500 + Gay Actors & Personalities
500 + gay or bisexual male personalities, past & present, listed in alphabetical order
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- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
James Adomian was born on 31 January 1980 in Omaha, Nebraska, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008), Trunk'd (2014) and California's Lost Gold (2012).- Actor
- Soundtrack
Grandiose Irish stage, film and television character player Max Adrian, a noted classical performer and musical comedy revue star with a highly distinctive voice and "old school" acting style, was born Guy Thornton Bor on November 1, 1903, in Kilkenny, County Kilkenny, Ireland. The son of Edward Norman Cavendish Bor and wife Mabel Lloyd Thornton, Max studied at the Portora Royal School and showed early interest in the performing arts. An intermission singer/dancer at a silent film theatre, he made his stage debut in the chorus in 1925 and proceeded to gain experience on the West End.
Following extensive repertory experience, Adrian (who was occasionally billed as Max Cavendish) enjoyed his first transcontinental stage hit with "First Episode", which toured throughout England and later transferred to Broadway in 1934. He went on to find wide personal success with his roles in "Troilus and Cressida" and "The Doctor's Dilemma" toward the end of the decade. Joining the Old Vic company in 1939, he scored as "The Dauphin" in "Saint Joan", then continued supremely with John Gielgud's company at the Haymarket Theatre in the mid-1940s as "Puck" in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Osric" in "Hamlet" and "Tattle" in "Love for Love".
A founding member of both the Royal Shakespeare Company and, much later, Laurence Olivier's National Theatre, Adrian earned widespread admiration for his work on the lighter side as a singer/comedian on the post-WWII musical revue stage. Many were produced by his long-time companion Laurier Lister (1907-1986). He also later performed eloquently, if outrageously, in one-man shows about George Bernard Shaw and the lesser successful "Gilbert and Sullivan".
Following his revue success, the often-bespectacled actor traveled to America in 1956 to appear in Leonard Bernstein's operetta, "Candide", on Broadway. Adrian stayed and pursued a career working in such summer stock productions of "Pygmalion" as Alfred as Doolittle, "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" as "Jourdain", "The Merchant of Venice" as "Shylock", and "The School for Scandal" as "Sir Peter Teazle", but never established a strong footing. He returned to London in 1959 to appear in Noël Coward "Look After Lulu!", which later was taken to Broadway.
In the early 1960s, Adrian became a member of Peter Hall's nascent Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in Stratford-upon-Avon, wherein he appeared in "As You Like It", "Twelfth Night" and "Troilus and Cressida", as well as the non-Bard productions of "The Duchess of Malfi", "The Devils" and "The Hollow Crown". He also was a founding member of Olivier's National Theatre Company at the Old Vic from 1963, wherein he supported Peter O'Toole "Hamlet" as "Polonius". He also went on to appear in "Saint Joan", "Uncle Vanya", "The Recruiting Officer" and "The Master Builder".
Less renowned for his work on film, Adrian's made his debut in 1934 with two films: The Primrose Path (1934) and Eight Cylinder Love (1934). Film highlights during this earlier period came with his roles in the historical pieces The Remarkable Mr. Kipps (1941) and Courageous Mr. Penn (1942) and as "The Dauphin" in Olivier's classical masterpiece, Henry V (1944) (aka Henry V). Post-war films included lesser parts in The Taming of Dorothy (1950), Pool of London (1951) and The Pickwick Papers (1952). In later years, he showed some minor flash in Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965) and The Deadly Affair (1967), and capped his cinematic career as a favorite actor of visionary director Ken Russell and his mesmerizingly bizarre films The Music Lovers (1971), The Boy Friend (1971) and The Devils (1971). He fared much better on TV with several Shakespearean and other classical roles, notably as a delightful "Fagin" in "Oliver Twist", impressive Benjamin Disraeli in "Victoria Regina", and as composer "Fredrick Delius" in "Song of Summer".
Dying of a heart attack in 1973, the prolific stage actor, survived by his partner, was paid tribute by such luminaries as Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness and revue co-star Joyce Grenfell.- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Andrew Ahn was born on 10 March 1986 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He is a director and producer, known for Spa Night (2016), Andy (2010) and Dol (First Birthday) (2011).- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Clayton Holmes Grissom was born on November 30, 1978 in Raleigh, North Carolina, to Faye Aiken Parker and Vernon Grissom. When Clay was a teenager, he had a love for teaching and helping young children and later on studied to became a school teacher. When he was about 23 years old, a longtime friend persuaded him to audition for American Idol. When he was 25 years old he released his debut album, "Measure of a Man." (singles from his debut album include: "Invisible," "This Is The Night" and "The Way") His debut album sold over 600,000 copies in the USA in its first week of release. It has sold almost 2.5 million in the US as of 4/16/04.- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
Edward Albee was born on 12 March 1928 in Washington, District of Columbia, USA. He was a writer, known for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), A Delicate Balance (1973) and Qui a peur de Virginia Woolf? d'Edward Albee (2011). He died on 16 September 2016 in Montauk, New York, USA.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Ben Aldridge was born on 12 November 1985 in Exeter, Devon, England, UK. He is an actor, known for Knock at the Cabin (2023), Spoiler Alert (2022) and The Long Call (2021).- Actor
- Composer
- Writer
Olly Alexander was born on 15 July 1990 in Yorkshire, England, UK. He is an actor and composer, known for God Help the Girl (2014), Bright Star (2009) and The Dish & the Spoon (2011).- Director
- Writer
- Art Director
Marc Allégret was born on 22 December 1900 in Basel, Switzerland. He was a director and writer, known for The Curtain Rises (1938), Avec André Gide (1951) and Julietta (1953). He was married to Nadine Vogel. He died on 3 November 1973 in Paris, France.- Actor
- Producer
Chad Allen was born on 5 June 1974 in Cerritos, California, USA. He is an actor and producer, known for Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (1993), TerrorVision (1986) and Happy New Year, Charlie Brown (1986).- Music Department
- Actor
- Soundtrack
Peter Allen was born on 10 February 1944 in Tenterfield, New South Wales, Australia. He was an actor, known for Arthur (1981), Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999) and Muriel's Wedding (1994). He was married to Liza Minnelli. He died on 18 June 1992 in San Diego, California, USA.- Emmy Award winner Ted Allen is host of the hit prime-time competition series Chopped (2007) on the Food Network, and a frequent contributor to Food Network's The Best Thing I Ever Ate (2009). He was a judge on the first four seasons of Bravo's Top Chef (2006) and Food Network's Iron Chef America: The Series (2004) and was the food and wine specialist on the groundbreaking Bravo series Queer Eye (2003). He is the author of "The Food You Want to Eat: 100 Smart, Simple Recipes" (Clarkson-Potter), a collection of vibrant, all-natural dishes, and will publish a second cookbook for Clarkson in spring 2012. He also co-wrote the New York Times Best Seller "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy: The Fab Five's Guide to Looking Better, Cooking Better, Dressing Better, Behaving Better, and Living Better".
Since 1997, Ted has been a contributing editor to Esquire magazine, where he writes about food, wine, style and everything else the American man needs to know. He was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for his Esquire feature on the little-known phenomenon of male breast cancer. Ted also writes for such publications as Bon Appetit, Epicurious and Food Network Magazine. Before joining Esquire, Ted was a senior editor and restaurant critic at Chicago magazine. Ted holds an M.A. in journalism from New York University, with an advanced certificate in the school's Science and Environmental Reporting Program, and a B.A. in psychology from Purdue University. He lives in Brooklyn with his longtime partner, Barry Rice. - Writer
- Actor
- Producer
Kevin Allison was born on 16 February 1970 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. He is a writer and actor, known for The State (1993), Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991) and The Ten (2007).- Cinematographer
- Director
- Camera and Electrical Department
One of the highest appraised contemporary cinematographers. He was born in Spain but moved to Cuba by age 18 to join his exiled anti-Franco father. In Havana, he founded a cineclub and wrote film reviews. Then, he went on to study in Rome at the Centro Sperimentale. He directed six shorts in Cuba and two in New York. After the 1959 Cuban revolution, he returned and made several documentaries for the Castro-regime. But after two of his shorts (Gente en la playa (1960) and La Tumba Francesca) had been banned, he moved to Paris. There he became the favourite cameraman of Éric Rohmer and François Truffaut. In 1978, he started his impressive Hollywood-career. In his later years, he co-directed two documentaries about the human rights situation in Cuba: Improper Conduct (1984) (about the persecution of gay people) and Nadie escuchaba (1987). He shot several prestigious commercials for Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein. Nestor Almendros died of cancer.- Writer
- Director
- Producer
The most internationally acclaimed Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel was born in a small town (Calzada de Calatrava) in the impoverished Spanish region of La Mancha. He arrived in Madrid in 1968, and survived by selling used items in the flea-market called El Rastro. Almodóvar couldn't study filmmaking because he didn't have the money to afford it. Besides, the filmmaking schools were closed in early 70s by Franco's government. Instead, he found a job in the Spanish phone company and saved his salary to buy a Super 8 camera. From 1972 to 1978, he devoted himself to make short films with the help of of his friends. The "premieres" of those early films were famous in the rapidly growing world of the Spanish counter-culture. In few years, Almodóvar became a star of "La Movida", the pop cultural movement of late 70s Madrid. His first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom (1980), was made in 16 mm and blown-up to 35 mm for public release. In 1987, he and his brother Agustín Almodóvar established their own production company: El Deseo, S. A. The "Almodóvar phenomenon" has reached all over the world, making his films very popular in many countries.- Actor
- Composer
- Director
Following his parents' divorce, the legendary Synth-pop/New Wave artist Marc Almond was accepted into a general art design course at Southport College, where he studied performance art. During his time at art college he did a series of performance theater pieces: the Andy Warhol inspired piece "Zazou", "Glamour in Squalor" and "Twilights and Lowlifes". Marc's love for Siouxsie and the Banshees influenced him to leave college with a 2.1 honors degree and form Soft Cell in 1979. The band skyrocketed to fame in the early 1980s with their hit "Tainted Love".- Costume and Wardrobe Department
- Costume Designer
Hardy Amies was born on 17 July 1909 in Maida Vale, London, England, UK. He was a costume designer, known for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Two for the Road (1967) and Maytime in Mayfair (1949). He died on 5 March 2003 in Langford, Oxfordshire, England, UK.- Actor
- Writer
Stephen K. Amos is known for Huge (2010), My Night with Reg (2021) and Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (2009).- Writer
- Actor
- Director
Amstell was born on 29 November 1979 and was raised in Gants Hill, London. The lively and determined chap made his first television appearance in 1993 when he appeared as a contestant on the Channel 4 game show GamesMaster (1992-1998), which he unfortunately lost, but this did not falter him on his climb to fame, he went on appear on 'Good Morning with Anne and Nick (1992-1996)' doing an impression of Dame Edna Everage, and a 1994 episode of Family Catchphrase. In the latter, he described himself as a budding magician and showed one of his tricks to the presenter, Andrew O'Connor. Amstell and his family won a television and a video recorder.
Amstell started performing on the comedy circuit when he was just 13 and later caught the eye of television executives by becoming the youngest finalist of the BBC New Comedy Awards in 1998. His first professional television appearance was the same year, as a presenter on the UK children's channel Nickelodeon. He would later go on to co-host Popworld, with his quirky style of interviewing, he stirred controversy when discussing personal items with guests on the show.
Simon would later go on to become the second host of the comedic panel show 'Never Mind the Buzzcocks (1996-2015)' replacing Mark Lamarr.- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Lindsay was born in Bangalore, India but educated in England at Cheltenham College and Wadham College, Oxford where he was a classical scholar. He then spent 3 years war time service in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps. His career in the theatre started at the Royal Court in the late 1950's where he was responsible for the premiere productions of The Long and the Short and the Tall, Sergeant Musgrave's Dance, Billy Liar and The Bed Before Yesterday. His collaboration with David Storey began with the film This Sporting Life followed by the plays In Celebration, Home, The Changing Room, Early Days and his last, in 1992, Stages He also contributed to the Times, Observer and New Statesman newspapers.- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Sound Department
- Actor
- Writer
- Director
Casper is an accomplished actor, writer, film director and producer.
In 2020, he was nominated for the John Cassavetes Award at the Sprit Awards for producing "Wild Nights with Emily", Madeleine Olnek's comedic biopic about Emily Dickinson starring Molly Shannon. Also in 2020, Casper premiered his 10th feature film as a producer, when the Swedish relationship drama "Are We Lost Forever", directed by David Färdmar, had its world premiere at the Gothenburg International Film Festival.
Prior to this Casper produced and directed eight multi-award winning features in the US (five of which he also wrote): "Slutty Summer" (2004), "A Four Letter Word" (2007), "Between Love & Goodbye" (2008), "The Big Gay Musical" (2009), "Violet Tendencies" (2010), "Going Down in LA-LA Land" (2011), "Kiss Me Kill Me" (2015) and "Flatbush Luck" (2016). in Sweden he wrote and directed the drama "Ett Sista Farväl" ("A Last Farewell") in 2013. The short film went on to play over 130 film festivals worldwide and picking up 18 awards.
As an actor, Casper most recently appeared on Swedish TV in the film "Beck - ett nytt liv", and series "Dolt under ytan" and "Harmonica". In the US he has guest-starred on TV shows like "Hawaii Five-0," "Deadbeat" and"Swedish Dicks." Co-starring credits include "The Blacklist" and "Lethal Weapon." His many film roles include the Academy Award winning "Little Children". On stage, Casper has played as Hamlet in "Hamlet" in New York City and Romeo in "Romeo & Juliet" in Paris.
Casper is a dual citizen of the United States and Sweden, splitting his time between Stockholm, New York and Los Angeles. He studied acting and directing at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York.
Casper has been selected as one of the 100 most influential and newsworthy people by Out Magazine.- Actor
- Soundtrack
British character actor Harry Andrews had the sort of massive granite face and square jaw that would stamp that career, but he set himself apart with brilliant stage and screen work. He had graduated from Wrekin College in Shropshire and then moved on to the stage, appearing with Liverpool Repertory in 1933 and focusing on Shakespearean roles. He was befriended by stage star John Gielgud who invited him to New York and Broadway as part of the cast of "Hamlet" in 1935. On the return to London, Andrews did a run of plays in the West End. Then Gielgud invited him into his own stage company. Soon after he was asked into the Old Vic Company by its director Laurence Olivier. His roles were becoming increasingly substantial, authoritative parts to match his sharp and forceful, through-the-teeth delivery of lines. Next he did not pass up the opportunity to join the Stratford Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he spent a decade honing himself into an established, fine, versatile actor, described by the controversial London theater critic Kenneth Tynan as "the backbone of British theater."
He came to the small screen before the large, having debuted in British experimental television in 1939, followed over a decade later with his debut on the ever expanding and fecund American playhouse TV in 1952. His big screen debut came the next year in a character part which would accent his career-from ancient to modern-the disciplined military man in Paratrooper (1953). From there the roles came his way - three or four per year - well into 1979, when TV took up most of his time. His movie making was spent either before American or British cameras. And the military roles were always masterly done, whether a roughed out sergeant or a more dignified officer. Though his most famous noncom may be Sergeant Major Tom Pugh alongside John Mills in J. Lee Thompson's classic adventure Ice Cold in Alex (1958), his achievement as Sergeant Major Bert Wilson, the near psychotic martinet, opposite Sean Connery and Ian Bannen, in The Hill (1965) was an over-the-top tour de force. That same year he was back in costume - having played many an ancient and medieval noble role through the 1950s - in something different - playing the great Renaissance architect Donato Bramante against Charlton Heston as rival Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965). Not a big part, nevertheless Andrews gave the role a subdued and matter-of-fact strength that well fit the ambitious architect of the fiery Pope Julius II (played with great verve by Rex Harrison). While Andrews was also excellent with a tongue-in-cheek style for comedic roles, as in the send up, The Ruling Class (1972), he excelled against type as a flamboyant homosexual in the black comedy Entertaining Mr Sloane (1970). He had said something like: "I don't want to be a star -- I want to be a good actor in good parts" - but his presence always made him standout. It was ironic that he had difficulty in memorizing lines. Sometime later co-star Alan Bates thought him very courageous for his obvious triumph over this impediment. Bates further remarked that Andrews' great sense of humor and no-nonsense personable character made him a favorite with younger actors as a continuous well of encouragement and learning experiences. Though his parts were smaller as he grew older, he filled each of his roles, big or small - over 100 of them - with a giant's footsteps.- Director
- Writer
- Editor
Kenneth Anger grew up in Hollywood and started out as a child actor, but his interest in filmmaking was evident at an early age: he made his first film, Who Has Been Rocking My Dreamboat (1941) , at age 14.
Anger developed into one of the pioneers of the American underground film movement. His gritty, violent, often homosexual-themed films were too strong for American audiences of the time, and many of his productions were filmed in Europe, mainly France.
However, Anger is best known for authoring the landmark "Hollywood Babylon" book series, which detailed a far seamier side of the Hollywood film industry than most people were aware.- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
Steve moved to Los Angeles, where he made his film debut in the teen-aged slasher flick, Sweet Sixteen (1983), opposite Bo Hopkins. The following year, he broke all of the girls hearts in the popular Cannon-produced film, The Last American Virgin (1982), alongside Lawrence Monoson. Roles in The Goonies (1985) and Survival Quest (1988), then led to what should have been his big break, when he co-starred with Jodie Foster and Kelly McGillis in the Academy Award-winning film, The Accused (1988), as a fraternity undergraduate involved in a bar room rape incident. He then appeared in Sandra Bernhard's screen version of her hit one-woman Broadway show, Without You I'm Nothing (1990), plus roles in the films Drive (1991), It's My Party (1996) and the romantic comedy-drama, 'Til There Was You (1997).
Steve has also dabbled in writing and producing, starring opposite Bo Hopkins once again and an all-star cast in the independent film, Inside Monkey Zetterland (1992). Steve adapted the screenplay Gloria (1999), starring Sharon Stone and George C. Scott from the 1980 version by John Cassavetes.- Tall, incisive, aquiline-featured British character actor. Born in Fulham, London, Archard won a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1938. The following year, he made his stage debut opposite Jessica Tandy in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, at the Regent's Park Theatre. A conscientious objector during the war, Archard made the rounds of repertory theatre for several years, with intermittent periods of unemployment. In 1959, he decided to emigrate to Canada for a fresh start. Having already booked his passage, he suddenly received several offers to appear in television dramas. The resulting body of work led to an audition with writer/producer Elwyn Jones for the central role in the projected BBC series Spy-Catcher (1959).
For four seasons (24 episodes), Archard played the role of the real life Lt.Col. Oreste Pinto, who used psychology and guile to unmask foreign spies entering Britain during the Second World War. With the part came recognition and a steady stream of work. Ironically, given his pacifist disposition, Archard was frequently cast as military men or police officers. He performed these to perfection, with his trademark authoritative bearing and icy delivery. He was equally effective as a vicar in Village of the Damned (1960), and a Soviet intelligence operative in The Spy with a Cold Nose (1966). On television, he had a recurring role in Z Cars (1962) and played the ill-fated Egyptologist Marcus Scarman in Doctor Who (1963), 'The Pyramids of Mars'. A frequent face in horror movies, he essayed the vampire hunter Van Helsing in the 'Dracula' instalment of the anthology series Mystery and Imagination (1966). He was also somewhat memorable as Major General Fullard in the film version of Dad's Army (1971), in which he contemptuously referred to Captain Mainwaring as "a damn bank clerk".
On stage he was seen in Terence Rattigan's 'Cause Celebre' at the West End (1977) and in Peter O'Tooles ill-received 'Macbeth' at the Old Vic in 1980. Bernard Archard retired to his home in Somerset after his character in Emmerdale Farm (1972) was killed off. He died in May 2008 at the ripe old age of 91. - Actor
- Producer
- Writer
Richard Crispin Armitage was born and raised in Leicester, England, to Margaret (Hendey), a secretary, and John Armitage, an engineer. He attended Pattison College in Binley Road, Coventry, where he discovered his love for acting. He took part in many theatre productions all over the UK, from musical theatre (Cats) to classical theatre (Death of a Salesman). He enrolled at LAMDA in 1995 and starred in The Cherry Orchard and The Normal Heart among others.
He started working in cinema in 1999 with some small roles in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Cleopatra and This Year's Love (1999). In 2000 he took part in the RSC Macbeth tour of the USA and Japan with Antony Sher as the lead actor. In 2002, he had a breakthrough with his role as the charming but a bit odd character John Standring in Sparkhouse (2002), a BBC Miniseries in three parts, opposite Sarah Smart. After two guest-roles in Cold Feet (1997) in 2003 and Between the Sheets (2003), he landed a role as Steven in Frozen (2005). In 2004, he became famous throughout the whole UK with his role of mill-owner John Thornton in North & South (2004) (BBC). He landed a key role in BBC Robin Hood from 2006 to 2009 as the dark and evil Guy of Gisborne, then from 2008 to 2010 he played Lucas North in the successful British series Spooks (MI-5 in the USA). He kept working on British TV (Strike Back: Origins in 2010) and had a small but pivotal role in Captain America: the first Avenger, till he became known worldwide with his role of Thorin Oakenshield in Peter Jackson's trilogy of The Hobbit (2012/2014), for which he received a Saturn Award. In 2014 he was the protagonist of Yael Farber's acclaimed version of Arthur Miller's The Crucible at the Old Vic in London, for which role he was nominated for an Olivier Award. He starred in the third season of Hannibal (2015) in the role of serial killer Francis Dolarhyde, which got him another Saturn Award. In 2016 he starred in the Epix original series Berlin Station in the lead role of Daniel Miller, and in the same year he received many positive reviews for his role of Kenneth in Mike Bartlett's Love, love, love for Roundabout Theatre in NYC. In 2017 He worked on Ocean's Eight, and on the second season of Berlin Station. In July 2017 the film Pilgrimage came out with many positive reviews. He has narrated several audio books with Audible, for which he has received two nominations for an Audie Award. He has recently given the voice to Trevor Belmont in the series Castlevania on Netflix.- Actor
- Composer
- Music Department
Billie Joe Armstrong was born in Piedmont, California, a small town surrounded by the city of Oakland, and was raised in Rodeo, California, the youngest of six children of Ollie (Jackson) and Andrew "Andy" Marsicano Armstrong. His father worked as a jazz musician and truck driver for Safeway Inc. to support his family. He died of esophageal cancer on September 10, 1982. The song "Wake Me Up When September Ends" is a memorial to his father. He has five older siblings: David, Alan, Marci, Hollie, and Anna. His mother worked at Rod's Hickory Pit restaurant in El Cerrito. Armstrong and Mike Pritchard's first live performance was at Rod's Hickory Pit in 1987; their first performance under the name Green Day was in Davis, a college town approximately an hour's drive northeast of San Francisco Bay.
Armstrong's interest in music started at a young age. He attended Hillchest Elementary School in Rodeo, where a teacher encouraged him to record a song titled "Look for Love" at the age of five on the Bay Area label Fiat Records. After his father died, his mother married a man whom her children disliked, which resulted in Armstrong's further retreat into music. At the age of 10, Armstrong met Mike Dirnt in the school cafeteria and they immediately bonded over their love of music. He became interested in punk rock after being introduced to punk rock by his brothers. Armstrong has also cited Minneapolis-based bands The Replacements and Husker Du as major musical influences.
Armstrong attended John Swett High School, also in Crockett, and later Pinole Valley High School in Pinole, California, but then dropped out to pursue his musical career.
In 1987, aged 15, Armstrong formed a band called Sweet Children with his childhood friend Mike Pritchard. In the beginning, Pritchard and Armstrong both played guitar, with John Kiffmeyer on drums, and Sean Hughes on bass. After a few performances, Hughes left the band in 1988; Pritchard then began playing bass and they became a three-piece band. They changed their name to Green Day in April 1989, choosing the name because of their fondness for marijuana. That same year, they released their debut EP 1,000 Hours through Lookout Records. They recorded their debut studio album 39/Smooth and the extended play Slappy in 1990, which were later combined with 1,000 Hours into the compilation 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours in 1991. Frank Edwin Wright III eventually became Green Day's drummer in late 1990 when Sobrante left Green Day in order to go to college. California punk band Rancid's lead singer Tim Armstrong asked Armstrong to join his band, but he refused owing to the progress with Green Day. Wright made his debut on Green Day's second album, Kerplunk. With their next album, Dookie (1994), the band broke through into the mainstream, and have remained one of the most popular rock bands of the 1990s and 2000s with over 60 million records sold worldwide. In 2009, their hit American Idiot became a musical on Broadway.
Apart from working with Green Day and side-band Pinhead Gunpowder, Armstrong has collaborated with many artists over the years. He has co-written for The Go-Go's ("Unforgiven") and former Avengers singer Penelope Houston ("The Angel and The Jerk" and "New Day"), co-written a song with Rancid ("Radio"), and sung backing vocals with Melissa Auf der Maur on Ryan Adams' "Do Miss America" (where they acted as the backing band for Iggy Pop on his Skull Ring album ("Private Hell" and "Supermarket"). Armstrong has produced an album for The Riverdales. He has also been confirmed to be part of a side project called The Network, which released an album called Money Money 2020. Money Money 2020 was released on Adeline Records, a record label co-owned by Armstrong. Armstrong also provided lead guitar and backing vocals on 3 songs for The Lookouts' final extended play IV (1989).
Hoping to clear his head and develop new ideas for songs, Armstrong traveled to New York City alone for a few weeks, renting a small apartment in the East Village of Manhattan. He spent much of this time taking long walks and participating in jam sessions in the basement of Hi-Fi, a bar in Manhattan. However, the friends he made during this time drank too much for his liking, which was the catalyst for Armstrong's return to the Bay Area. After returning home, Armstrong was arrested on DUI charges on January 5, 2003, and released on $1,200 bail.
In 2010, Armstrong joined the cast of American Idiot, which won two Tonys, for one week in the role of St. Jimmy. He replaced the original Broadway cast member Tony Vincent from September 28 to October 3. (American Idiot is an adaption of Green Day's concept album of the same name). Armstrong returned to the role of St. Jimmy for 50 performances beginning January 1, 2011.
On Thursday, July 26, 2012 it was announced he joined Season 3 of NBC's The Voice as a mentor for Christina Aguilera. He will mentor the artists on Aguilera's team where she serves as a coach.
In 1990, Armstrong met Adrienne Nesser at one of Green Day's early performances in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They married on July 2, 1994, and the day after their wedding, Adrienne discovered she was pregnant. Their first child, Joseph Marciano Armstrong, who was born on February 28, 1995, now plays drums in a Berkeley-based band named Emily's Army. Their second child, Jakob Danger Armstrong, was born on September 12, 1998. Billie Joe is the co-owner of Adeline Records, along with his wife.- Actor
- Producer
François Arnaud was born on 5 July 1985 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He is an actor and producer, known for The Borgias (2011), Blindspot (2015) and I Killed My Mother (2009).- Peter Arne was for a short time the perfect villain in British film. After a couple of roles in war movies (The Purple Plain (1954) and The Cockleshell Heroes (1955)) and a Tarzan movie (Tarzan and the Lost Safari (1957)) he became a villain in Strangers' Meeting (1957). From than on he continued to play sinister types in The Moonraker (1958), Intent to Kill (1958), Breakout (1959), Conspiracy of Hearts (1960), The Hellfire Club (1961) and The Secret of Monte Cristo (1961). He was very convincing as a Cromwell officer, an Italian camp commander or a Nazi officer. Several times he had sword fights as a devious count. In 1962 he was a pirate sidekick of Christopher Lee in The Pirates of Blood River (1962), but a new kid on the block by the name of Oliver Reed challenged him and killed him halfway through the picture. It seemed like a symbolic fight because for a while Oliver Reed played the roles in Hammer Pictures that Peter Arne could have played and Arne moved to TV roles. His days as a leading actor were over and he continued work in TV and in bit parts in features. Sometimes directors he worked with before brought him back for a little role. In 1972 he got a nice break with "The Stallion", a TV movie in which he starred with a horse. He was also in a couple of Blake Edwards movies. He became an antique dealer with his sister as a sideline. He was murdered at the age of 63 shortly after being cast in Doctor Who (1963).
- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
Richard Arnold is known for Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016), Hustle (2004) and Neighbours (1985).- Actor
- Soundtrack
Robert Arthur was born on 18 June 1925 in Aberdeen, Washington, USA. He was an actor, known for Ace in the Hole (1951), Twelve O'Clock High (1949) and Mother Wore Tights (1947). He died on 1 October 2008 in Aberdeen, Washington, USA.- Director
- Writer
- Actor
British film director Anthony Asquith was born on November 9, 1902, to H.H. Asquith, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his second wife. A former home secretary and the future leader of the Liberal Party, H.H. Asquith served as prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1908-1916 and was subsequently elevated to the hereditary peerage. His youngest child, Anthony, was called Puffin by his family, a nickname given him by his mother, who thought he resembled one. Puffin was also the name his friends called him throughout his life.
Asquith was active in the British film industry from the late silent period until the mid-1960s. As a director he was highly respected by his contemporaries and had a long and successful career; by the 1960s he was one of only three British directors (the others being David Lean and Carol Reed) who were directing major international motion picture productions. However, Asquith's proclivity for adapting plays for the screen caused an erosion in his critical reputation as a filmmaker after his death. He was faulted for what was perceived as his failure to focus, like his contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, on the cinematic. Asquith was known as an actor's director, and solicited some of the finest film performances from Britain's greatest actors, including Edith Evans and Michael Redgrave.
Although Asquith's first love was music, he lacked musical talent. He channeled his artistic ambitions toward the nascent motion picture, and was instrumental in the formation of the London Film Society to promote artistic appreciation of film. Asquith traveled to Hollywood in the 1920s to observe American film production techniques, and after returning to England, he became a director.
Among his best-known films is Pygmalion (1938), an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's stage play, which he co-directed with its star, Leslie Howard. The film was a major critical success, even in the United States, winning multiple Academy Award nominations. Nobel Prize-winner Shaw, who had been a co-founder of the London Film Society along with Asquith, won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for the film. Asquith had a long professional association with playwright Terence Rattigan, and two of Asquith's most famous and successful pictures were based on Rattigan plays, The Winslow Boy (1948) and The Browning Version (1951). Asquith directed the screen version of Rattigan's first successful play, French Without Tears (1940), in 1940.
Asquith's most successful postwar film was, arguably, his adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). More than a half-century after it was made, Asquith's film remains the best adaptation of Wilde's work. Ironically, Asquith's father H.H., while serving as Home Secretary, ordered Wilde's arrest for his homosexual behavior. Wilde's arrest, for "indecent behavior", led to his incarceration in the Reading jail and destroyed the great playwright, personally. The Wilde incident stifled gay culture in Britain for the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Another irony of the situation is that H.H.'s youngest son, Anthony, himself was gay.
By the 1960s Asquith was directing Hollywood-style all-star productions, including the episodic The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), once again from a screenplay by Rattigan, and the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor potboiler The V.I.P.s (1963), also with a screenplay by Rattigan. It is based in an incident in the life of Laurence Olivier, a frequent Asquith collaborator. In 1967 Asquith was tipped to direct the big-screen adaptation of the best-selling novel The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) set to co-star Olivier and Anthony Quinn, but he had to drop out of the production due to ill heath. He died on February 20, 1968, at the age of 65.
The British Academy Award for best music is named the Anthony Asquith Award in his honor.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Jim Bailey started out in the 1950s in the Nationally Syndicated show The Children's hour. By the early 1960s he turned to Theater on and Off Broadway and in Summer Stock acting and singing. His first break was being cast in the 1962 Off Broadway musical Fly Blackbird, co-starring Robert Guillaume . It was nominated for two Obie Awards. He went on to perform in other plays and musicals such as The Diary of Anne Frank, The Boyfriend, Wildcat, The Bells are Ringing and Calamity Jane with Ginger Rogers.
He would go onto a career in Television, Movies and theater and headline some of the Worlds major concert venues. He had several appearances at New York's Carnegie Hall (which was recorded and released in 1973) London's Palladium, Los Angeles' Dorothy Chandler Pavillion, Shubert Theater and Hollywood Bowl , Toronto's O'Keefe Center and Boston's Symphony Hall and most of the main showrooms in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. He has also performed in Europe, Australia, Canada, South America and South Africa.
Among the high points of his career are televised performances for the The Queen of England and Prince Phillip in 1973 and Princess Diana and Prince Charles in 1992. He also did performances for American Presidents. He appeared at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid in 1981 and Super Night at the Super-bowl in New Orleans in 1978. Both of these performances had a worldwide audience. Most of these performances are online.
In 1970 Army Archerd said in his column " Jim Bailey is responsible for bringing the art of female impersonation onto mainstream television." His appearance as Judy Garland on the Ed Sullivan Show was such a phenomenon he was asked back In January 1971 to perform again and was booked onto The Carol Burnett Show and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. In 1972 Here's Lucy and What's my line followed and then went onto some of the hottest Variety shows of the 1970s' such as The Dean Martin Show, The Merv Griffin Show and The Mike Douglas Show. In the United Kingdom he performed on David Frosts show and Russell Hartys show. .
In his nationally syndicated newspaper column Earl Wilson said 'Jim bailey is the hottest thing in show business.." By the mid 1970s he turned to acting roles on such shows as Switch, The Rockford Files and Vegas. By the 1980s he was in the Emmy nominated episode of Night Court playing the Transexual Chip/ Charlene.
A character actor, singer and comedian, he has long specialized in bringing to life some of America's most revered female performers, including Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand Phyllis Diller and Peggy Lee. An accomplished singer in his own right with an operatic background and a degree from the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music, Jim also performs as himself and has several recordings.
Among his other career highlights was performing with Judy Garland in Los Angeles in 1964. The recreation with Liza Minnelli of the famous " Judy and Liza at the London Palladium" in Las Vegas in 1972 . He also performed a concert for Barbra Streisand and other Hollywood heavyweights like Clint Eastwood and Warren Beatty in Los Angeles in 1995.
Later theater credits included "Tallulah and Tennessee" co-starring screen icon Bette Garett, "Mae West at the club El Fey" , "Me and Jezebel". "Fragile Fire", (directed by the late Paul Winfield), "Nightclub Confidential" and his last acting role was Ally Mcbeal playing Harold Dale in 2001. By the time of his death in 2015 his varied career had lasted 60 years.
He also had The Jim Bailey Theater in Palm Springs, CA.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Jonathan Stuart Bailey is an English actor. Known for his roles on stage and screen, he began his career as a child performer in Royal Shakespeare Company productions when he was seven years old, and by eight was performing as Gavroche in a West End production of Les Misérables. Since then, he has established a prolific career on screen and stage working on different genres and portraying a wide array of characters.- Actor
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Born in Doveshire, England, in 1941, Long John Baldry (calledl "Long John" because he was 6'7") was a pioneer in the British blues-rock scene in the 1960s. He started out as a folk singer, often touring Europe with American folkie Jack Elliott (aka Ramblin' Jack Elliott). He switched to the blues, however, after playing with such bands as Alexis Korner and his Blues Incorporated band and Cyril Davies and His Rhythm and Blues All Stars. He formed his own band in 1964, The Hoochie-Koochie Men, then put together a band named Steampacket--which featured Rod Stewart--and then Bluesology, which included keyboard player Reg Dwight, later to change his name to Elton John.
In the late 1960s Baldry turned to pop music, and had a big hit with "Let the Heartaches Begin" in 1968, but by the early 1970s he was back to playing rock. In the mid-'70s he ran into some personal problems and took some time off from the music industry. In 1980 he moved from the UK to Canada and became a Canadian citizen, and only occasionally recorded and played club dates in Canada. He died in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2005.- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Actor
James Baldwin was born on 2 August 1924 in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for I Am Not Your Negro (2016), If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) and American Playhouse (1980). He died on 1 December 1987 in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Alpes-Maritimes, France.- Producer
- Writer
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Alan Ball is an American writer, director, and producer who is known for writing the acclaimed film American Beauty and creating the HBO series True Blood starring Anna Paquin. He also wrote the films Towelhead and Uncle Frank. He also created Here and Now, Six Feet Under, and Banshee. He won awards for American Beauty and True Blood.- Music Department
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- Actor
Bruno Balz was the greatest German lyricist (Lied-Texter) of all time. Miss Zarah Leander with the help of Michael Jary saved his life from the Nazis and get him out of a Concentration Camp during WWII. "Victor and Viktoria" was his first success in 1933. He did a lot of lyrics for Michael Jary, songs as "Der Wind hat mir ein Lied erzählt" ("Le Vent m'a dit une chanson") for the film La Habanera (1937) in which Miss Leander sold millions of Odeon records in three languages (German, Swedish and French).
Another song is "Davon geht die Welt nicht unter" ("Ce n'est pas la fin du monde"), which was an anti-Nazi song. After WWII Bruno Balz worked with Zarah in the film "Gabriella" and also wrote "Das machen nur die Beine von Dolores" ("The Legs Of Dolores", "Le Charme de Dolores") and "Wir wollen niemals auseinandergeh'n", which was meant for Zarah Leander.- Adam Barker was born in 1966. He is an actor, known for Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Wycliffe (1993).
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Born in Liverpool, England, UK, Clive Barker is an English writer, director, and visual artist, best known for his works in the genres of horror and dark fantasy. His mother Joan Ruby (née Revill) was a painter and school welfare officer and his father Leonard Barker was a personnel director for an industrial relations firm. He studied English and philosophy at the University of Liverpool. His first artistic endeavors took place while at school, where he was a part of students' theatre. In the early days of his artistic career, he supported himself by working as a male prostitute. In 1978 he co-founded a theatre group called The Dog Company, among whose members was Doug Bradley who later went on to star in Barker's Hellraiser movie series. In 1985 he published his debut novel, The Damnation Game, and the same year he wrote his first feature movie scripts: Underworld (1985) and Rawhead Rex (1986). The end effect of these two movies disappointed Barker so much that he decided to adapt his prose into a movie he would direct himself, leading to the creation of Hellraiser (1987). The movie achieved cult status and turned into a multimedia franchise, although Barker lost control over it at one point, only to regain it in 2020. In addition to his work in literature and movies, he is also a visual artist, often illustrating his own books and was involved in a number of television, comic book, and visual arts projects.- Actor
- Writer
Roy Barraclough began his career as a draughtsman, taking time off to work as an entertainer in a holiday camp on the Isle of Wight. Combining his day job with local amateur theatre for several years, he was eventually offered a full-time acting contract by repertory theatre producer Nita Valerie with her company in Huddersfield. Barraclough regularly appeared on stage and at times played piano in the pit, including for comedian Hylda Baker.
Barraclough later joined the repertory company at Stoke (appearing alongside Ben Kingsley) and then Oldham in 1966, appearing alongside Barbara Knox and Anne Kirkbride, who later both became colleagues on Coronation Street (1960). Whilst at Oldham he made his first TV appearances for Granada Television, including Coronation Street in 1964.
In 1969, he was cast as Harry Everitt in Yorkshire Television's first soap opera Castle Haven with Kathy Staff as his on-screen wife. Although the soap only lasted a year, Barraclough became a regular guest actor on YTV shows. It was whilst having lunch in the canteen there that he was asked to stand in for a missing actor on the first series of The Les Dawson Show. It was the start of a working relationship which would last many years both at YTV and the BBC. Barraclough appeared in the Jack Rosenthal sitcom The Lovers (1970) playing a grumpy barman. He played a similar role in the Rising Damp episode ("Pink Carnations", 1978) and also appeared in ITV's sitcom George & Mildred (1976).
Throughout the 1970s, he formed a partnership with comedian Les Dawson. They played two grotesque old ladies '...of a certain age...', Dawson playing Ada Shufflebotham, Barraclough playing Cissie Braithwaite, the more 'refined' of the two. In 1972 he gained a legion of young fans in the memorable children's series Pardon My Genie (1972-73) as ironmonger Mr Cobbledick, Hal Adden was played by Ellis Jones.
Barraclough made occasional appearances in Coronation Street in 1972 and 1975, playing the rather sleazy Alec Gilroy, theatrical agent to night club singer Rita Littlewood. He returned permanently in 1986 and a marriage to Bet Lynch was included in his character's narrative. After several departures and comebacks, Barraclough finally left Coronation Street at the end of 1998.
Barraclough was later to appear in a sitcom, Mother's Ruin (1994), in which he played a bachelor dominated by his belligerent mother (Dora Bryan). He made a guest appearance in Last of the Summer Wine ("Has Anyone Seen A Peruvian Wart? 2005) playing opposite his friend Kathy Staff and appeared in a variety of TV shows including _Casualty_, Peak Practice (1994, 2001) and Funland (2005).
In 2009, he played the vicar in the BBC1 drama All the Small Things and from 2012 to 2013 he played Maurice in Last Tango in Halifax. In 2016 he played Mr Grainger in a reboot of Are You Being Served?. In 2001, he appeared on Lily Savage's Blankety Blank.
On stage, Barraclough appeared in everything from musicals (The Boy Friend and Gypsy) to high drama (Death of a Salesman and A Different Way Home) and Christmas shows and pantomimes. He created the role of Santa in the lavish stage musical Santa Claus, which he reprised for several Christmases.- Actor
- Writer
- Music Department
Born in Glasgow, Scotland, and raised in Joliet, Illinois. He returned to the UK, for a 6 month Shakespeare semester with the United States International University of San Diego, but left to star in the musical production of "Anything Goes," with Elaine Paige. He went on to star in "Miss Saigon," "Matador," "Rope," and "Hair" at London's West End. Barrowman has homes in London and Cardiff, Wales.- Actor
- Writer
Michael Barrymore was born in Bermondsey London in 1952, the breeding ground for many famous stars, including Charlie Chaplin, Max Bygraves and Tommy Steele.
Having won the TV show New Faces, Michael's big break came when he joined Russ Abbot's Television Madhouse. His own series with Thames Television, The Michael Barrymore Show, soon followed accompanied by his infamous appearances at all the major variety shows.
In 1987 he made the first of his Strike It Lucky shows for Thames Television. It proved so successful that the entertainer went on to make a further nine series.
In 1989, Michael's versatility put him at the forefront of British Entertainment; he trod the boards playing Wishee Washee with Frank Bruno as the Genie of the Lamp in the pantomime Aladdin at London's prestigious Dominion Theatre, where bookings went through the roof. The following Christmas, with Michael's popularity so high, he starred in Cinderella as Buttons at the Bristol Hippodrome and again ticket sales broke all records.
Highlights of Michael's career have included two Royal Variety Performances and Royal shows in the presence of Her Majesty The Queen. In 1992 he starred in The Children's Royal Variety Performance attended by Princess Margaret, to universal acclaim.
In 1993 Michael was signed by London Weekend Television who recognised the performer's huge talent that would, in the next few years, earn him an awesome array of awards and accolades. His top rated series Barrymore won him the title of Top ITV Entertainment Presenter for three years running at the British Comedy Awards from 1993 to 1995. Having now established himself firmly in the public's affection with his mixture of warmth and spontaneity, Michael went on to collect trophies for the Best Entertainment Show and Best Entertainment Performance at the 1994 Royal Television Society Awards.
Michael went on to win a veritable arsenal of awards in 1995 and scored another triumph with his series My Kind Of People. Travelling the length and breadth of Britain, Michael recruited an even bigger army of fans as he invited them to sing their souls out or dance their legs off completely unrehearsed in London Weekend Television's first major foray into weekday prime-time television.
Also in that year, at the first ever National Television Awards voted for by viewers, Michael both won the title of Top Entertainment Presenter and also saw Barrymore scoop Best Entertainment Show. At the same ceremony he also notched up Top Game Show for Strike It Lucky (1986).
In the same ground breaking fashion the following year, underscoring Michael's reputation as Britain's top male entertainer, he was awarded the prestigious Gold Medal - the top accolade in the variety category - at the New York Festival for an episode of Barrymore. Again Michael was voted by the public as Best Entertainment Presenter at the National Television Awards.
During 1997 Michael recorded a new series of Strike It Rich, followed by the filming of his cameo role in the Spice Girls movie Spiceworld. He also recorded a new series of My Kind Of Music and performed his live Christmas show Barrymore Live for 11 Days at Fairfield Halls which sold out every night and received overwhelming standing ovations. Once again Michael received the National Television Award for Best Entertainment Presenter.
In 1998 he had enormous ratings with his hit series My Kind Of Music and he also recorded a new series of Strike It Rich. Michael won two awards at the Challenge TV Game Show Awards and Best Game Show Host and Most Popular Tv Presenter at the National Television Awards.
Michael toured England, Wales and Scotland during 1998 with his An Evening with Barrymore live show, again his huge popularity was reflected in the instant sell outs and standing ovations. Michael also recorded a new series of My Kind Of Music for 1999.
In 1999 and 2000 Michael made a brand new series called Kids Say The Funniest Things which was an instant ratings success and his first ever drama comedy series Bob Martin, both bringing him more awards for Best Entertainment Show and Best Comedy Performance at the National Television Awards.
Michael went on to sell out his live Laid Back tour across New Zealand and then again returning to a further sell out tour in both Australia and New Zealand receiving standing ovations and sell outs each night for both tours.
In 2004 Michael went on the road again in New Zealand with his sell out Heartland Tour receiving overwhelming standing ovations and positive press reviews.
Michael became a resident of New Zealand in March 2004 but splits his time between London and Auckland.
He continued the year working on various potential television productions and, as he did in the UK on numerous occasions, took the role of Master of Ceremonies for a variety of corporate events, including the Thrive EMA conference, and delivered various after dinner speeches bringing his own unique, versatile and spontaneous humour to each and every event.
Michael was also given the opportunity to try on a journalistic hat in 2004 when he was asked to write his own column for the new Herald on Sunday. This was new territory for Michael and his work was well received.
Michael played the role of lawyer Billy Flynn in the hit stage musical Chicago. A first ever musical performance by the entertainer, Michael won the crowds with co star Tina Cross in a two month tour around the North Island of New Zealand. The show sold to sell out audiences and rave reviews. Michael has done a number of live shows and is constantly in demand for corporate entertainment in New Zealand.
In 2006 Michael joined Channel 4's Celebrity Big Brother. The unanimous applause for him as he entered and left the house, showed the huge public support for Michael in England, and he was voted by the public most popular known celebrity in the show.
Since then Michael has appeared as a guest in various televisions shows.- Music Department
- Writer
- Actor
The son of a Jewish Tailor in London's working class East End young Lionel had no formal musical education and never learned musical notation but his music teacher at school declared him to be a genius. He gained a scholarship to St Martin's School of Art at age 16 and started work as a set painter in the theatre. When he saw a notice asking for song writers it was to change his life. His new name was inspired on a bus journey past St. Bartholomew's Hospital (affectionately known as Barts). He wrote his first musical in 1958, Wally Pone of Soho. It was not a success. However, the songs he wrote for the early British rock'n'rollers Tommy Steele (Rock With the Caveman and Little White Bull) and Cliff Richard (Living Doll - at No. 1 for 6 weeks in 1959) brought Lionel his first taste of success. His first musical success was with "Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be". By the end of 1959 both "Fings" and "Lock Up Your Daughters" were running successfully in London's West End. In June 1960 he opened "Oliver!" which had been turned down by a dozen promoters and had to be financed by Bart himself. An immediate hit it received 16 curtain calls on the opening night and had advanced sales of 30,000 in the first week. Oliver! was followed by other fairly successful shows such as Blitz and Maggie May. Bart was just 30 and earning £16 a minute! To finance his next musical "Twang!!" (based on the Robin Hood story) he signed away all rights to Oliver! The new show flopped badly and Bart estimated he lost about one million pounds in that and in the lost rights to Oliver! He filed for bankruptcy in 1972 with debts of £73,000. By the late 1970s his heavy drinking had brought on diabetes. He stopped drinking but one third of his liver had been destroyed. Lionel Bart died aged 68 after suffering cancer for 6 months.- Actor
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The "viral duet king" Adam (Bronx, New York) is more than just another pop voice on the scene, and his accomplishments - from having the "Ultimate Sexiest Video" on Logo, to scoring a Top 20 Billboard club hit with Kathy Sledge (of Sister Sledge), to his iTunes Top 100 duets with Margaret Cho and Pandora Boxx - reflect that in spades. He is about to bring fun to pop music, and a style never before seen blending comedy with dance and outrageouness. He's performed on The Howard Stern Show, featured on TMZ, E!, Radar, Out.com, US Magazine, OK Magazine, the NY Post, The Advocate, & many, many more!
In Spring 2006 his dance single, I Wanna Hold You, was heard in Abercrombie & Fitch stores throughout the country. The debut music video then hit the #1 spot on MTV Logo network's "Click List Countdown" that August, and was one of the Top 10 videos of 2007 on the network. Adam was one of the original stars on the network, and voted favorite Click List artist of 2007, and landed on afterElton.com's Hot 100 [celebrity list] for 2008. Adam's next single, Standing in the Rain, with DJ Russ Harris, was the named the #1 "Ultimate Sexiest Video" on Logo. DJ Times Magazine called him "one of the strongest male vocalists in 2007". The music video for Standing in the Rain premiered in October on Logo's new mainstream dance/pop show Pop Lab, hosted by Solange and Lady Gaga on Logo. He then went on to host the March 11th (2009) episode of Pop Lab's Spring Break Edition, following past week's host, Beyonce.
Needing a steady follow up, his song VIP premiered on HBO in June of 2010 on the music show "Feedback", and Adam became a staple on HBO for the next two years, his music videos being shown in between movies. VIP was also the #2 music video on Logo's Click List Countdown Top 10 Videos of 2010, while Standing in the Rain was picked as an official "fist pumping beat" by NY's #1 hit music station, Z100. VIP (and another single, Q&A) made its way onto TV, and was featured heavily on two seasons of Oxygen's hit reality show "Bad Girls Club", MTV's "The Real World", & Showtime's "Real L Word". Adam then worked with Kathy Sledge (lead singer of Sister Sledge) on a song called Give Yourself Up, which hit Top 20 on the Billboard club chart in October 2011. The song was featured in the 2014 movie "Don Jon". The music video was featured on TMZ when Adam was seen with a bevvy of reality stars. Following in that vein, he released a music video for Q&A, featuring Lisa Lampanelli. He then, in 2012, signed with GR Media firm and recorded a new single with Nadya Suleman, aka, Octomom, called Sexy Party. The CD cover stirred up controversy when Adam was seen holding Octomom's breasts and made international headlines. In the Fall he was involved in a controversial debate with Angelina Pivarnick from The Jersey Shore on deeyoon.com where he defended gay marriage. They released a song called "Serendipity" and filmed a controversial music video where Angelina marries TLC's "Starter Wives" star Cheryl Caruso.
In 2013, he released two viral music videos: It's Tan Mom! and It's Too Big (w/ Jonah Falcon). He appeared on the Howard Stern Show twice and performed, with Howard saying he made a "niche" for himself. That year, a career highlight for him, he performed "We Are Family" w/Kathy Sledge in Asbury Park. He was featured on VH1's Best Week Ever and even Jenny McCarthy weighed in. In July he released a parody song and video w/RuPaul's Drag Race All-Star, Pandora Boxx, called "You Seemed Shady to Me" which hit #46 on the iTunes Comedy singles chart. In August, he released a song with Tan Mom called "Life of the Party" and had yet another memorable appearance on Stern. 2014 started out with a bang as Adam released a new single with Margaret Cho. "See U Next Tuesday" hit the Top 100 on iTunes. In summer 2014, he released the viral sensation "The Kitty Anthem". He also signed with the World of Wonder Network, (WoW! Presents), and began interviews with stars such as Miss Universe, Bianca Del Rio, Alyssa Edwards and Alaska. In 2015 he invented the viral sensation, the "Honey Boo Boo bop" with none other than Honey Boo Boo herself! 2016 saw him land his second top 17 Billboard club dance song "Heartbreak Hotline".
In 2017 it was announced he would be on the WE tv series, "Dr. Miami"- Actor
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- Writer
Paul Bartel was born in Brooklyn in 1938. He decided he wanted to direct animated movies when he was 11 and by 13 had spent a summer working at New York's UPA animation studio. He majored in theater arts at UCLA, and received a Fulbright scholarship to study film direction in Rome, producing a short that was presented at the 1962 Venice Fiom Festival. He later was hired by Roger Corman's brother, Gene, to direct a low-budget horror featured called Private Parts (1972). Roger Corman hired him as a second unit director on Big Bad Mama (1974), which led to his directing Death Race 2000 (1975). He could not persuade Corman to finance his pet project, Eating Raoul (1982). The $500,000 black comedy was made after his parents sold their New Jersey home and gave him the money. Shot in 22 days, mostly weekends, over the course of a year, Eating Raoul (1982) starred Bartel and Mary Woronov as gourmet cannibals who lure sex swingers to their apartment, smack them with a skillet, rob them and use the proceeds to buy a restaurant.- Actor
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Lance Bass is the quintessential illustration of a highly successful and driven jack-of-all-trades: singer, host, actor, producer, writer, entrepreneur, philanthropist and cosmonaut.
Beyond his fame as a member of the phenomenally successful group *NSYNC, where the group sold an impressive 60 million plus records worldwide, Bass has made himself a household name throughout the globe. With countless career highlights in music spanning the past 20 years, including multiple Grammy® nominations, two diamond RIAA awards, MTV Video Music Awards®, American Music Awards® and People's Choice Awards® to name a just a few, he has expanded his accomplishments into multiple entertainment mediums.
Bass can currently be seen as a daily contributing panelist on The Meredith Vieira Show (2014), which he joined in September of 2015. In 2007, Bass lit up Broadway, starring as "Corny Collins" in the smash hit, "Hairspray", published his revealing memoir, "Out of Sync", and danced his way to the finals on season seven of ABC's hit competition show, Dancing with the Stars (2005). In 2003, he was inducted into the Mississippi Musician's Hall of Fame, making him the youngest person to ever receive this honor. In 2012, he joined Sirius XM and launched a pop culture daily radio show, called "Dirty Pop", with Lance Bass and, during the weekends, hosts their "Pop2k Countdown", where he can still be heard today.
Building on his passion for film and documentaries, Bass has established himself as an acclaimed producer with titles like Kidnapped for Christ, where he was awarded the Audience Award for Documentary Feature during it's Slamdance premiere this past January and Mississippi I Am, which recently won Best Documentary at the Manhattan International Film Festival. This November, he is being recognized for his outstanding achievements at the Mississippi Film Festival with an encore screening of Mississippi I Am. Other producing credits include the Miramax film, On the Line (2001), where he not only served as Executive Producer, but was also the film's star and earned him the coveted Movieguide® Award for excellence in family-oriented programming. In 2005, he executive-produced Randal Kleiser's romantic comedy, Lovewrecked (2005), starring Amanda Bynes, Chris Carmack and Jamie-Lynn Sigler. He is also the recipient of the Golden Apple Award® as Male Film Discovery of 2001.
While known for his success in music, including a #1 European dance single, in 2014, called "Walking On Air" and featuring newcomer Bella Blue, Bass has made numerous memorable guest appearances in film, television and as the animated voice in several popular children's cartoons. With his sights focused on hosting, Bass is preparing for his fifth consecutive year as co-host of the American Music Awards' Coca-Cola Red Carpet, has guest-anchored the KTLA Morning News in Los Angeles, filled in for Harvey Levin on TMZ and has become a frequent correspondent with the landmark entertainment show, Entertainment Tonight.
As an entrepreneur, he founded Famous Yard Sale, which was inspired by his memories of weekend yard sales in his hometown of Laurel, Mississippi, where he reinvented the yard sale as a virtual auction marketplace for celebrities to donate their excess belongings and raise money for their favorite charities. This led him to create and executive produce the Lifetime series Celebrity Home Raiders. Currently, he has partnered up with Slavco and Daniel Tuskaloski, and TeliApp to create Sparxx, a social relationship and dating app specifically designed for the LGBT community with the goal of breaking the mold of conventional LGBT dating apps. Sparxx was designed to help men and women and their personally defined sexuality, find meaningful and long lasting relationships.
Philanthropically, Lance remains active in various charitable organizations including serving on the Young Hollywood Board of the Environmental Media Association. He is also the National Youth Spokesperson for World Space Week, consistent with his interest in space travel. A fact that many are unaware of, Bass is a certified cosmonaut after several months of training in the Russian space program where Bass received cosmonaut certification and continued on to Houston's Johnson Space Center to take part in astronaut training. Additionally, Lance is a strong advocate for animals and has been a spokesperson for animal rescues all over the country, including directly working with Lucky Puppy, a dog rescue based in Los Angeles, CA.
Bass currently resides in Los Angeles with his husband Michael Turchin, whom he married in 2014 and was featured as a wedding special on E! in early 2015.- Actor
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Alan Bates decided to be an actor at age 11. After grammar school in Derbyshire, he earned a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. Following two years in the Royal Air Force, he joined the new English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre. His West End debut in 1956, at 22, was also the company's first production. In the same year Bates appeared in John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger," a play that gave a name to a generation of postwar "angry young men." It made Bates a star and launched a lifetime of his performing in works written by great modern playwrights -- Harold Pinter, Simon Gray, Storey, Bennett, Peter Shaffer and Tom Stoppard (as well as such classic playwrights as Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg and William Shakespeare). Four years later Bates appeared in his first film, a classic: The Entertainer (1960), in which he plays one of Laurence Olivier's sons. More than 50 film roles have followed, one of which, The Fixer (1968) (from a novel by Bernard Malamud) earned an Academy Award nomination for Bates. He married Victoria Ward in 1970. Their twin sons, Benedick and Tristan, were born in 1971. Tristan died during an asthma attack in 1990; Ward died in 1992. Bates threw himself into his work to get through these tragedies, and spoke movingly about the effects of his losses in interviews. He was the Patron of the Actors Centre in Covent Garden, London; Bates and his family endowed a theatre there in memory of Tristan Bates, who, like his father and brother, was an actor. With few exceptions, Bates performed in premium works, guided by intuition rather than by box office. For each role he created a three-dimensional, unique person; there is no stereotypical Alan Bates character. Women appreciate the sensitivity he brought to his romantic roles; gay fans appreciate his well-rounded, unstereotyped gay characters; and the intelligence, humor and detail - the smile that started in the eyes, the extra pat or squeeze, the subtle nuances he gave to his lines, his beautiful, flexible voice - are Bates hallmarks that made him special to all his admirers. The rumpled charm of his youth weathered into a softer but still attractive (and still rumpled) maturity. In his 60s Alan Bates continued to divide his time among films, theatre and television. His 1997 stage portrayal of a travel writer facing life's big questions at the bedside of his comatose wife in Simon Gray's "Life Support" was called "a magnificent performance, one of the finest of his career" (Charles Spencer, Sunday Telegraph, 10 August 97). His last two roles in New York earned critical praise and all the Best Actor awards Broadway can bestow. He was knighted in January 2003, and only a few weeks later began treatment for pancreatic cancer. He was positive that he would beat the disease, and continued to work during its course, only admitting to being "a bit tired." His courage and strength were remarkable, and even in his final days his humor remained intact. After his death, there was an outpouring of affection and respect. As Ken Russell said in his Evening Standard tribute, "The airwaves have been heavy with unstinted praise for Alan Bates since his untimely death . . . All the tributes were more than justified for one of the great actors ever to grace the screen and stage."- Actor
- Writer
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As a youth in 1940's Glasgow Stanley spent as much time as possible at the Grosvenor Cinema even skipping school. His father was a branch manager of Commercial Union while his mother would have liked to have been an actress, When the family agreed that acting was respectable his mother took him round halls where he gave renderings of Harry Lauder and Mae West, Schooling eventually came to a stop which disappointed his father who'd wanted him to be a doctor. His father died he'd lived long enough to know that Stanley was going to do well. He eventually moved South with his wife, Moira, and proceeded to established himself in London on his own terms with a reputation of being a perfectionist,- Born Leeds, England and trained at Old Vic Theatre School, 1947-1949. First stage appearance in "Tough at the Top" (C.B. Cochran's last musical) in 1949, followed by seasons at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon; Glasgow Citizen's and Birmingham Repertory Theatre. First in London's West End in "The Happy Time" (1952) and more recently in "Worzel Gummidge", "A Month of Sundays", "Maria" and "Unfinished Business". Overseas: played Caesar in "Caesar and Cleopatra" (International Festival, Paris, 1956); Ravinia Shakespeare Festival (Chicago, 1964); Pickering in "My Fair Lady" (Houston, 1991). In 1998 he was nominated as "Best Actor" for the Royal Midland Television Awards for his role as Alby James in an episode of Peak Practice (1993).
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Simon Russell Beale is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed talents in British theatre.
He spent his early years abroad as his father was Surgeon General to the British Army (his mother is also a doctor), but aged 8 was relocated to England and became a pupil at St Paul's Cathedral School. He then attended Clifton College in Bristol on a choral scholarship before studying English at the University of Cambridge (also on a music scholarship). He began a course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, initially as a singer, later switching to acting, but left unsatisfied. He was spotted in a student play at the Edinburgh Festival, which led to starting a professional acting career.
He was first noticed in comic roles at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he forged collaborations with Sam Mendes whom he has continued to work with. Since 1995 he has been a regular player at the National Theatre.
Beale is an associate of the National Theatre and the Almeida Theatre in London, and an associate artist at the RSC.- Actor
- Producer
- Writer
Adam Beales (born 11 October 1999), known as Adam B, is a YouTuber, actor, and television host from Derry, Northern Ireland. He was a co-presenter of the CBBC show 'The Dog Ate My Homework' and as of September 2020, he became the 40th Blue Peter presenter. Beales has over 3 million subscribers on YouTube and has collaborated with Disney.- Production Designer
- Art Department
- Art Director
Albrecht Becker was born on 14 November 1906 in Thale, Germany. He was a production designer and art director, known for Das Glas Wasser (1960), The Captain from Köpenick (1956) and Woe to Him Who Loves (1951). He died on 22 April 2002 in Hamburg, Germany.- Actor
- Director
- Soundtrack
Brian Bedford was born on 16 February 1935 in Morley, Yorkshire, England, UK. He was an actor and director, known for Nixon (1995), Robin Hood (1973) and Grand Prix (1966). He was married to Tim MacDonald. He died on 13 January 2016 in Santa Barbara, California, USA.- Actor
- Composer
- Music Department
Andy Bell was born on 25 April 1964 in Peterborough, England, UK. He is an actor and composer, known for Dick Tracy (1990), Coneheads (1993) and The Rules of Attraction (2002).- Writer
- Actor
- Producer
Brad Bell was born on 4 October 1985. He is a writer and actor, known for Husbands (2011), I Want to Get Married (2011) and Glitch Techs (2020).- Writer
- Actor
- Producer
Alan Bennett is an award-winning dramatist and screenwriter who is best known as a member of Beyond the Fringe (1964) (a satirical review that was a hit on both the London stage and on Broadway and featured fellow members Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore) and for his plays The Madness of King George (1994) and The History Boys (2006). Bennett and Miller also collaborated on the TV sketch show On the Margin (1966).
In 1995, Bennett was nominated for an Academy Award for his adaptation of his own play "The Madness of King George." He has declined a knighthood and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University.- Composer
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Richard Rodney Bennett was an eclectic composer of serious orchestral works, jazz songs and music for stage and screen. Of the former, his most famous compositions include a First Symphony, a piano concerto and four string quartets. Among the latter are scores for operas, such as the dramatic "The Mines of Sulphur" and the more light-hearted and satirical "A Penny for a Song". Born into an artistic family (his mother was a pianist and composer, his father a writer of children's books), Bennett wrote a cantata, "Put Away the Flutes", while still in his early teens. He enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music in London in 1953, graduating three years later. He subsequently continued his studies under the avant garde French composer/conductor Pierre Boulez in Paris, eventually becoming adept at fusing jazz and serial techniques, in addition to mastering jazz piano.
Comfortable in varied genres, some of his best film music is strongly jazz tinged, notably The Wrong Arm of the Law (1963) and Billion Dollar Brain (1967). Other well-known scores include the romantic, melodic themes for Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) and Murder on the Orient Express (1974), the latter two garnering both Oscar and Grammy Award nominations ("Orient Express" also winning a BAFTA). From 1979, Bennett was based in New York, where his Second Symphony had been commissioned by Leonard Bernstein eleven years earlier (Bernstein eventually became one of his referees for a green card, Stephen Sondheim, another). Bennett's predilection for jazz was given free reign in the 1990's, when he began to play jazz piano in cabaret, including at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London and a season at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, invariably accompanied by vocalists Claire Martin or Marian Montgomery. He had also held the international chair of composition at the Royal Academy of Music from 1994 to 2000.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Helmut Berger - Austrian born film actor, mostly known for starring in Luchino Visconti's films, which are now considered modern classics. Born Helmut Steinberger in Salzburg in 1944, he turned down a prospect of running a family hotel business and went to London where he worked as waiter to pay his way through drama school. Later he attended the University of Perugia in Italy and spent some time in France. His acting career began with French and Italian commercials and showed no signs of progress until he was picked up by Luchino Visconti out of pool of "extras" during the shooting of Sandra (1965) in 1964. Berger's relationships with Visconti, whose partner he remained for 12 years, brought him to the attention of press and allowed him to act in some Visconti's films such as The Damned (1969), Ludwig (1973) and Conversation Piece (1974). Visconti is said to view Berger as the very image of his idea of a "demonic, insane and sexually perverted" man. As a matter of fact Berger often portrayed anguished souls and sinister villains. His acting career continued throughout the 1970s but was temporarily broken up in the early 80s when he battled alcohol problem. He appeared in numerous French, Italian, German films and spent one season on American soap Dynasty (1981) but few directors used his gifts with the same skill as Visconti. His autobiography "Ich" (Me), in which he famously referred to his relationships with Visconti as "marriage" and claimed to be the director's widow, appeared in 1998. Berger is still very active appearing in TV series regularly. He also very modestly attributed his acting achievements to Visconti's directing.- Writer
- Music Department
- Composer
Renowned composer ("West Side Story", "Candide", "On The Town"), conductor, arranger, pianist, educator, author, TV/radio host, educated at the Boston Latin School and Harvard University (BA) with Walter Piston. Edward Burlingame Hill and A. Tillman Merritt. He studied piano with Helen Coates, Heinrich Gebhard and Isabelle Vengerova, at the Curtis Institute with Fritz Reiner, and at the Berkshire Music Center with Serge Koussevitzky (and became an assistant to Koussevitzky). He was assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1943-1944, and conductor of the New York Symphony, 1945-1948.
He was music advisor to the Israel Philharmonic from 1948-1949, and a member of the faculty at the Berkshire Music Center from 1948 (though he did take leaves of absence), and head of the conducting department there in 1951. He was Professor of Music at Brandeis University, 1951-1956; and co-conductor of the New York Philharmonic, 1957-1958, and music director there after 1958. He won an Emmy award for his televised Young People's Concerts. He was guest conductor of symphony orchestras in the USA and Europe, and conducted the Israel Philharmonic seven times between 1947 and 1957. He toured the US with Koussevitzky in 1951, and was the first American to conduct at the La Scala Opera House in Milan, in 1953. He was awarded the Sonning Prize in Denmark, and was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
He joined ASCAP in 1944, and his chief musical collaborators included Betty Comden, Adolph Green, John Latouche, and Stephen Sondheim. His song compositions include "New York, New York", "Lonely Town", "Some Other Time", "I Can Cook, Too", "I Get Carried Away", "Lucky to Be Me", "Ohio", "A Quiet Girl", "It's Love", "A Little Bit in Love", "Wrong Note Rag", "Glitter and Be Gay", "El Dorado", "The Best of All Possible Worlds", "Maria", "Tonight", "Something's Coming", "I Feel Pretty", "Cool", "America", and "Gee, Officer Krupke".- Actor
- Producer
Popular leading man in 1940's Hollywood who, with his suave demeanor, exotically handsome looks and well-modulated voice, was first called upon to portray mysterious or villainous characters. Soon he would be teamed with other "exotics" (e.g. Maria Montez and Sabu) in a series of escapist adventures, filmed in glorious Technicolor and set in lands of fable, which proved most popular with movie audiences of the World War II years. But with the end of the war, his career (like that of Montez) would decline. He ultimately returned to his city of birth to pursue opportunities in commercial photography.- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
Christopher Biggins was born on 16 December 1948 in Oldham, Lancashire, England, UK. He is an actor and writer, known for The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Masada (1981) and Revelations (2005). He has been married to Neil Sinclair since 30 December 2006. He was previously married to Beatrice Aston.- Writer
- Producer
- Additional Crew
Dustin Lance Black was born on 10 June 1974 in Sacramento, California, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Milk (2008), Under the Banner of Heaven (2022) and J. Edgar (2011). He has been married to Tom Daley since 6 May 2017. They have one child.- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Sir Dirk Bogarde, distinguished film actor and writer, was born Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde on March 28, 1921, to Ulric van den Bogaerde, the art editor of "The Times" (London) newspaper, and actress Margaret Niven in the London suburb of Hampstead. He was one of three children, with sister Elizabeth and younger brother Gareth. His father was Flemish and his mother was of Scottish descent.
Ulric Bogaerde started the Times' arts department and served as its first art editor. Derek's mother, Margaret - the daughter of actor and painter Forrest Niven - appeared in the play "Bunty Pulls The Strings", but she quit the boards in accordance with her husband's wishes. The young Derek Bogaerde was raised at the family home in Sussex by his sister, Elizabeth, and his nanny, Lally Holt.
Educated at the Allen Glen's School in Glasgow, he also attended London's University College School before majoring in commercial art at Chelsea Polytechnic, where his teachers included Henry Moore. Though his father wanted his eldest son to follow him into the "Times" as an art critic and had groomed him for that role, Derek dropped out of his commercial art course and became a drama student, though his acting talent at that time was unpromising. In the 1930s he went to work as a commercial artist and a scene designer.
He apprenticed as an actor with the Amersham Repertory Company, and made his acting debut in 1939 on a small London stage, the Q Theatre, in a role in which he delivered only one line. His debut in London's West End came a few months later in J.B. Priestley's play "Cornelius," in which he was billed as "Derek Bogaerde". He made his uncredited debut as an extra in the pre-war George Formby comedy Come on George! (1939).
The September 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union triggered World War II, and in 1940 Bogarde joined the Queen's Royal Regiment as an officer. He served in the Air Photographic Intelligence Unit and eventually attained the rank of major. Nicknamed "Pippin" and "Pip" during the war, he was awarded seven medals in his five years of active duty. He wrote poems and painted during the war, and in 1943, a small magazine published one of his poems, "Steel Cathedrals," which subsequently was anthologized. His paintings of the war are part of the Imperial War Museum's collection.
Similar to his character, Captain Hargreaves, in King & Country (1964), he was called upon to put a wounded soldier out of his misery, a tale recounted in one of his seven volumes of autobiography. While serving with the Air Photographic Intelligence Unit, he took part in the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which he said was akin to "looking into Dante's Inferno".
In one of his autobiographies, he wrote, "At 24, the age I was then, deep shock stays registered forever. An internal tattooing which is removable only by surgery, it cannot be conveniently sponged away by time."
After being demobilized, he returned to acting. His agent re-christened him "Dirk Bogarde," a name that he would make famous within a decade. In 1947 he appeared in "Power Without Glory" at the New Lindsay Theatre, a performance that was praised by Noël Coward, who urged him to continue his acting career. The Rank Organization had signed him to a contract after a talent scout saw him in the play, and he made his credited movie debut in Dancing with Crime (1947) with a one-line bit as a policeman.
His first lead in a movie came that year when Wessex Films, distributed by Rank, gave him a part in the proposed Stewart Granger film Sin of Esther Waters (1948). When Granger dropped out, Bogarde took over the lead. Rank subsequently signed him to a long-term contract and he appeared in a variety of parts during the 14 years he was under contract to the studio.
For three years he toiled in Rank movies as an apprentice actor without making much of a ripple; then in 1950, he was given the role of young hood Tom Riley in the crime thriller The Blue Lamp (1950) (the title comes from the blue-colored light on police call-boxes in London), the most successful British film of 1950, which established Bogarde as an actor of note. Playing a cop killer, an unspeakable crime in the England of the time, it was the first of the intense neurotics and attractive villains that Bogarde would often play.
He continued to act on-stage, appearing in the West End in Jean Anouilh's "Point of Departure". While he was praised for his performance, stage acting made him nervous, and as he became more famous, he began to be mobbed by fans. The pressure of the public adulation proved overwhelming, particularly as he suffered from stage fright. He was accosted by crowds of fans at the stage door during the 1955 touring production of "Summertime," and his more enthusiastic admirers even shouted at him during the play. He was to appear in only one more play, the Oxford Playhouse production of "Jezebel," in 1958. He never again took to the boards, despite receiving attractive offers.
He first acted for American expatriate director Joseph Losey in The Sleeping Tiger (1954). Losey, a Communist and self-described Stalinist at the time, had emigrated to England after being blacklisted in Hollywood after he refused to direct The Woman on Pier 13 (1949) at RKO Pictures, which was owned by right-wing multi-millionaire Howard Hughes at the time, and he was accused in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee of being a Communist. The director, like Bogarde, would not find his stride until the early 1960s, and Losey and Bogarde would build their reputations together.
First, however, Losey had to overcome Bogarde's reluctance to star in a low-budget film (shot for $300,000) with a blacklisted American director. Losey, who had never heard of Bogarde until he was proposed for the film, met with him and asked Bogarde to view one of his pictures. After seeing the film, Bogarde was enthusiastic, and Losey talked him into taking the role, which he accepted at a reduced fee (Losey originally was not credited with directing the film due to his being blacklisted in the States). A decade later they would make more memorable films that would be watersheds in their careers.
It was not drama but comedy that made Dirk Bogarde a star. He achieved the first rank of English movie stardom playing Dr. Simon Sparrow in the comedy Doctor in the House (1954). The film was a smash hit, becoming one of the most popular British films in history, with 17 million admissions in its first year of release. As Sparrow, Bogarde became a heartthrob and the most popular British movie star of the mid-50s. He reprised the character in Doctor at Sea (1955), Doctor at Large (1957).
The title of the latter film may have described his mood as a serious actor having to do another turn as Dr. Sparrow between his career-making performances in Losey's The Servant (1963), with a script by Harold Pinter, and Losey's adaptation of the stage play King & Country (1964), in which Bogarde memorably played the attorney for a young deserter (played by Tom Courtenay).
Bogarde, hailed as "the idol of the Odeons" in honor of his box-office clout, was offered the role of Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger (1959) by producer Harry Saltzman and director Tony Richardson, based on the play that touched off the "Angry Young Man" and "Kitchen Sink School" of contemporary English drama in the 1950s. Though Bogarde wanted to take the part, Rank refused to let him make the film on the grounds that there was "altogether too much dialog." The part went to Richard Burton instead, who went over-the-top in portraying his very angry, not-so-young man.
After this disappointment, Bogarde went to Hollywood to play Franz Liszt in Song Without End (1960) and to appear in Nunnally Johnson's Spanish Civil War drama The Angel Wore Red (1960) with Ava Gardner. Both were big-budgeted films, but hampered by poor scripts, and after both films failed, Bogarde avoided Hollywood from then on.
He was reportedly quite smitten with his French "Song Without End" co-star Capucine, and wanted to marry her. Capucine, who suffered from bi-polar disorder, was bisexual with an admitted preference for women. The relationship did not lead to marriage, but did result in a long-term friendship. It apparently was his only serious relationship with a woman, though he had many women friends, including his I Could Go on Singing (1963) co-star Judy Garland.
In the early 1960s, with the expiration of his Rank contract, Bogarde made the decision to abandon his hugely successful career in commercial movies and concentrate on more complex, art house films (at the same time, Burt Lancaster made a similar decision, though Lancaster continued to alternate his artistic ventures with more crassly commercial endeavors). Bogarde appeared in Basil Dearden's seminal film Victim (1961), the first British movie to sympathetically address the persecution of homosexuals. His career choice alienated many of his old fans, but he was no longer interested in being a commercial movie star; he, like Lancaster, was interested in developing as an actor and artist (however, that sense of finding himself as an actor did not extend to the stage. His reputation was such in 1963 that he was invited by National Theatre director Laurence Olivier to appear as Hamlet to open the newly built Chichester Festival Theatre. That production of the eponymous play also was intended to open the National Theatre's first season in London. Bogarde declined, and the honor went instead to Peter O'Toole, who floundered in the part.)
Jack Grimston, in Bogarde's "Sunday Times" obituary of May 9, 1999, entitled "Bogarde, a solitary star at the edge of the spotlight," said of the late actor that he "belonged to a group that was rare in the British cinema. He was a fine screen player who owed little to the stage. Dilys Powell, the Sunday Times film critic, wrote of him before her own death: 'Most of our gifted film players really belonged to the theater. Bogarde belonged to the screen.'" Bogarde had won the London Critics Circle's Dilys Powell award for outstanding contribution to cinema in 1992.
Appearing in "Victim" was a huge career gamble. In the film, Bogarde played a married barrister who is being blackmailed over his closeted homosexuality. Rather than let the blackmail continue, and allow the perpetrators to victimize other gay men, Bogarde's character effectively sacrifices himself, specifically his marriage and his career, by bravely confessing to be gay (homosexuality was an offence in the United Kingdom until 1967, and there reportedly had been a police crackdown against homosexuals after World War II which made gay men particularly vulnerable to blackmail).
The film was not released in mainstream theaters in the US, as the Production Code Administration (PCA) refused to classify the film and most theaters would not show films that did not carry the PCA seal of approval. "Victim" was the antithesis of the light comedy of Bogarde's "Doctor" movies, and many fans of his character Simon Sparrow were forever alienated by his portrayal of a homosexual. For himself, Bogarde was proud of the film and his participation in it, which many think stimulated public debate over homosexuality. The film undoubtedly raised the public consciousness over the egregious and unjust individual costs of anti-gay bigotry. The public attitude towards the "love that dared not speak its name" changed enough so that within six years, the 1967 Sexual Offences Act decriminalizing homosexual acts between adults passed Parliament. Bogarde reported that he received many letters praising him for playing the role. His courage in taking on such a role is even more significant in that he most likely was gay himself, and thus exposed himself to a backlash.
Bogarde always publicly denied he was a homosexual, though later in life he did confess that he and his manager, Anthony Forwood, had a long-term relationship. When Bogarde met him in 1939, Forwood was a theatrical manager, who eventually married and divorced Glynis Johns. Forwood became Bogarde's friend and subsequently his life partner, and the two moved to France together in 1968. They bought a 15th-century farmhouse near Grasse in Provence in the early 1970s, which they restored. Bogarde and Forwood lived in the house until 1983, when they returned to London so that Forwood could be treated for cancer, from which he eventually died in 1988. Bogarde nursed him in the last few months of his life. After Forwood died, Bogarde was left rudderless and he became more reclusive, eventually retiring from films after Daddy Nostalgia (1990).
Mark Rowe and Jeremy Kay, in their obituary of Bogarde, "Two brilliant lives - on film and in print," published in "The Independent" on May, 9, 1999, wrote, "Although he documented with frankness his early sexual encounters with girls and later his adoring love for Kay Kendall and Judy Garland, he never wrote about his longest and closest relationship - with his friend and manager for more than 50 years, Tony Forwood. Sir Dirk said the clues to his private life were in his books. "If you've got your wits about you, you will know who I am." The British documentary The Private Dirk Bogarde: Part One (2001) made with the permission of his family, stressed the fact that he and Forwood were committed lifelong partners.
In the same issue, the National Film Theatre's David Thompson, in the article "The public understood he was essentially gay," wrote about Bogarde at his high-water mark in the 1950s, that "Audiences of that time loved him . . . Very few people picked up on the fact that there was a distinct gay undertone. It says something about British audiences of the time. He had the good fortune to break out of that prison, and it came through the film Victim (1961), where he played a gay character, and through meeting with Joseph Losey, who directed him in The Servant (1963). For the first time, Bogarde's ambivalence was exploited and used by film."
Bogarde's sexuality is not the issue; what was striking was that it was an act of personal courage for one of Britian's leading box-office attractions to appear in such a provocative and controversial film. Even in the 21st century, many mainstream actors are afraid to play a gay character lest they engender a public backlash against themselves, which is much less likely than it was more than 40 years ago when Bogarde made "Victim."
Apart from sociology, "Victim" marks the milestone in which critics and audiences could discern the metamorphosis of Bogarde into the mature actor who went on to become one of the cinema's finest performers. Most of Bogarde's best and most serious roles come after "Victim," the film in which he first stretched himself and broke out of the mold of "movie star." He received the first of his six nominations as Best Actor from the British Academy of Film & Television Arts (BAFTA) for the film.
Bogarde co-starred with John Mills in The Singer Not the Song (1961), and with Alec Guinness in Damn the Defiant! (1962) (a.k.a. "Damn the Defiant!"). In 1963 he reunited with Losey to film the first of two Losey films with screenplays by Pinter. Bogarde's participation in the two Losey/Pinter collaborations, The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967), in addition to 1964's "King & Country", solidified his reputation. Critics and savvy moviegoers appreciated the fact that Bogarde had developed into a first-rate actor. For his role as the eponymous servant, Bogarde won BAFTA's Best Actor Award. He had now "officially" arrived in the inner circle of the best British film actors.
These three films also elevated Losey into the ranks of major directors (Bogarde also starred in Losey's 1966 spy spoof Modesty Blaise (1966), but that film did little to enhance either man's reputation. He turned down the opportunity to appear in Losey's The Assassination of Trotsky (1972) due to the poor quality of the script).
Philip French, in his obituary "Dark, exotic and yet essentially English", published in "The Observer" on May 9, 1999, said of Bogarde, "Losey discovered something more complex and sinister in his English persona and his performance as Barrett, the malevolent valet in 'The Servant,' scripted by Harold Pinter, is possibly the most subtle, revealing thing he ever did - by confronting his homosexuality in a non-gay context."
Losey told interviewer Michel Ciment that his work with Bogarde represented a turning point in the actor's career, when he developed into an actor of depth and power. He also frankly admitted to Ciment that without Bogarde, his career would have stagnated and never reached the heights of success and critical acclaim that it did in the 1960s.
Interestingly during the filming of "The Servant." Losey was hospitalized with pneumonia. He asked Bogarde to direct the film in order to keep shooting so that the producers would not cancel the film. A reluctant Bogarde complied with Losey's wishes and directed for ten days. He later said that he would never direct again.
Bogarde co-starred with up-and-coming actress Julie Christie in John Schlesinger's Darling (1965), for which Christie won a Best Actress Oscar and was vaulted into 1960s cinema superstardom. During the filming of the movie, both Bogarde and Christie were waiting to hear whether they would be cast as Yuri Zhivago and his lover Lara in David Lean's upcoming blockbuster Doctor Zhivago (1965). Christie got the call, Bogarde didn't, but he was well along in the process of establishing himself as one of the screen's best and most important actors. He won his second BAFTA Best Actor Award for his performance in "Darling."
Bogarde went on to major starring roles in such important pictures as The Fixer (1968), for which Alan Bates won a Best Actor Academy Award nomination. While Bogarde never was nominated for an Oscar, he had the honor of starring in two films for Luchino Visconti, The Damned (1969) ("The Damned") and Death in Venice (1971), based on Thomas Mann's novella "Death in Venice." Bogarde felt that his performance as Gustav von Aschenbach, the dying composer in love with a young boy and with the concept of beauty, in "Death in Venice" was the "the peak and end of my career . . . I can never hope to give a better performance in a better film."
Visconti told Bogarde that when the lights went up in a Los Angeles screening room after a showing of "Death in Venice" for American studio executives, no one said anything. The silence encouraged Visconti, who believed it meant that the executives were undergoing a catharsis after watching his masterpiece. However, he soon realized that, in Bogarde's own words, "Apparently they were stunned into horrified silence . . . A group of slumped nylon-suited men stared dully at the blank screen." One nervous executive, feeling something should be said, got up and asked, "Signore Visconti, who was responsible for the score of the film?"
"Gustav Mahler," Visconti replied.
"Just great!", said the nervous man. "I think we should sign him."
After "Venice", Bogarde made only seven films over the next two decades and was scathing about the quality of the scripts he was offered. To express himself artistically, he began to write. In his third volumes of autobiography, he wrote, "No longer do the great Jewish dynasties hold power: the people who were, when all is said and done, the Picture People. Now the cinema is controlled by vast firms like Xerox, Gulf & Western, and many others who deal in anything from sanitary-ware to property development. These huge conglomerates, faceless, soulless, are concerned only with making a profit; never a work of art . . . "
He rued the fact that "it is pointless to be 'superb' in a commercial failure; and most of the films which I had deliberately chosen to make in the last few years were, by and large, just that. Or so I am always informed by the businessmen. The critics may have liked them extravagantly, but the distributors shy away from what they term 'A Critic's Film', for it often means that the public will stay away. Which, in the mass, they do: and if you don't make money at the box-office you are not asked back to play again."
However, the courageous artist was not to be daunted: "But I'd had very good innings. Better than most. So what the hell?" His well-written works were enthusiastically received by critics and the book-buying public.
Bogarde appeared in another film that flirted with the theme of German fascism, Liliana Cavani's highly controversial The Night Porter (1974) ("The Night Porter"). He played an ex-SS officer who encounters a woman with whom he had been engaged in a sado-masochistic affair at a World War II Nazi extermination camp. Many critics found the film, which featured extensive nudity courtesy of Charlotte Rampling, crassly offensive, but no one faulted Bogarde's performance.
He played Lt. Gen. Frederick "Boy" Browning in the all-star blockbuster A Bridge Too Far (1977). Although some of his fellow actors were World War II veterans, only Bogarde had been involved in the actual battle. His performance arguably is the best in the film. Appearing in Alain Resnais' art house hit Providence (1977) gave Bogarde the opportunity to co-star with John Gielgud. He also starred in German wunderkind Rainer Werner Fassbinder's adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Despair (1978), with a script by Tom Stoppard. Though the film was not much of a critical success, Bogarde's acting as 1930s German businessman Hermann Hermann, a man who chooses to go mad when faced with the paradoxes of his life in his proto-fascist fatherland, was highly praised.
Bogarde enjoyed working with Fassbinder. He wrote that "Rainer's work was extraordinarily similar to that of Visconti's; despite their age difference, they both behaved, on set, in much the same manner. Both had an incredible knowledge of the camera: the first essential. Both knew how it could be made to function; they had the same feeling for movement on the screen, of the all-important (and often-neglected) 'pacing' of a film, from start to finish, of composition, of texture, and probably most of all they shared that strange ability to explore and probe into the very depths of the character which one had offered them."
After his experience with Fassbinder, he acted only four more times, twice in feature films and twice on television. Bogarde was nominated for a Golden Globe for playing Roald Dahl in The Patricia Neal Story (1981). He got rave reviews playing Jane Birkin's father in Bertrand Tavernier's Daddy Nostalgia (1990), his last film.
In 1984 Bogarde was asked to serve as president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, a huge honor for the actor, as he was the first Briton ever to serve in that capacity. Two years earlier he had been made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des lettres 1982. A decade later, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II on February 13, 1992.
Bogarde won two Best Actor Awards out of six nominations from the British Academy of Film & Television Arts, for "The Servant" and "Darling" in 1964 and 1966, respectively. He was also nominated in 1962 for "Victim," in 1968 for "Accident" and Our Mother's House (1967) and in 1972 for "Morte a Venezia."
Bogarde suffered a stroke in 1996, and though it rendered him partially paralyzed, he was able to recover and live in his own flat in Chelsea. However, by May of 1998 he required around-the-clock nursing care, and he had his lawyers draw up a "living will," also known as a no-resuscitation order. Bogarde publicly came out in favor of voluntary euthanasia, becoming Vice President of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society. He publicly addressed the subject of his own "living will," which ordered that no extraordinary measures be taken to keep him alive should he become terminally ill.
The living will proved unnecessary. Dirk Bogarde died of a heart attack on May 8, 1999, in his home in Chelsea, London, England. According to his nephew Brock Van den Bogaerde, the family planned to hold a private funeral but no memorial service in accordance with his uncle's wish "just to forget me." Bogarde wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered in France, and accordingly, his remains were returned to Provence.
Margaret Hinxman, in her May 10, 1999, obituary in "The Guardian", said of him, "At his peak and with directors he trusted - Joseph Losey, Luchino Visconti and Alain Resnais - Dirk Bogarde . . . was probably the finest, most complete, actor on the screen."
Clive Fisher's obituary in "The Independent" on May 10, 1999, praised Bogarde as "a major figure because, wherever they were made, his finest films are all somehow about him. He was a great self-portraitist and the screen persona he fashioned, a stylization of his private being, not only dominated its surroundings but spoke subliminally and powerfully to British audiences about the tensions of the time, about connivances and cruel respectabilities of England in the Fifties and Sixties."
The secret of Dirk Bogarde's success as a great cinema actor was his intimate relationship with the camera. Bogarde believed that the key to acting on film was the eyes, specifically, the "look" of the actor. Like Alan Ladd, it didn't matter if an actor was good with line readings if they had mastery over the "look." For many critics and movie-goers at the end of the 20th century, Dirk Bogarde's face epitomized the "look" of Britain in the tumultuous decades after the Second World War.
David Tindle's portrait of Bogarde is part of the collection of London's National Portrait Gallery, London. In 1999, the portrait, on temporary loan, was displayed at 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister's official residence, with other modern works of art. Officially, Dirk Bogarde had become the look of Britain.- Actor
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Brian began to skate at age 8 when he went to a figure skating show which starred Peggy Fleming. He fell in love with the sport and quickly became very accomplished. At times, he even gave the 1984 men's Olympic Champion, Scott Hamilton, a run for his money. In 1988, he won "The Battle of the Brians" between himself and Canadian Brian Orser. He went pro and has skated and toured with skaters like Tara Lipinski, Michelle Kwan, Scott Hamilton, Paul Wylie and Kurt Browning.- Actor
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Matthew Staton Bomer was born in Webster Groves, Greater St. Louis, Missouri, to Elizabeth Macy (Staton) and John O'Neill Bomer IV, a Dallas Cowboys draft pick. Matt was raised in Spring, Texas, and educated at Klein High School, near Houston. After school, he attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Bomer then relocated to New York to forge a career in acting.
Theater work followed, but his television break came with a small part in All My Children (1970). This lead to a reoccurring role in Guiding Light (1952) as murderous Ben Reade. Further success in TV followed including parts in Tru Calling (2003), Chuck (2007) and the lead role in Traveler (2007). Bomer also scored film roles in projects such as Flightplan (2005) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006). In 2009, he was cast in the lead role of criminal mastermind Neal Caffrey in Fox's White Collar (2009).- Actor
- Writer
- Director
Bottrell is probably best known for playing the creepy "Lincoln Meyer" on season three of Boston Legal. Other memorable work includes recurring and guest star work on such shows as Frasier (2023 reboot), Modern Family, FBI: Most Wanted, Law and Order (2022), The Blacklist, Rectify, Law and Order: SVU, Longmire, Mad Men, Justified, True Blood, NCIS, Criminal Minds, Castle, iCarly, and Days of Our Lives. A former off-Broadway actor & playwright, his critically-acclaimed one-man shows, "David Dean Bottrell Makes Love: A One-Man Show" and "The Death of Me Yet" consistently play to sold out audiences on both coasts. Bottrell co-wrote the off-Broadway play, "Dearly Departed" as well as the film adaptation entitled "Kingdom Come" starring Whoopi Goldberg, L.L. Cool J., Anthony Anderson and Jada Pinkett-Smith. He's also the author of the critically acclaimed how-to book, Working Actor: Breaking In, Making a Living and Making a Life in the Fabulous Trenches of Show Business published by Random House (Ten Speed Press) in February 2019. Bottrell divides his time between Los Angeles and New York.- Music Artist
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David Bowie was one of the most influential and prolific writers and performers of popular music, but he was much more than that; he was also an accomplished actor, a mime and an intellectual, as well as an art lover whose appreciation and knowledge of it had led to him amassing one of the biggest collections of 20th century art.
Born David Jones, he changed his name to Bowie in the 1960s, to avoid confusion with the then well-known Davy Jones (lead singer of The Monkees). The 1960s were not a happy period for Bowie, who remained a struggling artist, awaiting his breakthrough. He dabbled in many different styles of music (without commercial success), and other art forms such as acting, mime, painting, and play-writing. He finally achieved his commercial breakthrough in 1969 with the song "Space Oddity", which was released at the time of the moon landing. Despite the fact that the literal meaning of the lyrics relates to an astronaut who is lost in space, this song was used by the BBC in their coverage of the moon landing, and this helped it become such a success. The album, which followed "Space Oddity", and the two, which followed (one of which included the song "The Man Who Sold The World", covered by Lulu and Nirvana) failed to produce another hit single, and Bowie's career appeared to be in decline.
However, he made the first of many successful "comebacks" in 1972 with "Ziggy Stardust", a concept album about a space-age rock star. This album was followed by others in a similar vein, rock albums built around a central character and concerned with futuristic themes of Armageddon, gender dysfunction/confusion, as well as more contemporary themes such as the destructiveness of success and fame, and the dangers inherent in star worship. In the mid-1970s, Bowie was a heavy cocaine abuser and sometime heroin user.
In 1975, he changed tack. Musically, he released "Young Americans", a soul (or plastic soul as he later referred to it) album. This produced his first number one hit in the US, "Fame". He also appeared in his first major film, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). With a permanently-dilated pupil and skeletal frame, he certainly looked the part of an alien. The following year, he released "Station to Station," containing some of the material he had written for the soundtrack to this film (which was not used). As his drug problem heightened, his behavior became more erratic. Reports of his insanity started to appear, and he continued to waste away physically. He fled back to Europe, finally settling in Berlin, where he changed musical direction again and recorded three of the most influential albums of all time, an electronic trilogy with Brian Eno "Low, Heroes and Lodger". Towards the end of the 1970s, he finally kicked his drug habit, and recorded the album many of his fans consider his best, the Japanese-influenced "Scary Monsters". Around this time, he appeared in the title role of the Broadway drama The Elephant Man, and to considerable acclaim.
The next few years saw something of a drop-off in his musical output as his acting career flourished, culminating in his acclaimed performance in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983). In 1983, he released "Let's Dance," an album which proved an unexpected massive commercial success, and produced his second #1 hit single in the United States. According to producer Nile Rodgers, the album was made in just 17 days and was "the easiest album" he'd ever made in his life. The tour which followed, "Serious Moonlight", was his most successful ever. Faced with this success on a massive scale, Bowie apparently attempted to "repeat the formula" in the next two albums, with less success (and to critical scorn). Finally, in the late 1980s, he turned his back on commercial success and his solo career, forming the hard rock band, Tin Machine, who had a deliberate limited appeal. By now, his acting career was in decline. After the comparative failure of Labyrinth (1986), the movie industry appears to have decided that Bowie was not a sufficient name to be a lead actor in a major movie, and since that date, most of his roles have been cameos or glorified cameos. Tin Machine toured extensively and released two albums, with little critical or commercial success.
In 1992, Bowie again changed direction and re-launched his solo career with "Black Tie White Noise", a wedding album inspired by his recent marriage to Iman. He released three albums to considerable critical acclaim and reasonable commercial success. In 1995, he renewed his working relationship with Brian Eno to record "Outside." After an initial hostile reaction from the critics, this album has now taken its place with his classic albums. In 2003, Bowie released an album entitled 'Reality.' The Reality Tour began in November 2003 and, after great commercial success, was extended into July 2004. In June 2004, Bowie suffered a heart attack and the tour did not finish its scheduled run.
After recovering, Bowie gave what turned out to be his final live performance in a three-song set with Alicia Keys at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York in November 2006. He also returned to acting. He played Tesla in The Prestige (2006) and had a small cameo in the comedy David Bowie (2006) for fan Ricky Gervais. In 2007, he did a cartoon voice in SpongeBob SquarePants (1999) playing Lord Royal Highness. He had a brief cameo in the movie ''Bandslam'' released in 2009; after a ten year hiatus from recording, he released a new album called 'The Next Day', featuring a homage cover to his earlier work ''Heroes''. The music video of ''Stars are Out Tonight'' premiered on 25 February 2013. It consists of other songs like ''Where Are We Now?", "Valentine's Day", "Love is Lost", "The Next Day", etc.
In 2014, Bowie won British Male Solo Artist at the 2014 Brit Awards, 30 years since last winning it, and became the oldest ever Brit winner. Bowie wrote and recorded the opening title song to the television miniseries The Last Panthers (2015), which aired in November 2015. The theme used for The Last Panthers (2015) was also the title track for his January 2016 release, ''Blackstar" (released on 8 January 2016, Bowie's 69th birthday) was met with critical acclaim. Following Bowie's death two days later, on 10 January 2016, producer Tony Visconti revealed Bowie had planned the album to be his swan song, and a "parting gift" for his fans before his death. An EP, No Plan, was released on 8 January 2017, which would have been Bowie's 70th birthday. The day following his death, online viewing of Bowie's music skyrocketed, breaking the record for Vevo's most viewed artist in a single day.
On 15 January, "Blackstar" debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart; nineteen of his albums were in the UK Top 100 Albums Chart, and thirteen singles were in the UK Top 100 Singles Chart. The song also debuted at #1 on album charts around the world, including Australia, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the US Billboard 200. At the 59th Annual Grammy Awards, Bowie won all five nominated awards: Best Rock Performance; Best Alternative Music Album; Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical; Best Recording Package; and Best Rock Song. The wins marked Bowie's first ever in musical categories. David Bowie influenced the course of popular music several times and had an effect on several generations of musicians.- Music Artist
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Boy George was born on 14 June 1961 in Eltham, Kent, England, UK. He is a music artist and actor, known for The Crying Game (1992), The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and The Bad Batch (2016).- Actor
- Soundtrack
UK Actor/singer Daniel Boys was born in Yateley, Hampshire.
After spending three years at the acclaimed Guildford School of Acting, Daniel embarked on a career that has seen him singing and performing in London's West End, extensively around Europe and even as far afield as Japan, China and Australia. He has appeared in numerous theatrical productions including; 'Rent', 'Sunset Boulevard', 'Grease', 'West Side Story', 'Sweeney Todd', 'Avenue Q', 'Spamalot' 'Boys In The Band', 'Nativity' and 'Falsettos'.
Television and film credits include 'Unforgotten', 'Obsession', 'Eastenders', 'Life After Life', 'Endeavour', 'Nativity Rocks' and 'Holby City'- Actor
- Sound Department
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David Alanson Bradberry was born on 16 April 1986 in Alexandria, Louisiana, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for Bite Marks (2011), The Hideaway (2017) and Confessions (2016).- Actor
- Soundtrack
Wilfrid Brambell was born on 22 March 1912, in Dublin, Ireland. His first acting experience was when he was aged just two, entertaining wounded soldiers returning from action during the First World War. On leaving school he worked part-time as a reporter for The Irish Times and part-time as an actor at the Abbey Theatre. During World War II he joined the British military forces entertainment organisation ENSA. On his return Wilfrid began performing with various repertory companies across the UK in Swansea, Bristol and Chesterfield. It was also during this time that he began breaking into films. His television career began in the 1950s, when he was cast in small roles in the BBC Television productions: "The Quatermass Experiment", "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and "Quatermass II". These roles earned him a reputation for playing old men, though he was only in his forties at the time. Wilfrid was just 49 when he first played Albert Steptoe. The role immediately launched him to fame and notoriety and made him into a national figure. His film work continued with a role in the 1962 Walt Disney film "In Search of the Castaways" and playing Paul McCartney's granddad in The Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night". "Steptoe and Son" finished in 1974 after eight series and two hit spin-off films. Wilfrid and Co-Star Harry H. Corbett continued to revive the characters for special one off performances and events including a 1977 tour of Australia. He continued to take small roles in various television series and films during the late 1970s and 1980s before losing his battle against cancer on 18th January 1985.- Actor
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Marlon Brando is widely considered the greatest movie actor of all time, rivaled only by the more theatrically oriented Laurence Olivier in terms of esteem. Unlike Olivier, who preferred the stage to the screen, Brando concentrated his talents on movies after bidding the Broadway stage adieu in 1949, a decision for which he was severely criticized when his star began to dim in the 1960s and he was excoriated for squandering his talents. No actor ever exerted such a profound influence on succeeding generations of actors as did Brando. More than 50 years after he first scorched the screen as Stanley Kowalski in the movie version of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and a quarter-century after his last great performance as Col. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), all American actors are still being measured by the yardstick that was Brando. It was if the shadow of John Barrymore, the great American actor closest to Brando in terms of talent and stardom, dominated the acting field up until the 1970s. He did not, nor did any other actor so dominate the public's consciousness of what WAS an actor before or since Brando's 1951 on-screen portrayal of Stanley made him a cultural icon. Brando eclipsed the reputation of other great actors circa 1950, such as Paul Muni and Fredric March. Only the luster of Spencer Tracy's reputation hasn't dimmed when seen in the starlight thrown off by Brando. However, neither Tracy nor Olivier created an entire school of acting just by the force of his personality. Brando did.
Marlon Brando, Jr. was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Marlon Brando, Sr., a calcium carbonate salesman, and his artistically inclined wife, the former Dorothy Julia Pennebaker. "Bud" Brando was one of three children. His ancestry included English, Irish, German, Dutch, French Huguenot, Welsh, and Scottish; his surname originated with a distant German immigrant ancestor named "Brandau." His oldest sister Jocelyn Brando was also an actress, taking after their mother, who engaged in amateur theatricals and mentored a then-unknown Henry Fonda, another Nebraska native, in her role as director of the Omaha Community Playhouse. Frannie, Brando's other sibling, was a visual artist. Both Brando sisters contrived to leave the Midwest for New York City, Jocelyn to study acting and Frannie to study art. Marlon managed to escape the vocational doldrums forecast for him by his cold, distant father and his disapproving schoolteachers by striking out for The Big Apple in 1943, following Jocelyn into the acting profession. Acting was the only thing he was good at, for which he received praise, so he was determined to make it his career - a high-school dropout, he had nothing else to fall back on, having been rejected by the military due to a knee injury he incurred playing football at Shattuck Military Academy, Brando Sr.'s alma mater. The school booted Marlon out as incorrigible before graduation.
Acting was a skill he honed as a child, the lonely son of alcoholic parents. With his father away on the road, and his mother frequently intoxicated to the point of stupefaction, the young Bud would play-act for her to draw her out of her stupor and to attract her attention and love. His mother was exceedingly neglectful, but he loved her, particularly for instilling in him a love of nature, a feeling which informed his character Paul in Last Tango in Paris (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris") when he is recalling his childhood for his young lover Jeanne. "I don't have many good memories," Paul confesses, and neither did Brando of his childhood. Sometimes he had to go down to the town jail to pick up his mother after she had spent the night in the drunk tank and bring her home, events that traumatized the young boy but may have been the grain that irritated the oyster of his talent, producing the pearls of his performances. Anthony Quinn, his Oscar-winning co-star in Viva Zapata! (1952) told Brando's first wife Anna Kashfi, "I admire Marlon's talent, but I don't envy the pain that created it."
Brando enrolled in Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at New York's New School, and was mentored by Stella Adler, a member of a famous Yiddish Theatre acting family. Adler helped introduce to the New York stage the "emotional memory" technique of Russian theatrical actor, director and impresario Konstantin Stanislavski, whose motto was "Think of your own experiences and use them truthfully." The results of this meeting between an actor and the teacher preparing him for a life in the theater would mark a watershed in American acting and culture.
Brando made his debut on the boards of Broadway on October 19, 1944, in "I Remember Mama," a great success. As a young Broadway actor, Brando was invited by talent scouts from several different studios to screen-test for them, but he turned them down because he would not let himself be bound by the then-standard seven-year contract. Brando would make his film debut quite some time later in Fred Zinnemann's The Men (1950) for producer Stanley Kramer. Playing a paraplegic soldier, Brando brought new levels of realism to the screen, expanding on the verisimilitude brought to movies by Group Theatre alumni John Garfield, the predecessor closest to him in the raw power he projected on-screen. Ironically, it was Garfield whom producer Irene Mayer Selznick had chosen to play the lead in a new Tennessee Williams play she was about to produce, but negotiations broke down when Garfield demanded an ownership stake in "A Streetcar Named Desire." Burt Lancaster was next approached, but couldn't get out of a prior film commitment. Then director Elia Kazan suggested Brando, whom he had directed to great effect in Maxwell Anderson's play "Truckline Café," in which Brando co-starred with Karl Malden, who was to remain a close friend for the next 60 years.
During the production of "Truckline Café," Kazan had found that Brando's presence was so magnetic, he had to re-block the play to keep Marlon near other major characters' stage business, as the audience could not take its eyes off of him. For the scene where Brando's character re-enters the stage after killing his wife, Kazan placed him upstage-center, partially obscured by scenery, but where the audience could still see him as Karl Malden and others played out their scene within the café set. When he eventually entered the scene, crying, the effect was electric. A young Pauline Kael, arriving late to the play, had to avert her eyes when Brando made this entrance as she believed the young actor on stage was having a real-life conniption. She did not look back until her escort commented that the young man was a great actor.
The problem with casting Brando as Stanley was that he was much younger than the character as written by Williams. However, after a meeting between Brando and Williams, the playwright eagerly agreed that Brando would make an ideal Stanley. Williams believed that by casting a younger actor, the Neanderthalish Kowalski would evolve from being a vicious older man to someone whose unintentional cruelty can be attributed to his youthful ignorance. Brando ultimately was dissatisfied with his performance, though, saying he never was able to bring out the humor of the character, which was ironic as his characterization often drew laughs from the audience at the expense of Jessica Tandy's Blanche Dubois. During the out-of-town tryouts, Kazan realized that Brando's magnetism was attracting attention and audience sympathy away from Blanche to Stanley, which was not what the playwright intended. The audience's sympathy should be solely with Blanche, but many spectators were identifying with Stanley. Kazan queried Williams on the matter, broaching the idea of a slight rewrite to tip the scales back to more of a balance between Stanley and Blanche, but Williams demurred, smitten as he was by Brando, just like the preview audiences.
For his part, Brando believed that the audience sided with his Stanley because Jessica Tandy was too shrill. He thought Vivien Leigh, who played the part in the movie, was ideal, as she was not only a great beauty but she WAS Blanche Dubois, troubled as she was in her real life by mental illness and nymphomania. Brando's appearance as Stanley on stage and on screen revolutionized American acting by introducing "The Method" into American consciousness and culture. Method acting, rooted in Adler's study at the Moscow Art Theatre of Stanislavsky's theories that she subsequently introduced to the Group Theatre, was a more naturalistic style of performing, as it engendered a close identification of the actor with the character's emotions. Adler took first place among Brando's acting teachers, and socially she helped turn him from an unsophisticated Midwestern farm boy into a knowledgeable and cosmopolitan artist who one day would socialize with presidents.
Brando didn't like the term "The Method," which quickly became the prominent paradigm taught by such acting gurus as Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Brando denounced Strasberg in his autobiography "Songs My Mother Taught Me" (1994), saying that he was a talentless exploiter who claimed he had been Brando's mentor. The Actors Studio had been founded by Strasberg along with Kazan and Stella Adler's husband, Harold Clurman, all Group Theatre alumni, all political progressives deeply committed to the didactic function of the stage. Brando credits his knowledge of the craft to Adler and Kazan, while Kazan in his autobiography "A Life" claimed that Brando's genius thrived due to the thorough training Adler had given him. Adler's method emphasized that authenticity in acting is achieved by drawing on inner reality to expose deep emotional experience
Interestingly, Elia Kazan believed that Brando had ruined two generations of actors, his contemporaries and those who came after him, all wanting to emulate the great Brando by employing The Method. Kazan felt that Brando was never a Method actor, that he had been highly trained by Adler and did not rely on gut instincts for his performances, as was commonly believed. Many a young actor, mistaken about the true roots of Brando's genius, thought that all it took was to find a character's motivation, empathize with the character through sense and memory association, and regurgitate it all on stage to become the character. That's not how the superbly trained Brando did it; he could, for example, play accents, whereas your average American Method actor could not. There was a method to Brando's art, Kazan felt, but it was not The Method.
After A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which he received the first of his eight Academy Award nominations, Brando appeared in a string of Academy Award-nominated performances - in Viva Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953) and the summit of his early career, Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). For his "Waterfront" portrayal of meat-headed longshoreman Terry Malloy, the washed-up pug who "coulda been a contender," Brando won his first Oscar. Along with his iconic performance as the rebel-without-a-cause Johnny in The Wild One (1953) ("What are you rebelling against?" Johnny is asked. "What have ya got?" is his reply), the first wave of his career was, according to Jon Voight, unprecedented in its audacious presentation of such a wide range of great acting. Director John Huston said his performance of Marc Antony was like seeing the door of a furnace opened in a dark room, and co-star John Gielgud, the premier Shakespearean actor of the 20th century, invited Brando to join his repertory company.
It was this period of 1951-54 that revolutionized American acting, spawning such imitators as James Dean - who modeled his acting and even his lifestyle on his hero Brando - the young Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. After Brando, every up-and-coming star with true acting talent and a brooding, alienated quality would be hailed as the "New Brando," such as Warren Beatty in Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961). "We are all Brando's children," Jack Nicholson pointed out in 1972. "He gave us our freedom." He was truly "The Godfather" of American acting - and he was just 30 years old. Though he had a couple of failures, like Désirée (1954) and The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), he was clearly miscast in them and hadn't sought out the parts so largely escaped blame.
In the second period of his career, 1955-62, Brando managed to uniquely establish himself as a great actor who also was a Top 10 movie star, although that star began to dim after the box-office high point of his early career, Sayonara (1957) (for which he received his fifth Best Actor Oscar nomination). Brando tried his hand at directing a film, the well-reviewed One-Eyed Jacks (1961) that he made for his own production company, Pennebaker Productions (after his mother's maiden name). Stanley Kubrick had been hired to direct the film, but after months of script rewrites in which Brando participated, Kubrick and Brando had a falling out and Kubrick was sacked. According to his widow Christiane Kubrick, Stanley believed that Brando had wanted to direct the film himself all along.
Tales proliferated about the profligacy of Brando the director, burning up a million and a half feet of expensive VistaVision film at 50 cents a foot, fully ten times the normal amount of raw stock expended during production of an equivalent motion picture. Brando took so long editing the film that he was never able to present the studio with a cut. Paramount took it away from him and tacked on a re-shot ending that Brando was dissatisfied with, as it made the Oedipal figure of Dad Longworth into a villain. In any normal film Dad would have been the heavy, but Brando believed that no one was innately evil, that it was a matter of an individual responding to, and being molded by, one's environment. It was not a black-and-white world, Brando felt, but a gray world in which once-decent people could do horrible things. This attitude explains his sympathetic portrayal of Nazi officer Christian Diestl in the film he made before shooting One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Edward Dmytryk's filming of Irwin Shaw's novel The Young Lions (1958). Shaw denounced Brando's performance, but audiences obviously disagreed, as the film was a major hit. It would be the last hit movie Brando would have for more than a decade.
One-Eyed Jacks (1961) generated respectable numbers at the box office, but the production costs were exorbitant - a then-staggering $6 million - which made it run a deficit. A film essentially is "made" in the editing room, and Brando found cutting to be a terribly boring process, which was why the studio eventually took the film away from him. Despite his proved talent in handling actors and a large production, Brando never again directed another film, though he would claim that all actors essentially direct themselves during the shooting of a picture.
Between the production and release of One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Brando appeared in Sidney Lumet's film version of Tennessee Williams' play "Orpheus Descending," The Fugitive Kind (1960) which teamed him with fellow Oscar winners Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward. Following in Elizabeth Taylor's trailblazing footsteps, Brando became the second performer to receive a $1-million salary for a motion picture, so high were the expectations for this re-teaming of Kowalski and his creator (in 1961 critic Hollis Alpert had published a book "Brando and the Shadow of Stanley Kowalski"). Critics and audiences waiting for another incendiary display from Brando in a Williams work were disappointed when the renamed The Fugitive Kind (1960) finally released. Though Tennessee was hot, with movie versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) burning up the box office and receiving kudos from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, The Fugitive Kind (1960) was a failure. This was followed by the so-so box-office reception of One-Eyed Jacks (1961) in 1961 and then by a failure of a more monumental kind: Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), a remake of the famed 1935 film.
Brando signed on to Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) after turning down the lead in the David Lean classic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) because he didn't want to spend a year in the desert riding around on a camel. He received another $1-million salary, plus $200,000 in overages as the shoot went overtime and over budget. During principal photography, highly respected director Carol Reed (an eventual Academy Award winner) was fired, and his replacement, two-time Oscar winner Lewis Milestone, was shunted aside by Brando as Marlon basically took over the direction of the film himself. The long shoot became so notorious that President John F. Kennedy asked director Billy Wilder at a cocktail party not "when" but "if" the "Bounty" shoot would ever be over. The MGM remake of one of its classic Golden Age films garnered a Best Picture Oscar nomination and was one of the top grossing films of 1962, yet failed to go into the black due to its Brobdingnagian budget estimated at $20 million, which is equivalent to $120 million when adjusted for inflation.
Brando and Taylor, whose Cleopatra (1963) nearly bankrupted 20th Century-Fox due to its huge cost overruns (its final budget was more than twice that of Brando's Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)), were pilloried by the show business press for being the epitome of the pampered, self-indulgent stars who were ruining the industry. Seeking scapegoats, the Hollywood press conveniently ignored the financial pressures on the studios. The studios had been hurt by television and by the antitrust-mandated divestiture of their movie theater chains, causing a large outflow of production to Italy and other countries in the 1950s and 1960s in order to lower costs. The studio bosses, seeking to replicate such blockbuster hits as the remakes of The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959), were the real culprits behind the losses generated by large-budgeted films that found it impossible to recoup their costs despite long lines at the box office.
While Elizabeth Taylor, receiving the unwanted gift of reams of publicity from her adulterous romance with Cleopatra (1963) co-star Richard Burton, remained hot until the tanking of her own Tennessee Williams-renamed debacle Boom! (1968), Brando from 1963 until the end of the decade appeared in one box-office failure after another as he worked out a contract he had signed with Universal Pictures. The industry had grown tired of Brando and his idiosyncrasies, though he continued to be offered prestige projects up through 1968.
Some of the films Brando made in the 1960s were noble failures, such as The Ugly American (1963), The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). For every "Reflections," though, there seemed to be two or three outright debacles, such as Bedtime Story (1964), Morituri (1965), The Chase (1966), A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), Candy (1968), The Night of the Following Day (1969). By the time Brando began making the anti-colonialist picture Burn! (1969) in Colombia with Gillo Pontecorvo in the director's chair, he was box-office poison, despite having worked in the previous five years with such top directors as Arthur Penn, John Huston and the legendary Charles Chaplin, and with such top-drawer co-stars as David Niven, Yul Brynner, Sophia Loren and Taylor.
The rap on Brando in the 1960s was that a great talent had ruined his potential to be America's answer to Laurence Olivier, as his friend William Redfield limned the dilemma in his book "Letters from an Actor" (1967), a memoir about Redfield's appearance in Burton's 1964 theatrical production of "Hamlet." By failing to go back on stage and recharge his artistic batteries, something British actors such as Burton were not afraid to do, Brando had stifled his great talent, by refusing to tackle the classical repertoire and contemporary drama. Actors and critics had yearned for an American response to the high-acting style of the Brits, and while Method actors such as Rod Steiger tried to create an American style, they were hampered in their quest, as their king was lost in a wasteland of Hollywood movies that were beneath his talent. Many of his early supporters now turned on him, claiming he was a crass sellout.
Despite evidence in such films as The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) that Brando was in fact doing some of the best acting of his life, critics, perhaps with an eye on the box office, slammed him for failing to live up to, and nurture, his great gift. Brando's political activism, starting in the early 1960s with his championing of Native Americans' rights, followed by his participation in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's March on Washington in 1963, and followed by his appearance at a Black Panther rally in 1968, did not win him many admirers in the establishment. In fact, there was a de facto embargo on Brando films in the recently segregated (officially, at least) southeastern US in the 1960s. Southern exhibitors simply would not book his films, and producers took notice. After 1968, Brando would not work for three years.
Pauline Kael wrote of Brando that he was Fortune's fool. She drew a parallel with the latter career of John Barrymore, a similarly gifted thespian with talents as prodigious, who seemingly threw them away. Brando, like the late-career Barrymore, had become a great ham, evidenced by his turn as the faux Indian guru in the egregious Candy (1968), seemingly because the material was so beneath his talent. Most observers of Brando in the 1960s believed that he needed to be reunited with his old mentor Elia Kazan, a relationship that had soured due to Kazan's friendly testimony naming names before the notorious House un-American Activities Committee. Perhaps Brando believed this, too, as he originally accepted an offer to appear as the star of Kazan's film adaptation of his own novel, The Arrangement (1969). However, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Brando backed out of the film, telling Kazan that he could not appear in a Hollywood film after this tragedy. Also reportedly turning down a role opposite box-office king Paul Newman in a surefire script, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Brando decided to make Burn! (1969) with Pontecorvo. The film, a searing indictment of racism and colonialism, flopped at the box office but won the esteem of progressive critics and cultural arbiters such as Howard Zinn. He subsequently appeared in the British film The Nightcomers (1971), a prequel to "Turn of the Screw" and another critical and box office failure.
Kazan, after a life in film and the theater, said that, aside from Orson Welles, whose greatness lay in film making, he only met one actor who was a genius: Brando. Richard Burton, an intellectual with a keen eye for observation if not for his own film projects, said that he found Brando to be very bright, unlike the public perception of him as a Terry Malloy-type character that he himself inadvertently promoted through his boorish behavior. Brando's problem, Burton felt, was that he was unique, and that he had gotten too much fame too soon at too early an age. Cut off from being nurtured by normal contact with society, fame had distorted Brando's personality and his ability to cope with the world, as he had not had time to grow up outside the limelight.
Truman Capote, who eviscerated Brando in print in the mid-'50s and had as much to do with the public perception of the dyslexic Brando as a dumbbell, always said that the best actors were ignorant, and that an intelligent person could not be a good actor. However, Brando was highly intelligent, and possessed of a rare genius in a then-deprecated art, acting. The problem that an intelligent performer has in movies is that it is the director, and not the actor, who has the power in his chosen field. Greatness in the other arts is defined by how much control the artist is able to exert over his chosen medium, but in movie acting, the medium is controlled by a person outside the individual artist. It is an axiom of the cinema that a performance, as is a film, is "created" in the cutting room, thus further removing the actor from control over his art. Brando had tried his hand at directing, in controlling the whole artistic enterprise, but he could not abide the cutting room, where a film and the film's performances are made. This lack of control over his art was the root of Brando's discontent with acting, with movies, and, eventually, with the whole wide world that invested so much cachet in movie actors, as long as "they" were at the top of the box-office charts. Hollywood was a matter of "they" and not the work, and Brando became disgusted.
Charlton Heston, who participated in Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington with Brando, believes that Marlon was the great actor of his generation. However, noting a story that Brando had once refused a role in the early 1960s with the excuse "How can I act when people are starving in India?," Heston believes that it was this attitude, the inability to separate one's idealism from one's work, that prevented Brando from reaching his potential. As Rod Steiger once said, Brando had it all, great stardom and a great talent. He could have taken his audience on a trip to the stars, but he simply would not. Steiger, one of Brando's children even though a contemporary, could not understand it. When James Mason' was asked in 1971 who was the best American actor, he had replied that since Brando had let his career go belly-up, it had to be George C. Scott, by default.
Paramount thought that only Laurence Olivier would suffice, but Lord Olivier was ill. The young director believed there was only one actor who could play godfather to the group of Young Turk actors he had assembled for his film, The Godfather of method acting himself - Marlon Brando. Francis Ford Coppola won the fight for Brando, Brando won - and refused - his second Oscar, and Paramount won a pot of gold by producing the then top-grossing film of all-time, The Godfather (1972), a gangster movie most critics now judge one of the greatest American films of all time. Brando followed his iconic portrayal of Don Corleone with his Oscar-nominated turn in the high-grossing and highly scandalous Last Tango in Paris (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris"), the first film dealing explicitly with sexuality in which an actor of Brando's stature had participated. He was now again a top ten box office star and once again heralded as the greatest actor of his generation, an unprecedented comeback that put him on the cover of "Time" magazine and would make him the highest-paid actor in the history of motion pictures by the end of the decade. Little did the world know that Brando, who had struggled through many projects in good faith during the 1960s, delivering some of his best acting, only to be excoriated and ignored as the films did not do well at the box office, essentially was through with the movies.
After reaching the summit of his career, a rarefied atmosphere never reached before or since by any actor, Brando essentially walked away. He would give no more of himself after giving everything as he had done in Last Tango in Paris (1972)," a performance that embarrassed him, according to his autobiography. Brando had come as close to any actor to being the "auteur," or author, of a film, as the English-language scenes of "Tango" were created by encouraging Brando to improvise. The improvisations were written down and turned into a shooting script, and the scripted improvisations were shot the next day. Pauline Kael, the Brando of movie critics in that she was the most influential arbiter of cinematic quality of her generation and spawned a whole legion of Kael wannabes, said Brando's performance in Last Tango in Paris (1972) had revolutionized the art of film. Brando, who had to act to gain his mother's attention; Brando, who believed acting at best was nothing special as everyone in the world engaged in it every day of their lives to get what they wanted from other people; Brando, who believed acting at its worst was a childish charade and that movie stardom was a whorish fraud, would have agreed with Sam Peckinpah's summation of Pauline Kael: "Pauline's a brilliant critic but sometimes she's just cracking walnuts with her ass." He probably would have done so in a simulacrum of those words, too.
After another three-year hiatus, Brando took on just one more major role for the next 20 years, as the bounty hunter after Jack Nicholson in Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks (1976), a western that succeeded neither with the critics or at the box office. Following The Godfather and Tango, Brando's performance was disappointing for some reviewers, who accused him of giving an erratic and inconsistent performance. In 1977, Brando made a rare appearance on television in the miniseries Roots: The Next Generations (1979), portraying George Lincoln Rockwell; he won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for his performance. In 1978, he narrated the English version of Raoni (1978), a French-Belgian documentary film directed by Jean-Pierre Dutilleux and Luiz Carlos Saldanha that focused on the life of Raoni Metuktire and issues surrounding the survival of the indigenous Indian tribes of north central Brazil.
Later in his career, Brando concentrated on extracting the maximum amount of capital for the least amount of work from producers, as when he got the Salkind brothers to pony up a then-record $3.7 million against 10% of the gross for 13 days work on Superman (1978). Factoring in inflation, the straight salary for "Superman" equals or exceeds the new record of $1 million a day Harrison Ford set with K-19: The Widowmaker (2002). He agreed to the role only on assurance that he would be paid a large sum for what amounted to a small part, that he would not have to read the script beforehand, and his lines would be displayed somewhere off-camera. Brando also filmed scenes for the movie's sequel, Superman II, but after producers refused to pay him the same percentage he received for the first movie, he denied them permission to use the footage.
Before cashing his first paycheck for Superman (1978), Brando had picked up $2 million for his extended cameo in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) in a role, that of Col. Kurtz, that he authored on-camera through improvisation while Coppola shot take after take. It was Brando's last bravura star performance. He co-starred with George C. Scott and John Gielgud in The Formula (1980), but the film was another critical and financial failure. Years later though, he did receive an eighth and final Oscar nomination for his supporting role in A Dry White Season (1989) after coming out of a near-decade-long retirement. Contrary to those who claimed he now only was in it for the money, Brando donated his entire seven-figure salary to an anti-apartheid charity. He then did an amusing performance in the comedy The Freshman (1990), winning rave reviews. He portrayed Tomas de Torquemada in the historical drama 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), but his performance was denounced and the film was another box office failure. He made another comeback in the Johnny Depp romantic drama Don Juan DeMarco (1994), which co-starred Faye Dunaway as his wife. He then appeared in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), co-starring Val Kilmer, who he didn't get along with. The filming was an unpleasant experience for Brando, as well as another critical and box office failure.
Brando had first attracted media attention at the age of 24, when "Life" magazine ran a photo of himself and his sister Jocelyn, who were both then appearing on Broadway. The curiosity continued, and snowballed. Playing the paraplegic soldier of The Men (1950), Brando had gone to live at a Veterans Administration hospital with actual disabled veterans, and confined himself to a wheelchair for weeks. It was an acting method, research, that no one in Hollywood had ever heard of before, and that willingness to experience life.Marlon admitted having sex with men but denied being gay!- Actor
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The refined and debonair English actor Jeremy Brett will forever be best remembered for his long-running and critically acclaimed portrayal of Sherlock Holmes for Britain's Granada Television. From a privileged background, Brett was educated at England's most prestigious independent school, Eton College. After training as an actor at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, Brett made his professional stage debut in repertory in 1954. He became a noteworthy classical actor who was to make regular appearances on stage, including many with the National Theatre.
Brett was as cultured off screen as on. His interests included classical music, archery and horseback riding. His greatest popularity and acclaim would come with his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes on television from the 1980s through to the 1990s. Where so many have tried and failed to capture the essence of the character, either being derided or forgotten, Brett's widely praised take on it has been described by many as superlative and even definitive. Brett suffered from poor health towards the end of his life but he was still playing the role of Holmes shortly before his death in 1995 at the age of 61.- Daniel Brocklebank grew up in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. He started acting professionally at the age of 14. One of his first projects was playing the lead role of Ralph in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of "Lord Of The Flies" in 1995. He returned to the RSC in 2003 in productions of "As You Like It", "Titus Andronicus" and "The Tamer Tamed". He also starred in "Cressida" opposite Sir Michael Gambon in Londons west end, directed by Sir Nicholas Hytner. Daniel works extensively in the UK and in the USA in all aspects of the industry. In 1999 he won a Screen Actors Guild Award for his performance in the multi award winning "Shakespeare In Love" and in 2010 he won a Best Actor Award at LesGaiCineMad International Film Festival for his role in British indie film "Release." As well as private LAMDA tuition Daniel also trained in musical theatre and is a strong singer and pianist.
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Derren Brown was born on 27 February 1971 in Croydon, Surrey, England, UK. He is a producer and writer, known for Derren Brown: The Experiments (2011), Ghost Stories (2017) and Crooked House (2008).- Actor
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Adam Browne is known for Star Trek: Hidden Frontier (2000), Star Trek: Odyssey (2007) and Star Trek: The Helena Chronicles (2008). He has been married to J.T. Tepnapa since 2007.- Actor
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Charles Bryant was born on 8 January 1879 in Hartford, Cheshire, England, UK(undisclosed). He was an actor and writer, known for Revelation (1918), Stronger Than Death (1920) and Salomé (1922). He was married to Marjorie Gilhooley. He died on 7 August 1948 in Mount Kisco, New York, USA.- Chris Bryant was born on 11 January 1962 in Cardiff, Wales, UK.
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Dan Bucatinsky was born in New York City, New York, USA to Argentinian parents, Julio and Myriam. He is of Latin and Jewish descent. He is an Emmy winning actor, known for The Baker and the Beauty (2020), Second Act (2018) and Scandal (2012) and a producer of Who Do You Think You Are? (2010) and Web Therapy (2008) and 25 Words Or Less (2018). He has been married to filmmaker Don Roos since 2008. They have two children.- Aaron Buckingham was born on 7 July 1983 in London, England, UK.
- Larger than life, Laughtonesque, and with an eloquent, king-sized appetite for maniacal merriment, a good portion of the work of actor Victor Buono was squandered on hokey villainy on both film and television. Ostensibly perceived as bizarre or demented, seldom did Hollywood give this cultivated cut-up the opportunity to rise above the deliciously hammy arrogance that flowed through so many of his cartoonish characters. He loved to make people laugh and while he could have approached his career with more serious attention, the real money was in his madness. In the end, the actor's chronic weight and accompanying health problems took their toll -- a fatal heart attack at the untimely age of 43 -- and a wonderful actor/writer/poet/chef had exited way before his time.
Born on February 3, 1938 in San Diego, California, the son of Victor Francis Buono and Myrtle Belle (née Keller), his interest in entertainment was originally encouraged by his grandmother, Myrtle Glied (1886-1969), who had once been a vaudevillian on the Orpheum Circuit. It was she who taught Victor how to sing and recite in front of company. His initial choice of career was somewhere in the direction of medicine but the pure joy he experienced from several high school performances (playing everything from Aladdin's evil genie to Hamlet himself) led him to dismiss such sensible thinking and take on the bohemian life style of an actor.
The already hefty-framed hopeful started appearing on local radio and television stations in San Diego. At age 18, he became a member of the Globe Theater Players where he was cast in Shakespeare and the classics ["Volpone", "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Knight of the Burning Pestle", "The Man Who Came to Dinner", "Witness for the Prosecution", "Henry IV, Part I (as Falstaff)", "As You Like It", "Hamlet" (as Claudius)].
In 1959, a Warner Bros. agent happened to scope out the talent at the Globe Theatre and caught Victor's wonderfully robust portrayal of Falstaff (a role he would return to now and then) and gave him a screen test. Looking older than he was, the studio set upon using Victor in weird and wacky ways, such as his bearded poet Bongo Benny in an episode of 77 Sunset Strip (1958). His wry and witty demeanor, fixed stare, huge girth and goateed mug was guaranteed to put him in nearly every television crime story needing an off-the-wall character or outlandish villain.
Following an unbilled appearance in The Story of Ruth (1960), Victor was intriguingly cast by director Robert Aldrich to play Edwin Flagg, the creepy musical accompanist and opportunist who tries to use one-time child celebrity Bette Davis for his own piggy bank in the gothic horror classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). He held his own beautifully opposite the scenery-chewing Davis and was nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar for his efforts. This role also set the tone for the increasingly deranged characters he would go on to play.
Cast as the title menace in The Strangler (1964), Victor delved wholeheartedly into the sick mind of a mother-obsessed murderer and offered a startling, tense portrayal of a child-like monster who gives new meaning to the art of "necking" with women. Director Aldrich used Victor again (albeit too briefly) for his Southern-baked "Grand Guignol" horror Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) this time as Ms. Davis' crazed father. Victor also showed up in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) starring Max von Sydow where he flamboyantly took on the High Priest Sorak role in this epic but criticized retelling of Jesus.
He enhanced a number of lightweight 1960s movies including 4 for Texas (1963), Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964), The Silencers (1966) and Who's Minding the Mint? (1967) with his clever banter and gleeful menace. The lurid title said it all when Victor gamely took on the horror movie The Mad Butcher (1971) [aka The Strangler of Vienna] wherein he played a former mental patient preying on women again. This deranged low-budget German/Italian co-production added a "Sweeney Todd" meatpie tie in.
Victor's hearty, scene-stealing antics dominated late 1960s television series. Recurring madmen included his Count Carlos Manzeppi on The Wild Wild West (1965) and King Tut who habitually wreaked havoc on Gotham City on Batman (1966). One could always find his unsympathetic presence somewhere on a prime-time channel (Perry Mason (1957), Get Smart (1965), I Spy (1965)) but his roles ended up more campy than challenging. However, one heartfelt, serious portrayal was his portrayal of President William Howard Taft in the epic miniseries Backstairs at the White House (1979). Elsewhere, he recorded a self-effacing comedy album ("Victor Buono: Heavy!") and even wrote comic poetry ("Victor Buono: It Could Be Verse". He was indeed a sought-after raconteur on daytime and nighttime talk shows.
Continuing with the theatre but on a more infrequent basis, his one-man stage shows included "Just We Three", "Remembrance of Things Past" and "This Would I Keep". He also appeared as Pellinore opposite Robert Goulet and Carol Lawrence in a 1975 performance of "Camelot" and earned minor cult status for his memorable performance in the play "Last of the Marx Brothers' Writers" in a return to the Old Globe Theatre in 1977.
The never-married actor felt compelled to conceal his homosexuality. A well-regarded gourmet chef and an expert on Shakespeare, he died of a massive heart attack at his ranch in Apple Valley, California on January 1, 1982. Before his death was announced, Buono had just been cast in the Broadway-bound play "Whodunnit?" by Anthony Shaffer. The show finally arrived in New York without him and almost a year to his death (December 30, 1982). - Actor
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Born Raymond William Stacy Burr on May 21, 1917 in New Westminster, British Columbia, he spent most of his early life traveling. As a youngster, his father moved his family to China, where the elder Burr worked as a trade agent. When the family returned to Canada, Raymond's parents separated. He and his mother moved to Vallejo, California, where she raised him with the aid of her parents. As he got older, Burr began to take jobs to support his mother, younger sister and younger brother. He took jobs as a ranch hand in Roswell, New Mexico; as a deputy sheriff; a photo salesman; and even as a nightclub singer.
During World War II, he served in the United States Navy. In Okinawa, he was shot in the stomach and sent home. In 1946, Burr made his film debut in San Quentin (1946). From there, he appeared in more than 90 films before landing the titular character on Perry Mason (1957), the role for which he was best-known. Decades later, he reprised the role opposite former co-star Barbara Hale in a series of NBC television movies. At age 65, he returned to teaching drama as a professor of theatre at Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park.
After a brave battle with cancer, Burr died at age 76 on September 12, 1993 at his ranch home in Geyserville, Sonoma County, California. Married once, the union ended in divorce. He had no children.- Actor
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Charles Busch is a writer in theater and writer of the film Psycho Beach Party (2000). He is famous for crossdressing in his films he appears in and theatrical presentations he does. Busch got a lot of attention in film and television work playing a prisoner named Nat Ginsberg for two seasons on HBO's Oz (1997).- Actor
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Heinz Burt was born on 24 July 1942 in Germany. He was an actor, known for Inherent Vice (2014), Kings of the Road (1976) and Non-Fiction (2018). He died on 7 April 2000 in Southampton, Hampshire, England, UK.- Actor
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David Burtka was born on 29 May 1975 in Dearborn, Michigan, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas (2011), Neil's Puppet Dreams (2012) and CSI: NY (2004). He has been married to Neil Patrick Harris since 6 September 2014. They have two children.- Actor
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Dan Butler was born on 2 December 1954 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for Frasier (1993), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011). He has been married to Richard Waterhouse since 12 September 2010.- Actor
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Douglas Byng was one of the most redoubtable entertainers of the 20th century whose long career spanned theatre, pantomime, cabaret, film and television. Billed as 'Bawdy - But British' he was a prolific comic songwriter and a master of the double-entendre, often appearing in drag or as a noted pantomime Dame. Noël Coward once described his act as 'the most refined vulgarity in London'.
Byng never really retired from the stage and was working even at the age of 90. A born raconteur, he was suddenly rediscovered when he made a guest appearance on the BBC's Parkinson (1971) Show in 1977 with Carol Channing.
In 1986, he made his final stage appearance when he performed his one-man show at the Royal National Theatre in London. In one of the most successful careers in British show-business, he had appeared on stage for 72 years.- Rhys Cadman was born on 24 September 1998 in Oldham, Manchester, England. He is an actor, known for Coronation Street (1960), Northern Lights (2016) and Appropriate Adult (2011).
- JP Calderon is a reality television star, model and professional volleyball player. He made his first appearance on television in 2006 as a popular contestant on "Survivor: Cook Islands," the 13th season of the blockbuster CBS series. Calderon also appeared on three seasons of reality show "The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency" on Oxygen, where he was handpicked by Dickinson at an open call and became one of the agency's most successful models. His real-life decision to come out publicly as a gay man became a major storyline during the show's second season in 2007.
He starred on "Survivor: Cook Islands" during one of the franchise's most controversial seasons, where contestants were split into four tribes based on racial ethnicity. Calderon, of Costa Rican descent, was one of five members of the Hispanic "Aitutaki" tribe.
Though Calderon remained closeted during "Survivor," he made a life-altering decision during the "The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency" to appear on the cover of the February 2007 issue of "Instinct" magazine and come out as a gay man. After a strong response to the story, Calderon was also the March 2008 cover story, making him the first person to ever appear twice on the cover of "Instinct." His "coming out" episode remains one of the highest-rated episodes of "The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency" ever.
Calderon's modeling career remains strong, and today he is signed with Ford Modeling Agency. He continues to work in various high fashion and editorial campaigns, magazine shoots and runway shows around the globe.
Born and raised in Marina del Rey, California, Calderon is also an expert volleyball player. He began playing professionally in 2004 and became a nationally ranked member of the Association of Volleyball Professionals. He started as a member of the prominent men's volleyball team at California State University, Long Beach, where he graduated with a degree in speech communication in 2000. He went on to become an assistant coach of the Long Beach State University's nationally ranked women's volleyball team for five years.
Calderon also coaches and administrates the Mizuno Long Beach Girls Volleyball Club, which helps young girls improve their abilities and work toward full university scholarships. His leadership over the years has led the group to earning eight medals at the Junior Olympics, including the team's first-ever gold medal in July 2009.
Calderon is active in many charities and has been featured at events for organizations including GLAAD, APLA, The Trevor Project and Susan G. Komen Foundation for Breast Cancer, and remains committed to furthering his philanthropic work. - Actor
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Steve Callahan was born on 8 August 1967 in Livonia, Michigan, USA. He is an actor and casting director, known for Nine Lives (2004), East Side Story (2006) and Role/Play (2010). He has been married to Matthew Montgomery since 21 March 2015.- Actor
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Simon Callow was born on 13 June 1949 in London, England, UK. He is an actor and writer, known for Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Shakespeare in Love (1998) and A Room with a View (1985). He has been married to Sebastian Fox since June 2016.- Actor
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Tim Campbell was born 27 September 1975. He starred in TV shows Snobs (2003),Home and away (1993-2008), Dead Gorgeous (2010), House Husband's (2012 -2013) and more.On 18 of August 2014 Tim Campbell and Anthony Callea announced their engagement and later that year in November Tim Campbell and Anthony Callea got married in New Zealand.- Actor
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Best known for his appearances on British television in the comedy series Father, Dear Father (1968), Patrick Cargill was also a distinguished stage actor and a brilliant farceur. His immaculate timing was known throughout the profession to the point that when directors were casting a certain type of leading role they would refer to it as a "Patrick Cargill part".
Cargill made his stage debut in Bexhill on Sea, Sussex, as a teenager before joining Anthony Hawtrey's company in London. Throughout the 1950s he was rarely off the West End stage in a string of farces and comedies, in many of which he played the leading role.
In 1967 he was offered the television series Father, Dear Father, written especially for him, in which he played a thriller writer, the inept father of two teenage daughters who were played by Natasha Pyne and Ann Holloway. The series ran until 1973 and in 1976 he returned to television in The Many Wives of Patrick (1976), in which he appeared as a middle-aged playboy trying to divorce his sixth wife in order to remarry his first.
In 1978 he appeared on the London stage in a revival of Anthony Shaffer's thriller, "Sleuth", which was not well received by the critics on the grounds that with all his charm, Cargill's leading role lacked menace.
In 1967 he was personally chosen by Charles Chaplin to play the role of Hudson, "a gentleman's gentleman", in the film A Countess from Hong Kong (1967). The two actors struck up a close friendship. A superb light comedian, Cargill said: "Comedy is instinctive. You know it's there but the moment you consciously search for it you're completely lost. Timing is a skill that you develop over the years. It gives you the necessary courage to wait - to pause while the audience gathers in anticipation."- Director
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Marcel Carné, the son of a cabinet maker, entered the movies as the assistant of Jacques Feyder. At the age of 25 he directed his first movie Jenny (1936). Colaborating with the writer Jacques Prévert, the decorator Alexandre Trauner, the musician and composer Maurice Jaubert and the actor Jean Gabin he became the great director of the pre-war era of the French cinema with the poetic realism style (e.g. Hotel du Nord (1938)). During the occupation of France by Nazi-Germany he worked in the zone of the government of Vichy making Children of Paradise (1945), a clear anti-Nazi parable and all time classic of French cinema. After having been confronted with a purge trial he went on filming but none of his later movies could catch up with his former works.- Actor
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Actor, songwriter ("Christmas Eve"), composer and author Carleton Carpenter, was educated at Bennington (VT) High School. He appeared on Broadway, in "Bright Boy", "Three to Make Ready", and "John Murray Anderson's Almanac," and on television, and made many records. Carpenter wrote special material for Debbie Reynolds, Kaye Ballard, Marlene Dietrich and Hermione Gingold, and also scripts for films and television. Joining ASCAP in 1955, his other popular-song compositions include "I Wouldn't Mind," "Ev'ry Other Day," "Cabin In the Woods," "A Little Love" and "Come Away."- Writer
- Actor
- Producer
Alan Carr was born on 14 June 1976 in Weymouth, England, UK. He is a writer and actor, known for Alan Carr: Chatty Man (2009), Changing Ends (2023) and The Friday Night Project (2005).- Actor
- Producer
Michael Cashman was born on 17 December 1950 in London, England, UK. He is an actor and producer, known for Unman, Wittering and Zigo (1971), EastEnders (1985) and Armchair 30 (1973). He was previously married to Paul Cottingham.