Mabel Normand (November 9, 1892 – February 23, 1930) was an American silent film comedienne and actress. She was a popular star of Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios and is noted as one of the film industry's first female screenwriters, producers and directors. Onscreen she co-starred in commercially successful films with Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle more than a dozen times each, occasionally writing and directing movies featuring Chaplin as her leading man. At the height of her career in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Normand had her own movie studio and production company.
Throughout the 1920s her name was linked with widely publicized scandals including the 1922 murder of William Desmond Taylor and the 1924 shooting of Courtland S. Dines, who was shot by Normand's chauffeur with her pistol. She was not a suspect in either crime. Her film career declined, possibly due to both scandals and a recurrence of tuberculosis in 1923, which led to a decline in her health, retirement from films and her death in 1930 at age 37.
Gabriel-Maximilien Leuvielle (French pronunciation: [linˈdɛʁ]; 16 December 1883–31 October 1925), better known by the stage name Max Linder, was a French actor, director, screenwriter, producer and comedian of the silent film era. His onscreen persona "Max" was one of the first recognizable recurring characters in film.
Born in Caverne, France to Catholic parents, Linder grew up with a passion for the theatre and enrolled in the Bordeaux Conservatorie in 1899. He soon received awards for his performances and continued to pursue a career in the legitimate theatre. He became a contract player with the Bordeaux Théâtre des Arts from 1901 to 1904, performing in plays by Molière, Pierre Corneille and Alfred de Musset.
In the early 1900s, Linder appeared in short comedy films for Pathé, usually in supporting roles. His first major film role was in the Georges Méliès-like fantasy film The Legend of Punching. During the following years, Linder made more than one hundred short films portraying "Max", a wealthy and dapper man-about-town frequently in hot water because of his penchant for beautiful women and the good life. Starting with The Skater's Debut in 1907, the character became one of the first identifiable motion-picture characters who appeared in successive situation comedies. In 1911, Linder began co-directing his own films (with René LePrince) as well as writing the scripts.
Georges Bizet (French pronunciation: [ʒɔʁʒ bizɛ]) formally Alexandre César Léopold Bizet, (25 October 1838 – 3 June 1875) was a French composer, mainly of operas. In a career cut short by his early death, he achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, became one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertory.
During a brilliant student career at the Conservatoire de Paris, Bizet won many prizes, including the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1857. He was recognised as an outstanding pianist, though he chose not to capitalise on this skill and rarely performed in public. Returning to Paris after almost three years in Italy, he found that the main Parisian opera theatres preferred the established classical repertoire to the works of newcomers. His keyboard and orchestral compositions were likewise largely ignored; as a result, his career stalled, and he earned his living mainly by arranging and transcribing the music of others. Restless for success, he began many theatrical projects during the 1860s, most of which were abandoned. Neither of the two operas that reached the stage—Les pêcheurs de perles and La jolie fille de Perth—was immediately successful.
Johann Baptist Joseph Maximilian Reger (19 March 1873 – 11 May 1916) was a German composer, conductor, pianist, organist, and academic teacher.
Born in Brand, Bavaria, Reger studied music in Munich and Wiesbaden with Hugo Riemann. From September 1901 he settled in Munich, where he obtained concert offers and where his rapid rise to fame began. During his first Munich season, Reger appeared in ten concerts as an organist, chamber pianist and accompanist. He continued to compose without interruption. From 1907 he worked in Leipzig, where he was music director of the university until 1908 and professor of composition at the conservatory until his death. In 1911 he moved to Meiningen where he got the position of Hofkapellmeister at the court of Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. In 1915 he moved to Jena, commuting once a week to teach in Leipzig. He died in May 1916 on one of these trips of a heart attack at age 43.
He had also been active internationally as a conductor and pianist. Among his students were Joseph Haas, Sándor Jemnitz, Jaroslav Kvapil, Ruben Liljefors, George Szell and Cristòfor Taltabull.
Balazs Szabo is a Hungarian-born artist and author who has lived in the United States since 1956. He is best known as a fine artist influenced by the Viennese “fantastic realists” style. He derives his artistic inspiration from Hieronymus Bosch, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst. His portraits, large murals and surrealist works are internationally-known and can be found in private and in corporate collections throughout Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Europe and the United States. Balazs Szabo’s selected works are in the museums of Hawaii, New Jersey and North Carolina. Mr. Szabo’s art book The Eye of the Muse (1987) won the 1987 USA Print Design Excellence Award and his historical memoir Knock in the Night (2006) has been translated into the Hungarian from the original English in 2008.
Balazs Szabo is the younger of Sandor Szabo’s two sons. Balazs’s parents divorced in 1947 and Sandor remarried in 1948 to then renowned Hungarian film star Barczy Kato. Szabo was an acclaimed Hungarian American who was awarded the highest awards an actor can claim in Hungary including the Kossuth Prize. Balazs at three years old was sent to live with his maternal grandparents, Paula and Eugene at Lake Balaton, while his older brother, Barna, lived with his father in Budapest. Educated and cultured, his maternal grandparents taught him literature, music and art in the small space they shared as a family in the villa which previously belong to them prior to the Communist confiscations. At age seven he met his father again and a few years later was taken back to Budapest to live with his birth mother. But this arrangement did not last. Battered by her, Balazs ran away and testified in court. The Court ruled to have Balazs live with his father, brother and stepmother, Barczy Kato in Budapest.