• Academy Award
• Academy Awards
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• 
  

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  Broadway theatre
  Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City. Along with London's West End theatre, Broadway theatre is widely considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world.
  The Broadway theatre district is a popular tourist attraction in New York. According to The Broadway League, Broadway shows sold approximately $1.081 billion worth of tickets in calendar year 2011, compared with $1.037 billion for 2010. Attendance in 2011 was 12.13 million.
  New York did not have a significant theatre presence until about 1750, when actor-managers Walter Murray and Thomas Kean established a resident theatre company at the Theatre on Nassau Street, which held about 280 people. They presented Shakespeare plays and ballad operas such as The Beggar's Opera. In 1752, William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors from Britain to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager. They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice and The Anatomist. The company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad operas and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. The Revolutionary War suspended theatre in New York, but thereafter theatre resumed in 1798, the year the 2,000-seat Park Theatre was built on Chatham Street (now called Park Row). The Bowery Theatre opened in 1826, followed by others. Blackface minstrel shows, a distinctly American form of entertainment, became popular in the 1830s, and especially so with the arrival of the Virginia Minstrels in the 1840s.
  
  wn.com/Broadway_theatre
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  Kansas
  Kansas (ⁱ/ˈkænzəs/) is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name (natively kką:ze) is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south wind," although this was probably not the term's original meaning. Residents of Kansas are called "Kansans."
  For thousands of years what is now Kansas was home to numerous and diverse Native American tribes. Tribes in the Eastern part of the state generally lived in villages along the river valleys. Tribes in the Western part of the state were semi-nomadic and hunted large herds of bison. Kansas was first settled by European Americans in the 1830s, but the pace of settlement accelerated in the 1850s, in the midst of political wars over the slavery issue. When officially opened to settlement by the U.S. government in 1854, abolitionist Free-Staters from New England and pro-slavery settlers from neighboring Missouri rushed to the territory to determine if Kansas would become a free state or a slave state. Thus, the area was a hotbed of violence and chaos in its early days as these forces collided, and was known as Bleeding Kansas. The abolitionists eventually prevailed and on January 29, 1861, Kansas entered the Union as a free state. After the Civil War, the population of Kansas grew rapidly, when waves of immigrants turned the prairie into farmland. Today, Kansas is one of the most productive agricultural states, producing high yields of wheat, sorghum and sunflowers. Kansas is the 15th most extensive and the 33rd most populous of the 50 United States.
  
  wn.com/Kansas
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  Los Angeles
  Los Angeles (ⁱ/lɒs ˈændʒələs/ loss-AN-jə-ləs; Spanish: [los ˈaŋxeles], which is written Los Ángeles; British pronounciation /lɒs ˈændʒəliːz/ loss-AN-jə-leez) with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in the state of California, and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of 468.67 square miles (1,213.8 km²), and is located in Southern California. Often known by its initials L.A., the city is the focal point of the larger Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana metropolitan statistical area and Greater Los Angeles Area region, which contain 12,828,837 and nearly 18 million people respectively as of 2010, making it one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world and the second largest in the United States. Los Angeles is also the seat of Los Angeles County, the most populated and one of the most ethnically diverse counties in the United States, while the entire Los Angeles area itself has been recognized as the most diverse of the nation's largest cities. The city's inhabitants are referred to as "Angelenos".
  
  wn.com/Los_Angeles

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  Betty Field
  Betty Field (February 8, 1913 – September 13, 1973) was an American film and stage actress. Through her father, she was a direct descendant of the Pilgrims John Alden and Priscilla Mullins.^{[citation needed]}
  Born in Boston, Massachusetts to George Field and Katharine Lynch, Field began her acting career on the London stage in Howard Lindsay's farce, She Loves Me Not. Following its run she returned to the United States and appeared in several stage successes, before making her film debut in 1939. Her role as Mae, the sole female character, in Of Mice and Men (1939) established her as a dramatic actress.
  She starred opposite John Wayne in the 1941 film The Shepherd of the Hills. Field played supporting roles in films such as Kings Row (1942), in which she played a victim of incest, although that fact was not readily apparent due to the heavy censorship of the time.^{[citation needed]}
  Field preferred performing on Broadway and appeared in Elmer Rice's Dream Girl and Jean Anouilh's The Waltz of the Toreadors, but returned to Hollywood regularly, appearing in Flesh and Fantasy (1943), The Southerner (1945), The Great Gatsby (1949), Picnic (1955), Bus Stop (1956), Peyton Place (1957), Butterfield 8 (1960) and Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). Her final film role was in Coogan's Bluff in 1968. She also appeared on television.
  
  wn.com/Betty_Field
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  Bonnie Bedelia
  Bonnie Bedelia Culkin (born March 25, 1948) is an American actress known for her roles in the action films Die Hard and Die Hard 2, as well as the courtroom drama Presumed Innocent. She was also nominated for a Golden Globe award for Heart Like a Wheel. She is currently starring in the NBC series Parenthood.
  Bedelia was born in New York City, New York, the daughter of Marian Ethel (née Wagner), a writer and editor, and Philip Harley Culkin, a journalist. She is the sister of Kit Culkin and the aunt of actors Macaulay, Kieran, and Rory Culkin. She married scriptwriter Ken Luber on April 24, 1969, and they had a son, Yuri, the following year. The time off to focus on motherhood (she had second son Jonah Luber in 1976) proved detrimental to her rising star. Divorced from the father of her two children, she is currently married to third husband actor Michael MacRae, whom she married in 1995.
  From 1961 to 1967, Bonnie was a regular on the CBS soap opera, Love of Life, playing the role of Sandy Porter. She also worked on Broadway, making her debut supporting Patty Duke in 1962 in Isle of Children and winning a Theatre World award in the lead of My Sweet Charlie in 1966. In April 1969 she guest starred in "The Unwanted", an episode of the TV series Bonanza. That year she also attracted attention as the pregnant marathon dancer in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?.
  
  wn.com/Bonnie_Bedelia
• Cliff Robertson
  Clifford Parker "Cliff" Robertson III (September 9, 1923 – September 10, 2011) was an American actor with a film and television career that spanned half a century. Robertson portrayed a young John F. Kennedy in the 1963 film PT 109, and won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the movie Charly. On television, he portrayed retired astronaut Buzz Aldrin in the 1976 adaptation of Aldrin's autobiographic Return to Earth, played a fictional character based on Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms in the 1977 adaptation of John Ehrlichman's Watergate novel The Company, and portrayed Henry Ford in the 1987 Ford: The Man and the Machine. His last well-known film appearances were in 2002 through 2007 as Uncle Ben in the Spider-Man film trilogy.
  Robertson was born on September 9, 1923 in La Jolla, California, the son of Clifford Parker Robertson, Jr. (1902–1968), and his first wife, the former Audrey Olga Willingham (1903-1925). His Texas-born father was described as "the idle heir to a tidy sum of ranching money". Robertson recalled that his father "was a very romantic figure—tall, handsome. He married four or five times, and between marriages he'd pop in to see me. He was a great raconteur, and he was always surrounded by sycophants who let him pick up the tab. During the Depression, he tapped the trust for $500,000, and six months later he was back for more." The actor's parents divorced when he was one, and Robertson's mother died of peritonitis a year later in El Paso, Texas, at the age of 21. He was raised by his maternal grandmother, Mary Eleanor "Eleanora" Willingham (née Sawyer, 1875–1957), in California, and he and his father rarely saw one another. He graduated from La Jolla High School in 1941, where he was known as "The Walking Phoenix".^[why?] He then served in the merchant marine in World War II before attending Antioch College in Ohio and dropping out to work as a journalist for a short time.
  
  wn.com/Cliff_Robertson
• Daniel Taradash
  Daniel Taradash (January 29, 1913 - February 22, 2003) was an American screenwriter.
  Taradash's credits include Golden Boy (1939), From Here to Eternity (1952), Rancho Notorious (1952), Don't Bother to Knock (1952), Désirée (1954), Picnic (1955), Storm Center (1956), which he also directed, Bell, Book and Candle (1958), Morituri (1965), Hawaii (1966), Castle Keep (1969), Doctors' Wives (1971), and Bogie (1980), a film biography of Humphrey Bogart.
  Daniel Taradash was born in Kentucky and raised in Chicago and Miami Beach. He attended Harvard University where he met his future producing partner Jules Blaustein. He graduated with a law degree and passed the New York State bar. But when his play "The Mercy" won the 1938 Bureau of New Plays contest (the two previous winners were Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams), a career in theater was launched. He moved to Hollywood, where he worked as a scripter. His first assignment was as one of four credited writers on the screen version of Clifford Odets' "Golden Boy" (1939).
  
  wn.com/Daniel_Taradash
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  Dick Van Patten
  Richard Vincent "Dick" Van Patten (born December 9, 1928) is an American actor, best known for his role as patriarch Tom Bradford on the television sitcom Eight is Enough. He began work as a child actor and was successful on the New York stage, appearing in more than a dozen plays as a teenager. He later starred in numerous television roles including the long running CBS television series, I Remember Mama and Young Dr. Malone. Later, he would star or co-star in many feature films including Mel Brooks' Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Charlton Heston's Soylent Green and the Academy Award winning Charly.
  Van Patten was born in Kew Gardens, New York, the son of Josephine Rose (née Acerno), an Italian American who worked in advertising, and Richard Byron Van Patten, a Dutch American interior decorator. He began work as a model and actor as a child making his Broadway debut at the age of seven. He was successful on the New York stage, appearing in a dozen theatrical plays before reaching his teen years.He later moved to Hollywood and began a lengthy career in film and television.
  
  wn.com/Dick_Van_Patten
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  Elizabeth Wilson
  Elizabeth Welter Wilson (born April 4, 1921) is an American actress. She was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2007.
  Wilson was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the daughter of Marie Ethel (née Welter) and Henry Dunning Wilson, who was an insurance agent. Wilson attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, then studied with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse. She made her Broadway debut in Picnic in 1953. Her stage credits include Desk Set, The Good Woman of Szechuan, Sticks and Bones, Uncle Vanya, Threepenny Opera, The Importance of Being Earnest, Morning's at Seven, You Can't Take It with You, Ah, Wilderness!, and A Delicate Balance.
  Wilson made her screen debut reprising her stage role in the 1955 film adaptation of Picnic. Additional credits include The Goddess, A Child is Waiting, The Birds, The Graduate, Catch-22, The Day of the Dolphin, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Nine to Five, Grace Quigley, Regarding Henry, The Tunnel of Love, The Addams Family, and Quiz Show. She portrays Franklin Roosevelt's mother, Sara Ann Delano Roosevelt, in Hyde Park On Hudson.
  
  wn.com/Elizabeth_Wilson
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  Elvis Presley
  Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977) was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King".
  Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Presley moved to Memphis, Tennessee, with his family at the age of 13. He began his career there in 1954, working with Sun Records owner Sam Phillips, who wanted to bring the sound of African American music to a wider audience. Accompanied by guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, Presley was the most important popularizer of rockabilly, an uptempo, backbeat-driven fusion of country and rhythm and blues. RCA Victor acquired his contract in a deal arranged by Colonel Tom Parker, who would manage the singer for over two decades. Presley's first RCA single, "Heartbreak Hotel", released in January 1956, was a number one hit. He became the leading figure of the newly popular sound of rock and roll with a series of network television appearances and chart-topping records. His energized interpretations of songs, many from African American sources, and his uninhibited performance style made him enormously popular—and controversial. In November 1956, he made his film debut in Love Me Tender.
  
  wn.com/Elvis_Presley
• George Duning
  George Duning (February 25, 1908 – February 27, 2000) was an American musician and film composer. He was born in Richmond, Indiana and educated in Cincinnati, Ohio at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, where his mentor was Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.
  During his early 20s played trumpet and piano for the Kay Kyser band, later arranging most of the music for Kyser's popular Kollege of Musical Knowledge radio program. It was during the Kyser band's appearance in Carolina Moon (1944) that Duning's work was noticed, leading to a Columbia contract. Duning joined the Navy in 1942 and served as a conductor and arranger with Armed Forces Radio.
  Morris Stoloff signed Duning to Columbia Pictures in 1946, where he worked almost exclusively through the early 1960s, collaborating most often with director Richard Quine.
  Prominent Duning scores are two of the best examples of western genre - the original 3:10 to Yuma, and Cowboy - and those he composed for films as diverse as My Sister Eileen, Picnic, The World of Suzie Wong, Me and the Colonel, The Devil at Four O'Clock, Bell, Book, and Candle, Any Wednesday, and Toys in the Attic.
  
  wn.com/George_Duning
• Gregory Harrison
  Gregory Neale Harrison (born May 31, 1950) is an American actor. He is known for his role as Chandler in the 1987 cult favorite North Shore and as Trapper John MacIntyre's (played by Pernell Roberts) young surgeon, Dr. George Alonzo 'Gonzo' Gates, on the CBS series Trapper John, M.D. (a role he played from 1979 to 1985).
  Harrison was born in Avalon, California, the son of Ed, a ship's captain and poet.
  He was also the title character on the 1977-78 science fiction series Logan's Run, after which he played the role of Levi Zendt on the 1978 NBC miniseries Centennial and had a situation comedy on CBS called Family Man, in which he played a single-father fireman who was rearing three children. He also played a widowed sheriff rearing three children in his mother's motel called Safe Harbor (1999).
  Harrison later won a role as Pernell Roberts' young surgeon, in a popular spin-off medical drama, which was taken from the long-running sitcom, M*A*S*H, on Trapper John, M.D., prior to guest-starring on an episode of its parent series, the year after Wayne Rogers left the show.
  
  wn.com/Gregory_Harrison
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  Gretchen Mol
  Gretchen Mol (born November 8, 1972) is an American actress and former model. She is known for her roles in films like Rounders, Celebrity, 3:10 to Yuma, The Thirteenth Floor, and The Notorious Bettie Page, where she played the title character. She appears as Gillian Darmody in HBO's Boardwalk Empire.
  Mol was born in Deep River, Connecticut, where her mother, Janet, is an artist and teacher and her father is a school teacher at RHAM. She went to high school with Broadway actor Peter Lockyer, with whom she performed in school musicals and plays. Her brother, Jim Mol, is a director and editor in the film industry. Mol attended The American Musical and Dramatic Academy and graduated from the William Esper Studio. After summer stock in Vermont, she took a job for a while as an usher at Angelika Film Center. She was living in a Hell's Kitchen walk-up when she was noticed by a talent agent who spotted her working as a hat check girl at Michael's Restaurant in New York.
  Mol's acting career began in summer stock theatre in Vermont where she played a variety of roles including Godspell and 110 In The Shade. She played Jenny in Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things on stage in both London and New York in 2001, in a role she reprised in the film version, released in 2003. The New York Times critic Ben Brantley, in his review of the play (which he disliked), wrote, "[Mol] gives by far the most persuasive performance as the unworldly Jenny, and you wind up feeling for her disproportionately, only because she seems to be entirely there, in the present tense". In 2004, Mol spent a year singing and dancing as Roxie in the Broadway production of Chicago.
  
  wn.com/Gretchen_Mol
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  Ivan Passer
  Ivan Passer (born July 10, 1933) is a Czech-born film director and screenwriter.
  A significant figure in the Czech New Wave of the mid-1960s, Passer worked closely with Miloš Forman on many of his films, and directed his first feature in 1965. Following the Soviet invasion in 1968, Passer defected to the West, aided by Carlo Ponti and has been living and working in the United States since then.
  Appearing As Himself:
  
  
  
  wn.com/Ivan_Passer
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  James Dean
  James Byron Dean (February 8, 1931 – September 30, 1955) was an American film actor. He is a cultural icon, best embodied in the title of his most celebrated film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), in which he starred as troubled Los Angeles teenager Jim Stark. The other two roles that defined his stardom were as loner Cal Trask in East of Eden (1955), and as the surly ranch hand, Jett Rink, in Giant (1956). Dean's enduring fame and popularity rests on his performances in only these three films, all leading roles. His premature death in a car crash cemented his legendary status.
  Dean was the first actor to receive a posthumous Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and remains the only actor to have had two posthumous acting nominations. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Dean the 18th best male movie star on their AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars list.
  James Dean was born on February 8, 1931, at the Seven Gables apartment house located at the corner of 4th Street and McClure Street in Marion, Indiana, to Winton Dean and Mildred Wilson. Six years after his father had left farming to become a dental technician, James and his family moved to Santa Monica, California. The family spent several years there, and by all accounts young Dean was very close to his mother. According to Michael DeAngelis, she was "the only person capable of understanding him". He was enrolled at Brentwood Public School in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles until his mother died of cancer when Dean was nine years old.
  
  wn.com/James_Dean
• James Vicary
  James McDonald Vicary (April 30, 1915 – November 7, 1977) was a market researcher best known for pioneering the notion of subliminal advertising in 1957.
  Born in Detroit, and trained at the University of Michigan (A.B 1940), he pioneered the use of eye-blink analysis to obtain clues about subjects' levels of emotional tension when exposed to various stimuli. He also studied the phenomena of impulse buying and word association.
  He is most famous for having perpetrated a fraudulent subliminal advertising study in 1957. In it, he claimed that an experiment in which moviegoers were repeatedly shown 0.03-second advertisements for Coca-Cola and popcorn significantly increased product sales. Based on his claims the CIA produced a report "The operational potential of subliminal perception" in 1958 that led to subliminal cuts being banned in the US^{[dubious – discuss]}. It suggested that “Certain individuals can at certain times and under certain circumstances be influenced to act abnormally without awareness of the influence”. When challenged later to replicate the study, he failed to find significant results. Some doubt^{[weasel words]} the original study was ever carried out at all.
  
  wn.com/James_Vicary
• James Wong Howe
  James Wong Howe, A.S.C. (Chinese 黃宗霑; pinyin: Huáng Zōngzhān) (August 28, 1899 – July 12, 1976) was a Chinese American cinematographer who worked on over 130 films. A master at the use of shadow, he was one of the first to use deep-focus cinematography, photography in which both foreground and distant planes remain in focus.
  During the 1930s and 1940s he was one of the most sought after cinematographers in Hollywood. He was nominated for ten Academy Awards for cinematography, winning twice. Howe was judged to be one of history's ten most influential cinematographers in a survey of the members of the International Cinematographers Guild.
  
  wn.com/James_Wong_Howe
• Jennifer Jason Leigh
  Jennifer Jason Leigh (born February 5, 1962) is an American film and stage actress, best known for her roles in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Single White Female, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Georgia and Short Cuts. She is also the co-writer and co-director of the film The Anniversary Party, made with fellow actor Alan Cumming.
  Leigh is known for her emotionally raw and often sexually explicit portrayals of vulnerable and damaged women, and for her intensive method inspired research into her roles.
  Leigh was born on 5 February 1962 in Hollywood, California. She is the daughter of actor Vic Morrow and screenwriter Barbara Turner. Leigh's birth name was Jennifer Leigh Morrow. She changed her surname early in her acting career, taking the middle name Jason in honor of actor Jason Robards, a family friend. Leigh's parents were Jewish, of Russian descent on her father's side.
  Leigh has an older sister, Carrie Ann Morrow, who was credited as a "technical advisor" in Georgia, and on whom Leigh's character Sadie Flood was reputedly based. Leigh also has a half-sister, actress Mina Badie, from her mother's marriage, who acted alongside Leigh in The Anniversary Party. The director Reza Badiyi was her mother's second husband and was at the time her stepfather.
  
  wn.com/Jennifer_Jason_Leigh
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  Jo Mielziner
  Joseph "Jo" Mielziner (March 19, 1901, in Paris - March 15, 1976, in New York City) was an American theatrical scenic, and lighting designer born in Paris, France. He is "the most successful set designer of the Golden era of Broadway", and worked on both stage plays and musicals.
  He was the son of artist Leo Mielziner, Sr. (son of a rabbi), and Ella (née Friend), a writer, and brother of actor-director Kenneth MacKenna. He studied at the Art Students League and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Mielziner was considered one of the most influential theatre designers of the 20th century, designing the scenery and often the lighting for more than 200 productions, many of which became American classics. He "pioneered 'selective realism' in scenic design". According to his obituary, he was perhaps "praised most often...for his sweeping canvas of people under the Brooklyn Bridge, used as a backdrop for Maxwell Anderson's Winterset.
  After his education and spending 13 months in Europe "absorbing the revolutionary changes occurring in traditional stage design", in 1923 he worked for the Theatre Guild in New York as an assistant stage manager and bit actor. Mielziner's Broadway debut as a designer was in 1927 with The Guardsman, for which he designed the scenery and lighting. His other Broadway credits include the original productions of Sweet and Low, Another Part of the Forest, Winterset, Oh, Captain!, Dodsworth, Strange Interlude, Carousel, South Pacific, Guys and Dolls, The King and I, A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Gypsy, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, as well as the film Picnic and the ballet Who Cares?. He won the Academy Award, Best Color Art Direction, for his work on Picnic.
  
  wn.com/Jo_Mielziner
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  Josh Brolin
  Josh James Brolin (pronounced /ˈbroʊlɨn/; born February 12, 1968) is an American actor. He has acted in theater, film and television roles since 1985, and won acting awards for his roles in the films W., No Country for Old Men, Milk and True Grit.
  Brolin was born in Santa Monica, California, the son of Jane Cameron Agee, a wildlife activist who was a native of Corpus Christi, Texas, and actor James Brolin. Brolin was raised on a California ranch with little exposure to his father's acting career. His parents divorced when he was 16 and his stepmother is singer/actress Barbra Streisand. He became interested in acting after taking an improv acting class in high school.
  Brolin started his career in TV movies and guest spots on TV shows before getting a more notable role as Brand Walsh in the Richard Donner-directed movie The Goonies (1985). He was considered for the role of Tom Hanson in the series 21 Jump Street; he and Johnny Depp were the finalists for the role, and at that time the two became close and remained friends even after the role was ultimately awarded to Depp. Brolin guest-starred in an episode of the show in its first season.
  
  wn.com/Josh_Brolin
• Joshua Logan
  Joshua Lockwood Logan III (October 5, 1908 – July 12, 1988) was an American stage and film director and writer.
  Logan was born in Texarkana, Texas, the son of Susan (née Nabors) and Joshua Lockwood Logan. When he was three years old his father committed suicide. Logan, his mother, and younger sister, Mary Lee, then moved to his maternal grandparents’ home in Mansfield, Louisiana, which Logan used forty years later as the setting for his play The Wisteria Trees. Logan's mother remarried six years after his father's death and he then attended Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana, where his stepfather served on the staff. At school, he experienced his first drama class and felt at home. After his high school graduation he attended Princeton University. At Princeton, he was involved with the intercollegiate summer stock company, known as the University Players, with fellow student James Stewart and also non-student Henry Fonda. During his senior year he served as president of the Princeton Triangle Club. Before his graduation he won a scholarship to study in Moscow with Constantin Stanislavsky, and Logan left school without a diploma.
  
  wn.com/Joshua_Logan
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  Kim Novak
  Kim Novak (born Marilyn Pauline Novak, February 13, 1933) is an American film and television actress.
  Her first film roles were in Pushover and Phffft! (both 1954), and her breakthrough role was in Picnic (1955). Over the next three years, she appeared in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), The Eddy Duchin Story (1956), Pal Joey (1957), and Bell, Book and Candle (1958). She is best known for her role as Judy Barton in the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo. Novak's career went into decline afterwards, and she appeared in films sporadically until 1991. Now retired, she lives with her veterinarian husband on a ranch in Eagle Point, Oregon.
  Novak was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Joseph and Blanche (née Kral) Novak. Both her parents were of Czech descent. Her father worked as a dispatcher on the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad and both her parents had been teachers.
  While attending David Glasgow Farragut High School, she won a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago. After leaving school, she began a career modeling teen fashions for a local department store. She later received a scholarship at a modeling academy and continued to model part-time. She worked as an elevator operator, a sales clerk and a dental assistant.
  
  wn.com/Kim_Novak
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  Lee Strasberg
  Lee Strasberg (November 17, 1901 – February 17, 1982) was an American actor, director and acting teacher. He cofounded, with directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as "America's first true theatrical collective". In 1951, he became director of the non-profit Actors Studio, in New York City, considered "the nation's most prestigious acting school". In 1969, Strasberg founded the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York City and in Hollywood to teach the work he pioneered.
  He is considered the "father of method acting in America," according to author Mel Gussow, and from the 1920s until his death in 1982 "he revolutionized the art of acting by having a profound influence on performance in American theater and movies". From his base in New York, he trained several generations of theatre and film's most illustrious talents, including Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and director Elia Kazan.
  
  wn.com/Lee_Strasberg
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  Mary Steenburgen
  Mary Nell Steenburgen (born February 8, 1953) is an American actress. She won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for playing the role of Lynda Dummar in Jonathan Demme's 1980 film Melvin and Howard.
  Steenburgen was born in Newport, Arkansas, the daughter of Nellie Mae (née Wall), a school-board secretary, and Maurice Steenburgen, a freight-train conductor who worked at the Missouri Pacific Railroad. Steenburgen grew up in North Little Rock, Arkansas.
  Steenburgen moved to New York City in 1972, working at Doubleday while studying acting at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse under Will Esper. Her break came when she was discovered by Jack Nicholson in the reception room of Paramount's New York office and was cast as the lead in his second directorial effort, the 1978 Western Goin' South. She had a leading role in the 1979 film Time After Time as a modern woman who falls in love with author H. G. Wells, played by her first husband-to-be Malcolm McDowell.
  In only her third film, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the 1980 film Melvin and Howard, playing the wife of a man who claims to have befriended reclusive eccentric Howard Hughes. Another notable film appearances came in the well-received 1983 film Cross Creek.
  
  wn.com/Mary_Steenburgen
• Michael Learned
  Michael Learned (born April 9, 1939) is an American actress known for her role as Olivia Walton on The Waltons.
  Learned was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Elizabeth Duane "Betti" (née Hooper) and Bruce Learned, a diplomat. Her maternal grandfather was an attaché for the United States Embassy in Rome. She lived on a Connecticut farm with her five sisters for the first ten years of her life. She was named Michael because her father, a diplomat, had wanted and expected to have a boy and had selected the name Michael in advance. When it was clear he had a daughter rather than a son, he decided to keep the name he had chosen.^{[citation needed]} When she was 11, Learned moved to Austria, where her father worked for the U.S. State Department. At this time, she attended Arts Educational School, Tring now Tring Park School for the Performing Arts in Tring, Hertfordshire, England. During this time, she discovered the theatre and decided to make acting her life's work. In a 2002 article she wrote for Daily Word, a publication of the Unity Church, Learned states that at the time she was cast in The Waltons, she had "hit rock bottom". It was then, at age 32, that Learned realized she was an alcoholic. Taking herself to ex-husband Peter Donat's cabin on the California coast, Learned states she decided to "get sober" and that her time there was the beginning of a spiritual journey. Learned further stated in the article that she has been sober since 1977.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Learned
• Mike Nichols
  Mike Nichols (born Michael Igor Peschkowsky; November 6, 1931) is a German-born American television, stage and film director, writer, producer and comedian. He began his career in the 1950s as one half of the comedy duo Nichols and May, along with Elaine May. In 1968 he won the Academy Award for Best Director for the film The Graduate. His other noteworthy films include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carnal Knowledge, Working Girl, Closer and the TV mini-series Angels in America. He also staged the original theatrical productions of Barefoot in the Park, Luv, The Odd Couple and Spamalot.
  Nichols is one of a small group of people who have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award. His other honors include the Lincoln Center Gala Tribute in 1999, the National Medal of Arts in 2001, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2010.
  Mike Nichols was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin, Germany, the son of Brigitte (née Landauer) and Paul Peschkowsky, a physician. His father was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Russian Jewish immigrant family that had been wealthy and lived in Siberia, leaving after the Russian Revolution and settling in Germany around 1920. His mother's family were German Jews. His maternal grandparents were anarchist Gustav Landauer and author Hedwig Lachmann. Nichols is a third cousin twice removed of scientist Albert Einstein, through Nichols' mother. He moved to the United States to flee the Nazis on April 28, 1939. His father, who had changed his name to Paul Nichols, had successfully set up a medical practice in Manhattan and the family lived near Central Park. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1944 and attended public elementary school in Manhattan (PS 87). After graduating from Walden High School, Nichols briefly attended New York University before dropping out. In 1950, he enrolled in the pre-med program at the University of Chicago.
  
  wn.com/Mike_Nichols
• Morris Stoloff
  Morris Stoloff (1 August 1898, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – 16 April 1980, Los Angeles, California) was a musical composer.
  Stoloff worked as a music director at Columbia Pictures from 1936 to 1962. Among space age pop fans, he is best remembered for his 1956 Top 10 hit that paired the swing era tune "Moonglow" with the love theme from the movie Picnic.
  A child prodigy on the violin, Stoloff was taken under the wing of W. A. Clark. After studying with Leopold Auer for several years, Stoloff was touring the U.S. as a featured soloist at the age of 16, and joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic a year later as its youngest member ever.
  When sound came to motion pictures, studios came looking for musicians to provide it, and Stoloff was one of the first to cross over from classical music to movies. He was the first concertmaster on Paramount Pictures' payroll, and he worked with setting up the mechanics of a system that had to provide a steady stream of music for everything from epic dramas to serials and comedy shorts.
  
  wn.com/Morris_Stoloff
• 
  Natalie Wood
  Natalie Wood (born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko; Russian: Наталья Николаевна Захаренко; July 20, 1938 – November 29, 1981) was an American film and television actress best known for her screen roles in Miracle on 34th Street, Splendor in the Grass, Rebel Without a Cause, and West Side Story. After first working in films as a child, Wood became a successful Hollywood star as a young adult, receiving three Academy Award nominations before she was 25 years old.
  Wood began acting in movies at the age of four and at age eight was given a co-starring role in the classic Christmas film Miracle on 34th Street. As a teenager, her performance in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She starred in the musical films West Side Story (1961) and Gypsy (1962), and received Academy Award for Best Actress nominations for her performances in Splendor in the Grass (1961) and Love with the Proper Stranger (1963).
  Her career continued with films such as Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969). After this she took a break from acting and had two children, appearing in only two theatrical films during the 1970s. She was married to actor Robert Wagner twice, and to producer Richard Gregson in between the marriages to Wagner. She had one daughter by each: Natasha Gregson and Courtney Wagner. Her younger sister, Lana Wood, is also an actress.
  
  wn.com/Natalie_Wood
• Raymond Bailey
  Raymond Thomas Bailey (May 6, 1904 – April 15, 1980) was an American actor on the Broadway stage, movies, and television. He is best known for his role as wealthy banker, Milburn Drysdale, in the television series The Beverly Hillbillies.
  He was born in San Francisco, California, the son of William and Alice (née O'Brien) Bailey. When he was a teenager he went to Hollywood to become a movie star. He found it was harder than he had thought, however, and took a variety of short-term jobs. He worked for a time as a day laborer at a movie studio in the days of silent pictures, but was fired for sneaking into a mob scene while it was being filmed. He also worked for a while as a stockbroker and a banker.
  Having no success getting any kind of movie roles, Bailey then went to New York where he had no better success getting roles in theatre. Eventually he became a crewman on a freighter and began sailing to various parts of the world, including China, Japan, the Philippines and the Mediterranean. While docked in Hawaii, he worked on a pineapple plantation, acted at the community theatre and sang on a local radio program.
  
  wn.com/Raymond_Bailey
• 
  Reta Shaw
  Reta Shaw (September 13, 1912 – January 8, 1982) was an American character actress known for playing authoritative women, housekeepers, and domineering wives, especially on television. She was a graduate of the Leland Powers School of the Theater in Boston, Massachusetts.
  The zaftig actress appeared on Broadway in her comic role as Mabel in the original production of The Pajama Game in 1952, as well as in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Picnic and Annie Get Your Gun, the last on tour with Mary Martin.
  She had featured roles in several motion pictures, including Picnic, The Pajama Game, Mary Poppins, Pollyanna, The Ghost And Mr. Chicken, Bachelor in Paradise (with Bob Hope) & Escape to Witch Mountain.
  On television, she was seen with Red Skelton, Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Patty Duke, and Andy Griffith and appeared on Wally Cox's Mr. Peepers series, Armstrong Circle Theater, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Millionaire. She also appeared on The Dick Van Dyke Show as an unemployment office worker.
  She is best remembered as the housekeeper on TV's The Ghost & Mrs. Muir. She appeared in the first season (1958–1959) of CBS's The Ann Sothern Show in the role of Flora Macauley, the overbearing wife of the gentlemanly hotel owner Jason Macauley (played by Ernest Truex). In the 1960-1961 television season, she played the housekeeper, Thelma, to Tab Hunter's character Paul Morgan, a young cartoonist, in NBC's The Tab Hunter Show. Shaw again played a housekeeper in the 1961-1962 CBS series Ichabod and Me, starring Robert Sterling and George Chandler as active and retired newspapermen in a small New England town.
  
  wn.com/Reta_Shaw
• Robert Priestley
  Robert Priestley (June 12, 1901 – November 27, 1986) was an American set decorator. He won two Academy Awards and was nominated for another in the category Best Art Direction.
  Priestley won two Academy Awards for Best Art Direction and was nominated for another:
  
  wn.com/Robert_Priestley
• 
  Rosalind Russell
  Rosalind Russell (June 4, 1907 – November 28, 1976) was an American actress of stage and screen, perhaps best known for her role as a fast-talking newspaper reporter in the Howard Hawks screwball comedy His Girl Friday, as well as the role of Mame Dennis in the film Auntie Mame. She won all 5 Golden Globes for which she was nominated, and was tied with Meryl Streep for wins until 2007 when Streep was awarded a sixth. Russell won a Tony Award in 1953 for Best Performance by an Actress in a Musical for her portrayal of Ruth in the Broadway show Wonderful Town (a musical based on the film My Sister Eileen, in which she also starred).
  Russell was known for playing character roles, exceptionally wealthy, dignified ladylike women, as well as for being one of the few actresses of her time who regularly played professional women, such as judges, reporters, and psychiatrists. She had a wide career span from the 1930s to the 1970s and attributed her long career to the fact that, although usually playing classy and glamorous roles, she never became a sex symbol, not being famous for her looks.
  
  wn.com/Rosalind_Russell
• Rue McClanahan
  Rue McClanahan (February 21, 1934 – June 3, 2010) was an American actress, best known for her roles on television as Vivian Harmon on Maude, Fran Crowley on Mama's Family, and Blanche Devereaux on The Golden Girls, for which she won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in 1987.
  McClanahan was born Eddi-Rue McClanahan in Healdton, Oklahoma, the daughter of Dreda Rheua-Nell (née Medaris), a beautician, and William Edwin "Bill" McClanahan (July 4, 1908 – February 20, 1999) a building contractor. She and her family were Methodists
  She was of Irish and Choctaw, Native American ancestry. Her Choctaw great-grandfather was named Running Hawk according to her autobiography My First Five Husbands... and the Ones Who Got Away (2007). She grew up in Ardmore, Oklahoma; she graduated from Ardmore High School. McClanahan earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Tulsa, where she majored in German and Theater and joined the woman's sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta. She was also a National Honor Society Member.
  
  wn.com/Rue_McClanahan
• 
  Susan Strasberg
  Susan Elizabeth Strasberg (May 22, 1938 – January 21, 1999) was an American film and stage actress.
  Strasberg was born in New York City, New York, the daughter of theatre director and drama coach Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio and former actress Paula Strasberg. Her brother John Strasberg is an acting coach.
  After a widely praised performance as a teenager in Picnic (1956), Strasberg originated the title role in the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank and was nominated for a Tony Award at the age of 18. She later starred in the Italian Holocaust film Kapò which was nominated for an Academy Award as best foreign film of 1960.
  From the 1960s into the 1980s Strasberg guest starred in many U.S. television dramas, including The Virginian, The Invaders, Bonanza, The F.B.I., Breaking Point, Burke's Law, The Streets of San Francisco, Night Gallery, McCloud, Alias Smith & Jones, The Big Valley, Remington Steele, and The Rockford Files (in a 1974 episode she played Deborah Ryder and in 1976 she played Karen Stiles, Rockford's ex-girlfriend).
  
  wn.com/Susan_Strasberg
• 
  Verna Felton
  Verna Felton (July 20, 1890 – December 14, 1966) was an American character actress who was best known for providing many female voices in numerous Disney animated films, as well as voicing Fred Flintstone's mother-in-law Pearl Slaghoople for Hanna-Barbera. Her film appearances during the 1940s included If I Had My Way (1940), Girls of the Big House (1945) and The Fuller Brush Man (1948). She was much in demand as a movie character actress during the early 1950s, including Buccaneer's Girl (1950) Belles on Their Toes (1952) Don't Bother to Knock (1952) and her memorable supporting role of Mrs. Potts in the film of William Inge's Picnic (1955). She was also known for her husky voice and no-nonsense attitude. She was born in Salinas, California.
  
  wn.com/Verna_Felton
• William Flannery
  William Flannery (November 17, 1898–January 25, 1959) was an American art director. He won an Academy Award in the category Best Art Direction for the film Picnic.
  
  
  
  wn.com/William_Flannery
• 
  William Holden
  William Holden (April 17, 1918 – November 12, 1981) was an American actor. Holden won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1954 and the Emmy Award for Best Actor in 1974. One of the most popular and well known movie stars of all time, Holden was one of the biggest box office draws of the 1950s, he was named one of the "Top 10 Stars of the Year" six times (1954–1958, 1961) and appeared on the American Film Institute's AFI's 100 Years…100 Stars list as number 25. He starred in some of the most popular and critically acclaimed films of all time, including such blockbusters as Sunset Boulevard, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Wild Bunch, The Towering Inferno, and Network.
  Holden was born William Franklin Beedle, Jr. in O'Fallon, Illinois, the son of Mary Blanche (née Ball), a schoolteacher, and William Franklin Beedle, Sr., an industrial chemist. He had two younger brothers, Robert and Richard. Holden's paternal great-grandmother, Rebecca Westfield, was born in England in 1817, while some of his mother's ancestors settled in Virginia's Lancaster County after emigrating from England in the 17th century. Growing up, Holden was raised in the Methodist church, and while some sources cite him as a Congregationalist, Holden identified himself as a Methodist throughout his life. His family moved to South Pasadena when he was three.
  
  wn.com/William_Holden
• 
  William Inge
  William Motter Inge ( /ˈɪndʒ/;(1913-05-03)May 3, 1913 – June 10, 1973(1973-06-10)) was an American playwright and novelist, whose works typically feature solitary protagonists encumbered with strained sexual relations. In the early 1950s, he had a string of memorable Broadway productions, and one of these, Picnic, earned him a Pulitzer Prize. With his portraits of small-town life and settings rooted in the American heartland, Inge became known as the "Playwright of the Midwest".
  Born in Independence, Kansas, Inge attended Independence Community College and graduated from the University of Kansas in 1935 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Speech and Drama. While at the University of Kansas, Inge was a member of the Nu Chapter of Sigma Nu. Offered a scholarship to work on a Master of Arts degree, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend the George Peabody College for Teachers, but later dropped out.
  Back in Kansas, he worked as a laborer on the state highway and a Wichita news announcer. In 1937–38 he taught English and drama at Cherokee County Community High School in Columbus, Kansas. After returning and completing his Master's at Peabody in 1938, he taught at Stephens College, in Columbia, Missouri, from 1938 to 1943.
  
  wn.com/William_Inge

Picnic (1956)

Actors

• William Holden
• Kim Novak
• Betty Field
• Susan Strasberg
• Cliff Robertson
• Arthur O'connell
• Verna Felton
• Reta Shaw
• Nick Adams
• Raymond Bailey
• Elizabeth Wilson
• Rosalind Russell
• Warren Frederick Adams
• Carle E. Baker
• George E. Bemis

Director

• Joshua Logan

• Too Fast
• Breathe In
• Love Song for an Imaginary Lover
• Shareware
• Öko
• Woke Me Up Yesterday
• Who Do You Love?
• Fixed
• Two Worlds
• Deltaplane
• Carrot Street

• Umbrella
• Behind
• Cocoon
• Private Party
• Waking Me Up
• Iris' Garden
• Quicksand
• Rise & Shine
• King Rat
• Without a Fight
• Don't Believe in Hell
• Old Faithful
• Chalkboard (2001 remix)
• Don't Cry Little Boy

• Mojo Bone
• Road Hog
• Yellow Bad Machine
• Bang Bang Shoot Shoot
• Insect Summer
• Wish You Were a Herring
• (What I Need is a Liquid) Spank
• Check your Brakes
• Samples
• The Goat
• Ha Ha, Hee Hee

• Infinity Man
• Calling Home
• Come & Go
• One Live Love
• Fine In My Mind
• Chalkboard
• Tug O' War
• Forgive Me
• I'll Be There With You
• Mockingbird
• Sorry, We're Not Open
• [untitled]