Year 1948 (MCMXLVIII) was a leap year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar.
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.
Rafael Ángel del Socorro Calderón Guardia was the president of Costa Rica from 1940 to 1944.
Calderón was born on 10 March 1900 in San José. In his youth, Calderón studied in Costa Rica, France and Belgium, where he married Yvonne Clays Spoelders, who was later to be the first female diplomat of Costa Rica. After finishing his studies, Calderón became a practicing surgeon, which he would remain for most of his early career.
In 1940, with the support of conservative coffee elites, Calderón was elected President of Costa Rica. Prior to Calderón, Costa Rican Presidents, while democratically elected, had largely supported the interests of the conservative coffee oligarchy.
Calderón soon turned his back on the conservative coffee elite to address widespread poverty and poor health conditions among the working poor. He became the first Central American president to primarily focus his attention on poverty and deteriorating social conditions.
During his presidency he established the Work Code, which introduced the minimum wage, and other important protections for laborers. Prior to this reform, working conditions for Costa Rica's poor had been abhorrent. Calderón also founded the CCSS, a national social security retirement program, extremely advanced for its time. He also instituted a national healthcare program. In education, he established the University of Costa Rica.
José María Hipólito Figueres Ferrer (25 September 1906 – 8 June 1990), served as President of Costa Rica on three occasions: 1948–1949, 1953–1958, and 1970–1974.
During his first term in office, he abolished the country's army, nationalized its banking sector, and granted women and blacks the right to vote.
Figueres was born on 25 September 1906 in San Ramón in Alajuela province. The locations are significant, according to his best biographer, because his parents came from a world of wide ambition that most Costa Ricans envied, and he was born in a nation that put a high value on his impeccable Spanish background. Figueres was the eldest of the four children of a Catalan doctor and his wife, a teacher, who had recently immigrated from Catalonia to San Ramón in west-central Costa Rica.
Figueres first language was Catalan, as he talked to his parents in this language.
Figueres returned to the country in 1928 and bought a farm in Tarrazú. He named the farm, with a certain degree of foresight, La Lucha sin Fin (the struggle without an end).10
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.