Year 1944 (MCMXLIV) was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar.
Below, events of World War II have the "WWII" prefix.
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.."
somewhere a pen is busy with hate tonight
jaded eyes and cynics bring me down
somewhere a kid is playing his heart out tonight
but he'll get nowhere with the Berkeley in-crowd
well put-downs are so easy
like a novel without a soul
and every executioner wears a hood
when it's time for heads to roll
well they're just like new dictators
trying to tell us what to love
well their opinion they can take and shove
somewhere young rebels will meet up tonight
somewhere skateboarders and straightedgers will unite
they don't need no magazine that's filled with hate and lies
get enough from the world around them
they're young but they are wise
but negativity's easy
you just fire and walk away
and it's the armchair general
who lives to fight another day
well their opinion they can take and shove
if this was 1944, they'd be pointing their guns at you
cause every fascist, left or right, has a fucked-up set of rules
but do they really think the kids are such fools?