Year 1959 (MCMLIX) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar.

Laurence Harvey (1 October 1928 – 25 November 1973) was a Lithuanian-born actor who achieved fame in British and American films.

Harvey maintained throughout his life that his birth name was Laruschka Mischa Skikne, but his birth name was actually Zvi Mosheh Skikne. He was the youngest of three boys born to Ber and Ella Skikne, a Lithuanian Jewish family in the town of Joniškis, Lithuania. Aged five he emigrated with his family to South Africa, where he was known as "Harry Skikne".

He grew up in Johannesburg, and was in his teens when he served with the entertainment unit of the South African Army during World War II. After moving to London, England, he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art where he became known as Larry. After learning his craft at RADA, he began to perform on stage and film, where he adopted the stage name "Laurence Harvey", taken either from the shop name Harvey Nichols or from Harvey's Bristol Cream.

He made his cinema debut in the British film House of Darkness (1948), but only established himself in British cinema when he appeared with Rex Harrison and George Sanders in King Richard and the Crusaders (1954) and as Romeo in Renato Castellani's adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, narrated by John Gielgud, in the same year. This enabled him to gain his first Hollywood experience. He was cast as the writer Christopher Isherwood in I Am A Camera (1955), with Julie Harris as Sally Bowles (Cabaret is a musical from the same source texts). He also appeared on American TV and on Broadway, making his Broadway debut in 1955 in the play Island of Goats, a flop which closed after one week, though his performance won Harvey a 1956 Theatre World Award.^{[citation needed]}

Santo & Johnny were an Italian-American rock and roll duo from Brooklyn, New York, comprising brothers Santo and Johnny Farina.

They are best known for their instrumental "Sleep Walk", which became a regional hit and eventually reached the top of the Billboard pop chart when it was released nationally in 1959.

At present, Santo is semi-retired and Johnny currently tours and records new material with his own band. Johnny is also the president of Aniraf, Inc., an international record company based in New York.

Santo and Johnny Farina were born in Brooklyn, New York; Santo on October 24, 1937 and Johnny on April 30, 1941. Their father was drafted into the Army while they were children and was stationed for some time in Oklahoma. After hearing a steel guitar on the radio, he wrote to his wife, "I'd like the boys to learn to play this instrument".

Upon returning from World War II, the boys' father found a music teacher who gave the boys steel guitar lessons. When Santo was a teenager, he was able to get a local music store to modify an acoustic guitar, allowing him to play it like a steel guitar.

James Douglas Muir "Jay" Leno /ˈlɛnoʊ/ (born April 28, 1950) is an American stand-up comedian and television host.

From 1992 to 2009, Leno was the host of NBC's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Beginning in September 2009, Leno started a primetime talk show, titled The Jay Leno Show, which aired weeknights at 10:00 p.m. (Eastern Time, UTC-5), also on NBC. After The Jay Leno Show was canceled in January 2010 amid a host controversy, Leno returned to host The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on March 1, 2010.

James "Jay" Leno was born in New Rochelle, New York, in 1950. His mother, Catherine (née Muir; 1911–1993), a homemaker, was born in Greenock, Scotland, and came to the United States at age 11. Leno's father, Angelo (1910–1994), who worked as an insurance salesman, was born in New York to immigrants from Flumeri, Italy. Leno grew up in Andover, Massachusetts, and although his high school guidance counselor recommended that he drop out of school, he later obtained a Bachelor's degree in speech therapy from Emerson College, where he started a comedy club in 1973. Leno's siblings include his late older brother, Patrick, who was a Vietnam veteran and a lawyer.

Ayn Rand ( /ˈaɪn ˈrænd/; born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, February 2 [O.S. January 20] 1905 – March 6, 1982) was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism.

Born and educated in Russia, Rand moved to the United States in 1926. She worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and had a play produced on Broadway in 1935–1936. After two initially unsuccessful early novels, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel The Fountainhead. In 1957, she published her best-known work, the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward she turned to nonfiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own magazines and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982.

Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected all forms of faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism, and rejected ethical altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed all forms of collectivism and statism, instead supporting laissez-faire capitalism, which she believed was the only social system that protected individual rights. She promoted romantic realism in art. She was sharply critical of the philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her besides Aristotle.