic female singer-songwriters to be compared to Bush by the media. She has been noted as an influence on female artists such as Tori Amos, Björk,[133] Alison Goldfrapp,[134][135] Nerina Pallot,[136] KT Tunstall,[137] Happy Rhodes,[138] Lily Allen,[139] PJ Harvey,[36][140] Little Boots,[141][142][143] and Florence Welch,[144][145] in addition to acts as diverse as Muse,[137] OutKast,[140] and Bloc Party.[146] Paula Cole named Bush as an influence while accepting the Best New Artist Grammy in 1996. Ariel Pink wrote a tribute song for her titled "For Kate I Wait" on the album The Doldrums. The trip-hop artist Tricky has said about Bush, "I don't believe in God, but if I did, her music would be my bible".[18] Punk rocker John Lydon, better known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, declared her work to be "beauty beyond belief",[147] "fucking brilliant" and labelled her "a true original". Rotten once wrote a song for her, titled "Bird in Hand" (about exploitation of parrots) that Bush rejected. Rotten theorised that Bush thought the song contained insulting references aimed at her.[148][149] Marc Almond chose "Moments of Pleasure" as one of his 10 favourite songs on Radio 2 in June 2007, saying that the song had a profound influence on him when he was combating drug addiction in New York in the 1990s. In November 2006, the singer Rufus Wainwright named Bush as one of his top ten gay icons.[150] Outside music, Bush has been an inspiration to several fashion designers, most notably Hussein Chalayan.[151]
Many artists around the world have recorded cover versions of Bush songs, including Charlotte Church, The Futureheads (who had a UK top ten hit with a cover of "Hounds of Love"), Placebo (whose cover of "Running Up that Hill" has featured in many TV series and films), Pat Benatar, Faith and the Muse, Hayley Westenra, Jane Birkin, Natalie Cole, Ra Ra Riot,[152][153] Maxwell,[154] The Church[155] and Nada Surf.[156] The British dance act Utah Saints sampled a line from "Cloudbusting" for their single, "Something Good". Artists such as Tori Amos, Nolwenn Leroy, Patrick Wolf and Happy Rhodes (whose upper vocal range has been compared with the one of Kate Bush)[157] have covered her songs in live performances. Coldplay said their track "Speed of Sound" was originally an attempt to re-create "Running Up that Hill". Suede front-man Brett Anderson has stated that "Wuthering Heights" was the first single he ever bought and mentioned "And Dream of Sheep" in Suede's song "These are the Sad Songs".[158] British folk singer Jim Moray also references "And Dream of Sheep" in his self-penned track "Longing for Lucy".[159] Progressive death metal act Novembre also covered "Cloudbusting" on their album Novembrine Waltz. In 2009, John Forté released a hip hop version of "Running Up that Hill".[160]
In 2010, composer and vocalist Theo Bleckmann released an album of Kate Bush covers, titled Hello Earth! – The Music of Kate Bush which includes his interpretation of fourteen Bush classics,[161] which he also performs live around the world. In an interview with Hungarian online music magazine Kortár's Blog, Bleckmann explained his choice to explore Bush's work: "The music of Kate Bush has been a saviour throughout my teenage years when I lived in a small town in Germany...To come back to her music fresh...and to discover more depths and beauty in it, became an overwhelming confirmation of the endurance of great music regardless of genre and time."[162][163]
Personal life[link]
Kate Bush is married to guitarist Dan McIntosh and the couple have a son, Albert.[164] She resides in Devon and until late-2011 had another residence near Theale, West Berkshire.
Discography[link]
Main article: Kate Bush discography
- The Kick Inside (1978)
- Lionheart (1978)
- Never for Ever (1980)
- The Dreaming (1982)
- Hounds of Love (1985)
- The Sensual World (1989)
- The Red Shoes (1993)
- Aerial (2005)
- Director's Cut (2011)
- 50 Words for Snow (2011)
See also[link]
References[link]
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- ^ Thompson, Ben (5 November 2006). "Ben Thompson reviews an album of two halves". Sunday Telegraph.
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- ^ Link to several reviews of ''Director's Cut''. Katebushnews.com. Retrieved 1 August 2011.
- ^ Various links to reviews of Director's Cut. Katebushnews.com. Retrieved 1 August 2011.
- ^ News of re-mastered albums from Fish People On 15 May 2011, Bush entered the world of the Internet with her first complete website (also called Fish People) where all her videos can be viewed and news and information is available. [http://katebush.com/home Fish People – The Official Site of Kate Bush. Katebushnews.com. Retrieved 1 August 2011.
- ^ Pitbull Tops U.K. Singles Chart; Kate Bush Album Debuts At No. 2. Billboard. 23 May 2011. Retrieved 1 August 2011.
- ^ Kate Bush reveals guest lyricist on new album – James Joyce. The Guardian. 5 April 2011. Retrieved 1 August 2011.
- ^ Perpetua, Matthew (12 September 2011). "Kate Bush: First New Album in Six Years". Rolling Stone. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/kate-bush-first-new-album-in-six-years-20110912. Retrieved 12 September 2011.
- ^ Kate Bush announces new album release. KateBush Official Website. 12 Sep 2011. Retrieved 12 Sep 2011
- ^ "Review of "Wild Man" by NME; 10 Oct 2011". NME. 10 October 2011. http://www.nme.com/reviews/kate-bush/12361. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
- ^ "Fish People". Katebush.com. http://www.katebush.com/news/wildman-single-released-11-october. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
- ^ Powers, Ann. "NPR music critic Ann Powers reviews "50 Words for Snow"". Npr.org. http://www.npr.org/2011/11/13/142133269/first-listen-kate-bush-50-words-for-snow. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
- ^ "ABC Radio National Album of the Week". Australia: ABC. 14 November 2011. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/breakfast/stories/2011/3359910.htm. Retrieved 16 January 2012. [dead link]
- ^ "Stephen Dalton describes ''50 Words for Snow''". Katebushnews.com. http://www.katebushnews.com/index.php/author/peter/. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
- ^ "Bush tells Jamie Cullum "Snowflake" was written for her son". Avro.nl. http://avro.nl/audioplayer/?p=podcast_schiffersxtra&pc=schiffersxtra_17391&stream=undefined. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
- ^ "Bush explains decisions regarding ''50 Words for Snow''". Avro.nl. http://avro.nl/audioplayer/?p=podcast_schiffersxtra&pc=schiffersxtra_17391&stream=undefined. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
- ^ Greg Kot Music critic 11:35 am CST, 18 November 2011 (18 November 2011). "Chicago Tribune review of ''50 Words for Snow''". Chicago Tribune. http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/turnitup/chi-kate-bush-album-review-50-words-for-snow-reviewed-20111118,0,6147350.column. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
- ^ "50 Words for Snow Reviews, Ratings, Credits, and More at Metacritic". Metacritic.com. http://www.metacritic.com/music/50-words-for-snow. Retrieved 19 November 2011.
- ^ Brit Awards nominations: Kate Bush vs Adele for best female The Telegraph 12 January 2012
- ^ [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17739529 BBC News - All-female shortlist is a first for Ivor Novello awards
- ^ a b Kate Bush admits frustration over time between albums. BBC. 4 May 2011. Retrieved 1 August 2011.
- ^ Bush rejects autobiographical implications of songs in BBC Interview with Mark Radcliffe. BBC. 17 May 2011. Retrieved 1 August 2011.
- ^ Hudson, Sue (December 1985). "The Unique Poetry Of Kate Bush". Hi-Fi & Record Review.
- ^ Hudson, Sue. "The Back Page". Hi-Fi and Record Review.
- ^ Davis, Erik (1993). "Red Shoes review". Spin.
- ^ Solanas, Jane (1983). "The Barmy Dreamer". New Musical Express.
- ^ Colin Irwin (November 1989). "Iron Maiden". Q magazine.
- ^ Phil Sutcliffe (30 August 1980). "Labushka". Sounds.
- ^ "100 Greatest Gayest Albums 51–60". Out Magazine. http://www.out.com/detail.asp?id=24096.
- ^ "Top 100 Greatest Gayest albums 81–90". Out Magazine. http://www.out.com/detail.asp?id=24099.
- ^ "Kate Bush interview". Q Magazine. 1990.
- ^ "Kate Bush interview". Smash Hits. 1980.
- ^ Brown, Len (7 October 1989). "In the Realm of the Senses". New Musical Express.
- ^ a b "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong". Q magazine. December 1993.
- ^ Sutcliffe, Phil (June 1991). "Hounds of Love Sleeve Notes". Q magazine.
- ^ Irwin, Colin (10 October 1980). "Paranoia and Passion of the Kate Inside". Melody Maker.
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- ^ Littlejohn, Maureen (March 1990). "The Sensual Woman". Network.
- ^ Gambaccini, Paul (24 November 1993). "Kate Bush Smiles in Her New Red Shoes". New York Press.
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- ^ "Kate Bush – BBC Christmas Special 1979". http://gaffa.org/passing/v79_dec.html. Retrieved 6 June 2008.
- ^ a b Kate Bush The reclusive first lady of art rock: when she's not admiring John Lydon, she's pestering the Queen Classic Rock Magazine Issue 160
- ^ a b "Kate Bush DVDs & Videos". allmusic.com. http://www.allmusic.com/artist/kate-bush-p3805/discography/dvds-videos. Retrieved 10 May 2011.
- ^ "Kate Bush radio interview". CBAK 4011 (Australia). 1985.
- ^ Aizlewood, John (December 2001). "The Big Sleep". Q magazine.
- ^ Mojo Magazine, page 81, October 2005 edition
- ^ "Cocteau Twins Discography". CocteauTwins.org. http://www.cocteautwins.org/~leesa/cocteautwins/cHTML/html/soundtracks.html. Retrieved 4 April 2007.
- ^ "Kate Bush – Under Review". Amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000EXZHPQ/. Retrieved 4 April 2007.
- ^ "Saturday Night Live: Universal announces The complete 4th season TVonDVD.com 5 September 2008". http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Saturday-Night-Live-Season-4/10468.
- ^ "Unveiling Britain's 'Secret' Home Media Magazine 5 December 2008". http://homemediamagazine.com/tv-dvd/unveiling-britains-secret-14017.
- ^ http://www.katebush.com/news/mistraldespair-animation "Mistraldespair Animation Segment"
- ^ http://www.katebush.com/news/wild-man-animation "Wild Man" Animation Segment.
- ^ http://www.katebush.com/news/eider-falls-lake-tahoe-animation Credits for "Eider Falls at Lake Tahoe"
- ^ Kate Bush's Shadow Play NPR 24 January 2012
- ^ Ken Livingstone Interviewed: Boris, The Other Boris, Music, Politics & London. The Quietus. 23 September 2010. Retrieved 1 August 2011.
- ^ "FAQ: rec.music.gaffa – Love-Hounds – Kate Bush". Faqs.org. http://www.faqs.org/faqs/music/kate-bush-faq/. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ Holmes, Linda (6 August 2009). "Five Great John Hughes Moments National Public Radio (United States) 6 August 2009". Npr.org. http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2009/08/five_great_john_hughes_moments.html. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ "Eighties Kate Bush track goes Top 10 on download chart". Music Week. 24 November 2005. http://www.musicweek.com/story.asp?storyCode=16666§ioncode=1. Retrieved 21 November 2010.
- ^ "Soundtracks for Felicia's Journey" at IMDb
- ^ "Starter For Ten Soundtrack CD". CD Universe. 13 February 2007. http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/pid/7318125/a/Starter+For+Ten.htm. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ Chart Log UK: B Zobbel.de
- ^ Silberman, Stacey (30 November 2007). "Tis the Awards Season: Lots of Green & “Golden” Loving Stars". Hollywood Today. http://www.hollywoodtoday.net/?p=3036. Retrieved 2008-05-15.
- ^ Awards for The Golden Compass, Satellite Awards
- ^ Palmer, Del. "Lyra". DelPalmer.com. http://www.delpalmer.com/page14.htm. Retrieved 2008-05-15.
- ^ "Mna Na h-Éireann". Hot Press. 29 May 1996.
- ^ "Lionel Azulay MySpace Page". Myspace.com. http://www.myspace.com/lionelazulayLionel. Retrieved 29 May 2010. [dead link]
- ^ "Kate Bush News and Information 26 August 2008". Katebushnews.com. http://www.katebushnews.com/katenews.htm. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ "Erasure & Kate Bush: The Lost Collaboration The Quietus 4 March 2009". Thequietus.com. http://thequietus.com/articles/01240-erasure-wanted-to-work-with-kate-bush. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ Rolf Harris: Glastonbury was highlight of my entertainment career. Metro. 30 June 2010. Retrieved 1 August 2011.
- ^ http://www.clashmusic.com/news/could-kate-bush-tour-again - retrieved 1 June 2012
- ^ "Interview with Bjork". Time Out. 15 October 1997.
- ^ Price, Simon (21 May 2001). "Goldfrapp, Union Chapel, LondonNelly Furtado, Shepherd's Bush Empire, London The Independent 21 May 2001". The Independent (London). http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/reviews/preformgoldfrapp-span-classsmallerunion-chapel-londonspanbrnelly-furtado-span-classsmallershepherds-bush-empire-londonspanpreform-685546.html. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ Hopkins, Daniel (6 March 2008). "Goldfrapp Seventh Tree Review Dallas Observer 5 March 2008". Dallasobserver.com. http://www.dallasobserver.com/2008-03-06/music/goldfrapp/. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ "Nerina Pallot on life, love and Kylie Minogue". http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/820427-nerina-pallot-on-life-love-and-kylie-minogue.
- ^ a b Boyd, Brian (28 October 2005). "What Kate didn't do next". The Irish Times.
- ^ "Happy Rhodes – And Dream Of Sheep (Kate Bush cover)". NME. http://www.nme.com/nme-video/youtube/id/WoNGpa9tJkg/search/Happy%20Rhodes. Retrieved 25 January 2012.
- ^ "Queens of British pop (including an interview with Lily Allen about Kate Bush)", BBC Television, 1 April 2009 (first broadcast)
- ^ a b "Kate Bush is Back". Triple J Music News. http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/musicnews/s1470979.htm. Retrieved 4 April 2007.
- ^ "Meet Little Boots". Highland News. 26 February 2009. http://www.highland-news.co.uk/Home/Entertainment/Meet-Little-Boots-5231.htm. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ Youngs, Ian (9 January 2009). "Little Boots tops music tips list BBC 9 January 2009". BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7814304.stm. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ Little Boots on her 'tour' of 33 festivals The Times 17 May 2009[dead link]
- ^ Youngs, Ian (7 January 2009). "BBC Sound of 2009: Florence and The Machine BBC 7 January 2009". BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7813609.stm. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ Dingwall, John. Exclusive: Florence and The Machine star vows to turn heads at Brits Glasgow Daily Record, 30 January 2009
- ^ "Archive". BlocParty.com. Archived from the original on 23 March 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20070323002520/http://blocparty.com/history.php. Retrieved 4 April 2007.
- ^ "Queens of British pop – John Lydon talks about being a Kate Bush fan". BBC. 1 April 2009 (first broadcast). http://www.bbc.co.uk/musictv/queensofbritishpop/artists/katebush/4/?4. Retrieved 25 1 2012.
- ^ "We Are Worthy". Q magazine. November 2001.
- ^ "John Lydon – Bush Rejected Rotten's Song 12 May 2007". Contactmusic.com. http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/article/bush%20rejected%20rottens%20song_1052447. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ Wainwright, Rufus (12 November 2006). "Gay icons". The Observer (London). http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,,1942438,00.html. Retrieved 3 April 2007.
- ^ Chalayan, Hussein (12 February 2005). "Hussein Chalayan on Kate Bush". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/heroes--villains-hussein-chalayan-on-kate-bush-1530348.html. Retrieved 3 April 2007.
- ^ by WNYC Soundcheck (29 August 2008). "Ra Ra Riot Navigates The Hype National Public Radio (United States) 29 August 2008". Npr.org. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94106363. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ Sullivan, Matt (11 December 2008). "Are fresh-faced indie rockers Ra Ra Riot suspended in art-rock? Nashville Scene 10 December 2008". Nashvillescene.com. http://www.nashvillescene.com/2008-12-11/music/are-fresh-faced-indie-rockers-ra-ra-riot-suspended-in-art-rock/. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ By JANE STEVENSON – Sun Media (13 October 2008). "Live Review: Maxwell". Toronto Sun. http://www.torontosun.com/entertainment/music/2008/10/13/7066031-sun.html. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ "The Church maps summer tour with new album in tow LiveDaily 15 April 2009". Livedaily.com. 15 April 2009. http://www.livedaily.com/news/18774.html. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ "Nada Surf Cover Moody Blues, Depeche Mode Spin 5 January 2010". Spin.com. 5 January 2010. http://www.spin.com/articles/nada-surf-cover-moody-blues-depeche-mode. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ "Happy Rhodes". Furia.com. http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=misc&id=HappyRhodes. Retrieved 8 June 2010.
- ^ "RISE TV programme". Channel 4. 17 September 2002. http://www.katebushnews.com/2002.htm. Retrieved 3 April 2007.
- ^ Moayeri, Lily (9 June 2005). "X&Y review". Miami New Times. http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2005-06-09/music/coldplay/. Retrieved 4 April 2007.
- ^ "How I Fell in Love in Prison by John Forte for The Daily Beast 13 March 2009". Thedailybeast.com. 13 March 2009. http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-03-13/how-i-fell-in-love-in-prison/full/. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
- ^ "Theo Bleckmann release of "Hello Earth!- The Music of Kate Bush". Theobleckmann.com. http://www.theobleckmann.com/MUSIC/MUSIC_DISCO_13_details.html. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
- ^ "Interview with Bleckmann about Kate Bush's music". Kortars.freeblog.hu. 14 October 2011. http://kortars.freeblog.hu/archives/2011/10/14/131_Question_Interview_with_Theo_Bleckmann__131_kerdes_Theo_Bleckmannhez/. Retrieved 16 January 2012.
- ^ http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2012/03/13/148531597/kate-bush-as-heard-by-this-dude-who-sings-jazz-a-conversation?ps=mh_frhdl1 NPR Review of Hello Earth! The Music of Kate Bush
- ^ "Kate Bush and the war of Wuthering Heights". London Evening Standard. 5 May 2007. http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23395189-kate-bush-and-the-war-of-wuthering-heights.do. Retrieved 25 1 2012.
Further reading[link]
- Vermorel, Fred and Judy, Kate Bush: Princess of Suburbia (1980) Target Books
- Vermorel, Fred, The Secret History of Kate Bush and the Strange Art of Pop (1983) Omnibus Press ISBN 0.7119.0152.X
- Cann, Kevin and Mayes, Sean, Kate Bush: A Visual Documentary (1988) Omnibus Press ISBN 0-7119-1039-1
- Muskens, Helena; Racké, Quirine, Come Back Kate. Snow White Films. Involved TV Channel: NPS. 2007
- 'I'm not some weirdo recluse' (The Guardian, 28 October 2005)
- This Bush's mission finally gets accomplished (National Post, 22 December 2005)
- Two Musicians who have worked with Bush describe her working style and non work personality
- The Illustrated Collector's Guide to Kate Bush, 2nd Edition, published by Collector's Guide Publishing. A complete guide to everything Kate Bush. Includes albums, CDs, DVDs, books and other collectibles. It's complete up to Aerial.
- Withers, Debroah Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory . Hammeron Press, 1 March 2010. ISBN 0-9564507-0-9.
- Thompson, Graeme Kate Bush: Under the Ivy. Omnibus Press, 1 May 2010 ISBN 1-84772-930-4
- Gracey, James 'It's Coming For Me Through The Trees' – The Influence of Horror Cinema on the Music of Kate Bush Behind the Couch, 18 August 2010
External links[link]
 |
Book: Kate Bush |
| Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print. | |
Media related to Kate Bush at Wikimedia Commons
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Kate Bush |
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||||||||||||||||||||
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Bush, Kate |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | English singer, songwriter, musician and record producer |
| Date of birth | 30 July 1958 |
| Place of birth | Bexleyheath, Kent, England |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
For other people named Robin Williams, see Robin Williams (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with Robbie Williams.
 |
This article's lead section may not adequately summarize its contents. Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of the article's key points. (January 2012) |
| Robin Williams | |
|---|---|
_crop.jpg) Williams at "Stand Up for Heroes" in 2007 |
|
| Birth name | Robin McLaurin Williams |
| Born | (1951-07-21) July 21, 1951 (age 60) Chicago, Illinois, United States |
| Medium | Stand-up, film, television |
| Nationality | American |
| Years active | 1972–present |
| Genres | Character comedy, physical comedy, improvisational comedy, satire/political satire, observational comedy, blue comedy |
| Influences | Peter Sellers, Richard Pryor, Jonathan Winters, George Carlin, Chuck Jones |
| Influenced | Conan O'Brien, Frank Caliendo,[1] Dat Phan, Jo Koy |
| Spouse | Valerie Velardi (1978–1988; 1 child) Marsha Garces Williams (1989–2008; 2 children) Susan Schneider (2011–present) |
| Website | RobinWilliams.com |
| Academy Awards | |
| Best Supporting Actor 1997 Good Will Hunting – Sean Maguire |
|
| Emmy Awards | |
|
Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program 1988 ABC Presents A Royal Gala |
|
| Golden Globe Awards | |
|
Best Actor – Television Series Musical or Comedy 2005 |
|
| Screen Actors Guild Awards | |
|
Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture 1997 Good Will Hunting – Sean Maguire |
|
| American Comedy Awards | |
| Funniest Actor in a Motion Picture (Leading Role) 1994 Mrs. Doubtfire – Daniel Hillard ("Euphegenia Doubtfire") |
|
Robin McLaurin Williams[2][3] (born July 21, 1951[4]) is an American actor and comedian. Rising to fame with his role as the alien Mork in the TV series Mork & Mindy, and later stand-up comedy work, Williams has performed in many feature films since 1980. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. He has also won two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globes, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and five Grammy Awards.[5][6]
Contents |
Early life[link]
Williams was born in Chicago, Illinois. His mother, Laura McLaurin (née Smith, 1922–2001), was a former model from New Orleans, Louisiana.[7] His father, Robert Fitzgerald Williams (September 10, 1906 – October 18, 1987), was a senior executive at Ford Motor Company in charge of the Midwest region. His maternal great-great-grandfather was senator and Mississippi governor Anselm J. McLaurin.[8] Williams is of English, Welsh, Irish, and French ancestry.[9] He was raised in the Episcopal Church (his mother practiced Christian Science).[10][11] He grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he was a student at the Detroit Country Day School,[12] and later moved to Woodacre, Marin County, California, where he attended the public Redwood High School. Williams studied at Claremont McKenna College (then called Claremont Men's College) for four years.[13] He has two half-brothers: Todd (who died August 14, 2007) and McLaurin.[14]
Williams has described himself as a quiet child whose first imitation was of his grandmother to his mother. He did not overcome his shyness until he became involved with his high-school drama department.[15]
In 1973, Williams was one of only 20 students accepted into the freshman class at the Juilliard School, and one of only two students to be accepted by John Houseman into the Advanced Program at the school that year, the other being Christopher Reeve.[16] In his dialects class, Williams had no trouble mastering all dialects quickly. Williams left Juilliard in 1976.
Television career[link]
After appearing in the cast of the short-lived The Richard Pryor Show on NBC, Williams was cast by Garry Marshall as the alien Mork in the hit TV series Happy Days.[17] As Mork, Williams improvised much of his dialogue and physical comedy, speaking in a high, nasal voice. Mork's appearance was so popular with viewers that it led to a spin-off hit television sitcom, Mork & Mindy, which ran from 1978 to 1982; the show was written to accommodate Williams' improvisations. Although he played the same character as in his appearance in Happy Days, the show was set in the present day, in Boulder, Colorado, instead of the late '50s in Milwaukee. Mork was an extremely popular character, featured on posters, coloring books, lunchboxes, and other merchandise.
Starting in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Williams began to reach a wider audience with his standup comedy, including three HBO comedy specials, Off The Wall (1978), An Evening with Robin Williams (1982), and Robin Williams: Live at the Met (1986). Also in 1986, Williams reached an ever wider audience to exhibit his style at the 58th Academy Awards show.[citation needed]
His stand-up work has been a consistent thread through his career, as is seen by the success of his one-man show (and subsequent DVD) Robin Williams: Live on Broadway (2002). He was voted 13th on Comedy Central's list "100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time" in 2004.[18]
After some encouragement from his friend Whoopi Goldberg, he was set to make a guest appearance in the 1991 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, "A Matter of Time", but he had to cancel due to a scheduling conflict;[19] Matt Frewer took his place as a time-traveling con man, Professor Berlingoff Rasmussen. Williams, along with Billy Crystal, appeared in a cameo together at the beginning of an episode of the third season of Friends. Both Williams and Crystal's parts weren't originally in the script. They were apparently in the building where the show was shooting and were asked to improvise their lines.[20]
Williams appeared on an episode of the American version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? (Season 3, Episode 9: November 16, 2000). During a game of "Scenes from a Hat", the scene "What Robin Williams is thinking right now" was drawn, and Williams stated "I have a career. What the hell am I doing here?"[21] On December 4, 2010, he appeared with Robert De Niro on SNL in the sketch What Up with That.
Movie roles[link]
Most of Williams' acting career has been in film, although he has given some performances on stage as well (notably as Estragon in a production of Waiting for Godot with Steve Martin). His performance in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) resulted in Williams being nominated for an Academy Award.[17] Many of his roles have been comedies tinged with pathos.
His role as the Genie in the animated film Aladdin (1992) was instrumental in establishing the importance of star power in voice actor casting. Williams also used his voice talents in Fern Gully, as the holographic Dr. Know in the 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, in the 2005 animated film Robots, the 2006 Academy Award-winning Happy Feet, and an uncredited vocal performance in the film Everyone's Hero. Furthermore, he was the voice of The Timekeeper, a former attraction at the Walt Disney World Resort about a time-traveling robot who encounters Jules Verne and brings him to the future.
In 1998, he won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his role as a psychologist in Good Will Hunting.[17] Williams has also starred in dramatic films, which earned him two subsequent Academy Award nominations: First for playing an English teacher in Dead Poets Society (1989), and later for playing a troubled homeless man in The Fisher King (1991);[17] that same year, he played an adult Peter Pan in the movie Hook. Other acclaimed dramatic films include Awakenings (1990) and What Dreams May Come (1998). In the 2002 film Insomnia, Williams portrays a writer/killer on the run from a sleep-deprived Los Angeles policeman (played by Al Pacino) in rural Alaska. And also in 2002, in the psychological thriller One Hour Photo, Williams played an emotionally disturbed photo development technician who becomes obsessed with a family for whom he has developed pictures for a long time. In 2006 Williams starred in The Night Listener, a thriller about a radio show host who realizes he has developed a friendship with a child who may or may not exist.
He is known for his improvisational skills and impersonations. His performances frequently involve impromptu humor designed and delivered in rapid-fire succession while on stage. According to the Aladdin DVD commentary, most of his dialogue as the Genie was improvised.
In 2006, he starred in five movies including Man of the Year and was the Surprise Guest at the 2006 Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards. He appeared on an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition that aired on January 30, 2006.
At one point, he was in the running to play the Riddler in Batman Forever until director Tim Burton dropped the project. Earlier, Williams had been a strong contender to play the Joker in Batman. He had expressed interest in assuming the role in The Dark Knight, the sequel to 2005's Batman Begins,[22] although the part of the Joker was played by Heath Ledger, who went on to win, posthumously, the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
He was portrayed by Chris Diamantopoulos in the made-for-TV biopic Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Mork & Mindy (2005), documenting the actor's arrival in Hollywood as a struggling comedian.
Disputes with Disney[link]
In gratitude for his success with the Disney/Touchstone film "Good Morning, Vietnam", Williams voiced the Genie in the Disney animated film Aladdin for SAG scale pay ($75,000), on condition that his name or image not be used for marketing, and his (supporting) character not take more than 25% of space on advertising artwork, since Toys was scheduled for release one month after Aladdin's debut. The studio went back on the deal on both counts, especially in poster art by having the Genie in 25% of the image, but having other major and supporting characters portrayed considerably smaller. Disney's Hyperion book, Aladdin: The Making Of An Animated Film, listed both of Williams' characters, "The Peddler" and "The Genie", ahead of main characters but was forced to refer to him only as "the actor signed to play the Genie".[23]
Williams and Disney had a bitter falling-out, resulting in Dan Castellaneta voicing the Genie role in "The Return of Jafar" and the "Aladdin" animated television series. Castellaneta was also recorded as the original voice for the feature "Aladdin and the King of Thieves". When Jeffrey Katzenberg was fired from Disney and replaced by former 20th Century Fox production head Joe Roth (whose last act for Fox was greenlighting Williams' film "Mrs. Doubtfire"), Roth arranged for a public apology to Williams by Disney. Williams agreed to perform in Hollywood Pictures' "Jack", directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and even agreed to voice the Genie again for the "King of Thieves" sequel (for considerably more than scale), replacing all of Castellaneta's dialogue.[24]
When Williams re-teamed with "Doubtfire" director Chris Columbus for 1999's "Bicentennial Man", Disney asked that the budget be cut by approximately $20 million, and when the film was released on Christmas Day, it flopped at the box office. Williams blamed Disney's marketing and the loss of content the film had suffered due to the budget cuts. As a result, Williams was again on bad terms with Disney, and Castellaneta was once again recruited to replace him as Genie in the "Kingdom Hearts" video game series and the "House of Mouse" TV series. The DVD release for "Aladdin" has no involvement whatsoever from Williams in the bonus materials, although some of his original recording sessions can be seen.
Robin Williams has recently made peace with The Walt Disney Company and in 2009 agreed to be inducted into the Disney Hall of Fame, designated as a Disney Legend.[25]
Stand-up career[link]
Williams has done a number of stand-up comedy tours since the early 1970s. Some of his most notable tours include An Evening With Robin Williams (1982), Robin Williams: At The Met (1986) and Robin Williams LIVE on Broadway (2002). The latter broke many long-held records for a comedy show. In some cases, tickets were sold out within thirty minutes of going on sale.
After a six year break, in August 2008 Williams announced a brand new 26-city tour titled "Weapons of Self Destruction". He was quoted as saying that this was his last chance to make cracks at the expense of the current Bush Administration, but by the time the show was staged only a few minutes covered that subject. The tour started at the end of September 2009, finishing in New York on December 3, and was the subject of an HBO special on December 8, 2009.[26]
Accusations of plagiarism[link]
Williams was accused of stealing material from other comics to the extent that David Brenner claims that he confronted Williams personally and threatened him with bodily harm if he heard Williams utter another one of his jokes.[27]
Theatre career[link]
In theatre, Williams has headed his own one-man show, Robin Williams: Live on Broadway, that played at The Broadway Theatre in July 2002.[28] He made his Broadway acting debut in Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, which opened on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on March 31, 2011.[29][30][31] He previously appeared opposite Steve Martin at Lincoln Center in an Off-Broadway production of Waiting for Godot.[32]
Personal life[link]
Marriages and children[link]
Robin Williams' first marriage was to Valerie Velardi on June 4, 1978. They have one child, Zachary Pym (Zak) (born April 11, 1983). During Williams' first marriage, he was involved in an extramarital relationship with Michelle Tish Carter, a cocktail waitress whom he met in 1984. She sued him in 1986, claiming that he did not tell her he was infected with the herpes simplex virus before he embarked on a sexual relationship with her in the mid-1980s, during which, she said, he transmitted the virus to her. The case was settled out of court. Williams and Velardi divorced in 1988.[33]
On April 30, 1989, he married Marsha Garces, his son's nanny who was already several months pregnant with his child. They have two children, Zelda Rae (born July 31, 1989) and Cody Alan (born November 25, 1991). However, in March 2008, Garces filed for divorce from Williams, citing irreconcilable differences.[34]
Williams married his third wife, graphic designer Susan Schneider, on October 23, 2011, in St. Helena, California.[35]
Family and friends[link]
While studying at Juilliard, Williams befriended Christopher Reeve. They had several classes together in which they were the only students, and they remained good friends for the rest of Reeve's life. Williams visited Reeve after the horse riding accident that rendered him a quadriplegic, and cheered him up by pretending to be an eccentric Russian doctor (similar to his role in Nine Months). Williams claimed that he was there to perform a colonoscopy. Reeve stated that he laughed for the first time since the accident and knew that life was going to be okay.[16]
On August 20, 2007, Williams' elder brother, Robert Todd Williams, died of complications from heart surgery performed a month earlier.[36]
Addiction and health problems[link]
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Williams had an addiction to cocaine; he has stated that he has since quit. Williams was a close friend of and frequent partier alongside John Belushi. He says the death of his friend and the birth of his son prompted him to quit drugs: "Was it a wake-up call? Oh yeah, on a huge level. The grand jury helped too."[17]
On August 9, 2006, Williams checked himself in to a substance-abuse rehabilitation center (located in Newberg, Oregon), later admitting that he was an alcoholic.[37] His publicist delivered the announcement:
After 20 years of sobriety, Robin Williams found himself drinking again and has decided to take proactive measures to deal with this for his own well-being and the well-being of his family.
Williams was hospitalized in March 2009 due to heart problems. He postponed his one-man tour in order to undergo surgery to replace his aortic valve.[38][39] The surgery was successfully completed on March 13, 2009, at the Cleveland Clinic.[40][41]
Other interests[link]
Williams is a member of the Episcopal Church. He has described his denomination in a comedy routine as "Catholic Lite—same rituals, half the guilt."[42]
Williams is an avid enthusiast of games, even naming two of his children after game characters. He named his daughter after Princess Zelda from The Legend of Zelda action-adventure game series.[43][44][45] They both have even been featured in an ad for the Nintendo 3DS remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.[46] On this note, his son may have been named after Cody from the beat 'em up game Final Fight.[47] He also enjoys pen-and-paper role-playing games and online video games, recently playing Warcraft 3, Day of Defeat, Half-Life,[48] and the first-person shooter Battlefield 2 as a sniper.[49] He was also previously a fan of the Wizardry series of role-playing video games.[50]
On January 6, 2006, he performed live at Consumer Electronics Show during Google's keynote.[51] In the 2006 E3, on the invitation of Will Wright, he demonstrated the creature editor of Spore while simultaneously commenting on the creature's look: "This will actually make a platypus look good."[52] He also complimented the game's versatility, comparing it to Populous and Black & White. Later that year, he was one of several celebrities to participate in the Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day.[53]
A fan of professional road cycling, he was a regular on the US Postal and Discovery Channel Pro Cycling team bus and hotels during the years Lance Armstrong dominated the Tour de France.[54] He owns over 50 bicycles.[55]
He also enjoys rugby union and is a big fan of former All Black, Jonah Lomu.[56]
Williams is a supporter of eco-friendly vehicles. He currently drives a Toyota Prius,[57] and is on the waiting list for an Aptera 2 Series electric vehicle.[58]
Williams has recently announced that he would love to play The Riddler in the next installment to the Batman films by director Christopher Nolan, though Nolan has stated that The Riddler will not be featured in the film.[59]
Charity work[link]
Williams and his former wife, Marsha, founded the Windfall Foundation, a philanthropic organization to raise money for many different charities. Williams devotes much of his energy to charity work, including the Comic Relief fundraising efforts (the program is hosted by himself, Billy Crystal, and Whoopi Goldberg).[17] In December 1999, he sang in French on the BBC-inspired music video of international celebrities doing a cover of the Rolling Stones' "It's Only Rock & Roll" for the charity Children's Promise.[60]
In response to the 2010 Canterbury Earthquake, Williams donated all proceeds of his "Weapons of Self Destruction" Christchurch performance to helping rebuild the New Zealand city. Half the proceeds were donated to the Red Cross and half to the mayoral building fund with the words "I hope this donation will go some way to helping the extensive rebuilding effort in the city."[61] Williams has performed with the USO for U.S. troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.[62]
Filmography[link]
Film[link]
Television[link]
| Year | Title | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1977 | The Richard Pryor Show | Man with bad arm John Brownstein Defense attorney Archeologist Shopper Titanic survivor Voice of gun |
Writer |
| Laugh-In | |||
| Eight is Enough | Episode: "The Return of Auntie V" | ||
| 1978 | Happy Days | Mork | Episode: "My Favorite Orkan" |
| America 2-Night | Jason Shine | Episodes: "Jason Shine" and "Olfactory Distosis Telethon" | |
| 1978–1982 | Mork & Mindy | Mork | 92 episodes Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Musical or Comedy (won in 1979, nominated in 1980) Nominated—Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor – Comedy Series |
| 1979 | Happy Days | Episode: "Mork Returns" | |
| Out of the Blue | Episode: "Random's Arrival" | ||
| 1981 | Saturday Night Live | Himself | Host/various characters |
| 1982 | The Billy Crystal Comedy Hour | Episode: #1.1 | |
| Faerie Tale Theatre | Frog/Prince Robin | Episode: "Tale of the Frog Prince" | |
| SCTV Network 90 | Various characters | Episode: "Jane Eyrehead" | |
| 1984 | Saturday Night Live | Himself | Host/various characters |
| Pryor's Place | Gaby | Episode: "Sax Education" | |
| 1986 | Saturday Night Live | Himself | Host/various characters |
| The Max Headroom Show | Episode: "Max Headroom's Giant Christmas Turkey" | ||
| 1988 | Saturday Night Live | Host/various characters | |
| Wogan | |||
| 1991 | Wogan | ||
| A Wish For Wings That Work | The Kiwi | Voice only (credited as Sudy Nim) | |
| 1992 | The Larry Sanders Show | Himself | Episode: "Hank's Contract" |
| 1994 | Homicide: Life on the Streets | Robert Ellison | Episode: "Bop Gun" Nominated—Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor – Drama Series |
| Live & Kicking | Himself | ||
| The Larry Sanders Show | Episode: "Montana" | ||
| Nyhetsmorgon | Episode: "Filmen 'Mrs. Doubtfire' svensk premiär" | ||
| In the Wild | Episode: "In the Wild: Dolphins with Robin Williams" | ||
| 1995 | Primer Plano | ||
| 1996 | American Masters | Episode: "Take Two: Mike Nichols and Elaine May" | |
| Primer Plano | |||
| HBO First Look | Himself | Episode: "Fathers Day" | |
| 1997 | Friends | Tomas | Uncredited |
| 1998 | Nyhetsmorgon | Himself/Sean Maguire | Episode: "Filmen Good Will Hunting" |
| Hollywood Squares | Himself | Guest appearance | |
| Noel's House Party | Episode: #8.10 | ||
| 1999 | L.A. Doctors | Hugo Kinsley | Episode: "Just Duet" |
| 2000 | Whose Line Is It Anyway? | Himself | Episode: #3.9 |
| 2002 | Comedy Central Canned Ham | Episode: "Death to Smoochy" | |
| Leute heute | |||
| Supermarket Sweep | |||
| 2003 | Player$ | Episodes: "E3 03, Playa", "Players Halloweenie Televizzie" | |
| Freedoom: A History of Us | Josiah Quincy Ulysses S. Grant Missouri farmer Wilbur Wright Orville Wright |
Episodes: "Wake Up America", "A War to End Slavery", "Liberty for All", and "Safe for Democracy" | |
| Life With Bonnie | Kevin Powalski | Episode: "Psychic" | |
| 2004 | This Hour Has 22 Minutes | Himself | |
| 2005 | Just For Laughs | ||
| 2006 | Extreme Makeover: Home Edition | ||
| Mind of Mencia | Episode: "That's F**king Historical" | ||
| Getaway | Episode: #15.15 | ||
| 2008 | American Idol: The Search for a New Superstar | Ivan "Bob" Poppanoff the "Russian Idol"/Himself | Episodes: "Idol Gives Back" and "Live Results Show: One Contestant Eliminated" |
| Law & Order: Special Victims Unit | Merrit Rook | Episode: "Authority" Nominated—Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor – Drama Series |
|
| 2009 | SpongeBob SquarePants | Himself | Episode: "Truth or Square" |
| 2009 | TV Land Moguls | Episode: "The 80s" | |
| 2010 | Alan Carr Chatty Man | ||
| Pentagon Channel commercial | |||
| 2011 | Curiosity | Episode: "Your Body on Drugs" |
Discography[link]
- Reality...What a Concept (1979)
- Throbbing Python of Love (1983)
- A Night at The Met (1986)
- Pecos Bill (1988)
- Live 2002 (2002)
- Weapons of Self Destruction (2010)
Williams appeared in the music video of Bobby McFerrin's hit 1988 song "Don't Worry, Be Happy".[63] He teamed with McFerrin again to record a cover of The Beatles' "Come Together" for the 1998 George Martin album In My life.
He made a cameo in Cobra Starship's video "You Make Me Feel..." along with his daughter, Zelda Williams.[64]
References[link]
- ^ Pantagraph.com | Free Time | Caliendo hopes 'Frank TV' makes good first impression
- ^ According to the Nevada Marriage Index, 1956-2005; at http://www.ancestry.com/
- ^ The official Michigan social register, 1967, Virginia F. Searcy
- ^ Sources conflict. The print biographies The Life and Humor of Robin Williams: A Biography and Robin Williams: A Biography give his birth year as 1952. The Robin Williams Scrapbook also gives a birth year as 1952, as does Encyclopædia Britannica. Williams refers to himself as being "55" in an interview published July 4, 2007. Monk, Katherine (2007-07-04). "Marriage 101 with Robin Williams". StarPhoenix. http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/news/lifestyle/news/lifestyle/story.html?id=8b777192-8e77-464d-b8da-0cb90be40901&k=1045. He also verifies his date of birth as July 21, 1951 in a fansite interview: Stuurman, Linda. RWF talks with Robin Williams: Proost!, May 25, 2008.
- ^ Thomas, Mike (2002-02-24). "A nose for laughs". Chicago Sun-Times. http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=CSTB&p_theme=cstb&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0F360C3C1592F9AE&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM. Retrieved 2009-12-14.
- ^ McMullen, Marion (2002-10-05). "Article: Weekend TV: Star profile. (Features)". Coventry Evening Telegraph. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-92577025.html. Retrieved 2009-12-14.
- ^ "If Robin Williams' comedies are inspired by his life no wonder he's been in therapy". Sunday Herald. 1999-03-14. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/smgpubs/access/70123882.html?dids=70123882:70123882&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Mar+14%2C+1999&author=&pub=Sunday+Herald&desc=If+Robin+Williams'+comedies+are+inspired+by+his+life+no+wonder+he's+been+in+therapy&pqatl=google. Retrieved 2009-12-14.
- ^ Rubenstein, Steve (2001-09-08). "Laurie Williams - comedian's mother - SFGate". Articles.sfgate.com. http://articles.sfgate.com/2001-09-08/news/17615883_1_christian-science-elvis-impersonator-modeling. Retrieved 2011-11-25.
- ^ "People News". monstersandcritics.com. http://www.monstersandcritics.com/people/news/article_1206619.php/Robin_Williams_talks_about_rehab_and_alcoholism.
- ^ Gristwood, Sarah (1998-06-18). "Bobbin' Robin". Mail & Guardian Online. Archived from the original on October 4, 2006. http://web.archive.org/web/20061004023437/http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/mg/art/film/9806/980618-robin.html. Retrieved 2007-12-26.
- ^ Topel, Fred (2007-07-03). "Robin Williams on License to Wed". CanMag. http://www.canmag.com/nw/8218-license-to-wed-robin-williams. Retrieved 2007-12-26.
- ^ "Detroit Country Day: Frequently Asked Questions". Dcds.edu. http://www.dcds.edu/page.cfm?p=843. Retrieved 2010-08-29.
- ^ October 1982 Playboy Magazine
- ^ McLellan, Dennis (2007-08-18). "R. Todd Williams, 69; winery founder, comic's brother" (PDF). Los Angeles Times. http://www.toadhollow.com/pdf/memorial/ToddLATimesObit.pdf. Retrieved 2008-02-10.
- ^ Terry Gross (host) (2006-08-03). "Robin Williams: 'The Night Listener'". Fresh Air from WHYY. National Public Radio. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5602441.
- ^ a b Reeve, Christopher (1998). Still Me. New York: Random House. pp. 167–172. ISBN 978-0-679-45235-5.
- ^ a b c d e f James Lipton (host) (2001-06-10). "Robin Williams". Inside the Actors Studio. episode 710. season 7. Bravo. http://www.bravotv.com/Inside_the_Actors_Studio/guest/Robin_Williams.
- ^ "Comedy Central Presents: 100 Greatest Stand-Ups of All Time". Internet Movie Database. http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0429332/. Retrieved 2007-12-26.
- ^ "Biography for Robin Williams". Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000245/bio. Retrieved 2008-04-13.
- ^ "Episode 24 | series: Friends". Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0583657/combined.
- ^ "Episode 9". Whose Line Is It Anyway?. season 3. 2000-11-16.
- ^ Otto, Jeff (2006-06-26). "Robin Williams, Joker?". IGN. http://au.movies.ign.com/articles/714/714752p1.html. Retrieved 2007-12-26.
- ^ "Disney's got a brand-new Baghdad". Entertainment Weekly. 1992-09-04. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,312562,00.html. Retrieved 2007-03-16.
- ^ Hill, Jim (April 2000). "Be Careful What You Wish For". Jim Hill Media. http://jimhillmedia.com/blogs/jim_hill/archive/2000/12/31/312.aspx. Retrieved 2008-03-15.
- ^ "2009 Disney Legends Award Recipients to Be Honored During D23 Expo in Anaheim". PR Newswire. 2009-09-01. http://news.prnewswire.com/ViewContent.aspx?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/09-01-2009/0005086237. Retrieved 2009-09-01.
- ^ robinwilliams.com
- ^ Richard Zoglin (2008). Comedy at the Edge. Bloomsbury USA. ISBN 978-1-58234-624-3.
- ^ The Broadway League. "Robin Williams: Live on Broadway". IBDB: The Official Source for Broadway Information.
- ^ "Bengal Tiger to Roar at the Richard Rodgers Theatre March 11 Starring Robin Williams". Broadway.com, November 12, 2010.
- ^ "Culture Monster". "Robin Williams to star in 'Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo' on Broadway". Los Angeles Times. October 21, 2010.
- ^ "Tickets for Broadway's Bengal Tiger, Starring Robin Williams, Now on Sale" playbill.com, November 17, 2010.
- ^ "Review/Theatre; 'Godot': The Timeless Relationship of 2 Interdependent Souls". The New York Times, November 7, 1988. Accessed May 4, 2011.
- ^ Hoffman, Jan (1992-08-09). "THE SEXES; Pillow Talk". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE2DF153FF93AA3575BC0A964958260. Retrieved 2007-12-26.
- ^ Garchik, Leah (2008-03-27). "Robin Williams' wife files for divorce after nearly 19 years". The San Francisco Chronicle. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/26/DD7AVQHPA.DTL&tsp=1.
- ^ Ravitz, Justin (2011-10-24). "Robin Williams Weds!". Us Weekly. http://www.usmagazine.com/celebritynews/news/robin-williams-weds-20112410.
- ^ Newsdaily.com
- ^ "Robin Williams Comes Clean on 'GMA' – ABC News". Abcnews.go.com. 2006-10-02. http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2515796. Retrieved 2010-08-29.
- ^ "Robin Williams in South Florida hospital". The Miami Herald. 2009-03-04. http://www.miamiherald.com/news/breaking-news/story/933065.html. Retrieved 2009-03-04. [dead link]
- ^ Jones, Kenneth."Robin Williams' Spring Broadway Bow Postponed Due to Heart Surgery", playbill.com, March 5, 2009
- ^ "Robin Williams's Heart Surgery Called a Success". http://www.peop/le.com/people/article/0,,20267281,00.html.
- ^ "Robin Williams' heart surgery goes 'extremely well'". CNN. 2009-03-23. http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/03/23/robin.williams.health/. Retrieved 2010-05-22.
- ^ Johnson, Caitlin A. (2007-07-03). "A "License" to Laugh". CBS News. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/07/03/earlyshow/leisure/boxoffice/main3011495.shtml. Retrieved 2009-03-27.
- ^ "Robin Williams named his daughter after Princess Zelda". Destructoid. http://www.destructoid.com/robin-williams-named-his-daughter-after-princess-zelda-156315.phtml. Retrieved 2011-11-25.
- ^ "Robin Williams Zelda Commercial: Actor Lends Voice, Daughter For Newest Game". The New York Times. 2011-06-15. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/15/robin-williams-zelda-video_n_877835.html. Retrieved 2011-06-16.
- ^ "Robin Williams Jokes About Playing Call of Duty Online". 1up.com. http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3177150. Retrieved 2010-08-29.
- ^ John Funk (2011-06-15). "The Escapist : News : New Zelda Ad Stars Robin Williams and his Daughter Zelda". Escapistmagazine.com. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/111044-New-Zelda-Ad-Stars-Robin-Williams-and-his-Daughter-Zelda. Retrieved 2011-11-25.
- ^ Glenn M. (November 29, 2009). "Even Robin Williams loves him some Call of Duty". QuickJump Gaming Network. http://www.qj.net/qjnet/wii/even-robin-williams-loves-him-some-call-of-duty.html. Retrieved 18 September 2011.
- ^ Interview at Pro-HL.com
- ^ "Mork & Me". The Archies. 2005-12-05. http://thearchies.blogspot.com/2005/12/mork-me.html.
- ^ Rusel DeMaria; Johnny L. Wilson (2003). High score! : The illustrated history of electronic games (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. p. 154. ISBN 0-07-223172-6. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HJNvZLvpCEQC&pg=PA154. Retrieved 18 September 2011.
- ^ "Engadget.com". Engadget.com. http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/06/live-coverage-of-the-google-keynote/. Retrieved 2010-08-29.
- ^ "Robin Williams plays Spore". Google. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1734727723734486891. Retrieved 2010-08-29.
- ^ "Dungeons and Dragons Game Day at London Dungeon". Viewlondon.co.uk. http://www.viewlondon.co.uk/whatson/dungeons-and-dragons-game-day-article-5339.html. Retrieved 2010-08-29.
- ^ Murphy, Brian. "Tour de Lance: 100 percent pure". ESPN. http://espn.go.com/page2/s/murphy/020729.html. Retrieved 2007-06-29.
- ^ "Robin Williams Archive". Bike Forums. 2002-06-17. http://www.bikeforums.net/archive/index.php/t-10161.html. Retrieved 2010-08-29.
- ^ "Robin Williams Tickets". Ticketsnow.com. http://www.ticketsnow.com/Robin-Williams-Tickets.html. Retrieved 2010-08-29.
- ^ [1][dead link]
- ^ "Exclusive: Aptera 2e – Article". RoadandTrack.com. 2009-02-11. http://www.roadandtrack.com/article.asp?section_id=10&article_id=7651. Retrieved 2010-08-29.
- ^ "Robin Williams Wants To Be The Riddler in Batman 3". Screencrave.com. 2010-06-29. http://screencrave.com/2010-06-29/robin-williams-wants-to-be-the-riddler-in-batman-3/. Retrieved 2010-08-29.
- ^ "Stones cover enters festive race". BBC NEWS. 1999-12-10. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/558252.stm.
- ^ "Robin Williams donates proceeds to Canterbury quake". 2010-11-16. http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/robin-williams-donates-proceeds-canterbury-quake-3898905. Retrieved 2010-11-11.
- ^ Bronstein, Phil (2005-02-09). "Good Morning, Iraq". San Francisco Chronicle. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/02/09/DDG5AB3TBJ38.DTL. Retrieved 2009-09-04.
- ^ "Bobby McFerrin Homepage". Bobbymcferrin.com. http://www.bobbymcferrin.com/dont_worry.php. Retrieved 2010-08-29.
- ^ "Cobra Starship's 'You Make Me Feel ...' On the set of the new clip, Gabe Saporta explains how a magic photo booth tells a universal story.". MTV.com. http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1666505/cobra-starship-you-make-me-feel-video.jhtml. Retrieved 2011-06-28.
- "Road Trip with Robin"
- "Robin Williams mimic ends 'fraud'" (BBC News)
- "Robin Williams' impersonator stopped" (AskMen.com)
- "Robin Williams Enters Rehab", August 9, 2006 (Access Hollywood)
- Lovece, Frank, New York Newsday (April 27, 2006)
Bibliography[link]
- Jay David (1999). The Life and Humor of Robin Williams: A Biography. New York: Quill. ISBN 978-0-688-15245-1.
- Andy Dougan (1999). Robin Williams: A Biography. Thunder's Mouth Press. ISBN 978-1-56025-213-9.
- Stephen J. Spignesi (1997). The Robin Williams Scrapbook. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Pub.. ISBN 978-0-8065-1891-6.
External links[link]
|
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Robin Williams |
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Robin Williams |
- Robin Williams – official website
- Robin Williams at the Internet Broadway Database
- Robin Williams at the Internet Movie Database
- Robin Williams at the TCM Movie Database
- Robin Williams at Yahoo! Movies
|
||||||||
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Williams, Robin |
| Alternative names | Williams, Robin McLaurin |
| Short description | Academy Award-winning American actor and comedian |
| Date of birth | 1951-7-21 |
| Place of birth | Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
http://wn.com/Robin_Williams
Related pages:
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"Black man" redirects here. For the novel, see Black Man.
| Race |
|---|
| Classification |
| Genetics |
| Group differences |
| Social |
| Related |
The term black people is used in some socially-based systems of racial classification for humans of a dark-skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups represented in a particular social context. Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class and socio-economic status also play a role, so that relatively dark-skinned people can be classified as white if they fulfill other social criteria of "whiteness" and relatively light-skinned people can be classified as black if they fulfill the social criteria for "blackness" in a particular setting.[1]
As a biological phenotype being "black" is often associated with the very dark skin colors of some people who are classified as "black". But, particularly in the United States, the racial or ethnic classification also refers to people with all possible kinds of skin pigmentation from the darkest through to the very lightest skin colors, including albinos, if they are believed by others to have African ancestry, or to exhibit cultural traits associated with being "African-American". As a result, in the United States the term "black people" is not an indicator of skin color but of socially based racial classification.[2]
Some definitions of the term include only people of relatively recent Sub-Saharan African descent (see African diaspora). Among the members of this group, dark skin is most often accompanied by the expression of natural afro-hair texture. Other definitions of the term "black people" extend to other populations characterized by dark skin, sometimes including people indigenous to Oceania.[3][4]
Contents |
Physiological traits[link]
Dark skin[link]
Further information: Human skin color
The evolution of dark skin is linked intrinsically to the loss of body hair in humans. By 1.2 million years ago, all people having descendants today had the same receptor protein of today's Africans; their skin was dark, and the intense sun lowered the chance of survival of those with lighter skin that resulted from mutational variation in the receptor protein.[5] This is significantly earlier than the speciation of Homo sapiens from Homo erectus some 250,000 years ago.
Skin cancer as a result of ultraviolet light radiation causing mutations in the skin is less common among people with dark skin than it is among those with light skin.[6][7] Dark skin prevents an essential B vitamin, folate, from being destroyed. In the absence of modern medicine and diet, a person with dark skin in the tropics would live longer, be healthier and more likely to reproduce than a person with light skin. As evidence of this expectation of adverse effects of light skin in the tropics, White South Africans [8] and white Australians have some of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world.[9]
Conversely, as dark skin prevents sunlight from penetrating the skin, it hinders the production of vitamin D3. When humans migrated to less sun-intensive regions in the north, low vitamin D3 levels became a problem, and humans with lighter skin were more successful in reproducing. White people of Europe, who have low levels of melanin, naturally have an almost colorless skin pigmentation, especially when untanned. This low level of pigmentation allows the blood vessels to become visible, which gives the characteristic pale pink color of white people. The loss of melanin in white people is thought to have been caused by a mutation in one letter out of 3.1 billion letters of DNA.[10]
The genetic mutations leading to light skin, though different among East Asians and Europeans,[11] suggest the two groups experienced a similar selective pressure due to settlement in northern latitudes.[12]
Black skin pigmentation has been linked to a number of other properties, including tactile characteristics, and slower and less pronounced development of wrinkles.[13]
Hair[link]
Main article: Afro-textured hair
The texture of hair in people of Sub-Saharan African ancestry is noticeably different from that of European and Asian populations. Herodotus described the peoples of Libya (the "western Ethiopians") as woolly-haired.
Such "afro-hair" texture is denser than its straight counterparts. Due to this, it is often referred to as "coily", "thick", "nappy", "bushy", or "woolly". For several reasons, possibly including its relatively flat cross section (among other factors[14]), this hair type conveys a dry or matte appearance.[15][16] Its unique shape renders it prone to breakage when combed or brushed.[16]
The specific characteristics of the natural afro-hair form are unique among all mammals.[clarification needed][dubious – discuss][17] The texture likely predates the evolution of dark skin. It evolved when, as pre-human australopithecines lost most of their fur to enable perspiration, the need to protect the newly exposed pale skin underneath this body hair was crucial (see[18] in light of Rogers and others., 2004 and Harding and others., 2000). The trait ceased to be essential to survival at the equator upon the evolution of hairless dark skin. Yet it has continued to be expressed vestigially among most Melanesians, Andaman Islanders, and sub-Saharan Africans.
Sub-Saharan Africa[link]
Further information: Demographics of Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa is a common, if imprecise term that encompasses African countries located south of the Sahara Desert. It is commonly used to differentiate the region culturally, ecologically, politically and, more controversially, racially, from North Africa, which has historically been considered part of the Mediterranean sphere and whose residents are primarily of Arab ethnicity.
Because the indigenous people of this region are primarily dark-skinned, it is alternatively called "Black Africa".[19] However the terminology Black Africa and Sub-Sahara Africa is considered by some as a pejorative term and a vestige of colonialism, which divided Africa into European terms of homogeneity.[20] Some criticize the use of the term, because, as it has become in many quarters synonymous with Black Africa, people may not realize that there are also indigenous black populations in North Africa. In addition, the Sahara cuts across countries such as Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Chad, leaving some parts of them in North Africa and some in sub-Saharan Africa.
Some black Africans prefer to be culturally distinguished from those who live in the north of the continent.[21]
Cultural ideas of a black race[link]
South Africa[link]
In South Africa during the apartheid era, the population was classified into four main racial groups: Black, White, Asian (mostly Indian), and Coloured. The Coloured group included people of mixed Bantu, Khoisan, and European descent (with some Malay ancestry, especially in the Western Cape). The Coloured definition occupied an intermediary position between the Black and White definitions in South Africa.
The apartheid bureaucracy devised complex (and often arbitrary) criteria in the Population Registration Act to determine who belonged in which group. Minor officials administered tests to enforce the classifications. When it was unclear from a person's physical appearance whether a person was to be considered Colored or Black, the "pencil test" was employed. This involved inserting a pencil in a person's hair to determine if the hair was kinky enough for the pencil to get stuck.[22]
During the apartheid era, those classed as "Coloured" were oppressed and discriminated against. But, they had limited rights and overall had slightly better socioeconomic conditions than those classed as "Black".
In the post-apartheid era, the ANC government's laws in support of their affirmative action policies define "Black" people to include "Africans", "Coloureds" and "Asians". Their affirmative action policies have also favored "Africans" over "Coloureds". Some South Africans categorized as "African Black" openly state that "Coloureds" did not suffer as much as they did during apartheid. The popular saying by "Coloured" South Africans to illustrate their dilemma is:
We were not white enough under apartheid, and we are not black enough under the ANC (African National Congress)
In 2008, the High Court in South Africa ruled that Chinese South Africans who were residents during the apartheid era (and their descendents) are to be reclassified as "Black people" solely for the purposes of accessing affirmative action benefits, because they were also "disadvantaged" by racial discrimination. Chinese people who arrived in the country after the end of apartheid do not qualify.[23]
Other than by appearance, "Coloureds" can usually be distinguished from "Blacks" by language. Most speak Afrikaans or English as a first language, as opposed to Bantu languages such as Zulu or Xhosa. They also tend to have more European-sounding names than Bantu names.[24]
In the Middle East[link]
Near East and North Africa[link]
See also: Afro-Arab
Black African and Near Eastern peoples have interacted since prehistoric times.[25][26] Some historians estimate that as many as 14 million black slaves were transported across the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara Desert in the Arab slave trade from 650 to 1900 CE.[27][28] The Moroccan Sultan Moulay Ismail "the Bloodthirsty" (1672–1727) raised a corps of 150,000 black slaves, called his Black Guard, who coerced the country into submission.[29][30]
In more recent times, about 1000 CE, interactions between black people and Arabs resulted in the incorporation of extensive Arabic vocabulary into Swahili, which became a useful lingua franca for merchants. Some of this linguistic exchange occurred as part of the slave trade; the history of Islam and slavery shows that the major juristic schools traditionally accepted the institution of slavery.[32] As a result, Arab influence spread along the east coast of Africa and to some extent into the interior (see Swahili people). Timbuktu was a trading outpost that linked West Africa with Berber, Arab, and Jewish traders throughout the Arab World. As a result of these interactions, some female-mediated gene flow into the Middle East from Sub-Saharan Africa can be observed in certain populations.[33]
According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's University of the state of Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. He claims that black-looking Arabs, much like black-looking Latin Americans, consider themselves white because they have some distant white ancestry.[34]
Moore also claims that a film about Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had to be canceled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. In fact, the 1983 television movie Sadat, starring Louis Gossett, Jr., was not canceled. The Egyptian government refused to let the drama air in Egypt, partially on the grounds of the casting of Gossett.[35]
Sadat's mother was a dark-skinned Sudanese woman and his father was a lighter-skinned Egyptian. In response to an advertisement for an acting position he remarked, "I am not white but I am not exactly black either. My blackness is tending to reddish".[36]
Fathia Nkrumah was another Egyptian with ties to Black Africa. She was the late wife of Ghanaian revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah, whose marriage was seen as helping plant the seeds of cooperation between Egypt and other African countries as they struggled for independence from European colonization. This helped advance the formation of the African Union.[37]
Because of the patriarchal nature of Arab society, Arab men enslaved more black women than men, and used more black female slaves than males. The men interpreted the Qur'an to permit sexual relations between a male master and his female slave outside of marriage,[38][39] leading to many mixed-race children. When an enslaved woman became pregnant with her Arab master's child, she became umm walad or “mother of a child”, a status that granted her privileged rights. The child was allowed to prosper from the wealth of the father and was given rights of inheritance.[40] Because the society was patrilineal, the children took their fathers' status at birth and were born free. Some succeeded their fathers as rulers, as was the case with Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur, who ruled Morocco from 1578 to 1608. His mother was a Fulani concubine of his father.
Such tolerance, however, was not extended to wholly black persons, even when technically "free." Arabs commonly believed that blacks were slaves.[41] The term "abd", (Arabic: عبد,) "slave," remains a common term for black people in the Middle East, and, depending on the context, usually though not always derogatory.[42]
Turkey[link]
See also: Afro-Turks
Beginning several centuries ago, a number of sub-Saharan Africans were brought by slave traders during the Ottoman Empire to plantations between Antalya and Istanbul in modern-day Turkey.[43] Some of their descendants remain, mixed with the rest of the population in these areas, and many migrated to larger cities. Some came from the island of Crete following the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923.[44]
Israel[link]
About 150,000 black people live in Israel, amounting to just over 2% of the nation's population. The vast majority of these, some 120,000, are Beta Israel,[45] most of whom came during the 1980s and 1990s from Ethiopia.[46] In addition, Israel is home to over 5,000 members of the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem movement, who reside mainly in a distinct neighborhood in the Negev town of Dimona. Unknown numbers of black converts to Judaism reside in Israel, most of them converts from the UK, Canada, and the United States. Thousands of mixed-race individuals with non-black Jewish relatives also live in Israel.
In the Americas[link]
See also: Afro-American peoples of the Americas
Approximately 12 million Africans were shipped to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade from 1492 to 1888. Today their descendants number approximately 150 million,[47] most of whom live in the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America. Most notably Brazil has the largest population in the world, aside from Nigeria, of individuals of at least partial African descent. Many have a multiracial background of African, Amerindian, European and Asian ancestry. The various regions developed complex social conventions with which their multi-ethnic populations were classified.
United States[link]
Main article: African American
In the first 200 years that black people were in the United States, they commonly referred to themselves as Africans. In Africa, people primarily identified themselves by ethnic group (closely allied to language) and not by skin color. Individuals would be Ashanti, Igbo, Bakongo or Wolof. But when Africans were brought to the Americas, they were forced to give up their ethnic affiliations when they were combined with other groups from Africa. In areas of the Upper South, different ethnic groups were brought together. This is significant as Africans came from a vast geographic region, the West African coastline stretching from Senegal to Angola and in some cases from the south east coast such as Mozambique. A new identity and culture was born that incorporated elements of the various ethnic groups and of European cultural heritage, resulting in fusions such as the Black church and Black English. This new identity was based on African ancestry and slave status rather than any one ethnic group.[48]
In March 1807, Britain, which largely controlled the Atlantic, declared the trans-atlantic slave trade illegal, as did the United States. (The latter prohibition took effect January 1, 1808, the earliest date on which Congress had the power to do so under Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution.)
By that time, the majority of black people were U.S.-born, so use of the term "African" became problematic. Though initially a source of pride, many blacks feared the use of African as an identity would be a hindrance to their fight for full citizenship in the US. They also felt that it would give ammunition to those who were advocating repatriating black people back to Africa. In 1835 black leaders called upon black Americans to remove the title of "African" from their institutions and replace it with "Negro" or "Colored American". A few institutions chose to keep their historic names, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church. "Negro" and "colored" remained the popular terms until the late 1960s.[49]
The term black was used throughout but not frequently as it carried a certain stigma. In his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech,[50] Martin Luther King, Jr. uses the terms negro fifteen times and black four times. Each time he uses black it is in parallel construction with white, for example, "black men and white men".[51]
With the successes of the civil rights movement, a new term was needed to break from the past and help shed the reminders of legalized discrimination. In place of Negro, activists promoted the use of black as standing for racial pride, militancy and power. Some of the turning points included the use of the term "Black Power" by Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael) and the release of James Brown's song "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud".
In 1988 Jesse Jackson urged Americans to use the term African American because the term has a historical cultural base. Since then African-American and black have essentially a coequal status. Controversy continues over which term is more appropriate. Some such as Maulana Karenga and Owen Alik Shahadah argue African-American is more appropriate because it accurately articulates geography and historical origin.[48] Others have argued that "black" is a better term because "African" suggests foreignness, despite the long presence of black people in the US.[52] Still others believe the term black is inaccurate because African Americans have a variety of skin tones.[citation needed] Surveys show that the majority of black Americans have no preference for "African American" or "Black,"[53] although they have a slight preference for "black" in personal settings and "African-American" in more formal settings.[54] Increases in the number of immigrants to the United States from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America have brought up questions about who uses the term African-American. The more recent African immigrants may sometimes view themselves, and be viewed, as culturally distinct from native-born people who are descendants of African slaves.[55]
The U.S. census race definitions says a black is a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as "Black, African Am., or Negro," or who provide written entries such as African-American, Afro-American, Kenyan, Nigerian, or Haitian. However, the Census Bureau notes that these classifications are socio-political constructs and should not be interpreted as scientific or anthropological.[56]
A considerable portion of the U.S. population identified as black also has some Native American or European ancestry. For instance, genetic studies of African-American people show an ancestry that is on average 17–18% European.[57]
One-drop rule[link]
Since the late nineteenth century, the South used a colloquial term, the one-drop rule, to classify as black a person of any known African ancestry. This practice of hypodescent was not put into law until the early twentieth century.[58] Legally the definition varied from state to state, and was more flexible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before the American Civil War. For instance, Thomas Jefferson held persons who were legally white (less than 25% Black) according to Virginia law at the time, but, because they were born to slave mothers, they were born into slavery, according to the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, which Virginia adopted into law in 1662.
Outside of the US, some other countries have adopted the one-drop rule, but the definition of who is black and the extent to which the one-drop "rule" applies varies greatly from country to country.
The one-drop rule may have originated as a means of increasing the number of black slaves[59] and been maintained as an attempt to keep the white race pure.[60] One of the results of the one-drop rule was uniting the African-American community.[58] Some of the most prominent civil-rights activists were multiracial, and advocated equality for all.[citation needed]
Blackness[link]
The concept of blackness in the United States has been described[by whom?] as the degree to which one associates themselves with mainstream African-American culture and values. To a certain extent, this concept is not so much about race but more about culture and behavior. Blackness can be contrasted with "acting white," where black Americans are said to behave with assumed characteristics of stereotypical white Americans, with regard to fashion, dialect, taste in music,[64] and possibly, from the perspective of a significant number of black youth, academic achievement.[65]
The notion of blackness can also be extended to non-black people. Toni Morrison once described Bill Clinton as the first black president,[66] because of his warm relations with African Americans, his poor upbringing and also because he is a jazz musician. Christopher Hitchens was offended by the notion of Clinton as the first black president noting "we can still define blackness by the following symptoms: alcoholic mothers, under-the-bridge habits...the tendency to sexual predation and shameless perjury about the same". Some black activists were also offended, claiming Clinton used his knowledge of black culture to exploit black people like no other president before[67] for political gain, while not serving black interests. They note his lack of action during the Rwanda genocide[68] and his welfare reform which some claim led to the worst child poverty since the 1960s[69] along with the fact that the number of black people in jail increased during his administration.[70]
The question of blackness also arose in Democrat Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Commentators have questioned whether Obama, who was elected the first black President of the United States, is black enough, as his mother was white American, and his father was a black Kenyan immigrant.[61][63] Obama refers to himself interchangeably as black and African-American.[71] "Is Barack Obama the first black President of the United States?"[72]
Brazil[link]
Main article: Race in Brazil
The topic of race in Brazil is a complex and diverse one.[citation needed] A Brazilian child was never automatically identified with the racial type of one or both parents, nor were there only two categories to choose from. Between a pure black and a very light mulatto over a dozen racial categories would be recognized in conformity with the combinations of hair color, hair texture, eye color, and skin color. These types grade into each other like the colors of the spectrum, and no one category stands significantly isolated from the rest. That is, race referred to appearance, not heredity.[73]
There is some disagreement among scholars over the effects of social status on racial classifications in Brazil. It is generally believed that upward mobility and education results in reclassification of individuals into lighter skinned categories. The popular claim is that in Brazil poor whites are considered black and wealthy blacks are considered white. Some scholars disagree arguing that whitening of one's social status may be open to people of mixed race, but a typically black person will consistently be identified as black regardless of wealth or social status.[74][75] Multiracial persons can even reappreciate their African heritage and start to declare themselves as black persons with increasings of social status and education.
Statistics[link]
| Brazilian Population, by Race, from 1872 to 1991 (Census Data)[76] | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ethnic group | White | Black | Brown | Yellow (Asian) | Undeclared | Total | ||||
| 1872 | 3,787,289 | 1,954,452 | 4,188,737 | - | - | 9,930,478 | ||||
| 1940 | 26,171,778 | 6,035,869 | 8,744,365 | 242,320 | 41,983 | 41,236,315 | ||||
| 1991 | 75,704,927 | 7,335,136 | 62,316,064 | 630,656 | 534,878 | 146,521,661 | ||||
| Year | White | Pardo | Black |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1835 | 24.4% | 18.2% | 51.4% |
| 2000 | 53.7% | 38.5% | 6.2% |
| 2010 | 48.4% | 42.4% | 6.7% |
From the year 1500 to 1850 an estimated 3.5 million Africans were forcibly shipped to Brazil.[74] It is estimated that more than half of the Brazilian population is at least in part descendants of these Africans. Brazil has the largest population of Afro-descendants outside of Africa. In contrast to the US there were no segregation or anti-miscegenation laws in Brazil and as a result intermarriage has affected a large majority of the Brazilian population. Even much of the white/Asian population has either African or Amerindian blood. According to the last census of the twentieth century 54% identified themselves as white, 6.2% identified themselves as black and 39.5% identified themselves as Pardo (brown) — a broad multiracial category.[77]
A philosophy of whitening emerged in Brazil in the nineteenth century. Until recently the government did not keep data on race. However, statisticians estimate that in 1835 half the population was black, one fifth was Pardo (brown) and one fourth white. By 2000 the black population had fallen to only 6.2% and the Pardo had increased to 40% and white to 55%. Essentially most of the black population was absorbed into the multiracial category by intermixing.[73] A recent study found that at least 29% of the middle class white Brazilian population had some recent African ancestry.[78]
Race relations in Brazil[link]
Because of the ideology of miscegenation, Brazil has avoided the polarization of society into black and white. The bitter and sometimes violent racial tensions that divide the US are notably absent in Brazil. According to the census, 6.7% of Brazilians said they were black, compared with 6.2% in 2000, and 43.1% said they were mixed race, up from 38.5%. According to Brazil's minister for racial equality, Elio Ferreira de Araujo, attributed the change to growing pride among his country's black and indigenous communities.[79]
However, the philosophy of the racial democracy in Brazil has drawn criticism from some quarters. Brazil has one of the largest gaps in income distribution in the world. The richest 10% of the population earn 28 times the average income of the bottom 40%. The richest 10 percent is almost exclusively white. One-third of the population lives under the poverty line, with blacks and other non-whites accounting for 70 percent of the poor.[80]
In the US, black people earn 75% of what white people earn.[81] In Brazil, non-whites earn less than 50% of what whites earn. Some have posited that Brazil does in fact practice the one-drop rule when social economic factors are considered. This is because the gap in income between blacks and other non-whites is relatively small compared to the large gap between whites and non-whites. Other factors such as illiteracy and education level show the same patterns.[82] Unlike in the US where African Americans were united in the civil-rights struggle, in Brazil the philosophy of whitening has helped divide blacks from other non-whites and prevented a more active civil rights movement.
Though Brazilians of African heritage make up a large percentage [83] the population there are very few black politicians. The city of Salvador, Bahia, for instance, is 80% Afro-Brazilian but has never had a black mayor. Critics indicate that US cities that have a black majority, such as Detroit and New Orleans, have never had white mayors since first electing black mayors in the 1970s.[79][84]
Non-white people also have limited media visibility. The Latin American media, in particular the Brazilian media, has been accused of hiding its Black, Indigenous, Multiracial and East Asian population. For example the telenovelas or soaps are said to be a hotbed of largely light-eyed white and light-skinned mulattoes and mestizos (often deemed as white persons in Brazil if achieving the middle class or higher social status) actors. Most rare empowered persons of color represented in Latin American media possess typically Caucasian features due to a mix of racist standards of beauty, colourism and lookism. Nevertheless, in the last years, the number of empowered afrodescendants (either economically or by other ways) increased in Brazilian media coverage. Despite Brazil also possessing criminal black man stereotypes, it is considered a huge prejudice and mostly not used in a disordered way by the media, in spite of sometimes common "humouristic" sexist jokes and LGBT stereotyping [85] and as such lack of politically correctness in native race issues is not a major problem (there are way more stereotypes of Asian people, Europeans or U.S. Americans, for example).
These patterns of discrimination against non-whites have led some to advocate for the use of the Portuguese term 'negro' to encompass non-whites so as to renew a black consciousness and identity, in effect an African descent rule.[86] It generates criticism since Pardo, or Brown people, is intended to include caboclos (mestizos), assimilated Amerindians and tri-racials, not only afrodescendants — thus Brazilian of some or no recent African descent, as most White Brazilians, become 60–70% of the population, breaking the argument of possible Brazilian one-drop rule since real noticeable mulattoes, cafuzos (zambos) and black persons are a minority and the Brazilian poor represents larger percents in Brazil. As one would expect from an underdeveloped country, there are pockets of poverty in White-majority and Japanese Brazilian-majority areas, rarer in urban developments but common in rural areas. They are even more common among Mestizo-majority areas, and Amerindian communities.
In Asia and Australasia[link]
File:BillyBlue.jpg
Billy Blue, Jamaican-born convict sent to Australia, where he became a popular member of the community, many streets, landmarks, hotels and businesses in North Sydney having been named in his honour.
China[link]
As of August, 2008, The Migration Information Source article noted that "A Nigerian Embassy spokesman estimated that Nigerians possibly make up the largest group of Black Africans in China, with about 2,000 to 3,000 Nigerians in Guangdong in 2006. Most businessmen only stay temporarily."[87][88]
India and Southeast Asia[link]
See also: Indo-African (disambiguation)
The Great Andamanese are one of five Negrito ethnic groups (Adivasi or tribal) native to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands; they are among the first inhabitants of what is now India, arriving over 70,000 years ago. They are facing extinction.[89] The other four ethnic groups are the Jangil, Jarawa, Onge and Sentinelese. By their external physical appearance (phenotype) such people resemble Black Africans with dark skin and sometimes tightly coiled hair. There have been suggestions of a Black African origin. However, in the case of the Andamanese people, a study conducted by the NCBI indicated that the Andamanese people possessed closer affinities with the Southeast Asian population than with the Black African population.[90]
In South India there are also several communities of Black African descent, such as the Sheedis/Siddis, specifically the Siddis of Karnataka, who descend from Black African slaves. In Pakistan, these descendants are known as the Makrani.
Other black people of Southeast Asia, collectively known as Negritos, include the Semang peoples of Malaysia, the Mani of Thailand the Aeta of Luzon and the Ati of Panay in the Philippines.[91]
Melanesia[link]
There are several groups of dark-skinned people who live in various parts of Asia, Australia and Oceania who sometimes are referred to as black people. They include the Indigenous Australians, the Melanesians (now divided into Austronesian-speaking populations and Papuans, and including the great genetic diversity of New Guinea), the Semang people of the Malay peninsula, and indigenous first nation Fijians. They are as genetically, anthropologically and culturally related to Africans only as much as all other non-Africans are related to Africans, and because of this it has been deemed controversial to label them black people in the sense of some relation to the native African peoples and the African diaspora that is not similarly present in other Asian, Oceanic or European populations.
In Europe[link]
Main article: Black people in Europe
United Kingdom[link]
Main article: Black British
According to the Office for National Statistics, as of the 2001 census, there are over a million black people in the United Kingdom; 1% of the total population describe themselves as "Black Caribbean", 0.8% as "Black African", and 0.2% as "Black other".[92] Britain encouraged the immigration of workers from the Caribbean after World War II; the first symbolic movement was those who came on the ship the Empire Windrush. The preferred official umbrella term is "black and minority ethnic" (BME), but sometimes the term "black" is used on its own, to express unified opposition to racism, as in the Southall Black Sisters, which started with a mainly British Asian constituency, and the National Black Police Association, which has a membership of "African, African-Caribbean and Asian origin".[93]
France[link]
Main article: Afro-French
While census collection of ethnic background is illegal in France, it is estimated that there are about 2.5 – 5 million black people residing there.[94][95]
Balkans[link]
Due to the Ottoman slave trade that had flourished in the Balkans, the coastal town of Ulcinj in Montenegro had its own black community.[96] As a consequence of the slave trade and privateer activity, a considerable number of Ulcinj inhabitants until 1878 were black.[97] The Ottoman Army also sent an estimated 30,000 Black African troops and cavalrymen to its expedition in Hungary during the Austro-Turkish War of 1716–18.[98]
Eastern Europe[link]
See also: Afro-Russian
As African states became independent in the 1960s, the Soviet Union offered many of their citizens the chance to study in Russia. Over a period of 40 years, about 400,000 African students from various countries moved to Russia to pursue higher studies, including many Black Africans.[99][100] This extended beyond the Soviet Union to many countries of the Eastern bloc.
A cultural classification of people as "black" exists in Russia. Certain groups of people who are ethnically different, and generally darker than ethnic Russians are pejoratively referred to as "blacks" (chernye), and face specific sorts of social exclusion (see Racism in Russia). Roma, Georgians, and Tatars fall into this category.[101] Those referred to as "black" are from the former Soviet republics, predominantly peoples of the Caucasus, for example, Chechens.[102] Although "Caucasian" is used in American English to mean "white people", in Russian – and most other varieties of English – it only refers to the Caucasus, not European people in general.
See also[link]
Footnotes[link]
- ^ McPherson, Lionel K; Shelby, Tommie (2008). Blackness and Blood: Interpreting African American Identity. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. p. 179. http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Journal_Samples/PAPA0048-3915~32~2~10%5C010.pdf.
- ^ Glenn, Evelyn Nakano (2009). Shades of difference: why skin color matters. Stanford University Press. p. 225. ISBN 978-0-8047-5998-4. http://books.google.ca/books?id=WewhspE2Q9UC&lpg=PR1&dq=Shades%20of%20difference%3A%20why%20skin%20color%20matters&pg=PA225#v=onepage&q&f=true
- ^ Various isolated populations in Southeast Asia sometimes classified as black include the Austronesians and Papuans, the Andamanese islanders, the Semang people of the Malay peninsula, the Aeta people of Luzon, and some other small populations of indigenous peoples.
- ^ black. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Retrieved April 13, 2007, from Dictionary.com website
- ^ Rogers, Alan R.; Iltis, David; Wooding, Stephen (February 2004). "Genetic variation at the MC1R locus and the time since loss of human body hair". Current Anthropology (The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research) 45 (1): 105–8. DOI:10.1086/381006. OCLC 193553649. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/381006. Retrieved 2008-07-22.
- ^ Nouri, Keyvan (2007). Skin Cancer. McGraw-Hill Professional. p. 32. ISBN 0-07-147256-8. http://books.google.com/?id=TlhFQYziim8C&pg=PA32.
- ^ Edlin, Gordon; Golanty, Eric (312). Health and Wellness. Jones & Bartlett Learning. ISBN 0-7637-6593-7. http://books.google.com/?id=Ki_fbxDZsHcC&pg=PA312.
- ^ "Contribution to Skin Cancer Prevention in South Africa: Modelling the UV Index Utilizing Imprecise Data". http://www.ehrn.co.za/sunsmart/download/15.pdf.
- ^ "Australia Struggles with Skin Cancer". http://www.cancer.org/docroot/NWS/content/NWS_1_1x_Australia_Struggles_with_Skin_Cancer.asp.
- ^ "Scientists find DNA change accounting for white skin". Washington Post.
- ^ Norton, H. L.; Kittles, R. A.; Parra, E.; McKeigue, P.; Mao, X.; Cheng, K.; Canfield, V. A.; Bradley, D. G. et al. (2006). "Genetic Evidence for the Convergent Evolution of Light Skin in Europeans and East Asians". Molecular Biology and Evolution 24 (3): 710–22. doi:10.1093/molbev/msl203. PMID 17182896.
- ^ Juzeniene, Asta; Setlow, Richard; Porojnicu, Alina; Steindal, Arnfinn Hykkerud; Moan, Johan (2009). "Development of different human skin colors: A review highlighting photobiological and photobiophysical aspects". Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B: Biology 96 (2): 93–100. doi:10.1016/j.jphotobiol.2009.04.009. PMID 19481954.
- ^ William Montagna, Giuseppe Prota, John A. Kenney Jr. (1993). Black skin: structure and function. Academic Press. p. xii. ISBN 0-12-505260-X. http://books.google.ca/books?id=BpL8V2YJkQ4C&pg=PR12.
- ^ Franbourg et al. "Influence of Ethnic Origin of Hair on Water-Keratin Interaction" In Ethnic Skin and Hair E. Berardesca, J. Leveque, and H. Maibach (Eds.). page 101. Informa Healthcare. 2007
- ^ Nick Arrojo, Jenny Acheson, Great Hair: Secrets to Looking Fabulous and Feeling Beautiful Every Day, (St. Martin's Press: 2008), p.184
- ^ a b Dale H. Johnson, Hair and hair care, (CRC Press: 1997), p.237
- ^ Ethnic Skin and Hair E. Berardesca, J. Leveque, and H. Maibach (eds.). Informa Healthcare. 2007
- ^ Iyengar, B. "The hair follicle is a specialized UV receptor in human skin?" Bio Signals Recep, 7(3), pages 188–194. 1998[not in citation given]
- ^ Keita, Lansana (2004). "Race, Identity and Africanity: A Reply to Eboussi Boulaga". CODESRIA Bulletin (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa) 1 & 2: 16.
- ^ http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/language%20new%20reality.htm Language African Reality
- ^ Keith B., Richburg (Reprint edition (July 1, 1998)). Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. Harvest/HBJ Book. ISBN 0-15-600583-2.
- ^ Nullis, Clare (2007). "Township tourism booming in South Africa". The Associated Press. http://www.canada.com/topics/travel/features/story.html?id=59ec6285-c9fb-41ab-93f9-419f62733f07&k=67896.
- ^ "We agree that you are black, South African court tells Chinese", The Times
- ^ du Preez, Max (2006-04-13). "Coloureds – the most authentic SA citizens". The Star. http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3201857.
- ^ "Mauritania: Fair elections haunted by racial imbalance"
- ^ Remembering East African slave raids
- ^ "The Unknown Slavery: In the Muslim world, that is – and it's not over"
- ^ Welcome to Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to Black History
- ^ Lewis. Race and Slavery in the Middle East. Oxford University Press 1994.
- ^ ʿAbīd al-Bukhārī (Moroccan military organization). Encyclopædia Britannica.
- ^ "Slaves in Saudi". Naeem Mohaiemen. The Daily Star, 27 July 2004.
- ^ Lewis 1994, Ch.1
- ^ "Extensive Female-Mediated Gene Flow from Sub-Saharan Africa into Near Eastern Arab Populations", National Institutes of Health
- ^ Musselman, Anson. "The Subtle Racism of Latin America". UCLA International Institute. http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4125.
- ^ Louis Gosset Jr. Hollywood.com
- ^ Joseph Finklestone, Anwar Sadat: Visionary Who Dared, pages 5–7,31 ISBN 0-7146-3487-5
- ^ African Union Summit
- ^ See Tahfeem ul Qur'an by Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, Vol. 2 pp. 112–113 footnote 44; Also see commentary on verses [Quran 23:1]: Vol. 3, notes 7–1, p. 241; 2000, Islamic Publications
- ^ Tafsir ibn Kathir 4:24
- ^ "Slavery in Arabia". "Owen 'Alik Shahadah". http://www.arabslavetrade.com.
- ^ Hunwick, John. "Arab Views of Black Africans and Slavery" (PDF). http://www.yale.edu/glc/events/race/Hunwick.pdf.
- ^ Labbé, Theola; Omar Fekeiki (2004-01-11). "A Legacy Hidden in Plain Sight". Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A6645-2004Jan10. Retrieved 2008-01-29.
- ^ Ayvalık’ın renkli derneği, retrieved 28 August 2008
- ^ "Turks with African ancestors want their existence to be felt", Today's Zaman, 11 May 2008, Sunday, retrieved 28 August 2008]
- ^ "The Ethiopian Population In Israel", Reuters. July 16, 2009.
- ^ "Why Jews see racism in Israel", Christian Science Monitor, September 1, 2009.
- ^ "Community Outreach" Seminar on Planning Process for SANTIAGO +5 , Global Afro-Latino and Caribbean Initiative, February 4, 2006
- ^ a b Shahadah, Owen 'Alik. "Linguistics for a new African reality". http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/language%20new%20reality.htm.
- ^ African American Journeys to Africa page63-64
- ^ Martin Luther King, Jr. (August 28, 1963). I Have a Dream (Google Video). Washington, D.C.. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1732754907698549493. [dead link]
- ^ Smith, Tom W. (Winter, 1992). "Changing Racial Labels: From "Colored" to "Negro" to "Black" to "African American"" (PDF). The Public Opinion Quarterly (Oxford University Press) 56 (4): 496–514. DOI:10.1086/269339. OCLC 192150485. http://www.soc.iastate.edu/soc522a/PDF%20readings/Smith.pdf.
- ^ McWhorter, John H. (8 September 2004). "Why I'm Black, Not African American". Los Angeles Times. http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_latimes-why_im_black.htm. Retrieved 26 September 2010.
- ^ Newport, Frank (28 September 2007). "Black or African American?". Gallup. http://www.gallup.com/poll/28816/black-african-american.aspx. Retrieved 26 September 2010.
- ^ Miller, Pepper; Kemp, Herb (2006). What's Black About? Insights to Increase Your Share of a Changing African-American Market. Paramount Market Publishing, Inc. p. 8. ISBN 0-9725290-9-8. OCLC 61694280. http://books.google.com/books?id=1OzZr_U2x_wC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA8#v=onepage&q&f=false.
- ^ Swarns, Rachel L. (2004-08-29). "'African American' Becomes a Term for Debate". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE5DB1F3EF93AA1575BC0A9629C8B63. Retrieved 2008-07-22.
- ^ 2000 US Census basics
- ^ How White Are Blacks? How Black Are Whites? by Steve Sailer
- ^ a b James, F. Davis. "Who is Black? One Nation's Definition". PBS. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/mixed/onedrop.html.
- ^ Clarence Page, A Credit to His Races, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, May 1, 1997.
- ^ Sweet, Frank (2006-04-01). "Presenting the Triumph of the One-Drop Rule". The One-Drop Rule. http://backintyme.com/essays/?p=25. Retrieved 2008-07-22.
- ^ a b "Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: "A More Perfect Union" (transcript)" (pdf). BBC News. 2008-03-18. pp. p2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/18_03_08_obama_speech.pdf. Retrieved 2008-06-27. "This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either "too black" or "not black enough." We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well." See also: video
- ^ Adesioye, Lola (2008-06-27). "Too black or not black enough, Obama just can't win". Comment is Free (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/27/barackobama.ralphnader?gusrc=rss&feed=commentisfree. Retrieved 2008-06-27.
- ^ a b Coates, Ta-Nehisi Paul (2007-02-01). "Is Obama Black Enough?". Time. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1584736,00.html. Retrieved 2008-06-27. "Barack Obama's real problem isn't that he's too white — it's that he's too black."
- ^ Edler, Melissa (Spring 2007). "Acting White". Kent State Magazine. http://www.kent.edu/Magazine/Spring2007/ActingWhite.cfm. Retrieved 2008-07-22.
- ^ Ogbu, J. "Black American students in an affluent suburb: a study of academic disengagement". Erlbaum Associates Press. Mahwah, NJ. 2003.
- ^ Hansen, Suzy (2002-02-20). "Blacks and Bill Clinton". Salon. http://dir.salon.com/story/books/int/2002/02/20/clinton/index.html. Retrieved 2008-07-22.
- ^ "Find Articles 404 File not found". http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_go1637/is_200204/ai_n6880693. [dead link]
- ^ Carroll, Rory (2004-03-31). "US chose to ignore Rwandan genocide". The Guardian (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/mar/31/usa.rwanda. Retrieved 2008-07-22.
- ^ Roberts, Larry (1999-06-02). "Clinton's welfare reform has increased child poverty". World Socialist Web Site. http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/jun1999/welf-j02.shtml. Retrieved 2008-07-22.
- ^ Gray, Kevin A. (2002-12-07). "Soul Brother? Clinton and Black Americans". Counterpunch. http://www.counterpunch.org/gray1207.html. Retrieved 2008-07-22.
- ^ Kroft, Steve (2007-02-11). "A Transcript Excerpt Of Steve Kroft’s Interview With Sen. Obama". CBS News. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/11/60minutes/main2458530.shtml. Retrieved 2008-07-22.
- ^ Swirski, Peter (2010). Ars Americana Ars Politica. McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 978-0-7735-3766-8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_Americana_Ars_Politica.
- ^ a b Skidmore, Thomas E. (April 1992). "Fact and Myth: Discovering a Racial Problem in Brazil" (PDF). Working Paper 173. http://www.nd.edu/~kellogg/publications/workingpapers/WPS/173.pdf.
- ^ a b Edward E., Telles (2004). Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. Princeton University Press. pp. 95–98. ISBN 0-691-11866-3.
- ^ Telles, Edward E. (3 May 2002). "Racial Ambiguity Among the Brazilian Population" (PDF). Ethnic and Racial Studies (California Center for Population Research) 25 (3): 415–441. DOI:10.1080/01419870252932133. http://www.ccpr.ucla.edu/ccprwpseries/ccpr_012_01.pdf.
- ^ http://www.ibge.gov.br/ibgeteen/povoamento/
- ^ "CIA World Factbook: Brazil". https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/br.html. [dead link]
- ^ Sex-biased gene flow in African Americans but not in American Caucasians
- ^ a b http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/25/brazil-2010-census-kalunga Guardian | Brazil's census offers recognition at last to descendants of runaway slaves
- ^ Barrolle, Melvin Kadiri. "African 'Americans' in Brazil". New America Media. http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=5b8d531de860940110af2433244782c6. Retrieved 2009-08-05.
- ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/17/brazil-census-african-brazilians-majority Guardian Newspaper | Brazil census shows African-Brazilians in the majority for the first time
- ^ Roland, Edna Maria Santos. "The Economics of Racism: People of African Descent in Brazil". http://www.falapreta.org.br/durban/racism.doc.
- ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/17/brazil-census-african-brazilians-majority Guardian | Brazil's census offers recognition at last to descendants of runaway slaves
- ^ Charles Whitaker, "Blacks in Brazil: The Myth and the Reality," Ebony, February 1991
- ^ (Portuguese) Vexing stereotypes in humouristic shows is homophobia, lawyer Maria Berenice says. Maria Berenice Dias "homoaffective" (LGBT) rights, Family Law and Succession lawyer blog, 2011.
- ^ Brazil Separates Into a World of Black and White, Los Angeles Times, September 3, 2006
- ^ China and Africa: Stronger Economic Ties Mean More Migration. By Malia Politzer. Migration Information Source. August 2008
- ^ Guangzhou "Chocolate City": Africans Seek Their Dreams in China. 18-Dec-2008.
- ^ Extinction threat for Andaman natives. BBC News. March 5, 2005.
- ^ Thangaraj, Kumarasamy; Singh, L; Reddy, AG; Rao, VR; Sehgal, SC; Underhill, PA; Pierson, M; Frame, IG et al. (2003-01-21). "Genetic Affinities of the Andaman Islanders, a Vanishing Human Population" (PDF). Current Biology 13 (2): 86–93. DOI:10.1016/S0960-9822(02)01336-2. OCLC 112009350. PMID 12546781. http://hpgl.stanford.edu/publications/CB_2002_p1-18.pdf. Retrieved 2009-08-05.
- ^ Chapter 6: The Negrito Race
- ^ National Statistics Online
- ^ NBPA Website The emphasis is on the common experience and determination of the people of African, African-Caribbean and Asian origin.
- ^ Europe's Minority Politicians in Short Supply. The Washington Post. April 24, 2005.
- ^ In officially colorblind France, blacks have a dream – and now a lobby. Csmonitor.com. January 12, 2007.
- ^ Yugoslavia – Montenegro and Kosovo – The Next Conflict?
- ^ ULCINJ – HISTORY
- ^ African Slave Trade in Russia, By Dieudonne Gnammankou in La Channe et le lien, Doudou Diene, (id.) Paris, Editions UNESCO, 1988
- ^ MediaRights: Film: Black Russians
- ^ Лили Голден и Лили Диксон. Телепроект "Черные русские": синопсис. Info on "Black Russians" film project in English
- ^ The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies After Socialism By Caroline Humphrey Cornell University 2002 p36–37
- ^ Lisa Taylor, Emergency—Explosion of State and Popular Racism follows Moscow Blasts, International Solidarity with Workers in Russia (ISWoR), 13 September 1999.
External links[link]
- two African American boys Clarence 'Grandpa' Liv and Alonzo 'Teddy' Tucker at the Wright Brothers bicycle shop, 1897(old-pictures.com database)
- Clarence Liv and Alonzo 'Teddy' Tucker at the Wright Cycle Company, photo taken by Wright Brothers 1897(old-pictures.com)
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This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
| Will Ferrell | |
|---|---|
 Ferrell in May 2009 |
|
| Born | John William Ferrell (1967-07-16) July 16, 1967 (age 44) Irvine, California, United States |
| Occupation | Comedian, impressionist, actor, writer |
| Years active | 1995–present |
| Spouse | Viveca Paulin (2000–present) |
John William "Will" Ferrell (/ˈfɛrəl/;[1] born July 16, 1967)[2] is an American comedian, impressionist, actor, and writer. Ferrell first established himself in the mid 1990s as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, and has subsequently starred in the comedy films Old School, Elf, Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Stranger than Fiction, Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro, and The Other Guys. He is considered a member of the "Frat Pack", a generation of leading Hollywood comic actors who emerged in the late 1990s and the 2000s, including Jack Black, Ben Stiller, Steve Carell, Vince Vaughn, and brothers Owen and Luke Wilson.
Contents |
Early life[link]
Ferrell was born in Irvine, California, the son of Betty Kay (née Overman), a teacher who taught at Old Mill School elementary school and Santa Ana College,[3] and Roy Lee Ferrell, Jr., a musician with The Righteous Brothers.[4] His parents were both natives of Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, and moved to California in 1964;[5][6] Ferrell has Irish ancestry.[7] Ferrell has a younger brother, Patrick.[8] When he was 8, his parents divorced. Ferrell said of the divorce, "I was the type of kid who would say, 'Hey Look at the bright side! We'll have two Christmases.'" The divorce was amicable and both parents were committed to their children. The biggest problem was Lee's line of work. As a person in show business, his paychecks were never steady and he was gone from home months at a time. Growing up in the environment made Ferrell not want to go into show business, but get a steady job.[8]
Will first attended school at Turtle Rock Elementary and later attended Rancho San Joaquin Middle School, both in Irvine. He attended University High School in Irvine, and was a kicker for the school's varsity football team.[9] He was also on the soccer team and captain of the basketball team, and served on student council. As a joke, he started the reptile club (even though he didn't know anyone who owned one), but the club only lasted for two meetings.[10]
Ferrell called third grade "a pivotal year". He realized he could make his classmates laugh if he pretended to smash his head against the wall, or if he tripped and fell on purpose, and said it was a great way to make friends.[11] He told the Orange County Register that the dullness of Irvine contributed to the growth of his humor:
Growing up in suburbia, in safe, master-planned Irvine, there was no drama so we had to create it in our heads. My main form of entertainment was cracking my friends up and exploring new ways of being funny. I didn't have to have the survival mode instinct like other comics, who grew up in tough neighborhoods. I had the opposite. For me, I grew up in Mayberry, and the humor broke the boredom. And there was a lot to make fun of.[12]
In his senior year of high school, Ferrell and a friend would perform comedy skits over the school's intercom system, with cooperation from the principal. The two had to write their own material though. Ferrell also performed comedic skits in the school's talent shows. He won the "Best Personality" superlative voted by his classmates.[10]
He enrolled at the University of Southern California, where he studied Sports Broadcasting and joined the Delta Tau Delta Fraternity. In college, he was known for a few pranks. On occasion, he would dress in a janitor's outfit and stroll into his friends' classes. He was also known for streaking around campus with a few other people from the Delta Tau Delta fraternity.[10] Ferrell earned an internship at a local television station in the sports department. He did not enjoy the work.[13]
After graduating with a bachelor's degree in Sports Information in 1990, he knew he did not want to do broadcasting. He took up jobs as a hotel valet, and on his second day he tore a baggage rack off the top of a van by trying to drive it under a low-lying beam. He also worked as a teller at Wells Fargo, but came up short $300 the first day and $280 the second—he was not stealing the money, he was just careless and error-prone.[13]
In 1991, he moved out of the house (thanks to his mother's encouragement to pursue something he liked) and to Los Angeles. He auditioned (and got in), and developed his improvisation skills as a member of the comedy group The Groundlings.[13]
Career[link]
[edit] The Groundlings
Before joining The Groundlings, Ferrell's attempts at standup comedy had little success. He started in the advanced classes and grew to love improvisation. He realized he also liked to impersonate people, and one of his favorites was Harry Caray, the Hall of Fame baseball announcer. Soon he began to create original characters. With fellow Groundlings member Chris Kattan, they created the Butabi Brothers, who go out to dance clubs to try to pick up women but are constantly rejected. While taking classes, Ferrell got a job at an auction house via his friend Viveca Paulin. The job was ideal as it was flexible enough for him to audition and go to rehearsals while also being employed. He received small roles, including TV series Grace Under Fire and Living Single, low-budget films such as A Bucket of Blood, as well as commercials. One winter, he even served as a mall Santa Claus. Then, in 1994, he won a spot with the top professional group of The Groundlings.[14]
[edit] Saturday Night Live
After SNL's dip in popularity in 1994–1995 and in need of new cast members for the next season, a producer saw The Groundlings and asked Ferrell, Kattan, and Cheri Oteri to audition for SNL's main producer, Lorne Michaels.[15]
Ferrell joined Saturday Night Live in 1995 and left in 2002 after a successful seven-year tenure. He returned to host twice (both in season finales), and once in the cold open of the final episode of Saturday Night Live Weekend Update Thursday.
During his time on SNL, Ferrell made a name for himself with his impersonations, which included:
- U.S. President George W. Bush
- Chicago Cubs announcer Harry Caray,
- Singer Robert Goulet (crooning a cappella pieces of music by Sisqó, Baha Men, and Notorious B.I.G.),
- Singer Neil Diamond,
- Inside the Actors Studio host James Lipton (who was quoted several times favoring Ferrell's impersonation),
- Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy,
- United States Attorney General Janet Reno,
- Convicted Unabomber Ted Kaczynski,
- Game show host Alex Trebek,
- Fictitious black private detective Shaft,
- Professional wrestler-turned-Governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura,
- U.S. Vice President Al Gore (Darrell Hammond took over once Ferrell started playing Bush),
- Iraqi President Saddam Hussein,
- Cuban President Fidel Castro.
His original characters included "Morning Latte" co-host Tom Wilkins, Ed the Horse's twin brother Ned (cf. Mister Ed), fictional Blue Öyster Cult member Gene Frenkle (physically modeled after Blue Öyster Cult vocalist Eric Bloom), music teacher Marty Culp, Spartan cheerleader Craig Buchanan, Dale Sturtevant from "Dissing Your Dog", Hank of the Bill Brasky Buddies, David Leary from "Dog Show", and night clubber Steve Butabi in a sketch that went to the big screen in 1998's A Night at the Roxbury.
Ferrell returned to Saturday Night Live as a guest host on May 14, 2005, and May 16, 2009. Both times, he reprised his role as Alex Trebek in the "Celebrity Jeopardy" sketches. On the May 14 appearance, Ferrell reprised his role as Robert Goulet in a fake commercial advertising a series of crooned ringtones and, during the performance of the song "Little Sister" by musical guests Queens of the Stone Age, Ferrell came on stage playing the cowbell.
Ferrell became the highest paid cast member of Saturday Night Live in 2001 with a season salary of $350,000.[16]
Film career[link]
During his time on Saturday Night Live, Ferrell appeared in several movies: Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, A Night at the Roxbury, Superstar, The Ladies Man, Dick, Drowning Mona, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and Zoolander.
His first starring role came after his departure from SNL with Frank "The Tank" Richard in Old School (2003). The film "belongs to Mr. Ferrell", declared the New York Times, which described how he "uses his hilarious, anxious zealotry to sell the part."[17] Old School was a major success and Ferrell received an MTV Movie Awards nomination for Best Comedic Performance.
The title role in Elf (2003) followed, as did another MTV Movie Awards nomination. Ferrell continued to land comedy roles in 2004 and 2005 in films such as Melinda and Melinda, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Starsky & Hutch earning himself a place among Hollywood's Frat Pack.[18] In 2005, Ferrell earned $40 million.[19] In 2006, Ferrell starred in Stranger Than Fiction and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby; both received critical and box office success. Ferrell's performance in Stranger Than Fiction introduced audiences to the dramatic potential of Ferrell's acting talents. On December 27, 2006, 'The Magazine' named Ferrell as one of its three actors of the year in their 2006 year in review issue.[20]
Ferrell appeared as part of a pre-game video package for the Rose Bowl along with Texas alum Matthew McConaughey. Ferrell also sang a song at the ESPY Awards in 2006 about Lance Armstrong and Neil Armstrong. He and John C. Reilly also did a spot during the 2008 ESPY Awards where they made demands in order for them to appear at the ESPYs like asking Portland Trail Blazers' center Greg Oden to tuck them in at night and tell them stories of the old times or to bring back the Cold War so the Olympics can be interesting again.
Ferrell participated in a 79th Academy Awards musical-comedy performance with John C. Reilly and Jack Black, wherein they sang a song about comedies being snubbed by the voters in favor of dramas.
In May 2009 it was announced Ferrell is in talks to star in Neighborhood Watch, a comedy about an urbanite who moves to the suburbs and uncovers a conspiracy. In negotiations to direct is David Dobkin, who gave Ferrell a cameo in Wedding Crashers.[21] In August 2009, Ferrell decided not to do the film. In the summer of 2009, Ferrell did a large amount of filming with several young actors. He helped out on a film entitled Making a Movie[citation needed], which is now on DVD.
In June 2009, Land of the Lost was released. It was a commercial and critical flop after earning $19 million on opening weekend, about two-thirds of what the studio expected.[22][23]
In 2010, he was the executive producer and star of The Other Guys, a buddy cop film, which also has an ensemble cast which consists of Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton, Steve Coogan, Ray Stevenson, Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson. Unlike Land of the Lost, the film was a commercial success, earning over $140 million,[24] and was positively reviewed by critics.
Ferrell is set to star in Casa de Mi Padre, a telenovela spoof comedy set in a ranch with Mexican stars Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal. The movie's story will be told in melodramatic telenovela form and will feature English-language subtitles.[25]
Voice acting[link]
Ferrell has worked as a voice actor in several animated television programs, including his portrayal of Bob Oblong, a 1950s-style father with no arms or legs, in the short-lived animated television series The Oblongs. He has had several guest appearances on Family Guy, where he played the Black Knight in "Mr. Saturday Knight", as well as Fat Greek Guy and Miles "Chatterbox" Musket in Fifteen Minutes of Shame. Ferrell also starred as Ted (a.k.a. The Man in the Yellow Hat) in the film Curious George[26] and guest voiced on an episode of the FOX sitcom King of the Hill as a political correct soccer coach. He voiced the title character in the 2010 DreamWorks Animation film Megamind.
Stage career[link]
Ferrell made his Broadway debut taking on departing U.S. President George W. Bush in a one-man show called You’re Welcome America. A Final Night with George W. Bush. The show started performances on January 20, 2009, in previews—Bush's final day in office—at the Cort Theatre and opened officially on February 1. The limited engagement played through March 15, 2009.[27]
Creating and producing[link]
[edit] Funny or Die
In April 2007, Ferrell launched "Funny or Die",[28] a streaming video website where short comedy films are uploaded and voted on by users. The site features The Landlord, starring Ferrell and Pearl McKay, the toddler daughter of Funny or Die co-founder Adam McKay. Ferrell's character is harassed for the rent by his landlady, a swearing, beer-loving, two-year-old girl (played by McKay's daughter, Pearl). Child psychologists have criticized Ferrell and the McKay family for child exploitation,[29] to which McKay responded:
Fortunately she is in this great stage now where she repeats anything you say to her and then forgets it right away, which is key. She has not said the 'B-word' since we shot the thing.
They followed with the release of a video entitled "Good Cop, Baby Cop" which also starred baby Pearl;[31] the end of the video stated that this would be her final appearance and wished her a happy "baby retirement."
In September 2008, Ferrell released another video entitled "Will Ferrell Answers Internet Questions" where he takes some pressing questions and comments from his fans.
Another Ferrell appearance on "Funny or Die"[28] is in the video called "Green Team," featuring also McKay and John C Reilly. It shows militant ecologic activists terrorizing the crew on a filming set.
[edit] Eastbound & Down
Ferrell co-produces (with Adam McKay) an HBO show starring Danny McBride called Eastbound & Down.[32] He also has a recurring role as car dealer Ashley Schaeffer.
Personal life[link]
In August 2000, Ferrell married Swedish actress Viveca Paulin, whom he met in 1995 at an acting class. They live in New York City and in Orange County, California and have three sons, Magnus Paulin Ferrell, born March 7, 2004,[33] Mattias Paulin Ferrell, born December 30, 2006,[34] and Axel Paulin Ferrell, born January 23, 2010.[35]
In 2006, I-Newswire.com, a site that accepts submissions from readers and publishes them as "press releases", reported that Ferrell had died in a paragliding accident. The hoax was published before its factual inaccuracy was noticed. The story was further propagated when it appeared on Google News.
Ferrell is a fan of USC Trojan football. At USC, Ferrell was a member of Delta Tau Delta fraternity and is now an active alumnus. Ferrell has worked with former head coach Pete Carroll to do motivational stunts for the players during the season.[9]
Ferrell is also a supporter of English Premier League football club [36] Chelsea, representing Chelsea as honorary captain in the coin toss before the Chelsea v Inter Milan match at The Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, on July 21, 2009.[37]
Ferrell enjoys running and has participated in several major marathons such as the Boston, New York and Stockholm Marathons.[38] He also raises money for charity, including his Scholarships for Cancer Survivors campaign through Crowdrise; a social networking community for volunteers and a micro-donations fundraising platform.[39]
In 2007, Autograph magazine named Ferrell the worst celebrity autographer. Its editor stated, "What's so frustrating about Will Ferrell being the worst autograph signer this past year is that he used to be so nice to fans and collectors and a great signer. What makes him so bad is that he'll taunt people asking for his autograph."[40] In response, Ferrell has stated, "I don't know how I got on the list. I sign a lot of autographs", but has admitted to taunting autograph-seekers: "I do. I really do. I'm like, 'How badly do you want this autograph?' 'Are you sure?' 'You say you're my biggest fan, really, prove it.' I'll do things like that. They have to earn it."[41]
Ferrell had noted that, although he was well known for his SNL impersonation of President George W. Bush, he chose, for both professional and political reasons, not to meet the President on several occasions, unlike his SNL predecessor Dana Carvey's famous chummy relationship with George H. W. Bush: "I declined, partly out of comedic purposes, because when I was on the show Saturday Night Live at the time, it didn't make sense to really meet the people that you play, for fear of them influencing you. And then the other side of it is, from a political standpoint, I don't want to meet that guy."[41] Ferrell also appeared on an episode of Man vs. Wild, where he traveled throughout the tundras of Sweden with the show's host, Bear Grylls. In the episode, Ferrell came across various unique situations, which included eating the eye of a reindeer.[42]
Ferrell made a comical debut as a relief pitcher for the Round Rock Express, the Triple-A affiliate of the Houston Astros, on May 6, 2010. He was introduced as "Billy Ray 'Rojo' Johnson", and was brought in to relief pitch for the sixth inning. He then entertained the fans by bringing a sack of beer cans to the mound, as well as being ejected and getting chased by the opposing batter. He revealed himself to the fans when his moustache fell off during the chase. The appearance was cooked up by Ferrell and the Express, who sent out a press release announcing Johnson's "signing", to promote The Will Powered Golf Classic the following day at the nearby Cimarron Hills Country Club, which benefits Cancer for College, an organization that provides scholarships to cancer survivors.[43]
Ferrell has an estimated net worth of $80 million.[44]
He appeared in the video for "Make Some Noise" by the Beastie Boys in the front of a limo playing a cowbell.
Awards and nominations[link]
Emmy Awards
Nominated:
- 2001: Outstanding Individual Performance In A Variety Or Music Program (for Saturday Night Live)
ESPY Awards
Won:
- 2007 ESPY Awards, Best Sports Movie (for Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby)
- 2008 ESPY Awards, Best Sports Movie (for Semi-Pro)
Golden Globe Awards
Nominated:
- 2006: Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (for The Producers)
- 2007: Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy (for Stranger than Fiction)
James Joyce Award
- 2008: James Joyce Award from University College Dublin's Literary and Historical Society in recognition for "excelling in his field".[45][46]
Kids Choice Awards
MTV Movie Awards
Won:
- 2007: Best Kiss for Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (with Sacha Baron Cohen)
Nominated:
- 2003: Best Comedic Performance (for Old School)
- 2003: Best On-Screen Team (with Luke Wilson and Vince Vaughn for Old School)
- 2004: Best Comedic Performance (for Elf)
- 2005: Best Comedic Performance (for Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy)
- 2005: Best On-Screen Team (with Paul Rudd, Steve Carell and David Koechner for Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy)
- 2005: Best Musical Performance (with Paul Rudd, David Koechner and Steve Carell for Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy)
- 2007: Best Comedic Performance (for Blades of Glory)
- 2007: Best Fight (for Blades of Glory)
Razzie Awards
Nominated:
- 2005: Worst Actor for Bewitched and Kicking & Screaming
Satellite Awards
Nominated:
- 2006: Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical (for Stranger Than Fiction)
Spike TV Guys' Choice Awards
Won:
- 2007 Spike TV Guys' Choice Awards, Funniest Mo-fo
- 2007 Spike TV Guys' Choice Awards, Most Viral Video
Teen Choice Awards
Won:
- 2007: Choice Movie Actor – Comedy for Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Blades of Glory
Nominated:
- 2004: Choice Comedian
- 2004: Choice Movie Actor – Comedy for Elf
- 2005: Choice Comedian
- 2005: Choice Movie Actor – Comedy for Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Kicking & Screaming
- 2005: Choice Movie Hissy Fit for Kicking & Screaming
- 2005: Choice Movie Rumble for Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
- 2005: Choice Movie Sleazebag for Kicking & Screaming
- 2007: Choice Comedian
- 2007: Choice Movie Chemistry (with Jon Heder), for Blades of Glory
- 2007: Choice Movie Dance (with Jon Heder), for Blades of Glory
- 2007: Choice Movie Hissy Fit for Blades of Glory
- 2008: Choice Comedian
- 2008: Choice Movie Actor – Comedy for Semi-Pro
- 2009: Choice Movie Actor – Comedy for Land of the Lost
Tony Awards
Nominated:
Mark Twain Prize for American Humor
Ferrell was selected as the 2011 recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
Filmography[link]
| Year | Movie | Role | U.S. gross (USD) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | Bucket of Blood | Young Man | Made for TV | |
| Criminal Hearts | Newscaster | |||
| 1997 | Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery | Mustafa | $53.9M | |
| Men Seeking Women | Al | |||
| 1998 | A Night at the Roxbury | Steve Butabi | $30.3M | Also Writer |
| The Thin Pink Line | Darren Clark | |||
| 1999 | Superstar | Sky Corrigan/God | $30.6M | |
| Dick | Bob Woodward | $6.2M | ||
| Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me | Mustafa | $206M | ||
| The Suburbans | Gil | $11,130 | ||
| 2000 | The Ladies Man | Lance DeLune | $13.6M | |
| Drowning Mona | Cubby the Funeral Director | $15.4M | ||
| 2001 | Zoolander | Mugatu | $45.2M | |
| Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back | Federal Wildlife Marshal Willenholly | $30.1M | ||
| 2002 | Boat Trip | Brian's Boyfriend | $8.6M | Uncredited |
| 2003 | Old School | Frank "the Tank" Ricard | $74.6M | |
| Elf | Buddy | $173.4M | ||
| 2004 | Melinda and Melinda | Hobie | $3.8M | |
| Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy | Ron Burgundy | $84.1M | Also Writer | |
| Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie | Ron Burgundy | Straight-To-DVD Also Writer |
||
| Starsky & Hutch | Big Earl | $88.2M | Uncredited | |
| Oh, What a Lovely Tea Party | Himself | |||
| 2005 | The Producers | Franz Liebkind | $19.4M | |
| Wedding Crashers | Chazz Reinhold | $209.2M | Uncredited | |
| Winter Passing | Corbit | $101,228 | ||
| Bewitched | Jack Wyatt/Darrin | $62.3M | ||
| Kicking & Screaming | Phil Weston | $52.6M | ||
| The Wendell Baker Story | Dave Bix | $127,144 | ||
| 2006 | Stranger Than Fiction | Harold Crick | $40.1M | |
| Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby | Ricky Bobby | $148.2M | Also Writer/Executive Producer | |
| Curious George | Ted/The Man in the Yellow Hat | $58.3M | Voice Role | |
| 2007 | Blades of Glory | Chazz Michael Michaels | $118.2M | |
| 2008 | Semi-Pro | Jackie Moon | $33.4M | |
| Step Brothers | Brennan Huff | $101.1M | Also Writer/Executive Producer | |
| 2009 | Land of the Lost | Dr. Rick Marshall | $49.4M | |
| The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard | Craig McDermott | $15.1M | Uncredited Also Producer |
|
| SpongeBob's Truth or Square | Himself | |||
| 2010 | The Other Guys | Detective Allen Gamble | $119M | Also Executive Producer |
| Megamind | Megamind | $147M | Voice Role | |
| Hubworld | Himself | Guest star Season 1, Episode 1 |
||
| Everything Must Go | Nick Halsey | $2.7M | ||
| 2012 | Casa de Mi Padre[48] | Armando Alvarez | Also Producer | |
| Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie[49] | Damien Weebs | Also Producer/Co-Producer | ||
| The Campaign[50] | Cam Brady | Also Producer/Co-Producer | ||
| 2013 | Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters[51] | Dr. Baumgartner | Also Producer | |
| Bouncers [52] | Also Producer | |||
| Anchorman: The Legend Continues [53] | Ron Burgundy | Also Writer |
Television work[link]
- Saturday Night Live (cast member from 1995 to 2002, host in 2005, 2009 and 2012)
- Cow and Chicken (1997–2001, voice in various episodes)
- Saturday Night Live: Presidential Bash 2000 (2000)
- Family Guy (as the Black Knight, 2001)
- Undeclared (guest star)
- The Oblongs (Bob Oblong, 2001–2002, voice)
- King of the Hill (as Coach Lucas, 1999, voice)
- The Tom Green Show (guest star)
- Family Guy (as himself, 2005)
- The Naked Trucker and T-Bones Show (guest star)
- Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway (voiceover and guest)
- Eastbound & Down (BMW Dealership Owner Ashley Schaeffer)
- You're Welcome America: A Final Night With George W. Bush (as George W. Bush, 2009)
- Man vs. Wild (guest star)[54][55]
- Live with Regis and Kelly (co-host)
- 63rd Tony Awards (2009), 2009 MTV Movie Awards and 2009 TV Land Awards
- The Merrick & Rosso Show (as himself, 2009)
- SpongeBob SquarePants (as himself, 2009)
- Strangers with Candy (2000)
- Funny or Die Presents (2010)
- Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job (2010)
- 30 Rock (as the "Bitch Hunter", 2010)
- The Office (as Deangelo Vickers, 2011)
Compilations[link]
- Saturday Night Live: The Best of Will Ferrell (200?)
- Saturday Night Live: The Best of Will Ferrell, Vol. 2 (2004)
Salary[link]
- Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) $20,000,000[56]
- Bewitched (2005) $20,000,000[56]
- Kicking & Screaming (2005) $20,000,000[56]
- Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) $6,900,000[56]
References[link]
- ^ "Will Ferrell Answers Internet Questions from Will Ferrell and Jake". Funnyordie.com. September 17, 2008. http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/36d31abcf2. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
- ^ According to the State of California. California Birth Index, 1905–1995. Center for Health Statistics, California Department of Health Services, Sacramento, California. At Ancestry.com
- ^ "Will Ferrell 1967-". Biography Today (Omnigraphics, Inc.) 16 (2): 54. 2007. ISSN 1058–2347.
- ^ "Will Ferrell Biography (1968?-)". Filmreference.com. http://www.filmreference.com/film/92/Will-Ferrell.html. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
- ^ "Where There's Will..., There's a Way to Talk About Comedy, Drama and Shooting in Charlotte". Charlotte Observer. November 27, 2005. http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=CO&s_site=charlotte&p_multi=CO&p_theme=realcities&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=10E2AEB791FEC7F0&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM. Retrieved January 14, 2010.
- ^ Riddick & Rountree and Related Families From Northeast North Carolina by Betty Smith Hobbs
- ^ Davis, Caris (January 24, 2008). "Will Ferrell Has Irish Award Society in Stitches – Will Ferrell". People. http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20173470,00.html?xid=rss-fullcontentcnn. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
- ^ a b Biography Today, p.54
- ^ a b Dave Albee,Carroll Chronicles: Celebrities love to practice with Pete, Marin Independent Journal, August 29, 2007.
- ^ a b c Biography Today, p.55
- ^ Biography Today, pp.54-55
- ^ Koltnow, Barry (July 25, 2008). "Will Ferrell says growing up in Irvine made him funny". The Orange County Register. http://www.ocregister.com/articles/ferrell-ocr-wanted-2103182-think-know. Retrieved July 25, 2008.
- ^ a b c Biography Today, p.56
- ^ Biography Today, pp.56-57
- ^ Biography Today, p.58
- ^ "War of the Funnymen – Netscape Celebrity". Webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com. http://webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com/celebrity/package.jsp?name=celebrity/content/bsf_carreyvsfarrell. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
- ^ Mitchell, Elvis, "Never Too Late to Have an Adolescence", New York Times, February 21, 2003.
- ^ Wloszczyna, Susan (June 15, 2004). "Wilson and Vaughn: Leaders of the 'Frat Pack'". USA Today. http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2004-06-15-frat-pack_x.htm. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
- ^ "Forbes: The world's best-paid actors and actresses – MSN Money". Moneycentral.msn.com. March 20, 2006. http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/invest/forbes/P147872.asp. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
- ^ TheMagazine – Volume 1 Issue 3, December 27, 2006
- ^ McNary, Dave (May 5, 2009). "Will Ferrell might join 'Neighborhood'". Variety (Reed Elsevier). http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118003236.html. Retrieved May 6, 2009.
- ^ Nashawaty, Chris (June 7, 2009). "Is America over Will Ferrell?". Entertainment Weekly. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31156974/. Retrieved June 8, 2009.
- ^ Peterseim, Locke (June 8, 2009). "Down goes Ferrell! Down goes Ferrell!". Redblog. http://blog.redbox.com/redblog/2009/06/down-goes-farrell-down-goes-farrell.html. Retrieved June 9, 2009. [dead link]
- ^ Box Office Mojo: The Other Guys
- ^ Hernandez, Lee (February 11, 2011). ""Juno" Star Michael Cera Takes Up Spanish as a Second Language". Latina magazine. http://www.latina.com/entertainment/movies/juno-star-michael-cera-takes-spanish-second-language. Retrieved February 11, 2011.
- ^ Will Ferrell
- ^ Will Ferrell to Star in You're Welcome America. A Final Night with George W. Bush on Broadway (October 16, 2008) Retrieved June 6, 2011
- ^ a b "Funny Or Die". http://www.funnyordie.com/.
- ^ Today Show June 7, 2007
- ^ "Will Ferrell and Pearl in The Landlord". http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/74.
- ^ "Good Cop, Baby Cop". http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/33f2687080.
- ^ "Talk: Home". HBO. http://www.hbo.com/news/archives/2007_09_28.html. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
- ^ "NEWS BRIEFS: Lynch Wedding Postponed". People Magazine. March 11, 2004. http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,627987,00.html.
- ^ "Will Ferrell, Wife Viveca Welcome a Son". People Magazine. January 2, 2007. http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20005718,00.html.
- ^ "Will Ferrell Welcomes Third Son". People Magazine. January 27, 2010. http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20339657,00.html.
- ^ "The Shed – Celebrity Fans". Theshed.chelseafc.com. http://theshed.chelseafc.com/celebs.shtml. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
- ^ England (July 23, 2009). "Hollywood Star Will Ferrell Acts As Honorary Chelsea Captain". Goal.com. http://www.goal.com/en/news/9/england/2009/07/23/1399747/hollywood-star-will-ferrell-acts-as-honorary-chelsea-captain. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
- ^ Keith Phipps, Interview: Will Ferrell, The A.V. Club (The Onion), October 29, 2003.
- ^ "Will Ferrell on Crowdrise". http://www.crowdrise.com/willferrell. Retrieved April 28, 2010.
- ^ "Will Ferrell named worst autograph signer". The Superficial. December 18, 2007. http://thesuperficial.com/2007/12/will_ferrell_named_worst_autog.php. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
- ^ a b Nathan Rabin, Interview: Will Ferrell, The A.V. Club (The Onion), February 27, 2008.
- ^ "Man vs Wild". Film.com. http://www.film.com/celebrities/will-ferrell/story/ferrell-survives-man-vs-wild/27621586/. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
- ^ Mark Newman and Brian McTaggart. "Will Ferrell pitches, entertains in Round Rock". Mlb.mlb.com. http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20100507&content_id=9865792&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb/. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
- ^ http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/actors/will-ferrell-net-worth/
- ^ The Irish Times, "Joyce award for Ferrell who will catch up on his reading", January 24, 2008
- ^ 'http://www.literaryandhistorical.com/events/
- ^ Kids' Choice Awards 2011 Nominees: Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez lead
- ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1702425/
- ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1855401/
- ^ . http://www.latinoreview.com/news/jason-sudeikis-will-be-in-dog-fight-with-will-ferrell-and-zach-galifianakis-15166.
- ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1428538/
- ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1333189/
- ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1229340/fullcredits#cast
- ^ "Ferrell Films 'Man vs. Wild' Spot With Grylls". Huffington Post. April 15, 2009. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/15/ferrell-films-man-vs-wild_n_187535.html. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
- ^ "Will Ferrell Goes Wild | The Outside Blog". Outside-blog.away.com. April 29, 2009. http://outside-blog.away.com/blog/2009/04/will-ferrell-goes-wild.html. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
- ^ a b c d IMDB Profile
External links[link]
|
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Will Ferrell |
|
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Will Ferrell |
- Will Ferrell at the Internet Movie Database
- Will Ferrell's High Five Hollywood
- Will Ferrell's profile on Funny Or Die
- 10 Best Will Ferrell Skits
- Will Ferrell Interview for 'Everything Must Go'
- Will Ferrell Interview
- Maxim Rated Top SNL performer
- Will Ferrell at Complex Magazine
- HBO's Special Event page for Will Ferrell You're Welcome America: A Final Night with George W Bush
- Crowdrise Scholarships for Cancer Survivors Fundraising Campaign
|
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|||||
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Ferrell, Will |
| Alternative names | Ferrell, John; Ferrell, John William |
| Short description | An American actor, writer, and comedian |
| Date of birth | July 16, 1967 |
| Place of birth | Irvine, California, United States |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
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