Birthdays: December 18
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- Music Artist
- Composer
- Actress
Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell is an American musician, singer and actress from Los Angeles. She performed hit songs such as "Bad Guy" and "No Time to Die," which was used in the James Bond film of the same name. She provided ADR for Ramona and Beezus, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules and X-Men: Apocalypse.- Director
- Writer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Alan Rudolph was born on 18 December 1943 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He is a director and writer, known for Trouble in Mind (1985), Choose Me (1984) and Afterglow (1997). He is married to Joyce Rudolph.- Music Artist
- Actor
- Composer
Alejandro Sanz was born on 18 December 1968 in Madrid, Madrid, Spain. He is a music artist and actor, known for Common Wealth (2000), El verano que vivimos (2020) and Shakira Feat. Alejandro Sanz: La tortura (2005). He has been married to Raquel Perera since May 2012. He was previously married to Jaydy Michel.- Actress
- Producer
Alex Sgambati was raised between New York, North Carolina, and California. She is of Greek and Italian descent; her mother is a Greek immigrant who came to the United States through Belgium. Sgambati is an actress and producer whose work spans theater, television, and film, with a particular focus on female-driven storytelling.- Allan Kayser was born on 18 December 1963 in Littleton, Colorado, USA. He is an actor, known for Night of the Creeps (1986), Mama's Family (1983) and House of Forbidden Secrets (2013). He has been married to Sara Kayser since 23 August 2014. They have two children. He was previously married to Lori Kayser.
- Amy Grabow was born on 18 December 1979 in Huntington Beach, California, USA. She is an actress, known for General Hospital (1963), Though None Go with Me (2006) and Supernatural (2005). She is married to Dale Allen Freeman. They have two children.
- Writer
- Director
- Producer
André S. Labarthe was born on 18 December 1931 in Oloron-Sainte-Marie, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France. He was a writer and director, known for Vivre sa vie (1962), Vincent van Gogh à Paris: Repérages (1988) and Vive le cinéma! (1972). He died on 5 March 2018 in Paris, France.- Music Department
- Actress
- Director
Angie Stone was born on 18 December 1961 in Columbia, South Carolina, USA. She is an actress and director, known for The Hot Chick (2002), Ride Along (2014) and The Fighting Temptations (2003).- Ania Sowinski was born on 18 December 1979 in London, England, UK. She is an actress, known for Men in Black: International (2019), Eddie the Eagle (2015) and Holby Blue (2007).
- Producer
- Actress
- Writer
Ann Serrano Lopez was born on 18 December 1960 in Hartford, Connecticut, USA. She is a producer and actress, known for Arrested Development (2003), George Lopez (2002) and Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000). She was previously married to George Lopez.- Anna Walton was born on 18 December 1980 in London, England, UK. She is an actress, known for Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), Mutant Chronicles (2008) and Vampire Diary (2006).
- Annazette Chase was born on 18 December 1941 in Los Angeles, California, USA. She is an actress, known for Truck Turner (1974), The Toy (1982) and The Greatest (1977).
- Arantxa Sánchez Vicario is a Spanish former world No. 1 retired tennis player. She won 14 Grand Slam titles: four in singles, six in women's doubles, and four in mixed doubles. In 1994, she was crowned the ITF World Champion for the year.
Arantxa Sánchez Vicario started playing tennis at the age of four, when she followed her older brothers Emilio Sánchez and Javier Sánchez (both of whom became professional players) to the court and hit balls against the wall with her first racquet. As a 17-year-old, she became the youngest winner of the women's singles title at the 1989 French Open, defeating World No. 1 Steffi Graf in the final.
She won six women's doubles Grand Slam titles, including the US Open in 1993 (with Helena Suková) and Wimbledon in 1995 (with Jana Novotna). She also won four Grand Slam mixed doubles titles. In 1991, she helped Spain win its first-ever Fed Cup title, and helped Spain win the Fed Cup in 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1998. Sánchez Vicario holds the records for the most matches won by a player in Fed Cup competition (72) and for most ties played (58).
Sánchez Vicario was a member of the Spanish teams that won the Hopman Cup in 1990 and 2002.
Over the course of her career, Sánchez Vicario won 29 singles titles and 69 doubles titles before retiring in November 2002. She came out of retirement in 2004 to play doubles in a few select tournaments as well as the Athens 2004: Games of the XXVIII Olympiad (2004), where she became the only tennis player to play in five Olympics in the Games history. Sanchez Vicario is the most decorated Olympian in Spanish history with four medals - two silver and two bronze.
In 2007, she was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. She was only the third Spanish player (and the first Spanish woman) to be inducted. - Actress
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Ashley Victoria Benson was born on December 18, 1989 in Anaheim Hills, California, to Shannon (Harte) and Jeff Benson. She has Irish, English, and German ancestry. She has been dancing competitively since she was 2 with hip hop, jazz, ballet, tap and lyrical. She has been singing since she was about 5 and she hopes to pursue that, along with her acting. Ashley started modeling at the age of 5 for dance catalogs. Ashley was then pursued by The Ford Modeling Agency at the age of 8. She worked steadily in print and is still with the Agency. At the age of 10, she wanted to pursue acting. Ashley went on to do 35 commercials, and then on to theatrical roles. Acting was now Ashley's passion. Ashley put all her focus into acting, which left little time for modeling and dancing, anymore. Ashley's most recent role is "Hanna Marin" on ABC Family's Pretty Little Liars (2010). Ashley also had a cameo in Romeo Miller (aka Lil Romeo) and Solange's music video for the song "True Love". She did a photo shoot with Britney Spears for Vogue Magazine. She is in NLT's music video, "That Girl".- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
Baron Vaughn was born on 18 December 1980 in Portales, New Mexico, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for Grace and Frankie (2015), Mystery Science Theater 3000 (2017) and The New Negroes (2019).- Actor
- Sound Department
- Additional Crew
Beau Billingslea was born on 18 December 1944 in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. He is an actor, known for Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998), The Blob (1988) and Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001). He is married to Cecelia Marie Thompson. They have two children.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Elizabeth Ruth Grable was born on December 18, 1916 in St. Louis, Missouri, to Lillian Rose (Hofmann) and John Conn Grable, a stockbroker. She had German, English, Irish, and Dutch ancestry. Her mother was a stubborn and materialistic woman determined to make her daughter a star. Elizabeth, who later became Betty, was enrolled in Clark's Dancing School at the age of three. With her mother's guidance, Betty studied ballet and tap dancing.
Betty and her mother set out for California with the hopes of stardom. She attended the Hollywood Professional school but Lillian lied about her daughter's age and Betty (real age 13), landed several minor parts as a chorus girl in early musicals (Whoopee! (1930), New Movietone Follies of 1930 (1930), Happy Days (1929) and Let's Go Places (1930)), initially billed as 'Frances Dean'. In 1932 (real age 15), she signed with RKO Radio Pictures and began to use the moniker 'Betty Grable'. The bit parts continued for the next three years. Betty finally landed a substantial part in By Your Leave (1934). One of her big roles was in College Swing (1938). Unfortunately, the public did not seem to take notice.
The following year, she married former child star Jackie Coogan. They briefly toured on vaudeville and his success boosted hers, but they divorced in 1940. When she landed the role of Glenda Crawford in Down Argentine Way (1940), the public finally took notice of this shining bright star. Stardom came in such comedies as Coney Island (1943) and Sweet Rosie O'Grady (1943).
The public was enchanted with Betty. Her famous pin-up pose during World War II adorned barracks all around the world. With that pin-up and as the star of lavish musicals, Betty became the highest-paid star in Hollywood. After the war, her star continued to rise. In 1947, the United States Treasury Department noted that she was the highest paid star in America, earning about $300,000 a year - a phenomenal sum even by today's standards. Later, 20th Century-Fox, who had her under contract, insured her legs with Lloyds of London for a million dollars. She continued to be popular until the mid-1950s, when musicals went into a decline. Her last film was How to Be Very, Very Popular (1955).
She then concentrated on Broadway and nightclubs. In 1965, she divorced band leader Harry James, whom she had wed in 1943. Her life was an active one, devoid of the scandals that plagued many stars in one way or another. She cared more for her family than stardom.
Betty Grable died at age 56 of lung cancer on July 2, 1973 in Santa Monica, California, five days before Veronica Lake's death. She was interred at Inglewood Park Cemetery.- Bill Duggan is known for Nash Bridges (1996), The Shield (2002) and Courts mais GAY: Tome 12 (2006).
- Bill Zuckert was born on 18 December 1915 in The Bronx, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994) and Star Trek (1966). He was married to Gladys Holland and Margaret Lottie Wallace. He died on 23 January 1997 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Bobby Barber was born on 18 December 1894 in New York City, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for Adventures of Superman (1952), The Abbott and Costello Show (1952) and Time to Expire (1929). He was married to Maxine. He died on 24 May 1976 in Seal Beach, California, USA.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Bobby Keys was born on 18 December 1943 in Lubbock, Texas, USA. He was an actor, known for Son of Dracula (1973), The Rolling Stones: Bridges to Buenos Aires (2019) and The Rolling Stones: Voodoo Lounge Live at the Tokyo Dome 1995 (1995). He was married to Holly. He died on 2 December 2014 in Franklin, Tennessee, USA.- Actor
- Director
Boy Olmi was born on 18 December 1955 in Buenos Aires City, Distrito Federal, Argentina. He is an actor and director, known for Sangre del Pacífico (2008), Rebelde Way (2002) and Casa natal (1998). He has been married to Carola Reyna since 1994. They have two children.- Producer
- Actor
- Executive
William Bradley "Brad" Pitt was born on December 18, 1963 in Shawnee, Oklahoma and raised in Springfield, Missouri to Jane Etta Pitt (née Hillhouse), a school counselor & William Alvin "Bill" Pitt, a truck company manager. At Kickapoo High School, Pitt was involved in sports, debating, student government and school musicals. Pitt attended the University of Missouri, where he majored in journalism with a focus on advertising. He occasionally acted in fraternity shows. He left college two credits short of graduating to move to California. Before he became successful at acting, Pitt supported himself by driving strippers in limos, moving refrigerators and dressing as a giant chicken while working for El Pollo Loco.
Pitt's earliest credited roles were in television, starting on the daytime soap opera Another World (1964) before appearing in the recurring role of Randy on the legendary prime time soap opera Dallas (1978). Following a string of guest appearances on various television series through the 1980s, Pitt gained widespread attention with a small part in Thelma & Louise (1991), in which he played a sexy criminal who romanced and conned Geena Davis. This led to starring roles in badly received films such as Johnny Suede (1991) & Cool World (1992).
But Pitt's career hit an upswing with his casting in A River Runs Through It (1992), which cemented his status as an multi-layered actor as opposed to just a pretty face. Pitt's subsequent projects were as quirky and varied in tone as his performances, ranging from his unforgettably comic cameo as stoner roommate Floyd in True Romance (1993) to romantic roles in such visually lavish films as Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994) and Legends of the Fall (1994), to an emotionally tortured detective in the horror-thriller Se7en (1995). His portrayal of frenetic oddball Jeffrey Goines in 12 Monkeys (1995) won him a Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role.
Pitt's portrayal of Achilles in the big-budget period drama Troy (2004) helped establish his appeal as an action star and was closely followed by a co-starring role in the stylish spy-versus-spy flick Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005). It was on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith that Pitt, who married Jennifer Aniston in a highly publicized ceremony in 2000, met Angelina Jolie. Pitt left Aniston for Jolie in 2005, a break-up that continues to fuel tabloid stories years after its occurrence.
He continues to wildly vary his film choices, appearing in everything from high-concept popcorn flicks such as Megamind (2010) to adventurous critic-bait like Inglourious Basterds (2009) and The Tree of Life (2011). He has received two Best Actor Oscar nominations, for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) and Moneyball (2011). In 2014, he starred in the war film Fury (2014), opposite Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Jon Bernthal, and Michael Peña.
Pitt and Jolie have 6 children, 3 adopted & 3 biological.- Actress
- Music Department
- Composer
Bridgit Claire Mendler was born in Washington DC, and lived there until she was eight years old. Her family moved to the west coast, just outside of San Francisco, California. This is when she first expressed an interest in acting and began booking local jobs. In 2004, she landed her first role in the animated film, The Legend of Buddha (2004), as "Lucy". When she was 13, she landed her first acting role, as a guest star on General Hospital (1963). In 2008, she landed a role, as "Kristen Gregory", in the film, The Clique (2008). In 2009, Mendler became a recurring character on the Disney channel sitcom, Wizards of Waverly Place (2007), as "Juliet Van Heusen", until the series finale in 2012. Also in 2009, Mendler auditioned for the role of "Sonny Monroe" in Sonny with a Chance (2009). But the part was won by Demi Lovato. In 2010, Mendler won the role of "Teddy Duncan" on Good Luck Charlie (2010). In 2011, she starred as "Olivia White", the lead role in the Disney Channel original movie, Lemonade Mouth (2011). Also in 2011, Mendler had the role of "Appoline" in the film, Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2 (2011). Mendler later co-wrote and sang the Disney's "Friends for Change Games" anthem, called "We Can Change the World". In 2012, she guest-starred on the television series, House (2004), as "Callie Rogers". She later voiced the lead role of "Arrietty" in The Secret World of Arrietty (2010). Mendler's debut album, "Hello, My Name Is...", was released on October 22, 2012, by Hollywood Records. On February 12, 2013, her second single, "Hurricane", was released for radio airplay. The song peaked at number 1 Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100, in United States, and sold over 300,000 digital copies.- Actress
- Costume and Wardrobe Department
Bridie Carter was born on December 18th in Melbourne, Australia and is the oldest of three children - she has two younger brothers.
Bridie has been nominated for the TV Week Logie Awards three times. In 2003 she was nominated for a Silver Logie For Most Popular Actress, this award is voted for by the public. In 2004 she was nominated for the Silver Logie for Most Outstanding Actress which is awarded from within the industry as well as scoring another nomination for Most Popular Actress.
In early May of 2004 Bridie married Michael Wilson. Their wedding was covered by Australian magazine Woman's Day and appeared in the May 17th issue. The couple reside in Byron Bay, Sydney.- Lovely, radiant, enticing, and charismatic blonde Candice Rialson was perhaps the most dynamic and personable actress to appear in enjoyably trashy drive-in pictures throughout the 1970's. Rialson was born on December 18, 1951 in Santa Monica, California and grew up in Orange County, California. She was crowned Miss Hermosa Beach at age 18. After making her film debut in an uncredited bit as a bikini-clad beauty on the beach in The Gay Deceivers (1969), the pert 'n' perky Candice enlivened a bunch of choice down 'n' dirty exploitation features: She was a naive, innocent hitchhiker who runs afoul of kinky perverts in the bizarre Pets (1973), one of Gloria Grahame's slutty daughters in the sleazy Mama's Dirty Girls (1974), a hapless lass with a talking and singing vagina (!) in the outrageously bawdy Chatterbox! (1977), a small-town tramp in the immensely entertaining Moonshine County Express (1977), and a stuck-up starlet in the nifty Stunts (1977). Following her winningly easy 'n' breezy turns in the amiably silly soft-core comedies Candy Stripe Nurses (1974) and Summer School Teachers (1975) for legendary B-movie filmmaker Roger Corman, Candice expertly essayed her best, most substantial, and appealing role as "Candy Wednesday", a bubbly aspiring actress who winds up working for the chintzy schlock movie studio "Miracle Pictures" ("If it's a good film, then it's a Miracle") in the very clever and hilarious junk film parody Hollywood Boulevard (1976). Moreover, Rialson also had bit parts in the mainstream features The Eiger Sanction (1975), Logan's Run (1976) and Silent Movie (1976) and made guest appearances on the TV shows Maude (1972), Shaft (1973), Switch (1975), Adam's Rib (1973), and Fantasy Island (1977).
After doing yet another minor part as a nurse playing with a rake in Winter Kills (1979), Candice Rialson voluntarily quit acting at the end of the 1970's, got married, settled down in Studio City, California, and had one child. However, she remained a cult favorite of 1970's exploitation film fans. Quentin Tarantino, in particular, was such a strong admirer of Rialson's work that he reportedly patterned the Bridget Fonda character in Jackie Brown (1997) after her. Candice Rialson passed away at age 54 from liver disease on March 31, 2006. She is much loved and missed by her many fans the world over. - Actor
- Producer
- Director
Casper Van Dien's breakthrough role was as the lead in Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi film Starship Troopers (1997). Still one of the most talked about films of 1997 that has one of the largest cult followings in film history. He was also in Tim Burton's critically acclaimed film Sleepy Hollow (1999), as Brom Van Brunt. He was the 20th Tarzan and the only one to ever film in Africa and ride an African elephant in the Warner Bros. film Tarzan and the Lost City (1998).
Other film credits include The Pact (2012), which was well received at Sundance. Casper played a down and out alcoholic detective opposite Caity Lotz. A Post Apocalyptic survivor in Beyond The Wave (2015) shot entirely in China. Starring opposite Sean Maher as part of a two man crew on a mission to the end of the universe in the much anticipated independent film ISRA 88 (2016) .
Television credits include "Monk" (2008) Playing a Navy Doctor for the season finale, and "Beverly Hills, 90210" (1994).
Casper has tackled the web recently playing Johnny Cage in the insanely popular Machinima web-series "Mortal Kombat Legacy" seasons 2 and 3. He won best actor for his comedic chops in the series. He stars as "Hawk Guy" in the upcoming Avengers spoof "Interns of F.I.E.L.D." produced by Screen Junkies. You can also check him out as the hunky bartender in the popular series "Conman" starring Alan Tudyk and Nathan Fillion. He played the perfect version of himself in the comedy series "Crunchtime".
His most recent victory has been behind the camera as a Director. He has directed three films in which he also starred in. His second film Patient Killer won best film and best director awards and was bought and aired on Lifetime.- Celia Johnson was an English actress, once nominated for an Academy Award. Johnson was born in the town of Richmond, Surrey in 1908. Richmond was incorporated into Greater London in 1965, as part of an administrative reform. Celia's parents were John Robert Johnson and Ethel Griffiths. Neither of them was involved in show business.
In 1916, 8-year-old Johnson made her theatrical debut, at a performance of the play "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid". It was a charity performance, to help raise funds for then-ongoing World War I. Nobody intended for her to become a professional actress, but she liked the stage experience.
Johnson attended St Paul's Girls' School in West London, from 1919 to 1926. She graduated at the age of 18. During her school years, Johnson often had acting parts in school plays, and played music in the school's orchestra. Her music teacher at the school was Gustav Holst (1874-1934), a relatively well-known classical composer.
In the late 1920s, Johnson studied acting at both the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and the Comédie-Française in Paris. One of her teachers was French actor Pierre Fresnay (1897-1975). One of her classmates in London was Margaretta Scott (1912-2005)
In 1928, Johnson made her professional debut, cast in a performance of the play "Major Barbara" (1905) by George Bernard Shaw. In 1929, she first performed in London, and in 1931 she first performed in New York City. She made a name for herself as a theatrical actress throughout the 1930s, and married journalist Peter Fleming (1907-1971).
Johnson's career and personal life were derailed by World War II. A hit role as the second Mrs. Winter in a 1940 theatrical adaptation of "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier, was cut short. The theatre where Johnson was performing was damaged through London's bombing by the Luftwaffe. Johnson's widowed sister and sister-in-law moved in with her, bringing their kids with. Having to care for 7 kids (both her own children and her nephews), left Johnson with no time to spare for theatrical tours.
Seeking a way to supplement her income during the War, Johnson started appearing in theatrical films. She started with small parts, but got her first major hit with the family drama "The Happy Breed" (1944), which followed the ups-and-downs in the life of a (fictional) family over a period of several decades. For this role, Johnson received a National Board of Review Award for Best Actress.
In 1945, Johnson was starring in another hit film, the romantic drama "Brief Encounter". It featured her in the role of Laura Jesson, a housewife trapped in a dull and monotonous marriage. Laura falls in love with a new man in her life, Dr. Alec Harvey, and he falls in love with her. With circumstances keep this relationship platonic, until Harvey leaves the country to work abroad. Laura contemplates suicide, but is forced to return to her monotonous life. The role gained Johnson a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
For most of the late 1940s, Johnson was in semi-retirement. She had given birth to two daughters and felt that she needed to devote more time to her family. From the 1950s to her death, Johnson was primarily appearing in theatrical plays and television roles. Her film roles were few, but critically well-received.
In 1982, the 76-year-old Johnson was busy with another theatrical tour. During a day-off from the tour, Johnson returned to her home in Nettlebed, Oxfordshire. She invited friends over to play bridge, but suffered a stroke during the game. She died a few hours later, while still in her home. She left an estate worth £150,557. She was survived by three children.
Johnson's fame as a theatrical actress faded away following her death, as there were few filmed versions of her performances. However, her film roles became available on the home video market, and they have helped introduce Johnson to new generations of fans. - Actor
- Soundtrack
Chaqueño Palavecino is known for Soledad y Larguirucho (2012), Laten argentinos (2016) and Felicidades: Navidad 2015 (2015).- Charles Lester "Les" Kinsolving come from a distinguished family of clerics. He was an Episcopal minister and then became a news reporter. Les has worked at many newspapers. He is now a syndicated 'Talk Show Host' for WCBM-680AM in Baltimore, MD.
- Chino Volpato is known for Midachi: el regreso del humor (2000), Mesa de noticias (1983) and Midachi TV (2006).
- Chris Furrh was born on 18 December 1974 in San Marcos, Texas, USA. He is an actor, known for Lord of the Flies (1990), The Magical World of Disney (1954) and A Family for Joe (1990).
- Music Artist
- Actress
- Composer
Christina Maria Aguilera was born on December 18, 1980 in Staten Island, New York City, New York to musician Shelly Loraine Fidler Kearns and U.S. Army sergeant Fausto Wagner Xavier Aguilera Monge. Her father is Ecuadorian and her mother, who is American-born, has Welsh, Dutch and German ancestry. Her parents divorced when she was young and she lived with her mother, although they moved around a lot. Her goal almost since birth was to be a singer, and at age 12 she was invited to audition for The All New Mickey Mouse Club (1989). She won the part and stayed until the show ended. In 1999 she had her breakthrough hit, "Genie in a Bottle." Since then she's made millions of fans, sold millions of records, and won many awards, including a Grammy for Best New Female Artist. She has even made a Latin album and released a Christmas album.
Aguilera is a bilingual singer. She has received many honors including Grammy Nominations and a win for Best New Artist. 2 MTV Video Music Awards, a Radio Music Awards, 2 VH1 Awards, and a Teen Choice Award with 'Lil' Kim', Mya and Pink and the smash hit "Lady Maramalade". She was on The All New Mickey Mouse Club (1989) with *NSYNC's Justin Timberlake and JC Chasez, Britney Spears, Ryan Gosling, and Keri Russell. Her musical influences include Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and Janet Jackson.- Actress
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Claudia was born in Brooklyn, New York and educated in New York City. She made her debut on Law & Order in 2004 and moved to Los Angeles in February 2005 to pursue her lifelong dream of acting in TV and film. Her first role in Los Angeles was an under 5 on General Hospital Night Shift and her first supporting film role was in "He's Just Not That Into You". Prior to pursuing acting, she was a marketing executive in the Beauty Industry in New York City. She said goodbye to corporate America in November, 2001. She received her MBA in 1984 from Pace University and her BBA in 1980 from Bernard Baruch College. During her corporate years, her creative outlet was competitive ballroom dancing.- Actress
- Director
- Writer
Claudia Gerini was born in Rome, where she did classical studies and dance training. Her acting career began when an advertising agency cast her in several commercials.
Claudia Gerini has had a long movie career in Italy and abroad, working with actors and directors like Sergio Castellito, Giuseppe Tornatore, Mel Gibson, acting both in comedic and dramatic roles. Her first star-making role was in "Viaggi di nozze" with comedian Carlo Verdone, with whom she will still works from time to time.
In theater, Claudia Gerini appeared in the show "Angelo e Beatrice" by Francesco Apolloni. She recently returned to the stage with the one-woman show "Storie di Claudia," written and directed by Giampiero Solari, a musical which highlights all her skills: dance, singing and acting.
She has acted in some of the most interesting projects of contemporary Italian cinema, such as "La Sconosciuta" by Giuseppe Tornatore, "Non ti muovere" by Sergio Castellitto, "Una famiglia perfetta" by Paolo Genovese, "Diverso da chi" by Umberto Carteni and many others.
Claudia Gerini has two daughters (Rosa and Linda ) and never stops studying and training. In addition to Italian, she fluently speaks English, French and Spanish.- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Director
Danny Simon was a comedy writer, who together with his brother, Neil Simon, wrote for such classic 1950s television series as Your Show of Shows (1950). It was Danny who mentored his younger sibling and nicknamed him "Doc". They worked together in radio in the late 1940s and then in television, a period of their lives chronicled in Neil Simon's 1993 play, "Laughter on the 23rd Floor".
The brothers wrote not only for Your Show of Shows (1950), 90 minutes of live original comedy starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, but also worked for The Jackie Gleason Show (1952), The Red Buttons Show (1952) and The Phil Silvers Show (1955), in which Silvers portrayed the conniving Army Sgt. Ernie Bilko.
While working on Your Show of Shows (1950), the Simons collaborated with such writers as Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Sheldon Keller, Mel Tolkin and later Woody Allen, who once said, "Everything I learned about comedy, I learned from Danny Simon".
When Neil grew dissatisfied with the restrictions of network TV and left to write for the theater, Danny stayed in television as head writer for NBC's The Colgate Comedy Hour (1950). He later wrote for The Danny Thomas Show (1953), starring Danny Thomas; Diff'rent Strokes (1978) and The Facts of Life (1979); and provided material for many of Joan Rivers appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962).- Dave Bry was born in 1970 in Red Bank, New Jersey, USA. He was married to Emily Raimes. He died on 15 October 2017 in New York City, New York, USA.
- Diane Disney was born on 18 December 1933 in Los Angeles, California, USA. She was a writer, known for Walt Before Mickey (2015), One Hour in Wonderland (1950) and Christmas with Walt Disney (2009). She was married to Ron Miller. She died on 19 November 2013 in Napa, California, USA.
- Actor
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- Producer
Leor Dimant was born on 18 December 1972 in Latvian SSR, USSR [now Latvia]. He is an actor and composer, known for Heat (1995), Gone Baby Gone (2007) and End of Days (1999).DJ Lethal- Music Artist
- Actor
- Composer
Earl Simmons (December 18, 1970 - April 9, 2021), known by his stage name DMX ("Dark Man X"), was an American rapper and actor. He began rapping in the early 1990s and released his debut album It's Dark and Hell Is Hot in 1998, to both critical acclaim and commercial success, selling 251,000 copies within its first week of release. DMX released his best-selling album, ... And Then There Was X, in 1999, which included the hit single "Party Up (Up in Here)". His 2003 singles "Where the Hood At?" and "X Gon' Give It to Ya" were also commercially successful. He was the first artist to debut an album at No. 1 five times in a row on the Billboard 200 charts. Overall, DMX sold over 74 million records worldwide.- Ed Kemper was born on 18 December 1948 in Burbank, California, USA.
- Actress
- Writer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Actress Emily Atack was born December 18, 1989, in Luton, Bedfordshire, England, UK. Best known for comedy, she has appeared in numerous projects for TV, stage, and screen. In 2016, Emily played Daphne in the movie reprise of Dad's Army (2016) alongside Bill Nighy and Toby Jones. In 2017 Emily starred in Lies We Tell (2017) starring Gabriel Byrne and Harvey Keitel. She was series regular Charlotte Hinchcliffe in all three series of the multiple award winning The Inbetweeners (2008); other TV credits include HBO/BBC's Tracey Ullman's Show (2016), Sky One's Little Crackers (2010), and BBC One's Father Brown (2013).- Emily Rebecca Swallow was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Sterling, VA and Jacksonville, FL.
She earned a BA in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Virginia and interned at the State Department, but an acting teacher at UVA noticed her passion and talent for acting and singing and encouraged her to pursue further training. She auditioned for the prestigious NYU Tisch Graduate Acting Program and was accepted into their MFA Program.
On television, Emily is best known for Supernatural (2005), The Mentalist (2008), How to Get Away with Murder (2014), Monday Mornings (2013), and the highly anticipated Disney+ Series The Mandalorian (2019). She can also be heard as the voice of Dracula's ill-fated true love, Lisa Tepes, in the Netflix series Castlevania (2017).
Emily continues to act on stage whenever she can, starring in world premieres of Donald Margulies play The Country House at LA's Geffen Playhouse, opposite Mark Rylance in Louis Jenkins' play Nice Fish at the Guthrie Theatre, in John Patrick Shanley's musical Romantic Poetry at Manhattan Theater Club and in High Fidelity on Broadway. In summer of 2018 she played a lady AND a charlatan opposite Tom Hanks' Falstaff in the Shakespeare Center Los Angeles production of Henry IV Parts 1&2. She was part of the LA Drama Critics' Circle Award-Winning 2016 production of Disgraced at the Mark Taper Forum in LA and she won the Falstaff Award for best Female Performer in 2010 for her performance as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew at the Old Globe in San Diego.
Emily is a gifted singer; she has done her share of musicals and rock concerts. In 2012, Emily and fellow singer/comedienne Jac Huberman created a stage show called Jac N Swallow, which they perform in New York at the Laurie Beechman Theater and Joe's Pub. They would like to do the show again; will someone please babysit Jac's kids? - Actor
- Producer
- Music Department
Frankie J. Holden was born on 18 December 1952. He is an actor and producer, known for A Place to Call Home (2013), Introducing the Dwights (2007) and The Daryl Somers Show (1982). He is married to Michelle Pettigrove. They have one child. He was previously married to Melda Dorothy Rees.- Composer
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Galt MacDermot was born on 18 December 1928 in Montréal, Québec, Canada. He was a composer, known for Hair (1979), Zodiac (2007) and Forrest Gump (1994). He was married to Marlene Bruynzeel. He died on 17 December 2018 in Staten Island, New York City, New York, USA.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Born in Los Angeles California on December 18, 1936, to Jeanie Dickson and Bill Gray, Gary would go on to work in such well-known films as Randolph Scott's Return of the Bad Men (1948), and the Loretta Young / William Holden / Robert Mitchum film, Rachel and the Stranger (1948). Bill Gray was a business manager for many celebrities in the film industry, and Gary''s career began as a result of two of his Dad's clients; Bert Wheeler (of Wheeler and Woolsey fame) and Jack Benny, who both recommended putting Gary in pictures, which Bill did. Gary Gray made his film debut in A Woman's Face (1941), with Joan Crawford. Following quickly with Sun Valley Serenade (1941), in which he portrayed a war orphan. His big break came when he landed the role of young Johnny in RKO's big-budget western, Return of the Bad Men (1948).
Before this hit was released, Gary beat out Bobby Driscoll for the part of young Davey, in the frontier epic, Rachel and the Stranger (1948).
In 1950, he played the son of Nancy Reagan and James Whitmore, in the classic, The Next Voice You Hear... (1950). His performance in that film led to a contract at MGM, where he starred with the original Lassie in the Technicolor The Painted Hills (1951).
After completing the latter, he spent more time attending school. Gary graduated from Van Nuys High, and went on to attended Valley College, where he majored in theater arts. Throughout the fifties, Gary continued to work, doing mainly television, guesting on many series.
Gary's fondness for the West, beginning with the film's he worked in, also gave him a love of horses, which he owned horses.
Gary returned to film, as a now young man, and appeared in the Universal-International western, Wild Heritage (1958). His last film was the cult western, Terror at Black Falls (1962), with House Peters Jr., and Peter Mamakos.
In 1960, Gary started a swimming pool maintenance and repair business. On January 28, of the following year, Gary married Jean Charlene Bean. They had 4 daughters and 19 grandchildren. For the last twenty-five years of his 38 years in the swimming pool industry, he worked for 2 of the major international manufacturers of equipment as territory, regional, and national sales manager.
Gary was a sought-after speaker, and educator for the National Spa and Pool Institute, as well as by the Independent Pool and Spa Service Association.
Gary retired in July,1999, and over the years, Gary had amassed many copies of his films and television appearances, as well as stills, posters, and lobby cards. Around this time, Garry had begun being guest at film festivals throughout the US. He enjoyed visiting with fans, and told many stories from his career.
In addition to spending time with his family, he enjoyed time on the golf course
Garry Gray died of cancer in 2006.- Cinematographer
- Director
- Writer
George Stevens, a filmmaker known as a meticulous craftsman with a brilliant eye for composition and a sensitive touch with actors, is one of the great American filmmakers, ranking with John Ford, William Wyler and Howard Hawks as a creator of classic Hollywood cinema, bringing to the screen mytho-poetic worlds that were also mass entertainment. One of the most honored and respected directors in Hollywood history, Stevens enjoyed a great degree of independence from studios, producing most of his own films after coming into his own as a director in the late 1930s. Though his work ranged across all genres, including comedies, musicals and dramas, whatever he did carried the hallmark of his personal vision, which is predicated upon humanism.
Although the cinema is an industrial process that makes attributions of "authorship" difficult if not downright ridiculous (despite the contractual guarantees in Directors Guild of America-negotiated contracts), there is no doubt that George Stevens is in control of a George Stevens picture. Though he was unjustly derided by critics of the 1960s for not being an "auteur," an auteur he truly is, for a Stevens picture features meticulous attention to detail, the thorough exploitation of a scene's visual possibilities and ingenious and innovative editing that creates many layers of meanings. A Stevens picture contains compelling performances from actors whose interactions have a depth and intimacy rare in motion pictures. A Stevens picture typically is fully engaged with American society and is a chronicled photoplay of the pursuit of The American Dream.
George Stevens was nominated five times for an Academy Award as Best Director, winning twice, and six of the movies he produced and directed were nominated for Best Picture Oscars. In 1953 he was the recipient of the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award for maintaining a consistent level of high-quality production. He served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences from 1958 to 1959. Stevens won the Directors Guild of America Best Director Award three times as well as the D.W. Griffith Lifetime Achievement Award. He made five indisputable classics: Swing Time (1936), a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical; Gunga Din (1939), a rousing adventure film; Woman of the Year (1942), a battle-of-the-sexes comedy; A Place in the Sun (1951), a drama that broke new ground in the use of close-ups and editing; and Shane (1953), a distillation of every Western cliché that managed to both sum up and transcend the genre. His Penny Serenade (1941), The Talk of the Town (1942), The More the Merrier (1943), I Remember Mama (1948) and Giant (1956) all live on in the front rank of motion pictures.
George Cooper Stevens was born on December 18, 1904, in Oakland, California, to actor Landers Stevens and his wife, actress Georgie Cooper, who ran their own theatrical company in Oakland, Ye Liberty Playhouse. Cooper herself was the daughter of an actress, Georgia Woodthorpe (both ladies' Christian names offstage were Georgia, though their stage names were Georgie). Georgie Cooper appeared as Little Lord Fauntleroy as a child along with her mother at Los Angeles' Burbank Theater. George's parents' company performed in the San Francisco Bay area, and as individual performers they also toured the West Coast as vaudevillians on the Opheum circuit. Their theatrical repertoire included the classics, giving the young George the chance to forge an understanding of dramatic structure and what works with an audience. In 1922 Stevens' parents abandoned live theater and moved their family, which consisted of George and his older brother John Landers Stevens (later to be known as Jack Stevens), south to Glendale, California, to find work in the movie industry.
Both of Stevens' parents gained steady employment as movie actors. Landers appeared in Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931) and Citizen Kane (1941) in small parts. His brother was Chicago Herald-American drama critic Ashton Stevens (1872-1951), who was hired by William Randolph Hearst for his San Francisco Examiner after Ashton had taught him how to play the banjo. An interviewer of movie stars and a notable man-about-town, Ashton mentored the young Orson Welles, who based the Jedediah Leland character in Citizen Kane (1941) on him. Georgie Cooper's sister Olive Cooper became a screenwriter after a short stint as an actress. Jack became a movie cameraman, as did their second son.
Stevens' movie adaptation of "I Remember Mama," the chronicle of a Norwegian immigrant family trying to assimilate in San Francisco circa 1910, could be a mirror on the Stevens family's own move to Los Angeles circa 1922. In "Mama", the members of the Hanson family feel like outsiders, a theme that resonates throughout Stevens' work. Acting was considered an insalubrious profession before the rise of Ronald Reagan's generation of actors into the halls of power, and being a member of an acting family necessarily marked one as an outsider in the first half of the 20th century. Young George had to drop out of high school to drive his father to his acting auditions, which would have further enhanced his sense of being an outsider. To compensate for his lack of formal education, Stevens closely studied theater, literature and the emerging medium of the motion picture.
Soon after arriving in Hollywood, the 17-year-old Stevens got a job at the Hal Roach Studios as an assistant cameraman; it was a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Of that period, when the cinema was young, Stevens reminisced, "There were no unions, so it was possible to become an assistant cameraman if you happened to find out just when they were starting a picture. There was no organization; if a cameraman didn't have an assistant, he didn't know where to find one."
As part of Hal Roach's company, Stevens learned the art of visual storytelling while the form was still being developed. Part of his visual education entailed the shooting of low-budget westerns, some of which featured Rex. Within two years Stevens became a director of photography and a writer of gags for Roach on the comedies of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
His first credited work as a cameraman at the Roach Studios was for the Stan Laurel short Roughest Africa (1923). Stevens was a terrific cameraman, most notably in Laurel & Hardy's comedies (both silent and talkies), and it was as a cameraman that his aesthetic began to develop. The cinema of George Stevens was rooted in humanism, and he focused on telling details and behavior that elucidated character and relationships. This aesthetic started developing on the Laurel & Hardy comedies, where he learned about the interplay of relationships between "the one who is looked at" and "the one doing the looking." Verisimilitude, always a hallmark of a Stevens picture, also was part of the Laurel and Hardy curricula; Oliver Hardy once said, "We did a lot of crazy things in our pictures, but we were always real."
From a lighting cameraman, Stevens advanced to a director of short subjects for Roach at Universal. Within a year of moving to RKO in 1933, he began directing comedy features. His break came in 1935 at RKO, when house diva Katharine Hepburn chose Stevens as the director of Alice Adams (1935). Based on a Booth Tarkington novel about a young woman from the lower-middle class who dares to dream big, the movie injected the theme of class aspiration and the frustrations of the pursuit of happiness while dreaming the American dream into Stevens' oeuvre. Before there was cinema of "outsiders" recognized in the late 1970s, there were Stevens' outsiders, fighting against their atomization and alienation through their not-always-successful interactions with other people.
Stevens created his first classic in 1936, when RKO assigned him to helm the sixth Astaire-Rogers musical, Swing Time (1936). Stevens' past as a lighting cameraman prepared him for the innovative visuals of this musical comedy. Through his control of the camera's field of vision, Stevens as a director creates an atmosphere that engenders emotional effects in his audience. In one scene Astaire opens a mirrored door that the scene's reflection in actuality is being shot on, and being keyed into the illusion emotionally introduces the audience into the picture, in sly counterpoint to Buster Keaton's walk into the screen in his _Sherlock, Jr. (1924)_ . Stevens' use of light in "Swing Time" is audacious. He freely introduces light into scenes, with the effect that it enlivens them and gives them a "light" touch, such as the final scene where "sunlight" breaks out over the painted backdrop. The film never drags and is a brilliant showcase for the dancing team. Rogers claimed it was her favorite of all her pictures with Astaire.
Stevens' next classic was the rip-roaring adventure yarn Gunga Din (1939), based on the Rudyard Kipling poem. Though no longer politically correct in the 21st century, the picture still works in terms of action and star power, as three British sergeants--Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.--try to put down a rampage by a notorious death cult in 19th-century colonial India.
Having learned his craft in the improvisational milieu of silent pictures, Stevens would often wing it, shooting from an underdeveloped screenplay that was ever in flux, finding the film as he shot it and later edited it. With filmmaking becoming more and more expensive in the 1930s due to the studios' penchant for making movies on a vaster scale than they had previously, Stevens' methods led to anxiety for the bean-counters in RKO's headquarters. His improvisatory crafting of "Gunga Din" resulted in the film's shooting schedule almost doubling from 64 to 124 days, with its cost reaching a then-incredible $2 million (few sound films had grossed more than $5 million up to that point, and a picture needed to gross from two to 2-1/2 times its negative cost to break even).
Studio executives were driven to distraction by Stevens' methods, such as his taking nearly a year to edit the footage he shot for "Shane." His films typically were successful, though, and in the late 1930s he became his own producer, earning him greater latitude than that enjoyed by virtually any other filmmaker with the obvious exceptions of Cecil B. DeMille and Frank Capra. He made three significant comedies in the early 1940s: Woman of the Year (1942), the darker-in-tone The Talk of the Town (1942) (a film that touches on the subject of civil rights and the miscarriage of justice) and The More the Merrier (1943) before going off to war.
Joining the Army Signal Corps, Stevens headed up a combat motion picture unit from 1944 to 1946. In addition to filming the Normandy landings, his unit shot both the liberation of Paris and the liberation of the Nazi extermination camp Dachau, and his unit's footage was used both as evidence in the Nuremberg trials and in the de-Nazification program after the war. Stevens was awarded the Legion of Merit for his services. Many critics claim that the somber, deeply personal tone of the movies he made when he returned from World War II were the result of the horrors he saw during the war. Stevens' first wife, Yvonne, recalled that he "was a very sensitive man. He just never dreamed, I'm sure, what he was getting into when he enlisted." Stevens wrote a letter to Yvonne in 1945, telling her that "if it hadn't been for your letters . . . there would have been nothing to think cheerfully about, because you know that I find much [of] this difficult to believe in fundamentally."
The images of war and Dachau continued to haunt Stevens, but it also engendered in him the belief that motion pictures had to be socially meaningful to be of value. Along with fellow Signal Corps veterans Frank Capra and William Wyler, Stevens founded Liberty Films to produce his vision of the human condition. The major carryover from his prewar oeuvre to his postwar films is the affection the director has for his central characters, emblematic of his humanism.
Stevens' second postwar film, A Place in the Sun (1951), was his adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy," updated to contemporary America. Released three years after his family film I Remember Mama (1948), it features an outsider, George Eastman, trapped in the net of the American Dream, the pursuit of which dooms him. Sergei Eisenstein had written an adaptation for Paramount of "An American Tragedy" (the title a sly reversal of "The American Dream"), but Eisenstein's participation in the project was jettisoned when the studio came under attack by right-wing politicians and organizations for hiring a "Communist", and the U.S. government deported Eisenstein shortly afterward. His script was unceremoniously dumped, and Josef von Sternberg eventually made the picture, but his vision was so far from Dreiser's that the old literary lion sued the studio. The film was recut and proved to be both a critical and box-office failure.
Alfred Hitchcock maintained that it was far easier to make a good picture from a mediocre or bad drama or book than it was from a good work or a masterpiece. It remained for George Stevens to turn a literary masterpiece into a cinematic one--a unique trick in Hollywood. What was revolutionary about "A Place in the Sun," in terms of technique, is Stevens' use of close-ups. Charlton Heston has pointed out that no one had ever used close-ups the way Stevens had in the picture. He used them more frequently than was the norm circa 1950, and he used extreme close-ups that, when combined with his innovative, slow-dissolve editing, created its own atmosphere, its own world that brought the audience into George Eastman's world, even into his embrace with the girl of his dreams, and also into the rowboat on that fateful day that would forever change his life. The editing technique of slow-lapping dissolves slowed down time and elongated the tempo of a scene in a way never before seen on screen.
Stevens' mastery over the art of the motion picture was recognized with his first Academy Award for direction, beating out Elia Kazan for that director's own masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly for THEIR masterpiece, An American in Paris (1951), for the Best Picture Oscar winner that year (most observers had expected "Sun" or "Streetcar" to win, but they had split the vote and allowed "American" to nose them out at the finish line. MGM's publicity department acknowledged as much when it ran a post-Oscar ad featuring Leo the Lion with copy that began, "I was standing in the Sun waiting for a Streetcar when . . . ").
Stevens' theme of the outsider continued with his next classic, Shane (1953). The eponymous gunman is an outsider, but so is the Starrett family he has decided to defend, as are the "sodbusters", and even the range baron who is now outside his time, outside his community and outside human decency. Giant (1956), Stevens' sprawling three-hour epic based on Edna Ferber's novel about Texas, also features outsiders: sister Luz Benedict, hired-hand transformed into millionaire oilman Jett Rink, transplanted Tidewater belle Leslie Benedict, her two rebellious children and eventually her husband Bick Benedict, a near-stereotypical Texan who finally steps outside of his parochialism and is transformed into an outsider when he decides to fight, physically, against discrimination against Latinos as a point of honor. The Otto Frank family and their compatriots in hiding in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), American cinema's first movie to deal with the Holocaust, are outsiders, while Christ in his The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)--subtle, complex and unknowable--is the ultimate outsider. The Only Game in Town (1970)--Stevens' last film with Elizabeth Taylor, his female lead in "A Place in the Sun" and "Giant"--was about two outsiders, an aging chorus girl and a petty gambler.
Stevens' reputation suffered after the 1950s, and he didn't make another film until halfway into the 1960s. The film he did produce after that long hiatus was misunderstood and underappreciated when it was released. The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), a picture about the ministry and passion of Christ, was one of the last epic films. It was maligned by critics and failed at the box office. It was on this picture that Stevens' improvisatory method began to take a toll on him. It took six years from the release of "Anne Frank," which had garnered Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director, until the release of "Greatest Story." There had been a long gestation period for the film, and it was renowned as a difficult shoot, so much so that David Lean helped out a man he considered a master by shooting some ancillary scenes for the picture. The film has a look of vastness that many critics misunderstood as emptiness rather than as a visual correlative of the soul. Stevens' script is inspired by the three Synoptic Gospels, particular the Gospel According to St. John. John stresses the interior relation between the self and things beyond its knowledge. Though misunderstood by critics at the time of its release, the film has become more appreciated some 40 years later. Stevens is a master of the cinema, and is fully in command of the dissolves and emotive use of sound he used so effectively in "A Place in the Sun."
His last film, The Only Game in Town (1970), also was not a critical or box-office success, as Elizabeth Taylor's star had gone into steep decline as the 1970s dawned. Frank Sinatra had originally been slated to be her co-star, but Ol' Blue Eyes, notorious for preferring one-take directors, likely had second thoughts about being in a film directed by Stevens, who had a (well-deserved) reputation for multiple takes. His filmmaking method entailed shooting take after take of a scene during principal photography from every conceivable angle and from multiple focal points, so he'd have a plethora of choices in the editing room, which is where he made his films (unlike John Ford, famous for his lack of coverage, who had a reputation of "editing" in the camera, shooting only what he thought necessary for a film). Warren Beatty, typically underwhelming in films in which he wasn't in control, proved a poor substitute for Sinatra, and the film tanked big-time when it was released, further tarnishing Stevens' reputation.
In a money-dominated culture in which the ethos "What Have You Done For Me Lately?" is prominent, George Stevens was relegated to has-been status, and the fact that he had established himself as one of the greats of American cinema was ignored, then forgotten altogether in popular culture. Donald Richie's 1984 biography "George Stevens: An American Romantic" tags Stevens with the "R" word, but it is too simplistic a generalization for such a complicated artist. Stevens' films demand that the audience remain in the moment and absorb all the details on offer in order to fully understand the morality play he is telling. James Agee had been a great admirer of Stevens the director, but Agee died in the 1950s and the 1960s was a new age, an iconoclastic age, and George Stevens and the classical Hollywood cinema he was a master of were considered icons to be smashed. Film critic Andrew Sarris, who introduced the "auteur" theory to America, disrespected Stevens in his 1968 book "The American Cinema." Stevens was not an auteur, Sarris wrote, and his latter films were big and empty. He became the symbol of what the new, auteurist cinema was against.
The Cahiers du Cinema critics attacked Stevens by elevating Douglas Sirk. Sirk's Magnificent Obsession (1954), so the argument went, was a much better and more cogent exegesis of America than "Giant," which was "big and empty" as was the country they attacked (though they loved its films). The point of iconoclasm is to smash idols, no matter what the reason--and Stevens, the master craftsman, was an idol. However, to say "Giant" was empty is absurd. To imply that George Stevens did not understand America is equally absurd. "Giant" contains what is arguably the premier moment in America cinema of the immediate postwar years, and it is an "American" moment--the confrontation between patrician rancher Bick Benedict and diner owner Sarge (Robert J. Wilke). Many critics and cinema historians have commented on the scene, favorably, but many miss the full import of it.
The film has been built up to this climax. Benedict has shared the prejudices of his class and his race. All his life he has exploited the Mexicans whom he has lived with in a symbiotic relationship on HIS ranch, giving little thought to the injustice his class of overlords has wrought on Latinos, on poor whites, or on his own family. His wife, an Easterner, is appalled by the poverty and state of peonage of the Mexicans who work on the ranch and tries to do something about it. Her idealism is echoed in her son, who becomes a doctor, rejects his father's rancher heritage, and marries a Mexican-American woman, giving his father an Anglo/Mexican-American grandson.
While out on a ride with his wife, daughter, daughter-in-law and her child, they stop at a roadside diner. Sarge, the proprietor, initially balks at serving them because of the Latinos in their party. He backs down, but when more Latinos come into his diner, he moves to throw them out. Benedict decides to intervene in a display of noblesse oblige, and also out of family duty. Sarge is unimpressed by Benedict's pedigree, and a fight breaks out between the hardened veteran--recently returned from the war, we are meant to understand--and the now aged Benedict. Bick first holds his own and Sarge crashes into the jukebox, setting off the song "The Yellow Rose of Texas" while he recovers and then sets out to systematically demolish Mr. Bick Benedict, the overlord. As the song plays on in ironic counterpoint, shots of his distraught daughter and other family members are undercut with the cinematic crucifixion of Bick Benedict, the overlord, by the former Centurion. After Sarge has finished thrashing Benedict, he takes a sign off of the wall and throws it on Benedict's prostrate body: "The management reserves the right to refuse service to anyone". This is not only America of the 1950s, but America of the 21st century. For just as Sarge is defending racism, he is also defending his once-constitutional right to free association, as well as exerting his belief in Jeffersonian-Jacksonian democracy in thrashing a plutocrat. This is a type of yahooism that Bruce Catton, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Civil War, attributed to the rebellion. There had always been a very well developed strain of reckless, individualistic violence in America, frequently encouraged, ritualized and sanctified by the state. The diner scene in "Giant" could only have been created by a man with a thorough knowledge of what America and Americans were (and continue to be). Sarge will try to accommodate Benedict, who has stepped out of his role as racist plutocrat into that of paternalistic pater familias, just as the sons of the robber barons of the 19th century--who justified their economic depravities with the doctrine of social Darwinism--did in the 20th century, endowing foundations that tried to right many wrongs, including racism, but Sarge will only go so far. When he is stretched beyond his limit, when his giving in is then "pushed too far," he reacts, and reacts violently.
This scene sums up American democracy and the human condition in America perhaps better than any other. America is a violent society, a gladiator society, in which progress is measured in, if not gained by, violence. Yes, Sarge is standing up for racism and segregation (a huge topic after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation), but he is also standing up for himself, and his beliefs, something he has recently fought for in World War II. The ironies are rich, just as the irony of American democracy, which excluded African-Americans and women and the native American tribes from the very first days of the U.S. Constitution, is rich. This is America, the scene in Sarge's diner says, and it is a critique only an American with a thorough knowledge of and sympathy for America could create. It is much more effective and philosophically true than the petty neo-Nazi caricatures of Lars von Trier's Dogville (2003), who are cowards. Characters in a George Stevens film may be reluctant, they may be hesitant, they may be conflicted, but they aren't cowardly.
Another ironic scene in "Giant" features Mexican children singing the National Anthem during the funeral of Angel, who in counterpoint to Bick's son, his contemporary in age, is of the land, to the manor born, so to speak, but lacking those rights because of the color of his skin. Angel had gone off to war, and he returns to the Texas in which he was born on a caisson, in a coffin, starkly silhouetted against the Texas sky as the Benedict mansion had been earlier in the film when Leslie had first come to this benighted land. Angel, who had experienced racial bigotry due to his birth into poverty on the Benedict ranch, had fought Adolf Hitler. He is the only hero in "Giant," and his death would be empty and meaningless without Bick Benedict's reluctant conversion to integration through fisticuffs.
The great turning points in American cinema typically have involved race. The biggest, most significant movies of the first 50 years of the American cinema death with race: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903), Edwin S. Porter's major movie before his The Great Train Robbery (1903) and the first film to feature inter-titles; The Birth of a Nation (1915), D.W. Griffith's racist masterpiece--which was a filming of a notorious pro-Ku Klux Klan book called "The Clansman"--in which a non-sectarian America is formed in the linking of Southern and Northern whites to fight the African-American freedman; The Jazz Singer (1927), in which a Jewish cantor's son achieves assimilation by donning blackface and disenfranchising black folk by purloining their music, which he deracinates, while turning his back on his Jewish identity by marrying a Gentile; and Gone with the Wind (1939), the greatest Hollywood movie of all time--in which the Klan is never shown and the "N" word is never used, although the entire movie takes place in the immediate post-Civil War South--a sweeping, romantic masterpiece in which a reactionary, ultra-racist plutocracy is made out to be the flower of American chivalry and romance.
Stevens' "Giant" was a major film of its time, and remains a motion picture of the first rank, but it was not the cultural blockbuster these movies were. Yet it more than any other Hollywood film of its time, aside from Elia Kazan's rather whitebread Gentleman's Agreement (1947) and Pinky (1949), directly addresses the great American dilemma, race, and its implications, and not from the familiar racist, white supremacist point of view that had been part of American movies since the very beginning. Those attitudes had been rooted in the American psyche even before the days of The Perils of Pauline (1914) serials (simultaneously serialized in the white supremacist Hearst newspapers), in which many a sweet young thing was threatened with death or--even worse, the loss of her maidenhead--by a sinister person of color (always played by a Caucasian in yellow or brown face).
A 1934 "Fortune Magazine" story about the rosy financial prospects of the Technicolor Corp.'s new three-strip process contained a startling metaphor for a 21st-century reader: "Then - like the cowboy bursting into the cabin just as the heroine has thrown the last flowerpot at the Mexican - came the three-color process to the rescue." It was this endemic, accepted racism that Stevens challenged in "Giant," which is at the root of America's expansionist philosophy of manifest destiny, and which was at the root of much of the southern and western economies. Those who died in World War II had to have died for something, not just the continuation of the status quo. It was a direct and knowing challenge to the system by someone who thoroughly knew and thoroughly cared about America and Americans.
George Stevens died of a heart attack on March 8, 1975, in Lancaster, California. He would have been 100 years old in 2004, and in that year he was celebrated with screenings by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, London's British Film Institute, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His legacy lives on in the directorial work of fellow two-time Oscar-winning Best Director Clint Eastwood, particularly in Pale Rider (1985), which suffers from being too-close a "Shane" clone, and most memorably in his masterpiece, Unforgiven (1992).- Animation Department
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Francesco Maurizio Guido was born on 18 December 1924 in Alassio, Liguria, Italy. He was a director and actor, known for Robinson Crusoe (1974), I sogni proibiti di Tommy (1993) and Crazy Westerners (1967). He died on 7 October 2018 in Alassio, Liguria, Italy.Gibba- Director
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Gillian Armstrong was born on 18 December 1950 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. She is a director and producer, known for My Brilliant Career (1979), Not Fourteen Again (1996) and Little Women (1994). She is married to John Pleffer. They have two children.- Actress
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Gladys Cooper was the daughter of journalist William Frederick Cooper and his wife Mabel Barnett. As a child she was very striking and was used as a photographic model beginning at six years old. She wanted to become an actress and started on that road in 1905 after being discovered by Seymour Hicks to tour with his company in "Bluebell in Fairyland". She came to the London stage in 1906 in "The Belle of Mayfair", and in 1907 took a departure from the legitimate stage to become a member of Frank Curzon's famous Gaiety Girls chorus entertainments at The Gaiety theater. Her more concerted stage work began in 1911 in a production of Oscar Wilde's comedy "The Importance of Being Earnest" which was followed quickly with other roles. From the craze for post cards with photos of actors - that ensued between about 1890 and 1914 - Cooper became a popular subject of maidenly beauty with scenes as Juliet and many others. During World War I her popularity grew into something of pin-up fad for the British military.
In the meantime she sampled the early British silent film industry starting in 1913 with The Eleventh Commandment (1913). She had roles in a few other movies in 1916 and 1917. But in the latter year she joined Frank Curzon to co-manage the Playhouse Theatre. This was a decidedly new direction for a woman of the period. She took sole control from 1927 until other stage commitments in 1933. She was also doing plays, some producing of her own, and a few more films in the early 1920s. It was actually about this time that she achieved major stage actress success. She appeared in W. Somerset Maugham's "Home and Beauty" in London in 1919 and triumphed in her 1922 appearance in Arthur Wing Pinero's "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray". It was ironic that writer Aldous Huxley criticized her performance in "Home and Beauty" as "too impassive, too statuesque, playing all the time as if she were Galatea, newly unpetrified and still unused to the ways of the living world." On the other hand, Maugham himself applauded her for "turning herself from an indifferent actress (at the start of her career) to an extremely competent one". She also debuted the role of Leslie Crosbie (the Bette Davis role in the 1940 film) in Maugham's "The Letter" in 1927.
In 1934 Cooper made her first sound picture in the UK and came to Broadway with "The Shining Hour" which she had been doing in London. She and it were a success, and she followed it with several plays through 1938, including "Macbeth". About this time Hollywood scouts caught wind of her, and she began her 30 odd years in American film. That first film was also Alfred Hitchcock's first Hollywood directorial effort, Rebecca (1940). Hers was a small and light role as Laurence Olivier's gregarious sister, but she stood out all the same. Two years later she bit into the much more substantial role as Bette Davis' domineering and repressive mother in the classic Now, Voyager (1942) for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress - the first of three. Though aristocratic elderly ladies were roles she revisited in various guises, Cooper was busy through 1940s Hollywood.
She returned to London stage work from 1947 and stayed for some early episodic British TV into 1950 before once again returning to the US, but was busy on both sides of the Atlantic until her death. Through the 1950s and into the 1960s Cooper did a few films but was an especially familiar face on American TV in teleplays, a wide range of prime-time episodic shows, and popular weird/sci-fi series: several Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone, and Outer Limits. When Enid Bagnold's "The Chalk Garden" opened in London in 1955, Cooper debuted as Mrs. St. Maugham and brought it to Broadway in October of that year where it ran through March of 1956. Her last major film was My Fair Lady (1964) as Henry Higgins' mother. The year before she had played the part on TV. In the film, the portrait prop of a fine lady over Higgins' fireplace is that of Cooper painted in 1922. She wrote an autobiography (1931) followed by two biographies (1953 and 1979). In 1967 she was honored as a Dame Commander of the Order of British Empire (DBE) for her great accomplishments in furthering acting.- Actress
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After acting studies at the Gothenburg City Theatre from 1950-52, she made her breakthrough debut in Gustaf Molander's Kärlek (1952). When Ingmar Bergman became head of the Malmö City Theatre he asked her to join him there and with him as a director she played the role of Margareta in Goethe's 'Faust'. Bergman also gave her supporting roles in his movies, most notably the mute woman in The Seventh Seal (1957). She followed up on a few offers from abroad but the roles wasted her screen presence. Bergman once again gave her an offer she couldn't refuse, to direct a movie. Paradistorg (1977) received a lot of praise from all over the world. Time Magazine considered it one of the four best non-US movies of 1978. Her appearances in movies has been rare but she gave a wonderful appearance in the children's TV show Kaspar i Nudådalen (2001). Lindblom has for many years worked for The Royal Dramatic Theatre, appearing in plays by August Strindberg or William Shakespeare. In 2002 she received a Guldbagge award for her lifetime achievements in movies.- Harvey Atkin was born on 18 December 1942 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was an actor, known for Meatballs (1979), Barney's Version (2010) and Speed Zone (1989). He was married to Celia Tessler. He died on 17 July 2017 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
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Hugo Sofovich was born on 18 December 1939 in Argentina. He was a writer and director, known for El show de Barbieri y Pelele (1975), Operación Ja-Ja (1963) and Un toque diferente (1977). He died on 12 January 2003 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.- Actor
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Ian Shaw was born on 18 December 1969. He is an actor and writer, known for The Contract (2006), Johnny English Reborn (2011) and EastEnders (1985).- Born under a Full Moon to Nigel and Jennifer Payton in the cold, dark winter of 1975 at St Paul's Hospital, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, James Payton was educated in the local area by rogues, vagabonds, bounders, cads, and the cinema. He is best known for his performances as Frank Longbottom in Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix (2007), USO Hitler in Marvel's Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Tony Blair in the Nick Moran directed film of Alan McGee's life, Creation Stories (2021), as a Lawyer in Rian Johnson's 'Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery' (2022) , as himself in Oliver Guy-Watkins award winning documentary, Who is James Payton? (2020), & as 'Gabriel' in two episodes of 'Wedding Season' (2022) on Disney+. Upcoming work includes Luc Besson's 'Dogman' (2023), alongside Caleb Landry-Jones. He cites Peter Sellers, Alec Guinness, David Niven and Noël Coward as influences. James continues to work in Film, Television and Commercials despite numerous attempts to stop him. He still lives in London, even though he should know better.
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James Sie was born in Summit, New Jersey, USA. He is an actor, known for Stillwater (2020), Jackie Chan Adventures (2004) and Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005). He has been married to DougWood since 7 October 1990. They have one child.- Actor
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Jason Mantzoukas is an American actor, comedian, writer and podcaster. He is best known for his recurring role as Rafi in the FX comedy series The League, and as one of the three co-hosts of the podcast How Did This Get Made? alongside Paul Scheer and June Diane Raphael. After beginning his career as an improv comedian, he has played several comedic roles in film and television. He appeared in the films The Dictator, The Long Dumb Road, Sleeping with Other People, They Came Together, Conception, and John Wick: Chapter 3. He has had recurring roles on three TV series created by Michael Schur: Parks and Recreation (as Dennis Feinstein), Brooklyn Nine-Nine (as Adrian Pimento), and The Good Place (as Derek Hofstetler). He voices the characters Jay Bilzerian in the Netflix animated series Big Mouth, Alex Dorpenberger in the HBO Max animated series Close Enough, Rex Splode in the Amazon Prime animated action series Invincible, and Jankom Pog in the Paramount+ animated series Star Trek: Prodigy.- Actor
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Jeff Kober was born in Billings, Montana on December 18, 1953. Not satisfied with being a rancher, Kober relocated to the L.A. area in his twenties with the desire to become an actor. His first appearance on the small screen was a non-billed role in the 1980s series V (1984). Kober went on to supporting roles in the highly acclaimed Vietnam War drama China Beach (1988) and the short-lived, but now-cult horror series Kindred: The Embraced (1996). Following these series, Kober has guested on some of the most popular television series of the day. They include Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999), CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000), ER (1994), 24 (2001), The Closer (2005) and Criminal Minds (2005).
Kober's big screen career began with the film Out of Bounds (1986), in which he played the first of his signature nefarious characters - "Roy Gaddis", a small-time drug dealer with murderous inclinations. This role led to more film opportunities in The First Power (1990), Tank Girl (1995) (a comedic turn), Defining Maggie (2002), World Without Waves (2004), and the remake of The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007), among others. Never one to balk at taking a chance in the acting field, Kober has also appeared in several short independent films - the Academy Award-winning Session Man (1991) and, most recently, Lucid (2006), another film that has garnered a number of awards at independent film festivals across the country. He has done extensive stage work, most prominently, as "the father" in Jenny Sullivan's autobiographical work "J For J" and "Defying Gravity". Being a creature of diverse talents, Kober is also a noted artist (he was responsible for the paintings attributed to his character "Daedalus" on Kindred: The Embraced (1996) and is the c/o author of "Art That Pays: The Emerging Artist's Guide to Making a Living" along with Adele Slaughter. On the personal front, Kober is twice divorced (Rhonda Talbot, Kelly Cutrone) and the father of one son. He has, at present, finished work on The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007) (set for release in March 2007)-in the role of "Col. Lincoln Redding". Kober's next film was Multiple (2008).- Actor
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Jens Okking was born on 18 December 1939 in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was an actor and writer, known for Strømer (1976), At klappe med een hånd (2001) and Nitten røde roser (1974). He was married to Anette Walther. He died on 21 January 2018 in Copenhagen, Denmark.- Joni Flynn was born on 18 December 1949 in Assam, India. She is an actress, known for Octopussy (1983), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Felicity (1978).
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Joseph Stalin (a code name meaning "Man of Steel") was born Iosif (Joseph) Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in 1878 in Gori, Georgia, the Transcaucasian part of the Russian Empire. His father was a cobbler named Vissarion Dzhugashvili, a drunkard who beat him badly and frequently and left the family when Joseph was young. His mother, Ekaterina Gheladze, supported herself and her son (her other three children died young and Jopseph was effectively an only child) by taking in washing. She managed, despite great hardship, to send Joseph to school and then on to Tiflis Orthodox Theological Seminary in Tbilisi, hoping he would become a priest. However, after three years of studies he was expelled in 1899, for not attending an exam and for propagating communist ideas and the books of Karl Marx.
Since 1898, Stalin became active in the Communist underground as the organizer of a powerful gang involved in a series of armed robberies. After robbing several banks in southern Russia, Stalin delivered the stolen money to Vladimir Lenin to finance the Communist Party. Stalin's gang was also involved in the murders of its political opponents; Stalin himself was arrested seven times, repeatedly imprisoned, and twice exiled to Siberia between 1902 and 1913. During those years he changed his name twice and became more closely identified with revolutionary Marxism. He escaped many times from prison and was shuttling money between Lenin and other communists in hiding, where his intimacy with Lenin and Bukharin grew, as did his dissatisfaction with fellow Communist leader Lev Trotskiy. In 1912 he was co-opted on to the illegal Communist Central Committee. At that time he wrote propaganda articles, and later edited the Communist paper, "Pravda" (Truth). As Lenin's apprentice he joined the Communist majority (Bolsheviks), and was responsible for the consolidation of several secret communist cells into a larger ring. Stalin's Communist ring in St. Petersburg and across Russia played the leading role in the Russian Revolution of 1917. After the revolution the Bolsheviks Communists grabbed the power, then Communists murdered the Tsar and the Russian royal family. Stalin and Lenin took over the Tsar's palaces and used the main one in Kremlin as their private residence.
Lenin appointed Stalin the People's Commissar for Nationalities in the first Soviet government and a member of the Communist Politburo, thus giving him unlimited power. Stalin led the "Reds" against anti-Communist forces known as the "Whites" and also in the war with Poland. He also organized "Red Terror" in Tsaritsin (later renamed Stalingrad). With his appointment as General Secretary to the Party Central Committee in 1922, a post he held for the next 30 years, until his death, he consolidated the power that would ensure his control of the country after Lenin's death in 1924. He also took, or gave himself, other key positions that enabled him to amass total power in the Party and Soviet government.
Stalin was known for his piercing eyes and terrifying stare, which he used to cow his opponents into submission during private discussions. In 1927 Stalin requested medical help for his insomnia, anger and severe anxiety disorder. His doctors diagnosed him as having "typical clinical paranoia" and recommended medical treatment. Instead, Stalin became angry and summoned his secret service agents. The next day the chief psychiatrist, Dr. Bekhterev, and his assistants died of poisoning. In addition, before the doctors' diagnosis about Stalin's mental condition could become known, he ordered the executions of intellectuals, resulting in the murders of hundreds of thousands of doctors, professors, writers, and others.
Stalin's policy of amassing dictatorial power under the guise of building "socialism in the country" resulted in brutal extermination of all real and perceived anti-Communist opposition. His purges of the Soviet military brought about the execution of tens of thousands of army officers, many of them experienced combat veterans of the Revolution, the Civil War, the Polish campaigns and other military operations (this decimation of the Russian officer corps would result in the Soviet Union's initial defeats at the hands of Nazi invaders at the beginning of World War II). He also isolated and disgraced his political rivals, notably Trotsky. Stalin's economic policies of strict centralized planning (i.e., the "five-year plans") resulted in the near ruination of the Soviet economy and mass famines in many areas of the Soviet Union, notably in Central Russia and the Ukraine. Popular resistance to Stalin's policies, such as nationalization of private lands and collective farming, by independent farmers ("kulaks"), brought about brutal retaliation, in which millions of kulaks were either forced off their land or executed outright. Altogether Stalin's economic and political policies resulted in the deaths of up to 10 million peasants during 1926-1934. Between 1934 and 1939 he organized and led massive purge (known as "The Great Terror") of the party, government, armed forces and intelligentsia, in which millions of so-called "enemies of the Soviet people" were imprisoned, exiled or executed. In the late 1930s, Stalin sent some Red Army forces and material to support the Spanish Republican government in its fight against the rebels led by Gen. Francisco Franco and aided by troops and material from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Stalin made the Non-Aggression Pact with Adolf Hitler in 1939, which bought the Soviet Union two years' respite from involvement in World War 2. After the German invasion in 1941, the USSR became a member of the Grand Alliance and Stalin, as war leader, assumed the title of Generalissimus. He had no formal military training and scorned the advice of his senior officers, due to suspicion and his rising paranoia, actions that resulted in horrific losses to the Russian military in both men and material (not to mention civilian losses). He rejected military plans made by such experienced officers as Marshal Georgi Zhukov, and insisted they be replaced by his own plans, which led to even more horrific losses. Towards the end of WWII he took part in the conferences of Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman and Clement Attlee. The agreements reached in those conferences resulted in Soviet military and political control over the liberated countries of postwar Castern and Central Europe.
From 1945 until his death Stalin resumed his repressive measures at home, resulting in censorship of the arts, literature and cinema, forced exiles of hundreds of thousands and the executions of intellectuals and other potential "enemies of the state". At that time he conducted foreign policies that contributed to the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. Stalin had little interest in family life, although he was married twice and had several mistresses. His first wife (Ekaterina Svanidze, married c. 1904) died three years after their marriage and left a son, Jacob (also known as Yacov), an officer in the Russian army during World War II who was captured by the Nazis and died in a POW camp (his father refused German offers to exchange him for captured German officers). His second wife (Nadezhda Alliluyeva, married 1919) attempted to moderate his politics, but she died by suicide, leaving a daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, and an alcoholic son, Vasili Stalin, who later died in exile. Increasingly paranoid, Stalin launched attacks on such intellectuals as Osip Mandelstam, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Anna Akhmatova, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and many other cultural luminaries. Stalin personally intervened in the fate of "counterrevolutionary" Yiddish writers and changed their sentences from exile to execution. Thirteen of them were executed by the Soviet secret police; their leader, Perets Markish, was executed in the typical KGB manner by a single gunshot to the head on August 12, 1952, in Moscow.
Stalin died suddenly on March 5, 1953, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, after announcing his intention to arrest Jewish doctors, whom he believed were plotting to kill him. The "official" cause of death was announced as brain hemorrhage. Stalin's apprentice, Georgi Malenkov, took the power, but was soon ousted by Nikita Khrushchev. Three years after death, Stalin was posthumously denounced by Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 for crimes against the Party and for building a "cult of personality." In 1961 Stalin's body was removed from Lenin's Mausoleum, where it had been displayed since his death, and buried near the Kremlin wall. In 1964 Leonid Brezhnev dismissed Khrushchev and brought back some of Stalin's hard-line policies. After 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev initiated a series of liberal political reforms known as "glasnost" and "perstroika", and many of Stalin's victims were posthumously rehabilitated, and the whole phenomenon of "Stalinism" was officially condemned by the Russian authorities.- Joseph Wayne Miller was born on 18 December 1981 in Park Ridge, Illinois, USA. He was an actor, known for Heavyweights (1995) and Folks! (1992). He died on 9 January 2018 in Chicago, Illinois, USA.
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Josh Dallas was born in Louisville Kentucky. At the age of sixteen, Josh received the Sarah Exley Scholarship, a full ride scholarship given to one American student every three years to study acting at the prestigious "Mountview Conservatoire for the Performing Arts" in London, England. As an actor, Josh has performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal National Theatre, The English National Opera, The New Shakespeare Company, The Young Vic, to name a few.- Director
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Jules Dassin was an Academy Award-nominated director, screenwriter and actor best known for his films Rififi (1955), Never on Sunday (1960), and Topkapi (1964).
He was born Julius Samuel Dassin on 18 December 1911, in Middletown, Connecticut, USA. He was one of eight children of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Samuel Dassin and Berthe Vogel. Young Dassin grew up in Harlem, and he attended Morris High School in the Bronx, graduating in 1929. After taking acting classes in Europe, he returned to New York. In 1934, he became and actor with the ARTEF Players (Arbeter Teater Farband), and was a member of the troupe until 1939. Dassin played character roles in Yiddish, mainly in the plays by Sholom Aleichem. But upon discovering "that an actor I was not," he switched to directing and writing. At that time, he joined the Communist Party of the United States, but left the party in 1939, he said, disillusioned after the Soviet Union signed a pact with Adolf Hitler.
Dassin came to Hollywood in 1940, and was an apprentice to directors Alfred Hitchcock and Garson Kanin. In 1941, he made his directorial debut at MGM with adaptation of a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Dassin's best directorial works for Hollywood include such criminal dramas as Brute Force (1947) starring Burt Lancaster; The Naked City (1948), one of the first police dramas shot on the streets of New York; and Night and the City (1950) starring Richard Widmark as a hustler in London who is caught up in his own schemes. While he was assigned by producer Darryl F. Zanuck to make the film, Dassin was accused of affiliation with the Communist Party in his past. Zanuck advised Dassin to "shoot the expensive scenes first, to hook the studio" so the film was finished and released in 1951. Dassin was reported to HUAC in a 1951 testimony by directors Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle. That was enough to sink his career in Hollywood. Dassin was subpoenaed by HUAC in 1952 and eventually became blacklisted after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
He left the United States for France in 1953 and struggled during his first years in Paris. He was not fluent in French, and his connections were limited. However, Dassin's low-budget film, Rififi (1955), famous for its long heist sequence that was free of dialog, won him the Best Director Award at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. There, he met the Greek actress Melina Mercouri. Later, Dassin co-starred opposite Mercouri in his film Never on Sunday (1960), which won the Best Film Award at Cannes in 1960. At that time, the anti-Communist witch hunt in America was fading, and Dassin was accepted again. He received two Academy Award-nominations for directing and screen-writing for Topkapi (1964), starring Mercouri, Maximilian Schell, and Peter Ustinov. Dassin also served as member of jury at the Cannes and several other international film festivals.
Jules Dassin was married twice. He had three children with his first wife, violinist Beatrice Launer. His son, Joe Dassin, was a popular French singer in the 1960s and '70s, with such hits as "Bip Bip," "L'Eté Indien" and "Aux Champs-Èlysées." In 1966, Jules Dassin married Mercouri, an ardent anti-fascist who lost her Greek citizenship for opposing the junta, and the couple was living in Manhattan, remaining very active in their efforts to restore democracy in Greece during the dictatorship of the Colonels. After 1974, the couple returned to Greece, Mercouri became a member of the Greek Parliament, and Culture Minister of Greece. While living in Athens, Dassin was active in the effort to bring the 2500-year-old Elgin marbles of the Parthenon back to Athens from their current location at the British Museum in London. In this and other humanitarian causes, Dassin followed the last will of his late wife.
Jules Dassin died of complications caused by a flu, on April 1, 2008, at age 96, at Hygeia Hospital in Athens, Greece. He is survived by two daughters and grandchildren.- Director
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Julian Arahanga was born on 18 December 1972 in Raetihi, New Zealand. He is a director and producer, known for The Matrix (1999), Once Were Warriors (1994) and Songs from the Inside. He has been married to Becs Arahanga since 7 February 2009. They have three children.- Justin Edinburgh was born on 18 December 1969 in Basildon, Essex, England, UK. He was married to Kerri. He died on 8 June 2019 in Basildon, England, UK.
- Kam Tong was born on 18 December 1906 in Oakland, California, USA. He was an actor, known for Flower Drum Song (1961), Women of the Prehistoric Planet (1966) and Have Gun - Will Travel (1957). He was married to Betty Sakata. He died on 8 November 1969 in Costa Mesa, California, USA.
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Kari Byron was born on 18 December 1974 in Santa Clara County, California, USA. She is an actress and producer, known for MythBusters (2003), Creature Features (2016) and White Rabbit Project (2016). She was previously married to Paul Urich.- Actress
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Born two months premature at four pounds, Kate Noelle Holmes made her first appearance on December 18, 1978, in Toledo, Ohio. She is the daughter of Kathleen Ann (Craft), a philanthropist, and Martin Joseph Holmes, Sr., a lawyer. She is of German, Irish, and English ancestry. Her parents have said that her strong-willed personality is probably due to her early birth. Being the youngest in the Holmes clan, completing the family of three other sisters and one brother, Katie was always the baby.
As a teenager, she began attending modeling school. When she was sixteen, her teacher invited her to go to a modeling competition with other girls from her class. She competed in the International Modeling and Talent Association by singing, dancing, and reciting a monologue from To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). By the end of that time in New York, Katie won many awards. But she said she didn't want to model because it wasn't challenging enough. So when she was seventeen, Katie went to Los Angeles to audition for movies. Luckily, on her second audition, she was cast in the movie, The Ice Storm (1997), directed by Ang Lee. Katie's character was Libbets Casey, a rich New Yorker, who is pursued by two of the main characters. It was a small part, but it marked the beginning of her professional acting career.
After the excitement of her first movie, Katie began sending in audition tapes for pilot shows. During that time, she was also starring in her all-girls Catholic high school musical, Damn Yankees, as Lola. After Kevin Williamson received her audition tape for his new show, Dawson's Creek (1998), the producers wanted her to come to Hollywood right away and read live for them. But because they wanted her to come on the opening night for Damn Yankees, Katie had to tell them she couldn't make it. Fortunately, the show's producers wanted her so much for that role, they rescheduled her callback and the result was she got the part as Joey Potter. During her first year with Dawson's Creek (1998), Katie was able to do two movies, Disturbing Behavior (1998) and Go (1999), and, for the former, she won Best Breakthrough Female Performance at the 1999 MTV Movie Awards.
The following year, she starred next to Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys (2000), playing Hannah Green, a published author and a boarder at her teacher's (Douglas) house, who has a crush on him, and tries to seduce him. Her first leading role came in 2002, with Abandon (2002). She played a college student named Katie Burke, who is haunted by the mysterious disappearance of her boyfriend who vanished two years prior. With Dawson's Creek (1998) coming to a close after six years in May of 2003, it was a bittersweet moment for all the cast. Accustomed to being in North Carolina filming ten months out of a year, the cast members now had the opportunity to make more movies.
Katie demonstrated this in October, when she had two new movies, Pieces of April (2003) and The Singing Detective (2003), coming out in that month alone. Pieces of April (2003) is a charming Thanksgiving movie about April (Holmes), the black sheep of her family, who wants to give her family the perfect dinner before her mother passes on. The Singing Detective (2003) is a dark musical where the main character (Robert Downey Jr.) was a writer in a hospital for skin conditions who writes a dark world of seduction and murder in his mind. Katie Holmes played the kind Nurse Mills who tends to his every need. She also gets to lip sync and dance in this movie. In 2004, she starred in the romantic movie First Daughter (2004), in which she played the President's (Michael Keaton) daughter, Samantha, who wants to go to college without any Secret Service tagging along. In 2005, Holmes co-starred in Batman Begins (2005), where she played Rachel Dawes, a childhood sweetheart and love interest to Batman/Bruce Wayne.
Katie has a daughter with her ex-husband, Tom Cruise.- Music Artist
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Keith Richards is an internationally recognized iconic figure in contemporary culture and popular music as a singer, guitar player, songwriter, film actor, and public figure. He was voted 10th greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stone Magazine, and was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, as founding member of the legendary rock band The Rolling Stones. Together with his song-writing partner, Mick Jagger, he wrote and recorded hundreds of songs, including their monster hit 'Satisfaction', one of the defining songs of the era.
He was born on December 18, 1943, in Dartford, Kent, England, UK. His father, Bert Richards, a factory worker, was injured during the WWII. His mother, Doris (Dupree), introduced him to music of jazz, and also encouraged his singing performances with a choir in Westminster Abbey. Keith Richards met Mick Jagger when he attended primary school during the 1950s, albeit when they went into secondary schools they lost touch for a while. But one day in 1960 they accidentally met on a train and talked about starting up a band. Eventually, Richards and Jagger made their dream come true. They established one of the most legendary life-long songwriting partnerships, following the example of John Lennon and Paul McCartney's songwriting for The Beatles. Besides their main success in popular music and entertainment, Richards and Jagger had carried on their early image of unkempt and surly youth that many others would emulate, and spread their influence across traditional boundaries of genres and styles into filmmaking, art, fashion, and contemporary lifestyle, thus turning Jagger and Richards into cross-cultural trend-setters.
Since The Rolling Stones were formed in 1962, Richards and Jagger were continuously absorbing from many musical styles and assimilated various genres and artistic influences, ultimately creating their very own inimitable style. Together they undergone transformation from semi-amateur local musicians to the leading international superstars. Both Richards and Jagger became poster boys for excess, however, they had survived ups and downs in their careers and personal lives, and remained the core of the band. Initially they shared a flat with the late Brian Jones in London, in 1962. The first lineup of the Stones consisted of Mick Jagger on lead vocal and harmonica Keith Richards on guitar, Bill Wyman on bass, Charlie Watts on drums and Brian Jones on guitar. In 1964 they released their first album titled "The Rolling Stones." In 1965 Richards and Jagger wrote their single, "The Last Time," that became their first number 1 hit in the UK. Then came "Satisfaction" (1965), which was composed by Keith Richards in his sleep, and with the addition of provocative lyrics by Mick Jagger it became the greatest hit and their calling card on each and every show.
In 1966, after The Beatles stopped giving live performances, The Rolling Stones took over as the unofficial "biggest touring band in the world" for the next few years. During 1966-1969 they toured the world, and constantly updated their song-list with many great hits like "Lets Spend the night together" (1967), "Sympathy for the Devil" (1968) and "Honky tonk woman" (1969). The incredible international success of the Stones came with a sad side, caused by Brian's drug and alcohol abuse that impaired his speech and appearance, so the band-mates had to replace him. In July 1969, Brian Jones died of drowning in his swimming pool while having signs of drug overdose. Upon Richards's and Jagger's approval, guitarist Mick Taylor took Brian's place. Brian's death at age 27 made him one of the first members of the infamous "27 Club" of rock stars who died at that age. Although Brian's estrangement from his band-mates, and his numerous arrests were caused by his personal problems with drugs, both Richards and Jagger were blamed at the time for Brian's death. The loss of one of their founding members was a painful moment for the Stones. However, at the end of the 1960s their creativity reached the new highs. Their albums "Beggars Banquet" (1968) and "Sticky Fingers" (1971) were among the most popular albums they ever made, having such hits as "Wild Horses" and "Brown Sugar."
During the 1970s The Rolling Stones remained the biggest band in the world, albeit they were rivaled by the Led Zeppelin. The Stones made thousands of live performances and multi-million record sales with hits like "Angie" (1973), "It's Only Rock and Roll" (1974), "Hot Stuff" (1976) and "Respectable" (1978). At that time both Keith Richards and Mick Jagger had individual ambitions, and applied their untamed creativity in various projects outside the Stones. Keith released his own single. In 1974 Ron Wood had replaced Mick Taylor on guitar and Keith and Ron both played lead guitars. During the decade Keith Richards had a family crisis on his hands, and suffered through emotional pain and drug abuse, albeit it didn't stop him from being himself. In 1980 the group released "Emotional Rescue" which Keith Richards didn't care for, and the group didn't even tour to promote the album. In 1981 with the release of 'Tattoo You', the group went on a major world tour filling stadiums in the US and in Europe. In 1983 the Stones recorded the album "Undercover" at the Compass Point in Nassau and during this time Mick and Keith were having arguments over rights of the group. After having created tens of albums and over a hundred popular songs together, their legendary song-writing partnership was undergoing the most painful test: the bitter rivalry between two enormously talented and equally ambitious superstars.
Outside of The Rolling Stones, Richards toured with The New Barbarians, and also was the front-man of the X-Pensive Winos in the 1980s. In 1985 Keith Richards took part in the "Artists United Against Apartheid" charity project, and has been a participant in many more charitable concerts ever since. In 1992 he released his solo album titled 'Main Offender', which got him back on the road with a promotional tour. Also during the tour he continued singing a few Stones songs. But individual career and solo performances did not bring Richards as much satisfaction as he experienced together with his writing partner. Eventually, Jagger and Richards got together in Barbados and started to write new songs for the album "Steel Wheels." After the Stones recorded it they went back on the road. It was the first tour of The Rolling Stones in 7 years. But in 1992 Bill Wyman announced that he was going to leave the group. In 1993 Keith Richards and his band released an album and toured for a few months. However, his artistic and personal connection with the Stones had eventually prevailed, and Richards reunited with his former band-mates.
In 1994 The Rolling Stones got back together again and recorded the album "Voodoo Lounge" and toured the world extensively. In 1995 an album of their warm up gig in a pub in Denmark was released. It was an acoustic live album called "Stripped". In 1997 they released the album "Bridges to Babylon" and started a new tour promoting the album. In 1998 a live album "No Security" was released. Their 1999 the tour ended and the group hasn't performed together until 2002. At that time Keith Richards continued playing guitar for various projects and artists, such as Norah Jones, and Aretha Franklin among others. Richards has been good friends with Johnny Depp, who modeled the character of Capt. Jack Sparrow after him, including his voice, his mannerisms, his personality, and aspects of his appearance. In return, Johnny Depp invited Keith Richards to play his father, Captain Teague, in the third installment of the "Pirates" franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007).
The Rolling Stones have released 55 albums of original work and compilations, and sold over 200 million records word-wide during their career spanning over 45 years. "The Stones" played in all kinds of spaces from small clubs to big stadium arenas, they remained one of the biggest entertainment acts touring the world with a retinue of jet-set hangers-on. Their inimitable shows, no matter the best, or the worst, has been played with fire and emotion, giving their audiences the kind of music they do best - it's only rock'n roll. In 2007 they even rocked the Tsar's Winter Palace with fifty thousand fans in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the communist revolution took place. They gave more large-scale shows internationally than any other existing band in the world, culminating in their 2005-2007 "A Bigger Band" tour with 147 concerts, the highest grossing tour of all time with $559 million earned. At their shows, even if you don't shake your hips like Mick Jagger, just hold on to your hat as tears go by, and they can start you up and get you rocking. You can make it if you try.
Since 1962, during the career spanning over 45 years, Keith Richards has been the lead guitarist and primary musical force behind The Rolling Stones, as well as songwriter for the band. He also continues making numerous guest performances as guitarist, as well as actor and producer active in various other projects. Besides his favorite Telecaster and Gibson guitars, Keith Richards owns a valuable collection of about one thousand vintage guitars of various brands, many of which he takes along on concert tours and studio gigs.
Since Richards wrote the signature "Satisfaction" guitar riff, that was called by Newsweek "five notes that took the world," his influence on popular music had never stopped. In his own words, Keith Richards has been dedicated to "grow this music up" beyond the theatrics of the rock's past and "keep it fresh."- Actress
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Kirsty Jean Mary Strain was born in Glasgow, Scotland. She trained at Langside College in Glasgow before going on to study at The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York under the tutelage of Paul Calderon and George Loros. She lived in New York for 3 years before returning home to work in the UK.- Actress
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She rose to fame in the drama Kimi wa petto (2003) with Jun Matsumoto and gained huge popularity.
Her first international film was The Last Samurai (2003) where she played Taka, wife of a Samurai slain by the character Nathan Algren, portrayed by Tom Cruise, Koyuki was well-known in Japan for years before that. She first caught the attention of the public in 1997 by winning an exclusive modelling contract with the magazine Non-no, but quickly grew beyond modelling and has earned acclaim as an actress through her many roles on Japanese television and in several Japanese films.
She has been appeared in many commercials, including Coca-Cola Japan's Sokenbicha, P&G Max Factor SK-II, and Suntory Kakubin.- Actress
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Krizia is a first generation Cuban American from Miami, Florida.
Her works spans across many mediums including television with a recurring role on Barry, FBI: International, and 911: Lonestar, voicing video games like Sims 4, League of Legends, and Fortnite, plus animated series such as Boss Baby, The Loud House, and Harley Quinn.
She is also a voice director for games such as Wylde Flowers, Fortnite, and Call of Duty and she founded Voiceover Camp - an online school for developing Voiceover skills.- Actress
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Krystyna Janda was born on 18 December 1952 in Starachowice, Swietokrzyskie, Poland. She is an actress and director, known for Interrogation (1989), Pestka (1995) and A Few People, a Little Time (2005). She was previously married to Andrzej Seweryn and Edward Klosinski.- Actor
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Larry D. Mann was born on 18 December 1922 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was an actor, known for The Sting (1973), In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964). He was married to Gloria Kochberg. He died on 6 January 2014 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Laurita Fernández is known for The Lulú Club (2023), Igualita a mí (2010) and Quiero vivir a tu lado (2017).
- Leila Arcieri was born on 18 December 1973 in San Francisco, California, USA. She is an actress, known for Son of the Beach (2000), Daddy Day Care (2003) and Untitled Kanye West HBO Project (2008).
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Leonard Maltin is one of the most recognized and respected film critics of our time. He recently completed his 30th season with the long-running television show, Entertainment Tonight (1981).
Maltin was born on Friday, December 18th, 1950, in New York City and grew up in suburban Teaneck, New Jersey. He credits the huge volume of old movies shown on New York television - and access to the City's famous revival theaters, as well as the Museum of Modern Art - with his "basic training" in film history. He attended New York University as a journalism major, and quickly became the entertainment editor of the campus' daily newspaper.
He and a friend published their own home-grown magazine when they were in the fifth grade. This evolved into a mimeographed publication called "Profile", which reflected Leonard's growing interest in show business and film history. At the age of 13, he volunteered his services as a writer to two fanzines: "The 8mm Collector", of Indiana, Pennsylvania, and "Film Fan Monthly", of Vancouver, Canada. Two years later, he assumed responsibility for "Film Fan Monthly" and continued publishing it for the next nine years.
It was that magazine that inspired an English teacher in his high school to suggest that he meet a friend of hers who was an editor at Signet Books. That meeting led to an offer for him to compile a paperback compendium of capsule movie reviews. The book was published in 1969, when Maltin was 18 and a freshman at NYU. Decades later, he is still best-known for that now-annual paperback reference, "Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide". A perennial best-seller, "The Guide" has become an indispensable tool for movie lovers and includes over 16,000 film reviews, with ratings and essential facts about each title. In 2005, he introduced a companion volume, "Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide", which focuses on movies made before 1965, going back to the silent era.
Leonard's other books include "The Best 151 Movies You've Never Seen", "The Disney Films", "Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons", "The Great American Broadcast: A Celebration of Radio's Golden Age", "The Great Movie Comedians", "The Art of the Cinematographer", "Selected Short Subjects" and (as co-author) "The Little Rascals: The Life and Times of Our Gang".
Leonard has been teaching at the USC School of Cinematic Arts for the last fifteen years. His popular class screens new films prior to their release, followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers. Guests over the years have included: Alexander Payne, Judd Apatow, James Franco, David Lynch, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, Costa-Gavras, Bertrand Tavernier, Anthony Hopkins, Annette Bening, Paul Haggis, Paul Weitz, Mark Ruffalo, Walter Salles, Guillermo del Toro & Jason Segel, to name just a few. In addition to top writers and directors, Maltin welcomes costume and production designers, editors, composers, cinematographers, casting directors, and other creative collaborators, in order to explore all aspects of the filmmaking process. This direct access to top talent has proven to be invaluable in his students' own filmmaking endeavors.
Leonard's reviews and signature on-air interviewing style can now be seen on his weekly program, Maltin on Movies (2010), on ReelzChannel, where he has appeared since the channel went on the air. He also previews movies-on-demand on Comcast and appears occasionally on "Turner Classic Movies". For three years, he co-hosted the weekly syndicated movie review program, "Hot Ticket", which was produced by Entertainment Tonight (1981).
Leonard is a prolific freelance writer, whose articles have appeared in "The New York Times", "The Los Angeles Times", "The London Times", "Smithsonian", "TV Guide", "Esquire", "The Village Voice" and "American Film". He has contributed to Oxford University Press' "American National Biography", and was the film critic for "Playboy" magazine for six years.
Additionally, Leonard frequently lectures on film and was a member of the faculty of New York City's "New School for Social Research" for nine years. He served as Guest Curator at the "Museum of Modern Art" film department in New York on two separate occasions.
Leonard created, hosted and co-produced the popular "Walt Disney Treasures" DVD series and appeared on Warner Home Video's "Night at the Movies" features. He has written a number of television specials, including "Fantasia: The Creation of a Disney Classic and has hosted, produced and written such video documentaries and compilations as The Making of 'The Quiet Man' (1992), The Making of 'High Noon' (1992), "Cartoons for Big Kids", The Lost Stooges (1990), "Young Duke: The Making of a Movie Star", Cliffhangers! Adventures from the Thrill Factory (1993) and _Cartoon Madness: The Fantastic Max Fleischer Cartoons (1900)_.
In 2006, he was named by the Librarian of Congress to join the Board of Directors of the National Film Preservation Foundation. He also has received awards and citations from the American Society of Cinematographers, Anthology Film Archives, The Society of Cinephiles and the Telluride Film Festival. In 1997, he was made a voting member of the National Film Registry, which selects 25 landmark American films every year. Perhaps the greatest indication of his fame was his appearance in a now-classic episode of the animated series, South Park (1997).
He has been married, since 1975, to fellow movie lover Alice Tlusty Maltin. They are the proud parents of Jessie Maltin (aka Jessica Bennett Maltin), who in recent years has become a valued contributor to the annual Movie Guide.- Additional Crew
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Lia Jelin is known for The Jewish Gauchos (1975), Homenaje a Teatro Abierto (2013) and La carpa del amor (1979).- Actor
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Lonnie Brooks was born on 18 December 1933 in Dubuisson, Louisiana, USA. He was an actor, known for Blues Brothers 2000 (1998), The Express (2008) and Forever Lulu (2000). He died on 1 April 2017 in Chicago, Illinois, USA.- Lucy Helyn Deakins is an American attorney and former actress best known for starring as Milly in The Boy Who Could Fly and originating the role of Lily Walsh on As the World Turns. Deakins was born in New York City, the daughter of Alice, a professor at Columbia University, and Roger, a professor at New York University. She graduated from Stuyvesant High School and enrolled in Harvard University in 1988. She graduated in 1994 with a degree in comparative religion. She took time off from acting to backpack across Europe. In 2007, she graduated from University of Washington School of Law and is now a practicing attorney in Denver, Colorado, specializing in the energy industry. She is a partner in the Denver law firm, Dunsing, Deakins & Galera.
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Lucy Worsley was born on 18 December 1973 in Reading, Berkshire, England, UK. She is a writer and producer, known for Tales from the Royal Bedchamber (2013), Our Food (2012) and Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen (2022). She has been married to Mark Hines since 2011.- Actress
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A curvaceous, dark-haired WWII pin-up beauty (aka "The Woo Woo Girl" and "The Girl with the Million Dollar Figure"), "B" film star Lynn Bari had the requisite looks and talent but few of the lucky breaks needed to penetrate the "A" rankings during her extensive Hollywood career. Nevertheless, some worthy performances of hers stand out in late-night viewings.
She was born with the elite-sounding name of Marjorie Schuyler Fisher on December 18, 1919 (various sources also list 1913, 1915 and 1917), in Roanoke, Virginia. She and her elder brother, John, moved with their mother to Boston following the death of their father in 1927. Her mother remarried, this time to a minister, and the family relocated once again when her stepfather was assigned a ministry in California (the Institute of Religious Science in Los Angeles).
Paying her dues for years as a snappy bit-part chorine, secretary, party girl and/or glorified extra while being groomed as a starlet under contract to MGM and Fox, her first released film was the MGM comedy Meet the Baron (1933), in which she provided typical window dressing as a collegian. For the next few years there was little growth at either studio, as she was usually standing amidst others in crowd scenes and looking excited. Finally in Lancer Spy (1937), she received her first billing on screen for a minor part as "Miss Fenwick". Though more bit parts were to dribble in, the year 1938 proved to be her breakthrough year. She finally gained some ground playing the "other woman" role in glossy soaps and musicals, first giving Barbara Stanwyck some trouble in Always Goodbye (1938).
Fox Studios finally handed her some smart co-leads and top supports in such second-tier films as The Return of the Cisco Kid (1939), Pack Up Your Troubles (1939), Hotel for Women (1939), and Hollywood Cavalcade (1939). Anxiously waiting for "the big one", she made do with her strong looks, tending toward unsympathetic parts. She enjoyed the attention she received playing disparaging society ladies, divas, villainesses, and even a strong-willed prairie flower in such films as Pier 13 (1940), Earthbound (1940), Kit Carson (1940), and Sun Valley Serenade (1941), but they did little to advance her in the ranks.
The very best role of her frisky career came with the grade "A" comedy The Magnificent Dope (1942), in which she shared top billing with Henry Fonda and Don Ameche. But good roles were hard to find in Lynn's case, and she good-naturedly took whatever was given her. Other above-average movies (she appeared in well over 150) of this period came with China Girl (1942), Hello Frisco, Hello (1943), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944), and Nocturne (1946).
With diminishing offers for film parts by the 1950s, she started leaning heavily towards stage and TV work. She continued her career until the late '60s and then retired. Her last work included the film The Young Runaways (1968) and TV episodes of "The Girl from U.N.C.L.E." and "The F.B.I." Divorced three times in all, husband #2 was volatile manager/producer Sidney Luft, better known as Judy Garland's hubby years later, who was the father of her only child. Her third husband was a doctor/psychiatrist, and she worked as his nurse for quite some time. They divorced in 1972. Plagued by arthritis in later years, Bari passed away from heart problems on November 20, 1989. Although she may have been labeled a "B" leading lady, she definitely was in the "A" ranks when it came to class and beauty.- Manuel Erice was born in 1965 in Pamplona, Navarra, Spain.
- Blonde and utterly beautiful, Mary Nolan had the requisite figure and prettiness to rise up fast in the Hollywood ranks. Her downfall, however, would be just as fast and not at all pretty.
She was born Mary Imogene Robertson in 1905 and began her show-business career as a teenage model. Showman Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. took a gander at her--and her gorgeous gams--and signed up the young beauty for his "Follies" shows. A Jazz-Age baby and party girl by nature, Mary (who was using the moniker Imogene Wilson) had already earned the somewhat dubious nickname of "Bubbles" while working in New York, but she made the fatal career mistake of involving herself with a married Ziegfeld comedian and stirring up a major sex scandal. Frank Tinney was a top headliner married to musical comedy star Edna Davenport at the time. Mary's relationship with Tinney became quite abusive and the tabloids exposed the affair after Mary was seriously hospitalized during one of their many arguments. As a third-party husband-stealer, Mary received no comfort at all despite her injuries, and was summarily fired by Ziegfeld.
Forced to flee to Germany to avoid the negative attention, Mary starred in a few films there under the new moniker Imogene Robertson. She weathered the storm for almost two years in Europe before returning unobtrusively to Hollywood films in 1927 under another new stage name--Mary Nolan.
She proved a capable if not exceptional leading lady, pacing herself well in such films as West of Zanzibar (1928) with Lon Chaney, Desert Nights (1929)--one of John Gilbert's last vehicles--and Outside the Law (1930), a gangster flick opposite Edward G. Robinson. She even appeared top-billed in a few minor efforts, including Shanghai Lady (1929) and Young Desire (1930), but Docks of San Francisco (1932) would prove to be her last film appearance.
Troubled over her sudden and inexplicable reversal of fortune, she unfortunately let her self-destructive tendencies kick in again. Broke and despondent, she suffered several nervous breakdowns and her health declined due to acute malnutrition and a variety of physical ailments. She turned to heroin, and it spelled the end.
Little was heard from her until 1948, when she died of cardiac arrest and liver problems. She was only 45 years old. Mary became just one more Hollywood tragedy -- an incredible beauty whose life turned absolutely beastly. - Producer
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Michael Maclear was born on 18 December 1929 in London, England, UK. He was a producer and writer, known for The Greenpeace Years (1991), In the Company of Strangers (2001) and Beautiful Dreamers (1990). He was married to Yoko Koide. He died on 25 December 2018 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.- Actress
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Molinee Green was born on 18 December 1981 in the USA. She is an actress and producer, known for The Three Trials (2006), Milf (2010) and Amateur Porn Star Killer 3D: Inside the Head (2009).- Actress
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Natalie Gal is an American actress and model. She was born in 1989 in the family of an opera singer and a poet. Natalie started studying ballet, gymnastics, arts, along with playing piano, singing, and performing in a theatre at the age of 6. She is often compared to a young Angelina Jolie, considered very promising young actress by media and magazines. She studied acting at New York University and speaks four languages fluently (Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, English). Natalie is represented by Pinkerton Models in LA, Elements Beauty and Pommier Models in Miami, also has agencies in Moscow, London, Paris. Natalie is actively involved in various charities around the world. In 2009 and 2010 she was helping APJ (Artists for Peace and Justice), later in September 2010 she has been chosen to be the chairman of People Power Progress (PPP) the organization promoting youth, teens, and young adults in higher participation in political, economical, and social life of the country. Natalie is also active member of PETA and has done several campaigns for them. She lives between NYC and LA, produces her tv show "Fashion Destinations" that is aired worldwide on FashionTV (FTV) as well as hosts a show on NEWTV, she's producing projects in Los Angeles and frequently travels to New York, Miami, Dallas, Las Vegas, Austin, London, and Paris for work. She has starred in different movie productions and modeled for different brands such as Chanel, Cavalli, Alexander Wang, Prada, Levuk, Allison Parris, Pantene, Wella, Nexxus, VS, CoverGirl, Wella, Pantene, Vivienne Tam, Rock and Republic, Guess, Diesel, Alexander McQueen, Revlon, worked for CWTV, was on covers for Grazia, Mademoiselle, Madam Figaro, Modern Luxury, 944, Ten10, Innocent, Elle Greece, Surface, Arsenic, Moda, Fit, Supermodel, Face, and Fitness magazines to name a few. Natalie travels constantly while pursuing her acting career and expanding her brand name as a model.- Nelly Karim is an Egyptian actress, fashion model and ballerina. She was born December 18, 1974 in Alexandria, Egypt for An Egyptian father and Russian Mother. Nelly Karim has drawn attention for her 2006 refusal to portray "seductive roles". She won Best Actress award in the Cairo International Film Festival in 2004 for her role in Enta Omry. She also won Jury Grand Prize at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards for her role in 678 and Best Actress at the Arab Film Festival in 2012 for 678.Nelly Karim has four children, the last of which was born in 2011.
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Nicole Hansen studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts. She also trained at Playhouse West with Jeff Goldblum.. After winning a Marilyn Monroe look-alike contest, Nicole was cast by David Fincher to play Marilyn in the Billy Idol videos,Cradle of Love and L.A. Woman. Director Dominic Sena cast her as the Angel in The Blue Nile's Headlights on the Parade video. Nicole's film acting credits include leading roles in American Cyborg and Soldier Boyz. Director Danny Cannon cast her in the film Strangers. She played herself in Driving to Ground Zero. She also acted in Beyond the Ashes (aka Ash Tuesday) with co-stars Tony Goldwyn, Jeaneane Garafolo and Giancorlo Esposito, and in Noise with Ally Sheedy and John Slattery. Many of these films were screened at the Tribeca, Austin, Montreal, Vail, Santa Barbara, and many other film festivals. In addition to acting, Nicole co-produced the pilot GT Inc. with Keenan Ivory Wayans and Tinseltown with Ron Perlman and Joe Pantoliano. Since 2008, Nicole has become a figure in marshaling Hollywood's resources into promoting the renewable energy sector. She produced Save It, a global warming message written and directed by 10 year-old Nikos Spiridakis, along with Executive Producer Marshall Herskovitz. The video starred Tony Goldwyn and 9 year-old Dimitri Spiridakis and it debuted on You Tube at #2 for non-profit videos. Save It also appeared on CNN and MSNBC during the 2008 Presidential Debates. It can now be seen on Weinstein Home Video releases of such films as Zack and Miri and The Reader. Nicole organized a screening of Save It at the United Nations. also produced the first ever Renewable Energy Conference, and Renewable Energy Awards Gala at the United Nations in June 2009. Nicole is also a public speaker on issues regarding the effects of Environmental Toxins on Neuro-developmental Disorders such as Autism, Dyslexia and ADHD.- Actress
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Born in Chingford Essex United Kingdom, and not India as published, the actor is English of Parsi ancestry not an Indian citizen. She subsequently moved at age 9 . The family later returned to the UK where she completed her education.with her parents to Hong Kong while it was still under British control- Actor
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Ossie Davis was born on 18 December 1917 in Cogdell, Georgia, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for Do the Right Thing (1989), Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) and Grumpy Old Men (1993). He was married to Ruby Dee. He died on 4 February 2005 in Miami Beach, Florida, USA.- Peggy Cummins was an Irish actress, appearing in several films between 1940 and 1961. Her best known role was that of trigger-happy bank robber Annie Laurie Starr in the film "Gun Crazy".
In December, 1925, Cummins was born under the name of "Augusta Margaret Diane Fuller" in Prestatyn, Denbighshire, Wales. Her parents were an Irish couple from Dublin, who visited Prestatyn during their vacation. They were reportedly seeking shelter from a storm there. Cummins' parents were Franklin Bland Fuller (1897-1943) and his wife, the actress Margaret Cummins (1889-1973). Through her father's side of the family, Cummins was a great-granddaughter of famed architect and novelist James Franklin Fuller (1835-1924).
Cummins was mostly raised and educated in Killiney, Dublin. As a child, she attended the Abbey School of ballet in Dublin. She was eventually spotted there and chosen for a non-speaking role in a performance of the play "The Duchess of Malfi" (1613/1614) by John Webster. Cummins played one of the play's murdered children and she was (in her words) "only seen in silhouette". This was her theatrical debut.
In 1938, Cummins made her London stage debut at the St James's Theatre. She performed in the role of Maryann, the juvenile lead in the children's review "Let's Pretend", In 1940, Cummins had her film debut in the drama "Dr. O'Dowd" . The film concerned Marius O'Dowd (played by Shaun Glenville) , an alcoholic doctor who has lost his license and the affection of his only son, but later attempts to befriend his young, estranged granddaughter Pat O'Dowd (Cummins).
Being only 15-year-old during her film debut's production, Cummins was (by agreement) limited to working 5 hours per day, and only under the supervision of a governess. The film was a success, and helped Cummins being cast in supporting roles in subsequent films. Meanwhile she continued her theatrical career. In 1943, Cummins played the 12-year-old Fuffy in a theatrical adaptation of the short story collection "Junior Miss" (1941) by Sally Benson. In 1944, Cummins played the leading role of Alice in a theatrical adaptation of the novel "Alice in Wonderland" (1865) by Lewis Carroll.
In 1944, Cummins played notable roles in the comedy film "English Without Tears" (1944) and the World War II-themed drama "Welcome, Mr. Washington". In 1945, Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century-Fox, brought Cummins to Hollywood. Cummins was considered for roles in both "Cluny Brown" (1946) and "Forever Amber" (1947), but was rejected for being "too young". Her first leading role in an American film was playing the blackmailer Belle Adair/Rose Lynton in the film noir "Moss Rose" (1947). The film was praised by the press but was a box office flop. Zanuck claimed that the losses from the film amounted to 1,300,000 dollars.
Cummins subsequently appeared in a handful of American films. She played Eleanor Apley, daughter of an upper-class Bostonian family, in the romantic comedy "The Late George Apley" (1947). She played Dora Winters, an escaped prisoner's love interest, in the thriller "Escape" (1948). She played Carey Greenway, the love interest of a Wyoming-based horse owner, in "Green Grass of Wyoming" (1948).
Cummins then returned to the United Kingdom to have a role in the romance film "That Dangerous Age" (1949), about a neglected wife who finds romance with a lover. Cummins played a supporting role to the film's female lead Myrna Loy. Cummins returned to the United States to play a femme fatale role as bank robber Annie Laurie Starr in the film "Gun Crazy" (1950). The film was released by the film studio United Artists,This was Cummins' last appearance in a film shot in the United States. In retrospect, the film has been considered culturally significant and chosen for preservation by the Library of Congress.
In the rest of the 1950s, Cummins mainly worked in British films. Among her best known roles in this period was the role of female lead Joanna Harrington in the cult-themed horror film "Night of the Demon" (1957). Receiving modest praise in its original release, their film has since been evaluated as one of the gems of the horror genre.
In the early 1960s, Cummins only appeared in comedies. They included the divorce-themed farce "Your Money or Your Wife" (1960), the crime comedy "Dentist in the Chair" (1960), and the veterinarian-themed comedy "In the Doghouse" (1961). "In the Doghouse" was Cummins' last film appearance, as she largely retired from acting at the age of 36. Her few subsequent appearances were guest-star roles in television.
From the 1970s onward, Cummins devoted her time to the national charity Stars Organisation for Spastics. She chaired the management committee of a holiday center for children with disabilities in Sussex. In 2008, the charity organization changed its name to Stars Foundation for Cerebral Palsy, with Cummins still among its volunteers.
In December 2017, Cummins suffered a stroke and died in London, where she had spend her last years. She died eleven days following her 92nd birthday. - Actress
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Her mother, Anna Griffiths, is an art consultant. Her uncle is a Jesuit priest. Has two older brothers. One brother, Ben, is a ski instructor. Lived on the Gold Coast, Queensland until age five, then moved to Melbourne. Attended Star of the Sea Catholic Girls' College, did well at school and learned ballet. When she was 11, her father left home with an 18 year old woman. She hasn't seen him for years. Her mother was an art teacher at the time and raised the children alone. Has an Education Degree in dance and drama. Worked for the theatre company The Woolly Jumpers, in Geelong. Made famous by Muriel's Wedding (1994).- Actress
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One of the most respected and premier mc's - regardless of gender - Rashia Fisher aka Rah Digga, has been legendary. She started off the only female member of New Jersey's acclaimed hip hop group, Da Outsidaz, where she also met future husband, Young Zee. Rah exploded on the music scene when she caught the eye of A Tribe Called Quest's Q-Tip, who introduced Rah to Busta Rhymes, who brought her onboard as the only female member of his Flipmode Squad. It wasn't long before Rah would be featured on some of hip-hop's most ground-breaking and influential projects, from Grammy winners and nominees to platinum juggernauts to gold gems, including: The Fugees' The Score ("Cowboys"); DJ Clue's The Professional, Pt. 2 ("Getting It"); several Busta projects - When Disaster Strikes("We Could Take It Outside"), Genesis ("Betta Stay Up in Your House"); and It Ain't Safe No More ("I Know What You Want"), just to name a few. Following Rah and the Flipmode Squad striking gold with The Imperial Album, and winning the Source Hip Hop Music Award for Best New Group, in 2000 she finally released her solo project, Dirty Harriet. A critically-acclaimed debut, it would produce several chart-topping singles - "Imperial" (featuring Busta), "Tight", "Break Fool" and "Tight The Remix." She also released the hit single, "Party and Bullsh*t" with the heavily spun remix that included Eve and Missy Elliot. Staying true to her roots, Rah has performed consistently on classic "underground" and cutting-edge artist and DJ compilation projects, such as: The Lyricist Lounge Vol. 1 ("Be Ok"); the anti-police brutality Hip Hop For Respect, in memory of Amadou Diallo; Talib Kweli's Reflection Eternal/Train of Thought ("Down for the Count"); DJ Whoo Kid & Lloyd Banks' Money in the Bank ("Party Over Here"), and many others. In addition, Rah has worked with some of hip hop's top producers, including: Rockweilder, Primo, Pete Rock, Scott Storch and Jus Blaze. Over the last ten years she has also revealed yet another great talent - acting. Starring alongside Beyonce and Wyclef Jean, Rah made her debut in MTV's Carmen: A Hip Hopera. She was also able to display her comedy skills as a guest star on FOX's "MAD TV." Though she was featured in two hip hop documentaries, Rah made her acting film debut in Thirteen Ghosts.
Now, Ten years after her solo gold solo debut, Dirty Harriet, Rah Digga is going back to her hip-hop roots with her new album "Classic". This album, produced by hip-hop super-producer Knotts, is Rah Digga at her purest, going back to her B-girl roots, with ten of her most hard hitting and lyrically challenging tracks to date. It is what her fans and fellow artists have been waiting ten years to hear. The return of Rah Digga has been long overdue, and it is finally upon us.- Actor
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Ravi Patel was born on 18 December 1978 in Freeport, Illinois, USA. He is an actor and producer, known for Transformers (2007), Meet the Patels (2014) and Master of None (2015). He has been married to Mahaley Patel since 8 November 2015. They have one child.- Actor
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Intense was the word for Ray Liotta. He specialized in psychopathic characters who hide behind a cultivated charm. Even in his nice-guy roles in Field of Dreams (1989) and Operation Dumbo Drop (1995), you get the impression that something is smoldering inside of him. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, and was adopted by Mary (Edgar), a township clerk, and Alfred Liotta, an auto parts store owner. He studied acting at the University of Miami, where he became friends with Steven Bauer (Scarface (1983), Thief of Hearts (1984)). He spent his first years acting in TV: Another World (1964), a TV movie and several short-lived series. He broke into movies with the black comedy Something Wild (1986), which garnered him rave reviews. Originally unable to get a reading, he was recommended for the part by Melanie Griffith (then married to Bauer).
Following the success Something Wild (1986), he received more offers in the "psycho" vein, but refused them to avoid being typecast. Instead, he made "little movies" like Dominick and Eugene (1988), which earned him standing as an actor's actor, and Field of Dreams (1989), whose success always surprised him. When he heard Martin Scorsese was casting Goodfellas (1990), he lobbied hard for the part of Henry Hill. The film's huge success brought him wide popularity and garnered him star billing in future films such as Article 99 (1992), Unlawful Entry (1992), and Unforgettable (1996).
Liotta died on May 26, 2022, aged 67, in his sleep while filming on location in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.- Actor
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He was trained by the Original Sheik, Ed Farhat, who was one of pro-wrestling's classic and greatest bad guys. Even though their styles are quite different (Sheik being a wild hardcore-style brawler, known for throwing fire, cutting his opponent's forehead's up with foreign objects like a pencil, fork, etc. whereas Van Dam is a technical high-flyer), Farhat taught him the importance of the right mindset.- Actor
- Producer
Robert Wahlberg was born on 18 December 1967 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He is an actor and producer, known for The Equalizer (2014), The Departed (2006) and Mystic River (2003). He has been married to Gina Santangelo since 25 September 1994. They have two children.