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• 
  

• 
  Apollo Theatre
  The Apollo Theatre is a Grade II listed West End theatre, on Shaftesbury Avenue in the City of Westminster. Designed by architect Lewin Sharp for owner Henry Lowenfield, and the fourth legitimate theatre to be constructed on the street, its doors opened on 21 February 1901 with the American musical comedy The Belle of Bohemia. The production was followed by John Martin-Harvey's season, including A Cigarette Maker's Romance and The Only Way, an adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.
  The first London theatre built in the Edwardian period, the Apollo was renovated by Schaufelberg in 1932, and a private foyer and anteroom was installed to the Royal Box. The sculpted work on the stone fascia is by T. Simpson, the building is of plain brick to the neighbouring streets. The theatre has a first floor central loggia. Inside there is a three galleried auditorium with elaborate plasterwork. The theatre seats 796, and the balcony on the 3rd tier is considered the steepest in London.
  The Stoll Moss Group purchased the Apollo Theatre in 1975 and sold it to Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Really Useful Group and Bridgepoint Capital in 2000. Nica Burns and Max Weitzenhoffer purchased the theatre and several others in 2005, creating Nimax Theatres, which still owns the theatre.
  
  wn.com/Apollo_Theatre
• 
  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.
  
  wn.com/Cornwall
• 
  Fortune Theatre
  The Fortune Theatre is a 432 seat West End theatre in Russell Street, near Covent Garden, in the City of Westminster, built in 1922-4 by Ernest Schaufelberg for impresario Laurence Cowen. The façade is principally bush hammered concrete, with brick piers supporting the roof. The theatre is entered through bronze double doors, internally, there is a foyer of grey and red marble, with a beaten copper ticket booth. The theatre is situated next to Crown Court Church and opposite the Theatre Royal. It was the first theatre to be built in London after the end of World War I.
  The theatre opened, as the Fortune Thriller Theatre on August 8, 1924, with Sinners by Lawrence Cowen. An author and playwright, Cowen commissioned the theatre in an Italianate style, that stands on the site of the old Albion Tavern, a public house that was frequented by Georgian and Victorian actors.
  During World War II, the theatre hosted performances by ENSA, entertainers drawn from the armed forces. Since the war, the theatre has been a receiving house, with actors such as Dame Judi Dench, Dirk Bogarde and Maureen Lipman appearing. The Fortune also hosted shows from Flanders and Swann and Beyond the Fringe. Nunsense played at the theatre in 1987.
  
  wn.com/Fortune_Theatre
• 
  Griffith University
  Griffith University is a public research university located in the southeastern region of the Australian state of Queensland. The university has five satellite campuses located in the Gold Coast, Logan City and in the Brisbane suburbs of Mount Gravatt, Nathan and South Bank. Current total enrollment is approximately 43,000 with 4,000 full-time equivalent staff. Griffith University offers undergraduate and postgraduate degrees across ten discipline areas including Arts, Education, Business, Health, Law, Engineering, Information Technology, Environment, Music and Visual Arts.
  
  wn.com/Griffith_University
• 
  Haymarket Theatre
  The Theatre Royal Haymarket (also known as Haymarket Theatre or the Little Theatre) is a West End theatre in the Haymarket in the City of Westminster which dates back to 1720, making it the third-oldest London playhouse still in use. Samuel Foote acquired the lease in 1747, and in 1766 he gained a royal patent to play legitimate drama (meaning spoken drama, as opposed to opera, concerts or plays with music) in the summer months. The original building was a little further north in the same street. It has been at its current location since 1821, when it was redesigned by John Nash. It is a Grade I listed building, with a seating capacity of 888. The freehold of the theatre is owned by the Crown Estate.
  The Haymarket has been the site of a significant innovation in theatre. In 1873, it was the venue for the first scheduled matinée performance, establishing a custom soon followed in theatres everywhere. Its managers have included Benjamin Nottingham Webster, John Baldwin Buckstone, Squire Bancroft, Cyril Maude, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and John Sleeper Clarke, brother-in-law of John Wilkes Booth, who quit America after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Famous actors who débuted at the theatre included Robert William Elliston (1774–1831) and John Liston (1776–1846).
  
  wn.com/Haymarket_Theatre
• 
  London Palladium
  The London Palladium is a 2,286 seat West End theatre located off Oxford Street in the City of Westminster. From the roster of stars who have played there and many televised performances, it is arguably the most famous theatre in London and the United Kingdom, especially for musical variety shows.
  Walter Gibbons, an early moving pictures manager, built the Palladium in 1910 to compete with Edward Moss's London Hippodrome and Oswald Stoll's London Coliseum. The facade (originally that of Argyll House, which is why the pub opposite is called The Argyll Arms) dates back to the 19th century. Formerly it was a temporary wooden building called Corinthian Bazaar, which featured an aviary and aimed to attract customers from the recently closed Pantheon Bazaar (now Marks and Spencers) on Oxford Street. The theatre was rebuilt a year later by Fredrick Hengler, the son of a tightrope walker, as a circus venue that included an aquatic display in a flooded ring. Next it became the National Skating Palace - a skating rink with real ice. However the rink failed and the Palladium was redesigned by Frank Matcham, a famous theatrical architect who also designed the Coliseum, for a site that previously housed Hengler’s Circus. The building now carries Heritage Foundation commemorative plaques honouring Lew Grade and Frankie Vaughan.
  
  wn.com/London_Palladium
• 
  Manchester
  Coordinates: 53°28′N 2°14′W / 53.467°N 2.233°W / 53.467; -2.233
  Manchester ⁱ/ˈmæntʃɛstər/ is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England with an estimated population of 498,800 in 2010. Manchester lies within one of the United Kingdom's largest urban areas; the Greater Manchester Urban Area which has a population of 2.2 million. The demonym of Manchester is Mancunian and the local authority is Manchester City Council.
  Manchester is situated in the south-central part of North West England, fringed by the Cheshire Plain to the south and the Pennines to the north and east. The recorded history of Manchester began with the civilian settlement associated with the Roman fort of Mamucium, which was established in c. 79 AD on a sandstone bluff near the confluence of the rivers Medlock and Irwell. Historically, most of the city was a part of Lancashire, although areas south of the River Mersey were in Cheshire. Throughout the Middle Ages Manchester remained a manorial township, but it began to expand "at an astonishing rate" around the turn of the 19th century. Manchester's unplanned urbanisation was brought on by a boom in textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution, and resulted in it becoming the world's first industrialised city. An early 19th-century factory building boom transformed Manchester from a township into a major mill town and borough that was granted city status in 1853. In 1894 the Manchester Ship Canal was built, creating the Port of Manchester.
  
  wn.com/Manchester
• 
  Paddington
  Coordinates: 51°31′02″N 0°10′23″W / 51.5172°N 0.1730°W / 51.5172; -0.1730
  Paddington is a district within the City of Westminster, in central London, England. Formerly a metropolitan borough, it was integrated with Westminster and Greater London in 1965. Three important landmarks of the district are Paddington station, designed by the celebrated engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and opened in 1847; St Mary's Hospital and Paddington Green Police Station (the most important high-security police station in the United Kingdom).
  A major project called Paddington Waterside aims to regenerate former railway and canal land between 1998 and 2018, and the area is seeing many new developments.
  The earliest extant reference to Padington, historically a part of Middlesex, was made in 1056.^{[citation needed]}
  In the later Elizabethan and early Stuart era, the rectory and associated estate houses were occupied by the Small (or Smale) family. Nicholas Small was a clothworker sufficiently well connected to have his new wife's (Jane Small) portrait painted by Holbein. Nicholas died in 1565 and his wife married again, to Nicholas Parkinson, who also resided in Paddington. Parkinson went on to be the Master of the Clothworker's company. Jane Small continued to live in Paddington after her second husband's death, and her manor house was big enough to have been let to Sir John Popham, the attorney general, in the 1580s. At this time there was an inn attached to the estate, named Blowers.
  
  wn.com/Paddington
• 
  Piccadilly Theatre
  The Piccadilly Theatre is a West End theatre located at 16 Denman Street, behind Piccadilly Circus and adjacent to the Regent Palace Hotel, in the City of Westminster, England.
  Built by Bertie Crewe and Edward A. Stone for Edward Laurillard, its simple facade conceals a grandiose Art Deco interior designed by Marc-Henri Levy and Gaston Laverdet, with a 1,232-seat auditorium decorated in shades of pink. Gold and green are the dominant colours in the bars and foyer, which include the original light fittings. Upon its opening on 27 April 1928, the theatre's souvenir brochure claimed, "If all the bricks used in the building were laid in a straight line, they would stretch from London to Paris." The opening production, Jerome Kern's musical Blue Eyes, starred Evelyn Laye, one of the most acclaimed actresses of the period.
  The Piccadilly was briefly taken over by Warner Brothers, and operated as a cinema using the Vitaphone system, and premièred the first talking picture to be shown in Great Britain, The Singing Fool with Al Jolson. The theatre reopened in November 1929, with a production of The Student Prince, having a success in January 1931 with Folly to be Wise, running for 257 performances.
  
  wn.com/Piccadilly_Theatre
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  Sydney Opera House
  The Sydney Opera House is a multi-venue performing arts centre in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It was conceived and largely built by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, opening in 1973 after a long gestation that had begun with his competition-winning design in 1957.
  Utzon received the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honour, in 2003. The Pritzker Prize citation stated:
  The Sydney Opera House was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site on 28 June 2007. It is one of the 20th century's most distinctive buildings and one of the most famous performing arts centres in the world.^{[citation needed]}
  The Sydney Opera House is on Bennelong Point in Sydney Harbour, close to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It sits at the northeastern tip of the Sydney central business district (the CBD), surrounded on three sides by the harbour (Sydney Cove and Farm Cove) and inland by the Royal Botanic Gardens.
  Contrary to its name, the building houses multiple performance venues. The Sydney Opera House is among the busiest performing arts centres in the world, hosting over 1,500 performances each year attended by some 1.2 million people. It provides a venue for many performing-arts companies, including the four key resident companies Opera Australia, The Australian Ballet, the Sydney Theatre Company and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and presents a wide range of productions on its own account. It is also one of the most popular visitor attractions in Australia, with more than seven million people visiting the site each year, 300,000 of whom take a guided tour.
  
  wn.com/Sydney_Opera_House
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  West Hampstead
  Coordinates: 51°33′15″N 0°11′20″W / 51.5543°N 0.1888°W / 51.5543; -0.1888
  West Hampstead is an area in north-west London, England, situated between Childs Hill to the north, Frognal and Hampstead to the north-east, Swiss Cottage to the east, and South Hampstead to the south. Until the late 19th century, the locale was a small village called West End. Modern West Hampstead emerged with the arrival of the railways, and the transformation of the area from farm land to housing estates. In 1879, the Metropolitan Railway adopted the name West Hampstead for its station on West End Lane, the main road through the area. Its motivation seemed to be to avoid confusion with the main retail area in central London, which was also known as the West End.
  West Hampstead's proximity to the Metropolitan line at Finchley Road and its own Jubilee line stop (West Hampstead), together with a high concentration of bars and restaurants, means that the area is a popular leisure destination for people who live in the north-western part of London. West End Lane itself is home to a number of cafes, bakeries and small shops, creating a "village" atmosphere during the day. In addition to the aforementioned London Underground links, West Hampstead is also served by West Hampstead railway station and West Hampstead Thameslink railway station.
  
  wn.com/West_Hampstead
• 
  Zennor
  Coordinates: 50°11′31″N 5°34′05″W / 50.192°N 5.568°W / 50.192; -5.568
  Zennor /ˈzɛnʊər/is a village and civil parish in Cornwall, England, UK. The parish includes the villages of Zennor, Boswednack and Porthmeor and the hamlet of Treen. It is located on the north coast, about 6 miles (10 km) north of Penzance. It lies along the B3306 road which connects St Ives to the A30 road. Alphabetically, the parish is the last in Britain. Its name comes from the Cornish for the local saint, St Senara.
  Zennor Head is a coastal promontory north of the village. The cliffs rise over 200 feet (60 m) from the sea and the highest point of the headland is 314 feet (96 m) above sea level. The village itself is at a height of around 360 feet (110 m).
  About a mile east of the village is the Zennor Quoit megalithic site.
  For the purposes of local government Zennor elects a parish council every three years. Higher functions are exercised by Cornwall Council. Until March 2009 the parish was included in the former Penwith District.
  
  wn.com/Zennor

• 
  Alan Bennett
  Alan Bennett (born 9 May 1934) is a British playwright, screenwriter, actor and author. Born in Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, he attended Oxford University where he studied history and performed with The Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame. He gave up academia, and turned to writing full time, his first stage play Forty Years On being produced in 1968.
  His output includes The Madness of George III and its film incarnation The Madness of King George, the series of monologues Talking Heads, the play The History Boys, and popular audio books, including his readings of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh.
  Bennett was born in Armley in Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire. The son of a co-op butcher, Walter and his wife Lilian Mary (nee Peel), Bennett attended Christ Church, Upper Armley, Church of England School (in the same class as Barbara Taylor Bradford) and then Leeds Modern School (now Lawnswood School), learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists during his national service and gained a place at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. However, having spent time in Cambridge during national service, and partly wishing to follow the object of his unrequited love, he decided to apply for a scholarship at Oxford University. He was accepted by Exeter College, Oxford from which he graduated with a first-class degree in history. While at Oxford he performed comedy with a number of eventually successful actors in the Oxford Revue. He was to remain at the university for several years, where he researched and taught Medieval History, before deciding he was not cut out to be an academic.
  
  wn.com/Alan_Bennett
• Alexei Sayle
  Alexei David Sayle (born 7 August 1952) is a British stand-up comedian, actor and author. He was a central part of the alternative comedy circuit in the early 1980s. He was voted the 18th greatest stand-up comic on Channel 4's 100 Greatest Stand-ups in 2007. In the updated 2010 poll he came 72nd.
  Much of Sayle's humour is in the tradition of Spike Milligan and Monty Python, with riffs based on absurd and surreal premises. His act is noted for its cynicism and political awareness, as well as physical comedy.
  Sayle was born and raised in Anfield, Liverpool, the son of Molly (Malka) Sayle (née Mendelson), a pools clerk, and Joseph Henry Sayle, a railway worker, both of whom were members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Sayle's mother was of Lithuanian Jewish descent, and some members of his immediate family were very devout Jews, as he mentioned on the BBC Radio 4 programme Great Lives when he nominated the Palestinian rights advocate, Edward Said on the programme. In the aftermath of the May 1968 French uprising, he joined the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). In later years he has said that, while no longer active in left politics, ‘I still would adhere to those philosophical and economic ideas of Marxism that I got when I was sixteen...it’s seemed to me as true now as it did then...’. From 1964-1969 he attended Alsop High School in Walton, and was expelled half way through sixth form. After that, Sayle took a foundation course in art at Southport, before attending Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. He attended Garnett College, Roehampton, a training college for teachers in Further Education. He has been married to Linda Rawsthorn since 1974.
  
  wn.com/Alexei_Sayle
• 
  Andrew Lloyd Webber
  Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber Kt. (born 22 March 1948) is an English composer and impresario of musical theatre.
  Lloyd Webber has achieved great popular success in musical theatre. Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End and on Broadway. He has composed 13 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass. He has also gained a number of honours, including a knighthood in 1992, followed by a peerage from the British Government for services to Music, seven Tony Awards, three Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, fourteen Ivor Novello Awards, seven Olivier Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2006.
  Several of his songs have been widely recorded and were hits outside of their parent musicals, notably "The Music of the Night" from The Phantom of the Opera, "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar, "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" and "You Must Love Me" from Evita, "Any Dream Will Do" from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and "Memory" from Cats.
  
  wn.com/Andrew_Lloyd_Webber
• 
  Arthur Boyd
  Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd, AC, OBE (24 July 1920 – 24 April 1999) was one of the leading Australian painters of the late 20th century. A member of the prominent Boyd artistic dynasty in Australia, his relatives included painters, sculptors, architects or other arts professionals. His sister Mary Boyd married John Perceval, and then Sidney Nolan, both artists. His wife Yvonne Boyd née Lennie, and son Jamie and daughters Polly and Lucy are also painters.
  Boyd's work ranges from impressionist renderings of Australian landscape to starkly expressionist figuration, and many canvases feature both. Several famous works set Biblical stories against the Australian landscape, such as "The Expulsion" (1947-48), now at Art Gallery of New South Wales.
  He was a member of the Antipodeans, a group of Melbourne painters that also included Clifton Pugh, David Boyd, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval and Charles Blackman.
  He was born at Murrumbeena, Victoria. Boyd had no formal training in painting and drawing, however he studied with his grandfather Arthur Merric Boyd, the New Zealand-born landscape painter and Merric Boyd, the Australian sculptor and studio potter. Early paintings were portraits and of seascapes of Port Phillip created while he was an adolescent, living in the suburbs of Melbourne. He moved to the inner city where he was influenced by his contact with European refugees. Reflecting this move in the late 1930s, his work moved into a distinct period of depictions of fanciful characters in urban settings.
  
  wn.com/Arthur_Boyd
• Barry Crocker
  Barry Hugh Crocker OAM (born 4 November 1935, in Geelong, Victoria,Australia) is a popular Australian singer, with a crooning vocal style.
  After undergoing National Service with the RAAF in 1955, Crocker toured with a theatre group and did the club circuit in Melbourne, followed by a partnership with David Clark (aka Dave Nelson), and performed in England and the United States. He returned to Australia to star in a TV musical comedy show called 66 And All That, which became The Barry Crocker Show (1966–67) on Network Ten.
  Barry went on to become the presenter and leading performer on The Sound Of Music TV series, which earned him a Gold Logie in 1970 as Australia's top (male) TV personality. His singing talents eventually earned him over 30 gold records.
  Barry made his acting debut on a 1969 episode of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.
  In May 1973 he released the album "Music Makes My Day", featuring an updated version of Robin Luke's "Susie Darlin" on the Festival label. The recording featured Olivia Newton-John and Pat Carroll on backup vocals and enjoyed chart success, reaching Number 25 in Sydney, Number 7 in Melbourne, Number 3 in Brisbane and Adelaide.
  
  wn.com/Barry_Crocker
• 
  Barry Humphries
  John Barry Humphries, AO, CBE (born 17 February 1934) is an Australian comedian, satirist, dadaist, artist, author and character actor. He is best known for his on-stage and television alter egos Dame Edna Everage, a Melbourne housewife and "gigastar", and Sir Les Patterson, Australia's foul-mouthed cultural attaché to the Court of St. James's. He is a film producer and script writer, a star of London's West End musical theatre, an award-winning writer and an accomplished landscape painter. For his delivery of dadaist and absurdist humour to millions, biographer Anne Pender described Humphries in 2010 as not only the most significant theatrical figure of our time … [but] the most significant comedian to emerge since Charlie Chaplin.
  Humphries' characters, especially Dame Edna Everage, have brought him international renown, and he has appeared in numerous films, stage productions and television shows. Originally conceived as a dowdy Moonee Ponds housewife who caricatured Australian suburban complacency and insularity, Edna has evolved over four decades to become a satire of stardom, the gaudily dressed, acid-tongued, egomaniacal, internationally feted Housewife Gigastar, Dame Edna Everage. Humphries' other major satirical character creation was the archetypal Australian bloke Barry McKenzie, who originated as the hero of a comic strip about Australians in London (with drawings by Nicholas Garland) which was first published in Private Eye magazine. The stories about "Bazza" (Humphries' nickname, as well as an Australian term of endearment for the name Barry) gave wide circulation to Australian slang, particularly jokes about drinking and its consequences (much of which was invented by Humphries), and the character went on to feature in two Australian films, in which he was portrayed by Barry Crocker.
  
  wn.com/Barry_Humphries
• 
  Barry Manilow
  Barry Manilow (born June 17, 1943) is an American singer-songwriter and producer. He is best known for such recordings as "Could It Be Magic", "Mandy", "Can't Smile Without You", and "Copacabana (At the Copa)."
  In 1978, five of his albums were on the best-selling charts simultaneously, a feat equalled only by Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Mathis. He has recorded a string of Billboard hit singles and multi-platinum albums that have resulted in his being named Radio & Records number one Adult Contemporary artist and winning three straight American Music Awards for Favorite Pop/Rock Male Artist. Between 1974 - 1983 Manilow had three number 1 singles and 25 that reached the top 40. Several well-known entertainers have praised Manilow, including Sinatra, who was quoted in the 1970s saying, "He's next." In 1988, Bob Dylan stopped Manilow at a party, hugged him and said, "Don't stop what you're doing, man. We're all inspired by you."
  As well as producing and arranging albums for other artists, including Bette Midler and Dionne Warwick, Manilow has written songs for musicals, films, and commercials. From February 2005 to December 30, 2009, he was the headliner at the Las Vegas Hilton, performing hundreds of shows before ending his relationship with the hotel. From March 2010, he has headlined at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas. He has sold more than 80 million records worldwide.
  
  wn.com/Barry_Manilow
• Barry McKenzie
  Barry "Bazza" McKenzie (full name: Barrington Bradman Bing McKenzie) is a fictional character originally created by the Australian comedian Barry Humphries (but suggested by Peter Cook) for a comic strip, written by Humphries and drawn by New Zealand artist Nicholas Garland, in the British satirical magazine Private Eye.
  The Private Eye comic strips were compiled into a book, The Wonderful World of Barry McKenzie, in which McKenzie travels to the United Kingdom to claim an inheritance. The book was published in London, but was banned in Australia with the Department of Customs and Excise stating that it "relied on indecency for its humour".
  In 1972, a Barry McKenzie film, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, was released, based on the book. In 1974, a sequel Barry McKenzie Holds His Own was produced. The films starred Australian singer Barry Crocker as McKenzie, and chronicled the character's adventures in the United Kingdom and France respectively. In the films, McKenzie is the nephew of another of Humphries' characters, Edna Everage. Despite the banning of The Wonderful World of Barry McKenzie in Australia, the films received considerable support from the Australian government of John Gorton, becoming the first film to receive funding from the Australian Film Development Commission. Later Prime Minister Gough Whitlam even made an appearance in Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, where he granted a damehood to McKenzie's aunt, Edna Everage.
  
  wn.com/Barry_McKenzie
• 
  Barry Tuckwell
  Barry Emmanuel Tuckwell AC, OBE (born 5 March 1931), is an Australian horn player who has spent most of his professional life in the United Kingdom and the United States.
  Barry Tuckwell was born on 5 March 1931 in Melbourne, son of Charles Tuckwell and his wife, Elizabeth. He has a younger sister, Patricia, a violinist and fashion model widely known as Bambi. She married the photographer Athol Shmith and later George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II.
  After studying the piano, organ, and violin as a chorister at St Andrew's Cathedral, Sydney, Barry Tuckwell was introduced to the horn at age 13 and was playing professionally within six months. He studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music under Alan Mann, one of Australia's most influential brass players. Tuckwell has said, "The horn chose me. Right from the beginning, it was something I knew I could do."^{[citation needed]}
  Tuckwell relates an anecdote regarding his choice of instrument: sitting in a cafe one day with his sister Patricia, Charles Mackerras and a horn player from the local symphony, Patricia speculated on what Tuckwell's future in music might be. The horn player suggested, "Why not try the horn?" Tuckwell did so and within two years was playing in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. With characteristic humour, when recounting this at the British Horn Society's festival in 2005, he turned to the audience and said, "One note a time, piece of cake!" The horn is often reckoned to be one of the most difficult orchestral instruments to master.
  
  wn.com/Barry_Tuckwell
• 
  Bea Arthur
  Beatrice "Bea" Arthur (May 13, 1922 – April 25, 2009) was an American actress, comedienne and singer whose career spanned seven decades. Arthur achieved fame as the character Maude Findlay on the 1970s sitcoms All in the Family and Maude, and as Dorothy Zbornak on the 1980s sitcom The Golden Girls, winning Emmy Awards for both roles. A stage actress both before and after her television success, she won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance as Vera Charles in the original cast of Mame (1966).
  Arthur was born Bernice Frankel on May 13, 1922 to Philip and Rebecca Frankel (1902–1986) in New York City. In 1933 her family moved to Cambridge, Maryland, where her parents operated a women's clothing shop. She attended Linden Hall School for Girls, an all girls boarding school in Lititz, Pennsylvania, before enrolling in the now-defunct Blackstone College for Girls in Blackstone, Virginia, where she was active in drama productions.
  Arthur joined the United States Marine Corps in 1943. She worked at such jobs as typist and truck driver, and was honorably discharged with the rank of staff sergeant in 1945. She had a single misconduct report in 1944 for contracting venereal disease. During her time in the Marines, she married another Marine, Robert Aurthur, and changed her last name. She later denied having served in the military.
  
  wn.com/Bea_Arthur
• Bill Goodwin
  Bill Goodwin (July 28, 1910 - May 9, 1958) was for many years the announcer and regular character of the Burns and Allen radio program, and subsequently The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show on television from 1950-51. Upon his departure, he was replaced by Harry von Zell.
  Goodwin was known for frequently promoting the item sold by the sponsor of the show (Swan Soap or Maxwell House Coffee, among others, on radio; Carnation Evaporated Milk on television). He was very effective on radio in doing 'integrated commercials,' in which the advertisement was deftly woven into the show's storyline. Goodwin was best known for his amiable and fun-loving personality, for his persona on air as a 'ladies' man,' and for joking around about Burns's appearance and age. Ironically, he died over 37 years before Burns.
  Goodwin occasionally hosted other TV and Theatre shows, including Penny to a Million and Dollar a Minute. His last job as announcer was for NBC Radio's The Bob Hope Show (1953–1955). He also acted in several movies, including The Stork Club (1945), The Jolson Story (1946), Jolson Sings Again (1949) and The Big Beat (1958) with fellow Burns and Allen regular Hans Conried.
  
  wn.com/Bill_Goodwin
• Bill Kenwright
  Bill Kenwright CBE (born 4 September 1945, in Liverpool, Merseyside, England) is a leading West End theatre producer and film producer.
  He is also the Chairman of Everton Football Club, an English professional football club from the city of Liverpool.
  He attended Booker Avenue County Primary School, and then Liverpool Institute High School from 1957 to 1964 and appeared in school productions (including Shylock in The Merchant of Venice) on the stage in the Mount St. building (predecessor to LIPA). He was also treasurer of the Christian Union at school.
  In 2007 Kenwright was a judge in the BBC1 television series "Any Dream Will Do."
  Kenwright is one of the UK's most successful theatre producers, best known for the long-running West End hit Blood Brothers and the record breaking tour of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Other recent productions have included West End runs of Whistle Down The Wind at the Palace Theatre, Festen in London, on a UK tour and now on Broadway, The Big Life, Elmina's Kitchen, Scrooge - The Musical, The Night Of The Iguana, A Few Good Men, A Man For All Seasons alongside UK tours of Jesus Christ Superstar, Tommy, Whistle Down The Wind, Tell Me On A Sunday, and This Is Elvis. He produced the London revival of Cabaret at the Lyric Theatre in September 2006, starring Anna Maxwell Martin, James Dreyfus and Sheila Hancock.
  
  wn.com/Bill_Kenwright
• 
  Bob Mackie
  Robert Gordon "Bob" Mackie (born March 24, 1940 in Monterey Park, California) is an American fashion designer, best known for his costuming for entertainment icons such as Cher, Judy Garland, Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli, Tina Turner, and Mitzi Gaynor. He was the costume designer for The Carol Burnett Show during its entire 11 year run and designed the costumes for the 1993 television adaptation of Gypsy.
  Mackie is also known for his exclusive dress designs for collector's edition Barbie dolls.
  Two of Mackie's best-remembered creations had a humorous aspect. While working on The Carol Burnett Show, he designed a "curtain dress" (complete with a curtain rod across the shoulders) that Carol Burnett wore in the Gone with the Wind parody: Went with the Wind. Mackie also designed the garish ensemble worn by Cher at the March 1986 Academy Awards: black stretch pants, a bejeweled loincloth, knee high boots, a black chainlink top, and a huge feathered Mohawk headdress that was one and a half times taller than her head. Introduced by Jane Fonda with the words, "Wait'll you see what's gonna come out here," Cher was appearing as a presenter after what many considered an Oscar snub (Cher was not nominated for her performance in Mask). "As you can see," said Cher, "I did receive my Academy booklet on how to dress like a serious actress."
  
  wn.com/Bob_Mackie
• Bruce Beresford
  Bruce Beresford (born 16 August 1940) is an Australian film director who has made more than 30 feature films over a 40-year career.
  Beresford was born in Paddington, Sydney, the son of Lona (née Warr) and Leslie Beresford, who sold electrical goods. He grew up in the then outer-western suburb of Toongabbie, and went to The King's School, Parramatta. He made several short films in his teens.
  He completed a bachelor's degree in humanities majoring in English at Sydney University, and then moved to England in 1962 in search of film work. He could not break into the British film scene, so he answered an advertisement for an editing job in Nigeria, where he worked for two years, in Enugu. He then returned to England and worked for the British Film Institute as a producer of short films by first-time directors.
  Beresford returned to Australia in 1970 to make his first feature film, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, and spent the next 10 years working in Australia's developing film industry.
  He established his reputation as one of Australia's best directors with a series of notable films in the 1970s, including Don's Party, The Getting of Wisdom, The Club and Breaker Morant.
  
  wn.com/Bruce_Beresford
• 
  Burt Reynolds
  Burton Milo "Burt" Reynolds, Jr. (born February 11, 1936) is an American actor, director and voice artist. Some of his memorable roles include Bo 'Bandit' Darville in Smokey and the Bandit, Lewis Medlock in Deliverance, Bobby "Gator" McCluskey in White Lightning and sequel Gator, Paul Crewe and Coach Nate Scarborough in The Longest Yard and its 2005 remake respectively, Billy Clyde Puckett in Semi-Tough, J.J. McClure in The Cannonball Run, the voice of Charlie B. Barkin in All Dogs Go to Heaven, and Jack Horner in Boogie Nights.
  Reynolds' parents were Burton Milo Reynolds, Sr. (1906–2002), who had Cherokee and Irish ancestry, and his wife, Fern H. (née Miller). Reynolds was born in Lansing, Michigan. He states in his autobiography that his family was living in Lansing, Michigan, when his father was drafted into the United States Army. Reynolds, his mother and his sister joined his father at Fort Leonard Wood, where they lived for two years. When Reynolds's father was sent to Europe, the family returned to Lansing. In 1946, Reynolds moved to Riviera Beach, Florida, with his parents. His father, Burt Sr., later became Chief of Police of Riviera Beach. Riviera Beach is the next town north of West Palm Beach.
  
  wn.com/Burt_Reynolds
• 
  Cameron Mackintosh
  Sir Cameron Anthony Mackintosh (born 17 October 1946) is a British theatrical producer notable for his association with many commercially successful musicals. At the height of his success in 1990, he was described as being "the most successful, influential and powerful theatrical producer in the world" by the New York Times. He is the producer of shows such as Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, Mary Poppins, Martin Guerre, Miss Saigon and Cats.
  Mackintosh was born in Enfield, London, the son of Diana Gladys (née Tonna), a production secretary, and Ian Robert Mackintosh, a timber merchant and jazz trumpeter. His father was Scottish and his mother, a native of Malta, was of Maltese and French descent. Mackintosh was raised in his mother's Roman Catholic faith^{[citation needed]} and educated at Prior Park College in Bath.
  He first knew that he wanted to become a theatre producer after his aunt took him to a matinee of the Julian Slade musical Salad Days when he was 8 years old.
  Mackintosh began his theatre career in his late teens, as a stagehand at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, graduating to stage manager on several touring productions. Before long, he began producing his own small scale tours before becoming a London-based producer in the 1970s. His early London productions included Anything Goes (which closed after only two weeks), Side By Side By Sondheim, The Card, My Fair Lady and Tom Foolery.
  
  wn.com/Cameron_Mackintosh
• 
  Charles Conder
  Charles Edward Conder (24 October 1868 – 9 February 1909) was an English-born painter, lithographer and designer. He emigrated to Australia and was a key figure in the Heidelberg School, arguably the beginning of a distinctively Australian tradition in Western art.
  Conder was born in Tottenham, Middlesex, the second son, of six children, of James Conder, civil engineer and Mary Ann Ayres. He spent several years as a young child in India before the death of his mother on 14 May 1873 in Bombay, aged 31 years; he was then sent back to England and attended a number of schools including a boarding school at Eastbourne, which he attended from 1877. He left school at 15, and his very religious, non-artistic father, against Charles's natural artistic inclinations, decided that he should follow in his footsteps as a civil engineer.
  In 1884, at the age of 17, he was sent to Sydney, Australia, where he worked for his uncle, a land surveyor for the New South Wales government. However he disliked the work, much preferring to draw the landscape rather than survey it. In 1886, he left the job and became an artist for the "Illustrated Sydney News", where he was in the company of other artists such as Albert Henry Fullwood, Frank Mahoney and Benjamin Edwin Minns. He also attended the painting classes of Alfred James Daplyn and had joined the Art Society of New South Wales.
  
  wn.com/Charles_Conder
• 
  Charlie Chaplin
  Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977) was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I. Chaplin used mime, slapstick and other visual comedy routines, and continued well into the era of the talkies, though his films decreased in frequency from the end of the 1920s. His most famous role was that of The Tramp, which he first played in the Keystone comedy Kid Auto Races at Venice in 1914. From the April 1914 one-reeler Twenty Minutes of Love onwards he was writing and directing most of his films, by 1916 he was also producing them, and from 1918 he was even composing the music for them. With Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith, he co-founded United Artists in 1919.
  Chaplin was one of the most creative and influential personalities of the silent-film era. He was influenced by his predecessor, the French silent film comedian Max Linder, to whom he dedicated one of his films. His working life in entertainment spanned over 75 years, from the Victorian stage and the music hall in the United Kingdom as a child performer, until close to his death at the age of 88. His high-profile public and private life encompassed both adulation and controversy. Chaplin was identified with left-wing politics during the McCarthy era and he was ultimately forced to resettle in Europe from 1952.
  
  wn.com/Charlie_Chaplin
• 
  Charlotte Church
  Charlotte Maria Church (born Charlotte Maria Reed; 21 February 1986) is a Welshsinger-songwriter, actress and television presenter. She rose to fame in childhood as a classical singer before branching into pop music in 2005. By 2007, she had sold more than 10 million records worldwide including over 5 million in the United States. In 2010 she was reported to be worth as much as £11m (though one 2003 report quoted her worth at £25m). She hosted a Channel 4 chat show titled The Charlotte Church Show. Church released her first album in five years, titled Back To Scratch, on 17 October 2010. She is also mentioned as one of the Bohemians in Ben Elton's musical We Will Rock You.
  Charlotte Church was born Charlotte Maria Reed in Llandaff, a district of Cardiff, Wales. She was brought up as a Roman Catholic by her mother, Maria, who was separated from Church's biological father, Stephen Reed. Church was adopted by her mother's second husband, James Church in 1986. Her break came at 11 when she sang Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Pie Jesu" over the telephone on the television show "This Morning" in 1997, followed by her performance on ITV's Big, Big Talent Show in 1997. This led to concerts at Cardiff Arms Park, the Royal Albert Hall and opening for Shirley Bassey in Antwerp. She also received a vocal scholarship to Howell's School Llandaff in Cardiff where she started in 1998 after leaving The Cathedral School, Llandaff. She balanced performing and school with help from tutors for when she was on the road and said in many interviews that she was "just like every other girl her age".
  
  wn.com/Charlotte_Church
• 
  Charlton Heston
  Charlton Heston (born John Charles Carter; October 4, 1923 – April 5, 2008) was an American actor of film, theatre and television. Heston is known for heroic roles in films such as The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, El Cid, and Planet of the Apes. He also is well known for his roles in the films The Greatest Show on Earth and Touch of Evil.
  Heston was also known for his political activism. In the 1950s and 1960s he was one of a handful of Hollywood actors to speak openly against racism and was an active supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. Initially a moderate Democrat, he later supported conservative Republican policies and was president of the National Rifle Association from 1998 to 2003.
  Heston was born John Charles Carter, the son of Lilla (née Charlton; 1899–1994) and Russell Whitford Carter (1897–1966), a sawmill operator. Most sources state that he was born in Evanston, Illinois. Heston's autobiography, however, and some other sources place his birth in No Man's Land, Illinois, which usually refers to a then-unincorporated area now part of Wilmette, a wealthy northern suburb of Chicago. Heston said in a 1995 interview that he was not very good at remembering addresses or his early childhood.
  
  wn.com/Charlton_Heston
• 
  Cher
  Cher ( /ˈʃɛər/) (born Cherilyn Sarkisian; May 20, 1946) is an American recording artist, television personality, actress, director, record producer, and philanthropist. Referred to as the Goddess of Pop, she has won an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, an Emmy Award, three Golden Globes, and a Cannes Film Festival Award for her work in film, music, and television. She is the only person in history to receive all five awards. She began her career as a backup singer and came to prominence in 1965 as one-half of the pop rock duo Sonny & Cher with the success of their song "I Got You Babe". She subsequently established herself as a solo recording artist and became a television star in 1971 with The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, a variety show for which she won a Golden Globe. A well-received performance in the film Silkwood earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress of 1983. In the following years, she starred in a string of hit films including Mask, The Witches of Eastwick, and Moonstruck, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress of 1987.
  
  wn.com/Cher
• 
  Clifton Pugh
  Clifton Ernest Pugh AO, (17 December 1924 – 14 October 1990) was an Australian artist and three-time winner of Australia's Archibald Prize. He was strongly influenced by German Expressionism, and was known for his landscapes and portraiture. Important early group exhibitions include The Antipodeans, the exhibition for which Bernard Smith drafted a manifesto in support of Australian figurative painting, an exhibition in which Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval and Charles Blackman showed; a joint exhibition with Barry Humphries, in which the two responded to Dadaism; and Group Four at the Victorian Artists Society Gallery with Pugh, John Howley, Don Laycock and Lawrence Daws.
  Pugh was a pioneering environmental activist in Australia.
  Pugh was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1985 for service to Australian Art. In 1990 he was appointed as the Australian War Memorial's official artist at the 75th anniversary celebrations of the Gallipoli landing.
  
  wn.com/Clifton_Pugh
• Clive James
  Clive Vivian Leopold James, CBE, AM (born 7 October 1939), born Vivian James, is an Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet and memoirist, best known for his autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs, for his chat shows and documentaries on British television and for his prolific journalism. He has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since the early 1960s.
  James was born in Kogarah, Sydney. He was allowed to change his name as a child because "after Vivien Leigh played Scarlett O'Hara the name became irrevocably a girl's name no matter how you spelled it".
  His father was taken prisoner by the Japanese during World War II. Although he survived the POW camp, he died when the plane returning him to Australia crashed in Manila Bay; he was buried in Hong Kong. James, who was an only child, was brought up by his mother in the Sydney suburb of Kogarah.
  In Unreliable Memoirs, James says an IQ test taken in childhood put his IQ at 140. He was educated at Sydney Technical High School (despite winning a bursary award to Sydney Boys High School) and the University of Sydney, where he studied Psychology and became associated with the Sydney Push, a libertarian, intellectual subculture. At the university, he edited the student newspaper, Honi Soit, and directed the annual Union Revue. After graduating, James worked for a year as an Assistant Editor for The Sydney Morning Herald.
  
  wn.com/Clive_James
• Connie Fisher
  Connie Fisher (born 17 June 1983) is a Welsh actress and singer, who won the BBC One talent contest, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?
  On 15 November 2006, she opened to excellent reviews in the part of Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music in the West End, London on a six-month contract, which was extended until 23 February 2008. She resumed the role of Maria in The Sound of Music UK tour starting in July 2009.
  Fisher was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, and is the daughter of a Royal Corps of Signals major. Fisher lived in Dorset, England until the age of six, when she moved to a village near Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire, Wales. She attended Hayscastle Junior School, and then went on to Sir Thomas Picton School. She is a fluent Welsh speaker.
  During her teenage years she was a member of Haverfordwest Operatic Society where she performed in The Pirates of Penzance and played Nellie Forbush in South Pacific. She was also a member of the Torch Youth Theatre where she performed in George Buchner's play Woyzek. She successfully became a member of National Youth Music Theatre (1999–2002), where she played the Lady of the Lake in the UK tour of Pendragon, and played the lead role, Morgan Le Fay, when the production toured Japan in 2001. From an early age Fisher was a member of Côr Newyddion Da (English translation - "Good News Choir"), which introduced her to the Eisteddfodic field and encouraged her to perform as a soloist. She competed annually in the Urdd Gobaith Cymru, National and International Eisteddfods. In 2002 Fisher won the Wilbert Lloyd Roberts Scholarship in the National Eisteddfod "Songs from the Shows" competition and the Milford and West Wales Mercury talent competition.
  
  wn.com/Connie_Fisher
• 
  Dame Edna Everage
  Dame Edna is a character created and played by Australian dadaist performer and comedian, Barry Humphries, famous for her lilac-coloured or "wisteria hue" hair and cat eye glasses or "face furniture," her favourite flower, the gladiola ("gladdies") and her boisterous greeting: "Hello Possums!" As Dame Edna, Humphries has written several books including an autobiography, My Gorgeous Life, appeared in several films and hosted several television shows (on which Humphries has also appeared as himself and other alter-egos).
  Humphries has regularly updated Edna, originally a drab Melbourne, Australia housewife satirising Australian suburbia. The character adopted an increasingly outlandish wardrobe after being performed in London in the 1960s, and grew in stature and popularity. Following film appearances and an elevation to damehood in the 1970s, the character evolved to "Housewife and Superstar", then "Megastar" and finally "Gigastar". Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Dame Edna became increasingly known and popular in the U.S. after multiple stage and television appearances.
  
  wn.com/Dame_Edna_Everage
• Danielle Hope
  Danielle Hope (born 26 April 1992) is an English actress and singer. She is the winner of the BBC talent contest Over The Rainbow and as a result played the part of Dorothy in the Andrew Lloyd Webber production of The Wizard of Oz, which began performances in the West End at the London Palladium in February 2011.
  Hope lived in Urmston, Greater Manchester and attended Knutsford High School in Cheshire, concentrating in drama and dance. Hope appeared in many of her school's musical theatre productions, playing such roles as Carmen in the musical Fame, the narrator in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Maria in West Side Story. She also appeared in We Will Rock You alongside Charlotte Wakefield from Spring Awakening
  She left her part-time job as a waitress to focus on her A-level studies in Drama and Dance, and a BTEC National Award Musical Theatre. She has also studied dance privately and performed at dance festivals, including the BBC African Dance Project at Bridgewater Hall.
  
  wn.com/Danielle_Hope
• David Ian
  David Ian Lane (born Chadwell Heath, England in 1961), is a former actor and now a theatre producer who The Stage has called "the most powerful man in UK theatre".
  Formerly the chairman of Live Nation’s global theatrical division, he was one of the judges in the BBC TV series How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?. In the 1980s, David took part in the A Song For Europe contest twice, finishing in 2nd place on both occasions. In 1984, as part of the group First Division with the song Where The Action Is, and in 1986 as part of the group Jump, performing Don't Hang Up On Love.
  The son of a Railway Fitter and a Personal Assistant, Ian started as an actor and starred in a number of UK theatre productions, including the musicals Time (musical), The Pirates of Penzance, Joseph in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Rocky in The Rocky Horror Show. He is known professionally as David Ian as the name David Lane was already taken when he applied to actors union Equity.
  In 1990 Ian met Paul Nicholas while they were both starring in a production of The Pirates of Penzance at the London Palladium. The pair created a partnership, Paul Nicholas & David Ian Associates Ltd. The company has since produced shows, including:
  
  wn.com/David_Ian
• David Williamson
  David Keith Williamson AO (born 19 February 1942) is one of Australia's best-known playwrights. He has also written screenplays and teleplays.
  David Williamson was born in Melbourne and brought up in Bairnsdale, Victoria. He initially studied mechanical engineering at the University of Melbourne from 1960.^{[citation needed]} His early forays into the theatre were as an actor and writer of skits for the Engineers' Revue at Melbourne University's Union Theatre at lunchtime during the early 1960s.
  After a stint as a lecturer for Swinburne University, he turned to writing plays in 1967.
  Williamson rose to prominence in the early 1970s, with works such as Don's Party (later turned into a 1976 film), a comic drama set during the 1969 federal election; and The Removalists (1971). He also collaborated on the screenplays for Gallipoli (1981) and The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). Williamson's work as a playwright focuses on themes of politics, loyalty and family in contemporary urban Australia, particularly in two of its major cities, Melbourne and Sydney.
  
  wn.com/David_Williamson
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  Debbie Harry
  Deborah Ann "Debbie" Harry (born July 1, 1945) is an American singer-songwriter and actress, best known for being the lead singer of the punk rock and new wave band Blondie. She has also had success as a solo artist, and in the mid-1990s she performed and recorded as part of The Jazz Passengers. Her acting career spans over thirty film roles and numerous television appearances.
  Harry was born in Miami, Florida, and adopted by Catherine Harry and Richard Smith, gift shop proprietors in Hawthorne, New Jersey. She attended Hawthorne High School, where she graduated in 1963. She graduated from Centenary College in Hackettstown, New Jersey, with an Associate of Arts degree in 1965.^{[citation needed]} Before starting her singing career she moved to New York City in the late 1960s and worked as a secretary at BBC Radio's office there for one year. Later, she was a waitress at Max's Kansas City, a go-go dancer in Union City, New Jersey, discothèque,^{[citation needed]} and a Playboy Bunny.
  Deborah Harry began her musical career in the late '60s with the folk rock group The Wind in the Willows, that recorded one album for Capitol Records. Harry then joined The Stilettos, with Elda Gentile and Amanda Jones, in 1974. The Stilettos included her eventual boyfriend and Blondie guitarist Chris Stein. When Harry and Stein left the Stilettos, they formed Angel and the Snake, with Tish and Snooky Bellomo. Shortly thereafter, Harry and Stein formed Blondie, naming it for the term of address men often yelled at Harry when she bleached her hair. Blondie quickly became regulars at Max's Kansas City and CBGB in New York City. After a debut album in 1976, commercial success followed in the late 1970s to the early 1980s, first in Australia and Europe, then in the United States.
  
  wn.com/Debbie_Harry
• 
  Denise van Outen
  Denise van Outen (born Denise Kathleen Outen, 27 May 1974)^{[citation needed]} is an English actress, singer and television presenter. Her most notable roles to date are as a presenter on The Big Breakfast, and as Roxie Hart in the musical Chicago on both the West End and on Broadway.
  Born Denise Kathleen Outen in Basildon, Essex, she is the youngest of Ted and Kathleen Outen's three children and was brought up a Catholic. She has a brother Terry and sister Jackie.
  At the age of seven, she began modelling for knitting patterns, and showed an early flair for performing. This resulted in her attending the Sylvia Young Theatre School. In 1986, at age 12, she played Eponine in Les Misérables alongside fellow Sylvia Young student Melanie Blatt (the role paid her school fees), the Anthony Newley directed production of Stop the World - I Want to Get Off, and A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
  As a teenager she had brief roles on a number of television dramas including Kappatoo and The Bill. She also sang with Cathy Warwick in "girl group" Those2Girls, by which time she had become Denise van Outen. She also did backing vocals with Melanie Blatt for the band Dreadzone.
  
  wn.com/Denise_van_Outen
• Dennis Price
  Dennis Price (23 June 1915 – 6 October 1973) was an English actor, remembered for his suave screen roles, particularly Louis Mazzini in Kind Hearts and Coronets and for his portrayal of the omniscient valet Jeeves in 1960s television adaptations of P. G. Wodehouse's stories.
  Price was born Dennistoun Franklyn John Rose-Price in Twyford in Berkshire, son of Brigadier-General Thomas Rose Caradoc Price and his wife Dorothy, née Verey. He attended Copthorne Prep School, Radley College and Worcester College, Oxford. He studied acting at the Embassy Theatre School of Acting.
  Price made his first appearance on stage at the Croydon Repertory Theatre in June 1937, followed by a London debut at the Queen's Theatre on 6 September 1937 in Richard II. He served in the Royal Artillery from March 1940 to June 1942 but quickly returned to acting after discharge, appearing with Noël Coward in This Happy Breed and Present Laughter and later as Charles Condomine in Blithe Spirit, which he later named in Who's Who in the Theatre as one of his two favourite parts along with the title role in André Obey's Noah. In the 1950s, Price appeared in London and New York in new plays and revivals of classics. In 1957 he made his debut in South Africa in lead roles in Separate Tables.
  
  wn.com/Dennis_Price
• Dick Bentley
  Charles Walter "Dick" Bentley (14 May 1907 – 27 August 1995), born in Melbourne, Australia, was a comedian and actor. He starred with Jimmy Edwards in Take It From Here for BBC Radio.
  As a boy, Bentley learned several musical instruments, and while still in his teens was a staple on the Melbourne cabaret circuit as a comedian and singer, his act consisting of playing a few bars of music deliberately badly, interspersed with jokes and legitimate musical numbers. He made his first appearance on ABC Radio in the early 1930s and by 1938 had become a fairly prominent personality. In that year he moved to London and worked for the BBC. Newly married to Peta, he returned to Australia on the outbreak of war, and spent several years entertaining the troops in the Pacific theatre.
  By 1946, he was one of Australia's highest-paid entertainers, and returned to Britain to try to re-establish himself in a much larger market. He joined up with writer Denis Norden and guested on many of the leading radio shows of the day. An appearance on Navy Mixture teamed him successfully with Jimmy Edwards, and indirectly led to the pairing of Denis Norden with Frank Muir, who was Edwards' writer. Muir and Norden together wrote Take It From Here (1948–60), with Edwards and Bentley as two of the three stars. The most memorable feature of Take It From Here was The Glums, with Edwards playing the slightly seedy Pa Glum and Bentley his terminally dim son, Ron. Interestingly, Bentley was thirteen years older than Edwards.
  
  wn.com/Dick_Bentley
• 
  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.
  
  wn.com/Dudley_Moore
• Eleanor Bron
  Eleanor Bron (born 14 March 1938) is an English stage, film and television actress and author.
  Bron was born in 1938 in Stanmore, Middlesex. Before her birth, her father Sidney had legally shortened the surname from Bronstein to Bron as an effort to enhance his newly-founded commercial enterprise, Bron's Orchestral Service. Her brother Gerry explained the change simply: "Bronstein's Orchestral Service was a bit of a mouthful."
  She attended North London Collegiate School and Newnham College, Cambridge: the latter she would later characterize as "three years of unparalleled pampering and privilege."
  Bron was the longtime partner of noted architect Cedric Price until his death in 2003; they had no children. Her elder brother is record producer Gerry Bron.
  Bron began her career in the Cambridge Footlights revue of 1959, entitled The Last Laugh, in which Peter Cook also appeared. The addition of a female performer to the Footlights was a departure, having been until that point all-male, with female characters portrayed in drag.
  
  wn.com/Eleanor_Bron
• 
  Flemish people
  Today, the Flemings or Flemish (Dutch: “de Vlamingen”; French: “les Flamands”) refers to the Dutch-speaking inhabitants of Belgium, where they are mostly found in the northern region of Flanders. They are one of two principal cultural-linguistic groups in Belgium, the other being the French-speaking Walloons. The Flemings make up the majority of the Belgian population (about 60%). Historically, “the Flemings” also refers to the inhabitants of the ancient county of Flanders, including the French-speaking or Picard-speaking Flemings of the regions around Tournai (today in Wallonia), Lille and Douai (today in French Flanders), who were called “les Flamands wallons” (the Romance Flemings).
  The feel of 'Flemish' being a national identity increased heavily, shortly after the Belgian Revolution. Prior to this, the term 'Flemings' in the Dutch language was in first place used for the inhabitants of the former County of Flanders. Flemish however had been used since the 14th century to describe the language of both the peoples of Flanders and the Duchy of Brabant. Italians started in 15th century to describe both peoples as 'Fiamingi', the English and the French followed in the 16th. The sentiments of having somehow a common identity, despite belonging to different states (most notably the share of a common language, the deeply felt need to 'act as one' against any foreign state) existed already in the Middle Ages. An example is the 'Flemish-Brabant Co-operation Treaty' (Vlaams-Brabants samenwerkingsverdag) from 3/12/1339 imposed by the main cities of both states upon their rulers. It must noted that the modern Belgian province of Limburg -nowadays Flemish- was not part of this.
  
  wn.com/Flemish_people
• 
  Francis Poulenc
  Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (French pronunciation: [fʁɑ̃sis ʒɑ̃ maʁsɛl pulɛ̃k]) (7 January 1899 – 30 January 1963) was a French composer and a member of the French group Les Six. He composed solo piano music, chamber music, oratorio, choral music, opera, ballet music, and orchestral music. Critic Claude Rostand, in a July 1950 Paris-Presse article, coined the term "half monk, half thug" (translated by Ivry from "le moine et le voyou"), a phrase that would often be used to describe Poulenc.
  Poulenc was born in Paris in 1899. His father Emile Poulenc was a second generation director of the Poulenc, and later Rhône-Poulenc, chemical corporation. His mother, an amateur pianist, taught him to play. He was introduced to Ricardo Viñes in 1914, a champion of the music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and became his pupil shortly afterwards. He was a capable pianist, and the keyboard dominated his early compositions.
  In 1916 a childhood friend, Raymonde Linossier (1897-1930), introduced Poulenc to Adrienne Monnier's bookshop, the Maison des Amis des Livres. There he met avant-garde poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon. He was to set many of their poems to music.
  
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  Franz Schubert
  Franz Peter Schubert (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁants ˈʃuːbɛɐ̯t]; 31 January 1797 – 19 November 1828) was an Austrian composer.
  Although he died at the age of 31, Schubert was a prolific composer, having written some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies (including the famous "Unfinished Symphony"), liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music. Appreciation of Schubert's music during his lifetime was limited, but interest in his work increased significantly in the decades following his death. Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Felix Mendelssohn, among others, discovered and championed his works in the 19th century. Today, Schubert is seen as one of the leading exponents of the early Romantic era in music and he remains one of the most frequently performed composers.
  Schubert was born in Himmelpfortgrund (now a part of Alsergrund), Vienna, on 31 January 1797. His father, Franz Theodor Schubert, the son of a Moravian peasant, was a parish schoolmaster; his mother, Elisabeth Vietz, was the daughter of a Silesian master locksmith, and had also been a housemaid for a Viennese family prior to her marriage. Of Franz Theodor's fourteen children (one illegitimate child was born in 1783), nine died in infancy; five survived. Their father was a well-known teacher, and his school in Lichtental, a part of Vienna's 9th district, was well attended. He was not a musician of fame or with formal training, but he taught his son some elements of music.
  
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• 
  Fred Astaire
  Fred Astaire (born Frederick Austerlitz; May 10, 1899 – June 22, 1987) was an American film and Broadway stage dancer, choreographer, singer and actor. His stage and subsequent film career spanned a total of 76 years, during which he made 31 musical films. He was named the fifth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute. He is particularly associated with Ginger Rogers, with whom he made ten films.
  Gene Kelly, another major innovator in filmed dance, said that "the history of dance on film begins with Astaire". Beyond film and television, many classical dancers and choreographers, Rudolf Nureyev, Sammy Davis, Jr., Michael Jackson, Gregory Hines, Mikhail Baryshnikov, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins among them, also acknowledged his importance and influence.
  Astaire was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of Johanna "Ann" (née Geilus) and Frederic "Fritz" Austerlitz (born September 8, 1868, as Friedrich Emanuel Austerlitz). Astaire's mother was born in the United States to Lutheran German immigrants from East Prussia and Alsace, while Astaire's father was born in Linz, Austria, to Jewish parents who had converted to Catholicism.
  
  wn.com/Fred_Astaire
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  Frederick Delius
  Frederick Theodore Albert Delius, CH (29 January 1862 – 10 June 1934) was an English composer. Born in the north of England to a prosperous mercantile family of German extraction, he resisted attempts to recruit him to commerce. He was sent to Florida in the United States in 1884 to manage an orange plantation, where he neglected his managerial duties; influenced by African-American music, he began composing. After a brief period of formal musical study in Germany beginning in 1886, he embarked on a full-time career as a composer in Paris and then in nearby Grez-sur-Loing, where he and his wife Jelka lived (except during the First World War) for the rest of their lives.
  Delius's first successes came in Germany, where Hans Haym and other conductors promoted his music from the late 1890s. In Delius's native Britain, it was 1907 before his music made regular appearances in concert programmes, after Thomas Beecham took it up. Beecham conducted the full premiere of A Mass of Life in London in 1909 (he had premiered Part II in Germany in 1908); he staged the opera A Village Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden in 1910; and he mounted a six-day Delius festival in London in 1929, as well as making gramophone recordings of many of Delius's works. After 1918 Delius began to suffer the effects of syphilis, contracted during his earlier years in Paris. He became paralysed and blind, but completed some late compositions between 1928 and 1932 with the aid of an amanuensis, Eric Fenby.
  
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  George Gershwin
  George Gershwin (September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) was an American composer and pianist. Gershwin's compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are widely known. Among his best known works are the orchestral compositions Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris, as well as the opera Porgy and Bess.
  Born in Brooklyn to a Ukrainian father of Jewish descent and a Russian mother, Gershwin studied piano under Charles Hambitzer and composition with Rubin Goldmark and Henry Cowell. He began his career as a song plugger, but soon thereafter started composing Broadway theatre works with his brother Ira Gershwin and Buddy DeSylva. He moved to Paris in an attempt to study with Nadia Boulanger, where he began to compose An American in Paris. After returning to New York City, he wrote Porgy and Bess with Ira and author DuBose Heyward. Initially a commercial failure, Porgy and Bess is now considered one of the most important American operas of the Twentieth Century. Gershwin moved to Hollywood and composed numerous film scores until his death in 1937 from a brain tumor.
  
  wn.com/George_Gershwin
• Googie Withers
  Georgette Lizette "Googie" Withers CBE, AO (12 March 1917 – 15 July 2011) was an English theatre, film and television actress. She was a longtime resident of Australia with her husband, the actor John McCallum, with whom she often appeared. She was a well-known actress during the war and post-war years.
  An Anglo-Indian, Withers was born in Karachi, then part of British India, to Edgar Withers, a captain in the Royal Navy, and a Dutch-German mother named Zitette. She acquired the name "Googie" (Little Pigeon) at a young age from her ayah (nanny). As a child, she learned Urdu.^{[citation needed]} Her father left the Royal Navy to manage a foundry in Birmingham, England, and Googie was sent to a boarding school near Dover, Kent. She began acting at the age of twelve. A student at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, she was a dancer in a West End production when she was offered work as a film extra in Michael Powell's The Girl in the Crowd (1935). She arrived on the set to find one of the major players in the production had been dismissed, and she was immediately asked to step into the role in her place.
  
  wn.com/Googie_Withers
• Gordon Chater
  Gordon Chater (6 April 1922, London, England – 12 December 1999, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia) was a comedian and actor.
  Chater attended Cambridge University to study to become a doctor but did not finish his degree. While at Cambridge he took part in many student revues.
  He arrived in Australia following World War II. He first came to prominence in Australia as a stage and radio actor, and was a cast member of the 1963 Sydney season of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, the debut production by the Old Tote Theatre Company, the precursor to the Sydney Theatre Company.
  Chater became a national TV star when he was cast with Carol Raye and Barry Creyton in the Australian satirical television series The Mavis Bramston Show, for which he won the 1966 Gold Logie Award for Most Popular Personality on Australian Television. He cemented his popularity with the title role in the popular sitcom My Name's McGooley, What's Yours?, playing the elderly live-in father of a young married couple, played by John Meillon and Judi Farr. He appeared in many other television comedy series. His fellow actors included Ray Barrett and Charles "Bud" Tingwell, among others.
  
  wn.com/Gordon_Chater
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  Gough Whitlam
  Edward Gough Whitlam, AC, QC (born 11 July 1916), known as Gough Whitlam ( /ˈɡɒf ˈwɪtləm/ GOFF WIT-ləm), served as the 21st Prime Minister of Australia. Whitlam led the Australian Labor Party (ALP) to power at the 1972 election and retained government at the 1974 election, before being dismissed by Governor-General Sir John Kerr at the climax of the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. Whitlam remains the only Prime Minister to have his commission terminated in that manner.
  Whitlam entered Parliament in 1952, as an ALP member of the House of Representatives. In 1960 he was elected deputy leader of the ALP and in 1967, after party leader Arthur Calwell retired, he assumed the leadership and became Leader of the Opposition. After narrowly losing the 1969 election, Whitlam led Labor to victory at the 1972 election after 23 years of Liberal-Country Coalition government.
  In his time in office, Whitlam and his government implemented a large number of new programs and policy changes, including the elimination of military conscription and criminal execution, institution of universal health care and fee-free tertiary schooling (university), and the implementation of legal aid programs. He won the 1974 election with a reduced majority. Subsequently, the Opposition, which controlled the Senate, was emboldened by government scandals and a flagging economy to challenge Whitlam. In late 1975, there was a weeks-long deadlock over the passage of appropriation bills, which was resolved by Kerr's dismissal of Whitlam and commissioning of Opposition leader Malcolm Fraser as caretaker Prime Minister. Labor lost the subsequent 1975 election in a landslide.
  
  wn.com/Gough_Whitlam
• Graeme Bell
  Graeme Emerson Bell AO MBE (born 7 September 1914 in Richmond, Victoria, Australia) is an Australian Dixieland and classical jazz pianist, composer and band leader. According to The Age, his "band's music was hailed for its distinctive Australian edge, which he describes as 'nice larrikinism' and 'a happy Aussie outdoor feel'".
  Aside from playing, Bell was one of the leading promoters of jazz in Australia, bringing American performers such as Rex Stewart to Australia.
  Bell wrote his autobiography in 1988, Graeme Bell, Australian jazzman : his autobiography, which included a discography compiled by Jack Mitchell. Bell was inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall of Fame in 1997 alongside The Bee Gees and Paul Kelly. By 1999, Bell had made over 1500 recordings and performed in thousands of gigs in Australia and internationally. The Australian Jazz Awards, or "The Bells", which commenced in 2003, are named in his honour.
  
  wn.com/Graeme_Bell
• Graeme Blundell
  Graeme Blundell (born 1945) is an Australian actor, director, producer, writer and biographer.
  Blundell was born in Melbourne; he grew up in Clifton Hill, a suburb of Melbourne. He was educated at University High School and the University of Melbourne.
  In his early years, Blundell worked at La Mama Theatre, The Pram Factory, Hoopla, the Playbox Theatre Company, and the Melbourne Theatre Company. He directed and acted in the premiere performance of Jack Hibberd's play Dimboola at La Mama. His first television appearance was as an uncredited extra in the debut episode of Homicide (1964). He is best known as playing the title character in the 70's sex-comedy film Alvin Purple.
  He has written extensively in The Australian newspaper as well as writing biographies of Brett Whiteley (Brett Whiteley: An Unauthorised Life, 1996, with his then wife Margot Hilton), and Graham Kennedy (King, 2003).
  Since March 2011, Blundell has hosted "Sunday Night At The Movies with Graeme Blundell" on FOXTEL's Fox Classics channel.
  
  wn.com/Graeme_Blundell
• Graeme Murphy
  Graeme Murphy (born 2 November 1950) is an Australian dance choreographer. Together with his fellow dancer (and wife since 2004) Janet Vernon, he has guided Sydney Dance Company to become one of Australia's most successful and well-known dance companies.
  Murphy was born in Melbourne, and grew up in Tasmania, where he took dance classes with Kenneth Gillespie in Launceston. He began his career as a student at the Australian Ballet School at the age of fourteen. In 1968 he became a dancer with the Australian Ballet where he had opportunities to choreograph. He toured America with the Australian Ballet in 1970–1971 and created his first ballet, Ecco le Diavole (Ecco), to music by Nino Rota, presented at Melbourne's Princess Theatre in July 1971, featuring Roslyn Anderson, Roma Egan, Janet Vernon, and Wendy Walker.
  The work was presented by the Australian Ballet Society at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne in July of that year. He later danced with the Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet (now Birmingham Royal Ballet), and Les Ballets Félix Blaska in France. In 1975 he worked as a freelance choreographer. He rejoined the Australian Ballet in the early months of 1976 as both a dancer and as a resident choreographer. He was appointed as Artistic Director of the Dance Company of New South Wales in November 1976 (in 1979 this company became the Sydney Dance Company).
  
  wn.com/Graeme_Murphy
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  Graham Norton
  Graham William Walker, known by his stage name Graham Norton, (born 4 April 1963) is an Irish actor, comedian, television presenter and columnist. He is the host of comedy chat programme The Graham Norton Show on BBC One in the UK and BBC America in the US. Hot Press has described him as "the 21st century's answer to Terry Wogan", with both men sharing an Irish background and the common link of being a BBC Radio 2 presenter and the BBC television commentator of the Eurovision Song Contest. Norton has won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Entertainment Performance on five occassions.
  Norton was born in Clondalkin, a suburb of Dublin, but grew up in Bandon, County Cork, Ireland to a Protestant family. He was educated at Bandon Grammar School, in County Cork and then University College Cork but did not complete his studies.
  In 1992 his stand-up comedy drag act in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as a tea-towel clad Mother Teresa of Calcutta made the press when Scottish Television's religious affairs department mistakenly thought he represented the real Mother Teresa.
  
  wn.com/Graham_Norton
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  Harold Acton
  Sir Harold Mario Mitchell Acton CBE (5 July 1904 – 27 February 1994) was a British writer, scholar and dilettante perhaps most famous for being wrongly believed to have inspired the character of "Anthony Blanche" in Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited (1945). Waugh himself wrote, "The characters in my novels often wrongly identified with Harold Acton were to a great extent drawn from Brian Howard".
  Acton was born into a prominent Anglo-Italian family at Villa La Pietra, his parents' house one mile outside the walls of Florence, Italy. He claimed that his great-great-grandfather was Commodore Sir John Acton, who was prime minister of Naples under Ferdinand IV, and grandfather of the Roman Catholic historian John Acton. However, the basis of this has been disputed.
  Harold was in fact the great-great grandson of Sir John's younger brother Joseph Acton (1 Oct 1737-12 Jan 1830) via his eldest son Charles.
  His father was the art collector and dealer Arthur Acton (1873–1953), his mother Hortense Mitchell (1871–1962), heiress to a prominent Chicago banking family. The Mitchell fortune allowed Arthur to buy the remarkable Villa La Pietra on the hills of Florence, where Harold lived for much of his life. The only modern furniture in the villa was in the nurseries, and that was disposed of when the children got older (Harold's younger brother William was born in 1906).
  
  wn.com/Harold_Acton
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  Helena Blackman
  Helena Blackman (born 10 December 1982 in Southampton) is a British musical theatre actress best known for being the runner-up in the BBC1 Reality TV programme How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?. She trained at the Guildford School of Acting.
  On October 29, 2006, Blackman was seen as Gypsy Rose Lee in a production of Gypsy which was performed at the Wales Millennium Centre as part of the Cardiff International Festival of Musical Theatre. In December 2006, Blackman played Dorothy in an acclaimed run of The Wizard of Oz at the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester.
  Blackman is a much in demand^{[citation needed]} cabaret performer at corporate events, she has recently been featured as a soloist in The night of a thousand voices at the Royal Albert Hall and in Tim McArthur's one-man show Sister Mary McArthur Comin' At-Cha! at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London.
  In May 2007, Blackman was seen giving advice to contestant Ben Ellis in an episode of Any Dream Will Do and in July 2007 she appeared as a soloist in an episode of BBC Radio 2's long-running Friday Night is Music Night opposite Daniel Boys. Blackman recently toured the UK extensively as "Nellie Forbush" in a run of Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific from 2007 - 2008.
  
  wn.com/Helena_Blackman
• Herbert Read
  Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC (1893–1968) was an English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner.
  Read was born in Kirkbymoorside in the North Riding of Yorkshire. His studies at the University of Leeds were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, during which he served with the Green Howards in France. He received the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order, and reached the rank of captain. During the war Read founded the journal Arts and Letters with Frank Rutter, one of the first literary periodicals to publish work by T. S. Eliot.
  Read's first volume of poetry was Songs of Chaos, self-published in 1915. His second collection, published in 1919, was called Naked Warriors, and drew on his experiences fighting in the trenches of the First World War. His work, which shows the influence of Imagism and of the Metaphysical poets, was mainly in free verse. His Collected Poems, appeared in 1946. As a critic of literature, Read mainly concerned himself with the English Romantic poets (e.g., The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry, 1953)but was also a close observer of imagism . He published a novel, The Green Child. He contributed to the Criterion (1922–1939) and he was for many years a regular art critic for the Listener.^{[citation needed]}
  
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  Jan Frans De Boever
  Jan Frans De Boever (Ghent, Belgium, 8 June 1872 - 23 May 1949) was a Flemish Symbolist painter. He was very successful during most of his lifetime, and he considered himself as one of the best painters ever in his country. His megalomaniac character made him a solitary and isolated artist, whose work moved the last few decades to the U.S.A. where became a beloved artist.
  Jan Frans De Boever received his training in Ghent at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts under Louis Tytgadt, whose niece he married.
  Tytgadt provided him with an introduction to important circles in his city, and he became a celebrated and well-known artist, a recognised celebrity at official exhibitions in Ghent, Antwerp, Brussels and Liege.
  Suddenly in about 1909 he modified his style radically, painting licentious women and prostitutes in morbid and bizarre settings. Skeletons, death and eroticism began to dominate his paintings. Semi-clothed women were depicted as servants of the devil, creating an atmosphere of evil. Man is shown as woman's toy, a languid object submitting himself to her slightest caprice.
  
  wn.com/Jan_Frans_De_Boever
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  Jeffrey Archer
  Jeffrey Howard Archer, Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare (born 15 April 1940) is a best-selling English author and former politician whose political career ended with his conviction and subsequent imprisonment (2001–03) for perjury and perverting the course of justice.
  Alongside his literary work, Archer was a Member of Parliament (1969–74), and deputy chairman of the Conservative Party (1985–86). He was made a life peer in 1992.
  Jeffrey Howard Archer was born in the City of London Maternity Hospital. He was two weeks old when his family moved to the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, where he spent most of his early life. He has an older brother born out of wedlock, also originally called Jeffrey, who was put up for adoption at an early age. The brother assumed the name David Brown and only discovered his relationship to Archer in 1980, even though Archer already apparently knew this, according to the journalist Michael Crick. His father, William (died 1956), was sixty-four when Archer was born. In 1951, he won a scholarship to Wellington School, in Somerset (not to be confused with the public school Wellington College, which is possible from the ambiguous biography in Archer's earlier books). At this time his mother, Lola, contributed a column "Over the teacups" to the local press in Weston-super-Mare and wrote about the adventures of her son 'Tuppence'; this caused Archer to be the victim of bullying while at Wellington School.
  
  wn.com/Jeffrey_Archer
• Jessie Buckley
  Jessie Buckley (born 28 December 1989, in Killarney, County Kerry) is an Irish singer and actress who came second place in the BBC talent show-themed television series I'd Do Anything, and subsequently played Anne Egermann in the West End revival of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music.
  The eldest of five children, Buckley comes from a musical family. Buckley's mother, Marina Cassidy, encouraged her to sing and coached her. She has a brother and three sisters. Buckley went to Ursuline Secondary School, an all-girls convent school in Thurles, County Tipperary where her mother, works as a vocal coach, where she performed in school productions. She played a number of male roles at school including the male lead role of Jets gang founder, Tony in the musical West Side Story and Freddie Trumper in Chess.
  She has achieved Grade eight in piano, clarinet and harp with the Royal Irish Academy of Music. She is also a member of the Tipperary Millennium Orchestra. Buckley also attended The Association of Irish Musical Societies (AIMS) workshops during the summer, to help improve her singing and acting; it was where she was then recognised as a talented actress and was encouraged to apply for Drama School in London. Just before she auditioned for I'd Do Anything she was turned down by two drama schools, including one the day before her first audition for the show. In 2008, Buckley won the AIMS Best Actress award for her portrayal of Julie Jordan in the Killarney Musical Society production of Carousel (musical).
  
  wn.com/Jessie_Buckley
• Jill Perryman
  Jill Perryman AM MBE (born 1933) is an Australian stage actress and singer, born in Melbourne. Her parents and her sister (Diana Perryman) were all prominent in Australian theatre. At the age of 19, she joined J.C. Williamson Theatres Ltd as a member of the chorus and in 1953 was understudying leading roles in stage musicals, including Evie Hayes in the Australian production of Call Me Madam.
  Perryman was strong in voice and personality and a long series of understudy and small roles eventually led her, through the recommendation of John McCallum, who was then joint managing director of J. C. Williamson Theatres Ltd, to take the lead in the key Australian production of Funny Girl, a performance that won her an Erik Award for Best Actress and led to major roles in other productions. These included I Do! I Do! in 1969; The Two of Us in 1971. No, No, Nanette in 1972 won her another Erik Award for Best Actress for her role as Lucille Early, then in 1973 she starred in A Little Night Music. In 1976 she played Gladys Zilch in Leading Lady, a musical production created especially for her. She also toured during 1977 in Side by Side by Sondheim. She played Miss Hannigan in Annie in 1978.
  
  wn.com/Jill_Perryman
• Joan Bakewell
  
  Joan Dawson Bakewell, Baroness Bakewell, DBE (born 16 April 1933 in Stockport) is an English journalist, television presenter and Labour Party Peer.
  Born Joan Dawson Rowlands, in Stockport, Cheshire, she was educated at Stockport High School for Girls – a grammar school in local authority control, on the site of what is now Hillcrest Grammar School – where she was head girl, and at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied Economics, then History.
  Joan Bakewell first became well known as one of the presenters of an early BBC Two programme, Late Night Line-Up (1965–72 and 2008). Frank Muir dubbed her "the thinking man's crumpet" during this period and the moniker stuck, although Bakewell herself dislikes the epithet.
  Bakewell co-presented Reports Action, a Sunday teatime programme which encouraged the public to donate their services to various good causes, for Granada Television during 1976–78. Subsequently, she returned to the BBC, and co-presented a short-lived late night television arts programme; briefly worked on the BBC Radio 4 PM programme, and was Newsnight's arts correspondent (1986–88).
  
  wn.com/Joan_Bakewell
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  Joan Sutherland
  Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, OM, AC, DBE (7 November 1926 – 10 October 2010) was an Australian dramatic coloratura soprano noted for her contribution to the renaissance of the bel canto repertoire from the late 1950s through to the 1980s.
  One of the most remarkable female opera singers of the 20th century, she was dubbed La Stupenda by a La Fenice audience in 1960 after a performance of the title role in Handel's Alcina. She possessed a voice of beauty and power, combining extraordinary agility, accurate intonation, "supremely" pinpoint staccatos, a splendid trill and a tremendous upper register, although music critics often complained about the imprecision of her diction. Her friend Luciano Pavarotti once called Sutherland the "Voice of the Century"; Montserrat Caballé described the Australian's voice as being like "heaven".
  Joan Sutherland was born to Scottish parents in Sydney, and attended St Catherine's School in the suburb of Waverley, New South Wales. As a child, she listened to and imitated her mother's singing exercises. Her mother, a mezzo-soprano, had taken voice lessons but never considered making a career as a professional singer. Sutherland was 18 years old when she began seriously studying voice with John and Aida Dickens. She made her concert debut in Sydney, as Dido in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, in 1947. In 1951, she made her stage debut in Eugene Goossens's Judith. In 1951, after winning Australia's most important competition, the Sun Aria, now known as the Sydney Eisteddfod McDonald's Operatic Aria in 1949. She then went to London to further her studies at the Opera School of the Royal College of Music with Clive Carey. She was engaged by the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as a utility soprano, and made her debut there on 28 October 1952, as the First Lady in The Magic Flute, followed in November by a few performances as Clotilde in Vincenzo Bellini's Norma, with Maria Callas as Norma.
  
  wn.com/Joan_Sutherland
• Jodie Prenger
  Jodie Prenger (born 12 June 1979 in Blackpool, Lancashire) is an English actress and singer. She was the winner of BBC talent show-themed television series I'd Do Anything on 31 May 2008. She was also the winner of the second series of The Biggest Loser on Living in 2006. She is also a former panellist on ITV1's flagship daytime show Loose Women.
  Prenger was educated at Elmslie Girls' School in Blackpool and Blackpool and The Fylde College before starting work in the area as an entertainer. She has performed extensively on the cabaret circuit in Northern England and particularly her hometown of Blackpool and Fylde coast where she has also worked as an agony aunt. In June 1998 she appeared in two different shows each night in two Blackpool theatres. First she had a solo spot in the Tiptoes Summer Spectacular at the resorts Opera House theatre before appearing 20 minute later in one of the main roles in a Blackpool and The Fylde College production of the musical comedy, Hot Mikado at the Grand Theatre.
  
  wn.com/Jodie_Prenger
• 
  John Barrowman
  John Scot Barrowman (born March 11, 1967) is a Scottish–American actor, singer, dancer, musical theatre performer, writer and television personality. Born in Glasgow, he grew up in Illinois following his family's emigration to the U.S. Encouraged by his high school teachers, Barrowman studied performing arts at the United States International University in San Diego before landing the role of Billy Crocker in Cole Porter's Anything Goes in London's West End.
  Since his debut in professional theatre, Barrowman has played lead roles in various musicals both in the West End and on Broadway, including Miss Saigon, The Phantom of the Opera, Sunset Boulevard and Matador. After appearing in Sam Mendes' production of The Fix, he was nominated for the 1998 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical and, in the early 2000s, returned to the role of Billy Crocker in the revival of Anything Goes. His most recent West End credit was in the 2009 production of La Cage aux Folles.
  
  wn.com/John_Barrowman
• 
  John Betjeman
  Sir John Betjeman, CBE ( /ˈbɛtʃəmən/; 28 August 1906 – 19 May 1984) was an English poet, writer and broadcaster who described himself in Who's Who as a "poet and hack".
  He was a founding member of the Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture. Starting his career as a journalist, he ended it as one of the most popular British Poets Laureate to date and a much-loved figure on British television.
  Betjeman was born "John Betjemann"; this was changed to the less German "Betjeman" during the First World War. His parents, Mabel (née Dawson) and Ernest Betjemann had a family firm which manufactured the kind of ornamental household furniture and gadgets distinctive to Victorians. His father's forebears had come from the Netherlands, more than a century earlier, setting up their home and business in Islington, London. Betjeman was baptised at St. Anne's Church Highgate Rise, a 19th Century church situated just at the foot of Highgate West Hill. The family lived at Parliament Hill Mansions in the Lissenden Gardens private estate in Highgate in North London.
  
  wn.com/John_Betjeman
• John Bluthal
  John Bluthal (born 12 August 1929) is a Polish-born British film and television actor, mostly in comedy. He is best known for his work with Spike Milligan and for his roles in the television series Never Mind the Quality Feel the Width and The Vicar of Dibley.
  Bluthal was born in Galicia, Poland, of Jewish descent. He emigrated to Australia with his family in 1938 at the age of nine. He studied drama at the University of Melbourne, and visited England, during which time he appeared in pantomime. He worked in repertory theatre in Melbourne and was also involved in broadcasting and schools broadcasting. He appeared in drama on ABC radio, and variety, including The Shell Hour and Gaslight Music Hall, which he devised, produced and starred in.
  In 1960 he came to England again and appeared in Citizen James for BBC television and also in the long-running UK TV series Never Mind the Quality Feel the Width where he played Manny Cohen, a Jewish tailor in business with an Irishman in London. Also in the early 1960s, he provided the voice for Commander Zero in the television puppet series Fireball XL5. He appeared in the role of Fagin in the musical Oliver! at New Theatre, London. He has made dozens of film and TV shows since he came to England.
  
  wn.com/John_Bluthal
• 
  John Brack
  John Brack (10 May 1920 - 11 February 1999 in South Melbourne, Victoria) was an Australian painter, and a member of the Antipodeans group.
  John Brack was Art Master at Melbourne Grammar School (1952–62). His art first achieved prominence in the 1950s. He also joined the Antipodeans Group in the 1950s which protested against abstract expressionism. He was appointed Head of National Gallery of Victoria Art School (1962–68), where he was an influence on many artists and the creation of the expanded school attached to the new gallery building.
  Brack's early conventional style evolved into one of simplified, almost stark, shapes and areas of deliberately drab colour, often featuring large areas of brown. He made an initial mark in the 1950s with works on the contemporary Australian culture, such as the iconic Collins St., 5 pm (1955), a view of rush hour in post-war Melbourne. Set in a bleak palette of browns and greys, it was a comment on the conformity of everyday life, with all figures looking almost identical. A related painting The Bar (1954) was modelled on Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, and satirised the Six o'clock swill, a social ritual arising from the early closing of Australian bars. Most of these early paintings and drawings were unmistakably satirical comments against the Australian Dream, either being set in the newly expanding post-war suburbia or taking the life of those who lived there as their subject matter.
  
  wn.com/John_Brack
• 
  John Farnham
  John Peter Farnham, AO, formerly billed as Johnny Farnham (born 1 July 1949), is an English-born Australian pop singer. As Johnny Farnham he was a teen pop idol from 1964 to 1979, and has since forged a career as an adult contemporary singer. His career has mostly been as a solo artist although he briefly replaced Glenn Shorrock as lead singer of Little River Band during 1982–1985. In September 1986 his solo single, "You're the Voice" peaked at No. 1 on the Australian singles charts. The associated album, Whispering Jack, held the No. 1 position for a total of 25 weeks, and is the highest-selling album in Australian history. Both the single and the album had Top Ten success internationally including No. 1 in Sweden.
  Domestically he has remained one of Australia's best-known performers with a career spanning over 40 years, and he is the only Australian artist to have a number one record in five consecutive decades (echoing Sir Cliff Richard in the UK) with singles: "Sadie (The Cleaning Lady)" in 1967, "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" in 1969/1970, and "Age of Reason" in 1988; and albums: Age of Reason, Chain Reaction in 1990, Then Again... in 1993, Anthology 1: Greatest Hits 1986-1997 in 1997, 33⅓ in 2000 and The Last Time in 2002.
  
  wn.com/John_Farnham
• John Lahr
  John Lahr (born July 12, 1941) is an American theater critic, and the son of actor Bert Lahr. Since 1992, he has been the senior drama critic at The New Yorker magazine.
  Born in Los Angeles, California, Lahr holds a B.A. from Yale University and a master's degree from Worcester College, Oxford. He has written many books, including the novels The Autograph Hound and Hot to Trot, as well as three biographies of important theatrical figures: one of his father called Notes on a Cowardly Lion; one of the British playwright Joe Orton called Prick Up Your Ears; and one of the Australian comedian Barry Humphries called Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization: Backstage with Barry Humphries. In 1987 he co-produced a film version of Prick Up Your Ears directed by Stephen Frears and written by Alan Bennett in which Lahr appeared as a character played by Wallace Shawn. Lahr also wrote the foreword to Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines, a 1994 collection of Bill Hicks's work.
  
  wn.com/John_Lahr
• 
  Jonathan Miller
  Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE (born 21 July 1934) is a British theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humorist and sculptor. Trained as a physician in the late 1950s, he first came to prominence in the early 1960s with his role in the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe with fellow writers and performers Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett. Despite having seen few operas and not knowing how to read music, he began stage-directing them in the 1970s and has since become one of the world's leading opera directors with several classic productions to his credit. His best-known production is probably his 1982 "Mafia"-styled Rigoletto set in 1950s Little Italy, Manhattan. In its early days he was an associate director at the Royal National Theatre and later he ran the Old Vic Theatre. He has also become a well-known television personality and familiar public intellectual in Britain and the United States of America.
  
  wn.com/Jonathan_Miller
• Julie Covington
  Julie Covington (born 11 September 1946, London) is an English singer and actress, best known for recording the original version of "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina".
  Covington's break came in 1967 when, while still a student at Homerton College, Cambridge, she was invited to sing on David Frost's television show – after which she secured a recording contract.
  She followed this early success with her 1971 Godspell casting at The Roundhouse, then with her 1972 original cast recording of Godspell (Day by Day) and her role as the original Janet Weiss in The Rocky Horror Show in 1973, a show she had to leave early because of an accident.
  Between 1974 and 1984 Covington appeared regularly in the companies of the National Theatre and the Royal Court Theatre, creating such roles as Alice in Plenty, Vivienne Eliot in Tom & Viv (for which she received an Olivier Award nomination) and Edward in the original production of Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine.
  In 1976 she appeared with the English National Opera as Anna in The Seven Deadly Sins. The same year saw her appearing in the television programme, Rock Follies.
  
  wn.com/Julie_Covington
• June Salter
  June Marie Salter AM (22 June 1932 – 15 September 2001) was an Australian actress and author prominent in theatre and television.
  June Salter was born in Bexley, New South Wales, the youngest of six children. As a child she studied piano and elocution and attended Kogarah Secondary School. While working as a typist-receptionist she joined the St George Players who played at St James' Hall (later called "Mercury Theatre" then "Phillip Street Theatre") and took further elocution lessons from Rosalind Kennerdale who was married to Lawrence H. Cecil. Largely through their influence, in 1952 she gained acting roles in 2GB's serial Night Beat, continuing her office work part-time until that was no longer possible. With the help of Queenie Ashton, she was accepted onto the books of Central Casting (Ashton's husband John Cover's company). Other jobs followed: Martin's Corner on 2UW, Undercover Carson and Shadows of Doubt on 2GB and Blue Hills for the ABC as Sally, taking over from Barbara Brunton.
  
  wn.com/June_Salter
• Keith Jack
  Keith Jack (born 2 March 1988) was the runner-up on the BBC reality talent show Any Dream Will Do, which offered the chance to be the next West End Joseph for the hit musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. He lost out to Lee Mead in the final on 9 June 2007.
  Before his appearances on Any Dream Will Do he was studying performance skills in Edinburgh and an HNC in Musical Theatre at Telford College also in Edinburgh. Since winning the 2006 Chicago Rock Café Rock Idol contest, held in the English West Midlands, he has been a student of celebrity vocal coach Carrie Grant, best known for belonging to Sweet Dreams, which came sixth in the 1983 Eurovision Song Contest and working on UK television talent contests, including Fame Academy, Comic Relief does Fame Academy and Pop Idol.[1] [2] [3] Keith Jack attended St. David's High School in Dalkeith where he performed in various Christmas concerts and other precarious events.
  Since the start of Any Dream Will Do, Keith Jack was noted as a strong contender. His vocals, in particular, were praised very highly. The main criticisms thrown at him were his diction and his physical appearance: some judges thought he looked 'too young' to play Joseph. However, by the end of the series, Keith was widely regarded as the strongest singer on the programme. John Barrowman and vocal coach Zoe Tyler in particular were full of praise. Barrowman said: "That was brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, son! You have a voice of gold."[4]. Tyler commented: "When I hear you sing now, you knock me for six" [5]. Denise van Outen described Keith as a "Young John Barrowman", while Bill Kenwright called Keith's talents "frightening". The panel was particularly impressed with his performances of Love Is All Around, Always on My Mind, Could It Be Magic and For Once in My Life.
  
  wn.com/Keith_Jack
• Kenn Brodziak
  Kenn Brodziak, OBE (1913-1999) was a leading Australian theatre and concert promoter, producer and artist manager whose career lasted from the 1940s until his death in 1999. Brodziak is best remembered as the promoter who brought The Beatles to Australia for their landmark Australasian tour of 1964.
  
  
  
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• Kevin Jacobsen
  Kevin George Jacobsen OAM (born 29 July 1937 in Sydney) is a well-known Australian entertainment entrepreneur.
  Along with his brothers Colin (Col Joye) and Keith, he was a member of prominent Australian 1960s band, The Joy Boys.
  In 1965, together with Col and Tony Brady, he formed ATA Allstar Artists, initially managing acts and promoting tours by Joye, The Joy Boys, Little Pattie, Sandy Shaw and Cathy Wayne; and later recording artists for their label ATA Records distributed by Festival Records.
  His company in Australia, Jacobsen Venue Management, has presented many acts including Barbra Streisand, Bruce Springsteen, the Bee Gees, The Three Tenors, Slim Whitman, Kiss, Simon and Garfunkel,Bob Marley, Shania Twain, Billy Joel, John Denver, Pearl Jam, Cyndi Lauper, Julio Iglesias, Barry Manilow, Meat Loaf, Olivia Newton-John, Peter Allen, Sammy Davis Jr, and many more, in addition to shows like Disney's Beauty and the Beast, Fame, and Dirty Dancing – The Classic Story on Stage. He was also the Executive Producer of the musical theatre production The Man from Snowy River: Arena Spectacular.
  
  wn.com/Kevin_Jacobsen
• 
  Kim Basinger
  Kimila Ann "Kim" Basinger ( /ˈbeɪsɪŋər/ BAY-sing-ər, often mispronounced /ˈbæsɪndʒər/ BASS-in-jər; born December 8, 1953) is an American actress, singer, and former fashion model.
  She is known for her portrayals of Domino Petachi, the Bond girl in Never Say Never Again (1983), and Vicki Vale, the female lead in Batman (1989). Basinger received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture nomination for her work in The Natural (1984). She won an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in L.A. Confidential (1997). Basinger also acted in the movies 9½ Weeks (1986) and 8 Mile (2002).
  Basinger was born in Athens, Georgia. Her father, Donald Wade Basinger, was a big band musician and loan manager who as a U.S. Army soldier landed in Normandy on D-Day (June 6, 1944). Her mother, Ann (née Cordell), was a model, an actress, and a swimmer who appeared in several Esther Williams films. The third of five children, she has two brothers, Mick and Skip, and two sisters, Ashley and Barbara. Basinger's ancestry includes German, Swedish, Irish and Native American, and she was raised a Methodist.
  
  wn.com/Kim_Basinger
• Lee Mead
  Lee Stephen Mead (born 14 July 1981) is an English musical theatre actor, best known for winning the title role in the 2007 West End revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat through the BBC reality TV casting show Any Dream Will Do. As well as subsequent roles in Wicked and Legally Blonde: The Musical, Mead is pursuing a music career with his third album, 'Love Songs', released in February 2012.
  After studying at performing arts college, Mead gained his first professional stage experience in cabaret as a cruise ship singer on the Portsmouth to Bilbao ferry and then in a summer season at Bridlington Spa Theatre. He moved into musical theatre in 2004, playing both Levi and the Pharaoh in the UK touring production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Following Joseph, Mead performed in the UK tours of Tommy (ensemble and first cover Tommy) and Miss Saigon (ensemble and first cover Chris) before joining the West End production of Phantom of the Opera as an ensemble player and understudy for the role of Raoul.
  
  wn.com/Lee_Mead
• Lewis Morley
  Lewis Morley, born in Hong Kong, 1925, to English and Chinese parents, is a photographer. He was interned in Stanley Internment Camp during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong between 1941 and 1945, when he was released and went to the United Kingdom with his family. He studied at Twickenham Art School for three years, and spent time as a painter in Paris in the 1950s. Perhaps best known for his photographs of Christine Keeler and Joe Orton, Morley began his career with assignments for magazines such as Tatler. He was also a successful theatre photographer.
  Morley emigrated to Australia in 1971 with his wife Patricia and son Lewis, and lives in the inner west of Sydney. He did studio and commercial work photographing architecture and food in magazines such as Belle, and worked with interior designers and stylists such as Babette Hayes, and Charmaine Solomon until his retirement in 1987. His autobiography Black and White Lies was published in 1992.
  In the mid 1990s, Morley ventured into the gallery business when he opened The Lewis Morley Photographers Showcase. Embracing the great tradition of photographic salons, the gallery presented the work of a variety of local photographers from a range of genres including Robert Billington, Brett Leigh Dicks, Russell Kilbey, Brendan Read, Peter Solnace and Greg Rouse.
  
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• 
  Lionel Bart
  Lionel Bart (1 August 1930 – 3 April 1999) was a writer and composer of British pop music and musicals, best known for creating the book, music and lyrics for Oliver!
  Bart was born Lionel Begleiter the youngest of seven surviving children in East London to Galician Jews, and grew up in Stepney. His father worked as a tailor in a garden shed in London E1. The family had escaped the deadly pogroms against Jews by Ukrainian cossacks in Galicia, which was then part of the Austrian Empire.
  Lionel changed his name to Bart, derived from when he passed by St. Barts' hospital on the top deck of a bus after he had completed his National Service with the Royal Air Force.
  As a young man he was an accomplished painter. At the age of six a teacher told his parents that he was a musical genius. His parents gave him an old violin, but he did not apply himself and the lessons stopped.
  At the age of 14 he obtained a Junior Art Scholarship to St Martin's School of Art. One Friday afternoon, he was suspended for "mischievousness" with another student, John Groom, for making a noise with the rest of the class, involving set squares and other paraphernalia. On the following Monday, he returned to School with a long explanation of his peripheral involvement in the disturbance and was re-instated. After St Martin's, he gave up his ambition to be a painter and took jobs in silk-screen printing works and commercial art studios. He never learned to read or write musical notation; this did not stop him from becoming a significant personality in the development of British rock and pop music.
  
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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.
  
  wn.com/Liza_Minnelli
• 
  Long John Silver
  Long John Silver is a fictional character and the primary antagonist of the novel Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
  
  wn.com/Long_John_Silver
• Michael Gudinski
  Michael Solomon Gudinski, AM (born 22 August 1952) is an Australian entrepreneur and businessman currently based in Melbourne who is a leading figure in the Australian music industry. Mostly known for forming the highly successful Australian record company Mushroom Records in 1972 through whom Gudinski signed several generations of Australian musicians and performers ranging from MacKenzie Theory, the Skyhooks, New Zealand's Split Enz, The Choirboys, Kylie Minogue to newer artists such as Eskimo Joe, Evermore and others forging a string of successful releases by local talent. He is the father of singer Kate Alexa, who has been signed to his record label Liberation Music since mid-2004.
  Gudinski was born to Jewish Russian immigrants who had arrived in Australia in 1948.
  He was educated at Melbourne High School and Mount Scopus, and was a school friend of several young musicians who later became prominent on the Australian music scene.
  Gudinski began promoting rock dances around Melbourne while still in his teens and moved into music agency work in the late 1960s. This led to the establishment of the Consolidated Rock artist agency in around 1970.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Gudinski
• 
  Mischa Barton
  Mischa Anne Marsden Barton (born 24 January 1986) is a British-American fashion model, film, television, and stage actress. She began her acting career on the stage, appearing in Tony Kushner's Slavs! and took the lead in James Lapine's Twelve Dreams at New York's Lincoln Center. She made her screen debut, making a guest appearance on the American soap opera All My Children (1996). She then voiced a character on KaBlam! (1996–1997), an animated television series on Nickelodeon. Her first major film role was as the protagonist of Lawn Dogs (1997), an acclaimed drama co-starring Sam Rockwell. She continued acting, appearing in major box office pictures such as the romantic comedy, Notting Hill (1999) and M. Night Shyamalan's psychological thriller, The Sixth Sense (1999).
  She later appeared in the independent drama, Lost and Delirious (2001) and played Evan Rachel Wood's girlfriend during a guest-arc on ABC's Once and Again (2001–2002). She is best known for her role as Marissa Cooper in the Fox television series The O.C. (2003–2006), for which she received two Teen Choice Awards and a Prism Award nomination. Entertainment Weekly named her the "It Girl" of 2003.
  
  wn.com/Mischa_Barton
• Mischa Spoliansky
  Mischa Spoliansky (28 December 1898 – 28 June 1985) was a Russian-born composer and a long-term resident in Britain.
  Spoliansky was born into a musical family in Białystok; his father was an opera singer and his sister would later become a pianist and his brother a cellist. After the birth of Mischa the family moved to Warsaw, and later Kalisz. After the early death of his mother, the family moved to Vienna.
  Spoliansky's early musical education in piano, violin and cello was continued in Dresden under Prof. Mark Guensberg. At the age of ten Spoliansky made his public debut.
  Shortly thereafter his father died and Spoliansky moved to Königsberg (Prussia) where he had relatives. In 1914 however as a result of the war he had to flee to Berlin, where his brother worked as a cellist.
  Spoliansky worked in a coffeehouse as a pianist in order to continue his musical education at the Stern'sches Konservatorium. Spoliansky's first compositions were played by the UFA-Filmtheaterorchester in Friedrichstraße. In addition he worked as a composer and pianist in a Russian émigré cabaret. There Victor Hollaender and Werner Richard Heymann heard him and invited him to write and play for the literary cabaret "Schall und Rauch" in the basement of the Große Schauspielhaus, which Max Reinhardt had founded in 1919. Spoliansky set the texts of Kurt Tucholsky, Klabund, Joachim Ringelnatz, and accompanied stars such as Gussy Holl, Paul O’Montis, Rosa Valetti and Trude Hesterberg. In 1920 under the pseudonym „Arno Billing“ he composed the melody for the first homosexual anthem called Das lila Lied, which he dedicated to Magnus Hirschfeld. It was published with other texts such as Sei meine Frau für vierundzwanzig Stunden.
  
  wn.com/Mischa_Spoliansky
• Monty Python
  Monty Python (sometimes known as The Pythons) was a British surreal comedy group who created Monty Python's Flying Circus, a British television comedy sketch show that first aired on the BBC on 5 October 1969. Forty-five episodes were made over four series. The Python phenomenon developed from the television series into something larger in scope and impact, spawning touring stage shows, films, numerous albums, several books and a stage musical as well as launching the members to individual stardom. The group's influence on comedy has been compared to The Beatles' influence on music.
  The television series, broadcast by the BBC from 1969 to 1974, was conceived, written and performed by members Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Loosely structured as a sketch show, but with an innovative stream-of-consciousness approach (aided by Gilliam's animation), it pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in style and content. A self-contained comedy team responsible for both writing and performing their work, the Pythons' creative control allowed them to experiment with form and content, discarding rules of television comedy. Their influence on British comedy has been apparent for years, while in North America it has coloured the work of cult performers from the early editions of Saturday Night Live through to more recent absurdist trends in television comedy. "Pythonesque" has entered the English lexicon as a result.
  
  wn.com/Monty_Python
• 
  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]}
  
  wn.com/Nathan_Lane
• Nicholas Garland
  Nicholas Withycombe Garland (born 1935) is a political cartoonist for the Daily Telegraph. He had previously drawn for The New Statesman, The Spectator and The Independent.
  He illustrated the Barry McKenzie comic strip by Barry Humphries in Private Eye (and republished in several of their books).
  He was educated at the Slade School of Art, and worked for a number of years as a stage manager and director.
  Nicholas is also the father of renowned British novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland.
  
  
  
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• 
  Nicole Kidman
  Nicole Mary Kidman, AC (born 20 June 1967) is an Australian actress, singer, film producer, and humanitarian. Kidman began her career in 1983, starring in various Australian film and television productions until her breakthrough in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm. Following several films over the early 1990s, she came to worldwide recognition for her performances in Days of Thunder (1990), Far and Away (1992), and Batman Forever (1995). Kidman followed this with other successful films in the late 1990s. It was her performance in the musical, Moulin Rouge! (2001) which earned Kidman her second Golden Globe Award and first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Her performance as Virginia Woolf the following year in the drama film The Hours (2002) received critical acclaim and earned Kidman the Academy Award for Best Actress.
  Kidman's other notable films include To Die For (1995), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Cold Mountain (2003), The Interpreter (2005), and Australia (2008). Her performance in 2010's Rabbit Hole (which she also produced) earned Kidman further accolades including a subsequent Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Kidman has been a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF since 1994 and for UNIFEM since 2006. Kidman's work has earned her a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, three Golden Globe Awards, one BAFTA, and an Academy Award. In 2006, Kidman was made a Companion of the Order of Australia, Australia's highest civilian honor, and was also the highest-paid actress in the motion picture industry. As a result of being born to Australian parents in Hawaii, Kidman has dual citizenship in Australia and the United States.
  
  wn.com/Nicole_Kidman
• Ocker
  The term "ocker" is used both as a noun and adjective for an Australian who speaks and acts in an uncultured manner, using a broad Australian accent (or Strine). The typical ocker is "usually found in a blue singlet and rubber thongs (foot wear) with a tinnie in his hand propping up a bar".
  Richard Neville defined ockerism as being "about conviviality: comradeship with a touch of good-hearted sexism". It is mostly fairly neutral, even affectionate - although it can be used in a pejorative sense, especially by Australians who consider themselves cultured or enlightened.
  Ocker was recorded from 1916 as a nickname for anyone called Oscar. The 1920s Australian comic strip Ginger Meggs contained a character called Oscar ('Ocker') Stevens. The term "ocker" for a stereotypically uncouth Australian came into use when a character of that name, played by Ron Frazer, appeared in the satirical television comedy series, The Mavis Bramston Show.
  Politicians, including former Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd, will often take on "ocker" cultural elements such as slang to appeal to various audiences.
  
  wn.com/Ocker
• Oscar Humphries
  
  Oscar Humphries (born April 1981 in Sydney) is an Australian fine art and design dealer and journalist. He has been editor of the The Spectator's art magazine Apollo since early 2010.
  His parents are the satirist Barry Humphries and surrealist painter Diane Millstead and he was educated at Bryanston School and Stowe School.
  Since 2000, he has written on a variety of subjects including art and design for British newspapers and magazines, including The Sunday Times, Arena and Tatler. In 2007 Humphries was made a contributing editor of The Spectator and was the launch editor of The Spectator Australia in 2008.
  As director of Sebastian + Barquet London he curated shows on Carlo Mollino,Paolo Venini and Rick Owens. As head of international sales for Timothy Taylor Gallery he curated "The Tightrope Walker" with Emma Dexter.
  
  wn.com/Oscar_Humphries
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  Oscar Wilde
  Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the circumstances of his imprisonment, followed by his early death.
  Wilde's parents were successful Dublin intellectuals. Their son became fluent in French and German early in life. At university Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He became known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles. As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States of America and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art", and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde had become one of the most well-known personalities of his day.
  
  wn.com/Oscar_Wilde
• Peter Coleman
  William Peter (Peter) Coleman (born 15 December 1928) is an Australian writer/journalist, former politician and Minister of the Crown in the cabinets of Tom Lewis and Sir Eric Willis. Following Willis' resignation as leader he was made Leader of the New South Wales Opposition. He was a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly for 10 years from 24 February 1968 until he lost his seat and his position as leader at the 1978 election and then for 6 years in the Australian House of Representatives for Wentworth for the Liberal Party of Australia.
  Coleman was born in the Melbourne suburb of Caulfield, the son of Stanley Charles Coleman, an advertising agent, and Norma Victoria Tiernan. Moving to Sydney, New South Wales, Coleman was educated at the selective North Sydney Boys High School. He graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in 1950 and then travelled to the United Kingdom to study at the London School of Economics, from which he graduated with an Master of Science degree specialising in Economics in 1952.
  
  wn.com/Peter_Coleman
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  Peter Cook
  Peter Edward Cook (17 November 1937 – 9 January 1995) was an English satirist, writer and comedian. An extremely influential figure in modern British comedy, he is regarded as the leading light of the British satire boom of the 1960s. Cook has been described by Stephen Fry as "the funniest man who ever drew breath", although his work was also controversial. Cook was closely associated with anti-establishment comedy which emerged in Britain and the United States in the late 1950s.
  Cook was born at his parents' house "Shearbridge", in Middle Warberry Road, Torquay, Devon. He was the only son and eldest of the three children of Alexander Edward (Alec) Cook (1906–1984), a colonial civil servant, and his wife Ethel Catherine Margaret, née Mayo (1908–1994). He was educated at Radley College and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he studied French and German. As a student, Cook initially intended to become a career diplomat like his father, but Britain "had run out of colonies", as he put it. Although politically largely apathetic, particularly in later life when he displayed a deep distrust of politicians of all hues, he did join the Cambridge University Liberal Club.
  
  wn.com/Peter_Cook
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  Peter Jackson
  Sir Peter Robert Jackson, KNZM (born 31 October 1961) is a New Zealand film director, producer, actor, and screenwriter, who is well known for his The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001 to 2003), adapted from the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien.
  He won international attention early in his career with his "splatstick" horror comedies beginning with Bad Taste (1987) before coming to mainstream prominence with Heavenly Creatures (1994), for which he shared an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay nomination with his wife, Fran Walsh. Jackson has been awarded three Academy Awards in his career, including the award for Best Director in 2003; he also won the BAFTA, Golden Globe and Saturn Award for Best Direction the same year.
  His films also include Meet the Feebles (1989), Braindead (1992), Forgotten Silver (1995), The Frighteners (1996), King Kong (2005),The Lovely Bones (2009), and the upcoming The Lord of the Rings prequels The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) and The Hobbit: There and Back Again (2013). He is also the producer of District 9 (2009) and The Adventures of Tintin (2011).
  
  wn.com/Peter_Jackson
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  Peter Ustinov
  Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov CBE ( /ˈjuːstɪnɒf/ or /ˈuːstɪnɒf/; 16 April 1921 – 28 March 2004) was an English actor, writer and dramatist. He was also renowned as a filmmaker, theatre and opera director, stage designer, author, screenwriter, comedian, humourist, newspaper and magazine columnist, radio broadcaster and television presenter. A noted wit and raconteur, he was a fixture on television talk shows and lecture circuits for much of his career. He was also a respected intellectual and diplomat who, in addition to his various academic posts, served as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF and President of the World Federalist Movement.
  Ustinov was the winner of numerous awards over his life, including two Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor, Emmy Awards, Golden Globes and BAFTA Awards for acting, a Grammy Award for best recording for children, as well the recipient of governmental honours from, amongst others, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. He displayed a unique cultural versatility that has frequently earned him the accolade of a Renaissance man. Miklós Rózsa, composer of the music for Quo Vadis and of numerous concert works, dedicated his String Quartet No. 1, Op. 22 (1950) to Ustinov.
  
  wn.com/Peter_Ustinov
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  Phil Collins
  Philip David Charles "Phil" Collins, LVO (born 30 January 1951) is an English singer-songwriter, drummer, pianist and actor best known as a drummer and vocalist for British progressive rock group Genesis and as a solo artist.
  Collins sang the lead vocals on several chart hits in the United Kingdom and the United States between 1975 and 2010, either as a solo artist or with Genesis. His singles, sometimes dealing with lost love, ranged from the drum-heavy "In the Air Tonight", dance pop of "Sussudio", piano-driven "Against All Odds", to the political statements of "Another Day in Paradise".
  Collins's professional music career began as a drummer, originally in a band called The Real Thing with Andrea Bertorelli, who later became his first wife. Collins played drums and shared lead vocals (with Brian Chatton) in Flaming Youth which recorded one album, (Ark II). In 1970, he took over drums for Genesis, which had already recorded two albums. In Genesis, Collins originally supplied backing vocals for front man Peter Gabriel, singing lead on only two songs: "For Absent Friends" from 1971's Nursery Cryme album and "More Fool Me" from Selling England by the Pound, which was released in 1973. Following Gabriel's departure in 1975, Collins became the group's lead singer.
  
  wn.com/Phil_Collins
• Philippe Mora
  Philippe Mora (born 1949) is a French-born Australian film director. Born in 1949 to a German Jewish father and a French Jewish mother, he began making films while still a child.
  Mora's first home movie Back Alley, now preserved in the The National Film and Sound Archive, was made in 1964 when he was 15. This was a parody of West Side Story filmed in Flinder's Lane, just behind his mother’s studio at 9 Collins Street. The film features Mora, his brother William and friends, Peter Beilby and Sweeney Reed. Hia next film, Dreams in a Grey Afternoon (1965) was made as a silent movie but was screened with music by artist Asher Bilu. Shot on 8 mm and blown up to 16 mm, the film features stop-motion animation of sculptures by the Russian-Australian sculptor and painter Danila Vassilieff, and includes rare footage of John and Sunday Reed.
  His next project, Man in a Film (1966), was a pastiche of Federico Fellini's 8½ and was also influenced by his recent viewing of The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night. Like its predecessor, it was made as a silent movie, shot on 8 mm and blown up to 16 mm, and again screened with music by Asher Bilu. Man in a Film starred Sweeney Reed and premiered at the Tolarno Galleries in early 1967.
  
  wn.com/Philippe_Mora
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  Phillip Adams
  Phillip Andrew Hedley Adams, AO (born 12 July 1939) is an Australian farmer, broadcaster and public intellectual. He currently hosts an ABC radio program, Late Night Live, four nights a week, and writes a weekly column for The Australian.
  He has been a successful advertising executive and film producer, and has served on many boards including Greenpeace Australia, Ausflag, Care Australia, Film Victoria, Museum Australia, both the Adelaide and Brisbane festivals of ideas, the Montsalvat Arts Society and the Don Dunstan Foundation. Awards include four honorary doctorates from Australian universities; two Orders of Australia; Republican of the Year 2005; the Senior ANZAC Fellowship; the Australian Humanist of the Year, the Golden Lion at Cannes; the Longford Award; and the Henry Lawson Australian Arts Award. In 1997 the International Astronomical Union named a minor planet orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter after him. A National Trust poll elected him one of Australia's 100 national living treasures.
  
  wn.com/Phillip_Adams
• Randolph Sutton
  Randolph Sutton (born Bristol July 1888 and died Brixton 28 February 1969) was an English singer. He was a popular stage entertainer in music hall and variety. He appeared at the "Royal Variety Performance". Sutton made a famous recording of "On Mother Kelly's Doorstep" during the 1930s and 1940s, and made a further recording of this song as late as January 1969, shortly before his death.
  He made his final stage appearance at the City Hall Theatre in St Albans, Hertfordshire on 26 February 1969.
  
  wn.com/Randolph_Sutton
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  Richard Strauss
  Richard Georg Strauss (11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and other orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Also sprach Zarathustra, An Alpine Symphony, and Metamorphosen. Strauss was also a prominent conductor throughout Germany and Austria.
  Strauss, along with Gustav Mahler, represents the late flowering of German Romanticism after Richard Wagner, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style.
  Strauss was born on 11 June 1864, in Munich, the son of Franz Strauss, who was the principal horn player at the Court Opera in Munich. In his youth, he received a thorough musical education from his father. He wrote his first composition at the age of six, and continued to write music almost until his death.
  
  wn.com/Richard_Strauss
• Robert Stigwood
  Robert Stigwood (born 16 April 1934 in Adelaide, South Australia) is an impresario and entertainment entrepreneur who relocated to England in 1954. In the 1960s and 1970s he was one of the most successful figures in the entertainment world, through his management of music groups like Cream and The Bee Gees, theatrical productions like Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar and film productions including the hugely successful Saturday Night Fever.
  Robert Stigwood was born in Adelaide in 1934, the son of an electrical engineer. He began his working life as a copywriter for a local advertising agency and in 1955 moved to England. He had an eventful trip: in one incident recounted by Simon Napier-Bell Stigwood bravely climbed fifty feet down a rope ladder into the hold of a tanker to administer morphine to a seaman who had fallen through a hatch. In Turkey he spent several months living with the family of a young friend in a hut in a small village and working with them in the fields.
  Stigwood found a job in an institution for "backward teenage boys" in East Anglia after his arrival in England. He worked primarily on nightshifts, overseeing the dormitories and "preventing any flow of traffic after lights out". However he found it an "unsympathetic and frustrating job" and left. He worked briefly for Hector Ross at the New Theatre Royal in Portsmouth, Hampshire on the south coast before Ross left and the theatre closed. During this time he met the young Paul Jones who would later front the Manfred Mann pop group.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Stigwood
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  Robin Boyd
  Robin Gerard Penleigh Boyd CBE (3 January 1919 – 16 October 1971) was an influential Australian architect, writer, teacher and social commentator. He, along with Harry Seidler, stands as one of the foremost proponents for the International Modern Movement in Australian architecture.
  Like his American contemporary John Lautner, Boyd had relatively few opportunities to design major buildings and his best known and most influential works as an architect are his numerous and innovative small house designs.
  Robin Boyd was a scion of the illustrious Boyd artistic dynasty in Australia, and many of his extended family were noted painters, sculptors, architects, writers or other arts professionals. Robin was the younger son of the painter Penleigh Boyd, and his own son, named after his grandfather Penleigh, is also an architect. He was a nephew of author Martin Boyd and a first cousin of famed Australian painter Arthur Boyd and his brothers David Boyd and Guy Boyd (founders of the Martin Boyd Pottery studio) and his first commission, in fact, was a backyard studio for Arthur Boyd. Robin's cousin Joan (Weigall) Lindsay (author of Picnic at Hanging Rock) married Daryl Lindsay, who became curator of the National Gallery of Victoria and was the brother of artist Lionel Lindsay and renowned artist and author Norman Lindsay.
  
  wn.com/Robin_Boyd
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  Roger Moore
  Sir Roger George Moore KBE (born 14 October 1927) is an English actor. He is best known for portraying British secret agent James Bond in the official film series between 1973 and 1985.
  Moore was born in Stockwell, London. The only child of George Alfred Moore, a policeman, and Lillian "Lily" (née Pope), a housewife, he attended Battersea Grammar School, but was evacuated to Holsworthy, Devon during Second World War and was then educated at Dr Challoner's Grammar School in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. He then attended the College of the Venerable Bede at the University of Durham but never graduated. At 18 years old, shortly after the end of the war, Moore was conscripted for national service. He was commissioned as an officer and eventually became a Captain. Moore served in the Royal Army Service Corps, commanding a small depot in West Germany. He later transferred to the entertainment branch (under luminaries such as Spike Milligan), and immediately prior to his national service, there was a brief stint at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), during which his fees were paid by film director Brian Desmond Hurst, who also used Moore as an extra in his film Trottie True. Moore was a classmate at RADA with his future Bond colleague Lois Maxwell, the original Miss Moneypenny. The young Moore first appeared in films during the mid to late-1940s, as an extra. Moore's film idol as a child was Stewart Granger. As a 17-year-old, Moore appeared as an extra in the film Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), finally meeting his idol on the set. Moore later worked with Granger in The Wild Geese.
  
  wn.com/Roger_Moore
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  Rupert Murdoch
  Keith Rupert Murdoch, AC, KSG (born 11 March 1931) is an Australian American media mogul. Murdoch became managing director of Australia's News Limited, inherited from his father, in 1952. He is the founder, Chairman and CEO of global media holding company the News Corporation, the world's second-largest media conglomerate.
  In the 1950s and '60s, he acquired various newspapers in Australia and New Zealand, before expanding into the United Kingdom in 1969, taking over the News of the World followed closely by The Sun. He moved to New York in 1974 to expand into the US market and became a naturalised US citizen in 1985. In 1981, he bought The Times, his first British broadsheet.
  In 1986, keen to adopt newer electronic publishing technologies, he consolidated his UK printing operations in Wapping, causing bitter industrial disputes. His News Corporation acquired Twentieth Century Fox (1985), HarperCollins (1989) and The Wall Street Journal (2007). He formed BSkyB in 1990 and during the 1990s expanded into Asian networks and South American television. By 2000 Murdoch's News Corporation owned over 800 companies in more than 50 countries with a net worth of over $5 billion.
  
  wn.com/Rupert_Murdoch
• Ruth Cracknell
  Ruth Cracknell AM (6 July 1925 – 13 May 2002) was an Australian theatre and television character actress and author, who appeared in many comedy roles, throughout a career spanning 56 years.
  Cracknell was born in 1925 in Maitland, New South Wales to Charles and Winifred Cracknell. When she was four years old, the family moved to Sydney. She was educated at North Sydney Girls High School and, after graduating, worked at the Ku-ring-gai Council as a clerk. At 17 she was taken to the theatre by a friend. She immediately wanted to become an actress and joined the Modern Theatre Players drama school.
  Cracknell's first acting jobs were in radio. By 1946, she was performing five episodes of radio plays a week. She also performed on stage with the Independent Theatre Company and the Mercury Theatre. In 1948, she joined the John Alden Company and had roles in King Lear, Measure for Measure and The Tempest. In 1952, at the age of 27, she left Australia to work in London for two years.
  Cracknell married Eric Phillips on 25 June 1957 and they had three children, Anna, Jane and Jonathan. Unlike many women of the time, she did not retire, but continued to act.
  
  wn.com/Ruth_Cracknell
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  Samuel Beckett
  Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in France for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.
  Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century. Strongly influenced by James Joyce, he is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.
  Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.
  The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland. The family home, Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Samuel's father, William. The house and garden, together with the surrounding countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, the Foxrock railway station and Harcourt Street station at the city terminus of the line, all feature in his prose and plays. Beckett's father was a quantity surveyor and his mother a nurse.
  
  wn.com/Samuel_Beckett
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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".
  
  wn.com/Sean_Connery
• Sheila Hancock
  Sheila Cameron Hancock, CBE (born 22 February 1933) is an English actress and author.
  Sheila Hancock was born in Blackgang on the Isle of Wight, the daughter of Ivy Louise (née Woodward) and Enrico Cameron Hancock, who was a publican. Her sister Billie is nine years older (and worked as a variety artist until retiring to Antibes in 2003 at the age of 79). After wartime evacuation, Hancock attended Dartford County Grammar School and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
  She worked in repertory during the 1950s and made her West End debut in 1958, replacing Joan Sims in the play Breath of Spring. She then appeared in Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop production of Make Me An Offer in 1959, and her other early West End appearances included the revue One Over the Eight with Kenneth Williams in 1961, and starring in Rattle of a Simple Man in 1962. In 1965, she made her Broadway debut in Entertaining Mr Sloane. In 1978, she played Miss Hannigan in the original London cast of the musical Annie and two years later, she played Mrs Lovett in the original London production of the musical Sweeney Todd.
  
  wn.com/Sheila_Hancock
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  Shirley MacLaine
  Shirley MacLean Beaty (born April 24, 1934), known professionally as Shirley MacLaine, is an American film and theater actress, singer, dancer, activist and author, well known for her beliefs in New Age spirituality and reincarnation. She has written a large number of autobiographical works, many dealing with her spiritual beliefs as well as her Hollywood career. She was nominated for an Academy Award five times before winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1983 for her role in Terms of Endearment. Her younger brother is Warren Beatty.
  Named after Shirley Temple, MacLaine was born in Richmond, Virginia. Her father, Ira Owens Beaty, was a professor of psychology, public school administrator, and real estate agent, and her mother, Kathlyn Corinne (née MacLean), was a drama teacher originally from Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada; MacLaine's grandparents were also teachers.The family was devoutly Baptist. Her uncle (her mother's brother-in-law) was A.A. MacLeod, a Communist member of the Ontario legislature in the 1940s.
  
  wn.com/Shirley_MacLaine
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  Sigourney Weaver
  Sigourney Weaver (born Susan Alexandra Weaver; October 8, 1949) is an American actress. She is known for her role of Ellen Ripley in the four Alien films: Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien Resurrection, for which she has received worldwide recognition.
  Other notable roles include Dana Barrett in Ghostbusters and its sequel Ghostbusters II, Gorillas in the Mist: The Story of Dian Fossey, Working Girl, Death and the Maiden, The Ice Storm, Galaxy Quest, Snow Cake, Prayers for Bobby and Grace Augustine in Avatar.
  Weaver has been nominated for three Academy Awards, three BAFTA Awards (one win), two Emmy Awards, six Saturn Awards (two wins) and six Golden Globe Awards, winning two in 1988 for Gorillas in the Mist and Working Girl, becoming the first person ever to have won two acting Golden Globe Awards in the same year. She was also nominated for a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award.
  Her 1986 Academy Award nomination for Aliens is considered as a landmark in the recognition of science fiction, action, and horror genres, as well as a major step in challenging the gender role in cinema. Weaver progressively received notoriety for her numerous contributions to the science fiction film history (including minor roles in successful works such as Futurama, WALL-E and Paul) and gained the nickname of "The Sci-Fi Queen".
  
  wn.com/Sigourney_Weaver
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  Sir Les Patterson
  Sir Leslie Colin "Les" Patterson is a fictional character portrayed by the Australian comedian Barry Humphries. Obese, lecherous and offensive, this farting, belching, nose-picking figure of Rabelaisian excess is an antipodean Falstaff. He is Dame Edna Everage's exact opposite: she is female, refined, Protestant and from Melbourne; he is male, uncouth, Catholic and from Sydney.
  Patterson's humour abounds in such a wide range of racist and sexual stereotypes that it would offend almost anyone who takes it at face value.
  By Humphries' own account, the character of Patterson first appeared in a one-man show that he performed at the St George Leagues Club in Sydney in January 1974. Appearing in the guise of the boorish, loud-mouthed and uncultured Patterson, Humphries claimed to be that club's own entertainments officer as he introduced the next act, Dame Edna Everage. As Humphries recalled, “I understood later that many members of the audience thought Les was genuinely a club official, which says a lot for his charm and sincerity”. Later that same year, the character (by now identified as Australia's cultural attache to the Far East) was revived in a two-week cabaret appearance that Humphries performed at the Mandarin Hotel in Hong Kong. In Humphries' words, “The English merchant bankers and commodity brokers and Australian accountants there all recognised Les as someone they knew in the Australian diplomatic corps, and took him to their hearts”. Patterson went on to play an even larger role in Humphries' next one-man show in London, Housewife Superstar! (1976), delivering a lengthy monologue that was included on the original cast album.
  
  wn.com/Sir_Les_Patterson
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  Spike Milligan
  Terence Alan Patrick Seán "Spike" Milligan KBE (16 April 1918 – 27 February 2002) was a British comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright, soldier and actor. His early life was spent in India, where he was born, but the majority of his working life was spent in the United Kingdom. He became an Irish citizen in 1962 after the British government declared him stateless. He was the co-creator, main writer and a principal cast member of The Goon Show, performing a range of roles including the popular Eccles.
  Milligan wrote and edited many books, including Puckoon and his seven-volume autobiographical account of his time serving during the Second World War, beginning with Adolf Hitler: My part in his downfall. He is also noted as a popular writer of comical verse; much of his poetry was written for children, including Silly Verse for Kids (1959). After success with the ground-breaking British radio programme, The Goon Show, Milligan translated this success to television with Q5, a surreal sketch show which is credited as a major influence on the members of Monty Python's Flying Circus.
  
  wn.com/Spike_Milligan
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  Stanley Donen
  Stanley Donen (pronounced /ˈdɔːnən/ DAWN-ən; born April 13, 1924) is an American film director and choreographer whose most celebrated works are Singin' in the Rain and On the Town, both of which he co-directed with actor and dancer Gene Kelly. His other noteworthy films include Royal Wedding, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Funny Face, Indiscreet, Damn Yankees!, Charade, and Two for the Road. He received an Honorary Academy Award in 1998 for his body of work and a Career Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival in 2004.
  Donen has been hailed by film critic David Quinlan as "the King of the Hollywood musicals". He began his career in the chorus line on Broadway for director George Abbott, where he befriended Gene Kelly. In 1943 he went to Hollywood and worked as a choreographer for several years before he and Kelly made On the Town in 1949. He then worked as a contract director for MGM under producer Arthur Freed and continued to make hit films and gain critical acclaim, both as a solo director and for his work with Kelly. In 1952 Donen and Kelly co-directed the musical Singin' in the Rain, which went on to become regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. Donen's relationship with Kelly had been shaky for several years and deteriorated in 1955 during the making of their final collaboration: It's Always Fair Weather. He then broke his contract with MGM and became an independent producer of his own work in 1957. By the end of the 1950s musical films were losing popularity and Donen began to focus on comedies instead, continuing to make hit films until the late 1960s. After that his films became fewer and his last theatrical film was released in 1984. He briefly returned to the stage as a director in the 1990s and again in 2002. Donen was married five times and had three children. His current long term partner is film director and comedian Elaine May.
  
  wn.com/Stanley_Donen
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  Stephen Spender
  Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work. He was appointed the seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the United States Library of Congress in 1965.
  Spender was born in Kensington, London, to journalist Edward Harold Spender and Violet Hilda Schuster, a painter and poet. He went first to Hall School in Hampstead and then at thirteen to Gresham's School in Holt and later Charlecote School in Worthing, but was unhappy there. On the death of his mother he was transferred to University College School (Hampstead), which he later described as "that gentlest of Schools." Spender subsequently went up to University College, Oxford where, in 1973, he was made an honorary fellow. He left Oxford without taking a degree and subsequently lived for periods of time in Germany. He said at various times throughout his life that he never passed an exam, ever. Perhaps his closest friend and the man who had the biggest influence on him was W. H. Auden. Around this time he was also friends with Christopher Isherwood (who had also lived in Weimar Germany), and fellow Macspaunday members Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis. He was friendly with David Jones and later come to know W. B. Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, Raymond Chandler, Dylan Thomas, Jean-Paul Sartre and T. S. Eliot, as well as members of the Bloomsbury Group, in particular Virginia Woolf.
  
  wn.com/Stephen_Spender
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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.
  
  wn.com/Tim_Allen
• Toni Lamond
  Toni Lamond AM (born 29 March 1932) is an Australian cabaret singer, stage and television actor, dancer and comedienne. She was given the nickname of "Lolly-Legs Lamond" by fellow veteran performer Noel Ferrier after being voted as having the second-best pair of legs in television while doing In Melbourne Tonight.
  Lamond was born in Sydney in 1932, as Patricia Lamond Lawman. She began her professional career at the age of ten when she sang on the radio while touring with her vaudevillian parents in variety shows. Her first stage performances were at the Tivoli Theatre in Sydney. Her first performances as a leading lady were with English comedian Tommy Trinder in The Tommy Trinder Show in 1952. She has starred in Australian productions of Oliver!, Annie Get Your Gun, The Pajama Game and Gypsy: A Musical Fable and was a regular in a number of 1970s television shows such as Number 96 and Graham Kennedy's In Melbourne Tonight. She later compered her own IMT, becoming the first woman in the world to compere a variety television show.
  
  wn.com/Toni_Lamond
• Wendy Blacklock
  Wendy Blacklock (born 1932, Sydney, Australia) was an Australia-based theatre and television actor best known for her long-running role of Edith "Mummy" MacDonald in the 1970s television soap opera Number 96.
  Blacklock's acting career began on the stage and she spent two years in England acting in repertory theatre. She returned to Australia and had a solid career in the theatre which included stage tours of Australia and New Zealand; she was also a regular cast member of the satirical revues staged at Sydney's Phillip Street Theatre in the 1960s. Prior to the role in Number 96 she had played in theatrical productions of Don's Party and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and made a few guest appearances in Australian television drama series.
  The role in Number 96 began in January 1974. At that time the show was Australia's highest-rated television program and Blacklock's character, dizzy housewife Edie – otherwise known as "Mummy" – along with Edie's regimented husband Reg (Mike Dorsey) and their adopted daughter Marilyn (Frances Hargreaves), became popular and enduring comedy characters in the series. In late 1976 there were plans to spin off the characters of Mummy and Daddy into a new situation comedy series titled Mummy and Me and starring Blacklock and Dorsey, but the proposed series was not picked up by the network and the characters remained in Number 96. Blacklock played in the series continuously until it ended in August 1977 and was in fact the final person shown in the closing scene of the last episode.
  
  wn.com/Wendy_Blacklock
• Wikipedia Persondata
  wn.com/Wikipedia_Persondata
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  Willie Rushton
  William George Rushton, commonly known as Willie Rushton (18 August 1937 – 11 December 1996) was an English cartoonist, satirist, comedian, actor and performer who co-founded the Private Eye satirical magazine.
  William George Rushton was born 18 August 1937 in the family home at Scarsdale Villas, Kensington, London (which 24 years later was to also be the editorial birthplace of Private Eye). He began attending Shrewsbury School in 1950, where he met his future Private Eye colleagues Richard Ingrams, Paul Foot and Christopher Booker. His distinctive character and tastes were already forming, as he introduced his friends to P. G. Wodehouse, the humorous columnist Beachcomber, and the records of ex-Footlights’ revue star Jack Hulbert. He gave a memorable performance as Lord Loam in The Admirable Crichton. He was becoming an accomplished illustrator, and his cartoons appeared in the school’s official magazine, The Salopian. He also contributed to the satirical rag, The Wallopian with Ingrams, Foot, Booker mocking school spirit, traditions and the masters. It was during this period that the term "pseud" was coined. The expression was given wider currency by Private Eye and is still in use as an insult against pseudo-intellectuals.
  
  wn.com/Willie_Rushton
• Zoë Tyler
  Zoë Tyler, (born (1970-07-07)7 July 1970) is an English voice coach, cruise ship singer, performer and reality television show judge. She is also a soloist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
  Tyler's career began when she joined the cast of Les Misérables at the age of 20. She followed by joining the touring cast of Jesus Christ Superstar, followed by the award-winning City of Angels in which she was part of the jazz singing quartet. After a sabbatical from West End musicals Tyler returned and joined the long-running musical Fame as the dance teacher. She also played a part in the soap Doctors which is filmed in Birmingham.
  As a recording artist, Tyler has sung on numerous artists' albums, including Michael Ball and Cliff Richard. Tyler also sang back-up vocals for Elton John,Barry Manilow and Donna Summer as well as Rod Stewart,Will Young,KD Lang and Bonnie Tyler.
  Tyler appeared on BBC One's How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? during the summer and autumn of 2006. The following year she was a judge on the follow-up series Any Dream Will Do.
  
  wn.com/Zoë_Tyler