- published: 15 Nov 2011
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- author: smokeybarz
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![SB.TV Warm Up Sessions - TK - [S3.EP30]](http://web.archive.org./web/20121223073558im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/F7JauzDvKlM/default.jpg "TK lights up a session with this track.")
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Tokelau
Tokelau (
/ˈtoʊkəlaʊ/) is a territory of New Zealand in the South Pacific Ocean that consists of three tropical coral atolls with a combined land area of 10 km2 and a population of approximately 1,400. The atolls lie north of the Samoan Islands, east of Tuvalu, south of the Phoenix Islands, southwest of the more distant Line Islands (both island groups belonging to Kiribati) and northwest of the Cook Islands.
The United Nations General Assembly designated Tokelau a Non-Self-Governing Territory. Until 1976 the official name was Tokelau Islands. Tokelau is sometimes referred to by the older, colonial name of The Union Islands.
The name Tokelau is a Polynesian word meaning "North Wind". The islands were named the Union Islands and Union Group by European explorers at an unknown time. Tokelau Islands was adopted as the name in 1946, and was contracted to Tokelau on 9 December 1976.
The change from Tokelau Islands to Tokelau marked a slight shift in emphasis, with consequences in regional diplomacy, in that the term Tokelau Islands clearly and substantially referred to a geographical expression, that is, a range of islands, whatever else it may connote. It is not necessarily controversial to refer by name to a range of islands, even though they may come under two or more political jurisdictions. Tokelau, on the other hand, can be taken to refer more immediately to some concept of nationhood, arguably infusing increased meaning to the draft 2006 independence constitution of Tokelau (which somewhat controversially claims Tokelauan inhabited Olohega (or Swains Island), currently part of American Samoa, as part of its national territory).[citation needed]
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Al Jolson
Al Jolson (May 26, 1886 – October 23, 1950) was an American singer, comedian, and actor. In his heyday, he was dubbed "The World's Greatest Entertainer".
His performing style was brash and extroverted, and he popularized a large number of songs that benefited from his "shamelessly sentimental, melodramatic approach". Numerous well-known singers were influenced by his music, including Bing CrosbyJudy Garland, rock and country entertainer Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bob Dylan, who once referred to him as "somebody whose life I can feel". Broadway critic Gilbert Seldes compared him to "the Greek God Pan", claiming that Jolson represented "the concentration of our national health and gaiety."
In the 1930s, he was America's most famous and highest paid entertainer. Between 1911 and 1928, Jolson had nine sell-out Winter Garden shows in a row, more than 80 hit records, and 16 national and international tours. Although he's best remembered today as the star in the first (full length) talking movie, The Jazz Singer in 1927, he later starred in a series of successful musical films throughout the 1930s. After a period of inactivity, his stardom returned with the 1946 Oscar-winning biographical film, The Jolson Story. Larry Parks played Jolson with the songs dubbed in with Jolson’s real voice. A sequel, Jolson Sings Again, was released in 1949, and was nominated for three Oscars. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Jolson became the first star to entertain troops overseas during World War II, and again in 1950 became the first star to perform for G.I.s in Korea, doing 42 shows in 16 days. He died just weeks after returning to the U.S., partly due to the physical exertion of performing. Defense Secretary George Marshall afterward awarded the Medal of Merit to Jolson's family.
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Al Pacino
Alfredo James "Al" Pacino (/pəˈtʃiːnɵ/; born April 25, 1940) is an American film and stage actor and director. He is famous for playing mobsters, including Michael Corleone in The Godfather trilogy and Tony Montana in Scarface, though he has also appeared several times on the other side of the law — as a police officer, a detective and a lawyer. His role as Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman won him the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1993 after receiving seven previous Oscar nominations, one of them being in the same year.
He made his feature film debut in the 1969 film Me, Natalie in a minor supporting role, before playing the leading role in the 1971 drama The Panic in Needle Park. Pacino made his major breakthrough when he was given the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather in 1972, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Other Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor were for Dick Tracy and Glengarry Glen Ross. Oscar nominations for Best Actor include The Godfather Part II, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, ...And Justice for All and Scent of a Woman.
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Al Rinker
Al Rinker (December 20, 1907 – June 11, 1982) began performing as a partner with Bing Crosby in 1925 and the two singers formed the Rhythm Boys, which singer/songwriter/pianist Harry Barris later joined. Barris wrote the songs Mississippi Mud, I Surrender, Dear, and Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams among others. The singing trio worked with Paul Whiteman's Big Band in Los Angeles until Crosby dissolved the group to go solo, recording both with Whiteman and on their own with Barris on piano.
The Rhythm Boys were filmed for the Paul Whiteman movie The King of Jazz (1930) singing Mississippi Mud, So the Bluebirds and the Blackbirds Got Together, I'm a Fisherman, Bench in the Park, and Happy Feet. According to a filmed interview of Rinker, Crosby performed the first two weeks on his first film while on daytime work release from jail after crashing his car into a telephone pole while driving drunk. After the Rhythm Boys broke up, they reunited only once, to appear together on the "Paul Whiteman Presents" radio broadcast on July 4, 1943.
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Albert Finney
Albert Finney (born 9 May 1936) is an English actor. He achieved prominence in films in the early 1960s, and has maintained a successful career in theatre, film and television.
A recipient of BAFTA, Golden Globe, Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Awards, Finney has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor four times, for Tom Jones (1963), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Dresser (1983), and Under the Volcano (1984); and was nominated for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Erin Brockovich (2000).
Finney is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His career began in the theatre; he made his first appearance on the London stage in 1958 in Jane Arden's The Party, directed by Charles Laughton, who starred in the production along with his wife, Elsa Lanchester. Then in 1959 he appeared at Stratford in Coriolanus opposite Laurence Olivier (as Coriolanus), Edith Evans and Vanessa Redgrave.
His first film appearance was a role in Tony Richardson's The Entertainer (1960), with Laurence Olivier, but he made his breakthrough with his portrayal of a disillusioned factory worker in Karel Reisz's film version of Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. This led to a series of "Angry Young Man" roles in kitchen sink dramas, before he starred in the Academy Award-winning 1963 film Tom Jones. Prior to this, Finney had been chosen to play T. E. Lawrence in David Lean's production of Lawrence of Arabia, but the actor quit after four days of shooting.
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Alec Guinness
Sir Alec Guinness, CH, CBE (2 April 1914 – 5 August 2000) was an English actor. After an early career on the stage he was featured in several of the Ealing Comedies, including Kind Hearts and Coronets in which he played eight different characters. However, he was probably best known for his six collaborations with David Lean: Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations (1946), Fagin in Oliver Twist (1948), Col. Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor), Prince Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Yevgraf in Doctor Zhivago (1965), and Professor Godbole in A Passage to India (1984). In later years, he achieved fame with younger audiences for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in George Lucas’s Star Wars films.
Guinness was born at 155 Lauderdale Mansions South, Lauderdale Road, Maida Vale, London as Alec Guinness de Cuffe. His mother's maiden name was Agnes Cuff. She was born 8 December 1890 to Edward Cuff and Mary Ann Benfield. On Guinness's birth certificate, the space for the mother's name shows Agnes de Cuffe. The space for the infant's name (where first names only are given) says Alec Guinness. The column for name and surname of father is blank.
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Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood. On 19 April 1955, he became an American citizen while remaining a British subject.
Over a career spanning more than half a century, Hitchcock fashioned for himself a distinctive and recognisable directorial style. He pioneered the use of a camera made to move in a way that mimics a person's gaze, forcing viewers to engage in a form of voyeurism. He framed shots to maximise anxiety, fear, or empathy, and used innovative film editing. His stories frequently feature fugitives on the run from the law alongside "icy blonde" female characters. Many of Hitchcock's films have twist endings and thrilling plots featuring depictions of violence, murder, and crime, although many of the mysteries function as decoys or "MacGuffins" meant only to serve thematic elements in the film and the extremely complex psychological examinations of the characters. Hitchcock's films also borrow many themes from psychoanalysis and feature strong sexual undertones. Through his cameo appearances in his own films, interviews, film trailers, and the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he became a cultural icon. Hitchocks reputation as a filmmaker is offset by claims that he engaged in obsessive and controlling behaviour towards many of his leading ladies, and that in some cases this extended to physical abuse and sexual harrassment.
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Anthony Hopkins
Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins, CBE (born 31 December 1937), best known as Anthony Hopkins, is a Welsh actor of film, stage and television, and a composer. Considered to be one of the greatest living actors, Hopkins is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Other prominent film credits include The Lion in Winter, Magic, The Elephant Man, 84 Charing Cross Road, Dracula, Legends of the Fall, The Remains of the Day, Amistad, Nixon, The World's Fastest Indian, and Fracture. Hopkins was born and brought up in Wales. Retaining his British citizenship, he became a U.S. citizen on 12 April 2000. Hopkins' films have spanned a wide variety of genres, from family films to horror. As well as his Academy Award, Hopkins has also won three BAFTA Awards, two Emmys and the Cecil B. DeMille Golden Globe Award. Hopkins was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1993 for services to the arts. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003, and was made a Fellow of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2008.
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Anthony Quinn
Antonio Rodolfo Quinn-Oaxaca (April 21, 1915 – June 3, 2001), more commonly known as Anthony Quinn, was a Mexican and American actor, as well as a painter and writer. He starred in numerous critically acclaimed and commercially successful films, including Zorba the Greek, Lawrence of Arabia, The Guns of Navarone, The Message, Guns for San Sebastian, Lion of the Desert and Federico Fellini's La Strada. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor twice; for Viva Zapata! in 1952 and Lust for Life in 1956.
Quinn was born Antonio Reyes in Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution. His mother, Manuela "Nellie" Oaxaca, was of Aztec Indian ancestry. His father, Francisco Quinn, was also born in Mexico, to an Irish immigrant father from County Cork and a Mexican mother. Frank Quinn rode with Pancho Villa, then later moved to Los Angeles and became an assistant cameraman at a movie studio. In Quinn's autobiography The Original Sin: A Self-Portrait by Anthony Quinn he denied being the son of an "Irish adventurer" and attributed that tale to Hollywood publicists.
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Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith (April 15, 1894 – September 26, 1937) was an American blues singer.
Nicknamed The Empress of the Blues, Smith was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s. She is often regarded as one of the greatest singers of her era and, along with Louis Armstrong, a major influence on subsequent jazz vocalists.
The 1900 census indicates that Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in July 1892. However, the 1910 census recorded her birthday as April 15, 1894, a date that appears on all subsequent documents and was observed by the entire Smith family. Census data also contributes to controversy about the size of her family. The 1870 and 1880 censuses report three older half-siblings, while later interviews with Smith's family and contemporaries did not include these individuals among her siblings.
Bessie Smith was the daughter of Laura (née Owens) and William Smith. William Smith was a laborer and part-time Baptist preacher (he was listed in the 1870 census as a "minister of the gospel", in Moulton, Lawrence, Alabama.) He died before his daughter could remember him. By the time she was nine, she had lost her mother and a brother as well. Her older sister Viola took charge of caring for her siblings.
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Bette Davis
Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis (April 5, 1908 – October 6, 1989) was an American actress of film, television and theater. Noted for her willingness to play unsympathetic characters, she was highly regarded for her performances in a range of film genres, from contemporary crime melodramas to historical and period films and occasional comedies, although her greatest successes were her roles in romantic dramas.
After appearing in Broadway plays, Davis moved to Hollywood in 1930, but her early films for Universal Studios were unsuccessful. She joined Warner Bros. in 1932 and established her career with several critically acclaimed performances. In 1937, she attempted to free herself from her contract and although she lost a well-publicized legal case, it marked the beginning of the most successful period of her career. Until the late 1940s, she was one of American cinema's most celebrated leading ladies, known for her forceful and intense style. Davis gained a reputation as a perfectionist who could be highly combative, and confrontations with studio executives, film directors and costars were often reported. Her forthright manner, clipped vocal style and ubiquitous cigarette contributed to a public persona which has often been imitated and satirized.
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Beverly Garland
Beverly Garland (October 17, 1926 – December 5, 2008) was an American film and television actress, businesswoman, and hotel owner. Garland gained prominence for her role as Fred MacMurray's second wife, "Barbara Harper Douglas", in the 1960s sitcom My Three Sons (a role she played from 1969 until the series ended in 1972 and for which she is mostly identified). In the 1980s, she co-starred as Kate Jackson's widowed mother, "Dotty West", in the television series Scarecrow and Mrs. King, on CBS. She also had a recurring role as Ginger Jackson on The WB Television Network series 7th Heaven.
Garland was born Beverly Lucy Fessenden in Santa Cruz, California, the daughter of Amelia Rose, a businesswoman, and James Atkins Fessenden, a singer and salesman. Garland grew up in Glendale, California. Her 1950s acting roles tended to be tough women who could handle themselves in violent situations. 1956 was a busy year for Garland: she played a female marshal in the Western Gunslinger with Chris Alcaide as her deputy; a prison escapee in Swamp Women; and a scientist's wife who battles an alien in It Conquered the World. All three movies were directed by Roger Corman and riffed in the 1990s by Mystery Science Theater 3000. Garland then starred as undercover police officer "Casey Jones" in the syndicated television series Decoy.
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Bill Mazeroski
William Stanley Mazeroski (born September 5, 1936 in Wheeling, West Virginia), nicknamed "Maz", is a former Major League Baseball player who spent his entire career (1956–72) with the Pittsburgh Pirates. A key member of the Pirates' World Series-winning teams in 1960 and 1971, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001.
While one of the greatest defensive second basemen of all time, he is perhaps best known for winning the 1960 World Series with a dramatic game-ending home run. The only other time that a World Series ended with a home run was Toronto's Joe Carter in 1993. Mazeroski's however, remains the only home run to win a World Series Game 7.
Mazeroski attended Warren Consolidated High School in Tiltonsville, Ohio, excelling in both baseball and basketball. He started on the varsity baseball team as a freshman.
As a 17-year-old in 1954, Mazeroski signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Originally a shortstop, he was quickly moved to second base and made his Major League debut on July 7, 1956. He would remain with the Pirates his entire career.
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Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Harris April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz singer and songwriter. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and musical partner Lester Young, Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo.
Critic John Bush wrote that Holiday "changed the art of American pop vocals forever." She co-wrote only a few songs, but several of them have become jazz standards, notably "God Bless the Child", "Don't Explain", "Fine and Mellow", and "Lady Sings the Blues". She also became famous for singing "Easy Living", "Good Morning Heartache", and "Strange Fruit", a protest song which became one of her standards and was made famous with her 1939 recording.
Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Sarah Julia "Sadie" Fagan (née Harris). Her father, Clarence Halliday (Holiday), a musician, did not marry or live with her mother. Her mother had moved to Philadelphia when thirteen, after being ejected from her parents' home in Sandtown-Winchester, Baltimore for becoming pregnant. With no support from her own parents, Holiday's mother arranged for the young Holiday to stay with her older married half sister, Eva Miller, who lived in Baltimore.
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Billy Bob Thornton
Billy Bob Thornton (born August 4, 1955) is an American actor, screenwriter, director and musician. Thornton gained early recognition as a cast member on the CBS sitcom Hearts Afire and in several early 1990s films including On Deadly Ground and Tombstone. In the mid-1990s, after writing, directing, and starring in the independent film Sling Blade, he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He appeared in several major film roles following Sling Blade 's success, including 1998's Armageddon and A Simple Plan. During the late 1990s, Thornton began a career as a singer-songwriter. He has released three albums and was the singer in a blues rock band.
Thornton was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the son of Virginia Roberta (née Faulkner), a psychic, and William Raymond "Billy Ray" Thornton (November 1929–August 1974), a high school history teacher and basketball coach who died when Thornton was 18. He has two younger brothers, Jimmy Don (April 1958–October 1988), who died of a heart attack at 30, and John David (born 1969), who resides in California. Jimmy Don Thornton wrote a number of songs, two of which—"Island Avenue" and "Emily"—Thornton has recorded on his solo albums. During his childhood, Thornton lived in both Alpine, Arkansas, and Malvern, Arkansas. He was raised a Methodist, in an extended family in a shack that had neither electricity nor plumbing. Thornton graduated from high school in 1973. A good high school baseball player, he tried out for the Kansas City Royals, but was let go after an injury. After a short period laying asphalt for the Arkansas State Transportation Department, he attended Henderson State University to pursue studies in psychology, but he dropped out after two semesters.
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Bing Crosby
Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby (May 3, 1903 – October 14, 1977) was an American singer and actor. Crosby's trademark bass-baritone voice made him one of the best-selling recording artistes of the 20th century, with over half a billion records in circulation.
A multimedia star, from 1934 to 1954 Bing Crosby was a leader in record sales, radio ratings and motion picture grosses. His early career coincided with technical recording innovations; this allowed him to develop a laid-back, intimate singing style that influenced many of the popular male singers who followed him, including Perry Como,Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin. Yank magazine recognized Crosby as the person who had done the most for American G.I. morale during World War II and, during his peak years, around 1948, polls declared him the "most admired man alive," ahead of Jackie Robinson and Pope Pius XII. Also in 1948, the Music Digest estimated that Crosby recordings filled more than half of the 80,000 weekly hours allocated to recorded radio music.
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Bix Beiderbecke
Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke (March 10, 1903 – August 6, 1931) was an American jazz cornetist, jazz pianist, and composer.
With Louis Armstrong, Beiderbecke was one of the most influential jazz soloists of the 1920s. His turns on "Singin' the Blues" (1927) and "I'm Coming, Virginia" (1927), in particular, demonstrated an unusual purity of tone and a gift for improvisation. With these two recordings, especially, he helped to invent the jazz ballad style and hinted at what, in the 1950s, would become cool jazz. "In a Mist" (1927), one of a handful of his piano compositions but the only one he recorded, mixed classical influences with jazz syncopation. Beiderbecke also has been credited for his influence, directly, on Bing Crosby and, indirectly, via saxophonist Frank Trumbauer, on Lester Young.
A native of Davenport, Iowa, Beiderbecke taught himself to play cornet largely by ear, leading him to adopt a non-standard fingering that some critics have connected to his original sound. He first recorded with a Midwestern jazz ensemble The Wolverines in 1924, after which he played briefly for the Detroit-based Jean Goldkette Orchestra before joining Frankie "Tram" Trumbauer for an extended gig at the Arcadia Ballroom in St. Louis, Missouri. Beiderbecke and Trumbauer both joined Goldkette in 1926. The band toured widely and famously played a set opposite Fletcher Henderson at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City in October 1926. The following year, Trumbauer and Beiderbecke left Detroit to join the best-known and most prestigious dance orchestra in the country: the New York-based Paul Whiteman Orchestra.
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Bob Crosby
George Robert "Bob" Crosby (August 23, 1913 – March 9, 1993) was an American Swing music and Dixieland bandleader and vocalist, best known for his group the Bob-Cats.
The seven Crosby children are: elder boys, Larry (1895–1975), Everett (1896–1966), Ted (1900–1973), Harry, (1903–1977, popularly known as Bing Crosby), two girls, Catherine (1905–1988) and Mary Rose (1907–1990) and Bob. His parents were English-American bookkeeper Harry Lowe Crosby (1871–1950) and Irish-American Catherine Harrigan (1873–1964), (affectionately known as Kate), the daughter of a builder from County Mayo in Ireland.
Bob Crosby began singing in the early 1930s with the Delta Rhythm Boys which included vocalist Ray Hendricks and guitarist Bill Pollard also with Anson Weeks (1931–34) and the Dorsey Brothers (1934–35). He led his first band in 1935, when the former members of Ben Pollack's band elected him as titular leader. He recorded with the Clark Randall Orchestra in 1935, led by Gil Rodin and featuring singer Frank Tennille, whose pseudonym was Clark Randall. Glenn Miller was a member of that orchestra which recorded the Glenn Miller novelty composition "When Icky Morgan Plays the Organ" in 1935. His most famous band, the Bob-Cats, was a Dixieland jazz group with members from the Bob Crosby Orchestra. Both the Bob Crosby Orchestra and the smaller Bob-Cats group specialized in Dixieland jazz, presaging the traditional jazz revival of the 1940s. Crosby's singing voice was remarkably similar to that of his brother Bing, but without its range.
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Broderick Crawford
Broderick Crawford (December 9, 1911 – April 26, 1986) was an Academy Award-winning American stage, film, radio and TV actor, often cast in tough-guy roles and best known for his starring role in the television series Highway Patrol.
Crawford was born William Broderick Crawford in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Lester Crawford and Helen Broderick, who were both vaudeville performers, as his grandparents had been. His father appeared in films in the 1920s and 1930s; his mother had a minor career in Hollywood comedies. He joined his parents on the stage, working for producer Max Gordon. When vaudeville went into decline, he attended Harvard University for three months, but dropped out to work as a stevedore on the New York docks.
Crawford returned to vaudeville and radio, which included a period with the Marx Brothers on their NBC radio comedy show Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel. He played his first serious character as a footballer in She Loves Me Not at the Adelphi Theatre, London in 1932. Crawford's talents were spotted by Noël Coward during the three weeks the play ran. Coward also played in the 1935 Broadway production of 'Point Valaine'.
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Buddy Adler
E. Maurice "Buddy" Adler (June 22, 1909 – July 12, 1960) was an American film producer and a former production head for 20th Century Fox studios.
Born in New York City, New York, he married in 1940 actress Anita Louise Fremault (1915–1970) with whom he had two children.
In 1954, his production of From Here to Eternity won the Academy Award for Best Picture and in 1956, his Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing was nominated for best picture. Adler also produced the 1956 film Bus Stop, starring Marilyn Monroe.
He was the recipient of the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1957. The following year he received the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion pictures.
Buddy Adler died of lung cancer, aged 51, in Los Angeles and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. His widow died ten years later.
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Burt Lancaster
Burton Stephen "Burt" Lancaster (November 2, 1913 – October 20, 1994) was an American film actor noted for his athletic physique and distinctive smile (which he called "The Grin"). After initially building his career on "tough guy" roles Lancaster abandoned his "all-American" image in the late 1950s in favor of more complex and challenging roles, and came to be regarded as one of the best actors of his generation as a result.
Lancaster was nominated four times for Academy Awards and won once — for his work in Elmer Gantry in 1960. He also won a Golden Globe for that performance and BAFTA Awards for The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and Atlantic City (1980). His production company, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, was the most successful and innovative star-driven independent production company in Hollywood of the 1950s, making movies such as Marty (1955), Trapeze (1956), and Sweet Smell of Success (1957).
In 1999, the American Film Institute named Lancaster 19th among the greatest male stars of all time.
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Campbell Scott
Campbell Scott (born July 19, 1961) is an American actor, director, producer, and voice artist.
Scott was born in New York City, the son of George C. Scott, an actor, director, and producer, and Colleen Dewhurst, a Canadian-born actress. He graduated from Lawrence University in 1983. His brother is Alexander Scott. He has a son, Malcolm, born in 1998.
In 1990, Scott played a lead role in the ground-breaking film Longtime Companion, which chronicles the early years of the AIDS/HIV epidemic and its impact upon a group of American friends. In the following year, Scott co-starred in the movie Dying Young (in which his mother also appeared) alongside Julia Roberts. He also appears in the 1992 movie Singles, and in 1996, he teamed up with Stanley Tucci to direct the film Big Night. The film met with critical acclaim and was nominated for the "Grand Jury Prize" at the Sundance Film Festival. For their work, Scott and Tucci won both the New York Film Critics Circle Award and the Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best New Director.
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Carl Fenton
Carl Fenton (1889-1980) born as Walter G. Haenschen, was an American bandleader, composer, and radio musician.
The Carl Fenton Orchestra (AKA "Carl Fenton’s Orchestra") was a title given to Brunswick Records studio bands through the 1920s. The name was invented by Brunswick music director Walter Gustave "Gus" Haenschen shortly after taking the position for their brand-new American division. Later, the name was taken by violinist Rudy Greenberg.
Haenschen, whose own name was considered ill-suited for commercial recordings, haphazardly chose the name "Fenton" after the town of Fenton, Missouri, near his hometown of St Louis, Missouri. He attended Washington University. (He told an interviewer "How do you find a name? Just pull it out of a hat." The first name "Carl" was likely selected by Brunswick’s office staff.
The earliest songs recorded by Carl Fenton’s Orchestra were Karavan and Romance, from October 1919. Brunswick Records released many "Carl Fenton" records, with various line-ups of musicians. The band was typically led by Haenschen in the studio, but was led by studio musician/conductor Reuben "Rudy" Greenberg during their occasional concerts.
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Cecil B. DeMille
Cecil Blount DeMille (August 12, 1881 – January 21, 1959) was an American film director and Academy Award-winning film producer in both silent and sound films. He was renowned for the flamboyance and showmanship of his movies. Among his best-known films are Cleopatra; Samson and Delilah; The Greatest Show on Earth, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture; and The Ten Commandments, which was his last and most successful film.
DeMille was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts while his parents were vacationing there and grew up in Washington, North Carolina. While he is known as DeMille (his nom d'oeuvre), his family name was Dutch and is usually spelled "de Mil". His father, Henry Churchill DeMille (1853–1893), was a North Carolina-born dramatist and lay reader in the Episcopal Church, who had earlier begun a career as a playwright, writing his first play at age 15. His mother was Beatrice DeMille (née Samuel), whose parents were both of German Jewish heritage. She emigrated from England with her parents in 1871, when she was 18, where they settled in Brooklyn, New York. According to biographer Carol Easton, Beatrice grew up in a middle-class English household.
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Charles S. Howard
Charles Stewart Howard (February 28, 1877 – June 6, 1950) was an American businessman. He made his fortune as an automobile dealer and became a prominent thoroughbred racehorse owner.
Howard was dubbed one of the most successful Buick salesman of all time. He lost a son to a car accident in 1926 at an early age and later bought the soon-to-be-famous horse Seabiscuit. According to Laura Hillenbrand's biography of Seabiscuit, Howard's early Buick dealership in San Francisco was given a boost by the hand of fate; on the day of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, he was one of the few individuals who had operational vehicles in the city, and was thus able to help the rescue effort significantly.
In 1921, long before he bought Seabiscuit, Charles Howard purchased the 16,000-acre (6,475 ha) Ridgewood Ranch at Willits in Mendocino County. His 15-year-old son, Frankie, died there in 1926 after a truck accident on the property (the elder Howard established the Frank R. Howard Memorial Hospital as a memorial to his son). Used as a secondary residence, by the 1930s Howard had converted part of the ranch into a thoroughbred horse breeding and training center. Although Seabiscuit was the most famous resident at Ridgewood Ranch, Charles Howard owned many horses in his secondary career as a Thoroughbred owner including Kayak II (also Kajak) and Hall of Fame colt Noor, the first of only two horses to defeat two U.S. Triple Crown champions.
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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.
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Clark Gable
William Clark Gable (February 1, 1901 – November 16, 1960), known as Clark Gable, was an American film actor most famous for his role as Rhett Butler in the 1939 Civil War epic film Gone with the Wind, in which he starred with Vivien Leigh. His performance earned him his third nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor; he won for It Happened One Night (1934) and was also nominated for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). Later movies included Run Silent, Run Deep, a submarine war film, and his final film, The Misfits (1961), which paired Gable with Marilyn Monroe, also in her last screen appearance. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Gable seventh among the greatest male stars of all time. He was nicknamed 'The King of Hollywood.'
Gable appeared opposite some of the most popular actresses of the time. Joan Crawford, who was his favorite actress to work with, was partnered with Gable in eight films, Myrna Loy worked with him seven times, and he was paired with Jean Harlow in six productions. He also starred with Lana Turner in four features, and with Norma Shearer and Ava Gardner in three each. In the mid-1930s, Gable was often named the top male movie star, and second only to the top box-office draw of all, Shirley Temple.
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Clint Eastwood
Clinton "Clint" Eastwood, Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American film actor, director, producer, composer and politician. Eastwood first came to prominence as a supporting cast member in the TV series Rawhide (1959–1965). He rose to fame for playing the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy of spaghetti westerns (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) during the late 1960s, and as Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry films (Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, The Enforcer, Sudden Impact, and The Dead Pool) throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These roles, among others, have made him an enduring cultural icon of masculinity.
For his work in the films Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004), Eastwood won Academy Awards for Best Director and Producer of the Best Picture, as well as receiving nominations for Best Actor. These films in particular, as well as others including Play Misty for Me (1971), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Tightrope (1984), Pale Rider (1985), Heartbreak Ridge (1986), In the Line of Fire (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), and Gran Torino (2008), have all received commercial success and critical acclaim. Eastwood's only comedies have been Every Which Way but Loose (1978) and its sequel Any Which Way You Can (1980), which are his two most commercially successful films after adjustment for inflation.
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Danny Kaye
Danny Kaye (born David Daniel Kaminski; January 18, 1913 – March 3, 1987) was a celebrated American actor, singer, dancer, and comedian. His best known performances featured physical comedy, idiosyncratic pantomimes, and rapid-fire nonsense songs.
Kaye starred in 17 movies, notably The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), The Inspector General (1949), Hans Christian Andersen (1952), and — perhaps his most accomplished performance — The Court Jester (1956). His films were extremely popular, especially his bravura performances of patter songs and children's favorites such as The Inch Worm and The Ugly Duckling. He was the first ambassador-at-large of UNICEF in 1954 and received the French Legion of Honor in 1986 for his many years of work with the organization.
David Daniel Kaminski was born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn. Jacob and Clara Nemerovsky Kaminski and their two sons, Larry and Mac, left Ekaterinoslav two years before his birth; he was the only one of their sons born in the United States. He spent his early youth attending Public School 149 in East New York, Brooklyn, where he began entertaining his young classmates with songs and jokes, before moving to Thomas Jefferson High School, but he never graduated. His mother died when he was in his early teens. Clara enjoyed the impressions and humor of her youngest son and always had words of encouragement for them; her death was a great loss for young Danny.
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Darryl F. Zanuck
Darryl Francis Zanuck (September 5, 1902 – December 22, 1979) was an American producer, writer, actor, director and studio executive who played a major part in the Hollywood studio system as one of its longest survivors (the length of his career being rivalled only by that of Adolph Zukor). He earned three Academy Awards during his tenure.
Zanuck was born in Wahoo, Nebraska, the son of Louise (Torpin) and Frank Zanuck, who owned and operated a hotel in Wahoo. Zanuck was of part Swiss descent and was raised a Protestant. At six, Zanuck and his mother moved to Los Angeles, where the better climate could improve her poor health. At eight, he found his first movie job as an extra, but his disapproving father recalled him to Nebraska.
In 1918, despite being sixteen, he deceived a recruiter and joined the United States Army and served in France with the Nebraska National Guard. Returning to the U.S., he worked in many part-time jobs while he tried to find work as a writer. He managed to find work producing movie plots, selling his first story in 1922 to William Russell and his second to Irving Thalberg. Screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas, then story editor at Universal Pictures' New York office, stated that one of the stories Zanuck sent out to movie studios around this time was completely plagiarized from another author's work. Zanuck then worked for Mack Sennett and took that experience to Warner Bros. where he wrote stories for Rin Tin Tin and under a number of pseudonyms wrote over forty scripts from 1924–1929, including Old San Francisco (1927). He moved into management in 1929 and became head of production in 1931.
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David Bowie
David Bowie ( /ˈboʊ.i/ BOH-ee; born David Robert Jones on 8 January 1947) is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. He is known for his distinctive voice and the intellectual depth and eclecticism of his work.
Bowie first caught the eye and ear of the public in July 1969, when his song "Space Oddity" reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart. After a three-year period of experimentation he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "Starman" and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie's impact at that time, as described by biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture." The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona proved merely one facet of a career marked by continual reinvention, musical innovation and striking visual presentation.
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David Niven
James David Graham Niven (1 March 1910 – 29 July 1983), was a British actor and novelist, best known for his roles as Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days and Sir Charles Lytton, a.k.a. "the Phantom", in The Pink Panther. He was awarded the 1958 Academy Award for Best Actor in Separate Tables.
Born in London, Niven attended Heatherdown and Stowe before gaining a place at Royal Military College at Sandhurst. He was gazetted a Lieutenant in the Highland Light Infantry. Having developed an interest in acting, he left the Highland Light Infantry, travelled to Hollywood and had several minor roles in film. He first appeared as an extra in the British film There Goes the Bride (1932). From there, he hired an agent and had several small parts in films from 1933, 1934 and 1935, including a non-speaking part in MGM's Mutiny on the Bounty. This brought him to wider attention within the film industry and he was spotted by Samuel Goldwyn. Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, Niven returned to England, and rejoined the army and was recommissioned as a lieutenant.
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Dean Martin
Dean Martin (born Dino Paul Crocetti; June 7, 1917 – December 25, 1995) was an American singer, film actor, television star and comedian. Martin's hit singles included "Memories Are Made of This", "That's Amore", "Everybody Loves Somebody", "You're Nobody till Somebody Loves You", "Sway", "Volare" and "Ain't That a Kick in the Head?". Nicknamed the "King of Cool", he was one of the members of the "Rat Pack" and a major star in four areas of show business: concert stage/night clubs, recordings, motion pictures, and television.
Martin was born in Steubenville, Ohio, to Italian parents, Gaetano and Angela Crocetti (née Barra). His father was from Montesilvano, Pescara, Abruzzo, Italy, and his mother was an Italian of part Neapolitan and part Sicilian ancestry. Martin was the younger of two sons. His brother was named Bill. Martin spoke only Italian until he started school. He attended Grant Elementary School in Steubenville, and took up the drums as a hobby as a teenager. He was the target of much ridicule for his broken English and ultimately dropped out of Steubenville High School in the 10th grade because he thought that he was smarter than his teachers. He delivered bootleg liquor, served as a speakeasy croupier, was a blackjack dealer, worked in a steel mill and boxed as welterweight. He grew up a neighbor to Jimmy the Greek.
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Denise Crosby
Denise Michelle Crosby (born November 24, 1957) is an American actress best known for portraying Security Chief Tasha Yar on Star Trek: The Next Generation. She is also known for her numerous film and television roles, for starring in and producing the film Trekkies. She is the granddaughter of the late entertainer Bing Crosby.
Crosby was born in Hollywood, California, the daughter of Marilyn Scott and actor Dennis Crosby. Her paternal grandfather was actor/singer/comedian Bing Crosby. She attended LeConte Junior High School with actress Rita Wilson (wife of Tom Hanks). Her choice of career solidified at an early age and was influenced by the involvement of other family members in show business.
Crosby's first high-profile role was as Lisa Davis on the soap opera Days of our Lives. She has appeared as Dr. Gretchen Kelly in three episodes of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, and as a sheriff on The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. episode "No Man's Land". In the early 1990s, she played the role of the mayor in the short-lived series Key West. She also appeared in two episodes of the cable television series Red Shoe Diaries, playing a different character in each episode. Crosby had a small recurring role in Aaron Spelling's prime time drama, Models Inc, a spin-off from Melrose Place. She was a guest star on the eighth season of The X-Files for two episodes, in which she plays a doctor who took examinations of Agent Scully's baby. In 1991, she was a guest star in a first season The Flash episode as Dr. Rebecca Frost. In 2006, she was a guest star in Dexter as Dexter's first victim. Crosby had a recurring role in Southland as Detective Dan "Sal" Salinger's wife.
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Dennis Crosby
Dennis Michael Crosby (July 13, 1934 – May 4, 1991) was an American singer and occasional actor, the son of singer and actor Bing Crosby, and twin brother of Phillip Crosby. He was the father of actress Denise Crosby.
Dennis was a son of Bing Crosby and his first wife Dixie Lee. He attended Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose with his other brothers where he graduated in 1952 and subsequently enrolled at Washington State University at Pullman.
In the late 1950s, Dennis and his brothers, Lindsay and Phillip, often performed as the Crosby Brothers in nightclubs and on The Ed Sullivan Show, though Dennis reputedly wished to avoid such appearances.
While a young man, Crosby performed military service in Germany.
On May 4, 1958, Crosby married Pat Sheehan, a Las Vegas showgirl and model who had once dated his father. She was also Miss San Francisco of 1950, Playmate of the month of October 1958, and part time actress. Within days, Crosby was sued by another woman, Marilyn Miller Scott, over the paternity of her daughter, Denise Crosby. The sensational lawsuit lasted three years and ended with Dennis being ordered to pay Scott child support and legal fees. This and the marriage to Sheehan and other details caused deep embarrassment for both him and his famous father. Although Bing died when his granddaughter was 19, the two reportedly never met.
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Dixie Lee
Dixie Lee (November 4, 1911 – November 1, 1952) was an American actress, dancer, and singer.
Born Wilma Wyatt, she adopted the professional name "Dixie Carroll" as a singer and showgirl. Winfield Sheehan of the Fox film studio changed the name to Dixie Lee, to avoid confusion with actresses Nancy Carroll and Sue Carol. She married Bing Crosby at the age of 18, and had four sons with him, two of whom, Lindsay and Dennis, would eventually commit suicide as adults.
Crosby's biographer Gary Giddins describes Dixie Lee as a shy, private person with a sensible approach to life. Giddins recounts that Dixie and Bing, as young marrieds, were often invited to parties where liquor was plentiful, and Dixie drank socially to keep up with Bing. She succeeded in curbing Bing's alcohol consumption, but ironically her own alcoholism worsened. She had a brief film career, starring in a few features for Bing's home studio Paramount Pictures in the 1930s; her most notable film is probably Love in Bloom (1935).
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Dorothy Lamour
Dorothy Lamour (December 10, 1914 – September 22, 1996) was an American film actress. She is best remembered for appearing in the Road to... movies, a series of successful comedies starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.
Lamour was born Mary Leta Dorothy Slaton in New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of Carmen Louise (née LaPorte) and John Watson Slaton, both of whom were waiters. Lamour was of French Louisianan, Spanish and Irish descent. Her parents' marriage lasted only a few years, with her mother re-marrying to Clarence Lambour, and Dorothy took his last name. That marriage also ended in divorce when Dorothy was a teenager.
In 1935, she had her own fifteen-minute weekly musical program on NBC Radio. She also sang on the popular Rudy Vallee radio show and The Chase and Sanborn Hour.
Early in her career, Lamour met J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. According to Hoover's biographer Richard Hack, Hoover pursued Lamour romantically, but she was initially interested only in friendship with him. Hoover and Lamour remained close friends to the end of Hoover's life, and after his 1972 death, Lamour did not deny rumors that she'd had an affair with him in the years after she divorced Herbie Kay. However, this appears nowhere in her memoirs My Side of the Road (Prentice-Hall, 1980) ISBN 0-13-218594-6.
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Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American composer, pianist, and big-band leader. Ellington wrote over 1,000 compositions. In the opinion of Bob Blumenthal of The Boston Globe "In the century since his birth, there has been no greater composer, American or otherwise, than Edward Kennedy Ellington." A major figure in the history of jazz, Ellington's music stretched into various other genres, including blues, gospel, film scores, popular, and classical. His career spanned more than 50 years and included leading his orchestra, composing an inexhaustible songbook, scoring for movies, composing stage musicals, and world tours. Several of his instrumental works were adapted into songs that became standards. Due to his inventive use of the orchestra, or big band, and thanks to his eloquence and extraordinary charisma, he is generally considered to have elevated the perception of jazz to an art form on a par with other traditional genres of music. His reputation increased after his death and the Pulitzer Prize Board bestowed on him a special posthumous honor in 1999.
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Dwight Eisenhower
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (pronounced /ˈaɪzənhaʊər/, EYE-zən-how-ər; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was the 34th President of the United States from 1953 until 1961. He had previously been a five-star general in the United States Army during World War II, and served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe; he had responsibility for planning and supervising the invasion of North Africa in Operation Torch in 1942–43 and the successful invasion of France and Germany in 1944–45, from the Western Front. In 1951, he became the first supreme commander of NATO.
Eisenhower was of Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry, and was reared in a large family in Kansas, by parents with a robust work ethic and religious background. As one of five sons, he was conditioned by a competitive atmosphere which instilled self-reliance. He attended and graduated from West Point, and later was married with two sons. After World War II Eisenhower served as Chief of Staff under President Harry S. Truman, then assumed the post of President at Columbia University.
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Eddie Lang
Eddie Lang (October 25, 1902 – March 26, 1933) was an American jazz guitarist, regarded as the Father of Jazz Guitar. He played a Gibson L-4 and L-5 guitar, providing great influence for many guitarists, including Django Reinhardt.
Lang was born Salvatore Massaro, the son of an Italian-American instrument maker in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At first, he took violin lessons for 11 years. In school he became friends with Joe Venuti, with whom he would work for much of his career. He was playing professionally by about 1918, playing violin, banjo, and guitar. He worked with various bands in the USA's north-east, worked in London (late 1924 to early 1925), then settled in New York City.
Lang was the first important jazz guitarist. He was effectively able to integrate the guitar into 1920s jazz recordings. He played with the bands of Joe Venuti, Adrian Rollini, Roger Wolfe Kahn and Jean Goldkette in addition to doing a large amount of freelance radio and recording work.
On February 4, 1927, Lang featured in the recording of "Singin' the Blues" by Frankie Trumbauer and His Orchestra featuring Bix Beiderbecke on cornet. Lang traded guitar licks while Beiderbecke soloed on cornet, in a landmark jazz recording of the 1920s.
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Frank McHugh
Francis Curray "Frank" McHugh (May 23, 1898 – September 11, 1981) was an American film and television actor.
Born in Homestead, Pennsylvania, McHugh came from a theatrical family. His parents ran a stock theatre company and as a young child he performed on stage. His brother Matt and sister Kitty performed an act with him by the time he was ten years old, but the family quit the stage around 1930. Another brother, Ed, became a stage manager and agent in New York.
McHugh debuted on Broadway in The Fall Guy in 1925. Warner Bros. hired him as a contract player in 1930. McHugh played everything from lead actor to sidekick and would often provide comedy relief. He appeared in over 150 films and television productions and worked with almost every star at Warner Bros. He was a close friend of James Cagney and appeared in more Cagney movies than any other actor. He appeared with him in eleven movies between 1932 and 1953. Their friendship lasted until McHugh's death.
By the 1950s, his film career had begun to decline, as evinced by his smaller role in Career (1959). From 1964 to 1965, he played the role of Willie Walters, a live-in handyman on ABC's sitcom, The Bing Crosby Show. His last television appearance was as Charlie Wingate in the episode "The Fix-It Man" on CBS's Lancer western series. McHugh played a handyman in that role too.
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Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra, /sɨˈnɑːtrə/, (December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was an American singer and film actor.
Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became an unprecedentedly successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, after being signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Being the idol of the "bobby soxers", he released his first album, The Voice of Frank Sinatra in 1946. His professional career had stalled by the 1950s, but it was reborn in 1953 after he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in From Here to Eternity.
He signed with Capitol Records in 1953 and released several critically lauded albums (such as In the Wee Small Hours, Songs for Swingin' Lovers, Come Fly with Me, Only the Lonely and Nice 'n' Easy). Sinatra left Capitol to found his own record label, Reprise Records in 1961 (finding success with albums such as Ring-a-Ding-Ding!, Sinatra at the Sands and Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim), toured internationally, was a founding member of the Rat Pack and fraternized with celebrities and statesmen, including John F. Kennedy. Sinatra turned 50 in 1965, recorded the retrospective September of My Years, starred in the Emmy-winning television special Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music, and scored hits with "Strangers in the Night" and "My Way".
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Fred Allen
Fred Allen (born John Florence Sullivan, May 31, 1894 – March 17, 1956) was an American comedian whose absurdist, topically pointed radio show (1932–1949) made him one of the most popular and forward-looking humorists in the so-called classic era of American radio.
His best-remembered gag was his long-running mock feud with friend and fellow comedian Jack Benny, but it was only part of his appeal; radio historian John Dunning (in On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio) wrote that Allen was radio's most admired comedian and most frequently censored. A master ad libber, Allen often tangled with his network's executives (and often barbed them on the air over the battles), while developing routines the style and substance of which influenced contemporaries and futures among comic talents, including Groucho Marx, Stan Freberg, Henry Morgan and Johnny Carson, but his fans also included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and novelists William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and Herman Wouk (who began his career writing for Allen).
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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.
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Fredric March
Fredric March (born Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel; August 31, 1897 – April 14, 1975) was an American stage and film actor. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1932 for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and in 1946 for The Best Years of Our Lives.
March was born in Racine, Wisconsin, the son of Cora Brown (née Marcher), a schoolteacher, and John F. Bickel, a devout Presbyterian Church elder who worked in the wholesale hardware business. March attended the Winslow Elementary School (established in 1855), Racine High School, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi. He began a career as a banker, but an emergency appendectomy caused him to reevaluate his life, and in 1920 he began working as an extra in movies made in New York City, using a shortened form of his mother's maiden name, Marcher. He appeared on Broadway in 1926, and by the end of the decade signed a film contract with Paramount Pictures.
March received an Oscar nomination in 1930 for The Royal Family of Broadway, in which he played a role based upon John Barrymore (which he had first played on stage in Los Angeles). He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1932 for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (tied with Wallace Beery for The Champ although March accrued one more vote than Beery), leading to a series of classic films based on stage hits and classic novels like Design for Living (1933) with Gary Cooper, Death Takes a Holiday (1934), Les Misérables (1935) with Charles Laughton, Anthony Adverse (1936) with Olivia de Havilland, and as the original Norman Maine in A Star is Born (1937) with Janet Gaynor, for which he received his third Oscar nomination.
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Gary Cooper
Frank James Cooper, known professionally as Gary Cooper, (May 7, 1901 – May 13, 1961) was an American film actor. He was renowned for his quiet, understated acting style and his stoic, but at times intense screen persona, which was particularly well suited to the many Westerns he made. He also excelled in sophisticated, screwball romantic comedies. His career spanned from 1925 until shortly before his death in 1961, and comprised more than one hundred films.
Cooper received five Academy Award nominations for Best Actor, winning twice for Sergeant York and High Noon. He also received an Honorary Award in 1961 from the Academy.
Decades later, the American Film Institute named Cooper among the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars, ranking 11th among males from the Classical Hollywood cinema period. In 2003, his performances as Will Kane in High Noon, Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees, and Alvin York in Sergeant York made the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains list, all of them as heroes.
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Gary Giddins
Gary Giddins (born March 21, 1948) is an American jazz critic, author, and director, best known for his longtime work with The Village Voice. Born in Brooklyn, and raised on Long Island, Giddins graduated from Grinnell College, Iowa, in 1970. After some freelance work as a music and film critic, in 1974 he started writing his column "Weather Bird" for the Village Voice, which he ended in December 2003.
Giddins has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, and the Bell Atlantic Award for Visions of Jazz: The First Century in 1998. His other books include Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams—The Early Years, 1903–1940, which won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and the ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Sound Research; Weatherbird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century; Faces in the Crowd; Natural Selection; and biographies of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. He has won an unparalleled six ASCAP–Deems Taylor Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Peabody Award in Broadcasting. He is the acting director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
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Gene Hackman
Eugene Allen "Gene" Hackman (born January 30, 1930) is a retired American actor and novelist.
Nominated for five Academy Awards, winning two, Hackman has also won three Golden Globes and two BAFTAs in a career that spanned five decades. He first came to fame in 1967 with his performance as Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde. His major subsequent films include The French Connection (1971), in which he played Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle; The Poseidon Adventure (1972); The Conversation (1974); Superman (1978), in which he played arch-villain Lex Luthor; Hoosiers (1986); Mississippi Burning (1987); Unforgiven (1992); The Firm (1993); Crimson Tide (1995); Get Shorty (1995); The Birdcage (1996); Enemy of the State (1998); and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).
Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, the son of Lyda (née Gray) and Eugene Ezra Hackman. He has a brother, Richard. His family moved frequently, finally settling in Danville, Illinois, where they lived in the house of his English-born maternal grandmother, Beatrice. Hackman's father operated the printing press for the Commercial-News, a local paper. Hackman's parents divorced in 1943 and his father subsequently left the family.
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George C. Scott
George Campbell Scott (October 18, 1927 – September 22, 1999) was an American stage and film actor, director and producer. He was best known for his stage work, as well as his portrayal of General George S. Patton in the film Patton, and as General Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.
George Campbell Scott was born in Wise, Virginia, the son of Helena Agnes (née Slemp; 1904–1935) and George Dewey Scott (1902–1988). His mother died just before his eighth birthday, and he was raised by his father, an executive with Buick. Scott's original ambition was to be a writer like his favorite author, F. Scott Fitzgerald; while attending Redford High School in Detroit, he wrote many short stories, none of which were ever published. As an adult, he tried on many occasions to write a novel, but was never able to complete one to his satisfaction.[citation needed]
Scott joined the US Marines, serving from 1945-49. He was assigned to 8th and I Barracks in Washington, D.C., in which capacity he taught English literature and radio speaking/writing at the Marine Corps Institute. He later claimed his duties at Arlington led to his drinking. After his military service, Scott enrolled in the University of Missouri, where he majored in journalism and then became interested in drama; he left college after a year to pursue acting.
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Grace Kelly
Grace Patricia Kelly (November 12, 1929 – September 14, 1982) was an American actress who, in April 1956, married Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, to become Princess consort of Monaco, styled as Her Serene Highness The Princess of Monaco, and commonly referred to as Princess Grace.
After embarking on an acting career in 1950, at the age of 20, Grace Kelly appeared in New York City theatrical productions as well as in more than forty episodes of live drama productions broadcast during the early 1950s Golden Age of Television. In October 1953, with the release of Mogambo, she became a movie star, a status confirmed in 1954 with a Golden Globe Award and Academy Award nomination as well as leading roles in five films, including The Country Girl, in which she gave a deglamorized, Academy Award-winning performance. She retired from acting at 26 to enter upon her duties in Monaco. She and Prince Rainier had three children: Caroline, Albert, and Stéphanie. She also retained her American roots, maintaining dual US and Monégasque citizenships.
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Gracie Fields
Dame Gracie Fields, DBE (born Grace Stansfield, 9 January 1898 – 27 September 1979), was an English-born, later Italian-based actress, singer and comedienne and star of both cinema and music hall.
Grace Stansfield was born over a fish and chip shop owned by her grandmother, Sarah Bamford, in Molesworth Street, Rochdale, Lancashire. She made her first stage appearance as a child in 1905, joining children's repertory theatre groups such as 'Haley's Garden of Girls' and the 'Nine Dainty Dots'. Her two sisters, Edith and Betty and brother, Tommy, all went on to appear on stage, but Gracie was the most successful. Her professional debut in variety took place at the Rochdale Hippodrome theatre in 1910 and she soon gave up her job in the local cotton mill, where she was a half-timer, spending half a week in the mill and the other half at school.
She met comedian and impresario Archie Pitt and they began working together. Pitt gave Fields champagne on her 18th birthday, and wrote in an autograph book to her that he would make her a star. Pitt would come to serve as her manager and the two married in 1923 at Clapham Register Office. Their first revue in 1915 was called Yes I Think So and the two continued to tour Britain together until 1924 in the revue Mr Tower of London, with other reviews including By Request, It's A Bargain and The Show's The Thing.
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Gregory Peck
Eldred Gregory Peck (April 5, 1916 – June 12, 2003) was an American actor.
One of the world's most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s, Peck continued to play important roles well into the 1980s. His notable performances include that of Atticus Finch in the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird, for which he won an Academy Award. President Lyndon Johnson honored Peck with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 for his lifetime humanitarian efforts. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Peck among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking at #12. He was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1983.
Eldred Gregory Peck was born in La Jolla, California, the son of Missouri-born Bernice Mae "Bunny" (née Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, who was a chemist and pharmacist. Peck's father was of Irish (maternal) heritage and English (paternal) heritage, and his mother was of Scots (paternal) and English (maternal) ancestry. Peck's father was a Catholic and his mother converted upon marrying his father. Peck's Irish-born paternal grandmother, Catherine Ashe, was related to Thomas Ashe, who took part in the Easter Rising fewer than three weeks after Peck's birth and died while on hunger strike in 1917. Peck's parents divorced by the time he was six years old and he spent the next few years being raised by his maternal grandmother.
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Gus Arnheim
Gus Arnheim (September 4, 1897 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – January 19, 1955 in Los Angeles, California) was an early popular band leader. He is noted for writing several songs with his first hit being "I Cried for You" from 1923. He was most popular in the 1920s and 1930s. He also had a few small acting roles.
In 1928-31, Arnheim had an extended engagement at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles. In 1930, when Paul Whiteman finished filming The King of Jazz for Universal, The Rhythm Boys vocal trio, consisting of Bing Crosby, Harry Barris and Al Rinker decided to stay in California and they signed up with Arnheim's band. While the Rhythm Boys only recorded one song with Arnheim, "Them There Eyes", which also happened to be The Rhythm Boys final recording, Arnheim's Orchestra backed Crosby on a number of songs released by Victor Records in 1931. These popular records, coupled with Arnheim's radio broadcasts featuring Crosby's solo vocals, were a key element to the beginning of Crosby's popularity as a crooner.
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Hal B. Wallis
Hal B. Wallis (born Harold Brent Wallis; September 14, 1898 – October 5, 1986) was an American film producer. He is known for producing Casablanca, and other important films featuring actors such as Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Elvis Presley, John Wayne, and many others.
Wallis was born in Chicago in 1898, the son of Eva (née Blum) and Jacob Walinsky, Eastern European Jews. His family moved in 1922 to Los Angeles, California, where he found work as part of the publicity department at Warner Bros. in 1923.
Within a few years, Wallis became involved in the production end of the business and would eventually become head of production at Warners. In a career that spanned more than fifty years, he was involved with the production of more than 400 feature-length movies.
Among the many significant movies he produced was Casablanca, one of the most honored movies in Hollywood history. Others include: Dark Victory, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Now, Voyager, The Maltese Falcon and Sergeant York. Wallis left Warner Bros. in 1944, after a clash with Jack Warner over Warner's acceptance of the Best Picture Oscar to Casablanca, to work as an independent producer, enjoying considerable success both commercially and critically. The first screenwriters he hired for his new enterprise were Ayn Rand and Lillian Hellman. Among his financial hits were the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedies, and several of Elvis Presley's movies. He produced True Grit, for which John Wayne won the Academy Award for Best Actor of 1969, and its sequel. He also produced Mary, Queen of Scots, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson, and Anne of the Thousand Days, starring Richard Burton and Genevieve Bujold.
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Hal Roach
Harold Eugene "Hal" Roach, Sr. (January 14, 1892 - November 2, 1992) was an American film and television producer and director, and actor from the 1910s to the 1990s.
Hal Roach was born in Elmira, New York, the grandson of Irish Immigrants. A presentation by the great American humorist Mark Twain impressed Roach as a young grade school student.
After an adventurous youth that took him to Alaska, Hal Roach arrived in Hollywood, California in 1912 and began working as an extra in silent films. Upon coming into an inheritance, he began producing short comedies in 1915 with his friend Harold Lloyd, who portrayed a character known as Lonesome Luke.
Also in 1915, Roach married actress Marguerite Nichols. They had two children, Hal, Jr. (1918–1972) and Margaret (1921–1964).
Unable to expand his studios in downtown Los Angeles because of zoning, Roach purchased what became the Hal Roach Studios from Harry Culver in Culver City, California. During the 1920s and 1930s, he employed Lloyd (his top money-maker until his departure in 1923), Will Rogers, Max Davidson, the Our Gang kids, Charley Chase, Harry Langdon, Thelma Todd, ZaSu Pitts, Patsy Kelly and, most famously, Laurel and Hardy. During the 1920s Roach's biggest rival was producer Mack Sennett. In 1925 Roach hired away Sennett's supervising director, F. Richard Jones.
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Harry Barris
Harry Barris (November 24, 1905 – December 13, 1962) was an American popular singer and songwriter.
Born in New York City, he was a member of the Rhythm Boys, a late 1920s singing trio which included Al Rinker and Bing Crosby, and was Crosby's entry into show business. The group sang several songs in the Paul Whiteman Orchestra film King of Jazz (1930) and recorded both with Whiteman and on their own with Barris on piano.
Barris appeared in 57 films between 1931 and 1950, usually as a band member, pianist and/or singer. In The Lost Weekend (1945), he is the nightclub pianist who humiliates Ray Milland by singing "Somebody Stole My Purse". An unusual change of pace for Barris was his comedy role in The Fleet's In (1942), as a runty sailor named Pee Wee who perpetrates malapropisms in a surprisingly deep voice.
Offscreen, Barris successfully composed songs including "Mississippi Mud", "I Surrender, Dear", "It Must Be True" and "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams". Rinker and Crosby also carved out careers on their own as well.
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Harry Crosby (actor)
Harry Lillis Crosby III (born August 8, 1958) is an American actor, singer, and investment banker.
Crosby was born in Hollywood, California, at Queen of Angels Hospital. He is the fifth son of actor and singer Bing Crosby, the eldest from Bing's second marriage to Kathryn Crosby (née Grandstaff). Harry is: the brother of Mary and Nathaniel Crosby; the half-brother of Gary, Dennis, Phillip and Lindsay Crosby; the uncle of Denise Crosby; the nephew of Bob Crosby and Larry Crosby.[citation needed]
Crosby has worked in investment banking since the 1980s and served as a managing director of Credit Suisse First Boston in New York City. He now occasionally performs with singers at coffee houses and clubs.[citation needed]
Crosby gained show business experience at an early age, by appearing with his father and family on various Christmas television shows, and at the London Palladium in 1976 and 1977. He has appeared in several films:
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Hillbilly
Hillbilly is a term referring to certain people who dwell in rural, mountainous areas of the United States, primarily Appalachia but also the Ozarks. Owing to its strongly stereotypical connotations, the term is frequently considered derogatory, and so is usually offensive to those Americans of Appalachian heritage.
Origins of the term "hillbilly" are obscure. According to Anthony Harkins in Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon, the term first appeared in print in a 1900 New York Journal article, with the definition: "a Hill-Billie is a free and untrammeled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him."
The Appalachian region was largely settled in the 18th century by the Scotch-Irish, the majority of whom originated in the lowlands of Scotland. Harkins believes the most credible theory of the term's origin is that it derives from the linkage of two older Scottish expressions, "hill-folk" and "billie" which was a synonym for "fellow", similar to "guy" or "bloke".
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Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey DeForest Bogart (December 25, 1899 – January 14, 1957) was an American actor. He is widely regarded as a cultural icon. The American Film Institute ranked Bogart as the greatest male star in the history of American cinema.
After trying various jobs, Bogart began acting in 1921 and became a regular in Broadway productions in the 1920s and 1930s. When the stock market crash of 1929 reduced the demand for plays, Bogart turned to film. His first great success was as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936), and this led to a period of typecasting as a gangster with films such as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and B-movies like The Return of Doctor X (1939).
Bogart's breakthrough as a leading man came in 1941, with High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon. The next year, his performance in Casablanca raised him to the peak of his profession and, at the same time, cemented his trademark film persona, that of the hard-boiled cynic who ultimately shows his noble side. Other successes followed, including To Have and Have Not (1944); The Big Sleep (1946); Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948), with his wife Lauren Bacall; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948); In a Lonely Place (1950); The African Queen (1951), for which he won his only Academy Award; Sabrina (1954); and The Caine Mutiny (1954). His last movie was The Harder They Fall (1956). During a film career of almost thirty years, he appeared in 75 feature films.
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Ian McKellen
Sir Ian Murray McKellen, CH CBE (born 25 May 1939) is an English actor. He has won multiple Laurence Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, two Academy Award nominations, and five Emmy Award nominations. His work has spanned genres from Shakespearean and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction. He is known for film roles such as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Magneto in the X-Men films, and as Sir Leigh Teabing in The Da Vinci Code.
McKellen was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979, was knighted in 1991 for services to the performing arts, and was made a Companion of Honour for services to drama and to equality, in the 2008 New Year Honours.
McKellen was born in Burnley, Lancashire, England, though he spent most of his early life in Wigan. Born shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the experience had some lasting impact on him. In response to an interview question when an interviewer remarked that he seemed quite calm in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, he said: "Well, darling, you forget — I slept under a steel plate until I was four years old."
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Inger Stevens
Inger Stevens (October 18, 1934 – April 30, 1970 ) was a Swedish-American movie and TV actress.
Inger Stevens was born Ingrid Stensland in Stockholm, Sweden. As a child she was often ill. When she was nine, her parents divorced and she moved with her father to New York City.[citation needed] At age 13 she and her father moved to Manhattan, Kansas, where she attended Manhattan High School. At 16 she worked in burlesque shows in Kansas City. At 18 she left Kansas for New York City where she worked as a chorus girl, and in the Garment District while taking classes at the Actors Studio.
Stevens appeared on television series, commercials and in plays, until she got her big break in the movie Man on Fire starring Bing Crosby.
Roles in major films followed, but she achieved her greatest success in the ABC television series The Farmer's Daughter, with William Windom. Previously, Stevens appeared in episodes of Bonanza, Route 66, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Eleventh Hour, Sam Benedict and The Twilight Zone.
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Irving Berlin
Irving Berlin (May 11, 1888 – September 22, 1989) was an American composer and lyricist of Jewish heritage, widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in American history. He published his first song, "Marie from Sunny Italy", in 1907 and had his first major international hit, "Alexander's Ragtime Band" in 1911.
"Alexander's Ragtime Band" sparked an international dance craze in places as far away as Berlin's native Russia, which also "flung itself into the ragtime beat with an abandon bordering on mania." Over the years he was known for writing music and lyrics in the American vernacular: uncomplicated, simple and direct, with his aim being to "reach the heart of the average American" whom he saw as the "real soul of the country."
He wrote hundreds of songs, many becoming major hits, which made him "a legend" before he turned thirty. During his 60-year career he wrote an estimated 1,500 songs, including the scores for 19 Broadway shows and 18 Hollywood films, with his songs nominated eight times for Academy Awards. Many songs became popular themes and anthems, including "Easter Parade", "White Christmas", "Happy Holiday", "This is the Army, Mr. Jones", and "There's No Business Like Show Business". His Broadway musical and 1942 film, This is the Army, with Ronald Reagan, had Kate Smith singing Berlin's "God Bless America" which was first performed in 1938. Smith still performed the song on her 1960 CBS television series, The Kate Smith Show. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, Celine Dion recorded it as a tribute, making it #1 on the charts.
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J.R. Ewing
John Ross Ewing, Jr. more commonly known as J. R. Ewing, played by Larry Hagman, is a central, nefarious figure on the hit CBS television series Dallas (1978–1991). J. R. was a covetous, egocentric, and amoral oil baron, who was constantly plotting subterfuges to plunder his foes and their wealth.
The concept was a blend of Bonanza with a rich, western patriarch and his three dissimilar sons, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof with its rival brothers,and their scheming wives, and Romeo and Juliet with two star-crossed lovers whose families are sworn enemies. The thrust of the series was initially the feuding families, with J. R. just a supporting character. However, his popularity grew and the producers acknowledged he became the "break-out character". Two highly rated 1980 episodes became pop culture zeniths. In "A House Divided" and "Who Done It?", the audience witnessed J. R. being shot by an unknown assailant. After the cliffhanger was broadcast in March, the audience had to wait until the October conclusion. The summer of 1980 was all abuzz with a new national obsession known as "Who shot J. R.?". Riding the crest of his new-found popularity, Larry Hagman threatened to leave the series unless his contractual demands were met. CBS leaked rumors of recasting, but the actor eventually prevailed.
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Jack Benny
Jack Benny (born Benjamin Kubelsky, February 14, 1894 – December 26, 1974) was an American comedian, vaudevillian, radio, television, and film actor, and also a notable violinist. Widely recognized as one of the leading American entertainers of the 20th century, Benny played the role of the comic penny-pinching miser, insisting on remaining 39 years old on stage despite his actual age, and often playing the violin badly.
Benny was known for his comic timing and his ability to get laughs with either a pregnant pause or a single expression, such as his signature exasperated "Well!" His radio and television programs, tremendously popular from the 1930s to the 1960s, were a foundational influence on the situation comedy genre. Dean Martin, on the celebrity roast for Johnny Carson in November 1973, introduced Benny as "the Satchel Paige of the world of comedy".
Benny was born Benjamin Kubelsky on February 14, 1894, in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in neighboring Waukegan, Illinois. He was the son of Meyer Kubelsky and Emma Sachs Kubelsky. Meyer was a Jewish saloon owner, later to become a haberdasher, who had emigrated to America from Poland. Emma had emigrated from Lithuania. Benny began studying the violin, an instrument that would become his trademark, when he was just six, with his parents' hopes that he would be a great classical violinist. He loved the violin, but hated practice. By age 14, he was playing in local dance bands as well as in his high school orchestra. Benny was a dreamer and a poor student and he was expelled from high school. He did equally badly in business school and at his father's trade. At age 17, he began playing the instrument in local vaudeville theaters for $7.50 a week. He was joined by Ned Miller, a young composer and singer, on the vaudeville circuit. They became life-long friends and Miller eventually joined the cast of The Jack Benny Program in the 1960s.
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Jack Lemmon
John Uhler "Jack" Lemmon III (February 8, 1925 – June 27, 2001) was an American actor and musician. He starred in more than 60 films including Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Mister Roberts (for which he won the 1955 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award), Days of Wine and Roses, The Great Race, Irma la Douce, The Odd Couple, Save the Tiger (for which he won the 1973 Best Actor Academy Award), The Out-of-Towners, The China Syndrome, Missing (for which he won 'Best Actor' at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival), Glengarry Glen Ross, Grumpy Old Men and Grumpier Old Men.
Lemmon was born in an elevator[citation needed] at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He was the only child of Mildred Burgess LaRue (née Noel) and John Uhler Lemmon, Jr., who was the president of a doughnut company. Lemmon attended John Ward Elementary School in Newton and The Rivers School in Weston, Massachusetts. He had stated that he knew he wanted to be an actor from the age of eight. Lemmon attended Phillips Academy (Class of 1943) and Harvard University (Class of 1947), where he lived in Adams House and was an active member of several Drama Clubs - becoming president of the Hasty Pudding Club - as well as a member of the Delphic Club for Gentleman, a final club at Harvard. After Harvard, Lemmon joined the Navy, receiving V-12 training and serving as an ensign. On being discharged, he took up acting professionally, working on radio, television and Broadway. He studied acting under coach Uta Hagen. He also became enamored of the piano and learned to play it on his own. He could also play the harmonica, organ, and the double bass.
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Jack Mullin
John T. "Jack" Mullen (1913–1999) was an American pioneer in the field of magnetic tape sound recording and made significant contributions to many other related fields. From his days at Santa Clara University to his death, he displayed a deep appreciation for classical music and an aptitude for electronics and engineering. When he died in 1999, he was buried with a rosary and a reel of magnetic tape. A 2006 documentary movie, Sound Man: WWII to MP3, was made about his life and contributions to sound recording.
By 1943, German engineers had developed a high-quality form of magnetic tape sound recording that was unknown elsewhere. The Nazi radio networks used it to broadcast music and propaganda around the clock.
From their monitoring of Nazi radio broadcasts during World War II, the Allies knew that German radio studios had some new kind of recorder that could reproduce high-fidelity sound in segments of unheard-of length, up to 15 minutes duration. But for several years, they didn't know what these machines were or how they worked, and it was not until Germany fell to the Allies during 1944-45 that the Americans discovered the new magnetic tape recorders. Mullin saw the future potential of the new technology and who developed it immediately after the war.
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Jack Nicholson
Not to be confused with Nicholas Jackson
John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson (born April 22, 1937) is an American actor, film director, producer and writer. He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. His twelve Oscar nominations make him the second most nominated actor of all time, behind only Meryl Streep, and tied with Katharine Hepburn.
Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and for As Good as It Gets. He also won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the 1983 film Terms of Endearment. He is tied with Walter Brennan for most acting wins by a male actor (three). Nicholson is well known for playing villainous roles such as Jack Torrance in The Shining, Frank Costello in The Departed, and the Joker in 1989's Batman, among many other roles.
Nicholson is one of only two actors who have been nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade from the 1960s to 2000s; the other is Michael Caine. He has won seven Golden Globe Awards, and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2001. In 1994, he became one of the youngest actors to be awarded the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. Notable films in which he has starred include Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Passenger, The Shining, Reds, Terms of Endearment, Batman, A Few Good Men, As Good as It Gets, About Schmidt, The Departed and Anger Management .
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Jack Warner
Jack Leonard "J. L." Warner (August 2, 1892 – September 9, 1978), born Jacob Warner in London, Ontario, was a Canadian American film executive who was the president and driving force behind the Warner Bros. Studios in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. Warner’s career spanned some forty-five years, its duration surpassing that of any other of the seminal Hollywood studio moguls.
As co-head of production at Warner Bros. Studios, he worked with his brother, Sam Warner, to procure the technology for the film industry's first talking picture. After Sam's death, Jack clashed with his surviving older brothers, Harry and Albert Warner. He assumed exclusive control of the film production company in the 1950s, when he secretly purchased his brothers' shares in the business after convincing them to participate in a joint sale of stocks.
Although Warner was feared by many of his employees and inspired ridicule with his uneven attempts at humor, he earned respect for his shrewd instincts and toughmindedness. He recruited many of Warner Bros.'s top stars and promoted the hard-edged social dramas for which the studio became known. Given to decisiveness, Warner once commented, "If I'm right fifty-one percent of the time, I'm ahead of the game."
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Jackie Robinson
Jack Roosevelt "Jackie" Robinson (January 31, 1919 – October 24, 1972) was an American baseball player who became the first black Major League Baseball (MLB) player of the modern era. Robinson broke the baseball color line when he debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. As the first black man to play in the major leagues since the 1880s, he was instrumental in bringing an end to racial segregation in professional baseball, which had relegated black players to the Negro leagues for six decades. The example of his character and unquestionable talent challenged the traditional basis of segregation, which then marked many other aspects of American life, and contributed significantly to the Civil Rights Movement.
In addition to his cultural impact, Robinson had an exceptional baseball career. Over ten seasons, he played in six World Series and contributed to the Dodgers' 1955 World Championship. He was selected for six consecutive All-Star Games from 1949 to 1954, was the recipient of the inaugural MLB Rookie of the Year Award in 1947, and won the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1949—the first black player so honored. Robinson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962. In 1997, Major League Baseball retired his uniform number, 42, across all major league teams.
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James Cagney
James Francis Cagney, Jr. (July 17, 1899 – March 30, 1986) was an American actor, first on stage, then in film, where he had his greatest impact. Although he won acclaim and major awards for a wide variety of performances, he is best remembered for playing tough guys. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him eighth among its 50 Greatest American Screen Legends.
In his first professional acting performance, he danced dressed as a woman in the chorus line of the 1919 revue Every Sailor. He spent several years in vaudeville as a hoofer and comedian, until he got his first major acting part in 1925. He secured several other roles, receiving good notices, before landing the lead in the 1929 play Penny Arcade. After rave reviews, Warner Bros. signed him for an initial $500-a-week, three-week contract to reprise his role; this was quickly extended to a seven-year contract.
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James Cavanaugh
James Michael Cavanaugh (July 4, 1823 – October 30, 1879) was a U.S. Representative from Minnesota and a delegate from the Territory of Montana. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, July 4, 1823 and received an academic education. He engaged in newspaper work, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1854 and began practice in Davenport, Iowa. He then moved to Chatfield, Fillmore County, Minnesota, in 1854 and continued the practice of law; upon the admission of Minnesota as a State into the Union, in 1858, was elected as a Democrat to the thirty-fifth congress and served from May 11, 1858, to March 3, 1859; unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1858 to the thirty-sixth congress; moved to Colorado in 1861 and resumed the practice of law; also engaged in mining; member of the State constitutional convention in 1865; moved to Montana in 1866; as a Democrat, he was elected a delegate to the fortieth and forty-first congresses (March 4, 1867 – March 3, 1871); unsuccessful candidate for renomination in 1870; engaged in the practice of law in New York City; returned to Colorado in 1879 and settled in Leadville, where he died October 30, 1879; interment in Greenwood Cemetery, New York City.
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James Mason
James Neville Mason (15 May 1909 - 27 July 1984) was an English actor who attained stardom in both British and American films. Mason remained a powerful figure in the industry throughout his career and was nominated for three Academy Awards as well as three Golden Globes (winning once).
Mason was born in Huddersfield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, to John and Mabel Mason; his father was a wealthy merchant. He was educated at Marlborough College, and earned a first in architecture at Peterhouse, Cambridge where he became involved in stock theatre companies in his spare time. Mason had no formal training as an actor and initially embarked upon it for fun. After Cambridge he joined the Old Vic theatre in London under the guidance of Tyrone Guthrie and Alexander Korda. In 1933 Korda gave Mason a small role in The Private Life of Don Juan but fired him three days into shooting.
From 1935 to 1948 he starred in many British quota quickies. A conscientious objector during World War II (causing his family to break with him for many years), he became immensely popular for his brooding anti-heroes in the Gainsborough series of melodramas of the 1940s, including The Man in Grey (1943) and The Wicked Lady (1945). He also starred with Deborah Kerr and Robert Newton in Hatter's Castle (1942). He then took the lead role in the critically acclaimed and immensely popular The Seventh Veil (1945) that set box office records in postwar Britain and raised him to international stardom. He followed it with a role as a mortally wounded Irish bank robber in Odd Man Out (1947) and his first Hollywood film, Caught (1949). Exhibitors voted him the most popular star in Britain in 1944 and 1945.
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James Stewart
James Maitland "Jimmy" Stewart (May 20, 1908 – July 2, 1997) was an American film and stage actor, known for his distinctive voice and persona. Over the course of his career, he starred in many films widely considered classics and was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning one in competition and receiving one Lifetime Achievement award. He was a major MGM contract star. He also had a noted military career and was a World War II and Vietnam War veteran, who rose to the rank of Brigadier General in the United States Air Force Reserve.
James Maitland Stewart was born on May 20, 1908, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the son of Elizabeth Ruth (née Jackson) and Alexander Maitland Stewart, who owned a hardware store. Stewart's parents were of Scottish descent and Presbyterians. His maternal ancestors served in the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the American Civil War. The eldest of three children (he had two younger sisters, Virginia and Mary), he was expected to continue his father's business, which had been in the family for three generations. His mother was an excellent pianist but his father discouraged Stewart's request for lessons. But when his father accepted a gift of an accordion from a guest, young Stewart quickly learned to play the instrument, which became a fixture off-stage during his acting career. As the family grew, music continued to be an important part of family life.
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Jamie Foxx
Eric Marlon Bishop (born December 13, 1967), professionally known as Jamie Foxx, is an American actor, singer-songwriter, rapper, stand-up comedian, and talk radio host who began playing the piano when he was five years old. As an actor, his work in the film Ray earned him the Academy Award and BAFTA Award for Best Actor as well as the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a musical/comedy. He is also a Grammy Award winning musician, producing three albums which have charted highly on the Billboard 200: Unpredictable, which topped the chart, Best Night of My Life and Intuition.
Born in Terrell, Texas, Foxx was raised by his mother's adoptive parents. He performed in high school and was awarded with a scholarship to United States International University. In his twenties, Foxx began performing stand-up at comedy clubs, and eventually joined the cast of In Living Color in 1991; this exposure helped him land film roles and star in his own sitcom, The Jamie Foxx Show. He released his debut album, Peep This, in 1994, but he did not gain significant musical success until 2004 when he was featured in Twista's song "Slow Jamz". Also in 2004, Foxx played critically acclaimed roles in the films Collateral and Ray. He released his second album, Unpredictable, in 2005, which was helped by his collaboration on Kanye West's number-one single "Gold Digger". His third album Intuition was released in 2008 and was anchored by the single "Blame It". Foxx released his fourth studio album, Best Night of My Life, in 2010.
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Jason Robards
Jason Nelson Robards, Jr. (July 26, 1922 – December 26, 2000) was an American actor on stage, and in film and television. He is a winner of the Tony Award, two Academy Awards and the Emmy Award. He was also a United States Navy combat veteran of World War II.
He became famous playing works of Eugene O'Neill, an American playwright, and regularly performed in O'Neill's works throughout his career. Robards was cast in both common-man roles and as well-known historical figures.
Robards was born in Chicago, the son of Hope Maxine (née Glanville) Robards and Jason Robards, Sr., an actor who regularly appeared on the stage and in such early films as The Gamblers (1929). Robards was of English, Welsh, Irish, and Swedish descent.
The family moved to New York City, New York, when Jason Jr. was still a toddler, and then moved to Los Angeles, California, when he was six years old. Later interviews with Robards suggested that the trauma of his parents' divorce, which occurred during his grade-school years, greatly affected his personality and worldview.
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Jean Hersholt
Jean Pierre Hersholt (12 July 1886 – 2 June 1956) was a Danish-born actor who lived in the United States, where he was a leading film and radio talent, best known for his 17 years starring on radio in Dr. Christian and for playing Shirley Temple's grandfather in Heidi. Asked how to pronounce his name, he told The Literary Digest, "In English, her'sholt; in Danish, hairs'hult." Of his total credits, 75 were silent films and 65 were sound films. He appeared in 140 films and directed four.
Hersholt was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, the son of Claire (née Petersen) and Henry Hersholt, actors who worked with the Danish Folk Theatre. Hersholt toured Europe performing with his family when he was young. He then graduated from the Copenhagen Art School. His first two films were made in Germany in 1906. He emigrated to the US in 1913, and the remainder of his movies were made in America.
Hersholt's best remembered film roles included Marcus Schouler in Erich von Stroheim's 1924 Greed and Shirley Temple's beloved grandfather in the 1937 film version of the 1880 children's book, Heidi, written by Swiss author Johanna Spyri. During his long career in the movies, his roles ran the gamut from early silent villains to secondary parts in which his mild Danish accent and pleasant voice suited him to depict a succession of benevolent fathers, doctors, professors and European noblemen. Hersholt's last role was in the 1955 movie Run for Cover.
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Jesse Eisenberg
Jesse Adam Eisenberg (born October 5, 1983) is an American actor. He made his screen debut with the comedy-drama television series Get Real from 1999 to 2000. After his first leading role in the film Roger Dodger (2002), he appeared in such films as The Squid and the Whale (2005) and The Education of Charlie Banks (2007).
In 2004, Eisenberg was honored with the Vail Film Festival Rising Star Award. In 2009, he starred in the comedy drama Adventureland and the horror comedy Zombieland, for which he won critical acclaim. He then played Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (2010), for which he received a Golden Globe and Academy Award nomination in the Best Actor category. He also starred in Holy Rollers (2010), which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Since then, he has voiced the main character in the animated film Rio (2011), and starred in the comedy 30 Minutes or Less (2011). He will once again voice Blu in Rio 2, which is scheduled for a 2014 release.
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Jimmy Dorsey
James "Jimmy" Dorsey (February 29, 1904 – June 12, 1957) was a prominent American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, trumpeter, composer, and big band leader. He was known as "JD". He composed the jazz and pop standards "I'm Glad There Is You (In This World of Ordinary People)" and "It's The Dreamer In Me".
Jimmy Dorsey was born in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, the son of a music teacher and older brother of Tommy Dorsey who also became a prominent musician. He played trumpet in his youth, appearing on stage with J. Carson McGee's King Trumpeters in 1913. He switched to alto saxophone in 1915, and then learned to double on clarinet. Jimmy Dorsey played on a clarinet outfitted with the Albert system of fingering, as opposed to the more common Boehm system used by most of his contemporaries including Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw.
With his brother Tommy playing trombone, he formed Dorsey’s Novelty Six, one of the first jazz bands to broadcast. In 1924 he joined the California Ramblers (who were based in New York City). He did much free lance radio and recording work throughout the 1920s. The brothers also appeared as session musicians on many jazz recordings. He joined Ted Lewis's band in 1930, with whom he toured Europe.
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Joan Crawford
Joan Crawford (March 23, 1905 – May 10, 1977), born Lucille Fay LeSueur, was an American actress in film, television and theatre.
Starting as a dancer in traveling theatrical companies before debuting on Broadway, Crawford was signed to a motion picture contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925. Initially frustrated by the size and quality of her parts, Crawford began a campaign of self-publicity and became nationally known as a flapper by the end of the 1920s. In the 1930s, Crawford's fame rivaled MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo. Crawford often played hardworking young women who find romance and financial success. These "rags-to-riches" stories were well received by Depression-era audiences and were popular with women. Crawford became one of Hollywood's most prominent movie stars and one of the highest paid women in the United States, but her films began losing money and by the end of the 1930s she was labeled "box office poison".
After an absence of nearly two years from the screen, Crawford staged a comeback by starring in Mildred Pierce (1945), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. In 1955, she became involved with the Pepsi-Cola Company through her marriage to company Chairman Alfred Steele. After his death in 1959, Crawford was elected to fill his vacancy on the board of directors but was forcibly retired in 1973. She continued acting in film and television regularly through the 1960s, when her performances became fewer; after the release of the British horror film Trog in 1970, Crawford retired from the screen. Following a public appearance in 1974, after which unflattering photographs were published, Crawford withdrew from public life and became more and more reclusive until her death in 1977.
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Joel Whitburn
Joel Carver Whitburn (born November 29, 1939; Wauwatosa, Wisconsin) is an American author and music historian.
Whitburn founded Record Research Inc. in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, in 1970, and put together a team of researchers to examine in detail all of Billboard's music and video charts. Record Research publishes reference books based on data from the various popular music charts and to date has published over 200 books, 50 of which are currently in the Record Research catalog. His flagship publication is Top Pop Singles which covers the history of Billboard's popular music charts. Featuring each recording's peak position, date charted, weeks charted, label and information, and trivia on recordings and artists, Whitburn's books are used extensively by the entertainment industry (especially radio DJs) and music fans worldwide. His research extends from 1890 to the present and covers many genres. Whitburn is also the author of the Top 40 Hits series of books published by Billboard Books.
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John Gilliland
John Sanford Gilliland, Jr. (October 18, 1935 – July 27, 1998) was an American radio broadcaster and documentarian best known for the Pop Chronicles music documentaries and as one of the original members of The Credibility Gap. He was born and died in his hometown of Quanah, Texas. He worked for a number of radio stations in Texas and California including KOGO in San Diego (1961-1965), KRLA 1110 in Los Angeles (1965-1970), and KSFO (AM) in San Francisco (1971-1978).
His radio career began in 1952 with KOLJ in his native Quanah, Texas. While attending Texas Christian University, he worked as a disc jockey at KCUL in Fort Worth. His shows were The House of Wax and The Man on the Beat. From 1959-1961 he worked for KLIF in Dallas. He also worked at KILT in Houston.
At the news department of KOGO in San Diego, Gilliland used the pseudonyms of John Land and Johnny Land.
In 1965, Gilliland came to the news department of KRLA radio in Los Angeles County, where he became one of the original members of The Credibility Gap which mixed topical humor along with their news broadcasts. Fellow founding member Richard Beebe said of him that
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John Travolta
John Joseph Travolta (born February 18, 1954) is an American actor, dancer, and singer. Travolta first became known in the 1970s, after appearing on the television series Welcome Back, Kotter and starring in the box office successes Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Travolta's acting career declined in the early 1980s and continued to deteriorate for the rest of the decade. His career enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s with his role in Pulp Fiction, and he has since continued starring in Hollywood films, including Face/Off, Ladder 49, and Wild Hogs. Travolta was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction. He won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for his performance in Get Shorty.
Travolta, the youngest of six children, was born and raised in Englewood, New Jersey, an inner-ring suburb of New York City. His father, Salvatore Travolta (November 1912 – May 1995), was a semi-professional American football player turned tire salesman and partner in a tire company. His mother, Helen Cecilia (née Burke, January 1912 – December 1978), was an actress and singer who had appeared in The Sunshine Sisters, a radio vocal group, and acted and directed before becoming a high school drama and English teacher. His siblings, Joey, Ellen, Ann, Margaret, and Sam Travolta, have all acted. His father was a second-generation Italian American and his mother was Irish American; he grew up in an Irish-American neighborhood and has said that his household was predominantly Irish in culture. He was raised Roman Catholic, but converted to Scientology in 1975.
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John Wayne
Marion Mitchell Morrison (born Marion Robert Morrison; May 26, 1907 – June 11, 1979), better known by his stage name John Wayne, was an American film actor, director and producer. An Academy Award-winner, Wayne was among the top box office draws for three decades, and was named the all-time top money-making star. An enduring American icon, he epitomized rugged masculinity and is famous for his demeanor, including his distinctive calm voice, walk, and height.
Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa but his family relocated to the greater Los Angeles area when he was four years old. He found work at local film studios when he lost his football scholarship to USC as a result of a bodysurfing accident. Initially working for the Fox Film Corporation, he mostly appeared in small bit parts. His acting breakthrough came in 1939 with John Ford's Stagecoach, making him an instant star. Wayne would go on to star in 142 pictures, primarily typecast in Western films.
Among his best known films are The Quiet Man (1952), which follows him as an Irish-American boxer and his love affair with a fiery spinster played by Maureen O'Hara; The Searchers (1956), in which he plays a Civil War veteran who seeks out his abducted niece; Rio Bravo (1959), playing a Sheriff with Dean Martin; True Grit (1969), playing a humorous U.S. Marshal who sets out to avenge a man's death in the role that won Wayne an Academy Award; and The Shootist (1976), his final screen performance in which he plays an aging gunslinger battling cancer.
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Jon Voight
Jonathan Vincent "Jon" Voight (/vɔɪt/) (born December 29, 1938) is an American actor. He has won one Academy Award, out of four nominations, and three Golden Globe Awards, out of nine nominations. Voight is the father of actress Angelina Jolie.
Voight came to prominence in the late 1960s with his performance as a would-be gigolo in Midnight Cowboy (1969). During the 1970s, he became a Hollywood star with his portrayals of a businessman mixed up with murder in Deliverance (1972), a paraplegic Vietnam veteran in Coming Home (1978), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor, and a penniless ex-boxing champion in The Champ (1979).
Although his output slowed during the 1980s, Voight received critical acclaim for his performance as a ruthless bank robber in Runaway Train (1985). During the 1990s, he most notably starred as an unscrupulous showman attorney in The Rainmaker (1997). Voight gave critically acclaimed biographical performances during the 2000s, appearing as sportscaster Howard Cosell in Ali (2001), as Nazi officer Jürgen Stroop in Uprising (2001), and as Pope John Paul II in the television miniseries of the same name (2005).
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Joseph E. Levine
Joseph E. Levine (September 9, 1905 – July 31, 1987) was an American film producer.
He was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His Embassy Pictures Corporation was an independent studio and distributor responsible for such films as Hercules (1958 film), The Carpetbaggers, Harlow, The Graduate, A Bridge Too Far and The Lion in Winter.
Levine is famous in the industry for his massive advertising campaigns, starting with Hercules in 1959. He is also responsible for bringing the movie Godzilla to the U.S. public. Levine had hired Terry Turner, a former RKO Pictures exploitation expert of the late 1920s and 1930s where he exploited King Kong amongst other films. Levine and Turner's exploitation campaigns were designed to appeal both to the general public but also the film industry and exhibitors as well.
In 1964, Levine received the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in recognition of his lifetime achievement in motion pictures.
Joseph E. Levine died in 1987 in Greenwich, Connecticut.
You can fool all of the people if the advertising is right
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José Ferrer
José Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cintrón (January 8, 1912 – January 26, 1992), best known as José Ferrer, was a Puerto Rican actor, as well as a theater and film director. He was the first Puerto Rican, as well as the first Hispanic actor to win an Academy Award. Jose Ferrer donated his Academy Award to the University of Puerto Rico as a tribute to his roots. The prolific and distinguished thespian also won numerous Tony Awards: In 1947 he won a Tony Award for his theatrical performance of Cyrano de Bergerac, and in 1952 Ferrer won the Distinguished Dramatic Actor Award for The Shrike, plus the Outstanding Director Award for The Shrike, The Fourposter, and Stalag 17. Jose Ferrer's contributions to American theatre were recognized in 1981 when he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Further honors came in 1985 when he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Ferrer was born in the Santurce, Puerto Rico, the son of Maria Providencia Cintron and Rafael Ferrer, an attorney and writer. He studied in the Swiss boarding school Institut Le Rosey. In 1933, he graduated from Princeton University, where he wrote a senior thesis "French Naturalism and Pardo Bazán"; he was also a member of the Princeton Triangle Club.
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Judy Garland
Judy Garland (June 10, 1922 – June 22, 1969) was an American actress, singer and vaudevillian. Renowned for her contralto voice, she attained international stardom through a career that spanned 45 of her 47 years as an actress in musical and dramatic roles, as a recording artist and on the concert stage. Respected for her versatility, she received a Juvenile Academy Award and won a Golden Globe Award, as well as Grammy Awards and a Special Tony Award. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the remake of A Star is Born and for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the 1961 film, Judgment at Nuremberg. At 39 years of age, she remains the youngest recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in the motion picture industry.
After appearing in vaudeville with her two older sisters, Garland was signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a teenager. There she made more than two dozen films, including nine with Mickey Rooney and the 1939 film with which she would be most identified, The Wizard of Oz. After 15 years, she was released from the studio but gained renewed success through record-breaking concert appearances, including a return to acting beginning with critically acclaimed performances.
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Kathryn Crosby
Kathryn Crosby (born November 25, 1933) is an American actress and singer who also performed under the stage-name Kathryn Grant.
Born Olive Kathryn Grandstaff in Houston, Texas, she graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1955. Two years later she became Bing Crosby's second wife. The couple had three children, Harry, Mary Frances, and Nathaniel. She appeared as a guest star on her husband's 1964–1965 ABC sitcom The Bing Crosby Show.
She largely retired after their marriage, but did have a featured role in the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959). She also played the part of "Mama Bear" alongside her husband and children in Goldilocks and starred with Jack Lemmon in Operation Mad Ball (1957).
In the mid-1970s, she hosted The Kathryn Crosby Show, a 30-minute local talk-show on KPIX-TV in San Francisco. Husband Bing appeared as a guest occasionally.
Since Bing Crosby's death in 1977, she has taken on a few smaller roles and the lead in the short-lived 1996 Broadway musical State Fair.
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Kirk Douglas
Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch, Russian: И́сер Даниело́вич; December 9, 1916) is an American stage and film actor, film producer and author. His popular films include Out of the Past (1947), Champion (1949), Ace in the Hole (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Lust for Life (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), Spartacus (1960), and Lonely Are the Brave (1962).
He is No.17 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male American screen legends of all time, making him the highest-ranked living person on the list. In 1996, he received the Academy Honorary Award "for 50 years as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community."
Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, New York, the son of Bryna "Bertha" (née Sanglel) and Herschel "Harry" Danielovitch, a businessman. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Gomel, Belarus. His father's brother, who emigrated earlier, used the surname Demsky, which Douglas's family adopted in the United States. In addition to their surname, his parents also changed their given names to Harry and Bertha. Douglas grew up as Izzy Demsky and legally changed his name to Kirk Douglas before entering the Navy during World War II.
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Larry Crosby
Larry Crosby (January 3, 1895 – February 7, 1975) was the long-time publicity director of the singer Bing Crosby. He was the eldest of Bing's six siblings.
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Laurel and Hardy
Laurel and Hardy were one of the most popular and critically acclaimed comedy double acts of the early Classical Hollywood era of American cinema. Composed of thin Englishman Stan Laurel (1890–1965) and fat American Oliver Hardy (1892–1957), they became well known during the late 1920s to the mid-1940s for their slapstick comedy, with Laurel playing the clumsy and childlike friend of the pompous Hardy. They made over 100 films together, initially two-reelers (short films) before expanding into feature length films in the 1930s. Their films include Sons of the Desert (1933), the Academy Award winning short film The Music Box (1932), Babes in Toyland (1934), and Way Out West (1937). Hardy's catchphrase "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into!" is still widely recognized.
Prior to the double act both were established actors with Laurel appearing in over 50 films and Hardy in over 250 films. Although the two comedians first worked together on the film The Lucky Dog (1921), this was a chance pairing and it was not until 1926, when both separately signed contracts with the Hal Roach film studio, that they began appearing in movie shorts together. Laurel and Hardy officially became a team the following year in the silent short film Putting Pants on Philip (1927). The pair remained with the Roach studio until 1940, then appeared in eight "B" comedies for 20th Century Fox and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1941 to 1945. After finishing their movie commitments at the end of 1944, they concentrated on stage shows, embarking on a music hall tour of England, Ireland, and Scotland. In 1950 they made their last film, a French/Italian co-production called Atoll K, before retiring from the screen. In total they appeared together in 107 films. They starred in 40 short sound films, 32 short silent films and 23 full-length feature films, and made 12 guest or cameo appearances, including the recently discovered Galaxy of Stars promotional film (1936).
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Laurence Olivier
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM ( /ˈlɒrəns ɵˈlɪvi.eɪ/; 22 May 1907 – 11 July 1989) was an English actor, director, and producer. One of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century, he was the youngest actor to be knighted and the first to be elevated to the peerage. He married three times, to actresses Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Plowright. Actor Spencer Tracy said that Olivier was 'the greatest actor in the English-speaking world'.
Olivier played a wide variety of roles on stage and screen from Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and Restoration comedy to modern American and British drama. He was the first artistic director of the National Theatre of Great Britain and its main stage is named in his honour. He is regarded by some to be the greatest actor of the 20th century, in the same category as David Garrick, Richard Burbage, Edmund Kean and Henry Irving in their own centuries. Olivier's AMPAS acknowledgments are considerable: twelve Oscar nominations, with two awards (for Best Actor and Best Picture for the 1948 film Hamlet), plus two honorary awards including a statuette and certificate. He was also awarded five Emmy awards from the nine nominations he received. Additionally, he was a three-time Golden Globe and BAFTA winner.
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Lee Marvin
Lee Marvin (February 19, 1924 – August 29, 1987) was an American film actor. Known for his gravelly voice, white hair and 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m) stature, Marvin at first did supporting roles, mostly villains, soldiers and other hardboiled characters, but after winning an Academy Award for Best Actor for his dual roles in Cat Ballou (1965), he landed more heroic and sympathetic leading roles.
Marvin was born in New York City. He was the son of Lamont Waltman Marvin, an advertising executive and the head of the New York and New England Apple Institute, and his wife Courtenay Washington (née Davidge), a fashion writer and beauty consultant. He was named in honor of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who was his first cousin, four times removed. His father was a direct descendant of Matthew Marvin, Sr., who emigrated from Great Bentley, Essex, England in 1635 and helped found Hartford, Connecticut.
Marvin studied violin when he was young. As a teenager, Marvin "spent weekends and spare time hunting deer, puma, wild turkey, and bobwhite in the wilds of the then-uncharted Everglades." He attended St. Leo College Preparatory School in St. Leo, Florida after being expelled from several other schools for bad behavior.
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Les Paul
Lester William Polsfuss (June 9, 1915 – August 13, 2009)—known as Les Paul—was an American jazz and country guitarist, songwriter and inventor. He was the inventor of the solid-body electric guitar which made the sound of rock and roll possible. He is credited with many recording innovations. Although he was not the first to use the technique, his early experiments with overdubbing (also known as sound on sound),delay effects such as tape delay, phasing effects and multitrack recording were among the first to attract widespread attention.
His innovative talents extended into his playing style, including licks, trills, chording sequences, fretting techniques and timing, which set him apart from his contemporaries and inspired many guitarists of the present day. He recorded with his wife Mary Ford in the 1950s, and they sold millions of records.
Among his many honors, Paul is one of a handful of artists with a permanent, stand-alone exhibit in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is prominently named by the music museum on its website as an "architect" and a "key inductee" along with Sam Phillips and Alan Freed.
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Lindsay C. Howard
Lindsay Coleman Howard (March 31, 1904 - September 6, 1971) was an American sportsman.
The son of the prominent businessman and Thoroughbred racehorse owner, Charles S. Howard, Lindsay Howard began riding horses at a young age and by the early 1930s had developed into a top class polo player. He captained the San Mateo Hurricanes that played in the Pacific Coast Inter-circuit Cup Polo Championship against such teams as the Midwick Country Club, captained by Neil McCarthy. Lindsay Howard and his brother Robert frequently played matches in Argentina, the polo capital of the world, and they and friend Bing Crosby decided to establish "Caballeriza Binglin Stock Farm" near Buenos Aires where they purchased a number of locally bred horses and shipped them back to the United States.
In the latter part of the 1930s. Lindsay Howard became nationally known when he and Bing Crosby bought and raced horses together under the name Binglin Stable. at the same time as his father Charles Howard owned the superstar runner, Seabiscuit. In 1939 Lindsay Howard took over as trainer of the Binglin racing stable. The Binglin Stable partnership came to an end in 1953 as a result of a liquidation of assets by Bing Crosby in order to raise the funds necessary to pay the federal and state inheritance taxes on his deceased wife's estate.
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Lindsay Crosby
Lindsay Harry Crosby (January 5, 1938 - December 11, 1989) was an American actor and singer.
Lindsay Crosby, son of Bing Crosby and Dixie Lee, was born in California and named for his father's closest friend and Thoroughbred horse racing partner, Lindsay Howard. He was educated with his three brothers at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, California. He was remembered by his friends for having a special laid back and clever wit like his father. He performed with his brothers Gary, Dennis and Phillip Crosby as the Crosby Boys during the late 1950s in nightclubs and on The Ed Sullivan Show.
The Crosby Boys had a promising start to life, but the pressures of show business and their own inability to cope blighted their lives. They were greatly affected by their mother's decline into alcoholism and a premature death from cancer. Heavy drinking and their emotional problems took their toll. On December 11, 1989, Lindsay died from a self-inflicted rifle shot to the head. He was 51. His distraught brother, Dennis, never recovered from Lindsay's death and also committed suicide with a shotgun in May 1991.
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Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana.
Coming to prominence in the 1920s as an "inventive" cornet and trumpet player, Armstrong was a foundational influence in jazz, shifting the music's focus from collective improvisation to solo performance. With his instantly recognizable deep and distinctive gravelly voice, Armstrong was also an influential singer, demonstrating great dexterity as an improviser, bending the lyrics and melody of a song for expressive purposes. He was also greatly skilled at scat singing (vocalizing using sounds and syllables instead of actual lyrics).
Renowned for his charismatic stage presence and voice almost as much as for his trumpet-playing, Armstrong's influence extends well beyond jazz music, and by the end of his career in the 1960s, he was widely regarded as a profound influence on popular music in general. Armstrong was one of the first truly popular African-American entertainers to "cross over," whose skin-color was secondary to his music in an America that was severely racially divided. It allowed him socially acceptable access to the upper echelons of American society that were highly restricted for a black man. While he rarely publicly politicized his race, often to the dismay of fellow African-Americans, he was privately a strong supporter of the Civil Rights movement in America.[citation needed]
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Mack Sennett
Mack Sennett (January 17, 1880 – November 5, 1960) was a Canadian-born American director and was known as the innovator of slapstick comedy in film. During his lifetime he was known at times as the "King of Comedy". His short "Wrestling Swordfish" was awarded the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 1932 and he earned an Academy Honorary Award in 1937.
Born as Mikall (or Michael) Sinnott in Danville, Quebec, Canada, the son of Irish Catholic immigrant farmers. His father was a blacksmith in the small Eastern Townships village. When he was 17 years old his family moved to Connecticut.
The family lived for a time in Northampton, Massachusetts, where, according to his autobiography, Sennett first got the idea to go on stage after seeing a vaudeville show. He claimed that the most respected lawyer in town, Northampton mayor (and future President of the United States) Calvin Coolidge, as well as Sennett's own mother, tried to talk him out of his theatrical ambitions.[citation needed]
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Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando, Jr. (April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004) was an American movie star and political activist. "Unchallenged as the most important actor in modern American Cinema" according to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, Brando was one of only three professional actors, along with Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe, named by Time magazine as one of its 100 Persons of the Century in 1999.
Brando had a significant impact on film acting, and was the foremost example of the "method" acting style. While he became notorious for his "mumbling" diction and exuding a raw animal magnetism, his mercurial performances were nonetheless highly regarded, and he is widely considered as one of the greatest and most influential actors of the 20th century. Director Martin Scorsese said of him, "He is the marker. There's 'before Brando' and 'after Brando'." Actor Jack Nicholson once said, "When Marlon dies, everybody moves up one." He was ranked by the American Film Institute as the fourth greatest screen legend among male movie stars.
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Matty Malneck
Matty Malneck (December 9, 1903 - February 25, 1981) was an American jazz violinist, violist and songwriter.
Malneck's first professional gigs as a violinist began when he was age 16. He worked with Paul Whiteman from 1926 to 1937, and also recorded in the same period with Frank Signorelli, Frankie Trumbauer, Bix Beiderbecke, and Mildred Bailey. He led his own big band in 1938-39 and shot short films with vocalist Liz Tilton in the 1940s. He recorded as aleader for London Records in 1932 and Decca Records in 1938-39.
Malneck's credits as a songwriter have overshadowed his contributions as a performer. He composed several songs which became pop standards, including "I'll Never Be the Same" (recorded by Teddi King), "I'm Through With Love", "Goody Goody", "Eeny Meeny Miney Mo", and "If You Were Mine" (lyrics by Johnny Mercer and recorded by Billie Holiday in New York City on October 25, 1935 for Brunswick 7554).
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Maurice Chevalier
Maurice Auguste Chevalier (September 12, 1888 – January 1, 1972) was a French actor, singer, entertainer and a noted Sprechgesang performer. He is perhaps best known for his signature songs, including Louise, Mimi, Valentine, and Thank Heaven for Little Girls and for his films including The Love Parade and The Big Pond. His trademark attire was a boater hat, which he always wore on stage with a tuxedo.
Born in Paris, he made his name as a star of musical comedy, appearing in public as a singer and dancer at an early age before working in four menial jobs as a teenager. In 1909, he became the partner of the biggest female star in France at the time, Fréhel. Although their relationship was brief, she secured him his first major engagement, as a mimic and a singer in l'Alcazar in Marseille to which he received critical acclaim by French theatre critics. In 1918 he discovered jazz and ragtime and went to London, where he found new success at the Palace Theatre.
In 1917, he discovered jazz and ragtime and toured the United States. Whilst there, he met the American composers George Gershwin and Irving Berlin and brought Dédé to Broadway in 1922. He also developed an interest in acting, and had success in the operetta Dédé. When talkies arrived, he went to Hollywood in 1928 where he played his first American role in Innocents of Paris. In 1930 he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, for his roles in The Love Parade (1929) and The Big Pond (1930), which secured his first big American hit, Livin' in the Sunlight, Lovin' in the Moonlight.
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Max Bell
George Maxwell "Max" Bell (October 13, 1912 – July 19, 1972) was a Canadian newspaper publisher, race horse owner and philanthropist. He was best known as the co-founder of FP Publications, Canada's largest newspaper syndicate in the 1960s. He built his newspaper empire after inheriting the Calgary Albertan, and its $500,000 debt, from his father in 1936. He repaid debt by 1945 and proceeded to purchase papers across the country, including the Ottawa Citizen and the Globe and Mail. Much of Bell's fortune was built on Alberta's burgeoning oil and gas industry. He formed several companies in the late 1940s that came to be worth millions of dollars when sold.
Bell was a long time owner of thoroughbred race horses. He partnered with Frank McMahon to form two stables that won races across Canada, the United States and Europe. The pair joined with singer Bing Crosby to win the Irish Derby in 1965 while he and McMahon won the 1968 Queen's Plate. Bell was a part owner of several race tracks, including Balmoral Park, of which he became the first Canadian president. A noted philanthropist, he established the Max Bell Foundation shortly before his death, which has awarded millions of dollars in grants for medical, veterinary, sporting and educational causes.
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Mervyn LeRoy
Mervyn LeRoy (October 15, 1900 - September 13, 1987) was an American film director, film producer and sometime actor.
Born to Jewish parents in San Francisco, his family was financially ruined by the 1906 earthquake. (His paternal grandfather owned a successful San Francisco department store that was destroyed in the quake; the store was heavily insured, but the insurance company went bankrupt in the aftermath of the earthquake.) To make money, young Mervyn sold newspapers and entered talent shows as a singer. Through this he worked his way into vaudeville. When his act broke up, he and his cousin, Jesse Lasky, went to Hollywood.
LeRoy worked in costumes, processing labs and as a camera assistant until he became a gag writer and actor in silent films. His first directing job was in 1927's No Place to Go. When his movies made lots of money without costing too much, he became well-received in the movie business.
In 1931 he directed two key films which launched Edward G. Robinson into major stardom, the Oscar-nominated critique of tabloid journalism Five Star Final, and the classic gangster epic Little Caesar. From that point forward, LeRoy would be responsible for a diverse variety of films as a director and producer. In 1938 he was chosen as head of production at MGM, where he was responsible for the decision to make The Wizard of Oz. He was responsible for discovering Clark Gable, Loretta Young, Robert Mitchum and Lana Turner.
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Michael Douglas
Michael Kirk Douglas (born September 25, 1944) is an American actor and producer, primarily in movies and television. He has won three Golden Globes and two Academy Awards; as producer of 1975's Best Picture, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and as Best Actor in 1987 for his role in Wall Street. Douglas received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2009. He is the eldest of actor Kirk Douglas's four sons.
Douglas was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the first child of actor Kirk Douglas and Bermudian-born actress Diana Dill. His paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Gomel in Belarus (at that time a part of the Russian Empire). His mother was from Devonshire Parish, Bermuda; Douglas's maternal grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Melville Dill, served as Attorney General of Bermuda and was commanding officer of the Bermuda Militia Artillery. Douglas has a younger brother, Joel Douglas (born 1947), and two paternal half-brothers, Peter Douglas (born 1955) and Eric Douglas (1958–2004), from stepmother Anne Buydens.
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Michael Redgrave
Sir Michael Scudamore Redgrave, CBE (20 March 1908 – 21 March 1985) was an English stage and film actor, director, manager and author.
Redgrave was born in Bristol, Gloucestershire, England, the son of the silent film actor Roy Redgrave and the actress Margaret Scudamore. He never knew his father, who left when Michael was only six months old to pursue a career in Australia. His mother subsequently married Captain James Anderson, a tea planter, but Redgrave greatly disliked his stepfather.
He studied at Clifton College and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was a schoolmaster at Cranleigh School in Surrey before becoming an actor in 1934. There he directed the boys in Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest, but managed to play all the leading roles himself. The 'Redgrave Room' at the school was later named after him. In the new Guildford School of Acting building which opened in January 2010, there is the Sir Michael Redgrave studio.
Redgrave made his first professional appearance at the Liverpool Playhouse on 30 August 1934 as Roy Darwin in Counsellor-at-Law (by Elmer Rice), then spent two years with its Liverpool Repertory Company where he met his future wife Rachel Kempson. They married on 18 July 1935.
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Mike Pecarovich
Michael J. "Mike" Pecarovich (September 23, 1898 – March 23, 1965) was an American college football coach, lawyer, and actor. He served as the head coach at Loyola Marymount University in 1928 and 1939, Gonzaga University from 1931 to 1938, and the University of San Diego from 1960 to 1961. Pecarovich also coached two professional teams, the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast Professional Football League and the San Francisco Clippers of the California-based American Football League.
A native of Spokane, Washington, Pecarovich attended Santa Clara University, where he played on the football team from 1919 to 1921 as a guard and an end. Pecarovich then transferred to Gonzaga University, where he played football as a quarterback under head coach Gus Dorais. He graduated from Gonzaga in 1922, and the following season served as an assistant coach to Dorais. In 1924, Pecarovich earned a law degree and passed the bar exam.
After graduating law school, Pecarovich coached the Gonzaga High School football team for two years. He then coached the Los Angeles Angels, a football team in the Pacific Coast Professional League, until 1928. That year, Pecarovich took over as head football coach at Loyola Marymount, where he installed the Knute Rockne system. The Lions amassed a 5–3 record in 1928. In 1929 and 1930, he coached Cathedral High School in Los Angeles, California.
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Mildred Bailey
Mildred Rinker Bailey (February 27, 1907 – December 12, 1951) was a popular and influential American jazz singer during the 1930s, known as "The Queen of Swing", "The Rockin' Chair Lady" and "Mrs. Swing". Her number one hits were "Please Be Kind", "Darn That Dream", "Rockin' Chair" and "Says My Heart".
Born Mildred Rinker in Tekoa,Washington, her mother, Josephine, was an enrolled member of the Coeur d'Alene Tribe and a devout Roman Catholic. Her father, Charles, played fiddle and called square dances. Her mother played piano every evening after supper and taught Mildred to play and sing. Her brothers were the vocalist and composer Al Rinker, and the lyricist Charles Rinker.
At the age of seventeen, Bailey moved to Seattle and worked as a sheet music demonstrator at Woolworth's. She married and divorced Ted Bailey, keeping his last name because she thought it sounded more American than Rinker. With the help of her second husband, Benny Stafford, she became an established blues and jazz singer on the West Coast. According to Gary Giddins' book Bing Crosby – A Pocketful of Dreams – The Early Years 1903-1940, in 1925 she secured work for her brother, Al Rinker, and his partner Bing Crosby. Giddins further states that Crosby first heard of Louis Armstrong and other Chicago black jazz records from Bailey's own record collection. Crosby helped Bailey in turn by introducing her to Paul Whiteman. She sang with Paul Whiteman's band from 1929 to 1933 (Whiteman had a popular radio program and when Bailey debuted with her version of "Moaning Low" in 1929, public reaction was immediate, although she did not start recording with Whiteman until late 1931).
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Morgan Freeman
Morgan Freeman (born June 1, 1937) is an American actor, film director, aviator and narrator. Freeman has received Academy Award nominations for his performances in Street Smart, Driving Miss Daisy, The Shawshank Redemption and Invictus and won in 2005 for Million Dollar Baby. He has also won a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Freeman has appeared in many other box office hits, including Unforgiven, Glory, Seven, Deep Impact, The Sum of All Fears, Bruce Almighty, Batman Begins, March of the Penguins, The Bucket List, Wanted, The Dark Knight, and RED.
Morgan Freeman was born in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of Mayme Edna (née Revere), a teacher, and Morgan Porterfield Freeman, a barber who died April 27, 1961, from cirrhosis. He has three older siblings. Freeman was sent as an infant to his paternal grandmother in Charleston, Mississippi. His family moved frequently during his childhood, living in Greenwood, Mississippi; Gary, Indiana; and finally Chicago, Illinois. Freeman made his acting debut at age 9, playing the lead role in a school play. He then attended Broad Street High School, later named Threadgill Elementary School, in Mississippi. At age 12, he won a statewide drama competition, and while still at Broad Street High School, he performed in a radio show based in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1955, he graduated from Broad Street, but turned down a partial drama scholarship from Jackson State University, opting instead to work as a mechanic in the United States Air Force.
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Murdo MacKenzie
Murdo Mackenzie (April 24, 1850 near Tain, Ross-shire, Scotland – May 30, 1939 in Denver, Colorado) was twice (1891-1901 and 1922-1937) manager of the Scots-owned Matador Land and Cattle Company, and founding president of the American Stock Growers Association, for whom he testified before congress and the Interstate Commerce Commission. His testimony led to passage of the Hepburn Act of 1906 which eased railroad fares for western shippers.
President Teddy Roosevelt appointed him to the National Conservation Commission in 1908, and it was Mackenzie, then manager of the Brazil Land, Cattle and Packing Company, with whom Roosevelt stayed when he visited Brazil in 1913.
Born in Scotland, where he attended parish school and graduated from the Tain Royal Academy in 1869. He served in a law office and in the British Linen Bank, then as factor for Sir Charles Ross's estate at Balnagown Castle. He married Isabella Stronach MacBain in 1876 and fathered five children with her.
He sailed to the United States in 1885 to accept an offer to manage the Prairie Land and Cattle Company in Trinidad, Colorado. After becoming a naturalized citizen, he was elected mayor of Trinidad in 1891, before accepting the directorship at Matador.
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Nathaniel Crosby
Nathaniel Patrick Crosby (born October 29, 1961) is an American golfer.
Crosby was born at Hillsborough, California. He is the seventh child of the actor and singer Bing Crosby and the youngest of his three children from his second marriage to the actress Kathryn Grant.
Crosby performed with his father, mother, brother Harry and sister Mary in several Christmas television shows and at the London Palladium in 1976. He starred along with the rest of his family, in the 1970 television musical, Goldilocks.
As a high level amateur golfer, Crosby won the 1981 U.S. Amateur at the age of 19 years 10 months. He then won the Porter Cup in 1982 and was also low amateur at the 1982 U.S. Open, finishing 59th. He played on the winning 1982 Eisenhower Trophy and 1983 Walker Cup teams. He turned professional in 1984 and having failed to gain a place on the PGA Tour, played on the European Tour from 1985 to 1987.
Crosby then turned his attention to the business side of golf, becoming involved in golf club manufacturing companies and golf real estate. He regained his amateur status in 1994, initially in order to play in the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, the tournament founded by his father. He went on to play again in the Porter Cup and U.S Amateur, but this time without success.
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Ned Washington
Ned Washington (August 15, 1901 – December 20, 1976) was an American lyricist.
Washington was nominated for eleven Academy Awards from 1940 to 1962. He won the Best Original Music award twice: in 1940 for "When You Wish upon a Star" in Pinocchio and in 1952 for "High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin')" in High Noon.
Some of Washington's most famous songs include:
Ned Washington is a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame. His grave is located in Culver City's Holy Cross Cemetery.
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Nicolas Cage
Nicolas Cage (born Nicolas Kim Coppola; January 7, 1964) is an Academy Award–winning American actor, producer and director, having appeared in over 60 films including Raising Arizona (1987), The Rock (1996), Face/Off (1997), Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), Adaptation (2002), National Treasure (2004), Lord of War (2005), Ghost Rider (2007), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), Kick-Ass (2010), and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2012).
Cage was born Nicolas Kim Coppola on January 7, 1964 in Long Beach, California. His father, August Coppola, a professor of literature, and his mother, Joy Vogelsang, a dancer and choreographer, divorced in 1976. He was raised in a Catholic family. Cage's mother is of German descent and his father was of Italian descent. His paternal grandparents were composer Carmine Coppola and actress Italia Pennino, and his paternal great-grandparents were immigrants from Bernalda, Basilicata. Through his father, Cage is the nephew of director Francis Ford Coppola and actress Talia Shire, and the cousin of directors Roman Coppola and Sofia Coppola, film producer Gian-Carlo Coppola, and actors Robert Carmine and Jason Schwartzman. Cage's two brothers are New York radio personality Marc "The Cope" Coppola and director Christopher Coppola. He attended Beverly Hills High School, which is known for its many alumni who became entertainers. He aspired to act from an early age and also attended UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television. His first non-cinematic acting experience was in a school production of Golden Boy.
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Orson Welles
George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, writer and producer who worked extensively in theater, radio and film. He is best remembered for his innovative work in all three media, most notably Caesar (1937), a groundbreaking Broadway adaption of Julius Caesar and the debut of the Mercury Theatre; The War of the Worlds (1938), the most famous broadcast in the history of radio; and Citizen Kane (1941), which many critics and scholars name as the best film of all time.
After directing a number of high-profile theatrical productions in his early twenties, including an innovative adaptation of Macbeth and The Cradle Will Rock, Welles found national and international fame as the director and narrator of a 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds performed for the radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was reported to have caused widespread panic when listeners thought that an invasion by extraterrestrial beings was occurring. Although these reports of panic were mostly false and overstated, they rocketed Welles to instant notoriety.
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Paul Lukas
Paul Lukas (May 26, 1891 – August 15, 1971) was an Austrian-Hungarian-born actor.
Lukas was born Pál Lukács in Budapest, the son of Naria (née Zilahy) and Janos Lukacs, an advertising executive. His family was Jewish.
Lukas made his stage debut in Budapest in 1916 and his film debut in 1917. At first, he played elegant, smooth womanizers, but increasingly he became typecast as a villain. He had a successful stage and film career in Hungary, Germany and Austria where he worked with Max Reinhardt. He arrived in Hollywood in 1927 and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1933.
He was busy in the 1930s, appearing in such films as the melodrama Rockabye, the crime caper Grumpy, Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, the comedy Ladies in Love, and the drama Dodsworth. He followed William Powell and Basil Rathbone portraying the series detective Philo Vance, a cosmopolitan New Yorker, once in 1935 in The Casino Murder Case, but his major role came in 1943's Watch on the Rhine, when he played a man working against the Nazis (he had played the same role on Broadway in 1941). He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the role, winning out over luminary efforts as Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, Gary Cooper in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Walter Pidgeon in Madame Curie, and Mickey Rooney in The Human Comedy. In the same year, he guest starred as the eponymous character in an episode of the radio program Suspense, "Mr. Markham, Antique Dealer".
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Paul Newman
Paul Leonard Newman (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008) was an American actor, film director, entrepreneur, humanitarian, professional racing driver, auto racing team owner, and auto racing enthusiast. He won numerous awards, including an Academy Award for best actor for his performance in the 1986 Martin Scorsese film The Color of Money and eight other nominations, three Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Cannes Film Festival Award, an Emmy award, and many honorary awards. He also won several national championships as a driver in Sports Car Club of America road racing, and his race teams won several championships in open wheel IndyCar racing.
Newman was a co-founder of Newman's Own, a food company from which Newman donated all post-tax profits and royalties to charity. As of July 2011, these donations exceeded $300 million.
Newman was born in Shaker Heights (a suburb of Cleveland). He was the son of Theresa (née Fetzer or Fetsko; Slovak: Terézia Fecková) and Arthur Sigmund Newman, who ran a profitable sporting goods store. His father was Jewish (Paul's paternal grandparents, Simon Newman and Hannah Cohn, were immigrants from Hungary and Poland). His mother, who practiced Christian Science, was born to a Slovak Roman Catholic family at Humenné, Ptičie (formerly Pticsie) in the former Kingdom of Hungary, Austria–Hungary (now Humenné in Slovakia). Newman had no religion as an adult, but described himself as a Jew, stating that "it's more of a challenge". Newman's mother worked in his father's store, while raising Paul and his brother, Arthur, who later became a producer and production manager.
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Paul Scofield
David Paul Scofield, CH, CBE (21 January 1922 – 19 March 2008), better known as Paul Scofield, was an English actor of stage and screen. Noted for his distinctive voice and delivery, Scofield received an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for his performance as Sir Thomas More in the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, a reprise of the role he played in the stage version at the West End and on Broadway for which he received a Tony Award.
Scofield was born in Birmingham, England, the son of Mary and Edward Harry Scofield. When Scofield was a few weeks old, his family moved to Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, where his father served as the headmaster at the Hurstpierpoint Church of England School. At the age of 12 he began attending the Varndean Secondary School in Brighton, where he took various roles in school plays.
Scofield began his stage career in 1940 with a debut performance in Desire Under the Elms at the Westminster Theatre, and was soon being compared to Laurence Olivier. He played at the Old Rep in Birmingham. From there he went to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, where he starred in Walter Nugent Monck's 1947 revival of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
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Paul Whiteman
Paul Samuel Whiteman (March 28, 1890 – December 29, 1967) was an American bandleader and orchestral director.
Leader of the most popular dance bands in the United States during the 1920s, Whiteman produced recordings that were immensely successful, and press notices often referred to him as the "King of Jazz". Using a large ensemble and exploring many styles of music, Whiteman is perhaps best known for his blending of symphonic music and jazz, as typified by his 1924 commissioning and debut of George Gershwin's jazz-influenced "Rhapsody In Blue". Whiteman recorded many jazz and pop standards during his career, including "Wang Wang Blues", "Mississippi Mud", "Rhapsody in Blue", "Wonderful One", "Hot Lips", "Mississippi Suite", and "Grand Canyon Suite". His popularity faded in the swing music era of the 1930s, and by the 1940s Whiteman was semi-retired from music.
Whiteman's place in the history of early jazz is somewhat controversial. Detractors suggest that Whiteman's ornately-orchestrated music was jazz in name only (lacking the genre's improvisational and emotional depth), and co-opted the innovations of black musicians. Defenders note that Whiteman's fondness for jazz was genuine (he worked with black musicians as much as was feasible during an era of racial segregation), that his bands included many of the era's most esteemed white jazz musicians, and argue that Whiteman's groups handled jazz admirably as part of a larger repertoire. In his autobiography, Duke Ellington declared, "Paul Whiteman was known as the King of Jazz, and no one as yet has come near carrying that title with more certainty and dignity."
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People (magazine)
People (originally called People Weekly) is a weekly American magazine of celebrity and human-interest stories, published by Time Inc. As of 2006, it has a circulation of 3.75 million and revenue expected to top $1.5 billion. It was named "Magazine of the Year" by Advertising Age in October 2005, for excellence in editorial, circulation and advertising.People ranked #6 on Advertising Age's annual "A-list" and #3 on Adweek's "Brand Blazers" list in October 2006.
The magazine runs a roughly 50/50 mix of celebrity and human-interest articles. People's editors claim to refrain from printing pure celebrity gossip, enough so to lead celebrity publicists to propose exclusives to the magazine, evidence of what one staffer calls a "publicist-friendly strategy".
People's website, People.com, focuses exclusively on celebrity news. In February 2007, the website drew 39.6 million page views "within a day" of the Golden Globes. However "the mother ship of Oscar coverage" broke a site record with 51.7 million page views on the day after the Oscars, beating the previous record set just a month before from the Golden Globes.[not in citation given]
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Perry Como
Pierino Ronald "Perry" Como (May 18, 1912 – May 12, 2001) was an American singer and television personality. During a career spanning more than half a century he recorded exclusively for the RCA Victor label after signing with them in 1943. "Mr. C.", as he was nicknamed, sold millions of records for Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and pioneered a weekly musical variety television show, which set the standards for the genre and proved to be one of the most successful in television history. Como was seen weekly on television from 1949 to 1963, then continued hosting the Kraft Music Hall variety program on a monthly basis until 1967. His television shows and seasonal specials were broadcast throughout the world. Also a popular recording artist, Perry Como produced numerous hit records with record sales so high the label literally stopped counting at Como's behest. His combined success on television and popular recordings was not matched by any other artist of the time. Como's appeal spanned generations and he was widely respected for both his professional standards and the conduct in his personal life. In the official RCA Records Billboard magazine memorial, his life was summed up in these few words: "50 years of music and a life well lived. An example to all." Composer Ervin Drake said of him, "... [o]ccasionally someone like Perry comes along and won't 'go with the flow' and still prevails in spite of all the bankrupt others who surround him and importune him to yield to their values. Only occasionally."
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Peter O'Toole
Peter Seamus Lorcan O'Toole (born 2 August 1932) is an Irish actor of stage and screen. O'Toole achieved stardom in 1962 playing T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, and then went on to become a highly-honoured film and stage actor. He has been nominated for eight Academy Awards, and holds the record for most competitive Academy Award acting nominations without a win. He has won four Golden Globes, a BAFTA, and an Emmy, and was the recipient of an Honorary Academy Award in 2003 for his body of work.
Peter Seamus Lorcan O'Toole was born in 1932. Some sources give his birthplace as Connemara, County Galway, Ireland, and others as Leeds, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, where he grew up. O'Toole himself is not certain of his birthplace or date, noting in his autobiography that, while he accepts 2 August as his birthdate, he has a birth certificate from each country, with the Irish one giving a June 1932 birthdate. O'Toole is the son of Constance Jane (née Ferguson), a Scottishnurse, and Patrick Joseph O'Toole, an Irish metal plater, football player and racecourse bookmaker. When O'Toole was one year old, his family began a five-year tour of major racecourse towns in Northern England. He was brought up Roman Catholic. O'Toole was evacuated from Leeds early in World War II and went to a Catholic school for seven or eight years, where he was "implored" to become right-handed. “I used to be scared stiff of the nuns: their whole denial of womanhood – the black dresses and the shaving of the hair – was so horrible, so terrifying,” he later commented. “Of course, that's all been stopped. They're sipping gin and tonic in the Dublin pubs now, and a couple of them flashed their pretty ankles at me just the other day.”
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Peter Sellers
Richard Henry Sellers, CBE (8 September 1925 – 24 July 1980), known as Peter Sellers, was a British comedian and actor. Perhaps best known as Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther film series, he is also notable for playing three different characters in Dr. Strangelove, as Clare Quilty in Lolita, and as the TV-addicted man-child Chance the gardener in his penultimate film, Being There. Actress Bette Davis once remarked of him, "He isn't an actor—he's a chameleon."
Sellers rose to fame on the BBC Radio comedy series The Goon Show. His ability to speak in different accents (e.g., French, Indian, Italian, American, German, as well as British regional accents), along with his talent to portray a range of characters to comic effect, contributed to his success as a radio personality and screen actor and earned him national and international nominations and awards. Many of his characters became ingrained in public perception of his work. Sellers' private life was characterised by turmoil and crises, and included emotional problems and substance abuse. Sellers was married four times, and had three children from the first two marriages.
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Phil Harris
Phil Harris (born Wonga Philip Harris; June 24, 1904 – August 11, 1995) was an American singer, songwriter, jazz musician, actor, and comedian. Though successful as an orchestra leader, Harris is remembered today for his recordings as a vocalist, his voice work in animation (probably most famous later in his career for his roles as bears, one being Baloo in Disney's The Jungle Book, and as Little John in Disney's Robin Hood). He also voiced Thomas O'Malley in Disney's The Aristocats. Harris was also a pioneer in radio situation comedy, first with Jack Benny, and then in a series in which he co-starred with his wife, singer-actress Alice Faye, for eight years.
Harris was born in Linton, Indiana but grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and identified himself as a Southerner (his hallmark song was "That's What I Like About the South"). His upbringing accounted for both his trace of a Southern accent and, in later years, the self-deprecating Southern jokes of his radio character. The son of two circus performers, Harris's first work as a drummer came when his father, as tent bandleader, hired him to play with the circus band. Harris began his music career as a drummer in San Francisco, forming an orchestra with Carol Lofner in the latter 1920s and starting a long engagement at the St. Francis Hotel. The partnership ended by 1932, and Harris led and sang with his own band, now based in Los Angeles. Phil Harris also played drums in the Henry Halstead Big Band Orchestra during the mid-1920s.
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Phillip Crosby
Phillip Lang Crosby (13 July 1934 – 13 January 2004) was an American actor and singer, who began his career singing alongside his brothers and his father, Bing Crosby. He was the twin brother of Dennis Crosby.
He was born in California and was educated at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose. He and Dennis were two of Bing Crosby's four sons from his first marriage to the singer Dixie Lee.
Phillip and his brothers formed a harmony singing group, The Crosby Boys, who performed during the 1950s and 1960s. They appeared in nightclubs and on The Ed Sullivan Show on American television.
He was married four times to:
Despite a promising start to life, the brothers were overwhelmed by their emotional problems, which resulted in heavy drinking. Their mother's premature death from ovarian cancer was hastened by acute alcoholism. Philip's twin Dennis and his younger brother Lindsay committed suicide with shotguns, in their 50s. Gary died from lung cancer in August 1995, aged 62. Phillip died on January 13, 2004, in Woodland Hills, California from a heart attack, aged 69.
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Pope Pius XII
The Venerable Pope Pius XII (Latin: Pius PP. XII; Italian: Pio XII), born Eugenio Marìa Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli (2 March 1876 – 9 October 1958), reigned as Pope, head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of Vatican City State, from 2 March 1939 until his death in 1958.
Before election to the papacy, Pacelli served as secretary of the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, papal nuncio and Cardinal Secretary of State, in which capacity he worked to conclude treaties with European and Latin American nations, most notably the Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany. The concordat of 1933 which saw the self-destruction of the Centre (Catholic) Party, on the orders of the Holy See, and Pius' leadership of the Catholic Church during World War II, including his "decision to stay silent in public about the fate of the Jews", remain the subject of controversy.
After the war Pius XII advocated peace and reconciliation, including lenient policies towards Axis and Axis-satellite nations. The Church experienced severe persecution and mass deportations of Catholic clergy in the Eastern Bloc. In light of his overt involvement in Italian politics – anyone who voted for a Communist candidate in the 1948 elections was threatened with automatic excommunication – Pius XII became known as a staunch opponent of the Italian Communist Party. Pius XII explicitly invoked ex cathedra papal infallibility with the dogma of the Assumption of Mary in his 1950 Apostolic constitution Munificentissimus Deus. His magisterium includes almost 1,000 addresses and radio broadcasts. His forty-one encyclicals include Mystici Corporis, the Church as the Body of Christ; Mediator Dei on liturgy reform; and Humani generis on the Church's positions on theology and evolution. He eliminated the Italian majority in the College of Cardinals in 1946.
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Ray Milland
Ray Milland (3 January 1907 – 10 March 1986) was a Welsh actor and director. His screen career ran from 1929 to 1985, and he is best remembered for his Academy Award–winning portrayal of an alcoholic writer in The Lost Weekend (1945), a sophisticated leading man opposite a corrupt John Wayne in Reap the Wild Wind (1942), the murder-plotting husband in Dial M for Murder (1954), and as Oliver Barrett III in Love Story (1970).
Milland was born Alfred Reginald Jones (not Reginald Alfred John Truscott-Jones as has often been stated). His birth was registered in the March Quarter of 1907 in Neath, Wales, and he was the son of Elizabeth Annie (née Truscott) and Alfred Jones. In the 1911 census the family were living at 66 Coronation Road, Mount Pleasant, Neath, Wales. Of his parents, Milland wrote in his 1974 autobiography Wide-Eyed in Babylon, "My father was not a cruel or harsh man. Just a very quiet one. I think he was an incurable romantic and consequently a little afraid of his emotions and perhaps ashamed of them... he had been a young hussar in the Boer War and had been present at the relief of Mafeking. He never held long conversations with anyone, except perhaps with me, possibly because I was the only other male in our family. The household consisted of my mother, a rather flighty and coquettish woman much concerned with propriety and what the neighbours thought.."
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Raúl Juliá
Raúl Rafael Juliá y Arcelay (March 9, 1940 – October 24, 1994) was a Puerto Rican actor.
Born in San Juan, he gained interest in acting while still in school. Upon completing his studies, Juliá decided to pursue a career in acting. After performing in the local scene for some time, he was convinced by entertainment personality Orson Bean to move and work in New York City. Juliá, who had been bilingual since his childhood, soon gained interest in Broadway and Off-Broadway plays. He performed in mobile projects, including the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre.
Juliá was eventually noticed by Joseph Papp, who offered him work in the New York Shakespeare Festival. After gaining notoriety, he received roles in two television series, Love of Life and Sesame Street. For his performance in Two Gentlemen of Verona, he received a nomination for the Tony Award and won a Drama Desk Award. Between 1974 and 1982, Juliá received Tony Award nominations for Where's Charley?, The Threepenny Opera and Nine. During the 1980s, he worked in several films, receiving nominations for the Golden Globe Awards, for his performance in Tempest, and Kiss of the Spider Woman, winning the National Board of Review Award for Best Actor for the latter.
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Rex Harrison
Sir Reginald Carey "Rex" Harrison (5 March 1908 – 2 June 1990) was an English actor of stage and screen. One of Harrison's best remembered film roles was that of Professor Henry Higgins in the stage and film versions of My Fair Lady. The role earned him a Tony Award, a Golden Globe Award and Best Actor Oscar.
Harrison was born in Huyton, Lancashire, and educated at Liverpool College. After a bout of childhood measles, Harrison lost most of the sight in his left eye, which on one occasion caused some on-stage difficulty. He first appeared on the stage in 1924 in Liverpool. Harrison's acting career was interrupted during World War II while serving in the Royal Air Force, reaching the rank of Flight Lieutenant. He acted in various stage productions until 11 May 1990. He acted in the West End of London when he was young, appearing in the Terence Rattigan play French Without Tears, which proved to be his breakthrough role.
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Richard Basehart
John Richard Basehart (August 31, 1914 – September 17, 1984) was an American actor. He starred in the 1960s television science fiction drama Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, in the role of Admiral Harriman Nelson.
One of his most notable film roles was the acrobat known as "the Fool" in the acclaimed Italian film La Strada, directed by Federico Fellini. He also appeared as the killer in the film noir classic He Walked by Night (1948), as a psychotic member of the Hatfield clan in Roseanna McCoy (1949), as Ishmael in Moby Dick (1956), and in the drama Decision Before Dawn (1951). He was married to Italian Academy Award-nominated actress Valentina Cortese, with whom he had one son, the actor Jackie Basehart, before their divorce in 1960. Cortese and Basehart also costarred in Robert Wise's The House on Telegraph Hill (1951).
From 1964-68, Basehart played the lead role, Admiral Harriman Nelson, on Irwin Allen's first foray into science-fiction television, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Allen would go on to produce a number of sci-fi series in the 1960s and the highly successful feature films The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), earning him the moniker "The Master of Disaster." Although Basehart started his career as a film actor, he became best known for his role on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
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Roaring Lion
Roaring Lion (born Rafael de Leon, Aroquita, Trinidad, British Trinidad and Tobago, 22 February 1908 – 11 July 1999[citation needed]) was a calypsonian (calypso singer/composer). His 65-year career began in the early 1930s and he is best known for his compositions "Ugly Woman" (1933), "Mary Ann" and "Netty, Netty," which are still performed today.[citation needed]
Rafael de Leon was born in Aroquita, in the Caura Hills of northern Trinidad, to a mother named Basalicion de Leon and a father named Arias Cairi Llama. An illegitimate child, Lion spent some of his earliest years in two orphanages, before being taken in, following his mother's illness, by an elderly woman named Miss Charles who lived on Coffee Street in the southwestern city of San Fernando. Finally, he was presented by Charles to a Muslim Indian[citation needed] family in San Fernando who wanted him; he was adopted by Najeeran Khan, who became his adoptive mother. He championed orphanages throughout his career, with songs like 1940s "Orphan home" for one example. Although there has long been confusion about his full name, he himself gave it as Rafael Arias Cairi Llama de Leon. He later met his biological father, who told him that his name, Cairi, was another name for Trinidad, and that "Llama" is a sort of goat or deer from South America. In a 1990 interview, Roaring Lion stated that "from fear that I might be styled a thief, I only use Rafael Deleon."
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Robert Mitchum
Robert Charles Durman Mitchum (August 6, 1917 – July 1, 1997) was an American film actor, author, composer and singer and is #23 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male American screen legends of all time. Mitchum rose to prominence for his starring roles in several major works of the film noir style, and is considered a forerunner of the anti-heroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and 1960s.
Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, into a Methodist family. His mother, Ann Harriet (née Gunderson), was a Norwegian immigrant and sea captain's daughter, and his father, James Thomas Mitchum, was a shipyard and railroad worker. A sister, Annette, (known as Julie Mitchum during her acting career) was born in 1914. James Mitchum was crushed to death in a railyard accident in Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1919, when his son was less than 2 years old. After his death, Ann Mitchum was awarded a government pension, and soon realized she was pregnant. She returned to her family in Connecticut, and married a former British Army major who helped her care for the children. In September 1919 a second son, John, was born. When all of the children were old enough to attend school, Ann found employment as a linotype operator for the Bridgeport Post.
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Robert Ryan
Robert Bushnell Ryan (November 11, 1909 – July 11, 1973) was an American actor who often played hardened cops and ruthless villains.
Ryan was born in Chicago, Illinois, the first child of Timothy Ryan and his wife Mabel Bushnell Ryan. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1932, having held the school's heavyweight boxing title all four years of his attendance. After graduation, the 6′ 4" Ryan found employment as a stoker on a ship, a WPA worker, and a ranch hand in Montana.
Ryan attempted to make a career in show business as a playwright, but had to turn to acting to support himself. He studied acting in Hollywood and appeared on stage and in small film parts during the early 1940s.
In January 1944, after securing a contract guarantee from RKO Radio Pictures, Ryan enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and served as a drill instructor at Camp Pendleton, in San Diego, California. At Camp Pendleton, he befriended writer and future director Richard Brooks, whose novel, The Brick Foxhole, he greatly admired. He also took up painting.
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Robin Williams
Robin McLaurin Williams (born July 21, 1951) is an American actor and comedian. Rising to fame with his role as the alien Mork in the TV series Mork & Mindy, and later stand-up comedy work, Williams has performed in many feature films since 1980. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. He has also won two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globes, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and five Grammy Awards.
Williams was born in Chicago, Illinois. His mother, Laura McLaurin (née Smith, 1922–2001), was a former model from New Orleans, Louisiana. His father, Robert Fitzgerald Williams (September 10, 1906 – October 18, 1987), was a senior executive at Ford Motor Company in charge of the Midwest region. His maternal great-great-grandfather was senator and Mississippi governor Anselm J. McLaurin. Williams is of English, Welsh, Irish, and French ancestry. He was raised in the Episcopal Church (his mother practiced Christian Science). He grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he was a student at the Detroit Country Day School, and later moved to Woodacre, Marin County, California, where he attended the public Redwood High School. Williams studied at Claremont McKenna College (then called Claremont Men's College) for four years. He has two half-brothers: Todd (who died August 14, 2007) and McLaurin.
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Ronald Colman
Ronald Charles Colman (9 February 1891 – 19 May 1958) was an English actor.
He was born in Richmond, Surrey, England, as Roland Charles Colman, the second son and fourth child of Charles Colman and his wife Marjory Read Fraser. His siblings included Eric, Edith, and Marjorie. He was educated at boarding school in Littlehampton, where he discovered he enjoyed acting. He intended to study engineering at Cambridge University, but his father's sudden death from pneumonia in 1907 made this financially impossible.
He became a well-known amateur actor and was a member of the West Middlesex Dramatic Society in 1908-09. He made his first appearance on the professional stage in 1914.
After working as a clerk at the British Steamship Company in the City of London, he joined the London Scottish Regiment in 1909 and was among the first of Territorial Army to fight in World War I. During the war, he served with fellow actors Claude Rains, Herbert Marshall, Cedric Hardwicke and Basil Rathbone. On 31 October 1914, at the Battle of Messines, Colman was seriously wounded by shrapnel in his ankle, which gave him a limp that he would attempt to hide throughout the rest of his acting career. He was invalided from the service in 1916.
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Rosemary Clooney
Rosemary Clooney (May 23, 1928 – June 29, 2002) was an American singer and actress. She came to prominence in the early 1950s with the novelty hit "Come On-a My House" written by William Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian (better known as David Seville, the father figure of Alvin and the Chipmunks), which was followed by other pop numbers such as "Botch-a-Me" (a cover version of the Italian song Ba-Ba-Baciami Piccina by Alberto Rabagliati), "Mambo Italiano", "Tenderly", "Half as Much", "Hey There" and "This Ole House", although she had success as a jazz vocalist. Clooney's career languished in the 1960s, partly due to problems related to depression and drug addiction, but revived in 1977, when her White Christmas co-star Bing Crosby asked her to appear with him at a show marking his 50th anniversary in show business. She continued recording until her death in 2002. She was the aunt of Academy Award winning actor George Clooney.
Clooney was born in Maysville, Kentucky, the daughter of Marie Frances (Guilfoyle) and Andrew Joseph Clooney. Her father was of Irish and German descent and her mother was of Irish and English ancestry. She was raised Catholic. When Clooney was fifteen, her mother and brother, Nick, moved to California. She and her sister, Betty, remained with their father.[citation needed] The family resided in the John Brett Richeson House in the late 1940s.
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Roy Turk
Roy Kenneth Turk (September 20, 1892, New York – November 30, 1934, Hollywood, California) was an American songwriter. A lyricist, he frequently collaborated with composer Fred E. Ahlert – their popular 1928 song "Mean to Me" has become a jazz standard. He worked with many other composers, including for film lyrics. Turk was elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.
Among his compositions (with music by Fred Ahlert unless otherwise noted):
He also worked with composers such as Harry Akst, George Meyer, Charles Tobias, Arthur Johnston, Maceo Pinkard, and J. Russell Robinson.
General references
Inline citations
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Russ Columbo
Ruggiero Eugenio di Rodolpho Colombo (January 14, 1908 – September 2, 1934), known as Russ Columbo, was an American singer, violinist and actor, most famous for his signature tune, "You Call It Madness, But I Call It Love", his compositions "Prisoner of Love" and "Too Beautiful For Words", and the legend surrounding his early death.
Columbo was born in Camden, New Jersey, the twelfth child of Italian immigrant parents, Nicola and Giulia (Julia) Colombo. He started playing the violin while still very young and debuted professionally at the age of 13. He left high school at 17 to travel with various bands around the country. He sang and played violin in numerous nightclubs.
By 1928, at the age of 20, Columbo began to participate in motion pictures, including a Vitaphone short in which Columbo appeared as a member of Gus Arnheim and His Orchestra. Eventually, he did obtain some feature work in front of the camera, but he slowed down his activities in cinema to pursue other interests. At the time of his death, Columbo had just completed work on the film Wake Up and Dream; he was on his way to stardom when his life was cut short. Some of Columbo's other films are: Woman to Woman (with Betty Compton), Wolf Song (with Lupe Vélez), The Texan (with Gary Cooper), and Broadway Thru a Keyhole.
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Russell Crowe
Russell Ira Crowe (born 7 April 1964) is a New Zealand born Australian actor, film producer and musician. He came to international attention for his role as Roman General Maximus Decimus Meridius in the 2000 historical epic film Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor, a Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Actor, an Empire Award for Best Actor and a London Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and ten further nominations for Best Actor. Crowe appeared as the tobacco firm whistle blower Jeffrey Wigand in the 1999 film The Insider, for which he received five awards as Best Actor and seven nominations in the same category. In 2001, Crowe's portrayal of mathematician and Nobel Prize winner John F. Nash in the biopic A Beautiful Mind brought him numerous awards, including an BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor category Motion Picture Drama and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role.
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Samuel Goldwyn
Samuel Goldwyn (c. July 1879 – January 31, 1974) was an American film producer. He was most notably well known for being the founding contributor executive of several motion picture studios in Hollywood.
Goldwyn was born Schmuel Gelbfisz in Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire to a Hasidic, Polish Jewish family. At an early age, he left Warsaw on foot and penniless. He made his way to Birmingham, England, where he remained with relatives for a few years using the name Samuel Goldfish. In 1898, he emigrated to the United States, but fearing refusal of entry, he got off the boat in Nova Scotia, Canada, before moving on to New York in January 1899. He found work in upstate Gloversville, New York, in the bustling garment business. Soon his innate marketing skills made him a very successful salesman at the Albano Glove Company. After four years, as vice-president for sales, he moved back to New York City.[citation needed]
In 1913, Goldfish along with his brother-in-law Jesse L. Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, and Arthur Friend formed a partnership, The Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, to produce feature length motion pictures. Film rights for the stage play The Squaw Man were purchased for $4000 and Dustin Farnum was hired for the leading role. Shooting for the first feature film made in Hollywood began on December 29, 1913.
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Sean Penn
Sean Justin Penn (born August 17, 1960) is an American actor, screenwriter and film director, also known for his left-wing political and social activism (including humanitarian work). He is a two-time Academy Award winner for his roles in Mystic River (2003) and Milk (2008), as well as the recipient of a Golden Globe Award for the former and a Screen Actors Guild Award for the latter.
Penn began his acting career in television with a brief appearance in a 1974 episode of Little House on the Prairie, directed by his father Leo Penn. Following his film debut in 1981's Taps and a diverse range of film roles in the 1980s, Penn emerged as a prominent leading actor with the 1995 drama film Dead Man Walking, for which he earned his first Academy Award nomination and the Best Actor Award at the Berlin Film Festival. Penn received another two Oscar nominations for Sweet and Lowdown (1999) and I Am Sam (2001), before winning his first Academy Award for Best Actor in 2003 for Mystic River and a second one in 2008 for Milk. He has also won a Best Actor Award of the Cannes Film Festival for She's So Lovely (1997), and two Best Actor Awards at the Venice Film Festival for Hurlyburly (1998) and 21 Grams (2003).
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Spencer Tracy
Spencer Bonaventure Tracy (April 5, 1900 – June 10, 1967) was an American actor. Respected for his natural style and versatility, Tracy was one of the major stars of Hollywood's Golden Age. In a screen career that spanned 37 years, he was nominated for nine Academy Awards for Best Actor—a record he holds with Laurence Olivier—of which he won two.
Tracy discovered his talent for acting while a student at Ripon College, and subsequently gained a scholarship for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He spent seven years in the theatre, working in a succession of stock companies and intermittently on Broadway. Tracy's breakthrough came in 1930, when his lead performance in The Last Mile caught the attention of Hollywood. After a successful film debut in Up the River, Tracy was signed to a contract with Fox Film Corporation. His five years with Fox were unremarkable, and he remained largely unknown to audiences after 25 films. In 1935, Tracy joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Hollywood's most prestigious studio. His career flourished with a series of hit films, and in 1937 and 1938 he won consecutive Oscars for Captains Courageous and Boys Town. By the 1940s, Tracy was one of the studio's top stars. In 1942 he appeared with Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year, beginning a popular partnership that produced nine movies over 25 years.
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Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have sold more than 350 million copies and have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books. As of 2011, King has written and published 49 novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, five non-fiction books, and nine collections of short stories. Many of his stories are set in his home state of Maine.
King has received Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Society Awards, his novella The Way Station was a Nebula Award novelette nominee, and in 2003, the National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He has also received awards for his contribution to literature for his whole career, such as the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (2004), the Canadian Booksellers Association Lifetime Achievement Award (2007) and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America (2007).
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The Shadow
The Shadow is a collection of serialized dramas, originally in pulp magazines, then on 1930s radio and then in a wide variety of media, that follow the exploits of the title character, a crimefighting vigilante in the pulps, which carried over to the airwaves as a "wealthy, young man about town" with psychic powers. One of the most famous pulp heroes of the 20th century, The Shadow has been featured in comic books, comic strips, television, video games, and at least five motion pictures. The radio drama is well-remembered for those episodes voiced by Orson Welles.
Introduced as a mysterious radio narrator by David Chrisman, William Sweets and Harry Engman Charlot for Street and Smith Publications, The Shadow was fully developed and transformed into a pop culture icon by pulp writer Walter B. Gibson.
The Shadow debuted on July 31, 1930, as the mysterious narrator of the Street and Smith radio program Detective Story Hour. After gaining popularity among the show's listeners, the narrator became the star of The Shadow Magazine on April 1, 1931, a pulp series created and primarily written by the prolific Gibson.
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Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Sphere Monk (October 10, 1917 – February 17, 1982) was an American jazz pianist and composer considered one of the giants of American music. Monk had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "Epistrophy", "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser" and "Well, You Needn't". Monk is the second most recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington, which is particularly remarkable as Ellington composed over 1,000 songs while Monk wrote about 70.
His compositions and improvisations are full of dissonant harmonies and angular melodic twists, and are consistent with Monk's unorthodox approach to the piano, which combined a highly percussive attack with abrupt, dramatic use of silences and hesitations. This was not a style universally appreciated; poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin dismissed Monk as 'the elephant on the keyboard'.
Monk's manner was idiosyncratic. Visually, he was renowned for his distinctive style in suits, hats and sunglasses. He was also noted for the fact that at times, while the other musicians in the band continued playing, he would stop, stand up from the keyboard and dance for a few moments before returning to the piano.
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Tiger Woods
Eldrick Tont "Tiger" Woods (born December 30, 1975) is an American professional golfer whose achievements to date rank him among the most successful golfers of all time. Formerly the World No. 1, he is the highest-paid professional athlete in the world, having earned an estimated US$90.5 million from winnings and endorsements in 2010.
Woods turned professional in 1996, and by April 1997 he had already won his first major, the 1997 Masters. He first reached the number one position in the world rankings in June 1997. Through the 2000s, Woods was the dominant force in golf, spending 264 weeks from August 1999 to September 2004 and 281 weeks from June 2005 to October 2010 as world number one. From December 2009 to early April 2010, Woods took leave from professional golf to focus on his marriage after he admitted infidelity. His multiple infidelities were revealed by several different women, through many worldwide media sources. This was followed by a loss of form, and his ranking gradually fell to a low of #58 in November 2011. He snapped a career-long winless streak of 107 weeks when he captured the Chevron World Challenge in December 2011. As of April 8, 2012, he is ranked #8.
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Tom Cruise
Thomas Cruise Mapother IV ( /ˈtɒməs ˈkruːz ˈmeɪpɒθər/; born July 3, 1962), widely known as Tom Cruise, is an American film actor and producer. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards and has won three Golden Globe Awards for the same movies: Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Jerry Maguire (1996), Magnolia (1999). He started his career with the movie Endless Love. Cruise's first appearance in a major film was in 1981's Taps. His first leading role was in the film Risky Business, released in August 1983. Cruise played the role of a heroic naval pilot in the popular and successful 1986 film Top Gun, and also secret agent Ethan Hunt in the series of Mission: Impossible action films.
He has starred in a variety of other successful films, including: Rain Man (1988), Days of Thunder (1990), A Few Good Men (1992), Vanilla Sky (2001), Minority Report (2002), The Last Samurai (2003), Collateral (2004), and War of the Worlds (2005).
Since 2005, Cruise and Paula Wagner have been in charge of the United Artists film studio, with Cruise as producer and star and Wagner as the chief executive. Cruise is also known for his support of and adherence to the Church of Scientology.
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Tom Hanks
Thomas Jeffrey "Tom" Hanks (born July 9, 1956) is an American actor, producer, writer, and director. Hanks is known for his roles in Philadelphia and as the title character in Forrest Gump, roles which won him two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor. Hanks is also known for his Oscar nominated roles in Big, Saving Private Ryan and Cast Away.
Hanks' other acting roles include Apollo 13 as Jim Lovell, The Green Mile as Paul Edgecomb, Toy Story as Woody and Charlie Wilson's War as Charlie Wilson.
Hanks was born in Concord, California. His father, Amos Mefford Hanks (born in Glenn County, California, on March 9, 1924 – died in Alameda, California, on January 31, 1992), was an itinerant cook. His mother, Janet Marylyn (née Frager; born in Alameda County, California, on January 18, 1932), was a hospital worker. Hanks' mother is of Portuguese ancestry, while two of his paternal great-grandparents immigrated from Britain. Hanks's parents divorced in 1960. The family's three oldest children, Sandra (now Sandra Hanks Benoiton, a writer)[citation needed], Larry (now Lawrence M. Hanks, PhD, an entomology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Tom, went with their father, while the youngest, Jim, now an actor and film maker, remained with his mother in Red Bluff, California.[citation needed]
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Tuesday Weld
Tuesday Weld (born August 27, 1943) is an American actress.
Weld began her acting career as a child, and progressed to more mature roles during the late 1950s. She won a Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Female Newcomer in 1960. Over the following decade she established a career playing dramatic roles in films.
As a featured performer in supporting roles, her work was acknowledged with nominations for a Golden Globe Award for Play It As It Lays (1972), a nomination for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1978), an Emmy Award for The Winter of Our Discontent (1983), and a BAFTA for Once Upon a Time in America (1984).
Since the end of the 1980s, her acting appearances have been infrequent.
Weld was born Susan Ker Weld in New York City. Her father, Lathrop Motley Weld, was a member of the Weld family of Massachusetts; he died in 1947, shortly before her fourth birthday. Her mother was Weld's fourth and final wife, the former Yosene Balfour Ker, the daughter of the artist and Life illustrator William Balfour Ker. She was one of three full siblings, the other two being Sarah King Weld (born 1935) and David Balfour Weld (born 1937).
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Victor Banerjee
Victor Banerjee (Bengali: ভিক্টর ব্যানার্জী, Hindi: विक्टर बनर्जी) (born 15 October 1946) is an Indian actor who appears in Hindi, Bengali and English language films. He has also appeared on a number of TV series on Indian television. He has worked for prominent directors like Jerry London, Shyam Benegal, Satyajit Ray, Ram Gopal Varma, Roman Polanski, James Ivory, Mrinal Sen and David Lean.
Banerjee was born to a of Bengali Hindu family and is a descendant of Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee, a leading intellectual, a prominent man of his time and the first president of the Indian National Congress (1885).
He had his schooling in St. Edmund's, Shillong, and graduated in English Literature from St. Xavier's College, Calcutta.
In 1984, he acted as Dr. Aziz Ahmed in David Lean's film of A Passage to India, bringing him to the attention of Western audiences. Victor was nominated for BAFTA award for this role in 1986. He won two other awards for this role: Evening Standard British Film Award and NBR Award (National Board Review, USA).
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Victor Sjöström
Victor Sjöström (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈvɪktɔɾ ˈɧœˈstɾœm] (
listen); in the United States sometimes known as Victor Seastrom) (20 September 1879 – 3 January 1960) was a Swedish actor, screenwriter, and film director.
Born in Silbodal, in the Värmland region of Sweden, he was only a year old when his father, Olof Adolf Sjöström, moved the family to Brooklyn, New York. His mother died when he was seven years old in 1886. Sjöström returned to Sweden where he lived with relatives in Stockholm, beginning his acting career at 17 as a member of a touring theater company.
Drawn from the stage to the fledgling motion picture industry, he made his first film in 1912 under the direction of Mauritz Stiller. Between then and 1923, he directed another forty-one films in Sweden, some of which are now lost. Those surviving include The Sons of Ingmar (1919), Karin, Daughter of Ingmar (1920) and The Phantom Carriage (1921), all based on stories by the Nobel-prize winning novelist Selma Lagerlöf. They confirm him as one the very greatest of silent film directors, who helped to create a unique idiom with qualities quite different from those of sound cinema. Many of his films from the period are marked by subtle character portrayal, fine storytelling and evocative settings in which the Swedish landscape often plays a key psychological role. The naturalistic quality of his films was enhanced by his (then revolutionary) preference for on-location filming, especially in rural and village settings.
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Walt Disney
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O. Disney, he was co-founder of Walt Disney Productions, which later became one of the best-known motion picture producers in the world. The corporation is now known as The Walt Disney Company and had an annual revenue of approximately US$36 billion in the 2010 financial year.
Disney is particularly noted as a film producer and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created some of the world's most well-known fictional characters including Mickey Mouse, for whom Disney himself provided the original voice. During his lifetime he received four honorary Academy Awards and won 22 Academy Awards from a total of 59 nominations, including a record four in one year, giving him more awards and nominations than any other individual in history. Disney also won seven Emmy Awards and gave his name to the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort theme parks in the U.S., as well as the international resorts Tokyo Disney Resort, Disneyland Paris, and Hong Kong Disneyland.
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Walter Huston
Walter Thomas Huston ( /ˈwɔːltər ˈhjuːstən/; April 5, 1883 – April 7, 1950) was a Canadian-born American actor. He was the father of actor and director John Huston and the grandfather of actress Anjelica Huston and actor Danny Huston.
Huston was born in York County, Ontario, the son of Elizabeth (née McGibbon) and Robert Moore Huston, a provincial farmer who founded a construction company. He was of Scottish and Irish descent.
Huston began his Broadway career in 1924. Once talkies began in Hollywood, he achieved fame in character roles. His first major role was in 1929's The Virginian with Gary Cooper. He appeared in the Broadway theatrical adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's novel Dodsworth in 1934 and the play's film version two years later.
Huston remained busy throughout the 1930s and 1940s, both on stage and screen (becoming one of America's most distinguished actors); he performed "September Song" in the original Broadway production of Knickerbocker Holiday in 1938 (his grandaughter Anjelica Huston sang it on the May 7, 2012 episode of the NBC TV series "Smash"). Among his films are Abraham Lincoln (1930), Rain (1932), Gabriel Over the White House (1933), The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and Mission to Moscow (1943), a pro-Soviet World War II propaganda film as Ambassador Joseph E. Davies. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1948 for his role in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was directed by his son, John Huston. His last film was The Furies in 1950 with Barbara Stanwyck.
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Warren Beatty
Warren Beatty ( /ˈbeɪti/ BAY-tee; born March 30, 1937) is an American actor, producer, screenwriter and director. He has been nominated for 15 Academy Awards, including winning the Best Director Award and its highest honor, the Irving G. Thalberg Award. He has been nominated for 16 Golden Globe Awards and won six, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award, which he received in 2007. Only Beatty and Orson Welles have been nominated for producer, director, writer and actor in the same film. Welles did it once (for Citizen Kane), Beatty did it twice (for Heaven Can Wait and Reds).
Beatty was born Henry Warren Beaty in Richmond, Virginia. His mother, Kathlyn Corinne (née MacLean), was a Nova Scotia-born teacher, and his father, Ira Owens Beaty, was a Ph.D. of educational psychology, a public school administrator, and dealt in real estate. Beatty's grandparents were also educators. The family was Baptist. In 1945, the family moved from Richmond to Arlington, Virginia. Beatty's sister is the multi-award winning actress and writer Shirley MacLaine.
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Wendell Willkie
Wendell Lewis Willkie (/ˈwɛndl[unsupported input] ˈl[unsupported input]ɨs ˈwɪlki/; February 18, 1892 – October 8, 1944) was a corporate lawyer in the United States and a dark horse who became the Republican Party nominee for the president in 1940. A member of the liberal wing of the GOP, he crusaded against those domestic policies of the New Deal that he thought were inefficient and anti-business. Willkie, an internationalist, needed the votes of the large isolationist element, so he waffled on the bitterly debated issue of America's role in World War II, losing support from both sides. His opponent Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1940 election with 55% of the popular vote and 85% of the electoral vote.
Afterward, Roosevelt found Willkie to be compatible politically with his plans and brought him aboard as an informal ambassador-at-large. Willkie criss-crossed the globe on the former army bomber The Gulliver, bringing home a vision of "One World" freed from imperialism and colonialism. "One World" was Willkie's travelogue of his travels and meetings of the then-Allies heads of state, as well as ordinary citizens and soldiers in regions such as Russia and Iran. His liberalism lost him supporters in the GOP and he dropped out of the 1944 race, then died of a heart attack. He never held political office.
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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.
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Yul Brynner
Yul Brynner (Russian: Юлий Борисович Бринер, Yuliy Borisovich Bryner; July 11, 1920 – October 10, 1985) was a Russian-born stage and film actor. He was best known for his portrayal of Mongkut, king of Siam, in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor for the film version; he also played the role more than 4,500 times onstage. He is also remembered as Rameses II in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille blockbuster The Ten Commandments, General Bounine in Anastasia and Chris Adams in The Magnificent Seven. Brynner was noted for his distinctive voice and for his shaven head, which he maintained as a personal trademark long after adopting it for his initial role in The King and I. He was also a photographer and the author of two books.
Yul Brynner was born Yuliy Borisovich Bryner in 1920. He exaggerated his background and early life for the press, claiming that he was born Taidje Khan of part-Mongol-Tatar parentage, on the Russian island of Sakhalin. In reality, he was born at home in a four-storey residence at 15 Aleutskaya Street, Vladivostok, in the Far Eastern Republic (present-day Primorsky Krai, Russia). He also occasionally referred to himself as Julius Briner,Jules Bryner, or Youl Bryner. A biography written by his son, Rock Brynner, in 1989 clarified these issues.
wn.com/Yul_Brynner
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SB.TV Warm Up Sessions - TK - [S3.EP30]
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:17
- Updated: 19 Dec 2012
TK lights up a session with this track.
http://wn.com/SBTV_Warm_Up_Sessions_TK_S3EP30_
Bing Crosby & David Bowie - Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy 1977
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:46
- Updated: 23 Dec 2012
Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy is a Christmas song with an added counterpoint performed by David Bowie and Bing Crosby. "Little Drummer Boy" is a Christmas song written in 1957, while the "Peace on Earth" tune and lyrics were added to the song especially for Bowie and Crosby's recording. The song was recorded on 11 September for Crosby's 1977 television special, Bing Crosby's Merrie Olde Christmas. The pair exchanged dialogue about what they do for Christmas before singing "Little Drummer Boy" with a new counterpoint with original lyrics written for the special, "Peace on Earth". Bowie's appearance has been described as a "surreal" event, undertaken at a time that he was "actively trying to normalise his career" Crosby died on October 14, just over a month after recording the special. In the US, the show aired on 30 November 1977 on CBS. More about the song at Wikipedia below: en.wikipedia.org
http://wn.com/Bing_Crosby_David_Bowie_Peace_on_Earth_Little_Drummer_Boy_1977
Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy is a Christmas song with an added counterpoint performed by David Bowie and Bing Crosby. "Little Drummer Boy" is a Christmas song written in 1957, while the "Peace on Earth" tune and lyrics were added to the song especially for Bowie and Crosby's recording. The song was recorded on 11 September for Crosby's 1977 television special, Bing Crosby's Merrie Olde Christmas. The pair exchanged dialogue about what they do for Christmas before singing "Little Drummer Boy" with a new counterpoint with original lyrics written for the special, "Peace on Earth". Bowie's appearance has been described as a "surreal" event, undertaken at a time that he was "actively trying to normalise his career" Crosby died on October 14, just over a month after recording the special. In the US, the show aired on 30 November 1977 on CBS. More about the song at Wikipedia below: en.wikipedia.org
- published: 12 Dec 2010
- views: 540483
- author: HolidayFavorites
Young Keno feat TK, Ya Boy & Tyga - Tattoos & Jewelry Remix + Young Keno feat Jim Jones - Fast Life
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:33
- Updated: 21 Dec 2012
Young Keno feat TK, Ya Boy & Tyga Tattoos & Jewelry Remix + Young Keno feat Jim Jones Fast Life
http://wn.com/Young_Keno_feat_TK,_Ya_Boy_Tyga_Tattoos_Jewelry_Remix_+_Young_Keno_feat_Jim_Jones_Fast_Life
Young Keno feat TK, Ya Boy & Tyga Tattoos & Jewelry Remix + Young Keno feat Jim Jones Fast Life
- published: 21 Apr 2009
- views: 954087
- author: sosodefgangstar
CM Storm Quickfire TK Mechanical Keyboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:59
- Updated: 23 Dec 2012
CM Storm Quickfire TK keyboard unboxing. What a value! Incredibly smart layout, vibrant backlights, media keys, and your choice of Cherry MX switches! CA: ncix.com US: us.ncix.com
http://wn.com/CM_Storm_Quickfire_TK_Mechanical_Keyboard_Unboxing_First_Look_Linus_Tech_Tips
CM Storm Quickfire TK keyboard unboxing. What a value! Incredibly smart layout, vibrant backlights, media keys, and your choice of Cherry MX switches! CA: ncix.com US: us.ncix.com
- published: 13 Dec 2012
- views: 37940
- author: LinusTechTips
Rajanna Hindi Dubbed (www.moviezplus.tk)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 129:34
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
Watch online South Indian Movies in Hindi Version @Moviezplus.tk
http://wn.com/Rajanna_Hindi_Dubbed_wwwmoviezplustk
Watch online South Indian Movies in Hindi Version @Moviezplus.tk
- published: 24 Oct 2012
- views: 162721
- author: Moviez Network1
How To: Get a FREE .tk domain name (.tk)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:03
- Updated: 29 Nov 2012
My website: refinedtech.net In this tutorial I will show you how to get a free '.tk' domain name for free, just like my website. In my last tutorial I showed how to put your website live on the web; again for free www.youtube.com If you want to make a website easily watch the first one in the series: www.youtube.com Ze-Links: Subscribe: bit.ly My Website: zetutorials.tk Twitter twitter.com Please subscribe to help me out :) let me know if you want a '.co.cc' domain in the comments. Thanks for watching and please subscribe if I helped you. New vids every few days!! --- How to get a free domain name .tk domain name for free dot tk Free webhosting and best short domain ---
http://wn.com/How_To_Get_a_FREE_tk_domain_name_tk
My website: refinedtech.net In this tutorial I will show you how to get a free '.tk' domain name for free, just like my website. In my last tutorial I showed how to put your website live on the web; again for free www.youtube.com If you want to make a website easily watch the first one in the series: www.youtube.com Ze-Links: Subscribe: bit.ly My Website: zetutorials.tk Twitter twitter.com Please subscribe to help me out :) let me know if you want a '.co.cc' domain in the comments. Thanks for watching and please subscribe if I helped you. New vids every few days!! --- How to get a free domain name .tk domain name for free dot tk Free webhosting and best short domain ---
- published: 30 Jun 2010
- views: 28615
- author: ZeTutorials
How to make your own .tk website
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:00
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
go to www.dot.tk to start 1. Enter website name (with http 2. Give it a .tk name of your choice. 3. Choose between non-email, or email registration. (Non email websites expire if no one ever sees it, email ones always stay on, but require a verification email to be seen) 4. Have fun!!!
http://wn.com/How_to_make_your_own_tk_website
go to www.dot.tk to start 1. Enter website name (with http 2. Give it a .tk name of your choice. 3. Choose between non-email, or email registration. (Non email websites expire if no one ever sees it, email ones always stay on, but require a verification email to be seen) 4. Have fun!!!
- published: 09 Jul 2009
- views: 12077
- author: daslayer55
TK and Friends Prepare for Borderlands 2! - Ep.1 - Playing With My Scrote
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 30:49
- Updated: 20 Dec 2012
Borderlands - TK and Friends Prepare for Borderlands 2 - Ep.1 - Playing With My Scrote Introducing Snatch's long lost brother, Scrote! Also, Snk84 makes his first appearance on Youtube EVAR! Hope you guys enjoy the 'sode. If you have any suggestions, let me know :D Tags: Borderlands trendkill trendkillv01 trend kill build "class build" "character creation" "let's play" walkthrough playthrough commentary "borderlands 2" lilith brick roland mordecai maya salvador axton zero
http://wn.com/TK_and_Friends_Prepare_for_Borderlands_2!_Ep1_Playing_With_My_Scrote
Borderlands - TK and Friends Prepare for Borderlands 2 - Ep.1 - Playing With My Scrote Introducing Snatch's long lost brother, Scrote! Also, Snk84 makes his first appearance on Youtube EVAR! Hope you guys enjoy the 'sode. If you have any suggestions, let me know :D Tags: Borderlands trendkill trendkillv01 trend kill build "class build" "character creation" "let's play" walkthrough playthrough commentary "borderlands 2" lilith brick roland mordecai maya salvador axton zero
- published: 08 Mar 2012
- views: 46381
- author: TrendKiLLv01
TK and Friends Prepare for Borderlands 2! - Ep.3 - Split-Screen Pwn-Fest Part 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 30:41
- Updated: 20 Dec 2012
TK and Friends Prepare for Borderlands 2 - Ep.3 - Split-Screen Pwn-Fest Part 1 Andrew tries to steal my spotlight (and fails), we get our car stuck in a crag, and we (very) briefly discuss boners. Tags: Borderlands trendkill trendkillv01 trend kill build "class build" "character creation" "let's play" walkthrough playthrough commentary "borderlands 2" lilith brick roland mordecai maya salvador axton zero
http://wn.com/TK_and_Friends_Prepare_for_Borderlands_2!_Ep3_Split-Screen_Pwn-Fest_Part_1
TK and Friends Prepare for Borderlands 2 - Ep.3 - Split-Screen Pwn-Fest Part 1 Andrew tries to steal my spotlight (and fails), we get our car stuck in a crag, and we (very) briefly discuss boners. Tags: Borderlands trendkill trendkillv01 trend kill build "class build" "character creation" "let's play" walkthrough playthrough commentary "borderlands 2" lilith brick roland mordecai maya salvador axton zero
- published: 13 Mar 2012
- views: 21428
- author: TrendKiLLv01
Unibet Open St Maarten 2012 - Gangnam Style / TK (Thomas Kremser) style
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:25
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
Gangnam Style inspired dance goes down on the poker floor at Royal Casino in St Maarten www.unibetopen.com
http://wn.com/Unibet_Open_St_Maarten_2012_Gangnam_Style_TK_Thomas_Kremser_style
Gangnam Style inspired dance goes down on the poker floor at Royal Casino in St Maarten www.unibetopen.com
- published: 06 Dec 2012
- views: 30847
- author: UnibetOpen
Part 9: "Chasing TK"
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 14:04
- Updated: 21 Dec 2012
Case 2 is fully underway now. Chasing a train through the subway on motorbikes to get this TK guy. Wtf. We get on, and fight our way up the train, which mostly consists of me rushing and shotgunning his henchmen. That was extremely easy and we quickly finish the case, apparently. We stock up on weapons again and set out to save the survivors we missed, and any new ones that pop up. We don't intend to forfeit our, thus far, apparently perfect playthrough. CosmicContrarian and I play the campaign/story mode of Dead Rising 2. We are playing on the PC (games for windows live) and using the Xbox 360 controller. We are playing on full graphics at 1080p with 60fps, we have studio quality microphones and we have a very low ping. We also have SSDs to negate the ridiculous load times that plague the consoles. We also pwn. Pretty much a perfect set up for an LP. We have not played DR2 before (I played case zero years ago), but are veterans from the first game. We have everything we need to make an awesome LP/playthrough, anyway. More to come soon. Enjoy. www.youtube.com My playlist for the series www.youtube.com Cosmic's Channel ------------------------ be among the first to like my new facebook page. www.facebook.com and subscribe for more www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Part_9_Chasing_TK
Case 2 is fully underway now. Chasing a train through the subway on motorbikes to get this TK guy. Wtf. We get on, and fight our way up the train, which mostly consists of me rushing and shotgunning his henchmen. That was extremely easy and we quickly finish the case, apparently. We stock up on weapons again and set out to save the survivors we missed, and any new ones that pop up. We don't intend to forfeit our, thus far, apparently perfect playthrough. CosmicContrarian and I play the campaign/story mode of Dead Rising 2. We are playing on the PC (games for windows live) and using the Xbox 360 controller. We are playing on full graphics at 1080p with 60fps, we have studio quality microphones and we have a very low ping. We also have SSDs to negate the ridiculous load times that plague the consoles. We also pwn. Pretty much a perfect set up for an LP. We have not played DR2 before (I played case zero years ago), but are veterans from the first game. We have everything we need to make an awesome LP/playthrough, anyway. More to come soon. Enjoy. www.youtube.com My playlist for the series www.youtube.com Cosmic's Channel ------------------------ be among the first to like my new facebook page. www.facebook.com and subscribe for more www.youtube.com
- published: 24 Aug 2012
- views: 167
- author: volound
TK and Friends Prepare for Borderlands 2! - Ep.5 - ROID RAGE!
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 28:56
- Updated: 21 Dec 2012
TK and Friends Prepare for Borderlands 2 - Ep.5 - ROID RAGE! Pwnin' m0r noobz and fielding questions from the comment section! Tags: Borderlands trendkill trendkillv01 trend kill build "class build" "character creation" "let's play" walkthrough playthrough commentary "borderlands 2" lilith brick roland mordecai maya salvador axton zero
http://wn.com/TK_and_Friends_Prepare_for_Borderlands_2!_Ep5_ROID_RAGE!
TK and Friends Prepare for Borderlands 2 - Ep.5 - ROID RAGE! Pwnin' m0r noobz and fielding questions from the comment section! Tags: Borderlands trendkill trendkillv01 trend kill build "class build" "character creation" "let's play" walkthrough playthrough commentary "borderlands 2" lilith brick roland mordecai maya salvador axton zero
- published: 21 Mar 2012
- views: 16072
- author: TrendKiLLv01
TK and Friends Prepare for Borderlands 2! - Ep.6 - Bunches o' Good Questions!
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 31:46
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
TK and Friends Prepare for Borderlands 2 - Ep.6 - Bunches o' Good Questions! We answer a few of our favorite questions from previous video comments. Thanks for the questions, keep them coming :P Tags: Borderlands trendkill trendkillv01 trend kill build "class build" "character creation" "let's play" walkthrough playthrough commentary "borderlands 2" lilith brick roland mordecai maya salvador axton zero
http://wn.com/TK_and_Friends_Prepare_for_Borderlands_2!_Ep6_Bunches_o'_Good_Questions!
TK and Friends Prepare for Borderlands 2 - Ep.6 - Bunches o' Good Questions! We answer a few of our favorite questions from previous video comments. Thanks for the questions, keep them coming :P Tags: Borderlands trendkill trendkillv01 trend kill build "class build" "character creation" "let's play" walkthrough playthrough commentary "borderlands 2" lilith brick roland mordecai maya salvador axton zero
- published: 27 Mar 2012
- views: 13167
- author: TrendKiLLv01
TK and Friends Prepare for Borderlands 2! - Ep.7 - SNK Gets His Mic Back!
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 38:09
- Updated: 13 Dec 2012
TK and Friends Prepare for Borderlands 2 - Ep.7 - SNK Get's His Mic Back! We're back with another episode of the Borderlands LP. We're also announcing that elementmystic... something... will be playing with us on episode 8! Tags: Borderlands trendkill trendkillv01 trend kill build "class build" "character creation" "let's play" walkthrough playthrough commentary "borderlands 2" lilith brick roland mordecai maya salvador axton zero
http://wn.com/TK_and_Friends_Prepare_for_Borderlands_2!_Ep7_SNK_Gets_His_Mic_Back!
TK and Friends Prepare for Borderlands 2 - Ep.7 - SNK Get's His Mic Back! We're back with another episode of the Borderlands LP. We're also announcing that elementmystic... something... will be playing with us on episode 8! Tags: Borderlands trendkill trendkillv01 trend kill build "class build" "character creation" "let's play" walkthrough playthrough commentary "borderlands 2" lilith brick roland mordecai maya salvador axton zero
- published: 07 Apr 2012
- views: 14583
- author: TrendKiLLv01
TK Maxx Haul | Home decor, beauty & pretty things!
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 16:14
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
WHERE ELSE TO FIND ME: SHOP: www.dollybowbow.co.uk BLOG www.dollybowbow.blogspot.co.uk FACEBOOK www.facebook.com TWITTER: @dollybowbow INSTAGRAM: katebowbow WHAT I'M WEARING: T- shirt: American Apparel Adela Spike Necklace: www.dollybowbow.co.uk MUSIC: "Oh Wee" by Immortal Beats
http://wn.com/TK_Maxx_Haul_|_Home_decor,_beauty_pretty_things!
WHERE ELSE TO FIND ME: SHOP: www.dollybowbow.co.uk BLOG www.dollybowbow.blogspot.co.uk FACEBOOK www.facebook.com TWITTER: @dollybowbow INSTAGRAM: katebowbow WHAT I'M WEARING: T- shirt: American Apparel Adela Spike Necklace: www.dollybowbow.co.uk MUSIC: "Oh Wee" by Immortal Beats
- published: 28 Nov 2012
- views: 37990
- author: Dollybowbow
Fly Society (TK, HIT, J-Deeds, Boogz Boogetz) - Bad Bitches & Weed
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:52
- Updated: 23 Dec 2012
Check out WWW.BLKDMNDS.COM for all of our exclusive videos, pictures and behind the scenes. Music Video by Fly Society feat. Boogz Boogetz & J-Deeds performing Bad Bitches & Weed. Directed by Daniel Czernilofsky - BLKDMNDS - Follow BLKDMNDS on Twitter: www.twitter.com Like BLKDMNDS on Facebook: www.facebook.com Follow BLKDMNDS on Tumblr: BLKDMNDS.tumblr.com Follow BLKDMNDS on Instagram @BLKDMNDS - FLY SOCIETY - Follow Fly Society on Twitter: twitter.com - TERRY KENNEDY - Follow Terry Kennedy on Twitter: twitter.com - HIT - Follow HIT on Twitter: twitter.com - BOOGZ BOOGETZ - Follow Boogz Boogetz on Twitter: twitter.com - J-DEEDS - Follow J-Deeds on Twitter: twitter.com
http://wn.com/Fly_Society_TK,_HIT,_J-Deeds,_Boogz_Boogetz_Bad_Bitches_Weed
Check out WWW.BLKDMNDS.COM for all of our exclusive videos, pictures and behind the scenes. Music Video by Fly Society feat. Boogz Boogetz & J-Deeds performing Bad Bitches & Weed. Directed by Daniel Czernilofsky - BLKDMNDS - Follow BLKDMNDS on Twitter: www.twitter.com Like BLKDMNDS on Facebook: www.facebook.com Follow BLKDMNDS on Tumblr: BLKDMNDS.tumblr.com Follow BLKDMNDS on Instagram @BLKDMNDS - FLY SOCIETY - Follow Fly Society on Twitter: twitter.com - TERRY KENNEDY - Follow Terry Kennedy on Twitter: twitter.com - HIT - Follow HIT on Twitter: twitter.com - BOOGZ BOOGETZ - Follow Boogz Boogetz on Twitter: twitter.com - J-DEEDS - Follow J-Deeds on Twitter: twitter.com
- published: 18 Dec 2012
- views: 10837
- author: BLKDMNDS
Borderlands - Walkthrough ep.4: TK Baha's Leg
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 18:51
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
Follow Me on Twitter! www.twitter.com My first lets play on my new channel :) this lets play is going to be on the game borderlands for the pc. Im going to be playing with my friend jonathanpalnik1 here is his youtube channel in case you want to check out his videos: Intro Song: Painkiller - Moonlight Painkiller's channel: www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Borderlands_Walkthrough_ep4_TK_Baha's_Leg
Follow Me on Twitter! www.twitter.com My first lets play on my new channel :) this lets play is going to be on the game borderlands for the pc. Im going to be playing with my friend jonathanpalnik1 here is his youtube channel in case you want to check out his videos: Intro Song: Painkiller - Moonlight Painkiller's channel: www.youtube.com
- published: 25 Aug 2012
- views: 317
- author: Royko64
Borderlands - Walkthrough ep.2: TK Baha's Problem
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 17:40
- Updated: 21 Dec 2012
Follow me on twitter! www.twitter.com Sorry In Advance for the low/poor audio quality It will be fixed in episode 4 and future episodes from then on out :) (and sorry for the reupload, I thought I could fix the audio with my friends audio but it didnt really make a difference sadly :( ) My first lets play on my new channel :) this lets play is going to be on the game borderlands for the pc. Im going to be playing with my friend jonathanpalnik1 here is his youtube channel in case you want to check out his videos: www.youtube.com More videos on the way soon, be sure to rate comment and subscribe and let me know if you want more lets plays or what games I should try next :D
http://wn.com/Borderlands_Walkthrough_ep2_TK_Baha's_Problem
Follow me on twitter! www.twitter.com Sorry In Advance for the low/poor audio quality It will be fixed in episode 4 and future episodes from then on out :) (and sorry for the reupload, I thought I could fix the audio with my friends audio but it didnt really make a difference sadly :( ) My first lets play on my new channel :) this lets play is going to be on the game borderlands for the pc. Im going to be playing with my friend jonathanpalnik1 here is his youtube channel in case you want to check out his videos: www.youtube.com More videos on the way soon, be sure to rate comment and subscribe and let me know if you want more lets plays or what games I should try next :D
- published: 29 Jul 2012
- views: 298
- author: Royko64
Part 38: "TK Is Infected"
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 14:20
- Updated: 21 Dec 2012
All hell breaks loose and we get to watch all the survivors that we saved, die slowly, while we run around picking up spools of wire and barrels. Thanks, game. CosmicContrarian and I play the campaign/story mode of Dead Rising 2. We are playing on the PC (games for windows live) and using the Xbox 360 controller. We are playing on full graphics at 1080p with 60fps, we have studio quality microphones and we have a very low ping. We also have SSDs to negate the ridiculous load times that plague the consoles. We also pwn. Pretty much a perfect set up for an LP. We have not played DR2 before (I played case zero years ago), but are veterans from the first game. We have everything we need to make an awesome LP/playthrough, anyway. More to come soon. Enjoy. www.youtube.com My playlist for the series www.youtube.com Cosmic's Channel ------------------------ be among the first to like my new facebook page. www.facebook.com and subscribe for more www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Part_38_TK_Is_Infected
All hell breaks loose and we get to watch all the survivors that we saved, die slowly, while we run around picking up spools of wire and barrels. Thanks, game. CosmicContrarian and I play the campaign/story mode of Dead Rising 2. We are playing on the PC (games for windows live) and using the Xbox 360 controller. We are playing on full graphics at 1080p with 60fps, we have studio quality microphones and we have a very low ping. We also have SSDs to negate the ridiculous load times that plague the consoles. We also pwn. Pretty much a perfect set up for an LP. We have not played DR2 before (I played case zero years ago), but are veterans from the first game. We have everything we need to make an awesome LP/playthrough, anyway. More to come soon. Enjoy. www.youtube.com My playlist for the series www.youtube.com Cosmic's Channel ------------------------ be among the first to like my new facebook page. www.facebook.com and subscribe for more www.youtube.com
- published: 08 Oct 2012
- views: 90
- author: volound
Skyrim - Dragonborn Let's Play - Episode 8 - TK Nubs It Up
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 39:30
- Updated: 23 Dec 2012
I feel like I died more this episode than on the entire regular LP, lol. I think I was focusing on the fact that I wasted $50 on a game that barely runs... DAMN YOU AC3!
http://wn.com/Skyrim_Dragonborn_Let's_Play_Episode_8_TK_Nubs_It_Up
I feel like I died more this episode than on the entire regular LP, lol. I think I was focusing on the fact that I wasted $50 on a game that barely runs... DAMN YOU AC3!
- published: 19 Dec 2012
- views: 10408
- author: TrendKiLLv01
Part 17: Foiling The Heist.. TK Mad
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 16:15
- Updated: 21 Dec 2012
We take our wingmen through the zombie hordes as we do the next case. It consists mostly of running from casino to casino as well kill the guards and destroy the drills. We then smash up a van. Apparently TK was planning a heist. We need to stop that, even though there is a zombie apocalypse in progress. I dunno. CosmicContrarian and I play the campaign/story mode of Dead Rising 2. We are playing on the PC (games for windows live) and using the Xbox 360 controller. We are playing on full graphics at 1080p with 60fps, we have studio quality microphones and we have a very low ping. We also have SSDs to negate the ridiculous load times that plague the consoles. We also pwn. Pretty much a perfect set up for an LP. We have not played DR2 before (I played case zero years ago), but are veterans from the first game. We have everything we need to make an awesome LP/playthrough, anyway. More to come soon. Enjoy. www.youtube.com My playlist for the series www.youtube.com Cosmic's Channel ------------------------ be among the first to like my new facebook page. www.facebook.com and subscribe for more www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Part_17_Foiling_The_Heist_TK_Mad
We take our wingmen through the zombie hordes as we do the next case. It consists mostly of running from casino to casino as well kill the guards and destroy the drills. We then smash up a van. Apparently TK was planning a heist. We need to stop that, even though there is a zombie apocalypse in progress. I dunno. CosmicContrarian and I play the campaign/story mode of Dead Rising 2. We are playing on the PC (games for windows live) and using the Xbox 360 controller. We are playing on full graphics at 1080p with 60fps, we have studio quality microphones and we have a very low ping. We also have SSDs to negate the ridiculous load times that plague the consoles. We also pwn. Pretty much a perfect set up for an LP. We have not played DR2 before (I played case zero years ago), but are veterans from the first game. We have everything we need to make an awesome LP/playthrough, anyway. More to come soon. Enjoy. www.youtube.com My playlist for the series www.youtube.com Cosmic's Channel ------------------------ be among the first to like my new facebook page. www.facebook.com and subscribe for more www.youtube.com
- published: 01 Sep 2012
- views: 71
- author: volound
Dishonored - TK's Let's Play - Ep. 12 - TK the Rapper
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 34:03
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
Assassinating tallboys and rapping. THE BEST 10 SECONDS OF MY DAY!
http://wn.com/Dishonored_TK's_Let's_Play_Ep_12_TK_the_Rapper
Assassinating tallboys and rapping. THE BEST 10 SECONDS OF MY DAY!
- published: 15 Dec 2012
- views: 5264
- author: TrendKiLLv01
Dishonored - TK's Let's Play - Ep. 13 - I Don't Always Murder Women...
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 37:43
- Updated: 23 Dec 2012
But when I do, I stab them multiple times in front of everyone, at their own party.
http://wn.com/Dishonored_TK's_Let's_Play_Ep_13_I_Don't_Always_Murder_Women
But when I do, I stab them multiple times in front of everyone, at their own party.
- published: 20 Dec 2012
- views: 3743
- author: TrendKiLLv01
photo: AP / Carolyn Kaster
20 Dec 2012
Obama held a White House news conference on Wednesday to announce that Vice President Joe Biden will lead an interagency effort to craft new gun policies. The group is expected to offer its proposals in January. “We know this is a complex issue that stirs deeply held passions and political divides,” Obama said. “But the fact that this problem is complex can no longer be an excuse for doing nothing.” ... WAKE-UP CALL ... ....(size: 6.1Kb)
photo: AP / Alfred de Montesquiou
21 Dec 2012
UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. Security Council on Thursday authorized military action to wrest northern Mali from the control of al-Qaida-linked extremists, but it demanded progress first on political reconciliation, elections and training African troops and police ... Instead, it set out benchmarks to be met before the start of offensive operations, starting with progress on a political roadmap to restore constitutional order ... U.N ... On Nov ... ....(size: 3.1Kb)
photo: Public Domain / Tm
21 Dec 2012
The UN Security Council on Thursday unanimously approved sending an African-led intervention force to help Mali’s army reconquer much of the country from Islamist militants. The 15-member council gave the force an initial one year mandate to use “all necessary measures” to help the Mali government take back the northern half of the country from “terrorist, extremist and armed groups.” ... Agence France-Presse ....(size: 1.9Kb)
photo: AP
22 Dec 2012
An Egyptian constitution drafted by Islamists is expected to be approved in a referendum on Saturday after the charter, which opponents say will create deeper turmoil, won approval in a first wave of voting a week ago. The opposition have already cried foul, saying a litany of abuses means last Saturday’s ballot, involving about half the electorate, should be re-run ... Polling stations open at 8 a.m. (0600 GMT) and close at 7 p.m....(size: 4.4Kb)
photo: AP / Ahn Young-joon
20 Dec 2012
SEOUL, South Korea — Park Geun-hye's election as South Korea's first female president could mean a new drive to start talks with bitter rival North Korea, though it's unclear how much further she will go than the hard-line incumbent, a member of her own conservative party ... On Thursday, Park mentioned the North Korean rocket launch during a nationally televised speech ... Ties between the Koreas plummeted during Lee's term ... ....(size: 4.5Kb)
The Columbus Dispatch
22 Dec 2012
Movie Blog. Tom Cruise stars as Jason Bourne...err, I mean James Bond...strike that, Jack Reacher, in an action movie with the same name. For those who don't know the title character, Jack Reacher is the protagonist in a series of books by British scribe Lee Child ... ... She rated This Is 40 two-and-one-half stars ... “He was found guilty of TK, and sentenced to TK years” in prison, the line says. “TK” is shorthand for facts yet to come ... ....(size: 8.2Kb)
noodls
21 Dec 2012
Date Flight No Departure Airport Departure Time (Local) Arrival Airport Arrival Time 21/12/2012 TK 1943 IST 11.50 BRU 14.25 21/12/2012 TK 1944 BRU 15.25 IST 19.45 21/12/2012 TK 1085 IST 12.40 TGD 13.25 21/12/2012 TK 2642 IST 06.55 EZS 08.40 21/12/2012 TK 1086 TGD 14.25 IST 17.05 21/12/2012 TK 2643 EZS 09.35 IST 11.30 21/12/2012 TK 2122 IST 07.00 ......(size: 8.6Kb)
noodls
21 Dec 2012
Flight Number Days Departure Arrival TK 669 Monday, ... Friday,Saturday Istanbul 17.45 Yaounde 23.50 TK 669 Tuesday,Thursday,. Saturday,Sunday Yaounde 00.50 Douala 01.45 TK 669 Tuesday,Thursday, ... To view the flight schedules, please visit www.thy.com, contact our call center at +90 212 444 0849 or visit any TK sales office ......(size: 3.0Kb)
Stockhouse
21 Dec 2012
VANCOUVER, Dec. 21, 2012 /CNW/ - Tinka Resources Limited (the "Company"), (TSXV. TK) (Frankfurt. TLD) (OTCPK ... All securities issued under the private placement are subject to a four-month hold period that expires on April 22, 2013. The net proceeds from the private placement will be used to advance exploration work at the Company's Colquipucro project and for general working capital purposes ... On behalf of the Board,. "Andrew Carter" ... SOURCE....(size: 2.6Kb)
STL Today
21 Dec 2012
Broadway Oyster Bar. • The Revivalists, Jan. 25. • Flow Tribe, Jan. 31. • The Main Squeeze, Feb. 1. • Stiff Necked Fools, Feb. 2. • Andy Frasco & the U.N., Feb. 8. • Dash Rip Rock headlining Mardi Gras, Feb. 9. broadwayoysterbar.com. Chaifetz Arena. • Doug E. Fresh and Tony Rock have been added to the March 9 Mike Epps show ... Feb ... • Bobby Womack, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Shirley Brown, Mel Waiters, Charles Wilson, TK Soul, Denise LaSalle, 8th Annual St....(size: 3.4Kb)
Digital Spy
21 Dec 2012
Warning. This article contains spoilers that some readers may prefer to avoid. Please click here if you wish to continue. Dead Space 3's Achievements have been leaked ahead of its March launch. Achievements will be awarded for completing the game, killing certain bosses, and collecting audio logs and alien artefacts ... The list of Achievements in full. ... Payback - Kill a Soldier by TK'ing a grenade or rocket back at them -15 points ... ....(size: 4.8Kb)
Seeking Alpha
21 Dec 2012
Let me start by emphatically stating that Teekay Tankers (TNK) is a speculative investment. It is not meant for income investors or others who cannot or do not want to risk principal ... Thus, even in the best of times, the dividend would change from quarter to quarter, which might make it unsuitable for income investors. Okay, enough with the caveat emptors ... (TK), the parent, and the "daughters" Teekay LNG Partners L.P ... ....(size: 6.5Kb)
Seeking Alpha
21 Dec 2012
Tsakos Energy Navigation Limited (TNP) provides international seaborne energy transportation services such as transportation of crude oil, petroleum products and liquefied natural gas ... About Tsakos ... Competitive Landscape. Other than Tsakos, other global companies involved in oil and gas transportation include Teekay Corporation (TK), StealthGas Inc ... (DHT) based in Channel Islands and TORM A/S (TRMD) based in Denmark ... (click to enlarge) ... ....(size: 6.3Kb)
Yahoo Daily News
21 Dec 2012
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Dec. 21, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Alexza Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (ALXA) announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved ADASUVE® (loxapine) Inhalation Powder 10 mg for the acute treatment of agitation associated with schizophrenia or bipolar I disorder in adults ... here www.adasuve.com ... Lesem MD, Tran-Johnson TK, Riesenberg RA, Feifel D, Allen MH, Fishman R, Spyker DA, Kehne JH and Cassella JV ... ....(size: 10.4Kb)
StreetInsider
21 Dec 2012
Tweet. Get Alerts ALXA Hot Sheet. Price. $5.79 -6.91%. Overall Analyst Rating.. BUY ( Up). MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Dec. 21, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Alexza Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq. ALXA) announced today that the U.S ... ADASUVE combines Alexza's proprietary Staccato® delivery system with the antipsychotic drug, loxapine ... Lesem MD, Tran-Johnson TK, Riesenberg RA, Feifel D, Allen MH, Fishman R, Spyker DA, Kehne JH and Cassella JV ... ....(size: 12.8Kb)
Mail Guardian South Africa
21 Dec 2012
Jub Jub and his then girlfriend Kelly Khumalo at the Protea Magistrate’s Court in Soweto. (Lauren Mulligan). Our Coverage. More Coverage ... Jub Jub's rise to fame started when he was a toddler ... (Muntu Vilakazi) ... While the visible change and audible noise of this structural change dramatised themselves in the economic space, township youths such as TK Zee, Mandoza and ProKid brought a thundering noise into cultural and performance spaces....(size: 16.7Kb)
noodls
20 Dec 2012
Lagos (LOS) Cargo flight frequency increased to 4 flights per week as of December 21, 2012 FLT NBR START END DAYS DEP ARR TK 6623 19.Ksm/Nov.2012 30.Mar.2013 1 IST 12.45 18.45 LOS TK 6623 19.Ksm/Nov.2012 30.Mar.2013 1 LOS 20.30 04.00 IST FLT NBR START END DAYS DEP ARR TK 6323 28.Ekm/Oct.2012 30.Mar.2013 4, 6 IST 13.45 19.40 LOS TK 6323 ......(size: 5.1Kb)
noodls
20 Dec 2012
(Source. The United States Army). MULTINATIONAL BASE TARIN KOT, Afghanistan (Dec. 19, 2012) -- More than 11 years into the war in Afghanistan, care packages continue to be a pleasant reminder that Soldiers serving at Multinational Base Tarin Kot, or MNB-TK, are remembered during the holiday season. More than 20 organizations have adopted coalition forces at MNB-TK, sending various items from festive stockings to live Christmas trees....(size: 2.5Kb)
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Look up .tk in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
TK, Tk or tk may refer to:
In music:
- TK (Peruvian rock band)
- TK Records, a record label started by Henry Stone
In television:
- Takeru "T.K." Takaishi, a character from Digimon anime
- TK, a character in Angel Beats!
In sciences:
- Telecine
- Thymidine kinase (TK), a protein
In other uses:
- Tk (framework), a GUI software toolkit
- Tokelau, ISO 3166-1 country code
- .tk, the country code top level domain (ccTLD) for Tokelau
- Turkmen language's ISO language code
- Team killing, the act of killing a player on the same team
- TK, the protagonist of Driver: Parallel Lines
- Traditional knowledge
- Bangladeshi taka
- To come (publishing)
- Turkish Airlines's IATA code
- Tehsil or Taluk, a part of districts in India
- Telekinesis
- ThyssenKrupp, a German industrial conglomerate
 |
This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. |
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This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TK
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
| Bing Crosby | |
|---|---|
 Crosby on June 15, 1942 |
|
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Harry Lillis Crosby |
| Born | (1903-05-03)May 3, 1903[1] Tacoma, Washington, US |
| Died | October 14, 1977(1977-10-14) (aged 74) Madrid, Spain |
| Genres | Traditional pop, jazz, vocal[2] |
| Occupations | Singer, actor |
| Instruments | Vocals |
| Years active | 1926–1977 |
| Labels | Brunswick, Decca, Reprise, RCA Victor, Verve, United Artists |
| Associated acts | Bob Hope, Dixie Lee, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, The Rhythm Boys, Rosemary Clooney, David Bowie, Louis Armstrong |
| Website | bingcrosby.com |
Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby (May 3, 1903 – October 14, 1977)[3] was an American singer and actor. Crosby's trademark bass-baritone voice made him one of the best-selling recording artistes of the 20th century, with over half a billion records in circulation.[4]
A multimedia star, from 1934 to 1954 Bing Crosby was a leader in record sales, radio ratings and motion picture grosses.[5] His early career coincided with technical recording innovations; this allowed him to develop a laid-back, intimate singing style that influenced many of the popular male singers who followed him, including Perry Como,[6] Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin. Yank magazine recognized Crosby as the person who had done the most for American G.I. morale during World War II and, during his peak years, around 1948, polls declared him the "most admired man alive," ahead of Jackie Robinson and Pope Pius XII.[7][8] Also in 1948, the Music Digest estimated that Crosby recordings filled more than half of the 80,000 weekly hours allocated to recorded radio music.[8]
Crosby exerted an important influence on the development of the postwar recording industry. He worked for NBC at the time and wanted to record his shows; however, most broadcast networks did not allow recording. This was mainly because of the quality of recording at the time. While in Europe performing during the war, Crosby had witnessed tape recording, on which The Crosby Research Foundation would come to have many patents. The company also developed equipment and recording techniques such as the Laugh Track which are still in use today.[9] In 1947, he invested $50,000 in the Ampex company, which built North America's first commercial reel-to-reel tape recorder. He left NBC to work for ABC because NBC was not interested in recording at the time. This proved beneficial because ABC accepted him and his new ideas.[10] Crosby then became the first performer to pre-record his radio shows and master his commercial recordings onto magnetic tape. He gave one of the first Ampex Model 200 recorders to his friend, musician Les Paul, which led directly to Paul's invention of multitrack recording. Along with Frank Sinatra, Crosby was one of the principal backers behind the famous United Western Recorders recording studio complex in Los Angeles.[11]
During the "Golden Age of Radio," performers often had to recreate their live shows a second time for the west coast time zone. Through the medium of recording, Crosby constructed his radio programs with the same directorial tools and craftsmanship (editing, retaking, rehearsal, time shifting) being used in motion picture production. This became the industry standard.
Crosby won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as Father Chuck O'Malley in the 1944 motion picture Going My Way, and was nominated for his reprise of the role in The Bells of St. Mary's the next year, becoming the first of four actors to be nominated twice for playing the same character. In 1963, Crosby received the first Grammy Global Achievement Award.[12] Crosby is one of the 22 people to have three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Early life[link]
Crosby was born in Tacoma, Washington, on May 3, 1903,[1] in a house his father built at 1112 North J Street.[13] In 1906, Crosby's family moved to Spokane, Washington.[14] In 1913, Crosby's father built a house at 508 E. Sharp Ave.[15] The house now sits on the campus of Bing's alma mater Gonzaga University and formerly housed the Alumni Association.
He was the fourth of seven children: brothers Larry (1895–1975), Everett (1896–1966), Ted (1900–1973), and Bob (1913–1993); and two sisters, Catherine (1904–1974) and Mary Rose (1906–1990). His parents were Harry Lincoln Crosby (1870–1950), a bookkeeper, and Catherine Helen (known as Kate) (née Harrigan; 1873–1964). Crosby's mother was a second generation Irish-American.[16] His father was of English descent; some of his ancestors had emigrated to what would become the U.S. in the 17th century, and included Patience Brewster, the daughter of the Pilgrim leader and Mayflower passenger William Brewster (c. 1567 – April 10, 1644).[17]
In 1910, six-year-old Harry Crosby was forever renamed. The Sunday edition of the Spokesman-Review published a feature called "The Bingville Bugle".[18][19] Written by humorist Newton Newkirk, The Bingville Bugle was a parody of a hillbilly newsletter filled with gossipy tidbits, minstrel quips, creative spelling, and mock ads. A neighbor, 15-year-old Valentine Hobart, shared Crosby's enthusiasm for "The Bugle" and noting Crosby's laugh, took a liking to him and called him "Bingo from Bingville". Eventually the last vowel was dropped and the nickname stuck.[20]
In 1917, Crosby took a summer job as property boy at Spokane's "Auditorium," where he witnessed some of the finest acts of the day, including Al Jolson, who held Crosby spellbound with his ad libbing and spoofs of Hawaiian songs. Crosby later described Jolson's delivery as "electric".[21]
Popular success[link]
Music[link]
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This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2011) |
In 1923, Bing Crosby was invited to join a new band composed of high school students much younger than himself. Al Rinker, Miles Rinker, James Heaton, Claire Pritchard and Robert Pritchard, along with drummer Bing Crosby, formed the Musicaladers, who performed at dances both for high school students and club-goers. However, the group disbanded after two years. .[22]
By 1925, Crosby had formed a vocal duo with partner Al Rinker, brother of singer Mildred Bailey. Mildred introduced Al and Bing to Paul Whiteman, who was at that time America's most famous bandleader. Hired for $150 a week, they made their debut on December 6, 1926 at the Tivoli Theatre (Chicago). Their first recording was "I've Got The Girl," with Don Clark's Orchestra, but the Columbia-issued record did them no vocal favors, as it was inadvertently recorded at a speed slower than it should have been, which increased the singers' pitch when played at 78 rpm. Throughout his career, Bing Crosby often credited Mildred Bailey for getting him his first important job in the entertainment business.
Even as the Crosby and Rinker duo was increasing in popularity, Whiteman added a third member to the group. The threesome, now including pianist and aspiring songwriter Harry Barris, were dubbed "The Rhythm Boys". They joined the Whiteman touring act, performing and recording with musicians Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, and Eddie Lang and Hoagy Carmichael, and appeared together in a Whiteman movie.
Crosby soon became the star attraction of the Rhythm Boys, and in 1928 had his first number one hit with the Whiteman orchestra, a jazz-influenced rendition of "Ol' Man River". However, Crosby's reported taste for alcohol and his growing dissatisfaction with Whiteman led to the Rhythm Boys quitting to join the Gus Arnheim Orchestra. During his time with Arnheim, the other two Rhythm Boys were increasingly pushed to the background as the emphasis was on Crosby. Harry Barris wrote several of Crosby's subsequent hits including "At Your Command," "I Surrender Dear", and "Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams". But the members of the band had a falling out and split, setting the stage for Crosby's solo career.[23]
On September 2, 1931, Crosby made his solo radio debut.[24] Before the end of the year, he signed with both Brunswick Records and CBS Radio. Doing a weekly 15-minute radio broadcast, Crosby quickly became a huge hit.[23] His songs "Out of Nowhere", "Just One More Chance", "At Your Command" and "I Found a Million Dollar Baby (in a Five and Ten Cent Store)" were all among the best selling songs of 1931.[23]
As the 1930s unfolded, Crosby became the leading singer in America. Ten of the top 50 songs for 1931 featured Crosby, either solo or with others. A so-called "Battle of the Baritones" with singing star Russ Columbo proved short-lived, replaced with the slogan "Bing Was King." Crosby played the lead in a series of sound era musical comedy short films for Mack Sennett, signed a long-term deal with Jack Kapp's new record company Decca, and starred in his first full-length feature, 1932's The Big Broadcast, the first of 55 films in which he received top billing. He would appear in 79 pictures.
Around this time Crosby co-starred on radio with The Carl Fenton Orchestra on a popular CBS radio show. By 1936, he'd replaced his former boss, Paul Whiteman, as the host of NBC's Kraft Music Hall, the weekly radio program where he remained for the next ten years. "Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)", which also showcased one of his then-trademark whistling interludes, became his theme song and signature tune.
Crosby's much-imitated style helped take popular singing beyond the kind of "belting" associated with boisterous performers like Al Jolson, who had been obliged to reach the back seats in New York theatres without the aid of the microphone. As Henry Pleasants noted in The Great American Popular Singers, something new had entered American music, a style that might be called "singing in American," with conversational ease. This new sound led to the popular epithet "crooner".
Crosby made numerous live appearances before American troops fighting in the European Theater. He also learned how to pronounce German from written scripts, and would read propaganda broadcasts intended for the German forces. The nickname "Der Bingle" for him was understood to have become current among Crosby's German listeners, and came to be used by his English-speaking fans. In a poll of U.S. troops at the close of World War II, Crosby topped the list as the person who had done the most for G.I. morale, ahead of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, General Dwight Eisenhower, and Bob Hope.
"White Christmas"[link]
The biggest hit song of Crosby's career was his recording of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas", which he first introduced on a Christmas Day radio broadcast in 1941 (of which no extant copy is known), and soon thereafter in his 1942 movie Holiday Inn. Crosby's recording hit the charts on October 3, 1942, and rose to No. 1 on October 31, where it stayed for 11 weeks. A holiday perennial, the song was repeatedly re-released by Decca, charting another 16 times. It topped the charts again in 1945, and for a third time in January 1947. The song remains the best-selling single of all time.[23] According to Guinness World Records, Crosby's recording of "White Christmas" has "sold over 100 million copies around the world, with at least 50 million sales as singles."[25] Crosby's recording was so popular that he was obliged to re-record it in 1947 using the same musicians and backup singers; the original 1942 master had become damaged due to its frequent use in pressing additional singles. Though the two versions are very similar, it is the 1947 recording which is most familiar today. Crosby was dismissive of his role in the song's success, saying later that "a jackdaw with a cleft palate could have sung it successfully."
Motion pictures[link]
With 1,077,900,000 movie tickets sold, Crosby is by that measure the third most popular actor of all time, behind Clark Gable and John Wayne.[26] The Quigley Publishing Company's International Motion Picture Almanac lists Crosby in a tie for second on the "All Time Number One Stars List" with Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks, and Burt Reynolds.[27] Crosby's most popular film, White Christmas, grossed $30 million in 1954 ($260 million in current value).[26] Crosby won an Academy Award for Best Actor for Going My Way in 1944, and was nominated for the 1945 sequel, The Bells of Saint Mary's. He received critical acclaim for his performance as an alcoholic entertainer in The Country Girl, and received his third Academy Award nomination.
Crosby starred with Bob Hope in seven Road to musical comedies between 1940 and 1962, cementing the two entertainers as an on-and-off duo, despite never officially declaring themselves a "team" in the sense that Laurel and Hardy or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were teams. The series consists of Road to Singapore (1940), Road to Zanzibar (1941), Road to Morocco (1942), Road to Utopia (1946), Road to Rio (1947), Road to Bali (1952), and The Road to Hong Kong (1962), and Crosby and Hope were planning another entry called The Road to the Fountain of Youth in 1977, which was dropped upon Crosby's death. Appearing solo, Crosby and Hope frequently made note of the other during their various appearances, typically in a comically insulting fashion, and they appeared together countless times on stage, radio, and television over the decades as well as cameos in several additional films.
By the late 1950s, Crosby's singing career had evolved into that of an avuncular elder statesman, and his albums Bing Sings Whilst Bregman Swings and Bing With A Beat sold reasonably well,[23] even in the rock 'n roll era. In 1960, Crosby starred in High Time, a collegiate comedy with Fabian and Tuesday Weld that foretold the emerging gap between older Crosby fans and a new generation of films and music.[23]
Warner Bros. cartoons occasionally caricatured Crosby, alternately as an animal and as himself. His recognizable appearance popped up in I've Got to Sing a Torch Song, Hollywood Steps Out and What's Up, Doc?, while bird versions appeared in The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos, Swooner Crooner and Curtain Razor. Bingo Crosbyana had an insect version of him.
Television[link]
The Fireside Theater (1950) was Crosby's first television production. The series of 26-minute shows was filmed at Hal Roach Studios rather than performed live on the air. The "telefilms" were syndicated to individual television stations.
Crosby was a frequent guest on the musical variety shows of the 1950s and 1960s. He was especially closely associated with ABC's variety show The Hollywood Palace. He was the show's first and most frequent guest host, and appeared annually on its Christmas edition with his wife Kathryn and his younger children. In the early 1970s he made two famous late appearances on the Flip Wilson Show, singing duets with the comedian. Crosby's last TV appearance was a Christmas special filmed in London in September 1977 and aired just weeks after his death. It was on this special that Crosby recorded a duet of "The Little Drummer Boy" and "Peace on Earth" with the flamboyant rock star David Bowie. It was rush-released as a single 45-rpm record, and has since become a staple of holiday radio, and the final popular hit of Crosby's career. At the end of the century, TV Guide listed the Crosby-Bowie duet as one of the 25 most memorable musical moments of 20th-century television.
Bing Crosby Productions, affiliated with Desilu Studios and later CBS Television Studios, produced a number of television series, including Crosby's own unsuccessful ABC sitcom The Bing Crosby Show in the 1964–1965 season (with co-stars Beverly Garland and Frank McHugh). The company produced two ABC medical dramas, Ben Casey (1961–1966) and Breaking Point (1963–1964), the popular Hogan's Heroes (1965–1971) military comedy on CBS, as well as the lesser-known show Slattery's People (1964–1965).
Singing style and vocal characteristics[link]
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Crosby was one of the first singers to exploit the intimacy of the microphone, rather than using the deep, loud "vaudeville style" associated with Al Jolson and others. Crosby's love and appreciation of jazz music helped bring the genre to a wider mainstream audience. Within the framework of the novelty singing style of The Rhythm Boys, Crosby bent notes and added off-tune phrasing, an approach that was firmly rooted in jazz. He had already been introduced to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith prior to his first appearance on record. Crosby and Armstrong would remain professionally friendly for decades, notably in the 1956 film High Society, where they sang the duet "Now You Has Jazz."
During the early portion of his solo career (about 1931–1934), Crosby's emotional, often pleading style of crooning was extremely popular. But Jack Kapp (manager of Brunswick and later Decca) talked Crosby into dropping many of his jazzier mannerisms, in favor of a straight-ahead clear vocal style.
Crosby also elaborated on a further idea of Al Jolson's: phrasing, or the art of making a song's lyric ring true. His success in doing so was influential. "I used to tell Sinatra over and over," said Tommy Dorsey, "there's only one singer you ought to listen to and his name is Crosby. All that matters to him is the words, and that's the only thing that ought to for you, too."
Vocal critic Henry Pleasants wrote:
[While] the octave B flat to B flat in Bing's voice at that time [1930s] is, to my ears, one of the loveliest I have heard in forty-five years of listening to baritones, both classical and popular, it dropped conspicuously in later years. From the mid-1950s, Bing was more comfortable in a bass range while maintaining a baritone quality, with the best octave being G to G, or even F to F. In a recording he made of 'Dardanella' with Louis Armstrong in 1960, he attacks lightly and easily on a low E flat. This is lower than most opera basses care to venture, and they tend to sound as if they were in the cellar when they get there.[28]
Career statistics[link]
Crosby's was among the most popular and successful musical acts of the 20th century. Although Billboard Magazine operated under different methodologies for the bulk of Crosby's career, his chart numbers remain astonishing: 383 chart singles, including 41 No. 1 hits. Crosby had separate charting singles in every calendar year between 1931 and 1954; the annual re-release of "White Christmas" extended that streak to 1957. He had 24 separate popular singles in 1939 alone. Billboard's statistician Joel Whitburn determined Crosby to be America's most successful recording act of the 1930s, and again in the 1940s.
For 15 years (1934, 1937, 1940, 1943–1954), Crosby was among the top 10 in box office drawing power, and for five of those years (1944–1948) he was tops in the world.[23] He sang four Academy Award-winning songs – "Sweet Leilani" (1937), "White Christmas" (1942), "Swinging on a Star" (1944), "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" (1951) – and won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Going My Way (1944).
He collected 23 gold and platinum records, according to the book Million Selling Records. The Recording Industry Association of America did not institute its gold record certification program until 1958, by which point Crosby's record sales were barely a blip; prior to that point, gold records are awarded by an artist's own record company. Universal Music, current owner of Crosby's Decca catalog, has never requested RIAA certification for any of his hit singles.
Although often overlooked in many Crosby biographies, Bing charted an impressive 23 Billboard hits from 47 recorded songs with the immensely popular Andrews Sisters, whose Decca record sales were second only to Bing's throughout the 1940s. Patty, Maxene, and LaVerne were his most frequent collaborators on disc from 1939–1952, a partnership which produced four million-selling singles: "Pistol Packin' Mama," "Jingle Bells," "Don't Fence Me In," and "South America, Take it Away." They made one film appearance together in "Road to Rio" singing "You Don't Have to Know the Language," and they sang together countless times on radio shows throughout the 1940s and 1950s (appearing as guests on each other's shows quite often, as well as on many shows for the Armed Forces Radio Service during World War Two and beyond. The quartet's Top-10 Billboard hits from 1943–1945 (including "The Vict'ry Polka," "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Town of Berlin (When the Yanks Go Marching In)," and "Is You Is or Is You Ain't (Ma' Baby?)") helped provide the musical soundtrack for America's greatest generation during the dark war years.[29]
In 1962, Crosby was given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He has been inducted into the halls of fame for both radio and popular music. In 2007 Crosby was inducted into the Hit Parade Hall of Fame, and in 2008 into the Western Music Hall of Fame.[30]
Entrepreneurship[link]
Mass media[link]
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This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2007) |
Crosby's radio career took a significant turn in 1945, when he clashed with NBC over his insistence that he be allowed to pre-record his radio shows. (The live production of radio shows was also reinforced by the musicians' union and ASCAP, which wanted to ensure continued work for their members.) In On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, historian John Dunning wrote about German engineers having developed a tape recorder with a near-professional broadcast quality standard:
[Crosby saw] an enormous advantage in prerecording his radio shows. The scheduling could now be done at the star's convenience. He could do four shows a week, if he chose, and then take a month off. But the networks and sponsors were adamantly opposed. The public wouldn't stand for 'canned' radio, the networks argued. There was something magic for listeners in the fact that what they were hearing was being performed, and heard everywhere, at that precise instant. Some of the best moments in comedy came when a line was blown and the star had to rely on wit to rescue a bad situation. Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Phil Harris, and, yes, Crosby were masters at this, and the networks weren't about to give it up easily.
Crosby's insistence eventually factored into the further development of magnetic tape sound recording and the radio industry's widespread adoption of it.[31][32][33] He used his clout, both professional and financial, to innovate new methods of reproducing audio of his performances. But NBC (and competitor CBS) were also insistent, refusing to air prerecorded radio programs. Crosby walked away from the network and stayed off the air for seven months, creating a legal battle with Kraft, his sponsor, that was settled out of court. Crosby returned to the air for the last 13 weeks of the 1945–1946 season.
The Mutual network, on the other hand, had pre-recorded some of its programs as early as the 1938 run of The Shadow with Orson Welles. And the new ABC network, which had been formed out of the sale of the old NBC Blue network in 1943 following a federal anti-trust action, was willing to join Mutual in breaking the tradition. ABC offered Crosby $30,000 per week to produce a recorded show every Wednesday that would be sponsored by Philco. He would also get an additional $40,000 from 400 independent stations for the rights to broadcast the 30-minute show, which was sent to them every Monday on three 16-inch lacquer/aluminum discs that played ten minutes per side at 33⅓ rpm.
Crosby wanted to change to recorded production for several reasons. The legend that has been most often told is that it would give him more time for his golf game. And he did record his first Philco program in August 1947 so he could enter the Jasper National Park Invitational Golf Tournament in September, just when the new radio season was to start. But golf was not the most important reason.
Though Crosby did want more time to tend his other business and leisure activities, he also sought better quality through recording, including being able to eliminate mistakes and control the timing of his show performances. Because his own Bing Crosby Enterprises produced the show, he could purchase the latest and best sound equipment and arrange the microphones his way; the logistics of mic placement had long been a hotly debated issue in every recording studio since the beginning of the electrical era. No longer would he have to wear the hated toupee on his head previously required by CBS and NBC for his live audience shows (he preferred a hat). He could also record short promotions for his latest investment, the world's first frozen orange juice, sold under the brand name Minute Maid. This investment allowed Crosby to make more money by finding a loophole whereby the IRS couldn't tax him at a 77% rate.[34]
The transcription method posed problems, however. The acetate surface coating of the aluminum discs was little better than the wax that Edison had used at the turn of the 19th to 20th century, with the same limited dynamic range and frequency response.
But Murdo MacKenzie of Bing Crosby Enterprises had seen a demonstration of the German Magnetophon in June 1947—the same device that Jack Mullin had brought back from Radio Frankfurt, along with 50 reels of tape, at the end of the war. It was one of the magnetic tape recorders that BASF and AEG had built in Germany starting in 1935. The 6.5mm ferric-oxide-coated tape could record 20 minutes per reel of high-quality sound. Alexander M. Poniatoff ordered his Ampex company, which he'd founded in 1944, to manufacture an improved version of the Magnetophone.
Crosby hired Mullin to start recording his Philco Radio Time show on his German-made machine in August 1947, using the same 50 reels of I.G. Farben magnetic tape that Mullin had found at a radio station at Bad Nauheim near Frankfurt while working for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. The crucial advantage was editing. As Crosby wrote in his autobiography:
By using tape, I could do a thirty-five or forty-minute show, then edit it down to the twenty-six or twenty-seven minutes the program ran. In that way, we could take out jokes, gags, or situations that didn't play well and finish with only the prime meat of the show; the solid stuff that played big. We could also take out the songs that didn't sound good. It gave us a chance to first try a recording of the songs in the afternoon without an audience, then another one in front of a studio audience. We'd dub the one that came off best into the final transcription. It gave us a chance to ad lib as much as we wanted, knowing that excess ad libbing could be sliced from the final product. If I made a mistake in singing a song or in the script, I could have some fun with it, then retain any of the fun that sounded amusing.
Mullin's 1976 memoir of these early days of experimental recording agrees with Crosby's account:
In the evening, Crosby did the whole show before an audience. If he muffed a song then, the audience loved it – thought it was very funny – but we would have to take out the show version and put in one of the rehearsal takes. Sometimes, if Crosby was having fun with a song and not really working at it, we had to make it up out of two or three parts. This ad lib way of working is commonplace in the recording studios today, but it was all new to us.
Crosby invested US$50,000 in Ampex with an eye towards producing more machines. In 1948, the second season of Philco shows was taped with the new Ampex Model 200 tape recorder using the new Scotch 111 tape from the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M) company. Mullin explained how one new broadcasting technique was invented on the Crosby show with these machines:
One time Bob Burns, the hillbilly comic, was on the show, and he threw in a few of his folksy farm stories, which of course were not in Bill Morrow's script. Today they wouldn't seem very off-color, but things were different on radio then. They got enormous laughs, which just went on and on. We couldn't use the jokes, but Bill asked us to save the laughs. A couple of weeks later he had a show that wasn't very funny, and he insisted that we put in the salvaged laughs. Thus the laugh-track was born.
Crosby had launched the tape recorder revolution in America. In his 1950 film Mr. Music, Bing Crosby is seen singing into one of the new Ampex tape recorders that reproduced his voice better than anything else. Also quick to adopt tape recording was his friend Bob Hope.
Mullin continued to work for Crosby to develop a videotape recorder (VTR). Television production was mostly live television in its early years, but Crosby wanted the same ability to record that he had achieved in radio. 1950's The Fireside Theater, sponsored by Procter and Gamble, was his first television production. Mullin had not yet succeeded with video tape, so Crosby filmed the series of 26-minute shows at the Hal Roach Studios, and the "telefilms" were syndicated to individual television stations.
Crosby did not remain a television producer, but continued to finance the development of videotape. Bing Crosby Enterprises (BCE), gave the world's first demonstration of videotape recording in Los Angeles on November 11, 1951. Developed by John T. Mullin and Wayne R. Johnson since 1950, the device aired what were described as "blurred and indistinct" images, using a modified Ampex 200 tape recorder and standard quarter-inch (6.3 mm) audio tape moving at 360 inches (9.1 m) per second.[35]
TV stations[link]
A Bing Crosby-led group purchased KCOP-TV station in 1954.[36] NAFI Corporation and Bing Crosby purchase together the television station, KPTV, for $4 million on September 1, 1959.[37] In 1960, NAFI purchased KCOP from Crosby's group.[36]
Thoroughbred horse racing[link]
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Crosby was a fan of thoroughbred horse racing and bought his first racehorse in 1935. In 1937, he became a founding partner of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club and a member of its Board of Directors. Operating from the Del Mar Racetrack at Del Mar, California, the group included millionaire businessman Charles S. Howard, who owned a successful racing stable that included Seabiscuit. His son, Lindsay Howard, became one of Crosby's closest friends; Crosby named his son Lindsay after him, and would purchase his 40-room Hillsborough estate from Lindsay in 1965.
Crosby and Lindsay Howard formed Binglin Stable to race and breed thoroughbred horses at a ranch in Moorpark in Ventura County, California. They also established the Binglin stock farm in Argentina, where they raced horses at Hipódromo de Palermo in Palermo, Buenos Aires. A number of Argentine-bred horses were purchased and shipped to race in the United States. On August 12, 1938, the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club hosted a $25,000 winner-take-all match race won by Charles S. Howard's Seabiscuit over Binglin's horse Ligaroti. In 1943, Binglin's horse Don Bingo won the Suburban Handicap at Belmont Park in Elmont, New York.
The Binglin Stable partnership came to an end in 1953 as a result of a liquidation of assets by Crosby, who needed to raise enough funds to pay the hefty federal and state inheritance taxes on his deceased wife's estate.[38] The Bing Crosby Breeders' Cup Handicap at Del Mar Racetrack is named in his honor.
Crosby was also a co-owner of the British colt Meadow Court, with jockey Johnny Longden's friend Max Bell. Meadow Court won the 1965 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, and the Irish Derby. In the Irish Derby's winner's circle at the Curragh, Crosby sang "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling."
Though Crosby's stables had some success, he often joked about his horseracing failures as part of his radio appearances. "Crosby's horse finally came in" became a running gag.
Crosby the sportsman[link]
Crosby had an interest in sports. In the 1930s, his friend and former college classmate, Gonzaga head coach Mike Pecarovich appointed Crosby as an assistant football coach.[39] From 1946 until the end of his life, he was part-owner of baseball's Pittsburgh Pirates. Although he was passionate about his team, he was too nervous to watch the deciding Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, choosing to go to Paris with Kathryn and listen to the game on the radio. Crosby had the NBC telecast of the game recorded on kinescope. The game was one of the most famous in baseball history, capped off by Bill Mazeroski's walk-off home run. He apparently viewed the complete film just once, and then stored it in his wine cellar, where it remained undisturbed until it was discovered in December 2009.[40] The restored broadcast was shown on MLB Network in December 2010.
Crosby was also an avid golfer, and in 1978, he and Bob Hope were voted the Bob Jones Award, the highest honor given by the United States Golf Association in recognition of distinguished sportsmanship. He is a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame. In 1937, Bing Crosby hosted the first National Pro-Am Golf Championship, the 'Crosby Clambake' as it was popularly known, at Rancho Santa Fe Golf Club in Rancho Santa Fe, California, the event's location prior to World War II. Sam Snead won the first tournament, in which the first place check was for $500. After the war, the event resumed play in 1947 on golf courses in Pebble Beach, where it has been played ever since. Now the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am it has been a leading event in the world of professional golf.
Crosby first took up golf at 12 as a caddy, dropped it, and started again in 1930 with some fellow cast members in Hollywood during the filming of The King of Jazz. Crosby was accomplished at the sport, with a two handicap. He competed in both the British and U.S. Amateur championships, was a five-time club champion at Lakeside Golf Club in Hollywood, and once made a hole-in-one on the 16th at Cypress Point.
Personal life[link]
Crosby was married twice, first to actress/nightclub singer Dixie Lee from 1930 until her death from ovarian cancer in 1952. They had four sons: Gary, twins Dennis and Phillip, and Lindsay. The 1947 film Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman is indirectly based on her life. After Dixie's death, Crosby had relationships with actresses Inger Stevens and Grace Kelly before marrying the actress Kathryn Grant in 1957. They had three children: Harry (who played Bill in Friday the 13th), Mary (best known for portraying Kristin Shepard, the woman who shot J.R. Ewing on TV's Dallas), and Nathaniel.
Kathryn converted to Catholicism in order to marry the singer. Crosby was also a registered Republican, and actively campaigned for Wendell Willkie in 1940 against President Roosevelt, arguing that no man should serve more than two terms in the White House. After Willkie lost, Crosby decreed that he would never again make any open political contributions.
Crosby reportedly had an alcohol problem in his youth, and may have been dismissed from Paul Whiteman's orchestra because of it, but he later got a handle on his drinking. Village Voice jazz critic and Crosby biographer Gary Giddins says that Louis Armstrong's influence on Crosby "extended to his love of marijuana." Crosby smoked it during his early career when it was still legal, and "surprised interviewers" in the 1960s and 1970s by advocating its decriminalization. According to Giddins, Crosby told his son Gary to stay away from alcohol ("It killed your mother"[41]) and suggested he smoke marijuana instead.[41] Gary said, "There were other times when marijuana was mentioned and he'd get a smile on his face."[41] Gary thought his father's marijuana smoking had influenced his easygoing style in his films. Crosby finally quit smoking his pipe following lung surgery in 1974.
After Crosby's death, his eldest son, Gary, wrote a highly critical memoir, Going My Own Way, depicting his father as cold, remote, and both physically and psychologically abusive. Two of Crosby's other sons, Lindsay and Dennis, sided with Gary's claim and stated Crosby abused them as well.[42] Dennis also stated that Crosby would abuse Gary the most often.[42]
Gary Crosby wrote:
We had to keep a close watch on our actions... When one of us left a sneaker or pair of underpants lying around, he had to tie the offending object on a string and wear it around his neck until he went off to bed that night. Dad called it "the Crosby lavalier." At the time the humor of the name escaped me... "Satchel Ass" or "Bucket Butt" or "My Fat-assed Kid." That's how he introduced me to his cronies when he dragged me along to the studio or racetrack... By the time I was ten or eleven he had stepped up his campaign by adding lickings to the regimen. Each Tuesday afternoon he weighed me in, and if the scale read more than it should have, he ordered me into his office and had me drop my trousers... I dropped my pants, pulled down my undershorts and bent over. Then he went at it with the belt dotted with metal studs he kept reserved for the occasion. Quite dispassionately, without the least display of emotion or loss of self-control, he whacked away until he drew the first drop of blood, and then he stopped. It normally took between twelve and fifteen strokes. As they came down I counted them off one by one and hoped I would bleed early... When I saw Going My Way I was as moved as they were by the character he played. Father O'Malley handled that gang of young hooligans in his parish with such kindness and wisdom that I thought he was wonderful too. Instead of coming down hard on the kids and withdrawing his affection, he forgave them their misdeeds, took them to the ball game and picture show, taught them how to sing. By the last reel, the sheer persistence of his goodness had transformed even the worst of them into solid citizens. Then the lights came on and the movie was over. All the way back to the house I thought about the difference between the person up there on the screen and the one I knew at home.[43]
It was revealed that Crosby's will had established a blind trust, with none of the sons receiving an inheritance until they reached the age of 65.[44]
However, younger son Phillip vociferously disputed his brother Gary's claims about their father. Around the time Gary made his claim, Phillip stated to the press that "Gary is a whining...crybaby, walking around with a 2-by-4 and just daring people to nudge it off."[45] However, Phillip did not deny that Crosby believed in corporal punishment.[45] In an interview with People, Phillip stated that "we never got an extra whack or a cuff we didn't deserve."[45] During a later interview conducted in 1999 by the Globe, Phillip said:
My dad was not the monster my lying brother said he was; he was strict, but my father never beat us black and blue, and my brother Gary was a vicious, no-good liar for saying so. I have nothing but fond memories of Dad, going to studios with him, family vacations at our cabin in Idaho, boating and fishing with him. To my dying day, I'll hate Gary for dragging Dad's name through the mud. He wrote Going My Own Way out of greed. He wanted to make money and knew that humiliating our father and blackening his name was the only way he could do it. He knew it would generate a lot of publicity. That was the only way he could get his ugly, no-talent face on television and in the newspapers. My dad was my hero. I loved him very much. He loved all of us too, including Gary. He was a great father.[46]
Gary Crosby died in 1995 at the age of 62, and 69-year-old Phillip Crosby died in 2004.[47]
Lindsay and Dennis Crosby each committed suicide, shooting themselves with shotguns in 1989 and 1991, respectively. Nathaniel Crosby, Crosby's youngest son from his second marriage, was a high-level golfer who won the U.S. Amateur at age 19 in 1981, at the time the youngest-ever winner of that event (a record later broken by Tiger Woods). Harry Crosby is an investment banker who occasionally makes singing appearances.
Widow Kathryn Crosby dabbled in local theater productions intermittently, and appeared in television tributes to her late husband. Denise Crosby, Dennis Crosby's daughter, is also an actress and is known for her role as Tasha Yar on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and for the recurring role of the Romulan Sela (daughter of Tasha Yar) after her withdrawal from the series as a regular cast member. She also appeared in the film adaptation of Stephen King's novel Pet Sematary. In 2006, Crosby's niece, Carolyn Schneider, published the laudatory book "Me and Uncle Bing."
Failing health and death[link]
Following his recovery from a life-threatening fungal infection of his right lung in 1974, Crosby emerged from semi-retirement to start a new spate of albums and concerts. In March 1977, after videotaping a concert for CBS to commemorate his 50th anniversary in show business and with Bob Hope looking on, Crosby backed off the stage and fell into an orchestra pit, rupturing a disc in his back and requiring a month in the hospital. His first performance after the accident was his last American concert, on August 16, 1977; when the power went out, he continued singing without amplification. In September, Crosby, his family, and singer Rosemary Clooney began a concert tour of England that included two weeks at the London Palladium. While in England, Crosby recorded his final album, Seasons, and his final TV Christmas special with guest David Bowie (which aired several months after Crosby's death). His last concert was in The Brighton Centre four days before his death, with British entertainer Dame Gracie Fields in attendance. Although it has been reported that Crosby's last photograph was taken with Fields[citation needed], he was photographed playing golf on the day he died.[48]
At the conclusion of his work in England, Crosby flew alone to Spain to hunt and play golf. Shortly after 6 pm on October 14, Crosby collapsed and died of a massive heart attack on the green after a round of 18 holes of golf near Madrid where he and his Spanish golfing partner had just defeated their opponents. It is widely written that his last words were "That was a great game of golf, fellas."[49] In Bob Hope's Confessions of a Hooker: My Lifelong Love Affair With Golf, the comedian recounts hearing that Crosby had been advised by a physician in England to play only nine holes of golf because of his heart condition.
Legacy[link]
He is a member of the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in the radio division.[50]
The family launched an official website[51] on October 14, 2007, the 30th anniversary of Crosby's death.
In his 1990 autobiography Don't Shoot, It's Only Me! Bob Hope wrote, "Dear old Bing. As we called him, the Economy-sized Sinatra. And what a voice. God I miss that voice. I can't even turn on the radio around Christmas time without crying anymore."[52]
Calypso musician Roaring Lion wrote a tribute song in 1939 entitled "Bing Crosby", in which he wrote: "Bing has a way of singing with his very heart and soul / Which captivates the world / His millions of listeners never fail to rejoice / At his golden voice..."[53]
Compositions[link]
Crosby co-wrote lyrics to 15 songs. His composition "At Your Command" was no.1 for three weeks on the U.S. pop singles chart beginning on August 8, 1931. "I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You" was his most successful composition, recorded by Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, and Mildred Bailey, among others. Songs co-written by Crosby include:
- "That's Grandma" (1927), with Harry Barris and James Cavanaugh
- "From Monday On" (1928), with Harry Barris and recorded with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra featuring Bix Beiderbecke on cornet, no. 14 on US pop singles charts
- "What Price Lyrics?" (1928), with Harry Barris and Matty Malneck
- "At Your Command" (1931), with Harry Barris and Harry Tobias, US, no. 1 (3 weeks)
- "Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)" (1931), with Roy Turk and Fred Ahlert, US, no. 4; US, 1940 re-recording, no. 27
- "I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You" (1932), with Victor Young and Ned Washington, US, no. 5
- "My Woman" (1932), with Irving Wallman and Max Wartell
- "Love Me Tonight" (1932), with Victor Young and Ned Washington, US, no. 4
- "Waltzing in a Dream" (1932), with Victor Young and Ned Washington, US, no.6
- "I Would If I Could But I Can't" (1933), with Mitchell Parish and Alan Grey
- "Where the Turf Meets the Surf" (1941)
- "Tenderfoot" (1953)
- "Domenica" (1961)
- "That's What Life is All About" (1975), with Ken Barnes, Peter Dacre, and Les Reed, US, AC chart, no. 35; UK, no. 41
- "Sail Away to Norway" (1977)
Filmography[link]
Main article: Bing Crosby filmography
Discography[link]
Main article: Bing Crosby discography
Radio[link]
- The Radio Singers (1931, CBS), sponsored by Warner Brothers, 6 nights a week, 15 minutes.
- The Cremo Singer (1931–1932, CBS), 6 nights a week, 15 minutes.
- Unsponsored (1932, CBS), initially 3 nights a week, then twice a week, 15 minutes.
- Chesterfield's Music that Satisfies (1933, CBS), broadcast two nights, 15 minutes.
- Bing Crosby Entertains for Woodbury Soap (1933–1935, CBS), weekly, 30 minutes.
- Kraft Music Hall (1935–1946, NBC), Thursday nights, 60 minutes until January 1943, then 30 minutes.
- Armed Forces Radio (1941–1945; World War II).
- Philco Radio Time (1946–1949, ABC), 30 minutes weekly.
- The Bing Crosby Chesterfield Show (1949–1952, CBS), 30 minutes weekly.
- The Minute Maid Show (1949–1950, CBS), 15 minutes each weekday morning; Bing as disc jockey.
- The General Electric Show (1952–1954, CBS), 30 minutes weekly.
- The Bing Crosby Show (1954–1956, CBS), 15 minutes, 5 nights a week.
- A Christmas Sing with Bing (1955–1962, CBS, VOA and AFRS), 1 hour each year, sponsored by the Insurance Company of North America.
- The Ford Road Show (1957–1958, CBS), 5 minutes, 5 days a week.
- The Bing Crosby – Rosemary Clooney Show (1958–1962, CBS), 20 minutes, 5 mornings a week, with Rosemary Clooney.
RIAA certification[link]
| Album | RIAA[54] |
|---|---|
| Merry Christmas | Gold |
| Bing sings | 2x platinum |
| White Christmas | 4x platinum |
References[link]
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- ^ Music Genre: Vocal music.Allmusic. Retrieved October 23, 2008.
- ^ Obituary Variety, October 19, 1977.
- ^ "Bing Crosby Billboard Biography". Billboard. http://www.billboard.com/artist/bing-crosby/3574#/artist/bing-crosby/bio/3574. Retrieved October 28, 2009.
- ^ Giddins, 2001, p. 8.
- ^ Gilliland, John. Pop Chronicles the 40s: The Lively Story of Pop Music in the 40s. ISBN 978-1-55935-147-8. OCLC 31611854. , cassette 1, side B.
- ^ Giddins, 2001, p. 6.
- ^ a b Hoffman, Dr. Frank. "Crooner". http://www.jeffosretromusic.com/bing.html. Retrieved December 29, 2006.
- ^ Sterling, C. H., & Kittross, J. M. (1990). Stay tuned: A concise history of American broadcasting (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
- ^ Sterling, C. H., & Kittross, J. M. (1990). Stay tuned: A concise history of american broadcasting (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
- ^ Cogan, Jim; Clark, William, Temples of sound : inside the great recording studios, San Francisco : Chronicle Books, 2003. ISBN 0-8118-3394-1
- ^ "Lifetime Achievement Award. ''Past Recipients''". Grammy.com. February 8, 2009. http://www.grammy.com/Recording_Academy/Awards/Lifetime_Awards/. Retrieved February 10, 2010.
- ^ Bing Crosby had no birth certificate and his birth date was unconfirmed until his childhood Roman Catholic church released his baptismal record.
- ^ Blecha, Peter (August 29, 2005). "the Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History". HistoryLink.org. http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=7445}. Retrieved January 4, 2011.
- ^ Gonzaga History 1980–1989 (September 17, 1986). "Gonzaga History 1980–1989 – Gonzaga University". Gonzaga.edu. http://www.gonzaga.edu/Academics/Libraries/Foley-Library/Departments/Special-Collections/exhibitions/GonzagaHistory1980.asp. Retrieved January 4, 2011.
- ^ Giddins, Gary (2001). Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams.
- ^ Giddins, 2001, p. 24.
- ^ Newkirk, Newton (March 14, 1909). "The Bingville Bugle". Spokesman Review. http://www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/history/media/bingville.pdf. Retrieved September 25, 2010.
- ^ Newkirk, Newton (July 19, 1914). "The Bingville Bugle". Spokesman Review. http://leonardodesa.interdinamica.net/comics/lds/bing/bingville.asp. Retrieved September 25, 2010.
- ^ Gary Giddins (October 8, 2002). Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams – The Early Years, 1903 – 1940, Volume I. Back Bay Books. http://books.google.com/books?id=Oa2_zcwucAgC&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=bing+crosby+bingo+bingville+bugle&source=bl&ots=8DHK9U9Lfl&sig=BLFVQNnhQflUL769bVqYXepaWY8&hl=en&ei=JVqeTI-XM4H68Aa-2cAl&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CCcQ6AEwBDgK#v=onepage&q=bing%20crosby%20bingo%20bingville%20bugle&f=false.
- ^ Gilliland, John. Pop Chronicles the 40s: The Lively Story of Pop Music in the 40s. ISBN 978-1-55935-147-8. OCLC 31611854. , cassette 3, side B.
- ^ Giddins, 2001, p. 92-97.
- ^ a b c d e f g Bing Crosby at Allmusic
- ^ "Bing Crosby, Singer". Radio Hall of Fame. http://www.radiohof.org/musicvariety/bingcrosby.html. Retrieved September 2, 2010.
- ^ Guinness Book of Records 2007. Guinness. August 1, 2006. ISBN 978-1-904994-12-1.
- ^ a b "Crosby Movies". Waynesthisandthat.com. http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/crosbymovies.html. Retrieved February 10, 2010.
- ^ "Top Ten Money Making Stars of the past 79 years". Quigley Publishing. http://www.quigleypublishing.com/MPalmanac/Top10/Top10_lists.html. Retrieved August 17, 2011.
- ^ Pleasants, H. (1985). The Great American Popular Singers. Simon and Schuster.
- ^ Sforza, John: "Swing It! The Andrews Sisters Story;" University Press of Kentucky, 2000; 289 pages.
- ^ "Johnny Bond – WMA Hall of Fame". Westernmusic.com. http://www.westernmusic.com/performers/hof-crosby.html. Retrieved February 10, 2010.
- ^ Hammar, Peter. Jack Mullin: The man and his machines. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 37 (6): 490–496, 498, 500, 502, 504, 506, 508, 510, 512; June 1989.
- ^ An afternoon with Jack Mullin. NTSC VHS tape, 1989 AES.
- ^ History of Magnetic tape, section: "Enter Bing Crosby" (WayBack Machine)
- ^ "CORPORATIONS: Minute Maid's Man". Time. October 18, 1948. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,799353,00.html. Retrieved August 17, 2011.
- ^ "Tape Recording Used by Filmless 'Camera'," New York Times, November 12, 1951, p. 21. Eric D. Daniel, C. Denis Mee, and Mark H. Clark (eds.), Magnetic Recording: The First 100 Years, IEEE Press, 1998, p. 141. ISBN 0-07-041275-8
- ^ a b "KCOP Studio". Seeing Stars: the Television Studios... http://www.seeing-stars.com/tvstudios/KCOP.shtml. Retrieved March 23, 2011.
- ^ Dunevant, Ronald L.. "KPTV Timeline". Yesterday's KPTV. Ronald L. Dunevant. http://kptv.home.comcast.net/~kptv/timeline/timeline.htm. Retrieved March 23, 2011.
- ^ "Time Magazine Article". Time Magazine. August 3, 1953. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,822904,00.html. Retrieved January 25, 2007.
- ^ Bing Crosby and Gonzaga University: 1925 – 1951, Gonzaga University, retrieved June 6, 2011.
- ^ Sandomir, Richard (September 23, 2010). "In Bing Crosby's Wine Cellar, Vintage Baseball". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/sports/baseball/24crosby.html?_r=1&src=mv. Retrieved September 25, 2010.
- ^ a b c Giddins, 2001, p. 181.
- ^ a b Haller, Scot (March 21, 1983). "The Sad Ballad of Bing and His Boys – Child Abuse, Kids & Family Life, Bing Crosby". People. http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20084544,00.html. Retrieved January 4, 2011.
- ^ Gary Crosby (March 1983). Going My Own Way. Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-17055-0. http://www.nospank.net/crosbyg.htm.
- ^ Dunn, Ashley (December 13, 1989). "Lindsay Crosby Suicide Laid to End of Inheritance Income". Los Angeles Times. http://articles.latimes.com/1989-12-13/local/me-242_1_lindsay-crosby. Retrieved August 17, 2011.
- ^ a b c "Leah Garchik's Personals". The San Francisco Chronicle. January 20, 2004. http://articles.sfgate.com/2004-01-20/bay-area/17409442_1_gary-crosby-bing-crosby-philip-crosby/2.
- ^ Grudens, 2002, p. 59.
- ^ "Philip Crosby, 69, Son of Bing Crosby". New York Times. January 20, 2004. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E5D61439F933A15752C0A9629C8B63. Retrieved November 2, 2008.
- ^ Thomas, 1977, p. 86-87.
- ^ Callahan, Tom (2003-05). "The Bing dynasty: on the 100th anniversary of Crosby's birth, we celebrate the granddaddy of celebrity golf". Golf Digest. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HFI/is_5_54/ai_101967390. Retrieved November 2, 2008.
- ^ "NAB Hall of Fame". National Association of Broadcasters. http://www.nab.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Awards7&CONTENTID=11047&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm. Retrieved May 3, 2008. [dead link]
- ^ "The Official Home of Bing Crosby". Bingcrosby.com. http://www.BingCrosby.com. Retrieved November 2, 2008.
- ^ Hope, Bob (1990). Don't Shoot, It's Only Me!. Random House Publishers.
- ^ Giddins, 2001, pp. 427–428.
- ^ "RIAA certification". Archived from the original on June 8, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20070608063448/http://www.riaa.com/gp/database/default.asp.
- Bibliography
- Giddins, Gary (2001). Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams – The Early Years, 1903–1940. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0-316-88188-0. http://books.google.com/books?id=Oa2_zcwucAgC.
- Grudens, Richard (2002). Bing Crosby – Crooner of the Century. Celebrity Profiles Publishing Co.. ISBN 1-57579-248-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=Mkz_w-WYiMAC.
- Macfarlane, Malcolm. Bing Crosby – Day By Day. Scarecrow Press, 2001.
- Osterholm, J. Roger. Bing Crosby: A Bio-Bibliography. Greenwood Press, 1994.
- Prigozy, R. & Raubicheck, W., ed. Going My Way: Bing Crosby and American Culture. The Boydell Press, 2007.
- Thomas, Bob (1977). The One and Only Bing. Grosset & Dunlap. ISBN 0-448-14670-3.
Further reading[link]
- Thomas, Nick (2011). Raised by the Stars: Interviews with 29 Children of Hollywood Actors. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-6403-6. (Includes an interview with Crosby's son, Harry, and daughter, Mary)
External links[link]
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- Official website
- Bing Crosby at the Internet Movie Database
- Bing Crosby at the TCM Movie Database
- Bing Crosby Collection at Gonzaga University
- BING magazine (a publication of the ICC)
- Bing Crosby Official 10" (78Rpm) Discography
- A Bing Crosby Session based discography
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Crosby, Bing |
| Alternative names | Crosby, Harry Lillis (real name) |
| Short description | American singer, actor |
| Date of birth | May 3, 1903 |
| Place of birth | Tacoma, Washington, United States |
| Date of death | October 14, 1977 |
| Place of death | Madrid, Spain |
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| David Bowie | |
|---|---|
 Bowie during the Heathen Tour in 2002. |
|
| Background information | |
| Birth name | David Robert Jones |
| Born | (1947-01-08) 8 January 1947 (age 65) Brixton, London, England |
| Genres | Rock, glam rock, art rock, pop |
| Occupations | Musician, singer-songwriter, record producer, actor |
| Instruments | Vocals, guitar, keyboards, harmonica, saxophone, viola, cello, koto, percussion |
| Years active | 1964–2008 |
| Labels | Deram, RCA, Virgin, EMI, ISO, Columbia, BMG, Pye |
| Associated acts | The Riot Squad, Arnold Corns, Tin Machine, The Hype, The Lower Third, The Konrads |
| Website | davidbowie.com |
David Bowie ( /ˈboʊ.i/ BOH-ee;[1] born David Robert Jones on 8 January 1947) is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. He is known for his distinctive voice and the intellectual depth and eclecticism of his work.
Bowie first caught the eye and ear of the public in July 1969, when his song "Space Oddity" reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart. After a three-year period of experimentation he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "Starman" and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie's impact at that time, as described by biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture."[2] The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona proved merely one facet of a career marked by continual reinvention, musical innovation and striking visual presentation.
In 1975, Bowie achieved his first major American crossover success with the number-one single "Fame" and the hit album Young Americans, which the singer characterised as "plastic soul". The sound constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees. He then confounded the expectations of both his record label and his American audiences by recording the minimalist album Low (1977)—the first of three collaborations with Brian Eno over the next two years. The so-called "Berlin Trilogy" albums all reached the UK top five and garnered lasting critical praise.
After uneven commercial success in the late 1970s, Bowie had UK number ones with the 1980 single "Ashes to Ashes", its parent album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), and "Under Pressure", a 1981 collaboration with Queen. He then reached a new commercial peak in 1983 with Let's Dance, which yielded several hit singles. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles, including blue-eyed soul, industrial, adult contemporary, and jungle. His last recorded album was Reality (2003), which was supported by the 2003–04 Reality Tour.
Buckley says of Bowie: "His influence has been unique in popular culture—he has permeated and altered more lives than any comparable figure."[2] In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, Bowie was placed at number 29. Throughout his career, he has sold an estimated 140 million albums. In the UK, he has been awarded nine Platinum album certifications, 11 Gold and eight Silver, and in the US, five Platinum and seven Gold certifications. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him 39th on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time", and 23rd on their list of the best singers of all-time.
Contents
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Biography[link]
1947–62: early years[link]
David Bowie was born David Robert Jones in Brixton, London, on 8 January 1947. His mother, Margaret Mary "Peggy" (née Burns), of Irish descent,[3] worked as a cinema usherette, while his father, Haywood Stenton "John" Jones was a promotions officer for Barnardo's. The family lived at 40 Stansfield Road, located near the border of the south London areas of Brixton and Stockwell. A neighbour recalled that "London in the forties was the worst possible place, and the worst possible time for a child to grow up in." Bowie attended Stockwell Infants School until he was six years old, acquiring a reputation as a gifted and single-minded child—and a defiant brawler.[4][5]
In 1953 the family moved to the suburb of Bromley, where, two years later, Bowie progressed to Burnt Ash Junior School. His voice was considered "adequate" by the school choir, and his recorder playing judged to demonstrate above-average musical ability.[6] At the age of nine, his dancing during the newly introduced music and movement classes was strikingly imaginative: teachers called his interpretations "vividly artistic" and his poise "astonishing" for a child.[6] The same year, his interest in music was further stimulated when his father brought home a collection of American 45s by artists including Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, The Platters, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley and Little Richard.[7][8] Upon listening to "Tutti Frutti", Bowie would later say, "I had heard God".[9] Presley's impact on him was likewise emphatic: "I saw a cousin of mine dance to ... 'Hound Dog' and I had never seen her get up and be moved so much by anything. It really impressed me, the power of the music. I started getting records immediately after that."[8] By the end of the following year he had taken up the ukelele and tea-chest bass and begun to participate in skiffle sessions with friends, and had started to play the piano; meanwhile his stage presentation of numbers by both Presley and Chuck Berry—complete with gyrations in tribute to the original artists—to his local Wolf Cub group was described as "mesmerizing ... like someone from another planet."[8] Failing his eleven plus exam at the conclusion of his Burnt Ash Junior education, Bowie joined Bromley Technical High School.[10]
It was an unusual technical school, as biographer Christopher Sandford writes:
Despite its status it was, by the time David arrived in 1958, as rich in arcane ritual as any [English] public school. There were houses, named after eighteenth-century statesmen like Pitt and Wilberforce. There was a uniform, and an elaborate system of rewards and punishments. There was also an accent on languages, science and particularly design, where a collegiate atmosphere flourished under the tutorship of Owen Frampton. In David's account, Frampton led through force of personality, not intellect; his colleagues at Bromley Tech were famous for neither, and yielded the school's most gifted pupils to the arts, a regime so liberal that Frampton actively encouraged his own son, Peter, to pursue a musical career with David, a partnership briefly intact thirty years later.[10]
Bowie studied art, music, and design, including layout and typesetting. After Terry Burns, his half-brother, introduced him to modern jazz, his enthusiasm for players like Charles Mingus and John Coltrane led his mother to give him a plastic alto saxophone in 1961; he was soon receiving lessons from a local musician.[11]
In 1962, George Underwood injured Bowie's eye in a fight over a girl. Bowie owes his unusual eyes to the fact that not all the damage could be surgically repaired. Despite their fisticuffs, Underwood and Bowie remained good friends, and Underwood went on to create the artwork for Bowie's early albums.[12]
Eyes[link]
Bowie received a serious injury at school in 1962 when his friend George Underwood, while wearing a ring on his finger, punched him in the left eye during a fight over a girl. Doctors feared he would become blind in that eye. After a series of operations during a four-month hospitalisation,[13] his doctors determined that the damage could not be fully repaired and Bowie was left with faulty depth perception and a permanently dilated pupil. The latter condition has misled some to believe that Bowie has different coloured eyes, when in reality both irises are the same blue colour. [14]
1962–68: the Konrads to the Riot Squad[link]
Graduating from his plastic saxophone to a real instrument in 1962, Bowie formed his first band at the age of 15. Playing guitar-based rock and roll at local youth gatherings and weddings, the Konrads had a varying line-up of between four and eight members, Underwood among them.[15] When Bowie left the technical school the following year, he informed his parents of his intention to become a pop star. His mother promptly arranged his employment as an electrician's mate. Frustrated by his band-mates' limited aspirations, Bowie left the Konrads and joined another band, the King Bees. He wrote to the newly successful washing-machine entrepreneur John Bloom inviting him to "do for us what Brian Epstein has done for the Beatles—and make another million." Bloom did not respond to the offer, but his referral to Dick James's partner Leslie Conn led to Bowie's first personal management contract.[16]
Conn quickly began to promote Bowie. The singer's debut single, "Liza Jane", credited to Davie Jones and the King Bees, had no commercial success. Dissatisfied with the King Bees and their repertoire of Howlin' Wolf and Willie Dixon blues numbers, Bowie quit the band less than a month later to join the Manish Boys, another blues outfit, who incorporated folk and soul — "I used to dream of being their Mick Jagger", Bowie was to recall.[16] "I Pity the Fool" was no more successful than "Liza Jane", and Bowie soon moved on again to join the Lower Third, a blues trio strongly influenced by The Who. "You've Got a Habit of Leaving" fared no better, signalling the end of Conn's contract. Declaring that he would exit the pop world "to study mime at Sadler's Wells", Bowie nevertheless remained with the Lower Third. His new manager, Ralph Horton, later instrumental in his transition to solo artist, soon witnessed Bowie's move to yet another group, the Buzz, yielding the singer's fifth unsuccessful single release, "Do Anything You Say". While with the Buzz, Bowie also joined the Riot Squad; their recordings, which included a Bowie number and Velvet Underground material, went unreleased. Ken Pitt, introduced by Horton, took over as Bowie's manager.[17]
Dissatisfied with his stage name as Davy (and Davie) Jones, which in the mid-1960s invited confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees, Bowie renamed himself after the 19th century American frontiersman Jim Bowie and the knife he had popularised.[18] His April 1967 solo single, "The Laughing Gnome", utilising sped-up Chipmunk-style vocals, failed to chart. Released six weeks later, his album debut, David Bowie, an amalgam of pop, psychedelia, and music hall, met the same fate. It would be his last release for two years.[19]
Bowie's fascination with the bizarre was fuelled when he met dancer Lindsay Kemp: "He lived on his emotions, he was a wonderful influence. His day-to-day life was the most theatrical thing I had ever seen, ever. It was everything I thought Bohemia probably was. I joined the circus."[20] Kemp, for his part, recalled, "I didn't really teach him to be a mime artiste but to be more of himself on the outside, ... I enabled him to free the angel and demon that he is on the inside."[20] Studying the dramatic arts under Kemp, from avant-garde theatre and mime to commedia dell'arte, Bowie became immersed in the creation of personae to present to the world. Satirising life in a British prison, meanwhile, the Bowie-penned "Over the Wall We Go" became a 1967 single for Oscar; another Bowie composition, "Silly Boy Blue", was released by Billy Fury the following year.[21] After Kemp cast Bowie with Hermione Farthingale for a poetic minuet, the pair began dating; they soon moved into a London flat together. Playing acoustic guitar, she formed a group with Bowie and bassist John Hutchinson; between September 1968 and early 1969, when Bowie and Farthingale broke up, the trio gave a small number of concerts combining folk, Merseybeat, poetry and mime.[22]
1969–73: psychedelic folk to glam rock[link]
[edit] Space Oddity to Hunky Dory
Because of his lack of commercial success, Bowie was forced to try to earn a living in different ways. He featured in a Lyons Maid ice cream commercial, but was rejected for another by Kit Kat.[23] Intended as a vehicle to promote the singer, a 30-minute film featuring performances from his repertoire, Love You till Tuesday, was made. Although not released until 1984, the filming sessions in January 1969 led to unexpected success when Bowie told the producers, "That film of yours—I've got a new song for it." He then demoed the song that would provide his commercial breakthrough. "Space Oddity" was released later in the year to coincide with the first moon landing.[23] Breaking up with Farthingale shortly after completion of the film, Bowie moved in with Mary Finnigan as her lodger.[24] Continuing the divergence from rock and roll and blues begun by his work with Farthingale, Bowie joined forces with Finnigan, Christina Ostrom and Barrie Jackson to run a folk club on Sunday nights at the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street.[24] This soon morphed into the Beckenham Arts Lab, and became extremely popular. The Arts Lab hosted a free festival in a local park, later immortalised by Bowie in his song "Memory of a Free Festival".[25] "Space Oddity" was released on 11 July, five days ahead of the Apollo 11 launch, to become a UK top five hit. Bowie's second album, Space Oddity, followed in November; originally issued in the UK as David Bowie, it caused some confusion with its predecessor of the same name, and the early US release was instead titled Man of Words/Man of Music. Featuring philosophical post-hippie lyrics on peace, love and morality, its acoustic folk rock occasionally fortified by harder rock, the album was not a commercial success at the time of its release.[26]
Bowie met Angela Barnett in April 1969. They would marry within a year. Her impact on him was immediate, and her involvement in his career far-reaching, leaving Pitt with limited influence.[27] Having established himself as a solo artist with "Space Oddity", Bowie now began to sense a lack: "a full-time band for gigs and recording—people he could relate to personally".[28] The shortcoming was underlined by his artistic rivalry with Marc Bolan, who was at the time acting as his session guitarist.[28] A band was duly assembled. John Cambridge, a drummer Bowie met at the Arts Lab, was joined by Tony Visconti on bass and Mick Ronson on electric guitar. Known as The Hype, the band members created characters for themselves and wore elaborate costumes that prefigured the glam style of The Spiders From Mars. After a disastrous opening gig at the London Roundhouse, they reverted to a configuration presenting Bowie as a solo artist.[28][29] Their initial studio work was marred by a heated disagreement between Bowie and Cambridge over the latter's drumming style; matters came to a head when Bowie, enraged, accused, "You're fucking up my album." Cambridge summarily quit and was replaced by Mick Woodmansey.[30] Not long after, in a move that would result in years of litigation, at the conclusion of which Bowie would be forced to pay Pitt compensation, the singer fired his manager, replacing him with Tony Defries.[30]
The studio sessions continued and resulted in Bowie's third album, The Man Who Sold the World (1970). Characterised by the heavy rock sound of his new backing band, it was a marked departure from the acoustic guitar and folk rock style established by Space Oddity. To promote it in the United States, Mercury Records financed a coast-to-coast publicity tour in which Bowie, between January and February 1971, was interviewed by radio stations and the media. Exploiting his androgynous appearance, the original cover of the UK version unveiled two months later would depict the singer wearing a dress: taking the garment with him, he wore it during interviews—to the approval of critics, including Rolling Stone's John Mendelsohn who described him as "ravishing, almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacall"—and in the street, to mixed reaction including laughter and, in the case of one male pedestrian, producing a gun and telling Bowie to "kiss my ass".[31][32] During the tour Bowie's observation of two seminal American proto-punk artists led him to develop a concept that would eventually find form in the Ziggy Stardust character: a melding of the persona of Iggy Pop with the music of Lou Reed, producing "the ultimate pop idol".[31] A girlfriend recalled his "scrawling notes on a cocktail napkin about a crazy rock star named Iggy or Ziggy", and on his return to England he declared his intention to create a character "who looks like he's landed from Mars".[31]
Hunky Dory (1971) found Visconti, Bowie's producer and bassist, supplanted in both roles, by Ken Scott and Trevor Bolder respectively. The album saw the partial return of the fey pop singer of "Space Oddity", with light fare such as "Kooks", a song written for his son, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones, born on 30 May.[33] (His parents chose "his kooky name"—he would be known as Zowie for the next 12 years—after the Greek word zoe, life.)[34] Elsewhere, the album explored more serious themes, and found Bowie paying unusually direct homage to his influences with "Song for Bob Dylan", "Andy Warhol", and "Queen Bitch", a Velvet Underground pastiche. It was not a significant commercial success at the time[35] but was ranked No.16 by voters in the All Time Top 1000 Albums.
[edit] Ziggy Stardust
With his next venture, Bowie, in the words of biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture".[2] Dressed in a striking costume, his hair dyed red, Bowie launched his Ziggy Stardust stage show with the Spiders from Mars—Ronson, Bolder and Woodmansey—at the Toby Jug pub in Tolworth on 10 February 1972.[36] The show was hugely popular, catapulting him to stardom as he toured the UK over the course of the next six months and creating, as described by Buckley, a "cult of Bowie" that was "unique—its influence lasted longer and has been more creative than perhaps almost any other force within pop fandom."[36] The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), combining the hard rock elements of The Man Who Sold the World with the lighter experimental rock and pop of Hunky Dory, was released in June. "Starman", issued as an April single ahead of the album, was to cement Bowie's UK breakthrough: both single and album charted rapidly following his July Top of the Pops performance of the song. The album, which would remain in the chart for two years, was soon joined there by the six-month-old Hunky Dory. At the same time the non-album single "John, I’m Only Dancing", and "All the Young Dudes", a song he wrote and produced for Mott the Hoople, became UK hits. The Ziggy Stardust Tour continued to the United States.[37]
Bowie contributed backing vocals to Lou Reed's 1972 solo breakthrough Transformer, co-producing the album with Mick Ronson.[38] His own Aladdin Sane (1973) topped the UK chart, his first number one album. Described by Bowie as "Ziggy goes to America", it contained songs he wrote while travelling to and across the United States during the earlier part of the Ziggy tour, which now continued to Japan to promote the new album. Aladdin Sane spawned the UK top five singles "The Jean Genie" and "Drive-In Saturday".[39][40]
Bowie's love of acting led his total immersion in the characters he created for his music. "Offstage I'm a robot. Onstage I achieve emotion. It's probably why I prefer dressing up as Ziggy to being David." With satisfaction came severe personal difficulties: acting the same role over an extended period, it became impossible for him to separate Ziggy Stardust—and, later, the Thin White Duke—from his own character offstage. Ziggy, Bowie said, "wouldn't leave me alone for years. That was when it all started to go sour ... My whole personality was affected. It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity."[41] His later Ziggy shows, which included songs from both Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, were ultra-theatrical affairs filled with shocking stage moments, such as Bowie stripping down to a sumo wrestling loincloth or simulating oral sex with Ronson's guitar.[42] Bowie toured and gave press conferences as Ziggy before a dramatic and abrupt on-stage "retirement" at London's Hammersmith Odeon on 3 July 1973. Footage from the final show was released in 1983 for the film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.[43]
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Sample of "Ziggy Stardust" (1972). A pioneer of glam rock, Bowie performed as the character Ziggy Stardust, backed by The Spiders from Mars.
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After breaking up the Spiders from Mars, Bowie attempted to move on from his Ziggy persona. His back catalogue was now highly sought: The Man Who Sold the World had been re-released in 1972 along with Space Oddity. "Life on Mars?", from Hunky Dory, was released in June 1973 and made number three in the UK singles chart. Entering the same chart in September, Bowie's novelty record from 1967, "The Laughing Gnome", would reach number four.[44] Pin Ups, a collection of covers of his 1960s favourites, followed in October, producing a UK number three hit in "Sorrow" and itself peaking at number one, making David Bowie the best-selling act of 1973 in the UK. It brought the total number of Bowie albums currently in the UK chart to six.[45]
1974–76: soul, funk and the Thin White Duke[link]
Bowie moved to the United States in 1974, initially staying in New York City before settling in Los Angeles.[46] Diamond Dogs (1974), parts of which found him heading towards soul and funk, was the product of two distinct ideas: a musical based on a wild future in a post-apocalyptic city, and setting George Orwell's 1984 to music.[47] The album went to number one in the UK, spawning the hits "Rebel Rebel" and "Diamond Dogs", and number five in the US. To promote it, Bowie launched the Diamond Dogs Tour, visiting cities in North America between June and December 1974. Choreographed by Toni Basil, and lavishly produced with theatrical special effects, the high-budget stage production was filmed by Alan Yentob. The resulting documentary, Cracked Actor, featured a pasty and emaciated Bowie: the tour coincided with the singer's slide from heavy cocaine use into addiction, producing severe physical debilitation, paranoia and emotional problems.[48] He later commented that the accompanying live album, David Live, ought to have been titled "David Bowie Is Alive and Well and Living Only In Theory". David Live nevertheless solidified Bowie's status as a superstar, charting at number two in the UK and number eight in the US. It also spawned a UK number ten hit in Bowie's cover of "Knock on Wood". After a break in Philadelphia, where Bowie recorded new material, the tour resumed with a new emphasis on soul.[49]
The fruit of the Philadelphia recording sessions was Young Americans (1975). Biographer Christopher Sandford writes, "Over the years, most British rockers had tried, one way or another, to become black-by-extension. Few had succeeded as Bowie did now."[50] The album's sound, which the singer identified as "plastic soul", constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees.[51] Young Americans yielded Bowie's first US number one, "Fame", co-written with John Lennon, who contributed backing vocals, and Carlos Alomar. Lennon would call Bowie's work as "great, but just rock and roll with lipstick on".[52] Earning the distinction of being one of the first white artists to appear on the US variety show Soul Train, Bowie mimed "Fame", as well as "Golden Years", his November single,[53] that it was offered to Elvis Presley to perform, but Presley declined it.[53] Young Americans was a commercial success in both the US and the UK, and a re-issue of the 1969 single "Space Oddity" became Bowie's first number one hit in the UK a few months after "Fame" achieved the same in the US.[54] Despite his by now well established superstardom, Bowie, in the words of biographer Christopher Sandford, "for all his record sales (over a million copies of Ziggy Stardust alone), existed essentially on loose change."[55] In 1975, in a move echoing Ken Pitt's acrimonious dismissal five years earlier, Bowie fired his manager. At the culmination of the ensuing months-long legal dispute, he watched, as described by Sandford, "millions of dollars of his future earnings being surrendered" in what were "uniquely generous terms for Defries", then "shut himself up in West 20th Street, where for a week his howls could be heard through the locked attic door."[55] Michael Lippman, Bowie's lawyer during the negotiations, became his new manager; Lippman in turn would be awarded substantial compensation when Bowie fired him the following year.[56]
Station to Station (1976) introduced a new Bowie persona, the "Thin White Duke" of its title track. Visually, the character was an extension of Thomas Jerome Newton, the extraterrestrial being he portrayed in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth the same year.[57] Developing the funk and soul of Young Americans, Station to Station also prefigured the Krautrock and synthesiser music of his next releases. The extent to which drug addiction was now affecting Bowie was made public when Russell Harty interviewed the singer for his London Weekend Television talk show in anticipation of the album's supporting tour. Shortly before the satellite-linked interview was scheduled to commence, the death of the Spanish dictator General Franco was announced. Bowie was asked to relinquish the satellite booking, to allow the Spanish Government to put out a live newsfeed. This he refused to do, and his interview went ahead. In the ensuing conversation with Harty, as described by biographer David Buckley, "the singer made hardly any sense at all throughout what was quite an extensive interview. [...] Bowie looked completely disconnected and was hardly able to utter a coherent sentence."[58] His sanity—by his own later admission—had become twisted from cocaine; he overdosed several times during the year, and was withering physically to an alarming degree.[48][59]
Station to Station's January 1976 release was followed in February by a three-and-a-half-month concert tour of Europe and North America. Featuring a starkly lit set, the Isolar – 1976 Tour highlighted songs from the album, including the dramatic and lengthy title track, the ballads "Wild Is the Wind" and "Word on a Wing", and the funkier "TVC 15" and "Stay". The core band that coalesced around this album and tour—rhythm guitarist Alomar, bassist George Murray, and drummer Dennis Davis—would continue as a stable unit for the remainder of the 1970s. The tour was highly successful but mired in political controversy. Bowie was quoted in Stockholm as saying that "Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader", and was detained by customs on the Russian/Polish border for possessing Nazi paraphernalia.[60] Matters came to a head in London in May in what became known as the "Victoria Station incident". Arriving in an open-top Mercedes convertible, the singer waved to the crowd in a gesture that some alleged was a Nazi salute, which was captured on camera and published in NME. Bowie said the photographer simply caught him in mid-wave.[61] He later blamed his pro-Fascism comments and his behaviour during the period on his addictions and the character of the Thin White Duke.[62] "I was out of my mind, totally crazed. The main thing I was functioning on was mythology ... that whole thing about Hitler and Rightism ... I'd discovered King Arthur ...".[59] According to playwright Alan Franks, writing later in The Times, "he was indeed 'deranged'. He had some very bad experiences with hard drugs."[63]
1976–79: the Berlin era[link]
Bowie moved to Switzerland in 1976, purchasing a chalet in the hills to the north of Lake Geneva. In the new environment, his cocaine use increased; so too did his interest in pursuits outside his musical career. He took up painting, and produced a number of post-modernist pieces. When on tour, he took to sketching in a notebook, and photographing scenes for later reference. Visiting galleries in Geneva and the Brücke Museum in Berlin, Bowie became, in the words of biographer Christopher Sandford, "a prolific producer and collector of contemporary art. [...] Not only did he become a well-known patron of expressionist art: locked in Clos des Mésanges he began an intensive self-improvement course in classical music and literature, and started work on an autobiography".[64]
Before the end of 1976, Bowie's interest in the burgeoning German music scene, as well as his drug addiction, prompted him to move to West Berlin to clean up and revitalise his career. Working with Brian Eno while sharing an apartment in Schöneberg with Iggy Pop, he began to focus on minimalist, ambient music for the first of three albums, co-produced with Tony Visconti, that would become known as his Berlin Trilogy.[65] During the same period, Iggy Pop, with Bowie as a co-writer and musician, completed his solo album debut, The Idiot, and its follow-up, Lust for Life, touring the UK, Europe, and the US in March and April 1977.[66] Low (1977), partly influenced by the Krautrock sound of Kraftwerk and Neu!, evidenced a move away from narration in Bowie's songwriting to a more abstract musical form in which lyrics were sporadic and optional. It received considerable negative criticism upon its release—a release which RCA, anxious to maintain the established commercial momentum, did not welcome, and which Bowie's ex-manager, Tony Defries, who still maintained a significant financial interest in the singer's affairs, tried to prevent. Despite these forebodings, Low yielded the UK number three single "Sound and Vision", and its own performance surpassed that of Station to Station in the UK chart, where it reached number two. Leading contemporary composer Philip Glass described Low as "a work of genius" in 1992, when he used it as the basis for his Symphony No. 1 "Low"; subsequently, Glass used Bowie's next album as the basis for his 1996 Symphony No. 4 "Heroes".[67][68] Glass has praised Bowie's gift for creating "fairly complex pieces of music, masquerading as simple pieces".[69]
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Sample of "Heroes" (1977). One of the ambient rock songs to emerge from Bowie's Berlin Trilogy era, "Heroes" gained lasting popularity.
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Echoing Low's minimalist, instrumental approach, the second of the trilogy, "Heroes" (1977), incorporated pop and rock to a greater extent, seeing Bowie joined by guitarist Robert Fripp. Like Low, "Heroes" evinced the zeitgeist of the Cold War, symbolised by the divided city of Berlin.[70] Incorporating ambient sounds from a variety of sources including white noise generators, synthesizers and koto, the album was another hit, reaching number three in the UK. Its title track, though only reaching number 24 in the UK singles chart, gained lasting popularity, and within months had been released in both German and French.[71] Towards the end of the year, Bowie performed the song for Marc Bolan's television show Marc, and again two days later for Bing Crosby's televised Christmas special, when he joined Crosby in "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy", a version of "The Little Drummer Boy" with a new, contrapuntal verse. Five years later, the duet would prove a worldwide seasonal hit, charting in the UK at number three on Christmas Day, 1982.[72]
After completing Low and "Heroes", Bowie spent much of 1978 on the Isolar II world tour, bringing the music of the first two Berlin Trilogy albums to almost a million people during 70 concerts in 12 countries. By now he had broken his drug addiction; biographer David Buckley writes that Isolar II was "Bowie's first tour for five years in which he had probably not anaesthetised himself with copious quantities of cocaine before taking the stage. [...] Without the oblivion that drugs had brought, he was now in a healthy enough mental condition to want to make friends."[73] Recordings from the tour made up the live album Stage, released the same year.[74]
The final piece in what Bowie called his "triptych", Lodger (1979), eschewed the minimalist, ambient nature of the other two, making a partial return to the drum- and guitar-based rock and pop of his pre-Berlin era. The result was a complex mixture of New Wave and World Music, in places incorporating Hejaz non-Western scales. Some tracks were composed using Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies cards: "Boys Keep Swinging" entailed band members swapping instruments, "Move On" used the chords from Bowie's early composition "All the Young Dudes" played backwards, and "Red Money" took backing tracks from "Sister Midnight", a piece previously composed with Iggy Pop.[75] The album was recorded in Switzerland. Ahead of its release, RCA's Mel Ilberman stated, "It would be fair to call it Bowie's Sergeant Pepper [...] a concept album that portrays the Lodger as a homeless wanderer, shunned and victimized by life's pressures and technology." As described by biographer Christopher Sandford, "The record dashed such high hopes with dubious choices, and production that spelt the end—for fifteen years—of Bowie's partnership with Eno." Lodger reached number 4 in the UK and number 20 in the US, and yielded the UK hit singles "Boys Keep Swinging" and "DJ".[76][77] Towards the end of the year, Bowie and Angela initiated divorce proceedings, and after months of court battles the marriage was ended in early 1980.[78]
1980–89: from superstar to megastar[link]
Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980) produced the number one hit "Ashes to Ashes", featuring the textural work of guitar-synthesist Chuck Hammer and revisiting the character of Major Tom from "Space Oddity". The song gave international exposure to the underground New Romantic movement when Bowie visited the London club "Blitz"—the main New Romantic hangout—to recruit several of the regulars (including Steve Strange of the band Visage) to act in the accompanying video, renowned as one of the most innovative of all time.[79] While Scary Monsters utilised principles established by the Berlin albums, it was considered by critics to be far more direct musically and lyrically. The album's hard rock edge included conspicuous guitar contributions from Robert Fripp, Pete Townshend, Chuck Hammer and Tom Verlaine.[80] As "Ashes to Ashes" hit number one on the UK charts, Bowie opened a three-month run on Broadway on 24 September, starring in The Elephant Man.[81] The same year, he made a cameo appearance in the German film Christiane F., a real-life story of teenage drug addiction in 1970s Berlin. The soundtrack, in which Bowie's music featured prominently, was released as Christiane F. a few months later.
Bowie paired with Queen in 1981 for a one-off single release, "Under Pressure". The duet was a hit, becoming Bowie's third UK number one single. Bowie was given the lead role in the BBC's 1981 televised adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's play Baal. Coinciding with its transmission, a five-track EP of songs from the play, recorded earlier in Berlin, was released as David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht's Baal. In March 1982, the month before Paul Schrader's film Cat People came out, Bowie's title song, "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)", was released as a single, becoming a minor US hit and entering the UK top 30.[82]
Bowie reached a new peak of popularity and commercial success in 1983 with Let's Dance. Co-produced by Chic's Nile Rodgers, the album went platinum in both the UK and the US. Its three singles became top twenty hits in both countries, where its title track reached number one. "Modern Love" and "China Girl" made number two in the UK, accompanied by a pair of acclaimed promotional videos that, as described by biographer David Buckley, "were totally absorbing and activated key archetypes in the pop world. 'Let's Dance', with its little narrative surrounding the young Aborigine couple, targeted 'youth', and 'China Girl', with its bare-bummed (and later partially censored) beach lovemaking scene (a homage to the film From Here to Eternity), was sufficiently sexually provocative to guarantee heavy rotation on MTV. By 1983, Bowie had emerged as one of the most important video artists of the day. Let's Dance was followed by the Serious Moonlight Tour, during which Bowie was accompanied by guitarist Earl Slick and backing vocalists Frank and George Simms. The world tour lasted six months and was extremely popular.[83] Stevie Ray Vaughan was guest guitarist playing solo on "Let's Dance".
Tonight (1984), another dance-oriented album, found Bowie collaborating with Tina Turner and, once again, Iggy Pop. It included a number of cover songs, among them the 1966 Beach Boys hit "God Only Knows". The album bore the transatlantic top ten hit "Blue Jean", itself the inspiration for a short film that won Bowie a Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video, "Jazzin' for Blue Jean". Bowie performed at Wembley in 1985 for Live Aid, a multi-venue benefit concert for Ethiopian famine relief. During the event, the video for a fundraising single was premièred, Bowie's duet with Mick Jagger. "Dancing in the Street" quickly went to number one on release. The same year, Bowie worked with the Pat Metheny Group to record "This Is Not America" for the soundtrack of The Falcon and the Snowman. Released as a single, the song became a top 40 hit in the UK and US.[84]
Bowie was given a role in the 1986 film Absolute Beginners. It was poorly received by critics, but Bowie's theme song rose to number two in the UK charts. He also appeared as Jareth, the Goblin King, in the 1986 Jim Henson film Labyrinth, for which he wrote five songs. His final solo album of the decade was 1987's Never Let Me Down, where he ditched the light sound of his previous two albums, instead offering harder rock with an industrial/techno dance edge. Peaking at number six in the UK, the album yielded the hits "Day-In, Day-Out" (his 60th single), "Time Will Crawl", and "Never Let Me Down". Bowie later described it as his "nadir", calling it "an awful album".[85] Supporting Never Let Me Down, and preceded by nine promotional press shows, the 86-concert Glass Spider Tour commenced on 30 May. Bowie's backing band included Peter Frampton on lead guitar. Critics maligned the tour as overproduced, saying it pandered to the current stadium rock trends in its special effects and dancing.[86]
1989–91: Tin Machine[link]
Bowie shelved his solo career in 1989, retreating to the relative anonymity of band membership for the first time since the early 1970s. A hard-rocking quartet, Tin Machine came into being after Bowie began to work experimentally with guitarist Reeves Gabrels. The line-up was completed by Tony and Hunt Sales, whom Bowie had known since the late 1970s for their contribution, on drums and bass respectively, to Iggy Pop's 1977 album Lust For Life.[87]
Though he intended Tin Machine to operate as a democracy, Bowie dominated, both in songwriting and in decision-making.[88] The band's album debut, Tin Machine (1989), was initially popular, though its politicised lyrics did not find universal approval: Bowie described one song as "a simplistic, naive, radical, laying-it-down about the emergence of neo-Nazis"; in the view of biographer Christopher Sandford, "It took nerve to denounce drugs, fascism and TV [...] in terms that reached the literary level of a comic book."[89] EMI complained of "lyrics that preach" as well as "repetitive tunes" and "minimalist or no production".[90] The album nevertheless reached number three in the UK.[89] Tin Machine's first world tour was a commercial success, but there was growing reluctance—among fans and critics alike—to accept Bowie's presentation as merely a band member.[91] A series of Tin Machine singles failed to chart, and Bowie, after a disagreement with EMI, left the label.[92] Like his audience and his critics, Bowie himself became increasingly disaffected with his role as just one member of a band.[93] Tin Machine began work on a second album, but Bowie put the venture on hold and made a return to solo work. Performing his early hits during the seven-month Sound+Vision Tour, he found commercial success and acclaim once again.[94]
In October 1990, a decade after his divorce from Angela, Bowie and Somali-born supermodel Iman were introduced by a mutual friend. Bowie recalled, "I was naming the children the night we met ... it was absolutely immediate." They would marry in 1992.[95] Tin Machine resumed work the same month, but their audience and critics, ultimately left disappointed by the first album, showed little interest in a second. Tin Machine II's arrival was marked by a widely publicised and ill-timed conflict over the cover art: after production had begun, the new record label, Victory, deemed the depiction of four ancient nude Kouroi statues, judged by Bowie to be "in exquisite taste", "a show of wrong, obscene images", requiring air-brushing and patching to render the figures sexless.[96] Tin Machine toured again, but after the live album Tin Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby failed commercially, the band drifted apart, and Bowie, though he continued to collaborate with Gabrels, resumed his solo career.[97]
1992–99: electronica[link]
In April 1992 Bowie appeared at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, following the Queen frontman's death the previous year. As well as performing "Heroes" and "All the Young Dudes", he was joined on "Under Pressure" by Annie Lennox, who took Mercury's vocal part.[98] Four days later, Bowie and Iman were married in Switzerland. Intending to move to Los Angeles, they flew in to search for a suitable property, but found themselves confined to their hotel, under curfew: the 1992 Los Angeles riots began the day they arrived. They settled in New York instead.[99]
1993 saw the release of Bowie's first solo offering since his Tin Machine departure, the soul, jazz and hip-hop influenced Black Tie White Noise. Making prominent use of electronic instruments, the album, which reunited Bowie with Let's Dance producer Nile Rodgers, confirmed Bowie's return to popularity, hitting the number one spot on the UK charts and spawning three top 40 hits, including the top 10 song "Jump They Say".[100] Bowie explored new directions on The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), a soundtrack album of incidental music composed for the TV series adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's novel. It contained some of the new elements introduced in Black Tie White Noise, and also signalled a move towards alternative rock. The album was a critical success but received a low-key release and only made number 87 in the UK charts.[101]
Reuniting Bowie with Eno, the quasi-industrial Outside (1995) was originally conceived as the first volume in a non-linear narrative of art and murder. Featuring characters from a short story written by Bowie, the album achieved US and UK chart success, and yielded three top 40 UK singles.[102] In a move that provoked mixed reaction from both fans and critics, Bowie chose Nine Inch Nails as his tour partner for the Outside Tour. Visiting cities in Europe and North America between September 1995 and February the following year, the tour saw the return of Gabrels as Bowie's guitarist.[103]
Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 17 January 1996.[104] Incorporating experiments in British jungle and drum 'n' bass, Earthling (1997) was a critical and commercial success in the UK and the US, and two singles from the album became UK top 40 hits. Bowie's song "I'm Afraid of Americans" from the Paul Verhoeven film Showgirls was re-recorded for the album, and remixed by Trent Reznor for a single release. The heavy rotation of the accompanying video, also featuring Reznor, contributed to the song's 16-week stay in the US Billboard Hot 100. The Earthling Tour took in Europe and North America between June and November 1997.[105] Bowie reunited with Visconti in 1998 to record "(Safe in This) Sky Life" for The Rugrats Movie. Although the track was edited out of the final cut, it would later be re-recorded and released as "Safe" on the B-side of Bowie's 2002 single "Everyone Says 'Hi'".[106] The reunion led to other collaborations including a limited-edition single release version of Placebo's track "Without You I'm Nothing", co-produced by Visconti, with Bowie's harmonised vocal added to the original recording.[107]
1999–present: neoclassicist Bowie[link]
Bowie created the soundtrack for Omikron, a 1999 computer game in which he and Iman also appeared as characters. Released the same year and containing re-recorded tracks from Omikron, his album 'Hours...' featured a song with lyrics by the winner of his "Cyber Song Contest" Internet competition, Alex Grant.[108] Making extensive use of live instruments, the album was Bowie's exit from heavy electronica.[109] Sessions for the planned album Toy, intended to feature new versions of some of Bowie's earliest pieces as well as three new songs, commenced in 2000, but the album was never released. Bowie and Visconti continued their collaboration, producing a new album of completely original songs instead: the result of the sessions was the 2002 album Heathen.[110] Alexandria Zahra Jones, Bowie and Iman's daughter, was born on 15 August.[111]
In October 2001, Bowie opened The Concert for New York City, a charity event to benefit the victims of the September 11 attacks, with a minimalist performance of Simon & Garfunkel's "America", followed by a full band performance of "Heroes".[112] 2002 saw the release of Heathen, and, during the second half of the year, the Heathen Tour. Taking in Europe and North America, the tour opened at London's annual Meltdown festival, for which Bowie was that year appointed artistic director. Among the acts he selected for the festival were Philip Glass, Television and The Polyphonic Spree. As well as songs from the new album, the tour featured material from Bowie's Low era.[113] Reality (2003) followed, and its accompanying world tour, the A Reality Tour, with an estimated attendance of 722,000, grossed more than any other in 2004. Onstage in Oslo, Norway, on 18 June, Bowie was hit in the eye with a lollipop thrown by a fan; a week later he suffered chest pain while performing at the Hurricane Festival in Scheeßel, Germany. Originally thought to be a pinched nerve in his shoulder, the pain was later diagnosed as an acutely blocked artery, requiring an emergency angioplasty in Hamburg. The remaining 14 dates of the tour were cancelled.[114]
Since recuperating from the heart surgery, Bowie has reduced his musical output, making only one-off appearances on stage and in the studio. He sang in a duet of his 1972 song "Changes" with Butterfly Boucher for the 2004 animated film Shrek 2.[115] During a relatively quiet 2005, he recorded the vocals for the song "(She Can) Do That", co-written with Brian Transeau, for the film Stealth.[116] He returned to the stage on 8 September 2005, appearing with Arcade Fire for the US nationally televised event Fashion Rocks, and performed with the Canadian band for the second time a week later during the CMJ Music Marathon.[117] He contributed back-up vocals on TV on the Radio's song "Province" for their album Return to Cookie Mountain,[118] made a commercial with Snoop Dogg for XM Satellite Radio,[119] and joined with Lou Reed on Danish alt-rockers Kashmir's 2005 album No Balance Palace.[120]
Bowie was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award on 8 February 2006.[121] In April, he announced, "I’m taking a year off—no touring, no albums."[122] He made a surprise guest appearance at David Gilmour's 29 May concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The event was recorded, and a selection of songs on which he had contributed joint vocals were subsequently released.[123] He performed again in November, alongside Alicia Keys, at the Black Ball, a New York benefit event for Keep a Child Alive,[124] a performance that marks the last time Bowie performed his music on stage.[125]
Bowie was chosen to curate the 2007 High Line Festival, selecting musicians and artists for the Manhattan event,[126] and performed on Scarlett Johansson's 2008 album of Tom Waits covers, Anywhere I Lay My Head.[127] On the 40th anniversary of the July 1969 moon landing—and Bowie's accompanying commercial breakthrough with "Space Oddity"—EMI released the individual tracks from the original eight-track studio recording of the song, in a 2009 contest inviting members of the public to create a remix.[128] A Reality Tour, a double album of live material from the 2003 concert tour, was released in January 2010.[129]
In late March 2011, Toy, Bowie's previously unreleased album from 2001, was leaked onto the internet, containing material used for Heathen and most of its single B-sides, as well as unheard new versions of his early back catalogue.[130][131]
Acting career[link]
Main article: David Bowie filmography
Biographer David Buckley writes, "The essence of Bowie's contribution to popular music can be found in his outstanding ability to analyse and select ideas from outside the mainstream—from art, literature, theatre and film—and to bring them inside, so that the currency of pop is constantly being changed."[132] Buckley says, "Just one person took glam rock to new rarefied heights and invented character-playing in pop, marrying theatre and popular music in one seamless, powerful whole."[133] Bowie's career has also been punctuated by various roles in film and theatre productions, earning him some acclaim as an actor in his own right.
The beginnings of his acting career predate his commercial breakthrough as a musician. Studying avant-garde theatre and mime under Lindsay Kemp, he was given the role of Cloud in Kemp's 1967 theatrical production Pierrot in Turquoise (later made into the 1970 television film The Looking Glass Murders).[134] In the black-and-white short The Image (1969), he played a ghostly boy who emerges from a troubled artist's painting to haunt him.[135] The same year, the film of Leslie Thomas's 1966 comic novel The Virgin Soldiers saw Bowie make a brief appearance as an extra.[135] In 1976 he earned acclaim for his first major film role, portraying Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien from a dying planet, in The Man Who Fell to Earth, directed by Nic Roeg. Just a Gigolo (1979), an Anglo-German co-production directed by David Hemmings, saw Bowie in the lead role as Prussian officer Paul von Przygodski, who, returning from World War I, is discovered by a Baroness (Marlene Dietrich) and put into her Gigolo Stable.
Bowie took the title role in the Broadway theatre production The Elephant Man, earning high praise for an expressive performance. He played the part 157 times between 1980 and 1981.[81] Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, a 1981 biographical film focusing on a young girl's drug addiction in West Berlin, featured Bowie in a cameo appearance as himself at a concert in Germany. Its soundtrack album, Christiane F. (1981), featured much material from his Berlin Trilogy albums.[136] Bowie starred in The Hunger (1983), a revisionist vampire film, with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. In Nagisa Oshima's film the same year, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, based on Laurens van der Post's novel The Seed and the Sower, Bowie played Major Jack Celliers, a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp. Bowie had a cameo in Yellowbeard, a 1983 pirate comedy created by Monty Python members, and a small part as Colin, the hitman in the 1985 film Into the Night. He declined to play the villain Max Zorin in the James Bond film A View to a Kill (1985).[137]
Absolute Beginners (1986), a rock musical based on Colin MacInnes's 1959 novel about London life, featured Bowie's music and presented him with a minor acting role. The same year, Jim Henson's dark fantasy Labyrinth found him with the part of Jareth, the king of the goblins.[138] Two years later he played Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ. Bowie portrayed a disgruntled restaurant employee opposite Rosanna Arquette in The Linguini Incident (1991), and the mysterious FBI agent Phillip Jeffries in David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). He took a small but pivotal role as Andy Warhol in Basquiat, artist/director Julian Schnabel's 1996 biopic of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and co-starred in Giovanni Veronesi's Spaghetti Western Il Mio West (1998, released as Gunslinger's Revenge in the US in 2005) as the most feared gunfighter in the region.[139] He played the ageing gangster Bernie in Andrew Goth's Everybody Loves Sunshine (1999), and appeared in the TV horror serial of The Hunger. In Mr. Rice's Secret (2000), he played the title role as the neighbour of a terminally ill twelve-year-old, and the following year appeared as himself in Zoolander.
Bowie portrayed physicist Nikola Tesla in the Christopher Nolan film, The Prestige (2006), which was about the bitter rivalry between two magicians in the late 19th century. He voice-acted in the animated film Arthur and the Invisibles as the powerful villain Maltazard, and lent his voice to the character Lord Royal Highness in the SpongeBob's Atlantis SquarePantis television film. In the 2008 film August, directed by Austin Chick, he played a supporting role as Ogilvie, alongside Josh Hartnett and Rip Torn, with whom he had worked in 1976 for The Man Who Fell to Earth.[140][141]
Sexual orientation[link]
Buckley writes, "If Ziggy confused both his creator and his audience, a big part of that confusion centred on the topic of sexuality."[142] Bowie declared himself bisexual in an interview with Michael Watts of Melody Maker in January 1972, a move coinciding with the first shots in his campaign for stardom as Ziggy Stardust.[42] In a September 1976 interview with Playboy, Bowie said: "It's true—I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing that ever happened to me."[143]
In a 1983 interview with Rolling Stone, Bowie said his public declaration of bisexuality was "the biggest mistake I ever made" and "I was always a closet heterosexual".[144] On other occasions, he said his interest in homosexual and bisexual culture had been more a product of the times and the situation in which he found himself than his own feelings; as described by Buckley, he said he had been driven more by "a compulsion to flout moral codes than a real biological and psychological state of being".[145][146]
Asked in 2002 by Blender whether he still believed his public declaration was the biggest mistake he ever made, he replied:
Interesting. [Long pause] I don’t think it was a mistake in Europe, but it was a lot tougher in America. I had no problem with people knowing I was bisexual. But I had no inclination to hold any banners nor be a representative of any group of people. I knew what I wanted to be, which was a songwriter and a performer, and I felt that bisexuality became my headline over here for so long. America is a very puritanical place, and I think it stood in the way of so much I wanted to do.[147]
Buckley's view of the period is that Bowie, "a taboo-breaker and a dabbler ... mined sexual intrigue for its ability to shock",[148] and that "it is probably true that Bowie was never gay, nor even consistently actively bisexual ... he did, from time to time, experiment, even if only out of a sense of curiosity and a genuine allegiance with the 'transgressional'."[149] Biographer Christopher Sandford says that according to Mary Finnigan, with whom Bowie had an affair in 1969, the singer and his first wife Angie "lived in a fantasy world [...] and they created their bisexual fantasy."[150] Sandford tells how, during the marriage, Bowie "made a positive fetish of repeating the quip that he and his wife had met while 'fucking the same bloke' [...] Gay sex was always an anecdotal and laughing matter. That Bowie's actual tastes swung the other way is clear from even a partial tally of his affairs with women."[150]
Musicianship[link]
From the time of his earliest recordings in the 1960s, Bowie has employed a wide variety of musical styles. His early compositions and performances were strongly influenced by not only rock and rollers like Little Richard and Elvis Presley but also the wider world of show business. He particularly strove to emulate the British musical theatre singer-songwriter and actor Anthony Newley, whose vocal style he frequently adopted, and made prominent use of for his 1967 debut release, David Bowie (to the disgust of Newley himself, who destroyed the copy he received from Bowie's publisher).[19][151] Bowie's music hall fascination continued to surface sporadically alongside such diverse styles as hard rock and heavy metal, soul, psychedelic folk and pop.[152]
Musicologist James Perone observes Bowie's use of octave switches for different repetitions of the same melody, exemplified in his commercial breakthrough single, "Space Oddity", and later in the song "Heroes", to dramatic effect; Perone notes that "in the lowest part of his vocal register [...] his voice has an almost crooner-like richness."[153]
Voice instructor Jo Thompson describes Bowie's vocal vibrato technique as "particularly deliberate and distinctive".[154] Schinder and Schwartz call him "a vocalist of extraordinary technical ability, able to pitch his singing to particular effect."[155] Here, too, as in his stagecraft and songwriting, the singer's chamaeleon-like nature is evident: historiographer Michael Campbell says that Bowie's lyrics "arrest our ear, without question. But Bowie continually shifts from person to person as he delivers them [...] His voice changes dramatically from section to section."[156]
Bowie plays many instruments, among them electric, acoustic, and twelve-string guitar; alto, tenor and baritone saxophone; keyboards including piano, synthesizers and Mellotron; harmonica, Stylophone, xylophone, vibraphone, koto, drums and percussion, and string instruments including viola and cello.[157][158][159][160]
Legacy[link]
Bowie's innovative songs and stagecraft brought a new dimension to popular music in the early 1970s, strongly influencing both its immediate forms and its subsequent development. A pioneer of glam rock, Bowie, according to music historians Schinder and Schwartz, has joint responsibility with Marc Bolan for creating the genre.[161] At the same time, he inspired the innovators of the punk rock music movement—historian Michael Campbell calls him "one of punk's seminal influences". While punk musicians trashed the conventions of pop stardom, Bowie moved on again—into a more abstract style of music making that would in turn become a transforming influence. Biographer David Buckley writes, "At a time when punk rock was noisily reclaiming the three-minute pop song in a show of public defiance, Bowie almost completely abandoned traditional rock instrumentation."[162][163] Bowie's record company sought to convey his unique status in popular music with the slogan, "There is old wave, there is new wave, and there is Bowie..."[164] Musicologist James Perone credits him with having "brought sophistication to rock music", and critical reviews frequently acknowledge the intellectual depth of his work and influence.[161][165][166]
Buckley writes that, in an early 1970s pop world that was "Bloated, self-important, leather-clad, self-satisfied, ... Bowie challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day." As described by John Peel, "The one distinguishing feature about early-70s progressive rock was that it didn't progress. Before Bowie came along, people didn't want too much change." Buckley says that Bowie "subverted the whole notion of what it was to be a rock star", with the result that "After Bowie there has been no other pop icon of his stature, because the pop world that produces these rock gods doesn't exist any more. ... The fierce partisanship of the cult of Bowie was also unique—its influence lasted longer and has been more creative than perhaps almost any other force within pop fandom." Buckley concludes that "Bowie is both star and icon. The vast body of work he has produced ... has created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture. ... His influence has been unique in popular culture—he has permeated and altered more lives than any comparable figure."[2]
Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.[104] Through perpetual reinvention, he has seen his influence continue to broaden and extend: music reviewer Brad Filicky writes that over the decades, "Bowie has become known as a musical chameleon, changing and dictating trends as much as he has altered his style to fit, influencing fashion and pop culture."[167] Biographer Thomas Forget adds, "Because he has succeeded in so many different styles of music, it is almost impossible to find a popular artist today that has not been influenced by David Bowie."[168]
Personal life[link]
Bowie married Mary Angela Barnett (also known as Angie Bowie) on 19 March 1970 at Bromley Register Office in Beckenham Lane, Kent. They had a son together, Zowie Bowie (also known as Duncan Jones, film director), and divorced on 8 February 1980 in Switzerland.
The 1971 song "Kooks" on the album Hunky Dory was written for his newborn son.
In 1992 Bowie married Somali-American model Iman. They have one daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones, born 15 August 2000.[169] The couple resides primarily in Manhattan and London.[170]
Regarding his compositions, in 2005 he said "Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always." because he is "not quite an atheist and it bothers me."[171]
Awards and recognition[link]
Main article: List of awards and nominations received by David Bowie
Bowie's 1969 commercial breakthrough, the song "Space Oddity", won him an Ivor Novello Special Award For Originality.[172] For his performance in the 1976 science fiction film The Man Who Fell to Earth, he won a Saturn Award for Best Actor.[173] In the ensuing decades he has been honoured with numerous awards for his music and its accompanying videos, receiving, among others, two Grammy Awards[174][175] and two BRIT Awards.[176]
In 1999, Bowie was made a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.[177] He received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music the same year.[178] He declined the royal honour of Commander of the British Empire in 2000, and turned down a knighthood in 2003,[179] stating: "I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that. I seriously don't know what it's for. It's not what I spent my life working for."[180]
Throughout his career he has sold an estimated 250 million albums.[181] In the United Kingdom, he has been awarded 9 Platinum, 11 Gold and 8 Silver albums, and in the United States, 5 Platinum and 7 Gold.[182][183] In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, he was ranked 29.[181] In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him 39th on their list of the 100 Greatest Rock Artists of All Time[184] and the 23rd best singer of all time.[185] Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 17 January 1996.[104]
Discography[link]
Main article: David Bowie discography
|
|
Filmography[link]
As Actor[link]
| Year | Film | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1967 | The Image | The Boy | short film |
| 1969 | The Virgin Soldiers | Soldier | (extra) |
| 1970 | Pierrot in Turquoise or The Looking Glass Murders | Cloud | television film |
| 1976 | The Man Who Fell to Earth | Thomas Jerome Newton | Saturn Award for Best Actor |
| 1978 | Just a Gigolo | Paul Ambrosius von Przygodski | |
| 1981 | Christiane F. (Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo) | Himself | cameo |
| 1982 | The Snowman | Narrator | re-released version |
| Baal | Baal | television film | |
| 1983 | Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence | Maj. Jack 'Strafer' Celliers | |
| The Hunger | John | ||
| Yellowbeard | The Shark | cameo (uncredited) | |
| 1985 | Into the Night | Colin Morris | cameo |
| 1986 | Labyrinth | Jareth the Goblin King | |
| Absolute Beginners | Vendice Partners | ||
| 1988 | The Last Temptation of Christ | Pontius Pilate | cameo |
| 1991 | The Linguini Incident | Monte | |
| 1991 | Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me | Phillip Jeffries | cameo |
| 1996 | Basquiat | Andy Warhol | |
| 1998 | Gunslinger's Revenge (Il mio West) | Jack Sikora | |
| 1999 | Everybody Loves Sunshine | Bernie | |
| 2000 | Mr. Rice's Secret | William Rice | |
| 2001 | Zoolander | Himself | cameo (nominated for MTV Movie Award) |
| 2006 | The Prestige | Nikola Tesla | |
| 2007 | Arthur and the Invisibles | Emperor Maltazard | voice: English version |
| 2008 | August | Cyrus Ogilvie | cameo |
| 2008 | Spongebob Squarepants | L.R.H | guest voice |
| 2009 | Bandslam | Himself | cameo |
As Musician[link]
- Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: The Motion Picture (1983) (VHS, DVD in 2003)
- Love You Till Tuesday (1984) (VHS, DVD in 2005)
- Serious Moonlight (1984) (VHS, unofficial DVD in 1999, official DVD in 2006)
- Glass Spider (1988) (VHS, unofficial DVD as Glass Spider Tour in 2001, official DVD in 2007)
- Bowie – The Video Collection (1993) (VHS)
- Black Tie White Noise (1993) (VHS, DVD in 2005)
- Best of Bowie (2002) (DVD)
- A Reality Tour (2004) (DVD)
As Producer[link]
- Büvös vadász (1994) (... aka Magic Hunter)
- Passaggio per il paradiso (1998) (... aka Gentle Into the Night, ... aka Passage to Paradise)
- Scott Walker: 30 Century Man (2006)
Documentaries[link]
- Love You Till Tuesday (1969) (as the subject, short)
- Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1973) (as the subject, documentary/concert film)
- Cracked Actor (1974) (as the subject, BBC)
- Group Madness (1983)
- Cool Cats: Twenty-Five Years of Rock 'N' Roll Style (1983)
- Queen: The Magic Years (1987)
- Imagine: John Lennon (1988)
- Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol (1990)
- Travelling Light (1992)
- Inspirations (1997)
- Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart (1998)
- Mayor of the Sunset Strip (2003)
See also[link]
|
Book: David Bowie |
| Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print. | |
- Best selling music artists
- Bowie Bonds
- Bowie (Flight of the Conchords)
- List of artists who reached number one on the Hot 100 (US)
- List of artists who reached number one on the US Dance chart
- List of David Bowie tours
- List of number-one hits (United States)
- List of Number 1 Dance Hits (United States)
- List of people who have declined a British honour
Notes[link]
- ^ "How to say: Bowie". bbc.co.uk. 8 January 2008. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/magazinemonitor/2007/01/how_to_say_bowie.shtml. Retrieved 16 September 2010.
- ^ a b c d Buckley (2005): pp. 516–17, 524, 529
- ^ "From Morrissey to Tony Blair: How Irelands children are at the heart of English culture". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/from-morrissey-to-tony-blair-how-irelands-children-are-at-the-heart-of-english-culture-445584.html. Retrieved 6 July 2011.
- ^ Hume, John et al (2008). Britain & Ireland: Lives Entwined III. British Council. p. 127. ISBN 978-0-86355-612-8.
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 9–16
- ^ a b Sandford (1997): pp. 18–19
- ^ Buckley (2000): p. 21.
- ^ a b c Sandford (1997): pp. 19–20
- ^ Doggett, Peter (January 2007). "Teenage Wildlife". Mojo Classic (Mojo) (60 Years of Bowie): 8–9.
- ^ a b Sandford (1997): pp. 21–22
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 25
- ^ Buckley (2005): p.19
- ^ Evans, Mike (2006). Rock 'n' Roll's Strangest Moments: Extraordinary Tales from Over Fifty Years. Anova Books. p. 57. ISBN 978-1-86105-923-9.
- ^ Heterochromia Central - What Is Central Heterochromia?
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 28
- ^ a b Sandford (1997): pp. 29–30
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 35–39
- ^ Buckley (2000): p. 33
- ^ a b Sandford (1997): pp. 41–42
- ^ a b Buckley (2005): pp. 41–42
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 46
- ^ Buckley (2005): pp. 49–52
- ^ a b Sandford (1997): pp. 49–50
- ^ a b Sandford (1997): p. 53
- ^ McKay, George (1996). Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance. Verso. p. 188. ISBN 978-1-85984-908-8.
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 60
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 54–60
- ^ a b c Sandford (1997): pp. 62–63
- ^ Buckley (2000): pp. 89–90
- ^ a b Sandford (1997): p. 67
- ^ a b c Sandford (1997): pp. 73–74
- ^ Pegg (2000): pp. 260–65
- ^ Buckley (2005): pp. 95–99
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 80
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 85–86
- ^ a b Buckley (2005): pp. 135–36
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 93–95
- ^ Buckley (2000): p. 156
- ^ Pegg (2004): pp. 281–83
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 108
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 106–7
- ^ a b Carr & Murray (1981): p. 7
- ^ Carr & Murray (1981): p. 116
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 163
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 115
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 3
- ^ Buckley (2005): pp. 180–83
- ^ a b Buckley (2005): pp. 204–5
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 128
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 138
- ^ Carr & Murray (1981): pp. 68–74
- ^ Buckley, 2003, p.130.
- ^ a b Sandford (1997): p. 146
- ^ Roberts, David (ed.) (2001). Guinness World Records: British Hit Singles. Guinness World Records Ltd. p. 120. ISBN 0-85156-156-X.
- ^ a b Sandford (1997): pp. 135–36
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 137, 153
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 238
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 244
- ^ a b Sandford (1997): p. 158
- ^ Buckley (2000): pp. 289–91.
- ^ Paytress, Mark (January 2007). "The Controversial Homecoming". Mojo Classic (Mojo) (60 Years of Bowie): 64.
- ^ Carr & Murray (1981): p. 11.
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 252
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 154–55
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 149
- ^ Needs, Kris (January 2007). "The Passenger". Mojo Classic (Mojo) (60 Years of Bowie): 65.
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 166–68
- ^ Perone (2007): p. 175
- ^ Thomson (1993): p. xiii
- ^ Pegg (2000): pp. 90–92
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 181–82
- ^ Bronson, Fred (1990). The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits. Billboard Books. p. 572. ISBN 0-8230-7677-6.
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 293
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 189
- ^ Carr & Murray (1981): pp. 102–7
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 281
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 191–92
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 197
- ^ Pegg (2000): p. 29
- ^ Carr & Murray (1981): pp. 108–14
- ^ a b Sandford (1997): pp. 205–7
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 208, 211–12
- ^ Buckley (2005): pp. 335–55
- ^ Buckley (2005): pp. 165–66
- ^ McNair, James (January 2007). "Tumble & Twirl". Mojo Classic (Mojo) (60 Years of Bowie): 101.
- ^ Fyfe, Andy (January 2007). "Too Dizzy". Mojo Classic (Mojo) (60 Years of Bowie): 88–91.
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 387
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 274
- ^ a b Sandford (1997): p. 275
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 273
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 394
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 278–79
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 278
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 280–86
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 289
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 292
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 294–95
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 298–99
- ^ Buckley (2005): pp. 413–14
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 301–8
- ^ Buckley (2000): pp. 494–95, 623
- ^ Buckley (2000): pp. 623–24
- ^ Buckley (2000): pp. 512–13
- ^ a b c "David Bowie: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction". rockhall.com. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. http://rockhall.com/inductees/david-bowie. Retrieved 16 September 2010.
- ^ Buckley (2000): pp. 533–34
- ^ Thompson (2006): p. 203
- ^ Thompson (2006): pp. 203, 212
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 466
- ^ Perone (2007): p. 125
- ^ Buckley (2005): pp. 488–89
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 485
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 491
- ^ Buckley (2005): pp. 493–95
- ^ Buckley (2005): pp. 504–5
- ^ Buckley (2004): p. 16
- ^ Perone (2007): p. 142
- ^ Thompson (2006): pp. 291–92
- ^ "Space Is the Place: Innovative Brooklyn rockers blast off to the future". Spin (Spin Media LLC): 1. June 2006.
- ^ Lamb, Charles W.; Hair, Joseph F.; McDaniel, Carl (2007). Marketing. South-Western College Pub. p. 472. ISBN 978-0-324-36208-4.
- ^ Stone, Andrew (2008). Denmark. Lonely Planet. p. 46. ISBN 978-1-74104-669-4.
- ^ Thompson (2006): p. 293
- ^ Yuan, Jada (1 May 2006). "David Bowie Takes Time Off, Sneaks Into Movies". New York Magazine. http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/16865/. Retrieved 16 September 2010.
- ^ Gulla, Bob (2008). Guitar Gods: The 25 Players Who Made Rock History. Greenwood. p. 95. ISBN 978-0-313-35806-7.
- ^ Mitchell, Gail (November 2009). "The Elements of Style". Billboard (Billboard.com): 22.
- ^ Gilmore, Mikal (2 February 2012), "How Ziggy Stardust Fell to Earth", Rolling Stone magazine (1149): 36–43,68
- ^ Schinder & Schwartz (2007): p. 500
- ^ Marchese, David (May 2008). "The Inquisition: Scarlett Johansson". Spin (Spin Media LLC): 40.
- ^ "David Bowie to release "Space Oddity" multi-tracks to celebrate moon landing". NME News. 6 July 2009. http://www.nme.com/news/david-bowie/45872. Retrieved 2 September 2010.
- ^ Diver, Mike (5 February 2010). "David Bowie A Reality Tour Review". bbc.co.uk. http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/5gwx. Retrieved 2 September 2010.
- ^ Perpetua, Matthew (22 March 2011). "Unreleased David Bowie LP 'Toy' Leaks Online". Rolling Stone. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/unreleased-david-bowie-lp-toy-leaks-online-20110322. Retrieved 25 March 2011.
- ^ Michaels, Sean (23 March 2011). "David Bowie's unreleased album Toy leaks online". The Guardian (UK). http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/mar/23/david-bowie-toy-album-leak. Retrieved 25 March 2011.
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 526
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 2
- ^ Sandford (1997): p. 43
- ^ a b Buckley (2005): p. 49
- ^ Sandford (1997); p. 208
- ^ Pegg (2004) p. 561.
- ^ Sandford (1997): pp. 252–53
- ^ Thompson (2006): p. 195
- ^ "August". imdb.com. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470679. Retrieved 14 September 2010.
- ^ "The Man Who Fell to Earth". imdb.com. http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0074851/fullcredits. Retrieved 14 September 2010.
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 140
- ^ "Interview: David Bowie". Playboy. September 1976. Archived from the original on 1 August 2010. http://web.archive.org/web/20100801045250/http://www.playboy.com/articles/david-bowie-interview/index.html?page=2. Retrieved 14 September 2010.
- ^ "David Bowie Calls Himself 'A Closet Heterosexual'". orlandosentinel.com (Orlando Sentinel). 30 May 1993. http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1993-05-30/news/9305300344_1_david-bowie-mick-jagger-ziggy. Retrieved 13 May 2012.
- ^ Buckley (2000): p. 401
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 106
- ^ Collis, Clark (August 2002). "Dear Superstar: David Bowie". blender.com (Alpha Media Group Inc). http://www.blender.com/guide/articles.aspx?id=366. Retrieved 16 September 2010.
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 141
- ^ Buckley (2005): p. 147
- ^ a b Sandford (1997): p. 48
- ^ Perone (2007): p. 4
- ^ Perone (2007): pp. 22, 36–37
- ^ Perone (2007) p. 12
- ^ Thompson, Jo (2004). Find Your Voice: A Self-Help Manual for Singers. Artemis Editions. p. 76. ISBN 978-0-634-07435-6.
- ^ Schinder & Schwartz (2007): p. 483
- ^ Campbell (2008): p. 254
- ^ Thompson (2006): p. 346
- ^ Hopkins, Jerry (1985). Bowie. MacMillan. p. 239. ISBN 978-0-02-553730-9.
- ^ Perone (2007): pp. 17–44, 152–60
- ^ Buckley (2004): p. 48
- ^ a b Schinder & Schwartz (2007): p. 482
- ^ Campbell (2008) p. 304
- ^ Buckley (2004): p. 45
- ^ Thomson (1993): p. 217
- ^ Perone (2007): p. 183
- ^ Paytress, Mark (2003). Bolan: The Rise and Fall of a 20th Century Superstar. Omnibus Press. p. 218. ISBN 978-0-7119-9293-1.
- ^ Filicky, Brad (10 June 2002). "Reviews; David Bowie: Heathen". CMJ New Music Report (CMJ) 71 (766): 13.
- ^ Forget, Thomas (2002). David Bowie (Rock & Roll Hall of Famers). Rosen Publishing Group. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-8239-3523-9.
- ^ FIRST LOOK: The News in Brief, August 15, 2000. Ca.eonline.com (2000-08-15). Retrieved on 2012-05-09.
- ^ Iman. Fashion Model Directory. Retrieved on 2012-05-09.
- ^ Anthony DeCurtis (5 May 2005). In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life And Work. Hal Leonard Corporation. pp. 262–263. ISBN 978-0-634-06655-9. http://books.google.com/books?id=8Rr53q4VxuoC&pg=PA262. Retrieved 14 May 2012.
- ^ "Ivor Novello Awards". buckmusicgroup.com. Bucks Music Group. http://www.bucksmusicgroup.com/about/Ivor_Novello_Awards.html. Retrieved 16 September 2010.
- ^ "Past Award Winners". saturnawards.org. The Academy of Science Fiction Fantasy & Horror Films. http://www.saturnawards.org/past.html. Retrieved 11 September 2010.
- ^ "Grammy Award Winners". Grammy.com. National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, Inc. http://www.grammy.com/GRAMMY_Awards/Winners/Results.aspx?title=&winner=David%20Bowie&year=0&genreID=0&hp=1. Retrieved 16 September 2010. [dead link]
- ^ "Lifetime Achievement Award: Past Recipients". Grammy.com. National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, Inc. Archived from the original on 26 August 2010. http://web.archive.org/web/20100826002047/http://www2.grammy.com/Recording%5FAcademy/Awards/Lifetime%5FAwards/. Retrieved 16 September 2010.
- ^ "David Bowie". brits.co.uk. Brit Awards Ltd. http://www.brits.co.uk/artist/david-bowie. Retrieved 11 September 2010.
- ^ Lichfield, John (8 May 2009). "The Big Question: How does the French honours system work, and why has Kylie been decorated?". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-big-question-how-does-the-french-honours-system-work-and-why-has-kylie-been-decorated-822752.html. Retrieved 17 September 2010.
- ^ "ChChChChanges". berklee.edu. Berklee College of Music. http://www.berklee.edu/news/1999/grad99.html. Retrieved 17 September 2010.
- ^ Thompson, Jody (8 January 2007). "Sixty things about David Bowie". (No. 35): BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6230201.stm. Retrieved 17 September 2010.
- ^ Mohan, Dominic (12 September 2003). "Exclusive: Bowie refuses knighthood". The Sun. http://www.bowiewonderworld.com/press/00/030912thesun.htm. Retrieved 11 December 2010.
- ^ a b Todd, Ben (27 November 2009). "David Bowie asked to play at Glastonbury for third time to mark 40th anniversary". The Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1231539/David-Bowie-asked-play-Glastonbury-time-mark-40th-anniversary.html. Retrieved 11 September 2010.
- ^ "Gold and Platinum: Search Results". riaa.com. Recording Industry Association of America. http://www.riaa.com/goldandplatinumdata.php?resultpage=1&table=SEARCH_RESULTS&artist=David%20Bowie&sort=Artist&perPage=25. Retrieved 12 September 2010.
- ^ "Certified Awards Search". bpi.co.uk. British Phonographic Industry. http://www.bpi.co.uk/certifiedawards/search.aspx. Retrieved 12 September 2010.
- ^ "The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time". Rolling Stone. 15 April 2004. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5939214/the_immortals_the_first_fifty. Retrieved 14 September 2010.
- ^ "The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time". Rolling Stone. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/6027/32782/33036. Retrieved 14 September 2010.
References[link]
- Buckley, David (2000) [First published 1999]. Strange Fascination — David Bowie: The Definitive Story. London: Virgin. ISBN 0-7535-0457-X.
- Buckley, David (2004). David Bowie: The Complete Guide To His Music. Omnibus Press. ISBN 978-1-84449-423-1.
- Buckley, David (2005) [First published 1999]. Strange Fascination — David Bowie: The Definitive Story. London: Virgin. ISBN 978-0-7535-1002-5.
- Buckley, Peter (2003). The rough guide to rock. Rough Guides. ISBN 1-84353-105-4.
- Campbell, Michael (2008). Popular Music in America: And The Beat Goes On. Schirmer. ISBN 978-0-495-50530-3.
- Carr, Roy; Murray, Charles Shaar (1981). Bowie: An Illustrated Record. New York: Avon. ISBN 0-380-77966-8.
- Cole, Shaun (2000). 'Don we now our gay apparel': gay men's dress in the twentieth century. London: Berg. ISBN 1-85973-415-4.
- Ditmore, Melissa Hope (2006). Encyclopedia of prostitution and sex work, Volume 2. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0-313-32970-2.
- Pegg, Nicholas (2004) [First published 2000]. The Complete David Bowie. London: Reynolds & Hearn. ISBN 1-903111-73-0.
- Perone, James E. (2007). The Words and Music of David Bowie. Praeger. ISBN 978-0-275-99245-3.
- Sandford, Christopher (1997) [First published 1996]. Bowie: Loving the Alien. Time Warner. ISBN 0-306-80854-4.
- Schinder, Scott; Schwartz, Andy (2007). Icons of Rock: An Encyclopedia of the Legends Who Changed Music Forever. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-33845-8.
- Thomson, Elizabeth (1993). The Bowie Companion. Macmillan. ISBN 0-283-06262-2.
- Thompson, Dave (2006). Hallo Spaceboy: The Rebirth of David Bowie. Ecw Press. ISBN 978-1-55022-733-8.
Further reading[link]
- Trynka Paul, Starman: David Bowie – The Definitive Biography, Little, Brown Book Group Limited, 2011
- Cann, David, Any Day Now: David Bowie the London Years 1947–1974, Kenneth Pitt in Books, 2011
- Jacke, Andreas, David Bowie – Station To Station, Psychosozial- Verlag, 2011
- Seabrook, Thomas Jerome, Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town, Jawbone Press, 2008.
- Spitz, Marc, Bowie: A Biography, Crown Publishers, 2009.
- Tremlett, George, David Bowie: Living on the Brink, Carroll and Graf, 1997.
- Waldrep, Shelton, "Phenomenology of Performance", The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie, University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
- Welch, Chris, David Bowie: We Could Be Heroes: The Stories Behind Every David Bowie Song, Da Capo Press, 1999.
- Wilcken, Hugo, 33⅓: David Bowie's Low, Continuum, 2005.
External links[link]
|
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: David Bowie |
 |
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: David Bowie |
- Official website
- Official Myspace page
- Official YouTube channel
- Documentary Film - David Bowie: Sound and Vision
- Bowieart – paintings, printmakings, etc.
- Works by or about David Bowie in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Bowie, David |
| Alternative names | David Robert Jones |
| Short description | English singer, songwriter, musician |
| Date of birth | 8 January 1947 |
| Place of birth | London, England, UK |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
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This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
This article is about the Peoples Temple leader. For other persons of the same name, see Jim Jones (disambiguation).
| Jim Jones | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | James W. Jones (1931-05-13)May 13, 1931 Randolph County, Indiana, U.S. |
| Died | November 18, 1978(1978-11-18) (aged 47) Jonestown, Guyana |
| Occupation | Religious leader |
| Religion | Agnostic/Atheist[1] |
| Spouse | Marceline Baldwin Jones (1927 - 1978) |
| Children | Agnes Paulette Jones (1943 - 1978) Suzanne Jones Cartmell (1953 - 2006) Stephanie Jones (1954 - 1959) Lew Eric Jones (1956 - 1978) Jim Jon Prokes (1975 - 1978) Stephan Gandhi Jones (1958- ) James Warren Jones, Jr. (1961-) |
| Parents | James Thurman Jones (1887 - 1951) Lynetta Putnam Jones (1902 - 1977) |
Reverend James Warren "Jim" Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, which is best known for the November 18, 1978 mass suicide of 909 Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana along with the killings of five other people at a nearby airstrip. Over 200 children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of whom were forcibly made to ingest cyanide by the elite Temple members.
Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple in that state in the 1950s. Jones and the Temple later moved to California, and both gained notoriety with the move of the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco in the mid-1970s.
The incident in Guyana ranks among the largest mass suicides in history, though most likely it involved forced suicide and/or murder, and was the single greatest loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster until the events of September 11, 2001. Among the dead was Leo Ryan, who remains the only Congressman assassinated in the line of duty as a Congressman in the history of the United States.[2]
Contents |
Early life[link]
File:884 2-Lynetta.jpg
Lynetta Putnam Jones, the mother of Jim Jones
Jim Jones was born in a rural area of Randolph County near the Ohio border,[3] to James Thurman Jones (May 31, 1887 – May 29, 1951), a World War I veteran, and Lynetta Putnam (April 16, 1902 – December 11, 1977).[4] He was of Irish and Welsh descent.[5] Jones would later claim partial Cherokee ancestry through his mother, though this was likely false according to his maternal second cousin Barbara Shaffer.[5][note 1] Economic difficulties during the Great Depression necessitated that Jones' family move to nearby Lynn, Indiana, in 1934.[6] Jim Jones and a childhood friend both claimed that Jones' father was associated with the Ku Klux Klan.[6]
In interviews for the 2006 documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, childhood acquaintances recalled Jones as being a "really weird kid" who was "obsessed with religion ... obsessed with death". They alleged that as a child, Jones frequently held funerals for small animals and had reportedly stabbed a cat to death.[7]
Jones was a voracious reader as a child and studied Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi and Adolf Hitler carefully,[8] noting each of their strengths and weaknesses.[8] After Jones' parents separated, he moved with his mother to Richmond, Indiana.[9] He graduated from Richmond High School early and with honors in December 1948.[10]
Jones married nurse Marceline Baldwin in 1949, and moved to Bloomington, Indiana.[11] He attended Indiana University at Bloomington, where a speech by Eleanor Roosevelt about the plight of African Americans impressed him.[11] Jones' sympathetic statements about communism offended Marceline's grandmother.[11] In 1951, Jones moved to Indianapolis, where he attended night school at Butler University, earning a degree in secondary education in 1961.[12]
Building the Temple[link]
Indiana beginnings[link]
Further information: Peoples Temple
In 1951, Jones became a member of the Communist Party USA, and began attending meetings and rallies in Indianapolis.[13] He became flustered with harassment he received during the McCarthy Hearings,[13] particularly regarding an event he attended with his mother focusing on Paul Robeson, after which she was harassed by the FBI in front of her co-workers for attending.[14] He also became frustrated with ostracism of open communists in the United States, especially during the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.[15] This frustration, among other things, provoked a seminal moment for Jones in which he asked himself "how can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church."[13][14]
Jones' interest in religion began during his childhood, primarily because he found making friends difficult, though initially he vacillated on his church of choice.[5] Jones was surprised when a Methodist superintendent helped him to get a start in the church even though he knew Jones to be a communist and Jones did not meet him through the Communist Party.[15] In 1952, Jones became a student pastor in Sommerset Southside Methodist Church, but claims he left that church because its leaders barred him from integrating blacks into his congregation.[13] Around this time, Jones witnessed a faith-healing service at the Seventh Day Baptist Church.[13] He observed that it attracted people and their money and concluded that, with financial resources from such healings, he could help accomplish his social goals.[13]
Jones then began his own church, which changed names until it became the Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel.[13] The People's Temple was initially made as an inter-racial mission.
Jones moved away from the Communist Party and Maoists when CPUSA members and Mao Zedong became critical of some of the policies of former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.[15]
Integrationist[link]
In 1960, Indianapolis Democratic Mayor Charles Boswell appointed Jones director of the Human Rights Commission.[16] Jones ignored Boswell's advice to keep a low profile, finding new outlets for his views on local radio and television programs.[16] When the mayor and other commissioners asked Jones to curtail his public actions, he resisted and was wildly cheered at a meeting of the NAACP and Urban League when he yelled for his audience to be more militant, and climaxed with "Let my people go!"[17]
During this time, Jones also helped to integrate churches, restaurants, the telephone company, the police department, a theater, an amusement park, and the Methodist Hospital.[13] After swastikas were painted on the homes of two African American families, Jones personally walked the neighborhood comforting African Americans and counseling white families not to move, in order to prevent white flight.[18] He also set up stings to catch restaurants refusing to serve African American customers[18] and wrote to American Nazi leaders then leaked their responses to the media.[19] When Jones was accidentally placed in the black ward of a hospital after a collapse in 1961, he refused to be moved and began to make the beds, and empty the bed pans of black patients.[20] Political pressures resulting from Jones' actions caused hospital officials to desegregate the wards.[20]
Jones received considerable criticism in Indiana for his integrationist views.[13] White-owned businesses and locals were critical of him.[18] A swastika was placed on the Temple, a stick of dynamite was left in a Temple coal pile, and a dead cat was thrown at Jones' house after a threatening phone call.[19] Other incidents occurred, though some suspect that Jones himself may have been involved in at least some of them.[19]
Jones' "Rainbow Family"[link]
Jim and Marceline Jones adopted several children of at least partial non-Caucasian ancestry; he referred to the clan as his "rainbow family,"[21] and stated: "Integration is a more personal thing with me now. It's a question of my son's future."[22] Jones portrayed the Temple overall as a "rainbow family."
The couple adopted three children of Korean-American ancestry: Lew, Suzanne and Stephanie. Jones had been encouraging Temple members to adopt orphans from war ravaged Korea.[23] Jones had long been critical of the United States' opposition to communist leader Kim Il-Sung's 1950 invasion of South Korea, calling it the "war of liberation" and stating that "the south is a living example of all that socialism in the north has overcome."[24] In 1954, he and his wife also adopted Agnes Jones, who was partly of Native American descent.[22][25] Agnes was 11 at the time of her adoption.[26] Suzanne Jones was adopted at the age of six in 1959.[26] In June 1959, the couple had their only biological child, Stephan Gandhi Jones.[25]
Two years later, in 1961, the Joneses became the first white couple in Indiana to adopt a black child, James Warren Jones, Jr.[27] Marceline was once spat upon while she carried Jim Jr.[19]
The couple also adopted another son, who was white, named Tim.[25] Tim Jones, whose birth mother was a member of the Peoples Temple, was originally named Timothy Glen Tupper.[22]
Asylum[link]
Belo Horizonte
Rio de Janeiro
Jones' Brazilian locations
After a 1961 Temple speech about nuclear apocalypse,[20] and a January 1962 Esquire Magazine article listing Belo Horizonte, Brazil, as a safe place in a nuclear war, Jones traveled with his family to the Brazilian city with the idea of setting up a new Temple location.[28]
On his way to Brazil, Jones made his first trip into Guyana.[29] After arriving in Belo Horizonte, the Joneses rented a modest three bedroom home.[30] Jones studied the local economy and receptiveness of racial minorities to his message, though language remained a barrier.[31] Jones was careful not to portray himself as a communist in a foreign territory, and spoke of an apostolic communal lifestyle rather than of Castro or Marx.[32]
After becoming frustrated with the lack of resources in the locale, in mid-1963, the Joneses moved to Rio de Janeiro.[33] There, they worked with the poor in Rio's slums.[33] Jones also explored local Brazilian religion.[34]
Jones was plagued by guilt for leaving behind the Indiana civil rights struggle and possibly losing what he had struggled to build there.[33] When Jones' associate preachers in Indiana told him that the Temple was about to collapse without him, Jones returned.[35]
California Eden[link]
Los Angeles
San Francisco
Ukiah
Bakersfield
Fresno
Sacramento
Santa Rosa
Some of the Peoples Temple's California locations
Further information: Peoples Temple and Peoples Temple in San Francisco
After Jones' return to Indiana from Brazil, in 1965, Jones claimed that the world would be engulfed in a nuclear war on July 15, 1967, that would then create a new socialist Eden on earth, and that the Temple must move to Northern California for safety.[13][36] Accordingly, the Temple began moving to Redwood Valley, California, near Ukiah.[13]
While Jones always spoke of the social gospel's virtues, before the late 1960s Jones chose to conceal that his gospel was actually communism.[13] By the late 1960s, Jones began at least partially openly revealing in Temple sermons his "Apostolic Socialism" concept.[13] Specifically, "those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment — socialism."[37] Jones often mixed those concepts, such as preaching that "If you're born in capitalist America, racist America, fascist America, then you're born in sin. But if you're born in socialism, you're not born in sin."[38]
By the early 1970s, Jones began deriding traditional Christianity as "fly away religion," rejecting the Bible as being white men’s justification to subordinate women and subjugate people of color and stating that it spoke of a "Sky God" who was no God at all.[13] Jones authored a booklet titled "The Letter Killeth," criticizing the King James Bible.[39] Jones also began preaching that he was the reincarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, Mahatma Gandhi, Buddha, Vladimir Lenin, and Father Divine. In the documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, former Temple member Hue Fortson, Jr. quoted Jones as saying, "What you need to believe in is what you can see ... If you see me as your friend, I'll be your friend. As you see me as your father, I'll be your father, for those of you that don't have a father ... If you see me as your savior, I'll be your savior. If you see me as your God, I'll be your God."[7]
By the spring of 1976, Jones began openly admitting even to outsiders that he was an atheist.[40] Despite the Temple's fear that the IRS was investigating its religious tax exemption, by 1977 Marceline Jones admitted to the New York Times that, as early as age 18 when he watched his then idol Mao Zedong overthrow the Chinese government, Jim Jones realized that the way to achieve social change through Marxism in the United States was to mobilize people through religion.[36] She stated that "Jim used religion to try to get some people out of the opiate of religion," and had slammed the Bible on the table yelling "I've got to destroy this paper idol!"[36] In one sermon, Jones said that, "You're gonna help yourself, or you'll get no help! There's only one hope of glory; that's within you! Nobody's gonna come out of the sky! There's no heaven up there! We'll have to make heaven down here!"[7]
Move to San Francisco[link]
Main article: Peoples Temple in San Francisco
The move of Peoples Temple headquarters to San Francisco in 1975 invigorated Jones' political career. After the Temple served an important role in the mayoral election victory of George Moscone in 1975, Moscone appointed Jones as the Chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission.[41]
Unlike most other figures deemed as cult leaders, Jones was able to gain public support and contact with prominent local and national United States politicians. For example, Jones and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on his campaign plane days before the 1976 election and Mondale publicly praised the Temple.[42][43] First Lady Rosalynn Carter also personally met with Jones on multiple occasions, corresponded with him about Cuba, and spoke with him at the grand opening of the San Francisco Democratic Party Headquarters where Jones garnered louder applause than Mrs. Carter.[42][44][45]
In September 1976, Willie Brown served as master of ceremonies at a large testimonial dinner for Jones attended by Governor Jerry Brown and Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally and other political figures.[46] At that dinner, while introducing Jones, Willie Brown stated "Let me present to you what you should see every day when you look in the mirror in the early morning hours.... Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein... Chairman Mao."[47] Harvey Milk, who spoke at political rallies at the Temple,[48] and wrote to Jones after a visit to the Temple: "Rev Jim, It may take me many a day to come back down from the high that I reach today. I found something dear today. I found a sense of being that makes up for all the hours and energy placed in a fight. I found what you wanted me to find. I shall be back. For I can never leave."[49][50]
In his San Francisco Temple apartment, Jones hosted San Francisco radical political figures such as Angela Davis for discussions.[51] He spoke with friend and San Francisco Sun-Reporter publisher Dr. Carlton Goodlett about Jones' remorse regarding not being able to travel to socialist countries such as Peoples Republic of China and the Soviet Union, speculating that he could be Chief Dairyman of the Soviet Union.[52] After his criticisms caused increased tensions with the Nation of Islam, Jones spoke at a huge rally healing the rift between the two groups in the Los Angeles Convention Center attended by many of Jones' closest political acquaintances.[53] Jones also enjoyed a favorable relationship with Warith Deen Mohammed, son of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad.[citation needed]
While Jones forged media alliances with key columnists and others at the San Francisco Chronicle and other media outlets,[54] the move to San Francisco also brought increasing media scrutiny. After Chronicle reporter Marshall Kilduff encountered resistance to publishing an exposé, he brought his story to New West Magazine.[55] In the summer of 1977, Jones and several hundred Temple members moved to the Temple's "Agricultural Project" in Guyana after they learned of the contents of Kilduff's article to be published in which former Temple members claimed they were physically, emotionally, and sexually abused.[45][56] Jones named the settlement Jonestown after himself.
Jonestown's formation and operation[link]
Jonestown
Georgetown
Kaituma
Peoples Temple Agricultural Project ("Jonestown", Guyana)
Main article: Jonestown
Jones had first started building Jonestown in 1970 as a means to create both a "socialist paradise" and a "sanctuary" from the media scrutiny which had started in 1972.[57] Here they also established a cooperative called the "People's Temple Agricultural Project". Regarding the former goal, Jones purported to establish Jonestown as a benevolent model communist community stating, "I believe we’re the purest communists there are."[58] In that regard, like the restrictive emigration policies of the then Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea and other communist states, Jones did not permit members to leave Jonestown.[59]
Religious scholar Mary McCormick Maaga argues that Jones' authority decreased after he moved to the isolated commune, because he was not needed for recruitment and he could not hide his drug addiction from rank and file members.[60] In spite of the allegations prior to Jones' departure to Jonestown, the leader was still respected by some for setting up a racially mixed church which helped the disadvantaged; 68 percent of Jonestown's residents were black.[61] Jonestown was where Jones began his belief called "Translation" where he and his followers would all die together and move to another planet and live blissfully.
New children[link]
File:JT-1978-06-jvs kimo ji.jpg
Kimo (left) and John (right)
Further information: Timothy Stoen
Jim Jones claimed that he was the biological father of John Victor Stoen, although the birth certificate lists Grace and Timothy Stoen as the parents of the boy.[62] The Temple repeatedly claimed that Jones fathered the child when, in 1971, Temple member Tim Stoen had requested that Jones have sex with Grace Stoen to keep her from defecting.[63] After Grace Stoen later defected in 1976 and began divorce proceedings against Tim Stoen in 1977, in order to avoid potentially giving up the boy in a custody dispute with Grace, Jones ordered Tim to take John to Guyana in February 1977.[64]
After purported father Tim Stoen defected from the Temple in June 1977, the Temple kept John Stoen in Jonestown.[65] The custody dispute over John Stoen would become a linchpin of several battles between the Temple and the Concerned Relatives.[66]
Jim Jones also fathered a son, Jim Jon (Kimo), with Carolyn Louise Moore Layton, a Temple member.[67]
Pressure and waning political support[link]
Further information: Timothy Stoen and Peoples Temple in San Francisco
While most of Jones' political allies broke ties after Jones' departure,[68] some did not. As a show of support, Willie Brown spoke out against enemies at a rally at the Peoples Temple, also attended by Harvey Milk and Art Agnos.[69] Most importantly for Jones and the Temple, Moscone's office shortly thereafter issued a press release saying that Jones had broken no laws.[70]
In the Fall of 1977, Tim Stoen and other relatives in Jonestown formed a "Concerned Relatives" group.[71] Stoen traveled to Washington D.C. in January 1978 to visit with Congressmen, including Leo Ryan and State Department officials, and wrote a "white paper" to Congress detailing the dispute and pressing for Congressional correspondence.[72] Stoen's efforts aroused the curiosity of Ryan, who wrote a letter on Stoen's behalf to Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham.[73]
Amidst growing pressure in the United States to investigate the Temple, on February 19, 1978, Harvey Milk wrote a letter of support for the Peoples Temple to President Jimmy Carter.[74][75][76] Therein, Milk wrote that Jones was known "as a man of the highest character."[76] Regarding the leader of those attempting to extricate relatives from Jonestown, Milk wrote he was "attempting to damage Rev. Jones reputation" with "apparent bold-faced lies."[76]
On April 11, 1978, the Concerned Relatives distributed a packet of documents, including letters and affidavits, that they titled an "Accusation of Human Rights Violations by Rev. James Warren Jones" to the Peoples Temple, members of the press and members of Congress.[77] In June 1978, escaped Temple member Deborah Layton provided the group with a further affidavit detailing alleged crimes by the Peoples Temple and substandard living conditions in Jonestown.[78]
Facing increasing scrutiny, in the summer of 1978, Jones also hired noted JFK assassination conspiracy theorists Mark Lane and Donald Freed to help make the case of a "grand conspiracy" by intelligence agencies against the Peoples Temple.[79] Jones told Lane he wanted to "pull an Eldridge Cleaver", referring to a fugitive Black Panther who was able to return to the United States after repairing his reputation.[79]
Visit by Congressman Ryan, murders[link]
File:JT-1978-01-entrance ji.jpg
Entrance to Jonestown
Main article: Jonestown
In November 1978, U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan led a fact-finding mission to Jonestown to investigate allegations of human rights abuses.[80] Ryan's delegation included relatives of Temple members, Don Harris, an NBC network news reporter, an NBC cameraman and reporters for various newspapers.[81] The group arrived in Georgetown on November 15.[80] On November 17, Ryan's delegation traveled by airplane to Jonestown.[82] The delegation left hurriedly the afternoon of November 18 after Temple member Don Sly attacked Ryan with a knife.[83] The attack was thwarted, bringing the visit to an abrupt end.[83] Congressman Ryan and his people succeeded in taking with them fifteen People's Temple members who had expressed a wish to leave.[84] At that time, Jones made no attempt to prevent their departure.[85]
Port Kaituma Airstrip shootings[link]
As members of Ryan's delegation boarded two planes at the airstrip, Jones' "Red Brigade" armed guards arrived in a tractor-pulled trailer and began shooting at the delegation.[86] The guards killed Congressman Ryan and four others near a twin engine Otter aircraft.[87] At the same time, one of the supposed defectors, Larry Layton, drew a weapon and began firing on members of the party that had already boarded a small Cessna.[88] An NBC cameraman was able to capture footage of the first few seconds of the shooting at the Otter.[87] The five killed at the airstrip were Congressman Ryan; Don Harris, a reporter from NBC; Bob Brown, a cameraman from NBC; San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson; and Temple member Patricia Parks.[87] Surviving the attack were future Congresswoman Jackie Speier, then a staff member for Ryan; Richard Dwyer, the Deputy Chief of Mission from the U.S. Embassy at Georgetown; Bob Flick, a producer for NBC News; Steve Sung, an NBC sound engineer; Tim Reiterman, a San Francisco Examiner reporter; Ron Javers, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter; Charles Krause, a Washington Post reporter; and several defecting Temple members.[87]
Deaths in Jonestown[link]
Later that same day, 909 inhabitants of Jonestown,[89] 303 of them children, died of apparent cyanide poisoning, mostly in and around a pavilion.[90] This resulted in the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster until the September 11, 2001 attacks.[91] No video was taken during the mass suicide, though the FBI did recover a 45 minute audio recording of the suicide in progress.[92]
On that tape, Jones tells Temple members that the Soviet Union, with whom the Temple had been negotiating a potential exodus for months, would not take them after the Temple had murdered Ryan and four others at a nearby airstrip.[92] The reason given by Jones to commit suicide was consistent with his previously stated conspiracy theories of intelligence organizations allegedly conspiring against the Temple, that men would "parachute in here on us," "shoot some of our innocent babies" and "they'll torture our children, they'll torture some of our people here, they'll torture our seniors."[92] Parroting Jones' prior statements that hostile forces would convert captured children to fascism, one temple member states "the ones that they take captured, they're gonna just let them grow up and be dummies."[92]
File:529 1 miller.jpg
Christine Miller
Given that reasoning, Jones and several members argued that the group should commit "revolutionary suicide" by drinking cyanide-laced grape flavored Flavor Aid (not Kool-Aid despite the popular phrase). However, later released video made to show the best of Jonestown shows Jones opening a storage container full of Kool-Aid in large quantities. This may have been what was used to mix the "potion" (as was referred to in several statements obtained by the FBI in the final tape recordings) along with a sedative.[92] One member, Christine Miller, dissents toward the beginning of the tape.[92] When members apparently cried, Jones counseled, "Stop this hysterics. This is not the way for people who are Socialists or Communists to die. No way for us to die. We must die with some dignity."[92] Jones can be heard saying, "Don't be afraid to die," that death is "just stepping over into another plane" and that it's "a friend."[92] At the end of the tape, Jones concludes: "We didn't commit suicide; we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world."[92] According to escaping Temple members, children were given the drink first and families were told to lie down together.[93] Mass suicide had been previously discussed in simulated events called "White Nights" on a regular basis.[78][94] During at least one such prior White Night, members drank liquid that Jones falsely told them was poison.[78][94]
Jones was found dead in a deck chair with a gunshot wound to his head that Guyanese coroner Cyrill Mootoo stated was consistent with a self-inflicted gun wound.[95] However, Jones' son Stephan believes his father may have directed someone else to shoot him.[96] An autopsy of Jones' body also showed levels of the barbiturate Pentobarbital which may have been lethal to humans who had not developed physiological tolerance.[97] Jones' drug usage (including LSD and marijuana) was confirmed by his son, Stephan, and Jones' doctor in San Francisco.
Other issues[link]
On December 13, 1973, Jones was arrested and charged with soliciting a man for sex in a movie theater bathroom known for homosexual activity, in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles.[98] The man was an undercover Los Angeles Police Department vice officer. Jones is on record as later telling his followers that he was "the only true heterosexual", but at least one account exists of his sexual abuse of a male member of his congregation in front of the followers, ostensibly to prove the man's own homosexual tendencies.[98]
While Jones banned sex among Temple members outside of marriage, he himself voraciously engaged in sexual relations with both male and female Temple members.[99][100] Jones, however, claimed that he detested engaging in homosexual activity and did so only for the male temple adherents' own good, purportedly to connect them symbolically with him (Jones).[99]
One of Jones' sources of inspiration was the controversial International Peace Mission movement leader Father Divine.[101] Jones had borrowed the term "revolutionary suicide"[102] from Black Panther leader and Peoples Temple supporter Huey Newton who had argued "the slow suicide of life in the ghetto" ought to be replaced by revolutionary struggle that would end only in victory (socialism and self determination) or revolutionary suicide (death).[citation needed]
Family aftermath[link]
- Marceline
File:410 1 Marcy.jpg
Marceline (Marcy) Jones
Jim Jones' wife, Marceline, was found poisoned at the pavilion.[103] On the final morning of Ryan's visit, Marceline had taken reporters on a tour of Jonestown.[104]
- Stephan, Jim Jr. and Tim Jones
Stephan, Jim Jr., and Tim Jones did not take part in the mass suicide because they were playing with the Peoples Temple basketball team against the Guyanese national team in Georgetown.[25][102] At the time of events in Jonestown, Stephan and Tim were both nineteen and Jim Jones Jr. was eighteen.[105] Tim's biological family, the Tuppers, which consisted of his three biological sisters,[106][107][108] biological brother,[109] and biological mother,[110] all died at Jonestown. Three days before the tragedy, Stephan Jones refused, over the radio, to comply with an order by his father to return the team to Jonestown for Ryan's visit.[111]
During the events at Jonestown, Stephan, Tim, and Jim Jones Jr. drove to the American Embassy in Guyana in an attempt to receive help. The Guyanese soldiers guarding the embassy refused to let them in after hearing about the shootings at the Port Kaituma airstrip.[112] Later, the three returned to the Temple's headquarters in Georgetown to find the bodies of Sharon Amos and her three children.[112] Guyanese soldiers kept the Jones brothers under house arrest for five days, interrogating them about the deaths in Georgetown.[112] Stephan Jones was accused of being involved in the Georgetown deaths, and was placed in a Guyanese prison for three months.[112] Tim Jones and Johnny Cobb, another member of the Peoples Temple basketball team, were asked to go to Jonestown and help identify the bodies of people who had died.[112] After returning to the United States, Jim Jones Jr. was placed under police surveillance for several months while he lived with his older sister, Suzanne, who had previously turned against the Temple.[112]
File:Jonestown-brochure-16 LewJones TerryCarter-Chaeoke.jpg
Lew Jones, Terry and Chaeoke
File:392 1-Agnes.jpg
Agnes Jones
When Jonestown was first being established, Stephan Jones had originally avoided two attempts by his father to relocate to the settlement. He eventually moved to Jonestown after a third and final attempt. He has since said that he gave into his father's wishes to move to Jonestown because of his mother.[113] Stephan Jones is now a businessman, and married with three daughters. He appeared in the documentary Jonestown: Paradise Lost which aired on the History Channel and Discovery Channel. He stated he will not watch the documentary and has never grieved for his father.[114] Jim Jones Jr., who lost his wife and unborn child at Jonestown, returned to San Francisco. He remarried and has three sons from this marriage,[102] including Rob Jones, a high-school basketball star who went on to play for the University of San Diego before transferring to Saint Mary's College of California.[115]
- Lew, Agnes and Suzanne Jones
Lew and Agnes Jones both died at Jonestown. Agnes Jones was thirty-five years old at the time of her death.[116] Her husband[117] and four children[118][119][120][121] all died at Jonestown. Lew Jones, who was twenty-one years old at the time of his death, died alongside his wife Terry and son Chaeoke.[122][123][124] Stephanie Jones had died at age five in a car accident.[25]
Suzanne Jones married Mike Cartmell; both turned against the Temple and were not in Jonestown on November 18, 1978. After this decision to abandon the Temple, Jones referred to Suzanne openly as "my goddamned, no good for nothing daughter" and stated that she was not to be trusted.[125] In a signed note found at the time of her death, Marceline Jones directed that the Jones' funds were to be given to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and specified: "I especially request that none of these are allowed to get into the hands of my adopted daughter, Suzanne Jones Cartmell."[126] Cartmell had two children and died of colon cancer in November 2006.[127][128] Found near Marceline Jones' body was a signed and witnessed will leaving all bank accounts "in my name" to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and writing that Suzanne Jones Cartmell should receive no assets.[129]
- John Stoen and Kimo
Further information: Timothy Stoen
Specific references to Tim Stoen, the father of John Stoen, including the logistics of possibly murdering him, are made on the Temple's final "death tape," as well as a discussion over whether the Temple should include John Stoen among those committing "revolutionary suicide."[92] At Jonestown, John Stoen was found poisoned in Jim Jones' cabin.[130]
Both Jim Jon (Kimo) and his mother, Carolyn Louise Moore Layton, died during the events at Jonestown.[131]
See also[link]
References[link]
- Explanatory notes
- ^ While Jim Jones claimed to be partially of Cherokee descent through his mother Lynetta, this story was apparently not true. (Lindsay, Robert. "How Rev. Jim Jones and Black Spencer Gained His Power Over Followers". New York Times. November 26, 1978). Lynetta's cousin Barbara Shaffer said "there wasn't an ounce of Indian in our family." (Lindsay, Robert. "How Rev. Jim Jones Gained His Power Over Followers". New York Times. November 26, 1978). Shaffer said that Lynetta was Welsh. ("Jones—The Dark Private Side Emerges". Los Angeles Times. November 24, 1978). The birth records for Lynetta have since been lost. (Kilduff, Marshall and Ron Javers. "Jim Jones Always Led — Or Wouldn't Play". San Francisco Chronicle. December 4, 1978).
- Citations
- ^ Jones, Jim in conversation with John Maher. "Transcript of Recovered FBI tape Q 622." Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. Jonestown Project: San Diego State University. Archived 13 February 2011 at WebCite
- ^ Brazil, Jeff. "Jonestown's Horror Fades but Mystery Remain." Los Angeles Times. December 16, 1999.
- ^ Hall, John R. (1987). Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. p. 3. ISBN 0-88738-124-3.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 9-10.
- ^ a b c Kilduff, Marshall and Javers, Ron. The Suicide Cult. Bantam Books, 1978. p. 10.
- ^ a b Hall, John R. (1987). Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. p. 5. ISBN 0-88738-124-3.
- ^ a b c Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple. American Experience, PBS.org.
- ^ a b Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 24.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 27.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1981. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 33.
- ^ a b c "Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple - Timeline." PBS.org. 20 February 2007.
- ^ Knoll, James. Mass Suicide & the Jonestown Tragedy: Literature Summary. Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University. October 2007.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Wessinger, Catherine. How the Millennium Comes Violently: From Jonestown to Heaven's Gate. Seven Bridges Press, 2000. ISBN 978-1-889119-24-3.
- ^ a b Jones, Jim. "Transcript of Recovered FBI tape Q 134." Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. Jonestown Project: San Diego State University.]
- ^ a b c Horrock, Nicholas M., "Communist in 1950s", New York Times, December 17, 1978
- ^ a b Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 68.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 69.
- ^ a b c Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 71.
- ^ a b c d Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 72.
- ^ a b c Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 76.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 65.
- ^ a b c Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple - People & Events PBS.org. 20 February 2007.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 63.
- ^ Jones, Jim. "Transcript of Recovered FBI tape Q 1023." Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. Jonestown Project: San Diego State University.
- ^ a b c d e Wessinger, Catherine. How the Millennium Comes Violently: From Jonestown to Heaven's Gate. 2000. ISBN 978-1-889119-24-3.
- ^ a b "The Wills of Jim Jones and Marceline Jones." Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ "Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple - Race and the Peoples Temple." PBS.org. 20 February 2007.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 77.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 78.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 79.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 81.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 82.
- ^ a b c Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 83.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 84.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 85-6.
- ^ a b c New York Times, "How Rev. Jim Jones Gained His Power Over Followers," Robert Lindsay, November 26, 1978
- ^ Layton, Deborah. (1998) Seductive Poison. Anchor, 1999. ISBN 0-385-48984-6. p. 53.
- ^ Jim Jones, Transcript of Recovered FBI tape Q 1053
- ^ Jones, Jim. "The Letter Killeth." Original material reprint. Department of Religious Studies. San Diego State University.
- ^ See, e.g., Jones, Jim in conversation with John Maher, "Transcript of Recovered FBI tape Q 622." Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. Jonestown Project: San Diego State University.]
- ^ Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple. PBS.org.
- ^ a b Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 302-4.
- ^ Los Angeles Times, "First Lady Among Cult's References; Mondale, Califano also listed", November 21, 1978.
- ^ Jones, Jim. "Transcript of Recovered FBI tape Q 799." Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. Jonestown Project: San Diego State University.
- ^ a b Kilduff, Marshall and Phil Tracy. "Inside Peoples Temple." Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. Jonestown Project: San Diego State University. August 1, 1977.
- ^ Layton, Deborah. Seductive Poison. Anchor, 1999. ISBN 0-385-48984-6. p. 105.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. page 308
- ^ "Another Day of Death." Time Magazine. 11 December 1978.
- ^ VanDeCarr, Paul "Death of dreams: in November 1978, Harvey Milk's murder and the mass suicides at Jonestown nearly broke San Francisco's spirit.", The Advocate, November 25, 2003
- ^ Sawyer, Mary My Lord, What a Mourning:’ Twenty Years Since Jonestown, Jonestown Institute at SDSU
- ^ Reiterman, Tim, and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. page 369.
- ^ Goodlett, Carlton B., Notes on Peoples Temple, reprinted in Moore, Rebecca and Fielding M. McGehee, III, The Need for a Second Look at Jonestown, Edwin Mellen Press, 1989, ISBN 0-88946-649-1
- ^ Reiterman, Tim, and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. page 282.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim, and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. page 285, 306 and 587.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 314
- ^ Layton, Deborah. (1998) Seductive Poison. Anchor, 1999. ISBN 0-385-48984-6. p. 113.
- ^ Hall, John R. (1987). Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. p. 132. ISBN 0-88738-124-3.
- ^ Jones, Jim. "Transcript of Recovered FBI tape Q 50." Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. Jonestown Project: San Diego State University.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 451.
- ^ McCormick Maaga, Mary. Hearing the voices of Jonestown. Syracuse University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8156-0515-3.
- ^ Moore, Rebecca. "The Demographics of Jonestown. Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University, adapted from Moore, Rebecca, Anthony Pinn and Mary Sawyer. "Demographics and the Black Religious Culture of Peoples Temple." in Peoples Temple and Black Religion in America. Bloomington: Indiana Press University, 2005. 57-80)
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 130-1
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p 445.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 377
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 324
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1.
- ^ "Jim Jon (Kimo) Prokes". Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ Liebert, Larry, "What Politicians Say Now About Jones", San Francisco Chronicle, November 20, 1978
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. page 327
- ^ Moore, Rebecca. A Sympathetic History of Jonestown. Lewiston: E. Mellen Press. ISBN 0-88946-860-5. p. 143.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim, and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. page 408
- ^ Hall, John R. (1987). Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0-88738-124-3. page 227
- ^ Reiterman, Tim, and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. page 458
- ^ Coleman, Loren, "The Copycat Effect", Simon & Schuster, 2004, page 68
- ^ Fishwick, Marshall, "Great Awakenings: Popular Religion and Popular Culture", Routledge, 1994, page 73
- ^ a b c Milk, Harvey Letter Addressed to President Jimmy Carter, Dated February 19, 1978
- ^ "Accusation of Human Rights Violations by Rev. James Warren Jones." Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. Jonestown Project: San Diego State University. April 11, 1978.
- ^ a b c "Affidavit of Deborah Layton Blakey." Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. Jonestown Project: San Diego State University.
- ^ a b Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. page 440.
- ^ a b Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 481.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 476-480.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 487-8.
- ^ a b Reiterman, Tim, and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 519-20.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim, and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 524.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 516.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim, and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 527.
- ^ a b c d Reiterman, Tim, and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 529-31.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim, and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 533.
- ^ Who Died?, Alternative Considerations of Jonestown, San Diego State University
- ^ 1978: Mass suicide leaves 900 dead. BBC, November 18, 2005
- ^ Rapaport, Richard, Jonestown and City Hall slayings eerily linked in time and memory, San Francisco Chronicle, November 16, 2003
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Jim Jones, "Transcript of Recovered FBI tape Q 42." Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. Jonestown Project: San Diego State University.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim, and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 559.
- ^ a b Reiterman, Tim, and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 390-91.
- ^ "Guyana Inquest — Interviews of Cecil Roberts & Cyril Mootoo" (PDF). http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown/PrimarySources/GuyanaInquest.pdf. Retrieved 2010-02-23.
- ^ Jonestown: Paradise Lost, Interview of Stephan Jones, Documentary airing on Discovery Networks, 2007
- ^ Autopsy of Jim Jones by Kenneth H. Mueller, Jonestown Institute at SDSU
- ^ a b Wise, David. "Sex in Peoples Temple." Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. Jonestown Project: San Diego State University.
- ^ a b Paranoia And Delusions, Time Magazine, December 11, 1978
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p. 176-77.
- ^ "FAQ: Who was the leader of Peoples Temple?" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. Jonestown Project: San Diego State University.
- ^ a b c Fish, Jon and Chris Connelly (2007-10-05). "Outside the Lines: Grandson of Jonestown founder is making a name for himself". ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=3047543&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab7pos2. Retrieved 2008-08-23.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p 565.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p 505-6.
- ^ "Who Survived the Jonestown Tragedy?" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ "Janet Marie Tupper" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ "Mary Elizabeth Tupper" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ "Ruth Ann Tupper" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ "Larry Howard Tupper" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ "Rita Jeanette Tupper Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1. p 474-75.
- ^ a b c d e f Smith, Gary. "Escaping Jonestown." Sports Illustrated. CNN.com. 24 December 2007.
- ^ Jones, Stephan. - "Marceline/Mom" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ Brownstein, Bill. "The son who survived Jonestown." The Gazette. Canada. 9 March 2007.
- ^ "22 - Rob Jones." University of San Diego Official Athletic Site. Accessed: 2009-10-03. Archived by WebCite
- ^ Agnes Paulette Jones Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple]. San Diego State University.
- ^ "Forrest Ray Jones" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ "Billy Jones" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ "Jimbo Jones" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ "Michael Ray Jones" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ "Stephanie Jones" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ Lew Eric Jones Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ "Terry Carter Jones" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ "Chaeoke Warren Jones" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ FBI Tape Q 265 - October 17, 1978 address. Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ "November 18 1978 Letter from Marceline Jones." Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ Who Has Died Since 18 November 1978? Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- ^ Smith, Gary. "Escape From Jonestown" Sports Illustrated CNN.com. 24 December 2007.
- ^ "Letter from Marceline Jones." Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. Jonestown Project: San Diego State University.
- ^ Reiterman, Tim, and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton, 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1)
- ^ "Carolyn Louise Moore Layton" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
- Bibliography
- Chidester, David, Salvation and Suicide: Jim Jones, the People's Temple and Jonestown (Religion in North America), 2nd rev.ed., Indiana University Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0-253-21632-8
- Klineman, George and Sherman Butler. The Cult That Died. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1980. ISBN 0-399-12540-X.
- Layton, Deborah. Seductive Poison. Anchor Books, 1999. ISBN 0-385-48984-6.
- Maaga, Mary McCormick. Hearing the voices of Jonestown. Syracuse University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8156-0515-3.
- Naipaul, Shiva. Black & White. Hamish Hamilton, London, 1980. ISBN 0-241-10337-1.
- Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs (1982). Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton. ISBN 0-525-24136-1.
External links[link]
|
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jim Jones |
- The Jonestown Institute
- FBI No. Q 042 The "Jonestown Death Tape", Recorded 18 November 1978 (Internet Archive)
- Transcript of Jones' final speech, just before the mass suicide
- The first part of a series of articles about Jim Jones published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1972.
- History Channel Video and Stills
- Isaacson, Barry. From Silver Lake to Suicide: One Family's Secret History of the Jonestown Massacre
- Mass Suicide at Jonestown: 30 Years Later, Time magazine
- Jonestown 30 Years Later photo gallery published Friday, October 17, 2008.
- Rapaport, Richard. Jonestown and City Hall slayings eerily linked in time and memory Both events continue to haunt city a quarter century later
- Nakao, Annie.The ghastly Peoples Temple deaths shocked the world. Berkeley Rep takes on the challenge of coming to terms with it.
- American Experience documentary, "Jonestown: The Life And Death Of Peoples Temple", shown on PBS
- Jonestown: 25 Years Later How spiritual journey ended in destruction: Jim Jones led his flock to death in jungle by Michael Taylor, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Published Thursday, November 12, 1998.
- Utopian nightmare Jonestown: What did we learn? Larry D. Hatfield, of The Examiner staff, Gregory Lewis and Eric Brazil of The Examiner staff and Examiner Librarian Judy Canter contributed to this report. Published Sunday, November 8, 1998.
- Jones Captivated S.F.'s Liberal Elite: They were late to discover how cunningly he curried favor by Michael Taylor, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. And [Haunted by Memories of Hell ] by Kevin Fagan, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Published Thursday, November 12, 1998. Both stories were included in the first of a two-part series.
- The End To Innocent Acceptance Of Sects Sharper scrutiny is Jonestown legacy by Don Lattin, San Francisco Chronicle religion writer. And Most Peoples Temple Documents Still Sealed by Michael Taylor and Don Lattin, San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. And Surviving the Heart of Darkness: Twenty years later, Jackie Speier remembers how her companions and rum helped her endure the night of the Jonestown massacre by Maitland Zane, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Published Friday, November 13, 1998. All stories were included in the second part of a two-part series.
- Inside Peoples Temple Marshall Kilduff and Phil Tracy, Used by permission of authors for the San Francisco Chronicle. Published Monday, August 1, 1977.
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Jones, Jim |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | |
| Date of birth | May 13, 1931 |
| Place of birth | Crete, Indiana, U.S. |
| Date of death | November 18, 1978 |
| Place of death | Jonestown, Guyana |
http://wn.com/Jim_Jones
Related pages:
http://it.wn.com/Jim Jones
http://cs.wn.com/Jim Jones
http://id.wn.com/James Warren Jones
http://es.wn.com/Jim Jones (pastor)
http://ru.wn.com/Джонс, Джеймс Уоррен
http://nl.wn.com/Jim Jones
http://pt.wn.com/Jim Jones
http://pl.wn.com/Jim Jones (przywódca sekty)
http://fr.wn.com/Jim Jones (pasteur)
http://de.wn.com/Jim Jones
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jones
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
Thomas Kremser is an Austrian poker tournament director (and semi-professional player) from Vienna, and the owner of the Concord Card Club.
He has been in charge of events on the World Poker Tour, European Poker Tour, Late Night Poker, William Hill Poker Grand Prix and many others. [1]
He is also the chief executive of the International Poker Federation and TK Poker Events International.
In 2001, Kremser was awarded the European Poker Awards' Casino Staff Person of the Year, and was nominated again every year from 2003 to 2007. At the 2007 awards, Kremser was awarded the European Poker Awards' Lifetime Achievement award.
Kremser regularly comments on The Hendon Mob's website's "You are the Tournament Director" series of articles.
Kremser was married to former Late Night Poker dealer Marina Rado in 2005 [2].
In May 2011, Kremser officially parted ways with the EPT, claiming that "the time is right to explore new adventures."[1]
Notes[link]
External links[link]
- Hendon Mob tournament results
- Hendon Mob "You are the Tournament Director" articles
- European Poker Tour profile
- PokerPlayerNewspaper.com article
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|||||
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Kremser, Thomas |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | |
| Date of birth | |
| Place of birth | |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
http://wn.com/Thomas_Kremser
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kremser
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
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