1941

1941 (MCMXLI) was a common year starting on Wednesday (dominical letter E) of the Gregorian calendar, the 1941st year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 941st year of the 2nd millennium, the 41st year of the 20th century, and the 2nd year of the 1940s decade.

Events

Below, the events of World War II have the "WWII" acronym.

January

John Milius

John Frederick Milius (born April 11, 1944) is an American screenwriter, director, and producer of motion pictures. He was one of the writers for the first two Dirty Harry films, received an Academy Award nomination as screenwriter of Apocalypse Now, and wrote and directed The Wind and the Lion, Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn.

Early life

Milius was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of three children to Elizabeth (née Roe) and William Styx Milius, who was a shoe manufacturer. When Milius was seven his father sold his business, retired and moved to California, where Milius became an enthusiastic surfer. When he was fourteen his parents sent him to a small private school, the Lowell Whiteman School, in the mountains of Steamboat Springs, Colorado "because I was a juvenile delinquent." Milius became a voracious reader and started to write short stories. "I had learned very early, to write in almost any style. I could write in fluent Hemingway, or in fluent Melville, or Conrad, or Jack Kerouac, and whatever." He says he was also influenced by the oral story telling of surfers at the time, who had a beatnik tradition.

Coastal California

Coastal California, also known as the California Coastline and the Golden Coast, refers to the coastal regions of the US state of California. The term is not primarily geographical as it also describes an area distinguished by cultural, economical and political attributes.

Geography

The area includes the North Coast, San Francisco Bay Area (including Silicon Valley), Central Coast, and South Coast. During the 2000 Census, roughly a third of households in coastal California had incomes exceeding $75,000, compared to 17.6% in the Central Valley and 22.5% at the national average.

The region is renowned for being home to artisan communities such as Laguna Beach and Carmel as well as its natural beauty as found in the Redwood Forests of the North Coast. While the area has always been relatively expensive, when compared to inland regions and the national average, the recent real estate boom has left it as the most expensive housing market in the nation. An October 2004 CNN Money publication found that a 2,200-square-foot (200 m²) home in a "middle management neighborhood" would cost an average of $1.8 million.

Christopher Lee

Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee CBE (27 May 1922 – 7 June 2015) was an English actor, singer, author, and World War II veteran. With a career spanning nearly 70 years, Lee initially portrayed villains and became best known for his role as Count Dracula in a sequence of Hammer Horror films. His other film roles include Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Saruman in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003) and The Hobbit film trilogy (2012–2014), and Count Dooku in the final two films of the Star Wars prequel trilogy (2002 and 2005).

Lee was knighted for services to drama and charity in 2009, received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2011 and received the BFI Fellowship in 2013. Lee considered his best performance to be that of Pakistan's founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the biopic Jinnah (1998), and his best film to be the British horror film The Wicker Man (1973). He frequently appeared opposite Peter Cushing in Hammer Horror films, and late in his career had roles in six Tim Burton films.

Steven Spielberg

Steven Allan Spielberg KBE OMRI (born December 18, 1946) is an American director, producer and screenwriter. Spielberg is considered as one of the founding pioneers of the New Hollywood era, as well as being viewed as one of the most popular directors and producers in film history. He is one of the co-founders of DreamWorks Studios.

In a career spanning more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as archetypes of modern Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. In later years, his films began addressing humanistic issues such as the Holocaust (in Schindler's List), the transatlantic slave trade (in Amistad), war (in Empire of the Sun, Saving Private Ryan, War Horse and Bridge of Spies) and terrorism (in Munich). His other films include Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Indiana Jones film series, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

Spielberg won the Academy Award for Best Director for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Three of Spielberg's films—Jaws (1975), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Jurassic Park (1993)—achieved box office records, originated and came to epitomize the blockbuster film. The unadjusted gross of all Spielberg-directed films exceeds $9 billion worldwide, making him the highest-grossing director in history. His personal net worth is estimated to be more than $3 billion. He has been associated with composer John Williams since 1974, who composed music for all save five of Spielberg's feature films.