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- Dorothy Chandler was born on 19 May 1901 in Lafayette, Illinois, USA. She was married to Norman Chandler. She died on 6 July 1997.1985
- Actress
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Frederica von Stade was born on 1 June 1945 in Somerville, New Jersey, USA. She is an actress, known for The Marriage of Figaro (1974), Les noces de Figaro (1980) and La Cenerentola (1982).1983- Art Department
- Costume and Wardrobe Department
Frank Stella was born on 12 May 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, USA. He is known for Great Performances: Dance in America (1976), Odd Nerdrum: Time, Water, Recollection (1992) and Cage/Cunningham (1991). He was married to Harriet McGurk and Barbara Rose. He died on 4 May 2024 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.1983- Additional Crew
Philip Johnson was born on 8 July 1906 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. He is known for Camera Three (1955), Beyond Utopia: Changing Attitudes in American Architecture (1983) and Richard Meier (1986). He died on 25 January 2005 in New Canaan, Connecticut, USA.1983- Additional Crew
Luis Valdez is known for Renovate My Family (2004).1983- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Actor
James A. Michener was born on 3 February 1907 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Adventures in Paradise (1959), South Pacific (1958) and Return to Paradise (1953). He was married to Mari Michener, Vange Nord and Patti Koon. He died on 16 October 1997 in Austin, Texas, USA.1983- Composer
- Music Department
Elliott Cook Carter Jr. was a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning American Western-classical-music composer who was born in and lived in New York City. He studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1930s and then returned to the United States. After a neoclassical phase, he went on to write atonal, rhythmically complex music. His compositions, which were performed all over the world, included orchestral, chamber, solo, and vocal works.
He was extremely productive in his latter years, during which he wrote more than 40 works between the ages of 90 and 100, and even more since he turned 100. He died at the remarkable age of 103 from natural causes.1985- Music Department
- Actor
- Soundtrack
Pinchas Zukerman was born on 16 July 1948 in Tel Aviv, Israel. He is an actor, known for The Prince of Tides (1991), Alice (1990) and Pacific Heights (1990). He has been married to Amanda Forsyth since March 2004. He was previously married to Tuesday Weld and Eugenia Zukerman.1983- Ralph Ellison was born on 1 March 1914 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA. He was a writer, known for Invisible Man, King of the Bingo Game (1999) and American Masters (1985). He was married to Fanny McConnell and Rose Poindexter. He died on 16 April 1994 in New York City, New York, USA.1985
- Actor
- Director
- Additional Crew
José Ferrer was a Puerto Rican actor and film director. He won an Academy Award for Best Actor for playing the title character in Cyrano de Bergerac (1950). Ferrer was the first Puerto Rican actor to win an Academy Award, and also the first Hispanic actor to win an Academy Award.
In 1912, Ferrer was born is San Juan, the capital city of Puerto Rico. Established as a Spanish colonial city in 1521, San Juan is the third oldest European-established capital city in the Americas, following Santo Domingo (established in 1496) and Panama City (established in 1521). Ferrer's father was Rafael Ferrer, a lawyer and author who was born and raised in San Juan. Ferrer's mother was María Providencia Cintrón, a native of the coastal town of Yabucoa. Ferrer's paternal grandfather was Dr. Gabriel Ferrer Hernández, who had campaigned for Puerto Rican independence from the Spanish Empire.
The Ferrer family moved to New York City in 1914, when José was 2-years-old. As a school student, Ferrer was educated abroad at the Institut Le Rosey, a prestigious boarding school located in Rolle, Switzerland. In 1933, Ferrer was enrolled at Princeton University, located in Princeton, New Jersey. He studied architecture, and wrote a senior thesis about French Naturalism and the literary works of Spanish naturalist writer Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921). In 1934, Ferrer transferred to Columbia University, where he studied Romance languages.
In 1934, while still a college student, Ferrer made his theatrical debut in Long Island-based theatre. In 1935, he was hired as the stage manager at the Suffern Country Playhouse. Later in 1935, Ferrer made his Broadway debut in the comedy play "A Slight Case of Murder" by Damon Runyon (1880-1946) and Howard Lindsay (1889-1968). This stage production of the play ran for 69 performances, with Ferrer appearing in all of them.
Ferrer's major success as a Broadway actor was performing in the play "Brother Rat" by John Monks Jr. (1910-2004) and Fred F. Finklehoffe (1910-1977). The play had a ran of 577 performances from 1936 to 1938. Among his subsequent theatrical appearances, the most successful were staged productions of Mamba's Daughters (1938), which ran for 163 performances, and "Charley's Aunt" (1940-1941), which ran for 233 performances. His role in "Charley's Aunt" required him to perform in drag, for the first time in his career.
Ferrer had one of the greatest theatrical successes of his career when playing the villainous Iago in a Broadway production of "Othello' by William Shakespeare. The production had a ran of 296 performances, lasting from 1943 to 1944. Ferrer played his most famous role as the historical figure of Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) in the 1946-1947 Broadway season. For this role, Ferrer won the 1947 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play.
Ferrer made his film debut in the Technicolor epic "Joan of Arc" (1948). He played the historical monarch Charles VII of France (1403-1461, reigned 1422-1461), the ruler who Joan of Arc served during the Hundred Years' War. For his debut role, Ferrer was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The Award was instead won by rival actor Walter Huston (1883-1950).
Ferrer's success as a film actor, helped him gain more film roles in Hollywood-produced films. He played the "smooth-talking hypnotist David Korvo" in the film noir "Whirlpool" (1949), and dictator Raoul Farrago in the film noir "Crisis". He had a career highlight with a film adaptation of the play "Cyrano de Bergerac", where he played the title role. For this role, he won the Academy Award for Best Actor.
His next critically successful role was that of artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) in the historical drama "Moulin Rouge" (1952). For this role, Ferrer was again nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. The award was instead won by rival actor Gary Cooper (1901-1961). The film also marked a financial success for Ferrer, who received 40% of the film's profits.
Ferrer also appeared in other box office hits of the 1950s, such as the musical "Miss Sadie Thompson" (1953), the Navy-themed drama "The Caine Mutiny" (1954), and the biographical film "Deep in My Heart" (1954). Ferrer was also interested in becoming a film director. He made his directing debut with the film noir "The Shrike" (1955). His subsequent directing efforts included war film "The Cockleshell Heroes" (1955), the film noir "The Great Man" (1956), the biographical film I Accuse! (1958), and the comedy film "The High Cost of Loving" (1958). While still critically well-received, several of these films were box office flops. He took a hiatus from films productions.
Ferrer attempted a comeback as a film director with the sequel film "Return to Peyton Place" (1961) and the musical film "State Fair" (1962). Both films were box office flops. As an actor, Ferrer had a supporting role as a Turkish Bey in the historical drama "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962). While a relatively minor role, Ferrer considered the finest role of his film career.
In television, Ferrer gained a notable role as the narrator in the pilot episode of the hit sitcom "Bewitched" (1964-1972). In films, Ferrer started playing mostly supporting roles. He briefly returned to the role of Cyrano de Bergerac in the French adventure film "Cyrano and d'Artagnan". He had another notable role as a historical monarch, playing Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee and Perea (reigned 4 BC-39 AD) in the Biblical epic "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (1965).
Ferrer had his first notable role as a voice actor, playing the villain Ben Haramed in the Rankin/Bass Christmas "The Little Drummer Boy" (1968). But at this time, he started having legal troubles. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) accused Ferrer of still owing unpaid taxes since 1962.
Ferrer had many film roles in the 1970s, but no outstanding highlights. As a voice actor, he voiced Cyrano de Bergerac in an episode of "The ABC Afterschool Special". In the 1980s, Ferrer played a monarch again, playing Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV in the science fiction film "Dune". The film was an adaptation of the 1965 novel "Dune" by Frank Herbert (1920-1986), and Shaddam was one of the film's villains. This was among the last notable roles of Ferrer's long career.
Ferred retired from acting entirely in 1991, due to increasing health problems. His last theatrical performance was a production of the generation-gap drama "Conversations with My Father". Ferrer died in 1992, due to colorectal cancer. He was 80-years-old. He died in Coral Gables, Florida, but was buried in the Santa María Magdalena de Pazzis Cemetery of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Several of his children had acting careers of their own.1985- Additional Crew
- Actress
- Writer
American dancer and choreographer Martha Graham was a revolutionary artist of modern dance in the early 20th century. Born in Allegheny, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in May 1894, her family moved to California when she was 10. She was inspired at that early age to become a dancer when she saw Ruth St. Denis perform her exotic "Epytia" modern dance in 1914. After much study, Graham brought a different dynamics and interpretation to modern dance, one of sharp angles and natural motion. Graham's father was an "alienist," a term used at the turn of the century describe a physician who specialized in human psychology. Dr. Graham was interested in the way people used their bodies, and that interest was passed on to his eldest daughter. Martha frequently repeated her father's maxim of "Movement never lies." Her abstract approach to dance and her minimal use of costumes and set decorations was disconcerting to audiences accustomed to the lovely fluid movements of modern dance introduced earlier by the likes of Isadora Duncan (many critics accused Graham of making dance "ugly"). What Graham wanted to evoke with her style of dance was a heightened awareness of life. She eventually developed a strong following and won over the critics. Her dance themes were inspired by America's past, biblical stories, historical figures, classical mythology, primitive rituals, and surprisingly, psychoanalyst Carl Jung's writings, Emily Dickinson's poems, Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings, and Zen Buddhism. She danced with such a passion that her presence on stage was electrifying. Graham founded the Dance Repertory Theater in New York in 1930. She was the first dancer to receive a Guggenheim fellowship in 1932. From 1931 to 1935, Graham toured the United States in the production "Electra." She was fascinated by different cultures, and her interest in Native Americans of the southwest United States was first embodied in the production "Primitive Mysteries." In 1937, she danced for President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House. Her most famous dance, "Appalachian Spring," was first performed in 1944. Graham gave her last stage performance in 1968, at age 74. In all, she produced 181 original ballets. A year before her death in 1990, she choreographed, at age 95, Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag"; the show featured costumes by Calvin Klein.1985- Additional Crew
- Writer
Lincoln Kirstein was born on 4 May 1907 in Rochester, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Glory (1989) and Great Performances: Dance in America (1976). He died on 5 January 1996 in New York City, New York, USA.1985- Camera and Electrical Department
- Cinematographer
Paul Mellon is known for Edinburgh Comedy Fest Live (2010), Being Victor (2010) and The Answer Trap (2021).1985- Louise Nevelson was born on 23 September 1899 in Pereyaslav, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire [now Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi, Kiev Oblast, Ukraine]. She was married to Charles Nevelson. She died on 17 April 1988 in New York City, New York, USA.1985
- Art Department
The artist Georgia O'Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin on November 18, 1887. In 1905, O'Keeffe attended the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York City to study at the Art Students League in New York City in the period 1907-08. After working as a commercial artist in Chicago, she became interested in Oriental design. From 1912 to 1914, she worked as a public school art supervisor in Amarillo, Texas, and then moved back to New York City to attend Columbia, where she took art classes conducted by Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow's system of art education was rooted in Oriental art themes. In 1916, she was appointed department head of art-teacher training at West Texas State Normal College, where she used Dow's philosophy in her teacher-training. She remained at the college through 1918.
Photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who was keen on modernism and modernist artists, discovered O'Keefe's work and exhibited some of her abstract drawings in New York in 1916. By the following year, the United States had become embroiled in World War One, and Stieglitz's professional commitments were nullified. He began to used O'Keeffe as a photographic model, creating works that engendered emotion and meaning through the conscious used of shape, line, and tone. Stieglitz began a cycle of cloud photographs he called "Equivalents," claiming that form conveyed emotional and psychological meaning in the visual arts, not the specific subject of the artist. As New York City thrust its way into the sky in its metamorphosis into the greatest and most important city on earth in the early 20th Century, Stieglitz shot cityscapes of New York during different time periods. These works great influenced O'Keeffe as there's was a synergistic relationship.
Their relationship also became sexual, and in time, Stieglitz left his wife for O'Keeffe, who was 24 years his junior. Their love was deep, but their relationship was often stormy; Stieglitz liked city life, with all its noise and broiling activity, while O'Keeffe loved open space and solitude. Stieglitz's cycle of photographs of her extended arguably is his most lasting work.
Married to Stieglitz, the proponent of modernism, O'Keeffe's early style featured intrinsically abstract subject matter such as details of flowers and architectural motifs. A common trope in her paintings were enlargements of botanical details. Shew was developing her own distinctive, and distinctively American style, an iconography that includes featuring details of plant forms that would one day embrace bleached bones and New Mexican desert landscapes, all sharply rendered.
In 1924, O'Keeffe married Steiglitz. Though Stieglitz masterfully shaped her career, there was resentment as O'Keeffe was the epitome of what was then called "the modern woman," i.e. independent, while her husband, of German Jewish stock, had old time European patriarchal prejudices. He at first tried to control O'Keeffe, until they reached an understanding. The bisexual O'Keeffe eventually had a nervous breakdown and wound up a sanatorium. But always, there was the art.
From 1926 to '29, O'Keeffe painted a cycle of New York City views, but her life's work generally focused on simple buildings rather than skyscrapers. Her paintings further simplified the buildings into an archetypal folk architecture that exuded permanence and tranquility.
O'Keeffe eschewed criticism that found symbolism in her work, such as the sexual imagery allegedly found in paintings such as "Black Iris" (1926). Her botanicals subjects in close-up begged an interpretation focused on their generative capacity, and the possibility inherent in these works generates their force and mystery. Her botanical works were full of energy and exalted life.
O'Keeffe began spending time in New Mexico in 1929. She became enthralled with the mesas, Spanish architecture, wooden crucifixes, fauna, and desert terrain. These all became elements in her work, which are characterized by clarity and unity, her subjects exist in their own solipsistic worlds.
"I simply paint what I see," O'Keeffe is quoted as saying, from O'Keeffe's own essays published in Georgia O'Keeffe in 1987.
Arguably her most famous visual trope, the sun-bleached skull of a cow, were eternalizations of Thanatos, a counterpoint to her early botanical work suffused with Eros. O'Keeffe did not go in for symbolism and argued that the skulls were merely symbols of the desert and of nothing else
"To me, they are strangely more living than the animals walking around -- hair, eyes and all, with their tails switching."
O'Keeffe bought an old adobe house in New Mexico in 1945 and moved there after Steiglitz's death in 1946. The house became one of her most frequent subjects. Her style simplified details of doors, windows, and walls to where they seemed like unmodified planes of color, an abstraction In the 1960s, patterns of clouds and landscapes seen from the air became a trope of her work, evoking the romantic view of nature that was par of her early work. Her work in the 1970s featured intense portrayals of a black rooster.
The nearly 100-year-old O'Keeffe continued to paint until a few weeks before her death. She died on March 6, 1986.1985- Actress
- Soundtrack
Leontyne Price was born on 10 February 1927 in Laurel, Mississippi, USA. She is an actress, known for Romeo + Juliet (1996), The Metropolitan Opera Presents (1977) and NBC Television Opera Theatre (1949). She was previously married to William Warfield.1985- Marian Anderson was born on February 27, 1897, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the first of three sisters in the family. Her father, named John Anderson, was a salesman at a railroad station. Her mother, named Anna Anderson, was a schoolteacher. From the age of six, Anderson sang in the choir of the United Methodist Church, where she became known as the "baby contralto." She taught herself piano and violin until the age of sixteen.
She was sponsored by her neighbors, who raised money for her to study under Giuseppe Boghetti. Their teacher-student relationship blossomed into a friendship that lasted for several decades. Boghetti broadened her range from traditional spirituals to classical opera repertoire. With the help of Joseph Pasternack, Anderson became the first African-American singer to perform with the Philharmonic Society of Philadelphia. Pasternack also introduced her to the Victor recording company, where Anderson made recordings of spirituals in 1923-1924. In 1925, Boghetti secretly entered Anderson in a New York Philharmonic contest, which she won and gave a successful performance with the New York Philharmonic on August 26, 1925, before a crowd of seven thousand.
Anderson went to Europe in 1927, because she saw Europe as a place of real freedom and culture, where she could perfect her craft. She spent most of her time in Germany and Scandinavia making successful tours with the Finnish pianist Kosti Vehanen. Vehanen introduced her to the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius who added a number of songs to her repertoire. In May of 1934, in Paris Anderson met Sol Hurok, who offered her a guarantee: 15 concerts with a fee of $500 per concert. No other impresario could match Hurok's offer, which Anderson signed. Under the direction of Sol Hurok, Anderson became the third highest box office draw. Her 1935 concert tour of the Soviet Union was another sensation. Anderson managed to overcome the communist censorship by changing the titles of spirituals and religious songs; Shubert's "Ave Maria" was translated by her Russian interpreter as "an aria by Schubert." She was also invited to the Moscow Art Theatre and performed for legendary directors Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko.
She brought her Finnish accompanist Kosti Vehanen to America. In 1936 Sol Hurok arranged for her to perform at Constitution Hall, which was owned by the "Daughters of the American Revolution" (DAR). Anderson was rejected because of the "white performers only" policy of the DAR. Hurok quickly turned to a black school in Washington D.C. and the concert was a success. Anderson was invited by the First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to perform for President Roosevelt at the White House, and the two women developed friendship. However in 1939, DAR again turned Anderson away from the Constitution Hall. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from DAR in protest of their discrimination of non-white artists. Sol Hurok brilliantly resolved the situation; he organized an open-air concert at the Lincoln Memorial, which was, ironically, near the Constitution Hall. 75,000 people of all races attended that historic concert of Anderson; it was broadcast nationwide and made her a celebrity.
During the 1940's Anderson's best accompanist Kosti Vahanen left for Finland, and her teacher Boghetti passed away. She was diagnosed with a cyst in her throat and had to stop her singing career. Her comeback after a throat surgery in 1948, was another sensation. Her voice sounded as beautiful as ever and the emotional depth in her song interpretations was impressive. However, some critics mentioned her troubles with technique, pitch, and breath in her later years. Anderson's career spanned over forty years. She made over two thousand performances worldwide, including concerts for inaugurations of American Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Kennedy, King Gustav of Sweden, and the King and Queen of England. Anderson became the first African-American vocalist in Japan's history to perform for the Imperial Court in 1953. In 1955, Anderson made her Metropolitan Opera debut, becoming the first African-American singer to perform there. In 1955, she sang in Hebrew with the Israel Philharmonic. In 1958, Anderson was appointed a delegate to the UN and made several diplomatic trips as a "goodwill ambassador" to Africa and Asia.
In 1964 Sol Hurok was asked by Anderson to organize her farewell concert tour. She began her last tour in October of 1964 with a concert in Washington D.C.'s Constitution Hall. After six months and 50 concerts in the USA and Canada Anderson gave her final performance on April 18, 1965, at Carnegie Hall. She spent her retirement years on her 155-acre farm in Connecticut, and extended her continuous support of such talents as Kathleen Battle, Jessye Norman, Leontyne Price and others. In 1990, Anderson made a documentary on her life and career, in addition to the documentary of her 1939 Lincoln Memorial Concert. She died of heart failure on April 8, 1993, in Portland, Oregon, and was laid to rest in Eden Cemetery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.1986 - Director
- Writer
- Producer
One of seven children, Frank Capra was born on May 18, 1897, in Bisacquino, Sicily. On May 10, 1903, his family left for America aboard the ship Germania, arriving in New York on May 23rd. "There's no ventilation, and it stinks like hell. They're all miserable. It's the most degrading place you could ever be," Capra said about his Atlantic passage. "Oh, it was awful, awful. It seems to always be storming, raining like hell and very windy, with these big long rolling Atlantic waves. Everybody was sick, vomiting. God, they were sick. And the poor kids were always crying."
The family boarded a train for the trip to California, where Frank's older brother Benjamin was living. On their journey, they subsisted on bread and bananas, as their lack of English made it impossible for them to ask for any other kind of foodstuffs. On June 3, the Capra family arrived at the Southern Pacific station in Los Angeles, at the time, a small city of approximately 102,000 people. The family stayed with Capra's older brother Benjamin, and on September 14, 1903, Frank began his schooling at the Castelar Elementary school.
In 1909, he entered Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School. Capra made money selling newspapers in downtown L.A. after school and on Saturdays, sometimes working with his brother Tony. When sales were slow, Tony punched Frank to attract attention, which would attract a crowd and make Frank's papers sell quicker. Frank later became part of a two-man music combo, playing at various places in the red light district of L.A., including brothels, getting paid a dollar per night, performing the popular songs. He also worked as a janitor at the high school in the early mornings. It was at high school that he became interested in the theater, typically doing back-stage work such as lighting.
Capra's family pressured him to drop out of school and go to work, but he refused, as he wanted to partake fully of the American Dream, and for that he needed an education. Capra later reminisced that his family "thought I was a bum. My mother would slap me around; she wanted me to quit school. My teachers would urge me to keep going....I was going to school because I had a fight on my hands that I wanted to win."
Capra graduated from high school on January 27, 1915, and in September of that year, he entered the Throop College of Technology (later the California Institute of Technology) to study chemical engineering. The school's annual tuition was $250, and Capra received occasional financial support from his family, who were resigned to the fact they had a scholar in their midst. Throop had a fine arts department, and Capra discovered poetry and the essays of Montaigne, which he fell in love with, while matriculating at the technical school. He then decided to write.
"It was a great discovery for me. I discovered language. I discovered poetry. I discovered poetry at Caltech, can you imagine that? That was a big turning point in my life. I didn't know anything could be so beautiful." Capra penned "The Butler's Failure," about an English butler provoked by poverty to murder his employer, then to suicide."
Capra was singled out for a cash award of $250 for having the highest grades in the school. Part of his prize was a six-week trip across the U.S. and Canada. When Capra's father, Turiddu, died in 1916, Capra started working at the campus laundry to make money.
After the U.S. Congress declared War on Germany on April 6, 1917, Capra enlisted in the Army, and while he was not a naturalized citizen yet, he was allowed to join the military as part of the Coastal Artillery. Capra became a supply officer for the student soldiers at Throop, who have been enrolled in a Reserve Officers Training Corps program. At his enlistment, Capra discovered he was not an American citizen; he became naturalized in 1920.
On September 15, 1918, Capra graduated from Throop with his bachelor's degree, and was inducted into the U.S. Army on October 18th and shipped out to the Presidio at San Francisco. An armistice ending the fighting of World War One would be declared in less than a month. While at the Presidio, Capra became ill with the Spanish influenza that claimed 20 million lives worldwide. He was discharged from the Army on December 13th and moved to his brother Ben's home in L.A. While recuperating, Capra answered a cattle call for extras for John Ford's film "The The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1919) (Capra, cast as a laborer in the Ford picture, introduced himself to the film's star, Harry Carey. Two decades later, Capra, designated the #1 director in Hollywood by "Time" magazine, would cast Carey and his movie actress wife Olive in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) for which Carey won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination).
While living at his mother's house, Capra took on a wide variety of manual laboring jobs, including errand boy and ditch digger, even working as an orange tree pruner at 20 cents a day. He continued to be employed as an extra at movie studios and as a prop buyer at an independent studio at Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street, which later became the home of Columbia Pictures, where Capra would make his reputation as the most successful movie director of the 1930s. Most of his time was spent unemployed and idle, which gave credence to his family's earlier opposition to him seeking higher education. Capra wrote short stories but was unable to get them published. He eventually got work as a live-in tutor for the son of "Lucky" Baldwin, a rich gambler. (He later used the Baldwin estate as a location for Dirigible (1931)).
Smitten by the movie bug, in August of that year, Capra, former actor W. M. Plank, and financial backer Ida May Heitmann incorporated the Tri-State Motion Picture Co. in Nevada. Tri-State produced three short films in Nevada in 1920, Don't Change Your Husband (1919), The Pulse of Life (1917), and The Scar of Love (1920), all directed by Plank, and possibly based on story treatments written by Capra. The films were failures, and Capra returned to Los Angeles when Tri-State broke up. In March 1920, Capra was employed by CBC Film Sales Co., the corporate precursor of Columbia Films, where he also worked as an editor and director on a series called "Screen Snapshots." He quit CBC in August and moved to San Francisco, but the only jobs he could find were that of bookseller and door-to-door salesman. Once again seeming to fulfill his family's prophecy, he turned to gambling, and also learned to ride the rails with a hobo named Frank Dwyer. There was also a rumor that he became a traveling salesman specializing in worthless securities, according to a "Time" magazine story "Columbia's Gem" (August 8, 1938 issue, V.32, No. 6).
Still based in San Francisco in 1921, producer Walter Montague hired Capra for $75 per week to help direct the short movie The Ballad of Fisher's Boarding House (1922), which was based on a poem by Rudyard Kipling. Montague, a former actor, had the dubious idea that foggy San Francisco was destined to become the capital of movies, and that he could make a fortune making movies based on poems. Capra helped Montague produced the one-reeler, which was budgeted at $1,700 and subsequently sold to the Pathe Exchange for $3,500. Capra quit Montague when he demanded that the next movie be based upon one of his own poems.
Unable to find another professional filmmaking job, Capra hired himself out as a maker of shorts for the public-at-large while working as an assistant at Walter Ball's film lab. Finally, in October 1921, the Paul Gerson Picture Corp. hired him to help make its two-reel comedies, around the time that he began dating the actress Helen Edith Howe, who would become his first wife. Capra continued to work for both Ball and Gerson, primarily as a cutter. On November 25, 1923, Capra married Helen Howell, and the couple soon moved to Hollywood.
Hal Roach hired Capra as a gag-writer for the "Our Gang" series in January, 1924. After writing the gags for five "Our Gang" comedies in seven weeks, he asked Roach to make him a director. When Roach refused (he somewhat rightly felt he had found the right man in director Bob McGowan), Capra quit. Roach's arch rival Mack Sennett subsequently hired him as a writer, one of a six-man team that wrote for silent movie comedian Harry Langdon, the last major star of the rapidly disintegrating Mack Sennett Studios, and reigning briefly as fourth major silent comedian after Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. Capra began working with the Harry Langdon production unit as a gag writer, first credited on the short Plain Clothes (1925).
As Harry Langdon became more popular, his production unit at Sennett had moved from two- to three-reelers before Langdon, determined to follow the example of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, went into features. After making his first feature-length comedy, His First Flame (1927) for Sennett, Langdon signed a three-year contract with Sol Lesser's First National Pictures to annually produce two feature-length comedies at a fixed fee per film. For a multitude of reasons Mack Sennett was never able to retain top talent. On September 15, 1925, Harry Langdon left Sennett in an egotistical rage, taking many of his key production personnel with him. Sennett promoted Capra to director but fired him after three days in his new position. In addition to the Langdon comedies, Capra had also written material for other Sennett films, eventually working on twenty-five movies.
After being sacked by Sennett, Capra was hired as a gag-writer by Harry Langdon, working on Langdon's first First National feature-length film, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926). The movie was directed by Harry Edwards who had directed all of Harry Langdon's films at Sennett. His first comedy for First National, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926) did well at the box office, but it had ran over budget, which came out of Langdon's end. Harry Edwards was sacked, and for his next picture, The Strong Man (1926), Langdon promoted Capra to director, boosting his salary to $750 per week. The movie was a hit, but trouble was brewing among members of the Harry Langdon company. Langdon was increasingly believing his own press.
His marriage with Helen began to unravel when it is discovered that she had a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy that had to be terminated. In order to cope with the tragedy, Capra became a work-a-holic while Helen turned to drink. The deterioration of his marriage was mirrored by the disintegration of his professional relationship with Harry Langdonduring the making of the new feature, Long Pants (1927).
The movie, which was released in March 1927, proved to be Capra's last with Harry Langdon, as the comedian soon sacked Capra after its release. Capra later explained the principle of Langdon comedies to James Agee, "It is the principal of the brick: If there was a rule for writing Langdon material, it was this: his only ally was God. Harry Langdon might be saved by a brick falling on a cop, but it was verboten that he in any way motivated the bricks fall."
During the production of Long Pants (1926), Capra had a falling out with Langdon. Screenwriter Arthur Ripley's dark sensibility did not mesh well with that of the more optimistic Capra, and Harry Langdon usually sided with Ripley. The picture fell behind schedule and went over budget, and since Langdon was paid a fixed fee for each film, this represented a financial loss to his own Harry Langdon Corp. Stung by the financial set-back, and desiring to further emulate the great Chaplin, Harry Langdon made a fateful decision: He fired Capra and decided to direct himself. (Langdon's next three movies for First National were dismal failures, the two surviving films being very dark and grim black comedies, one of which, The Chaser (1928), touched on the subject of suicide. It was the late years of the Jazz Age, a time of unprecedented prosperity and boundless bonhomie, and the critics, and more critically, the ticket-buying public, rejected Harry. In 1928, First National did not pick up his contract. The Harry Langdon Corp. soon went bankrupt, and his career as the "fourth major silent comedian" was through, just as sound was coming in.)
In April of 1927, Capra and his wife Helen split up, and Capra went off to New York to direct For the Love of Mike (1927) for First National, his first picture with Claudette Colbert. The director and his star did not get along, and the film went over budget. Subsequently, First National refused to pay Capra, and he had to hitchhike back to Hollywood. The film proved to be Capra's only genuine flop.
By September 1927, he was back working as a writer for Mack Sennett, but in October, he was hired as a director by Columbia Pictures President and Production Chief Harry Cohn for $1,000. The event was momentous for both of them, for at Columbia Capra would soon become the #1 director in Hollywood in the 1930s, and the success of Capra's films would propel the Poverty Row studio into the major leagues. But at first, Cohn was displeased with him. When viewing the first three days of rushes of his first Columbia film, That Certain Thing (1928), Cohn wanted to fire him as everything on the first day had been shot in long shot, on the second day in medium shot, and on the third day in close-ups.
"I did it that way for time," Capra later recalled. "It was so easy to be better than the other directors, because they were all dopes. They would shoot a long shot, then they would have to change the setup to shoot a medium shot, then they would take their close-ups. Then they would come back and start over again. You lose time, you see, moving the cameras and the big goddamn lights. I said, 'I'll get all the long shots on that first set first, then all the medium shots, and then the close-ups.' I wouldn't shoot the whole scene each way unless it was necessary. If I knew that part of it was going to play in long shot, I wouldn't shoot that part in close-up. But the trick was not to move nine times, just to move three times. This saved a day, maybe two days."
Cohn decided to stick with Capra (he was ultimately delighted at the picture and gave Capra a $1,500 bonus and upped his per-picture salary), and in 1928, Cohn raised his salary again, now to to $3,000 per picture after he made several successful pictures, including Submarine (1928). The Younger Generation (1929), the first of a series of films with higher budgets to be directed by Capra, would prove to be his first sound film, when scenes were reshot for dialogue. In the summer of that year, he was introduced to a young widow, Lucille Warner Reyburn (who became Capra's second wife Lou Capra). He also met a transplanted stage actress, Barbara Stanwyck, who had been recruited for the talkie but had been in three successive unsuccessful films and wanted to return to the New York stage. Harry Cohn wanted Stanwyck to appear in Capra's planned film, Ladies of Leisure (1930), but the interview with Capra did not go well, and Capra refused to use her.
Stanwyck went home crying after being dismissed by Capra, and her husband, a furious Frank Fay, called Capra up. In his defense, Capra said that Stanwyck didn't seem to want the part. According to Capra's 1961 autobiography, "The Name Above the Title," Fay said, "Frank, she's young, and shy, and she's been kicked around out here. Let me show you a test she made at Warner's." After viewing her Warners' test for The Noose (1928), Capra became enthusiastic and urged Cohn to sign her. In January of 1930, Capra began shooting Ladies of Leisure (1930) with Stanwyck in the lead. The movies the two made together in the early '30s established them both on their separate journeys towards becoming movieland legends. Though Capra would admit to falling in love with his leading lady, it was Lucille Warner Reyburn who became the second Mrs. Capra.
"You're wondering why I was at that party. That's my racket. I'm a party girl. Do you know what that is?"
Stanwyck played a working-class "party girl" hired as a model by the painter Jerry, who hails from a wealthy family. Capra had written the first draft of the movie before screenwriter Jo Swerling took over. Swerling thought the treatment was dreadful. According to Capra, Swerling told Harry Cohn, when he initially had approached about adapting the play "Ladies of the Evening" into Capra's next proposed film, "I don't like Hollywood, I don't like you, and I certainly don't like this putrid piece of gorgonzola somebody gave me to read. It stunk when Belasco produced it as Ladies of Leisure (1930), and it will stink as Ladies of Leisure, even if your little tin Jesus does direct it. The script is inane, vacuous, pompous, unreal, unbelievable and incredibly dull."
Capra, who favored extensive rehearsals before shooting a scene, developed his mature directorial style while collaborating with Stanwyck, a trained stage actress whose performance steadily deteriorated after rehearsals or retakes. Stanwyck's first take in a scene usually was her best. Capra started blocking out scenes in advance, and carefully preparing his other actors so that they could react to Stanwyck in the first shot, whose acting often was unpredictable, so they wouldn't foul up the continuity. In response to this semi-improvisatory style, Capra's crew had to boost its level of craftsmanship to beyond normal Hollywood standards, which were forged in more static and prosaic work conditions. Thus, the professionalism of Capra's crews became better than those of other directors. Capra's philosophy for his crew was, "You guys are working for the actors, they're not working for you."
After "Ladies of Leisure," Capra was assigned to direct Platinum Blonde (1931) starring Jean Harlow. The script had been the product of a series of writers, including Jo Swerling (who was given credit for adaptation), but was polished by Capra and Robert Riskin (who was given screen credit for the dialogue). Along with Jo Swerling, Riskin would rank as one of Capra's most important collaborators, ultimately having a hand in 13 movies. (Riskin wrote nine screenplays for Capra, and Capra based four other films on Riskin's work.)
Riskin created a hard-boiled newspaperman, Stew Smith for the film, a character his widow, the actress Fay Wray, said came closest to Riskin of any character he wrote. A comic character, the wise-cracking reporter who wants to lampoon high society but finds himself hostage to the pretensions of the rich he had previously mocked is the debut of the prototypical "Capra" hero. The dilemma faced by Stew, akin to the immigrant's desire to assimilate but being rejected by established society, was repeated in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and in Meet John Doe (1941).
Capra, Stanwyck, Riskin and Jo Swerling all were together to create Capra's next picture, The Miracle Woman (1931), a story about a shady evangelist. With John Meehan, Riskin wrote the play that the movie is based on, "Bless You, Sister," and there is a possibly apocryphal story that has Riskin at a story conference at which Capra relates the treatment for the proposed film. Capra, finished, asked Riskin for his input, and Riskin replied, "I wrote that play. My brother and I were stupid enough to produce it on Broadway. It cost us almost every cent we had. If you intend to make a picture of it, it only proves one thing: You're even more stupid than we were."
Jo Swerling adapted Riskin's play, which he and his brother Everett patterned after Sinclair Lewis' "Elmer Gantry." Like the Lewis novel, the play focuses on the relationship between a lady evangelist and a con man. The difference, though, is that the nature of the relationship is just implied in Riskin's play (and the Capra film). There is also the addition of the blind war-vet as the moral conscience of the story; he is the pivotal character, whereas in Lewis' tale, the con artist comes to have complete control over the evangelist after eventually seducing her. Like some other Capra films, The Miracle Woman (1931) is about the love between a romantic, idealizing man and a cynical, bitter woman. Riskin had based his character on lady evangelist Uldine Utley, while Stanwyck based her characterization on Aimee Semple McPherson.
Recognizing that he had something in his star director, Harry Cohn took full advantage of the lowly position his studio had in Hollywood. Both Warner Brothers and mighty MGM habitually lent Cohn their troublesome stars -- anyone rejecting scripts or demanding a pay raise was fodder for a loan out to Cohn's Poverty Row studio. Cohn himself was habitually loathe to sign long-term stars in the early 1930s (although he made rare exceptions to Peter Lorre and The Three Stooges) and was delighted to land the talents of any top flight star and invariably assigned them to Capra's pictures. Most began their tenure in purgatory with trepidation but left eagerly wanting to work with Capra again.
In 1932, Capra decided to make a motion picture that reflected the social conditions of the day. He and Riskin wrote the screenplay for American Madness (1932), a melodrama that is an important precursor to later Capra films, not only with It's a Wonderful Life (1946) which shares the plot device of a bank run, but also in the depiction of the irrationality of a crowd mentality and the ability of the individual to make a difference. In the movie, an idealistic banker is excoriated by his conservative board of directors for making loans to small businesses on the basis of character rather than on sounder financial criteria. Since the Great Depression is on, and many people lack collateral, it would be impossible to productively lend money on any other criteria than character, the banker argues. When there is a run on the bank due to a scandal, it appears that the board of directors are rights the bank depositors make a run on the bank to take out their money before the bank fails. The fear of a bank failure ensures that the failure will become a reality as a crowd mentality takes over among the clientèle. The board of directors refuse to pledge their capital to stave off the collapse of the bank, but the banker makes a plea to the crowd, and just like George Bailey's depositors in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), the bank is saved as the fears of the crowd are ameliorated and businessmen grateful to the banker pledge their capital to save the bank. The board of directors, impressed by the banker's character and his belief in the character of his individual clients (as opposed to the irrationality of the crowd), pledge their capital and the bank run is staved off and the bank is saved.
In his biography, "The Name Above the Picture," Capra wrote that before American Madness (1932), he had only made "escapist" pictures with no basis in reality. He recounts how Poverty Row studios, lacking stars and production values, had to resort to "gimmick" movies to pull the crowds in, making films on au courant controversial subjects that were equivalent to "yellow journalism."
What was more important than the subject and its handling was the maturation of Capra's directorial style with the film. Capra had become convinced that the mass-experience of watching a motion picture with an audience had the psychological effect in individual audience members of slowing down the pace of a film. A film that during shooting and then when viewed on a movieola editing device and on a small screen in a screening room among a few professionals that had seemed normally paced became sluggish when projected on the big screen. While this could have been the result of the projection process blowing up the actors to such large proportions, Capra ultimately believed it was the effect of mass psychology affecting crowds since he also noticed this "slowing down" phenomenon at ball games and at political conventions. Since American Madness (1932) dealt with crowds, he feared that the effect would be magnified.
He decided to boost the pace of the film, during the shooting. He did away with characters' entrances and exits that were a common part of cinematic "grammar" in the early 1930s, a survival of the "photoplays" days. Instead, he "jumped" characters in and out of scenes, and jettisoned the dissolves that were also part of cinematic grammar that typically ended scenes and indicated changes in time or locale so as not to make cutting between scenes seem choppy to the audience. Dialogue was deliberately overlapped, a radical innovation in the early talkies, when actors were instructed to let the other actor finish his or her lines completely before taking up their cue and beginning their own lines, in order to facilitate the editing of the sound-track. What he felt was his greatest innovation was to boost the pacing of the acting in the film by a third by making a scene that would normally play in one minute take only 40 seconds.
When all these innovations were combined in his final cut, it made the movie seem normally paced on the big screen, though while shooting individual scenes, the pacing had seemed exaggerated. It also gave the film a sense of urgency that befitted the subject of a financial panic and a run on a bank. More importantly, it "kept audience attention riveted to the screen," as he said in his autobiography. Except for "mood pieces," Capra subsequently used these techniques in all his films, and he was amused by critics who commented on the "naturalness" of his direction.
Capra was close to completely establishing his themes and style. Justly accused of indulging in sentiment which some critics labeled "Capra-corn," Capra's next film, Lady for a Day (1933) was an adaptation of Damon Runyon's 1929 short story "Madame La Gimp" about a nearly destitute apple peddler whom the superstitious gambler Dave the Dude (portrayed by Warner Brothers star Warren William) sets up in high style so she and her daughter, who is visiting with her finance, will not be embarrassed. Dave the Dude believes his luck at gambling comes from his ritualistically buying an apple a day from Annie, who is distraught and considering suicide to avoid the shame of her daughter seeing her reduced to living on the street. The Dude and his criminal confederates put Annie up in a luxury apartment with a faux husband in order to establish Annie in the eyes of her daughter as a dignified and respectable woman, but in typical Runyon fashion, Annie becomes more than a fake as the masquerade continues.
Robert Riskin wrote the first four drafts of Lady for a Day (1933), and of all the scripts he worked on for Capra, the film deviates less from the script than any other. After seeing the movie, Runyon sent a telegraph to Riskin praising him for his success at elaborating on the story and fleshing out the characters while maintain his basic story. Lady for a Day (1933) was the favorite Capra film of John Ford, the great filmmaker who once directed the unknown extra. The movie cost $300,000 and was the first of Capra's oeuvre to attract the attention of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, getting a Best Director nomination for Capra, plus nods for Riskin and Best Actress. The movie received Columbia's first Best Picture nomination, the studio never having attracted any attention from the Academy before Lady for a Day (1933). (Capra's last film was the flop remake of Lady for a Day (1933) with Bette Davis and Glenn Ford, Pocketful of Miracles (1961))
Capra reunited with Stanwyck and produced his first universally acknowledged classic, The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), a film that now seems to belong more to the oeuvre of Josef von Sternberg than it does to Frank Capra. With "General Yen," Capra had consciously set out to make a movie that would win Academy Awards. Frustrated that the innovative, timely, and critically well-received American Madness (1932) had not received any recognition at the Oscars (particularly in the director's category in recognition of his innovations in pacing), he vented his displeasure to Columbia boss Cohn.
"Forget it," Cohn told Capra, as recounted in his autobiography. "You ain't got a Chinaman's chance. They only vote for that arty junk."
Capra set out to boost his chances by making an arty film featuring a "Chinaman" that confronted that major taboo of American cinema of the first half of the century, miscegenation.
In the movie, the American missionary Megan Davis is in China to marry another missionary. Abducted by the Chinese Warlord General Yen, she is torn away from the American compound that kept her isolated from the Chinese and finds herself in a strange, dangerous culture. The two fall in love despite their different races and life-views. The film ran up against the taboo against miscegenation embedded in the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association's Production Code, and while Megan merely kisses General Yen's hand in the picture, the fact that she was undeniably in love with a man from a different race attracted the vituperation of many bigots.
Having fallen for Megan, General Yen engenders her escape back to the Americans before willingly drinking a poisoned cup of tea, his involvement with her having cost him his army, his wealth, and now his desire to live. The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932) marks the introduction of suicide as a Capra theme that will come back repeatedly, most especially in George Bailey's breakdown on the snowy bridge in It's a Wonderful Life (1946).
Despair often shows itself in Capra films, and although in his post-"General Yen" work, the final reel wraps things up in a happy way, until that final reel, there is tragedy, cynicism, heartless exploitation, and other grim subject matter that Capra's audiences must have known were the truth of the world, but that were too grim to face when walking out of a movie theater. When pre-Code movies were rediscovered and showcased across the United States in the 1990s, they were often accompanied by thesis about how contemporary audiences "read" the films (and post-1934 more Puritanical works), as the movies were not so frank or racy as supposed. There was a great deal of signaling going on which the audience could read into, and the same must have been true for Capra's films, giving lie to the fact that he was a sentimentalist with a saccharine view of America. There are few films as bitter as those of Frank Capra before the final reel.
Despair was what befell Frank Capra, personally, on the night of March 16, 1934, which he attended as one of the Best Director nominees for Lady for a Day (1933). Capra had caught Oscar fever, and in his own words, "In the interim between the nominations and the final voting...my mind was on those Oscars." When Oscar host Will Rogers opened the envelope for Best Director, he commented, "Well, well, well. What do you know. I've watched this young man for a long time. Saw him come up from the bottom, and I mean the bottom. It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Come on up and get it, Frank!"
Capra got up to go get it, squeezing past tables and making his way to the open dance floor to accept his Oscar. "The spotlight searched around trying to find me. 'Over here!' I waved. Then it suddenly swept away from me -- and picked up a flustered man standing on the other side of the dance floor - Frank Lloyd!"
Frank Lloyd went up to the dais to accept HIS Oscar while a voice in back of Capra yelled, "Down in front!"
Capra's walk back to his table amidst shouts of "Sit down!" turned into the "Longest, saddest, most shattering walk in my life. I wished I could have crawled under the rug like a miserable worm. When I slumped in my chair I felt like one. All of my friends at the table were crying."
That night, after Lloyd's Cavalcade (1933), beat Lady for a Day (1933) for Best Picture, Capra got drunk at his house and passed out. "Big 'stupido,'" Capra thought to himself, "running up to get an Oscar dying with excitement, only to crawl back dying with shame. Those crummy Academy voters; to hell with their lousy awards. If ever they did vote me one, I would never, never, NEVER show up to accept it."
Capra would win his first of three Best Director Oscars the next year, and would show up to accept it. More importantly, he would become the president of the Academy in 1935 and take it out of the labor relations field a time when labor strife and the formation of the talent guilds threatened to destroy it.
The International Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences had been the brainchild of Louis B. Mayer in 1927 (it dropped the "International" soon after its formation). In order to forestall unionization by the creative talent (directors, actors and screenwriters) who were not covered by the Basic Agreement signed in 1926, Mayer had the idea of forming a company union, which is how the Academy came into being. The nascent Screen Writers Union, which had been created in 1920 in Hollywood, had never succeeded in getting a contract from the studios. It went out of existence in 1927, when labor relations between writers and studios were handled by the Academy's writers' branch.
The Academy had brokered studio-mandated pay-cuts of 10% in 1927 and 1931, and massive layoffs in 1930 and 1931. With the inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 4, 1933, Roosevelt took no time in attempting to tackle the Great Depression. The day after his inauguration, he declared a National Bank Holiday, which hurt the movie industry as it was heavily dependent on bank loans. Louis B. Mayer, as president of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, Inc. (the co-equal arm of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association charged with handling labor relations) huddled with a group from the Academy (the organization he created and had long been criticized for dominating, in both labor relations and during the awards season) and announced a 50% across-the-board pay cut. In response, stagehands called a strike for March 13th, which shut down every studio in Hollywood.
After another caucus between Mayer and the Academy committee, a proposal for a pay-cut on a sliding-scale up to 50% for everyone making over $50 a week; which would only last for eight weeks, was inaugurated. Screen writers resigned en masse from the Academy and joined a reformed Screen Writers Guild, but most employees had little choice and went along with it. All the studios but Warner Bros. and Sam Goldwyn honored the pledge to restore full salaries after the eight weeks, and Warners production chief Darryl F. Zanuck resigned in protest over his studio's failure to honor its pledge. A time of bad feelings persisted, and much anger was directed towards the Academy in its role as company union.
The Academy, trying to position itself as an independent arbiter, hired the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse for the first time to inspect the books of the studios. The audit revealed that all the studios were solvent, but Harry Warner refused to budge and Academy President 'Conrad Nagel' resigned, although some said he was forced out after a vote of no-confidence after arguing Warner's case. The Academy announced that the studio bosses would never again try to impose a horizontal salary cut, but the usefulness of the Academy as a company union was over.
Under Roosevelt's New Deal, the self-regulation imposed by the National Industrial Relations Act (signed into law on June 16th) to bring business sectors back to economic health was predicated upon cartelization, in which the industry itself wrote its own regulatory code. With Hollywood, it meant the re-imposition of paternalistic labor relations that the Academy had been created to wallpaper over. The last nail in the company union's coffin was when it became public knowledge that the Academy appointed a committee to investigate the continued feasibility of the industry practice of giving actors and writers long-term contracts. High salaries to directors, actors, and screen writers was compensation to the creative people for producers refusing to ceded control over creative decision-making. Long-term contracts were the only stability in the Hollywood economic set-up up creative people,. Up to 20%-25% of net earnings of the movie industry went to bonuses to studio owners, production chiefs, and senior executives at the end of each year, and this created a good deal of resentment that fueled the militancy of the SWG and led to the formation of the Screen Actors Guild in July 1933 when they, too, felt that the Academy had sold them out.
The industry code instituted a cap on the salaries of actors, directors, and writers, but not of movie executives; mandated the licensing of agents by producers; and created a reserve clause similar to baseball where studios had renewal options with talent with expired contracts, who could only move to a new studio if the studio they had last been signed to did not pick up their option.
The SWG sent a telegram to FDR in October 1933 denouncing this policy, arguing that the executives had taken millions of dollars of bonuses while running their companies into receivership and bankruptcy. The SWG denounced the continued membership of executives who had led their studios into financial failure remaining on the corporate boards and in the management of the reorganized companies, and furthermore protested their use of the NIRA to write their corrupt and failed business practices into law at the expense of the workers.
There was a mass resignation of actors from the Academy in October 1933, with the actors switching their allegiance to SAG. SAG joined with the SWG to publish "The Screen Guilds Magazine," a periodical whose editorial content attacked the Academy as a company union in the producers' pocket. SAG President Eddie Cantor, a friend of Roosevelt who had bee invited to spend the Thanksgiving Day holiday with the president, informed him of the guild's grievances over the NIRA code. Roosevelt struck down many of the movie industry code's anti-labor provisions by executive order.
The labor battles between the guilds and the studios would continue until the late 1930s, and by the time Frank Capra was elected president of the Academy in 1935, the post was an unenviable one. The Screen Directors Guild was formed at King Vidor's house on January 15, 1936, and one of its first acts was to send a letter to its members urging them to boycott the Academy Awards ceremony, which was three days away. None of the guilds had been recognized as bargaining agents by the studios, and it was argued to grace the Academy Awards would give the Academy, a company union, recognition. Academy membership had declined to 40 from a high of 600, and Capra believed that the guilds wanted to punish the studios financially by depriving them of the good publicity the Oscars generated.
But the studios couldn't care less. Seeing that the Academy was worthless to help them in its attempts to enforce wage cuts, it too abandoned the Academy, which it had financed. Capra and the Board members had to pay for the Oscar statuettes for the 1936 ceremony. In order to counter the boycott threat, Capra needed a good publicity gimmick himself, and the Academy came up with one, voting D.W. Griffith an honorary Oscar, the first bestowed since one had been given to Charles Chaplin at the first Academy Awards ceremony.
The Guilds believed the boycott had worked as only 20 SAG members and 13 SWG members had showed up at the Oscars, but Capra remembered the night as a victory as all the winners had shown up. However, 'Variety' wrote that "there was not the galaxy of stars and celebs in the director and writer groups which distinguished awards banquets in recent years." "Variety" reported that to boost attendance, tickets had been given to secretaries and the like. Bette Davis and Victor McLaglen had showed up to accept their Oscars, but McLaglen's director and screenwriter, John Ford and Dudley Nichols, both winners like McLaglen for The Informer (1935), were not there, and Nichols became the first person to refuse an Academy Award when he sent back his statuette to the Academy with a note saying he would not turn his back on his fellow writers in the SWG. Capra sent it back to him. Ford, the treasurer of the SDG, had not showed up to accept his Oscar, he explained, because he wasn't a member of the Academy. When Capra staged a ceremony where Ford accepted his award, the SDG voted him out of office.
To save the Academy and the Oscars, Capra convinced the board to get it out of the labor relations field. He also democratized the nomination process to eliminate studio politics, opened the cinematography and interior decoration awards to films made outside the U.S., and created two new acting awards for supporting performances to win over SAG.
By the 1937 awards ceremony, SAG signaled its pleasure that the Academy had mostly stayed out of labor relations by announcing it had no objection to its members attending the awards ceremony. The ceremony was a success, despite the fact that the Academy had to charge admission due to its poor finances. Frank Capra had saved the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and he even won his second Oscar that night, for directing Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). At the end of the evening, Capra announced the creation of the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award to honor "the most consistent high level of production achievement by an individual producer." It was an award he himself was not destined to win.
By the 1938 awards, the Academy and all three guilds had buried the hatchet, and the guild presidents all attended the ceremony: SWG President Dudley Nichols, who finally had accepted his Oscar, SAG President Robert Montgomery, and SDG President King Vidor. Capra also had introduced the secret ballot, the results of which were unknown to everyone but the press, who were informed just before the dinner so they could make their deadlines. The first Irving Thalberg Award was given to long-time Academy supporter and anti-Guild stalwart Darryl F. Zanuck by Cecil B. DeMille, who in his preparatory remarks, declared that the Academy was "now free of all labor struggles."
But those struggles weren't over. In 1939, Capra had been voted president of the SDG and began negotiating with AMPP President 'Joseph Schenck', the head of 20th Century-Fox, for the industry to recognize the SDG as the sole collective bargaining agent for directors. When Schenck refused, Capra mobilized the directors and threatened a strike. He also threatened to resign from the Academy and mount a boycott of the awards ceremony, which was to be held a week later. Schenck gave in, and Capra won another victory when he was named Best Director for a third time at the Academy Awards, and his movie, You Can't Take It with You (1938), was voted Best Picture of 1938.
The 1940 awards ceremony was the last that Capra presided over, and he directed a documentary about them, which was sold to Warner Bros' for $30,000, the monies going to the Academy. He was nominated himself for Best Director and Best Picture for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), but lost to the Gone with the Wind (1939) juggernaut. Under Capra's guidance, the Academy had left the labor relations field behind in order to concentrated on the awards (publicity for the industry), research and education.
"I believe the guilds should more or less conduct the operations and functions of this institution," he said in his farewell speech. He would be nominated for Best Director and Best Picture once more with It's a Wonderful Life (1946) in 1947, but the Academy would never again honor him, not even with an honorary award after all his service. (Bob Hope, in contrast, received four honorary awards, including a lifetime membership in 1945, and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award in 1960 from the Academy.) The SDG (subsequently renamed the Directors Guild of America after its 1960 with the Radio and Television Directors Guild and which Capra served as its first president from 1960-61), the union he had struggled with in the mid-1930s but which he had first served as president from 1939 to 1941 and won it recognition, voted him a lifetime membership in 1941 and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1959.
Whenever Capra convinced studio boss Harry Cohn to let him make movies with more controversial or ambitious themes, the movies typically lost money after under-performing at the box office. The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932) and Lost Horizon (1937) were both expensive, philosophically minded pictures that sought to reposition Capra and Columbia into the prestige end of the movie market. After the former's relative failure at the box office and with critics, Capra turned to making a screwball comedy, a genre he excelled at, with It Happened One Night (1934). Bookended with You Can't Take It with You (1938), these two huge hits won Columbia Best Picture Oscars and Capra Best Director Academy Awards. These films, along with Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and It's a Wonderful Life (1946) are the heart of Capra's cinematic canon. They are all classics and products of superb craftsmanship, but they gave rise to the canard of "Capra-corn." One cannot consider Capra without taking into account The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), American Madness (1932), and Meet John Doe (1941), all three dark films tackling major issues, Imperialism, the American plutocracy, and domestic fascism. Capra was no Pollyanna, and the man who was called a "dago" by Mack Sennett and who went on to become one of the most unique, highly honored and successful directors, whose depictions of America are considered Americana themselves, did not live his cinematic life looking through a rose-colored range-finder
In his autobiography "The Name Above the Title," Capra says that at the time of American Madness (1932), critics began commenting on his "gee-whiz" style of filmmaking. The critics attacked "gee whiz" cultural artifacts as their fabricators "wander about wide-eyed and breathless, seeing everything as larger than life." Capra's response was "Gee whiz!"
Defining Hollywood as split between two camps, "Mr. Up-beat" and "Mr. Down-beat," Capra defended the up-beat gee whiz on the grounds that, "To some of us, all that meets the eye IS larger than life, including life itself. Who ca match the wonder of it?"
Among the artists of the "Gee-Whiz:" school were Ernest Hemingway, Homer, and Paul Gauguin, a novelist who lived a heroic life larger than life itself, a poet who limned the lives of gods and heroes, and a painter who created a mythic Tahiti, the Tahiti that he wanted to find. Capra pointed to Moses and the apostles as examples of men who were larger than life. Capra was proud to be "Mr. Up-beat" rather than belong to "the 'ashcan' school" whose "films depict life as an alley of cats clawing lids off garbage cans, and man as less noble than a hyena. The 'ash-canners,' in turn, call us Pollyannas, mawkish sentimentalists, and corny happy-enders."
What really moves Capra is that in America, there was room for both schools, that there was no government interference that kept him from making a film like American Madness (1932). (While Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Joseph P. Kennedy had asked Harry Cohn to stop exporting Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) to Europe as it portrayed American democracy so negatively.) About Mr. Up-beat and Mr-Downbeat and "Mr. In-between," Capra says, "We all respect and admire each other because the great majority freely express their own individual artistry unfettered by subsidies or strictures from government, pressure groups, or ideologists."
In the period 1934 to 1941, Capra the created the core of his canon with the classics It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can't Take It with You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Meet John Doe (1941), wining three Best Director Oscars in the process. Some cine-historians call Capra the great American propagandist, he was so effective in creating an indelible impression of America in the 1930s. "Maybe there never was an America in the thirties," John Cassavetes was quoted as saying. "Maybe it was all Frank Capra."
After the United States went to war in December 1941, Frank Capra rejoined the Army and became an actual propagandist. His "Why We Fight" series of propaganda films were highly lauded for their remarkable craftsmanship and were the best of the U.S. propaganda output during the war. Capra's philosophy, which has been variously described as a kind of Christian socialism (his films frequently feature a male protagonist who can be seen a Christ figure in a story about redemption emphasizing New Testament values) that is best understood as an expression of humanism, made him an ideal propagandist. He loved his adopted country with the fervor of the immigrant who had realized the American dream. One of his propaganda films, The Negro Soldier (1944), is a milestone in race relations.
Capra, a genius in the manipulation of the first form of "mass media," was opposed to "massism." The crowd in a Capra film is invariably wrong, and he comes down on the side of the individual, who can make a difference in a society of free individuals. In an interview, Capra said he was against "mass entertainment, mass production, mass education, mass everything. Especially mass man. I was fighting for, in a sense, the preservation of the liberty of the individual person against the mass."
Capra had left Columbia after "Mr. Smith" and formed his own production company. After the war, he founded Liberty Films with John Ford and made his last masterpiece, It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Liberty folded prior to its release (another Liberty film, William Wyler's masterpiece, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) was released through United Artists). Though Capra received his sixth Oscar nomination as best director, the movie flopped at the box office, which is hard to believe now that the film is considered must-see viewing each Christmas. Capra's period of greatness was over, and after making three under-whelming films from 1948 to '51 (including a remake of his earlier Broadway Bill (1934)), Capra didn't direct another picture for eight years, instead making a series of memorable semi-comic science documentaries for television that became required viewing for most 1960's school kids. His last two movies, A Hole in the Head (1959) and Pocketful of Miracles (1961) his remake of Lady for a Day (1933) did little to enhance his reputation.
But a great reputation it was, and is. Capra's films withstood the test of time and continue to be as beloved as when they were embraced by the movie-going "masses" in the 1930s. It was the craftsmanship: Capra was undeniably a master of his medium. The great English novelist Graham Greene, who supported himself as a film critic in the 1930s, loved Capra's films due to their sense of responsibility and of common life, and due to his connection with his audience. (Capra, according to the 1938 "Time" article, believed that what he liked would be liked by moviegoers). In his review of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Greene elucidated the central theme of Capra's movies: "Goodness and simplicity manhandled in a deeply selfish and brutal world."
But it was Capra's great mastery over film that was the key to his success. Comparing Capra to Dickens in a not wholly flattering review of You Can't Take It with You (1938), Green found Capra "a rather muddled and sentimental idealist who feels -- vaguely -- that something is wrong with the social system" (807). Commenting on the improbable scene in which Grandpa Vanderhof persuades the munitions magnate Anthony P. Kirby to give everything up and play the harmonica, Greene stated:
"It sounds awful, but it isn't as awful as all that, for Capra has a touch of genius with a camera: his screen always seems twice as big as other people's, and he cuts as brilliantly as Eisenstein (the climax when the big bad magnate takes up his harmonica is so exhilarating in its movement that you forget its absurdity). Humour and not wit is his line, a humor that shades off into whimsicality, and a kind of popular poetry which is apt to turn wistful. We may groan and blush as he cuts his way remorselessly through all finer values to the fallible human heart, but infallibly he makes his appeal - to that great soft organ with its unreliable goodness and easy melancholy and baseless optimism. The cinema, a popular craft, can hardly be expected to do more."
Capra was a populist, and the simplicity of his narrative structures, in which the great social problems facing America were boiled down to scenarios in which metaphorical boy scouts took on corrupt political bosses and evil-minded industrialists, created mythical America of simple archetypes that with its humor, created powerful films that appealed to the elemental emotions of the audience. The immigrant who had struggled and been humiliated but persevere due to his inner resolution harnessed the mytho-poetic power of the movie to create proletarian passion plays that appealed to the psyche of the New Deal movie-goer. The country during the Depression was down but not out, and the ultimate success of the individual in the Capra films was a bracing tonic for the movie audience of the 1930s. His own personal history, transformed on the screen, became their myths that got them through the Depression, and when that and the war was over, the great filmmaker found himself out of time. Capra, like Charles Dickens, moralized political and economic issues. Both were primarily masters of personal and moral expression, and not of the social and political. It was the emotional realism, not the social realism, of such films as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), which he was concerned with, and by focusing on the emotional and moral issues his protagonists faced, typically dramatized as a conflict between cynicism and the protagonist's faith and idealism, that made the movies so powerful, and made them register so powerfully with an audience.1986- Music Department
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Aaron Copland is an Academy Award-winning composer (The Heiress (1949)), author, conductor, lecturer and educator. He was educated at public schools and was a music student of his sister and later Leopold Wolfson, Victor Wittgenstein, Clarence Adler, Rubin Goldmark and Nadia Boulanger. In 1925, he received the first Guggenheim fellowship awarded to a composer. He was a lecturer for ten years at the New School for Social Research, a guest lecturer at Harvard University between 1935 and 1944, and Dean of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood from 1946. With Roger Sessions, he organized the Copland-Sessions concert series for young American composers, and he founded the American Festival of Contemporary Music, Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York. He was a conductor in the United States and abroad. As a guest conductor for the Boston Symphony, he toured with Charles Münch throughout the Far East in 1960. His memberships included the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal, and the US Medal of Freedom.1986- Willem de Kooning was born on 24 April 1904 in Rotterdam, Zuid-Holland, Netherlands. He was married to Elaine de Kooning. He died on 19 March 1997 in Long Island, New York, USA.1986
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Agnes de Mille was born on 18 September 1905 in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA. She was an actress, known for Oklahoma! (1955), The Ragamuffin (1916) and Carousel (1956). She was married to Walter Foy Prude. She died on 7 October 1993 in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.1986- Actress
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Legendary stage actress Eva Le Gallienne's life began just as grandly as the daughter of poet Richard Le Gallienne. Sarah Bernhardt was her idol growing up and, at age 18, was brought to New York by her mother. Making her London debut with "Monna Vanna" in 1914, she proved a star in every sense of the word. She appeared on Broadway first in "Liliom" in 1921 and lastly at the Biltmore Theatre in 1981 with "To Grandmother's House We Go," which won her a Tony nomination at age 82. Noted for her extreme boldness and idealism, she became a director and muse for theatre's top playwrights, a foremost translator of Henrik Ibsen, and a founder of the civic repertory movement in America. A respected stage coach, director, producer and manager over her six decades, Ms. Le Gallienne consciously devoted herself to the Art of the Theatre as opposed to the Show Business of Broadway and dedicated herself to upgrading the quality of the stage. She ran the Civic Repertory Theatre Company for 10 years (1926-1936), producing 37 plays during that time. She managed Broadway's 1100-seat Civic Repertory Theatre (more popularly known as The 14th Street Theatre) at 107 14th Street from 1926-32, which was home to her company whose actors included herself, J. Edward Bromberg, Paul Leyssac, Florida Friebus, and Leona Roberts. Her gallery of theatre portrayals would include everything from Peter Pan to Hamlet. Sadly, she almost completely avoided film and TV during her lengthy career. However, toward the end of her life, she did appear in a marvelous 1977 stage version of "The Royal Family" on TV and rendered a quietly touching performance as Ellen Burstyn's grandmother in Resurrection (1980), for which she received an Oscar nomination.1986- Writer
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Alan Lomax was born on 31 January 1915 in Austin, Texas, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Attack the Block (2011), Basic (2003) and Gangs of New York (2002). He was married to Antoinette Marchand and Elizabeth Harold. He died on 19 July 2002 in Safety Harbor, Florida, USA.1986- Lewis Mumford was born on 19 October 1895 in Flushing, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for The City (1939), Lewis Mumford on the City, Part 2: The City - Cars or People? (1963) and Lewis Mumford on the City, Part 3: The City and Its Region (1963). He died on 26 January 1990 in Amenia, New York, USA.1986
- Eudora Welty was born on 13 April 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, USA. She was a writer, known for American Playhouse (1980), The Frost Whistle (2008) and The Purple Hat (2010). She died on 23 July 2001 in Jackson, Mississippi, USA.1986
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Romare Bearden was born on 2 September 1912 in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. He is known for Gloria (1980), Marsalis on Music (1995) and The Core of the Apple (1986). He died on 12 March 1988 in New York City, New York, USA.1987- Music Artist
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On Saturday, June 15th, 1996, an era in jazz singing came to an end, with the death of Ella Fitzgerald at her home in California. She was the last of four great female jazz singers (including Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and Carmen McRae) who defined one of the most prolific eras in jazz vocal style. Ella had extraordinary vocal skills from the time she was a teenager, and joined the Chick Webb Orchestra in 1935 when she was 16 years old. With an output of more than 200 albums, she was at her sophisticated best with the songs of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, of George Gershwin, and of Cole Porter. Her 13 Grammy awards are more than any other jazz performer, and she won the Best Female Vocalist award three years in a row. Completely at home with up-tempo songs, her scat singing placed her jazz vocals with the finest jazz instrumentalists, and it was this magnificent voice that she brought to her film appearances. Her last few years, during which she had a bout with congestive heart failure and suffered bilateral amputation of her legs from complications of diabetes, were spent in seclusion.1987- Sydney Lewis is known for Out of the Closet, Off the Screen: The Life of William Haines (2001) and Studs Terkel: Listening to America (2009).1987. Mr and Mrs. Sydney Lewis were awarded the National Medal of the Arts.
- Howard Nemerov was born on 29 February 1920 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Tall Story (1960) and Howard Nemerov: Collected Sentences (1981). He was married to Margaret Russel. He died on 5 July 1991 in University City, Missouri, USA.1987
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Alwin Nikolais was born on 25 November 1910 in Southington, Connecticut, USA. He was a composer and director, known for Zelt (1969), The Company (2003) and Motel (1989). He died on 8 May 1993 in New York City, New York, USA.1987- Art Department
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Isamu Noguchi was born on 17 November 1904 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was a director and production designer, known for Shizukanaru boryoku (1963), Great Performances: Dance in America (1976) and Appalachian Spring (1944). He was married to Shirley Yamaguchi. He died on 30 December 1988 in New York City, New York, USA.1987- William Schuman was born on 4 August 1910 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a composer, known for Omnibus (1952), Night Journey (1960) and Eye on New York (1956). He died on 15 February 1992 in Manhattan, New York, USA.1987
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Robert Penn Warren was born on 24 April 1905 in Guthrie, Kentucky, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for All the King's Men (2006), All the King's Men (1949) and Band of Angels (1957). He was married to Eleanor Clark and Emma Brescia. He died on 15 September 1989 in Stratton, Vermont, USA.1987- Brooke Astor was born on 30 March 1902 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, USA. She died on 13 August 2007 in Briarcliff Manor, New York, USA.1988
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Saul Bellow was born on 10 July 1915 in Lachine, Québec, Canada [now Lachine, Montréal, Québec, Canada]. He was a writer and actor, known for Zelig (1983), Henderson the Rain King and Thirty-Minute Theatre (1965). He was married to Janis Bellow, Alexandra Ionesco Tuleca, Susan Glassman, Alexandra Tschacbasov and Anita Goshkin. He died on 5 April 2005 in Brookline, Massachusetts, USA.1988- Actress
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Known as "The First lady of the American Theater", Helen Hayes had a legendary career on stage and in films and television that spanned over eighty years. Hayes was born in Washington, D.C., to Catherine Estelle "Essie" Hayes, an actress who worked in touring companies, and Francis van Arnum Brown, a clerk and salesman. Her maternal grandparents were Irish. A child actress in the first decade of the 20th century, by the time she turned twenty in 1920 she was well on her way to a landmark career on the American stage, becoming perhaps the greatest female star of the theatre during the 1930s and 1940s. She made a handful of scattered films during the silent era and in 1931 was signed to MGM with great fanfare to begin a career starring in films. Her first three films, Arrowsmith (1931), The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931), and A Farewell to Arms (1932), were great hits and she would win the 1932 Oscar for Best Actress for her work in Madelon Claudet. Alas, her lack of screen glamour worked against her becoming a box office star during the golden era of Hollywood, and her subsequent films were often not well received by critics. Within four years she had abandoned the screen and returned to the stage for the greatest success of her career, "Victoria Regina", which ran for three years starting in 1935. Helen Hayes returned to motion pictures with a few featured roles in 1950s films and frequently appeared on television. In 1970, she made a screen comeback in Airport (1970), a role originally offered to Claudette Colbert, who declined it, earning Hayes her second Oscar, this time for Best Supporting Actress. Helen Hayes retired from the stage in 1971 but enjoyed enormous fame and popularity over the next fifteen years with many roles in motion pictures and television productions, retiring in 1985 after starring in the TV film Murder with Mirrors (1985).1988- Director
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The pre-eminent American photojournalist of sub-Saharan descent. An acclaimed photographer for Life magazine from the late 40s through late 60s, he turned to directing films, his second of which, the blaxploitation movie Shaft (1971), achieved success at the box office. In 1989 his first film effort, The Learning Tree (1969), was selected among the first 25 films so honored, by the U.S. Library of Congress to be preserved in the National Film Registry for all time.1988- Actor
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I.M. Pei was born on 26 April 1917 in Canton, China. He was an actor, known for Une nuit, le Louvre avec Lambert Wilson (2017), A Place to Be (1979) and Berlin Babylon (2001). He was married to Eileen Loo. He died on 16 May 2019 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.1988- Additional Crew
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Jerome Robbins was one of the founding members of the Ballet Theatre when it was formed in 1940 portraying a variety of roles for several years before devising his own creations such as 'Fancy Free' about 3 sailors on leave in New York which marked a long association with Leonard Bernstein. With Jerome in one of the leading roles it opened at the Metropolitan Opera House in April 1944 and quickly established Jerome and Leonard as important talents particularly when the play was turned into the film'On the Town' Among ballets Jerome staged for the New York City Ballet, of which he became company director are 'Pied Piper','The Cage',and 'Inter Play'. In 1958 he formed his own company 'Ballets: USA which did tours of Europe and the Middle East, New York and a national tour. Several members of the company were in the film West Side Story which Jerome staged fir Broadway, the National Company and London.1988- Rudolf Serkin was born on 28 March 1903 in Eger, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now Cheb, Czech Republic]. He was married to Irene Busch. He died on 8 May 1991 in Guilford, Vermont, USA.1988
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Roger L. Stevens was born on 11 March 1910. He is known for West Side Story (1961), Deathtrap (1982) and Boom! (1968). He died on 3 February 1998.1988- Composer
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One of the driving forces, both as critic and musician, of 20th century American music, Thomson studied music at both Harvard University and elsewhere in the Boston area before moving to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger in 1921. After spending a short time in his native land, he returned to Paris and remained there until 1940, working with many of the major composers, writers, and artists of the period, most significantly Gertrude Stein, with whom he wrote the opera "Four Saints in Three Acts" (1927-28). Upon returning to the US, Thomson became the music critic for the NY Herald-Tribune, earning himself a Pulitzer Prize in Music for his score for the film Louisiana Story (1948). Hated by many in the music world for his acerbic criticism, Thomson nevertheless won numerous accolades, including the Legion d'honneur (1947) and the Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime achievement (1983).1988- Additional Crew
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Dancer, choreographer, composer and songwriter, educated at the University of Chicago. She made world tours as a dancer, choreographer, and director of her own dance company. She directed the Katherine Dunham School of Dance in New York, and was artist-in-residence at Southern Illinois University. She also appeared in the Broadway musicals "Bal Negre" and "Carib Song". Joining ASCAP in 1964, her popular-song compositions include "Coco da Mata" and "New Love, New Wine".1989- Art Department
Martin Freedman was born on 26 February 1946. Martin is known for Agnes of God (1985) and The Guardian (1984). Martin died on 18 December 2011.1989- Music Department
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John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, along with Charlie Parker, ushered in the era of Be-Bop in the American jazz tradition. He was born in Cheraw, South Carolina, and was the youngest of nine children. He began playing piano at the age of four and received a music scholarship to the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina. Most noted for his trademark "swollen cheeks", Gillespie admitted to copying the style of trumpeter Roy Eldridge early in his career. He replaced Eldridge in the 'Teddy Hill' Band after Eldridge's departure. He eventually began experimenting and creating his own style which would eventually come to the attention of Mario Bauza , the Godfather of Afro-Cuban jazz who was then a member of the Cab Calloway Orchestra. Though Calloway disliked Gillespie's style, calling it "Chinese music", he hired him to his band in 1939. Gillespie was later fired after two years when he cut a portion of Calloway's buttocks with a knife after Calloway accused him of throwing spitballs (the two men later became lifelong friends and often retold this story with great relish until both of their deaths). Although noted for his on- and off-stage clowning, Gillespie endured as one of the founding fathers of the Afro-Cuban &/or Latin Jazz tradition. Influenced by Mario Bauza, known as Gillespie's musical father, he was able to fuse Afro-American jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms to form a burgeoning CuBop sound. Always a musical ambassador, he toured Africa, the Middle East and Latin America under the sponsorship of the US State Department. Quite often he returned, not only with fresh musical ideas, but with musicians who would eventually go on to achieve world renown. Among his proteges and collaborators are 'Chano Pozo', the great Afro-Cuban percussionist; Danilo Pérez, a master pianist and composer originally from Panama; Arturo Sandoval, trumpeter, composer and music educator originally from Cuba; Mongo Santamaria, an Afro-Cuban conguero, bonguero and composer; David Sanchez, saxophonist and composer; Chucho Valdés, an Afro-Cuban virtuoso pianist and composer; and Bobby Sanabria, a Bronx, NY-born Nuyorican percussionist, composer, educator, bandleader and expert in the Afro-Cuban musical tradition. Indeed, many Latin jazz classics such as "Manteca", "A Night in Tunisia" and "Guachi Guaro [Soul Sauce]" were composed by Gillespie and his musical collaborators. With a strong sense of pride in his Afro-American heritage, he left a legacy of musical excellence that embraced and fused all musical forms, but particularly those forms with roots deep in Africa such as the music of Cuba, other Latin American countries and the Caribbean. Additionally, he left a legacy of goodwill and good humor that infused jazz musicians and fans throughout the world with a genuine sense of jazz's ability to transcend national and ethnic boundaries--for this reason, Gillespie was and is an international treasure.1989- Music Department
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Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz was born on October 1, 1903, in Berdichev (near Kiev), Ukraine (then Russian Empire). His father, named Simeon Horowitz, was an electrical engineer. His mother, named Sophie Horowitz, was a professional pianist and teacher at the Kiev Conservatory. Young Vladimir Horowitz took his first piano lessons from his mother. At the age of 9 he entered the Kiev Conservatory where he studied with Vladimir Puchalsky, Sergei Tarnowsky, and Felix Blumenfeld. At the age of 11 he met and played with Aleksandr Skryabin. He graduated from the Conservatory in 1920 with the performance of the Piano Concerto No. 3 by Sergei Rachmaninoff. By that time his family was devastated by the purges of the Russian Revolution. All of their property, including the piano, was seized by the Bolsheviks.
Horowitz performed extensively in Kharkov, Kiev, Moscow, and Leningrad, acquiring a reputation as a virtuoso. In Leningrad alone he gave 23 concerts in 1922, being paid with food instead of money. He left Russia in 1925 and gave 69 concerts in Europe during the season of 1926-1927. He studied briefly with Alfred Cortot in Paris. Horowitz made his American debut in 1928 with the New York Philharmonic, playing the Piano Concerto No.1 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. His debut was a sensation. Horowitz performed sold-out concerts and commanded the highest fees throughout his legendary career. In 1932 Horowitz performed the Emperor Concerto by Ludwig van Beethoven with the conductor Arturo Toscanini and won the admiration of the maestro. The same year in Milan, Italy, Vladimir Horowitz married Wanda Toscanini. They had one daughter. Horowitz and Toscanini gave a remarkable fund-raiser for the war effort with their 1943 performance of the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. With that concert alone they raised $10,000,000 for the allies in the Second World War.
Horowitz was a close friend of Sergei Rachmaninoff. They played piano together at the Rachmaninov's home in Beverly Hills. Rachmaninov famously admitted that Horowitz surpassed him in the interpretation of his Piano Concerto No. 3. Horowitz played with unusually stretched fingers and low wrists, but even Rachmaninov said, "Horowitz plays contrary to what they taught, yet somehow with Horowitz it works." He performed an immensely wide repertoire, ranging from Arcangelo Corelli to Aleksandr Skryabin. He also made fine transcriptions of "Pictures at an Exhibition" by Modest Mussorgsky and of "Hungarian Rhapsody No.2" by Franz Liszt; which are considered to be the most difficult, even for a virtuoso like Horowitz. At some points in his career he suffered from anxiety and depression; taking long brakes, especially from 1953-1965 and from 1969-1974. On several occasions he was said to have experienced stage fright and had to be pushed onto the stage. Once he was sitting at the piano, however, he was perfect. His playing was famous for refined nuances, clear articulation, definitive phrasing, and impressive tone.
In 1986 Horowitz made a sensational tour of Russia, where he took his own Steinway piano in a bullet-proof case. His performances in Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg) were sold out many months prior to his arrival. These performances had both musical and political importance at the time when Mikhail Gorbachev was making changes in the rigid Soviet system. The acclaimed concert performance was released on video as 'Horowitz in Moscow' (1986).
Vladimir Horowitz died of a heart attack on November 5, 1989, in New York. He was laid to rest in the Toscanini family tomb in Cimitiero Monumentale, Milan, Italy.1989- Czeslaw Milosz was born on 30 June 1911 in Szetejnie, Kovno Governorate, Russian Empire [now Seteniai, Lithuania]. He was a writer, known for Robinson warszawski (1950), Teatr Polskiego Radia (2004) and Dolina Issy (1982). He was married to Carol Marie Thigpen and Janina Dluska. He died on 14 August 2004 in Kraków, Malopolskie, Poland.1989
- Robert Motherwell was born on 4 January 1915 in Aberdeen, Washington, USA. He was married to Helen Frankenthaler. He died on 16 July 1991 in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA.1989
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John Updike is among the leading novelists of the late 20th century, having twice won the Pulitzer Prize. Updike graduated Harvard College in 1954 to the staff of the New Yorker, with whom he has worked ever since as a contributor and reviewer. Updike has published 15 novels and lives in Massachusetts1989- Writer
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Legendary Broadway writer/producer/director George Abbott was born in 1887 in Forestville, New York. His father was mayor of Salamanca, New York, for two terms. In 1898 his family moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Abbott attended Kearney Military Academy. The family returned to New York, where Abbott attended Hamburg High School, graduating in 1907, and the University of Rochester (BA degree in 1911). He wrote the play "Perfectly Harmless" for University Dramatic Club. He attended Harvard University from 1911-1912, studying play writing under George Pierce Baker, and wrote "The Head of the Family" for Harvard Dramatic Club. In 1912 he won $100 in a play contest sponsored by the Bijou Theatre in Boston, Massachusetts, for "The Man in the Manhole", and worked at the Bijou for a year as assistant stage manager. He made his Broadway debut as an actor in 1913 in "The Misleading Lady" (as Babe Merrill, a drunken student), followed by "The Yeoman of the Guard" (1915), "The Queen's Enemies" (1916), "Daddies" (1918), "The Broken Wing" (1920), "Dulcy" (on tour) (1921), "Zander the Great" (1923), "White Desert" (1923), "Hell-Bent for Heaven" (1924), "Lazybones" (1924), "Processional" (1925) and "Cowboy Crazy" (1926). From that point he concentrated on writing and directing, with "The Fall Guy" (his Broadway's debut, 1925), "Three Men on a Horse" (1935), "Jumbo" (1935), "On Your Toes" (1936), "The Boys from Syracuse" (1938), "Too Many Girls" (1939), "Pal Joey" (1940), "Best Foot Forward" (1941), "On the Town" (1944), "High Buttom Shoes" (1947), "Where's Charley?" (1948), "Call Me Madam" (1950), "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (1951), "Wonderful Town" (1953), "The Pajama Game" (1954), "Damn Yankees" (1955), "New Girl Town" (1957), "Fiorello!" (1959), "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Forum" (1962), "Flora, the Red Menace" (1965; Liza Minnelli's Broadway debut).
He won five Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize (for "Fiorello!"). He was nominated for an Oscar for writing All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). His daughter, Judith Abbott, is a stage actress/director and was married (1946-49) to Tom Ewell.1990- Actor
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Hume Cronyn was a Canadian actor with a lengthy career. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in "The Seventh Cross" (1944).
Cronyn was born to a prominent family. His father was politician Hume Blake Cronyn (1864-1933), Member of Parliament for London, Ontario (term 1917-1921). The elder Cronyn was a grandson of both Benjamin Cronyn, first bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Huron (1802-1871) and politician William Hume Blake (1809-1870), first Chancellor of Upper Canada.
Cronyn's mother was Frances Amelia Labatt, heiress of the Labatt Brewing Company. Labatt remains the largest brewing company of Canada. Frances' father was businessman John Labatt (1838-1915), and her grandfather was company founder John Kinder Labatt (1803-1866). The Labatts were a prominent Irish-Canadian family, claiming descent from a French Huguenot family which settled in Ireland.
Cronyn was sent to a boarding school in Ottawa, where he studied from 1917 to 1921. The school was at the time called "Rockliffe Preparatory School", but has since been renamed to Elmwood School. Elmwood has become a school for girls. Cronyn attended first Ridley College in St. Catharines, and then McGill University in Montreal.
During his university years, Cronyn was a featherweight boxer. He was nominated for Canada's Olympic Boxing team for the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Cronyn was studying pre-law in the University, but switched his major to acting. He then enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he studied under theatrical director Max Reinhardt (1873-1943).
Cronyn made his Broadway debut in 1934, in the play "Hipper's Holiday". He had the minor role of a janitor. After a decade as a theatrical actor, Cronyn made his film debut in the psychological thriller "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943). He played crime fiction buff Herbie Hawkins. This was Cronyn's first collaboration with director Alfred Hitchcock. Cronyn later acted in "Lifeboat" (1944), and served as a screenwriter for both "Rope" (1948) and "Under Capricorn" (1949).
Cronyn was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Paul Roeder in the concentration camp themed film "The Seventh Cross" (1942). Roeder is a common factory worker in Nazi Germany, who risks his life and family to assist his old friend George Heisler (played by Spencer Tracy) to flee the country. While Cronyn's role was well-received, the award was instead won by rival actor Barry Fitzgerald (1888-1961).
In 1942, Cronyn married actress Jessica Tandy, and for many years they appeared together in theatre, film and television. The duo headlined the radio series "The Marriage" (1953-1954), depicting the difficulties of a professional woman in transitioning to the roles of housewife and mother. The duo also appeared in a television adaptation of the radio series, but it only lasted for 8 episodes.
Cronyn acting career mostly included supporting roles, but he found himself in the spotlight for the role of Joe Finley in the science fiction film "Cocoon". It became a surprise box office hit, and Cronyn was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Actor. The award was instead won by a much younger actor, Michael J. Fox (1961-).
Cronyn returned to the role of Joe Finley in the sequel "Cocoon: The Return" (1988). While less successful than its predecessor, Cronyn's role was well-received. He was again nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Actor, but again lost to a younger actor. The award was won by Tom Hanks (1956-).
Jessica Tandy died in 1994, and the widowed Cronyn married writer Susan Cooper in 1996. Cronyn had one of his last prominent roles in the film "Marvin's Room" (1996). He played the incapacitated and bed-ridden Marvin Wakefield, who has to be taken care of by his adult daughters. The cast of the film was collectively nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.
Cronyn's last film role was the role of con-artist Sam Clausner in the television film "Off Season" (2001). Cronyn died in 2003 from prostate cancer. He was 91-years-old.1990- Director
- Additional Crew
- Writer
Merce Cunningham was born on 16 April 1919 in Centralia, Washington, USA. He was a director and writer, known for Variations V (1966), Deli Commedia (1984) and Merce Cunningham (1998). He was married to John Cage. He died on 26 July 2009 in New York City, New York, USA.1990- Camera and Electrical Department
- Actor
- Costume and Wardrobe Department
From 1947 to 1948, Jasper Johns was a student at the University of South Carolina. He then studied at a private art school in New York from 1949 to 1952. After graduating, he did his military service for two years. Among other things, he also came to Japan. From there he took inspiration for his later motifs. In 1952, like his friend, the painter Robert Rauschenberg, he was in New York and made contact with John Cage's circle. Johns initially painted in the style of Abstract Expressionism, which he turned away from in the mid-1950s. During this time he depicted banal everyday things such as cans or targets and thus turned them into art subjects. For example, he created works entitled "Flag on an Orange Background" (1959). They were often executed in oil or encaustic. The acquaintance of the gallery owner Leo Castelli brought the artist fame in the New York art scene.
During this time, his flag paintings were presented for the first time in a solo exhibition. He also made shooting targets, series of numbers and maps into art objects. The separation from Abstract Expressionism was thus complete. His flag paintings were unique in the art of painting. They brought the subject of the picture into line with the picture itself. This raised the question of the identity of picture and object in art theory, for the first time after Duchamp's work "Fountain", which was later taken up again by the conceptual artists. In 1958, three-dimensional works were created as assemblages that were put together from a combination of different objects. Here too the artist used oil paint or encaustic. In 1960, Johns also made light bulbs or tin cans into "Sculpmetals", which he cast in bronze and painted. The following year he was awarded the Carnegie Prize at the Pittsburgh Biennale.
In 1960 he began his first experiments with the technique of lithography. Jasper Johns traveled to Hawaii and Japan in 1964. This year he was also honored with the first prize at the Venice Biennale. More awards followed. His later work is based on Jackson Pollock's color webs and his "all-over paintings". The images are filled with color bundles of lines. The name comes from because this technique and design does not give the images a focal point. His importance as a painter is his pioneering role in Pop Art and Minimal Art. He used everyday things that he incorporated into his paintings and sculptures.
With his flag and target paintings, he not only stimulated art-theoretical discussions of identity, but also created truly cult images.
Jasper Johns has lived in New York and Saint-Martin since 1988.1990- Music Artist
- Actor
- Music Department
Riley B. King (September 16, 1925 - May 14, 2015), known professionally as B.B. King, was an American blues singer-songwriter, guitarist, and record producer. He introduced a sophisticated style of soloing based on fluid string bending, shimmering vibrato and staccato picking that influenced many later blues electric guitar players. AllMusic recognized King as "the single most important electric guitarist of the last half of the 20th century".
King was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, and is one of the most influential blues musicians of all time, earning the nickname "The King of the Blues", and is considered one of the "Three Kings of the Blues Guitar" (along with Albert King and Freddie King, none of whom are related). King performed tirelessly throughout his musical career, appearing on average at more than 200 concerts per year into his 70s. In 1956 alone, he appeared at 342 shows.
King was born on a cotton plantation in Itta Bena, Mississippi, and later worked at a cotton gin in Indianola, Mississippi. He was attracted to music and the guitar in church, and he began his career in Juke joints and local radio. He later lived in Memphis and Chicago; then, as his fame grew, toured the world extensively. King died at the age of 89 in Las Vegas on May 14, 2015.1990- Animation Department
- Art Department
Jacob Lawrence was born on 7 September 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA. He is known for The Promised Land (1995), They Drew Fire (2000) and Soul! (1968). He was married to Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence. He died on 9 June 2000 in Seattle, Washington, USA.1990- Actress
- Soundtrack
This vibrant, fine-humored coloratura was able to accomplish what most others of her ilk could or would not do -- she humanized opera and made it approachable to the masses. There were no diva-like traits in this star and the public absolutely adored her for it. Dubbed "America's Queen of Opera" in 1971 by Time magazine, Beverly Sills, the lovely blonde with the toothy smile and fireplace-warm personality, also gained notice for her rise to stardom without benefit of European training, eventually paving the way for other American-trained singers to succeed without the accustomed "Met certification". During her career she recorded 18 full-length operas as well as numerous recital discs. A Victor Herbert album she recorded won a Grammy Award in 1978. If not one of its most distinctive and charismatic voices, she certainly became opera's most accessible figurehead and with it enticed a surprisingly wide audience who would have typically turned away from the long-haired art form.
Brooklyn-born Belle Miriam Silverman arrived on May 25, 1929, to Russian-Jewish émigrés and the good humor already started at birth when she was nicknamed "Bubbles" due to bubbles emanating from her mouth as she arrived. At age 3 she made her debut on a kiddie show and won a Brooklyn "beautiful baby" contest as well. Her singing gifts were detected early on and she began to study at age 7. Performing increasingly on various radio shows well into her teen years, she made her operatic debut at age 18 singing the role of Frasquita in "Carmen" with the Philadelphia Civic Opera.
In the early 1950s Beverly toured with the Charles L. Wagner Opera Company and established herself in the roles of Violetta in "La Traviata" and Micaela in "Carmen". The highlight during this time came with her role as Helen of Troy in "Mephistopheles" with the San Francisco Opera in 1953. She met future husband Peter Greenough, an associate editor, while touring with the New York City Opera in 1955 (she had auditioned unsuccessfully for the company for nearly 4 years). The couple married a year later and went on to have two children: Meredith and Peter Jr. Despite her sunny, optimistic demeanor, Beverly had her fair share of misfortune. Her daughter was born deaf and son born autistic. For the remainder of her life she became an avid spokesperson for children with particular needs.
Her buildup on the opera scene was surprisingly gradual. Over the years she developed a strong repertoire of leading roles in the works of Mozart, Handel, Offenbach, Donizetti, Rossini and Verdi. Stardom came with the role of Cleopatra in Handel's "Julius Caesar" in 1966 at Lincoln Center, and she confirmed it with subsequent roles in "Le Coq d'Or, "Mamon", "Lucia di Lammermoor" "The Siege of Corinth" and "Il Trittico".
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s she made herself available to the public in lighter forums at such open venues as the Hollywood Bowl. She willingly shared both the stage and small screen with such unlikely co-stars as Carol Burnett ("Sills and Burnett at the Met"), Danny Kaye, John Denver, Tony Bennett, Johnny Carson and even the Muppets. She won four Emmys for her interview show "Lifestyles with Beverly Sills" in the late 70s. On the operatic side, some of her televised performances included that of "The Barber of Seville", "La Traviata" and "Manon".
Beverly's lyric soprano began to falter at around age 50 in the late 1970s. She bid her audiences adieu in a 1980 performance of "Die Fledermaus" with Joan Sutherland for the San Diego Opera. Later that decade she was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980 and was paid tribute at the 1985 Kennedy Center Honors for her lifetime of contribution to the arts.
In later years Beverly worked behind the scenes after taking over the mismanaged City Opera Company and turning things around as its general director. She retired successfully from that leadership post in 1989 and five years later became chairman of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Retiring in 2002, she took over the chair for the Metropoliatan Opera itself until 2005 due to family obligations and health issues. Her husband Peter died in September of 2006; ten months later Beverly would follow.
(Obviously) a non-smoker all her life, Beverly nevertheless developed lung cancer. Her father had died of the same disease back in 1947. She died on July 2, 2007 at her Manhattan residence. Her two children and one grandchild survive.1990- Actress
- Soundtrack
A beloved, twinkly blue-eyed doyenne of stage and screen, actress Jessica Tandy's career spanned nearly six and a half decades. In that span of time, she enjoyed an amazing film renaissance at age 80, something unheard of in a town that worships youth and nubile beauty. She was born Jessie Alice Tandy in London in 1909, the daughter of Jessie Helen (Horspool), the head of a school for mentally handicapped children, and Harry Tandy, a traveling salesman. Her parents enrolled her as a teenager at the Ben Greet Academy of Acting, where she showed immediate promise. She was 16 when she made her professional bow as Sara Manderson in the play "The Manderson Girls", and was subsequently invited to join the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Within a couple of years, Jessica was making a number of other debuts as well. Her first West End play was in "The Rumour" at the Court Theatre in 1929, her Gotham bow was in "The Matriarch" at the Longacre Theatre in 1930, and her initial film role was as a maid in The Indiscretions of Eve (1932).
Jessica married British actor Jack Hawkins in 1932 after the couple had met performing in the play "Autumn Crocus" the year before. They had one daughter, Susan, before parting ways after eight years of marriage. An unconventional beauty with slightly stern-eyed and sharp, hawkish features, she was passed over for leading lady roles in films, thereby focusing strongly on a transatlantic stage career throughout the 1930s and 1940s. She grew in stature while enacting a succession of Shakespeare's premiere ladies (Titania, Viola, Ophelia, Cordelia). At the same time, she enjoyed personal successes elsewhere in such plays as "French Without Tears", "Honour Thy Father", "Jupiter Laughs", "Anne of England" and "Portrait of a Madonna". And then she gave life to Blanche DuBois.
When Tennessee Williams' masterpiece "A Streetcar Named Desire" opened on Broadway on December 3, 1947, Jessica's name became forever associated with this entrancing Southern belle character. One of the most complex, beautifully drawn, and still sought-after femme parts of all time, she went on to win the coveted Tony award. Aside from introducing Marlon Brando to the general viewing public, "Streetcar" shot Jessica's marquee value up a thousandfold. But not in films.
While her esteemed co-stars Brando, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden were given the luxury of recreating their roles in Elia Kazan's stark, black-and-white cinematic adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Jessica was devastatingly bypassed. Vivien Leigh, who played the role on stage in London and had already immortalized another coy, manipulative Southern belle on celluloid (Scarlett O'Hara), was a far more marketable film celebrity at the time and was signed on to play the delusional Blanche. To be fair, Leigh was nothing less than astounding in the role and went on to deservedly win the Academy Award (along with Malden and Hunter). Jessica would exact her revenge on Hollywood in later years.
In 1942, she entered into a second marriage, with actor/producer/director Hume Cronyn, a 52-year union that produced two children, Christopher and Tandy, the latter an actor in her own right. The couple not only enjoyed great solo success, they relished performing in each other's company. A few of their resounding theatre triumphs included the "The Fourposter" (1951), "Triple Play" (1959), "Big Fish, Little Fish (1962), "Hamlet" (he played Polonius; she played Gertrude) (1963), "The Three Sisters (1963) and "A Delicate Balance." They supported together in films too, their first being The Seventh Cross (1944). In the film The Green Years (1946), Jessica, who was two years older than Cronyn, actually played his daughter! Throughout the 1950s, they built up a sturdy reputation as "America's First Couple of the Theatre."
In 1963, Jessica made an isolated film appearance in Alfred Hitchcock's classic The Birds (1963). Low on the pecking order at the time (pun intended), Hitchcock gave Jessica a noticeable secondary role, and Jessica made the most of her brittle scenes as the high-strung, overbearing mother of Rod Taylor, who witnesses horror along the California coast. It was not until the 1980s that Jessica (and Hume, to a lesser degree) experienced a mammoth comeback in Hollywood.
Alongside Hume she delighted movie audiences in such enjoyable fare as Honky Tonk Freeway (1981), The World According to Garp (1982), Cocoon (1985) and *batteries not included (1987). In 1989, however, octogenarian Jessica was handed the senior citizen role of a lifetime as the prickly Southern Jewish widow who gradually forms a trusting bond with her black chauffeur in the genteel drama Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Jessica was presented with the Oscar, Golden Globe and British Film Awards, among others, for her exceptional work in the film that also won "Best Picture". Deemed Hollywood royalty now, she was handed the cream of the crop in elderly film parts and went on to win another Oscar nomination for Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) a couple of years later.
Jessica also enjoyed some of her biggest stage hits ("Streetcar" notwithstanding) during her twilight years, earning two more Tony Awards for her exceptional work in "The Gin Game" (1977) and "Foxfire" (1982). Both co-starred her husband, Hume, and both were beautifully transferred by the couple to television. Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1990, Jessica bravely continued working with Emmy-winning distinction on television. She died of her illness on September 11, 1994. Her last two films, Nobody's Fool (1994) and Camilla (1994), were released posthumously.1990- Actor
- Soundtrack
Roy Acuff was born on 15 September 1903 in Maynardville, Tennessee, USA. He was an actor, known for Night Train to Memphis (1946), Home in San Antone (1949) and Smoky Mountain Melody (1948). He was married to Mildred Louise Douglas. He died on 23 November 1992 in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.1991- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Additional Crew
Pietro Antonio Belluschi is known for This Space Between Us (1999) and Groove (2000).1991- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
Charles 'Honi' Coles was born on 2 April 1911 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He was an actor, known for Dirty Dancing (1987), Rocky II (1979) and The Cotton Club (1984). He was married to Marion Coles. He died on 12 November 1992 in New York City, New York, USA.1991- Actress
- Soundtrack
Kitty Carlisle Hart wore a cloak of many professional and elegant colors. Actress, opera singer, Broadway performer, TV celebrity, game show panelist, patron of the arts, and, at age 95, this vital woman continued her six-decade musical odyssey with songs and reminisces in her one-woman show: "Kitty Carlisle Hart: An American Icon," which toured from her beloved New York to Los Angeles. She developed pneumonia soon after her tour folded toward the end of 2006 and passed away of congestive heart failure in April of 2007.
Kitty Carlisle Hart was born Catherine Conn (pronounced "Cohen") on September 3, 1910 in New Orleans, Louisiana, to a family of German Jewish ancestry. Her father, Dr. Joseph Conn, was a gynecologist who died when she was only ten. Her very ambitious mother, Hortense (Holzman), escorted Kitty to Europe in 1921 with the intentions of marrying her off, Grace Kelly-style, into European royalty. When that plan didn't pan out, they stayed in Europe where Kitty received her adult education in Switzerland, London, Paris and Rome. She finally zeroed in on her acting career after being accepted into London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and also went on to train at the Theatre de l'Atelier in Paris.
She and her mother eventually returned to New York in 1932 wherein she first apprenticed with the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania. She attracted notice quite early in her career. Billed as Kitty Carlisle, she found radio work and made her first appearance on the musical stage in the title role of "Rio Rita." The legitimately-trained singer went on to appear in a number of operettas, including 1933's "Champagne Sec" (as Prince Orlofsky), as well as the musical comedies "White Horse Inn" (1936) and "Three Waltzes" (1937).
Her early ingénue movie career included warbling in the musical mystery Murder at the Vanities (1934), and alongside Allan Jones amidst the zany goings-on of the Marx Brothers in the classic farce A Night at the Opera (1935). She also played a love interest to Bing Crosby's in two of his lesser known musical outings Here Is My Heart (1934) and She Loves Me Not (1934).
Films were not her strong suit, however, and she returned to her theatre roots. Appearing in her first dramatic productions "French Without Tears" and "The Night of January 16th" in 1938, she went on to grace a number of chic and stylish plays and musicals throughout the 40s, including "Walk with Music (1940), "The Merry Widow" (1943, "Design for Living (1943) and "There's Always Juliet" (1944). She subsequently performed in Benjamin Britten's 1948 American premiere of "The Rape of Lucretia." In 1946, she married Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Moss Hart and appeared in a number of his works including his classic "The Man Who Came to Dinner" (1949) and the witty Broadway comedy "Anniversary Waltz" (1954). The couple had two children. He died in 1961 and she never remarried, spending much of her existing time keeping his name alive to future generations.
It was the small screen that would make Kitty a welcome household commodity. The steadfast panelist of several quiz shows in the 1950s, it was the popular game show To Tell the Truth (1956) that anointed her game show doyenne and icon. A regular panelist for some 20 years, she appeared on each and every revamped format from its 1956 inception to its 2002 syndicated version. Known for her stately presence, infectious laugh, pouffy dark Prince Valiant hairstyle, and sweeping couture gowns on the show, audiences reveled at her effortless class to these simple parlor games. She also was a substitute panelist for other popular game shows such as "What's My Line?" and "I've Got a Secret."
In later years, she became an important society maven of New York City, an avid patron and zealous supporter of the performing arts. Appointed to various state-wide councils, she was chairman of the New York State Council of the Arts in 1976 and served in that capacity for 20 years, also serving on the boards of various New York City cultural institutions. A noted lecturer, the civic-minded Carlisle Hart was active in administrative capacities as well, notably as Chairman of Governor Rockefeller's Conference on Woman (1966) and as special consultant to the Governor on women's opportunities. At one time she wrote the column "Kitty's Calendar" for Women's Unit News.
Kitty never stopped entertaining. Making her Metropolitan debut on New Year's Eve 1966 as Prince Orlovsky in "Die Fledermaus," she joined the touring production the following year. She appeared in concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra and appeared with the Boston Opera Company at one point. She added stature to a number of summer stock plays including "Kiss Me Kate," "The Marriage-Go-Round" and her husband's "Light Up the Sky." Returning to Broadway as a replacement for Dina Merrill in the 1983 revival of "On Your Toes," she was later spotted in Woody Allen's Radio Days (1987) and Six Degrees of Separation (1993).
Carlisle penned her autobiography, Kitty, in 1988. In the millennium, she appeared in a number of documentary films and TV movies. She died on April 17, 2007, at age 96, in Manhattan.1991- Pearl Primus was born on 29 November 1919 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. She was an actress, known for Great Performances: Dance in America (1976), All Star Revue (1950) and Floor Show (1948). She died on 29 October 1994 in New Rochelle, New York, USA.1991
- Music Department
- Actor
- Soundtrack
Isaac Stern was born on 21 July 1920 in Kremenets/Krzemieniec, Ukrainian People's Republic [now Kremenets, Ternopil Oblast, Ukraine]. He was an actor, known for Fiddler on the Roof (1971), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and Humoresque (1946). He was married to Linda Reynolds, Vera Lindenblit and Nora Kaye. He died on 22 September 2001 in New York City, New York, USA.1991- Actress
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Marilyn Horne was born on 16 January 1934 in Bradford, Pennsylvania, USA. She is an actress, known for Strange Days (1995), Carmen Jones (1954) and Orlando furioso (1990). She was previously married to Henry Lewis and Nicola Zaccaria.1992- Allan Houser died on 22 August 1994 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.1992
- Actor
- Soundtrack
Widely regarded as the one of greatest stage and screen actors both in his native USA and internationally, James Earl Jones was born on January 17, 1931 in Arkabutla, Mississippi. At an early age, he started to take dramatic lessons to calm himself down. It appeared to work as he has since starred in many films over a 40-year period, beginning with the Stanley Kubrick classic Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). For several movie fans, he is probably best known for his role as Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy (due to his contribution for the voice of the role, as the man in the Darth Vader suit was David Prowse, whose voice was dubbed because of his British West Country accent). In his brilliant course of memorable performances, among others, he has also appeared on the animated series The Simpsons (1989) three times and played Mufasa both in The Lion King (1994) and The Lion King (2019), while he returned too as the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016).1992- Actress
- Soundtrack
Sarah Colley studied dramatics in Belmont College in Nashville, intending to be a serious actress, but while touring with an Atlanta company, she created the Minnie Pearl character that became her life's work. Her first Grand Old Opry appearance was on the radio show in 1940, followed by 27 years of touring. She was diagnosed with cancer in 1985, and recovered after a double mastectomy. A mild stroke in June 1991 forced her to give up performing.1992: Her medal was donated to the Grand Ole Opry Museum in Nashville, Tennessee where it is shown on display.- Producer
- Writer
Robert Saudek was born on 11 April 1911 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. He was a producer and writer, known for Profiles in Courage (1964), Omnibus (1952) and The Road to the Wall (1962). He was married to Elizabeth Koch. He died on 17 March 1997 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.1992- Music Department
- Actor
- Composer
Earl Scruggs was born on 6 January 1924 in near Shelby, North Carolina, USA. He was an actor and composer, known for Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Love Guru (2008) and Penguins of Madagascar (2014). He was married to Louise Scruggs. He died on 28 March 2012 in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.1992- Music Department
- Actor
- Writer
Billy Taylor was born on 24 July 1921 in Greenville, North Carolina, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for Mr. Church (2016), Film '72 (1971) and The World Unseen (2007). He was married to Theodora Taylor. He died on 28 December 2010 in New York City, New York, USA.1992- Robert Venturi was born on 25 June 1925 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He was married to Denise Scott Brown. He died on 18 September 2018 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.1992
- Denise Scott Brown was previously married to Robert Venturi and Robert Scott Brown.1992
- Director
- Producer
- Editor
Robert Earl Wise was born on September 10, 1914 in Winchester, Indiana, the youngest of three sons of Olive R. (Longenecker) and Earl Waldo Wise, a meat packer. His parents were both of Pennsylvania Dutch (German) descent. At age nineteen, the avid moviegoer came into the film business through an odd job at RKO Radio Pictures. A head sound effects editor at the studio recognized Wise's talent, and made Wise his protégé. Around 1941, Orson Welles was in need of an editor for Citizen Kane (1941), and Wise did a splendid job. Welles really liked his work and ideas. Wise started as a director with some B-movies, and his career went on quickly, and he made many classic movies. His last theatrical film, Rooftops (1989), proved that he was a filmmaker still in full command of his craft in his 80s. The carefully composed images, tight editing, and unflagging pace make one wish that Wise had not stayed away from the camera for very long. Robert Wise died of heart failure on September, 14, 2005, just four days after his 91st birthday.1992- Actor
- Music Department
- Director
Bandleader, songwriter ("Minnie the Moocher", "Are You Hep to That Jive?"), composer, singer, actor and author, educated at Crane College. While studying law, he sang with the band The Alabamians, and took over the group in 1928. He led The Missourians orchestra, then organized and led his own orchestra, playing at hotels, theaters and nightclubs throughout the US, and making many records. He joined the cast of the touring company of "Porgy and Bess", which performed across the USA and Europe between 1952 and 1954. When that ended, he founded a quartet. Joining ASCAP in 1942, he collaborated musically with Jack Palmer, Buck Ram, Andy Gibson, Clarence Gaskill, Irving Mills and Paul Mills . His other popular song compositions include "Lady With the Fan", "Zaz Zuh Zaz", "Chinese Rhythm", "Are You In Love With Me Again?", "That Man's Here Again", "Peck-A-Doodle-Doo", "I Like Music", "Rustle of Swing", "Three Swings and Out", "The Jumpin' Jive", "Boog It", "Come on with the Come-on", "Silly Old Moon", "Sunset", "Rhapsody in Rhumba", "Are You All Reet?", "Hi-De-Ho Man", "Levee Lullaby", "Let's Go, Joe", "Geechy Joe", and "Hot Air".1993- Music Artist
- Music Department
- Actor
A tragic fate may have given this visionary a heightened sensitivity, perception, awareness, even expansion to his obvious musical gifts that he may have never touched upon had he not suffered from his physical affliction. Whatever it was, Ray Charles revolutionized American music and was catapulted to legendary status by the time he died in Beverly Hills at age 73.
Born on September 23, 1930, to Aretha and Baily Robinson, an impoverished Albany, Georgia, family that moved to Greenville, Florida while he was still an infant. It was not a cause for joy and celebration. His father soon abandoned the family and his baby brother, George Robinson, drowned in a freak washtub accident. Ray himself developed glaucoma at the age of five and within two years had lost his sight completely. A singer in a Baptist choir, he developed a love and feel for rhythms and studied music at the State School for Deaf and Blind Children, showing which brought out his talent and ear for playing various instruments, including the piano and clarinet.
An orphan by his early teens, Ray joined a country band at age 16 called The Florida Playboys. He moved to Seattle in 1948 where he and Southern guitarist Gossady McGee formed the McSon Trio. With an emphasis on easy-styled jazz, Ray also played in bebop sessions on the sly. He departed from the McSon Trio and signed with Los Angeles-based Swing Time Records, becoming the pianist for rhythm and blues great Lowell Fulson and his band. Atlantic Records eventually picked him up. Along the road he would add composer, writer and arranger to his formidable list of talents.
Ray's first R&B hit was "Confession Blues" in Los Angeles in 1949. In 1951, he had his first solo chart buster with "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand". His amazing versatility and raw, soulful delivery quickly caught on with audiences and helped put Atlantic Records on the map. Hits like "Mess Around", "Things I Used to Do", "A Fool for You", "I've Got a Woman", "Drown in My Own Tears", and especially "What'd I Say" in 1959, pushed gospel and R&B to a wider crossover audience. He made a move into the country music arena--unheard of for a black singer--in the 1960s, doing soulful spins on Hank Williams and Eddy Arnold tunes. In 1960, he left Atlantic and signed with ABC-Paramount. Under ABC-Paramount, hits poured out during this peak time with "I Can't Stop Loving You", "Hit the Road Jack", "Busted" and his beloved signature song "Georgia On My Mind".
His landmark 1962 album "Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music" brought a new swinging style to country music. From there, he traveled a mainstream route--from interpreting songs from The Beatles ("Eleanor Rigby") to appearing in "Diet Pepsi" ads ("You Got the Right One, Baby, Uh-huh!"). He also showed up sporadically in films, playing himself in the movie Ballad in Blue (1965) and guest-starring in The Blues Brothers (1980) with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. A television musical variety favorite with his trademark dark sunglasses and dry humor, he worked alongside such musical legends as Ella Fitzgerald and Barbra Streisand on their very special evenings of song.
It is hard to believe that with everything he accomplished, Ray also had to deal with a longstanding heroin problem. In the mid-1960s, he was arrested for possession of heroin and marijuana and revealed that he had been addicted for nearly two decades. By 1965, he had completely recovered. The man who lived life on the edge was divorced twice and had 12 children both in and outside his marriages.
At the time of his death from liver disease on June 10, 2004, he was working on a recording project of duets with such performers as Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, B.B. King, Elton John and Norah Jones. This collaboration entitled "Genius Loves Company" led to an incisive win at the Grammy Awards--eight posthumous trophies including "Album of the Year" and "Record of the Year".
A few months after his death, the critically-acclaimed feature film biography Ray (2004) was released starring Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx.1993- Director
- Writer
- Additional Crew
Bess Hawes was born on 21 January 1921 in Austin, Texas, USA. She was a director and writer, known for Pizza Pizza Daddy-O (1967), Buckdancer (1965) and Say Old Man Can You Play the Fiddle (1970). She was married to Baldwin Hawes. She died on 27 November 2009 in Portland, Oregon, USA.- Actor
- Soundtrack
One of the Metropolitan Opera's most enduring and acclaimed baritones, Brooklyn-born Robert Merrill was born Moishe Miller on June 4, 1917 (some sources list 1919), the son of Polish émigrés. His father, Abraham, was a shoe salesman and mother Lillian was an operatic soprano who performed in concert before her marriage. His parents changed their last name to Miller upon their arrival in the United States.
Robert's mother was the one who encouraged and guided Robert during his early operatic training after an initially promising career as a semipro pitcher subsided. Overweight and unhappy as a child, he was further hampered by a stuttering problem that only went away when he sang. His first audition for the Metropolitan Opera in 1941 was not successful. He made ends meet by singing for bar mitzvahs and weddings.
Robert finally made his operatic debut in 1944 voicing the role of Amonasro in "Aida" in Trenton, New Jersey, then successfully joined the Met the following year, taking his first company bow in December as Germont in "La Traviata." Displaying an amazingly vigorous yet smooth and effortless baritone, other roles in his standard repertoire would include the title role in "Rigoletto," Figaro in "The Barber of Seville," "Tonio in "Pagliacci" and Escamillo in "Carmen." Robert was deemed one of the finest Giuseppe Verdi baritones of his generation.
Unlike most of his peers, Robert extended himself willingly into the radio, film, nightclub and TV arenas. He even performed in Vegas. A featured soloist on radio's RCA Victor Show in 1946, he abandoned the Met for a time to jump at a chance to co-star in a film. This led to a volatile falling out with the Met's general manager, Rudolf Bing. Harmlessly featured in the comedy western Senorita from the West (1945) starring Allan Jones, Robert's subsequent part in the innocuously-titled Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick (1952) with Dinah Shore and Alan Young (of Mister Ed (1961) fame), in which he played an on-the-lam crook, was an unmitigated disaster. Realizing his mistake, he returned quickly to the company after several public apologies to Mr. Bing. On TV, he made guest appearances on "Your Show of Shows," "The Jackie Gleason Show," "The Milton Berle Show," ""The Red Skelton Show" "Sonny and Cher." He also appeared in TV operatic productions of Don Carlo (1950) and Carmen (1952), as well as talk show and game show circuits.
Robert's first marriage to the Met's reigning soprano Roberta Peters lasted a dismal three months. They remained friends, however, and would perform together from time to time. They were both frequent guests on Ed Sullivan's variety show, The Ed Sullivan Show (1948), during the 1950s and 1960s. Two children were born from his second marriage to pianist Marion Machno. Robert continued to sing at the Met until 1976, performing sporadically after that as a recitalist. He died of natural causes in 2004 at age 87.1993- Writer
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Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York City, one of three children born to Augusta (nee Barnett) and Isidore Miller. His family was of Austrian Jewish descent. His father manufactured women's coats, but his business was devastated by the Depression, seeding his son's disillusionment with the American Dream and those blue-sky-seeking Americans who pursued it with both eyes focused on the Grail of Materialism. Due to his father's strained financial circumstances, Miller had to work for tuition money to attend the University of Michigan, where he wrote his first plays. They were successful, earning him numerous student awards, including the Avery Hopwood Award in Drama for "No Villain" in 1937.
The award was named after one of the most successful playwrights of the 1920s, who simultaneously had five hits on Broadway, the Neil Simon of his day. Now almost forgotten except for his contribution to Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Hopwood achieved a material success that the older Miller could not match, but he failed to capture the immortality that would be Miller's. Hopwood's suicide, on the beach of the Cote d'Azur, reportedly inspired Norman Maine's march into the southern California surf in A Star Is Born (1937).
Like Fitzgerald, Miller tasted success at a tender age. In 1938, upon graduating from Michigan, he received a Theatre Guild National Award and returned to New York, joining the Federal Theatre Project. He married his college girlfriend, Mary Grace Slattery, in 1940; they would have two children, Joan and Robert. In 1944, he made his Broadway debut with "The Man Who Had All the Luck", a flop that lasted only four performances. He went on to publish two books, "Situation Normal" (1944) and "Focus" (1945), but it was in 1947 that his star became ascendant. His play "All My Sons", directed by Elia Kazan, became a hit on Broadway, running for 328 performances. Both Miller and Kazan received Tony Awards, and Miller won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. It was a taste of what was to come.
Staged by Kazan, "Death of a Salesman" opened at the Morosco Theatre on February 10, 1949, and closed 742 performances later on Nov 18, 1950. The play was the sensation of the season, winning six Tony Awards, including Best Play and Best Author for Miller. Miller also was awarded the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play made lead actor Lee J. Cobb, as Willy Loman, an icon of the stage comparable to the Hamlet of John Barrymore: a synthesis of actor and role that created a legend that survives through the bends of time. A contemporary classic was recognized, though some critics complained that the play wasn't truly a tragedy, as Willy Loman was such a pathetic soul. Given his status, Loman's fall could not qualify as tragedy, as there was so little height from which to fall. Miller, a dedicated progressive and a man of integrity, never accepted that criticism. As Willy's wife Linda said at his funeral, "Attention must be paid", even to the little people.
In 1983, Miller himself directed a staging of "Salesman" in Chinese at the Beijing People's Art Theatre. He said that while the Chinese, then largely ignorant of capitalism, might not have understood Loman's career choice, they did have empathy for his desire to drink from the Grail of the American Dream. They understood this dream, which Miller characterizes as the desire "to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be loved, and above all, perhaps, to count." It is this desire to sup at the table of the great American Capitalists, even if one is just scrounging for crumbs, in a country of which President Calvin Coolidge said, "The business of America is business," this desire to be recognized, to be somebody, that so moves "Salesman" audiences, whether in New York, London or Beijing.
Miller never again attained the critical heights nor smash Broadway success of "Salesman," though he continued to write fine plays that were appreciated by critics and audiences alike for another two decades. Disenchanted with Kazan over his friendly testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the two parted company when Kazan refused to direct "The Crucible", Miller's parable of the witch hunts of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Defending her husband, Kazan's wife, Molly, told Miller that the play was disingenuous, as there were no real witches in Puritan Salem. It was a point Miller disagreed with, as it was a matter of perspective--the witches in Salem were real to those who believed in them. However, subsequent research has shown that the cursorily-researched (at best) play contains fictional motifs (regarding Goodman and Goodwife Putnam and their offspring), limited research, and carelessness in identifying (or not identifying, as with William Stoughton) the true authors of the witch trials. Directed by another Broadway legend, Jed Harris, the play ran for 197 performances and won Miller the 1953 Tony Award for Best Play. Miller had another success with "A View from the Bridge", a play about an incest-minded longshoreman written with overtones of classical Greek tragedy, which ran for 149 performances in the 1955-56 season.
It was in 1956 that Miller made his most fateful personal decision, when he divorced his first wife, Mary Slattery Miller, and married movie siren-cum-legend Marilyn Monroe. With this marriage Miller achieved a different type of fame, a pop culture status he abhorred. It was a marriage doomed to fail, as Monroe was, in Miller's words, "highly self-destructive". In his 1989 autobiography, "Timebends", Miller wrote that a marriage was a conspiracy to keep out the light. When one or more of the partners could no longer prevent the light from coming in and illuminating the other's faults, the marriage was doomed. In his own autobiography, "A Life", Kazan said that he could not understand the marriage. Monroe, who had slept with Kazan on a casual basis, as she did with many other Hollywood players, was the type of woman someone took as a mistress, not as a wife. Miller, however, was a man of principle. He was in love. "[A]ll my energy and attention were devoted to trying to help her solve her problems", Miller confessed to a French newspaper in 1992. "Unfortunately, I didn't have much success."
The conspiracy collapsed during the filming of The Misfits (1961) (1961), with John Huston shooting the original script Miller had written expressly for his wife. The genesis of the story had come to him while waiting out a divorce from his first wife Mary in Nevada. Monroe hated her character Roslyn, claiming Miller had made her out to be the dumb blond stereotype she so loathed and had been trying to escape. Withering in her criticism of Miller, and ultimately unfaithful to him, she and Miller separated. Norman Mailer, in his 1973 biography, "Marilyn", ridiculed Miller for not doing enough to help Monroe. Film critic Pauline Kael lambasted Mailer by imputing petty machismo and jealousy as the cause of his animus against Miller. Miller would later reunite with Kazan to launch the new Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, with the play "After the Fall", a fictionalization of his relationship with Monroe. "Fall" ran for 208 performances in repertory in 1964 and 1965 and won 1964 Tony Awards for Jason Robards and Kazan's future wife Barbara Loden, playing the Miller and Monroe stand-ins Quentin and Maggie. Miller's own "Incident at Vichy" played in repertory with "Fall" in the 1965 season, but lasted only 32 performances.
On June 1, 1957, Miller was found in contempt of Congress for refusing to name names of a literacy circle suspected of Communist Party affiliations. The State Department deprived him of his passport, and he became a left-wing cause célèbre. In 1967 Miller became President of P.E.N., an international literacy organization that campaigned for the rights of suppressed writers. He published a collection of short stories entitled "I Don't Need You Any More", that same year. Returning to the Morosco Theatre, the site of his greatest triumph, "The Price" was Miller's last unqualified hit in America, running for 429 performances between February 7, 1968 and February 15, 1969. Though Miller won a 1968 Tony Award for Best Play, the bulk of his success as an original playwright was over. The Price (1971) (a 1971 teleplay) was nominated for six Emmy awards, including Outstanding Single Program-Drama or Comedy, and won three, including Best Actor for George C. Scott, who would later win a 1976 Tony playing Willy Loman in a 1975 Broadway revival.
Miller never again achieved success on Broadway with an original play. In the 1980s, when he was hailed as the greatest living American playwright after the death of Tennessee Williams, he even had trouble getting full-scale revivals of his work staged. One of his more significant later works, "The American Clock", based on Studs Terkel's oral history of the Great Depression, "Hard Times", ran for only 11 previews and 12 performances in late 1980 at the Biltmore Theatre. Also in 1980, Miller courted controversy by backing the casting of the outspokenly anti-Zionist Vanessa Redgrave as a concentration-camp Jewess in his teleplay Playing for Time (1980), an adaptation of the memoir "The Musicians of Auschwitz". Despite the fallout in the United States for America's then-greatest living playwright, his works were popular in Great Britain, whose intellectual and theatrical communities treated him as a major figure in world literature. The universality of his work was highlighted with his own successful staging of "Death of a Salesman" in Beijing in 1983.
"Death of a Salesman" has become a standard warhorse, now revived each decade on Broadway, and internationally. In addition to George C. Scott and Lee J. Cobb (who received an Emmy nomination for the 1966 teleplay; Miller himself received a Special Citation from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for the production), Dustin Hoffman and Brian Dennehy have garnered kudos for playing Willie Loman. The 1984 Broadway revival of "Salesman" won a Tony for best Reproduction and helped revive Miller's domestic reputation, while Volker Schlöndorff's 1985 film (Death of a Salesman (1985)) of the production won 10 Emmy nominations, including one for Miller as executive producer of the Outstanding Drama/Comedy Special. Hoffman won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for playing Willy Loman. The 1999 revival won four Tonys, including Dennehy for Best Actor, and ran for 274 performances at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. Arthur Miller died in Roxbury, Connecticut in 2005, aged 89. He had been suffering from cancer, pneumonia and a heart condition.
Miller based his works on American history, his own life, and his observations of the American scene. His stature is traditionally based on his perceived refusal to avoid moral and social issues in his writing. His willingness to fight for what he believed in his chosen art form made him a literary icon whose name will live on in world letters.1993- Actor
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In 1946 and 1947 Robert Rauschenberg studied at the Kansas City Art Institute. He then left America and moved to Paris. There he continued his art studies at the Académie Julian in 1947. The following year he returned to America and attended Black Mountain College until 1949. There he was a student of the German-American painter and designer Josef Albers. He also studied at the Art Student's League with the American painter and art writer Robert Motherwell, the Polish-born painter Jack Tworkov and the American painter Franz Kline.
Rauschenberg was inspired by the Dadaist works of the German painter, sculptor and poet Kurt Schwitters, by the ready-mades of the French artist Marcel Duchamp and by the style of the American composer John Cage; This resulted in "white" and "black" pictures in the first half of the 1950s. Rauschenberg then made his collages in an expressionist painting style, which he combined with textile materials or photographs. Already in these works the connection to his later Combine Paintings was clearly noticeable. In the mid-1950s, Rauschenberg made his debut with the first works of this kind - he combined his expressionist paintings with everyday objects from mass production such as radios, clocks, bottles and light bulbs.
In this connection, the three-dimensional objects appeared alienating and strange. His best-known work, "Monogram", comes from a series made between 1955 and 1959 and depicts a ram with a car tire. These works had a strong influence on the pop art movement of the 1960s. With his three-dimensional works of art, Rauschenberg helped a new realism to break through against the prevailing Abstract Expressionism. Especially through his use of images of personalities in American life such as John F. Kennedy in the work "Retroactive I" (1964), Rauschenberg intended to bring art closer to reality. At the beginning of the 1960s, Rauschenberg tried his hand at screen printing black and white series images.
Then he put on some multimedia shows in collaboration with John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. The artist's aim was to expand the existing possibilities of traditional art forms. In the 1970s and 1980s, Robert Rauschenberg returned to the collage technique and also produced lithographs and other graphics. For example, in the early 1970s he created cardboard wall works using packing boxes and returned to a more abstract formal language. In 1981 he created the work "Rauschenberg Photographs", a work with photographs on which he concentrated during this time. From 1985 to 1991, Rauschenberg went on the exhibition tour "ROCI" - "Rauschenberg Oversaes Culture Interchange", which took him through international countries.
In 1993 he received the USA National Medal of Art. A major Rauschenberg retrospective followed from September 1997 to March 1999, which was shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Menil Collection, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa. A large solo exhibition followed from December 2005 to May 2007, which was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Musée national d'art moderne, Center Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm was shown.1993- Director
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Lloyd Richards was born on 29 June 1919 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was a director and actor, known for American Playhouse (1980), The Wide World of Mystery (1973) and The Piano Lesson (1995). He was married to Barbara Davenport. He died on 29 June 2006 in New York City, New York, USA.1993- William Styron was born on 11 June 1925 in Newport News, Virginia, USA. He was a writer, known for Sophie's Choice (1982), Lie Down in Darkness and Playhouse 90 (1956). He was married to Rose Burgunder. He died on 1 November 2006 in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, USA.1993
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Paul Taylor was born on 29 July 1930 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. He is known for Great Performances: Dance in America (1976), The Wrecker's Ball: Three Dances by Paul Taylor (1996) and Singer Presents Burt Bacharach (1971). He died on 29 August 2018 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.1993- Writer
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Originally planning to become a lawyer, Billy Wilder abandoned that career in favor of working as a reporter for a Viennese newspaper, using this experience to move to Berlin, where he worked for the city's largest tabloid. He broke into films as a screenwriter in 1929 and wrote scripts for many German films until Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. Wilder immediately realized his Jewish ancestry would cause problems, so he emigrated to Paris, then the US. Although he spoke no English when he arrived in Hollywood, Wilder was a fast learner and thanks to contacts such as Peter Lorre (with whom he shared an apartment), he was able to break into American films. His partnership with Charles Brackett started in 1938 and the team was responsible for writing some of Hollywood's classic comedies, including Ninotchka (1939) and Ball of Fire (1941). The partnership expanded into a producer-director one in 1942, with Brackett producing and the two turned out such classics as Five Graves to Cairo (1943), The Lost Weekend (1945) (Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay) and Sunset Blvd. (1950) (Oscars for Best Screenplay), after which the partnership dissolved. (Wilder had already made one film, Double Indemnity (1944) without Brackett, as the latter had refused to work on a film he felt dealt with such disreputable characters.) Wilder's subsequent self-produced films would become more caustic and cynical, notably Ace in the Hole (1951), though he also produced such sublime comedies as Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960) (which won him Best Picture and Director Oscars). He retired in 1981.1993- Music Artist
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Harold George Belafonte was born on March 1, 1927 in New York City. He was educated at the New York Dramatic Workshop. He grew up in Jamaica, British West Indies, and did folk-singing in nightclubs and theaters, and on television and records. His debut was at the Village Vanguard in New York. Also, he appeared in the Broadway revues "John Murray Anderson's Almanac" and "Three for Tonight". He owns his own music publishing firm and film production company. He won a Tony Award in 1953, a Donaldson Award in 1953-1954, a Show Business Award in 1954, a Diners' Club Award in 1955-1956, and an Emmy Award for "Tonight with Belafonte". He has made many records. Joining the ASCAP in 1960, his popular-music compositions include "Turn Around", "Shake That Little Foot" and "Glory Manger".1994- Composer
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Dave Brubeck was born on 6 December 1920 in Concord, California, USA. He was a composer and actor, known for Inland Empire (2006), Baby Driver (2017) and Constantine (2005). He was married to Iola Brubeck. He died on 5 December 2012 in Norwalk, Connecticut, USA.1994- Music Artist
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Celia Cruz was born on 21 October 1925 in Havana, Cuba. She was a music artist and actress, known for Carlito's Way (1993), Amores Perros (2000) and Tower Heist (2011). She was married to Pedro Knight. She died on 16 July 2003 in Fort Lee, New Jersey, USA.1994- Dorothy Delay was born on 31 March 1917 in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, USA. She was married to Edward Newhouse. She died on 24 March 2002 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.1994
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One of the finest classical and contemporary leading ladies ever to grace the 20th century American stage, five-time Tony Award winner Julie Harris was rather remote and reserved on camera, finding her true glow in front of the theatre lights. The freckled, red-haired actress not only was nominated for a whopping total of ten Tony awards and was a Sarah Siddons Award recipient for her work on the Chicago stage, she also earned awards in other areas of the entertainment industry, including three Emmys (of 11 nominations), a Grammy and an Academy Award nomination. (Note: Harris would hold the record for the most competitive Tony performance wins (five) for a couple of decades. Angela Lansbury finally caught up with her in 2009 and singer/actress Audra McDonald surpassed them both in 2014 with six). While Harris certainly lacked the buoyancy and glamor usually associated with being a movie star, she certainly made an impact in the early to mid 1950s with three iconic leading roles, two of which she resurrected from the Broadway stage. After that she pretty much deserted film.
Born Julie Ann Harris on December 2, 1925, in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, she was the daughter of William Pickett, an investment banker, and Elsie L. (née Smith) Harris, a nurse. Graduating from Grosse Pointe Country Day School, an early interest in the performance arts was encouraged by her family. Moving to New York City, Julie attended The Hewitt School and later trained as a teenager at the Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School & Camp in Colorado. A mentor there, Charlotte Perry, saw great hope for young Julie and was insistent that her protégé study at the Yale School of Drama. Julie did just that -- for about a year.
Also trained at the New York School of Drama and one of the earliest members of the Acting Studio, young Julie made her Broadway debut in 1945 at age 19 in the comedy "It's a Gift". Despite its lukewarm reception, the demure, diminutive (5'3"), and delicate-looking thespian moved on. She apprenticed on Broadway for the next few years with ensemble parts in "King Henry IV, Part II" (1946), "Oedipus Rex" (1946), "The Playboy of the Western World" (1946), "Alice in Wonderland" (as the White Rabbit) (1947), and Macbeth" (1948).
More prominent roles came her way in such short-lived Broadway plays as "Sundown Beach" (1948), "The Young and Fair" (1948), "Magnolia Alley" (1949) and "Montserrat (1949). This led to her star-making theatre role at age 24 as sensitive 12-year-old tomboy Frankie Addams in the classic drama "The Member of the Wedding" (1950) opposite veteran actress Ethel Waters and based on the Carson McCullers novel. The play ran for over a year. The Member of the Wedding (1952) would eventually be transferred to film and, despite being untried talents on film, director Fred Zinnemann wisely included both Harris and young Brandon De Wilde (as young John Henry) to reenact their stage triumphs along with Ms. Waters. Harris, at 27, received her first and only Academy Award nomination as the coming-of-age Georgian tomboy.
It wasn't long before Julie's exceptional range and power won noticed nationwide. In 1952, she received her first "Best Actress" Tony Award for creating the larger-than-life role of Sally Bowles in "I Am a Camera," the stage version of one of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin stories ("Goodbye to Berlin" (1939). (Note: In the 1960s, Isherwood's play would be transformed successfully into the Broadway musical "Cabaret".) Harris again was invited to repeat her stage role in I Am a Camera (1955) with Laurence Harvey and Shelley Winters, winning the BAFTA "Best Foreign Actress" Award. That same year Harris starred opposite the highly emotive James Dean (she had top billing) as his love interest in the classic film East of Eden (1955), directed by Elia Kazan from the John Steinbeck novel. Strangely, Julie's brilliance in the role of Abra was completely overlooked come Oscar time...a terrible miscarriage of justice in this author's view.
After this vivid film exposure, Julie's love for the theatre completely dominated her career focus. She continued to increase her Broadway prestige with such plays as "Mademoiselle Colombe" (title role) (1954), "The Lark" (Tony Award: as Joan of Arc) (1955), "The Country Wife" (1957), "The Warm Peninsula" (1959), "Little Moon Over Alban" (1960) (which she took to Emmy-winning TV), "A Shot in the Dark" (1961), "Ready When Your Are, C.B.!" (1964), "Skyscraper" (1965), "Forty Carats" (Tony Award) (1968), "And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little" ) (1971), "The Au Pair Man" (1973) and "In Praise of Love" (1974). In between she gave stellar performances on TV with her Joan of Arc in The Lark (1957); title role in Johnny Belinda (1958); Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House (1959); Catherine Sloper in The Heiress (1961); title role in Victoria Regina (1961) (for which received an Emmy award); Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion (1963), and title role in Anastasia (1967).Be
In later years Harris reaped praises and honors for her awe-inspiring one-woman touring shows based on the lives of certain distaff historical figureheads. Her magnificently tormented, Tony-winning "First Lady" Mary Lincoln in "The Last of Mrs. Lincoln" (1972) was the first to be seen on stage and TV, followed by another Tony (and Grammy) Award-winning performance as poetess Emily Dickinson in "The Belle of Amherst" (1976) (directed by close friend Charles Nelson Reilly, as well as her early 1980s solo portrait of author Charlotte Brontë in "Bronte," which started out as a radio play. Julie was now placed among the theatre's luminous "ruling class" alongside legendary veterans Helen Hayes, Katharine Cornell and Judith Anderson.
As time wore on, Harris would become equally respected on film and TV for her portrayals of over-the-edge neurotics, wallflowers and eccentric maiden aunt types as witnessed by her co-starring roles in the films The Haunting (1963), Hamlet (1964) (as Ophelia), Harper (1966), You're a Big Boy Now (1966), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), The Bell Jar (1979), and the TV-movies How Awful About Allan (1970) and Home for the Holidays (1972). Perhaps a step down performance wise, the veteran actress, after a period of ill health, became a household name with her regular series work as Lilimae on the TV soap Knots Landing (1979).
At age 60, Harris continued to impress on Broadway with her 1990's versions of Amanda Wingfield in "The Glass Menagerie" and Fonsia Dorsey in "The Gin Game" for which she received her tenth and final Tony nomination. She also toured successfully with a production of "Lettice and Lovage". Unlike many other actors whose film roles disintegrated with appearances in bottom-of-the-barrel lowbudgets, Julie's final two supporting films roles were in two nicely constructed period romantic comedies -- The Golden Boys (2008) and The Lightkeepers (2009).
Ill health dogged Julie's later years (she battled breast cancer in 1981 and suffered two strokes -- one in 2001 (while performing in the Chicago play "Fossils") and again in 2010). Nevertheless, she continued to work almost until the end, including narrating five historical documentaries and giving Emmy-winning voice to such women suffragettes as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Married and divorced three times, Julie had one son by her second marriage -- Peter, who became a theatre critic. She also spent time enjoying the benefits of receiving special awards and honors for her full body of work. Among these, she was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1979, was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1994, received a "Special Lifetime Achievement" Tony Award in 2002 and was a 2005 Kennedy Center honoree.
Harris died on August 24, 2013, of congestive heart failure at her home in West Chatham, Massachusetts. She was 87.1994- Erick Hawkins was born on 23 April 1909 in Trinidad, Colorado, USA. He was an actor, known for Appalachian Spring (1944), Galaxie (1966) and American Masters (1985). He died on 23 November 1994 in New York, USA.1994
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Eugene Curran Kelly was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the third son of Harriet Catherine (Curran) and James Patrick Joseph Kelly, a phonograph salesman. His father was of Irish descent and his mother was of Irish and German ancestry.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the largest and most powerful studio in Hollywood when Gene Kelly arrived in town in 1941. He came direct from the hit 1940 original Broadway production of "Pal Joey" and planned to return to the Broadway stage after making the one film required by his contract. His first picture for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was For Me and My Gal (1942) with Judy Garland. What kept Kelly in Hollywood were "the kindred creative spirits" he found behind the scenes at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The talent pool was especially large during World War II, when Hollywood was a refuge for many musicians and others in the performing arts of Europe who were forced to flee the Nazis. After the war, a new generation was coming of age. Those who saw An American in Paris (1951) would try to make real life as romantic as the reel life they saw portrayed in that musical, and the first time they saw Paris, they were seeing again in memory the seventeen-minute ballet sequence set to the title song written by George Gershwin and choreographed by Kelly. The sequence cost a half million dollars (U.S.) to make in 1951 dollars. Another Kelly musical of the era, Singin' in the Rain (1952), was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for its National Film Registry. Kelly was in the same league as Fred Astaire, but instead of a top hat and tails Kelly wore work clothes that went with his masculine, athletic dance style.
Gene Kelly died at age 83 of complications from two strokes on February 2, 1996 in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California.1994- Composer
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Sixteen-year-old Pete Seeger enrolled at the Avon Old Farms School in Connecticut and then decided to become a hermit. His life since then has been one social cause after another, buoyed by an almost indefatigable career as a self-described "sing-along leader."
During the 1930s he attended Harvard, from which his musicologist father Charles Seeger (a member of the Industrial Workers of the World and a conscientious objector during World War I) had graduated in 1908. As an alternative to his major, Sociology (which he disliked), he played tenor banjo (failing to make the Harvard Jazz Band) and participated in the pacifist/communist Harvard Student Union so much that he lost his scholarship, leaving Harvard in 1938. In 1939 actor/folksinger 'Will Geer' organized the "All-American Left-Wing Folk-Song Revival Movement," a benefit concert for migrant workers in California. It was there that Pete met Woody Guthrie and began touring with him. In 1940 Seeger started the Almanac Singers with Lee Hays, Pete Hawes and Millard Lampell; during his tours with this pro-union, anti-war group the FBI began a file on him. The group broke up at the start of World War II (Seeger enlisted in the army; Guthrie entered the Merchant Marine). After the war he started People's Songs (later Sing Out!), and in 1949 formed a new group, The Weavers, with Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman and Ronnie Gilbert'. For years he had trouble with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and was, effectively, blacklisted. He recorded dozens of albums (Columbia, Folkways) and wrote thousands of songs, among which are "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," "If I Had a Hammer," and "Turn, Turn, Turn" (which in the 1960s became a huge hit for The Byrds). He helped start the Greenwich Village music magazine Broadside in the 1960s and reorganized the Newport Folk Festival. In 1996 the North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance awarded him its first Lifetime Achievement Award. He helped start Clearwater, an organization which sails a 106-foot boat along the Hudson River to show children the dangers of pollution.1994- Wayne Thiebaud was born on 15 November 1920 in Mesa, Arizona, USA. He was married to Betty Jean Carr and Patricia Patterson. He died on 25 December 2021 in Sacramento, California, USA.1994
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Richard Wilbur was born on 1 March 1921 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), Great Performances (1971) and Candide. He was married to Mary Charlotte Hayes Ward. He died on 14 October 2017 in Belmont, Massachusetts, USA.1994- Actress
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Licia Albanese was born on 23 July 1909 in Bari, Apulia, Italy. She was an actress, known for Otello (1948), Serenade (1956) and Great Performances (1971). She was married to Joseph A. Gimma. She died on 15 August 2014 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.1995