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The Everly Brothers were an American rock duo, known for steel-string acoustic guitar playing and close harmony singing. Consisting of Isaac Donald "Don" Everly (February 1, 1937 - August 21, 2021) and Phillip "Phil" Everly (January 19, 1939 - January 3, 2014), the duo combined elements of rock and roll, country, and pop, becoming pioneers of country rock.
The duo was raised in a musical family, first appearing on radio singing along with their father Ike Everly and mother Margaret Everly as "The Everly Family" in the 1940s. When the brothers were still in high school, they gained the attention of prominent Nashville musicians like Chet Atkins, who began to promote them for national attention.- Actress
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Hedy Lamarr, the woman many critics and fans alike regard as the most beautiful ever to appear in films, was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria. She was the daughter of Gertrud (Lichtwitz), from Budapest, and Emil Kiesler, a banker from Lemberg (now known as Lviv). Her parents were both from Jewish families. Hedwig had a calm childhood, but it was cinema that fascinated her. By the time she was a teenager, she decided to drop out of school and seek fame as an actress, and was a student of theater director Max Reinhardt in Berlin. Her first role was a bit part in the German film Geld auf der Straße (1930) (aka "Money on the Street") in 1930. She was attractive and talented enough to be in three more German productions in 1931, but it would be her fifth film that catapulted her to worldwide fame. In 1932 she appeared in a Czech film called Ekstase (US title: "Ecstasy") and had made the gutsy move to appear nude. It's the story of a young girl who is married to a gentleman much older than she, but she winds up falling in love with a young soldier. The film's nude scenes created a sensation all over the world. The scenes, very tame by today's standards, caused the film to be banned by the U.S. government at the time.
Hedy soon married Fritz Mandl, a munitions manufacturer and a prominent Austrofascist. He attempted to buy up all the prints of "Ecstasy" he could lay his hands on (Italy's dictator, Benito Mussolini, had a copy but refused to sell it to Mandl), but to no avail (there are prints floating around the world today). The notoriety of the film brought Hollywood to her door. She was brought to the attention of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, who signed her to a contract (a notorious prude when it came to his studio's films, Mayer signed her against his better judgment, but the money he knew her notoriety would bring in to the studio overrode any moral concerns he may have had). However, he insisted she change her name and make good, wholesome films.
Hedy starred in a series of exotic adventure epics. She made her American film debut as Gaby in Algiers (1938). This was followed a year later by Lady of the Tropics (1939). In 1942, she played the plum role of Tondelayo in the classic White Cargo (1942). After World War II, her career began to decline, and MGM decided it would be in the interest of all concerned if her contract were not renewed. Unfortunately for Hedy, she turned down the leads in both Gaslight (1940) and Casablanca (1942), both of which would have cemented her standing in the minds of the American public. In 1949, she starred as Delilah opposite Victor Mature's Samson in Cecil B. DeMille's epic Samson and Delilah (1949). This proved to be Paramount Pictures' then most profitable movie to date, bringing in $12 million in rental from theaters. The film's success led to more parts, but it was not enough to ease her financial crunch. She made only six more films between 1949 and 1957, the last being The Female Animal (1958).
Hedy retired to Florida. She died there, in the city of Casselberry, on January 19, 2000.- Additional Crew
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Francesco Scavullo was born on 16 January 1921 in Staten Island, New York City, New York, USA. He was a director and cinematographer, known for Mile Age (1991), Alright (1995) and The Crystal Gayle Special (1979). He died on 6 January 2004 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.- Actor
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George Denis Patrick Carlin was born and raised in Manhattan, New York City, to Mary (Bearey), a secretary, and Patrick John Carlin, an advertising manager for The Sun; they had met while working in marketing. His father was from Donegal, Ireland, and his mother was Irish-American. His parents divorced when he was two months old, and he was raised by his mother. The long hours the mother worked left the young George by himself for long hours every day, providing him (in his own words), the time he needed to think about various subjects, listen to radio, and practice his impersonations, that where acclaimed by his mother and coworkers since an early age. Carlin started out as a conventional comedian and had achieved a fair degree of success as a Bill Cosby style raconteur in nightclubs and on TV until the late 1960s, when he radically overhauled his persona. His routines became more insightful, introducing more serious subjects. As he aged, he became more cynic and bitter, unintentionally changing his stage persona again in a radical way throughout the '90s. This new George Carlin, usually referred to as the late George Carlin, is one of the most acclaimed and enjoyed by the public and critics. Carlin's forte is Lenny Bruce-style social and political commentary, spiced with nihilistic observations about people and religion peppered with black humor. He is also noted for his masterful knowledge and use of the English language. Carlin's notorious "Seven Dirty Words" comedy routine was part of a radio censorship case that made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978.- Director
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Herb Ritts was born in Los Angeles in 1952 and majored in economics at New York's Bard College. Shortly after college, in the mid-1970s, Ritts taught himself photography, snapping pictures of friends. One of his subjects was a friend's boyfriend, a then-unknown Richard Gere. His shots of the future star led Ritts into the world of celebrity photography with full force. He photographed everyone from Jack Nicholson to Michelle Pfeiffer to Mick Jagger, gaining unprecedented access to many of his subjects, including a paralysed Christopher Reeve and a post-brain surgery Elizabeth Taylor.
Ritts' work often appeared in magazines like Vogue, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone. His photos graced album covers, including Madonna's True Blue (1986), and appeared in advertisements for companies like Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, the Gap and Giorgio Armani. He has published books of his work, and his photography has also been displayed in galleries and museums. Some of Ritts' well-known music videos include Madonna's "Cherish," Chris Isaak's breakthrough "Wicked Game," Janet Jackson's "Love Will Never Do (Without You)." Most recently he has filmed NSYNC's "Gone," Jennifer Lopez's "Ain't It Funny," Britney Spears' "Don't Let Me Be the Last to Know" and Shakira's "Underneath Your Clothes."- Grace Hopper was born on 9 December 1906 in New York City, New York, USA. She was married to Vincent Foster Hopper. She died on 1 January 1992 in Arlington, Virginia, USA.
- Grace Metalious, the author of one of the most notorious and best-selling novels of the 1950s, was born Marie Grace de Repentigny on September 8, 1924, in Manchester, New Hampshire. Populated by multiple ethnic groups, Grace's mother downplayed their French Canadian heritage due to the discrimination directed towards the group by "native" Yankees and the Irish, who were at the top of the social structure of the New England mill town. Anxious for Grace to better herself, her mother insisted upon their living in neighborhoods in which there weren't many French Canadians, one of the last groups to emigrate to Manchester and thus, located far down on the social totem pole. From her mother, Grace learned first-hand about dissembling and hiding secrets, the revelation of which would lie at the heart of her first and most famous novel, "Peyton Place."
"Little Canada" or "le petit Canada" (a.k.a. "la petite Canada") is the name traditionally given to neighborhoods in cities and towns settled by immigrants from the Province of Quebec, known as French Canadians. Approximately 900,000 French Canadians emigrated to the United States in the period of 1840-1930, the vast majority of whom settled in New England. The immigrants typically moved to states close to Quebec, particularly those bordering the province, due to the physical proximity to Quebec and because their generally impoverished state obviated greater mobility.
The New England textile industry was a major recruiter of Quebecois laborers. The West Side of Manchester, a city with a large French Canadian population due to the hiring of substantial numbers of Quebecois to work in the textile mills in the 19th and 20th centuries, was the site of one of the more famous "Little Canadas" in the U.S. La Caisse Populaire Ste. Marie, or St. Mary's Bank, located in Manchester's Little Canada, was the first credit union chartered in the United States, the credit union being a financial institution pioneered in Quebec due to the inability of francophones, who were primarily Roman Catholic, to obtain credit from the mainly Protestant anglophone population that dominated "La belle province."
In 1968, Quebecois revolutionary Pierre Vallieres, jailed in New York City as a terrorist, wrote a book about the French Canadian population and their relationship to the Anglophone oligarchy, which sums up the French Canadian's perceived status. Indeed, during the 1972 presidential primary, the local newspaper, 'The Manchester Union Leader,' owned by the reactionary William Loeb, printed a fake letter planted by President Nixon's dirty tricks squad that had a staff member of Senator Edward Muskie, the Democratic front-runner, equating French Canadians with African Americans during a campaign stop in Florida. The so-called "Canuck letter" became a well-known Watergate artifact, referenced in the 1976 film All the President's Men (1976).
When she was 11 years old, Grace's father walked out on his family, which consisted of Grace, her mother and her two sisters. The Catholic Church frowned on divorce and until the 1980s made it very difficult for a person who was a Catholic to obtain one and remain a member of the faith in good standing. This meant that it was very unusual for a married French Canadian couple to legally dissolve their marriage in the first half of the last century. Grace and her sisters felt shame, shame for coming from a broken home and shame from the resulting social stigmatization, a psychological state underscored and deepened by the social, economic and political inferiority of the French Canadians by the Yankees (descendants of English and Scottish Protestant stock who had originally settled the state) and by the Irish, who dominated the working class and felt animosity towards the French Canadians as many had been recruited to the mills to break strikes the Irish had led.
Despite the common religion of the French Canadians and the Irish, the antipathy between the two ethnic groups ran so deep that two different Catholic church and parochial school systems evolved on the West Side of Manchester, one for the Irish and one for the French Canadians, whose ethnic youth gangs continued to fight each other through out the Depression years. Grace's mother avoided this by keeping what was left of the family rooted in the supposedly more genteel East Side on the other side of the Merrimack River that bisected Manchester and once provided power for the city's mills. The Merrimack is the same river that flows south through Lowell, Massachusetts, the hometown of another famous French Canadian, Jack Kerouac, and on through Lawrence, where singer Robert Goulet was born, on its trip to the sea. Manchester, once called "The Cottonopolis of the World" due to its huge output of textiles, was hard hit by the Great Depression, and the city's great Amoskeag mill complex went bankrupt. Hard times descended on the "Queen City" making the already hard lives of the working class even harder.
Grace escaped by writing romances in which a heroine eventually is united with the man-of-her-dreams and achieves happiness at the denouement of the story. She also appeared in school plays, which had the added benefit of taking her away from her unhappy family, a malaise exacerbated by their poverty. The family mood became even dourer when Grace met and fell in love with George Metalious, a younger boy she met at Central High School, but whose remarkable intelligence meant that he had been advanced in grade and was Grace's class contemporary. An ethnic Greek with a different faith, George was viewed disdainfully by her family, but Grace and George married over their objections in 1943.
While he went off to the Army during World War Two, a housing shortage and poverty forced Grace to undergo the ignominy of having to live on Manchester's West Side in the Squog neighborhood not far from "la petite Canada" her mother had always tried to avoid. Her last name, though, allowed her to deny her French Canadian heritage, and most of her adult acquaintances and many of her friends did not know the truth. When George returned from the war, he enrolled at the University of New Hampshire on the G.I. Bill to study education, and the family, which now consisted of the couple and their first-born, moved to Durham, New Hampshire. It was in Durham that Grace Metalious began to seriously focus on her writing. Her neglect of her house, her appearance, and her children (the Metaliouses eventually had three) earned her the disapprobation of her neighbors.
After taking his degree at UNH, George accepted an offer to be the principal at a school in Gilmanton Iron Works, New Hampshire. The family of five had to subsist on George's modest salary. Gilmanton Ironworks was the model for the fictional Peyton Place. Grace was inspired by the story of a real-life murder that had rocked New Hampshire in the post-war years, in which a young girl had shot her father who had been molesting her and hid his corpse in a barn. Grace wrote the first draft of a novel in 10 weeks in 1955. That novel was "Peyton Place."
In 1956, "Peyton Place," was accepted for publication by the New York publishing house Julian Messner. The manuscript had to be heavily edited, but when it was published in the autumn of that year, it became an unprecedented "blockbuster," surpassed in the 1950s in terms of sales only by The Bible. Though the book was panned by critics as "trash" and attacked by the moral arbiters of society, it stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year and was a global hit. Her riposte to criticism that she was a poor wordsmith was, "If I'm a lousy writer, then an awful lot of people have lousy taste."
To charges that she was a dirty writer, a purveyor of filth, she responded, "Even Tom Sawyer had a girlfriend, and to talk about adults without talking about their sex drives is like talking about a window without glass."
"Peyton Place" made Grace Metalious, who had known poverty and hard times all her life, a wealthy woman. Eight million copies of "Peyton Place" were sold in hardcover, along with another 12 million paperbacks. The press made Metalious a media-star, shining the spotlight on the plump housewife dressed in dungarees who wrote a bestseller defying the conformity of the 1950s, which held that the nuclear family in which the wife was subservient to her husband and children was the ideal lifestyle. Grace earned the sobriquet "Pandora in Blue Jeans" as she had opened up a box of sin, which was then revealed to the world.
The "Peyton Place" of Metalious' novel is a small, seemingly respectable New England town that actually is a cauldron of secrets and scandal boiling just below the seemingly placid surface. Aside from depictions of sex, rape, abortion, and suicide, there is a murder trial, when young Selena Cross is tried for murdering her father, who had molested her. Even before the publication of the novel, the good citizens of Gilmanton Iron Works were outraged, convinced that Grace had shamed them by washing their dirty linen before the world and making their town synonymous with lust and perversion. Grace eventually was threatened with libel lawsuits, and the town, which demurred from buying a copy of the best-seller for its public library, refused to extend her husband's contract as school principal.
"Peyton Place" not only changed the image of Gilmanton Iron Works, but it revolutionized the image of small town America from a Norman Rockewell painting to something more akin to the Potterville (Bedford Falls) of George Bailey's nightmare in It's a Wonderful Life (1946). The term "Peyton Place" became a buzzword to describe the duality of middle class life, with its deep secrets and rampant sex beneath a hypocritical veneer of propriety. The book was banned in many cities and towns, and by the Dominion of Canada. Grace Metalious and her book were denounced from the pulpit and by politicians, who claimed it corrupted the morals of young readers.
The book was read by tens of millions of people worldwide, and Hollywood quickly closed in and bought the novel for $125,000. Producer Jerry Wald's 1957 movie of Peyton Place (1957), starring Hollywood superstar Lana Turner as Constance MacKenzie, was a hit and even garnered nine Oscar nominations. (Validating the theme of troubles boiling just beneath the surface of people's "public" lives, Turner's 14-year-old Cheryl Crane stabbed her Mafiosi boyfriend Johnny Stompanato to death with a butcher knife in her mother's bedroom less than a fortnight after the Academy Award ceremony.) The movie spawned the sequel Return to Peyton Place (1961) in 1961, based on her 1959 follow-up to her original novel. "Peyton Place" also was spun off into a high-class, prime-time TV soap opera that made Ryan O'Neal and Mia Farrow into stars.
Metalious and success did not mix well. She spent her money freely, hit the bottle, divorced her husband George, married a local disc jockey, and partied in Hollywood before eventually returning to her home state towards the end of her life. She settled in Meredith, which was the heart of New Hampshire's beautiful Lakes Region nestled among the majestic White Mountains range. Back in the Granite State, she trolled the Lake Winnipesaukee area in a drop-top Cadillac, drunk, with a succession of lovers attracted by her cash.
The "Pandora in Bluejeans" remarried George Metalious in 1960, but her destructive behavior was too far developed, and they divorced for a second time in 1963. The failure of her other novels to achieve the level of success as "Peyton Place" -- in addition to the sequel "Return to Peyton Place," she published "The Tight White Collar" in 1961 and "No Adam in Eden" in 1963 -- added to her malaise and dipsomania.
Before the war, she and her young husband George used to drink a home-brewed Greek concoction called ouzo. But for Grace, alcohol was no longer a case of sharing warmth and laughter around the kitchen table with some friends; she had become a full-blown thirty-something bottle baby. Suffering from depression and alcoholism, she quickly went through her money.
"I looked into that empty bottle and I saw myself," she said.
Thirty-nine-year-old Grace Metalious died of cirrhosis of the liver on February 25, 1964, never having achieved the peace of mind that seems to have eluded her since the days when the mother taught the young girl to deny her heritage as a way of getting along in a world whose hypocrisies Grace could not ignore. Her life story illustrated the old saw: "Be careful what you wish for: You just might get it." She was a dreamer who did not know that realizing her dream would become her nightmare.
Grace Metalious will be remembered as the first popular women writer that pried the lid of off societal hypocrisy and violence directed towards women, a small-minded world that smoothed over the horrors of life through conformity to an ideal of polite, middle-class virtues that were more honored in the breach than in the observance. Her book made possible such subsequent early "chick-lit" as Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls." - Music Artist
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Roy Kelton Orbison (April 23, 1936 - December 6, 1988) was an American singer, songwriter, and musician known for his impassioned singing style, complex song structures, and dark, emotional ballads. His music was described by critics as operatic, earning him the nicknames "The Caruso of Rock" and "The Big O." Many of Orbison's songs conveyed vulnerability at a time when most male rock-and-roll performers chose to project masculinity. He performed while standing motionless and wearing black clothes to match his dyed black hair and dark sunglasses, which he wore to counter his shyness and stage fright.- Actor
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Ray Price was born on 12 January 1926 in Perryville, Texas, USA. He was an actor, known for The Guilt Trip (2012), Star Trek: Enterprise (2001) and A Man of No Importance (1994). He was married to Janie Mae and Betty Berthena Greb (Linda Powers). He died on 16 December 2013 in Mount Pleasant, Texas, USA.- Soundtrack
Red Sovine was born on 7 July 1917 in Charleston, West Virginia, USA. He died on 4 April 1980 in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.- Music Artist
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Led Zeppelin are a popular British band best known for their iconic "Stairway to Heaven" as well as for co-creating the music genre of heavy metal. Since their nine albums were recorded between 1968 and 1979, Led Zeppelin has been one of the most popular bands of all time, having sold more than 300 million records and millions of concert tickets worldwide.
The quartet was conceived at the end of the Hippie love era, in a group marriage of blues, rock and roll, soul, rockabilly, folk ballad, jazz, classical and Eastern music, and something else scattered over some woozy sounds of their songs. It was their mutual artistic stimulation, their group interplay and imagination that incorporated mythology and mysticism, and concocted their inimitable style, and established the concept of album-oriented rock career.
Jimmy Page was already an experienced lead guitarist who worked with multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones in 1967, and they agreed to work on the next project. In August 1968 Page invited Robert Plant and John Bonham to join his band, the New Yardbirds, for a September tour in Scandinavia. In October 1968 they took the name Led Zeppelin, which stemmed from a humorous conversation among several musicians about their chances of going down like a lead balloon. However, British bands were highly anticipated in the USA, and the Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun signed the new band without even seeing them.
Their debut album, 'Led Zeppelin', recorded and mixed in just about 36 hours in October 1968, at Olympic Studios in London, kicked open the door for all extremes and experiments. The phallic image of the blown up Hindenburg airship on the cover, designed by George Hardie, announced the hardening of rock and coming of the new super-group. While ascending to musical success as a powerhouse band, Led Zeppelin explored a variety of styles, from English folk ballads to blues and rock, and created their own inimitable style.
Prior to the release of their first album, Led Zeppelin made live appearances at the University of Surrey and in London in October 1968, then went on their first American tour in December 1968. In their first year, Led Zeppelin made four concert tours in the USA, and another four tours in the UK. Their second album was recorded entirely on the road at several American recording studios, and was an even greater success than the first one. "Whole Lotta Love", "Heartbreaker", "Living, Loving Maid", and "Ramble On" became big international hits.
Each member of the quartet contributed to their compositions, thus setting a fine example of group creativity. Their songs and albums rambled on with the highly versatile voice-guitar interplay. Plant's incredible vocal range and Page's enchanting guitar solos were as responsible for the band's singularity as its musical wanderlust. Plant's and Page's musicianship was supported by the tight playing by John Paul Jones on bass, and John Bonham on drums. The intense interaction of all four players on stage gave their live performances a visual counterpoint to well intertwined harmonic and rhythmic structures of their compositions.
Their third album, Led Zeppelin III, influenced by folk and Celtic music, offered more inventiveness with acoustic/electric sound-work, and revealed more of the band's versatility with such compositions as the "Immigrant Song" and "Since I've Been Loving You". With the release of their fourth, and most popular album, Led Zeppelin achieved a reputation of the biggest band in the world. 'Stairway to Heaven' became the most played radio hit, several other songs became rock classics, and nobody knows how many more times their lines would help other musicians (like the opening riff from "How Many More Times" was later used by Pink Floyd in their hit "Money").
Capitalizing on the success of their first four albums, the band toured extensively in the 1970s. At that time they chartered a private jet, nicknamed the Starship, that carried the band's name and later added the famous 'Swan Song' winged Apollo image on the tail. Going to California turned into a ritual of wildness and excess, most notably at the Hyatt House hotel on the Sunset strip in Los Angeles, known colloquially as the "Riot House" for a series of some most exciting off-stage events, such as riding a motorcycle inside the hotel and throwing TV set out of the window. One of their concerts under a heavy thunderstorm in Florida ended with police using tear gas, and led to a temporary pause in their concert tours.
During the 70s their career was interrupted several times by accidents, deaths and other unfortunate events. In September 198O on the eve of an American tour, John Bonham accidentally died from pulmonary edema after a day of drinking. In December 1980, Led Zeppelin disbanded, albeit the public could still feel their presence. In 1982 a collection of out-takes from various sessions from the 70s was released as their last album, Coda. During the 80s the remaining three members experienced a serious communication breakdown, until they briefly united for a short set in 1985, and once again, in 1988, with Bonham's son, Jason, for the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary show.
In 1994 Page and Plant showed their softer side when they performed live together on 'MTV Unplugged', which was released the same year as album titled 'No quarter'. Then they made an international tour with an orchestra. In 1995 Page and Plant were joined by Jones when the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, albeit the three former band-mates did not perform together. By that time Jimmy Page as well as Robert Plant had pursued individual careers touring and recording with their own bands.
Another ten years gone. Page's and Plant's call-and-response interplay took them through good times and bad times. Their sonic originality had sparked imagination and creativity in millions of open minds. Singers, songwriters, armies of music fans and a rainbow of dedicated 'led heads', as well as guitarists and guitar collectors worldwide remained united through the acquired experience and conditioning to the Led Zep sounds.
Hats off to Led Zeppelin, who opened the new extremes of musical expression, and are now back in the light confirming their presence. Their long anticipated reunion in December 2007 was a true celebration day. Their live performance was as tight as a rock band can be, and their living, loving song remains the same since we've been loving them. That's the way!
Thank you, Friends.- Music Artist
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Heart is known for Captain Marvel (2019), Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) and The Virgin Suicides (1999).- Actress
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Anna Maria Pierangeli was born June 19, 1932, in Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy. Anna and her twin sister, Marisa Pavan, both had their eyes on becoming film stars, since that was one of the big Italian pastimes. Anna adopted her surname and split it in half, and it was as Pier Angeli that she would find fame. Her first role was an uncredited part in 1948's The Million Dollar Nickel (1952), an Italian production. Pier was 16 at the time and it was to be the first of many roles for this beautiful woman. The film was largely forgettable but it was a start. The following year she played in another Italian production, Tomorrow Is Too Late (1950). Again it was a very small role, and she was not seen on the screen again until 1951. Between 1949 and 1951 she appeared in stage productions and found work in menial jobs. When she did return it was in the film The Light Touch (1951) as Anna Vasarri. Later that year she won the title role in Teresa (1951). However, she again hit a drought with only one film in 1952 and two in 1953. The next year things began to pick up, however, with Hollywood beckoning. After the Italian Miss Nitouche (1954) she caught the eyes of Hollywood moguls, who cast her in Flame and the Flesh (1954) and The Silver Chalice (1954). Now she divided her time between Italy and the US making movies. She married Vic Damone in 1954, a union that lasted only four years and produced one son.
No film offers came in 1955, but in 1956 Pier landed the role of Norma Graziano (wife of fighter Rocky Graziano) in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) opposite Paul Newman. The film was well received at the box office and she had hopes that things were going to pick up again. She played Ynez in Port Afrique (1956) later that year and then another drought ensued. After The Vintage (1957), Merry Andrew (1958) and SOS Pacific (1959), she made three more films in 1960. Then once again 1961 saw no appearances. In 1962 Pier played Ildith in Sodom and Gomorrah (1962) and later that year played in a French production entitled White Slave Ship (1961). After the Italian production of Shadow of Evil (1964) she returned in the hit European-American co-production Battle of the Bulge (1965).
After a handful of films between 1966 and 1970, Pier realized her dreams of super-stardom were not to be. She had divorced her second husband (Armando Trovajoli) in 1969 and made her final appearance on the screen in 1971 in the low-budget sci-fi opus Octaman (1971). On September 10th of that year Pier was found dead of a barbiturate overdose in her Beverly Hills home. She was only 39 years old.- Writer
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Fred Phelps was born on 13 November 1929 in Meridian, Mississippi, USA. He was a writer, known for Hatemongers (2000), The Most Hated Family in America (2007) and Judgment Day. He was married to Margie Phelps. He died on 19 March 2014 in Topeka, Kansas, USA.- Writer
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John Updike is among the leading novelists of the late 20th century, having twice won the Pulitzer Prize. Updike graduated Harvard College in 1954 to the staff of the New Yorker, with whom he has worked ever since as a contributor and reviewer. Updike has published 15 novels and lives in Massachusetts- Additional Crew
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Richard Avedon was born on 15 May 1923 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a director, known for Funny Face (1957), Chanel No. 5: Tomorrow's Woman (1966) and Gilda Live (1980). He was married to Evelyn Franklin and Doe Avedon. He died on 1 October 2004 in San Antonio, Texas, USA.- Music Artist
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Glen Campbell was born on 22 April 1936 in Billstown, Arkansas, USA. He was a music artist and actor, known for True Grit (1969), Shindig! (1964) and X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019). He was married to Kim Campbell, Sarah Jan Barg, Billie Jean Nunley and Diane Marie Kirk. He died on 8 August 2017 in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.- Willa Cather was born in 1875 on a small farm close to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. She was the eldest of seven children born to Charles Cather, a deputy Sheriff and struggling entrepreneur, and Mary Virginia Boak Cather. The family's Irish ancestors had settled in Pennsylvania in the 1750s, and Willa cut her hair short and wore trousers to her fashionable mother's chagrin. In 1883 the Cather family moved to join Willa's grandparents in Webster County, Nebraska. A year later they moved to Red Cloud, a nearby railroad town, where Willa met Annie Sadilek, whom she later used as the model for My Antonia. Willa attended the University of Nebraska, where she edited the school magazine and contributed to local papers. In 1892 she published her short story "Peter" in a Boston magazine, a story that later became part of her novel My Antonia. After graduation in 1895, became an editor at Home Monthly in Pittsburgh. Her short stories were ultimately published in a collection called `The Troll Garden' in 1905, which brought her to the attention of S.S. McClure. In 1906 she moved to New York to join McClure's Magazine, eventually becoming its managing editor. Over the next two decades, she published such prolific works as 'O Pioneers' (1913), 'My Antonia' (1917), and 'One of Ours' (1922), which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her early novels focused on the destruction of provincial life and the death of the pioneering tradition, though her later novels (including 'The Professor's House' (1925), 'My Mortal Enemy' (1926), and 'Death Comes for the Archbishop' (1927)) reflected the personal despair that followed her commercial success. Willa once said that she belonged to a world that had split in two and, as a woman of two centuries - the conservative 19th and the modern 20th - she bridged the large gap between traditional culture and the uneasy Americanism of new immigrants. She had a keen eye for new-century changes, writing about the most intimate pictures of the inner setting: the heart, the soul, the home. Though there is speculation about Cather's personal relationships with other women, her intimate connections with friends are found in the intense human interactions and nature imagery of her work. She maintained an active writing career, publishing novels and short stories until her death, whereupon she ordered her letters burned and was buried in New Hampshire.
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John Steinbeck was the third of four children and the only son born to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. His father was County Treasurer and his mother, a former schoolteacher. John graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and attended classes at Stanford University, leaving in 1925 without a degree. He was variously employed as a sales clerk, farm laborer, ranch hand and factory worker. In 1925, he traveled by freight from Los Angeles to New York, where he was a construction worker. From 1926-1928, he was a caretaker in Lake Tahoe, CA. His first novel, "Cup of Gold," was published in 1929. During the 1930s, he produced most of his famous novels ("To a God Unknown," "Tortilla Flat," "In Dubious Battle," "Of Mice and Men," and his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Grapes of Wrath"). In 1941, he moved with the singer who would become his second wife to New York City. They had two sons, Thom (b. 1944) and John IV (b. 1946). In 1948, his close friend Ed Ricketts died, he went through a divorce, he took a a tour of Russia, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His wrote the screenplay for Viva Zapata! (1952), and 17 of his works have been made into movies. He received three Academy Award nominations. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. US President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the United States Medal of Freedom in 1964, and he was commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp on what would have been his 75th birthday. His ashes lie in Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas.- Actor
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Rock 'n' roll pioneer Gene Vincent was born Eugene Vincent Craddock (Vincent Eugene according to some biographers) on February 11, 1935 in Norfolk, Virginia. He quit school at the age of 17 to join the Navy. His naval career was ended following a motorcycle accident while on shore leave in 1955. Shortly thereafter he heard an up-and-coming singer named Elvis Presley and decided on a singing career of his own. His excellent voice helped to hook him up with Norfolk disk jockey Tex Davis who pushed him through to Capitol Records where he recorded the million selling Be-Bop-A-Lula in 1956. While his first record earned him several movie appearances including The Girl Can't Help It (1956) and Hot Rod Gang (1958) and helped him to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, his success was short lived. His original Blue Caps band broke up fairly quickly and his fame in America dwindled as rebellious rockers of the 1950s were replaced by clean-cut teen idols of the early 1960s. Vincent moved to Britain in 1959, where he was a cult figure, and remained there for a decade. He returned to America in 1969 with a new record deal and enjoyed a brief revival among the hippy teenagers in California, who revered him as a legend. His new found fame was cut short by his death on October 12, 1971 at the age of 36 years following complications of a bleeding ulcer and seizure. He had been married four times and was a reputed hard drinker which most likely caused his death.- Music Artist
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Leonard Cohen was born on 21 September 1934 in Montréal, Québec, Canada. He was a music artist and composer, known for Watchmen (2009), Night Magic (1985) and Natural Born Killers (1994). He died on 7 November 2016 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Music Artist
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The Eagles are an American rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1971. With five number-one singles and six number-one albums, six Grammy Awards and five American Music Awards, the Eagles were one of the most successful musical acts of the 1970s in North America.
Founding members-were recruited by Linda Ronstadt as band members, some touring with her, and all playing on her third solo album, before venturing out on their own on David Geffen's new Asylum Records label.
Glenn Frey (guitars, vocals): Born in Detroit, Michigan, on November 6, 1948 and raised in nearby Royal Oak, Frey studied piano at age five, later switched to guitar, and became part of the mid-1960s Detroit rock scene. One of his earliest bands was called the Subterraneans, named after Jack Kerouac's novel, and included fellow Dondero High School classmates Doug Edwards (later replaced by Lenny Mintz) on drums, Doug Gunsch and Bill Barnes on guitar, with Jeff Hodge on bass.
Don Henley (drums, vocals): Donald Hugh Henley was born in Gilmer, Texas, and grew up in the small northeast Texas town of Linden. He is the son of Hughlene (McWhorter) and C. J. Henley. He has Irish, English and Scottish ancestry.
Bernie Leadon (guitars, vocals): Born July 19, 1947 In Minneapolis, Minnesota
Randy Meisner (bass guitar, vocals) :Randall Herman Meisner was born in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, the second child and only son of farmers Herman. He is a retired American musician, singer, songwriter and founding member of the Eagles.
Eagles Discography in Order:
Eagles (1972) Desperado (1973) On the Border (1974) One of These Nights (1975) Hotel California (1976) The Long Run (1979) Long Road Out of Eden (2007)- Virginia C. Andrews was born on 6 June 1923 in Portsmouth, Virginia, USA. She was a writer and actress, known for The Dollanganger Saga (2014), Flowers in the Attic (1987) and V.C. Andrews' Heaven (2019). She died on 19 December 1986 in Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA.
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Shel Silverstein was born on 25 September 1930 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer and composer, known for Almost Famous (2000), Border (2018) and Thelma & Louise (1991). He died on 10 May 1999 in Key West, Florida, USA.- Actor
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Tiny Tim, the ukulele-playing singer of 1920s ditties who was a true icon of the 1960s, was born Herbert Khaury on April 12, 1932, in New York City. The son of a Lebanese father and Jewish mother, the young Khaury grew up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. A high school dropout, his interest in the popular music of the 1890s through the 1930s manifested itself early, and his dream was to become a singer. He learned to play guitar and ukulele and began performing professionally as "Larry Love" in the early 1950s, making his debut at a lesbian cabaret in Greenwich Village called Page 3, where he became a regular. Though his parents tried to discourage him, Khaury continued to publicly perform the early mass culture American music that he so loved and collected on 78 records, at small clubs, parties and talent shows under a variety of names.
Khaury had established himself as a cult performer in the Greenwich Village music scene by the early 1960s, singing under the name that he would become famous for, that of the crippled lad in Charles Dickens' novel "A Christmas Carol" (allegedly the stage name was suggested by a manager who used to work with midgets; Khaury himself stood an inch over six feet, but the name helped to reinforce his bizarre persona). After appearing in You Are What You Eat (1968), he made an appearance on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1967), the smash hit series that was as much a part of the 1960s as Tim would come to be. He was an instant sensation and his career was made. His weird appearance and act (he evinced the polite manners of a bygone era, which stood out in stark contrast to the "Let it All Hang Out!" ethos of the time) touched a nerve and he became a cultural specimen that elucidated the zeitgeist of that era.
Tiny Tim appeared several more times on "Laugh-In" but became better known through his frequent guest spots on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962), where audiences were bemused by his eccentric personality. He signed with Frank Sinatra's record label Reprise and issued his debut album, "God Bless Tiny Tim," in 1968, featuring what became his signature song, a falsetto cover of "Tip-Toe Through the Tulips." "Tulips" became a hit, reaching the Top 20, and "God Bless Tiny Tim" sold over 200,000 copies. He followed it up before the year was out with the ingeniously entitled "Tiny Tim's Second Album."
Tiny Tim's wave crested in 1969, in terms of cultural recognition and popularity. In August he released his third LP, an album of children's songs called "For All My Little Friends," while on December 17 of that year he married "Miss Vicki," his 17-year-old girlfriend (Vicki Budinger) on "The Tonight Show." The wedding drew the largest rating ever recorded for an evening talk show, enjoying an incredible 85% share of the audience watching TV at that time. The couple mostly lived apart (as Tim did with his two later wives), and while the union produced a daughter, inevitably named Tulip, he and Miss Vicki divorced after eight years of marriage.
Tiny Tim performed around the country in 1970, enjoying some highly lucrative gigs in Las Vegas, but his business associates fleeced him. A one-trick pony, his popularity began to wane in the early 1970s and the lucrative bookings and TV appearances became a thing of the past. A trouper, Tiny Tim kept performing, eventually traveling the country playing community centers, high school theaters and other less-than-prestigious venues as part of Roy Radin's Vaudeville Revue with the likes of The Five Harmonica Rascals. He continued to record throughout the 1970s and 1980s for small labels, but he never again achieved any real success.
After the Roy Radin Revue, Tim kept on performing. He even joined a circus for its 36-week schedule. In the late 1980s he moved to Des Moines, Iowa, and managed a small comeback of sorts in the mid-'90s, when he appeared on Howard Stern's radio show. However, his comeback suffered a setback after he had a heart attack performing at a ukulele festival in September of 1996. After getting out of the hospital, Tiny Tim the trouper resumed his concert schedule. The schedule proved too taxing, and on November 30 he suffered another heart attack while performing "Tip-Toe Through the Tulips" in Minneapolis, and died an hour later. He was 64 years old.- Music Department
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Annunzio Paolo Mantovani was born November 15, 1905, in Venice, Italy, the son of a violinist who performed at La Scala under the baton of maestro Arturo Toscanini. Born into a musical household, Mantovani was taught the piano and music theory while a youth. When Mantovani's father was appointed conductor of the orchestra at London's Covent Garden theater in 1912, he moved with his family to England, which became his life-long home.
Following in his father's footsteps, Mantovani switched to violin at the age of 14, though he remained adept at the piano, which he used for composing music. At the age of 16, he made his debut as a professional violinist. As a member of a touring orchestra, he quickly matured as a performer and became a featured soloist. Appointed the conductor of the Hotel Metropole Orchestra in 1925, Mantovani made his first recordings with the group in 1928.
Mantovani's critical reputation as a virtuoso on the violin was established in 1930 and 1931 with a series of recitals. It was at this time, he organized the Tipica Orchestra to make radio broadcasts from London's tony Monseigneur restaurant. The Tipica Orchestra successfully toured England while recording for multiple labels in the period of 1932-1936, winding up on Columbia. Mantovani and the Tipica Orchestra scored major hits in the United States with "Red Sails in the Sunset" and "Serenade to the Night," after which Columbia changed the billing on the records to "Mantovani & His Orchestra." In 1940, Mantovani left Columbia and signed with Decca, which would be his label for the next 33 years.
Mantovani & His Orchestra were extremely popular in England during the early 1940s. During World War II, Mantovani served as musical director for a number of theatrical productions, but after the end of the war, Mantovani turned away from live performance and concentrated on recording. With arranger Ronald Binge, the former accordion-player for the Tipica Orchestra, Mantovania developed the lush sound he became famous for: the "cascading strings" (also known as "tumbling strings" effect. This emphasis on the string section that was his signature became a hallmark of "easy listening" music (also known as "light orchestral" music). The cascading strings effect (which was used frequently in movie and television scores for a generation afterwards by Mantovani imitators) was first employed on the 1951 single "Charmaine." The single sold over 1 million copies and opened the U.S. market to Mantovani's music for the first time since the mid-1930's.
Mantovani became a hit machine, releasing a plethora of hit singles in the early to mid-1950s, including "Song from Moulin Rouge," a #1 platter in 1953. Mantovani co-wrote and arranged (and backed with his orchestra) David Whitfield on his own #1 British smash "Cara Mia" in 1954, which cracked the U.S. Top Ten. He began recording long-playing records for Decca and its London subsidiary in 1954, and although the change-over of popular music to rock 'n roll limited his success on the singles chart, his albums sold millions, particularly in the U.S.
Over 40 Mantovani albums registered on the U.S. pop charts from 1955 to 1972, with 27 reaching the Top 40 and 11 scaling the heights into the Top Ten. His biggest hits were linked to the movies: "Film Encores," which went #1 in 1957 (his sole chart-topping LP), and "Mantovani Plays Music From 'Exodus' and Other Great Themes," a #2 hit in 1961. The "Exodus" LP moved over 1 million copies and remained on the charts for almost a year.
As the 1960s wore on, Mantovani's brand of pleasant, easy listening music increasingly diverged from mainstream tastes (and began to be seen as old-fashioned, something that belonged to the pre-rock 1950s along with round-screened, B+W TV sets). HIs LPs placed lower and lower on the charts, until they no longer charted at all after 1972's eponymous "Annunzio Paolo Mantovani." When the Decca label was dissolved and absorbed into MCA in 1973, his recording career came to an end. In all, he had recorded over 50 albums of his distinct brand of light orchestral music since the early 1950s.
Annunzio Paolo Mantovani died on March 30, 1980 at his country home in Tunbridge Wells, England. He was 74 years old.- Camera and Electrical Department
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Bert Stern was born on 3 October 1929 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA. He was a director and cinematographer, known for Jazz on a Summer's Day (1959), Twiggy in New York (1967) and Date with an Angel (1987). He was married to Shannah Laumeister Stern, Allegra Kent and Eleanor Fay Mostel (Teddy Ayer). He died on 26 June 2013 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.- Music Department
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Percy Faith was a child piano prodigy, but his hands were burned in a fire at age 18. Switching to conducting and arranging, his unique orchestral 'sound', with strong emphasis on creative string work, soon became familiar to listeners everywhere. He recorded 85 albums for Columbia Records, and three hit singles: "Delicado" (1952), "Theme from 'Moulin Rouge'" (1953), and "Theme from 'A Summer Place'" (1960). Johnny Mathis, Doris Day and Tony Bennett all considered Percy Faith among their favorite accompanists.- Music Artist
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Ray Conniff was born on 6 November 1916 in Attleboro, Massachusetts, USA. He was a music artist and composer, known for There's Something About Mary (1998), Great Expectations (1998) and The Help (2011). He was married to Vera Schmidheiny, Ann Marie Engberg and Emily Jo Ann Imhof. He died on 12 October 2002 in Escondido, California, USA.- Producer
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William Hanna was an animator, film director, and television producer. He was the co-founder of the company Hanna-Barbera, with his longtime partner Joseph Barbera.
Hanna was born in an Irish-American family, son of William John Hanna (1873-1949) and his wife Avice Joyce Denby. He was born in Melrose, New Mexico Territory, though the family never set root there. His father worked as a construction superintendent for railroads, water systems, and sewer systems. He was often re-assigned, requiring his family to move with him to new locations.
Hanna attended Compton High School in Compton California from 1925 to 1928. During his high school years, Hanna played the saxophone in a dance band. He developed a passion for music that would lead to him personally working on several theme songs for his animated work.
Hanna briefly attended Compton City College, studying both journalism and structural engineering. The Great Depression affected his family's financial situation, forcing him to drop out of college and seek work. He worked first as a construction engineer, then as a car wash employee. A family friend convinced him to seek a job for Leon Schlesinger's company "Pacific Title & Art Studio", which designed title cards for films. Though he lacked formal training, he displayed a talent for drawing. This helped him get hired at an upstart animation studio connected to Schlesinger, the Harman and Ising animation studio, which was producing the "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies" series. Hanna was promoted to head of their ink and paint department.
In 1933, the studio's heads (Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising) dissolved their business relationship with Schlesinger. Schesinger retained the rights to the "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies", while Harman and Ising kept the rights to their popular character Bosko. Hanna followed them into their subsequent projects. By 1936, he was promoted to film director and directed a few short films in their "Happy Harmonies" film series.
In 1937, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer stopped distributing animated films by Harman and Ising, and created their own animation subsidiary: the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio (1937-1957). They hired away most of the staff of the Harman and Ising studio, including Hanna. In 1938, Hanna became a senior director for the "Captain and the Kids" film series, an adaptation of the popular comic strip "The Katzenjammer Kids". The series failed to find an audience, and was terminated in 1939. Hanna was demoted from director to story-man.
During this period, Hanna started co-working with fellow animator Joseph Barbera on the idea of a film series featuring a cat-and-mouse duo. The two were allowed to co-direct the film "Puss Gets the Boot" (1940), introducing the characters of Tom and Jerry. The film was popular with critics and the audience, but studio head Fred Quimby was not initially interested in a full series with the characters. However, the commercial failure of other products of the studio convinced Quimby to try reusing Tom and Jerry. Hanna and Barbera were assigned their own production unit to work on the new series.
From 1940 to 1957, Hanna and Barbera co-directed 114 short films starring Tom and Jerry. The series was a critical and popular success, winning 7 Academy Awards and being nominated for other 7. In 1955, Fred Quimby retired, and Hanna and Barbera replaced him as studio heads. But by this time production costs for the films were high, while they were less profitable than before. MGM shut down the studio in 1957.
Hanna briefly partnered with animator Jay Ward in creating their own animation studio, called "Shield Productions". They parted ways before producing anything notable. Hanna next partnered with Barbera again, creating the company Hanna-Barbera Productions. Since the market for theatrical animated shorts was in decline, the duo intended to produce animation for television. They received partial funding from Screen Gems, in return for a distribution deal.
The studio's first television series was the moderately popular "The Ruff & Reddy Show". It was followed by the more successful "The Huckleberry Hound Show" and "The Yogi Bear Show", which introduced popular characters and managed to attract an adult audience. Realising that there was a market for adult-oriented cartoons, Hanna and Barbera next developed the animated sitcom "The Flintstones", a parody of "The Honeymooners" with a Stone Age setting. It found success with both adult and juvenile audiences, helping the studio become the leader in television animation for most of the 1960s.
In 1966, Hanna-Barbera Productions was sold to Taft Broadcasting for 12 million dollars. Hanna and Barbera continued serving as studio heads until 1991. In 1991, the studio was sold to Turner Broadcasting System, with Hanna and Barbera reduced to an advisory position. In 1996, the studio was sold to Time Warner, with Hanna remaining an advisor until his death in 2001.
In March 2001, Hanna died of esophageal cancer at his home in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, He was 90-years-old. He was buried at Ascension Cemetery in Lake Forest, California. His legacy includes more than 100 animated series, multiple films and television specials, and a large number of enduring characters.- Producer
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Joseph Roland Barbera was an American animator, film director, and television producer. He was the co-founder of the company Hanna-Barbera, with his longtime partner William Hanna.
Barbera was born in an Italian-American family. His parents were barbershop-owner Vincent Barbera (1889-1965) and Francesca Calvacca (1875-1969), both Italian immigrants from Sicily. Vincent was from the farming town of Castelvetrano, while Francesca was from the spa town of Sciacca (founded as the ancient Greek colony of Thermae).
Barbera was born in Little Italy, at the Lower East Side section of Manhattan. Months following his birth, Barbera's family moved to Flatbush, Brooklyn. He was mostly raised in Flatbush. Vincent Barbera grew prosperous for a while, but a gambling addiction led him to squander the family fortune. In 1926, Vincent abandoned his family, and Joseph was taken under the wing of his maternal uncle Jim Calvacca.
Barbera attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. During his high school years, he worked as a tailor's delivery boy. Meanwhile, he excelled in boxing and won a number of titles, but decided against becoming a professional boxer. He graduated high school in 1928, and started working odd jobs.
In 1929, Barbera first became interested in animation, after viewing Walt Disney's "The Skeleton Dance" (1929). Shortly after, he started working as a freelance cartoonist. Some of his print cartoons were published in Redbook, the Saturday Evening Post, and Collier's. Meanwhile Barbera took art classes at the Art Students League of New York and the Pratt Institute, hoping to improve his drawing skills.
Barbera was eventually hired as an inker and colorist by Fleischer Studios. In 1932, he was hired by the Van Beuren Studios as an animator and storyboard artist. At Van Beuren he worked on such film series as "Cubby Bear" and "Rainbow Parades". The studio's most prominent cartoon starts were a human duo known as "Tom and Jerry". Barbera worked on the Tom and Jerry series, and apparently liked the sound of the duo's name.
In 1936, Barbera left the financially struggling Van Beuren studio to work for Paul Terry's Terrytoons studio. In 1937, he left Terrytoons to work for the then-recently established Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio (1937-1957). MGM offered its animators higher salaries than what Terrytoons could offer. His first few years at the studio were not particularly notable. In 1939, he and co-worker William Hanna started working on the idea of a cat-and-mouse duo of characters. They were allowed to co-direct "Puss Gets the Boot" (1940), introducing the new duo of Tom and Jerry. It was critically and commercially successful, but studio head Fred Quimby was initially uninterested in producing a full series of Tom and Jerry films. The lack of success of other products of the studio convinced Quimby, and Barbera and Hanna became the head of their own production unit to work on the new series.
From 1940 to 1957, Hanna and Barbera co-directed 114 Tom and Jerry animated shorts. The Tom and Jerry series was very popular with critics and audience. But by the 1950s, production costs were high while the profitability of the shorts was lower than before. MGM decided to shut down its animation subsidiary. Barbera was unemployed for the first time in decades.
Barbera briefly partnered with Robert D. Buchanan (1931-) in production of an animated television series, the science fiction series "Colonel Bleep" (1957-1960). It was the first animated series specifically produced for color television. Barbera eventually left this partnership and teamed up with William Hanna again. They founded Hanna-Barbera Productions, their own animation studio. With theatrical animation in decline, they focused on the new market of television animation.
The studio's first television series was the moderately successful "The Ruff & Reddy Show". It was succeeded by the much more popular "The Huckleberry Hound Show" and "The Yogi Bear Show". Survey's revealed that the two shows had attracted an adult audience, convincing Hanna and Barbera that they could market animation to adults. Their next series was the animated sitcom "The Flintstones" (1960-1966), popular with both children and adults. Its success helped establish Hanna-Barbera Productions as the leader in television animation.
In 1966, Hanna-Barbera Productions was sold to Taft Broadcasting for $12 million dollars.Barbera and Hanna remained studio heads until 1991, when the studio was sold to the Turner Broadcasting System for an estimated 320 million million dollars. Barbera and Hanna were reduced to advisory positions, which would they keep for the rest of their lives. Barbera periodically worked on new Hanna-Barbera shows, and even provided input for the original live-action adaptation of Scooby-Doo in 2002.
In 2001, Hanna-Barbera Productions was absorbed into Warner Bros. Animation. Barbera received executive producer credits for Warner Bros. sequels and adaptations of his old series (such as "What's New, Scooby-Doo?" and "Tom and Jerry Tales"). In 2005, Barbera co-directed a new Tom and Jerry short film: "The Karate Guard". Barbera then started work on a Tom and Jerry feature film, " Tom and Jerry: A Nutcracker Tale" (2007). He died before production was completed.
Barbera died in December 2006, at the age of 95. He had never fully retired and was still working at the time of his death. His legacy includes more than a 100 television series, and a large number of enduring characters.